Building Sandcastles

You suppose you're not like everyone else; you don't remember your first time all that clearly. There was a maid with long hair and you remember in detail how it looked afterwards, spiraling out around the sheets, and how it resembled a rat king, but everything before that image is blurry and saline. She found you in the wake of finals that early spring after you turned thirteen, when your braces hadn't yet conquered your malocclusion. You remember she didn't laugh when you came, didn't tease you for your naivety or your close-cropped hair, only showed you where to put your hands. And though you've since forgotten those things she tried to teach you, you'll never forget the care she took in her effort.

You heard her crying in the pantry the following day as she spoke in parsimonious whispers to someone who sounded like your brother or your father or maybe even your other brother. You remember you didn't venture any closer, thinking it was none of your business. The day after that, she was gone and you realized you never even knew her name.

Akito finds you after finals are finished and you're fourteen and you've been sprawled on your bed like a Vitruvian man for hours, convincing yourself not to forget everything you've just been obliged to regurgitate. When he tells you to put on normal clothes and follow, you do, even though his manic smile means the Adderall hasn't had a chance to wear off yet. You're more worried by the fact that he slips behind the wheel of an S Class instead of summoning the chauffeur.

"We're going for ice cream," he says when he sees your face, "to celebrate. Come on, already."

You can't think of an excuse, so you try not to leave nail fissures in the suggestible leather as Akito takes fast turns. And you drive and drive and the more buildings that pass, the more you think you actually might want ice cream but that's definitely not where you're headed.

Akito takes you to the city, parks in a dark parking structure and drags you to a green door overhung with a grotty bulb incased in wire. He knocks twice, then twice again on that green door and you try not to feel the soles of your Berlutis sticking to the asphalt.

You go first when the door opens.

You might have thought you fell into the seventh circle of hell, but everyone in this devil's den is brandishing smiles. Deranged, exaggerated smiles, smiles that match Akito's adrenergic one, but smiles all the same. The atmosphere is hot in the way you've read about in your brother's hand-me-down magazines, in the way your sweat and shame adhere under your covers late at night.

The woman behind the hostess' stand eyes you warily and you think she looks like your father. You don't see the money that changes hands, but she's leading you to a table beside a dimly-lit stage atop which another woman in an open kimono and face paint and nothing else is attempting to recall kabuki and failing. As she walks away, you notice the hostess' dress is just an apron with garters. The men stare at her naked flesh as she returns to her post and you wonder if their concupiscence somehow burned her clothes away.

There's sake already sitting on the table and the vermeil tablecloth is dotted with stains you don't want to think about, but Akito surrenders his fate to the dais and grins with more contentment than you've ever seen in him. He sloshes sake into a misappropriated udon bowl and scoots it towards you across a mottle that looks like Denmark. You wonder what the Danish would say if they knew, and you're picturing Hans Christian Anderson stacking Lego towers and dreaming of snow queens as the woman on stage is replaced by another wielding fans.

The music turns to generic Chinese plinkering and rankles across your skin, but Akito is busy preparing himself for whatever else he has planned for the evening and the latent lasciviousness is making you feel as though you could be in ancient Rome, so, as the Romans do, you watch the dancer. Her movements are neither refined nor graceful, but it dawns on you that she looks very natural. Genuine. You enjoy her performance and you're not sure that it's completely despite the fact that soon all the clothing she has left is her fans and her shoes.

Your brother chooses that moment to resurface.

"Once a year," he says, as though you're in the middle of a conversation. "Once a—once a year. Isn't this better, little brother?"

He burps a bit and you realize he's had your sake along with the rest.

"See?" he demands, breaking into his outrageous smile. "You think it's better, too!"

He punches you in the shoulder, hard, in the way that always makes you think of that time you were four and he stole your model Boeing 747 and Nanny Sanako only simpered at "the young master." And he hit you when she glanced away.

He still hits you like that.

You can't think of anything to say, so you watch as the dancer's song dies down. Green, is your only thought as she retreats, drawing her mai obi over herself and bowing. What a nice shade of green.

When she's gone and you turn to Akito again, he looks like his mouth has taken over his face and he used it to swallow a gallon of drunkard's wisdom. He's got a server on his lap and he's slurring in her ear and you can't hear him, but you barely have time to blink before you're locked in a room with the fan dancer.

