"That's a disgusting habit, Ha-san," Shigure said.
Hatori exhaled a mouthful of smoke, and thought about how many delicate respiratory cells he was systematically killing, the percentages and probabilities of cancer that rose with every inhalation. He was a textbook masochist, he thought, a coward as well, playing at slow suicide.
Shigure leaned against the plush backrest of the booth, surveying the room with the bored indolence of someone with a lot of money and experience in how to use it. A flick of the wrist, a few glances in the right direction, there'd be a flood of girls by their side; the right sort of smile, and it'd be boys instead.
"So what's your poison tonight, Mister Customer?" Shigure asked, smiling, mellow. He leaned in close enough for Hatori to smell the burned-sugar odor of something slightly lighter than the clove cigarettes Shigure liked to smoke on his roof.
Hatori let his gaze flicker up and down Shigure's body. "Are you stoned?"
Shigure affected innocence. "Me? Drugs?"
"You reek of it," Hatori said simply, taking another drag of his cigarette. "So legal addictive stimulants aren't enough for you now."
"Part of the writerly experience," Shigure replied without a pause. "Coleridge was an opium addict for most of his life, you know. He produced some of the most brilliant poetry ever written -- not that you'd know, Ha-san. You've never appreciated the written word."
"I appreciate it given the proper inducement," Hatori said lightly.
"Maybe if you licked the kanna into somebody's thigh," Shigure said, laughing, glittering and high like one of the dancers on the stage not so very far away.
So like Shigure to do this, stumble into and out of consciousness: aware and alive with it one moment, six miles above ground and soaring the next, and always the same, never-changing.
Hatori remembered Shigure telling him that he was gay and that he was going down on their Form teacher in the same breath, and then adding how he was the lucky one of them, when everybody knew it wasn't true at all. But Shigure, like the muses he catered, created his own truth, one so essentially tangible that Hatori all but believed it.
Hatori rubbed his temple, cigarette trapped between his lips. "Where's Aya?"
"Who the fuck knows," Shigure laughed, as if it were the best joke ever.
Putting out his cigarette, Hatori sighed and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, and watched the grinding, pulsing beat of the room around them. The club was dark to the point of night, with expensive clientele meeting expensive girls and boys. Hatori had heard of the place first but Shigure was the one who understood it. "You have to go in there thinking you're richer and more entitled than anybody else in the room," Shigure had lectured him, eating Cup Ramen at his kitchen table, two weeks after he'd moved out of the Souma compound.
Shigure leaned back again, a sprawl of long limbs on the seat, nearly disappearing into the smoky near-darkness of the bar. Hatori admitted that Shigure was in fine form that night: lithe body in a neat black suit, loose and lengthy at the arms and legs, and the dark gray shirt beneath opened at the collar suggestively. The lights from the bar caught Shigure's belt buckle and it winked suggestively, as if to remind Hatori of where this could go.
"Miss him?" Shigure ground out, raspy all of a sudden.
Hatori didn't pretend to understand the Shigure and Ayame. He was never the reason, but collateral damage, and it wore on his nerves like an old scar, something he worried with rough fingers when it made its presence known.
"I was just wondering," Hatori finally said.
"It's stupid to lie to a writer," Shigure remarked, a laugh bubbling in his voice that didn't sound like a laugh at all. "We'll just make up all sorts of really complicated reasons why."
"I was just wondering," Hatori repeated easily, unconcerned. He was sure Shigure had been making up really complicated reasons why since day one, and would never stop.
Shigure licked his lips slowly, eyes drifting closed, hands raising as if he were about to conduct an orchestra, with long fingers widespread, melodrama amplified.
"Ha-san," Shigure started, "who has been best friends with Aya and Shigure since they were schoolchildren, fell in love with Aya's sweetness one day in high school." He opened one dark eye to make sure that Hatori was watching, and went on. "There was rain, lots of thunder, and then before Hatori knew it, Aya was sobbing about how strange and wonderful it felt."
