Work Text:
Shibuya night sky is always the same shade of blue
At this point, he thinks, downing his beer with an unpleasant gulp, the waiter’s serious, unmoving face will become more familiar than his own father’s.
The thought, that would have caused him great distress on a Monday or Tuesday or even during the second night this had happened, now makes him laugh.
It’s the beer, he knows, in some part of him that’s resisting the urge to disconnect from his body in an attempt to keep his sanity. There might be something desperate about his laughter, or perhaps it’s the fact that he had laughed out loud in first place that has Yatora looking at him strangely. He was against him having a drink, had said no the first dozens of times they did this scene, but he relented. The thing about having multiple chances is that eventually you learn what works, which buttons to push. If at first Yotasuke was met with a weighty ‘no’, now he knows exactly what to say to get Yatora to reluctantly agree to share a beer with him. The taste is still revolting, but the pleasant buzz makes this whole ordeal more tolerable, if only for his lowered inhibitions allowing him to blurt out whatever is on his mind. He has come to appreciate novelty a lot more since this curse began.
On a level he acknowledges but doesn’t want to address, another benefit of drinking in the late hours with Yatora is that he is guaranteed to have his eyes on him. Not openly, but in a sneaking-a-glance kind of way. He seems to do that a lot, Yotasuke thinks, but even more after a beer or two. Whenever he turns to look at him, he finds hazel eyes already observing him; he never holds his gaze for long when Yotasuke does try to meet it – admittedly, not often.
Yatora is weird, he thinks once again, and it gives him pause.
He narrows his eyes, purses his lips. Yatora is weird and he probably has something to do with all this. The first is a conclusion he had reached long ago, before this whole thing began. The second one is prompted by the fact that, of all days in his life to be stuck in, it had to be this one.
“This is a day I’d still remember ten years from now”, Yotasuke had said on his first night out with Yatora in Shibuya.
He was, of course, right. How could he not remember it, he thinks, stomach turning, when he has had to repeat the same day over and over again?
–
The first time it happens, he leaves Yatora on read.
The alarm rings; he picks up the phone and there it is, the unbelievable message:
Shibuya tonight?
In a heartbeat, a choice is made to ignore it. He can’t help making a face at it though, brows furrowing and lips curling in disgust. Seriously?, he wants to ask. Last night was fun, in it’s own way. Not something he would like to repeat but Yotasuke had, by his own standards, enjoyed their outing. They talked about many things and he felt like he understood Yatora better now. Maybe there were even building something like a normal, reciprocal friendship, instead of this weird arrangement they fell into – Yatora always trying to get involved with him while he halfheartedly allows it, confused by his motives and efforts.
Budding friendship or not, he would not go out two days in a row. What does he take him for, some party animal? He grimaces with distaste. Seriously, wasn’t he tired? Yotasuke himself is exhausted, eyes red and heavy from lack of sleep and a looseness to his limbs that makes it hard for him to get out of bed and start his day.
As he finally pushes the cover out of his way, relishing the warmth, it strikes him as odd that he doesn’t remember how he got home. He thought – he was sure – they took the train back to Geidai, because the atmosphere made an impression on him, with how empty and eerie it was. Usually, scenes of urban loneliness and empty public spaces made him feel melancholic, a tired sadness that seeped into his bones; but this time there was something earnest to it that he hadn’t expected, perhaps because of the first rays of light, radiant and warm, gently illuminating their surroundings. Sitting next to Yatora, soaking up the sunlight entering from the train window with intervals of darkness as they passed by buildings that blocked the sun, Yotasuke had to fight the urge to lean on his friend’s shoulder. It was so tempting; the heated seats and the sound of the train moving across the city were enough to almost lull him to sleep and suddenly, an idea he never allowed himself to dwell too much on formed on his mind. It was an intimacy he never expected to have and it was so near all he had to do was bridge the gap between them and rest his head. The sun warmed his face so gently it tinged everything in a pleasant, golden light and he remembers thinking, maybe it will be alright.
Perhaps he had slept then, he considers, because he can’t remember much from there. He looks down and at the sight of his old, dark-blue pajamas, his cheeks grow warm with embarrassment.
That Yatora would take him back home seemed plausible, if a bit awkward for him that he had slept and missed all of it. That someone helped him get changed was mortifying.
Toeing his slippers on, he gets out of his room and makes way into the kitchen, crouching slightly. He knows his mother would be there; he can hear the sound of lunch being made from the hallway, can smell something being fried and the sizzling sound of hot oil in a pan. He bows his head and moves silently, as to not attract attention, grabbing a bowl from the cupboard.
“Oh, Yota-kun! You’re going out with your friend today, yes?”, his mother turns her head to him, voice buzzing with excitement.
“What?”, he asks, taken aback. How did she know Yatora had asked him again?
She clicked her tongue, impatient. “You told me you were going out with a friend today, that I shouldn’t make dinner for you. Did you change your mind?”, she asked. She turned her back to him and then, lowering her voice enough that it could pass as if she was only complaining to herself, but loud enough to be clearly heard by anyone in the room: “Gosh, now I’ll have to run back to the shop and buy more ingredients… Oh, and I’ll have to carry them home too… I can’t take this anymore, I’m getting too old”, she bemoaned, before sighing to herself: “What a handful”.
He says nothing. He should be used to it by now, but her disapproval always stings.
Why can’t you be like the other kids?
Oh, my son, I don’t know how he turned out this way… I must have done something wrong.
He’s an artist, you see… Very peculiar types, I hope you can forgive him.
He quietly grabs a bowl of food and leaves to his bedroom, locking the door behind him. Sitting on the floor, he eats without savoring his meal. Yesterday he had told Yatora that maybe he didn’t have to follow everything his mother said. He had uttered those words with complete conviction in them, but now that he had to face her, his resolve quivered, crumbling like the poorly made sculpture of papier-mache he saw some classmates making when he was still in school. Mount Fuji looked like a misshapen pyramid, blobs falling and melting at the bottom. He shudders at the memory. He thought of offering advice, but his classmates all took him the wrong way whenever he tried, so why should he bother.
He always had trouble being understood.
Maybe he’ll go out with Yatora today after all. Beats staying home. His eyes fall on his project, still unfinished. The background is done; all he needs to do now is add the cage, polish a few details. He picks his phone and stares at the message again. Shibuya tonight?, it reads, pixels unchanging.
maybe. Shibuya again?, he sends before he can second-guess it.
Soon a bubble pops out with three dots on it. That was fast, he notices, reluctantly impressed. Was Yatora waiting for a reply?
what do you mean again? I thought you wanted to go to Shibuya because you hadn’t been there before at night …? (⊙_⊙) ？
He puts his phone away for a second, face twisting in an odd expression. The combination of the message with the emoji is bringing an uncomfortable, unwanted emotion he can’t quite explain, but feels a lot like betrayal. He thought Yaguchi was a cool guy, finally understood him a bit better after that night out, but now he feels used, like he’s just someone to play a joke on.
We literally went there yesterday.
The reply is almost immediate:
What are you talking about? We made plans for today. He doesn’t reply. The bubble pops out and off again, three dots appearing and disappearing as Yatora struggles for words. Good, he thinks, vindictive. This is not funny.
The second message arrives:
look if you don’t wanna go you can just say so, I get it. I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want. Sorry for being pushy.
His heart feels tight, all of a sudden, and he replies on impulse, text curt and empty: Good.
The messages stop coming after that.
It’s alright, he tells himself, pulling his knees to his chest. It was bound to happen anyway; people like him never get to make friends and keep them. He puts his phone down on his bed and gets his Switch. He doesn’t need anyone anyway.
–
Their fall out leaves a bad taste in his mouth, but he doesn’t want to budge. After eating lunch at home and hearing more jabs at his behavior disguised as earnest concern, he decides he would go out anyway. He had spent the entire day locked in his room, drawing, painting and occasionally playing games on his Switch. Looking at the clock, he sees the pointers moving until they reached seven o’clock. There’s an odd pang on his chest as he realizes that he was on his way to Shibuya around this time yesterday, hands sweaty and fidgeting as he was torn between dreading and looking forward to that night out.
Maybe he should message Yatora. Yotasuke was always harsh on him because he was always misunderstanding his intentions. Maybe this is another instance of that – they already established he’s not very good at reading the room.
He gets up, kicking his feet a little to shake off the cramps from sitting for too long in the same position. He feels dizzy. There’s a sharp pang on his chest, growing stronger by the minute, and his hand clutches his shirt before settling above his heart. There’s something wrong.
He needs to sit down. He gingerly moves across his room, leaning on the walls for support, until he reaches his bed. There’s definitely something wrong with him; pain flares up and he lays down on the bed, curling into a ball. His heart is beating fast, erratic. He grabs his phone, tries to unlock it but his hands are shaking. The lock screen says: Wednesday, 29th of December.
He frowns. That was yesterday. He manages to unlock it and it automatically opens his last app. He sees Yatora’s messages, all dated from the 29th. He scrolls up, but what’s there is ancient, from their visit to the temple.
He never deleted any messages. Even when they annoyed him, he still kept them – he couldn’t be bothered to delete them.
It made no sense.
Maybe someone else deleted them?, he wonders, thinking once again that he couldn’t remember how he got home and, since he had his fall out with Yaguchi, he hadn’t asked.
But his phone is password protected and he would never share that information with anyone.
Something is wrong. The entire day he was haunted by a feeling that something was slightly off, and yet he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was; he tried shaking it off and ignoring it, blaming his anxiety, but there was something really wrong.
Gritting his teeth through the pain, he pushes himself out of bed, checks his laptop. The white pixels indicating the date and time seem to mock him: Wednesday, 29, 7:05 PM. He goes online, checks the date. The page loads. The answer unchanging.
It’s a dream, he thinks. This is all a dream. He moves back to bed, grabs some medicine from his bedside table, shaking the bottle until a few pills pop out. Feels the weight of them, notices their colors, brings them to his lips and swallows it with a gulp of water and soon enough he falls asleep.
–
The alarm rings at 7 AM.
With his eyes still closed, he fumbles around until his hand reaches his phone by the bedside table and he hits the snooze button. The brightness of the room stings; a massive headache is forming behind his eyes. A shudder runs through his body as he remembers the nightmare he had; as if he didn’t feel trapped enough in his life, his brain decided to add another layer of restraint. He grabs his phone and presses the home button to see how much battery he has left, only to find a notification with Yaguchi’s name, message underneath glaring bright.
Shibuya tonight?
