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Shinsuke ran a hand over Okada's hair. Soft, and slightly mussed.
"We'll stay in touch," He said. Okada smiled. It was a smile of warm pleasure, a response to a lover's gentle attention. It was a smile of mingling bitterness and sadness and loneliness aching before it rightfully should.
"Right. That's what they all say."
"Hey." Shinsuke ran the edge of his thumb down the side of Okada's face. "We will."
Okada didn't say anything for a while. He let himself enjoy the feeling of lying back on Shinsuke, the heat of his body, the rise and fall of his chest.
"Okay," He finally said. But the loneliness was still there.
When he saw the first pictures of Shinsuke with them, Okada smiled. He felt happy for him, because Shinsuke looked happy. There was a youthful exuberance in his face, in his body, the kind of electric energy that only a new start, a really new one, could bring. It was something Okada hadn't seen in Shinsuke for a long time.
But still, the pictures stuck with him for a while. Like a small, niggling injury. Not enough to stop him in his tracks, but always just there, hanging in the back of his mind.
He talked on the phone with Shinsuke until the rest of America fell asleep around him, and then texted him until Shinsuke himself fell asleep.
The calls became shorter, and then fewer, and the texts became less frequent.
And it made sense, Okada told himself, because Shinsuke was busy. It was a whole new country, new company, new language, new style, new everything. It was hard, and he had to dedicate a lot of time to it.
But still. There was always a still. Something about it gave Okada a cold, slimy feeling in his stomach. He had felt something like it before, like when looking at an opponent holding a belt high above their head, but never so intensely. Never like it was truly inside of him and consuming him, coursing through his veins and running his blood cold. He chewed his lip so often now, Gedo remarked he may very well bite it off at some point.
He tried to be discreet and subtle about it, but it became his habit to ask the others in Chaos for news about Shinsuke. Phonecalls, texts, even the smallest things. It seemed they got even less (significantly less) than Okada, which should've been a comfort, but just worried him even more.
That was when he started sending the gifts. Small things, home comforts or (mostly) things that reminded Okada of Shinsuke and the two of them together. But there weren't many, because besides all the shipping hassles (as if Gedo didn't complain enough already about the international phone calls running them broke...), what could Okada offer Shinsuke that America didn't already have for him?
The phone calls pretty much ended altogether, and the texts became few and far between.
Shinsuke took pictures with all his new friends, tweeted them, swapped inside jokes with them. Okada started chewing his nails again, something he hadn't done since he was a teenager.
His fingers moved somewhat frantically when he texted now. In fact, there was an air of worry and fret about him all the time, these days. He had almost completely given up on subtlety and non-chalance, enough so that Tanahashi noticed.
Okada picked up his phone backstage after a match to send a text, when Tana laid a hand over the screen, pushing it away from him.
"Don't," He said, in that Tana way where one simple word could mean so many, a legion more. He carefully took the phone from Okada's hands, as though both the phone and Okada were as fragile as each other, and laid it on the bench where it had been.
Okada stared at the phone, biting his lip. Then he started chewing his thumb. Finally, he picked up the phone again.
"You're only hurting yourself," Tana said over his shoulder.
Okada opened his messages.
Okada lost the belt to Naito and it felt like the bottom of his stomach had turned to steel, dragging him down from the very core, down to the ground, so he was never able to muster the strength to get up again.
His phone lit up with one new text alert.
Okada looked over at it, lying on the bench opposite him, the steel of the bench he lay on himself, where he may lay forever, digging into his skin and chilling his spine.
He remembered Tana's words.
You're only hurting yourself.
And god, he must really be desperate to be listening to Tanahashi.
But at the rate he was going, he didn't need any more hurt.
He let the phone vibrate. Then ring. Then finally, fall silent.
And he smiled again, but this time, it was all loneliness.