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When Shou returns to his hotel room he’s greeted by the glare of the sun, a wave of cool air from the A.C. and the blissful sight of a fully charged cell phone.
At some point during the hours he’d been out someone had come by to clean and he feels a brief pang of guilt for messing up the creaseless sheets that disappears as soon as he grabs the phone from the bedside table. The dial tone drones for a good ten seconds or more after he’s pressed call before the person on the other end finally answers.
“Ritsu! What’s up?”
Ritsu makes a sound most accurately described as “hnnghll”.
“Ah, sorry, did I wake you?”
“Suzuki,” he says, syllables slack with sleep. It’s a statement, not a question. “Where are you? Do you know what time it is?”
Shou winces. It’s not the first time he’s been inconsiderate about the time difference - a side-effect of travelling so much his mind can’t seem to keep up with his body’s movement all the time – but he’s never messed up quite this bad before.
“México,” he replies in surprisingly adequate Spanish, “And no, but now that you mention it I can probably guess.”
Lunchtime on a Thursday where he is means that it’s probably very early Friday in Japan. School night.
“You don’t have any important tests in the morning, right? Because I’ll make up for that. Somehow.”
Ritsu snorts. “English today—yesterday, now. You got lucky.”
“Whatever. It’s not like it would’ve made that much difference in the long run.”
The chuckle that carries over the line settles in the pit of Shou’s stomach in the best kind of way.
“Unlike a year abroad.”
Shou falls back onto the white sheets and makes himself comfortable, stretching his legs and bathing his feet in the pool of light at the end of the bed cast by the bright midday sun. He wiggles his toes, basking in the warmth that matches the one blooming in his chest.
“What,” he says with feigned nonchalance, “are you missing me already? It’s only been four months.”
Four months of travelling from country to country, continent to continent, cleaning up his father’s mess. It was surprisingly quick work all things considered—nearly two years of preparation, information gathering and international agreements being signed under the table since his father’s failed attempt at world domination will do that, apparently. He’d nearly ruined it all by insisting on being brought along when he’d been contacted about it (for the sake of politely informing him about how he didn’t have property rights to a single square meter written in his father’s name, real or fake, thank you very much).
None of the people he’d worked with really wanted him there and none of them treated him like a child. All in all, not that different from his days in Claw.
“It’s high school entry exam season soon,” Ritsu mumbles, ears deaf to Shou’s teasing tone and tongue still numb with sleep, “I can’t really afford to make mistakes right now.”
There’s a dull thump and a rustling sound on the other end as Ritsu turns the speakers on and puts the phone down. In his mind’s eye he imagines Ritsu pulling the blanket tighter around him and burrowing into the soft pillow to escape the harsh light of the screen.
“We both know you can get into any school you want,” he replies. It’s not praise, simply fact.
Ritsu yawns and hums. “I don’t know what I want,” is all he concedes.
The hotel they’re staying at is like the dozens of hotels they’ve stayed at before; nice but not too nice both for the sake of budget and discretion, with freshly laundered sheets, carpeted floor and a bowl of fresh fruit on the desk. Only the pictures seem to change from hotel to hotel and yet there’s something strangely uniform about them – the paintings of local landscapes and still life with fruit that hang above his bed would be no less out of place in Spain, Thailand, Morocco. It’s like every hotel is one and the same, the doors of each room leading someplace different all over the world. Shou gazes at the off-white ceiling and thinks of liminal spaces.
“Hmm,” he hums. “Mexico’s cool. We landed last night so I haven’t had much of a look around yet, but there’s lots to see. I’ve made a list.”
So far he’s only walked around the blocks in the vicinity of the hotel trying to get a feel for its rhythm and character; where people worked, lived and slept. Learning how to find his way around was never first priority—his “employers” tended to know where they were supposed to go, and if they didn’t Shou wasn’t trusted with intelligence gathering anyway. Besides, it’s always easier to see where you’re going when you’re flying.
He’s already bought four postcards and will probably end up with at least four more before they’re done here. Choosing the postcards most worthy of travelling all the way to his mother’s and Ritsu’s mailboxes was a task he took almost as seriously as their missions.
“You’ve said that about every country you’ve visited so far,” Ritsu replies. Would it hurt you to stay in an absolute shithole for once? It would make me feel better.”
Shou laughs at that. Even sleep-drunk and speech-addled Ritsu has a tongue capable of not so much cutting as bludgeoning you. It’s one of his many endearing qualities.
