Work Text:
June 17th, 1998
Yoshida says no one else is open late enough for him. What if I crash while night falls on a long, dark evening and have to wait until the shop across town opens? he asks. What if my bike begs for gentle hands to fix her and she’s left to suffer? Then Denji would ignore him in favor of the line growing behind him, and he’d laugh and slide him a completed repair form.
What if I just missed you? And that’s when Denji knows he’s lying.
Laying on his back under a busted car dripping slick, vicious oil, he lets his hands wander. It’s quiet under a two tonned car held in the air by bending bits of metal resting a couple centimeters from his foot. If he kicked out, he could send the mesh of scrap metal he’s been trying to fix for three hours crashing down. He could hide his body beneath steel and plastic and a dying, gasping engine, and prevent the calamity he’s sure is coming. He could die as he lives: alone in a hell of his own making and weeping for it.
Yoshida finds him before he can gather his strength.
“Hi, Denji.” Denji can hear his smile even if he cannot see it. It sounds vexing, it sounds like he has been bottling his soft speech for no one’s but Denji’s ears. It sounds as though he knows why Denji thinks of hiding when he nears.
“I’m busy,” he says, his voice barely traveling under the car and over the harsh, grating noise of the rest of the shop. It’s busy for a Thursday afternoon. Most people save their repairs for tomorrow, for when Denji has already set his sights on his cold, lifeless room that houses no one but him, and then he must pretend he minds when he is kept from it.
Denji watches Yoshida’s feet shift from beneath the undercarriage. Even his shoes are clean, shined and expensive like he has no qualms with throwing money on the street just to step on it. Denji’s shoes stick out next to his, his boots more oil than leather.
“Can I help?” He doesn’t tell Denji why he’s dropped his bike off for the third time this month. Denji knows, and his hands tighten on a wrench. He ends up unfastening the wrong bolt and he sets to work all over again.
“You can leave,” he says. “That would help me a ton.” Yoshida kicks the sole of his boot.
“Denji,” he says again, as if he is in love with the sound of his own voice. “I can’t hear you from under there. Come out? For me?”
Yoshida can hear him just fine. If Denji can hear the sharp clicks of Beam’s fingers over his ancient keyboard and the snap of Asa’s bright pink bubble gum, Yoshida can hear him refuse him.
“Please?”
Denji rolls out from beneath the car.
Yoshida hair is windswept, looking like he has just hopped off his bike. Or as if his hair had been threaded through with reverent hands, and Denji drags his eyes down his body to see if the rest of him speaks of fresh sex, too. He looks at Yoshida until his eyes grow tired but want for little less, and he sets them against his gloved hands to give them respite. But they ache here, too.
Yoshida’s smile spreads like a disease and he speaks honey-smooth. “Hi, Denji.” There’s his name again, spoken like he is merely plucking the sounds from the air, giving it meaning only once it leaves his mouth. A lot of Yoshida is like that: intangible until it is his to give away, creating something from the nothing he sees in the world only when he deems it time.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” he says while Denji wonders after those he graces his eyes over but does not see. Do they writhe on the ground like Denji wants to, or have they found the snake hiding in the grass? Do they see this man for what he is, or do they wear Denji’s eyes and think him a fallen angel, walking along death’s sharp edge as though it is a game only he will play?
“I haven’t been able to ride Yua in weeks,” he says and means a thousand different things. He leans his hip against the car Denji is no longer under. It groans, put upon and weary, and Denji thinks it, too, has tired of his way of speaking with anything but words.
“Asa’s plenty good,” Denji says and ignores the question that isn’t asked. It’s Asa who knows bikes the way she knows how to pull breaths from the air and not him. His expertise, little that he’s garnered and hating every root he lays down that puts distance between here and there, lays with cars and trucks and the occasional tractor when he is given enough time to learn its bumps and valleys. Asa could fix Yoshida’s bike blind, could make it sing under her hands like a fattened canary, but Yoshida does not ask Asa.
“But Denji, I’ve missed you so badly it’s hard to breathe.”
Denji refuses to meet his eyes. “You should’a let her fix your bike,” Denji can’t help but say. He looks up at Yoshida through his sweat-soaked bangs and finds them running parallel. Yoshida, with elegant pose that begs to be asked after, and Denji, sitting on the floor in a pool of black ichor, his fingers stained and ruined, denying him.
“Oh, Denji, I don’t let anyone else touch my things,” he says, but Denji has done nothing but poke and prod and break the bike he had been given to fix.
Yoshida laughs like the chiming of bells, and Denji feels himself settle into his skin even as his apprehension rises. Yoshida is like this: he is a well of contradictions so deep and so dark Denji can only peer down and wonder. He can guess but never know, he can toss coins until he is sent to beg for more and still know nothing of this man who visits like a specter. He can wait on a man who never seems to tire of him, who runs his hands over the scars laid not on Denji’s body but his heart and ask for little but this next.
“My race is next week; won’t you look at Yua for me? Won’t you come and watch me catch the stars?” But Yoshida should have no need to catch what already belongs to him.
And so Denji does. He watches Yoshida ride Yua to the back of the shop and stand her at attention. He ghosts his hands over her dew drop paint and feels eyes carve at his back; whatever they flay, they heal with gentle, holy sutures.
Denji says, “I don’t know anything about motorcycles.” And knows if Yoshida has not listened to him before, he will not listen now.
“Try,” Yoshida says, as he always does, and Denji begins to take Yua apart. He cracks open her beating heart, warmed and steel smooth. He holds her lungs of smoke and blows them clean. He smooths over her legs that bring Yoshida a little closer to heaven, a little closer to home, and replaces them with new ones.
“For better traction,” he says but does not know, feeling as though he must do something besides wait to be speared by midnight eyes. “So nothing can stop you.” Not even the seductive pull of earth, begging Yoshida to stay.
June 21st, 1998
Yoshida is set to race against the setting of a Sunday’s moon, but he leaves the Monday before, and he takes Denji with him.
“How do you know I’d be here?” Denji asks as he settles into the seat next to him, backlit by the first rays of light that struggle over the horizon. He had been waiting—waiting, not hiding, because Yoshida will always find him—at the base of a mountain they once climbed together.
Yoshida had pulled up in a truck, not the one Denji is familiar with but a brighter one that shakes over the rocky road. Denji has never seen Yoshida ride Yua like he means it, not outside of practice laps on an empty track and short jaunts through the shop, directing Yua himself because no one can move her like he does, and he struggles with the disappointment that Yoshida did not ride out to meet him.
“I know you,” Yoshida says and starts the engine, the truck thrumming to life beneath them.
“You bugged Asa until she gave me up,” Denji says, because no one save for his sister, halfway across the world until he can come back for her, no one save for his brother, worn and breaking with the promise of a family he might never find, has ever really known him.
But Yoshida just laughs. “No.” He smiles. “I know you, Denji. I know you save money like you’re afraid it’s going to be taken from you. I know you eat like every meal is your last. I know you wake up early to watch every sunrise. I know you kiss me like I am air and you’re a man drowning. And I know you watch me,” Yoshida says as Denji burns in the seat next to him, “waiting for me to turn and look at you.”
Yoshida keeps his eyes on the road when he says, “but Denji, I am always watching you.”
Denji makes them break when night begins to fall. No good journey has ever been finished in the dark, and Denji had sat quiet next to Yoshida with his hands stained black until he could spoil the air they shared no longer.
Yoshida lays a blanket on the front of his truck because Yua rests in the back, and they let the still-running engine warm them through the fabric. Yoshida edges closer to Denji, and he lets him warm him, too.
“Denji,” Yoshida says, and then, “Denji, Denji, Denji,” because Denji does not imagine the way he thrills when he speaks his name. It sounds the same, even after months apart. “Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else.”
“Why?” Denji asks. “We’re not friends.”
Yoshida turns to face him, pinning him down with midnight eyes. There is poison in his eyes and twin poison in Denji’s blood, and the threat of death is addling and so sweet. He is intoxicated by its pull.
“Of course not,” Yoshida says. “We’re not friends, Denji.”
“I’ve never been in love,” he lies, turning on his back to watch Yoshida’s stars.
“No, Denji,” Yoshida says. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“I hate it here,” he says.
“Denji.”
“You were right. I want to go home.”
“Denji.”
“I don’t think my family misses me the way I miss them. I don’t think they want me to come back.”
“Denji,” Yoshida says. “Something I don’t know. Something I could not pluck from your mind the moment I saw you.”
“You smile with your eyes,” Denji says after a breathless moment, “when you mean it. You can fake everything else, but you can’t fake that.” Denji holds a hand to the sky and picks a star from the night. One already sits next to him, burning the skin from his bones while he asks for more. “You mean it when you smile at me.”
Yoshida traces a finger against his cheek, brushing the swooping fall of his dark lashes as if he can feel what Denji remembers but refuses to look at. “Denji, Denji, Denji,” he says, and finally looks at Denji like he wishes to eat him alive. Denji looks back like he wants to let him. “I'm always smiling at you.”
