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When Langa wakes up in the middle of the car ride to the hospital, Reki assumes it to be a good sign at first.
With that skull cradled in his lap, neck supported with a rolled-up hoodie covered in blood stains, he should feel a wave of relief upon seeing those eyes roll open. Before he can react, though, it becomes evident that something is amiss.
One of Reki’s hands is planted firmly on the inside door handle of the car and the other is fisted into the front of Langa’s shirt, right over his heart. Reki isn’t a medical professional by any means but feeling the steady thumping under his touch keeps him sane.
A particularly sharp turn combined with the maniac speed Joe maintains from the driver’s seat of Shadow’s car is what causes those eyes to open, both his and Reki’s bodies pulled by sheer velocity so suddenly that Reki has to brace himself against the door not to hit his own head on the window. His mouth runs dry seeing Langa staring back up at him, mostly out of fear that Langa will be in pain if he’s conscious enough to register it. He unfurls his fist from the twisted fabric to lay a hand against the boy’s face, trying to keep him from being jostled too harshly.
Neither of them makes a sound.
Langa doesn’t look like someone who can comprehend words despite being ‘awake’. His eyes are glassy and clouded over in almost a film, like plastic wrap surrounding his sclera. Reki still nearly takes it as a positive, though, that he’s alive and has the ability to respond to all the bumpy terrain - before the realization dawns on him. Langa’s pupils are uneven.
It’s subtle, but they are. The blue on the left is swallowed up by more black than on the right, and Langa isn’t blinking after a good minute and a half goes by. His mouth is partly open and tinged with red, whether from blood or simply dried and cracked from not being able to keep it shut, Reki doesn’t know. Doesn’t want to know.
Langa miraculously hadn’t visibly bled after the fall. Most of the dried blood on the hoodie beneath his neck is from the frantic, adrenaline-fueled manner in which Reki had slid down the side of a fucking mountain to get to the bottom of it more quickly. He isn’t sure where he’d even gotten cut from the jagged rock; he hasn’t felt any pain yet.
Another jostle around a tight corner causes Reki’s grip on Langa’s face to border on dangerously aggressive. He sends Cherry a pleading look from where the man turns to assess them from the passenger seat.
“Careful, Ape. We don’t need to crash on the way to the hospital.”
Reki can only see a sliver of Joe’s face from the rearview mirror, but he catches the way his eyebrows squeeze enough to make lines down his forehead.
“Time is everything right now, Kaoru,” he says in all seriousness.
Their voices have lost the teasing lilt that usually accompanies their back-and-forths. Reki forgets to say his own desperate plea for safe driving when he looks back at Langa, the words dying in his throat.
If he didn’t know better, he could try and pretend that Langa is truly looking back at him. But no, the gaze is empty and chilling.
Reki feels like he’s trapped in the backseat with a corpse. It makes his skin crawl, but he wouldn’t want anyone else to be in his place. If he holds Langa tight enough, he might not have to ever let go.
His thumb stutters across a pale cheek, sliding over a faint scuff mark of dirt. It’s the middle of the night and there are no other cars on the road. Joe probably won’t actually crash into anything, and he’s probably more than correct in the assumption. Time is everything.
“Almost there,” he says to the body sprawled across the three seats.
Langa doesn’t respond.
━━━━━━༻❁༺━━━━━━
The apartment is so quiet.
It’s the first night that Nanako has to return to work after taking personal leave, and she leaves a list of reminders on a sticky note along with verbally explaining everything to Reki at least three times before she’s out the door. She’s a wreck. Has been for a stretch of time, but Reki is able to have a conversation with her now without either of them breaking down. Maybe they’re both wrecks.
Reki collapses on the sofa the moment she’s gone and turns on the television to keep himself busy while Langa naps. He can never seem to get enough sleep these days. Reki can never seem to get any.
He flips through mindless evening programming and tries to listen to the words being spoken on screen, hugging one of Nanako’s decorative throw pillows to his chest. The glow of the large TV starts to hurt his eyes about an hour in, and he switches to a smaller one as he pulls his phone out of his hoodie pocket.
He hasn’t been on his phone much recently; it’s far too easy to Google unhelpful things that keep him on the brink of insomnia or to stumble onto the S social media page and indulge the darker corner of his brain by searching out the video someone had uploaded that night. Despite Cherry fighting tooth and nail against it, it keeps getting reuploaded.
Sick fucks.
(Reki is included in that group of sick fucks whether he wants to admit it or not, and he would never admit it to anyone).
Or more pressingly, he finds himself reading over the plethora of texts he never bothers to answer, from Joe or Miya or even Shadow strangely enough, ones asking where he’s been and how Langa is doing now that he’s home from the hospital. He’ll answer eventually. They’ve all been left open and read, but when a text pops up from his own mother, Reki bites into his lip knowing he’ll have to reply.
It reads ‘Will you be home tomorrow? Koyomi has an after-school program and girls need to stay home.’ The unspoken expectation is that he’ll watch the twins at home.
He glances behind his back towards Langa’s bedroom door, anxiety spiking in his chest. Nanako has to work tomorrow evening as well. His fingers fly across the keyboard.
‘langa needs 24/7 supervision mom. can they come with me here after school?’
Masae’s reply is instantaneous as if she knew exactly what he would say.
‘I don’t think that’s appropriate. And you’re not Langa’s caregiver, Reki.’
