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alexiethymia · 18 days

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these proustian moments

fandom: 初恋 | First Love Hatsukoi (TV 2022)

pairing: noguchi yae/namiki harumichi

summary: the smell of lilac flowers. stargazing with the constellations on your face. your arms tight around me. the taste of a cigarette-flavored kiss. and a sad song I almost forgot.

all the ways in which I remember you

"Once in a while when I wake up, I find myself crying. The dream I must have had I can never recall, but the sensation that I’ve lost something lingers for a long time after I wake up"

-your name

v. smell

Yae has always loved purple lilacs.

She knows this. But as with most things in her life, she can’t, for the life of her, remember why.

She searches her memories – what’s left of it anyway – but can’t seem to ever find them there. Sensei had always gifted her red roses, from Tsuzuru, pink carnations. On a whim, she searches their meaning – first emotions of love, hatsukoi – and can’t understand the overwhelming ache she feels in her chest.

In those early days, she might have thought it was because of Sensei, but that life is a distant memory to her now. It doesn’t hurt her, can’t even compare to the sob she feels rising up her throat at the first scent of that beautiful bouquet.

why

It’s so painful but like a fool she takes a deep whiff anyway, breathing it all in, hoping that it cleanses her lungs. She can’t help it, she likes what she likes (even when it caused her pain – father, sensei, and…)

She knows that she’ll find purple lilacs in the blank spaces of the jigsaw puzzle that is her life – if only she was brave enough or fool enough to take the plunge.

She doesn’t jump (at least not yet) but at the edge she smells a whiff of…tomatoes? And pasta? Napolitan.

It goes perfectly with shrimps so she adds plenty.

Delicious, if she can say so herself. Or maybe, she thinks as she gazes at the man in front of her and smiles. Meals are always better when you’re not alone.

vi. sight

Yae has always loved stars.

She remembers countless night skies, of stargazing, of pretending that the city lights were stars on the ground when the sky was too polluted to see clearly, that it shouldn’t matter anyway, those nights she can no longer remember.

(and yet)

It was a comfort to gaze at those solitary lights in the sky, to know that even something so lonely could still shine so beautifully bright. Here on this grassy knoll she could look into the past, even if it was not her own. Somewhere up there, noguchi yae was tetherless, floating aimlessly out in space.

She wakes with a dream half-remembered. That is usual for her. What isn’t usual is that on this certain day, at this certain time, she wakes to constellations inside an old laundromat. How strange.

Eventually the constellations take shape in the form of a man. Oh, it must have been his beauty marks which put her in the mind of stars. And yet, she must still be groggy from her nap for the next thought to take hold – how beautiful.

He was crying, a solitary tear marking a shooting star’s path down his face. She did not know why and for what, and yet she still wanted to grieve with him. She remembers when she first beheld Tsuzuru, glancing at his grown-up self walking in front of her. She remembers joy. And side-by-side, the feeling of loss. Perhaps like her, he was grieving for lost wishes.

He was Tsuzuru’s friend, kind Namiki-san who fixed her washing machine and probably saved her life in the process. Nothing more and nothing less.

and yet

Like Mars, she finds herself drawing nearer, ever closer and closer.

To her surprise, he draws closer too.

But no matter how near Mars comes to Earth, they will never touch.

Just like stars.

‘What about binary stars?’

She reads the text and thinks carefully before answering.

‘They’re bound to and gravitationally orbit around each other.

But they’ll never touch.’

She focuses on those three dots with laser-marked intensity. But he doesn’t reply.

This is enough.

Somehow, it’s less lonely with him next to her on this grassy knoll. Even if she has to fix her gaze firmly skyward just so she doesn’t make a mistake.

“You know…” And first mistake made, she looks directly at him.

“About what you were saying earlier about binary stars, I read something called a contact binary. They’re binary stars who are so close together that they touch. They’re supposed to be really rare. Either they end up merging to become one or exploding into a supernova.”

She laughs to avoid crying, and tries to ignore the minute point where their fingers touch. Two stars at first contact. “Since when did you become such an astronomy expert?”