“The sun is up,” Yoshida says, and it sits across from the faded moon. “We can leave now.”
Denji rests his head on his chest, having found its home sometime when the wind whistled and howled like a beaten dog and Denji sought protection in the waiting arms of the man next to him.
He is warm like the sun, warm like a blazing star set to burst, and Denji feels some of his deep-rooted cold scatter.
“We can leave now,” Yoshida says again and then holds him like he never wants to let go.
“Hiro,” Denji says, because he has not spoken his name in a lifetime, and beneath him the other man’s heart sings a chorus just for him. “Hiro, let me stay here a moment longer.”
August 15th, 1996
The heavens are crying when they meet. Denji waits in the front office, waits for clients or wanderers or gods to pass through their stained-glass doors. He gets something entirely different.
He doesn’t greet this stranger—because that’s what they are at this point, strangers, to each other, to themselves. Instead, he calls for Asa over his shoulder, not once taking his eyes from the figure in front of him.
He doesn’t remove his helmet, sturdy and black with a visor Denji can’t see past, and he wonders what he would find if he leapt to his feet and ripped it from him.
Denji doesn’t hear her footfalls over the pattering of rain, but he hears her say, “you look lost, Champion.”
The man—and it is a man—takes off his helmet. Denji doesn’t recognize him. He wears a racer’s clothes, all thickly padded and encasing his entire body as though he intends to weather the world.
He walks like owns the world, too. Walks as though he expects the ground to shake beneath him, as if he is waiting for heaven to call him back home. Denji looks past him and yes, it’s still raining.
The man looks at Denji and not Asa even though Denji is not considered in this hierarchy they are building around him. He is not even a footnote to be mentioned. He sits in a chair cornered off, not to be bothered or looked at, and he waits for Asa to call for him. He likes it that way. He likes being useful. He likes knowing he is strong enough to keep his head above water here if nowhere else.
But the man looks at Denji and not Asa, and his smile doesn’t waver when he says, “that’s an awfully nasty bruise you’ve got there.”
Denji sucks his teeth and stares the man down. Asa speaks around him.
“You can wait out the rain here, I suppose,” she says. “But then you’ve got to go, you’re taking up real estate in our waiting room.” The room is empty besides Denji and Asa and the man with the fixed smile and no name, and none of them mention it.
“Go?” he asks but looks only at Denji. “Am I to be put out on the street with no means to get home?”
“We’ve got a phone if you need to call a cab—”
“You won’t fix my Yua?”
It’s Denji that answers him. “Yua? For a bike?”
The man smiles at him, uneven and dynamic and with midnight eyes that widen before they fall to slits as though they had never moved at all, and this is the first time Denji thinks he is really seeing him. Seeing, and not just staring him through like he is a pane of glass erected in the image of a boy by the man’s own hands, waiting to be shattered.
“You don’t like it?” he asks.
It feels odd to call a bike something so tender, to name it something that speaks of such love. His name is not like hers. His was picked and then forgotten, chosen at a whim never to be thought of again. His name means nothing.
Denji shrugs. “It’s weird.”
The man hums and sets his helmet against his hip. He settles onto his feet and relaxes back on his heels. He breathes deep and sets in to stay a while.
“Don’t you have a crew for your bike?” Asa asks. “Legally I don’t think I can even look at it too long.”
“I do,” the man says. “But I’d like you to fix her, if you could.”
Asa slides behind a desk, their receptionist home for the night. It is just Denji and Asa, working through the pouring rain, expecting no one and receiving the man before them.
“I suppose I could squeeze you in,” she says, her fingers flying across the keyboard and Denji knows she’s only pretending to be busy. He chances a look at the other man, his other smile firmly back in place, and thinks he knows this, too. “Bring your bike around to the garage and I’ll let you in.”
“Ah,” the man says, still looking at Asa. He hasn’t looked at Denji again. He doesn’t quite understand the tangle of emotions winding in his stomach. “I’d like him to fix my Yua.”
“He doesn’t fix bikes,” Asa says. “Take your bike 'round back and I’ll have it fixed by the end of the week—”
“No,” the man says. “Him. Or no one.”
It takes a moment for Denji to realize the man is speaking of him. There is no one in the room save for him and Asa and this creature Denji knows well enough to be weary of, and still, he looks around for someone else. But only three hearts pound, and though his runs fastest when the man smiles again but not at him, Denji accepts it like the sharp blade of a guillotine hanging above.
Asa balks at the ultimatum. She would sooner stare down a shark and taunt it to bite than yield. This will be no different. “You’re more than welcome to go back in the rain.” It’s begun to howl, the trees across the street shaking and begging to keep their roots in the soil. “He doesn’t know shit about bikes. Give it to him and you’ll be worse off than when you came in.”
“That’s alright,” the man says. And he does not look at Denji. “I trust him.”
Asa huffs, but Denji watches in wonder as she tilts her chin back and holds out her hand. “Payment first then,” she says. “So you can’t run when he fucks it up.”
Denji takes the man’s card, sleek and black and too heavy to be anything but expensive. The man’s name is Yoshida Hirofumi, and Denji tests it out on his tongue. Lucky, Denji thinks. Is this man truly lucky, to have sought salvation and found only Denji?
Denji leads him to the garage, ducking beneath the hanging ropes he doesn’t bother to warn the man about. The other man is taking in the room like a baby being held in its mother’s hands to consume the sprawling skies. He looks like even the drying oil Denji has yet to clean entices him. Not once does he look at Denji.
He tugs on a looped chain, slowly pulling the heavy garage door open. The man doesn’t offer to help, and he doesn’t ask. Soon rain is running into the garage, soaking Denji’s clothes to his skin.
“Hurry up and bring Yua in,” Denji says, and the man looks at him then. Denji shifts on his feet, arrested by his dark eyes and his lilting smile and the crease by his mouth and the breadth of his shoulders. He turns away first. “Go before the room floods.”
The man rolls Yua in, propping her up on a kickstand. “She’s crying,” he says. “Can’t you hear?”
But Denji sees nothing but curling, red metal, hears nothing but the pounding of rain above them. “What do you need me to fix?”
“Ah,” the man says. Yoshida. Denji has been gifted a name, he would do well to use it and not fix ethereality to him where none belongs. Gods do not have names beyond divinity, angels need not hear their names to be called, but Yoshida is merely a man.
The rain has stopped.
“Ah,” Yoshida says again. “I know I said I trust you, but won’t you prove it to me? Just to calm my nerves before I leave you at the mercy of my precious Yua?”
“Prove it how?” Denji says instead of leave. What has he to prove to a man he just met? Why, Denji thinks, does he want to try?
“What’s your name?” Yoshida asks.
“Denji,” he says and gives no last name. He doesn’t use one, not here, and it has raised no questions he’s willing to answer.
“Denji,” Yoshida tries. “Denji, Denji, Denji.” He will wear it out like that. He will burn through his name like a fire until there is nothing but ash in the wind and then surely he will tire of it.
“Denji,” Yoshida says again, “what’s your biggest fear?”
A thousand thoughts rise like smoke in his mind, begging to be called upon, begging to be answered and seen and felt. “Chainsaws,” Denji says and disperses the smoke with a heavy breath. “Happy now?”
“No,” Yoshida says. He leans against Yua, crossing his feet at the ankle. But Denji has nowhere to sit, cannot mirror him, and instead he crosses his arms and hopes that will protect him.
“Denji,” Yoshida says, and Denji is surprised he does not hate the sound of his name in another’s mouth. “What happened to your face?” He traces his fingers over his own cheekbone, pausing over its well-defined edge.
He doesn’t ask about the circular scars in the creases of Denji’s elbows, or the darker bruises around his wrists, and he finds himself wanting to tell the truth. “I fell,” he says, because he wants many things he can’t have. “Knocked my face into my coffee table.”
“Clumsy boy,” Yoshida says and doesn’t believe him. Denji thinks they can’t be more than a decade apart. Yoshida seems older, be it his settled demeanor or his regal features, refined as though he is a master painter’s final piece.
“How old are you?” Denji asks, the first question of his own.
Yoshida smiles, this one small and satisfied and Denji could easily see it on a cat bathing beneath the sun. “Twenty-eight,” he says. Denji thought him younger, but still Yoshida is six years younger than Aki, and suddenly he is both older than time and newly born. Suddenly Denji wants to be anywhere but here.
“I’m twenty-four,” he offers, the first thing he has given without being asked, and Yoshida’s smile blooms like he has been gifted a fledgling to hold and grow in his own hands.
“You’re Japanese,” Yoshida says. It’s not a question. Still, Denji finds himself wanting to defend himself, his hackles rising mere moments after they fell. “You don’t look Japanese.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t really sound Japanese.” Yoshida’s accent—and Denji supposes he should stop calling it that; he is the odd one out, he is the tree growing in a field of wildflowers, and it’s him who trips over his words even years later—is low and even-cadenced, speaking as though he’s reading from a script long since memorized. He has a slow, almost southern drawl, similar to the old westerns Beam tries to get him to watch.