Annoyance flares up within him, a cracked phone screen blurring the message partway through. She doesn’t understand. Langa could have died that night, could have ended up at the bottom of the hill and spilled his brains onto the cold ground, and it would have been Reki to blame. Again.
Helping him get out of bed to piss and eat is the least he can possibly do, if not for Langa then for his own weak conscience.
He smacks his phone against his forehead.
‘we’ve had this conversation. i’d bring him to our house but i don’t drive. he’s not well enough to walk the entire way.’
The conversation fades out for a while, long enough to make him itch all over. He doesn’t like arguing with his mom, and this situation has put them both in rough spots a few times now. It's made Reki realize how much he was already shouldering at home before thoughtlessly taking on this new responsibility. It is his responsibility, though, to be there for Langa in whatever way he’s needed.
He has to make up for it all somehow.
His mom’s typing bubble looks inexplicably annoyed if such a thing can make sense.
‘Never mind Reki. Grandma said she’d watch them. I hope they don’t wear her out, her back has been bad recently.’
Great. The guilt doubles in size, and Reki has to turn his phone off and throw it to the side to try to avoid ruminating on it longer than he knows he will anyway. He sinks back into the cushions and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes to block the hot tears swimming right under his eyelids, heavy and thick.
━━━━━━༻❁༺━━━━━━
The fall happens so fast that everyone’s reactions lag behind a solid three seconds.
In those three seconds, Reki doesn’t breathe, doesn’t blink.
One moment, there are two racers rounding a corner on the most dangerous course any of the spectators have ever seen. Two impressively fast skaters with undeniable competitive chemistry and an edge above everyone else – two skaters that seem to embark on the impossible, dodging actively crumbling rocks and passing each other by a hair’s width every other push, struggling to overpower their opponent.
Two skaters leering at each other with near-feral ferocity, smiling wicked grins and pulling off inhuman stunts to impress each other, teetering on the edge of insanity.
It’s the most alive Langa has ever looked, and God, he looks different.
After he snaps out of his initial hyper-focused state, something Cherry knowingly refers to as The Zone, he blossoms into a whole new creature. His eyes are wild and alight, and his cheeks are flushed with excitement. It makes Reki’s heart burn just to observe from the sidelines, staring up at the projector screen with fists at his sides.
He’s chanting something to himself under his breath, a hurried rush of Langa’s name and encouragements that fall on no one’s ears, only to keep himself grounded.
The world as he knows it falls apart the very next moment.
It’s difficult to tell where exactly it goes wrong, or if Adam’s outstretched arm has anything to do with the resulting stumble. The crowd goes quiet for all three seconds – and then it erupts in ear-splitting noise.
Reki is running before he can think. He pushes through bodies and over the original abandoned course, kicking up dust and dirt on the way to his destination.
It’s something like fate that gets him there, given that he knows nothing about the new course and the absolute tunnel vision that his brain fades into. He skids to a stop right at the cliff’s edge and his stomach lurches as he accidentally leans and looks over the side of it without thinking. He’s sure people are still yelling and causing a commotion, but Reki only hears a sharp ringing.
Adam is nowhere to be seen and Langa is motionless at the bottom of the mountainside.
It’s only natural that he lowers his center of gravity and starts to slide down the steep decline of it immediately, using his hands and feet to stop himself from meeting a similar fate as he claws his way down.
Towards the bottom of the jagged and rocky terrain, the front of his shoe catches on a tree root and he tumbles forward, guarding his head with his forearms until the lurching and rolling stops, his vision of the Earth continuing to spin. Reki’s chest is heaving as he gets back on his feet only to collapse down next to Langa’s body.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he chants it like a prayer, eyes raking over the scene.
There’s no visible injury – that obviously isn’t much comfort with Langa lying limp, expressionless. Like he’s asleep. Reki puts a hand on his chest and finds that he’s breathing. It’s shallow and slow but it’s there, along with the beating of his heart.
Reki doesn’t know what to do. His palms are covered in dirty, bloody scratches and he feels faint after the rough departure down the cliffside, so he sits and waits. For what he isn’t sure.
There’s dirt in Langa’s pretty blue hair and his white overshirt is torn on one sleeve, jagged but void of blood. His newly repaired skateboard is across the landing, upside down with one lone wheel spinning and spinning in protest. Reki doesn’t know how long he sits there before Cherry’s motorcycle arrives.
Joe pulls him off the ground first – when had he started holding Langa’s hand? – it slips from his grasp when he’s hoisted up, wordless and devoid of the energy needed to fight the separation.
There’s more white noise, Joe and Cherry and maybe a third person yelling from the top of the mountain, and before he can connect one dot to the other, he’s being pushed into Shadow’s old car in a completely new location at the entryway of S.
━━━━━━༻❁༺━━━━━━
It's late in the evening when Langa emerges from the bedroom. The sound of the door opening knocks Reki out of the spiral of self-pity and exhaustion weighing him down and he jumps up, jogging over to the boy.
Langa looks almost normal. That’s the most frustrating part of this most days. Sometimes Reki can forget how different he is now when he looks the same as always - if you ignore how much skinnier he’d gotten in the hospital.
He drags a sleepy hand over droopy blue eyes and hugs his arms around his own waist that’s draped in a baggy Maple Leaf t-shirt.
