[August 1: Be indomitable, o my heart] [Initial D]; Drive

[tongari.livejournal.com]

Title: Drive
Day/Theme: August 1: Be indomitable, o my heart
Series: Initial D
Character/Pairing: Keisuke, Takumi
Rating: G


We’ve parked at the side of the road, a wide corner you can see the car nestling in from almost a mile away. It’s the first time he’s been here and he said coming up that he wanted to get out and look at the view, and I said if he needed to take a leak he could just say so. While waiting for him I stretch my arms out, hands still on the steering wheel, and push my head way back so the back of my seat starts to groan. He said to leave the radio on but the music was horrible and I’ve turned it off. Music fails to have any effect here, anyway; the silence on this road is as huge as the mountain itself, something so big it can’t help taking on a presence and power that individual trees and clouds and pieces of sky can never have.

He comes back to the car very slowly and I can hear and see him shuffling awkwardly through the foliage long before he opens the car door. “Like a little lost bear,” I tell him, but he’s not really here, part of him is still standing on the grass verge looking down the side of the mountain. It’s so green, all around us, I feel like I’m seeing a reflection of the valley floor still in his eyes when he looks at me.

“They all look the same,” I say. "All these mountains." And I want to say the difference is all by feel, that to me the texture and gradient and angles of the road don’t mean anything and instead they are like flavours diffusing through the tyres and frame of the car and up through your bones from your feet on the pedals and your hands around the steering, a glance from your eyes making contact with the mirror. I think, surely he must know what I mean. The silence of the mountain is such a huge thing, it seems to fill all of the space in this universe that is not taken up by him and me and the car; I can feel it pressing down on me, crushing the air that I breathe out of my lungs. All mountains are for climbing, but more importantly, for descending. Some things you don’t have to mention.

“It’s real pretty,” he says.

If I look down, I imagine that I can see a white car passing through the valley, moving cleanly like a swallow or a comet across the damp green fields.