He sounds like he has bathed in good ol’ American molasses and still drips with it, but Denji thinks if he listens hard, and he has been, he can hear the ruse like a mask worn by a performer he's seen somewhere else before start to fall. Denji wonders who he has been trying to fool.
“I moved between Gokayama and the states for few years before I settled here.”
Yoshida says Gokayama like he is spilling water from his lips, smooth and perfect, and he thinks if Yoshida had wanted him to, Denji would think he was born and raised in the village over from his own.
“I moved here three years ago,” Denji says when Yoshida lets the silence fester between them.
“Look at us, Denji, we barely missed each other.” Yoshida cocks his head. “Though I suppose luck has a way of bringing us together.”
“It was luck that broke your bike down in the pouring rain?” Denji asks.
“It was something,” Yoshida says. The rain has since stopped and through the sparse windows scattered around the garage, Denji can see sunlight peek through as though it had never hid to begin with.
Denji nods towards the bike. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Have you earned my trust?” Yoshida asks, tilting his head further and looking like a called dog.
“I better have. I’m not answering anymore damn questions. Let me look at your bike or you can fix her yourself,” Denji lies. He’s intrigued, he’ll admit, with the bike loved like a child by a man that has done nothing but perplex him from the moment he opened stained glass doors.
“Denji,” Yoshida says, and Denji feels something a little like disappointment build when he only says it once, “won’t you let me ask you one more?”
“Just one?”
Yoshida drags a finger twice diagonally across his heart. “And hope to die,” he promises, then smiles to himself like he is weaving a joke Denji will never understand, but he nods nonetheless.
“Why are you all alone?”
Denji balks, anger rising despite himself. “I’m not alone,” he says and wonders after this incessant, presumptuous man who walks into Denji’s life like he wants to leave fingerprints, like he wants to stain and tarnish and never be forgotten.
“You are,” he insists and Denji hates that he’s right.
“No,” Denji says, because he is nothing if not stubborn. “I work with Asa, and Beam. And I—I’ve got a roommate.” He winces. Ren does little to dissolve the loneliness Denji feels creep upon him like a plague—and Denji tries to convince himself there is none to exacerbate—but Yoshida has no need to know any of it.
“But none of them have stopped you from being alone, have they, Denji?” What are these eyes, Denji wants to ask, that tear through skin to peek at his veins and see his running blood, that read from him like he is a book written in this man’s honor?
“Maybe I want to be alone,” Denji says and knows even if this man were not god-touched, he would not fool him.
“Do you?”
No. No, he does not want this ache inside him to grow until it threatens to burst from his body wearing his bones like amor. No, he does not want to miss his family so badly it hurts worse than his failing heart and still know that coming home would do nothing but spread this awful feeling to those who should never have had to deal with it.
“Yes,” Denji says, because not being alone would only be worse. He clears his throat and feels blood fill in his mouth. He swallows it down. “That was your last question. Let me look at the damn bike.”
Yoshida steps aside, revealing ruby red paint.
“She doesn’t run like she used to,” he says, dragging the tips of his fingers along the narrow, padded seat. It’s long, for a racer’s. Big enough to fit two. “She’s slow.”
“Don’t bikes wear out over time?” Denji asks when he pops loose the fuel tank to find her make and model printed on the bottom.
“Not my Yua,” Yoshida says. “She’ll outlive even me.”
Denji tells him to come back in three days, after he has the chance to buy a manual out front and struggle through each page. Written English is still hard for him, the confusing anatomy of a motorcycle even harder, and he falls asleep with the book open paged on his face.
It is Ren, heavy-footed and doing nothing to quiet his steps when he pounds through the front door, that wakes him.
“Gonna need the apartment for the night,” he says as he hangs his coat on the back of their kitchen chair. It’s dripping a pool onto their wooden floors, and Denji wonders when it started to rain again. It had been dry like bleached bones when Denji rode the train home, and he had looked to the sky and saw nothing but stretching blue, as if the sky did not know something as ordinary as rain.
Denji sits up and watches Ren move through the apartment with ease. He grabs some of the leftovers Denji had been saving from the fridge and piles it high in his thick arms. The apartment had been Ren’s before Denji moved in, and Denji’s name is not and will never be on the lease, and he supposes it will stay only Ren’s.
“Why?”
“Got a girl coming over,” Ren says and slams the door to his room behind him.
Denji heaves himself from the couch and mourns after a rain jacket he doesn’t own, and then sprints the rest of the way to the train station.
He goes back to the shop, because Yoshida was right and he is alone, and he has nowhere else to run to.
He still hasn’t caught his breath from the run over, dodging raindrops as if he had any hope of staying dry, and he bends over himself and wills air into his lungs. It’s been getting harder these past months, summer winds and summer showers leading to an upkick of dust and oppressive heat Denji can do little to avoid.
His heart pounds in his chest as he rounds the corner to the shop, and when his eyes meet midnight black, it tries to beat from his chest.
“Yoshida,” he says, feeling out of place. He thinks between the two of them he is. Yoshida leans against the stained-glass door, his face raised to the sky. Beneath the canopy of the shop he’s dry, and Denji keeps his distance.
“Thought I told you to come back in a couple days,” he says, unlocking the door with the spare keys he swiped years ago. It only unlocks the front door, and he makes peace with sleeping on the rough carpet that’s never been cleaned.
“Ah, Denji,” Yoshida says, and Denji feels his heart finally slow. “I couldn’t wait.”
“To see Yua?” Denji asks as he tosses the keys on the receptionist’s desk and turns to face Yoshida. He’s smiling. He’s not dressed like a racer, though Denji supposes he has little to compare him to. He thinks a racer would be strong, and Yoshida looks strong. He thinks they’d have to be fast, on and off the track, and he thinks Yoshida’s feet would barely touch the earth should he run.
Yoshida keeps his coat on even after Denji has hung his thin one over the desk, the summer heat leaking through the shop doors. Layer upon layer upon layer, only the skin of his hands and face is shown. Denji’s arms twitch by his side like he wants to cover himself, feeling as though those midnight eyes are peeling him apart, skin to muscle to sinew to bone until there is nothing left.
“These keys won’t open the garage,” Denji says. “I can’t work on her until Asa comes in tomorrow morning.”
“That’s alright,” Yoshida hums. He has a voice like a singer, Denji finally realizes, honey-smooth and sturdy like he is a moment away from opening his lungs to the heaven to hymn to its angels.
“I’m sleeping here tonight,” Denji says. Then, with no thought or sense of self preservation, he continues, “you can stay, if you want.” And Yoshida’s eyes light like the stars have come to say hello.
Denji sets himself up against the wall, balling his waterlogged jacket under his head, rivers running down his spine. Yoshida settles in next to him, his shoulder touching Denji’s like he is not afraid to get wet, to be dirtied.
Denji shuffles further away, and to the disappointment he is too slow to chase off, Yoshida doesn’t follow.
“’M tired,” he says, a last chance to save himself. “Not gonna be much good company.”
“Denji,” Yoshida says, and Denji can hear him to turn face him even after his eyes have fallen closed, “I don’t mind.”
Denji almost falls asleep like that, fatigue dragging him down into familiar, constricting arms, sitting upright next to a man he hardly knows.
“Denji,” Yoshida says, and Denji opens his eyes to the first call of his name, unable to drift into slumber until he’s been allowed to leave. “Your hands haven’t healed properly.” And then he takes Denji’s hands in his own as though he is preparing to set them himself.
They’re cold, Denji notices first. Ice cold and long fingered with clean nails and a pretty little scar over the lifeline of his palm, and then Denji rips his hands away.
“The fuck’s wrong with you?” he asks, shuffling further along the wall until he bumps against the receptionist’s desk. “Don’t just grab people like that!” Denji’s hands are scarred and ugly and broken from fights he had no hope of winning, and he has never cared how they looked before. But next to Yoshida’s, next to his ones dipped in ichor, Denji feels the need to hide them from his watchful eyes.
“But Denji,” Yoshida says, his hands held aloft like he is waiting for Denji’s to return. “Are we not friends?”
“No,” Denji says, and tastes ash on his tongue. “We’re not friends, Yoshida.”
“Hirofumi,” Yoshida says. “Call me Hirofumi.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to hear you say my name, Denji,” Yoshida says, and Denji thinks it only fair that he says the other man’s name the way he’s been ruining his. No one else will say Denji the way Yoshida does.
"Hirofumi,” he says, then, “Hiro,” because that settles something in his stomach.
“Yes,” Yoshida breathes, suddenly close enough to touch. “Yes, like that. Say my name like that.” But Denji doesn’t know what he means.
