Chapter Text
Reki knows he’s lucky he got out of the beef with Shadow with only his left wrist sprained, ‘cause now he has a cool injury he can show to girls but he’s still able to skate and he can still manage to sketch and work on decks with his right hand.
He thinks he might want to change up a bit his board’s design – since Shadow burned his old one – once he’s fully healed, so he starts sketching out something.
“Hey Reki, that arm from a fight?” he hears one of his classmates assume.
“As if,” he spits out mindlessly, too focused on his drawing. He’s not the one to get into proper fights, never has. He likes to stand up for what it’s right and that’s why he constantly challenges assholes to races, but if he were to do that with someone that is ready to throw punches, he’s pretty sure he would come out beaten up.
“You just don’t learn your lesson. You got injured the other day, too,” another classmate teases.
“I said, as if!” Reki talks back, his tone a little more annoyed.
“You drawing something again?”
Reki loves drawing and sketching. When he was his little sisters’ age, he used to wish and ask for drawing supplies – along with skateboarding gear, obviously – every Christmas and every birthday, and he would always make sure he couldn’t hold the pencil anymore for how short it was before throwing it away.
He believes there’s still a stack of his old drawings somewhere in the mess that his room is.
“Are you interested?” he asks, beaming at the hope he’s gonna get to talk about his favorite things with someone.
Nonetheless, his excitement is met up with indifference, like always.
What was I expecting.
Reki hears his professor talk in the front of the classroom, but doesn’t pay him much attention and keeps writing down notes on the funny cartoon he drew of Shadow, until he hears a voice with a weird accent that he doesn’t recognize.
He bolts his head up and he’s met with a boy standing in front of the board, where the kanji reads Langa Hasegawa. Reki guesses he’s not from Japan since he doesn’t seem to speak the language very well, and his eyes also look kind of weird. He looks like he’s definitely out of place.
“I came here from Canada,” is basically everything the professor is able to get out of him in his presentation.
The boy ends up taking the seat beside Reki’s. Maybe I’ll make a new friend, he thinks.
⸻
“It’s like, that guy really seemed spaced out.”
Reki is at work, making conversation with his manager while he’s taking some wheels out of their box and placing them on the shelves.
“A returnee from overseas and half-Japanese, right? Could he not speak any Japanese?” Oka questions him.
“No. Apparently, that’s not an issue because his mom’s Japanese.”
His professor was able to get out of Langa some more information about himself during their class, but it still wasn’t a lot.
Distracted, Reki makes a wheel fall on his bandaged arm and whines.
“You really can’t do it with that arm,” Oka laments.
“I’m fine, I can do it,” Reki responds in what he would define as a reassuring tone.
“There’s never been a time when you say, ‘I’m fine’ that you really were.”
Oka knows Reki more than the latest would like to admit.
“That’s not true,” he bites back.
“You said you were fine about that beef with Shadow, too.”
Well.
“It’s all my fault because I suck.”
Thankfully, a client entering the shop saves him from a one-sided conversation with his manager that Reki really doesn’t want to have.
⸻
Is that Langa? Reki wonders when he gets out of the shop as his shift ends.
He lets his skate out of sight for a second and he sees it sliding right where the blue-haired boy is.
“Hey! Can you stop that?” he calls out.
Langa runs to the board and picks it up, examining it.
“You saved my butt, transfer student!” Reki tells him once he reaches him.
Langa looks like he just got teleported to the other side of the planet and has no idea where he is or who he’s talking to. Which might as well be the truth.
“You don’t remember me? I’m Reki Kyan, and I’m in your class!” Reki fakes being annoyed.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Langa says, but looks like he’s even more lost.
Reki considers himself a very friendly person, but doesn’t have a lot of people that he would actually call friends. He likes talking and he likes talking to people, but whether they want to listen isn’t up to him. Langa looks like he’s not a very talkative person, so maybe he could be the listening type.
Reki decides to go with the only way he knows how to make friends.
“Wanna skate?”
The boy refuses at first, but still tries to stand on his skate, failing miserably. Reki lets him fall and laughs jokingly at him.
“This thing wasn’t made for people to stand on!” Langa bites back at his mocking.
Reki has never been more ready to prove someone wrong.
“Of course it is!” he exclaims, as he mounts on his board and ollies over Langa’s head.
