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"There's no way, Tsukki." Tadashi says, his voice pours from the telephone receiver clutched in Kei's hand in crackling waves.
"I couldn't make this shit up if I tried." Kei snorts. He rolls over onto his side, pressing the phone between the pillow and his ear. The surface is rough against his face and he recoils a little bit at the feeling.
"But Tsukki, Tanaka-senpai wouldn't-" He cuts himself off with one of those intoxicating giggles that tends to stir something in Kei's chest. He smiles because of the familiarity of it, despite the tinny filter his phone forces it through.
"Yeah, he would."
"Okay, yeah," Another hiccup of laughter. Kei's heart skips a beat. "You're right he totally would." The tinkling din continues for another few seconds and Kei relishes in it even as a comfortable silence sinks in. Suddenly, he is very grateful that Tanaka somehow forced his way into his evening plans and got drunk enough to recount the tale of how he proposed to Amanai-san (when he revealed that it started with a strip tease in a convenience store, Kei had choked on his beer).
It's nearing two in the morning so he isn't surprised that Tadashi doesn't fill the gap in their conversation with mindless chatter, soft puffs of breath come instead and Kei closes his eyes against the sound.
“You’re getting tired.” Kei mumbles. It’s not a question.
A breathy chuckle, “Mhm, Tsukki.”
”You aren’t going to sleep.” Another not-question.
“I wouldn’t even if I could, Tsukki.” and Kei huffs a laugh. They’re miles apart, yet they’re both still clawing to share the same space for as long as they get, even if it’s shared in silence.
The hotel room is blessedly cool, probably the only thing he likes about venturing outside of the flat Tadashi and him own. It's a nice place, too, high ceilings with cool blue paint along the walls. The type that's supposed to be calming. His bed isn't too bad either and there's an alright view of the city from outside his window that he took a picture of and sent to Tadashi when he first got there. The acoustics are horrible, though, something he discovered against his will when his client, the one he’s in Osaka setting up gigs for in the first place, came by and insisted on singing his newest track for him instead of just playing it like a normal person.
If he didn’t love his job so much, Kei might’ve felt inclined to leave his own room as soon as the guy opened his mouth.
Tadashi yawns loudly into the receiver and Kei smirks at the sound, “Gee, it really is like I’m right there with you.” It’s too late (or maybe too early) for him to be sarcastic like this. He expects something playful back but expectations are for fools and children and Kei doesn’t think at twenty-four he can still be considered a kid.
"Hey, Kei?" The silence crackles and pops in the seconds that follow, stuttering like Kei’s heartbeat. It’s startling because he uses his first name (they have been dating for six years and it still gets to him when Tadashi says it), Kei doesn't say anything for a second. Tadashi's voice is soft, fuzzy around it's technologically distorted edges, gentle but firm in its seriousness. Despite that it still cuts, sinking right into his never healing homesickness — Tadashi-wanting — wound.
“Yes?” And he’s serious, too.
"I... I can't wait until you get back." Tadashi whispers it into the phone like it’s a secret, and Kei can see him clearly as soon as he does, his chest clenching. He’s swaddled in the plethora of blankets on their bed despite the stifling heat, knees curling up to his chest and pillow nearby for him to grab in the event that he doesn't accidentally fall asleep on the phone like he almost always does. He sees his lips turned down into that frown, the one that doesn't belong on Tadashi's face, the one he loves to kiss until it turns into a smile. Even his freckles would be falling down his cheeks in some sort of horrible starfall, bound to the skin that covers Tadashi's expressive facial muscles. It cuts deeper.
"I know," He says because it's the only thing he can. "I'll be on one of the earliest trains back tomorrow," He says because it's true. "I love you, Tadashi." He says because Tadashi hasn't said anything yet.
Some things thrive in the presence of quiet. Tadashi is not one of them.
"I love you too, Kei." Tadashi sounds less upset than a few seconds prior but Kei still brings his thumb to his mouth, beginning to gnaw on the already picked apart flesh. Kei knows he's prideful, understands that Tadashi is too, even if it's in a different, more open way as opposed to Kei's coolness. But Kei also knows how to admit his weaknesses, at least to himself and in the lonely tundra of his mind. Weakness number forty-four: verbal comforting, and he can tell that Tadashi is currently left with a deficit of that because of Kei.
"Tomorrow." Kei breaths out into the receiver, willing the second he's able to see his boyfriend face to face to come faster.
