forever's on your side (it's longer than you think).

1.

in the middle of cherry-blossom season of '06, hibari graduated, and nothing was the same.

i've always remembered that day because three really surprising things happened on it. the first was that a girl somehow managed to work up the courage to ask hibari for the second button on his gakuran jacket. the second was that a girl actually wantedthe second button on hibari's gakuran jacket. and the third was that he let her have it.

sometimes i wonder how that conversation went. did she find him alone in the reception room? did she do it in front of the whole disciplinary committee and everyone? did people laugh or cheer or just run away screaming? it's so sentimental, the way i see it in my head, the silhouettes of cherry-blossom petals dancing in the breeze and mid-day sun, but that's probably wishful thinking. when i asked hibari about it, all he said was,

"it cost me nothing." like it was a business transaction. i thought to myself, it would've been nice if he'd dressed it up a little, maybe; if he said that he was impressed by her spunk and was giving her what she deserved. that's not like hibari, though. that's not him at all.

hibari passed me a pair of his socks, and i put them in his sock drawer. i love the way he folds them so precise, like they do the origami napkins at a fancy restaurant so they can stand up or look like scallop shells or paper fans. you wouldn't imagine hibari could be so conscientious about this kind of thing, but sometimes he is. i'll catch him flattening out the spines of every book on the shelf, or turning the handles of all the pots in the kitchen to face the same way. and when he leaves early in the morning sometimes i'll find a sticky note attached to the back of the bedroom door, his handwriting small and neat and perfectly straight like pressed ants.

she must have done it on a dare, i decided, suddenly, because what would she even do with three years' worth of hibari's feelings? i hoped she'd kept them, at least. i couldn't bear to think of them lost or thrown out.

hibari passed me another pair of socks, and our fingers brushed. "why do you ask?"

"just curious," i said, for lack of something better to say. but it was true, i just wanted to know, that's really all it was.

2.

with hibari gone, school was even more boring than usual. it was a relief when we finally graduated and went to high school too. even though i still wasn't with hibari, it was better than staying at namichuu without him. better than the empty reception room which no other club dared to take over even in his absence, better than the lonely rooftop with no school-song lullaby to put me to sleep. i still went up there to sleep between classes or during them, but it was a bit like getting to the store right at closing time, when they're putting everything away and rolling down the metal grate. there isn't really anything for you to do, but you're already there, so you just linger for a bit aimlessly and then go home.

i did baseball in high school too, because, well, that's me. hibari didn't come to see any of my games, or at least he told me he didn't. except i know differently because gokudera once ran into him in the stands, and hibari made him swear under pain of death that he'd never tell. but gokudera's a rebel, he's weird that way, so he came and told me that very afternoon except he also made me promise never to let hibari know that he had, or hibari would beat him up.

after that it was hard not to try to spot hibari in the crowd, little round head with a fluffy canary perched on top somewhere in the middle of all those faceless strangers, but i was never that lucky. maybe he saw me searching for him, tipping my cap to the sun and all the spectators while the umpire yelled 'play ball'. even if he did, though, he would never say, because that's just the kind of guy he is. you wouldn't catch him hanging over the railing jeering and waving at me the way gokudera does, chewing on his cigarette with all the mothers holding their kids' hands and giving him disapproving looks out of the corner of their eye. no, hibari wouldn't say a word, but i don't mind one bit. how should i put it? it's kinda special, the way he keeps me guessing. being with him is never boring.

and gokudera wonders how i can stand it, but the truth is people mellow out when they get older. hibari still isn't one for big smiles and loving words, but he doesn't yell much or get very angry anymore. and that one time i was studying late in the university library, he taped the game on tv that i thought i would miss. he acted like it wasn't him that did it, but the important thing was that i knew it was.

i'm probably not explaining this very well. what i'm trying to say is, i wouldn't give up hibari, not for anything in the world. in the kitchen all the tins in the pantry are lined up from one end to the other in alphabetical order; in the fridge all the jars are sorted by special rules only hibari understands. and every time i go for some mayonnaise and move something out of its proper place hibari glares at me and moves it back, but i wouldn't give that up either. i love all of it, his eyelashes and the peach-fuzz on his upper lip in the morning, the pinched skin on his elbow, how he punches me in the bicep when i make him laugh when he doesn't want to laugh, which is all the time.

inside my heart there is a locked door, and behind that door there are shelves and shelves of memories of hibari. if he could see them he'd be mad, because they're all out of order, they're everywhere, stacks of sun-stained polaroids of closed eyelids or the white half-moon of his right thumbnail or the very tip of his nose, and empty jam jars arranged by the label, and boxes of sticky notes that say, concisely, 'laundry', or 'dinner', or 'late'. and i've never left little notes of my own for him to find around the house, but maybe i should start. would he appreciate it if i wrote him back with the same one-word economy? 'cause if i did, i would write down nothing but love.

