Chapter Text
Shuumei first came to me in a dream years before I ever put him to paper.
Never before had I been one to have vivid dreams. In fact, most of my life until that point I hardly remembered any dreams. In the morning, I would recall having had dreams, vague pieces scattered throughout my consciousness like holding five pieces of a thousand piece puzzle. Enough to know a larger picture was there, but nothing to give a strong inclination of what happened. To my memory, I never had a time in which I didn’t dream at all, but my dreams eluded me constantly until my first semester of high school. Like the flick of the switch, everything suddenly became so vivid and real.
He was my first dream to stick with me. It was as if I were seeing color for the first time in my life. Bright, beautiful shades of his ginger hair, his glowing smile, the light brown of his eyes. His laugh sang through my ears like sweet melodic chords. At that point, nothing specific stood out to me regarding who he was or what he was doing - just flashes of this figure that consumed my consciousness for weeks to follow. The dreams felt so real , so sharp to my senses that believing them to be works of my imagination became difficult the more that flashes of this mystery man haunted my dreams. I wanted to know him, I wanted to understand him, I wanted to reach out to these floating pictures to grasp at anything I could learn.
Once upon a time, I remember hearing that the people we see in dreams are always people we have met in real-life, that our brains never create “characters” for our unconscious theater. Whenever I racked my brain to try to understand where this person came from, I could never point anywhere in particular. He looked much older than me, too old to be someone from either my middle school or high school. Perhaps a college student? But I never spent much time around the local universities, and even then the man looked older still. Being an only child, the social circles I swam around really only included peers and my parent’s friends - and I knew for a fact that none of my parents' friends looked like that . It was entirely possible that this piece of knowledge was wrong - that somehow my mind had, in fact, created this character entirely out of thin air, maybe from a mixture of actors I saw in movies and protagonists in some of the early manga I read before my passion grew to what it is today. Even still, thinking him to be a figment of my imagination felt impossible - everything about him just seemed so real.
He visited my dreams for at least six months before I heard his name. In the dream, it was my voice that said it. When I did, the perpetual smile on his face lit up further.
“Shuumei.”
He was beautiful.
As soon as I had a name to the face, I couldn’t hold back any further. I had to draw him.
I had to find a way to bring him into my world, to validate the overbearing realness flooding my dreams of him. Back then, I was drawing out of a directionless hobby. It was what filled my freetime, what gave me a sense of purpose outside of school, yet I didn’t know exactly why just yet. Prior to Shuumei, I drew mostly what I saw around me in my day-to-day. Neighborhood cats, faces of actors on my mother’s television shows, different angles of my bedroom. Drawing was fun, but he became my first real muse.
I drew him every day. I tried my best to recreate my dreams so that I could see him in the daylight. I needed to validate the overwhelming sensation that this person was real, a living and breathing piece of the world around me.
As I walk through the door to my first apartment, the bizarre thought strikes me that I am standing here because of those dreams.
The apartment is far from glamorous. Just because at age twenty-three I can afford my own place apart from my parents does not mean I can afford a nice place apart from my parents. Upon entry, the space looks dark. It’s around noon outside, but the few windows all point towards a nearby building which blocks off the stream of sunlight that could be lighting up the space. The first thing to my right is a narrow kitchenette, enough space for someone my size to cook but that’s about it. To my left is the humble water closet, including a bathtub that hurts my back just looking at it. Straight ahead I see the main space of the studio, decorated with the few furniture pieces that come with the place, thankfully. A dinner table for two and a full mattress. Altogether, the space must barely be twenty square-meters, in spite of the twenty-five the landlord promised over the phone. It’s my fault, really, for only looking at the pictures, but this apartment is the cheapest one in the okayest part of town, and the only coffee shop within walking distance of my parent’s home that allowed for privacy closed down a month ago. Living alone would just make things easier.