He smirks and it lifts his beauty mark slightly. Yae trembles, wanting so badly to touch it. “Since thirty minutes ago when you invited me to visit Mars.”

She wants so badly. To touch each mark, to trace, to complete an entire orbit around his face and find all of the hidden corners and to feel his cheeks when he smiles.

She wouldn’t mind bursting into a supernova as recompense.

She must have had nights like this, of someone’s warmth beside her and looking at a sky too small to contain everything. Of getting lost in city lights but a presence there to tether her regardless. Deeper and deeper the black hole in her heart sucks everything in.

As the night ends or the dawn begins, the feeling grows. She can’t explain it, this restlessness, this foreboding feeling tipping her over the edge, that something will go wrong.

And as usual for her, Yae runs.

But she can’t escape.

This should have been enough.

They were never supposed to touch.

No, she wasn’t meant to have been in his orbit in the first place.

Because he already has a fixed star, and Noguchi Yae is, once again, cut adrift and left tetherless.

She shouldn’t have wished for more.

iii. touch

Yae has always loved the cold.

She was as any true-born Hokkaido girl as can be.

Which is why she should have been able to shake off this chill freezing her bones, locking them in that she can hardly move.

What was wrong with her?

She should have wanted to see him. Just to see him.

(She doesn’t want to see him.)

She wants–

His arms tight around her, so intertwined that she no longer knows where she ends and where he begins, his fingers threading through her hair and cradling her face, looking at her as if she was life itself. She can’t place where his hands are at any given moment because they are restless on her, aflutter and anxious to touch every part of her he can reach. Safe, safe, safe.

She had never been held like this before. Sensei had always held her precisely as if he was handling one of his instruments. Eventually his arms had felt like cages.

The closest she can compare it to is Mama’s hugs or Tsuzuru’s when he was still just a child. Rather, it must have been her who held Tsuzuru so tightly like this. A family member’s all encompassing love.

But none with such desperation, as if he’d lose her if he let her go, as if he wished with all his heart that they could just merge to become one star just so no one had to leave ever again.

again?

Oh how shameful. It only took this warmth for the ice to melt and drip from her eyes onto his face. And now that she’s started, she can no longer stop. At this rate, would her heart eventually thaw too?

Later, she has the chance to meet his family. They’re lovely people but she wonders who his sister sees when she looks at her.

As if a forgotten reflex she shapes family with her hands. She stares at them as they stare at her, wondering how she could have known to do that.

She has no memory.

For whose sake did she learn this for?

She locks eyes with Namiki-san, hands trembling.

Still a little while later, when she is gone and has no way of knowing and Harumichi has finished explaining himself, Yu shouts at her beloved brother the only way she knows how, with as much movement as she can muster to give shape to her utter incredulousness at her brother’s stupidity. She doesn’t hold back with Airu asleep.

‘I know already. You don’t have to call me an idiot because I know I am one,’ he signs with an exasperated huff. Yu wants to say more but hesitates when she sees how his hand clenches and unclenches unconsciously, as if clutching at something unseen.

Yu knows all about phantom pain. Sure, it’s not as if she actually lost her ears, but sometimes she catches herself wondering if it would have been less painful had she been deaf from the beginning. Did it hurt more when you never had it? Or was it more painful to have lost it after having it?

Her brother is weighed down by guilt undeserved, for those he thinks he couldn’t save, her and Yae.

She likes Tsunemi. She thinks she’ll be good for her brother, that eventually she can banish those shadows. Yu doesn’t want to see those haunted eyes anymore. And yet, as if unconsciously, she signs ‘she remembered’.

Yu flinches at the pain she sees in her brother’s eyes before he closes them and looks away at some faraway place.

She recognizes this look. She’s seen it before countless times when her onii-chan would unconsciously track every passing mother and her children, or the way he’d sometimes look at her, Bonji and Airu when he thought they didn’t notice. A deep longing that couldn’t be filled.

