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solongsun Since early childhood, Kaoru has been using doors to travel backwards and forwards through time: a motion he is sometimes able to control, and sometimes not. At the age of 22, he opens a door to the long-ago autumn of 1996 and finds something he never expected – a man who, decades before Kaoru's birth, seems to know exactly who he is...
Detention makes Toshiya late walking home. At this time of year, the sun is already going down, and the light shines reddish through the trees and the eaves of the houses. The air is cool and still, crisp, and the red sky fades into a light bluish grey overhead, decorated all over with thin skeins of dark cloud. The only sound is that of his own feet making crunching noises through the leaves that have fallen early, and the distant call of some croaky-voiced bird. The air smells of sap.
He follows a winding path through the skinny tree trunks, eventually coming out at a wide, windblown field. It's not been tended to over the whole of the faded summer: the grass is almost knee high. Superstitiously, he glances around, looking for any hint of a familiar body lurking in the gathering dimness, but he sees nothing. Unconsciously, he sighs.
Kaoru has a funny habit of appearing just when Toshiya thinks he needs him most, but he feels like he needs him today, and he's not here.
Where are you?
When are you, he should ask. He sets out across the field, a jagged sort of figure with legs grown too suddenly too tall for him; his walk is coltish and rangy; his hands jammed into his pockets make an awkward angle out of his elbows; he's thirteen, pretty in a way he's aware that boys shouldn't be – all long hair and delicate features, lips that look pouty no matter how he holds them, waist slender, eyes big and forever sending the wrong message, getting him into trouble.
He kicks out at the grass, feeling the longer blades rip against the toes of his shoes.
This is where he and Kaoru first met. It's funny how so many other memories of that time have faded away, whilst that one still stands sharp in his head: being six years old and standing here, Kaoru asking, where am I?
Giving Toshiya that look – such a strange look – and knowing his name. Recognising him and not saying a word about it. Carrying Toshiya on his back up the hill – Toshiya still remembers the way the other man's shoulders felt under his hands; to him Kaoru seemed so strong back then, so big, carrying him so effortlessly. It was strange, because Toshiya had thought he'd known what strength was, but this had felt like something else; it was a strength that was gentle; a strength that listened. He had missed it, when Kaoru was gone.
At the other end of the field, Toshiya climbs the rickety wooden fence and boosts himself easily over the top of it, dropping down onto a cobbled street that turns up into a sharp hill. He shoves his hands back into his pockets and carries on up the familiar route, the ghost of Kaoru beside him.
He remembers the soft, dissolving sort of feeling he got in the pit of his stomach, riding on the older man's back, their bodies close together like that. It was something he didn't understand at the time, but later it had all started to make sense; he remembers touching himself for the first time, lying on his side under the covers one night, and how familiar it had felt – that funny little flicker of arousal, before he even knew what the word meant.
He makes shorter work of the walk now than he did when he was six, and soon his parents' house stands in front of him – the last on the row since the Nakamuras' property was pulled down, tatty-looking with its missing roof tiles and weathered siding, and the gate that creaks and the wall that looks like it's about to fall down, the scrubby patch of garden full of weeds; he tries his best not to see it, marching firmly down the path.
It's only at the front door that he hesitates, taking a deep breath and steeling himself before he pushes his way inside.
Silence.
It's not like he expected anybody to be in. The eldest of his two brothers have both moved out already, and although Hiro still nominally lives at home he's generally off in Nagano City somewhere, smashing out street lights and getting into trouble on a borrowed motorbike. His mother will still be at work, and his father will be at work if it's a good day and drinking in some bar if it's a bad day. He can never be sure until his father arrives home and he's able to look at his face; try and read the emotional weather there.
