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“Don’t move.”
Sousuke goes completely rigid, a bit of an over exaggeration that makes Haruka’s shoulders bounce in amusement as he slides off of him and onto the floor. Sousuke watches him linger there for a few moments, knees on the wood with forearms propped under his chin on the edge of the loveseat, as if he regrets the action and wasn’t entirely committed to standing right away before he started moving. But he pushes to his feet anyway eventually and crosses the room to his desk.
If he weren’t already watching Haruka move around, Sousuke would know at this point the scraping of his shitty little dining-table-gone-desk chair across the banged up flooring by sound alone. It’s a particularly grating screech that he’s heard at least once a day for months. Haruka’s long stopped noticing it, Sousuke feels like he notices it more as time goes on. Maybe he’s just increasingly aware of exactly how much time Haruka is sitting on it when he works, and his back aches in sympathy at the thought. The chair’s throes of agony as it’s dragged from corner to corner of the little studio flat are just reflecting what a travesty it is for his body that Haruka chooses to use it instead of a padded desk chair.
Haruka pulls his shirt over his head, then drops his pants and boxers to the floor to mirror Sousuke, who was forced to nudity as a condition of being allowed to come over. He’s long stopped interpreting this stipulation as anything sexual or embarrassing whatsoever, as Haruka told him he would after a very flustered and nerve wracking first experience. Now it can even be considered par for the course, and it’s sort of nice anyway to not have to deal with layers of fabric since the studio’s only window faces west and catches the warmest part of the day head-on. He strips with Sousuke to make him feel more at ease, but it isn’t really necessary anymore. They both know that, but he does it anyway.
“You moved,” Haruka scolds as he settles to sit in front of Sousuke.
“I did not.”
“Put your hand back to the side of your face.”
He must’ve idly itched his nose or something, and drops his hand away from his chest to lay open-palmed next to his face as it was. He’s on his back with his head canted to the side, legs propped on the armrest by his calves, other arm closest to the back of the couch draped just above his hips. It’s not a pose, just how Haruka happened to pin him onto the couch for a doze after he got situated, but he’s also used to this.
“Draw me like one of your french girls.”
“You don’t have to say that every time.”
Sousuke chuckles as Haruka flips open one of the larger sketchbooks he owns and lays it flat on his crossed legs. It’s the one Sousuke is sort of afraid of if he’s being honest as he always ends up drawn in an uncomfortable level of detail within it. He knows Haruka isn’t scrutinizing him, not in a bad way anyway, but it’s a difficult mindset to shake and leave at the door. It’s been a challenge for him, personally and not on any level Haruka is aware of (he thinks), to let this happen as freely as it does, to dedicate as much trust as it takes for someone like him to let Haruka look that closely.
He can’t help but wonder, and always finds the questions shirking back from the tip of his tongue: Why him? What does Haruka see here, if he’s seeing anything at all, or has he not found it yet?
He calls this sketchbook Godzilla. For reasons Sousuke cannot begin to understand, Haruka started naming them without much of a pattern. There’s another on his shelf named Orochi (“Uh, like the dragon?” “Uh, what else?”). He could ask how the other figures these names and maybe get the rather uninspired answer with a shrug that Haruka probably has, but he enjoys the unknowing and mystery a little more.
Godzilla features Sousuke entirely in fully-rendered detail. Not isolated pieces of him, not loose lines, and not clothed like some of the pages his image has ended up on in other sketch books. No, this sketchbook is all him, and he has to admit to himself he’ll be relieved when the book is full and done, assuming whatever Haruka’s mining for will be made apparent by then.
Or not, if there’s nothing there.
Haruka always starts with a line to divide the page, and runs the tip of his tongue along the seam of his lips for the duration of the stroke. It was a cute tick when Sousuke wasn’t privy to the power behind it, now it’s as good as a spell that holds him in place once it’s finished. He’s called the line an anchor before, but that’s all greek to Sousuke.
And then he falls into his own world, dragging Sousuke down with him, and Sousuke can only wait to be released from it.
He lets his eyes slip shut to avoid Haruka’s pointed gaze sweeping up and down his frame. Searching, always looking. Despite his slowly building confidence overall that lets him lounge around in various stages of undress, he feels that unwanted brick of anxiety in his gut like he always does when it comes to the act of assuming the role of Haruka’s Subject. His ears hone in on the light scratching of graphite on paper, feels the point of the pencil on his skin when he thinks about the angle that makes up his jawline. He feels it scratch down to his throat, thin and sharp, and part of the trust he hands over is not turning away and curling up to protect himself while the sensation of being opened ear-to-ear burns intrusively between his temples.
“I start with a shape,” Haruka says suddenly. “A hollow, messy skeleton; a head and how your arms fall along your body. You have longer arms than most people. Your elbow rests perfectly in the pinch of your waist.”
Sousuke feels like he comes up for air at the sound of the voice, methodical and matter-of-fact. He can never hide his nervousness from Haruka, and he’s sort of glad for the other’s perceptiveness right now, showing him the surface. “Gee, thanks.”
“A lot of you is larger than average.”
“I take it back, genuine thanks.”
“That’s not what I mean.” But Sousuke thinks he smiles ever so slightly. “For example, your knuckles.”
“Are large?”
“And knobby. I like to draw your hands first.”
“Why?” Sousuke encourages.
“Because I like how you touch me.”
Sousuke flinches hard and huffs. He hates this sort of talk, and he thought Haruka did too. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“That is so fucking-”
“That’s why I draw it, and don’t talk about it.”