He blinks.
The words stay the same. Shibuya tonight?
The text disappears as the screen turns black from inactivity. Heart racing too fast for the early morning, Yotasuke presses the home button again and he’s greeted with today’s date: Wednesday, 29.
This can’t be real.
He gets up so fast he almost falls over, running out of his room and into the kitchen. The sizzling sounds are familiar, the smell that reaches his nostrils is the same.
“Oh, Yota-kun! You’re going out with your friend today, yes?”, his mother greets him, buzzing with excitement, turning her attention away from the frying pan.
He takes a step back, afraid.
“W-what?”, he asks, lacking for words.
She takes that as a no and her expression changes into a glare. The impatient click of a tongue, the way she turns her head back to the pans to hide her unhappiness. “You told me you were going out with a friend today, that I shouldn’t make dinner for you. Did you change your mind?”, she asked. The second time around, he sees how tense her shoulders are, how her lips are pulling downwards.
He takes another step back, hearing her litany of complaints echoing across the house.
“Gosh, now I’ll have to run back to the shop and buy more ingredients… Oh, and I’ll have to carry them home too… … Your poor mother is not young anymore, you know? What a handful”, she says, sighing wistfully as if Yotasuke isn’t standing there.
He feels as if his breath is being sucked out of his chest. He takes another step back, raises his arms defensively against his chest.
“What day is it?”, he asks.
She stops, looks at him, blinks. “What type of question is that? It’s Wednesday”.
He slams the door on his way to his room.
His mother sighs. “So poorly behaved, this kid”, she comments to herself. “I should have raised him better”.
–
Heart beating fast, he opens his laptop. The date is the same. He grabs his Switch, turns it on. Wednesday, 29. He gets a notification: (1) friend online.
It’s Okamoto. He sends him a message:
what day is it?
Of the week?
It’s Wednesday!
He suddenly finds it hard to breathe. The next message arrives, shortly after:
Do you wanna play Pokémon together?
This is not real.
This is some fucked up dream and he’s going to wake up in a second. It has to be.
He tries to look at the date again, but the digits blur. That’s when he realizes he’s shaking so hard he can’t focus.
He needs to snap out of it, he thinks, with detached clarity. It’s hard to remember he has a body, sometimes, when its maintenance is rarely his own concern. He remembers the pamphlet from the therapist’s office his parents made him visit once, the one about mindfulness. Let body sensations bring you back to the present moment. He needs to come back to himself. Enjoy the present moment, the paper announced, an italicized font aiming for tranquility but sounding vaguely condescending. He doesn’t want to enjoy the present moment. In fact, if this is not some twisted dream and he’s not going insane, then he’s had too much of the present moment. He grips his arms so tight he’ll have bruises tomorrow and his fingernails leave marks on his skin.
This is real. He’s not going to panic. Breathe in and breathe out, comes the voice of his therapist. It’s funny, because she never said that but he can hear it in her voice anyway. Going to therapy took too much of his time, according to his parents. You need to focus on other things, Yota, things you’re good at. He counts his breath until he calms down.
With the fear gone, all that he’s left with is emptiness.
He feels detached from his body, like it’s not his own. He curls and uncurls his fingers.
There must be an explanation. This is the third time he’s reliving this day – the original one where he went to Shibuya, yesterday when he stayed home and felt sick, and now today. He has to think rationally – why this date?
He checks the day again on his Switch. Okamoto’s message is still there, unanswered. Moving slowly, he types out, sorry, not today and puts the console away.
Why today?, he asks himself again, calmer than the first time.
Maybe because he was doing something that was unusual for him – spending the night out, hanging out with other people. Thinking about it, he started feeling unwell yesterday around the time he was supposed to be meeting Yatora in Shibuya, so that event has to be linked somehow to his situation.
In all the confusion and horror, he notices he forgot to reply to Yatora’s message. His fingers twitch, almost reaching the phone, before retreating.
He doesn’t know if he wants to go, to be honest.
It’s likely he’ll have to. The only thing special about this Wednesday is that he goes out with Yatora. If he wants to go back to normal, he’ll have to face him.
On the other hand, he feels drained enough already. His panic attack left him sluggish and unwilling to move. The idea of having to pretend that everything is fine while also trying to repeat the same inadequate and awkward lines from their first meeting would be torturous. He’s not good at that; he’s not good with other people. He’s aware of his shortcomings and social interaction is definitely one of the major ones.
Besides, Yatora is oddly sensitive about other people’s moods. He’ll pretend it doesn’t bother him, but he’s so reactive to everyone and everything that he’s bound to be troubled by his behavior. It doesn’t help that Yatora always seems to always interpret him wrong, though, so he might take offense and assume that Yotasuke doesn’t like him.
Guilt pulls gently at his heartstrings. He doesn’t want him to think that because it’s not that he doesn’t like Yatora. He does like him. He thinks. It’s complicated. Yatora brings in him feelings he is not willing to engage with.
Good, he had typed. Maybe Yatora wasn’t the only one misinterpreting things. There was no trick, no joke where he was being made fun of; Yatora was being earnest. Recognizing this, he feels something prickling under his skin, an emotion he can’t put a name on. Dealing with earnestness somehow made him like this, he never knows what to do with it. Especially when that feeling was directed at him.
He opens their chat history, none of the words he had said yesterday in there.
What a useless feeling, guilt. He’s the only one who remembers it anyway.
He quickly texts we meet at 7, Shibuya station, and steels himself.
He’ll repeat everything again and hope that it puts time back on track.
He lets Yatora take him to the same places; they eat, they talk, they sing, they get closer.
So when night comes to an end, Shibuya early morning sky turning a breathtaking shade of blue, they head to the metro station and he thinks, this is it. This is where he fell asleep and woke up in that nightmare. Sitting side by side on the empty train, he’s nervous, anxious to know if that would be enough, if this is what expected of him. It must be. Why else today, of all days? He tries to keep himself awake, convinced it will make him break this cycle, but the lull of the early morning sounds and the comfort of someone next to him are enough to make him involuntarily close his eyes. It’s only for a second, a moment to enjoy the gentle sunlight warming his face. Before he realizes it, he has fallen asleep.
He wakes up with the alarm ringing and a message from Yatora waiting him on his phone. He reaches for it with shaky hands and a sense of crushing powerlessness gets hold of him. There’s a silent scream trapped inside him.
On the screen, the letters read: Shibuya tonight?
–
He is stubborn, and tries following the same script a few more times.
He has to be doing something wrong, saying the right thing but at the wrong time. He goes to the same places, stops in front of the same paintings, has the same food and talks about the same topics to the point he feels like he knows Yaguchi’s childhood stories better than his own.
Not that he had many stories to tell, he notices with detached humor.
There’s not much to him other than art – he knows it because his family has said so, but also because they made it so. He has his own portion of blame, but recently he’s been thinking of how much their influence shaped him, how much he tried to do the things that would make them happy without questioning it. Talking to Yatora all these days, hearing his stories about getting scolded for coming home with cigarette smoke clinging to his clothes, his hair; his eyes filling with joy when he tells of playing tricks on his friends or how his face flushes with embarrassment when he admits to finding a love letter in his locker and not knowing what to do – the contrast with his own bland stories of going home and drawing is so stark it only highlights all the experiences he didn’t have. He can talk about his drawings and the reactions they got, but not much about other people.
It’s weird, he thinks, on his fourth night out in Shibuya, how he never considered how much he was missing until Yaguchi-kun showed up. It was what annoyed him in the first place – he had everything he had ever wanted and he was pursuing the only thing Yotasuke had. What was even worse – he enjoyed it. He had fun making art. It made him bitter – sure, not every artist was a misfit or an outcast, but what business did he have in art class, being all friendly and painting with a passion most of his peers – and himself included – had forgot, when he could be literally anywhere else?
He wasn’t even that skilled, back then; his dessin didn’t stand out, his technique needed polishing and there was nothing extraordinary about his composition. It was the second assignment that got Yotasuke’s attention. Against his better judgment, he let his eyes wander off his own canvas. It was entrancing to watch Yatora work, how his canvas was bursting with energy. Yotasuke was drawn to it. You could see how much he was enjoying the process by the way that he painted, each brushstroke brimming with vitality.
He was friendly and social and good looking and he had fun drawing.
Again, Yotasuke notices in retrospect, Yatora’s qualities only highlight his own faults. Contrast and compare – and Yotasuke’s main weakness becomes glaringly obvious.
Good art evokes emotion and admiration when the artist is true to their feelings and true to themselves when relaying a message. He admires Ono Konatsu because she lays her soul bare. There’s an honesty there he fears and admires because it’s making yourself visible, laying your thoughts and emotions bare so you can connect to others.
This quality is something that he lacks. He doesn’t have fun when working on a piece. He doesn’t feel sad, either; he only feels a sense of duty that propels him forward, an obligation he has to fulfil. The way he sees it, his main weakness in his art is that he gives nothing away. He endangers nothing of himself, of his feelings, partly because he’s afraid but also because he feels like he doesn’t have much of a self to give.
It never was much of a question before, in school. His art got praised because people saw only the mechanics, technical skill. He knows he’s good. It was cram school and Ooba-sensei and stupid Yaguchi-san with his passion that made him self-conscious. He wants to make art that is good, yes; but he wants to make art that feels close. Rather than praise, he wants understanding. Walking around museums with Yatora, he thinks maybe when this curse is over he will be okay with being seen and, if he’s lucky, he might even be accepted.
–
Trying to repeat everything exactly the same way is not only impossible – it is also driving him mad.
It’s getting harder to control his temper when he feels like his life is closing in on him, his cage getting smaller and smaller until he’s left with no room to breathe. He can’t keep living like this. He can literally feel his hold on his sanity wearing thinner with every attempt. His skin buzzes with frustration bordering on despair.
So when he wakes up one morning and checks his phone to see that familiar text waiting for him, he decides it might be time to ask for help. He picks up his phone, looks at his contact list: his mother, his father, Yatora, Hashida and Okamoto.
He’s not going to ask his parents. It’s out of question.
He rules Yatora out. He’s not sure, but it might have something to do with him and asking him directly feels like pushing an invisible boundary. The rules were never explained to him and yet there’s a feeling, an intuitive understanding that there are things he cannot, should not do.
Hashida would probably have a good answer; he had so much knowledge and self-awareness he would never get caught in a situation like this, and yet Yotasuke knows that he will not like his advice. His suspicions are that whatever Hashida might suggest will bring some progress, but the method would be unpleasant and not without pain.
