Chapter Text
The thing about Hirose Ryo is that he has never, not even once in his sixteen years of living, done anything halfway.
He cried at the end of every drama he watched, even the ones with happy endings. He ate ramen at eleven at night and then complained about his stomach until two in the morning.
He fell in love with Fujinaga Sakuya when he was nine years old, watching him solve a Rubik's cube in forty-three seconds at a family dinner, and had not stopped falling since.
So when Ryo decided, on a perfectly ordinary afternoon, that he was going to confess to Sakuya, he did it the only way he knew how. All of it, no rehearsal, straight to the guy's face.
They were walking home from school, the long route through the shopping arcade because Sakuya always took the long route for reasons Ryo had spent years trying to decode. The sky was that late-autumn yellow that made everything look a little warmer than it was. Ryo had not slept. His group chat had been a disaster zone since the night before.
Pim: you’re going to confess??? NOW??? HIROSE RYO i am literally in the middle of a practice exam
Ryo: I can’t keep doing this pim it’s been WHAT? 7 YEARS!
Ji: 7 years is a long time…
AL: Seven years? Fcking hell, ryo bestie i’m shaking for you
Cine: This is sooooo romantic I’m going to cry
Pim: Cine he hasn’t even done it yet!
Kate: Ryo what are you going to say exactly?
Ryo: I don’t know I’ll figure it out
Pim: That is genuinely the worst plan I’ve ever heard
Al: Let him cook!!!
Pim: al he doesn’t have a plan there is nothing to cook
Ryo: Thanks for your support Pim
Pim: I’m wishing you luck while also thinking you’re an idiot, both are true.
Cine: Ryo fighting, we love you!!!
So here Ryo was, walking next to Sakuya under the yellowing sky, and he had not figured it out at all. What he had instead was the feeling in his chest that had been building for seven years, pressing against his ribs like it was trying to get out through sheer force of will.
"Sakuya," Ryo said.
Sakuya didn't look at him. He was scrolling through something on his phone, one hand in his pocket while walking with a calm pace that Ryo had memorized without meaning to.
"What…" It was not a question. Sakuya rarely made questions sound like questions.
Ryo took a breath.
"I like you."
That made Sakuya stop walking.
Ryo stopped too. He turned to face him, because if he was going to do this, he was going to do it right. Sakuya was staring at him with that expression that looked like absolutely nothing, like he'd been trained since birth to give nothing away. He was wearing the school uniform with the top button undone because he always did that, and the afternoon light was behind him, and Ryo thought, not for the first time, that's the most handsome face I've ever seen. This is so unfair.
"I've liked you since we were nine," Ryo continued. His voice came out steadier than he expected. "I'm not saying this because I expect anything. I just, I've been carrying this around for a really long time and it got so heavy, so I wanted you to know that. That's all."
Sakuya looked at him for a long moment. His face didn't change.
Then he spoke and said, "That's disgusting."
Ryo's chest cracked somewhere down the middle.
He knew. He had known the answer before he walked into this, had braced himself against it, had told himself that hearing it out loud would be a mercy, would make it smaller and more manageable. He knew.
But hearing it still felt like biting into something and finding it wrong all the way through.
"Okay," Ryo said, and his voice barely shook at all. "Thank you for being honest."
And then he ran.
Not metaphorically. Literally ran down the shopping arcade, past the stalls and the hundred-yen shop, sneakers squeaking on the pavement, because he was sixteen and his chest hurt and he couldn't think of anything else to do with his body.
Until, he didn't see the banana peel.
Well, in some cliche stories, nobody has ever seen the banana peel. That was the thing about banana peels. They were there and then suddenly they were very very there, and Ryo's feet shot forward and his entire center of gravity tilted sideways, and he had approximately half a second to think—
Oh no…
Before someone grabbed him.
The grab was fast and certain, the catch was from someone with good reflexes, and it spun them both sideways and they went down anyway, not crashing but tipping, landing against the arcade pillar with Ryo's face approximately two centimeters away from that someone…
Ryo was shocked to notice that the handsome face right in front of him was Sakuya.
He had a lot of questions, like how Sakuya ran after him, or how he caught him, but there was a bigger problem to think about.
Oh.
Their lips met, accidentally. NOT INTENTIONAL but accidentally.
Their position was so awkward. They stayed like that for one second too long, and Ryo's eyes were open, so were Sakuya's, and in that half-second Sakuya looked frightened — genuinely frightened — the kind that had nothing to do with the fall and everything to do with how close they were. Everything and everyone else moved around them, footsteps and distant music and the smell of something frying, and none of it mattered. Then Ryo pulled back, ears burning so hard he could feel them in his teeth. Sakuya's face shut, fast.
"That…" Sakuya said, "Did not happen."
"Right." Ryo nodded immediately.
"We're going home."
"Right."
They walked the rest of the way in complete silence. Ryo's heart was beating so hard he was surprised Sakuya couldn't hear it. His phone buzzed three times in his pocket, then five, then what felt like continuously, and he did not look at it until he was safely behind the door of his own house with his shoes off and his school bag dropped in the genkan.
Pim: RYO ANSWER THE GODDAMN PHONE
Cine: ryo… how was it? Are you okay?
Ji: Bestie please respond
AL: PICK UP RIGHT NOW HIROSE
Kate: I am coming over!!!
Pim: Kate we live like 20 minutes away
Kate: AND I WILL WALK
Ryo: …..
Ryo: I kissed him
Pim: … WHAT
Cine: WHAT?
Ji: WHAT????????
AL: ISTG WHAT DO YOU MEAN????
Kate: I’m already walking! I GOT MY HOUSE KEYS
Ryo: It was an accident there was a banana peel
Pim: HIROSE RYO I NEED YOU TO EXPLAIN THAT SENTENCE MORE
(˵ ̆ 3 ̆˵)
The earthquake happened sometime before dawn. Not a big one. Ryo had slept through worse, but this one had bad timing, which earthquakes usually did. He woke up to things rattling on his shelves and his mom shouting something from downstairs and his phone alarm going off early, and he lay there for the seconds of shaking thinking about Sakuya's face, which was not how he had planned his morning.
Hirose's house was old, and old houses usually are not good with earthquakes. Two load-bearing walls and the east side of the roof had reached their limit. Papa Hirose called three contractors. All three said the same thing. The repairs would take at least six weeks, probably more, and the house was not safe to live in during that time.
Ryo sat at the kitchen table and listened to his parents have this conversation seriously.
"We'll stay at the Fujinagas," his mother said.
Ryo was dumbfounded.
"Sorry?"
"Yuko-san already called this morning and she insisted, she has some rooms to spare."
His father nodded. "They have a big house."
"The Fujinagas," Ryo repeated. Carefully. Like the words might do something different if he said them slowly. "Like the Fujinagas, the house of Fujinaga Sakuya. That Fujinagas?"
His mother looked at him, "Well, he's your friend."
"Ma, he's not, we are not — we go to school together, that's not, ma. I just told him yesterday that I liked him and he said it was disgusting and we ki— no, like, I have been avoiding him for more than 24 hours now and I cannot live in his house."
His mother clapped her hands together and his father just tried absorbing what he said, and then she replied, "Oh then that's good, at least you'll get to know him better!"
Ryo put his face down on the table.
He stayed there for a while. His phone buzzed.
Ryo: You guys will never guess what happened.
Pim: what
Ryo: I have to move into the Fujinagas house because of the earthquake damage
Cine: (๑/////๑ ˮ )(๑/////๑ ˮ )(๑/////๑ ˮ )
Ji: Wait like Fujinaga Sakuya’s house?
Ryo: ARE THERE ANY OTHER FUJINAGA IN OUR SCHOOL?
Ji: Well, there’s no harm in asking lol
Al: Oh my god, this is fate RYO. THIS IS FATE/
Pim: AL do not encourage this
AL: I’m not encouraging anything, I'm just saying the universe is doing something!
Pim: ryo. Buddy. King. ARE YOU OKAY?
