defeminized (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
defeminized) wrote2011-11-15 11:56 am
defeminized) wrote2011-11-15 11:56 am
Entry tags:
Preincarnation - Kame/Yamapi
Title: Preincarnation
Pairing: Kame/Yamapi
Word count: ~2790
Rating: PG
Genre/Warnings: Established relationship, slice of life, vague timeline
Notes: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greatfountain for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
amigo_exchange originally posted here. Thanks to pinkeuphoria1 and scorch66, who both endured my rants and survived the cardiac arrest because I announced that I wrote this at the very last minute.
Summary: Kame wishes that he had the power to look into the past.
Kame wishes that he had the power to look into the past. For all the talks about learning from one’s mistakes, it’s nothing when one doesn’t know what to learn from, he opines.
“But what kind of past are you looking for?” Nakamaru once asked. “I don’t think you’re supposed to take that saying that literally. Aren’t you’re supposed to learn as you live your life?”
“I wanna know what I was before I was born,” he had replied.
“So, simply put, you’re looking for your preincarnations?”
Kame had titled his head in reluctant agreement; something about preincarnations didn’t sit well with what he had in mind. “Maybe. Mostly I just want to know if we are bound to repeat the same mistakes we’ve committed in our previous lives. You see, if we are meant to learn from the past, why should we be reborn just to make the same mistakes all over again?”
“I guess you have a point,” Nakamaru had said.
He snaps himself from the memory and averts his glance towards a sleeping Yamapi on his bed. He pulls his glasses away from his face and places them on top of the table, then walks towards the bed and snuggles beside him. Yamapi stirs slightly and Kame sweeps his bangs away from his eyes.
“It’s still early,” he whispers into Yamapi’s ears, watching the sun slowly rise.
“Maybe you were a woman,” Kame says into the phone, and thinks that he’s just heard Yamapi spit his drink.
“Kame,” Yamapi says, pausing for a while to probably excuse himself from work. “You know very well that I have…something that very well defines me as a man.”
“I don’t mean that,” Kame says, twirling the keychain ring around his finger. He’d been doing some research work before Going!’s shooting when something came up that made him call Yamapi suddenly. “Have you thought of yourself in your past life, like if you were a woman?”
“That’s strange, why would you wanna think of that?”
“Just a thought,” Kame says, catching the keychain in his palm and sending an “ok” hand signal towards the assistant director, Aki-chan’s cue to realise that he’s going to be ready in just a few seconds. “Gotta go now, will I be seeing you for dinner later?”
“Can’t, schedule’s a bit tight today, tomorrow?”
“Uhm,” Kame says. They hardly spend much time together, but perhaps it’s better that they meet so infrequently. At least each and every encounter merits its own spot in his memories. Sometimes Kame would be too busy to even sleep, let alone eat, and sometimes Yamapi would be distracted by social plans to accommodate Kame’s unwillingness to entertain other people. By now, they are used to each other like that.
Sometimes Kame wants to know if Yamapi wants something more, something more conventionally romantic.
As an afterthought, Kame thinks that maybe he had been a woman in his past life.
“I can’t see you as a woman, not at all,” Tegoshi says.
In all honesty, Tegoshi isn’t a very subjective judge on that but Kame takes whatever he can. “That’s sort of easy for you to say, isn’t it?”
They laugh over their respective bowls of ramen. “You know what, I think I can see you as a samurai.”
“A poor, unskilful one or a powerful, handsome one?”
“But you can be unskilful and handsome at the same time,” Tegoshi suggests.
The conversation soon steers towards them thinking of various preincarnations of Yamapi. At some point they start suggesting things like an ant, bacterium (“It’s possible, you should ask Nakamaru-kun,” Tegoshi says), a slug, an elephant, Indian prince, Egyptian slave, king of a Mongolian tribe, Red Indian chief, and others.
They can’t stop laughing in that one hour they are spending in the ramen restaurant, and they can’t stop laughing even after Kame gets a call from Yamapi.
“Hello, slug,” is what Kame says as a greeting.
“What?”
They kiss in front of Yamapi’s doorstep and Kame accidentally triggers the alarm.
“We are lucky nobody’s living in here,” Kame chuckles as Yamapi resets his alarm password.
