Chapter Text
The sun hadn’t even warmed up yet, and Harua already hated being there.
Standing at the edge of the Hikaido School High field, he watched the boys warming up, running, and yelling as if it were the most natural and comfortable thing in the world. For him, though, it felt like punishment disguised as a healthy activity. Damn soccer.
At least the training outfit looked decent enough: white shorts above the knee, a light blue T-shirt with the team logo printed on the chest, and the number 00 on the back the only number left in the storage room. Apparently, it symbolized a new chapter for Harua, a fresh start… or, as his teammate had decided to put it, “Now you’re the newbie.”
“Look at you, all cute in those shorts,” a voice came from behind him. “Didn’t even know you had legs…”
Harua let out a deep sigh before turning around. Maki had appeared out of nowhere like a silent curse, flashing that smug little grin that showed off his naturally sharp canines and the shameless way he was checking him out.
“Are you gonna keep staring, or do you want to take a picture?”
“Can I?” Maki asked, grinning as he shoved his hands into his pockets.
“Do you wanna die?” Harua shot back.
“Not today. You’re so pale you look like notebook paper. Nervous?” he teased, clearly amused by Harua’s tense expression.
“I feel sick. I wanna throw up.”
Harua clenched his fists, trying to keep his eyes on the field, trying to ignore the chaos brewing inside him as Hirota got closer.
“That’s fear, Bunny,” Maki said. “Your body’s already prepping for the disaster it’s gonna be… Basic biology.”
Harua huffed, knowing he was annoyingly right but refusing to admit it out loud. He wasn’t about to give him that satisfaction.
“What if I fake a stomachache?”
“You could try,” Maki raised an eyebrow, pretending to consider it. “But the coach usually goes harder on the ones who skip the first day. You’d basically be signing your own weakness certificate.”
“I’d just say I ate too much and got indigestion…” Harua improvised.
“‘Too much,’ in your case, means a cookie and a half?”
“Hey! You idiot.”
“Come on, Bunny…”
Maki slung an arm around Harua’s shoulders, pulling him close like a war buddy. Harua tried to act indifferent, but that kind of closeness made him weirdly uneasy. Maki’s scent, the warmth of his touch, the casual tone… it all made it feel like they’d been childhood friends. His gaze slipped, accidentally meeting Maki’s.
There was a spark between their eyes.
“You’re not gonna die. At least not today. We’ll go easy on you just ten laps around the field.”
“Ten?!” Harua’s eyes went wide like he’d just heard a death sentence. “By the fifth, I’ll be dead!”
“Your body needs to get used to the intensity.”
Maki said it like some motivational coach which, for Harua, was completely demotivational.
Harua opened his mouth to come up with an excuse involving imaginary asthma or a sudden lack of oxygen, but the voice that came from behind them froze him mid-thought.
“Maki, you forgot your headphones at my place…”
Harua turned slowly. And there he was.
Nicholas Wang.
Time stopped for a moment.
Or maybe for an eternity Harua would never really know how many seconds he stood frozen in place.
The blood seemed to drain from his face and rush straight to his ears, which burned like someone had lit a match inside them. His heart was pounding so loud, he was sure the sound was audible.
Nicholas stopped too the second he saw him. His eyes met Harua’s, and there were no smiles, no polite greetings, not even a “good morning.” Just the silence between two people with unresolved history… and now, an inevitable future.
Shit.
How the hell had he forgotten Nicholas was on the soccer team? Ouch.
“Ah, thanks, Nico,” Maki said, breaking the awkward silence as he grabbed his headphones. “Left the house so fast I didn’t even notice I forgot them.”
Maki still hadn’t caught on to the tension hanging in the air while Nicholas and Harua stared each other down, so he casually turned to introduce them.
“Nico, this is Shigeta Harua. New guy on the team. Hikaido’s math star and blah blah blah,” Maki started. “Harua, this is Nicholas team captain.”
Nicholas looked at Harua for one more second before giving a barely noticeable nod. There was something in his eyes something that made Harua’s stomach twist.