Ryo: No
Kate: This is either the best or worst thing that has ever happened
Pim: Kate that is not helpful
Cine: But Kate is right! Ryo you have to tell us everything. LIKE EVERY SINGLE THING.
Ryo: I’m not answering that
Pim: RYO
AL: uhm wait, where does he sleep?
The answer, as it turned out, was Sakuya's room.
The Fujinaga house had a guest room, but it was full of old tax documents and had temporarily become his parents' room, so clearing it out was a project for later. Ryo's mother had arranged, with zero consultation of Ryo's emotional state, for Ryo to use the spare futon in Sakuya's room.
Ryo stood in the doorway with his luggage and looked at Sakuya, who was sitting at his desk pretending to read something and doing it badly.
"Hi," Ryo said.
"The futon's against the left wall," Sakuya said, not looking up.
Ryo came in and set his bag down. The room looked like no one had ever left anything out of place in it. Books sorted by subject, maybe by author within that, he couldn't tell from here. A corkboard above the desk covered in color-coded notes, each pinned at a certain angle that was probably accidental and probably wasn't. A small cactus on the windowsill, the only thing in the room that seemed to exist purely because someone had wanted it there. Nothing on the walls except one calendar and a photograph Ryo couldn't see from where he was standing. He sat on the edge of the futon. The mattress was thinner than he was used to but the sheets smelled clean, like someone had made the bed that morning and knew someone was coming.
"I know this is weird and I'm sorry," Ryo said.
Sakuya turned a page; he had not been reading it, Ryo could tell, because he'd flipped it too quickly.
"It's fine," Sakuya replied.
It was not fine, but Ryo had been doing this long enough to know when to push and when to let things settle. He reached into his bag for his phone charger and found, tucked in the side pocket, a small paper bag his mother had slipped in without telling him. He opened it.
Ramune candy, the kind he'd liked when he was small. His mother did this all the time, tucked things into his pockets when she knew he was anxious. He sat with the bag in his hands and felt something in his chest go a little softer.
"Auntie…" Sakuya said, and Ryo glanced up. Sakuya was looking at the paper bag. "She put things in your bag."
"Yeah, she always has," Ryo said.
It went silent for a moment. Then, from Sakuya's desk drawer, very quietly and without explanation, came a small box of chocolate pocky, which Sakuya set on the corner of his desk without looking at Ryo.
It was not an acknowledgment of anything. It was just pocky on the desk. Ryo ate three pieces and felt like his life was getting better.
(˵ ̆ 3 ̆˵)
Mama Fujinaga fed people with full commitment and no intention of stopping. Mama Fujinaga makes good tamagoyaki, it has been Ryo's favorite since he was a child, and he has known these facts since they were family friends. She always sent rice crackers home with them after visits. Living in her house made it immediate in a way that was a little hard to absorb.
The first morning she made him tamago gohan and miso soup and a plate of pickled vegetables because, as she explained, growing boys needed more than toast. The second morning she added grilled fish. By the third morning there was a full traditional breakfast on the table and Ryo sat across from it feeling like he had accidentally won something.
"You don't have to do all this, auntie," Ryo told her.
"Don't be ridiculous," she said, and put more rice in his bowl.
Papa Fujinaga, quieter and taller, had clearly given Sakuya his entire face and roughly half his personality. He mostly communicated by leaving things in the right places. A fresh towel outside the bathroom. A phone charger that happened to fit Ryo's phone on the kitchen counter. The newspaper folded to the comics section on the table where Ryo sat. He never mentioned any of it, and neither did Ryo, and somehow that was its own kind of warmth.
Sakuya watched all of this with the look of a boy who'd expected his parents to behave a certain way and was being surprised despite himself.
"They like you better than me," he said once, flatly, while watching his mother pack an extra onigiri for lunch.
"That's definitely not true," Ryo said with full denial.
Mama Fujinaga, without turning around, said, "Well, Ryo is easier to feed."
Sakuya stared at the back of her head.
"She's joking," Ryo said.
"I'm not joking at all," Mama Fujinaga said cheerfully.
(˵ ̆ 3 ̆˵)
Ryo knew the girl who walked home with Sakuya some evenings. It was Sakuya's girlfriend, Mika. He never asked Sakuya about Mika because he wasn't in a position to ask about her at all. She was easy to spot, neat uniform, a hair clip that caught the light, and acts like she belongs and she was welcome.
Once, from the upstairs window, Ryo watched her say something that made Sakuya tilt his head, slow and attentive, like he was actually listening. Ryo watched for a moment longer than he meant to, then went back to his homework.
He did that a lot in those first couple of weeks. Noticed things and put them down. The way Sakuya made room for her at the shoe rack without being asked. The fact that she knew which earphone he preferred and handed him the right one. Small things that meant time, that meant repetition, that meant someone had been paying enough attention to learn him a little. Ryo knew what that took. He had been doing it for seven years from a distance.
He was fine with it. He told himself he was fine with it, and mostly believed it, and went back to the problem set on his desk, and did not look out the window again.
(˵ ̆ 3 ̆˵)
Sakuya found the photo album almost a week into the Hiroses' stay.
It was sitting on the coffee table when Ryo came downstairs, because Mama Hirose had taken it out to show Mama Fujinaga the evening before and had not put it away. Sakuya was in the living room holding it like he wasn't sure whether to put it down or keep looking, and Ryo's mother was on the couch pointing at something and laughing.
Ryo froze in the doorway.
He knew that album. It documented, in devastating detail, the first three years of his life, during which he had looked, according to every adult who had ever weighed in on the matter, like a baby girl. His hair had been long. His mother had put it in small pigtails. He had been wearing a lot of yellow.
"Ryo," his mother said, with the voice of very much enjoying herself, "come look!"
"I'm fine from here."
"Sakuya thinks you look like a very cute baby girl."
"Ma…"
Sakuya looked up from the album. He was not smiling. His mouth was pressed slightly together, and his eyes moved from the photo back to Ryo with an attention that was too careful to be neutral.
"You had pigtails," Sakuya said.
"I was two," Ryo answered immediately.
"There are seventeen pages of it."
"I grew out of it."
"There's one where you're eating sand."
"I don't know what you want me to do with that information, Sakuya."
He almost smiled, almost. He looked back down at the album for a moment, then set it carefully on the table and walked upstairs without a word.
Ryo didn't know what to do with everything that happened. His mother patted the couch cushion next to her.
"He thought you were cute," Mama Hirose said with a fond smile.
"Ma, he didn't say that."
"He didn't say you weren't."
(˵ ̆ 3 ̆˵)
The tutoring was Ryo's parents' idea, technically, or at least they were the ones who asked. Ryo had suggested in the gentlest way he could that this was maybe not necessary, and his mother had looked at him with a face that said she knew what he was avoiding and he was going to do it anyway.
"You have midterms soon," Mama Hirose said.
"I know, Ma."
"Your math score from last term was—"
"I know that too," Ryo cut her off real fast.
"And you know Sakuya is very good at math, right?"
"I know that too and I hate it."
So the tutoring happened twice a week at the desk in Sakuya's room with Ryo sitting in the spare chair that Mama Fujinaga had brought up from the kitchen and Sakuya, surprisingly, explaining things in a patient, affectless way he had of explaining things, like a very handsome professor who occasionally sighed.
"You're not slow," Sakuya said, one evening, and Ryo looked up.
"What?"
"You said you were slow at math, well… you're not. You skip steps because you get impatient with the ones that seem obvious, and that's the difference."
Ryo stared at him. Sakuya was looking at the notebook, not at Ryo.
"…Okay," Ryo replied.
"Show me what you were doing with problem six."
Ryo showed him problem six. Sakuya found the exact step where he'd leapt over a transition and circled it without comment. Ryo rewrote the steps and it made sense.
"See," Sakuya said.
"Don't gloat."
"I'm not gloating."
"You're doing that face."
"I am not, I don't have that face that you're talking about."
"You definitely have it."
Sakuya looked up at him then, and for a moment the room was very quiet, just the two of them and the lamplight and the cactus on the windowsill, and Ryo felt that thing in his chest again, the familiar pressure, the soft pang, and thought, this is going to be a problem.
