smokestacks
read on ao3 (1,782 words)
Tashiro’s hair was loose, and blond all the way to the roots. Strands of it, cut unevenly, curled and stuck to his chin, his neck, and his shoulders. And he was smiling. “Wow, Hanzawa-sensei,” he chirped. “Fancy running into you here.” Hanzawa flicked the ash from his cigarette, and watched the smoldering embers of the end. “Please, you’re not my student,” he scoffed. “Don’t call me that.”
some people may have noticed me complain a lot about writing recently. this fic is the reason. I posted a wip version of this in april of last year, chipped away at it in parts, realized the whole thing didn’t work, and then rewrote the thing from the start. all this to say: I put a crazy amount of work into this one, so please enjoy.
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Tonight, he was craving heat. He’d come out for the cold, because he’d thought he’d wanted it, but he hadn’t, not more than he’d needed the snap of fresh air to clear the drunken haze from his mind. After that it was still cold, still miserable, still dull, like the headache festering at his temples. And this was when the desire, bottled up and dusky, began to gleam—he longed for a crystalline peace, fragile-edged and teetering.
Body leant over the railing of the veranda, his fingers searched into his pockets until he’d unearthed his lighter and a cigarette. The exposed flame sputtered against the windswept night. He clicked emptily though the tedium—caught sparks, flared heat, snuffed out—until the breeze broke into quiet.
Cigarette now lit, he led it to his waiting lips. The nicotine dragged through him, hot and acrid, stealing cacophony into stillness.
The view was distant from the city proper, but even here, the nightglow had sunken its claws into the dark. He let the cigarette dangle between two fingers, and breathed out the smoke. It dissipated as thin fog, and in its place came his frosted breath, tumbling up in the air as he lingered on the sky, lights bleeding in from the buzzing of the buildings below… He fumbled for his portable ashtray, pulled it from his pocket, and balanced it on the railing before taking another puff of his cigarette. Inhale, exhale… The world dripped slow like tar.
A gust rattled behind him—the sound cut through to him a few seconds late, so the face that appeared in his periphery was more mirage than truth.
Tashiro’s hair was loose, and blond all the way to the roots. Strands of it, cut unevenly, curled and stuck to his chin, his neck, and his shoulders. And he was smiling.
“Wow, Hanzawa-sensei,” he chirped. “Fancy running into you here.”
Hanzawa flicked the ash from his cigarette, and watched the smoldering embers of the end. “Please, you’re not my student,” he scoffed. “Don’t call me that.”
Tashiro made a face. “Feels weird to call you Hanzawa-san,” he declared, “so you’ll have to settle for senpai.”
Despite himself, Hanzawa laughed. “Settle…?” he began, and then his voice faltered into a noiseless exhale when Tashiro slipped a hand over his.
Perhaps the chill hadn’t quite chased away his intoxication. He’d dreamed of the door as a jagged pass, but it was sliding glass and mesh screen, neither of which were opaque. The territory he’d deemed unassailable had been bridged in a breath. Distances were funny like that—hard to judge, with walls.
He blew smoke out of his mouth. “Is this an intervention?” he asked.
Tashiro gave him a funny look. When he spoke, his breath wisped white. “I heard smokers have cold fingers. Thought I’d check if it was true.”
[art by @sunnfish]
Hanzawa clicked his tongue and took another drag; Tashiro’s face remained unchanged. “I’ve been outside,” he said. “Of course they're cold.”
“Well, I guess you’ve always had cold hands,” Tashiro said. He made this observation as he intertwined their fingers, slotting the warmth of his grip between Hanzawa’s shaking flesh. When their eyes met, his flashed with old memory—an unfair vise.
He swallowed. “Guess I have.”
Tashiro’s hand didn’t squeeze, but the entanglement of their fingers was pressure enough. Pinned together, their breaths intermingled, crisp and clean, scorched and sluggish.
In the distance, the city held straight against the dark, concrete and steel and glass wedged into right angles and stabbed into forgiving ground. The skyline scarred the earth as it always had, and in the dead night its lights glowered through the haze, mocking the faded stars that had long since dipped out of frame.
Ash lay leaden on his tongue. He hadn’t the hands to move for it, but the lighter in his pocket weighed of metals and flint and fuel. From his mouth, smoke curled over the horizon, heavy and foreboding. Whether the buildings were dated or stately or had just removed their scaffolding, their curse was well-told: the upswell of growth, the ever-coming march of industry, racing electrically forth, unsleeping and unflinching against the black of night, which waned as the moon into gray and blue smog.
Finally, Hanzawa asked, “Why’d you follow me out here?”
Tashiro didn’t refute the accusation. “I saw you go out a while ago,” he said, “and it looked like the more interesting thing.”
He tamped down a smile. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Tashiro said, emphatic. “Kuresawa went home because he wanted to be with his fiancée, Ogasawara-san lost a drinking contest to Miyano so he’s curled up on the floor and trying to recover his pride, Hirano-san’s moodily watching the TV with Shirahama, who’s still nervous even though it’s literally his apartment, and Sasaki-san got convinced into drinking so he and Miyano are, well…” His hand was warm and point-making. As he talked, he gestured with his whole body, words spilling forth with an almost frenetic quality, and still linked to him, Hanzawa was pulled along.