He’s not ready for that yet.
In the end, he messages Okamoto.
if you were stuck in a time loop, what would you do?
It takes a moment before a reply is delivered.
I didn’t know you liked sci-fi movies?! ╰(*°▽°*)╯
Idk! I think I would try to get back to the decisive moment and figure out the right answer. Unless it’s one of those time loops where you have to learn something about yourself or others LOL
This gives him pause. He never thought about this as a learning opportunity, but Okamoto-kun is right. He has infinite chances and not much to deal with in terms of consequences – the day reboots anyway as soon as he falls asleep. He doesn’t think there was a different choice to be made in the first time; he felt satisfied with the outcome even when he realized that type of thing was not for him. He starts fidgeting as realization dawns on him. He didn’t have any regrets with regards to that night, no decisive moment comes to mind, so that has to mean this time loop is about learning something about himself or about other people instead.
The problem is – he has no idea what lesson he is supposed to learn from all this. So far, the only effect this curse has had on him has been negative: he’s mentally tired and feeling more trapped and isolated than ever. He has nothing to distract his mind off it because nothing he does matters. He is stuck playing the same level, groveling through the same tasks without gaining any experience, points or progress.
Sorry, I don’t know if that was helpful (>_< 。 ) Did that make sense?
He types back, Yes, thank you, and decides to give it a try.
–
These are the things he learned in the past weeks:
One: whatever he has to learn, Shibuya is the background for it. The days he tried staying at home or going anywhere else, he felt so physically sick he thought he would rather curl up in a ball and die. There has been no guidance from the universe so far except this one, no meaningful dreams or a conveniently overheard conversation that pushes him in the right direction. The only tip he has had so far about all this is the universe’s discontentment at him not being in that neighborhood. It’s painful and he’s tired enough as it is without having to deal with physical pain on top of it, so he goes to Shibuya every night, even when the shining neon lights give him a headache and he starts to sweat at the sight of the loud, boisterous evening crowd.
Two, though it’s more of a hunch than a fact: Yatora might play a part in breaking this cycle, but he’s not central to it. He has tried going to Shibuya without him and it didn’t feel any different, no gut feeling telling him it was wrong or pain flaring up in rejection of this choice. There was an emptiness that wasn’t there before, a void he didn’t know needed filling, but he suspects that’s because he had come to expect his presence beside him, guiding him through these streets and sharing little snippets of his life. In the solitude of his bedroom the next day, he can admit the obvious: he likes Shibuya better when Yatora is around.
Three: eating the same thing every evening is getting tiring, especially because his first order at that sports bar wasn’t even that good.
He’s never been that adventurous when it came to food, but lately he’s been trying different dishes. There’s no point in saving money anyway, so whenever they grab dinner together, he picks something new. It’s almost funny, in a twisted way, how he’s never had this much freedom of choice; he always had the food others prepared for him or whatever was offered to him. The few times he went out, he felt guilty about spending his parents’ money and too anxious to try new things. Plus, trying new things off the menu is fun when Yatora reacts so much to his choices.
“Wow, for someone who doesn’t go out much your taste is like of an old man at a bar”, he notices, voice joking but eyebrows raised, when he orders sliced dried radish and clams in soy sauce on his beloved sports bar one night.
“Uh, interesting choice”, he says, voice unsure, brows furrowing when he points to the most expensive item on the menu on yet another Wednesday. Yotasuke feels guilty about that one, remembering how Yatora talked about not having a lot of money left for his project, and so he insists they share.
“Are you sure you want to try that?”, Yatora asks another day, worry written all over his face as the waiter brings a dish so spicy his eyes start watering from a distance.
He’s been learning a lot even if he doesn’t move forward, which make it a less more bearable.
This new routine has been making him feel a little less about to go insane, like he could snap at any second. It’s not that he feels less trapped, but rather that he’s growing familiar with this new cage, experimenting with its boundaries.
He’s half-heartedly listening to Yatora tell a story about something that happened to someone from the art club at his school when he stops mid-sentence, voice fluttering, awkward from the lack of response from Yotasuke. The brisk pause draws his attention to Yatora and he looks at him, properly looks at him, for the first time since this whole thing began. His face is flushed and he’s looking downward, embarrassed. He brings his hand to scratch his head, in attempt to figure out something to do with his hands, but the action is aborted half-way through. The fact that he’s so uncomfortable in his presence would normally make him feel guilt and self-loathing; this time, it strikes him like lightening and a revelation, shaking him to his very core.
Perhaps he’s repeating this day because he needs to untangle his weird, messy feelings towards him. But Takahashi, you’re always so conscious of Yaguchi-kun, comes Ooba-sensei’s voice. He knows he is weird about him. Something about him compels and deters him in equal measure. Perhaps he’s restricted to Shibuya, a place he has no attachment to on his own, because Shibuya is the heart of something important to understanding Yatora.
It’s a series of revelations, falling into place like dominoes. It strikes him that, throughout this friendship – if he can call it that – he has often misunderstood Yatora because he has only seen one side of him. From the beginning, he had taken everything the wrong way, thinking him spoiled, clueless, superficial; and all that while Yatora made an effort to meet him where he was, reaching out, showing interest, asking questions. He shared freely and while Yotasuke learned to appreciate it, he still didn’t know what to do with him because despite that, despite all of Yaguchi’s constant effort to keep the conversation going, all their chats in Shibuya and this cursed time-loop, Yotasuke still didn’t get him.
To shine a light is to cast a shadow. Whenever he looks at him, he sees only a fraction of what he really is, the façade he presents to the world – and to him, Yotasuke. Illuminate one side and you automatically obfuscate another. Yaguchi seems confident; Yaguchi is deeply insecure. He loves art, has a real passion for it; at times, he looks almost afraid of it. You learn the shape of an object by observing its form against the light, but sometimes it’s the shadow, if provided the right angle, that holds the essence. In the same way, people appear to him as confusing and inconsistent, their reasons unintelligible and superficial because he can only see one side of them, the one illuminated by a harsh, unforgiving light.
The image of Yatora’s painting on the second stage of Geidai’s exam enters his mind, memory causing a ripple of emotions and conflicted feelings within him. He bites his lip, lost in reflection. Looking objectively, his association of the nude as the true self was a clever idea and it was well-executed, considering the situation Yatora had been at the time. Yotasuke had been worried about him, thought he might be done with because of his fever and the mental pressure to pass the exam. He found him bowed on the floor, head on his hands, looking shaky while other examinees dodged him, taking their own materials upstairs. Yotasuke called him, crouched near him, asked him if he was okay, whether he should call a doctor. Yatora’s fever was so high he mistook him for someone else – and he didn’t have to be a doctor to know that was a dangerous symptom. He tried leaning on his shoulder, or rather, this Mori-senpai’s shoulder before he came to his senses. Luckily, Kuwana-san helped. He seemed embarrassed by it. “Sorry for all the troubled”, he said, right after saying that simply being in the same room as him would be a lot of pressure. That annoyed him, because what could he do about it? He was just doing the same thing as everybody else: drawing. Being told that having him around would add extra pressure when Yaguchi was already on the verge of collapsing because of it made him feel weird. It rubbed him the wrong way that Yaguchi saw it like that. Against his common sense, Yotasuke wanted him to keep going, even though the sensible thing would be to let him rest and call a doctor. He didn’t care, he was selfish. He wanted Yaguchi to pass not because he wanted him to be happy, but because he didn’t want that to be the last he would see of him.
In the end, he had nothing to worry about. Yatora got even better in the short while he wasn’t looking. His painting was a lot more than just a clever idea; it fulfilled the purpose of the exam perfectly. First tell us how you see yourself, then how you view the world. Drawing the nude by using the texture of the body while covering the examinees with heavy paint to highlight the “true self” feeling of the naked body – nakedness as something pitiful and unreliable, so we cover ourselves with clothes to hide our true nature. Our true selves are unreliable and unpredictable and we are afraid of being vulnerable; we clothe ourselves as an expression of guilt and shame for what we truly are.
Whatever you might say about Yatora’s art, you can’t say he’s not good at communicating. The message there was clear and it showed exactly what he thought of the world and how he behaved. Yotasuke had only seen a part of him, the one he showed to his classmates at the cram school and at Geidai. He doesn’t know a lot about him outside of what he sees in art school. Whenever they talk, it’s about art or their classes or something small and trivial. The first time they had a deeper conversation was when they went to Shibuya that first night and talked about their childhoods. Still, for all that Yatora makes people feel at ease and comfortable, there’s not much about him that he knows, Yotasuke realizes with a frown. Yatora’s good at making friends but the people he truly gets along with seem few.
In fact, Yotasuke doesn’t even know where he lives, though it can’t be far from him if they often take the same line home. Is he ashamed of his house, of his family? Another frown. That doesn’t make sense, he has met his mother. Besides, that’s not the type of person Yatora is. Are they not friends? He pauses. He has invited him and Hashida to his home, showed them his older drawings. It was the first time he brought someone home, the first time he wanted someone to see. Maybe they’ll understand, he remembers thinking, though he can’t say exactly what he wanted them to understand.
Yatora was the one who said they were friends, he thinks accusingly, stabbing his pickled radish with his chopsticks. Maybe he invited his other friends to his house. They seemed to go out a lot. Yotasuke was the one who suggested having Korean barbecue tonight, but the truth is, he had never been and in the end, they decided on a place Yatora had visited a couple of times. They entered a small shop that looked like a family business. It wasn’t that busy and the other patrons seemed at ease. He let Yatora decide on the menu and it didn’t take long for him to choose pork, pork belly and beef short ribs. Sharing food was something reserved for family and close friends and of the latter he had none for almost all his life. He sneaks a glance at Yatora, busy placing the meat on the grill, pressing on the ones that are almost done, turning it from side to side. He would like to consider him a friend, which is why he suggested Korean barbecue. This is what friends do, right?, he asks himself when Yatora puts a few slices of pork on his place and hands him the bowl with lettuce.
“You should dip it in one of the sauces first”, Yatora says, returning his attention to the grill. “I think the second one is not spicy, you should try that”.
He gingerly does so before wrapping the meat in a leaf of lettuce. He feels so awkward, eating like this with Yatora. It doesn’t help that he has little to no experience with the grill, so Yatora has to do all the work. Maybe he has more fun when he’s with his friends. The thought brings an uncomfortable, ugly feeling. He has seen Yatora’s friends, has met them that time when they came to see him for the festival, but he was so worried with getting away from them as soon as possible that he didn’t pay attention, he didn’t notice – how does Yatora react with them? Does he joke around more, drink more, is more at ease?
