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one_if_by_land, who is hopefully having tons of wild hijinks over in China:
A Closed Book
The first time it happened, it happened because Keisuke was bitter and puzzled and hurt and fucking furious, and searching around for any way to strike back that he could think of.
*
It’s somehow settled through half a dozen unrelated conversations that Keisuke will spend New Year’s 2015 in Japan, in his childhood home. It’s not ‘home’ home, anymore, not since Milan (and then London and, since last summer, New York), but the maternal unit is pining for him, he’s told, and he’s more equipped to play the dutiful son now than at certain other points in his life.
“Say hello to Ryousuke-san for me,” Fujiwara requests the night before his flight, looking so solemn that he’s forced to chase that age-inappropriate gravity away with a kiss. Fujiwara is the only person Keisuke knows who always smiles after the first kiss of a session, always in a way that seems to indicate either that he’s shy or that your technique amuses him.
You’ve got to respect a guy like that, even when he isn’t an annoying racing savant whose brilliance has made the world sit up and drool; when he is, the expert-recommended course to take is to kiss him again and again until there’s no more possibility of either shyness or amusement.
He leaves Fujiwara sleeping in his bed without a goodbye.
They’d tried to keep the visit under wraps, but reporters make the eye of Sauron look like amateurs, and he’s met with a couple of flash bulbs and the usual flurry of questions when he steps out of the gates.
“Sorry, I’m just here to relax. No comment,” he cuts through the crowd without slowing down, knowing that there are going to be malicious speculations in the papers next day and possibly an unflattering photograph. It doesn’t bother him, it bothers Fujiwara even less, and the only thing Ryousuke had said after the last media frenzy when certain lamentable aspects of his high school life had been revealed to an unsuspecting world was “Do please refrain from incurring a lawsuit, Dad’s health is precarious enough as it is.”
“Mmm,” he’d replied into the phone without looking away from the television screen. It might have bothered him in the past, but everyone outgrows hero worship at some point, even if it takes well over two decades, and betrayal makes for a fine catalyst.
In the end, it was all for the best.
He steps into the foyer at approximately half past nine, having observed as the taxi pulled over that the living room lights are on, and the sound of the TV is passing through the open windows. His mother, probably. Ryousuke had never had much use for TV beyond the half-hour news programs, and though the years have changed him, they haven’t been urging him in the direction of melodramatic Korean soaps.
He makes a deliberate clatter, kicking off his shoes, and the sound of a man swearing never to call the bitch again, never, ever! cuts off. “Keisuke?”
“In the flesh.”
She both looks and sounds overjoyed to see him, pleasure softening the wrinkled stretches of her face, her voice high-pitched and animated.
It’s comforting; she’d broken down after his father’s death the year prior, and he’d never quite managed to escape the guilty conviction that a filial son would be back home, holding down the ol’ fort, instead of flitting around the rest of the world sending nothing home besides trophies, but then, she’d had Ryousuke with her. Ryousuke can play the part of ten filial sons, and the attendant daughters-in-law besides.
Don’t worry, he’d said over the phone, easy and reassuring, I’ll take care of everything here, and it doesn’t take hero worship to believe that when Ryousuke says he’ll take care of something, it’ll be taken care of with the finesse of a card sharp.
“I hope you didn’t wait up for me,” he says, not because he thinks half past nine is too late for a lady of fifty-three to be up, but because this is what he’s learned to say, through years of observing Ryousuke. He doesn’t always apply the knowledge — doesn’t bother, most of the time — but it’s there, like the understanding of proper table manners for every occasion and the way to look at a reporter, smile, and get away without saying a thing while smelling of roses.
One of the perks of being Takahashi Ryousuke’s brother, even though nowadays the world is more inclined to think of Ryousuke as being Takahashi Keisuke’s brother when it thinks of him at all.
“No, no, your brother hasn’t even returned yet,” and it’s interesting to realize that it holds true here as well.
She lets him drop off his luggage in his old room and emerges from the kitchen with two plates of assorted fruits when he returns downstairs. They spend half an hour talking about his latest exploits, her charity work, the clinic and Ryousuke’s refusal to snag her a proper daughter-in-law so she can have babies to dandle, and then she goes off to bed, but not before he bends to plant a kiss on her cheek and say, “See you in the morning.”