“Hiro,” he says again, and pushes against Yoshida’s chest when he tries to get closer. He meets a chest sturdy like an oak tree, and a heart beating nearly as fast as his own. He drops his hands like they’ve been burned and Yoshida stays hovering beside him, his breath ghosting cold over Denji’s flamed cheeks.
“Why'd you wanna be a racer?” he asks, hoping to take the attention off himself and calm the discomfort growing in his chest. Does the itch take root and spread from how close Yoshida still lingers? Or is it born from the distance he is keeping between them?
Yoshida sets slitted eyes on Denji. Like a snake, he would think if they didn’t make him want to lean closer, to stare longer until the imprint of his eyes stays against the backs of his for a lifetime.
“It sets my soul free,” Yoshida says. Coming from anyone else, and Denji would laugh. People like Denji don’t speak like that, they do not speak with such earnesty to someone they do not know, they do not rip a piece of their still beating heart and offer it for judgement without a hint of fear. But Yoshida is nothing like him.
“Denji,” Yoshida says after he has been quiet for too long, “don’t you have anything like that?”
Denji thinks of quiet mornings in a shared bedroom, he thinks of clothes that don’t fit but he’d never give up, he thinks of pinks and blues and what must have been love.
“No,” Denji says, truth heavier around his throat than any lie could ever be. “I don’t.”
Denji wakes warm, from the curve of his shoulders to his now socked feet. He feels rising sunlight heating the backs of his thighs and his eyes drift open to the smell of dirtied ash.
He sits up on his palms and Yoshida’s coat pools around his waist, his own jacket stuffed under his head. Yoshida’s turned away from him, puffing smoke into the air on each exhale. His hands had not been stained with nicotine when they held Denji’s, and faintly he wonders if anything that touched his skin would ever leave a mark. He thinks he wants to try.
The tip of his cigarette flickers red, and Denji says, “my brother smokes,” almost like an admission of guilt. He doesn’t know if that’s true anymore. His brother could have stopped the day he left, he could have stopped anytime in the three years between, and Denji would not be privy to any of it.
With flattened lips Yoshida leaks smoke from his mouth and it dribbles down his chin to rest on the floor like a waterfall. Then he curves his lips, and for a wonderous moment Denji thinks he is going to try to kiss him, but he only exhales a halo of smoke into the room and Denji wrestles with shameful disappointment again.
“Do you want to try?” he asks, holding the lit cigarette in front of Denji.
“I’ve never smoked before,” he says, but he leans forward to take it from the other man’s fingers. He holds it like Yoshida had, between his middle and index finger, and pitches it tight enough to splinter the white paper.
“Gently,” Yoshida laughs, not at him but encouraging him to join. “Gently, like you’re holding a bird’s egg.”
Denji puts the cigarette to his lips and it is wet. Surely his cheeks are red enough to give him away, but Yoshida is looking nowhere but at his lips.
“Take a slow breath,” Yoshida says, “then hold the smoke in your lungs.” This will do nothing but worsen Denji’s weakened lungs, but he thinks he’d rather spend the time he has left with Yoshida’s eyes on him, consequences be damned.
Denji takes in too much at once and coughs out smoke like air. It feels a little like dying, the harsh smoke dragging through his beaten lungs and taking everything with it. Denji tastes iron in his mouth and coughs a splattering of blood into his palm, wiping it against his dark jeans before Yoshida can notice.
But he tries again. Slowly, with Yoshida’s watchful eyes pinning him in place, he sets the cigarette back between his lips. He drags the smoke into his mouth in pieces until he has enough to hold as a breath. Then all at once he lets it loose, lets it color and fill the air between them.
“Good boy. Just like that,” Yoshida says, parting the smoke with his words while Denji once again struggles to breathe even. It is a pattern, it seems, to lose his breath along with his mind when Yoshida leans close and stays, when he looks at him like he is moments away from crawling between his ribs to feel the way his heart beats for himself.
Denji finishes the rest of the cigarette, hating the taste of ash more with each intake. But it’s familiar, in the way it clots in his mouth and settles onto his clothes in the hopes to stay, and he sucks on the cigarette until he is breathing in filter paper.
Yoshida offers him an ash tray when he’s done, when there is nothing left to pull from the cigarette, and he crushes the stub against decorated glass.
“Are you hungry?” Yoshida asks, his eyes fixed on the bare wall in front of them. Denji wants to yell or scream or grab his face between his hands to make him look at him the way he had before.
“Yeah,” he says.
Yoshida offers him a hand and Denji grabs it, afraid it’s going to be rescinded before he can take it. Yoshida pulls him to his feet as though he weighs nothing. He keeps Denji’s hand, encaged in ice, for three long heartbeats, and even Denji’s slow down to prolong the moment. Then he lets go, and Denji is helpless but to follow after him.
“I don’t have any money with me,” he confesses when they step into the blinding sun. Denji shields his eyes, still not used to the unfiltered light that trickles past the airy clouds. Yoshida rises to it; he tips his head back like he could swallows the sun whole and still not get enough.
“Denji,” Yoshida says without looking, “let me feed you.”
Denji is more familiar with the area, Yoshida is merely passing through, but he lets the other man stop his car in front of a small diner.
“More,” Yoshida says when Denji orders the smallest, cheapest dish from the menu. “Take however much you want. Eat until you’re sated.”
This is a test, Denji is sure, to see if he will bleed the other man dry, if he will take his kindness and run it thin until it breaks and shatters. Then let Denji test him, too, let him peel the skin from Yoshida and see the creature lurking beneath.
Denji orders more than he could hope to eat, he orders more than he’s ever been gluttonous to even want, and he eats until he is sated, and then lets the rest of the food grow cold beside him.
Yoshida sits across from him, a plate of bursting, ripe fruit in front of him. He spears a blood red strawberry on a fork and holds it before Denji. “Share with me?”
No one else is in the diner this early, the call of the birds not yet sung, but Denji peers over his shoulder anyway. He wants to. He wants to lick the juice leaking down Yoshida’s wrist until he tastes nothing but him. He wants to crawl into his lap and split the rest of the fruit between them, and he knows his wants are nothing but shameful and fabricated from the kindness of a man who thinks nothing of it.
Denji leans over the table and takes the strawberry in his mouth. Now Yoshida watches him like he is memorizing the movement of his atoms, like everything will remain eternal in his mind. Denji swallows and tastes nothing at all.
“Denji,” Yoshida says, “do you believe in god?”
“Just the one?” Denji asks.
Yoshida unfolds a napkin and lays it on his lap. Simply to be contradictory, Denji spills some of the heavy syrup on the table before he pours it over his plate.
“Or as many as you’d like.”
Denji thinks for a moment, pushing his food around like moving it will make it any more appealing. His appetite died the moment they walked through the door, the moment the host dragged her eyes between Denji and Yoshida and the little space between them and found it some kind of sinful.
“No,” he says. “I don’t believe in any.”
The rising sunlight plays itself across Yoshida’s dark hair. He wears it in a style Denji’s only really seen in America, long in the back and then tapering towards the front, enough left behind to shadow his eyes lest he tilt his head as he does now, his eyes sticky amber. “Why not?” he asks.
“What kind of god would do this?”
“Do what?”
Denji raises his hands as if he’s trying to hold the world. “The forest fires that clog the air and make it so hard to breathe I think I’m dying. The girl and her dog on the corner of Cascade that beg for money every day. Disease that tears families apart.” What kind of god would set him loose on the world; what kind of god would give him people who love him, just to rip them away?
Denji shrugs. None of this matters. “Maybe he existed once, but he didn’t stick around.”
“Not in anything?” Yoshida asks. He rests his hands on the table, a scarred, ivory palm up. “Not in anyone?”
“What about you, huh?” Denji doesn’t like this game anymore. He feels like by not answering his question he is signing his fate in blood. “Do you believe in god?”
Yoshida doesn’t look religious, he doesn’t wear a cross, he didn’t hang a rosary from his car mirror, he didn’t say grace or thanks or promise an offering when they sat down to eat. Denji has come to realize he doesn’t look like much of any one thing.
“I believe in people,” Yoshida says. He thumbs out a couple bills, more money that Denji has in his wallet, and sets them on the table. “Are you still hungry?” he asks, ignoring the full plates surrounding Denji.
“Yes.”
Yoshida takes him back to his house, to a sprawling estate with looming oak trees and neat rows of wildflowers and what Denji recognizes as bushes of hydrangeas.
He has a lowly lit genkan, and all at once Denji is inundated with memories of late mornings with his sister, being ushered out the door, their older brother’s fraying patience threatening to snap, and Yoshida nearly bumps into him. Then his genkan is just a hallway, and the shoes resting by the door are his and not Denji’s or his brother’s or his sister’s, and if he hovers in the doorway long enough, no one will call him in.
Yoshida runs his ice fingers up his back, a chill slow to follow, and he tucks a wayward strand of hair behind Denji’s ear. “You alright?”
Denji steps through the doorway.