Onii-chan and her, they were family. Family was there for each other, through thick and thin, against raging rivers and bullies alike. She knew that her brother’s heart was fit to bursting with love for his family, but there was a hole there that even they couldn’t fill, she knew that.

Tsunemi is family.

But, Yae was once family too.

And she’d never seen onii-chan look at Tsunemi this way.

Yu sees her brother laugh and though she can’t hear him sob, she can see the tears at the corner of his eyes well enough. Smiling sardonically at her, he signs, ‘I saved her. I saved her this time, Yu. I wasn’t too late.’

Looking at his fragile state as if ready to break to pieces at any moment, and not because of a back injury, Yu prays that it doesn’t happen again, that her stupid, honest and lovable onii-chan never ends up being too late ever again.

She fears what’ll happen to him if something happens to her. She won’t be able to take losing her one and only precious older brother.

She puts her fear in a box and hides it deep in her chest. What else can she do as a younger sister, but tell him proudly, ‘good work’.

Yae thinks that Namiki-san’s touch is heavy. It must be for her to still feel the impression of his touch days after he saved her.

She doesn’t mind.

She is drowning in guilt that she doesn’t mind, that she wants to treasure this memory.

Even his hand on her arm pulling her back is heavy. She wouldn’t be able to escape even if she tried (even if she wanted to).

And heavier still, is the touch of his lips on hers.

ii. taste

Yae has always loved mints.

She would chew on them constantly as if chasing away a certain flavor.

And as with most things in her life that she loves, she can’t remember why.

Something is telling her to pay attention. This is important it tells her. If you hide, if you let go, you’ll never get it back.

Her heart is missing pieces and she’s afraid to look inside because what if it’s just a hollow container. There will be no ballerina dancer waiting when she opens it. She doesn’t even know where or when to look for the pieces she lost.

But on a certain day, at this certain time, up on a mountain and underneath the stars, a puzzle piece clicks into place.

Ah, it was this taste she was searching for, even if she didn’t know she was actually looking.

(call it flavor)

If this feeling inside her chest had a scent, it would smell of lilac flowers.

If this feeling inside her heart that she doesn’t dare name had a taste, it would taste like bitter cigarette smoke.

For the longest time Yae had been cold. She thought she was fine with that, but Namiki-san was a flint while she was a stone and he lit sparks in her when they collided.

When their lips move together, she ignites like a supernova.

But a supernova destroys everything in its path, and a star is already dead, a shadow of itself. Eventually, it has to fall.

Yae has long stopped making wishes on shooting stars.

When she inhales cigarette smoke, it only makes her cough, choking her. How bitter.

If lies had a taste, they would be sweet and cold, like ice cream.

How funny, the ice cream she’s eating only taste like ashes in her mouth as she tells him that it’s a mistake to move forward.

She’s a stone. She’s fine with never moving from this place. She is.

She has to bite back tears when he apologizes. Stop that. She was made of sterner stuff than this. She had given up something (someone) much more precious than this.

Could a heart survive breaking to pieces twice?

The ice cream reminds her of every dessert and meal of when her father had given her the best parts. But never did he give her or her mother the best parts of himself. That’s how she finds her resolve, because no matter how she feels, she never wants to do to his star what was done to her mother.

She sounds lovely, the woman he’s set to marry. There is so much care in his voice when he talks about her that the dull aching in her chest doesn’t matter at all.

She’s fine with being a transient stop on his way to his final destination.

It takes a brave man to force her to face her cowardice. It takes Otaro-san trying so hard even with failure, with shame, with embarrassment, to get her to admit that even if she is only a transient stop, she still wants their encounter to have been a meaningful one. She doesn’t want him to forget her and she doesn’t want to forget him.

She’s sick of forgetting.

She is no stranger to shame. She could stomach anything, bear anything because of Tsuzuru. That love weighed heavier than anything that nothing else mattered. So she can be brave for him too. And for herself.

If regret had a taste, it would be salty, like napolitan mixed with tears.

It turns out a heart can survive after breaking countless times after all. Her pitiful heart was strong, or at least pretended that it was.

But she’ll still see him off with a smile. Because this was a fated encounter and he changed her life, and in her memories that’s how she wants to remember the both of them.