"I knew those yaoi magazines were yours," Hatori muttered darkly. "Didn't you say they were a terrible stereotyping of gay culture?"
Ignoring him, Shigure went on, "But Ha-san, ever mindful of both his weepy uke and his best friend, kept it a secret, knowing that if Shigure were ever to find out that the stupid dog would throw a fit and slash his wrists and then write some brilliant novel with his effluvia as he died."
Hatori winced. "Nice imagery," he muttered.
"But now, years later, Ha-san is finally unable to hide his true feelings any longer," Shigure concluded, the silly, stoned smile still on his face, so utterly familiar. Hatori wondered if Yuki or Kyo had ever realized that the reason Shigure never had an aneurysm about his house being torn to bits on a constant basis wasn't just natural mellowness.
"What'd you think?" Shigure asked.
"It's brilliant," Hatori deadpanned. "A winner for sure."
Shigure nodded in satisfaction. "I thought the best part was the second syllable of 'uke.'"
Hatori rolled his eyes.
There was no subtle grace tonight, just Shigure waving one thin wrist, inelegant but effective, and in no time, Hatori was in one of the darker corners of the room, fucking someone he wouldn't remember the next morning with the barest minimum of touch.
"You're such an idiot," Shigure had commented the first time he'd dragged Hatori out. "You live in Japan. We're the universal capital of the sex trade. You think you can't find a fetish club for people with problems with prolonged human contact?" He'd shoved Hatori into a cab, utterly unconcerned with the color the driver's face turned when he added, "It's not all leather and nipple-clamps, you know."
And Hatori admitted he was stupid; he'd never even thought about it.
But that was how it generally went: Hatori resisted and Shigure proposed a solution without ever knowing the question, laughing all the way, while Aya followed at his own beat, twirling and adorned with lace.
Hatori made it back to the booth just in time to see Shigure shoving his tongue down someone's throat. The boy -- and it was a boy -- was in leather club gear, spiked hair shimmering with glitter, thin and effeminate, pretty and preoccupied.
It was no ordinary job, Hatori thought, sliding back into his earlier seat and watching Shigure with hooded eyes, and Shigure was no ordinary client. Hatori never understood why Shigure chose to pay for sex, when with a little more effort at any given book signing he'd have a string of men lined up for all his free moments and weekends.
And the boy made a noise like a surrendering sigh into Shigure's mouth, hands crawling over Shigure's chest until they settled on his shoulders, and the boy hauled himself into Shigure's lap, grinding down, moaning with it. In that moment, with hands snaking together and disappearing between them, Shigure and the boy looked beautiful, debauched and terrible and shining, and Hatori couldn't look away.
It must have been the way that Shigure kissed. From a distance, it looked volcanic, in the first person, Hatori wasn't sure how no one was burned.
Later, after the boy had been shoved away and money had changed hands wiped clean, they stumbled out into the night and into a taxi. Hatori fell asleep on Shigure's bed, and Shigure smoked himself into oblivion, lighting one cigarette after the next as he stared at his computer screen and page forty-six, at the last kanna he'd typed earlier that day and the blinking cursor beside it.
For no reason that he was willing to examine at length, all Hatori had dreamt of the night before was Shigure and the club boy, and it had made him wake up cranky and malcontent, only to find Shigure collapsed next to him on the messy bed. He'd gone to the bathroom, taken a shower, liberated some of Shigure's clothing, swearing every step of the way never to do this again.
Hatori looked down at where Shigure was still unconscious. Part of him thought that Shigure deserved the rest, the other parts of him -- far more compelling parts of him -- wished that he knew an even more obnoxious way to wake him.
Hatori grabbed the edge of the bedsheet, and tugged hard, rolling Shigure off the mattress and onto the ground with a thud.
"Fuck!"
Hatori went downstairs.