Another session, late enough that the window had gone dark. They'd gotten through the two problem sets without incident, and Ryo was working on the third when he said, without thinking, "You're actually good at this."
"Like what? Teaching?"
"Yeah."
Sakuya didn't answer. He reached over and corrected a sign error in Ryo's work with his pen, a clean single line through the wrong character. His hand was close enough that Ryo could see the ink on his fingers.
"Most people who are good at something aren't good at explaining it," Ryo said. "You explain it like you remember not knowing it."
Sakuya pulled his hand back. He looked at the notebook for a moment, then at the window, and Ryo thought he wasn't going to say anything at all.
"My grandmother," Sakuya said. "She used to make me explain things back to her, everything that I learned. She said if you couldn't explain it to someone who didn't know, you didn't actually know it yourself."
It was the most Sakuya had said about anything personal since Ryo had moved in. Ryo kept his face still and cleared his throat.
"She sounds smart."
"She was." A pause. "Okay, next problem."
And Ryo did the next problem.
(˵ ̆ 3 ̆˵)
The biking had been Mama Fujinaga's idea. Well, she had said it on the second morning, setting breakfast down and mentioning very, very casually that it seemed silly for them to leave at different times when they were going to the same place, and she wasn't wrong at all. So Sakuya glanced at his mother, then at his bike by the door, and said nothing, which is how he agreed to things. Ryo had eyed the bike, which had a seat for a passenger, and understood what she was suggesting.
So every morning Ryo sat on the back, hands on the rack or loosely at Sakuya's sides depending on the turn, and Sakuya biked at the pace he always biked, which was slightly too fast for comfortable conversation, which Ryo had come to think of as a feature. They were closer than they were at the desk or in the room, unavoidably, the warmth of Sakuya's back in the cold morning air, and neither of them mentioned it because mentioning it would have made it a thing and they had wordlessly agreed not to make it a thing — in short, not to make things far more awkward.
It was quiet in a way that suited them both. Ryo kept his earphones at low volume to hear traffic and watched the streets go past over Sakuya's shoulder. Sometimes they hit a red light and coasted to a stop and existed together, close, just waiting for the green.
Once, a cat crossed the road directly in front of them and Sakuya braked hard and Ryo grabbed his waist without thinking, and for a second they were both just stopped in the middle of the road watching the cat disappear under a fence. Ryo's arms were still on Sakuya's waist, and when Ryo started laughing, Sakuya glanced at him over his shoulder with the nothing-face and held the glance, just a beat longer than usual, before he turned back to the road and started pedaling again. Neither of them said anything. It was fine, it was in its strange way one of the better mornings.
(˵ ̆ 3 ̆˵)
The problem, initially, was not Sakuya. The problem was that his friends found out he was being tutored and they wanted in.
Ji: Wait wait, Sakuya is tutoring you and you didn’t tell us?
Ryo: I was going to
Pim: Ryo I have a 51 in calculus and I need this more than you
Ryo: That’s not how this works!
Cine: RYO PLEASE ASK HIM PLEASE RYO PLEASE PLEASE
Kate: yeah we have finals coming
AL: Ryo we are suffering, we all are
Ryo: He isn’t a tutoring service!
Pim: WHAT IS HE THEN?
Ryo: A person doing me a favor who i already feel weird asking things of
Pim: RYO I WILL MAKE YOU FIFTY HAIRPINS FOR FREE IF YOU ASK HIM
Ji: I’ll make it 60!
AL: I’ll personally glue every single rhinestone on a star clip design that you like with my own hands!!!
Ryo: You’re not even the one in trouble ji you just want to come
Ji: Well, I might be in trouble, preemptively!
Cine: RYO PLEASE :(((((
RYO: FINE
Sakuya said yes, which surprised Ryo, and then looked vaguely like he regretted it immediately afterward, which was more expected. The study session happened on a Saturday afternoon in the living room, because Mama Fujinaga had moved the coffee table and set up the low table with cushions and gone to buy snacks that nobody asked her to buy but everyone was deeply grateful for.
Ji, Cine, Pim, AL, and Kate arrived with their notebooks and their half-completed homework sets and varying degrees of desperation. Pim had the energy of a girl who'd decided she was going to pass her exam through sheer force of will and was not going to let anything, including herself, stand in her way. Al arrived with her hair already up in three of their newest hairpin designs at once, a star clip on one side and two small heart clips on the other, which was both a fashion choice and an advertisement, and she took in the room with the calm focus of a girl who'd come here to learn and was not leaving until she did. Ryo had four clips in, two gradient stars above his left ear and a matching pair of wire-framed hearts on the right, which was not unusual for him on a day when he'd helped with a new batch. He didn't notice he was wearing them until Cine pointed at his head by way of greeting and gave him a thumbs up.
Sakuya sat at one end of the table with a whiteboard marker he'd produced somewhere like a magician and looked at all of them.
"Which subject first," Sakuya said. Not a question.
"Calculus," said Pim immediately. "Specifically integration. Specifically the parts where everything falls apart."
"That's most of integration," Cine said.
"I know. I'm aware of that."
Sakuya wrote something on the small whiteboard he'd set against the bookshelf. "Start here. This is the one rule everything else comes from. If you understand this, the rest is variation."
He explained it. He was very good at explaining things, which made sense for someone at a level several floors above anyone else in the room. He didn't dumb it down. He just made the structure visible.
Pim, who had arrived with the focused intensity of a girl who has accepted that she is in trouble and is taking it personally, was scribbling notes with a concentration that had blocked out everything else in the room.
"Pim," Cine said, after a few minutes.
Nothing.
"Pim." A poke to the shoulder.
"Shh." Not looking up. "I'm trying to understand the thing."
"I was going to ask if you wanted more snacks."
"Not now. Shh. Let Sakuya speak, I'm actually trying to pass this exam."
Al, who was sitting next to Pim, pointed at her own notes and mouthed something at Cine. Cine leaned over to look. Al's notes were color-coded, tabbed, and had small stars drawn at each section break, and they were already half a page longer than anyone else's.
"Are you okay," Cine whispered to her.
"I'm great," Al whispered back, drawing another star. "I've been waiting for this."
Ryo, sitting next to Kate and ostensibly working on problem sets, looked up at Sakuya. Sakuya was watching Pim scribble notes and the corner of his mouth had pulled the smallest amount upward. He hadn't noticed he was doing it.
Kate leaned over to Ryo and said, very quietly, "he likes her energy."
"Don't tell her that," Ryo whispered back. "She'll use it as leverage forever."
At some point Ji, who had been working steadily and in silence and had quietly finished two problem sets without anyone noticing, produced a small bag from her backpack. Inside were new hairpins, still wrapped in the tissue paper they packaged them in before listing. Stars in gradient colors, small and delicate, the kind you could tuck along the side of your head and catch light when you moved. Two styles of heart clips, one wire-framed and one solid. A set of tiny crescent moons in silver.
"New designs," she said, laying them out on the corner of the table.
"Oh." Cine picked up a heart clip and immediately clipped it into her hair. "Ji this is the cutest thing I've ever seen."
"The gradient stars were Pim's idea." Ji looked at Pim, who was still writing. "Pim's idea," she said again, louder.
"I know, I heard you, thank you." Still writing. "Put the green star aside for me."
Al picked up one of the crescent moons and held it against the light from the window. It was small and bent just right, the kind of shape that looked handmade because it was, the tiny imperfections in the wire visible if you looked. Her face went soft.
"Ji," she said.
"Mm."
"This is genuinely beautiful."
Ji looked embarrassed, same as always whenever she was pleased. "It's just wire."
"It's not just wire, this took time and you care about it and it shows." Al clipped it into her hair alongside everything else she was already wearing. "I'm keeping it."
"Obviously."
Ryo turned over one of the gradient star clips in his hands. The back had the small stamp they always put on handmade pieces, a tiny sun. He'd been there when Kate designed that stamp, months ago, on a sheet of paper in the school courtyard while Cine argued with Pim about whether the sun needed rays.
He glanced up and found Sakuya looking at the clip in his hand.