“Or around here,” Yamapi adds, blushing furiously. The apartment building he’s living in is kind of deserted, as it’s one of the famed apartment blocks only rich people buy as their backup residence.
They enter the apartment and Kame pulls Yamapi towards him until their bodies clash. “So,” he whispers, fingers trailing down Yamapi’s chest, undoing his buttons one after another. “Shall we continue from where we left off?”
Yamapi relents to him, bending to meet their lips in a slow, lingering kiss. “Maybe,” he says in return. “But only if you tell me that you missed me.”
“Oh, I do,” Kame says, eyeing him flirtatiously. “Or so I think.”
“Really now? You want to play this kind of game?”
“I don’t know, you tell me,” Kame says, sneaking his hand under Yamapi’s shirt, teasing around his hipbone. “Do you want to?”
To Kame’s surprise, Yamapi lifts him up and carries him so that he’s now sitting on top on his kitchen counter. On his left, Yamapi seizes a small cherry he has ready on a tiny fruit basket and puts it between his teeth. His fingers graze Kame’s neck and he softly pulls his face towards him. Yamapi bites the cherry into half when their lips make contact and pushes the other half with his lips into Kame’s mouth.
“Kinky,” Kame concludes after swallowing. “I like this.”
“I think you were a dog in your previous life,” Kame says, Yamapi’s head lying on top of his chest.
“Why?” Yamapi asks, fingers twiddling Kame’s. “A lot of people say that I resemble a cat.”
“Really?”
“I think my short attention span has been found out,” Yamapi sighs.
Kame stifles a chortle and Yamapi rises up.
“What is that suppose to mean?”
“Nothing much,” Kame answers as he twists Yamapi’s ear affectionately. “What did they say? About your resemblance to a cat?”
“Apparently I don’t really pay attention to things I’m not interested in,” Yamapi says.
“It’s true,” Kame says.
“Really?”
“But I don’t think they mind it,” Kame continues, “so stop worrying. See, you’re such a dog.”
“Since when does a dog worry?”
“At least I know cats don’t.”
“And if I were a dog, what would you be?” Yamapi says, crawling slightly upwards so that his face is right on top of Kame’s. He lowers himself to plant a gentle kiss on the side of Kame’s neck; a spot he knows is his weakness.
He nibbles and teases so much, Kame topples over him in a surge of excitement.
“How sure are you that I’d be in your life even if you were a dog?”
Yamapi pulls him down and whispers into his ear.
“I just know.”
Kame tucks Yamapi’s hair behind his ear. “You have given it some thought, haven’t you?”
“About?”
“When I told you that you might have been a woman in your past life.”
“Of course,” Yamapi smiles. “I pay attention to you.”
Kame’s hand travels down to his leg.
“I know.”
They start coming up with theories on how they were like before they were Kame and Yamapi, before they were Shuuji and Akira. It’s easy enough; one of them would ask the other what if they were something and the other would cook up a story to link them both together.
If Yamapi had been a dog, Kame would have been a cat. They wouldn’t get along, but they would be permanently in each other’s life.
If Yamapi had been a samurai, Kame would have been his lord. And vice versa. This was easy; they would take any random samurai-related tales and fit themselves in it. Sometimes it would be to choose between Oda Nobunaga and Ranmaru, sometimes it would be Makoto Shishio and Seta Soujiro (“That’s not a ‘real samurai tale’,” Kame insisted, but Yamapi said that Rurouni Kenshin was as good as anything they had). Sometimes they would even be of the same rank, like Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin or Okita Souji and Saito Hajime1.
If Kame had been a king, Yamapi would have been his retainer. And vice versa. Kame asked Yamapi if he would really want to be his retainer instead of advisor, because Kame would be a difficult king to serve for. Yamapi merely smiled and said that it wouldn’t have been him serving King Kame, it would be Akira serving King Shuuji.
If Kame had been a tree, Yamapi would want to be a bird. “So that I can lie on you,” he says, nuzzling into Kame’s arms. Kame likes this one the best.
Soon enough, Kame realises that they are making up stories of their past lives in the assumption that they would be together no matter how that life would be like, they haven’t been entertaining the possibilities of a past life if the other never existed.
Yamapi texts him one day, with the picture of his cousin’s newborn baby daughter.
‘Isn’t she cute? Too bad Jin’s not around, he would have loved to see her!’