“You two already know each other?” Maki asked, finally sensing the weird energy.
“A bit,” Harua replied way too fast before Nicholas could say anything.
“You never said you knew him, Nico.” Maki’s eyes flicked between the two like he was watching a ping-pong match.
“It wasn’t that important…”
Nicholas’s words hit Harua’s chest like a sharp arrow, piercing through with precision. “Wasn’t that important.” So, to Nicholas, whatever they’d been didn’t even matter enough to mention to anyone?
That stung way more than Harua wanted to admit. His expression shifted from startled surprise to quiet, bitter disappointment.
Meanwhile, Maki was smiling cluelessly.
“Anyway…” Nicholas cleared his throat, drawing Harua’s attention. “Taki and I are going to another city today to pick up some gear. If you wanna come, we’re taking my dad’s car.”
“No fucking way, really? I drive.”
“Not happening. I’d rather not die in your hands, Maki,” Nicholas said as he started walking away.
“Oh, come on…” Maki whined like a child.
And then Nicholas left though not completely. Before joining the other guys on the field, he threw one last unreadable look Harua’s way.
Harua stayed still, trying to remember how to breathe. His chest was pounding so fast he might’ve passed out right there.
“What the hell was that, Bunny? You were basically trying to burn a hole through Nico’s head,” Maki said between laughs, earning a deadly side-eye.
“Shut up, Hirota.”
“What? I’m just saying what everyone saw,” he replied with a crooked grin.
Harua let out a tired sigh and bent down to tie his shoes mostly to hide his face, which was probably the deepest shade of red known to humankind.
Then the coach’s whistle cut through the air, grabbing everyone’s attention on the field.
“You ready?”
“I think I’m about to faint.”
“Not before scoring me a goal!” Maki shouted, sprinting ahead with that huge grin on his face.
Yeah. Harua was definitely in trouble.
Practice followed the usual structure, nothing out of the ordinary. It started with warm-ups a few laps around the field and a hundred jumping jacks.
And within just ten minutes of sweating, shouting, and running, Harua was already sitting flat on the ground, completely out of breath and begging for mercy.
“Get up, you weakling!” Jay, one of the boys on the team, shouted at him, making Harua almost flip him off.
Next came the short passes and light dribbling, where Harua didn’t hold back on the embarrassment when he decided to trip over the ball, slip, and hit the ground earning a chorus of laughter and stupid comments like:
“Harua, it’s a soccer ball, not a Pilates ball!”
“Careful, Bunny Boy, don’t start digging a hole now!”
“Why’s the team mascot on the field?”
Maki was laughing the whole time, but he still threw sharp looks at anyone who laughed louder than him as if to say, “Only I get to make fun of him, can’t you see he’s learning?”
Then came the passing drills. The coach explained how it worked. Harua just had to run with the ball and pass it to his partner for that round.
The problem? His first partner was Nicholas.
Harua nearly fell backward when the coach called their names together, and standing in front of Nicholas, he could feel the weight of that gaze on him.
“Trap it and pass it to me,” the redhead said.
“What?” Harua blinked.
“I’ll pass you the ball, then we run, and you pass it back to me.”
Let’s just say, in practice, it went very differently. When Nicholas passed him the ball, Harua panicked and kicked it straight ahead completely forgetting he wasn’t supposed to use that much strength for a short pass.
Was that chaos? Oh, it got worse.
Once the actual scrimmage started, the coach split them into two teams of ten. Harua was placed in defense probably in the naïve hope that he wouldn’t have to run too much. The whistle blew, and Harua immediately sprinted in the wrong direction.
“Harua! You’re supposed to defend!”
Embarrassed and panting, Harua made a U-turn like a car reversing and stumbled back into position.
A few minutes later, the ball finally came his way.
Focus, focus…
The boy coming at him was only slightly bigger, so it shouldn’t be hard. Just don’t let him pass. Simple.
For a moment, it actually seemed like things were going fine until a wave of nerves hit Harua, and he swung his leg to kick the ball.
Well… not the right one.