“Well, if it helps the flight here was the worst,” he says and grimaces before starting on a long rant that has been building up for the better part of 24 hours; about the loud man who had reeked so much of alcohol before they’d even boarded that Shou had thought he could get drunk on the fumes alone. Then there had been the toddler on the row behind them who was either screaming to make sure he’d get none of the sleep sorely needed before jetlag kicked in or kicking his seat hard enough to put a vertebra out of place, then the on-flight dinner that had just tasted off, even more than the food on airplanes usually did, and honestly why were they travelling on commercial flights if they were on a top secret anti-terrorist mission, much less economy class?
Ritsu lets him go on without interruption. When he’s done, there’s still no sound from the other end of the line except for Ritsu’s calm breathing.
“Ritsu? Hey, Ritsu? Are you still there?”
It takes him a couple of moments before he realises that the long-distance call hasn’t been cut off after all and when he does he can’t hold back a short laugh of disbelief. Somewhere around when the obnoxious child had entered the picture Ritsu had stopped humming in affirmation and fallen asleep.
The polite thing to do, Shou knows, would be to hang up and never let Ritsu live this down, but for every minute that passes Shou finds it harder and harder to bring himself to put the phone down. His chest feels strange, like his heart wants to burst and contract with fondness and longing both at once.
A hundred sounds carry through the open window. Midday traffic, shouting and laughter, the flapping of wings and the breeze flirting with the curtains are all as clear to him as the rhythm of Ritsu’s breathing. Shou is lying with his feet in the sun and the smell of fresh laundry and foreign flowers in the air while Ritsu sleeps in comfortable darkness an ocean and two centimetres away.
In that moment there seems to be no greater testament to his father’s folly than that he thought to rule a world so big and so small it can contain every voice in the street and beyond, yet Shou can lie in bed with a piece of plastic pressed to his ear and match the rise and fall of his chest to that of the boy he fell in love with on the other side of the earth. As if his father’s will alone would have been enough to pull every satellite from the firmament.
He lies like that for a while, body buzzing with a heady mix of embarrassment and delight, until Ritsu makes a sniffing noise in his sleep.
Shou definitely doesn’t start floating spontaneously like some kind of kid-- but he does have to cover his mouth to hold back the giggle that wants to burst fully-formed from his chest.
“I miss you,” he says, an absurd feeling of happiness lodged between his ribs.
He wants to be there next to Ritsu, buried in blankets and comforting darkness; to shape his body according to the curves and slopes of Ritsu’s back and feel his body move with every exhale. To put every one of his senses to good use, not just hearing. Shou drops his head onto the pillow and slings an arm across his eyes, still smiling.
“Jeez” he says, “you can be cruel, even without trying.”
He’s sure he didn’t use to fantasise this much back home. You’d think it would be the other way around, that Ritsu’s absence now would have made distractions easier. Instead it’s like he’s trying to fill the distances between them with daydreams; the fanciful notion of a smile for every mile, trading stray kisses for oceans. He wonders if it’s going to change anything once he’s back home again.
There’s a limit to how long he can afford to make long-distance calls, but more than that it’s embarrassment that finally makes him fumble for a way to finish the call. Shou coughs and grasps for a way to end the conversation they could have been having.
“I wish you were here,” he settles on. “Not here, per se, just—wherever I go or whatever I do I keep wondering what you’d say if you were with me. All the sights, the sounds, the food... I want to share it all with you. Even the bad stuff.”
He snorts, imagining how different yesterday’s flight would have been if Ritsu had been with him. They’d probably have been sniping at each other out of exhaustion and frustration for the entire flight only to have been laughing about it in the morning. Then he thinks of what he’s actually here for and sobers up.
“Except some of the things pops did. No one should have to see that.”
The noise outside hasn’t let up in the way noise never really lets up wherever there’s people to be found, but the sun has already begun its slow descent into the west. The shadows in the room will grow longer soon and the pool of light at the foot of the bed is already migrating further and further away from Shou.
“Anyway, I guess I’ll call again as soon as I can. At a better time,” he says with a grin. “Good night, Ritsu.”
He presses the end-call button with deliberation before dropping it on the other side of the double bed and closing his eyes, sunspots dancing on the inside of his eyelids. Somewhere in the distance a car horn blares, and Shou finds himself counting the seconds between each breath he takes.
Smiling, Shou pulls his feet back from their spot in the sun, the warmth lingering on his skin and in his chest for the rest of the day.