“He and Miyano are…?” Hanzawa prompted, when Tashiro came to a sudden stop.
Tashiro furrowed his brows. “I’m not supposed to say it…?” he mumbled, but then tilted his head at Hanzawa, and asked, “You’re good at keeping secrets, right?”
Hanzawa offered a miniscule nod. Tashiro’s grip went loose as he considered it.
“Dating,” he said, “That was what I thought, but I guess it’s just the… feeling of it? Kuresawa says not to say anything, and he’s the one with a wife, so he must know better than… I mean, what does it even mean, to date someone…?”
He did not tense. “I see,” Hanzawa said, though he wasn’t even looking in his direction.
A breath glanced by his ear. “Did you get another piercing, by the way?” Tashiro asked. “Your ears—they look a little different…”
“At—some point, yes.” Now he had tensed.
“I can’t place it,” Tashiro sighed. He was silent for a moment, and then muttered, “Need to clear my head, I don’t want to be too drunk tomorrow…”
“Night shift?” Hanzawa asked, turning to him.
Tashiro beamed. There was a glassy, unclear tint to his gaze. “Of course you knew that,” he said. “Must be pretty different than your 9 to 5, huh?”
Hanzawa demurred, “Teaching isn’t such a predictable schedule, what with grading and extracurriculars…”
“So you’re still working yourself to the bone,” Tashiro said. He worried his lip. “Not that I realized it, then.”
A deep, trembling chill was burrowing under his skin; his fingers twitched. He puffed on his cigarette, the warmth of it brittle and souring.
“Seems like you’re working pretty hard, too,” he said. “If you’re working weekends.”
Tashiro smiled sheepishly and scratched at the back of his neck. “Ah, well… at a certain point… there are just some things that are hard to run from.”
Wind bit at his cheeks and set his body back to rights. Hanzawa took a deep breath, and freed his hand. It was the only part of him that still glowed with heat. “Back then,” he said, “you always wanted to leave.”
Tashiro’s smile flickered. He said, “You didn’t let me.”
He watched the fire die as he stubbed out his cigarette on the ashtray, and pocketed it. “It was the previous president’s decision.”
“Which you upheld.”
His hand felt for his lighter. “Not well enough. I couldn’t make you captain.”
“Not your fault,” Tashiro countered. “I didn’t think I’d be a good fit. I just didn’t care about it the same way…”
Cool metal, hard edges. The thing pressed against his palm like the night. “Do you regret it?”
Tashiro’s answer was instantaneous: “No.” He repeated it firmly. “No, I don’t regret it. I spent a long time trying to quit, so I kept challenging you, and going to the bathhouse… and I wanted to quit, but I—I liked all of that. And I know I ran away when you wanted to make me captain. But I liked that, too.” His face had gone scarlet, but his lips were twitching up as he recollected the past.
“It would have been great if you were captain,” Hanzawa admitted.
“…Maybe you’re right,” Tashiro said. “I wonder if…” His gaze went half-lidded, drawing attention to his lowered lashes, long and undyed, the black shadow of them on his face a plain kind of beautiful. Again he had trailed off.
Rather than prompt him, Hanzawa went quiet, running his tongue over the roof of his mouth. It was dulled by the aftertaste of tobacco.
“After you graduated, it was like you disappeared,” Tashiro said. “But then you ended up working with Miyano. Only I didn’t see you much, still. And then now, we have all these people from the same high school, in the same building again… it’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?”
“It’s quite a serendipitous series of events,” Hanzawa agreed
Tashiro steadied himself on the railing. He stared at him. “You know,” he said, very slowly, very clearly, in the way that drunk people tried to not slur their words, careful to the extreme, “I missed you, too.”
His face was still red. Everything of him burned. Tashiro’s eyes were aglow, brightened like every dying firefly had found respite in the ring of his irises. Heat cascaded through Hanzawa’s body, tasting of thrill and triumph.
“…It’s too late to talk about that,” he lied, and stepped away from the railing. But he hesitated by the door. “…If you wanted to talk again, though, you could come by mine.” His piece said, he ducked back inside and didn’t look back.
The interior was just as Tashiro had described. Sasaki was flushed and curled up against Miyano’s shoulder, who startled and pinked at Hanzawa’s reappearance. Hirano and Shirahama too engrossed in the TV to take notice, white-knuckled on the couch as they watched Kagiura drive through the paint. He stepped over Ogasawara, who was slumbering on the floor, and once he’d crossed the room halfway, the balcony door slid open.
“Wait!” Tashiro cried out. “Your place—I don’t even know where that is!”
“If you want to know, you’ll have to catch me!” he crowed, and bolted for the front door.
And the rest of everything—it blurred by. An electric hum arced through him.
Tashiro skidded through the front door, which was just a wooden thing with hinges and knobs that had swung open and allowed chase. Gasping for breath, he called after him: “You have—seriously—bad habits!”
As he skipped down the stairs, footsteps thundered after him; Tashiro had broken out into a run.
Hanzawa bit down a grin. He walked faster.