“Mom’s gone?” he asks.
Reki nods.
“Yeah, um, she’ll be back in the morning. I’m here, though.”
Langa hums and looks around the room before frowning, like he’d forgotten why he came into the lounge in the first place. He gets that lost look on his face a lot now, but it’s at least familiar. Not too far off from his baseline awareness.
Reki isn’t sure what to say, but he remembers the sticky note and puts a hand on Langa’s elbow.
“She left us a list. You’ve got an appointment tomorrow morning, so you need to shower. Or would you rather eat first?”
He remembers to give Langa extra time to respond. When he realizes he’s not getting an answer, there’s an unexplainable pang in his chest that he has to shake off.
“Okay, shower first. We’ll just follow the order on the list.”
-
Langa needs less help now than when he’d first been discharged from rehab, but Reki still has to restrain himself from stepping in to assist in things that he’s capable of. He watches with twitching fingers as Langa stands in front of the running shower and tugs his shirt off with uncoordinated maneuvers, getting stuck in the arm holes twice before it’s successfully dropped to the floor. It lands inches away from the hamper of dirty clothes.
Pants and underwear are easier, but Langa has to hold onto the sink to step out of them due to his poor balance, always wobbly and unsure like a baby deer. Reki holds his breath every time those feet stumble, terrified that he’s going to fall. He doesn’t, though, and he only needs an arm to hold onto to step over the threshold of the tub and plop down in the newly bought shower chair.
It’s a stark reminder of the injury and Reki wants to hate it, but it keeps Langa safe along with the plethora of non-slip mats that have been added to the bathroom floor.
He checks the water temperature one final time and puts all of the shampoo and body wash bottles in plain view before shutting the curtain to give a delayed semblance of privacy.
“Alright, man, it’s all you. Say something if you need help.”
“Okay.”
Reki sits on the closed toilet seat and waits for about ten minutes. At first, there are sounds of movement and bottles opening and closing, the water pressure sputtering, and so on. When the noise becomes lessened over time, he starts to get antsy.
“Langa?”
There’s no answer, so he stands up and pushes the curtain back again. Langa is seated safely in the chair, but his head is hanging down and sending overgrown bangs falling into his face. Reki feels a spike of fear at the sight.
“Langa,” he says more firmly.
The boy raises his head and Reki’s heart crumbles a little more. There are tear tracks down his cheeks that are evident despite the rest of the water from the shower rolling over him, and Langa wipes them away fiercely, some intense emotion shining in his eyes. He’s shivering even though the water remains fairly hot, felt as it grazes Reki’s arms given his proximity.
“What’s wrong?”
Wiping away more tears as fast as they fall, Langa rests his head against the cool wall of the shower and visibly represses a sob. He opens his mouth to speak, and no words come out. Reki is already getting pelted with water, so he picks up the shampoo bottle and gets to work in silence.
He lathers the shampoo into Langa’s hair and guides him back to the stream to rinse it out before quickly working in a bit of conditioner. Nanako bought a special long-handled loofah thing a while back that comes in handy when Reki thinks to grab it and lather body wash on it. He tries to give it to Langa, but all he gets is a resounding head shake.
So, he grits his teeth and soldiers on, giving the boy’s body a once over in all the places he can reach without climbing into the tub fully clothed.
There was a time when this would make both of them flustered. There was a time when seeing each other in any state of undress would lead to smiling, open-mouthed kisses and fingers tangled in wild strands of hair. Reki doesn’t understand how he can miss Langa so badly when he’s centimeters away.
“Almost done, hang in there,” he says with an unfortunately frantic undertone.
It isn’t rare to see Langa cry these days. His emotions are completely unmasked and unpredictable, and they can change in the blink of an eye. The doctors and therapists said it was totally normal, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to deal with.
Langa doesn’t cry when he’s upset, he shuts down. He doesn’t sob in the shower for no damn reason.
After rinsing out what’s left of the conditioner, Reki cuts the water off and wraps a towel around Langa’s broad shoulders. They’re still shaking, like the rest of his body, and he hangs his head again when Reki starts to wrestle him into standing up.
“You’re okay, Langa. Can you tell me what day it is?”
There’s a beat of silence.
“Wednesday.”
“Good. What are you feeling right now?”
It’s one of those dumb tricks he’d picked up on at the rehab center, asking simple questions that should have easy answers. Giving Langa some sense of orientation and awareness of where he is and what he’s doing – coaxing him into the present.
He doesn’t answer for a while, too busy being pulled out of the tub to stand by the mirror. Reki towel dries his hair for him and watches their reflections in the glass. Langa is looking at himself with a frown before his eyes flicker to Reki’s stilted movements.
He may not be a caretaker in the literal sense, but he thinks he’s doing an okay job given the circumstances.
Langa leans back against him, completely uncaring that he’s nude and dripping water all over the place. Reki is going to have to start bringing spare clothes to keep here.
“Bad.”
“You feel bad?”
“Stupid.”
It’s Reki’s turn to frown. He hooks his chin over Langa’s shoulder and wraps an arm around his waist, swallowing thickly. The body in front of his own is far too frail for comfort.
His voice is hoarse when he speaks next because for a split second, it's like he can read into Langa’s mind. It’s a sliver of his old self staring back, trying to fight its way to the surface behind those glazed-over blue irises.