Langa is looking at him like he just grew a second head.
“I have a part-time job at that shop over there,” and adds, hoping with all himself that he’s going to agree, “if you’d like, I’ll pick out a board for beginners for you.”
Langa, instead, asks him, “What’s your hourly wage?
⸻
Langa ends up with a one-time job at Dope Sketch, and Reki reserves to explain to him everything about how ‘S’ and duels work. If not particularly interested in his passion, at least Langa is sticking with him for the time being, so he decides their newborn friendship is stable enough to tell him about how he builds decks.
The night of Langa’s job, they head out of the shop in a rush, Reki mounting on the scooter behind the other boy, and they arrive at the gates.
It’s the first time he brings a friend to this place, and he’s thrilled he’s gonna get to show Langa his world.
The perfect dream breaks really soon in the evening though, because as soon as the man that commissioned the skateboard opens the bag he finds an old and full of scratches deck that is definitely not the one Reki was working on just the night before.
I screwed up.
Before Reki can settle things with the man and skate this beef himself – and he better win it, ‘cause he absolutely doesn’t want to go back home with a tattoo – he finds Langa tapeing his feet to the old board.
“What the hell are you doing?” he panics, ‘cause he doesn’t know Langa enough to predict what he’s gonna do, but this sure as hell looks like he wants to do something reckless.
“I thought I’d skate.”
Exactly.
Langa, that has not yet been able to properly stand on a skate, wants to go up against one of the best skaters of ‘S’, that also happens to be the one that got Reki’s wrist sprained. Maybe he got his head messed up after all the falls, Reki genuinely wonders.
“You weren’t able to skate at all!” Reki states logically. “First off, what’s with that duct tape?”
“If I don’t do this, it’ll fall off under my feet and it’ll be dangerous.”
This guy is completely out of his mind.
“The opposite is true, idiot! Like that, you’ll get totally bruised up when you bail!”
“I’ll be fine.” A pause. “Probably.”
Peachy.
Shadow demands that someone skates with him, either or both, and won’t let a total novice like Langa hurt himself by skating against this joker if it’s the last thing he does.
But then, “He will be the one skating.” Out of nowhere, appears Cherry Blossom, one of the founders of ‘S’, and helps Langa stand from where he was sitting.
“Even if an amateur, if he gets on a board here, he has to skate. That’s the rule.”
He has to admit Cherry’s words are true, but Reki finally has a friend that is even mildly interested in skating and what if Langa gets hurt and he quits even before giving it a chance? He doesn’t want it to happen again.
“Hey, stop it! It’s absolutely impossible! It won’t be just broken bones, you know! Are you listening to me?” he tries to budge him, but Langa is firm in his decision. He gives up – more like he’s forced to since the guards are dragging him away from the track.
“Don’t go too fast! If anything, don’t be reckless!” he yells at him, before the light stop turns green. But Langa doesn’t move.
Normally, in skateboarding you get momentum by pushing your feet on the ground before placing yourself steadily on the board, but Langa’s feet are taped on it, and he can’t move them. Before Reki can try again to get him out of the reckless and idiotic situation, he sees his friend crouch down, push himself with his hands and stand up again once he starts going downhill.
Reki loses sight of Langa pretty quickly, but he can see him on the big screen thanks to the drone filming him. He’s surprisingly stable on the board.
“I’m gonna ride ahead. Wanna hop on?” Cherry calls out to him. He can freak out about the fact that the Cherry Blossom just offered him a ride later. All he can think about is Langa Langa Langa.
⸻
“I was watching you guys skate. How he puts weight on the board, his stance and posture, and how he fixed his feet in that position. He is likely someone experienced in snowboarding.”
Reki recalls Cherry’s previous words as he dismounts off the bike and sees the missing wheels on Langa’s board. If he has taken enough notes on Shadow’s techniques for victory secured, now is the time for those damn firecrackers of his.
“Look out, Langa!” he shouts out, aware that his friend probably can’t even hear him but he’s worried cause Langa is an idiot and he is being reckless and he doesn’t want him to get hurt and...
Langa is floating in the air over the firecrackers that closely resemble actual fireworks. All eyes are on him, no sound comes from the open mouths of all the spectators. Beautiful.
Reki swears he sees them. There are white snowflakes falling from the sky right there in Okinawa.