Chapter Text
Yuma has a habit of being fashionably late. It’s such a characteristic that all of his friends plan events for his late arrival, at a minimum Yuma is everywhere at least 10 minutes late. Classes are no exception to that rule. Especially not his ukiyo-e class, when he first saw it, he spent an hour trying to figure out what it meant - Yuma isn’t an art historian, he doesn’t care for moldy paper or faded pictures, he cares about things that matter. His first choice class was the ever popular history of technology class that everyone else was taking. Yuma was late to filling in the application as always and missed out.
白鳥
The halls of the building are quiet. If people didn’t know the time one could assume Yuma was early, basking in the warm glow of the sun as he leisurely walks through the empty halls. Being late has a kind of freedom to it, Yuma could leave, no one would ever know he was here, being late wouldn’t matter.
For some reason there is something telling him to attend at least the first lecture of the class, he never has to go again, never has to do the work, all he has to do is make something up for an assignment and pass. There was no need to get attached to pointless paintings.
He slowly approaches the last room in the hallway, he knows the door opens into the back of the room because despite all his aloofness about his tardiness he does care about disrupting the professor and the other students. There were always two options: one go in slowly and try to ignore his lateness, or two enter confidently. Yuma personally commits to the latter option but it always ends up being an awkward mix of the two of them.
白鳥
The creek of the door causes the professor to stop and most of the students look up beside those in the front row who are both too far away from the sound to disturb them but they are also the most engaged with the lecture.
Yuma makes a sign of apology and quickly takes a seat in the back row, he takes nothing out of his bad and puts his head on the table wishing to use the 2 hours as an excuse to catch up on sleep.
Most of the content goes over Yuma’s head, he is in a trance of half sleep while also being uninterested in it. He hears something about social transition and freedom, commercialism words he vaguely cares about but then the lecture starts talking about production or Mount Fuji and he zones back out. All of the colours are admittedly pretty but there is no meaning to them, Yuma just admires them, as he would anything he found beautiful. On some subconscious level, Yuma thinks the concept of the world itself is beautiful, somewhere within himself there is something freeing about learning something entirely new, something he has no attachment to, no expectations. Here no one expects anything from Yuma.
Despite this, he still manages to conform to every single expectation of him. He is the boy who sleeps during class, the one who will probably never show up again, the professor won’t know his name or face - and that's what is expected of him.
Yuma has a habit of conforming to expectations. Everywhere he goes he is exactly what everyone thinks he is: loud, opinionated, and apathetic. Really Yuma wants the world to see a different side to him, a calm side, he always has. That side is hidden away, rarely ever revealed. For this class, he wouldn’t mind being what people always think of him.
As the lecture finishes, the professor says something about the reading for the seminar and a drowned out reminder of its location and time. Yuma lets everyone around him pack up before he moves. His head is still half rested in the crook of his elbow while mainly being pressed against the table, it’s uncomfortable but his neck has gotten used to it meaning at some point it became comfortable. He doesn’t move until he is the only person left in the back row. Yuma always lets everyone else leave before him - if he is the last person to arrive he might as well be the last to leave.
He slowly stands up, adjusting his hoodie as he stands up, from his position he can see another student still packing away sitting in the front row.
白鳥
From where Yuma is standing, the boy is looking down at his notes, his hair unstyled and falling into his eyes. All of his equipment is blue, a strange shade of blue to come in a basic stationary set. Apart from that Yuma pays him no mind, the only inconvenience he provides is the fact he hasn’t left yet.
Carefully, Yuma walks down the stairs keeping a steady rhythm. He doesn’t want to go too slowly but he wants to give the boy enough time to pack up and leave. As he reaches the front row the boy is only just putting his papers into his backpack. Calling them papers isn’t accurate, as Yuma gets a closer look he can see it is a meticulously kept notebook with every page neatly designed. Yuma can’t believe the boy has time to make them during the lecture.