He would never have done anything like that even two or three years ago, which is why, he supposes, at twenty-six years old he’d been a prick.
After her bedroom door snicks shut, he spends some time wandering through the house as quietly as possible. Not much has changed since his last visit, although the items that had marked his father’s presence are no longer in sight — tucked away into some out-of-way closet, he imagines, just as Keisuke’s own mementoes can now be found only in his room.
Every trophy he’s won since he first made it big in the pros is in this building, and yet none of them decorate the mantlepieces and cabinets throughout the other rooms in the house.
It’s nearing eleven when Ryousuke returns. Keisuke hears the car pull into the driveway, the garage door going up, and is there leaning against the wall by the time Ryousuke emerges with keys in hand.
“Hey,” he says, tipping his head. “Mom’s already in bed.”
“That’s good; I’ve been after her to maintain a healthy schedule.” Ryousuke smiles at him, just as warmly as when Keisuke had been a child looking up with stars in his eyes, just as warmly as when Keisuke had thrown an encyclopedia at him and called him a traitor. It’s pissed Keisuke off in the past, sent him storming to Italy and independence, but he’s had years to get over it. Now, he thinks, he’d be worried if anything happened to alter the temperature of Ryousuke’s smiles — it would be an alteration of who he is.
Making the token responses to some meaningless small-talk chatter, he finds himself following Ryousuke back into the living room, where they start to work on polishing off the snacks between them.
The conversation is pleasant; they’ve always had enough to talk about, though these days racing is no longer the central topic. He has a panel of experts behind him now, refining his vehicle and technique and all the other myriad details that turn a competent racer into a winner, and an amateur who’s lived out his life in Kanagawa can offer him as much as Paris Hilton can offer Madonna, or so he tells himself.
Instead, they discuss ships and shoes and sealing wax, and it isn’t until jetlag begins to kick in that the pauses starts to drag out.
“You and Fujiwara did well in the Grand Prix,” Ryousuke drops into one of them, spearing one of the last squares of mango with his toothpick. “Beautiful race to watch.”
“Luck,” he shrugs. It was. It would have been luck if Fujiwara had won the competition as well. “Oh, and I brought the spoils of war back with me.”
“If you keep this up, soon you won’t be able to fit into your room.”
Another one of Ryousuke’s forty-degree smiles, and once upon a time Keisuke might have asked him why he didn’t just place the cups where they would be conspicuous to visitors, as trophies were usually destined to end up — would have asked it because he’d thought he knew the answer, because he’d thought the answer was guilt.
Now, he doesn’t ask, because he knows the actual answer, and it isn’t guilt.
Not that that line of thought will get them anywhere. “Fujiwara says hi, by the way. I think he would’ve liked to come and see you again.”
“Then you should have invited him.”
“Next time, maybe.”
They’ve finished the fruits, both mango and watermelon. He drops his toothpick into one of the empty platters, crosses the space between the sofa and Ryousuke’s armchair, kneels down, and entraps Ryousuke’s right hand to lick his fingers clean. They’re sweet and sticky on top, salty underneath, and still as beautiful as ever.
Ryousuke makes a soft noise that isn’t rebuffal and isn’t invitation. He doesn’t try to retrieve his hand. Keisuke doesn’t expect him to; the last time they’d done this had been the night after their father’s funeral, and if Ryousuke had found the act acceptable then, there’s certainly no reason for him to refuse it now.
They’re both men now, though, and a one-person armchair is no fit place for making out. “Your room?” Keisuke murmurs around the joints of Ryousuke’s ring finger, the one that’s never seen a ring. His own still smells faintly of dust.
“Certainly.” Ryousuke runs a hand through his hair — smooth, now, back to its original color, making the physical resemblance between them a bit more obvious nowadays — and then pulls him up, thigh grazing Keisuke’s crotch as they stand in a motion that’s as innocent as Eden’s serpent, and Keisuke grits his teeth against the flare of heat that burns every last vestige of jetlag away.
Ryousuke smiles again, and there had never been a lack of affection there, never anything that contradicted the assurance that Keisuke was one of the most important considerations in the world.
What Keisuke had protested wasn’t being an important consideration but being a consideration, but he’s had time to grow resigned to it.
“Up, up,” he says, and “Patience,” Ryousuke chides, and Keisuke uses his acquired maturity to keep himself from pinching his brother’s ass.