Yoshida makes takoyaki. He cooks it in sizzling oil until Denji can smell its golden-brown color, stuffs them so full they are near bursting, and lays them steaming on a plate for them to share. It’s Denji’s favorite, and somehow he’s sure Yoshida knew.
They eat in silence. It’s only once Denji has helped the other man clean up, the food sitting heavy and full in his stomach does he ask, “what do you want?” and think it long overdue.
“Want with what?” Yoshida asks, drying his hands.
Denji swallows and Yoshida’s eyes trace the movement. “With me. What do you want with me?”
Yoshida drapes the kitchen towel over his shoulder and leans his hip against the counter. Denji is so startled by the mundane act, as though Yoshida is finally living in a space and not just existing in it, that he almost misses the quiet, “why do I have to want something?”
“Why else would you stay with me all night and buy me breakfast? What do you want?” Denji asks again, tired of the question already. He is tired of having to ask it at all.
Yoshida crosses his arms and Denji finds himself mirroring him, a facsimile of yesterday. And it was only yesterday, that Yoshida walked into the shop and took a sharp nail to Denji’s life, shattering it into colored glass rain.
Yoshida takes a cautious step forward, then another and another until they are close enough to touch. Denji’s back is against the kitchen island. He has nowhere to run. He doesn’t want to.
Slowly, giving Denji time to watch and track the slow arc of his finger, Yoshida traces his bottom lip. “I wanted to see you smile,” he says. “I wanted to see your eyes light up the way mine do when I race. I wanted to set your soul aflame with—” and Denji will have to ask him to finish later, because he grabs Yoshida’s face in his warmed, beating hands and crashes their mouths together.
He backs the other man against the counter, nearly bending him backwards with the force. He kisses him with anything but grace, having no well of experience to draw from. Then just as suddenly he pulls back as if he’s been burned, his lips hot because—because Yoshida had not kissed him back. He sat pliant and let Denji’s heart race alone. Denji does not think the blood in his mouth is imagined.
“Sorry,” he says, retreating like the return of the waves by the moon’s call. He holds his hands palm up. “I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry.”
Yoshida says nothing in the silence. He watches Denji, his lips kiss-bruised and so lovely it’s hard to drag his eyes from.
He tilts his head. “Did you not want to kiss me?”
Denji wants to lie. He wants to run and never stop, wants his legs to give out from under him and then crawl until his knees whittle away to nothing. Denji has never kissed anyone, has felt lust and hunger but never this deep, piercing pull that threatens to tear him apart.
Denji raises his chin, meeting Yoshida’s eyes, so much darker without the sun to feed them. “I wanted to.” He doesn’t allow shame to coat his throat and stick his words. Let Yoshida turn away in disgust, let him ask Denji to leave and then never speak to him again, never look at him like he cannot get enough, but Denji will not be ashamed for this.
Again, Yoshida steps towards him. Denji steels himself, for biting words, for the crack of a fist, anything but cold hands on his cheeks, guiding him closer.
“Denji,” Yoshida whispers, their lips brushing, “can I kiss you?” And again, it is Denji who rises to meet him.
Yoshida kisses like he breathes, he kisses how he speaks and watches and moves. He kisses like he has done nothing with his life but perfect it. Soon Denji is overwhelmed with it all, with his cold hands that roam from his cheeks to cup the back of his neck and cradle his waist, pulling him closer than he thought possible. He is dizzy by the want he can feel radiating off the other man, the want that arose from Yoshida but reverberates in Denji chest, growing and moving until it’s a creature of its own, begging to be released.
Denji breaks away to gasp, “Hiro,” and set it free.
Yoshida devours his moans and whines and the soft, unconscious panting born not from his struggling heart but the other’s body against his.
Yoshida presses into him, encouraging him to walk backwards, and Denji is expecting to meet the couch, maybe the edge of the table. He is expecting rough and fast and meaningless, and then Yoshida opens his bedroom door with a hand that barely leaves Denji before it’s back against the heated skin of his spine like it never left at all.
Yoshida pushes gently, and Denji falls willingly onto his bed.
“Denji,” he says, sounding barely controlled in a way Denji has never heard. He sounds like he is a rope about to snap, a vast well of water barely contained by a cracked dam. “Denji, tell me now if you don’t want this. Tell me now because I don’t think I’ll be able to stop.”
Denji hooks an ankle around his knee and pulls him forward until he drops it against the bed, hovering over him. He can feel Yoshida shaking, feel his restraint fracturing beneath him.
Denji sits up, their noses brushing, and catches Yoshida’s eyes with his. He rips his shirt off, and it lands somewhere over his shoulder. He cannot take a moment longer without Yoshida’s skin on his.
He wraps his arms around Yoshida’s broad shoulders and pulls them down to the bed together. “Hiro,” he says, and then again, because he already loves the sound, loves how it makes Yoshida’s eyes impossibly darker, he says, “Hiro,” and then little after that.
Yoshida steals his breaths from his lungs and Denji offers his wild heart in return. He runs his hands down Denji’s chest and over his thighs, nudging them apart. He settles into the space Denji makes for him and takes whatever he is willing to give. He takes everything.
It is blinding white and hitching chests and electric skin, and Denji comes back to earth with Yoshida wrapped around him.
The other man traces his fingers up Denji’s scarred, still sensitive body and calms it in moments. He lays a hand over the scar trailing down the center of Denji’s chest even if he can’t see it. Yoshida kisses the back of his neck, and he quiets his heartbeats, too.
Yoshida offers a bath, big enough for them both, and he carries Denji like a bride when his legs give out beneath him.
The water is warm, Yoshida’s feet cold when they touch his, and the bath is large enough for them to sit opposite and stare each other down.
Denji is expecting uncomfortable. He’s expecting regret and tense shoulders and the pointed ticking of a clock. Instead, he gets an effortless crook of a finger and shampoo running down his back, Yoshida’s hands threading through his hair.
He gets Yoshida’s smile, even if he can only hear it, and the soft mantra of his name. Yoshida cleans his chest and his tacky thighs and the arches of his feet. He pulls Denji closer, his body sliding easy in the water, and settles Denji’s legs around him, his ankles brushing the defined bones of his hips.
Yoshida traces the outline of a mark on the crest of his shoulder made by Denji’s teeth. He’s about to apologize and sink below the water to hide his heating cheeks, but Yoshida smiles at him, his dark eyes pinching at the corner.
“You bit me,” he says. It was simply too much. It was Yoshida’s body against his, his mouth on his skin, his voice calling out for him, and Denji was arrested with the desire to bite and mark and make himself permanent, even if just for a moment. He hadn’t even realized he had given in until he came down from a strung out high and saw the imprints of his teeth on ivory skin.
Denji has mapped his body, and save for the small scar on his palm, the other man is unblemished. Except for the remnant of himself.
He doesn’t apologize. He isn’t sorry. Yoshida leans forward and he is overcome with the hunger to mark him again, to sink into his blood and stay a while. Yoshida takes his hand and lays fleeting kisses on each fingertip until Denji slides his hand around the back of his neck to pull him into a kiss. Close mouthed and slow, and it’s still the best thing he’s ever had.
Then he dunks Yoshida into the bath and the other man comes up for gasping for air, streams of water dripping from his hair.
“You’re filthy,” Denji says when Yoshida looks as though he is about to take him again in the bathtub. “Come here.” And Yoshida slinks closer.
He takes a moment to adjust them, Yoshida’s back to his naked front, and then with his heart racing he begins to wash his hair. Lips parting in a sigh, Yoshida leans back, his head resting on Denji’s shoulder as he works through his smooth strands.
Once he’s clean, Denji hesitantly settles his arms around Yoshida’s waist, waiting to be refuted. And because Yoshida exists solely to defy his expectations, he curls against him, riveting Denji’s body around his own.
Yoshida turns his head to kiss at Denji, to kiss his cheek and the swirl of his ear and the corner of his mouth, kissing any part of him he can reach until Denji holds him tight enough to bruise and hopes he does.
Yoshida tilts his head back at a nearly impossible angle, exposing the silver column of his throat, and he bites deep enough into Denji shoulder for it to hurt. He hisses and digs his nails into Yoshida’s arms, but he doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t want to.
Satisfied, Yoshida sets to lapping up the blood that’s begun to bead from the wound, the impression of his teeth solidified on Denji’s shoulder. He takes in the rounded, almost heart shaped mark and wonders if it will bruise.
“There,” Yoshida says, a smile creeping upon his face. “Now we match.”
Denji makes them both breakfast. He doesn’t know what Yoshida likes, has no desire to ask after Yoshida caught him tracing the shape of the bite in the mirror and looked like he wanted to leave a thousand more, so he makes a little of everything. A battling combination of American and Japanese foods, and Yoshida sits with his head cradled in his palm as he watches Denji move around his kitchen with ease. It’s as though he designed it himself, the bowls next to the gas stove, a collection of knives sharpened as though they’ve never been used hanging above the quartz countertop. He could blind himself and move around the kitchen like he was born for it.
