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The smells from the flower shop are so different from the sickly hot summertime scent of Tokyo. They spill across the sidewalk and into the street beyond, a tranquil caress of perfume. The shop’s sliding glass doorways are thrown open wide, and bushels of saccharine colors litter the stoop. They challenge passers-by to come in and explore; to see a bit of nature the concrete wilds of Tokyo have not afforded them in too long. Still, Ritsuka’s high-tops linger a bit too long on the pavement before he crosses the threshold. Wary blue eyes assess the slew of colors, narrowed. He feels as comfortable here as an elephant might in an antiques store.
On principle, Ritsuka does not do beautiful things. He does jarring twangy melodies that hitch behind navels and make listeners want to dance; he does loud and acrid and syncopated just right. Not in a million years would he have thought himself here willingly.
His nails press into his palms as he steps inside, glancing at the choice, buffeted by the smell of flowers. He’s here for Mafuyu. And for the same Mafuyu, he supposes he’s done stranger.
An elderly woman peers up from the check-out desk. She is bespectacled and squat and blends in more than he expects; when she talks, Ritsuka nearly leaps out of his collared shirt.
“Shopping for a girlfriend, my dear?”
This again. Ritsuka grits his teeth. “Something like that.”
“Take your time, honey.” She gestures a hand laden with heavy jewelry towards the offerings. “We’ve got a deal on tulips today, two-for-one…”
-
He decides on an orange lily for the reason alone that its assertive star shape is distinctly less feminine than anything else in the shop; that when he prods at the petals with fingers calloused and distinctly unused to touching something quite so delicate, they press back into him stiff and unrelenting. The same way that Mafuyu does sometimes, when practice runs long and his eyes blink sleepily as he and Ritsuka wait together for the subway. And nobody’s around, and Ritsuka can touch, and Mafuyu burrows insistently into the heat of his hand. Fleeting moments.
It had probably been a joke. They’d certainly been tired enough for it to have been. The lights of the diner had burned a little too brightly at two a.m., as they’d clustered in their usual plasticine booth, drunk on exhaustion and, in Akihiko and Haruki’s cases, something brightly colored that had come garnished with a paper umbrella and the nauseating stench of hard liquor. Mafuyu’s finger had curled the red-striped straw about his own empty milkshake glass. Ritsuka had watched it go, around and around.
It was one of those happy nights. Those bright nights. Those permeating nights where every lamp and bulb shone a little too vividly; where edges blurred. The sort that had Ritsuka wondering within its midst if such a thing like fate really exists.
Across the booth, their bandmates had laughed and touched in the novel, intimate way that had blossomed with the year’s cherry blossoms. But Ritsuka hadn't paid them mind in a half an hour. Instead, his thumb had snuck across the expanse between he and Mafuyu’s thighs and pressed its way into the boy's coiled fist, beneath the table where nobody could see. That Mafuyu had curled his fingers back around Ritsuka’s was their secret. As was the lurch in his gut Ritsuka still feels whenever Mafuyu touches him like this.
(Almost a year of these impossibly gentle touches. Ritsuka sometimes wonders if he’s being driven mad with it, the way he wants to scratch and pull and tighten his grip until they’re as close as they can be. The rest of him is too frightened to press any further against Mafuyu’s gentle body lest it give underneath him. Lest Mafuyu finally break.)
“I like flowers,” Mafuyu had said, thoughtfully.
“Isn’t that a little girly?” Ritsuka asked.
Mafuyu shrugged skinny shoulders. “Probably.”
Ritsuka holds the lily tenderly as the subway car screeches into the station. He fingers the long neck as he steps on. He suspects himself to be on the receiving end of strange looks—a boy carrying a single long-stemmed lily on the train. A lunatic, likely. He ignores them.
The orange tint of the petals reminds him of Mafuyu's hair.
-
“Do boys like flowers?” Ritsuka had asked
Yayoi’s curious face peers over the cushions of the sofa; a tower, from where Ritsuka is situated underneath them, strumming innocuous chords on his guitar. Her night to cook, and how Ritsuka enjoys lounging in the common area as she slaves.
“What?”
“I asked if boys—” Ritsuka’s face burns with an unholy hellfire. “Like to receive flowers. You know, as a gift.”
“Any boy?” She asks, with the weight of insinuation that tells Ritsuka they both well know the answer. He combats her attitude with silence.
Yayoi gives in first. “Sato probably would, if that’s who you mean. He’s—“ she waves her hand in a generalizing circle.
“He’s what?”
“Oh, you know what I’m trying to say, Ritsuka! Quit playing coy.” She tosses her hair over her shoulder. “Sato would like it, probably. He’s soft like that.”
Ritsuka had bit his lip rather than give her the satisfaction of an upset response, because despite Mafuyu’s candied words and nebulous hair and those eyes that stare through time, he isn’t soft like that. When he is mourning, Mafuyu is an iron barrier, impermeable. When he knows he is right, he is the rigid edge of a blade. When he kisses Ritsuka in the bliss of private, shared moments he is molten. His fingers leave trails that burn on Ritsuka’s skin. He paints Ritsuka with aching marks that don’t heal.
