the virtue of repetition

by cimorene

Aiba doesn't know what he did in a former life to be stuck with two godchildren whose favorite movie is Ringu. What happened to ordinary children's favorites like Totoro and Pokemon?

But the thing is, Aiba liked Ringu two weeks ago. Sho isn't even halfway done with his on-set filming up in Hokkaido or who knows where, Sora-chan's big case hasn't gone to trial yet which means she's putting in overtime like a Johnny's junior, and Yuki-chan and Tomo-chan, the little bastards, have already made Aiba hate a perfectly good horror movie that he used to like. That is the real horror, here.

Ringu is a classic, but it will never be scary to Aiba again. He's lost the ability to jump. Instead of his heartbeat speeding up, when the movie finishes and they just push Play again, he has to choke down the urge to vomit, or curse at the ceiling. Last night he called Ohno just to complain about how water wasn't scary. ("Water is kind of scary though. If you're afraid of drowning," said Ohno.) It isn't really Ringu's fault. There are probably not very many movies that Aiba would want to watch one hundred times a day for two weeks, which is how often it feels like he has watched this one.

Yuki and Tomo still think it's hilarious. They love the girl's long wet hair dripping over her face. It makes them laugh.

"What do you want to do now, huh?" says Aiba when the movie ends for the first time after dinner. "We could read a story, do you want to read a story? Hey, I know! Tomo, do you want to play ships? With the water toys, in the tub?"

"Ringu!" says Tomo.

"You love boats," says Aiba. "Don't you want to splash and make a huge puddle on the floor that I can slip and fall in and hit my head on the floor?"

Tomo, at two, doesn't really understand that image, but Yuki-chan thinks it's a joke and laughs her tiny little giggle. Aiba pokes her under her fat little chin and she laughs some more, but when she stops laughing she still says, "We want to watch Ringu again! And I want hot chocolate!"

"Hot chocolate in the middle of the night?" says Aiba. "Are you really sure, when we had dessert forever ago? Do you want me to get so fat I'll pop?"

Tomo grins slowly, as if it takes him a minute to completely work through all the many ways in which Aiba popping would be the best thing ever. His grin is blinding. It sparkles. "Yes!" he says.

"Should I really give you guys caffeine?" Aiba wonders. But it's not like it will make any difference to anyone except Aiba.

Sora has plied him with bakery pastries, delicious gourmet coffee fresh from the cafe, a new cashmere scarf ("Aiba-san, you're always cold, and so when I bought one for myself I thought, well!"), and even a hug today in her gratitude for the extra time to do her smart lawyer homework locked in the office upstairs. Sho should be home the day after tomorrow just in time for the trial, and until then, Aiba only has (roughly) thirty more viewings of Ringu to go.

"Ringu?" says Tomo, his face beginning to fall.

"No, let's make hot chocolate," says Aiba firmly, grabbing one toddler under each arm. "Chocolate, Tomo-chan! Chocolate!"

He doesn't have anything to do tomorrow. Anything except watch Ringu and press ignore every time he receives a new text from his agent, that is. He can afford to get the kids wired at nine pm and start the movie again.

[ § § § ]

When Aiba claws his way up out of sleep, groggy and disoriented, he is stretched out on the floor with his face wedged under the front edge of the sofa, his mouth full of blue plush bunny fur, toasty warm under the fluffy feather duvet from his own room but stiff in every joint from sleeping on the floor. He's old enough that his upper back twinges and his hip pops when he climbs to his feet.

There's no sign of the children or their slippers, so he figures that either the ghost girl from Ringu has finally pulled them into the TV or Sora-chan has put them to bed. Probably the second one.

He fumbles through the half-open door of the TV room, down the half-flight of stairs to the entry, and that's when he's startled into waking up the rest of the way. The light is on in the kitchen. He doesn't remember leaving it on.

He wonders if Sora is down there marking up documents on her laptop or having a snack, or if he's somehow slept all the way until it's time for her to wake up in the morning; but he doesn't hear anything, no coffee-maker grumbles or microwave hums or newspaper rustles or slipper shuffles. The clock next to the bathroom says it's 4:21 in the morning, which answers his question about breakfast. Aiba used to get up this early regularly for work; Sora doesn't, at least, not this week.