“You are not stupid.”
━━━━━━༻❁༺━━━━━━
They’re barreling through the hospital entrance when Reki notices the swelling. It was imperceptible before, but in the harsh lights of the building, he can see clearly that Langa’s head is swollen on the right side, previously masked by dirty hair and the dark interior of the car. There’s budding redness around his hairline that could easily become a bruise as well.
He honestly doesn’t get a great view of it as he and Cherry trail behind where Joe has Langa hoisted over a muscular shoulder pacing swiftly towards the emergency care waiting room.
The time in the hospital is a blur.
Reki doesn’t do well in those environments to begin with, and he quickly finds that he isn’t able to concentrate on anything in particular once Langa is taken out of his sight. He doesn’t talk to Joe and Cherry, and the only thing he remembers besides sitting in rigid silence is being checked out by a nurse for the cut on his side, and the brief moment he’d taken out his phone to give Cherry Nanako’s contact information.
They’d needed it for…something. Medical consent forms, more information, whatever.
Reki is in a daze until the sun begins to rise.
Nanako hadn’t taken long to arrive. She might’ve even been working in the same building for all he knows. He couldn’t talk to her, or even look at her without feeling on the verge of throwing up.
Eventually, he’s forced by Joe to go home and get cleaned up, which he doesn’t remember much of either.
It takes three days for Langa to start responding to staff and visitors (and even then, it’s only in response to pain or loud voices, which he rolls his head away from – for some reason the doctor treats this as a good thing).
It takes five and a half days for him to be moved from the ICU to a regular hospital room, and for his catheter to be removed.
It takes Reki seven days to visit at the same time as Nanako, who he presumes has to hate him for all of this.
They walk in at the same time, completely unplanned, to find Langa already awake and propped up on an obscene number of pillows. The lights are dimmed but Reki can see that his hands are in some sort of restraint or splint, fists curled around what looks like a softer version of a section of a pool noodle. His fingers are spread apart and held down by padded straps. A prisoner.
Nanako gestures for Reki to walk in first.
He does so tentatively, approaching Langa the same way one would when faced with a wounded animal. There’s a seat next to the bed that he takes with apprehension.
Langa’s not attached to tons of intricate lines or tubing at this point as Reki imagined, he’s only hooked up to a singular monitor for his vitals. That’s a bit of relief as that’s probably the bare minimum in a place like this. Reki still isn’t sure how responsive he’s going to be.
“Hi Langa.”
Langa turns at the noise, slowly and carefully. His pupils are even again. He doesn’t speak or anything, only looks at Reki and then behind him where Nanako is standing next to a bunch of half-inflated helium balloons from God knows who.
The bouquet of pink tulips and white gladioli on the bedside table are unmistakably from Shadow’s shop, though. There’s a tray with dull hospital food that sits perfectly untouched next to it, as well as a few cards and a plastic cup full of ice.
Reki has so much that he wants to say that he can’t with the boy’s mother in the room. He wants to apologize, or beg for forgiveness, or wax poetic about how much he loves him – because shit, he loves him so much and had nearly lost him, could still potentially lose him at the end of this when Langa comes to his senses.
Reki doesn’t even know if Langa understands why he’s here.
He remembers when Langa was in the ICU and Joe and Cherry had visited of their own volition. Cherry had told Reki in no uncertain terms that Langa was completely incoherent.
He couldn’t recount what happened, why he’d been taken to the hospital. He was talking then, but only in half-formed sentences and displeased grunts whenever someone talked at him for too long. There’s no way of knowing how much better off he is now.
So, Reki only reaches out to put a hand over his, right over the top of those weird soft straps wrapped around bruised knuckles. The bruising has sprung forth in full force now in reds and purples. On his forehead, his arms, probably underneath the cheap-looking gown. And Langa is so pale that they stick out like a sore thumb.
Reki traces little patterns on the back of his hand and breathes out a sigh.
“They say you’re going to be starting therapy when you get strong enough, so you need to start eating, okay? I know the hospital food is shit. Next time I’ll sneak in some A&W poutine.”
As expected, he doesn’t get much in reply.
“And, uh – I’ll try and see if I can get some skating magazines and stuff, so you’re not always bored. Oh. Huh, I guess that isn’t much help if you’re still having problems with your vision. Is it still-?” Reki pauses, feeling stupid.
The reality is that he doesn’t have a single thing that can make this any less horrible than it is. Langa is stuck in a drab hospital room with nothing to do except slowly heal, and he’s probably making it worse by talking too much and confusing him.
Nanako clears her throat.
“He isn’t able to read right now, they said it’s too much strain on his eyes and he could be having some double vision or blurriness. But he could look at the pictures maybe?” She suggests.
Reki shrugs.
“I’ll figure something out.”
-
Reki waits outside for Nanako to finish having some alone time with her son. His instinct is to run as soon as he’s out of the room, narrowly stopped by the fear of making her realize what a coward he is.
He’s in some uncomfortable padded chair near the nurses’ station when she steps out, gently shutting the door behind her. She…looks like shit. Much the same as Reki probably does.
“He seems to be doing better.”
Reki nods, hoping that it’s true – he’s been too consumed with fear and guilt and anger to know for certain himself.
His mouth goes dry as he's suddenly pulled into an awkward side hug and Nanako’s long hair falls into his face.
