Passion, From Ry

Roses, red and fully blossomed, glistening with dewdrops—the type the shop added before delivery. Manufactured glamour. Tak knew this, even as he acknowledged that he could care less. Because he’d been sent flowers.

Roses, he thought numbly.

“They’re from Ry!” exclaimed the boss, looking around at the others with astonishment. Can you believe this? said his expression when he turned to Tak. “Ry Takahashi!”

Tak shrank back momentarily, as the glistening mass of red had suddenly lurched for his nose.

“Read it, Tak!” urged Cole, eyes wide. Eager. Tak glanced between his friends, suddenly nervous. Roses, said his mind again as he reached to grab the stems.

“It’s . . .” He turned the card over, scanned the back for the barest instant, before looking again at the slanted writing he’d never before seen. “It’s a date,” he said, turning his head to the side to view the interesting curve of Ry’s 2 in a new way. Slowly, Tak came to realize the atmosphere of the group had changed. He looked up, nonplussed. What? his expression asked, innocently clueless.

It was the boss who cleared his throat and spoke first. “A date, huh. . . .”

Tak’s eyes bulged. “Eh? No!” He hurried to shake his hands and indicate a full-body negative, but the roses rustled dangerously and he was distracted. His face lost its frantic quality as he calmly corrected the flowers in his grasp.

“Flowers and everything . . .” murmured Kenji. “Didn’t know Rai was . . . uh, ya know—”

“That way,” finished the boss for him. Kenji nodded, his face a bit uncomfortable, and a bit more confused than that, as if he had yet to fully absorb the situation.

Tak scratched under his chin nonchalantly, gazing pensively to the right, head again cocked. “Date, as in he’s given me a date and time to meet him on Akina. He wants a race,” Tak explained. A sudden and brief widening of eyes traveled around the group, looping around and excepting Tak only.

“Oh!” was unanimously exclaimed, before a small and uncomfortable outbreak of chuckles claimed all but the man staring down at the roses another man had sent him.

“It was way too easy to believe Ry and Tak were . . .” Kenji trailed off. It was some time later, and they’d just gotten off work.

Cole nodded at his side. “Yeah,” he agreed, looking shell-shocked. “I know what you mean.”

--

The next day, Tak strolled beneath cultivated trees with Natalie, his eyes on the sky. The condensed moisture he knew to make up the clouds reminded him of the misters the flower shop must have used on the roses before delivery. He’d been remembering them a lot throughout the day. . . .

He then remembered the date sprawled in elegantly casual writing, and his mind slipped to the race . . . the race he hand been imagining since receiving the card, since the flowers.

Sure, he thought to himself as he imagined tailing Ry’s car through a corner. Send me flowers, Ry. Invite me to a race with the symbol for passion. It fits.

Driving was his passion, no matter that it escaped him just how this had come to be. Ry must share this passion—must feel it rushing thought his body at the image of racing after Tak . . . right? The flowers meant . . . Ry was looking forward to the race, Tak thought. This in itself seemed to bring something like the passion of driving to life in his chest. Just the thought of it . . .

“Tak?” His head snapped up from where he’d unknowingly allowed it to slump over. “Huh?” Tak turned and found Natalie studying him coyly from the corner of her eye. “Sorry. What were you saying?”

“Tak . . .” She turned toward him. “Where are you today?”

He blinked. On Akina, racing passionately with Ry. “Walking with you in the park, last time I checked.”

Natalie’s face colored, and Tak thought belatedly that he should’ve just apologized again. He hurried to do so.

“I’m sorry, Natalie, I’ve just got a bit on my mind.”

She turned away from him and let her fingertips skim a low-hanging branch’s leaf-clusters. She was silent for a moment, then, “Do you remember our first date, Tak? You were like this then, too. . . . And I thought it was cute.”

Tak scratched the underside of his chin uncomfortably, wondering if she required an answer.

“In fact,” she continued, “it’s always been like this. Me, you . . . and whoever else you’re always thinking about.” Natalie’s voice had grown unusually quiet, and Tak could do nothing but stare at her, mouth slightly open. “Who is she?” Natalie asked, skimming the leaves again.

Tak thought he’d choked on air. “It’s not a she!” he protested, struggling to understand the drastic turn in conversation. Natalie turned wide eyes on him, hand frozen in the air.

“S . . . so, it’s a—a he?” she strained, incredulous.

“Er . . .” Tak fidgeted, less than at ease. “Well, this time it was. I guess. . . .” He scratched his chin again, baffled. Meanwhile, Natalie looked affronted.

“So,” she started again, hand lowering, “y . . . you think of girls and . . . boys?” Her voice squeaked painfully on the last word. Tak raised an eyebrow, nonplussed. He thought maybe by now he should have had a T-shirt declaring him to be so.

“Well, yeah. . . .” He shrugged. Do I think about boys and girls? he thought. Why? Should I only think of one or the other? Or only one at a time? “Natalie, I don’t really see what you’re getting at,” he said, a hand raising idly to scratch the side of his face, as this conversation seemed to constantly call for.

Her face pinked again. “W-well . . . yeah,” she copied, sighing slightly. “I guess you wouldn’t. Good for you. Out and proud.” She smiled and beamed up at him as he made a general “I’ve no idea what you mean, and am not entirely sure I wish to” sound. “Don’t worry,” she continued, winking and holding up a finger. “I won’t tell.”