Kame’s schedule is blank that night, but he knows it isn’t why he rushes to the hospital.
Yamapi’s standing in front of the nursery when Kame finds him in the hospital. His eyes light up as he sees Kame and he leads him to Ayaka’s room, where she lies sleeping by her husband’s side.
They leave the room quietly after placing the basket of fruits on the table in the room, which is already filled with other congratulatory gifts from relatives and friends.
“Her name is Namie,” Yamapi says when they are back to staring at the baby from outside the nursery. “I named her.”
Kame holds his hand and puts his chin on top of his shoulder. “You have great taste in names,” he says. “It’s a really pretty name.”
“I was here before the father arrived,” Yamapi continues. “It’s magical, to have seen a baby being born.”
They stare wordlessly at Namie for hours after that, but Kame’s thoughts are elsewhere.
He looks at Namie and thinks of her past life, if she ever was a tree, or a princess, a bird, a queen or anything else. He looks at Namie and thinks of her future life and wonders if she will ever grow up to be a superstar, a politician, a model, a scientist, anything. He looks at Namie and wonders if she can think about her present, if she can remember being named and received by her uncle.
Then he looks at Yamapi and wonders if Yamapi ever wished they were in another life, another simpler life, like if they were the tree and the bird.
Kame knows himself pretty well; and that’s how he knows that he would be able to find Yamapi anytime, anywhere, any lifetime, past or present.
He doesn’t tell Yamapi of the dreams he has everytime they imagine themselves in another life, another lifeform, another person, another era, another world.
For all that he knows, Yamapi could be a green-horned alien and he would still be able to tell it’s him by the way he tilts his head as he chuckles.
“You think too much,” Masuda says. “You should know yourself that he’s far kinder than anyone could ever know.”
“Did Nakamaru tell you unnecessary things again?” Kame asks in exasperation. So much for confiding.
“We care for you,” Masuda assures, patting him on the back. “And we care for Yamapi.”
“Save the lip service for other occasions,” Kame retorts, quite harsher than he intended.
Thankfully, Masuda has gotten too used to his snarks to be actually offended.
“Yes, we will. Don’t you worry.”
“Like this?” Yamapi asks. He’s lying on Kame’s sofa, head thrown backwards towards the floor with his neck on the armrest. Kame’s lying on his stomach on the floor half a meter away from Yamapi’s head, holding his improvised DSLR camera.
“Yes,” Kame says and clicks on the button. He rambles various commands as he moves around Yamapi to take pictures. “Smile”, “Don’t smile”, “A little to the left”, “Look at me more” – Yamapi’s beautiful no matter the angle.
“Hey, Kame,” Yamapi complains after an hour of modelling, “let me take your pictures.”
“No,” Kame denies. “The new lenses are expensive.” Yamapi’s still lying on the sofa, head on the armrest instead of dangling down.
“Put that down,” Yamapi says.
When Kame doesn’t listen, he pulls him by his shirt until Kame’s face is over his, facing each other upside down.
Kame obeys; he gently places his beloved camera on the carpeted floor, turning the lenses off in the process.
“I wanna kiss you,” he tells Kame. They are in a very strange position to be kissing, but Yamapi looks like he’s happy to be seeing Kame’s face in such an unconventional manner.
“Who’s Spiderman?” Kame asks suddenly, referring to the very same movie they watched together the other day.
“I have no idea,” Yamapi answers, pushing Kame’s face down towards his and biting his upper lip. “You tell me,” he breathes in between kisses.
The lights are not on, but Yamapi doesn’t need any light to glow. Kame takes some time after taking his own clothes off to look at Yamapi, really look at him as he sits on top of him and touches his body. He lets his fingers begin from both of his temples and meet between his brows. Yamapi holds his wrists in his palms and directs his hands slowly; from his cheeks to his necks to his collarbone and stops them on his chest.
“Have I told you how ethereal you look,” he says to Kame, looking up at him, “when you look at me like that?”
“No,” Kame answers. It’s an honest answer.
“And now you do,” Yamapi says. He releases his grip from Kame’s wrist and takes his palm to his face, kissing it.
“I love you,” Kame declares like he has never said it before.
He bends slightly.
“All of you.”