The subway announces the next stop, and Ritsuka’s fingers wind in his wiry hair and tug his thoughts to present. The flower is nestled snug between his index and thumb. It sways and jostles along with the momentum of the car, back and forth.
-
Mafuyu awaits Ritsuka against an old mossy wall in a shirt buttoned lazily to a spot just beneath his collarbone, striped and sewn with last season’s colors that look nice against his skin. His hair is just barely tousled by the wind. Ritsuka thinks he looks beautiful.
“Hey,” he calls from afar, and regrets it almost as soon as he does. Mafuyu’s permeating eyes focus on the flower. Still far away, and the shock on Mafuyu’s face displays loud and clear. And Ritsuka feels every part the fool.
He would ditch it now, had Mafuyu not already seen it. Abandon it to the whims of an alley and replace it with something like a stolen kiss when people aren’t looking, or a pick from his collection, the sort Mafuyu always holds onto so tenderly even though it’s just a damned piece of plastic. But it’s too late for any of that, and so he presents the flower with cheeks matching the petals’ hue.
“I got you something,” he says in lieu of a greeting. “Take it.”
Mafuyu’s eyes widen.
“For our date?”
“I guess."
The flower is plucked from Ritsuka delicately, and blinks down the center. Mafuyu's fingertips—fingertips Ritsuka knows to be just about as tough and calloused as his own—probe at the petals. He smiles that little grin of his, and Ritsuka’s stomach soars.
“Thank you.”
Ritsuka fucks with the hair at the crown of his head. “It’s just a flower.”
He wonders how weak it is, that his mood can be changed so rapidly by that singular smile.
-
Mafuyu comes out with sunlight.
There are days that dawn overcast and miserable, days where Ritsuka knows Mafuyu will be too. He may not be book smart, but Ritsuka is good at observation, and has come to empathize with Mafuyu’s hurt like an arrow to his own chest. Some days when he awakens to the clouds, he is able to text Mafuyu something embarrassing and sickly sweet and get a response, or run his fingers along the nape of Mafuyu’s ivory neck as they sit in their spot and be awarded a smile for his efforts. Days his efforts can pull Mafuyu from the pit.
Others, his boyfriend is enshrouded behind a curtain Ritsuka cannot seem to penetrate, gaze cast so far away Ritsuka wonders if he’s in the present at all.
Those days they stumble over words and fumble touches previously sacred. Those days, Ritsuka goes to bed hurting and angry, shameful tears burning at his eyes and rolling down his face for the way he feels dismissed; pathetic; useless.
Today isn’t one of those days.
They visit Mafuyu’s favorite music shop, a hole in the wall joint with cheap parts and framed band posters littering the chipping concrete wall. Mafuyu blazes a trail down the aisles, flower clutched in a fist in one hand and the other fingering the items as he passes them by. Ritsuka wonders vaguely if he should have brought sunglasses.
Instead he loses himself in the provocative curves of electric guitar section for a while, fingers itching with the infantile desire to touch and strum and make the pretty little instruments sing beneath his talented fingers. When Mafuyu finds him again, the boy is clutching a block of wood with a little gold bar worked into its center. It smells like the deep forest. Like a furniture shop.
“What’s that?”
“Resin.” Mafuyu’s fingers close over the little cube. His gaze scatters across the guitars to Ritsuka’s front. “A present.”
Ritsuka doesn’t understand, but he nods and ushers Mafuyu towards the register nonetheless.
The sun has reached its full midday height when they exit the shop. It colors Mafuyu’s curls an autumn red. Like fire.
-
Mafuyu touches him, and Ritsuka is cut from his tether.
They sit outside an ice cream parlor with twin cones, bleached white napkins and plastic spoons abandoned beside that long-stemmed lily and the little bag that carries Mafuyu’s resin upon the metal table. Ritsuka watches Mafuyu’s pink tongue work the cone, uneasy and shifting in his chair.
Mafuyu’s fingers find his knee under the table and he just about jumps out of his skin.
“Oh—“ Mafuyu withdraws his hand. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s—“ Ritsuka is at a loss for words, especially when everything he wants to ask feels too raw and desperate to say aloud. Those same thoughts he can hardly keep from whispering when they’re alone in his room, guitars long forgotten on the floor, and Mafuyu’s lips are on his. When Ritsuka wants to ask Mafuyu to drag his fingernails through his scalp. When he hungers for the sharp thrill of teeth.
He glances across the detoxifying light of early afternoon towards Mafuyu, mint ice cream drying at the corner of lips Ritsuka is growing to become quite familiar with and those wide eyes finally affixed upon him. Ritsuka grimaces at nothing, and takes Mafuyu’s fingers before he can think better of it. In front of whomever might be passing them by. He squeezes.
“Someone might see,” Mafuyu reminds him carefully. Green ice cream melts in a heavy glob down his fingers.