He didn’t kick the ball.
In a panicked, clumsy blur, Harua squeezed his eyes shut, took a deep breath, and kicked with such desperate force that he landed a perfectly aimed shot right in the most delicate region of male anatomy.
The boy collapsed immediately with a strangled scream, and Harua clapped both hands over his mouth. The fall was dramatic like someone watching their life flash before their eyes in slow motion. The others rushed over, and the whistle blew again, sharp and loud.
“M–my… my soul…” the poor guy groaned.
Maki dropped to his knees, laughing so hard he could barely breathe.
“Dude, you castrated him!” he howled, half crying from laughter.
The coach threw his hands over his head in pure despair.
“SHIGETA! THIS IS SOCCER, NOT A LIFE-OR-DEATH DUEL!”
“IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!!!” Harua yelled back, pale as paper, eyes wide. “I JUST— I JUST— I WAS AIMING FOR THE BALL!”
“Yeah, the wrong ball!” someone shouted from the back, bursting into laughter.
The injured boy lay curled up on his side, both hands between his legs, holding on to whatever dignity he had left.
“I’m not gonna have kids… I’m not gonna have kids…”
Harua dropped to his knees beside him, panicking completely.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry— do you want ice? Should I call an ambulance?”
And, as if the universe hadn’t humiliated him enough, he showed up.
“Everything okay here?”
Nicholas.
Harua froze.
Nicholas looked from the boy on the ground to Harua, then to the coach and sighed, almost laughing.
“You guys actually let him join the team?”
“IT WAS A TECHNICAL ERROR!” Harua protested.
“Yeah, technical error on the teammate’s anatomy…” Maki muttered, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes.
Nicholas just crossed his arms and looked at Harua that look again, the one that messed with him.
“You’re still… unpredictable,” he said, voice neutral but a tiny smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.
Harua, now somewhere between a nervous breakdown and spontaneous combustion, seriously considered digging a hole right there in the grass and living in it just like they’d joked earlier.
After that unfortunate incident, the poor boy was taken to the infirmary to make sure he hadn’t actually lost his ability to reproduce. Meanwhile, practice continued as usual. Unfortunately.
Nothing changed the opposing team scored a goal, and while that happened, Harua was still sitting on the grass, rethinking every single life choice that had led him to that field. Later, when he tried to make a simple pass to Maki, he kicked so hard he hit the coach standing on the sidelines clipboard and all.
By the end of practice, the scoreboard was the least of Shigeta’s worries.
What everyone would remember was the tragic debut of the “promising new player’s horror show.”
As everyone was leaving, Maki walked over to Harua, tossing a towel over his shoulders.
“I told you you wouldn’t die, but I almost had to take that back. You okay?”
“Why am I like this…?” Harua sighed, buried in sweat and shame.
“You were born to do math, not cross passes. Relax, Bunny, I can talk to the director and say it’s better if you go bake cupcakes instead.”
“No! It’s a matter of honor now.”
Harua stood up, determined. He’d never thought of giving up on a challenge if an equation seemed wrong, he’d redo it until it worked.
And that wouldn’t change on the field. Harua wanted to prove he was capable.
He started walking toward the locker room to get those sticky clothes off and wash away the embarrassment of the day. Maki followed behind him, wearing that grin that said he still had a lot of nonsense to spill.
“You ran like someone was chasing you with a chainsaw, dude” the blonde commented, opening his locker and grabbing his water bottle.
“Shut up, Hirota!” Harua snapped, still breathless “I hate this. I hate this place. I hate sweat. I hate…”
“Nicholas?” Maki interrupted, casual, like it was just another question in the list.
Harua froze for a second, his hand still on the locker handle. His eyes immediately met the blonde’s who was leaning against his locker, arms crossed, a teasing smile on his lips. For a moment, Harua forgot how to breathe.
“What about him?” Harua asked.
“Nothing” Maki said, amused “Just noticed that every time he got near you, you missed a pass. Or tripped. Or nearly choked to death.”
“Coincidence. That’s all.”