Namie starts calling Yamapi “jii-chan” when she turns one. Yamapi chatters on and on about how cute she is, prodding around and prancing in the shoes he gave her.
Kame looks at the pictures Yamapi took of her and wonders if Namie remembers the night when her uncle rushed to the hospital to receive her before her father did, and wonders if she is beginning to collect memories of her present.
He wonders when does a person start making mistakes, and if mistakes begin from infancy.
“Kame,” Yamapi calls, snapping Kame back to reality. “What are you thinking about?”
“Do you think we will be something else in our next lifetime,” he starts, “after being Kame and Yamapi?”
“I don’t know,” Yamapi says. “I think being Kame and Yamapi is still the best, no matter what.”
Something sinks inside Kame.
The next time Kame dreams about Yamapi, Kame expects it to be a retelling of whatever they have randomly made up in their many conversations about their possible past lives.
Instead, he meets with a blank room with nothingness shrouding him. Everything’s white around him and he isn’t wearing anything.
He falls involuntarily as the ground underneath him opens up into the water. He’s gasping for breath frantically when he feels himself pulled up to the surface by a strange, magnetic force.
He’s standing on water, and the images of his “past lives” begin spinning in the water under him. Soon enough, the centrifugal force begins to affect him and he begins to spin as well.
The images of his “past lives” dissolve and almost everything he sees now is from his own memory – himself playing baseball, singing on stage, kissing Yamapi and making love on the bed and finally, something he doesn’t recognise.
A baby. It’s not Namie.
He wakes up with a start.
He refreshes himself and starts researching for child adoption agencies and reading about personal accounts from adopting parents on various blogs.
Kame surprises Yamapi with a visit one night. He’s sleeping, clothes strewn all over the floor beside his bed.
“Hey there,” Kame whispers into his hair.
Yamapi’s eyes flutters sleepily. “Sorry, was tired and drunk.”
Kame plants light kisses all over Yamapi’s face and runs his fingers through his hair. “Sleep on, I’ll be here.”
Everything he has in mind can wait for tomorrow. About his plans for their future – living together, building a family and growing old.
Their future can wait.
Right now, Kame just wants to lie beside Yamapi, thinking of their past which he remembers, their present which he can see, and the future they are going to make together.
-fin
1 These names aren’t significant, I swear.
Pairing: Kame/Yamapi
Word count: ~2790
Rating: PG
Genre/Warnings: Established relationship, slice of life, vague timeline
Notes: Written for
greatfountain for amigo_exchange originally posted here. Thanks to pinkeuphoria1 and scorch66, who both endured my rants and survived the cardiac arrest because I announced that I wrote this at the very last minute. Summary: Kame wishes that he had the power to look into the past.
Kame wishes that he had the power to look into the past. For all the talks about learning from one’s mistakes, it’s nothing when one doesn’t know what to learn from, he opines.
“But what kind of past are you looking for?” Nakamaru once asked. “I don’t think you’re supposed to take that saying that literally. Aren’t you’re supposed to learn as you live your life?”
“I wanna know what I was before I was born,” he had replied.
“So, simply put, you’re looking for your preincarnations?”
Kame had titled his head in reluctant agreement; something about preincarnations didn’t sit well with what he had in mind. “Maybe. Mostly I just want to know if we are bound to repeat the same mistakes we’ve committed in our previous lives. You see, if we are meant to learn from the past, why should we be reborn just to make the same mistakes all over again?”
“I guess you have a point,” Nakamaru had said.
He snaps himself from the memory and averts his glance towards a sleeping Yamapi on his bed. He pulls his glasses away from his face and places them on top of the table, then walks towards the bed and snuggles beside him. Yamapi stirs slightly and Kame sweeps his bangs away from his eyes.
“It’s still early,” he whispers into Yamapi’s ears, watching the sun slowly rise.
“Maybe you were a woman,” Kame says into the phone, and thinks that he’s just heard Yamapi spit his drink.
“Kame,” Yamapi says, pausing for a while to probably excuse himself from work. “You know very well that I have…something that very well defines me as a man.”
“I don’t mean that,” Kame says, twirling the keychain ring around his finger. He’d been doing some research work before Going!’s shooting when something came up that made him call Yamapi suddenly. “Have you thought of yourself in your past life, like if you were a woman?”
“That’s strange, why would you wanna think of that?”