As he stands parallel to the boy, Yuma looks at him. Looking into his eyes proves difficult due to his overgrown hair, he is placing his bag onto his back (a blue backpack decorated with pins and still half open). The boy gets something out, a pair of blue headphones he slings around his neck, he fiddles on his phone before placing them on his head. Yuma continues to look at him before signalling for him to leave. The boy shakes his head and as he does so the hair briefly makes room to look at his eyes, Yuma looks into them and notices their softness and decides to leave the boy to his music and decides to entertain his own thoughts. He can’t decide what captivated him more, the multiple colours of the paintings, or that boy's specifically blue pen, or his dark eyes.
As always, Yuma’s best friend Nicholas is waiting outside of his lecture room, he talks about his own lecture, in Yuma’s preferred technology class and teasingly asks how he found his art class and Yuma shrugs, unsure of how to put his thoughts into words. There wasn’t anything exceptional about what he learnt but it had all made him think like never before. The pair walk away with Nicholas talking about the coming days and Yuma fixated on the last 3 hours of his life.
燕
Jo arrives everywhere at a minimum 10 minutes early. But for his ukiyo-e class he is 30 minutes early, the first person in the room. This was the class Jo had asked for since his first year. Every other class consisted of either Roman or Greek sculptors, Renaissance paintings and art movements hailing from Europe. This class was something he was interested in, the history of the floating world - what made it drive it and most importantly what was produced. Jo knows there were problems getting the numbers needed for the class to run nevertheless, the faculty valued one overenthusiastic student over 100 careless ones. No one ever loved the other classes, and Jo would love this one.
The intricacies and colour choices had always fascinated him but he values it beyond an art form. For Jo ukiyo-e had always been about understanding social life of the time, not political turmoil, or changing aristocracies, but about the life of ordinary people, of everyday things.
At the same time as this class is the extremely popular history of technology class that Jo avidly avoids but he knows it was the first choice of a lot of the students in his class. Really the professor should just teach the class to Jo, he is probably the only person who wants to be there, something that will undoubtedly become evident within the coming weeks as less people decide to show up.
The fact of the matter was, Jo didn’t really care. For the first time in his life he was excited at the thought of speaking to a group of people, potentially doing a presentation because he knew that this was his thing, that it was the thing he knew the most about in the world. If he himself was a woodblock painting he might be able to understand himself, decipher his own intricacies instead of constantly being in a state of confusion about who he is, what he wants.
Jo wants stability, but also craves change. He seeks out comfort, things he knows but always wonders what would happen if he did something else, something unexpected. Jo always did exactly what he expected of himself, what everyone else expected. He loved the predictability but hated that he was stuck, the floating world wasn’t stuck and he wishes he could be more like that.
燕
As more students begin to pour into the room, Jo starts to get out his stationary: a blue writing pen, a blue highlighter, and a blue notebook - all a specific shade of blue, the same shade of Prussian blue. Aisuri-e was the printing of woodblock pictures almost entirely in Prussian blue, becoming more popular from the 1820s easily identified by pictures being excessively blue. Jo thought the colour was calming, the entirely blue pictures reflected trading culture, diplomatic relations but most interestingly the changing tides, the shores of Japan beginning to change forever. Most people just thought it was just a normal blue stationary set but that ignored the amount of effort Jo and his best friend Maki put into looking for them. They were all specifically Prussian blue.
On the opening slide to the lecture is Hokusai’s great wave and Jo rolls his eyes. The image that defines an art period and Jo hates it, he is a little bit like that, always wanting to hate the popular, he wants people to know he truly cares, that he cares enough to know something beyond the basics. He knows that the professor has to start with something famous, get people beyond Jo interested but he could have done that while showing off the rare beauties of Edo era Japan. The flowers blooming in spring, the swallows migrating south for winter, or the farming of everyday people. To Jo that is what ukiyo-e is about, not metaphorical political collapse or stability, why couldn’t all just be more simple, a mirror into life?