“Sure” Maki replied, sarcastic “But you did go pale when he came close right after you almost killed Jake Junior.”
“I was tired… His name’s Jake? What class is he in? I need to apologize…”
Maki chuckled, biting his lip a habit, apparently. Harua couldn’t help but glance at the movement before quickly looking away again.
“Come on, spit it out. Are you two mortal enemies?”
“You’re closer to that than he is.”
“Ex-boyfriends?” Maki guessed.
Harua immediately turned back to his locker, struggling with the combination lock. Maki noticed the nervousness and raised an eyebrow before leaning closer, effortlessly unlocking it.
“We… dated.”
Harua said it under his breath, after a sigh almost as if his mouth itself refused to let the words out.
He hoped Maki hadn’t heard, his hands tightening around the towel as he wiped the sweat under his hair, still avoiding eye contact.
“And?” Maki tilted his body closer, resting an elbow on the locker next to him. “Did he dump you or did you dump him?”
“You’re way too nosy, you know that? That’s none of your business.” Harua shot back, sharp and defensive.
He slammed the locker door shut, the loud sound enough to make Maki pull back slightly. The taller boy now watched him with a mix of curiosity and confusion.
“So that’s why you looked like a kid afraid of clowns when he showed up earlier to give me my headphones…”
Harua let out a weak laugh, leaning his head against the locker behind him.
“Don’t tease me, please. I already hate myself enough…”
Maki went silent for a few seconds. He really wanted to tease him, but something stopped him.
Then that mischievous grin crept back onto his face.
“What if… we made him look at you again?”
Harua turned, suspicious.
“What do you mean?”
“You wouldn’t want him to look at you again? He still seems to feel something for you.”
“You… think so?” Harua asked, his voice fragile, almost shy.
“Yep, absolutely” Maki lied smoothly.
The truth was, Maki didn’t have a clue. But he needed Harua to believe in what he was about to say next.
“A fake relationship. You and me. Just for a short while. Nothing big. Just enough to make him scratch his head and get a little jealous.”
Harua frowned for a few seconds, their eyes meeting again before an explosion of laughter burst out.
“You’re joking, right?!” he asked, even though part of him feared the answer.
There was no way this was happening.
Hirota Riki and Shigeta Harua dating? Even if it was fake?
That was absurd.
The whole school already thought the two of them had some secret thing going on this would only feed the rumors if it wasn’t handled carefully. Harua didn’t stop laughing, even when Maki’s expression made it very clear he wasn’t joking.
“Seriously, Hirota” Harua rolled his eyes, a nervous smile fading from his lips “Are you stupid? All this just to make him jealous? I don’t need that. Actually, I don’t need to do anything about Nicholas.”
“Even knowing he’s planning to ask someone else out?” Maki dropped the bomb suddenly.
“What?” Harua turned to him, eyes wide, curiosity instantly replacing his irritation.
“I don’t need that.” Sure you don’t want to know what Nicholas has been up to…” Maki said, tone playful, before starting to walk away, passing a stunned Harua.
“Is Nicholas already interested in someone else?”
The thought settled in Harua’s mind like poison.
He’d buried their memories deep in his subconscious they resurfaced sometimes, but now, the idea of Nicholas moving on, being happy with someone else, was a sharp blade slicing open wounds he thought had long healed.
In a desperate, impulsive move, Harua grabbed Maki’s wrist, stopping him and forcing the taller boy to face him.
“What do you know about that…?” Harua’s voice came out uneven, a mix of anger and vulnerability.
At that moment, for the first time in a long while, he felt that familiar chill of insecurity spread through his chest. His gaze lifted toward Maki, and the taller boy caught a glimpse of something raw and desperate behind those eyes.
Hirota had never seen Harua like that before the tension between them thickened like a storm about to break.
“Uhm… I might know something. I mean, he’s my friend, we tell each other stuff. Let’s just say Nico’s thinking about asking someone out…”
“Is he? Who?” Harua asked, a little too desperate.