"My friends make them," Ryo said. "Hairpins, hair clips. After school, mostly. Ji has a little workshop at her place with a stamp press and everything."
"I know," Sakuya said. "I've seen them at school."
Ryo blinked. "You noticed?"
Sakuya looked away. "It's hard not to, especially if you wear them on your bag and in your hair. Both."
Ryo touched the side of his head, where he'd clipped two small heart shapes that morning without thinking about it. He'd been doing that so long it had stopped registering as a thing he was doing.
He set the gradient star clip carefully on the corner of Sakuya's notebook.
Sakuya looked at it. Then turned his gaze to Ryo.
"You don't have to," Ryo said.
A pause. Then Sakuya picked it up and put it in his pencil case without a word, and turned back to the whiteboard.
Kate, who had watched all of this, wrote in her notebook and passed it to Ryo. Are you sure he isn't gay because like he is so down bad. Ryo wrote back that he really isn't. He has a gf. Kate wrote lol ok.
(˵ ̆ 3 ̆˵)
The rain came without much warning to everyone.
Ryo had made sure to check his weather app that morning, he had noted the afternoon forecast, and had texted the group chat that it would be raining by 3 pm. He had his umbrella in his bag, because he had remembered.
What he had not accounted for was Sakuya. That afternoon, Ryo was at the school gate with his umbrella already open, waiting beside Sakuya's bike. He'd walked out ahead of Sakuya, whose last period ran a few minutes later, and leaned against the fence with the umbrella up and watched the first drops hit the pavement, waiting for him like he always did.
Then he saw Mika.
She was at the gate too, with an umbrella that matched her hair clip; she was saying something that got Sakuya's attention, and he was listening to her attentively. They were close together under her umbrella because the rain was picking up. The blankness Sakuya wore at school was gone. He looked at her with a face full of expression.
Mika leaned up and said something in his ear. Sakuya glanced over toward the gate, once, and for a moment Ryo could see him register what she said — the umbrella, the waiting, Ryo standing right there beside his bike. Something moved across his face, there, and went before it had a shape. He looked at Mika.
"I'll get the bike tomorrow," he said to Ryo without quite meeting his eyes, then he walked away with Mika under her umbrella and never looked back.
Ryo stood motionless in the rain and looked at Sakuya's bike, still locked to the fence, and lingered there for a while. The rain came down harder. He had his umbrella and his bag and no key for the lock and he sighed thinking about the whole walk home ahead of him.
It took him a total of 25 minutes. His shoes were soaked through by the end of it and the bottom of his trousers were wet and the rain had found the gap at the back of his collar despite the umbrella. He walked and did not think about Sakuya's face when he looked at Mika, or how he'd said I'll get the bike tomorrow like Ryo was some kind of delivery, the information something to be filed away and addressed later.
His phone was dry. He kept it in his bag under the rain cover. He did not let anyone know about what happened.
(˵ ̆ 3 ̆˵)
Ryo woke up the next morning with a sore throat. By afternoon he had a full fever, the kind that made his eyes ache behind their sockets and made the light feel like an enemy. Mama Fujinaga found out right away even without him telling her, because Ryo hadn't been gone since morning. She got him a cold compress and a thermos of okayu, her face plainly worried, and Ryo felt briefly terrible about being sick on her.
"Auntie, this is just a cold," he said from the futon.
"You were out in the rain yesterday." She said and sighed, which was worse than an actual accusation because she already observed everything even without Ryo telling her and still delivered it with complete softness.
"I had an umbrella."
"Your shoes were soaked through." She adjusted the compress on his forehead. "Sleep, I'll bring dinner later, I'll let your mom and dad know about this as well."
She went downstairs and Ryo lay on the futon and stared at the ceiling, which sent his thoughts drifting somewhere, and suddenly he was thinking about Sakuya walking away under a different umbrella.
He was still mostly under when Sakuya came home. He distantly heard the front door, voices downstairs, and footsteps on the stairs. The room felt different; the air always shifted when another person entered. He didn't fully surface. He was too far under the weather, weighed down by a heavy fever. His body had decided that this was where he was going to be for a while.
A moment later, he heard Sakuya crouch beside him.
The compress on his forehead slipped. Sakuya fixed it. The touch was quick and careful, and Ryo anchored his thoughts on the sensation. Sakuya's hand lingered a second longer than necessary, checking his temperature.
Ryo didn't move. He wasn't sure if it was because he was too exhausted, or because he feared that if Sakuya knew he was awake, the hand would pull away. Don't move, don't move, he thought dimly, and stayed perfectly still.
He surfaced again later, though still not completely. The lamp was turned down low, and a glass of water sat on the floor next to the futon, one that hadn't been there before. The okayu was gone; the empty thermos had been capped and set aside. He didn't remember eating.
Sakuya was at his desk, but he had angled his chair slightly, something he never did. His lamp was turned away so the harsh edge of the light wouldn't reach the futon.
Ryo watched him for a moment, this person who had called him disgusting and given him Pocky in the same week, who kept his windows clean and his books sorted, and who had just spent who-knows-how-long managing a sick person's compress and water without being asked. Then, he drifted back to sleep.
It was the deepest part of the night when it happened.
Ryo had been drifting in and out for hours, surfacing and sinking without any reliable pattern. He was aware of the room. He was aware of Sakuya still awake at his desk, the soft sound of pages turning. He was aware of his own breathing, slower than usual, weighted with sleep.
He surfaced a little more when he felt the air in the room shift. He didn't open his eyes all the way, just enough to catch the outline of Sakuya crouching beside the futon in the low light.
Checking the compress or the water.
But Sakuya's hand came up, not toward the compress, and Ryo had just enough time to be confused before he felt it. Barely there, barely anything: lips that landed just at the corner of his mouth and then went absolutely still, as if Sakuya had meant to aim somewhere else and found he couldn't stop what was already happening. The moment stretched. The house was silent. Ryo's heart was doing something it had no business doing, and he couldn't stop any of it.
It lasted half a second. Less.
Sakuya pulled back. Ryo kept his eyes closed. He heard Sakuya's breathing, not quite even, and then heard him shift. Then he felt it again, this time on his forehead. Softer. Deliberate. The way you did something when you meant it, knowing you were going to regret learning that about yourself. His hand came up first, barely brushing Ryo's hair back, followed by his lips, cool against the heat of Ryo's skin. Ryo lay very still, let it happen, and thought nothing at all.
A long pause.
Then Sakuya sat back. After a moment, he returned to his desk, and did not move again for a long time.
Ryo lay on the futon and stared at the inside of his eyelids. He thought about a lot of things, and then thought about nothing, and then the fever pulled him back under.
He didn't know what to do with it. He didn't know if it was real. His fever had been high enough that he couldn't be certain which parts of the night were real and which parts his mind had made up. He had no way to check because he was not going to ask Sakuya, he was definitely not going to ask Sakuya, and so it sat in the back of his mind where things he couldn't act on went. It sat there softly and persistently, like a song he'd only heard once.
Sakuya woke up that morning and sat at his desk without opening a single book, something that had never happened before. Then he went downstairs and told his mother to please make Ryo's breakfast first.
"I always make his first," Mama Fujinaga said.
"Good," Sakuya said. He picked up his chopsticks and said nothing else about it.
(˵ ̆ 3 ̆˵)
There were good days.
Ryo was just finding out what it's like to live with someone little by little. The bad things were worse because they were constantly up close, but the good things were also right there, undeniable.
There was the morning Ryo woke up early enough to see Sakuya reading before school. It wasn't a textbook; it was a novel with a worn spine that he held with both hands. Ryo had seen Sakuya's face in a lot of configurations, but never like this: loose, unguarded, actually happy about something. Just him and the book, with nobody watching. Except Ryo was watching.
Ryo lay still, feeling like any movement would break something fragile. The room was grey with early light. Sakuya was sitting cross-legged in his chair, something he never did at his desk, which meant he'd pulled the chair out, settled into it, and entirely forgotten to care about his posture. His shoulders were down. The corner of his mouth had lifted just barely, not quite enough to be a full smile, but enough that Ryo caught the exact moment the book surprised him.