“I come here sometimes with my friends”, Yaguchi had said, when he guided him to this barbecue spot. He tightens his grip on his chopsticks and makes a decision. If he wants to understand Yaguchi, he needs to understand Shibuya. This place holds all the answers.
So the next time they go out, he asks Yaguchi to show him the places he would go every week; forget about trying to show Yotasuke the best spots or curate his first experience of the neighborhood at night. He wanted to do what Yaguchi normally did, whatever that was.
He thinks it was a very straightforward request. It makes, however, Yaguchi very fidgety.
He takes him to a bar, first. It is still early, so most of the customers haven’t arrived it and they don’t have to share the space with lots of people; if Yotasuke raises his eyes from the laminated menu, he would see maybe a couple or two, but far enough he can’t listen to their conversation and it’s just background noise. Good. He hates listening in to conversations. From his table, he takes a look around the bar, but there’s not much that catches his eye. The tables are dark, with no cloth covering it; a yellow lamp illuminates each table, making for an intimate, warm ambience. That, or so that you can’t see your food properly; but Yotasuke would rather hope it’s a stylistic choice.
The table vibrates slightly and his eyes follow the source of it; Yatora is tapping his fingers across the table, nervous.
“You okay?”, he asks, because he can’t see sweat gathering on Yaguchi’s brows.
He laughs. It’s an uncomfortable sound.
“Yes, I’m okay, it’s just…”, he stops, at loss of words. He gathers courage and looks Yotasuke in the eyes. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather… go somewhere else?”, he suggests, lamely.
Yotasuke arches an eyebrow. “Is the food bad?”
He looks at the menu again, but the options seem pretty standard, dishes you would find in any bar around the area. He would know – he has visited many at this point.
“No, it’s pretty good!”, Yatora says, and then lets out a shaky, nervous laugh. “If you’re sure…”
Of course, he is sure. He asked, didn’t he? He gives him a side-look and Yaguchi starts explaining again.
“It’s just a place I come by myself”, he adds, folding and unfolding a paper napkin. “You know, when you don’t have enough money but you also don’t wanna go home yet. It’s nothing special, but you asked for places I come often so…”, he finishes, voice faltering at the end.
“This is okay”, Yotasuke replies, picking a piece of cucumber with his chopsticks and bringing it to his mouth. Yatora’s eyes follow the movement, and though he is chewing, Yotasuke’s lips feels suddenly dry. He’s not going to choke again. He reaches preemptively for his glass of water, drinking in a hurry. When he finally puts his glass down, he looks Yatora straight in the eye.
“What?”, he asks, aware that he’s being stared at and uncomfortable.
Yatora shakes his head. “Nothing, sorry”. Yotasuke gives him a pointed stare and he wavers. “The way you hold things,” he explains, head cocked in his direction. “It’s different. Very… you.”
His hand, which was about to reach for the plate of grilled eels, stops and hovers above the dish. He brings the chopsticks together without picking anything and looks at his grip. He stays silent for a second, trying to think of the best way to say this. He can’t. The minute lasts longer than he thought, because Yatora starts getting flustered.
“Sorry, I hope that’s not creepy, it’s just—”, he stops midsentence, swallows dry. His face is reddening by the second and he makes a half-attempt to cover it with his hands. “It’s kind of cool”, he says, voice straining, “the way you hold things”, he finishes lamely.
An awkward silence falls over the table. Yotasuke can feel Yatora’s embarrassment emanating in waves. He has to say something if he wants to salvage the atmosphere.
“My teachers in elementary school sent a few letters to my parents”, he says. Kids have to learn how to hold things properly when they’re young or it won’t stick. They said things like that, but that doesn’t make for interesting conversation, so he simply acknowledges: “It’s a bad habit”. He transfers the eel to his plate and puts his chopsticks down. My parents tried to make me learn, but that affected how I held a pencil so my drawings got worse, is something else he doesn’t say. One thing mattered more than the other; by the time he was in middle school, it was just another peculiarity that people let it slide because he was talented.
Yatora puts a turnip glazed with miso on a plate and pushes it towards Yotasuke.
“I don’t see why it’s a problem, it’s just your way of doing things”, he offers, genuine.
It’s not the first time he comes to realize this and it won’t be the last, yet it surprises him every time.
“Yaguchi-san, you’re a really nice person”.
His friend blushes. He gets flustered easily, Yotasuke thinks. He seems confident at first, but he’s actually very insecure and self-conscious. He cares so much about what other people think, even when they’re not that good, he thinks, image of professor Tsukinoki’s artwork coming to mind. He almost scowls. Yatora should care only about the opinion of people who matter. Why get so hung up over what someone like that has to say? That professor’s not even as good as me, he thinks vindictively. Just because he has his artwork in a gallery doesn’t make it impressive.
Still. Yatora flushes a really nice shade of pink and it’s hard not to notice. Yotasuke wets his lips, mouth suddenly dry, and tries not to let the bubbling feeling inside him take hold. This time loop is not about his attraction to men, or how he would like to trace the back of Yatora’s neck with his fingertips whenever he sees him with his head down, immersed in his work. It’s not about how conscious he is of where Yatora is standing in relation to him, the space between them and how easy it would be to casually bridge that distance, shoulders brushing gently.
It’s not about this because if it was, he would never forgive the universe. He has come to terms with his sexuality a long time ago. There’s no truth to be learned here and it doesn’t mean that he has – or should – do something about it, he thinks with contempt. Especially not like this. If there comes a day he’ll say something to Yatora, and the idea grows on him the more time they spend together, he will do it on his own terms and not because of some stupid curse.
“Why did you invite me?”, he asks instead, stretching his feet under the table. Though he has been walking through these streets every day for the past month, he doesn’t have much to show for it. His body has the endurance he’s always had – of someone who rarely goes out and lives a sedentary lifestyle.
“Um, if I’m being honest, I didn’t think you would take my offer seriously?”, Yatora laughs nervously, eyeing Yotasuke as if measuring his response to this.
Oh.
Well, he can’t really hold that over him when he called him on New Years Eve for the same motive. “I see”, he replies.
He feels a light kick against his foot, and startled, looks at Yatora in the eyes. He is smiling.
“I’m glad you decided to come”, he says, earnest, and for some reason the room gets uncomfortably warm.
“Thanks for inviting me”, he offers back, by which he means, I’m glad I got to hang out with you.
–
It is nice.
Some days are nicer than others, but lately, it’s been nice.
That’s why it takes him some time to notice when the atmosphere starts changing.
He wakes up every morning with a feeling of dread lodging itself on the pit of his stomach every time he sees it is still Wednesday. That’s become routine. It gets more manageable as the day goes by and he’s offered a lot more freedom to divert from the original script – he needs to be in Shibuya from seven o’clock onwards, but what he does there is up to him. He can’t change his starting line, no matter what he does. He has to deal with the cards that the universe handed him on that original Wednesday morning – his mother, frying something in the kitchen, eager to know more about Yatora. Oh, his mother is so nice! We went to an exhibition together, did you know Yaguchi-kun’s mother was against him pursuing art? She changed her mind, of course, but aren’t you glad you never had to go through that situation? His father, frowning at him and looking doubtful when he hears about his plans but mostly that he’s going out with a friend. A friend?, a simple, short question that carries an amalgam of small judgements – you have a friend? You have a friend who wants to spend time with you? Spend the entire night with you, holding your hand because you’re you and you’re not suited for the things normal people do, like go out and have fun?
He had spent so much time at home, never one to go out much, that there’s a familiar, comforting feeling to those walls but ever since this time-loop began it feels more and more like a cage. Lately, every room feels stifling with unknown rules and a sort of mythology of its own. Maybe because his dialogues there leave little room for any deviation, maybe because all parents say the same things all the time, but there’s a sort of air that indicates that one wrong move could cause something to crack, break, explode. However much he yearns for change, he is afraid of how it would manifest in his house; a volatility, an unravelling, a dissolution. There’s something unbearable about staying there for too long, which is odd. He spent most of his life there and though he often felt trapped, he doesn’t remember the atmosphere being quite like this. It’s usually manageable – it’s only his mother and father, isn’t that the most familiar thing in the world? – but today being in the same room as them unsettles him. They feel like strangers, like actors from a play that’s been on stage for too long, saying their lines not because they feel them but because there’s a sense that they have to say them.
It makes him uneasy, so he leaves earlier this time, sending a quick message to Yatora to let him know he’s heading to Shibuya already.
He’s trying to keep his frustration in check, but it builds up inside him. He doesn’t pay attention to his surroundings anymore – it’s all the same as it ever was. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Things don’t change. He can’t change. Not enough to satisfy the universe or whatever entity that has laid this curse on him. A voice from the metro announces the station and he rushes to the door. Being earlier has its perks, as the station is not as busy as it would be later on, people leaving work and heading home. He tries not to notice, but there are no familiar faces this time and this disconcerts him so much after a month of seeing the same people every day that he turns his hands into fists and keeps his eyes on the ground for how long it takes him to leave the station.
It’s Wednesday and early enough for the average salaryman or woman to still be in the office. All he has to do is walk a bit further from the main street and the traffic starts waning, nowhere near the bustling streets he found on his first time there. He remembers being intimidated by it, shaking at the sight of how big Shibuya was. The fact that Yatora, of all people, was acting like a wimp as well calmed him. The memory alone brings a smile to his face. The hellish circumstances that would follow could not sour his first experience there. He wouldn’t let them. That had been something precious, delicate and blossoming. It belonged to him and no one else and he refuses to let the universe ruin that for him, cursed though he might be. Unbidden, a chill runs through him. The amber light that marks the golden hour seems to glitter and an odd feeling takes hold of him, an alertness that precedes awe and has a magical, mystical quality to it.
A heartbeat; his own heartbeat, pulsing through his body so strong that he could picture it, blood pumping through his arteries. It’s all it takes for him to see it, a flash of black around the corner of the street, a flickering shadow near the ground. He’s frozen still and for a second, it feels like the air was sucked out of the atmosphere. Everything turns sharper and his body moves before he can properly make sense of it.