Yoshida eats everything he puts in front of him, his appetite inexhaustible, an antithesis to earlier when he merely sat and watched Denji eat like he could not be bothered to raise a fork unless it was to feed him.
“What are you doing today?” he asks as they clean beside each other. Denji had almost forgotten the other man was there, quiet save for his slow, almost absentminded breathing.
Denji sets the final plate on the drying rack, a bubble of soap popping under his gaze. “Nothing.”
Yoshida takes him to an offshoot of the Columbia River, his car rattling over the unpaved roads before stopping under a canopy of cedar trees. Denji’s heavy steps scatter a pair of grazing deer, but they only run to the thick line of shrubbery while Yoshida leads Denji to the rocky edge of the creek.
He takes off his shoes and stands barefoot on the shore. “Denji,” he says, holding out a hand and a soft smile. “Join me.”
The water is shockingly cold, betraying the full, punishing sun above them. The air is thick with kicked up dust and heat, and soon Denji is wading deeper into the water.
Yoshida has left his long, ankle scraping coat at the shore, and slowly he removes his shirt too. Though Denji had just seen his beautifully inked chest, and been pressed against it and kept beneath it, he is another creature entirely under the bright sun, and Denji finds himself unable to look away.
Yoshida catches Denji around the waist. “Watch it,” Denji mutters when Yoshida presses his pitching smile against his mouth. “Someone could see.”
“It’s just us and the fish swimming by your feet,” Yoshida says. “I don’t think they’re going to tell anyone.” And then he bends Denji backwards, licking into his mouth and chasing the unease from his mind, leaving behind the taste of him.
December 5th, 1996
Denji waits in Ahira’s office, watching the rain trickle down the windowpane. His chair is padded and soft on the bruises around his legs and he finds himself lulled into the beginnings of sleep from the heat leaking through the windows.
Ahira comes in a few moments later, her hands empty except for a thin file. She sets it on the desk between them and sits in front of him.
“It says here,” she says, flipping through the file, “that you haven’t picked up any of your antiarrhythmics, Mr. Hayakawa, is that correct?”
It is still so strange, to hear Hayakawa ring through the air and know it’s calling for him. “Yes, ma’am.”
She flips the file closed and pleats her fingers on her desk. “Any reason?”
It will make no difference, Denji thinks, if he lives two more years instead of three, if he drugs himself to the gills and waits pliant for death to whisk him away. “I couldn’t afford them,” he says.
“You’ve got insurance, don’t you?”
Denji nods. Asa has forged his paperwork well enough to pay him under the table but still keep him on her books. But half of a couple thousand a month is still too much, and Denji has always prioritized survival over comfort. Maybe his heart runs as though it’s afraid and then lays quiet for much too long, maybe he struggles to pull air into his lungs and feels his world narrow into darkness. Maybe he looks at Yoshida and has to wonder if it his smile or his mother’s curse that makes his heart beat from his chest. But Denji is not dead, not yet, and he’s content to wait it out.
“Well, we’ll still have to charge you for the initial prescription ordered, even if you didn’t pick up the first couple doses. We’ll put in an order to cancel the rest, I suppose,” Ahira says. “You can pay at the receptionist’s on your way out.”
The walk through the rest of the hospital is quiet, long hallways of white so bright it’s nearly painful, and Denji sets his gaze to his feet so he doesn’t have to watch the tears fall from the people he passes. He has never liked hospitals, not when his brother held his hand and kept his head turned against his shoulder when they listened to his heart and found it lacking, not when his sister lent him her spool of yarn and spoke loud over the shouting spilling from the cardiologist’s office. Not when he woke up under a tangle of tubes and wires to tear stains on their faces and the knowledge that his broken heart refused to be fixed.
He hated hospitals when his brother ushered him into the back of his car, his hitching breaths struggling to be pulled even as he promised Denji he’d do anything to keep him safe.
Now Denji is alone, and he hates them still.
“Can I spread it out over a few cards?” Denji asks the receptionist, and she sets him on a three-month long plan to pay them back. It is going to be rice and flour water for the stretching future, and Denji finds his stomach aching just from the thought.
He catches dark hair before porcelain skin, before midnight eyes that widen and then pinch as he smiles, and soon Denji is mouthing the call of his name along with Yoshida.
“Denji,” Yoshida says, coming to him and stopping maddeningly far away. They’re in public, the curious eyes of the receptionist burning into his back, but Denji finds his fingers twitching with the desire to reach for Yoshida. He forces them still.
“Hi, Hiro,” he says, and Yoshida’s smile widens impossibly more. Then he takes in his dirtied clothes, the smear of soil and ripped fabric along his thigh and to his hip. “What happened to you?”
Yoshida looks down at himself, as if he is only realizing the state of his clothes. “Fell off my bike,” he says.
“Aren’t you a professional?” Denji asks, corralling Yoshida into a chair in the waiting room. Yoshida is at a hospital, standing of his own power and smiling, but his heart only settles after he runs his eyes down every part of him he can see. “How did you fall off your bike?”
“I got distracted,” Yoshida says. He tilts his head up towards Denji, his eyes creasing into a snake’s slits. “I was thinking about you. Thinking about you in my bed and wondering what I have to do to get you back in it.”
All he has to do is ask, all he must do is smile at Denji and speak his name, and he’d come running like a dog.
Denji face flushes and Yoshida’s smile grows pleased when he sees it. “You’re okay though?” Denji asks, chasing away the memory of Yoshida next to him, hovering above him or between his thighs and thinks he might burst into flames if the other man continues to look at him like he is about to swallow him whole.
“Perfect,” Yoshida says. “My coach wanted me to be sure. She wouldn’t let me back on my Yua until a doctor signed off.”
“Good,” Denji says.
Yoshida tugs Denji closer by his beltloop until he’s standing between his legs. A swell of nerves begins to build in his throat, but Yoshida keeps a respectful distance between them, and no eyes but his fall on Denji. He wants to crawl into his lap and make to stay.
“What about you?” he asks, his feet tangling with Denji’s. “What are you doing here?”
“Check-up,” Denji lies. It’s never been this hard, to lie, to spin falsehoods like a spider’s web. But Yoshida looks at him and Denji finds himself wanting to crack open his ribs and have him read his broken heart for himself.
“And you’re all good?” Denji nods, not trusting himself to speak, knowing Yoshida’s eyes would pull the truth writhing from his mouth.
“Come with me?” Yoshida asks, and Denji is helpless but to follow.
Together they step out into blinding sunlight.
March 25th, 1997
Ren hits heavy, but he only hits once, and then will Denji concede and bite back his grievances and make himself content with letting them fester and sink beneath his skin.
But not today. Today his heart is slow and his chest is heaving and there’s blood in his mouth and he wants to take up space for once in his goddamn life.
Ren hits heavy, but Denji hits back, surprise stilling the other man’s hands. His nose is broken, snapped to the side like a diverted river, and Denji thinks he smiles. Then Ren smashes his face against the granite countertop, bursting stars behind his eyes, and leans his weight onto him.
“Do you want me to get your ass deported?” He wraps his hand around Denji neck and squeezes. He knows well enough not to move, not even when his vision begins to dull and then darken, and after a few pounding beats Ren lets him go with a final crack of his skull against the counter.
His footsteps retreat into whispers and Denji lets himself catch his breath. Ren will not come back, because he hits heavy but he hits once, lest Denji provoke him like he has done never before, and Denji knows he won’t come back for a second round. His breath reeked of alcohol and sweet spirits, and Denji thinks if he followed him into his room, he’d find him passed out on top of his sheets.
Denji lowers himself to the floor and leans against the cabinets, calming his heart until it beats even but never strong.
March 28th, 1997
Yoshida has come back to the shop, month after month after month, asking for no one but Denji to look at Yua.
There is little wrong with her, at least little Denji can find. And he will implore Yoshida, again and again and again, each time with less fervor, growing into the ease the other man brings him, that he knows nothing of bikes and will be little help to someone like him.
But Yoshida is stubborn, and Denji is more so, and they will continue this dizzying dance until one of them surrenders. Denji does not know what a white flag looks like when it waves in the air, and so he finds his hands once again buried deep in Yua’s engine.
She’s running slow, Yoshida has told him, and Denji takes her apart and puts her back together and finds nothing amiss. Then he does it again and finds a single screw out of place and resting in the tank bag Denji had removed hours ago.
“Fucker,” Denji says, failing to keep the fondness from his voice. But there’s no one in the shop to hear him, so he says again, imbuing all the cloying affection he feels. “Fucker.”
“Did you call for me?” Yoshida asks, and Denji curses again, Yua hiding the long shadow of Yoshida until he’s close enough to hover above Denji.
Instead, he drops to his knees, a myriad of emotions playing across his face, none sticking long enough for Denji to place them.