Thank you.

I love you.

i. sound

Yae has always loved music.

Even when she felt lost, music was her compass back to herself.

Her love only grows deeper when it brings her closer to her son.

That a combination of notes could thrum heartstrings was always magical to her.

Music, especially from far off lands, was the closest she would ever feel to soaring.

That she likens Namiki-san’s voice to music should be no cause for concern.

It’s just that, the first time she hears his voice, it had sounded so familiar, like the forgotten lyrics of a song you used to love.

Déjà vu. She’s been here before, heard her name get called by that voice countless times. It’s the same, but also not quite, like a beat that’s slightly off.

She’s confident she can know him by his voice alone, place him anywhere in a crowd.

(At this point, she had no way of knowing that Harumichi had picked hers out of a sea of radio waves, a needle in a haystack. He’d known her even then.)

At first she was fine with texts, but then she began to get greedy. Cellphones were magical tools. They could so easily connect hearts. When she reads about what flying is like for him, she hears his voice clear as if he was speaking right next to her ear. She swears she could feel herself flying alongside him.

But no one told her that music could also make her crash like an airplane or a meteor falling to earth.

She’ll never get to hear this voice again, talk to him again.

He wishes her happiness, and though Yae can’t imagine how, she promises she’ll try.

Our last kiss had a tobacco flavor.

It was a bitter and painful fragrance.

One by one, the puzzle pieces she’s gathered,

I wonder where you’ll be tomorrow at this time

And who you’ll be thinking about

click into place.

How could she have forgotten…

The most important…

Now it’s still a sad love song

Until I can sing a new one

She’s been called by that voice countless times before.

Noguchi. Noguchi-san. Yae.

A cocksure voice, brimming with kindness. A deeper timbre, more formal but no less kind.

An undercurrent that he had always imbued her name with and yet only now (too late) does she notice.

Noguchi-san

She wishes – on shooting stars and birthday candles – to hear him call her Yae once more. Even if he’s no longer here to grant even her most selfish of wishes.

It doesn’t matter that it’s not the him of ten years later that she failed to meet. It doesn’t matter if it’s seventeen years later or twenty years later. She’ll wait just like he’s been waiting all this time. She’ll search for him on the path he laid out for her. And she’ll find him just like how he found her.

Harumichi, Harumichi, Harumichi

Tsuzuru means ‘to bring together’.

Notes are easy enough to bring together to form a melody, but maybe he can be like his mother too and bring together people.

When did he realize…?

The notes themselves were important but so were the spaces between. Sometimes you didn’t even need words.

He never saw them together since he first introduced the cool security guard to his mom, but in retrospect maybe he should have realized the obvious. Because Harumichi looked at his mother the same way he looked at Uta, but with pain he couldn’t even begin to fathom beyond his adolescent years.

He doesn’t want his mother to cry anymore. He wants someone to love his mother as much as his mother loves with her entire being.

It could be Harumichi.

But he never said anything.

So Tsuzuru couldn’t say anything either.

When Harumichi decided to leave, Tsuzuru was holding himself back from shouting.

‘Don’t you know how cool my mom is? When you come back someone else would have snatched her already. If all you do is keep making her wait then you don’t deserve her!’

But that wasn’t Tsuzuru’s choice to make.

So he pretends he doesn’t see her tears when a song makes her remember.

When his mom risks her life and limb (and his!) just to make it to the airport, that’s when he knew, she really was the coolest mom ever!

For bringing him and his first love together, the least he could do was reunite her with hers.

It takes too many years for his liking. Harumichi is hardly in one place at a time. For a while, he even vanishes. But when he eventually tracks the wily bastard to Iceland and even gets visual confirmation from Uta, he could almost sing and shout.

Instead he calls his mom.

o. sense

Yae has always loved Harumichi.

Even when she forgot him, yes even then.

Something in her had always loved him, something that couldn’t forget, maybe her very soul.