And she's nice and soft and shy in all the right places, and somewhere along the way you've had the audacity to name her Jade and you want to ask her for coffee on Thursday and the movies on Friday and to tour Tokyo National with you on Sunday and for the rest of your lives. But before you can adjust your words, she's weaving herself into a malachite haori and you're being handed Akito and you're pulling the driver's seat forward and praying for empty things like roads and house.

You're on a street you're not sure you recognize when Akito snorts himself awake.

"Oh," he says after a moment of owlish blinking. "I guess I must have had a little too much fun." He shifts and zips his fly and sighs.

Drizzle dusts the windshield and you don't know which one of the switches cues the wipers. German car manufacturers and your brother are on what seems to be a successful a quest to overcomplicate your life.

"I know things will work out," Akito is saying from the passenger's seat. His head is thrown back on the headrest, his jaw pale in the rhythm of the halogen lights passing outside.

You feel as though you've missed boarding his train of thought again, but you're starting to think that's just the way he gets.

"Father will find a wife for me, so I know there's no reason to date. I don't want to do that to a girl. Or myself."

The rain is picking up and you think you might have to pull over if Akito stays absorbed in his justifications.

"But sometimes I just need someone, you know? even if it's only for a couple of hours."

You depress what turns out to be the defrost and lift a lever that triggers the left turn signal. You squirt cleaning fluid in odd commiseration before finding the wipers. They flick back and forth too rapidly.

"You look lonely, Kyoya." Akito breathes onto the glass and draws a pattern in the mist. "You'll probably always be lonely, but you don't have to look it all the time."

It's a heart, you finally discern as your brother's finger traces the last bit. A heart with an unevenly-fletched arrow through it.

"So take tonight, okay? Take tonight until next year and don't make anyone else lonely."

He's silent as you watch the condensation run through his heart.

The year you're fifteen, you meet Tamaki Suoh and your life goes to shit.

You've never been angry, not in this way. Uncontrollably, irrationally. Explosively. You've lived with a seething rage, a super-cooled fluid that crept into your foundations, but you'd tempered it long ago, bonded it with resignation and tied it with ribbons of familial duty and honor until it settled into just the way things are. You've always been exceptional at turning those red emotions inward, using them as quiet fossil fuel to forge your resolve.

But so abruptly you're beating pillows and breaking perfectly good pencils and thinking hard about wringing the neck of a certain Froggie. And your father is raising an eyebrow at your expenses and Fuyuumi is aiming that maddeningly knowing smile at you and you haven't had an hour to yourself since that boy rode up on his white horse and offered you a goddamn rose.

But you won't surrender.

You'll best him at whatever game he's playing because that's what you do so well.

Even if it's a fool's contest.

You perch at the edge of your whitewashed deck chair, looking out over an unripened ocean and thinking of mermaid songs. You think about those sea nymphs and resent their partiality. You empathize with Prufrock; you've never had one for yourself, either. You think if you could find one of his sea-girls, you could use her to lure Tamaki into the water and drown him with "seaweed red and brown." The notion makes the corners your mouth lift and you hide in your black tea.

Mr. Hiro has a yellow pail and he's waving to you as he mounts the back stairs up from the beach. You feel his slow trod as he crosses the salt-washed boards and bows before you.

"Beautiful day, isn't it, young sir?" the innkeeper inquires while squinting into the sun.

You mean to make a sound, but it doesn't quite pass your throat. You don't particularly agree, not after Tamaki insisted you crash a beach bonfire party last night, kept you up until just before dawn learning folk tunes and swapping ghost stories, then bounded into your room scant hours later and insisted you join the inn's other patrons for brunch.

Mr. Hiro's eyes twinkle as he says, "Not a morning person, are you?"

He laughs, a weathered, corrugated sound. You wonder if it was like that before he moved to the ocean, or if he somehow imbued the texture of waves into his voice after he arrived.

"It must be your twin, then."

You feel your brows contract a split-second before you remember how crucial it is to hide your attitude toward Tamaki. There's no fooling some eyes, though.