Toshiya takes off his shoes and arranges them neatly by the door, ignoring the shoe rack because like many other things in the house, it's broken. His bedroom is still the same room that he first led Kaoru to when he was six years old, and once he's in there he closes the door firmly behind him, drops his school bag in the corner and crosses over to the cassette player. He has a mixtape he's created shoddily, taping songs from the radio, and he jams that into the player and hits play. There's a click and a whining sort of noise – like everything else in the room, the cassette player is old – but gradually that clears and he closes his eyes briefly as the sound of Joy Division playing Atmosphere fills his tiny bedroom.
Sighing deeply, he begins to undress, pulling off his hated school uniform throwing it into a messy pile in the corner. He does this in front of the window, gazing listlessly out at the view because there's nobody around to see him; this house backs onto nothing but mountain, rising up and up and up until it makes him sick; until it looks like it's puncturing the sky, leaking clouds. Naked, he crosses closer to the window and peers out of it; the view is pretty – or it could be pretty at a different time of year; the house backs onto a forest and at this time of year the trees look stark and intimidating – but his face isn't happy. He looks out searchingly, his eyes scanning every square inch of space for a familiar face, for the familiar line of a shoulder or a flash of familiar skin.
'Where are you,' he mutters, hardly realising he's spoken aloud.
Turning away, he goes mechanically to his closet and, with a furtive look around him, twists the brass doorknob and steps inside. It's a much more awkward manoeuvre than it was when he was six; he has to bow his head just to fit inside, and when he finally gets the door closed behind him, it's claustrophobically cramped, his elbows pressed tight against his body.
He's seen Kaoru disappear inside here before, so why can't Toshiya pull the same trick? Taking a deep breath, he slides down until he's sitting, his knees bent uncomfortably close in front of him. Carefully he rests his hands on them, his whole body curled up like a stone; he lowers his head and closes his eyes in the darkness and, as hard as he can, wills it to happen.
Not just to disappear, but to come out the other end – to come out where Kaoru is. He wonders what he's doing; if he's going about his normal life. It's a nonsensical thought because of course Kaoru hasn't even been born yet, but it's almost impossible for Toshiya to think of that as the truth; far easier to think of him as always alive, always somewhere. Existing in the way the reflection in the mirror exists, a place almost identical but flipped; he lives his parallel life, goes to his parallel job and sleeps in his parallel bed, and all the while Toshiya is pressing up against the glass that separates their two worlds. Invisible, always, because it seems this glass is one-way; Kaoru can reach out, but he can't reach in.
He takes another deep breath, tries to imagine what the world is like in Kaoru's time but it's impossible, like trying to imagine a brand new colour. Kaoru will never talk about it when Toshiya asks, not even when he begs; he senses that's another of his precious rules.
'You'll know one day,' he always says, and though it's a cheap distraction it works, because he's talking about the day in the future when they'll live in the same time, and it's a wistful idea but a bittersweet one.
By the time Kaoru is born, Toshiya will be forty-five years old. He checks his mental arithmetic and scrubs that out; forty-four, he amends, because he's pretty sure Kaoru's birthday is February 17, and Toshiya's isn't until the end of March.
Forty-four years old, and Kaoru a tiny baby. By the time Kaoru's eighteen, he'll be sixty-three.
He tips his head back, letting his skull hit the side of his closet with a thunk; the thin wooden sides sway slightly around him, cheaply made.
Say Kaoru lives to be seventy or so: Toshiya will probably be dead for about half his life.
It's comforting inside the closet. He's surrounded by the smell of himself; his own clothes and the detergent they're washed in, and his own bedding folded on a shelf. He wonders what Kaoru thought, stepping through this door and coming out somewhere else.
He wonders if Kaoru ever wishes he could do the same thing backwards.
Toshiya closes his eyes and settles down more comfortably, relaxing his limbs as much as he can inside the small space; this is his time. He doesn't have to worry about school again for at least another – he calculates quickly – fifteen hours or so, and it's only five so it'll be a little while before anybody else arrives home to start up the nightly shouting and slamming of doors. He's alone, and he supposes he is lonely, but it feels like a luxury all the same: for at least the next hour, nobody's going to call him a stupid name or try and trip him or shove him into a wall; nobody's going to yell at him to get out of the room or, even worse, look right through him with their blind, hostile eyes.