He runs towards it, but whatever it is, it’s ahead of him and much faster. He is out of breath, and the thumping of his heart reverberates in his eardrums. You can't lose it, you can't. It can’t be a coincidence. It has to mean something, he felt it. A pull, tugging at his heartstrings, calling him. His palms are getting clammy and shaking. Keep up, keep chasing it. His legs burn from the effort and he moves on instinct alone, so when he takes note of his surroundings, they seem familiar in a nightmarish way, like he’s been running in circles – but Shibuya’s streets are not circular, so it doesn’t even make sense, except it does because everything lately has been circular. He’s trapped in a wheel and he can’t get out, he can’t stop, he has no option but to perform the motions that are expected of him. There’s no way out. There’s no way out. He wants to despair but that need is put aside as he clings to that shadow, hoping it will explain some part of this curse. It must. There must be an explanation. But he can’t reach it – every time he thinks he’s getting closer, it evades him, like a trick of light.
He can’t barely see it – he needs to catch it – he needs to get out of here, to get away from all of it, to escape—
He flings himself towards it, only to reach something broad and solid, and he nearly falls back, stunned.
“Whoa, you okay?”, he hears before vision and sensations can sharpen into meaning.
He did not fall.
Holding his arm with enough strength to ache, Yatora looks at him with concern. He doesn’t let go, and Yotasuke doesn’t move either, too concerned with eyeing his surroundings. The walls are tinged black, the shadows of trees are gone. Everything is enveloped in darkness.
Oh, he realizes, with sinking dread. It’s night already.
It’s night already and the shadow he’s been chasing vanished in the dark. The golden moment was lost and whatever it was, whatever creature that might hold the answers to this curse, it is gone. All his effort was fruitless.
His legs give in. It’s a good thing Yatora was holding him or he would’ve fallen already. It’s a good thing to be held. His shoulders slump, the fighting spirit drained out of him. He was clinging to hope with desperate hands and now it had been snatched away. Why show me something if I can’t have it. He was better off not knowing. Possibility is a curse and it poisons the heart. Maybe if he had reached it, he would be free. Maybe if he had touched it, he would go back and not remember a thing about these Wednesdays in Shibuya. There’s a burning sensation on his eyes and he realizes too late that he is crying. He blinks it away, his vision a blur, and slowly Yatora’s face starts getting into focus. His bleached hair, his hazel eyes looking at him, concerned. His brows are furrowed, he wets his lips and looks so unsure, so out of place. He’s still holding him. Yotasuke can’t bear to look at him right now so he turns his face away. He doesn’t want to be seen, not like this. He tries to calm himself, tries to convince himself everything is going to be alright even though it won’t, because it won’t be okay even if he went back to his previous life. There was no escape from wanting what he could not have, no escape from being him. He’s stuck with that knowledge now. There is no forgetting.
He’s looking to the other side when he feels it, a light pat on his back. For some reason, that warm, gentle touch almost makes him start crying again. It’s such a small thing, but it means so much, it carries so much weight. The touch is hesitant, as Yatora fumbles in words and actions, torn between giving him space and hovering over Yotasuke, offering reassuring pats on his back. “Um, I’m sorry? Are you, uh, okay?”, asks, though he doesn’t see any signs of injuries. Yotasuke shakes his head and hears a sigh of relief. “That’s good”, he says. Then, he stops, looks down. Yatora notices he’s still holding him, grip tight, and finally lets go, averting his eyes. Yotasuke is grateful, taking the time to recompose himself. He wipes his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt and takes a shaky breath before admitting, “I missed it”.
Yatora tilts his head. “What?”
“I was chasing something, but I missed it”, he says, voice monotone. He owes Yatora some explanation after seeing him like that. The shame that would usually follow a vulnerable moment is absent. In fact, he feels nothing at all, a numbness that is foreign and oddly freeing. There’s no point in reacting so emotionally to this in the first place. So he’s trapped in a cycle of someone else’s making; so he’s a puppet playing a part in this pantomime. He never felt he had much control of his life anyway. At least now he can blame his failure on the universe instead of on himself.
Yatora gives pause, as if stunned. His brows furrow. “The cat?”, he asks, voice tilting at the end. “Uh, I think it’s right over there? It brushed past me so fast that I had to turn around to see it. Um, sorry about that”, he offers, embarrassed. So that’s why he wasn’t paying attention to where he was going, Yotasuke infers. If he hadn’t looked the other way, he wouldn’t have bumped into Yotasuke. “I think it went towards those bushes? It might still be there, if you want to have a look”.
That has Yotasuke raising his head. Their eyes meet briefly and he nods. Yatora nods back in acknowledgement and he moves to the side, giving space for Yotasuke to join him. “Sorry again about that”, he says.
Yotasuke shakes his head, saying nothing. If anything, he’s glad he has someone beside him to prove this is real. Even if it ends up being just a regular street cat, it will be nice to have some distraction. He doesn’t want to think about how he might be losing his mind. No, it’s good Yatora is there.
Yatora has to bend a little as they walk into the flowerbed, avoiding the branches of a tree. He shakes his phone to activate his flashlight and aims it to the tree. “Here, look.”
Yotasuke approaches carefully, heart beating fast. He has to come very close to Yatora to be able to see it, close enough he can feel the heat emanating from his body, but there it is: hiding in one of the branches there is a black cat, blinking lazily at them.
“Pretty cute, right?”, Yatora asks, smiling.
Yes, it is cute. The feeling of disappointment he had been expecting doesn’t come. He narrows his eyes. What is he missing?
He sees Yatora offering his hand for the cat to sniff before being brushed off as the cat gets down from the tree, sitting on the grass. The cat looks at them, eyes looking suspiciously mirthful as if enjoying the situation. Yatora tries petting it again, squatting and letting the cat sniff him. This time, it stays quiet, looking at Yotasuke. See?, it seems to say, smug, as it gets it’s ears scratched gently.
“Aw, it’s so friendly. Don’t you wish you could take it home?”, Yatora asks, smiling softly as he pets the cat.
“I don’t”, he answers, curtly. Taking care of a living thing is a huge responsibility and one he has found recently he is not prepared to take. Getting a cat, especially one that’s already grown, would be a huge mistake. You have to raise it to love it, he thinks, and the other way around too.
The cat flicks its tail at that, still looking at him with a stare that’s hard to translate. He frowns. There’s something oddly familiar about that cat, a way of being that feels close. He hears Yatora snicker.
“This cat has cartoon eyes”, he says, marveled.
Indeed, it has. Yotasuke frowns once again. The almost cartoonish eyes, the heavy black fur. The feeling he has seen it before, a certain recognizable quality that he can’t explain because he hasn’t seen this cat before. He has, however, imagined it. Drawn it. Suddenly, he understands that this cat feels familiar to him because it looks suspiciously like one he drew when he was young.
He raises his hands to touch it, stopping at the last second. Would it break a spell? Undo the curse? The cat stares back, seemingly amused.
There’s no way it’s the same cat, right? Drawings don’t come alive.
And if they did, he considers, they would choose something more meaningful than a black cat.
Making a decision, he brings his palms to caress it. The moment contact is made, there’s a flash of recognition. It comes to him as a memory, a vision he had forgotten. Him, small, face still chubby, looking intently at a notebook. On a white page, this same cat, made and colored with crayons and surprisingly spirited and full of life. He stumbles back from the wave of emotions it brings; a pang of envy mixed with pity and sadness for his younger self. The cat drawing might be rudimentary, unpolished, but it was lovingly made; you could tell he had fun drawing it.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Yatora is looking at him with concern again.
He shakes his head.
He needs to think, to be alone.
If the source of a curse is a drawing I made, does it mean I’m not supposed to draw anymore?
But what is he supposed to do? It’s all he has.
“Yotasuke-kun, are you sure you’re okay?”, Yatora asks, concerned.
Yotasuke waves him off, batting his hand away. He doesn’t want to be touched right now. The words don’t want to come out, he would rather go home without saying anything to him. How do you explain when simply thinking about it makes your blood boil, your head spin? He’s afraid he might say something he’ll regret later and the worst part is that he’s the only one who will know. Regardless of what he does, the same invitation awaits him tomorrow.
“I need to go, sorry”, is what comes out of his mouth before he flees. He gets home and rummages through his room until he finds it. Forgotten in a drawer, dusty and faded, lies the drawing of a cat exactly like the one he saw. He stares at it for a while before putting it back and heading to bed. He’s home early and yet he falls asleep fast. There’s no pain this time. He thinks he knows what he has to do.
–
He chooses the morning to just lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. It’s an ordinary ceiling; the only interesting thing about it is how the outside light casts shadows over it, the shape of the pendant growing bigger and disform as the hours pass.
He lays there and takes it all in; the light, the shadows, the smell of something being fried, his mother’s footsteps, his father’s complaints about cat fur sticking to his work clothes. His heart tightens like clay. This is his world, he thinks. This is the space that built him, that made him who he is. This is the space that confines him. Try to understand, he tells himself. Watch. Listen. Maybe the answers all lie there; maybe there are no answers and this is just how things are. There’s a lump in his throat that doesn’t want to go away; he blinks as his eyes start stinging. He spent so much time thinking things could’ve been different if he had chosen something other than art, if he had another talent, something like being good at sports or being a good friend, that it takes him a while to accept that it was chosen for him. Perhaps he never had a choice at all. Things were always going to turn out like this, whether he could dance, sing or write instead. His parents were always going to put all their stakes on it, controlling his actions to get him to act how they wanted, to seek their approval.
Perhaps his Fate had been sealed even before he was born, he thinks, desperate laughter bubbling inside him. His parents wanted a child so much, tried for so long that they almost ran out of time. And then, there he was. Yotasuke. Their world. A memory resurfaces, slowly and then all at once. Small fingers tracing the ink, guided by a calloused and warm hand. Gently, she guides his finger over the characters of his name. The name Yotasuke can be read as Sekai, see?, hands stilling over the first character. She lets go of his hand, holding his shoulder instead and giving him a squeeze. Because for mom and dad, you mean the world to us. Do you understand? He nods. So be good, Yota. You have to be good to your parents. He remembers thinking about what that meant, those words. Something like, follow everything I say, Yota. Your parents know what’s best for you. You have to be good, meaning you’re not good now, which turns into you’re never good enough. All this time he has been striving for something that was always out of reach. Maybe it was time he realized that.
The sound of slippers against the floor brings him back to the present moment. The walking is slow, the movements stiff and labored. His mother is old, he realizes, and his clay heart cracks and splinters. There’s a knock, followed by the sliding of the door. He stays in bed, but his eyes follow her as she walks in his room, a plate of cut up fruit on her hand.