“Just a thought,” Kame says, catching the keychain in his palm and sending an “ok” hand signal towards the assistant director, Aki-chan’s cue to realise that he’s going to be ready in just a few seconds. “Gotta go now, will I be seeing you for dinner later?”
“Can’t, schedule’s a bit tight today, tomorrow?”
“Uhm,” Kame says. They hardly spend much time together, but perhaps it’s better that they meet so infrequently. At least each and every encounter merits its own spot in his memories. Sometimes Kame would be too busy to even sleep, let alone eat, and sometimes Yamapi would be distracted by social plans to accommodate Kame’s unwillingness to entertain other people. By now, they are used to each other like that.
Sometimes Kame wants to know if Yamapi wants something more, something more conventionally romantic.
As an afterthought, Kame thinks that maybe he had been a woman in his past life.
“I can’t see you as a woman, not at all,” Tegoshi says.
In all honesty, Tegoshi isn’t a very subjective judge on that but Kame takes whatever he can. “That’s sort of easy for you to say, isn’t it?”
They laugh over their respective bowls of ramen. “You know what, I think I can see you as a samurai.”
“A poor, unskilful one or a powerful, handsome one?”
“But you can be unskilful and handsome at the same time,” Tegoshi suggests.
The conversation soon steers towards them thinking of various preincarnations of Yamapi. At some point they start suggesting things like an ant, bacterium (“It’s possible, you should ask Nakamaru-kun,” Tegoshi says), a slug, an elephant, Indian prince, Egyptian slave, king of a Mongolian tribe, Red Indian chief, and others.
They can’t stop laughing in that one hour they are spending in the ramen restaurant, and they can’t stop laughing even after Kame gets a call from Yamapi.
“Hello, slug,” is what Kame says as a greeting.
“What?”
They kiss in front of Yamapi’s doorstep and Kame accidentally triggers the alarm.
“We are lucky nobody’s living in here,” Kame chuckles as Yamapi resets his alarm password.
“Or around here,” Yamapi adds, blushing furiously. The apartment building he’s living in is kind of deserted, as it’s one of the famed apartment blocks only rich people buy as their backup residence.
They enter the apartment and Kame pulls Yamapi towards him until their bodies clash. “So,” he whispers, fingers trailing down Yamapi’s chest, undoing his buttons one after another. “Shall we continue from where we left off?”
Yamapi relents to him, bending to meet their lips in a slow, lingering kiss. “Maybe,” he says in return. “But only if you tell me that you missed me.”
“Oh, I do,” Kame says, eyeing him flirtatiously. “Or so I think.”
“Really now? You want to play this kind of game?”
“I don’t know, you tell me,” Kame says, sneaking his hand under Yamapi’s shirt, teasing around his hipbone. “Do you want to?”
To Kame’s surprise, Yamapi lifts him up and carries him so that he’s now sitting on top on his kitchen counter. On his left, Yamapi seizes a small cherry he has ready on a tiny fruit basket and puts it between his teeth. His fingers graze Kame’s neck and he softly pulls his face towards him. Yamapi bites the cherry into half when their lips make contact and pushes the other half with his lips into Kame’s mouth.
“Kinky,” Kame concludes after swallowing. “I like this.”
“I think you were a dog in your previous life,” Kame says, Yamapi’s head lying on top of his chest.
“Why?” Yamapi asks, fingers twiddling Kame’s. “A lot of people say that I resemble a cat.”
“Really?”
“I think my short attention span has been found out,” Yamapi sighs.
Kame stifles a chortle and Yamapi rises up.
“What is that suppose to mean?”
“Nothing much,” Kame answers as he twists Yamapi’s ear affectionately. “What did they say? About your resemblance to a cat?”
“Apparently I don’t really pay attention to things I’m not interested in,” Yamapi says.
“It’s true,” Kame says.
“Really?”
“But I don’t think they mind it,” Kame continues, “so stop worrying. See, you’re such a dog.”
“Since when does a dog worry?”
“At least I know cats don’t.”
“And if I were a dog, what would you be?” Yamapi says, crawling slightly upwards so that his face is right on top of Kame’s. He lowers himself to plant a gentle kiss on the side of Kame’s neck; a spot he knows is his weakness.
