Like The Water Loves The Air (Chuuya x Reader)

Chapter One

It was like learning how to walk again, coming back to Yokohama after all these years. It was like learning how to breathe. 

Something that had once been so natural, the simple act of existing within the city's wide and lovely streets, had somehow become dangerous and unfamiliar in a ghostly way. A shiver shot through her from the breeze filtering off the harbor. Y/n knew Seattle was the so called 'windy city' but, had always thought it would be a name more fittingly given to her home town. Y/n had never been to Seattle.

Y/n had never been to a lot of places, never done a lot of things. She didn't regret it, however. Regret was a complicated emotion. If you wished to change the past, it meant you wished to change the present. Y/n liked where she was, had worked hard to become the person standing on these streets today. She regretted nothing because of that.

It is such a strange thing, coming home. The streets look the same, save for small changes. The house she used to live in was still there but, it had been repainted. Someone else lived there, a new family, and they had changed the yard, pulling out the years of rose bushes and replacing them with grass for the kids to play on. It was complicated, the way she tried to go to the corner store she'd gone to as a child only to find it had been replaced by a bar. In a deeply intimate sense of the word, it was painful.

She hadn't left for any negative reason. To be perfectly honest, she hadn't really wanted to leave at all. It had simply been time. She had been an adult and it was necessary for her to start her own life which, for Y/n, meant going somewhere new. She had to leave in order to come back, it was as simple as that. What she didn't expect was how much of her life would have changed by the time she was able to come back. She repeated it like a prayer. She thumbed the beads of the rosary in her mind. Not even her parents lived in Yokohama anymore.

Y/n applied for a job at the bar, the one that had replaced the corner store. It was an action driven both by need and a deep seated nostalgia, a love for the life she had once lived. It was complicated when she got it. The idea of going to this place that had once been her home, those streets that had once belonged entirley to her but no longer did, every day. 

She was grateful, there was no doubt about that. Y/n was an author and while the proceeds from her published work provided a bit of money, it was nowhere near enough to keep her on her feet. The job was a blessing and a curse. She bore it well upon her seasoned back.

So her new life began. She woke up early, went for long walks in the park, along the water. She wrote for hours on end some days and on others, she simply shot her laptop a cursory glance on the way out the door. At night, she worked. It was a simple rhythm, a gracious revolving of the earth around the sun.

The day Y/n had found her muse, she hadn't been looking for one. Sure, she had had muses before. They were helpful, they directed the line of fire whether they were a person, a place, an object, or even a feeling. Y/n liked having a muse, but she hadn't been on the hunt.

It had been a normal shift at work, nothing special or irregular. She had been working at the bar for a month at that point and back in Yokohama for about the same give or take a few days. She, like her coworkers, had looked up from her work at the sound of the door opening and watched the man enter. The first thing that had come to mind at his harsh blue eyes and fiery hair was that, oddly enough, he reminded her of the ocean.

As she had watched the man cross the space, finding comfort in a table near the back, her coworker had leaned into her shoulder.

"Be careful with that one. He's one of our regulars. He has a temper."

Y/n had watched carefully as the man had shed his coat, dropping it into the booth and therefore claiming the space as his own before he sauntered up to the bar.