When he was a kid, he used to daydream that he was adopted, or that he'd been accidentally switched at the hospital. Some official-looking people would show up and say that they were very sorry but a mistake had been made, and Toshiya had to go and be with his proper family now, who would cuddle him and tell him how much they'd missed him. It's a stupid fantasy, he knows that – with his father's big hands and gangly frame and his mother's delicate face he can't possibly be anything but a Hara – and it's stupid that he still retreats to it sometimes, even when he's far too old to be gathered close by some other family.
It's just that he can't help but feel that his real family is out there somewhere, and that one day he'll find them. There just has to be a group of people out in the world who have been looking and waiting for him in the same way that he's been looking and waiting for them, and when he's with them he won't be different any more, and he won't be lonely any more. They'll live in a big city and they'll wear different clothes and they'll dye their hair, and nobody will laugh at them or say mean things, or if people do say mean things then they won't care, they'll just laugh back twice as loud; they'll pierce their ears and nobody will call them a fag; they'll drink and they'll smoke and they'll take drugs and they'll be young forever, and glorious.
He falls asleep thinking about it, his young body a tangle of limbs in a very small space. He sleeps through his mother's arrival home; the clattering of the front door and her quiet, defeated call into the house; when she eases open his bedroom door she sees his school bag and uniform on the floor but no other sign of him, just the hissing sound of a tape that's come to its end. She turns off the cassette player, sighs, and closes her son's bedroom door behind her again. While Toshiya shifts and dreams, she thinks about how her very last son is growing just as out of control as all the others.
Toshiya dreams of stupid, mundane things: school, swimming, trees. Turning shapes resolve themselves into Kaoru's face and arms and lips, and fast asleep Toshiya is falling towards them, turning his own face up to Kaoru's mouth and letting those gentle, careful arms come up around him. He sighs and tries to turn, pressing against the door at the wrong angle; the weak latch swings open and he ends up deposited unceremoniously onto the floor in a heap of sleepy limbs, blinking in confusion, groggy and weak feeling.
Stiffly he pulls himself to his feet, and his half-hard cock bobs between his thighs with his movements. It's grown colder and he shivers as lies himself down on his bedroom floor, flat on his back, his legs spread uncertainly and his hand between them. Biting his lip anxiously, he closes his eyes.
Thinks of Kaoru's hands instead of his; small and delicate and sometimes tattooed, sometimes not. Thinks of those hands on him, moving over his body the way his own are; one of them gently encircling his dick and the other pushing up his chest, stroking over the skin there.
Kaoru would take care of him; he'd make it good. Toshiya knows this because Kaoru has always taken care of him.
There are no lights on and his room is dark, making his body another shifting shadow amongst others; the sun has just set, and the sky outside looks grey and dim but luminous. The trees that stand against it are black.
He wonders how many times he's touched himself in his life. He's pretty sure he was nine when he first figured out how; nine or ten, and – god – he remembers telling Kaoru about it excitedly, offering to show him, because he'd been so sure that he was the only person in the world to discover that his dick could do this awesome thing. He can't remember how Kaoru responded, though; whether the older man forced a laugh and advised him not to go talking about it, or just got embarrassed and changed the subject. Sometimes he thinks its definitely the former and sometimes the latter, depending on how much Kaoru lets him get away with; if he lets Toshiya snuggle up to him or hold his hand.
He still thinks of him as a kid, and it drives Toshiya crazy.