“I mean it. He’s going to get better, he’s strong,” she says.
She somehow smells nice despite her unkempt appearance and wrinkled top. It’s a citrusy perfume scent that overwhelms and comforts Reki all at once. He tries to nod again. His defenses are beginning to crumble, though, and he really doesn’t want to cry in front of her.
“Does he talk to you?” he asks.
Nanako pulls away from the hug and shifts her weight onto the opposite foot; she’s not quite able to meet Reki’s eyes.
“Sometimes, he tries. It’s hard for him to find words right now. I’m just glad he stopped asking me for Oliver.”
Oh.
That goes straight to Reki’s fragile heart and squeezes around it like a vice. It’s a punch to the gut.
He has never had to school his expression so hard before, clenching his teeth together with a sharp inhale and gripping the inside of his hoodie pocket.
Nanako sees straight through him and hurriedly shakes her head.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. He’s going to be okay, Reki. It was a moderate TBI. I’ve cared for patients with more severe ones that have ended up in comas or that had to have multiple surgeries. I think he might’ve been extremely lucky, especially with you and your friends there to help.”
Reki doesn’t have a response to that – his mind spins thinking over the conversation for the next few days, wondering how on Earth anyone could look at Langa and consider him lucky.
━━━━━━༻❁༺━━━━━━
Getting Langa dressed is much more stressful than undressed. Reki helps him pick out a pair of comfortable pajamas since it’ll be time to head back to bed soon anyway and makes Langa sit down to pull his pants on.
It’s little tasks like these in which it’s truly evident where his remaining deficits lie. He’s physically capable of performing the actions needed to get his feet in the leg holes, but planning and executing them is a whole other thing. Reki has to talk him through all of the steps and then even has to help pull them up Langa’s legs because he just – won’t try.
He sits there and fiddles with the drawstrings until the waistband is being forcibly tugged up and onto his body. That’s why Reki doesn’t even bother with underwear; Nanako can tackle that tomorrow morning before the therapy appointment.
After some bargaining and pleading, Langa gets his shirt on as well. Reki brushes his hair for him and braids it while it’s damp, hoping that it’ll help keep it out of the boy’s way since it’s well past his shoulders now.
And right. The sticky note. Reki doesn’t really need to reference it to know what should be next.
He settles his hands on Langa’s shoulders with an exhausted huff.
“You’ve gotta eat now. Let’s go see what we’ve got.”
-
The amount of food in the Hasegawa family’s fridge is lacking to put it lightly. Langa turns up his nose at the few options of leftovers that Reki presents to him and that’s honestly fine because Reki lifts the foil on one of the bowls and finds that it smells as though it’s been there for a few weeks.
Eventually, he breaks and pulls out a loaf of bread and some simple ingredients for a sandwich, laying them all out on the kitchen table along with a butterknife and a plate.
Langa takes a seat at the table and makes no move to do anything productive with it.
“What do you think you can make with these ingredients?” Reki asks, taking the seat next to him.
Langa blinks back at him with an unimpressed stare.
“A sandwich.”
“Dumb question, sorry. I am going to make you put it together though. Nanako wants you to be able to do things for yourself.”
“I can make a sandwich.”
“I know you can. Show me.”
So Langa opens the loaf of bread and grabs two slices – normally it would be at least four, with his appetite and ability to unhinge his jaw like a snake when it comes to food – but Reki will accept two.
Langa places them on the plate and starts opening a package of deli meat, which he is more generous with, piling it onto one of the pieces of bread. The cheese is the gross American kind in individually wrapped slices, all yellow and flimsy, and Langa picks one up with determination written across his features.
His left hand refuses to cooperate at times.
Nanako explained that brain injuries can affect almost anything depending on location. She had a bunch of fancy terms and medical jargon for it, but the bits that Reki picked up on told him that since the injury was on the right side, it affected the left side of Langa’s body. Go figure.
But that’s why he’s shaky and weak there, fingers moving unnaturally as he attempts to open the cheese. It’s kind of hard to watch and Reki has to stare down at the table when Langa’s fingertips slide right off the surface of the plastic for the fifth time, a frustrated growl coming from the boy’s lips.
Reki is constantly in a limbo of deciding when to let him figure it out and when to intervene, a skill that he thought he had under his belt due to his little sisters until now.
He’s just about to give in and offer a hand when the cheese is thrown clear across the kitchen, landing with a soft thud somewhere. His head snaps up to meet Langa’s eyes, which are already misty and intense.
“Dude. When you need help, you ask for help. You don’t lash out.”
Langa lets out a deep breath.
“You talk to me like I’m a kid. Might as well a-“ he gets stuck in the middle of the sentence, visibly struggling to continue, causing his face to go even more twisted up.
Reki has already sunk back into his seat in almost equal frustration by the time he finishes speaking.
“-act like one.”
“I’m not trying to treat you like a kid. You’re an adult, Langa. You’ve had an injury. It’s okay if some things are difficult, I’m just saying-“
“Everything is difficult!”
Reki swallows, pushing his hair off his forehead as that suffocating feeling keeps crawling up his ribcage.
It’s his fault. It’s his fault Langa is like this now.
He’s the one that pushed him to get on a board in the first place. He’s the one who never tried hard enough to keep him away from Adam. And now he’s making it worse by being here.
He decides to try one of Nanako’s tactics.