“It’s already eleven, you need to get up”, she chides, leaving the plate by his bedside table. “Are you feeling sick?”
Without waiting for an answer, she sits on the edge of the bed and brings the back of her hand to measure his temperature, holds for a second, frowns. “I’ll make some okayu for you”, she declares, getting up with energy. “I had something else on my mind for today’s lunch, but what can you do…”, she sighs. Before heading back to the kitchen, she stops right in front of his bedroom door, gives his room an accessing look, nodding slightly, before her eyes fall on the plate of fruits, strawberries cut to small sizes, their red bright and appealing against the plate. “You should eat it before it tastes bad”. The door is closed shut.
Do you regret having me?, he wants to ask. What do you want from me?, he wondered for as long as he can remember.
Why do you want me to be different?
Why do you try to manipulate me like that?
Why am I not good enough?
And the worst question of them all – how can I be good enough?
He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t say anything. A silent scream echoes inside him and he curls up, pulling his blanket tighter until he’s wrapped in it. He wants the world to go away. He doesn’t want to go out, doesn’t want to brave Shibuya streets once more, doesn’t want to face Yatora. What does he know, he thinks, not for the first time. How can he understand, when he has a normal family? People who support him in whatever he does?
He wonders what his parents would say if he quit art. Would they shout at him, be angry? It was the one thing he had, his only connection with them, frail though it was. A chill runs through him. He suddenly feels very cold. Would he still be their son if he’s not an artist? He thinks of how near he was to quitting university when Yatora invited him. Doesn’t this rabbit really love you? He felt seen and understood by someone for the first time when he heard those words. Hope blossomed in his chest that maybe it wasn’t all for nothing after all.
He was going to quit, but he didn’t.
He was going to quit, but he went to Shibuya instead.
The curse was caused by a drawing he made as a child.
He created his own curse.
Like a spark, the thought brings jolts into action.
He locks his bedroom door. He knows what to do.
He was going to quit. He was meant to quit. He laughs, he wants to cry, he thinks he should curl up and die. He ignores all those instincts and grabs a pair of scissors, holding them like a knife. Feels the weight of them in his hands. How can something so light feel so heavy? It’s like the air in his room is denser, time reaching a standstill. Yotasuke takes a moment to notice the texture brushing against his fingers, the glint of metal in the light. In a movie, he would see his reflection here – but there is nothing. His eyes fall on the canvas instead, his project still a work in progress. He should honor this, at least. A deep breath, hands deliberately still. Take it all in. A room, bare except a traditional Japanese ink painting and a cage, but the cage isn’t there just yet. A white rabbit, seen through the mesh, standing on its hind legs and reaching towards the painting, looking at it. The rabbits in the ink painting are free, playing and roaming around in nature; the brush strokes that makes them are joyful and easy. The cage protects the white rabbit and confines it. Safe from it all, he experiences life through a drawing. However he might yearn for those experiences, he can’t have them. He is safe inside the enclosure, except there is none because that’s the last thing to be added to his painting and Yotasuke hasn’t done that yet. Maybe the curse chose this day because his year-end project is not finished – if there is no cage, he can just walk away.
Maybe the only way to break free is by tearing the painting. He wonders if that would please Nekoyashiki at last, an interactive performance. Help me destroy this painting, he would say, but all he has is his paintings so really, in a way he would be saying help me destroy myself.
He tears it all to shreds – his paintings, his sketchbook, all his drawings. Papers are crumpled, brushes are broken into two, splinters making him bleed. He cuts down his paintings and smears what’s left with dark paint, the texture horrible on his hand, making it burn and itch. He was never one to see things in only one color, never one to let his vision get distorted by it, except this time it feels as if everything is tinged black. Dark, muddy black that fills his room, clouds his mind, washes it all away. Later, sitting on the floor among the ruins of his work, hands stained and sticky, he vaguely recalls the sound of knocks on his door, hesitant at first and then insistent. Thinking back, he knows there were voices calling him but when he tries to conjure the words his mind goes blank. They were worried. He can’t remember if he said anything back to his parents, but he must have because he’s left alone. There’s a quietness in the house that feels eerie, but Yotasuke can’t bring himself to feel guilt over it. His hands are smudged in the way his vision feels, there’s an aching to his knuckles that indicates it’s going to get swollen and a dryness in his eyes that stings.
Are you happy now?, he asks, devoid of feeling. Is this enough?
He knows without looking at the clock that it’s almost seven o’clock, the sharp pain associated with being away from Shibuya setting in. What else do you want from me, he silently asks the universe.
He closes his eyes, switching the view of his destroyed room to one of pure darkness. Make it go away. He just wants to stop. I did what you wanted of me. Please let me go. The pain gets sharper until, blissfully, he loses conscience.
–
Yotasuke wakes up and it’s Wednesday again.
He’s okay.
There isn’t any pain from yesterday, no soreness. He inspects his hand against the light; no bruises, clean. Curls it into a fist and lets it fall down.
He’s okay.
He will have to do Wednesday again. He stares at the ceiling for a few seconds before mustering the strength to get out of bed.
His sketchbook is lying on the bedside table. His fingers run through the cover, slow and careful. Almost fond. There’s something reassuring about it still being there; not only for its familiarity but because it means destroying it was not the answer the universe wanted from him. It’s bittersweet.
Right next to it, his phone vibrates. A new message.
Shibuya tonight?
He picks his phone up and swipes the notification away. Opening the app, his eyes linger on Yatora’s picture. It’s cropped from a group picture, probably taken by his friends. Someone has an arm over his shoulder and his eyes are doing that squinting thing that means he’s genuinely happy. Yotasuke feels a wave of conflicting feelings wash over him, fluctuating between envy, frustration and a craving of some sort. A frown finds place into his face. He never knows how to feel about Yatora. He’s not sure whether he wants to be like him or if he just wants to be near him. Maybe to make Yatora laugh like that with him would be enough.
He doesn’t want to think about it.
He taps on Hashida’s name instead.
Do you know any myths or curses about a child’s drawing taking a life of its own?
He puts his phone away and begins his quest.
Every single one of his paintings and drawings were kept inside his room since he removed his mother’s favorite pieces from the doorway. He destroyed them yesterday and there had been no sign of that cursed cat. It’s not destruction it wants, he understands now. If that’s what it wanted, it would’ve been in that pile, but though he had destroyed many pieces, that one had been missing. At this point, Yotasuke suffered the steadfast conviction that the drawing was sentient somehow and it disappeared to escape the fate of being reduced to smithereens. Shuffling through papers, he recognized some, while others seemed almost foreign to him. It had to be in there somewhere.
The shapes in this one are very simple, he notices when picking up a page. There’s something candid about his first sketches, an earnestness he has lost. He holds a drawing of a dog, done in crayons. He signed the year at the bottom; he was six years old. A house, a lake, a lion. An excursion to the zoo. His childhood life documented through a series of drawings. He could’ve done a better job in that one, could’ve added more depth to that house, made something more detailed out of that background. Still, there’s something captivating about it, those simple lines. He might not enjoy drawing like Yatora, but he’s glad he didn’t really destroy these.
His phone buzzes with a reply. Unlocking the screen, he finds a few messages from Hashida.
Ohoho? Are you looking for inspiration?
To answer your question: yes. The first one that comes to mind is The Boy Who Drew Cats. Are you familiar with that story?
His heart beats faster. The source of the curse was a cat. He types back:
Not really. Tell me
( ｡ ❛‿‿❛ ｡ )
Alright, because you asked nicely ~★
In a small village lived a farmer and his wife. They had a few children and they all helped in the farm, except for one, who was small and frail. He was very smart, so the parents sent him to the village temple to become an apprentice there. He was an excellent student, but he couldn’t resist drawing cats everywhere – in the margin of books, in the temple’s pillars and screens. The priest, naturally, was quite annoyed at that and expelled him. Before the boy leaves, he received a word of warning from the priest: Avoid large spaces at night, keep to the small. Not wanting to face the disappointment he would bring to his family at being expelled, he doesn’t go home, but rather to the temple of a neighboring village. He gets there only to find the place deserted, dusty and cobwebbed. Alone in the temple, he finds many big white screens to draw and a writing box with a brush and inkstone and he can’t resist: he draws cats on them. You can see where this going, right?
A flicker of annoyance passes through him.
The cats come alive?, he guesses, impatient.
Precisely. The temple was deserted because of a giant Goblin-rat who killed every human who tried to fight it. At night, the boy remembered the priest’s advice and hid inside a cabinet to sleep. That’s when he heard fighting, scratching and howling. Terrified, he stayed in there until morning, when he found the corpse of the Goblin-rat. Who might have killed it?, he wondered, and then he notices that the cats on the wall now have blood on their mouths. Creepy, right?
But this is where the story changes. There’s a version that says the boy becomes the abbot of the temple; in another one, he becomes a famous artist instead.
It takes him a few minutes to digest all this. He rereads it twice, stops, contemplates. Some things about this old fairytale match his own experience, but a lot of it is different too. Glaringly, there’s no mention of time travelling, and yet –
And yet there’s something that tells him this is exactly it. A gut feeling he can’t explain, an invisible pull that is pushing him in that direction, whispering reassurance. This is the calmest he ever felt since this whole thing began.
Yotasuke looks back at his phone. Hashida’s last message is still there, two blue ticks marking that it’s been read. Minutes have passed since then and Yotasuke types back:
Thanks.
The answer is almost immediate:
You’re welcome ~ It’s rather sweet, isn’t it? The thought that the things we create, even on a whim, can save us from harm, keep us safe.
It’s not the first time he wants to ask Hashida: Where in the world do you get all this info? How do you know so much? He has known him for a long time now, and it never fails to surprise him how knowledgeable he is, not only in art, but in general.
Throughout all this, he never stopped to consider that the universe might be trying to protect him. Learning about this story, it becomes obvious why he blacked out after destroying all his art: it’s the opposite of what it wants from him. Of course it’s this day, he realizes with clarity. He’s repeating this day because he goes out with Yatora – Yatora, for whom he has an incredibly tangled mix of emotions, Yatora whom he envies for his genuine enjoyment of art, Yatora who asked him, doesn’t this rabbit really love you?, who told him, Yotasuke-kun, I love drawing too.
He looks at the clock. It’s still early. He knows what he has to do.
Yaguchi-kun, can we meet earlier?
–
It is strange, being this early in Shibuya.