If circumstances were different, I would consider living under their roof a little bit longer, saving up further to avoid a starving artist lifestyle in the middle of Tokyo while I get my bearings about me. Not that I’m starving, that’s certainly dramatic, but elbow room isn’t something I can splurge on, not yet with the infancy of my career. Most of my cousins continue to live at home, some only having moved out after getting engaged or married. If I were in any other career, things would be different, but I’m struggling at this point to keep up the facade that I’m working a desk job at a publishing company.
Eventually, I will have to tell my parents that I’m a manga artist, which will inevitably end with them asking what I write.
The thought of that conversation makes my stomach churn. Indeed, moving out was a necessary evil to put that discomfort as far away as I can. For now, I will stick in the shadows, with only close friends knowing about my profession and a carefully constructed pen name to hide my identity.
I don’t have much on me as I step further into my new abode - an overstuffed backpack and two exhausted suitcases follow me through. At some point later today, my father intends to drive by with a few of my boxes - mostly full of my manga collection, many of the volumes having gone from hiding under my bed for years to being packed into boxes in the middle of the night underneath old papers and knick-knacks. My guilty pleasure treasure trove of some of my most prized possessions.
With a heavy sigh, I abandon my suitcases and pack on the floor right beside my bed in order to heave myself onto the naked mattress. Falling face first into the fabric, there’s an old smell to it - not dirty, not mildewy, but definitely old. I try my best not to think of the sorts of people who lived in this place before me, who slept on this very bed. I should get a mattress pad, shouldn’t I? Another item to put on the ever-growing shopping list.
This past week has been filled with packing, panicking, and my parents insisting on taking me on several big “moving out” trips around town with them, despite the fact that I’ve only moved about a twenty minute drive away from my childhood home. Close enough for comfort. In all the chaos and concern, my work fell to the wayside. I know a deadline hangs above my head like a sword, with only two more weeks to have my final draft of the current chapter completed. Staring up at the ceiling, which sports only a few water stains on it, I find it difficult to imagine getting much work done in the dim light of my new cave. I’d have to invest in a lamp sooner than the mattress pad - the only overhead lights I see are in the kitchen, and there’s no way I could set up shop in the narrow space between the wall and the oven.
My stomach churns as I close my eyes. I can hear the pitter-patter of someone’s dog above me as well as a rumble of a couple arguing below. Paper thin walls, another beautiful feature.
I miss my home. I miss the smell of dinner cooking in the kitchen. I miss my mother’s smiling face greeting me when I get home every day, asking me about work. I miss my father’s laughter from the other room when he talks with her. I miss the familiar four walls of my bedroom where I blossomed into the awkward man I am today.
My stomach churns again as I think about having to cook for myself. My father, of course, promised to accompany me on my first outing to the nearest grocery store, but nothing I can buy can make-up for the fact that my attempts at creating an edible meal are subpar at best. Even the “fool-proof” meals my mother tried to teach me in the past few weeks ended with smoke and burnt edges and mushy rice. Without a doubt, I’d have to familiarize myself with the local restaurants to be sure I eat something that resembles food once in a while.
After at least a half-hour of staring at the ceiling and anxiously contemplating my entire existence, I push myself onto my feet and start unpacking.
*
I give working from home the old college try. I sincerely do.
I want it to work so bad, but I spent eight hours looking at the same panel on day one.
On days two and three, I try everything at my disposal. I go across the neighborhood to get a damn lamp, I try at least ten different spots to work from, I shove plugs into my ears to try to stop the grating sound of a constantly excited dog running across my ceiling. Beyond the discomfort and the distraction, the biggest hurdle I can’t seem to overcome is the spiral of my thoughts.
Being a relatively introverted person, I always figured I would enjoy living alone. Having a space completely for me, not needing to go out and force conversations all day with family or classmates or neighbors, always sounded wonderful. My own nook where I don’t have to worry about who’s peeking over at my notes or feel the need to only read my manga in the dead of night with a flashlight underneath the covers of my bed. For someone like me, this level of privacy should be paradise, even in the face of the less than ideal conditions.
It takes maybe a few hours for me to miss my parents terribly. Not their laughter or the environment they cultivated, but the presence of someone that cares about me and who I care about.