It’s never not going to give him a thrill to be heading off into his brother’s room — where he’d learned to speak, to walk, where they’d spent nights going over car schematics and suspension — and know that what follows is going to take place in the dark, broken taboos that would turn into ashes in the light of day. His definition of propriety is much more conventional than Ryousuke’s.
It’s just that he doesn’t give two pennies for propriety, while Ryousuke lives a life circumscribed by it; fortunately, ‘Thou Shalt Not Fuck Thy Brother’ wasn’t written into any of the rulebooks Ryousuke’s using.
Illuminated only by a few whisps of light from the streetlamps outside, it’s hard to tell if anything’s changed here, and frankly, at the moment he doesn’t care. Once the door’s closed behind them he’s cupping his hands around Ryousuke’s jaw and kissing him and kissing him, mixing his own smoke and alcohol-tinged breath with Ryousuke’s wholesome wintergreen goodness.
(The day he’d realized Ryousuke sucked on mints at work was the day his brother’s cooler-than-thou image had been completely shattered, but the habit does make for nice, clean-smelling kisses, very Ryousuke.)
“Mmm,” Ryousuke says, and then “mmph,” and “doorknob,” which is enough to maneuver them towards the bed — clean white sheets, comforter that smells of detergent and not sweat, again very Ryousuke. Keisuke tangles their feet at the edge of it, in the way that always makes Fujiwara tumble downwards, flushed and laughing, but Ryousuke somehow manages to fold gracefully into a sitting position without missing a beat. There’s nothing to do but go with it and straddle him with a sigh.
Ryousuke’s fingers brush his throat. “You don’t sound,” there goes his first button, “very,” second, “pleased,” and all the rest, until he’s sprawled over his brother’s lap with his chest bare and his cock perking up at the enactment of a thousand illicit dreams.
So many times they’ve done this, but it never gets old.
“Just wondering why you’re so bloody perfect all the time,” he murmurs into Ryousuke’s ear, then tongues the outline of it deliberately, feeling the grip around his waist tighten momentarily, the thighs underneath his own tremble. Not so perfect, really, and by now there’s nobody who knows more about Takahashi Ryousuke’s buttons than himself.
They rarely see each other anymore, but when they do, he presses down hard.
Ryousuke’s fingers aren’t as steady as they move to undo his own shirt, and he feels a little victorious thrill at that: not once has he broken completely through Ryousuke’s restraint, but each time, he hopes, he gets a little closer to the edge of the cliff.
“Let me help you with that,” he breathes, but it’s not easy to push Ryousuke off balance and even harder to keep him there, and Ryousuke bats his hands away, saying
“I think I can manage on my own,” equally soft, but threaded with an unmistakable undercurrent of amusement, as if there’s nothing Keisuke can do for Ryousuke that he can’t do better by himself.
Keisuke grimaces and shoves Ryousuke flat on his back against the bed, then freezes when the springs squeak with a healthy high-pitched whine — right, the mattress has seen a bit more wear since the the last time it had both of them on it.
They can’t be loud. Their mother’s presence two rooms away and the inadequately soundproofed walls ensure this. Keisuke’s used to abusing the headboard and teasing out every last possible needy gasp from Fujiwara in his penthouse apartment back on 5th Avenue, where only the clouds can see them and the only neighbors to hear them are the pigeons.
With Ryousuke, always, silence is fucking golden.
Sadly, there’s nobody he can share these comparisons with — Fujiwara doesn’t know about Ryousuke, and while Ryousuke might know about Fujiwara (Keisuke hasn’t said anything, but Ryousuke is Ryousuke), he’s never brought the subject up. Keisuke’s not going to be the one to look up into his big brother’s face and say, “Hey, big bro, you know who else I’m boffing? You remember that other protege of yours, the pride and joy of Project D? Funny thing, haha…”
There are reasons besides embarrassment that he doesn’t discuss his love life with his brother. Maybe he should invest in a therapist like the rest of the world…but then, one whiff of his story would be enough to overcome the fear of any lawsuit over breach of confidentiality.
In any case, there’s no way the triangle will last.
For now, he concentrates on nibbling his way down Ryousuke’s neck, while Ryousuke does things with his hands that make it necessary to smother all the noises that escape into skin that tastes — like hospital, actually, very hygienic and not at all alluring, objectively speaking, but it’s Ryousuke, which means that disinfectant has for ages held the association of forbidden fruit in Keisuke’s mind.