"Aah. Don't like that term, then? I apologize, young sir," he says, eyes still dancing and expression unabashed. "That's what Nana called you, you know. She said it last night, that you and your friend looked like twin angels, one light and one dark."

The old man chortles when he looks at your face, which must be frozen a quarter of the way to disgusted.

"Don't pay the old lady any mind, youngster," he chuckles. "She's full of nothing but whimsy. And she's not afraid of snakes—isn't that wicked?"

You can't think of anything to say to that and nothing but, "Hmm," emerges from you. The fresh air is leaving you bereft, like somehow you need the smog to galvanize your thoughts. And you have always worked well in confines.

The innkeeper leans forward and you feel like a conspirator when he whispers, "Don't worry, though. I've brought a present to distract her from you handsome boys." He gestures towards his bucket.

You cock your head and peer inside just to be polite, expecting an urchin or a collection of coruscating shucks.

It's a sandcastle.

An immaculate, miniature, English-style castle sits in his pail, replete with crenellated battlements, driftwood drawbridge and tiny limpet shell windows.

Mr. Hiro grins. "I've been at it since dawn. Took me nearly an hour to get that tower there to stand up properly."

"Impressive," you manage. But you rather think it was a waste of time.

"Someday you'll be married," the innkeeper is saying in that didactic tone old men use when they've forgotten being on the receiving end. "Then you'll know what it feels like to want to put a kingdom in the palm of her hand."

With that, he gives you an exaggerated wink and shuffles inside the sliding glass door, calling: "Oh, Nanokowa, my dear! Whereabouts are you lost this time? —Oh, good day, young sir."

You hear Tamaki's exuberance and snippets of their conversation between wave crashes.

" . . . day today—oh what a beautiful . . ."

" . . . truly think so? Thank . . ."

" . . . must have taken you a while . . ."

" . . . is to use fine sand and only a . . ."

" . . . Nanokowa is very lucky."

Tamaki emerges onto the deck and collapses into the chair next to you, looking for all the world like he'll never move again, but a second later he's up and tugging your arm and saying something about going into town.

"Today's our final day," he cajoles, "and last night Isoba told me there's a shop nearby with the most amazing ice cream and he said we just have to go before we leave, Kyoya!"

If you were a superstitious person, you'd be tempted to think that Fate was playing games with you. Why did everyone assume you like ice cream?

But you smile your saccharine smile and let him drag you to town.

Tamaki actually takes you for ice cream.

And you meet Emma and Kurakano.

They attend the local high school, were just headed for a day of shopping at the outdoor plaza and happened to stop in for a snack. Emma is saying this all very quickly and prolixly, her apt gaze never leaving Tamaki. You can see the exact moment when his surprise turns to amusement and then to unaffected enjoyment as the girl is carried away by her stories. Kurakano insinuates that Emma frequents this parlor on account of a certain server. Emma blushes, but she's not deterred and you consider the return in relieving Kurakano of the boredom you can see settling in her shoulders after her friend refuses to take the bait.

"So, am I stuck with you or are you stuck with me?" Kurakano queries and you turn to find her tapping a plastic teaspoon against her sly smile.

She doesn't apologize for Emma so you feel no need to apologize for Tamaki. You absorb her confident air, her glassy composure, her almost haughty self-possession and decide to be honest, trusting Tamaki's attention to the loquacious Emma.

"It's more like I'm stuck with him."

Kurakano smirks and you feel her intelligence abutting yours. You know her aplomb is epidermal and she reads Murasaki Shikibu after dark, but her acuity is real. You watch the lenses of her glasses flash and you imagine the two of you must look like fireflies searching the night sky for a mate, but you can't match her cadence.

She seems feel it, too, and you don't leave with her number.

The entire trip back, you wait for Tamaki to be smug about his facile conquest, but it never comes. You expected him to be conceited or smitten or anything but indifferent, but he's the same as ever, exclaiming after inscrutable things. All at once you wonder what it would take to pinion his regard, to restrain his kaleidoscope attention and focus it—hone that passion to a point and see how far it could penetrate.

You freeze.

Then, slowly, you adjust your glasses with a lithe forefinger.

What a thing to think.

