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Sometimes Scaramouche looks in the mirror and thinks someone should name a pathological condition after him. Sounds narcissistic. Kunikuzushi, the chronic pacing of disliking oneself and the world as one’s pendulum swings back and forth until he realises how long it has been since he last slept.
Having the eyebags pointed out at family gatherings does not help either, he thinks.
Beyond the meekly drawn curtains, unapologetically being oneself is not meant to be a mean-spirited comment, not meant to be anything, even when Kazuha would probably insist a positive connotation onto it. Sometimes Scaramouche looks in the mirror and he feels small, like the melody of happy birthday only brings out the worst in his vision. He’s technically one year too old to be spending too many hours considering which headphones he should buy.
Tartaglia would say they all sound the same, or not, or they are all hurting his cupped ears and it’s a nuisance when he’s right. Tartaglia is not in the store with him right now.
Loud bass. Its volume is enough to make his skull hum.
“This one has better sound blocking,” Kazuha nudges him gently in the too-bright department store and the world is sane, and he is Kunikuzushi, the guy who stands with his mouth open for a bit too long for comfort.
If there lives an after self-disgust, it would be the crinkle on Kazuha's eyes when he smiles.
It’s odd because they live together. They have been since the beginning and he’s not, hit by a fucking truck, in the metaphorical way Arlecchino and Columbina immediately exclaimed their relationship two months and fourteen days in during orientation week twelve years ago. Scaramouche knows because he counted. And because he counted, La Signora said it would not happen until he stopped counting.
“Thanks. Let’s get that.”
Shifts his weight forward as Kazuha puts the headphone over his hair, it’s around the fourth drumming heartbeat that he realises how quiet the universe can be, until there leaves only Kazuha in his view.
There’s a small price in shopping for your own birthday present, because he’s expecting the worst of everything in each step. He thinks about getting his card declined, about the curve he has to bounce through if it does, and how the poor cashier is staring at him with tired eyes before glancing at Kazuha’s good gesture. It has happened before, two years back. His stomach practically sunk deeper and deeper until it collapsed on itself.
Getting older just means staring at the mirroring display of shit you need to outgrow when you have no prospect and nothing planned for the next fourteen years, and he stares at the t-shirt because his old one, the matching one, is a little worn-out and he should be letting go of trying to discreetly match with Kazuha long before they get heartbroken over something stupid, like milk.
Milk? He pauses. Kazuha would never let him live it down if he bad-mouths their relationship in this insane way of thinking.
“Did you have everything you want, Kuni?”
Kazuha holds the reusable bag in his hands, and Scaramouche is not looking at the content inside when he says, yeah, and walks with two conscious steps in between them for the ride to the elevator.
He thinks and thinks and the other takes his words with such alacrity that the day sucks a little less.
He also thinks their hands brushed in the compact space, but that’s just living with Kazuha.
Arlecchino says Kazuha should have known better about romance with all of his poetry achievements hanging on their living room shelves. Scaramouche is going to boot her a second later, but he’s intrigued and he’s not going to turn away from a little temptation every now and then.
The kitchen light sears.
In here, Tartaglia and Columbina are trying to figure out the mechanic of his new stove because fine, there’s something distinctly chic looking about this new thing and maybe he got it because of that. Maybe it’s because Scaramouche reads on Reddit that this model is the easiest to clean in case of emergencies, which describes having Kazuha cook for him in a frenzy, sometimes.
“Hey.”
Arlecchino pulls Kazuha to the side mid-baking, and murmurs a few roaring words he can’t make out in this stupid headphone that is too good at cancelling noises, and Scaramouche realises he’s actually half angry at a product for working so good. La Signora and Pantalone insist he tries it out as they decorate the hall with something simple, which is code for brain-boggling art since neither has a good reputation with minimalism.
He irks. The characters in Arlecchino’s stories are faceless from the way her lips smack in rhythm, but not too foreign, judging from the way Kazuha blinks a few times before reaching his palms up to ease the intensity. Even the mere sight is knocking into his mind, and Scaramouche doesn’t want to think about what Arlecchino could possibly argue over, four seats and a glass door away from him and the couch.
What— I’m not— Are you— I’m serious. Kazuha goes through the motion and there has got to be a simile to describe the sheer stiffness of his body language. Nothing crosses Scaramouche’s mind when the song shuffles, and he realises he desperately wants the context of this weaving tale.
You’ll be dead if it’s not done, Arlecchino concludes.
Later, the woman turns to Scaramouche with her teeth sharp, chirping of a winning canary.
Pantalone sings happy birthday first. It’s a tradition.
They always discourage him from starting the song.