The first time they did this, Keisuke had been nervous and angry, determined to leave an indelible mark on Ryousuke’s skin, and lasted barely five minutes. Sometimes he wonders if his continued unslaked thirst for it stems primarily from a need to make up for that one devastating blow to pride.
In the meantime, though, he’s learned many things, and he does his best to put them all into play.
Like this. Yes.
In a twisted way, it’s a mirror of childhood, when he’d recite every new tidbit of knowledge he learned from school to his brother like bringing flowers to a girlfriend, waiting for that pat on his head, that smile of approval, except even Ryousuke can’t smile when he’s scrabbling at the sheets and beaded with sweat.
Sometimes Keisuke wonders if he’s warping Fujiwara just as surely as Ryousuke’s will and wishes had warped him. God, he hopes not.
Ryousuke’s arm winds around the back of his neck to pull him down, nose to nose. “Focus,” he says, like he’s reading Keisuke’s mind — frowning just slightly, which coming from him is as good as a grimace.
Keisuke focuses. It’s no longer as ironclad as it once was, but commands from Ryousuke can still bypass the brain and shoot straight to the reflexes. He fumbles around in the bedside drawer for lube and a condom, giving Ryousuke enough time to kick off the slacks pushed down around his ankles.
Though they’ve traded off top/bottom roles in the past, Ryousuke still tends to subtly nudge the proceedings towards an outcome where he’s not actually buggering his little brother, and Keisuke has to wonder what kind of twisted sense that makes in Ryousuke’s head, because the actual incest doesn’t seem to faze him. Perhaps he just sees the sex as an extension of looking after Keisuke, indulging him, but tonight, Keisuke’s too tired to fight it.
Not that doing what he’s called on to do (Ryousuke) is a hardship, and Ryousuke may not think of this as perversion, but Keisuke knows it is and doesn’t care. He doesn’t care.
There are plenty of things that take priority over caring, such as insinuating a hand under and behind Ryousuke, and his cock is standing at full attention now, happy and ready to play, and this is no time for thinking.
Ryousuke twists and squirms before holding unnaturally still, eyes closed, lips parted for breath, and Keisuke wants to lean down and kiss him, he wants to rake his nails down that smooth, perfect chest so that Ryousuke won’t be able to take off his shirt without raising questions. He does both.
When he begins to push inside — slowly, slowly, Ryousuke always does this part flawlessly and Keisuke’s not going to lose at sex, too — the friction is so exquisite that that first time flashes before his eyes, causing him to grit his teeth and think about car crashes for a bit.
Ryousuke doesn’t prod him (probably knows what’s going on, the bastard), and eventually he’s in deep enough to draw back and thrust again, yes, yes, yes, yes, he’s king of the racetrack these days and has fans fawning at his feet, but this is like sitting on top of the world, on top of childhood dreams and aspirations and desires, very literally on top of a childhood idol.
Distantly, the clock chimes twelve, and he clamps down on his thoughts.
This is no time for thinking.
This is the time for doing, doing (Ryousuke), for being as careful as he can stand to be, and that muffled noise Ryousuke is making into the back of his arm is caused by pain, he thinks, caused by pain caused by him, but this isn’t the time to care.
This is the time for shaking and sweating and thrusting, for hissing curses and praying — that the bed will shut up, that Mom won’t wake up, that Fujiwara’s all right, that he’s doing this perfectly and once Ryousuke knows how great he is he’ll stay right here with him, under him, forever and ever and ever — and spilling, in the end, into Ryousuke’s body, trying to grab onto one moment in time and turn it into an answer.
*
The first time it happened, it happened because Keisuke was terrified, trying to take from his brother what was given willingly in the absence of all the things that were not.
*
He wakes briefly to the smell of soap and shampoo and the pleasant sensation of being toweled off, mumbling into the pillow and hearing Ryousuke chuckle.
“Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you later,” a familiar reassurance that sends him spiralling back down into sleep with the potency of a knockout drop.
Ryousuke is, as always, true to his word, and the next time he squints his eyes open it’s due to the earthquake caused by an insistent hand on his shoulder.
“You can keep sleeping if you want, but breakfast’s going to be ready in fifteen.”