“It’s temporary, Langa. I know it sucks. You don’t deserve to have to go through this, but you’re going to get past it-“
“And what if I don’t?” Langa interrupts again.
His fingers are gripping the edge of the table so hard it looks painful. There are bags under his pretty blue eyes that never used to be there before, or maybe it’s residual bruising that hasn’t faded, it’s difficult to tell.
Reki follows his gaze that’s gone distant and strange, all the way over to the kitchen countertop. He breathes out a shaky exhale at the realization that Langa is staring down the wooden knife block, assessing it like it holds all the answers. He doesn't want to think about what that means.
“You’re going to. The doctors said most of the symptoms should subside within a year. You’ve got me and your mom, we’re going to help you.”
Langa laughs and it’s scarily hollow.
“You won’t like me anymore if I’m… like this.”
“Don’t say that. I love you.”
Upon saying it, Reki has a sudden grasp of the fact that it’s the first time he’s said it aloud since the accident. Add that to the guilt eating him whole.
It’s with a twist of irony that he thinks Langa probably wouldn't remember it either way.
Langa is still staring at those fucking knives, so he reaches out and quickly unwraps a different slice of cheese, placing it on the sandwich. He takes one of Langa’s hands and places it over top of the lid of a condiment bottle.
“Halfway done. You have to eat.”
━━━━━━༻❁༺━━━━━━
The first time Reki visits Langa in inpatient therapy, they’re trying to get him out of bed. He’d been coaxed into going with the help of Joe’s relentless prodding and finds himself in a rather small and intimate wing of the hospital that looks a bit different from the general acute care rooms.
There’s a large lounge by the nurses’ station with a few different tables and shelves upon shelves of things like weights, arm bikes, and stranger objects such as board games and coloring books. He’s led past all of that by a woman in scrubs to a hall lined with personal rooms, and he knows before they even get to the right door that the commotion he hears is from Langa.
The woman sends him a withering look masked by an ever-present smile and knocks before entering, Reki trailing close behind.
There are two others in dark blue scrubs at Langa’s bedside, propping him up on the edge of it and attempting to get a pair of shoes on his feet. Langa’s head snaps up at the additional company and his eyes are wide and wild.
Beyond that, though, is a deep-set tiredness.
“Reki.”
“Hi,” Reki says.
He watches as Langa’s patience wavers even more when what he supposes are therapists get back to the task at hand, shoving a weird-looking tool into Langa’s right hand. His left is working hard to support his weight on the bed, arm muscles trembling with the effort of it.
The tool is metal and long and the therapist that handed it over kneels down to place Langa’s shoe on the floor in front of him. The purple Converse look better than they did when Langa was admitted, the dirt mostly wiped clean.
“Okay, Langa. You know the drill. Focus on keeping your balance and take your time.”
The therapist ignores the uttered remarks of defiance that range from ‘this is so fucking stupid’ and ‘I can do it normally, jackass’, along with a few other choice phrases in English that Reki can’t parse out but is certain are equally inappropriate.
He’s never heard Langa talk like that to anyone, not even when they’re joking around with friends. He’s looking at a stranger.
But ultimately Langa sticks the weird metal stick into the back end of the shoe to hold it still while he pushes his foot into it with clumsy uncertainty. His face is flushed by the time it’s fully on and he immediately pulls his leg up to bend at the knee in an attempt to tie it.
Langa battles with the laces for what feels like ages, having to catch himself falling sideways multiple times before the therapist tries to help. To Reki’s horror, that pale white hand smacks away the therapist’s arm hard enough for the sound to echo.
“Here, here, I’ll get it,” he insists.
He pushes further into the room and drops to his knees in front of the bed, sending Langa a tight smile.
“It’s fine, man, you could barely tie your shoes in the first place.”
Langa presses his lips together and thankfully drops his foot back to the floor with a thud. Reki ties the laces as quickly as humanly possible.
-
They end up back in the lounge area at some point.
It’s unbearably awkward because Reki is pretty sure he saw a sign somewhere asking people to wait until therapy hours are over to visit, but no one has asked him to leave yet.
They’re at a table; it’s Reki, a male therapist who looks to be in his late thirties, and Langa, sitting bored in a wheelchair that appears too big for him. The lounge is bright, too bright for someone with a head injury, and full of older patients. Langa is by far the youngest in the wing.
The therapist searches around the shelves for a while before presenting Langa with something that Reki assumes to be a game of some sort. It’s a wooden board with colorful pegs that would easily blend in with his little sisters' toy bin back home. Langa glares daggers at it as if it has already personally offended him.
“No.”
“Just for a bit, to compare. Don’t you want to beat your record from last time?”
“No,” Langa says again.
The therapist only smiles, taking his seat once more next to the boy.
Reki props his elbows up on the table. In a way it’s entertaining, seeing someone usually so calm getting properly pissed off and speaking his mind about it. This version of Langa is completely void of inhibition.
The therapist leaves the board there anyway and pulls out his cell phone, swiping quickly to the timer app.
“You can do it. I’m starting the clock, let’s see what you got.”
To Reki’s surprise, the moment the timer starts, Langa raises his arm to remove the pegs despite his verbal refusal. He’s a competitive guy after all.
“Nope, left arm. You either use it or lose it.”
Switching to his left with a groan, Langa pulls them out one by one and tosses them onto the table at a pretty impressive speed. When they’re all removed, he tries to put them back in.