3.

do you ever think about how weird life is? does anyone? i asked the guy who was ringing me up at the convenience store, my two packets of nissin ramen, carton of milk and a fuji apple, and he just stared at me, so i guess not.

but think about it! it's weird, right? when someone's two years older than you, they'll be two years older than you, forever. i think about the two years that hibari had before there was even a me at all, while i'm setting the table for dinner. chopsticks and chopstick holders; teacup for him, glass of water for me. two whole years on his own, alone in this wide world. i don't think he was lonely, though, because hibari doesn't ever get lonely. you could drop him out in the desert for forty days and nights and at the end of it he would probably just be kinda thirsty.

maybe i should be scared of how the days keep passing and i can't make them stop, how i can't even remember what i had for lunch tuesday last week. isn't that an important detail from my life? shouldn't i care if it was onigiri or soup or a pork bun or a cheese sandwich? even people with really good memories, the amount of stuff they've forgotten dwarfs the stuff they still retain. i wonder if hibari remembers what i cooked for him last week. it's not just food! there are real feelings in there. but see, people forget these things all the time, and they don't even notice that they're gone. i think i wouldbe scared, if i remembered how.

the way we live now is pretty simple - partly because i'm a simple guy, and partly because hibari's a simple guy, but mainly because we don't have a lot of money. college students rarely do. i told my dad i was moving out to live with a friend, and he said, oh, tsuna and co.? and i said yes, but guiltily. forgive me, hibari, for grouping you with the rest of us. it was for my dad's sake.

i've been thinking. is it normal to keep secrets from the person you love? like this one, and the one that gokudera made me swear never to tell hibari, and probably tons more that have slipped my mind. if hibari was keeping secrets from me, would i want to know? probably, i'd say. probably. i wouldn't have to know what they were; just that he had secrets at all, because then i would never stop learning about him.

4.

gokudera thinks i'm crazy. maybe it would have bothered me, except for the fact that he's like that with everyone - just a little rough around the edges. his mom died when he was little and his family was really strict after that, so it's like he has to show everyone that he's moved on. i think he's one of those people who can't really let things go.

for all his faults, though, he's a good guy! one of the best i know. the first time hibari and i kissed, i texted gokudera the news. first he said congratulations you moron, and then it took a while to convince him that i wasn't lying in a hospital bed, and even longer to assure him that i didn't need any medical attention at all. which was a lie, because right after the first time, hibari hit me so hard that it gave me a scar.

the second time was much better, though.

on the day i had my last college entrance exam in senior year of high school, gokudera gave me this mix cd he'd made. the jewel case was cracked and didn't close properly, and the album liner notes consisted of a single page torn out of a magazine which had 'gokudera's awesome mix cd' scribbled on one side and 'version: baseball idiot'on the other, but i loved it anyway. i listened to it in my room while lying on my futon, bobbing my head all the while.

hibari had asked me in a bored voice, sitting by the open window with the night breeze in his hair,

"is this what herbivores like?"

"guess so," i'd laughed, tapping my foot. "you don't like it?"

hibari didn't answer; he just hopped down from the sill and crawled over me, eyes-closed-heart-open. i couldn't say no, even if i'd wanted to. (which i didn't.) and i didn't have time to turn off the stereo, but that was okay, because there were people downstairs in the restaurant, not to mention my dad and everything. so we did it with the cd still going in the background, which was a good thing in the end because it was pretty noisy, for a first time.

afterwards i got up to shut the window because it was getting chilly, and if there was anyone standing in the street i probably flashed them, but i didn't care at all. the cd had looped around to the first track again, and hibari was lying on my futon without any clothes on. i tried not to look directly at him because it'd make me hard again, but when i lay back down at his side, it happened anyway. and maybe at the time i thought something like, man it's good to be young, or i wonder how many times we're going to do it, but maybe not. with hibari's hands on your chest and your neck and flat on your stomach, you stop thinking about anything at all.

5.

it probably doesn't make sense for someone like me to be in university, but after i threw my shoulder in high school it was never quite the same. and you know, i'm a pretty practical person, when it comes down to it. i couldn't be a burden to my dad, i've got to make a living eventually. so, education. 'sif calculus is going to make me a better person. i said this to gokudera once and he snorted at me like i had no idea what i was talking about. "education isimportant," he said, sounding like my dad, and then he hit me when i started laughing. but i can't help it, you can't force someone to care. on any given day i'm more likely to be thinking about what's for dinner, or baseball, or hibari. honestly i should just take over dad's restaurant and be done with it. at least i can understand sushi.

when hibari finds me moping on the couch, twisting my bad shoulder round and round to hear it creak, he tells me in a flat voice, "stop it."

"sorry," i say, and desist. he plops down on the couch next to me, switching on the tv. hibari watches the news like other people watch drama serials, so full of concentration. but i can't tell if he's really interested or if he's just feigning it for my sake. his hand's resting on his lap, temptingly, so i pick it up, and graze my lips against his knuckles. his fingers smell like ink, like toner; that closed stuffy copy-room smell of static and warm paper. must've been xeroxing pages out of one of those musty old legal tomes for his research.

"were you making copies again today?"

he flicks eyes over at me, bored.

"shush."

i grin and nip one of his fingers, and he retaliates by dragging me down onto the couch with him, eyes still fixed on the eight o'clock news.

"i said be quiet."

one arm wrapped around my middle, hibari holds me there with a knuckle pressed to my mouth, like affection or maybe a warning. so i take the hint. i lie there under him, just breathing quietly. in and out, in and out.

there on the screen is a cold world with a newscaster and bright lights and a desk. the papers she's shuffling around are props, but they look real to us.

when i kiss his hand again, the finger joint against my lips has a vague chemical taste.

time passes.

fin.