Ryo's mind went to the corkboard with its color-coded notes. The books are sorted perfectly by subject. The careful, measured angle of everything. He thought about how much of Sakuya's life looked like a boy who had decided, very early on, that the world would be easier to manage if nothing in it ever got to surprise him. And then he considered the expression Sakuya was wearing right now, alone in a room he believed was still asleep.
His eyes drifted to the photograph on the wall above the calendar. He'd never gotten close enough to see what it was. He'd thought about examining it a few times. He didn't get up now, either. He turned his gaze to the ceiling instead.
At some point, Sakuya turned a page and glanced up, the pure reflex of someone checking the time, and his eyes landed on Ryo. They stayed there for a second. Ryo hadn't looked away fast enough.
Sakuya closed the book. He didn't put it down; he just held it, one thumb marking his page, and looked at Ryo. The nothing-face was instantly back in place.
"You're awake," he said.
"Yeah," Ryo said.
A pause. Then Sakuya opened the book again and went back to reading. Ryo lay on his futon, stared at the ceiling, and did not think anything useful for a while.
There was also the time Ryo had his NCT playlist playing aloud while doing homework. Sakuya hadn't told him to turn it off. He had just worked at his desk in silence until, after a while, he asked without looking up, "What's the group with the rotating members?"
"NCT," Ryo said, very carefully, like he was approaching a small animal that might bolt.
"How many members?"
Ryo took a breath. "Twenty-five active. But it's like, okay, think about it like this. It's basically like Vogue magazine, except for boy groups. You have NCT 127, which is the main unit, Korea-based. Then you have WayV, which is the China unit, then NCT Dream, which is technically the youth unit but everyone's an adult now. Then NCT Wish, which is the Japan unit, and then NCT U, which is the super-unit. The concept is that the members rotate depending on the song, so it's not a fixed lineup. It's whoever fits the project. Like Vogue having a different cover every month, but the brand stays the same. And the whole system can keep expanding; it's not capped."
Sakuya turned around in his chair. He was looking at Ryo with the expression of who was asked a yes-or-no question and received an entire documentary.
"Members," Ryo said, taking the look as a challenge, and started counting on his fingers. He named them all the way through, the 127 line, the Dream line, the WayV line, the Wish boys, going without stopping because once he started he couldn't stop. It was muscle memory. He knew this as easily as other people knew capital cities.
When he finally finished, Sakuya said, "That's a lot of people to keep track of."
"That's kind of the point. Like, there's always someone for everyone in there. It's designed to be that way."
"Who's yours?"
"Kim Doyoung!" Ryo didn't hesitate. "He's been my bias since I was twelve. He writes songs sometimes. He's really funny, but not in an obvious way—like, you have to pay attention to get the joke. And he's... he's not the warmest-seeming person at first, but when he cares about someone, he just goes all the way in. No reservations."
He stopped talking. Sakuya was looking at him.
"That tracks," Sakuya said.
He turned back to his desk, but he didn't pick up his pen. For a second or two, there was just the hum of the lamp, the cactus on the sill, and the sound of the street outside. Ryo had the distinct impression that Sakuya was very carefully not looking at anything in particular. Then, Sakuya reached for the pen, and the moment closed over.
Ryo stared at the back of his head.
"What does that mean?"
"Nothing. Focus on problem twelve."
But the bad days were also right there.
There was the afternoon Ryo came back from a hairpin-making session at Ji's place. He smelled like glue, still wore a star clip he'd helped stamp out, and had a smudge of ink near his collarbone from leaning too close to the press. His bag was already half-open from rooting through it on the walk back, and he was mid-sentence about something funny that had happened, his voice carrying the easy warmth of a good afternoon.
Sakuya said, entirely without inflection, "You're loud when you're with them."
Ryo stopped in the doorway. "Sorry?"
"You're loud. Like this." Sakuya gestured at him vaguely. "When you walk in."
Ryo thought, That's not a compliment, then. Is it an insult? He couldn't tell. That was one thing about Sakuya, Ryo never knew. He had seven years of evidence and still couldn't parse it, still kept misreading the exact same sentences over and over.
"I'll keep it down," he said quietly.
"That's not what I said."
"Then what did you say?"
Sakuya looked at him for a long moment, then turned away. He said nothing. Ryo felt that cracking sensation again, the one he'd had in the shopping arcade, only quieter this time. Less dramatic. Just the small, everyday version of it. The grinding kind.
He went to the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub for a few minutes, texted the group chat something stupid about ramen, and went back.
The room was exactly the same. Sakuya at his desk, back turned, lamp on. The cactus on the windowsill. The corkboard. Everything where it always was. That was somehow the worst part of it: that nothing had shifted. The room just absorbed the moment and went on being the room.
Ryo set his bag down. Took out his homework. Sat on the edge of the futon. Sakuya didn't turn around, and Ryo didn't say anything. There was no resolution to any of it, just the two of them in the small space, the scratch of Sakuya's pen, the rustle of Ryo's homework pages turning, and the ordinary sounds of two people simply existing in the same place after a moment had gone wrong. He did his homework and didn't bring it up again.
There was the day Sakuya got a perfect score on a practice exam, unsurprising to everyone, including Sakuya, and their homeroom teacher had made a slightly bigger deal of it than necessary, calling it "exceptional" in front of the class. Sakuya had said thank you in the correct, polite tone. After class, Ryo had said, without thinking, "That's amazing, you should be proud of yourself," exactly as he would have said it to anyone he cared about.
Sakuya looked at him with an expression Ryo couldn't quite place. It wasn't dismissive, and it wasn't the nothing-face. It was something that moved too fast to catch. "Don't do that," he said.
"Do what?"
"That." He didn't specify. He just walked ahead.
Ryo fell two steps behind and thought, What did I do? He thought about it for the rest of the walk home, through dinner, and into the evening, turning it over, trying to find the thing he'd done wrong. He couldn't find it.
There wasn't always something he'd done wrong. Sometimes Sakuya just pushed, and the pushing didn't have a reason Ryo could find. Ryo was just left trying to make himself smaller so he'd stop brushing against whatever edge Sakuya had thrown up.
The two steps stayed between them all the way home. Ryo watched the back of Sakuya's head and his shoulders and how he walked, that same pace, unhurried, like nothing had happened. Like he'd just stated a fact and moved on. Maybe he had. Maybe to Sakuya it was that simple, a thing said and then finished, and Ryo was the one still chewing on it. That was possible. That was probably exactly it.
He kept waiting for Sakuya to slow down. To look back. To say something that would tell him what had happened in there, what he'd actually meant. Sakuya didn't slow down. Didn't look back. The gap between them was held at exactly two steps the whole way. Ryo walked it out, thought about all the times he'd said the right thing to the wrong effect, and still couldn't figure out which version this was.
He texted Al that night.
ryo: is it bad that i still feel like i did something wrong even when i don't know what i did
al: bestie that's not you doing something wrong. that's someone making you feel like you did. Those are different things
ryo: yeah
al: you're allowed to take up space you know. you don't have to be quieter to fit around him
ryo: ...thanks al
al: anytime. also pim is trying to steal the crescent moon clip i lent her and i need you to back me up in the group chat
ryo: al i'm having a moment
al: i know and i hear you AND pim is stealing from me these are both true
Then there was a morning where Sakuya looked at Ryo's bag hanging by the door and said, entirely without preamble, "The star ones hold better than the heart ones. The clasp is different."
He was still looking at the bag rather than at Ryo.
Ryo just stared at him.
"...I'll tell Ji," Ryo said finally.
"It's just an observation."
"No, I mean, he'd want to know. He'd probably want to fix it." Ryo picked up his bag. The heart clip on the side had been sliding down all week; he'd been meaning to mention it. "You're right, actually. Kate said the same thing about the clasp."
A pause. Sakuya turned back to his desk.
"Good," he said. And that was all.