"Tomorrow." Tadashi repeats. Kei hears the small, hopeful smile in his voice.
When Kei gets off of the train at nine thirty-eight am the next morning (they both know the exact time, even if they don’t have a chance to acknowledge it), it takes every ounce of their collective willpower not to stand in the middle of the station wrapped up in each other, them against the world. But they can't do that, no matter how nice it would be, not when they can barely take on their broken air-conditioner. But they do embrace as soon as Kei steps onto the platform, a fleeting thing that leaves neither of them satisfied.
Perhaps that is why they barely leave their bed as soon as they get home.
Kei and Tadashi lay together in a field of blankets. Their skin is sticky with the summer heat that creeps into their small flat, the faulty air-conditioning system looming over their heads like the full moon outside. Sometimes it works, usually it doesn't, but the times that it did always seemed to make up for its lack of consistency where cooling was concerned.Tadashi feels sweat dampen the roots of his hair; if Kei still had his glasses on they would be slipping down the slope of his nose. He would wish for it to magically work, for it to be cold enough for them to burrow together underneath the blankets (Kei says he hates when they do that; Tadashi knows he’s lying), but then it really wouldn’t feel like they were in their room then at all.
Tadashi is hot and somewhat uncomfortable because of that and knows that they both probably smell horrible, but he does not hurry to disturb the spikey, creased mounds of kicked away covers or move away from Kei. It's perhaps in spite of the heat that he clings tighter, daring it to come in between him and his ever travelling boyfriend in any form now that they have each other in their arms again. One arm is thrown over Kei's bare stomach (this contact is punctuated by the mild adhesion of their sweaty skin, the kind that will sound a little wet when separated), and his leg is under their large Jurassic Park blanket, the other positioned in between Kei's, Tadashi's head finding its home just underneath his collarbones.
This, this is one of the many things he lets himself selfishly miss.
If Kei hates it then he doesn't complain. He doesn't unhook his arms from around Tadashi to create physical distance and he certainly doesn't get up to open a window, trying to coax a breeze from the mouth of the night. No, he hangs on with more ferocity as well. Something in Tadashi's chest warms when he notices that.
He likes these nights, more than Tadashi feels it's safe to admit. He would definitely like it better if they didn't have that internal capitalisation that comes with special, every once in a while events — emphasis put on something that people with normal schedules (or lovers of basic grammar) would find unimportant. Tadashi likes having something to look forward to, the spark of excitement that races down his spine when he comes out of the bathroom, teeth brushed, face washed, pajama clad, and sees Kei scowling at something he's reading while reclining on their bed. He likes them, but he really hates them too; giving a drop of water to someone parched in the desert, and all that.
"Thirty two days of summer left." Kei says, pulling the words straight from the humidity. Tadashi feels the vibrations against his ear as he speaks, both lulling him to sleep and keeping him wide awake.
Giggling softly, Tadashi asks, "You counted?"
"Just now." Kei's voice is solemn, but Tadashi hears the smirk settling on his lips. Tadashi lifts his head while shifting his weight on the elbow underneath him, turning so he can check if he was right. Everything is dark, of course it is, being nearly one in the morning, but Kei is close enough that Tadashi can just make out the sardonic twist of his lips. Kei's eyes are on him because of the shifting around and they stay on him as Tadashi leans forward to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth; it's hard for him to do it through his grin.
"Someone's excited for pumpkin spice lattes." Tadashi watches as Kei's nose scrunches (the action is so cute that he barely contains the urge to kiss him there as well) in disgust but probably a little bit of offence in the gesture for good measure. When they first started college, Kei had gotten a part-time job as a barista. The amount of people who asked him for pumpkin spice lattes that autumn was impressive to say the least (thirty-seven in two weeks, Kei kept count), and he didn't even work at Starbucks. Needless to say Kei has been disenchanted with the drink for a while now.
"I'm excited for our flat to not feel like hell." He deadpans.
“It’s not that bad...”
“Tadashi, Dante would’ve gotten inspiration for Inferno just by walking through the door.”
And he missed that dry delivery too, the gleam in Kei’s eyes when his quick wit has served him well. Tadashi kind of wants to cry, just seeing that instead of imagining it over a phone for a week and a half. He loves Kei and loves knowing that he’s doing something that makes him happy — Kei supported Tadashi when he decided he wanted to go into engineering, and again when he switched his career path to video game design and had to rebuild his plans for the future, all because it was, is, Tadashi’s passion. Tadashi supports him the same way, even if he hates having to spend days, sometimes weeks, away from each other.