He takes a shallow sort of breath as he touches himself, his head filling with the sorts of crazy thoughts that only ever occur to him when he's doing this; like that it would be hot if Kaoru could see him right now, or other things, more intense things that he's not all the way sure about, four-letter-word things. It's at the background of his mind most of the time, shoved down into a dark corner, but as soon as he has his cock in his hand it feels like it all comes rising up to the surface; like that even though he's not entirely sure how it works when two men fuck, he still wants Kaoru to fuck him. Like how sometimes when he's around Kaoru he finds himself wondering what his dick would taste and feel like in his mouth, but when he's touching himself he feels like he knows how it would be, and he wants it.
His cock twitches in his hand, and he grasps it tightly.
The thing is, there are times when he's sure he and Kaoru have done it. There's something about the way the other man gets so shy and uncomfortable with him when he's affectionate; something about the worried way Kaoru looks at him sometimes, and Toshiya wants to ask but he knows Kaoru will never tell him – would refuse, and might even feel angry with him for asking.
But he wants to know. He wants to know if in the future he gets what he wants or not; if Kaoru's as turned on by Toshiya as Toshiya is by him. Nervously, he wants to know when it happens – if it happens – so he can be ready.
Thinking about it, his mind passing smoothly over the blurrier details, he cums quickly. There's actual semen, too, which hasn't been happening very long; only for the past year and a half or so. When that started, he at least knew enough to not tell Kaoru about it.
Tiredly he gets to his feet, holding his sticky hand awkwardly aloft and separate from his body; he grabs a tissue and wipes himself off as best he can. Naked, he wanders back over to the window, his eyes performing their same slow scan between the tree trunks and the tangle of roots and branches – only this time he sees it; a flash of pale skin amongst the trees like a little glimmer in the darkness, and a soft shadow of dark hair.
He spins around and starts to dress himself roughly, yanking items out of his closet almost at random; he smooths his hair down with hands that shake excitedly. He wonder if he'll still look all flushed and satisfied; if Kaoru will be able to tell what he's just done. Jeans, T-shirt, jacket. There's no time for socks, and there's no way in hell he's braving the gauntlet through the rest of the house in order to grab his shoes from by the door; barefoot, he yanks up the sash window and hooks one long, skinny leg outside of it.
The air is cold. He wriggles his toes. The windowsill presses a little uncomfortably against his still-sensitive crotch and then he's over and out, letting himself drop a few feet and land in an awkward crumple. Scrambling upright, he glances around quickly, his eyes glowing warm and his breath a cloud of white in the dim evening, searching for that beautiful, familiar face and frowning when he can't find it.
Shrugging his jacket more squarely onto his shoulders – it's a hand-me-down, like just about everything else he owns, and much too big – he sets off towards the woodland. The trees start only a few metres from the back of his house, and he remembers how they used to give him nightmares when he was younger; all that darkness. The ground underfoot changes from scratchy grass to compacted earth, fallen leaves and pine needles, and he steps on something sharp; a thorn or something. He doesn't care. His hair whips around his face as he turns wildly in every direction, his eyes struggling to pick out a face in the darkness.
'No shoes, Toshiya?'
That voice, so deep for such a delicately-proportioned person; so known to Toshiya, the ink his very best memories are written in.
He turns around and embraces the older man desperately, inhaling his familiar smell. He remembers a time when Kaoru would have looked so tall and imposing to him, but now they're almost the same height; when he hugs Kaoru it's possible to rest his chin on the other man's shoulder, rather than pressing his face into his chest. He hears Kaoru give a low, warm chuckle; feels warm arms squeezing him gently.
'I knew you'd come,' Toshiya mutters against his ear.
'You did? How?'
Toshiya sighs, burying his face into Kaoru's neck. 'I needed you,' he says.
Or maybe he doesn't say it aloud; he's not sure. He feels it in the tenderness of Kaoru's touch, the deep sigh of breath in the other man's throat; he knows he understands.
From:
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OMG, the expression on Kaoru's face when Totchi tells him about discovering masturbation must have been hilarious. Poor Kaoru! Talk about a conversation you don't want to be having with the child who grows up to be your lover.
From:
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