Work Text:
Sakusa Kiyoomi stares at the painting longer than he should.
He hates it. He hates everything about it. The ridges where the paint has hardened in layers, the way the colors dance between each other in an uneven blend. The couple holding hands, their backs too tight, and smiles too stiff.
His name is in the corner, but the piece doesn’t feel like his.
“Kiyo, it’s time to go.”
He doesn’t respond to his cousin, instead, he turns wordlessly, following Komori out of the room, hoping the bitter taste in his throat will stay behind with the painting.
As they walk through the hall, the portraits seem to stare after them. Their beady eyes match those of the crowd Kiyoomi had escaped from only an hour ago. Now, the excited chatter has dulled to an echo of cracked heels on the hard floor or the occasional cough by the elderly man eyeing a Degas in the next room.
Komori sends him an uneasy look. His gaze is uncomfortable on Kiyoomi’s cheek.
“You don’t have to do any more interviews today.”
He says it like he’s hoping Kiyoomi will take a breath of relief.
Instead, the artist stares ahead, barely even acknowledging his cousin’s presence. “But tomorrow?”
Komori looks away.
It’s always the same.
“Maybe you could ask them—“
“You know it won’t work.” Kiyoomi wasted months pleading with his parents for just a week—a day—an hour without microphones being shoved in his face or journalists scribbling down his every word. Nothing will change. He knows that now.
You owe us, his parents had reminded him until Kiyoomi learned to stop asking for anything. We do this all for you. The least you can do is act grateful for it, Kiyoomi.
Komori pulls at his brown bangs, brows furrowed. If Kiyoomi didn’t know any better, he’d think this was the first time they’d had this conversation. But the same words have been exchanged so many times, that he’s starting to grow sick of them.
Finally, his cousin sighs, giving up on whatever he was trying to think through.
“They’ll get off your back once we start university. That’s one more week of this and you’re off the hook.”
It certainly doesn’t feel like it.
They walk under the final archway which gives out to the entrance of the small museum. Ticket booths line the entrance with tired-looking employees seated behind glass. A couple chatters on a bench by the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up most of the right wall. Outside, the blare of cars sounds as fumes of exhaust leak into the Tokyo city sky.
Komori searches his bag for his scarf. It isn’t cold enough for him to need it so late in March, but he insists on wearing it anyway.
“Where are they?” Kiyoomi scans the lobby. There’s no sign of his parents waiting by the entrance.
“Outside,” Komori says, fastening the scarf around his neck. “Or they were five minutes ago. They sent another car for us.”
Of course, Kiyoomi thinks. They can’t even spare him a few minutes of self-contempt before whisking him off to the next location, and even then—they never even wait for him.
He’s glad when the tall glass museum doors shut him and Komori outside.
A small black car hums by the curb, and a man Kiyoomi vaguely recognizes as his parents’ new driver is waiting by the back passenger door with a cigarette plucked between his thumb and index finger. The man is only as tall as Komori, but stockier and looks as disinterested in them as Kiyoomi is in him.
“Thanks for waiting, Matto-san,” Komori grins, breezing to the other side of the car in one swift movement.
The driver—Matto-san, Kiyoomi tries to ingrain it in his head—snubs out his cigarette with his foot and opens the door for Kiyoomi with only a short nod, eyes unseeable behind thick black lenses.
No words are shared during the ride back to their apartment, which is good because Kiyoomi is beginning to nurse a headache. The last driver always talked too much, either uncomfortable by the heavy silence that Kiyoomi travels with after another forced public appearance, or unable to recognize that Kiyoomi finds weather-talk to be one of the most useless forms of communication created by man.
He’s only ever voiced this to Komori and wonders vaguely if his cousin has anything to do with his parents’ changed taste in drivers.
Three years ago, he might have thought his parents were using it as an apology.
He spends the car ride idly scrolling through recent art scene articles. There have been a few University exhibits in Tokyo that had caught his eye over the past few months, but most of the work he’d seen during his visits seemed rushed at best, and insincere at worst. Not that Kiyoomi has a right to criticize.
His brow pinches when he sees an article on him by the Fine Arts of Japan web magazine. Several other articles pop up with his name, and the heavy weight of dread sets on his shoulders as he reads title after title proclaiming his so-called incredible artistic success.
Sakusa Kiyoomi, the 18-Year-Old Artist Who Has It All!
Sakusa Kiyoomi Painting Sold For 900,000 Yen at Prime of Tokyo Arts Auction.
Read About Artist Sakusa’s Recent Exhibit in The Link Below!
He turns off his phone.
Matto-san pulls up beside his apartment complex ten minutes later and lets both the boys let themselves out.
Maybe it isn’t cold enough for Komori’s scarf, but Kiyoomi is glad he wore a coat. The brisk afternoon wind sends a chill through the gaps in his sleeves, trailing up his arm and settling somewhere in his chest, cold and numbing.