He nibbles and teases so much, Kame topples over him in a surge of excitement.
“How sure are you that I’d be in your life even if you were a dog?”
Yamapi pulls him down and whispers into his ear.
“I just know.”
Kame tucks Yamapi’s hair behind his ear. “You have given it some thought, haven’t you?”
“About?”
“When I told you that you might have been a woman in your past life.”
“Of course,” Yamapi smiles. “I pay attention to you.”
Kame’s hand travels down to his leg.
“I know.”
They start coming up with theories on how they were like before they were Kame and Yamapi, before they were Shuuji and Akira. It’s easy enough; one of them would ask the other what if they were something and the other would cook up a story to link them both together.
If Yamapi had been a dog, Kame would have been a cat. They wouldn’t get along, but they would be permanently in each other’s life.
If Yamapi had been a samurai, Kame would have been his lord. And vice versa. This was easy; they would take any random samurai-related tales and fit themselves in it. Sometimes it would be to choose between Oda Nobunaga and Ranmaru, sometimes it would be Makoto Shishio and Seta Soujiro (“That’s not a ‘real samurai tale’,” Kame insisted, but Yamapi said that Rurouni Kenshin was as good as anything they had). Sometimes they would even be of the same rank, like Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin or Okita Souji and Saito Hajime1.
If Kame had been a king, Yamapi would have been his retainer. And vice versa. Kame asked Yamapi if he would really want to be his retainer instead of advisor, because Kame would be a difficult king to serve for. Yamapi merely smiled and said that it wouldn’t have been him serving King Kame, it would be Akira serving King Shuuji.
If Kame had been a tree, Yamapi would want to be a bird. “So that I can lie on you,” he says, nuzzling into Kame’s arms. Kame likes this one the best.
Soon enough, Kame realises that they are making up stories of their past lives in the assumption that they would be together no matter how that life would be like, they haven’t been entertaining the possibilities of a past life if the other never existed.
Yamapi texts him one day, with the picture of his cousin’s newborn baby daughter.
‘Isn’t she cute? Too bad Jin’s not around, he would have loved to see her!’
Kame’s schedule is blank that night, but he knows it isn’t why he rushes to the hospital.
Yamapi’s standing in front of the nursery when Kame finds him in the hospital. His eyes light up as he sees Kame and he leads him to Ayaka’s room, where she lies sleeping by her husband’s side.
They leave the room quietly after placing the basket of fruits on the table in the room, which is already filled with other congratulatory gifts from relatives and friends.
“Her name is Namie,” Yamapi says when they are back to staring at the baby from outside the nursery. “I named her.”
Kame holds his hand and puts his chin on top of his shoulder. “You have great taste in names,” he says. “It’s a really pretty name.”
“I was here before the father arrived,” Yamapi continues. “It’s magical, to have seen a baby being born.”
They stare wordlessly at Namie for hours after that, but Kame’s thoughts are elsewhere.
He looks at Namie and thinks of her past life, if she ever was a tree, or a princess, a bird, a queen or anything else. He looks at Namie and thinks of her future life and wonders if she will ever grow up to be a superstar, a politician, a model, a scientist, anything. He looks at Namie and wonders if she can think about her present, if she can remember being named and received by her uncle.
Then he looks at Yamapi and wonders if Yamapi ever wished they were in another life, another simpler life, like if they were the tree and the bird.
Kame knows himself pretty well; and that’s how he knows that he would be able to find Yamapi anytime, anywhere, any lifetime, past or present.
He doesn’t tell Yamapi of the dreams he has everytime they imagine themselves in another life, another lifeform, another person, another era, another world.
For all that he knows, Yamapi could be a green-horned alien and he would still be able to tell it’s him by the way he tilts his head as he chuckles.
“You think too much,” Masuda says. “You should know yourself that he’s far kinder than anyone could ever know.”
“Did Nakamaru tell you unnecessary things again?” Kame asks in exasperation. So much for confiding.
“We care for you,” Masuda assures, patting him on the back. “And we care for Yamapi.”
“Save the lip service for other occasions,” Kame retorts, quite harsher than he intended.
Thankfully, Masuda has gotten too used to his snarks to be actually offended.
“Yes, we will. Don’t you worry.”