There's a briefcase on the table though, so maybe Sora was down here and left it, or -

The figure at the table is facing away, and the hair is black and long and so the very first thing he thinks is that housebreakers have broken into the house and killed Sora...

...who is wearing pinstripes and not pajamas...

...and has mysteriously gotten a lot taller than she was at dinner...

...and is in fact now male or just really, really androgynous (that would take a lot of plastic surgery for Sora, who is the kind of girl who would totally have won swimming suit model contests and in fact, the kind of girl Aiba used to date, before he started dating boys, and then for the most part stopped dating anyone).

By the time the nervous babbling track in Aiba's mind has reached the end of this train of thought, the rest of him has actually recognized Jun, so that's all right.

The bony ankles, the long legs and arms, the artlessly graceful way he somehow manages to pose even though he's slumped over the table like a dropped sack of rice: it's all perfectly, iconically Matsumoto Jun. It's silly that Aiba didn't recognize him right away and just goes to show how tired he is.

Of course, Aiba thought Jun was in Tokyo and didn't expect him to show up in the middle of the night, in the middle of the week, at Sho's house when Sho isn't even there. They haven't heard from each other in a couple of months now, with one thing and another. It's... a reminder.

Aiba tip-toes into the kitchen, not wanting to wake Jun up, and moves around the table to get a look at him from another angle. Jun's face is turned to the side, his mouth slightly parted and his breath making a little circle of mist on the table top. He still looks very young, much like Aiba, who, however, can go either way with makeup, the makeup artists always tell him. (Sho and Nino, in contrast, really look like adults now.) Jun's eyelashes are so curly that they slant down onto his cheeks and then, brushing them, point almost directly away again. There's a tension line between his eyebrows even in sleep to match the slightly defensive cast of his shoulders.

He's still wearing his suit jacket, strangely defensive in a place as safe (and warm) as Sho and Sora's homely kitchen. There's a cold cup of tea in front of him, though. He probably just fell asleep before he could take it off - logical; there's no need to elaborately psychoanalyze everything Jun does with his clothes, Aiba tells himself. But then again, Aiba knows Jun very well, and Jun... cares about clothes. If there's a psychoanalysis that occurs to him here, it's probably right. Aiba bites his lip.

Jun just looks so familiar like this. Most of the time Aiba almost forgets about that short while when he and Jun were, well, having an affair. But every now and then moments from the past come back to him with such clarity: like now, or when Jun surprises him by ruffling his hair or standing him still and wrapping Aiba's scarf around his neck for him with that sly little smile in his eyes. It's silly, because Aiba has seen Jun sleeping hundreds more times when they weren't fucking around than when they were, so what he is really nostalgic for is just having the right to give in to his impulses with Jun and indulge his... desires.

What Aiba's feeling now couldn't really be called sexual desire. He's too tired, for one thing. But even though nothing stops him from touching Jun with affection - Aiba does, of course, just like Sho, Ohno, and Nino - it doesn't answer what he wants; it echoes with memories. He's not going to waste some of his precious allotment of unselfconscious platonic affection when Jun isn't even awake to audience it.

Aiba silently takes the cup from the table and tips the tea into the sink. He turns the electric kettle on to make a cup for himself and leans against the counter to wait. From this angle Jun's face is turned away from him, and all Aiba sees - blurry with sleep, which no doubt means he should get glasses - is the white blur of his forehead and nose against the grey sleeve, the black hair pulled behind his ears. His hair is twisted back and up, longer now than it was for their first kiss but lying obediently against his head. Aiba wonders if Jun's wearing that scientifically miraculous styling goop that they use at photoshoots that doesn't look like gel but prevents your hair from even moving in the breeze, except then he sees the glimmer of lavender.

In the crook of his other arm, where the back of Jun's head is pressed to the table, the light is catching on something metallic in pale purple that sparkles. Aiba moves around the table to get a better look at a long purple hair clip, one of those curved ones with that's about ten centimeters long with a hinge under one end, the top piece a sideways-tapering cone shape flattened towards the tip. Up close Aiba can make out the glitter of rhinestones set in the metal and a silver butterfly etching at the wide end. The rest is trapped between Jun's head and the table.