At first, Scaramouche wants to say he’s too old for parties at his house, but they’re not surprise parties anymore and Tartaglia says it’s fun to just have a gathering of close ones in his backyard. La Signora is the first to cut into his cake, the inside is coloured like blades of grass, of unfeeling the rain on a nice outing.
“Green,” Kazuha whispers to him because that’s the colour Scaramouche claimed to be his favourite.
For a moment, he forgets that it’s only mentioned due to Kazuha’s small desk plant at their dorm.
Scaramouche sits at his birthday party, four bike rides and one river away from that dorm room where his hands reached out automatically to wipe the frosting off Kazuha’s grin, and he wants to rest his head on his knees. This is the part where some pathologists would have already drafted him up into a hundred of dumbfounded names and categories, so he doesn’t have to think about love and what it means for his body to feel so warm, orbiting around the torturing kindness of Kaedehara Kazuha like this.
Whichever way he’s being read, Scaramouche is already losing, worse for wear.
Everyone cheers. Arlecchino gives Kazuha a glare that is all too telling, but the other doesn’t see and sometimes, Scaramouche wishes he has less awareness when it comes to things like this. The first bite with Kazuha smiling at him, of twelve years and god, Scaramouche has wanted him for twelve fucking years—is a sore subject to even think about in that one second.
This wasn’t supposed to happen in real life.
“Scaramouche, you got a little—” La Signora reaches for a napkin, but Kazuha reaches a thumb upward to wipe the cream away from his lips. He freezes. It takes Scaramouche a second too long to register the contact. It takes Kazuha less, but his redness is blooming all the same.
Sparks and the whole room is so loud and yet, so quiet.
Scaramouche looks at the camera Columbina is holding and why hasn’t someone said cut already?
He cleans up. The midnight dims. This is not one of Kazuha’s poems where the love interest is a pathway, a stand-in for his endless glow towards life as a whole while Scaramouche shrivels up away from her light. Time is going to clean this up, he thinks, still counting the beating of his heart.
It never did, but here’s to another year.
There were moments, he guesses. Vital ones adorned inside his brain alongside potted plants and their rotating system to water every single one Kazuha owns. There were moments when Scaramouche thought it could have meant something, the way Kazuha would care for him.
Fingers like honey, Kazuha painted the first stroke onto his shoulders and Scaramouche could never forget the scent of ointment, fresh and bitter against skin as all the bruises ate up until his body no longer looked like a bad mimicking of the Starry Night. I’m never letting you drive alone to campus, the guy grinned and fine, it’s not like Kazuha’s dimples were the most beautiful thing he had ever set his sights upon.
Blame the dorm director. Blame the dorm director. Blame whoever was responsible for putting them together, a boy who noticed too many things and another who had always been clueless. Scaramouche cooked him something other than cup noodles, and Kazuha painted again. Still, this time, it was with words. He became the muse in a poem to be sent across their department, and Kazuha named it Springtime as if Scaramouche didn’t just tell him about his birthday.
Scaramouche sat in his bed across from Kazuha’s, in the tight space where it would smell of sweat if the summer were too unkind to their fan, and he tried desperately not to think about the gruffness of his roommate. He paced and writhed and swallowed away the time Kazuha would come home glittering with golden dust by sun fall. He built a wall and it was hollowed out enough for him to fit inside its embrace, and he thought about the emerald gleams of Kazuha’s toothbrush resting next to his. And he never thought to look too deeply into having something pathologically named after him, but Scaramouche needed an explanation beyond his twisted words and the too-warm palms.
Maybe it would have been different if he actually dated people, and he would have had more things to think about, like the way this girl in his psych class was twirling her pencil and resting it between her lips. But they turned into Kazuha’s and it made sense in his head. And he was pining but Kunikuzushi, the chronic pacing of clenching his fists so he wouldn’t brush his hands through Kazuha’s braid in the fall and wow, and wow and wow,... would make more sense than love.
So there’s that and there’s Kazuha and Scaramouche needs his brain to look at the sink instead of aimlessly trying to make it through another year.
“Kuni?” Kazuha slides in the kitchen after fourteen minutes of fighting a drunken Columbina from falling asleep in their living room, and he scrunches his nose up against the clink of dishes. Nothing is muffled when the world rests, and “Hey, Kuni.”
He begins and it’s the voice he uses for only Scaramouche, a curated softness from sharing one bedroom to two doors too far down the hallway to his left.
“When you have a second, can we talk about something?”
“Oh.”
Scaramouche wipes the counter down and he can hear anxiety pools in the backseat with its list of horrid, terrible aches. There were stories that ended with these words, can we talk about something was always leading up to a really, truly big, heartbreaking rise.
On every curve of his breath, he finds it harder to play pretend.