“Calm down, Bunny” Maki’s lips curved into a grin “I’ll give you more details if you accept my proposal. We’ll make Nicholas interested in you again, and of course, in my case…” his grin turned into a smirk “…you’ll help me make someone else jealous too.”
“You want to pretend to date me to make someone jealous?” Harua raised a brow. “What makes you think this will even work?”
“Secret crushes, you know how it goes” Maki shrugged, pretending to sound casual, though the spark in his eyes gave him away.
Harua crossed his arms, gaze unfocused for a few seconds. The idea sounded ridiculous, idiotic, and what if it didn’t work? Did he really want Nicholas’s attention again? What if Nicholas was already interested enough in someone else that no fake relationship would make a difference?
There was still a tiny spark of hope.
“So we just… pretend?” Harua asked cautiously.
“Just pretend. Simple. Everyone will think we’re really dating, including Nicholas. I’ll make sure he gets jealous enough, and eventually he’ll confront me about it.”
“And what will you do then?”
“We’ll stage a breakup scene. He’ll see it, follow you, and then you use that charm of yours to win him back, Bunny.”
Maki grinned again while Harua felt his ears burning.
“This is ridiculous…”
Harua thought for a few more seconds, heart pounding from a mix of nerves and anticipation.
Finally, he sighed.
“…Fine… but just for a little while.”
“Deal!”
Maki lifted his hand, eyes glinting with that contagious excitement of his like he was already celebrating before anything had even happened.
Harua opened his mouth to say something, but the words died midair. He just clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and sighed. With a hesitant motion, he raised his hand to meet Maki’s.
He felt the warmth of Maki’s palm against his own and for a brief second, that touch made it impossible not to notice how small his hand looked compared to Maki’s. Practically swallowed whole.
“…Uh oh. Look who’s coming.”
Harua turned his head slowly and felt his stomach drop. Nicholas. Talking to someone, heading straight toward them.
Oh no.
Oh, no, no, no.
“Crap… What do I do? Should I run? Do I—” He spun around in small circles, eyes darting in panic as if searching for an escape route.
“Showtime, Bunny.”
Maki’s voice came low and teasing, pulling Harua’s attention back to him.
He blinked, confused, not processing what that meant until Maki’s hand suddenly wrapped around his waist.
Firm. Warm. Confident.
Harua froze. His brain short-circuited, every nerve screaming what the hell is happening But before he could speak, before a single sound could leave his lips Maki leaned in.
And kissed him.
Not a soft brush. Not an accident. A real kiss.
The world fell silent all at once the voices, the echo of the locker room, everything blurred out until all that existed was the heat of Maki’s mouth against his. The soft press of lips that sent a jolt running down his spine, an explosion under his skin.
It was quick but long enough for Harua to feel every heartbeat slamming against his ribs. His breath caught somewhere in his throat, and his chest tightened with a mess of surprise… and something deeper. Something he didn’t understand.
And somehow… he kissed back.
Instinct took over; his lips moved with Maki’s, hesitant at first, then slowly syncing. His tongue brushed against Maki’s in a shy, trembling touch curious, uncertain, but undeniably there.
The feeling was different. Intense.
Like something that had been bottled up inside him for too long was finally breaking free.
Then reality hit cold and merciless.
He was kissing Maki. In the locker room.
Where anyone — Nicholas — could’ve seen.
He jerked back fast, stumbling away, eyes wide and face burning red. His breathing came out in short gasps as he looked at Maki who was, of course, grinning. That smug, golden grin that screamed trouble.
He wiped the corner of his mouth with his thumb, looking way too pleased.
“I… what the hell do you think you’re doing—” Harua muttered, voice low and wrecked, words tangled somewhere between anger and disbelief.
And then he turned and walked off l nearly tripping over his own feet brushing past Nicholas and another guy without daring to look up.
Leaving Maki behind, smiling like someone who’d just found his new favorite game.
“Hm… this is gonna be fun.”
The blond murmured, his gaze lazily shifting toward Nicholas now standing completely still, eyes locked on the scene that had just unfolded