There's something almost shocking about it, bizarrely, unexpectedly unexpected. Aiba feels touched by the stupid silver rhinestone-pooping butterfly on its metallic purple perch as if by the birth of a baby, or seeing his mother cry. The feeling lodges uncomfortably in his chest, fluttering from the presence of Jun's sleeping form slumped there at the table, and making his throat and eyes tingle.

Aiba has to turn around, and he puts his hand on the fridge automatically, and almost opens it instead of the cupboard before he remembers what he's doing. He gets a teacup down and spoons tea leaves into the strainer absently, not wanting to make a whole pot, and pours the water directly into the cup. He could have taken coffee, sugar, or basil for all the attention he pays; it's pure luck that it's houjicha.

He pays attention to the tea after that, watching it and the dark window above the sink until it's exactly the right color of green and he can take the strainer out. When he turns around, he feels calm. He isn't sure if he really is calm, or if that is a convenient illusion he has conjured for himself, but he is willing to take it either way.

The picture is the same: slightly aging pop idol and movie star slumped deeply asleep over wooden table, arms folded childlike with ageless ivory doll face pillowed on them; tie charmingly askew, pinstripes sexily rumpled. Jun has just reached an age where he plays older love interests, and not younger ones. He tells Aiba when they meet up, repeatedly but never in public, that he doesn't want to play love interests any more at all. Considering how often Jun has played them, it's fair enough, but Aiba can't help finding it ironic that Jun says this to him. If there is one thing Jun does more automatically than any other, though, it's seek distance. It wouldn't matter to Jun that he doesn't have to explain himself any longer, that he never owed Aiba an explanation in the first place.

Aiba walks the rest of the way around the table until he's almost back at the kitchen door and puts his teacup down slowly and carefully so it won't make a sound. Jun sleeps peacefully still. He doesn't twitch when Aiba leans close, and Aiba takes that as permission to do what he's thinking and take the clip out of Jun's hair. It can't be comfortable resting your head on a piece of metal.

Aiba's fingers brush against Jun's cool, smooth hair when he extracts the sparkly purple clip, and Jun's hair uncoils itself, as if it can take a breath and relax now, against his hand. Aiba lets his fingers sink into it and touch the back of Jun's neck - muscles hard and tense even in sleep, skin warm and alive. Aiba wants to touch a lot more of him than just his neck, to see how his body has changed and whether he's tense all over and whether he will relax if coaxed. So he takes his hand out of the neck of Jun's shirt and lays it on his shoulder instead.

"Matsujun." Nothing. "Jun." Nothing. "Ju-un?" Still nothing. "Come on, wake up. You can't sleep at the table," Aiba continues in a conversational tone. Jun's eyebrows wrinkle reluctantly, which means he's on his way to awake. No need to wait until he finishes waking up, though. Aiba slides an arm around his ribs and heaves him to his feet.

"Mmm?" says Jun.

"Bedtime," Aiba whispers. "Come lie down in bed."

"What are you doing?" Jun says thickly, without actually opening his eyes. "You don't pick up a grown adult and carry them to bed, you wake them up. You've been a nanny for too long."

"I'm not going to carry you. It's not like being a nanny, it's like if you were drunk," Aiba explains. "Are your eyes open? We're at the step -"

"Yes, my eyes are open." Jun is totally lying. His eyes were not open, but he steps up into the raised-floor tatami room without stubbing his toes.

Aiba pauses at the cabinet, pushing the door open with one hand, and drags out a pillow and throws it on the floor, the only thing he can take out without bending over and dislodging Jun, who is leaning on his shoulder. Jun drifts loose like a little boat in the water, with his arm trailing after him over Aiba's shoulders and down his arm, where his hand curls briefly and clasps Aiba's wrist like a bracelet in a brief squeeze.

Aiba is aware of Jun's shadow teetering behind him while he drags the folded futon and duvet from the shelf. He turns around. Jun has shed his jacket and opened his shirt partway and is lying face down on the pillow.