It was not a big moment but Ryo turned it over on the walk to school and thought, he noticed. He looked at the thing and paid attention, and he noticed. And then he thought, Stop it. Stop counting these up like they add to something. They don't add to something. He shoved the thought away and kept walking.
pim: ryo you've been quiet
ryo: no i haven't
pim: you sent one message today and it was about ramen
ryo: i like ramen
cine: ryo what happened
ryo: nothing
al: ryo.
ryo: it's fine
ji: you don't have to say if you don't want to but we're here
kate: what ji said
pim: also what they said but also ryo it's okay to be sad about something that's hard
ryo: ...thanks pim
pim: don't get used to it i'm still mad you gave kate the limited edition heart clip first
ryo: oh my god pim that was three weeks ago
pim: and i still think about it
kate: I DIDN'T EVEN ASK FOR IT
pim: you were standing there with your cute little face kate you didn't have to ask
al: pim this is so embarrassing for you
pim: al i will end you
cine: (╥﹏╥) (╥﹏╥) (╥﹏╥)
ryo: i hate this group chat
ji: no you don't
ryo: lmao okay, i don’t
There was also one night that Ryo thought about a lot afterward. He'd woken up for no reason, the kind of waking where the brain just decides it's done with sleeping for a bit. He lay on the futon and looked at the ceiling and listened to the house go quiet, and then he heard it. Not quite a sound, just a shift, the odd hush of someone else being awake in the dark.
He turned his head. Sakuya was sitting at his desk, but not working. His chair was angled toward the window. He was looking at something outside, or at nothing, and the lamp was off, and the light coming through the window was that cold blue-grey of deep night, and his face in that light was, for once, unguarded.
He looked like he was thinking about something but didn't want to think.
Ryo stayed very still, because this felt like something he had no right to, something Sakuya would shut away instantly if he knew he was being seen. He watched, for a few minutes, how Sakuya just sat there in the dark, and thought, I love you. Just that, simple and flat and tired. I've loved you for seven years and I don't know how to stop and I'm not sure I want to.
Sakuya turned, and for a half-second Ryo thought he'd been caught, but Sakuya's eyes went to the futon and went still, and Ryo realized he was just looking at the shape of him.
Then Sakuya stood up.
He crossed the room, quiet, and crouched down at the edge of the futon, and Ryo closed his eyes the rest of the way because his heart was doing something it had no business doing and he did not know what else to do. He breathed slowly. He kept his face still.
He felt Sakuya fix the blanket that had slipped, just the corner, tucking it back. Then nothing for a long moment, just the sound of the house and the distant street and both of them not moving.
Ryo thought, go back to your desk. Go back to your desk and we can both pretend this was normal.
Then he felt it. Sakuya's hand, barely there, pushed his hair off his forehead just as he'd done when Ryo was sick, and Ryo's breath went slightly wrong and he had to work very hard at keeping it even. The hand stayed a moment. Just resting. Not moving.
"You're too honest," Sakuya said, quietly. Not to Ryo, probably. To the room. To the dark. "That's the problem with you."
Ryo did not move. He did not say anything. He was not supposed to be awake.
Sakuya took his hand back. He went back to his chair. After a long time, the lamp came back on low, and Ryo heard the pages of a book, and he lay in the dark with his eyes closed.
He didn't know what to do with it. He filed it next to the fever-night and all the other not-nothings, and went back to sleep, or tried to, and thought, I'm going to be fine, and then thought, I have no idea if that's true.
(˵ ̆ 3 ̆˵)
Mika broke up with Sakuya.
Ryo wasn't there for it. He heard about it the same way he heard about most things Sakuya was involved in. Not from Sakuya, and not from anyone who was there, but from the quality of the silence afterward.
Sakuya came home later than usual that night. He said nothing at dinner. He sat at his desk for two hours and appeared to do very little. When Ryo said goodnight, Sakuya said goodnight back, and nothing else.
The next day, Mika was at school with her friends and looked fine, the kind of fine that meant it had been her choice. Sakuya moved through the day at his usual pace with his usual face, telling Ryo nothing, same as it always did.
He found out the actual reason later, from Kate, who had heard from someone in Mika's class.
"She said," Kate told him, carefully, at lunch, "that he talked about you a lot."
Ryo was so dumbfounded that he put down his chopsticks.
"Like."
"Like, apparently. He didn't notice. But she did." Kate was looking at him with the careful expression she got when she was trying to figure out how something would land. "Not in a bad way, she said. She wasn't angry about it, she said she just realized something."
Ryo picked his chopsticks back up. He moved some rice around his bowl.
"That doesn't mean anything," he said.
"No," Kate agreed. Gently.
"He told me I was disgusting."
"Yeah."
"He's never once said he's changed his mind about that."
"I know." Kate picked up her own chopsticks. "I'm not telling you what to do with it. I'm just telling you what I heard."
Ryo thought about the gradient star clip in Sakuya's pencil case. The pocky on the desk. You're too honest, said to the dark like a confession. Goodnight, said like it meant something.
He thought about being left at the school gate in the rain.
He thought about the day Sakuya had told him not to compliment him, and how Ryo had spent the rest of that walk trying to figure out what he'd done wrong.
"Okay," he said. And changed the subject.
After the breakup, little by little Sakuya pulled back.
Not from everything, and not all at once. But the tutoring stopped, or rather just stopped being scheduled, and Sakuya was home less, and when he was home he was at his desk with his headphones on, which was his version of a closed door.
The headphones were new. That was the part Ryo noticed. Sakuya had always had headphones, but he'd worn them at school or on the train, not in the room when Ryo was right there. Now they went on the moment he sat down, and they stayed on, and the room had a different quality to it. Ryo would come in, set his bag down, sit on the futon, and Sakuya would not turn around, and they would exist in the same small space without touching any of it.
Once, Ryo asked if Sakuya wanted anything from the convenience store. Sakuya pulled one headphone off, said "no" without looking, and put it back. Ryo went to the convenience store and bought himself a canned coffee and stood outside for a few extra minutes in the evening air before going back, which was not something he'd ever needed to do before.
He respected it. He went to Ji's place more. He spent more time in the Fujinaga kitchen helping Mama Fujinaga with things she didn't need help with and which she let him do anyway, and she would hand him a task and not ask questions, which was its own kind of kindness.
She put him to work on the prep that didn't require skill, the things you could do while your hands were busy and your mind was somewhere else. Washing vegetables. Sorting dried goods back into their jars. Folding the dish towels she'd already folded, which she accepted from him without comment and refolded the right way after. He stood at the counter next to her and she moved around him just as she moved around everything in her kitchen, without rushing, without fuss, and the radio was on low, some evening program, and outside the light went from gold to grey.
One evening she set a cup of tea in front of him without asking and went back to whatever she was doing at the stove. Ryo wrapped his hands around the cup and watched the steam.
"He doesn't always know what he's doing," she said. She wasn't looking at him. Her voice was even, factual, the tone of someone reporting the weather. "He gets something in his head and he holds it there and he doesn't look at it from the other side. His father was the same way." A pause. The ladle moved in a slow circle. "He's learning. He's just slow."
Ryo didn't say anything. He wasn't sure what to say.
He also started doing something he hadn't let himself do before, which was trying to talk himself out of it. He made himself hold the things that hurt. Being left at the school gate. Being told he was disgusting. Being told not to do that when all he'd done meant something. The weeks of being at close range and being kept at arm's length. He made himself really look at them, just as his mother sometimes told him to look directly at things that scared him.
They didn't stop hurting. But they started to feel like evidence of something he could name.
He thought, maybe the point is that some people are not able to receive what you have to give them. Not because of what you are. Just because of who they are and where they are, and those two things not matching up.
He thought that's a very mature and healthy conclusion.
I still love him tho
It was around this time that Yujin appeared.