“What happened to your face?” he asks over the howling of the wind. Yoshida brushes his hand over the bridge Denji’s nose, drawing a pained hiss from his lips. He pulls his hands back entirely, and Denji wishes he hadn’t made a sound.
"You were right,” Denji says, turning back to Yua in the hopes Yoshida will follow and become transfixed by his bike and not the mosaic of bruises he knows have yet to fade. “I’m clumsy.”
“Denji,” he says again, and Denji knows should he ask a second time he will not have the strength to refuse him. “What happened?”
He thinks of saying nothing, of keeping quiet. But he’s found it increasingly difficult not to give in when Yoshida asks. Should he ask for the blood in his veins or the pulse in his throat, and Denji would hand them over willingly.
“I was asking for it,” Denji says after a moment, turning back to Yua. He adds the missing screw back to its place and lets his hands still over her crimson paint. “I was angry, and I couldn’t do anything and when my roommate hit me—I don’t know. I wanted to fight back.”
Because he can fight nowhere else. His mother will die and she will pass on her killing heart, his family will struggle and starve for him and he will flee from their loving embrace. Yoshida will invite him into his bed and his house and his arms and Denji will shy away, knowing it will be ripped from him the moment he gives in.
“It was my fault.”
“Denji,” Yoshida says, his hands folded against his thighs. “No one should touch you if you don’t want them to.” He brushes his thumb over the pool of bruises beneath Denji’s eyes and he feels the tension leave his spine as though the cold of Yoshida’s hands had chased it away.
“Nothing should hurt you like this.”
Denji goes home later that day once the rain has let up, the bruises on his face dark but painless, and the apartment is a heady scent of waiting quiet.
He flicks on a light, and the apartment floods with warmth from the darkest corners to the edges of each room.
He calls for Ren, because it would be worse to expect no one and see his towering frame round the corner, but no one calls back.
Denji locks his bedroom door and fixes a chair beneath the handle. He watches the sun’s slow descent as it chases away the remnants of the rain and falls asleep only once it has risen again.
April 30th, 1997
He comes home early on a Friday, and a woman stands in the middle of the apartment. She’s measuring the length of the kitchen table, the tail end of a measuring tape wrapped around her neck, and while she seems surprised to see him, she is back to masked emotion in moments.
“You’re the roommate,” she says. She takes a step to the side, a slash of sunlight blinding her. “I came by twice this week, but no one answered.” Denji was at the shop or Yoshida’s house or on a winding hike up a mountain when they grew tired of the other two.
“Sorry,” he offers when she does nothing but stare at him.
“Mr. Johnson was the only one on the lease, and he’s the only one I owed the previous rate to,” she says. “I haven’t heard from him in six weeks.”
Denji has not seen nor heard from him in a month, the apartment brighter than it’s ever been. Denji can open the curtains and let the light in, he can drag a chair against the window and let the wind dance in and the soft sunlight lull him to sleep.
“Is there a problem?” Denji asks.
“I was leasing this apartment to Mr. Johnson well below market value, and if he’s not here to honor it, well, I think I have a duty to myself to increase the rent.” She looks at Denji. Takes in his ripped, faded jeans and the too big shirt he’s haphazardly tucked into his waistband. “Unless you can pay it?”
Denji could hardly afford the split rent when Ren was still here, and he knows without asking that he won’t be able to.
“How long do I have to move out?” he asks.
“End of the week,” she says, sliding the measuring tape from around her neck and rounding the kitchen counter. “Or I’m tossing everything you own off the balcony.”
Yoshida helps him move. He shows up to the apartment without Denji asking, without Denji telling him of his impending eviction, and he offers the back of his truck.
“Is this everything?” he asks when together they fill three boxes and forgo the truck bed and instead stack everything Denji has gathered in the past three years in the backseat.
“Yeah,” Denji says. “The furniture and stuff are Ren’s.”
“Ren,” Yoshida says, resting his hand across the top of Denji’s seat as he puts the truck into reverse. He pulls away from Denji’s apartment and Denji says goodbye to the only constant he’s known in the time between. It fades to a pinprick in the rearview mirror and he doesn’t miss it. “He was your roommate?”
“Yeah,” Denji says, leaning his head against the headrest. Yoshida sets his hand over the back of his neck. “Fucker kind of left me high and dry. I couldn’t afford the place on my own.”
“What about my house? I’ve got an extra room,” Yoshida says. He chances a glance away from the road to wink at Denji. “I’ve got an extra-large bed.”
“Hiro, if I couldn’t afford that shithole I can’t afford to live in your mansion.”
“Denji,” Yoshida says. He laughs, the chiming of bells or the stroke of a harp, and Denji finds his own lips pulling up. “I wouldn’t charge you to live with me.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Denji says. The city flashes by and gives way to rural stretches of land, interrupted by the occasional farmhouse. They’ll pass through the edge of the reservation next, and then it’s over the river and towards the corner of the state Denji’s never been to. “You’ve got to want something.”
“Nothing,” Yoshida says without missing a beat. “I don’t want anything from you that you wouldn’t want to give.” But then he would have everything Denji has to offer.
Denji gets an apartment by the shop. It’s a single bedroom and almost criminally underpriced and newly on the market. He signs the lease in his own name, and his landlord doesn’t ask for a social security number he doesn’t have or proof of income that will surely fall short or look him in the eyes when she hands him his keys.
It’s also a single bus ride from Yoshida’s house, and Denji falls a little in love with it when sunlight streaks through the windows and lights the apartment from the inside out.
Yoshida helps him unpack and watches as Denji sets an overflowing pot of Devil’s Ivy in the middle of the empty living room.
“Before the bed?” Yoshida asks. “The ice cream you insisted on buying is melting in my car, but you unpack the plant first?”
Denji shrugs. “Ren watered all my plants with alcohol, and I spent like, two months buying more with the money I was supposed to use for groceries before I figured it out. I missed being able to take care of something.”
Yoshida nods, pulling him close by the waist to kiss the crown of his head. They unpack the rest of Denji’s life, filling only a fraction of the apartment, and still Denji feels more at home here than he ever did with Ren. They collapse into Denji’s new bedroom as night falls only to realize the bed is in pieces, just a bare metal frame and a mattress yet to be bought. Yoshida laughs and drags them to the cushion-less couch to sleep.
The next week a cart full of garden plants is left on his doorstep.
June 13th, 1997
Sometimes Yoshida will smile at him like he’s looking into the future and he loves what he sees. Sometimes he’ll stroke a finger over the bridge of Denji’s nose and kiss every freckle that gets lost in the ensuing blush and find the lighter ones on his lips and kiss those, too. Sometimes Yoshida will drive to the shop, Yua singing under his hands, and Denji will be able to feel his infatuation with life from behind stained-glass doors.
Now Yoshida is panting beneath him, and Denji grins, licking up the length of his cock before he swallows him whole.
“Ah, Denji,” Yoshida says, his fingers lost in Denji’s hair but not yanking, just cradling the back of his head. “Denji, Denji, Denji.”
Denji sucks him down, feeling the tip of his cock hitting the back of his throat and asking for more. Yoshida’s skin is too perfect, sheets of smooth moonstone, while he is a smattering of bruises and hickeys and love bites and Denji wants to even the field.
He lets Yoshida’s cock fall from his mouth and the other man traces his bottom lip. Denji bites that too and Yoshida grins before Denji crawls up his to suck at his throat.
He is bare save for his beating, rhythmic heart, and beneath him Yoshida mirrors him, having stripped each other naked the moment he knocked on Denji’s door, hands full of groceries that would only be abandoned, his midnight eyes pinching closed when he smiled at Denji.
“Denji,” Yoshida says again, his chest rumbling as he says his name. “Come here.” Yoshida pulls him up to his mouth, licking at the seam of his lips until Denji’s part and Yoshida’s cold tongue smooths against the backs of his teeth.
“Careful,” Denji pulls away to gasp, Yoshida’s nails dragging lightly along his back. “Teeth’re sharp.”
“I don’t care,” Yoshida says, dragging Denji sturdier against him, drawing hitching moans from them both. “Bite me, mark me, drain the blood from my veins.” He kisses Denji sweetly on the lips and Denji feels his smile against his. “Make me yours, baby.”
Denji sits back, Yoshida’s hands fixing on his hips and holding him steady, the idea of Yoshida inside him already intoxicating.
It’s fast and slow and punishingly drawn out, and he has Denji begging like a man on his knees more than once, Yoshida the deity granting him salvation when his fingers dig into Denji’s thighs and leave marks, when he pushes meanly into Denji and laps up his whines. When he comes sharp and panting inside him and Denji follows a moment later.
Denji stays, trying fruitlessly to catch his breath laid across Yoshida’s chest.
Yoshida kisses his ear, biting and yanking when Denji does little more than tap his awareness against the ink on his chest. “You alright?”
“Yeah,” Denji sighs even as he heart runs away from him. “Yeah, Hiro.”
