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Azuma sweeps his hair back, throwing the cape over his shoulder just right to catch the stage lights that illuminate him from below. “Good night…and sweet dreams,” he stage-whispers, and Tasuku gives him the slightest flick of the eyelids, a minute movement that he’d learned to be attuned to. Time for the last direction, he thinks, and lowers himself down just a bit further, mouthing at Tasuku’s neck just enough that he grazed skin. The cue plays for his exit, and he pulls away with a pop half-manufactured, half-real. As he strides out into the wings, he notes with pride the sparkling shimmer that his lipstick had left on Tasuku’s neck. It was a good choice after all, he muses as Izumi rushes over with a water bottle and a towel.
He watches with a keen eye as Tasuku performs the last scenes of their closing show alone, as always, and exchanges a half-smile with Tsumugi who’s equally glued to the stage. Really, those two were such theater junkies. Ah, the way he was angling himself to the audience as he cried was perfect, Azuma notes. Izumi had complimented him the other day on his grasp of blocking, and he’d laughed: of course he’d be good at knowing how to handle one’s body to be most effective, considering his profession.
She’d given a smile back, quirking her lips just a little before moving on to smacking Homare on the head with the script, and Azuma had thought for a bit during their post-rehearsal stretches on why he’d chosen to work the job he did.
—
After his family passed, he was so desperate for anyone to love him. So, so, so desperate.
His family was him and his brother and their parents, and they weren’t super rich or anything but they were happy together, and his brother was kind to him and let him tag along with him and his parents were nice and let him watch television sometimes when he shouldn’t.
The endless stream of aunts and uncles that came by after they died were not his family.
They whispered platitudes and pointed at how sad he looked and some of them patted him on the shoulder and said that they were in a better place now, but they couldn’t lie to him. His parents had said it was bad to lie.
One kind uncle (he was the only one Azuma remembered fondly, an old man with glasses and a squint who smelled of peppermint and mothballs) told him the truth, that they had been in a car crash and they’d gone and crashed straight into the ocean and now they were dead.
(They’d ushered that kind uncle away after that, whispering in fierce tones about how that wasn’t anything to tell a child, and he pretended he hadn’t heard anything besides the word ocean when they returned to fuss over him.)
They were all liars, every last one of them, and they left dozens of well-wishes and pleasantries and some of them left him food to eat but when they left, his family wasn’t there anymore and he was viciously, hatefully glad that the kind uncle had told him that they were dead because Azuma didn’t think he could stand it if he were left waiting forever.
—
Kota sobs on stage, clutching the cup that Reo had left behind. A stupid, cutesy thing, but Azuma had chosen it because—
—
“Tasuku, can you get your car out?” Tsumugi nudges, and Tasuku rolls his eyes.
“Mooch. What for?”
“The whole troupe’s coming, we’re shopping for some props today to help Tetsuro-san out,” he smiles, and Tasuku reluctantly gets up off the couch.
“Pile in, I guess,” he yells out the window when he pulls around, and Azuma stifles a laugh as he pulls his hair back into a ponytail. “Arisugawa, you’re responsible for making sure Mikage comes along.”
Izumi starts rattling off a list as soon as they’re inside the 100 yen store of things they need, Hisoka exempt, and Azuma gets assigned a mug, some fruits, a glass bowl, and a cheap bento set. He grabs the other items pretty quickly, then wanders over to the mug section to find a nice design when one catches his eye.
It’s nothing too complex, just a cute checked blue-and-pink plaid with cherries on it, but it reminds him all too viscerally of the mug set his mother had bought them when he was young. “A matched set, just for us,” she’d smiled, and he’d giggled at the simple joy of drinking out of a matching cup with his family.
The cup’s in his hand before he knows it, and while the others shoot him curious glances when he scans it instead of a sleek black or white one that would match with the rest of the aesthetic, they don’t question him any further. He’s a little glad he doesn’t have to tell anyone else at least for now.
—
He’s left waiting anyways. Left waiting for anyone to take him in, young and alone, an orphan.
Of course, nobody did.
This uncle couldn’t take him because he already had three kids, this person couldn’t take him because the apartment was too small, this aunt was too busy to deal with an elementary aged kid—
It didn’t matter in the end. There were caretakers, and his needs were taken care of, but—
He’s still so, so, so alone.
There’s nobody to brush out his hair, nobody to give him a kiss before he sleeps, nobody to casually bump shoulders with as he leaves for school.
Azuma still drinks out of the same mugs that his mother had gotten the week before they’d left on that trip. He doesn’t want to go buy others. It’d sink in, then, that he was all alone, and he didn’t have a mother to buy more mugs for him.
He grows his hair out, long and silky, and remembers how his brother had said he liked it. They’re gone, they’re gone, he chants, but his heart still yearns, and whenever he brushes it out again, he whispers a little prayer: Please, I don’t want to be alone.
—
He takes up cuddling when he’s an adult. He spends the night with men and women of all walks of life, sleeping next to them, holding them in his arms. He listens to their worries, and they pay him handsomely, and he likes it because when he’s pressed skin against skin to someone else, he can forget for a little how lonely the night feels without someone else’s breathing echoing nearby.
The nightmares don’t stop with the cuddling, unfortunately, but he at least learns how to hide them better.