The summer hits you like a gut shot, sudden and swarming, hanging in pockets as quinine as smoke in between the tall buildings. You pass near storefront sliding doors just to catch a gust of climate control as you make your way down sidewalks crowded with people who look as miserable as you feel.

Tamaki, draped over an iron patio chair and flirting quietly with the scenery, is already perspiring a charming glaze under the shade of a black awning. There's mint and ice in the bottom of his crystal glass and you don't ask what he'd been drinking as you join him.

"You're late, Kyoya," he chides, peering at you through his sunglasses. The gradient lenses turn his irises a cool bronze and you think they look like ten yen coins at the bottom of a fountain.

"Sorry, traffic here is always bad this time of day. Aijima had to drop me two blocks over. Did you eat already?"

Tamaki shakes his head and you flag down a waiter.

"So, where are we going, Kyoya? You said you had a surprise for me," he says, excitement just warming to a simmer.

You smile and it's almost wholly authentic. You remember his face as you watched him talk about Paris in the summer, about avoiding the tourist-packed Champs-Elysées for those quiet, terrace-strewn cafes, about how the city swelled like a living being, pregnant with things he called liberal, but were more likely just pretentious. "Well, you were saying you miss the Rodin and the Louvre, and I can't do anything about the great classics, but a friend of the family runs a studio nearby and they're holding a Fuyuki Hattori exhibit today."

Tamaki breaks into rapturous delight, but you hold up a hand.

"Hattori is just a photographer, so don't get your hopes up, but the gallery is nice and we'll probably see some people from school."

Tamaki bursts into praises anyway and doesn't stop until you escape into the cool embrace of Yumi's gallery, stomachs full of lemon risotto and artichoke.

You greet those who necessitate greetings before pacing the walls with Tamaki, mutual silence broken only by intermittent comments on the achromatic prints. Hattori's work is as it always is, simple without being commonplace; diaphanous without denying the harsher realities, but your companion seems to shift the greyscale with his presence, as if his company is brightening these scenes you've seen before in a different mien.

You decide it's just glare from his hair.

You see Yumi emerge from the back room and excuse yourself to meet her approach.

She's beautiful today, characteristic skin-tight kimono hugging her supple curves and relenting in a high slit, lavender silk brocade shimmering in the studio lighting, royal midnight sash artistically askew. She greets you in her European fashion, blowing air kisses at either side of your cheeks, but she doesn't forget to draw her lacquered nails down your biceps as you part.

"Your brother is a brute," she opens.

You smile. "Oh? I'm sorry. What offense has he given this time?"

Yumi crosses her arms and waves dismissive fingers in your direction. "Don't you pretend to be sorry, Otori. You know I set him up with that friend of mine who's been dying to be introduced and he blew her off."

"As I recall, I told you he wouldn't come."

You indulge her counterfeit affrontedness with the same effort Yumi puts into the performance. After all, a tacit acknowledgement of her manipulative wiles is all you have to offer, since your pity would be unwelcome and your charity unseemly.

"All that work I put in so that their first meeting would be something enviable and I get no consideration on either side for my—Oh, who is your friend?" But she's already yielding her hand to Tamaki's greeting.

You watch Yumi's mental tabulations of Tamaki's attire and recognize the instant the monetary total rises above "acceptable of notice" to "high priority." She's acute that way, her art measured in flesh rather than the oils and pastels that so often adorn her mother's studio's walls.

"Suoh. It's an absolute pleasure to bask in the presence of such radiant beauty," Tamaki is saying, Yumi's hand still in his.

You notice the slide-ruler of Yumi's attention shift towards Tamaki, but you give her credit for not shutting you out completely as she takes you both on a personal tour of the gallery. You've always known that her aptitude excelled in that area; she worked out more quickly than most that you're a wasted effort when it comes to her particular brand of fund raising.

She brushes a thread of hair off her neck, wafting perfume at your classmate, before she excuses herself to greet a group of newcomers. She doesn't look back, and you give her entire performance a casual A-minus.

Tamaki is watching Yumi's deliberate sashay when you turn your attention back to him.

"Sad," he says in such a detached way that you have to run your eyes up and down his body just to make sure you're still talking with the right boy.