“Can it wait?” He asks, which is kind of sad because anyone can see that he’s stalling, and he’s too old to do things like, being scared of confrontations with a sickening realisation that a person can’t just live out the rest of his college’s wish with another when this kitchen is getting too small for them to just plant their feet. “I’m sort of tired, Kaedehara.”
Kazuha tells him back, “It’s really important.”
There’s no use in saying no.
The point is, it’s not his birthday anymore since the clock hits midnight three ticks ago, and Scaramouche has already done cleaning up the leftovers while one-fifth of his guests sleep soundly on his couch. But he has done cleaning up and the guests left, but large trees outback still have fairy lights, and there is a table set when he lost count of his tableware.
He snorts. Kazuha leads.
The main course is that one poetry notebook from college Kazuha would never discard.
“What’s all this?” Scaramouche rolls his eyes because the rule is for him to buy his own gifts.
“A contract,” Kazuha suggests and the correct answer, the legal one, is no, this looks nothing close. “Okay. You got me. It’s a late celebration since you don’t really do anniversaries or anything, and I get it.”
He doesn’t look at him, and Scaramouche blinks at the coiled oddness.
“But I really want to celebrate living with you, for however long we have.”
A long silence.
“Okay.”
It’s hard for bodies to lie.
Kazuha sits him down and the notebook, worn cover, is filled with annotations, further explanations than the ones carved inside his memories. Scaramouche flips through the pages and there’s a smile on Kazuha’s face, half-apologetic. They’re dated from the first day Scaramouche moved in, five hundred eight million and eight hundred thousand heartbeats ago.
- I hate it when I can’t write something so obvious to the eyes, to the silence of an unseen audience when moonlight paints over your bangs and I am not sleeping enough, judging from how I can see each star imprinted upon your forehead. That’s the point, I think. That’s the theme. I am burning bright in the bed six tiles away from yours, and I am working myself up in a frenzy because you can be honest if I want it.
But I cannot and there is no right for me to demand such kind things from you.
- I burn with a feverish upcoming and college is almost done as you lay cold towel on my neck and chest. I sweat through my shirt and you tuck my hair behind my ear, and no one is saying anything for better or worse. It’s not for worse, I think, because your fingers are gentle and you give me a little smile, like this moment is mine to keep and hold and a fever is completely okay and being cared, being touched, being cherished is a way of living inside our room where the beds are practically close enough to breathe in the air you have exhaled two seconds back. You pull our beds together that night to watch over me in case I roll over, and I wrap my arms around my body, but they end up coiling around your chest. And you say that you would miss me if I move out to the honorary house and I murmur against your bare back that I won’t, because who is going to tell you to ease down on the eyeliner.
I don’t think you hear me.
- I wake up and it’s still shame, vividly living in between my ribs. I’m not sure I fully understand the equivalent of sunshine and a smile from you on a nice day. We are walking home from your family’s dinner and your mom prompts you to move out and think about marriage, so you excuse us both. You tuck coins into the pocket of your shirt until it creates a small pool, and your nose curves up against the texture and the price of a better headset, and I want you to lend those coins into my pocket until you can feel better, again.
Did I mention that I’m an idiot, Kuni? I don’t think you would take it kindly to my self-berating, because you didn’t and you wouldn’t and maybe that’s one of the reasons why I find it so hard to ignore this realisation. I don’t think intelligence would guarantee a good life because I have a nauseous sense of understanding myself, and it’s not something I want to explore.
Hypothetical question: Being unapologetically oneself is hard sometimes, when there is too much on your shoulders and we are all destined to travel alone to figure out the means and causes on this universe, but I tried it and it hurt and what if I don’t have the time to do anything justice, Kuni?
I want to uncurl my palms and ask for your assistance, but your heart beat so loudly on that Thursday when my fingers brushed your back, and I think you knew already and asking would be meaningless if we both knew.
- When I first guessed your favourite colour to win the last cup noodle in our cupboard, I knew you would have liked black the most since it was your whole wardrobe, every notebook cover and even the pen ink you picked. I wanted you to have that last bit of our grocery, so I said green.
You looked at me, and then back at your knees, saying nothing and I smiled a moment too soon to realise what you were planning next. You said you had always loved green, and you lied, and I had loved you the whole time.
Springtime comes around again and again and you are still here, and I still place the same cup noodle brand on our shelf regardless.
Love.
I think we can acknowledge it. I think it’s what we already have, the art of our dynamo.
“Are you alright?” Kazuha eventually says and he hasn’t realised the sky is doting orange as he goes through the two hundred and fifty-five pages of scribbled love notes. It has never been the universe that centres him and removes the noises, each feeling pulsing below skin and Scaramouche doesn’t have any words to conclude.
“Fine. It’s fine. I just, I now have something to look forward to next year,” he says and it’s—
Okay.