"You're right, I have been a nanny too long," says Aiba, throwing the blanket at Jun. It lands on top of him. ("Hey!" Jun mutters, but it's muffled by the blanket on top of his head and the pillow under it.) "I have been a nanny long enough to watch Ringu ten thousand times, which is way, way too many." He puts the futon on the floor in the part of the room not taken up by Jun's sprawling arm and leg.

The pile of blankets next to him moves and lifts. Jun emerges nose-first and says, blinking sleepy cat-eyes at Aiba, "Maybe I should go back to Tokyo."

"You get used to it," Aiba offers.

"Hmf." Jun pushes himself up on his hands, and Aiba sees a glimpse of his bare chest under the shirt as he crawls onto the futon, fumbling to undo his fly. "Or maybe I should go pick up Ringu Two."

Aiba pauses, arrested. "I really don't know," he says. The endless but already-memorized torture of the first movie, or committing yet another to memory, thus adding one more to the ranks of movies he can never enjoy again (not that he really enjoyed Ringu Two, but on the hate-o-meter it's down around one - Aiba's hate is a rare commodity - while his current hate for Ringu One is up at ten, nearly boiling over). "We'll talk about it tomorrow." He hears some kind of noise from Jun and says, "What?"

Jun just says, "Never mind," and throws his tie across the room. It bounces off the rice paper screen and flops to the floor. He looks up at Aiba standing over him, the light from across the hall casting pale shadows in the fine creases beside his eyes and making his expression look mysteriously serious and deep, as if he is considering whether to tell Aiba some very bad news, or reciting poetry.

Aiba licks his lips.

"Are you going to bed now?" says Jun. He doesn't make it sound like a question. Aiba would think he's being told to get out except that there is nothing cool or casual, nothing dismissive, in Jun's face and body. His neck curving forward, the concave planes of his chest and the sharp lines of his face and jaw, his mouth perfectly neutral: this is Jun with a problem. Maybe he is really asking some other question that Aiba can't understand. Maybe if he just finds the right thing to say...

But maybe Aiba is full of himself. Jun's problems are Jun's. He doesn't owe Aiba any explanations.

"Yeah, I will," says Aiba. "Good night."

[ § § § ]

Aiba comes downstairs in the morning while Sora is finishing her usual breakfast of milk yogurt and grilled cheese toast with ham and ketchup, with Tomo-chan in his panda-foot pajamas in her lap.

"Ohayo gozaimasu," says Aiba, pronouncing all the syllables and bowing to make up for his embarrassment about not even waking up when she took the kids to bed.

Sora just smiles at him, almost laughing really, and pats Tomo's belly. "Good morning. Aiba, can you get Tomo a cup of orange juice? I can't seem to stand up for some reason."

Aiba goes to the fridge for the juice first, then pours himself a cup of coffee. Sora makes it a little stronger than he likes, but he just adds more sugar.

"Matsumoto-san is here, I see," Sora remarks when Aiba is absorbed stirring his coffee. He looks up, blinking, and she tilts her head at Jun's briefcase standing up in a chair.

"Mmmm," Aiba agrees. The door across the hall to the downstairs guest room is shut, he saw when he came in. "I didn't know he was coming for a visit."

"Sho mentioned it to him a little while ago, maybe coming down when he's working on the movie," she says. "Perhaps after you had to leave it would have been helpful."

"I've got at least another week of vacation before my agent is allowed to call me again," says Aiba. "I'll try and stretch the vacation out, though, so I can stay the rest if you need me."

"You know you're welcome any time, not just when we're busy." Sora's smile is sparkling.

"You know Sora just doesn't want to say you're in the way." The drawl comes over Aiba's shoulder and he turns in surprise.

"Jun!" says Aiba.

"They've had to fire their poor army of nannies just to fulfill your little au pair fantasies, Aiba-chan. It's sad, really. All those efficient future primary school teachers unemployed."

"Good morning, Matsujun," says Sora. "Please stop spreading scandalous slander about my household. I'd hate to have to sue such an old family friend."