That’s when things get problematic. The previous agility is gone and it’s like all of his energy has been sapped, muscles twitching as he lifts the pieces from the table and counteracting any potential precision.
At one point he seems to get confused and starts taking them out again, and the therapist has to demonstrate the goal once more to get Langa back on track. All in all, it’s an effort to watch.
“Alright, two and a half minutes. That’s alright. How about you choose what we do next?”
Langa looks up right into Reki’s eyes.
“I want to leave.”
━━━━━━༻❁༺━━━━━━
After Langa finishes his sandwich, Reki cleans up all of the ingredients and rummages around for a glass to fill with tap water. He stands by the sink until it’s halfway full and pulls out the medication organizer kept in the top of the cabinets.
There are a variety of little colored pills in the Wednesday evening section, rattling around until he ultimately dumps them into his palm. From what he can remember from Nanako’s instructions, the three of them are an antidepressant, a muscle relaxer, and some kind of pain medication. They’re all familiar enough that he feels confident placing them in front of Langa along with the water.
“Here’s your dessert, my liege,” he says.
Langa has the capacity to laugh even though he’s been in a mood all evening, scooping them up with his unaffected hand and throwing them back into his mouth. Reki watches extra closely to make sure that they go down with the water.
While Langa's busy taking a few more sips, Reki makes the executive decision to turn and quickly pick up the block of knives from the counter. It’s heavier than he assumed it would be, but he thinks he manages to get them under the sink cabinet before Langa notices a thing.
Better safe than sorry.
He waits for Langa to stand and place the glass next to the sink. That’s an improvement from even a week ago when he wouldn’t have thought to clean up after himself at all.
“Ready for bed?”
-
They make a pit stop by the living room to gather Reki’s discarded phone and an extra blanket that’s thrown over the sofa before retiring to the bedroom.
Langa has only been awake for a couple of hours, but he’s clearly exhausted on the walk and collapses onto the mattress with a sigh of relief. Reki holds back on scolding him for not being more careful.
Instead, he helps Langa get situated under the blankets and walks around the other side to turn off the yellow glow of the lamp.
“Am I sleeping in here?”
The question comes out quieter than intended. Bordering on fearful. Reki doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath until Langa nods against the pillow.
He gently settles down on the mattress and crawls under the covers, scooting close enough that their legs brush against each other. Just being in the same bed as Langa causes a knot to form in his throat.
Ever since this whole thing, Reki has stayed over a handful of times, always ending up on the couch for one reason or another. They didn’t really sleep over at Langa’s place before the injury. His bed isn’t as comfortable as Reki’s.
Staring at the back of Langa’s head, he reaches out with a hesitant hand to touch. Just the upper part of the boy’s back, sliding over notches of spine and the lower peak of shoulder blades. Langa pushes back into it, so Reki doubles down and allows his fingers to trail over that messy French braid and the smooth nape of the neck beneath it.
There’s a mole right in the center that he pokes at curiously.
“Reki.”
“Hm?”
“C’mere.”
“I am here.”
“No, cuddle.”
Ah. It’s been a while since they’ve done that, too, obviously.
There’s a strange bout of nervousness that Reki feels budging his way into Langa’s space, the kind of butterflies he had when this was new. It’s kind of technically still new, just – interrupted by circumstance. The line between their friendship and relationship had only begun to blur around a month before the race, though the fall into more romantic tendencies was anything but a slow burn after the initial confession.
Reki wraps an arm around Langa’s middle, kissing that spot right behind his ear that he likes so much.
“You know I love you, right?”
A clock ticks somewhere in the room. A metronome counting down the seconds until Langa sighs and nods once more.
“Love you too.”
“I mean it. And…I’m really fucking sorry, Langa,” Reki continues.
His voice grows more strained around the words. He means it more than he’s ever meant anything, more than he could possibly put into a sentence.
Reki presses his head between Langa’s shoulder blades and wills himself not to break down.
“Why are you sorry?” Langa’s own sleepy voice comes sometime later.
“I… let you get hurt. I didn’t visit as much as I should have when you were in the hospital. I let you get on a skateboard in the first place, I took you to S. I’ve done a lot of messed up shit. I could go on.”
He wishes he could see Langa’s face, but he’s also very grateful that he can’t. It’s just the two of them swallowed up in the dark of the room, the perfect place for secrets and regrets to spill without a filter. Reki tells himself that first thing tomorrow, he’ll delete the stupid S app from his phone and never watch that video again.
He hopes that it’s true. There’s enough fuel in his brain for nightmares to keep him awake for an indefinite period of time without torturing himself with it.
Langa shifts in his hold but doesn’t turn around.
“That’s bullshit.”
“What?”
“You’re here now, Reki.”
Langa’s head lolls back far enough that Reki can see one of his eyes and the outline of his profile, shadowed and soft. Dammit. He’s too forgiving for his own good.
If Reki hadn’t been so selfish, he could have seen all this happening because he has seen it happen before. The same story told twice, minus accidentally falling in love in the process.
Okay – he might’ve had a teeny crush on Kaito, but he never confessed those feelings. He’d kept them locked up safe and even then, there had been a life-changing accident and guilt-tinged hospital visits. Now he hasn’t seen Kaito in five years.