“That I’m . . . outside?” he asked, eyebrows raised questioningly. She giggled and leaning in conspiratorially.

“Riiight.” She winked again. Tak, feeling very much like an island wrapped, not in water, but a gap in understanding, thought to himself—I’d rather be racing Ry.

--

The race had come. They sky glowed pink and orange behind Ry’s still silhouette, and Tak thought again of roses. Of passion. Of chasing Ry. . . . Of being chased, he wondered.

Ry stepped out and away from his car, closing the door behind himself. Slowly, and with definite steps, he approached Tak. With each clearly heard foot-fall, a portion of the onlookers faded away, until even Cole, who had a moment before stood behind him, ceased to exist. And Ry was three feet in front of him. Tak imagined them connected by a thick stem, mangled with thorns and burning with the heat in his chest—the heat dewy roses said Ry felt as well, Tak thought.

“Takumi Fujiwara.” Ry pronounced his name easily and clearly, his voice pleasant with focused, powerful energy. Tak’s heartbeat intensified.

“Ry Takahashi.” He let the other hear it, too. The vibrating, expectant tension between them—embodied by the purrs of their cars—had brought a smile to his lips. He saw it returned on Ry’s face.

“I’ve looked forward to this.”

I knew it, breathed something in Tak, as the passion broke over his skin in prickling waves.

“Me too.”

--

He was a mouse. Chased by the most dangerous of felines, Tak raced away from failure, heart thudding with the thrill. A corner came and passed, the cat so close as they drifted he might’ve stretched out his neck and flicked his tongue over Tak’s tail. But he couldn’t, and that was the best. Ry couldn’t reach out and tease him, prod him to go the tinniest bit faster—because he wasn’t playing; he was stalking.

Tak felt a prickling at his neck. A heat that burned cold and hot on his senses raged over his face, and he sweated. Like the misted pedals of passion—beads of perspiration rolled down his face as his stomach lurched with the chase. The excitement—utter and extreme—chafed violently at his nerves.

Many corners in, the agile, purring cat behind him still breathed down his neck. It sent chills down his spine. He wiped the sweat from his brow as he raced on, mouth slightly agape. His nerves were bleeding.

Drift after drift—repeated glances back—and, suddenly, Ry was falling back. What? He frowned at the reflection of retreating headlights, the absence of breath on his shoulder more unsettling than its presence—before looking forward again, and he realized.

He sucked breath in harshly, braked as fast as he dared, and turned desperately as the pressure vanished—but the disappointment glinted malevolently in the shadows of the corner.

No.

He’d lost it.

No.

Ry was passing him.

No.

Was the passion gone?

Numb, he continued the race. He didn’t feel like a cat, excited and salivating on the mouse’s tail. He felt like the mouse that had cracked and cornered himself at the best part of the chase. The mouse that had fallen remarkably, horribly short of expectation.

He turned, and drifted, and followed an automatic line—heart sinking as he went. Was this what it felt to lose?

Eons of disbelief and agonizing feelings of failure seemed to drag on—before he noticed, with shocked hope, the nearer appearance of Ry’s tail lights. He was stunned, momentarily paralyzed. But then, determination set in, and as “I’ve lost” became “I can still win,” passion enflamed him.

He followed his instinct, he followed the unending depths of his emotion, and then—he followed the groove, right to Ry’s tail. His chest surged with heat—it felt something like happiness, but the feeling of becoming the cat, of breathing down Ry’s neck, was the realization of passionate ambition.

The last stretch began to run underneath them—and Tak took the outside, drifted there as his heart pounded. He pressed, waiting for an option—a moment in which to strike and claim whatever it was they were racing for—and in a moment of slow clarity, he watched Ry drift away from the inside. And Tak took it.

And Tak won.

He passed a girl, on his way to the finish, who giggled behind her hand and raised a feminine fist in encouragement.

“You go, Tak!” she yelled, smiling with slight giddiness. “Out and proud!”

--

Ry stood, hand on the hood of his car as he stared down at it fondly. “You are . . .” he spoke, smiling slightly—if strangely. “Unique. Very special . . . to have beaten me. . . .” He looked up at Tak, and found his expression to be that of one who couldn’t say for certain whether they’d won or lost. “I’d like to see you again sometime,” he said.

Tak looked up at him. “Like with the roses? You want another race?” he asked, forgetting momentarily that he could not identify what he’d won. A sound, pleasing like the purr of expectation between them before the race, reached Tak. Ry had chuckled.

“Would you like to go out with me?” Ry asked, and Tak, in his bewilderment, remembered asking Natalie, “What? . . . Like outside?”

“I’d like to experience passion with you again,” Ry said, and Tak’s mouth made a slow, numbly shocked “O” shape as he watched. “Date” and “out” obtained new meaning as he stared back. A slow inkling came to him that this was what he had won.

“Yeah.”

More roses.

-end-

A/N:

I wrote this after watching episode twenty-two for the second time—and giggling insanely at the roses Ry had thought appropriate to send Tak. The first time I’d seen it, I’d overlooked it as one of those gay things straight guys in anime are so adept at doing—but really, what a waste is that? I thought I’d use it this time around. I followed inspiration, and so this—Passion, From Ry—came to be.

I hope you enjoyed reading this silly one-shot! Please tell me what you think of it!