By the time Kiyoomi remembers to thank their driver, the car is gone.
And maybe that’s for the better. Komori is always the one for pleasantries, and Kiyoomi wouldn’t be able to say any genuine thanks while knowing that the man will be back in just a few hours to pick him up for dinner.
“Let’s get changed,” Komori says, nodding toward the door. “I have to work for a bit. Are you going to need anything?”
“Like what?” Kiyoomi says, turning away from the vacated street to follow Komori inside.
“Emotional support, maybe?” Komori twitches a brow upward as if he were telling a funny joke. A tiny smile plays on his lips. “Another run-through of what not to say when you see your brother-in-law?”
“The first run-through was fine,” Kiyoomi bites. He’s relieved by the wave of warmth the building provides once they’re inside. They bee-line for the elevator around the corner, ignoring the few people scuttling around the lobby. Kiyoomi hopes that nobody is waiting by the elevator and allows some of the tension to roll from his shoulders when he finds no one there. “You’re acting like I need to be trained.”
“You do,” Komori shakes his head, pressing his thumb down on the button to call an elevator. “No amount of media training can wipe the ever-present disgust from your voice when you see him. You’ll scare him off.”
“He’s already married to my sister,” Kiyoomi scowls. “Not much I can scare him away from at this point. It’s not my fault he tried to touch my shoulder last time. He was slobbering and disgusting.”
“He was drunk, Kiyo,” his cousin sighs right as the elevator pings and the doors open smoothly. “Everyone was.”
“I wasn’t.”
An old couple shuffles out. Kiyoomi cleanly steps out of their way, pulling his surgical mask further up his face as he follows Komori into the lift. Old people like to cough a lot, he thinks bitterly, wondering what sort of germs currently infest the air as they begin their climb to the fifth floor.
“And he apologized,” Komori adds as if the conversation has any real importance. “You should go easier on him.”
“I don’t want to go to this,” Kiyoomi says, watching as the red number above the button panel flickers from 2 to 3. He wants to go to sleep.
“The dinner is for you, you know,” his cousin says. He’s rapping his knuckles quietly on the wall by his hip, foot tapping to a beat undoubtedly playing in his head. He looks tired, maybe as tired as Kiyoomi feels, but he’s better at not complaining about it. “Think of it as a final send-off. It’ll be at the steakhouse you liked from last summer.”
The elevator slows.
“You’re not the one who has to go,” Kiyoomi says coldly.
The number glows 5 above. The door pings and slides open.
“And I don’t want a sendoff,” he says, sparing a look at Komori as he exits the elevator. Komori looks up at him with something Kiyoomi might recognize as pity if he cared to look closely enough. But he turns away, stepping with forced speed down the right hall. His steps crack against the wooden floor, echoing off the walls, and resounding from the textural ceiling. Kiyoomi has a headache.
“Then what do you want, Kiyo?” Komori asks, pace brisk as he tries to keep up with the taller boy.
Kiyoomi scowls as if Komori can see it and hunches his shoulders.
There’s no point in asking for things that could never happen. No point in thinking about what he can never have. No point in hoping, or wishing, or letting himself want.
His mind wanders before he can stop it. To December. The desperation he’d felt. The need for an escape. A Picasso exhibition. And the noisy asshole he’d argued over a painting with.
Kiyoomi, trying very hard not to, thinks of honey-brown eyes, a Kansai accent, and ugly mustard-colored hair. He closes his eyes. He lets out a breath of air. He packages away each and every image, placing them in a corner of his mind that he only allows himself to go to at night, alone, where the cameras and the eyes can’t get to them.
He thinks of a boy from Hyougo who couldn’t finish an assignment. He thinks of a name that he wants to forget. He thinks of Blue Period and a dead artist who was unafraid to paint what he wanted, even in his misery. He pushes away the bitterness.
Kiyoomi unlocks his apartment door, waits for the sharp click of the lock, and lets himself into the concrete box he calls home. He shoves everything in his mind away until all that’s left is the blank apathy he’s so carefully perfected over the years.
“Kiyo?” Komori says, watching him from the doorway. His eyes are calm, if not concerned, and they probe him with a silent question.
Kiyoomi faces his cousin and doesn’t think of anything at all.
“If I told you what I want,” he says, “would I get it?”
Komori looks away and does not respond.
No. They both know this because they both know what Sakusa Kiyoomi wants.
He walks to his room and shuts his door, sets his bag neatly on his desk, and pulls at the tie around his neck.
He doesn’t think about anything.
Not his parents. Not his art. Not his cousin. Not the boy from Hyougo.
Not the one thing he can’t have.
Instead, he stares at his reflection in his too-big mirror and scrubs the dirt and grime off his face. There is a certain surety about this that he’s learned to accept years ago. His paintings are not his own. His skill is not his own. His life is not his own.
Sakusa Kiyoomi does not love art anymore.
And he does not ever, ever say, “I want to be free.”