Has no idea where he is or how he’s doing. He wouldn’t blame Langa for running away too.
Maybe he’s cursed.
“I am here. Is that what you want, though?”
“Yeah. Of course.” Langa’s brows scrunch together with that confused puppy expression he pulls so often.
“I would understand if you resented me.”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“But I-“
“No. You didn’t. So drop it.”
Reki’s mouth snaps shut before he can make things worse. His fingers skirt around to clench onto the front of Langa’s baggy t-shirt.
“Did he?”
“Who?”
“Did…did Adam push you?”
It’s the question that’s been on everyone’s mind. Between Cherry’s fruitless attempts to remove all traces of the incident from the internet and Joe’s focus on the more emotional side of things, constantly sending Reki texts with talk therapy recommendations, neither of them seems to be any closer to getting to the bottom of the actual potential crime.
The video footage is inconclusive. There’s a dramatic wave of a hand that conveniently disappears behind Langa’s back, close but not too close, and then the stumble. The Yeti board stays under Langa’s feet until the slide over the cliff edge.
And no one has heard a goddamn peep from Adam since that night. Just thinking about it has Reki itching under his sweatshirt.
He’s so caught up in racing thoughts that he doesn’t notice the progressive frown spreading across Langa’s face.
“I don’t remember. I remember the beginning of the race. But…”
The frown deepens and Reki waits with bated breath only to realize that he might be asking for too much.
He props himself up to pepper another apologetic kiss on the boy’s cheek.
“Nothing else?”
“No. Next thing I know, I’m getting a sponge bath from strangers and peeing into a bag.”
Reki can’t help but laugh at the bluntness of that, landing a few more sneaky kisses just because he can. He can force himself to be content with that for tonight. It’s a miracle that he’s here in Langa’s bedroom, both of them safe and sound.
Everything else can be dealt with tomorrow.
“That’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”
“Can we sleep now?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
-
Langa falls asleep easily.
While he snores away, Reki’s phone screen comes to life. There’s a new text from both his mom and Nanako.
One reads ‘I’m sorry for earlier. You’re not your sisters’ caretaker either. I just hope you and Langa are both well. Love you, goodnight’.
The other is simpler but makes his heart ache just the same. ‘Thank you again Reki <3 You boys get some rest’.
━━━━━━༻❁༺━━━━━━
The back of Shadow’s car is usually cramped and doused with the overpowering scent of a dozen different types of flowers.
Tonight, Reki barely notices the aroma, or how he has to pull his legs into his chest because they’re too long and the front passenger seat is pushed too far back.
He’s excited and nervous and he hadn’t even headbutted Miya when the kid won the three-way rock paper scissors competition for shotgun.
It’s the night of Langa’s rematch with Adam after the last one fell through with police sirens and a close getaway, and he’s never been more certain that he’ll get to see the downfall of the King of S. Langa seems confident too, in that way that makes Reki’s throat go scratchy and hot because he has to admit – it’s kind of sexy. Seeing him smile that confident grin when Shadow tells him he’s crazy for not dropping out of the tournament might as well be a new form of foreplay with the way Reki wants to pounce on him.
It almost overtakes the fear in the back of his mind.
And now they’re alone in the backseat, definitely still in view of the others but not caring in the slightest. Langa’s board takes up a good third of the space, causing them to have to squish together to fit.
Reki has an arm around Langa’s shoulder and Langa’s hand is resting on his thigh, occasionally tapping it in enthusiastic bursts of energy.
Shadow turns down the radio (blasting absolutely deafening metal that has Reki questioning how many decibels it takes to do permanent hearing damage) when they get further away from populated city streets, the familiar mountain terrain gradually replacing it. He turns his head back and Reki tries not to flinch at the jump scare of clown makeup in his peripheral vision.
“Lovebirds, we got any bets going on tonight?” he barks, rounding a corner while barely glancing at the worn road.
Miya forcibly grabs the top of his head and pulls it facing forward.
“Eyes on the road, old man, some of us have plenty of life left to live.”
“You won’t anymore, squirt, if you don’t keep your paws off me!”
Reki laughs at the theatrics and leans his head against Langa. They haven’t explicitly told any of the other skaters about the nature of their relationship yet, but he’s getting better at not freaking out when they can see right through them anyway.
Langa’s fingers on his thigh tighten, sending a thrill through his body.
“When I win, me and Reki are going to race. Just the two of us,” Langa says.
That kind of thing hardly qualifies as a bet. Reki knows Shadow is fishing for more of the humiliating types of arrangements that leave someone tattooed or bald, which is quickly confirmed when the old man makes a bland noise of ‘bleh’ and turns his attention away.
Miya kicks his feet up on the dashboard.
“Boring. You can do that anytime.”
Ignoring the two in the front, Reki smiles at Langa and is rewarded with a sweet press of their noses together, making his scrunch up in pure affection. He looks into Langa’s cool blue eyes and presses a thumb to his lips.
“And we will. We’re gonna skate together forever.”
The unspoken promise of infinity hangs between them. Reki still has (loose) limits on public sappiness, but Langa seems to get the memo. His eyes light up even more vibrantly and he catches Reki’s lips with his own, sliding them together just once. That half second of a kiss is thankfully missed by their friends who have continued to argue over what kind of bets should be placed.
Langa nudges their foreheads together one last time before pulling away.
“Always.”