He still has a few hours before sunset and it’s so utterly strange seeing the neighborhood at this time of the day. It’s easier to notice details that he missed during the night, the colors of the shops, the texture of the streets. Like seeing it in full for the first time, Yotasuke can’t tear his eyes away, comparing and contrasting with his memory of Shibuya at dusk and dawn.
The broad daylight also demystifies it. Nighttime is exciting, shiny, neon-colored and full of promises. Late afternoon, when the sun tinges everything with a golden light, is warm and alluring, with a fairytale quality to it. No wonder that’s when the cat appeared.
Daylight – harsh, plain daylight – is none of that. It simply is. No metaphors, no promises, no magic. There’s something reassuring about how normal it makes everything look, how mundane it makes Shibuya seem.
He sits on a bench, waiting for Yatora, and feels at peace. Time stretches before him. There’s no rush. His phone buzzes with a new message.
Okay, just left the station, I’ll meet you in 5
He hums, quietly, and directs his attention to the crowd leaving the metro. The thing about Shibuya is that it’s always brimming with people, full of life and noise and color. There’s always an easy distraction, something to pass the time. He sees Yatora’s bleached hair from far – he’s tall enough to stand out in a crowd, he notices, with minor resentment – and waits for him.
“Hey”, Yatora greets, smiling. Yotasuke nods.
It’s still early; they have plenty of time before dinner, so they go to museums, check exhibitions together. He has seen those paintings so many times now that it should be boring, but it isn’t. This isn’t the first time he has seen them but it is Yatora’s, at least on this timeline. It doesn’t get old, not for Yotasuke at least, the way his friend is drawn into some paintings orbit, the way his mouth gapes and eyes shine in awe in front of a sculpture, a landscape, a portrait. Yotasuke doesn’t think anyone could blame him for spending as much attention to Yatora’s reactions as he does to the paintings themselves; how could he look away, when you can tell Yatora feels a strong sense of love and affection to those art pieces?
He can’t quite feel the same way. The paintings are nice and he’s glad he came to see them, but they evoke no feeling of fondness, no overflowing love. Perhaps art will always mean something different to him. Sometimes, though, he’ll stop in front of a painting that feels like it’s calling him, speaking to him and he will look, take it all in. There are paintings that feel close, others that are beautiful. Some he doesn’t understand, but he guesses that’s okay too – maybe every drawing has its own purpose, obscure to him as a viewer as the cats were to the priest in the folk story Hashida told him.
They are cutting their way through a shopping mall when Yatora stops. Malls are always busy and he usually avoids them so Yotasuke thinks that maybe he just avoided bumping into someone, but when he doesn’t move, he raises an eyebrow at him. “What?”
He follows Yatora’s line of vision: the logo from a famous, if mildly expensive, brand of clothing. Yatora points vaguely at it. “Um, do you mind if we go in, have a look at some of the stuff they have? I need to buy a gift for my uncle”, he explains.
Yotasuke shrugs. They still have time before dinner, so why not?
When they go in and Yatora starts picking up clothes and asking him for his opinion, he starts to suspect his uncle’s birthday gift was an excuse. Somehow, he doubts Yatora’s uncle wears extra small. He doesn’t say anything though. It’s nice, he thinks, how Yatora offers people things by making them think they’re doing him a favor instead. It makes it easier for him to accept.
Yatora raises a blue flannel shirt. He shakes his head. Too much like the ones he already has.
A white T-shirt with black sleeves. He considers, but no – white gets stained too easily. Besides, it’s winter and he wants something warmer.
An argyle, checkered vest gives him pause. He stills his hand over it, run his fingers through the fabric – soft, warm. It’s a nice color as well, not too bright. Yatora notices his interest and suggests, “maybe you could try it on?”
He could. He pictures himself in it, how comfortable it looks, how warm he would be. His own clothes, that he bought for himself – because he wanted it, because he liked it.
Putting it back into the clothes rack, he tells Yatora, “I’ll buy it tomorrow”.
If tomorrow comes, that’s exactly what he’ll do.
They spend too much time browsing the shops, not buying anything. Yatora is broke, having spent most of his money on his year-end project; and Yotasuke sees no point in buying anything that might disappear tomorrow. They leave the shopping mall and head to a place Yotasuke knows fairly well by now, the bar Yatora used to visit often. Three times a week…, Yotasuke had said, impressed, during their first time there. He now knew the menu by heart.
“What are you ordering?”, Yatora asks. “Feel free to order anything you like”.
He knows the answer he’ll get, but he still says it. “Beer!”
“No”, Yatora protests, and then to the waiter. “I’ll have a ginger ale”.
“I know you drink with your friends”, Yotasuke accuses him. Yatora might feed him that lie about not drinking because he’s a minor, but he knows he drinks with his friends. It’s patronizing.
Yatora crinkles his nose at that. “Well, okay, yeah, but just because other people do it doesn’t mean that you should?”, he offers, trying for a lighter tone.
“I’ll have a beer”, Yotasuke says to the waiter.
Yatora sighs. “Make it two then, and some karaage, please”.
Even though he has had beer before, Yotasuke almost spits out his drink when he takes a first sip. He likes the buzz it gives him, but truly, he doesn’t think it’s worth it. Beer tastes awful, if he’s being honest. He swallows it while grimacing at the taste. He glares at Yatora, who’s casually drinking his beer. It’s not fair how everything seems so easy when he does it.
Yatora looks sheepishly back at him. “It’s an acquired taste”, he concedes, resting his glass on the table. “I didn’t like it that much either when I started drinking”.
“Why did you do it then?”, Yotasuke asks.
“It was more of a social thing, for me”, he replies, averting his eyes and scratching his head in embarrassment. “My friends were drinking so I thought I should join in”, he shrugs.
Yotasuke studies him. “So you started drinking and smoking because you wanted to be accepted by your friends?”, he asks. It sounds more judgmental than it would be deemed polite.
Yatora laughs.
“It seems a bit stupid when you say it like that, but yeah, in a way?”, he says, running his hands through his own hair. “Maybe the first taste of beer wasn’t that great and the smell of cigarette smoke on my clothes was a bit annoying in the beginning, but I didn’t hate any of it. I liked being with my friends, doing things together, so it was a minor annoyance, yes, but I didn’t have any strong feelings. Drinking, smoking, it made it easier for me to connect with people”, he explains. His eyes fall on Yotasuke. “But you don’t have to do any of that if you’re not into it, you know”, he adds, earnest. “I know you’re stronger than me, but I still want to say that. Don’t do anything you’re not comfortable with just to appease other people”.
Yotasuke scoffs, incredulous. “In what way am I stronger than you?”, he asks, voice raising a bit at the end.
Yatora looks away. “I don’t know”, he confesses, voice unsure. “I just always thought that. Like, you know who you are and what you can do so you don’t care much about what others think”, he says, taking a gulp of his beer.
Yotasuke’s own grip on his drink tightens. His hand feels sticky, slightly wet from the glass and partly because of his nerves. “That”, he says, voice coming out strained, “is not true”.
Those words hang in the air between them, settling over the atmosphere like a heavy shroud.
Say something. It’s getting uncomfortable and he needs to say something to make it better, but he doesn’t know what to say because he’s right, why should he apologize for being right—
“Yotasuke-kun”, Yatora calls him. Their eyes meet and only then he continues: “I’m sorry”.
It’s so sincere and unexpected that it startles him. “Uh?”, he asks, but Yatora is not looking at him.
Looking down at his glass, Yatora holds the cup gently with both hands, cradling it. His eyes flickered with an emotion Yotasuke couldn’t read, so he decides to wait. Give him time.
“I owe you an apology”, he starts again, after a few seconds of silence. “It wasn’t fair to you, to go on and on about talent”, he says, and stops for a second, as if figuring his next words. “Someone once told me that when I call it talent, it makes it sound like they haven’t done anything, like there was no work involved. Like some people are blessed with talent and all the rest of us can do is try to catch up”, he explains, fidgeting with his fingers. He sighs. “I think in a way I started idealizing you because you’re amazingly good at drawing and I wanted to be like that. You know I admire you, right? But I think that did more damage than good, for both of us”. He stills, his shoulders slumping a bit.
Yotasuke’s throat feels dry. “What do you mean?”
Silence fills the space between them, heavy. Yatora shuffles on his seat.
“I think”, he begins, “that I used the excuse of talent as a shield. I felt insecure in my art, felt my skills were below that of my peers, so if I could explain it all away with ‘they’re talented, of course their work is going to be better than yours’… it was a way to protect myself, I think. But that’s not really fair to you, is it?”, he asks. “Because I stopped seeing you as a person, a living, breathing person with feelings and worries like any other, and saw you as this… ideal to be reached. So I’m sorry”, he finishes, “for treating you like that”.
Something bubbles in his chest. His expression goes blank. What is he supposed to say to that? He kind of hates Yatora for this, like he did during the second part of the Geidai entrance exam. Man, being in the same classroom as you is gonna be a lot of pressure…
It’s not very fair of him, though. He also misjudged Yatora. A sigh comes out of him.
“Yaguchi-kun”, he starts. “I was wrong about you too. You’re also not the person I thought you were”.
Yatora flushes at that. “Do you mean in a good way?”, he asks, flustered.
Yotasuke’s lips curl into a smile. “Who knows”, he replies.
The mood gets lighter after that. They eat, drink, share stories. At the end of their dinner, Yatora puts his chopsticks neatly on the side of his plate. The room is starting to feel warm, the smell of food lingering in the air. Yotasuke had taken his coat off and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt after a while, his body deciding that his thick winter coat was too hot for an indoor restaurant. It had gotten better after a cold drink, but it’s getting uncomfortably hot again, his skin sticking to the seat, disgusting and unpleasant.
“Do you wanna head out?”, Yatora asks, seeing him fidget in his chair.
“Yeah, let’s go”, he agrees, already getting up.
The night air is cold enough to sting when they step outside, their cheeks pink and in good spirits. By this point on any other Wednesday they would be heading to a karaoke bar and Yatora does suggest it, but Yotasuke shakes his head. Walking would do him good. There’s much to think about on Yatora’s apology and he chews on those words, digests them slowly as they walk in silence, side by side.
It’s when they reach a square that he figures out what’s been bothering him. He halts and his friend moves a few steps in front of him until he notices. Yatora looks back, tilting his head.
