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perhaps, i am bitter, minami says out of the blue, face half-obscured by the shaft of iridescent light refracted from the glass of the aquarium behind him. his fingers rest themselves upon the railing that separates the public walkway from the displayed surface, and nagi does not have to fully turn around to look and know that a withering smile is probably set upon his lips. what do you think? am i ever unpleasant?
if he is to be frank, nagi feels that he will inevitably be stepping onto another landmine of sorts concerning the other man no matter how he chooses to go about it, but he perseveres anyway; he reaches for the diplomatic answer as he has always been raised to do. i think that you have been nothing but polite, natsume-shi. you could call yourself the epitome of courtesy, even, if you so wished to.
courtesy? minami repeats after and laughs, like a tiny whispery thing escaping into the air. what about sincerity then, how do i fare in that department?
nagi pauses, watches as a giant sunfish sails past the both of them, leaving a faint watery ripple in its wake, and thinks of a piano key he's pressed once and never got to touch again.
the artificial lights above them darken.
(it was the start of a major scale.)
he thinks of lonely things: of a flower laid to rest and a pink tied ribbon long unravelled, further beyond anyone's reach.
he thinks of minami's hunched shoulders here, and of the dirt crumbling from the bottom of his shoes at the funeral as last words were said and his brother glanced at him with the sharpest of meaning.
in the distance, a whale mourns and a telephone rings.
minami flickers before him, like an unsteady flame.
i think that is for you to decide by yourself, natsume-shi. nagi says, finally, feeling a weight dip off his back at the curl of honesty. there is an itch in his heart and a hairline crack beginning to form along the exhibition walls surrounding them. we are all our own best judges and enemies, after all. we decide what we truly choose to hear or see.
do we? when he looks up to gauge his reaction, minami's face is nothing but an alabaster sheen, a mask nagi knows he will never break. i didn't pin you as the type to feed yourself lies to feel better about something.
bigger cracks spread across the walls and this is it; nagi breathes. the telephone continues ringing; someone somewhere is still not answering that damned call.
i don't, is all rokuya nagi gets to say before the world breaks.
the glass panels keen and collapse in on themselves, resulting in a crush of roaring water so absolute that it consumes all the air in his lungs and all the thoughts in his head as the momentum of it propels minami's body right into his. curving his arms over the man's shoulderblades, nagi tastes salt and sees shoals of tropical fish pouring over them, each scale and fin scoring a ledger against his skin like the musical arrangements haruki used to note down on a sheet.
(da capo al fine, his dearest friend explained pointing at the initials, radiant and everlasting, from the beginning to the end— from the beginning to the end again.)
nagi tries to kick his way up against the currents, manhandling as much as he dares with the deadweight that is minami's frame propped on top of his, and for a searing delirious moment, he almost laughs out loud at the hubris: of all the subjects and martial arts that he has ever been coached in, nagi was never once taught to be a human buoy.
it isn't easy, isn't it? minami whispers, impossibly, into his ear.
his pale hair whips painfully into nagi's eyes, and in the precise second that nagi's grip slackens, minami hoists himself forward until his face is centimetres away from nagi's lips. the smile he has on is the blandest nagi has ever seen.
air bubbles trail from the split line. nagi's lungs feel like they can barely heave.
minami's burning eyes never leave his. one day you'll learn of all the things that it takes.
the clang of metal against concrete.
and that's when you'll regret it.
promptly, he dissipates, sifting through nagi's heart and fingers like a film of sea foam crumpling away, deeper and deeper, leaving nagi to float alone in the abyss.
it is the emptiest nagi has felt for the longest time.
it is the quietest he has ever been.
and then, he, too, wakes up.
***
the sheets are cold, almost wet to the touch even, when nagi opens his eyes to his room at the company's dormitory.
already, he can hear mitsuki nagging at yamato to quit day drinking and for him to shift his lazy arse off the couch he's taken to dusting, a futile exercise of which even tamaki calls out on to the former's consternation. riku sneezes and iori fusses. somewhere in the kitchen, the toaster dings at the end of a verse sougo is humming.
his cellphone blares, signalling the alarm he's set for the morning reruns of Magical☆Kokona.
like this, almost everything is right with the world, but nagi remembers an aching, a gap on the venue detail of the aquarium ticket he'd taken and clipped the end off in his dream, a whalesong left unrequited.
nagi breathes it in.
he exhales.
(from the beginning to the end, from the beginning to the end again.)