I wish I’d kept in better contact with friends from high school and university. Of course, I send and respond to texts from time-to-time, but I’ve never been particularly good at arranging hangouts or calling people on the phone. After graduation, the majority of my social interaction has been with my parents and the barista at the cafe by my parents’ house. None of those people are regularly at my disposal anymore, though.
I know there is at least someone that lives in this area, but I struggle to remember who. Someone I went to high school with for sure, which narrows the list down some. I know Kuresawa moved to live with his girlfriend in a quaint neighborhood not far from his university and Tashiro continues to live with his parents a few blocks north of our old high school, so it’s neither of my two “regular” friends from that time period, the only two I’ve really kept any assemblance of contact with. Must be someone that did slip through the gigantic cracks in my communication.
Regardless, the loneliness and disorder of my new setting rendered me useless by day four. With the clock ticking constantly, I have no choice come day five but to migrate.
Finding a place where I can work is as easy as cake - that is, cake made by me which inevitably ends in a disgustingly sweet taste when I spill double the amount of sugar into the mixture and becomes littered with pieces of white shells at my clumsy attempts at cracking eggs. I’d lucked out the day I discovered my old stomping grounds, a cafe about five blocks east of my old home. It was wonderfully quiet with an upstairs that was virtually abandoned most days. The perfect place for someone like me to get work done. It would be impossible to find some place like that, but staying at home would result in me professionally shooting myself in the foot.
And, this chapter is so important. It’s the chapter where my protagonist, Soma, first realizes he has feelings for the love interest, Shuumei. It’s not something I can just phone in - it’s a delicate moment that deserves proper care and attention. On one hand, it’s terrifying to go runoff into an unknown setting to work on something that would be terribly embarrassing to be caught drawing in public, but on the other hand, it’s terrifying to think of screwing up such an important moment in my story because I can’t put the proper concentration into the work.
So I take to the internet. I identify a handful of cafes in walking distance before doing my best to search through customer reviews and company websites to get a look inside the layout of these places. Were there corners where I could be unbothered? Were there nooks where regular customers wouldn’t go? Would it be possible to go relatively unnoticed as I work on my shameful craft? Would I be safe sitting there, depicting one of the more taboo forms of love? Not that there was anything graphic - I have no interest in writing that sort of story. It’s not as if I’m actually interested in seeing men do that .
In my phone, I type up a running list of potential spots: Espresso House, La Foret Cafe, and the Screamin’ Beans. The last one sounds intimidating, so I decide to work my way through the first two before going anywhere that coffee beans might be screaming.
Espresso House turns out to be the closest of the three to my apartment, so with my entire “workstation” stashed away in my backpack, I walk the ten minute trail over there. It’s at the corner of a busier intersection, which should have been my first warning. The second I enter through the doors, I’m hit with the cacophony of a loud gathering of students, businessmen, and various others lined up waiting impatiently for their orders. At least one patron accompanies every table, all of them within clear view of the door. Before I even have a moment to consider looking toward their menu, I make a b-line to the door.
There’s no way, no way I could ever do productive work there.
I pull up the map on my phone. The Screamin’ Bean is technically the next closest stop, but my initial hesitation with that place seems warranted when I notice that it’s right across the street from a local university building. Another hot spot for chaos and millions of nosy eyes staring at me while I try to work. Absolutely not.
That leaves the third option, the smallest of the three cafes from what I can tell. Looking at the map, it will be a longer walk from home, maybe something that it would be better to bus to, but it’s more remote location feels promising. From what I recall of the pictures I’d looked up (photos clearly taken by a phone, posted onto a social media page for the coffee shop), the cafe is all one room, but the tables stood further from one another and a few of them were even booths, a promise of relative privacy if I could be sure to land one during trips.
The hot sun of early summer makes the long walk less than pleasant, but I cannot abandon my mission. I think about my protagonists, about the images I’ve plotted out in my mind of the first time their hands touch as they both reach for the door at just the same time, the look in Shuumei’s eyes I’ve seen in my dreams a million times over and need to recreate so I can truly bring him to life.
