SHUTTER The day Tezuka accidentally brings a lab notebook back to their apartment with him - a thick reddish-brown volume with nasty yellowy pages and blue graph lines - Fuji picks it up and reads the label "Te-zu-ka Ku-ni-mi-tsu" in exaggerated tones. Tezuka swipes it back impatiently like it holds secrets, maybe it does - and in the confusion of flapping pages, like too many birds flying in a crowded flock, a thick gray slice of something familiar to the both of them falls. "Film?" Fuji smiles wide, showing a sliver of pearl as his lips part. He bends, reaches down, says, "I thought I was the photographer." Fuji is somewhat disappointed all too soon; the film is specked with a fine gray mist over a paler foggy background, and the only "picture" on it consists of black blobs and splotches all in lines and columns, and somewhere in-between the top and bottom blobs are faint uneven bands of not-so-intense dark-gray - spots trying to assert themselves. Tezuka swipes it out of Fuji's playful hands. "It's not a photo. It's a Western blot. Goat-anti-mouse epitope tagging on a nickel-agarose pulldown from HeLa cells -" he cuts himself off as Fuji smiles and nods. Except when it's Fuji, it's not smiling and nodding because it will placate the talker; it's smiling and nodding because Fuji actually understands. Sometimes it is wholly infuriating how much Fuji grasps that he should not, and sometimes it is merely unfair. Fuji smiles; he knew, he always knew. "Bringing lab home?" "I didn't mean to. I'll be going back after dinner." Dinner that Fuji has cooked, and is cooling on the glass table, four plates and two pairs of chopsticks surrounding a red glass vase of blue and yellow flowers. Tezuka is holding the plastic and for a moment squints at bright primary colors through the matte of XAR Film, six by eight. Fuji doesn't ask why Tezuka works odd hours, many hours. He did several times: the first time he received a curt reply of "because primer extensions take six hours" and the second time "because it will finish incubating" with no antecedent. The third time Fuji answered his own question. "I suppose it's like photography, isn't it? If I'm not at the right place in the right angle at the right time of day, everything disappears." He said this with the kind of voice that haunts Tezuka's ears when there is nothing but the white noise of gloved hands and the whine of furious machines in the laboratory. Fuji sometimes wakes up at midnight and crawls out of a shared bed because he cannot resist the dramatic shadows, the outline of silver on black and the very pale cast of color that remains, faintly haunting as a ghost might be in the daytime. The first time Tezuka had woken up, and Fuji had actually sighed at the brilliant way that moonlight sliced itself on their windowpanes and patterned all over Tezuka and their bed in disarray. Fuji had had thirty seconds to take pictures before Tezuka started yelling about how he was not going to be in any exhibition, and Fuji had soothed him with promises of a "private collection". The second time Tezuka clutched at Fuji while half-asleep, Fuji had given into clumsy fingers splayed about his hips, and the next day Fuji bemoaned the loss to a Tezuka who, while apologizing, took a scrap of satisfaction in knowing where Fuji's priorities lay, at least so long as they were in bed. The third time Tezuka let Fuji go, and Fuji returned to bed quickly, and Tezuka was well satisfied. -- "Tezuka," Fuji suddenly says the next evening, "show me that film again." "I don't remember which one it was," Tezuka starts to say, but Fuji has already walked over to the counter where Tezuka's bags and books sit. "All of them, then. You get to see all my work." Fuji's pictures hang on the walls around them, it's true. Tezuka never did understand art, but he appreciates the beauty of the pictures the same way that he accepts Fuji: with a lot of wonder, and not a little apprehension, but complete acceptance. Fuji picks up the notebook and opens the water-stained pages with the same utter respect that Tezuka gives the thick photo albums that Fuji stacks in boxes, and his fingers, slender and callused from a long ago time of handling tennis rackets, trace over the thick film the way that Tezuka's eyes carefully glide over the frames and glass that shield Fuji's favorite works. "Tezuka," Fuji says, "is there a darkroom where you work?" "Sure," Tezuka says. "No chemicals though - you just slide the film into a machine and it comes out. I doubt you'd want to use it. And I wouldn't need all your fancy things for my film." It is abundantly unclear in his tone if he prefers one type over the other, if he wishes they could mix somehow. Fuji smiles. "Then it's close enough," he says. "For?" "For it to be the same," Fuji says, and moves in for a kiss and the lab notebook crashes to the floor. Tezuka says with a frown, "Hardly," just before they touch. And right after the press of lips, he scrambles for the notebook and hears Fuji's pout through the thick air. --- It's three weeks of work-induced sulking later that Tezuka returns home happy, and he comes back again with the notebook, whose pages are stuffed a little fuller of film this time. "Let me see," Fuji coaxes, and Tezuka lets him. "It worked," Tezuka says, pulling out a piece of film that looks just like the first one he showed Fuji. Maybe it looks a little cleaner, the blobs / splotches / bands are in some sort of pattern that reminds Fuji of punch cards. "Explain it?" Fuji asks. He smiles. "People are always asking me to explain my photographs. I'd like to hear you do that for a change." "You're an artist. This is hardly art." "It makes no sense to me." Fuji smirks so very slightly. Tezuka explains, feeling foolish, and mumbles something in a soft lecture-like voice about proteins and DNA and how the complex that forms is so very fragile and how he detected their interaction. How it took months of work to preserve that one instant, and how he froze it into a gel and cast it onto a film and how he's so, so happy that it worked and developed. Fuji smiles and his eyes open, and the combination dazzles. "So you captured a moment. A moment," he repeats, and circles with a slender finger the bands that Tezuka says represent the tiny lengths of time that tinier things interact. "People tell me how I capture moments. You too, Tezuka?" Tezuka stares at the photographs on the wall, Fuji's by-now-famous, brilliantly beautiful pictures of precarious balance - things falling and floating - equilibrium and disorder on the rounded edge of crashing - sharp indecision, a split-second, instances far far shorter than the span of a click of the shutter, but Fuji is magical, Fuji is a genius, and he stole those fragments. "No," Tezuka starts to say, "it was just -" And Fuji stole him, too, really. Tezuka wonders what that makes him. Despite that, Tezuka thinks that Fuji missed something. Tezuka had missed the two of them going over the delicate balance point and had tilted, gently, into erosion. He does not know when possibilities had thickened into things tangible, at which points exactly the lilt and timbre of a voice went up and down and took him with it, the day that he first noticed that the way that Fuji looked at him was a little different today from yesterday's gaze and he had tried, and failed, to memorize it because it would be different again tomorrow. Tezuka realizes, and the thought is blinding, that it's the same thing after all - because the instances will always choose themselves. And Tezuka smiles and for once has the last word as he mouths oh that and he flattens Fuji against the white wall and wills the instant to stretch out long and thin and overexpose itself onto the two of them. - end -