He stretches and yawns and burrows deep into Ryousuke’s pillow and bed for a long, glorious moment before rolling over. “Mmnah, I’ll get up, gimme a sec.”
It doesn’t take long to sneak back to his room for clothes and run a quick shower, washing off the traces of the night. Ryousuke had thrown out his old toothbrush — unhygienic, of course — but he has his traveling kit with him, so it’s no big deal. He pauses in front of the mirror before leaving the room to watch his reflection raise a mocking eyebrow back at him.
Breakfast is rice and soup, pickles and grilled fish, and though he loves his eggs and sausages (and goose liver pate and caviar, these days), this is the kind of food he grew up with. He shuts his eyes for a moment to savor the feeling.
“Still sleepy?” His mother, full of indulgence, and this he hadn’t grown up with, but he’ll take the change.
“Didn’t get much sleep last night,” he says, refraining from cutting his eyes across to his brother.
“You’ll need to be upright and conscious at the party tonight,” Ryousuke says, and Keisuke can hear the smile in his voice.
But- “You didn’t say anything about a party.”
“Should I have had to?” Ryousuke’s raised eyebrow isn’t at all like his own, he muses, despite the physical family resemblance. He’d rather face his own. “The clinic always holds a party.”
“And I never attend them,” he shrugs, spearing through a pickle, “so let’s just go with what works.”
“You’re not a boy anymore, Keisuke,” his mother chides, and this is more like what he’s used to. “Besides, I have some people I want to introduce to you.”
“Mom-” he cuts off when he realizes what she means.
“You should come. You might enjoy yourself.”
“I don’t need you to pick out a wife for me, Mom.” God, it’s been years since he blushed, but this is what family will do to you.
“Well, you’re certainly not doing much of a job yourself, are you?” and suddenly Keisuke realizes from where Ryousuke had inherited that arch of eyebrow. “All I see in the papers are stories about you and women who might as well be wearing napkins as dresses — ”
“It’s the tabloids! You know they’ll print anything that sells a few more copies.”
“Do you have anyone you’re planning to introduce to us?” That’s from Ryousuke, and Keisuke glares down into his rice.
“I will.”
“That’s what you always say,” his mother points out, but Ryousuke doesn’t push any further. He doesn’t have to, after all.
Ryousuke is single, has been for years. He’d been going out with Morita Yumi for nine months when Keisuke threw that first pro racing trophy at him and kissed him and demanded this, God, I’m giving you my life, if you can’t give up anything worthwhile, then at least give me this.
Ryousuke’s guidelines for life are a closed book to everyone else, but he adheres to them like glue, like super-industrial extra-strength krazy glue, and one of them is fidelity to lovers — he’d broken up with Morita the next day — and another is children, Keisuke. We need to carry on the family line.
You’re ancient, you know that? You belong in an antique store.
Nevertheless.
And Ryousuke won’t marry as long as any improper relations with Keisuke continue, but that means Keisuke must, and though Keisuke might, if he tried hard enough, overcome conscience sufficiently to cheat on a girl nice enough to meet their mother’s standards, it would mean losing Fujiwara as surely as if he’d trashed Fujiwara’s 86 back in the day.
He isn’t sure if he can give that up, either.
Once he would have tried to argue, to use himself as leverage — I’ll give up racing, I’ll give up this life that you laid down for me — but he’s realized since then how insubstantial a threat that would be. Ryousuke doesn’t care about racing; Keisuke dumps the trophies on him, and he dumps the trophies in a room where nobody lives.
“I’m just here to relax,” he says, and tries to pretend that if he wishes for it hard enough, it’ll become true.
*
The first time it happened, it happened because Ryousuke had never connected love with sex, never connected love with anything but family, so adding sex to their relationship was like adding oil to water — didn’t change the relationship, didn’t change themselves. He’d always played all roles for Keisuke, whatever was needed, and lover wasn’t that far a stretch.
“I love you,” Ryousuke had said with perfect sincerity both before and after, and Keisuke believed him, believes him, but Ryousuke’s definitions are so different from everyone else’s that he thinks he might spend the rest of his life puzzling out what it is that he’s believing in.
End
Happy (belated) Birthday, Bingcherry!
*
Also, sign-ups for the seventh round of end today! Do sign up, please? :D; It’s quite fun, and the results so far have been fabulous.