Shigure's first book was brilliant: raw and unvarnished, with none of the softly curving silences that existed in his prose now. Hatori had read it over the course of three weeks, in twenty-page sequences, having to put it down from the sheer intensity because it made an unwelcome pain blossom in his heart. He'd spent the three months afterward marveling at Shigure, at how he laughed and teased and played like a child when at heart and in mind he was capable of tearing Hatori from reality and drowning him in metaphor.
It was power, and Hatori respected it.
But after the first book, the others afterward had calmed, gentled, and like the wizened hand of a master, Shigure painted his portraits with watercolor instead of blood, now.
It was all still there, though, just beneath a casual exterior of babbling stupidity, and Shigure wielded it like a deadly weapon when it suited his purposes. Intriguing to see that much power harnessed so easily, and Hatori sometimes wanted to ask, but never really wanted an answer.
Fascinating and terrible, the way that Shigure curled himself inward, spun his control into a whirl and waited patiently until someone fell into his grasp: Akito, Yuki, Kyo, Tohru -- Hatori. They were all component parts to Shigure's plan.
The only awareness sharper than the inevitability of that was Hatori knowing that he was not simply a component part.
"Are you in love with me?" he'd asked, what seemed like a million years ago.
Shigure had laughed it off and shooed him out of the house. The epigram of his fourth book read very simply, "Yes."
Hatori remembered telling Shigure that they wouldn't be friends after he'd succeeded, and Hatori thought it might be true. But what he hadn't managed to convey in his terrified frustration then, with his hand hard on the wooden pane of the shogi and watching the line of Shigure's back as he made to leave, was that Shigure could choose some other part for Hatori to play.
He picked up Shigure's clothes where he'd abandoned them the night before and stuffed them into a bag, opening all the windows on Shigure's first floor. It would hardly do for Yuki or Kyo to realize what their so-called caretaker did when all of them went to bed early.
Hatori walked slowly through the woods, the plastic bag folded and tucked under his arm, and he thought about the dappling shadows and of Shigure.
He disliked being inebriated in public, and his and Shigure's outings always left him feeling particularly in need of intoxication, a luxury which he did not allow himself until he reached the privacy of his own room, his locked door, his floor.
It made him ill to think badly of Kana, so he always did it while profusely drunk.
Hatori stared at the ceiling of his office, fingers stroking the side of the vodka bottle and thought that if she'd been stronger, if she'd only believed him that it wasn't her fault, if she could have understood, if she'd maybe loved him less, then it would not have come to that horrible day.
But he could not banish the sweet taste of her mouth, or the soft curve of her arm, the way she smelled, and how "I love you" had been replaced with "Just so you know, if I was a normal seahorse, I would have died when you threw me into the furo."
It was awkward and funny, sweet and always pastel-toned in retrospect.
She was, Hatori decided in passing moments of wakefulness, a good first love.
And in passing moments of truth, Hatori admitted that Shigure was a great love.
Good or not depended completely on Shigure's behavior that week.
And whether or not Shigure allowed the passing moment of truth to remain depended on how this all ended, and if it would at all. Shigure's plans and the Souma family secret, Yuki and Tohru and Kyo and Akito and himself as well, pawns and players and pieces; Hatori was patient, he could wait to see the conclusion, and then he'd make one of his own.
Love came in many forms and shapes, and did not necessarily need traditional consummation at all, he'd decided.
But the image of Shigure was burned into his eyelids, looking lazy and debauched, drowsy with his own decadence, alive and radiant, so that when Hatori closed his eyes, he still saw Shigure there in all his sprawling glory.
A reminder, a penance, a moment of glaring truth that could not be ignored, no matter how he tried.
At least until the next phone call, and the next seedy club, and the next time he saw Shigure glittering and blurry.
"Ha-san," Shigure had asked, long ago. "Did you read my book?"
And there had been a question in there, implicit, and buried beneath many lies, but for Shigure's cleverness at hiding things, Hatori's answer had been as simple as the truth Shigure had hidden so poorly for so long.
"Yes," he'd said.
That would be the answer, Hatori thought, blinking out of consciousness, for as long as he refused to give in, and Shigure continued to make up complicated reasons why.