“You know, I really did hate you”, Yotasuke says, looking at him from a short distance. “I hated you because I envied your drive, your passion. You say I’m talented, that art comes easily to me but that’s not true. It’s not easy. I don’t enjoy it. I haven’t enjoyed it since I was a child. It feels like a curse, sometimes”. He clenches his fists. It’s not easy, not really. Not when he’s trying to reach something he can never reach, trying to earn something he can never get. It’s hard to explain without talking about the time loop, without talking about his mother, the pressure from his family, from their teachers. He thinks about the cat drawing that started all this, so simple and yet so joyful. He hasn’t felt like that in ages.
Yatora shifts the weight from one foot to another. Yotasuke lets the silence linger between them. He needs him to understand. He’ll wait, standing still and observing him, until he gets it.
“I was really shocked when you said you didn’t like drawing”, Yatora says after a while. He laughs then, but it’s an empty laughter. “I thought, this guy is so good, how can he not enjoy it? But I think I get it now”, he says, giving him a weak smile. There’s something like recognition in his eyes and that smile does a funny thing to Yotasuke’s heart. Embarrassed by how much that meant to him, Yotasuke starts walking again, heading to a bench that gives them a wide view of the square. This way, they can sit down and not have to look at each other. He doesn’t know what he might say if he looks at Yatora right now.
They sit there, observing the movement in the streets. It’s late enough that there’s not a huge crowd, but it’s close enough to Shibuya crossing that you don’t have to wait long to see a few teenagers partying, office workers looking slightly disheveled after a night of drinking, strangers wandering about, their laughter loud and bubbly.
Yatora sways to the side, gently bumping him. “Hey, wait here, I have an idea”, he says, eyes sparkling. He gets up before Yotasuke has time to protest and heads off to one of the streets that leads to the square.
Yotasuke waits. He takes a deep breath, the chilly air making way into his lungs and sobering him up. He only had one beer. He might not have a strong tolerance to alcohol but there’s no way that’s what’s getting him drunk. It’s his conversation with Yatora that has had a heady effect on him. He feels giddy, hopeful, on the verge of something. He wipes his sweaty palms on his jeans, shakes his head vigorously and takes another breath. He sees Yatora returning, plastic bag from a 24-hours convenience store on his hand, a smiley emoji-face plastered on it with the words ‘have a nice day’. He’s been having the same day for so long he doubts he would ever classify it as nice, but this one isn’t so horrible, even if he’ll have to repeat it tomorrow.
Yatora sits next to him on the bench, rummaging through the bag until he picks up a box of crayons and the tackiest notebook Yotasuke has ever seen. On the cover, a popular cartoon character strikes a heroic pose, masked face staring straight ahead and shoulders pushed back in a proud, victorious stance. The colors are bright and garish and there are action bubbles with onomatopoeia in them. Boom! Wham! Pow!
It’s a ruled notebook, for God’s sake.
He raises his eyebrows. “Seriously?”
“Hey, don’t knock it off until you try it”, he replies, not a single hint of self-consciousness on him. Weird. Yotasuke wouldn’t have picked him as someone who enjoyed child cartoons about superheroes and admitted doing it without any embarrassment. Then again, Yatora liked idols and sang those cheesy pop songs when they went to karaoke bars, so it shouldn’t surprise him.
“Okay”, he relents, but there’s still a shade of doubt in his voice.
Yatora tears out two pages from the notebook; keeps one to himself and hands the other one to Yotasuke, along with the notebook to give him some support. “Let’s both draw something. Doesn’t have to be good”, he rushes to explain. “I think you need to draw what makes you happy”.
Yotasuke frowns, but picks up a crayon from the box anyway. The crayon feels weird on his hand, its waxy texture foreign. He hasn’t used one of these in ages; even their shape feels wrong, too small for his hands. He picks a color and tests it lightly against the cheap paper; it’s harder to make softer lines with it. Skepticism takes hold of him. He glances to the side, but Yatora seems entranced already, trying out different colors and humming to himself.
Well, he might as well try it. If it doesn’t work, there’s always tomorrow. He has an infinity of tomorrows. Tentatively, he makes a line on the paper, still unsure of what his motif is going to be. The crayon glides pleasantly through the paper.
Maybe this isn’t such a bad idea after all.
Glancing up from the page, he looks around, tries to find inspiration. Shibuya is so colorful and lively that he could find something interesting to draw in every corner. No wonder this places features on Yatora’s work so often, he thinks. There’s an odd sense of belonging in there, despite the late hours, the artificial lights, how urban it is. Even its imperfect bits bring a feeling of fondness. It should feel impersonal, given how big of a neighborhood it is, the amount of people that pass by its streets every day. It doesn’t. Even in the early morning stillness, that quiet and foreign Shibuya before people start going to work, the empty streets feel lived in, populated even in absence with traces of people.
His eyes fall on a lamp post, illuminating an empty bench and dyeing it with a warm, soft yellow light. It’s just a light, the way it falls on objects, but this is what it can do: the edges of the bench feel like dissolving, getting closer and closer until it stops being an object and it starts being a mood. Consider the atmosphere: there’s intimacy there, the feeling of being held within a loving embrace, of being safe. Two months ago, he would say it’s insane to think of Shibuya at night as being safe but now—now he gets it.
He gets to work.
He’s immersed in it, distracted, when he hears Yatora. “There was this thing I read”, he says, carefully trying the words as one would mix paint, gently dabbing it and paying attention to the undertones, “that really spoke to me. It was a book I borrowed from Hashida. It talked about many things”, he says, putting a crayon down and picking up another color, “but the one that stayed with me was about Van Gogh. He was in his early twenties and living in London, away from home and without any friends, not a single penny to his name. Not that unusual, right?”, he smiles, letting him on the joke.
Yotasuke doesn’t respond, but keeps his eyes on him to signal he’s listening. “He wasn’t there to be an artist, though. He was writing a letter to his brother, Theo, when he looked out of the window and saw a lovely sight. It was so beautiful, he wrote, that he had to show him; and so on that cheap letter paper he made this beautiful little drawing”.
He gets another crayon, tries it out before putting it back.
“I think art means something different for all of us, but I also think that ultimately it’s an act of love. You love something so much you want to share it; you love someone so much you want to show them what you see and how you see it. It’s like holding a paper and saying: I see things like this, do you see it as well? You know”, he continues, voice dropping to a confessional tone, face flushed pink, “my mother didn’t want me to do art as a career. She thought it was risky and we’re not well off like other people in our class. Geidai was my only option. She was worried about me, about falling into debt and wasting my potential. We tried talking, but it didn’t go that well. I couldn’t express all that I wanted to say with my words, so I did a drawing of her, for her, and in doing so I started paying attention to all sorts of things I had never seen before, things I hadn’t thought about before. Art makes you look, makes you really pay attention to the details, right, like the texture of someone’s hand or the expressions they make. It made me conscious of just how much I was missing out, how much was invisible to me just because I wasn’t looking properly… Ugh, what am I saying?”, he finishes, covering his face with his hands. The warmth he was feeling is starting to fade with the chilly night breeze and he starts getting self-conscious of his rambling thoughts. “This is so embarrassing, please forget I said anything”, he groans, blushing a little.
Yotasuke extend his hand towards him, crayon on the palm of his hand. “No”, he replies, “I think it makes sense”. Yatora tentatively picks it up, giving him another color in turn.
Yatora lets out a sigh of relief and laughs. They work in silence after that, until they’re both ready to swap drawings. Yotasuke bites his lips when he hands Yatora his drawing. It’s stupid. He knows he’s good, he hasn’t feel nervous about showing his drawings to anyone since he was a child. This feels nerve-wracking. He decides to focus his attention on Yatora’s drawing instead: a charming depiction of two people entering a convenience store at night. The color scheme is simple, as they were both working with a 48 colors crayon box, but it has some of that warmth, vibrancy of night out with friends. He decides to risk a glance at Yatora, assess his reaction. They are in the middle of a square, surrounded by neon lights that spread their color around them. It gives Yatora an almost supernatural look. His blonde hair absorbs the color of the night and maybe Shibuya is blue for him but to Yotasuke the hue that envelops him is a reassuring purple that makes his heart ache with how much he wants.
“It’s not fair”, Yatora laughs. “You do a 20 minute drawing with convenience store crayons and it’s so good I want to live inside it”.
Yotasuke draws his breath sharply. Something unscrews inside him. His heart rattles like a kettle. “S-stop”, he says, face getting red.
“No, I mean it”, Yatora reassures him. And then: “But what I think doesn’t matter. The question is – did you have fun drawing it?”
Yotasuke leans back, pressing his lips together. The weird, astonishing, remarkable thing is – he had. Maybe it hadn’t been the same feeling he had a child, that unrestrained freedom and joy, but he had liked it. He is so shocked to discover that he can, actually, have fun drawing that when he comes to his senses again, the sky is already turning that shade of blue he sees every early morning in Shibuya. He looks around, takes it all in and feels something shift inside him, the knowledge that there’s a new day beginning nestling on his chest.
“Y-yeah”, he manages, still startled.
Yatora smiles at that, corners of his eyes crinkling. Yotasuke’s heart flutters, his face getting pink. He cups his hand in front of his face, partly covering his blush, and breathes onto them.
“It’s cold…”, he complains.
Yatora gets moving. “The trains are running already. Let's go”.
“Let’s go”, he agrees, walking faster to keep up with him.
A drowsy longing for rest falls over them. Heading to the station, Yotasuke feels his eyes drawn to a street corner, a magnetic pull that has him looking even as he keeps walking. There it is, the cat from his drawing, sitting smugly on the edge between light and shadow. It meows, lazily, looking at him with its cartoon eyes. It seems proud. Yotasuke’s lips curl upward in a tiny smile because that alone has lifted a huge weight off his shoulder. He feels lighter than he’s ever been.
On the metro, he fights his instinct to fall asleep as the lull of the train and the heated seats tempt him to take a nap. Yatora tells him he needs to go back to school to resubmit his project outline. He agrees to go because he needs to grab painting materials.
He falls asleep on the university’s corridor, wrapped in his thick winter coat. When he wakes up, it is Thursday and his back hurts from the odd sleeping position. Glancing up, he frowns because this is not his bedroom. There’s no alarm ringing, no text message waiting for him. From where he sits on the floor, he can see Geidai’s classrooms, closed. The corridor is empty, except for them and a few painting screens propped up against the wall. He blinks, slowly. The image stays the same.
Hope blossoms in his chest. Yotasuke takes a deep breath, gathering courage before looking to his side. Yatora is sleeping peacefully next to him, close enough that he can feel the warmth emanating from him. He makes a decision, then, and closes the distance between them, laying his head on Yatora’s shoulder.