His name was Han Yujin and he was in Ryo's class and he had been, as near as Ryo could figure, trying to find an excuse to talk to him for the better part of a month. He finally found one when the teacher assigned group projects and Yujin ended up in Ryo's group along with Cine, who noticed everything about everyone, sent a voice note to the group chat that night that was just her saying she thought the Han Yujin kid liked Ryo, and that was twenty-three minutes of chaos right there.
pim: hold on. the tall one with the good hair?
cine: that's him
pim: ryo he's cute
ryo: pim
pim: i'm just saying
al: wait which one is he i need a visual
cine: soccer club. the one who always has the plain white earrings
al: OH. ryo he IS cute
ji: he's in the soccer club. he's nice. i've talked to him a few times.
kate: ryo how do you feel about this
ryo: i don't know. maybe that's okay? maybe i should find out.
cine: [long pause] okay
cine: we support you
pim: obviously
ji: yeah
al: all the way
kate: all of us.
ryo: thanks
pim: but ryo
ryo: yeah
pim: make sure it's actually what you want. not just. something that's easier.
ryo: ...yeah. i know. thanks pim.
pim: okay. now back to important matters. kate explain the heart clip situation one more time
kate: PIM
al: pim let it GO
pim: i will not
Yujin was easy to be around. He laughed at things and made other people laugh and didn't have a complicated face that needed translating. What you saw was what was happening, and what was happening was that he was happy to be near Ryo, and he said so in normal ways, direct and without drama.
Ryo found himself thinking, I forgot this could be like this.
They started texting, and then studying for the project, and then Yujin asked if he could come over to work on the project, and Ryo said yes without fully thinking through the process of 'coming over' meaning the Fujinaga house.
He thought about it for about five minutes after confirming the date, which was too late to take back.
ryo: okay so slight issue
pim: what did you do
ryo: i invited yujin to study at my place
ryo: which is currently the fujinagas house
pim: .
cine: oh
ji: oh no
al: ...ryo
kate: ryo
ryo: i know
pim: i mean. maybe sakuya won't be home?
ryo: he's usually home
al: he really is
pim: ..yeah fair
Yujin arrived on a Saturday afternoon, punctual and cheerful, with his school bag and a convenience store bag because he had decided on his own that they should have snacks and bought them accordingly. Ryo opened the door himself. The Fujinagas were out running errands; he'd asked Mama Fujinaga the night before and she'd said of course, bring whoever you like, and left a spare key on the counter. Yujin stepped inside, glanced around, and said, "nice place," easy, like everything else he said. Then his attention shifted to Ryo, to the two crescent moon clips Ryo had put in that morning without thinking about it, and he said, "those are really cool, where'd you get them." Ryo said, "My friend makes them." Yujin said, "seriously?" and studied them like he actually meant it, the kind of attention people gave when they realized something was handmade. Ryo found this unreasonably easy to be around.
He took Yujin upstairs.
Sakuya's door was open. Sakuya was at his desk. He glanced up when they came in, took in Yujin with one sweep of his gaze, and turned back to his laptop without saying anything.
"This is, um," Ryo said. "My roommate. Sakuya. Fujinaga Sakuya, this is Han Yujin."
Yujin waved easily. "Hey."
Sakuya didn't respond. Ryo did not read too much into this because Sakuya not responding to social conventions was not new.
They set up on the low table, notebooks out, Yujin explaining the section they were stuck on with the patience of a boy who'd clearly understood it immediately and was waiting for the right way to explain it. He was good at that, actually. Patient. He talked through problems sideways, coming at the angle rather than straight at it, which happened to be how Ryo's brain wanted to receive them.
He caught Sakuya looking at them once, from his desk. Twice. A third time.
He didn't say anything.
An hour in, Yujin got up to use the bathroom, and Sakuya said, very flatly, "Tell him we have a tutoring session this week."
Ryo looked up. "What?"
"You have tutoring. This week. Tell him."
"Sakuya," Ryo said, slowly. "We haven't had a tutoring session in weeks."
A pause. Sakuya was looking at his screen.
"We're resuming."
Ryo stared at the back of his head. He thought about the weeks of headphones and not being home and the wall that had gone up, and anger moved through him, clean and unfamiliar, because he had not let himself be angry about any of this before.
"Why do you need me to tell him that," he said. "He has nothing to do with our tutoring."
"He's here."
"So?"
Sakuya turned around. His face was the controlled one, the one that gave nothing, but around the edges of it something was happening that Ryo couldn't read.
"It'll be confusing," he said. "If he thinks you have free time."
"Confusing to who?"
Silence.
"Do you like that guy?" Sakuya said. Flat and direct, no inflection at all, asking it the same blunt way he asked anything he actually wanted answered while pretending not to.
Ryo heard Yujin's footsteps on the stairs.
"That," he said, "is genuinely none of your business." And turned back to his notebook.
Yujin came back in and sat down and said, "where were we?" and Ryo pointed to the problem and they kept working, and Sakuya did not say anything else, and the room was loud with everything that wasn't being said.
After Yujin left, Ryo stood in the doorway. Sakuya was still at his desk.
"Why did you lie to him?" Ryo asked.
Sakuya didn't turn around. "I didn't."
"You made up a tutoring session we don't have."
"I said we were resuming. We are."
"That's not, you decided that thirty seconds before saying it, Sakuya, and you said it because you wanted him to leave." Ryo's voice was coming out steadier than he felt. "Why? You've never cared before. You've never, this whole time, you haven't said anything about, you've been actively not talking to me for weeks and now you care who I have studied over?"
"I don't care." Sakuya said flatly and immediately.
"Are you jealous?"
Sakuya turned around then. His face was very controlled.
"No."
"You're doing the thing where you say things and your face says something else and I can never tell which one to believe, Sakuya, and I'm really tired of it, I have been tired of it for a really long time, so can you just for once, once, say the actual thing?"
Something in Sakuya's jaw moved. He stood up. The room felt smaller.
"No, I don't like that guy, no, I'm not jealous, no, there is nothing happening here," he said, and his voice had that controlled quality pushed harder, like he was pressing against something. "I told you what I thought when you confessed. That hasn't changed. Nothing about this has changed. You're here because your house got damaged and you're going to leave when it's fixed and that's all this is, and you've been walking around here like, like there's something to figure out, like I'm a puzzle, and I'm not, I'm telling you directly, I don't like you, I have never liked you, how many times do I have to say that before you, before you stop," and then he stopped.
Ryo laughed. It came out wrong. It came out like something that had been waiting a long time to come out wrong.
"You kissed me," he said. "Twice."
The room went very quiet.
"The first one, okay. The banana peel. We were falling and it happened and you said it didn't and I let you say that because I didn't want to make it into something you'd hate me for. Fine."
His voice was doing something it wasn't supposed to do, fraying at the seams while he was still trying to hold the shape of it. "But the second time you came to me. I was sick and you came across the room in the dark and you kissed me on the corner of my mouth and then you kissed my forehead like I was something you were allowed to do that to, and I was awake, Sakuya. I was completely awake. I felt all of it. And you went back to your desk and you never said a word and I have been carrying that for weeks, I have been carrying it next to everything else, the pocky and the compress and the blanket and you fixing my hair in the middle of the night and saying I was too honest like that was something I should apologize for, and I have been telling myself that none of it meant anything because you said it didn't, because you keep saying it doesn't, because you're standing right there saying it right now."
He stopped. He had to stop. His chest was tightening around something he had no name for.
"But you kissed me. Not once. Twice. And you did it when you thought I wouldn't know, which means some part of you knew it was something. Some part of you knew."
Sakuya had not moved. His face had gone somewhere Ryo had never seen it go, off the map of every expression Ryo had spent seven years learning.
"So I don't need you to love me," Ryo said, quieter now, quiet the way things get when you run out of the energy to be loud. "I stopped asking for that a long time ago. But don't stand there and tell me nothing happened. Don't look me in the face and say that. I was there both times and I remember and I'm not crazy and I'm not making it into something it wasn't. You did that. You did that and then you looked at me like I was the problem."
Ryo's eyes were wet. He couldn't do anything about that.
"Loving you hurts so much, Sakuya," he said. Just the truth of it, small and tired. "It always has."
Sakuya looked at him. He seemed, for the first time in all the weeks Ryo had known him up close, like something in him had gone slightly off its axis. Like he had aimed at a target and hit something he wasn't prepared for.
Ryo wiped his face and sat on the edge of the futon and picked up his phone.