The blue flash across the screen zooming in on different parts, until the final slide is grey and white - focusing in on Mount Fuji in the center of the image, tiny, being engulfed by a towering wave. The water is equally destructive and calm. Everyone always focuses on the wave but if Jo was forced to he would highlight his favourite part as being the almost concealed image of Mount Fuji.
As always, Jo waits for the lecture to finish before he packs his things away letting everyone around him filter out in some sort of mad rush to get to the next moment in their lives. Jo goes slowly through his packing up routine: pens away in his pencil case, notebook neatly placed in his backpack, pick his headphones up, play music and leave. Today because of how early he was, he forgot to put his headphones on the table and put them back in his bag and now he has to search for them.
Out of the corner of his eye he can see a boy slowly making his way down the central set of stairs. He is in a hoodie, which clearly doesn’t belong to him, or is far too big on his small frame. Jo continues to look for his headphones hoping the other boy will leave before him, he puts his bag on his back and looks at him. From his angle Jo can tell this boy has just woken up from a nap, his eyes are slightly droopy, his face a little puffy but his general impression is of someone who doesn’t want to be here. Jo shakes his head as they look at each other and the other boy leaves, he is met by someone else at the door and walks off seemingly in a much happier mood than the lecture left him in. Jo too leaves but only after thanking the professor and deciding on the musical he would listen to on his walk back. His life was simple, and he had never wanted anything else than exactly what he knew.
白鳥
He sees it again, the picture from the lecture. Now he is conscious of it he sees the wave everywhere, it’s so common that he can’t believe he had ever missed it. Every busy street of Tokyo has some type of reference to an era long gone, an era that still hangs in the air, in the lanterns lighting the alleyway or the fans in the window of a souvenir shop. Rather than the image of the wave Yuma sees plastered everywhere, he finds the images of cats sleeping or birds sitting on a tree much more interesting. For the first time in his life he notices the things most people forget.
The blooming cherry blossoms are favoured over the plums and Yuma for once really looks at the plum blossoms admires their colour, their shape, their beauty. He had never even noticed them bloom before and now it's all he can think about. In the same way the blue of the boy's headphones follow him about, it’s in all of the pictures, in the umbrellas, in the shop signs. If Yuma closed his eyes he would be able to imagine him there, his pen and his notebook but most importantly his soft hair as it fell over his eyes - Yuma can remember looking into them and walking away.
Yuma has always been one for walking, mainly into trouble but today he works because he wants to, he wants to look at the birds fighting in the pond - look as they live so peacefully together and then something breaks between them, just for them to go back to that peaceful coexistence. The swans fight because they want to but also because all of the other birds expect them to and Yuma watches as they swim and play and do things they really want to do. The sun is dead center in the sky but the weather has a cold bite to it, the wind picks up the water from the lake and Yuma sits there staring at the expanse of the lake that has long since become an ocean in his imagination. It doesn’t start to rain but eventually Yuma finds it too cold to stay, his shoes are wet and his hands are cold but his heart is warm from looking at the world through a different lens. Past Yuma would have spent his spare time gaming, going to cafés or taking pictures of his friends. Yuma decides the next time he goes out he’ll bring his camera and try to capture something new, a different side of himself.
白鳥
For the first time in his life, Yuma arrives somewhere early. He’s still not early enough to be the first person there, he can see through the window in the door that there is a boy there. His hair is styled out of his face so Yuma can see the curve of his nose and the sparkle in his eyes. Without doubt it is the same boy as before, his blue pen is out on the desk and he fiddles with the same pair of headphones.
Yuma waits. He’s never been very good at second impressions. He doesn’t know what he wants this boy to think of him, maybe that he cares, that he is different from the rest of the people who didn’t even show up to the first seminar. Yuma thought he would be one of those people.
When he got enrolled in this class he swore that he would attend the first lecture and never show his face again but on the other hand no class had ever made him think so much before. This wasn’t just a module about some boring pieces of paper, it was about a culture still very much alive.
He doesn’t know what made him show up to the seminar, he hadn’t done the reading, he didn’t care much for the topic, and it was 9am on a Thursday morning. Yuma opens the door anyway.