“Fuck ‘em."
Mafuyu laughs and holds on tighter.
-
Without the weight of the guitars on their backs, it feels as though they might be able to walk forever. And so they do, battered high tops scraping through the concrete maze of Tokyo as they wind a meandering path to the grassy outskirts, fingers twining shamelessly. Today is a sunny day for Mafuyu, and Ritsuka is seized by the sensation that he needs to enjoy it while he can. When the heavy burden of depression doesn’t sit heavy upon Mafuyu's shoulders. That cumbersome reminder.
Ritsuka knows the guilt for loathing Mafuyu's hurt all too intimately. He’s been warned away from that ugly feeling by Akihiko just the week prior, who Ritsuka thought to never notice anything beyond the silver glint of his drum set. But Akihiko was right in catching Ritsuka glaring at Mafuyu’s guitar in practice. That biting anger when Mafuyu sits with it tucked into him in a way that can’t be comfortable, and if only Mafuyu were to give Ritsuka the fucking chance he might hold him better than a piece of wood. That one night where their kisses had stretched out until they both gasped for breath, when they rolled over across Mafuyu’s bed only to find it there, waiting.
“You need to let it go,” Akihiko had told Ritsuka sagely then. Together they’d lounged on the concrete stoop outside of the practice rooms, twin coils of cigarette smoke dissipating into Tokyo’s orange sky beyond. “That anger. You need to let go of it now or it’ll break you.”
“Never knew you to care," Ritsuka had groused, crushing the rest of his cigarette into ash against the pavement. Any action that might hide the foul flush on his cheeks at being so damn legible.
“Sure I care.” Akihiko’s sage look lasted all of three seconds before the wiseass grin that Ritsuka sometimes wants to wipe off of his face with a fist. “Older an' more experienced than you, aren’t I? Gotta pass along whatever wisdom I amass before I drink it away…"
And loathe as he is to think it, Ritsuka understands Akihiko to be right. Every bad day, each collapse of Mafuyu’s house-of-cards happiness, and the more irritable Ritsuka becomes. There are times he wants to reach out and shake Mafuyu by the shoulders to drag him back into the world and out of the arms of a ghost. Where he’s seized by the sick desire to bite down on Mafuyu’s fingers hard just to remind the boy he can still bleed.
The sun nears the horizon, and Ritsuka’s eyes close as he’s assailed by shame.
The cool breeze of nightfall grounds him. A melody floats on the air.
“What are you humming?” He asks suddenly. “That’s new, isn’t it?”
“It is!” Mafuyu grins. “Although it’s technically a secret.”
“A secret, even from me?”
A nod. “A song. That I’m writing for you. You can’t know on principle.”
“You’re writing a song?” Ritsuka repeats, dumbly. “Don’t you need help with the melody?"
Mafuyu’s gaze scatters to tall grasses that grow at the side of the road. His thumb works a line down the stalk of the lily. And sudenly, Ritsuka feels ashamed for pressing—for pulling Mafuyu along connected by their fingers as though that alone would make Mafuyu any more his—for giving him a gift that’s just going to die.
(And he's especially ashamed of the possession he feels hot behind his ribs, but some things can't be helped. That he’s certain he is not temporary doesn’t mean he’s permanent.)
He decides to walk Mafuyu home, not for concern of his safety or any misguided sense of chivalry but so that he can hold onto Mafuyu’s fingers a little longer. Even as they elapse into silence and the buildings around them thicken and age. He glances at his companion to find the flower has closed up, and a far-away expression in Mafuyu’s eyes.
But when they stop on the stoop, Mafuyu doesn’t pull away as he has before. Rather, his fingers twine in Ritsuka’s collar. He drags him close.
“What are you—“
“Quiet,” Mafuyu whispers, and the look he gives Ritsuka is scorching before their mouths meet.
The street is vacant, the light low, and Ritsuka is kissed in a hungry way that leaves him reeling. It’s all he can do to touch at that nebulous hair and slide his thumbs down Mafuyu’s neck. Done in.
Mafuyu pulls back, and his forehead connects with Ritsuka’s jaw. They stand there, breathing. Reorienting. Mafuyu’s gentle smile, and Ritsuka’s sharp eyes. Mafuyu’s pink to Ritsuka’s blue. He’d never have thought them the sort to come together quite like this.
But when Mafuyu leans in for another, Ritsuka’s fingers hike around his waist so comfortably. And so he dismisses it for now: the ghost that sometimes still forces its way between them, the weight of the fine guitar and the far-away look in Mafuyu's eyes when it snows. For now, his thoughts are useless little things conflated in optimism and romance and other shit Ritsuka’s realist’s brain has never comfortably allowed him. He thinks about fate and puzzle pieces. The day-worn petals of the lily brush against his ear as Mafuyu readjusts his grip.
That one summer’s evening, Ritsuka is invited up to the little loft with the yappy dog and worn bed, and so he goes.
Their hands remain entwined as they escape the dark of night to the brilliant lights beyond.