Gravitation Fan Fiction ❯ Langer Schlaf: The Long Sleep ❯ One ( Prologue )

Langer Schlaf

By Nix Winter

Disclaimer… I don't own Gravitation.

Spoilers… um.. not really any so far.. though it is set after the series and OAV's… and who knows.. it might be AU to the manga.. cuz I didn't read those.

Warnings… there will be violence and probably a lemon. If you're reading this on a site that doesn't permit such things, the uncensored version can be found at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/YukiandShuichi/

as it gets written, of course.

It was always the same. Music called and Shuichi tramped out to make love to new stages, to new audiences. Sipping some of the difficult to get French coco he'd bought for the pink brat for his birthday. It was too sweet and it left foam clinging to the stubborn residue of rude black coffee. It tasted like early morning Shuichi kisses.

Eiri set down in Shuichi's chair, sipped the chocolate, then moved to his own chair. He smiled though. Late tomorrow Shuichi would be home. Smiling more, Eiri leaned back and drank a bit more chocolate. He'd just sent the final corrected galleys of his latest book back to the publisher, and even though it was a great deal different than the story he'd planned for Shuichi in the draft, he was happy with it.

Maybe he could get Shuichi to take a couple months off with him, go to Greece or Mexico. Maybe just for a couple of weeks. Right now Shuichi would be somewhere between San Francisco and Sacramento, drivng along the western edge of the United States with all the hippies and techno freaks. The Silicon Valley had not been a place that Eiri wanted to see. New York was quiet wild enough for his tastes, the wild west didn't sound at all appealing.

Leaving the chocolate unfinished, sitting on the table between their chairs, he went back to his computer, maybe write out some notes for the new novel. Slightly amused with himself by the time he sat down, he thought maybe his jealousy over Shuichi's devotion to his music was like calling the kettle black. Artists, he thought, mousing his way to a photo album on the machine, setting it to slideshow through, at the side of his desktop as he tried to focus on the nasty empty word file.

The chat application that Shuichi had wanted him to download beeped at him, and irritated by the interruption of his thoughts, he clicked it open to a message, "Accept incoming video chat?"

He clicked yes, but scowled into his cam. "Baka?"

"EIRI!! Eiri! How are you? I miss you! I love you! We just left San Francisco about half an hour ago! Look what I got in my hair!"

It made Eiri's chest tighten. His lover bounced in front of some cam in a gas station convenience store, a some bit of green and blue thread wrapped around his hair, then down farther so that it looked like he had a strand of hair down past his shoulder. At the end of it swung ceramic ying/yang symbol. Eiri reached towards his camera, as if he could reach out to the pink haired singer. "I was working until you called."

"Eiri! I can't wait to get home! It's hot here! And people are all dressed up in costumes here. I think I saw someone dressed up as you before I left San Francisco. This Halloween thing is big. What's on your lip? Are you okay?"

Eiri brushed his fingers over his lips. Chocolate. Shuichi grinned so he guessed the warmth on his cheeks showed, even though the pictures refreshed so slowly, giving them both blocky images. "I'm fine. Don't miss your plane, Shuichi."

"You miss me!" Shuichi grinned playfully, slightly suggestively into the camera and Eiri blushed more. So much for innocence in his lover. "I can't wait to get home!" He followed that up by leaning very close to the camera, laying his pointer finger on his tongue, and sucking it into his mouth.

"Baka!" Eiri protested, but his fingers were caressing the side of the cam again, like he could really touch Shuichi's face. Shuichi responded by leaning towards Eiri's touch. "Hurry up and come home. And, baka, some nasty Californian is pointing at you. Get on the bus."

"Don't worry, Eiri-kun! Everything's okay, or K'll get'em! Gotta go! Love you!" Shuichi blew a kiss at the camera, then tapped the screen to close the chat client.

The guy Eiri had seen when Shuichi leaned into his virtual caress smiled, sort of a presumptuous smirk. Shuichi's nose wrinkled and he grabbed up his soda and chips. They wouldn't have stopped at all, but the traffic coming out of San Francisco had just slowed to a crawl, locking them a stand still for nearly four hours. With the air conditioning threatening to overheat, they'd pulled into a truck stop and just about everyone had spilled out of the bus before it had even come to a full stop.

The guy had the nerve to wink, but Shuichi didn't think he was a fan. Ratty jeans, a tee-shirt with something in German that just looked obscene, grungy blond hair, and a knife long enough to be used for seppku strapped to his thigh. He looked like a candidate for California Serial Killer of the Year. Shuichi took a step towards the cash register. He grabbed a couple of postcards and gave a slightly paranoid look to where the guy had been. Something flashed on his right side though, and he turned to look, only to see nothing, no matter that all the hair was standing up on the back of his neck.

He shoved his chips and soda across the counter, the post cards he counted and held up four fingers for the woman. She smiled, said something in English and Shuichi flashed her the Victory sign. She laughed, held up a bit of American currency, the one with the fifty in the corner, pointed towards the bus, and Shuichi nodded happily, scooping up his purchases.

The bus was carrying more than just Bad Luck to Sacramento. A group of backup singers and three dancers had talked Suguru into letting them ride along. After the traffic had stalled them, Hiro and Shuichi had joined in with the games. Two of the dancers and Suguru hadn't even bothered to get off the bus. Shuichi expected they'd be tucked away in the bedroom of the rented bus.

Hiro called out from the store, waving. The red head's wife hadn't come along to the San Francisco concert, so there he stood just outside the store with a figure in one hand and big redheaded lady doll. He lifted on up, then the other, asking Shuichi's opinion from across the parking lot. Shuichi flashed him a V sign again, meaning take them both, and Hiro wandered back into the store to pay from the, or make his choice.