My muse.
What I do might be embarrassing. It might be a point of easy ridicule and judgment from strangers and loved ones alike. It might raise uncomfortable questions about who I am, about my personal identity. It might lead to unnerving assumptions and people wanting distance from someone like me. It might make people see me in a new light. It might be something I can never tell anyone, but it will never not be important to me.
From afar, you may not even realize this place is a cafe. It’s only up close that you can see the Roman lettering, written in cursive so that the foreign word melts together. La Foret. I wonder if the owner’s French or if they’re just a fan. More often than not, it’s the latter. As I push the door open, a gentle bell rings above my head.
I’m greeted by the beautiful smell of freshly ground coffee before I’m greeted by what I see. A relatively empty space, one timid-looking university student standing near the counter, as if waiting for her drink to arrive and one older man in one of the booths, nose thoroughly buried in a newspaper as a croissant sits half-eaten by his elbow. At the counter itself stands a pointedly tall man with wide doe eyes, a body that tells me he must be a grown adult around my age but with a face that screams youth. The second the bell sings out, his wide, dark eyes stare at me awkwardly before he attempts a welcoming smile. Either he’s new here, or he’s kinda bad at customer service. I suppose I’m not the one to cast the first stone in this case. Behind the wall of coffee machines, I see the top of the head of whoever works alongside this grown boy, but past the flash of dyed hair, I can’t tell much about them.
The hair color reminds me so much…
I shake the thought from my head. I’m here on a mission. So far everything about this place feels right, but I need to grab a drink to justify my presence before I start taking the coffee shop on its first test run.
Just as uncomfortable, I offer up a smile back at the barista as he asks for my order.
“A small coffee, please,” I say, surprisingly able to speak without my voice cracking. I almost expected that speech would be difficult, considering I haven’t actually talked with a human being since my father helped me unpack groceries into my limited cabinet space.
The barista nods, going to grab a cup before a stray elbow nudges at him and whoever hides behind the machines whispers something assertively. “Oh, yeah, um - cream or sugar?”
I shake my head. “No, just black.”
It’s not that I particularly like the taste of black coffee, but trying to drink something sweet ruins the experience for me.
After we exchange a name for the order and a modest payment for the modest drink, I scope out the seating arrangements. I’m called to one booth in particular, stationed neatly against the back corner of the room. Not perfectly hidden, but hidden well enough that unless someone is pointedly going to sit by me, no through traffic would be perturbing me. The best seat in the house.
I place my pack down on the seat closest to the back wall, claiming a position so I could have eyes on the cafe around me at any given time. Another assurance that stray eyes wouldn’t be coming to attack me from behind and disturb my artist domain.
It’s unfortunate in the end that I end up feeling so comfortable at this moment. It only makes the following shock more poignant.
I don’t pay much mind to what’s in front of me when my name is called out from behind the counter, my eyes instinctively focusing backward to where my backpack is at the table. Even in a place so small and empty, the constant paranoia of someone for some reason digging in my bag and looking through my work has trained my eyes to stay glued to my personal items. In public, I find myself more afraid of someone looking through my bag rather than someone actually stealing anything. This focus prevents me from getting a good eye at the person handing me my coffee before it’s too late.
“Small black coffee.” The voice practically sings the order as he extends his coffee-bearing hand out to me. It’s a voice I’ve heard before, but never like this. Never in the light of day.
His ginger hair hangs long and messy over and around his face, partially concealing the light brown of his upturned eyes, his gaze glowing through the spaces between his bangs. Alongside the unnatural color of his hair, his ears are covered in piercings, a purposefully asymmetrical array of jewelry on each side. In spite of the initial bad boy appearance of his modifications, the smile he offers me is wide and bright, comforting and kind with a touch of humor to it. I can just see the tiny hint of a snaggletooth along the side of his smile as he grins with his teeth. He towers over me, making me look at him from a particular angle that feels familiar and natural.
Just like I’ve always seen him.
I drop the cup just as it’s handed off to me, hot coffee spilling all over the counter and floor.