"You mean," says Jun, sitting down in the chair next to Aiba's and slinging an arm around Aiba's shoulders, "you'd hate to hire another lawyer because you know how much they cost."

"So why are you here, then?" says Aiba. "If not to act out nanny fantasies?"

Jun lounges elegantly in a strange-looking but trendy plaid shirt and raises an eyebrow. "To get away from Tokyo, of course," he says. "I needed a vacation."

"If you don't mind, Jun," says Sora sweetly, "could you help Yuki and Tomo do the laundry today? Yuki loves to hang it up and take it down, but she can't fold it yet. I know you're the expert with clothes."

"It's dangerous to spar with lawyers, I see," Jun chuckles, and leans over to scoop Tomo out of her lap. Sora just twinkles at him.

[ § § § ]

Aiba spends most of the morning dozing on his back in the yard while Jun and Yuki hang wet clothes over his head. It's a beautifully sunny day, and nice and warm.

Being ignored by both children is a novel experience for Aiba, but Jun is even more exciting a guest than he is. Without hearing the words, Aiba absorbs the low, deadpan drawl of Jun's voice and the excited chattering of Yuki and Tomo in response. They sound like a pair of cheeping songbirds or squeaking monkeys (Aiba is the expert in cute animal noises). Jun is all cool, detached amusement, but that doesn't dampen their enthusiasm at all.

On some level, Aiba wants to ask Jun about it, see whether he does it on purpose, whether it comes naturally, whether he takes it for granted. How it feels to him, visiting Sho and Ohno and Nino for doses of real home life that he doesn't even have in his own home.

Aiba turns his head so it falls in shadow and the sun doesn't glare so hard on the backs of his eyelids; it was making his eyes hurt. He's just projecting his own depression onto Jun, anyway. (Jun is just as overworked as Aiba and somewhat more of a recluse by nature, but his little black book is more stuffed than Ohno's loose sketch drawer. His name's been linked to every attractive man of his sexual persuasion on the scene in their age range, it seems like, most of the ones ten years younger, and a number of older. Not, of course, if you don't know the right people. But Aiba does, nowadays. None of those people know about Jun and him. Nobody ever did.)

"Okay, now you can make lunch," Jun finally says, close. Aiba opens his eyes to find Jun carefully stretching himself out in the grass parallel to Aiba. "I'm starving."

Aiba blinks. "What do you want?"

"I don't know." Jun waves his hand dismissively without opening his eyes. "It's my turn to nap."

"Did you sleep on the train?" Aiba asks him, feeling slow and a little dizzy from waking up suddenly.

"Mm, sort of," says Jun. "No worse than I slept most nights the last few weeks. That's the problem."

"I knew your sleeping habits were even worse than mine, but honestly."

Jun snorts. "Hey, at least I don't have a regular early-morning gig. Besides, you don't know anything." His voice is light and he's smiling when he says that, and it's a tone Aiba has heard a million times since they were children: Stupid Aiba! - Mocking, gently, even when it has a sharp edge. But the words...

...the words fall on him like heavy stones, one after the other, and Aiba barely hears the rest of what Jun says even though he's still talking.

It's been a long time since Jun has said that to him. Eight years.

The tone was very different then. He was shouting, which is rare for Jun, and shaking, which is much rarer. It's amazing, thinks Aiba, that two people who see one another as much as he and Jun do - which isn't so often, anymore, but over the years it does add up - could go eight years without such a simple sentence passing between them. He wonders if it could be pure chance, or if eight years is how long it took for the prohibition to wear off of those words for Jun.

Although he often thinks about what Jun remembers and how he remembers it, Aiba never considered before whether he remembered that particular conversation. "Hah, of course not," he says out loud, answering whatever it was Jun said. "You know, I really am hungry... "

Jun shrugs, "In a hurry? Just make some instant ramen then." His eyes are closed behind his sunglasses, allowing Aiba to look at him as intently and carefully as he wants to, but he honestly doesn't know what he thinks: does Jun remember it or not? It's as baffling as whether to get Ringu Two or not.

Maybe more baffling, because he'll probably never know.

end

A Just Like Verse story: follows "Just One of the Boys".