Comes The Sun
Momoshiro/Echizen. PG-13.
2004 | 1200 words
Of sunny days and rainy nights.
When Echizen turns seventeen and starts receiving letters from the best (or what Momo assumes should be the best since they spend in each brochure just about what he gets for a week’s lunch allowance) North American universities promising the world, the moon, the stars and a donut if only he would use his natural born talent in their uniform in exchange for perfect grades without ever needing to open a book again, Momo doesn’t really say anything. Echizen stares at the brochures, gives them an overall look with that customary lack of interest for anything, stares at Momo and waits for a reaction.
They stare at each other for long minutes, and Momo thinks he should have something to say, but he’s never been the smart kind, so nothing occurs him except for a deep feeling that he could use a burger or two right now. Then Echizen shrugs, mumbles his usual “che”, throws the brochures in the paper bin beside the mahogany desk the old monk had sent from Canada -or Cambodia or Cadillac or whatever starting with a c- and climbs Momo’s lap, whispering “I’m gonna be a fat bald monk anyway, don’t need a diploma for that” before kissing him without locking the door.
- - -
The nights Echizen finds a thick brochure wrapped in fancy plastic film over his bed when they get to his place after practice, burger palace, arcade, street court and a walk or two around the block just to finish a conversation the old monk must not hear, are the nights Momo gets the best sex ever. The letters frighten him to a certain point, but they also make Echizen forget to lock doors and close windows and contain his voice, and so the sense of danger and disrespect and complete uncontrol make Momo start to wish Echizen got more of them, or that he was always around when they come.
- - -
Until one day, Momo finds out the brochures Echizen throws away every week before his very eyes are actually piling up under the kid’s bed, some of them more worn than the others, particularly the ones centring on the New York City areas. Echizen catches him surrounded in old brochures that, in theory, have been thrown away and recycled already, and they don’t speak for nearly three days.
On the third day, Momo and Kaidoh find a bird with a broken wing chirping miserably at the viper’s doorstep on the way back from Kawamura-sempai’s place. Kaidoh feels sorry for the bird, but he has a cat and can’t have potential food fooling around in the house, so Momo takes the bird home and decides to take care of it until the little thing can fly again -and then he decides life is full of bullshitty clichéd metaphors and calls Echizen for a burger.
They have sex that night, and Echizen locks the door just in case.
- - -
Sometimes it rains for a minute, two, ten, and the rest of the week. It starts some time in the middle of dinner, and while the monk gives him an evil accusatory eye, Momo smiles a little smile to himself, looking forward to bed time, when he knows that instead of shoving him a futon and curling up with Karupin in his bed, Echizen will play scared-of-thunder and curl up with him on the floor in the middle of the night -not as soon as they turn off the light, but late enough that the kid thinks Momo is so deep asleep he won’t notice what happened until morning comes and Echizen can sneak out again back to his cold bed.
He doesn’t blame the monk. Sometimes it does look like the rain follows him wherever he goes, especially if he goes where he always goes, and truth be told, he would love to able to control, tease, provoke, bend to his will something as intangible as the rain, the wind, the sunlight, the night sky, the spin of the ball. Echizen. But Momo knows he’s not Fuji-sempai, not nearly.
- - -
The day Echizen tells him he’s leaving, Momo is far from surprised. He’s known all along, but he doesn’t expect any kind of talking about it, they’ve never talked about much of anything before -not anything that mattered. It’s raining, and Echizen is afraid of thunder, so they’re sharing a small futon on the floor, not exactly cuddling because men don’t cuddle in the first place, and besides, there is the cat, always in the middle of them like a sentinel of the old monk.
So Echizen tells him, after a particularly loud thunder bolt, that he’ll be going back to New York next year, and Momo says “un” because it’s all he can say. He’s sure Ryuzaki-sensei must be happy to the last with these news, and he’s sure Tezuka-buchou, who will always be buchou even if he hasn’t heard from the man in a year or two, must be proud too. Echizen is their creation, the rest of them just happened to be around, Oishi-sempai had said once, a few weeks before college life ate them all and left only high-schooling Echizen and working-class Momoshiro behind.
He doesn’t expect talking, and he doesn’t expect Echizen to ask anything out of him, that’s how it’s always been between them, but Momo feels the tug on his sleeve and sees the look in Echizen’s eyes, and without a word, they settle what doesn’t need to be said. That’s also how its always been between them.
- - -
Even in New York, the rain still follows Momo around, and some time between the second and the fourth year, he starts to believe that maybe he does have something to do with it, or maybe it’s just that the rain knows him far too well. They don’t need to lock doors anymore, but they do because New York City is just way too violent to take that kind of risk. They never close the windows, though, and sometimes when they get home from work/class and their schedules happen to meet together and they haven’t seen each other in a week even living under the same roof, they have to make do with the couch or the living room floor or the kitchen table, because it has rained all day and their bed is soaking and their room is dripping from the walls and yet another mattress is ruined.
Echizen sometimes thinks Momo does this on purpose just for the that small feeling of home he gets from hanging the futons in the window and drying them in the sun the next day while Karupin fools around catching his own shadow on the walls.
- - -
When the crazy old monk gives him that look, Momo never looks up from his plate, in respect not for the monk but for the kid’s mother -she is such a sweet mom and always seems to know their state of hunger just by looking at the two of them. But he knows that, across the table, Echizen is smiling too.
Filed under Tennis no Ohjisama |