The sun sets through the window, and only once it has passed the horizon does Yoshida shift beneath him.
“Come on,” he says. He sits up and Denji wraps his hands around his shoulders, moving with him until he’s sitting in his lap. “I’ll make us dinner.”
He helps Denji to his feet, and it’s not the tenderness between his legs that makes it hard to stand, nor the scent of a sweat-soaked Yoshida that addles his mind.
Yoshida finds him a loose pair of sleep pants and helps him into them when he struggles to keep his eyes open.
He holds Denji’s waist, kissing his forehead. He lays his hand across Denji’s chest, the pounding in his ribs reverberating between them.
“You’re heart’s beating so fast,” Yoshida whispers against his lips. Denji’s world narrows down to the curve of his mouth and the lovely slant of his dark, midnight eyes. “Just for me.”
And then Denji feels darkness overtake him and strong hands catch at his hips, hearing the call of his name and being unable to answer it.
June 17th, 1997
He wakes to the crashing of thunder.
“You’re dying,” Yoshida says. He’s sitting in a chair by Denji’s bedside, close enough to see and hear, and all too far to touch. He’s not looking at Denji, so reminiscent of the day they met Denji wants to scan the room and look for Yua.
But it is just Denji and Yoshida and the distance he can feel the other man putting between them.
“You’re dying,” he says again, as if he will only believe it once it’s said a second time. The skin beneath his eyes is painted a mottled, painful smear of blackbluegreen Denji wants to wash away. He cannot even move his hands to try. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
Denji leans back against his pillows, the IV leaking life into his bloodstream moving with him and tugging at his vein.
“No.” He doesn’t even think of lying. Yoshida sets his head to the heavens and looks only at it and not Denji.
“Do you know how long?” It had been five years when Denji left his brother and his sister and the home they built from soil and emptiness to finally craft into something warm and loving.
“A year. Maybe two.” If he’s lucky as he has never been. If he keeps still and quiet and doesn’t look at this man who makes his heart race and decay faster than it already is.
“Another summer,” Yoshida says. “That’s all I get with you?”
“Hiro,” Denji starts and doesn’t know how to finish. How can he? How can be explain to Yoshida that there is a timer counting meticulously down for him, that he is set to wither and rot beneath the ground and still let himself fall in love with someone he was never meant to have? How can he tell him he would do it again and again and again if he was given the chance?
“Hiro, I’m sorry.”
Yoshida closes his eyes. He still has not looked at Denji since he woke up. “Please don’t apologize. Not for this.”
July 24th, 1997
Denji does not speak to Yoshida for the next month, and he doesn’t know whose fault it is. Denji goes down to the dirt track and watches him practice, watches him circle the earth and create a gravity of his own. He watches and he leaves before Yoshida can call for him.
So when Asa drags him from beneath a car and says someone is here for him, he thinks it's a mistake. “No one’s here for me,” he says. He stays laying on the floor, the underside of a broken car his skylight.
“He said he won’t leave until you speak to him,” Asa says. She flicks her cigarette towards his feet, ash falling like a waterfall, and Denji hates the smell from someone else. “His motorcycle is taking up space in our parking lot.”
Yoshida is waiting for him, the clouds lingering and the skies overcast, as though they cannot choose whether to pour and cry or steal the liquid from the air.
“Denji,” he says. He offers Denji his cold, moon white hand. “Come with me?”
Denji is more than familiar with his house, with his garden overflowing with flowers and shrubs and a sapling apple tree the two of them planted with their own two hands. He recognizes the crows that wait for the seeds Denji used to leave on the yard. He hovers outside of Yoshida’s house.
“Denji,” Yoshida says again, looking at him for the first time in weeks, for the first time in a lover’s eternity, and Denji steps through the doorway.
He holds Denji face between his cold, cold hands. “Can I kiss you?” And Denji meets him halfway. Kissing him is a balm on his soul, it is like licking a festering wound and being able to feel it heal itself. It makes his heart run like an animal and Denji can’t bring himself to care.
Yoshida rests a hand on his chest and feels it for him, putting distance Denji cannot bare between them.
“Can I make you dinner?” Yoshida asks and means will you stay.
Denji says, “yes,” and means as long as you’ll have me. As long as I have to give.
They eat in something akin to silence, and Denji knows Yoshida is reading their time apart in the lay of Denji shoulders and the set of his lips and the shaking hands he takes in his own.
Denji cleans on his own, waving Yoshida back down when he rises to help. He still remembers where Yoshida keeps his pots and pans and bowls, and he breathes a weak sigh of relief when he opens the cabinet and finds a stack of plates where he expected them to be.
An open cell phone rests on the table when Denji turns around, and Yoshida answers him before he has a chance to ask. “Two minutes,” he says. “Just give them two minutes.” And then he unmutes the phone and a painfully familiar voice rings out.
“—llo? I’m about to hang up the damn phone if you don’t—”
“Aki?” Denji says around his wild run heart. The voice on the other end falls deathly silent, and for a moment Denji thinks his curse has traveled a thousand miles to steal another life.
“Denji?” And Denji’s heart continues. “Denji, is that you? Where are you, are you safe, are you okay—”
“Aki, I’m really sorry,” Denji says. Yoshida’s phone is expensive and silver screened and still it dilutes Aki’s voice and Denji can’t read him like this. He can’t pick apart his every action or the minute changes in his expression an ocean away.
“Sorry for what?” Aki asks, and his soft voice is too much like this. It’s too gentle and caring for someone who abandoned their family with not even a note goodbye. It’s sweet like syrup and sounds as though it should be directed towards someone he still loves and not the devil-boy who ran from him. Denji hears his own hitching breath echo through the phone.
“Hey, hey, please don’t cry,” Aki says, frantic as though Denji is not frozen to the spot, roots wrapping around his ankles, refusing to let him leave. “Just—just give me a second.” His voice peters out as though he has pulled the phone away and he hears him shout for their sister.
“Denji?!” Power yells, and Denji loses the battle he had been fruitlessly fighting.
“I’m sorry,” Denji sobs. “I’m so so sorry.”
September 29th, 1997
Denji doesn’t see Yoshida for the next two months. He is busy, with packing and unpacking his apartment until he’s living out of the boxes stacked in his living room. He is busy convincing his family to stay in Japan, refusing to tell them where he has run to. He is busy with his beaten, broken heart that pulls him in a thousand different directions.
And impossibly, through all the emotions warring in his mind, he misses Yoshida. He gets on a bus and rides it to the other man’s house. He stays on the bus and watches Yoshida’s dying garden pass through the pouring rain. He goes home and sleeps in an empty, too big bed, and waits for tomorrow to do it again.
He’s upset, he realizes a few weeks in. He’s upset that Yoshida saw the war tearing him apart and decided his future for him. He’s upset Yoshida decided for him when he was too weak to do so himself.
He hates that if a pistol was held to his head and he was forced to pick, between rotting away in a new country with only the man he loves to mourn him, or in the arms of his family who have never stopped fighting in his place, he would lie dead with a bullet in his brain far quicker than his wicked heart could ever hope to kill him.
June 21st, 1998
A barricade walks along the dirt track, though Denji watches nowhere near it. He stands in the back of the roaring crowds, a mere hint in the swelling mass, but Yoshida finds him like it is just Denji and Yoshida and Yua between him.
He opens his visor, a sliver of midnight looking into Denji’s soul. Denji, he mouths, and Denji knows but cannot see the way his lips hold the sound of his name. Denji, he says again. Denji Denji Denji until his name means nothing but Yoshida’s heart held in waiting hands.
Yoshida lifts his palm, raised in a blessing, and gives this to Denji, too. Then he closes his visor, midnight giving way to daylight, and he waits on Yua for the race to begin.
But this is no race, not with Yoshida leading like a king, soaring across the earth as though it has no pull on him, as though it does not drag him down as it does Denji.
Laps and leagues and lightyears ahead, Yoshida stops in the middle of the dirt track, a stone’s tossed from an unreached finish line. And then Denji sees midnight while the sun is high in the sky, and Yoshida says Denji like it is the breaking of bread after a fast, like it is something to be shared between lovers, and Denji rushes down to the earth to meet him as the other racers strike the ground around them.
“Where do you want to go?” Yoshida asks in the middle of the track, in the middle of an early god’s morning. He hands Denji the helmet that had been waiting for him.
“Home,” Denji says, settling against Yoshida’s wide back, his knees pinched around his waist. “I want to go home.”
And Yoshida takes him back to heaven.
Hiro, Denji will say when they’re alone. Hiro Hiro Hiro, he will mirror until it is all he can think, until the other man fills him with nothing but the feel of himself, until it is just Denji and Yoshida and nothing between them.
Hiro, Denji will say once his wild run heart has calmed. Hiro, his hands will say as they map his bare, inked chest. Hiro, Denji will say with his body on his. Hiro, Denji will start, and then Yoshida will kiss him quiet and take him home.