His chest tightens in what feels like the sort of jump-scare he might get from a movie, but is chased by relief. Maybe despite the embarrassment, that was the point. “Why’d you tell me then?” he dares to ask.
“Because ever since that first class, you’re afraid of me, and you shouldn’t be.”
There’s a part of Sousuke, tiny these days but there nonetheless, that tries to sit up and yell fuck off, fuck you, and what do you know? And he hates that side of himself, that reactionary, angry side that gets him into trouble with the people he loves when they confront him like this.
Because it’s taken a long time and a lot of messing up to accept that angry side is rooted in fear, and to hear it thrown back at him like this leaves him on edge. But there’s the balm of relief from a moment prior vying for his attention too, because Sousuke wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Haruka’s trying to start a fight. No, he really does trust him, so what is he so afraid of?
“What about before?” he asks, turning away from his agitation for once, making Haruka look up in surprise. Surprise that he didn’t get angry or that he’s asking for more. Maybe both. “Before you knew what I felt like.”
He returns his focus to his sketchbook. “I imagined it.”
Sousuke tries to imagine it. Lets his eyes fall shut again and attempts to recreate not even twenty minutes ago to start, while Haruka was still lying flush along him. His cheek was warm, but where was it again? Maybe nestled just below his collarbone, the right one. But maybe he was leaning forward more, and it was under his left. Did the top of his head reach Sousuke’s chin? Was his hair silky from a shower or coarse from chlorine? Did he braid their legs together and obnoxiously bump his bony fucking ankles on Sousuke’s because he knows it makes him squirm?
He doesn’t remember what any of Haruka felt like- even the warmth of his cheek is just a word, not a feeling- and until now it’s never struck him as odd that he can’t recall that sort of level of sensory detail, and suddenly a throwaway remark by Haruka saying he imagined it before it ever happened seems far and beyond Sousuke’s comprehension.
“How?”
Haruka does smile now, if not ulteriorly. “You really want to know?”
“I want to understand, sure.”
He’s quiet in favor of a few loud lines followed by a series of short strokes that Sousuke’s only ever been able to think of as falling feathers.
“At first I wondered- if you ever actually found the courage to touch me, that is, which was indeterminate for a bit-” He pauses to let Sousuke scoff before Sousuke registers he wants to.
“If my hands were soft?” he snorts, knowing already Haruka would never wax so poetically.
“...Where you’d start. If you’d force me by my jaw to kiss you, take it all for yourself and not share in one demanding movement.”
“I-”
“- would never, though, I know…” Haruka continues, voice lilting down a quiet road, never pausing the light scritch of falling feathers. “Then if not that, if you would be so insecure as to pet me. Pat me on the head. ‘Uh, good job Haru’,” he says in some intentionally dumb imitation of Sousuke’s voice, a smarmy twitch picking at the corner of his mouth. “But no, that wasn’t right either. Didn’t feel right to imagine… didn’t keep me up or catch my breath but what did...” he trails off and away, focus led momentarily downwards, countenance nearly hard as stone in a strange juxtaposition to the feathers still falling.
“What did was imagining, were you honest... if your hand was over mine, guiding my pencil… imagining how you’d draw yourself. If you could.”
“If? I could too,” he says in jest, but it tumbles from him frail instead.
“No, you’re awful,” Haruka criticizes without making it sound like a criticism at all. “But if you could… you’d start with a hollow, messy skeleton.”
Sousuke finds he has no quip this time, and that his current study of Haruka has at some point broken him of his own role of being a subject. Haruka keeps drawing, lets his revelation hang suspended on thin wire for a moment.
“And you’d stop at that,” he says sharply, cutting it down. Sousuke feels it shatter, somehow, and nearly doesn’t stop himself from covering his head with his arms on instinct. “Then you’d let go of my hand, and face me, and touch every single part of me. Reverently, I imagined, with even pressure from only your fingertips, and warmth from the center of your palms. You’d set out to memorize every single detail of me and succeed, pull color into my skin, steal the gasps from my lungs and all for you to fill in the space you left behind since you never thought to give yourself anything more than the skeleton.”
For how quickly it spills from him, Sousuke would expect Haruka to be out of breath. But he’s just as placid as when he started, and it’s Sousuke who experiences the fatigue, the exasperation, while Haruka slows his pencil, pecks out lazy hops now in no particular pattern.
“That’s what I imagined, before you touched me.”
Sousuke swallows the sandstorm in his throat, musters up the courage to even dare to ask. “And after you knew?”
Haruka snaps the sketchbook closed and delivers it with two hands to Sousuke with a lean forward from his creaky chair. “Unfortunately it was just as I imagined it. So I started this for you.”
Sousuke stares at it, fear keeping him still again and it couldn’t have been Haruka’s goal, but his eyes betray him and break to dart to his folded pile of clothes at the door. “There’s nothing wrong with a skeleton,” he mutters meekly. “If it’s all I can do-”
Haruka shakes his head to shush him and insists it forward until Sousuke finally breaks his pose-but-not-really to receive it. “It isn’t. You’re so much more, Sousuke,” he adds quietly, leaning forward again to tap the cover of the sketchbook. “You’re the creator of this, not me.”
“Oh,” he breathes dumbly, making Haruka snort, and pushing all the creeping static away on one exhale. Haruka isn’t patronizing him, or scrutinizing him, or belittling his insecurities. He’s just helping him finish what he started because
“You really suck at drawing, is all,” Haruka finishes for him, and doesn’t get his smirk off in time before Sousuke drops the sketchbook and drags him off that piece of shit chair.