“For a circle, or whole thing?" Tadashi questions with a tilt of his head.
"A circle. It isn’t that bad." Kei answers without hesitation.
”Which one?”
Biting his lip as if in deep thought, Kei’s eyes flit to the ceiling and then back to Tadashi, “The sixth.”
"The one with the flaming crypts?"
"The one with the flaming crypts." Kei affirms. Tadashi shakes his head, chuckles bubbling up and out of him like a stream at his boyfriend's mock seriousness before he settles back down in his previous position. The amused huff and genuine smile on Kei's face don't go unnoticed.
Another thing he missed, being able to see his smiles instead of hearing them.
Tadashi hears the subtle badum, badum, badum of Kei's heartbeat under his ear. He closes his eyes then, letting his breathing sync up with the percussion ensemble locked behind Kei's ribcage. When he was younger, Tadashi could only sleep with sound in the background, the tv from the living room, white noise from a fan, his parents' voices from their bedroom. It only became a problem when he started sleeping over at Kei's house — their home was made with much thicker walls and Kei made his abhorrence of noise while he slept quite clear from the get go. For a few months, Tadashi just contented himself to sleeping poorly every time he was over there, even bringing extra games for his handheld console to play until he was so tired it didn't matter if he could hear something or not.
Eventually, Kei found out. A much younger Tadashi had braced himself for a small amount of ridicule and a large amount of apathy, but not much else. What he got instead was a grumbled insult at him not bringing it up sooner along with a pair of Kei's earbuds (he was always losing them so he kept extras in the likely event his main pair of the month disappeared; it was why he switched to the bulkier, harder to lose over-the-ear headphones as soon as he got some for his birthday) and Akiteru's old MP3 player so that he could fall asleep to music instead of tossing and turning to silence.
The memory makes Tadashi squeeze his arms briefly around Kei.
"Hm?" The blond asks, the sleep-muddled quality of his voice causing a fond smile to bloom on Tadashi's face which he doesn't even bother to hide. In the absence of an immediate response (his own form of Jeopardy music), Kei's hand moves to tap out a staccato rhythm on his hip that feels (because hipbones aren't conducive to creating any sort of hearable beat) suspiciously like a math-rock beat that used to lull him into swift unconsciousness when he still listened out of Kei's spare earbuds.
"I'm just happy we get to do this, that's all."
With the quiet sound of sweaty skin unsticking from sweaty skin, Kei moves the arm around Tadashi's back just enough so that he can card his fingers through Tadashi's hair, pressing a soft kiss to the crown of his head. His fingers still twitch with a beat Tadashi can only pretend to know.
Actions have always screamed when Kei has mumbled — shown his hand when his poker face had been sculpted of stone. For as long as Tadashi has understood Kei (something that happened a while after they met properly; he discovered that knowing and understanding are two very different things) he has been aware that no matter how good he is at verbally sparring, he is horrible at actually saying the things that he means, especially to Tadashi. Not because he doesn't care enough to say it, but because he tends to care too much and mess it up with his overthinking.
Tadashi relates — really, the only thing that seperates them on this front is the fact that Kei looks for other ways to express himself while Tadashi keeps trying to rely on mutable words.
"It's worth the flaming crypt." And Tadashi laughs outright at the quip and feels the vibrations of Kei's laughter too, more than he hears it. He thinks: it, this, them, is worth three flaming crypts and the intermittent periods of time when Kei doesn't have to travel all over Japan and falling asleep to the sound of a phone connection crackling instead of a heartbeat. He thinks: it would be nice to stay like this forever, even though it's too hot to be comfortable. He thinks: their bedroom might feel the sixth circle of Hell but, really, it's Paradise in disguise.
"Yeah, Tsukki. But we should seriously think about getting a fan, though, or something." Tadashi says with a yawn, nuzzling into Kei's chest.
"We can talk about it tomorrow." Kei commands, not unkindly, and something fizzes in Tadashi's chest. Right, tomorrow. It's different this time, not like it was the night before when Tadashi was sure time would go through a taffy pulling machine just to spite them, expanding and lengthening in order to make Kei's arrival home ten hours long instead of two. But luckily the confectioners of fate decided to favour them. Not only that but Kei doesn't have to leave again for a few more days. They'll have more nights like this, the nights that he likes even if he hates them, all in a row. They really have tomorrow this time. A dopey smile plays on his lips as Tadashi hums his assent.
Tomorrow.