“Like this?” Yamapi asks. He’s lying on Kame’s sofa, head thrown backwards towards the floor with his neck on the armrest. Kame’s lying on his stomach on the floor half a meter away from Yamapi’s head, holding his improvised DSLR camera.
“Yes,” Kame says and clicks on the button. He rambles various commands as he moves around Yamapi to take pictures. “Smile”, “Don’t smile”, “A little to the left”, “Look at me more” – Yamapi’s beautiful no matter the angle.
“Hey, Kame,” Yamapi complains after an hour of modelling, “let me take your pictures.”
“No,” Kame denies. “The new lenses are expensive.” Yamapi’s still lying on the sofa, head on the armrest instead of dangling down.
“Put that down,” Yamapi says.
When Kame doesn’t listen, he pulls him by his shirt until Kame’s face is over his, facing each other upside down.
Kame obeys; he gently places his beloved camera on the carpeted floor, turning the lenses off in the process.
“I wanna kiss you,” he tells Kame. They are in a very strange position to be kissing, but Yamapi looks like he’s happy to be seeing Kame’s face in such an unconventional manner.
“Who’s Spiderman?” Kame asks suddenly, referring to the very same movie they watched together the other day.
“I have no idea,” Yamapi answers, pushing Kame’s face down towards his and biting his upper lip. “You tell me,” he breathes in between kisses.
The lights are not on, but Yamapi doesn’t need any light to glow. Kame takes some time after taking his own clothes off to look at Yamapi, really look at him as he sits on top of him and touches his body. He lets his fingers begin from both of his temples and meet between his brows. Yamapi holds his wrists in his palms and directs his hands slowly; from his cheeks to his necks to his collarbone and stops them on his chest.
“Have I told you how ethereal you look,” he says to Kame, looking up at him, “when you look at me like that?”
“No,” Kame answers. It’s an honest answer.
“And now you do,” Yamapi says. He releases his grip from Kame’s wrist and takes his palm to his face, kissing it.
“I love you,” Kame declares like he has never said it before.
He bends slightly.
“All of you.”
Namie starts calling Yamapi “jii-chan” when she turns one. Yamapi chatters on and on about how cute she is, prodding around and prancing in the shoes he gave her.
Kame looks at the pictures Yamapi took of her and wonders if Namie remembers the night when her uncle rushed to the hospital to receive her before her father did, and wonders if she is beginning to collect memories of her present.
He wonders when does a person start making mistakes, and if mistakes begin from infancy.
“Kame,” Yamapi calls, snapping Kame back to reality. “What are you thinking about?”
“Do you think we will be something else in our next lifetime,” he starts, “after being Kame and Yamapi?”
“I don’t know,” Yamapi says. “I think being Kame and Yamapi is still the best, no matter what.”
Something sinks inside Kame.
The next time Kame dreams about Yamapi, Kame expects it to be a retelling of whatever they have randomly made up in their many conversations about their possible past lives.
Instead, he meets with a blank room with nothingness shrouding him. Everything’s white around him and he isn’t wearing anything.
He falls involuntarily as the ground underneath him opens up into the water. He’s gasping for breath frantically when he feels himself pulled up to the surface by a strange, magnetic force.
He’s standing on water, and the images of his “past lives” begin spinning in the water under him. Soon enough, the centrifugal force begins to affect him and he begins to spin as well.
The images of his “past lives” dissolve and almost everything he sees now is from his own memory – himself playing baseball, singing on stage, kissing Yamapi and making love on the bed and finally, something he doesn’t recognise.
A baby. It’s not Namie.
He wakes up with a start.
He refreshes himself and starts researching for child adoption agencies and reading about personal accounts from adopting parents on various blogs.
Kame surprises Yamapi with a visit one night. He’s sleeping, clothes strewn all over the floor beside his bed.
“Hey there,” Kame whispers into his hair.
Yamapi’s eyes flutters sleepily. “Sorry, was tired and drunk.”
Kame plants light kisses all over Yamapi’s face and runs his fingers through his hair. “Sleep on, I’ll be here.”
Everything he has in mind can wait for tomorrow. About his plans for their future – living together, building a family and growing old.
Their future can wait.
Right now, Kame just wants to lie beside Yamapi, thinking of their past which he remembers, their present which he can see, and the future they are going to make together.
-fin
1 These names aren’t significant, I swear.
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