When Shuichi turned back around though, the scruffy looking guy with the knife was feeling up under the tire well. "K!"

"What's the problem?" K asked in English, then again in Japanese. Shuichi turned to make sure K were looking them pointed back at the tire well, but the man was gone. Shuichi knelt down to look under the bus, to see if he were running off in that direction, but there wasn't anyone he could see. "Shindo-san, what is it?"

"There was a guy, with a big knife here, with his hand up by the tire." Shuichi grumbled, the frustration of separation and traffic jams, and loud dancers who wanted to make Suguru loud for a while building up in him.

"He's gone now," K reassured Shuichi, as he pressed against the tire, to see that the pressure was still good. "Let's go."

"Yeah," Shuichi said as a chill settled around him. Hiro was on his way though and the back of the bus actually seemed to almost bounce, so Shuichi figured Suguru and his playmates were on board. Sakano was curled up in a seat, muttering about what Tohma would say to him for not protecting his cousin's virtue.

Shuichi felt paper thin as he set down into his chair, propped his legs up on the table across from him. He'd been so high when he was talking to Eiri, not he was just tried.

The back up singers re-boarded the bus like a flock of neon hens, chattering to each other. "We should be passing Immortality.com's building soon," the taller one said. "I hope it's dark when we go buy. I hear they're having their official unveiling of their product tonight."

"For all the money they've got in capital, I hear it better be some project! My boyfriend almost went to work there. They pay good for a start up."

The last of them, who was just getting back on the bus and crunching some chips or something, asked, "What is their product? I've heard it's everything from a complete plastic surgery package to some kind of vampire drug."

"Ooo," the first one said, making eerie music sound. "What else would one annonce Halloween night? Everyone wants to live for every, right?"

"Not me, Tohma-san is going to be so unhappy," Sakano wailed, and Shuichi heard the cocking of a gun. The wailing quieted.

"I think living forever would have a big price," K said in English, simple enough that even Shuichi could understand it. English was an odd language though, like trying communicate with chopsticks the size of black board makers and always every sentence had 'I' in it… at least almost every sentence.

"Forever live if everyone Japanese speak," Shuichi said and grimaced as the back up singers started giggling.

Even K was trying not to snicker, so Shuichi made a face at all of them, opened his chips and laid his chair back so he could half curl up and watch out the window.

Hiro plopped down on the other side of the table. "I should have gotten to Saks. Aiyaka wanted a bag from there, that said San Francisco, Saks… Shuichi-kun, you okay?"

"Yeah, just ready to be home." Then he saw that guy again, as the bus's breaks let off air and it pulled forward out of the parking lot. The odd Californian was waving to him, then blew him a kiss. He shivered. "I don't like this Halloween holiday."

"What?" One of the singers said, leaning over the back of the empty chair next to Hiro. "You're afraid of vampires? Don't they teach you how to fight those in Japan?"

"Japan is not as violent as the US," K said.

"There aren't really vampires, are there?" Sakano asked, face whitening more than it had been.

"Of course not, not even on Halloween," K reassured him.

Shuichi sat up, took a big drink of his blue soda and then drew his upper lip up in a snarl, "I vant to drink your soda!"

"Oh that's just too much! A Romanian accent over a Japanese accent! I bet you'd make a cute vampire though. People would give you blood just cuz you're so cute!"

"Hey!" Shuichi said, eyes narrowing.

Hiro kicked him lightly, smiled just the way a friend could to get him to lighten up. "Now Yuki, he'd make a good vampire, all foreboding and elegantly sensual."

"Who's Yuki?"

"My love," Shuichi said, smiling, hearts in his eyes. "Yuki Eiri, the best romantic writer in all of Japan."

"A gay guy writes romance stories? Do people know he's gay?"

Shuichi nodded, popping a couple more chips in his mouth. He didn't say anything though, just enjoyed the shivers over his back, the hope of Eiri's arms around him soon.

Hiro picked up the end of the conversation though, and it went on like that through the rest of Shuichi's soda, over more endless open brown nothingness. There was only the occasional office building, like the city had thrown out seeds and they'd scattered far by the wind.

"There it is!" One of the girls squealed, pointing towards side Sakano was sitting on. Immortality.com's building rose up out of the undeveloped nothingness like a tiny sprawl of gothic granite. Even Hiro moved to look at it, at the gargoyles and the one tall cathedral like tower. "The put this whole thing up in like six months, I heard. I hear inside it's got all this stained glass, like a cathedral, and that they have like 300 employees."

"That's pretty big," K mused, "If they have only 300 employees, what do they use all the space for?"

"It's so ugly," Sakano said. "I want to take a photo of it."

"Where's the parking lot," K asked, and Shuichi could hear the suspicion in his manager's voice. Sometimes, K was more like a cop than a music agent. Even if it wasn't any of his business, he was looking out for bad guys.

"American's have bad taste," Shuichi pronounced, as if that solved everything.

"Our concert sold out."

"Those were Japanese-Americans and yaoi fan girls."

"What's yaoi?" One of the singers was trying to get the window down so she could take a photo, which prompted Sakano to try the same thing.

Then the tire blew and the bus veered, sliding towards the side of the road, sliding rather too neatly into the off ramp that would deposit them directly into the parking lot of Immortality.com.

"Ohhhhh! It's vampires out to get us!" The shortest of the singers cooed in mock terror. "Will you save me?" She said, glomping onto Sakano, who's eyes bugged out until Shuichi started laughing.

"At least it's not Godzilla," Shuichi teased, getting out his cell phone. He did not want to be late getting home, vampires or not.