(He still jolts awake, eyes stinging and chest heaving, crying out “Don’t go—” in his sleep, but now he doesn’t make any noise or motion, so at least it doesn’t interfere with his work.)
Touch becomes his way of life, and in a way, it’s comforting knowing that he has the nighttime to look forward to, where he can spend its wee hours experiencing skin to skin contact nonstop with another person.
His family had always been touchy, little points of contact that showed him they cared, and Azuma still remembers how his brother’s hand had felt on his own tiny one when they walked to school and how his father’s hand felt resting on the top of his head and how soft his mother’s hands were when they brushed through his hair despite her insistence that they weren’t. He lies awake at night sometimes, wondering why it didn’t feel the same. Wondering why having his entire body pressed up against another person wasn’t the same, why it didn’t satisfy the bone-deep aching inside of him that longed so badly for someone to touch him and make him feel safe and all right like when he was young.
Still. Cuddling pays the bills for the large empty apartment that he’s hardly ever home to see, and it’s a way to at least avoid the nightmares for a little while, so he keeps doing it.
—
“Psst,” Izumi nudges him. “Curtain call.”
He flashes a grateful smile and walks back out, boots clicking, to thunderous applause. He feels Tasuku grab his hand from his left, raising it up high just before the bow, and as he sweeps his cape into the fancy bow he’d learned just a couple days before their debut show, he smiles up at Tasuku’s face in thanks.
They walk off stage, and he holds on for just a few seconds longer to Tasuku’s hand to feel its weight in his and to feel the swish of air as he swings their arms together childishly. Azuma feels the weight of Tasuku’s quizzical gaze on him, but he just smiles mysteriously before dropping his hand and heading further backstage to take off his makeup and undo his hair. He won’t tell him how nice it felt to have someone else’s hand wrapped around his so casually, he thinks, but he’ll cherish the feeling while it lasts.
—
Azuma never told Tasuku anything, so why is the rest of his troupe being so touchy?
He notices it more and more as the days go on.
Every casual touch, every movement they take, he logs in his mind, and slowly, gradually, he begins to build a profile of how they approach him. (What a weird phrase to use, like he’s a wounded animal. But then, he supposes, he somewhat is. Definitely a phrase Homare might use.) He’s not sure if he just picks up on it more as the days go by, or if they had only started after Nocturnality, but.
Tsumugi offers light, familiar touches, most frequently on his wrists or arms. He taps Azuma’s waist from behind when they’re sliding past each other in the crowded hallway as Summer Troupe barrels down the corridor fighting for the baths, drums his fingers on his wrists when he tries to take a look at a bracelet Azuma’s wearing, lightly bumps against him on the way out to the garden, and presses their hands together when he passes flowers over to Azuma for his room.
Tasuku’s less free with his touches. He grabs Azuma’s hand to adjust poses, moves behind him to pose his body in a scene, taps his hand to drop it lower, but every once in a while, he nudges closer as Azuma tucks himself up against him on the couch and they watch old plays on the TV together, and Azuma feels warm again in a way he doesn’t when he’s cuddling with his customers.
Hisoka’s his favorite sleeping partner, he thinks. Sometimes he returns from an outing to see Hisoka curled up on his bed like a cat, barely blinking open an eye and muttering about “Arisu’s typewriter too loud,” and he chuckles softly as he slides into the sheets next to him. Sleeping next to him is different from work; there’s no direct skin contact most of the time (unless he wakes up with Hisoka piled on top of him) and Hisoka’s too sleepy to do more than utter a few words before they’re both asleep. The most important distinction for him, however, is how Hisoka’s body rises and falls on his sheets, and how when he wakes up from a nightmare, Hisoka’s cat-green eyes are always blinking open at him to remind him that he’s not alone anymore. Those moments, Hisoka gives him a little nudge on his chest, and moves a little closer, as if he understands just why he’d wake shivering, and Azuma smiles gratefully before falling back asleep peacefully.
Homare touches Azuma like he does everything else: grandly, with no room for subtlety. He smacks Azuma on the back in huge sweeps whenever he says anything particularly witty, kisses his hand deeply in a mockery of fairy tale princes whenever he gets poetic inspiration, claps his shoulder forcefully whenever they go on stage, and broadly links his arm with Azuma’s when they’re sent out together on grocery runs by Omi. It almost reminds him of his father’s gestures sometimes, and he imagines he can see his father in the sweep of Homare’s arm as it arcs across the space between them before it’s broken by Homare’s distinct laugh—and Azuma can’t help himself from joining in.
(Later, when a new member joins the troupe, he’ll experience the quiet comfort of a soft breath always echoing in the room when he sleeps, just like when he was a child. Later, he’ll know how it feels to have someone care about him enough that they promise to drop whatever they’re doing just to stay with him through the night. Later, he’ll feel the quiet press of another’s body to his, not in the same draping way as his customer’s cuddles but instead just as a hug, a wordless reassurance.)
Azuma learns to accept these touches as they come, feel the comfort of a family’s love surround him once more in casual touches that somehow manage to envelope his whole body with warmth, and as his time in Mankai passes, he looks at the ocean and smiles.
Father, Mother, Hajime-nii-san? Are you watching me? I’ve found my family again.