His hands were steady. That surprised him, a little. He opened his contacts and pressed his mother's name.
She picked up on the second ring. "Ryo? What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong," he said, and his voice came out smaller than he wanted it to. "I was just. Can we move? Not back to the house, I know it's not ready, but somewhere else. Maybe. Can we figure something else out?"
A pause on the other end. He heard his mother shift, heard the background sounds of the ramen shop, the hiss of the kitchen, the low murmur of his father saying something.
"Are you okay?" she said.
"I will be. I just, I can't." He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.
Another pause. He heard his parents confer, his mother's low voice and his father's quieter reply, and then she came back.
"Come to the shop tonight," his mother said. "Bring your things. We'll set you up in the back, it's just for now, just until we figure out the next step."
"The back room?"
"It's not that fancy as it looks but it's ours." He heard her smile through the phone, soft and certain. "Come home, Ryo."
He sat there for a moment after she hung up. Then he stood, and started to fold his things, quietly and without looking at Sakuya.
Sakuya watched him. He did not speak.
The futon. He'd slept on it for weeks, the thin mattress and the clean smell of it that first night. He folded the blanket and set it at the foot with the pillow on top, just as he'd found it. The spare chair Mama Fujinaga had brought up from the kitchen was still there, angled toward the desk where they'd done the tutoring. He didn't move it.
He took his phone charger from the wall. The ramune candy from the windowsill, half the bag still left. He found two of his notebooks under the edge of the futon and stacked them on top of each other.
He did not let himself look at the pencil case on Sakuya's desk.
He did not let himself look at the cactus.
He did not look at the photograph on the wall that he'd never gotten close enough to see.
He thought about the pocky and the gradient star clip and the cold compress and how Sakuya had fixed the blanket in the middle of the night, and he did not look at any of it. He zipped up the bag.
"I need to go," he said. He wasn't asking. "I'll get the rest of my things later."
He went downstairs. The front door was unlocked; the Fujinagas had come back. His mother was in the hallway, coat still on, phone in her hand, and Mama Fujinaga was coming through the door behind her, still holding a grocery bag, and they both looked at him when he appeared at the bottom of the stairs, his bag over his shoulder, and something on his face must have been clear enough because Mama Fujinaga set the grocery bag down and came to him first and put her hand on his head, just as she'd been doing since he arrived.
"You have nothing to be sorry for," she said, before he could say anything.
"I know," he said, though he'd been about to apologize. "Thank you. For everything. Really."
His mother put a hand briefly on his back, and they moved toward the door.
Sakuya came downstairs before they left. Ryo was by the door with his bag, waiting. Sakuya stood on the last step and took in the hallway, at Ryo and his mother and his own parents, and then his gaze dropped to the bag, and then to Ryo, and then he said, to Ryo's mother, "I'm sorry. This is my fault."
Ryo's mother looked at him. Her face was gentle and open, without any softening of what she meant.
"He loved you with all his heart," she said. "For a very long time. I hope you understand what that means." A pause. "I think some distance is good for him right now."
Sakuya said nothing.
Mama Fujinaga went to the kitchen without a word and came back with a container of leftover okayu that she pressed into Ryo's hands. Her eyes were bright.
"Come back when you're ready," she said. "The door is always open."
Ryo nodded, because he couldn't say anything.
Papa Fujinaga was standing just inside the doorway, still in his jacket. He was watching Sakuya, and the expression on his face was not angry, which was almost worse. It was just quiet and knowing, the expression of a father who understood what his son had done and what it had cost.
Outside, the air was cool and clear and there were stars. Ryo walked to his mother's car and got in and sat with his bag in his lap and the container of okayu balanced on top of it, and when the car started moving he watched the Fujinaga house until he couldn't see it anymore.
pim: ryo hey
ryo: hey
pim: are you okay
ryo: i will be
al: where are you
ryo: going to the ramen shop. staying in the back room for now
cine: the one with the old movie posters?
ryo: that's the one
ji: we're coming
ryo: you don't have to
pim: we know. we're coming anyway.
ji: i'll bring the good chips
cine: i'll bring the face masks
kate: i'll bring the new hairpin designs we can do them tonight
al: i'm already on the train
ryo: al you live the furthest
al: and i left the fastest. See you soon, bestie.
ryo: you guys
pim: don't say anything mushy or i'm uninviting myself
ryo: thank you
pim: ugh. okay. you're welcome. see you in fifteen.
The ramen shop was small, twelve seats across low tatami tables out front, and a kitchen that smelled like dashi and something sweet underneath it. His parents ran it like they ran most things, with a quiet, no-fuss kind of competence. The back room was just as Ryo remembered it from when he was small and used to fall asleep here while his parents finished closing. A narrow folding cot, a shelf of old inventory binders, three movie posters his father had put up as a joke years ago and then never taken down. It was barely big enough for one.
It was not fancy but the back room was entirely theirs.
Ryo sat on the cot and ate a bowl of tonkotsu his father set in front of him without ceremony, and watched his father wipe down the counter, and felt the stillness of being somewhere that would not move.
At some point his father put a hand on his shoulder. He didn't say anything. Ryo looked up at him.
"You okay?" his father said.
"Not really."
"Okay."
That was it. His father went back to the counter, and Ryo finished his ramen, and when Ji and Cine and Pim and Kate and Al showed up with chips and face masks and a full bag of new hairpin materials, his father waved them all toward the tatami tables out front instead, since five more people were never going to fit in the back room with Ryo. They pushed the low tables together and against the wall to clear the floor, and it was loud and warm out there, and Pim told him at least twice that she was not doing the mushy friend moment and then did it twice. Kate brought the gradient star clips they'd been working on. Ji brought the stamp press in her bag because of course she did. Cine cried during a drama clip on her phone and blamed it on the face mask and everyone let her. Al, who had in fact taken the train, arrived seven minutes after everyone else with wind-blown hair and three new crescent moon designs sketched on a receipt she'd found in her coat pocket.
"I had ideas on the way," she said, spreading the receipt on the table. "Look at the curve on this one."
"Al, you drew that on a receipt," Pim said.
"The best ideas don't wait for proper paper, Pim."
"That's genuinely something you believe."
"Obviously."
Ryo sat with a half-finished gradient star clip in his hands and thought, this is enough. For tonight, this is enough.
He didn't know yet what was coming. He didn't know about the morning Sakuya would show up at the shop before opening, standing in the street with that expression, the most off-script one yet, the one that was going to look like everything he'd been holding and all the words that had come out wrong. He didn't know that Mama Fujinaga was going to call his mother and his mother was not going to tell him about it for a week, smiling to herself every time she looked at him. He didn't know what Sakuya had said to his parents after he left, or what his parents had said back. He didn't know any of that.
What he knew was the clip in his hands, and Ji explaining the new stamp alignment, and Pim's voice saying something loud and decisive from across the table, and Kate's laugh, and Al's receipt on the table between them like a map to something.
Cine held up her phone. "Okay look at this scene. Tell me that's not the second lead."
"That's not the second lead," Pim said immediately.
"It absolutely is."
"That guy is clearly the main character, Cine, look at the lighting."
"The lighting is the same."
"The lighting is never the same, where are your eyes?"
"Al, back me up."
Al looked at the phone, head tilting. "I mean. Pim's right about the lighting."
"THANK YOU," Pim said.
"But Cine's right that he's the second lead."
"That doesn't even make sense, you can't both be right," Pim said.
"Sure you can. The lighting is a directorial choice to make you feel like he's the main character, but the narrative structure says second lead. Both things are happening."
A pause. Everyone looked at Al.
"Al," Kate said. "That was really smart."
"I know," Al said, and went back to her crescent moons.
Ryo laughed. It surprised him, the laugh, how it came out before he could decide about it, and Ji looked at him and smiled, and Ryo felt it, warm and real and still in there after everything.
He finished the star clip and held it up in the light.
Perfect, in the small handmade way that all their pins were perfect. Slightly imperfect but clearly made by someone who meant it.
He clipped it into his own hair, right above his ear, and went back to work.