Valentine’s Day.
It really meant very little to him, that particular day. Gone were the days of the shop when the girls would flood through the doors, carrying their offerings of chocolate for each of them. It had always made him feel uncomfortable, neither having the knack that Yohji did for smiling and flirting and thanking, nor Omi’s innocence despite his occupation or his talent for blushing at the most appropriate moment. Even Ken’s confused embarrassment was beyond his capabilities.
All three of them knew and understood what the day would bring and accepted it, perhaps even welcomed it. Certainly Omi enjoyed the seemingly endless amounts of chocolate that he consumed while staying up late to finish his homework. It was all so effortless to his teammates and coworkers. For him, it was yet another reminder that he’d forgotten how to live a normal life.
Then again, in his own defensive, he’d never been that good with people. He was smart and clever, shy and reserved. Enjoyment meant a thick book that he could spend hours reading. It had not once meant, ever, the company of crowds or the giggling of a blushing girl. His parents and his sister, the other waiters at the restaurant – sometimes it had meant them. Not always, not even his sister whom he adored.
Yohji had once accused him of being cold and emotionless. Stood right in his face and pronounced him dead before his time. Unmoving, unfeeling, uncaring…simply unable. It amazed Yohji that someone of his beauty would be so foul of temperament. That someone like him could be without passion. Like nothing before, it had hurt. Those words, spoken by the one person he thought himself close to had, with their sharpness, wounded him so greatly that he was laid bare in an instant. He could remember his retaliation, remember the rebukes and the retorts as he shouted himself hoarse.
He’d surprised himself to be sure, but had surprised Yohji more. Everything he was and everything he had been he shared with the man who’d been more of a friend and brother than any he’d known. He expected Yohji to be disgusted or to leave, unwilling to deal with this particular incarnation of himself. He didn’t. He stayed. He took him in his arms and held him through the tears of frustration and shame. He hugged him and kissed him and comforted him and loved him. By the next morning, his brother was his lover.
For the first time in a long time, there was rightness in his world. There was something – someone – who could make sense of the nightmare of living. Love couldn’t cleanse all his sins, but it could feed his soul and mend his spirit. He found it oddly easy, all things considered, to love Yohji utterly and completely. He suspected he had loved the man from the beginning.
And it was good, as good as it could be, for a couple of years. Until Fate stepped in with her heavy hand and her sense of fairness and irony and before she departed nothing was the same. Omi had become Persia and a true Takatori despite, much earlier, needing to hear that he wasn’t. Ken and his bloodlust had retreated to Tokyo prison. Yohji had disappeared. Perhaps not in body, but in spirit and memory. Now Itou Ryo. Now married. No longer his. Years in the making, moments in the destruction.
Certainly he had not been left unchanged. He was soul-sick again, yearning for someone who could not, would not, recognize him. Death became his only companion and in the end, the only soulmate he was suited for it seemed. Still, there was a sense of self that came with remembrance and nostalgia. He understood far more than he had before. And when a new team took him in, he could show them glimpses of who he was without fear of exclusion.
He smiled, sometimes, in front of the others. He could do that now. Being loved, even if that love was no more, altered a person in ways that could not be undone. He was, strangely, grateful for that fact. Yohji had taught him, so long ago, what it meant to be Aya. For that, and for all else, he thanked the man often. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing.
If not for that one Valentine’s Day...
Aya glanced over the arrangement of deep red roses, surveying his work with a critical eye. Finding nothing lacking, he tied the finishing bow around the fragile crystal vase and smiled, pleased. So too, was the customer when he returned from the back and presented it to the young man. The traditions of the holiday were quite different in England than Japan, but Aya certainly didn’t mind.
Gone where the throes of girls with their chocolate gifts, it was true, but the loving spirit of the holiday remained. In fact, truth be told, Aya found this means of celebrating the day far more acceptable. Yohji always did say he was a romantic at heart.
And, if somewhere in Japan, a handsome salary man was eyeing the assortment of roses and cattleyas that had appeared on his desk whose card said only I will love you always, what did it matter if he assumed they were from his wife? Aya knew the truth. That was all that mattered now.