You already have an intimate knowledge of what's "sad," but you'd place good money, influence and years of your life against Tamaki knowing anything of Yumi's situation: her father, spendthrift and ungovernable; her mother, cursed with no talent for judging value in anything other than art; no brothers to shield her and no sisters to share her burden.

Tamaki storms your reverie by twining his arm around yours and dragging you from the gallery.

Glass soul, you think, as Tamaki's hand falls over yours and guides you to its owner's next flight of fancy.

You're almost sixteen by the time you sit under your first kotatsu and the world looks different from down here.

Tamaki is festooned about the couch, a garishly pink envelope passing between the fingers of his right hand. The insulating snow outside the picture window provides an air of confidence, recalls crackling fires and heavily perfumed garlands, and you fill two cups with cinnamon tea to complete the setting.

"So?"

Your prod is almost indifferent in delivery, but Tamaki's sigh is explosive.

It's been months, now, since your prospects were forcibly altered, since an airhead spake blasphemous words and sent you careening down this path of no return.

Rule-breaker.

The sheer magnitude of the future splayed out before your mind's eye is exhilarating, enkindling. Arousing. Set free, your faculties are learning to roam on atrophied legs, and the potential is staggering. Even these quiet moments now hum with an undercurrent of ambition. You hope no one else can sense the metamorphosis, but it would be impossible not to see it. It's all in the eyes and you're having a difficult time reconciling that a different shine has replaced what had been.

You know the answer to Tamaki's vacillations and you suspect he does, as well, even as he bolts up in action, only to crash back to the cushions with a defeated flumph. His scrutiny is so intense that you begin to wonder if he somehow manifested the blushing vellum into existence.

The tea cozy is new, as is the kotatsu, having been purchased for Tamaki only, but the yarn is already gaining fuzz around the sides, the fine fibers succumbing to even the gentlest of handling.

It's shaped like a chicken.

You were appalled, at first, by the knitted accessory currently insulating china of exponentially higher quality. Choosing the kotatsu yourself had been without question, so you'd gathered magazines and catalogues of required reading and set yourself to the task. After picking the extremely traditional piece of furniture, you'd gathered the order forms to be disposed of, and a leaflet dropped from the pile. A chicken's yarned features stared up at you from the floor, and by more instinct than reason, you ordered it too.

You know this is all Tamaki's fault.

Just the Way Things Are is rapidly shifting into Everything Is and you're suddenly seeing splashes of color and hearing harps and smelling baguettes. You start to think maybe you could tell him that you've always wanted to visit Minas Tirith and he'd flip his hair and look up at you through those lashes and say, "Let's build it, then, okay?" And you want to take him to Chelsea during that season between winter and spring, crunch down that salted concrete between West 17th and 5th and admire the redbrick in a place no one knows you and no one cares what you are.

Idleness and impulse have never been your forte, though, so you sit and stare at the chicken pot and do anything but wonder what it means.

You hear Tamaki's voice from somewhere far away, as though he's finding his own meandering way back.

"She's still under the impression that love and sex are the same thing."

You take a moment to straighten the cozy.

"Come have tea," you say.

He rises, note still dangling from his loose hold.

"She thinks she can make demands because I kissed her hand."

You sense the irony in a greater measure than you understand its extent, and that leaves you more frightened for the unknown letter-writer than for the recipient. You've learned just how demanding Tamaki can be under that epidermal innocence, impositions of self vastly more appreciable than souvenirs and trips. But you've also discovered what that effort buys you.

And, as a student of business, you can safely say it's a bargain.

Sounds fall from your lips and everything is out before you realize you've spoken.

"She doesn't realize you're a prince."

It's silent as the snow piles up against the windows and you're radically conscious of feeling more embarrassed than you can ever remember. You touch your hand to the chicken's wing and mumble something about warming the water.

You're almost to the door when you hear Tamaki speak.

"Hey, Kyoya, I just had an incredible idea. Let's form a club."

whyagain 2015-2018

A/N: And so goes my first piece for this or any other anime fandom, although I've watched more anime than I care to admit. Hehe. Also, this piece, originally intended as an experimental work, has spent upwards of three years roaming around my hard drive, so I apologize for the disjointed nature. Good, bad or indifferent, please feel free to let me know.