Icelandic winters aren’t any colder than Hokkaido ones but she’s perfectly fine where she is, cozy and toasty in Harumichi’s arms. There’s nothing frantic or guilty about him now. He looks like there’s nothing weighing him down. Simply put, he looks at peace.

When she looks at him, Yae remembers a passage from an English novel, about souls and what they were made of. Her mind is fuzzy as she thinks of orbiting satellites, steady and constant. Of twilights and halfway points. Of a one in a six billion chance. She’s at peace too.

At her look, Harumichi squeezes her tighter and asks her wordlessly.

“It’s nothing…just, would you laugh at me if I told you I also fell in love with you at first sight?”

He smiles, teeth showing. “The first time or the second time?”

She huffs but lets him have it. He deserved it. They deserved this easiness after everything. “The second time.”

“Of course you did,” he replies while nuzzling the side of her head and bringing their noses together in an eskimo kiss, “I fell in love with you again and again every time I saw you.”

There are no flowers here, no color. Everything is white, or grey or blue as far as the expanse can be seen. She feels weightless like they’re in outer-space.

But the light shines on the ice turning it into glass, and the air smells clean. There’s a steady supply of corn potage to keep them warm. The both of them are listening to Tsuzuru’s new track on their old cd player when ‘U’ starts and as the familiar notes play, she turns and brings her arms around a familiar body. She knows it as well as she knows her own.

Her favorite scent. Her favorite taste.

A cigarette kiss to keep them both warm. As they open their mouths she feels her toes curl in her boots. He holds her tighter if that were even possible.

If there are tears in their eyes, she doesn’t see them. The wind is too cold here and turns them into flurries soaring and flying up to the sky.

When they separate, a mere hair’s breadth apart, Harumichi whispers against her lips, “Hey, would you laugh at me if I asked you to marry me here and now?”

My tears, silently trickling down my cheek

They tell me…

It turns out she can feel those tears after all. The cold is a shock to her system. Like a live wire she pounces on him with the snow cushioning their fall.

“Oof. Be careful, we’re not as young as we used to be. I don’t want to be rolled in a wheel chair to my own wedding,” he chides while brushing off snow drifts from her hair, and then threading his fingers through the strands.

“Speak for yourself,” she jokes with her tongue out. And well Harumichi can’t have that. She’s just too cute for words sometimes. Rolling them both over while cushioning her head, he kisses her deeply, like a man who’s loved her for over twenty years.

He doesn’t want to wait anymore.

It’s hard to kiss her like this when she keeps on giggling but Harumichi wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s always loved a challenge.

“Your mom would kill you if we got married without your family present.”

He shrugs.

“Fine, but I’m sure Yu definitely would.”

At that scary thought, he has to pause.

“We’ll get married back in Japan then. So would you? Please marry me so I can fulfill my long-held dream of having a beautiful flight attendant for a wife.”

‘So that I can fulfill my dream of making you happy, for the rest of our lives.’

Yae snorts from laughing so much, but Harumichi finds even that adorable. “Yes, of course. How could my answer be anything else? I didn’t chase you down here just to be a kept woman you know.”

There are no words for the happiness that Harumichi feels right now. It feels so much bigger than his entire body can contain. Rolling them over once again so that Yae lays on top of him, he just cradles her close, hugging her tightly and with the same feelings that once lovestruck boy felt when his first love had first said ‘yes’.

Later, they’ll head home together, perhaps warm up with a bath before making love with the stars as their only witness. At this same time tomorrow, the love of his life will be his wife, because there is absolutely no way he can wait. He’s getting a ticket first thing for the first flight back to Japan tomorrow. Hell, he’ll even fly the plane if he has to.

For now, on a certain day at this certain time, he imagines his first love in a wedding dress as pure and white as snow.

That this is my first love

I need you, I need you

#first love: hatsukoi #first love hatsukoi #first love #noguchi yae #namiki harumichi #jdrama #fic #fanfic #this was a perfect drama #someone put it best #a love letter to love #and this fic is a love letter to it #how to hyperfixate??#write a fic about a series that already ended #but even if no one reads this #this is for me to let go of the words stuck inside my head

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