if i were to stay

by headroompiano

Summary:

When Yushi was young he asked his mother this ; if his brain were to be transplanted into someone else, which one would still be him? The body — the body he’s always had — or his mind, in someone else's?

They were sitting on the curb by a pitstop, loooking out over a neverending and winding road, as his father filled up the tank of the car with gas. His mother had ruffled his hair and told him that that was a silly question, but he was very smart for his age. She didn’t give him an answer.

Notes:

this fic took me to hell and back. techincally it is still riku's birthday here, so despite this fic being yushi-centric, it can sort of kind of be a gift for him too. sorry for making him miserable.

thank u to my lovely lovely friends who supported me in the many months it took to write this, without it it would not be posted at all LMAO enjoy... this was edited by me alone and very hastily, so any mistakes please feel free to let me know!!

In Fukui the summers are short, warm, oppressive, and mostly cloudy. The winters are cold and rainy. It is wet all year round.

Sea salt sticks to skin. The white foam curves of waves crash against shins, dampening rolled-up denim and staining it navy blue. Humidity does not lift its heavy blanket even in the depth of night, so sweat glistens Yushi’s brow as he wades shin-deep. He’s stepped out further than Riku, who has only let the water kiss his ankles, because he’s afraid of the mass of it. He says the depth, the way the ocean goes on and on and doesn't ever stop, is too scary for him — knowing that he’s looking down and staring at barrels of nothing. It was his idea to come to the beach late at night. Yushi doesn’t comment on it. 

He walks deeper, lets the chill of the ocean settle into his skin. It hurts a little. Ice-cold stinging shoots through his fingers as he wets his hands through it. 

“Yushi!” Riku calls into the dark. The sharpness of his voice pierces through the night like church bells in the early morning. “You’re too far out, come back.”

Yushi doesn’t turn around. He hums in acknowledgement, but he thinks it gets lost somewhere in the warm whistle of a breeze that wefts its way through his bangs. He takes a few moments to let the sound of Riku’s voice ripple through his head, lets himself roll a response over in his tongue, before he turns to wade his way back to where Riku is waiting for him at the shore.

“It’s cold,” Yushi says as his feet touch and meld into wet sand. “The water.” 

Riku’s skin glistens with sweat, and he laughs like chimes caught by the wind. 

“Let’s go back, then. I’ll make tea.” he replies as he grabs Yushi’s wrist, his lithe fingers digging into the jewellery that adorns it, against the protrusion of his bone. The blue beads make red indents on his skin, and Yushi wants to tell him that it hurts a little bit, but he doesn’t say anything at all.

The bracelet was bought for Yushi on his eighteenth birthday. Riku was shy when he gave it to him, in a way that he is with everybody except for Yushi, and he stared at the scuffs on his shoes as he handed the small black box, wrapped in ribbon, to him. He let an anguished, nervous laugh as he muttered something like “I know that you like blue.” It was a water stone bracelet, a simple silver chain decorated with jagged crystals in various hues of sea and sky. It looked both expensive and thoughtful, in a way that has always been so quintessentially Riku. Yushi loved it. He hasn’t taken it off since — not even alone.

Alone, he traces the jagged edges of crystal with the pad of his thumb, digs the corner into the soft flesh until he feels an indent, until he feels something pointed that reminds him he is real. That reminds him of Riku.

A week later, Yushi found that Riku had bought himself one to match.

 

He likes to do that, carry pieces of those he loves around with him. It’s monochrome and made of lava rock as opposed to Yushi’s stone, but it matches him all the same, in the same way that the blue matches Yushi — Riku has an eye for these kinds of things, in a way that Yushi never understood. 

 

He watches the back of his neck as Riku walks a few strides behind him, their fingers brisking against each other but not quite touching. Not quite. The sound of cicadas fills the empty night air as he brushes his pinky against the calloused stone. He hasn’t seen Riku without his on, either. 

He wonders if he takes it off when he’s not there.

The walk back to Riku’s home is silent. It’s a small apartment, on the ground floor, not too far from the coastline. Yushi thinks he might know it better than he knows his own, with all the time he's spent there. He remembers the bathroom light that doesn't work quite right, that flickers if you leave it on for too long. Riku sleeps in the small room next to the kitchen, because the window has a draft and he gets too hot at night. He remembers when the paint started to peel off the front door — remembers the corner that first started to chip away, and now half of the top-coat has been destroyed completely.  Years and years of knowing Riku has gone into knowing this — into knowing which one of the floorboards creaks, knowing the pattern in which the white on the front door had started to chip away. 

They're accompanied by nothing but a mellow cicada's song. A quiet lull ; the muted drone of a continuous chirping. Absent-mindedly, Yushi joins in. Riku's hand eventually finds his, and interlocks their fingers. He looks at him like he's something soft. Yushi keeps humming — his gentle voice flutters against an almost-there breeze as they turn the corner, and up a small granite flight of stairs. 

Yushi sits on the dining room floor, cross-legged, as Riku nurses a pot of boiling water over the stove. The chill from the ocean's water had melted the second they stepped inside, and in it's place came a suffocating humidity — the kind that creeps under your clothes and lives there, the kind that sticks to the walls and makes them feel as if they're closing in. 

Riku offers to open all the windows, but it doesn’t really help. A warm cup of green tea is placed in front of him and Riku joins him on the floor, mentioning an article he read online about how warm drinks are better for you when it’s hot, because they make you sweat, and release the heat from your body. He brings his cup to his lips as he speaks, letting the curve of them press against the edge, and Yushi catches himself staring. He's listening, but he’s also caught up in watching the swirls of steam rise and dissipate into the air, and on the warm feeling of the mug against his palms. On the warmth that must be pressed against Riku's lips, he's sure. He tries not to think about it like that. He taps his fingers rhythmically on the mug’s rim, pretends they’re dancing through the mist. 

“What are you thinking about?” 

Riku knows the answer is usually nothing in particular, but he asks anyway. Yushi thinks that it’s so that he knows that he cares, but he also thinks that it soothes Riku’s own mind more than it soothes him. His thumb draws circles on sage green ceramic — Riku’s lucky colour, from a phase he went through — he brings it to his lips, filing through his head for an appropriate response. Cardboard boxes are stacked neatly by the kitchen’s doorway, some still open and pooling with black clothes. The clean taste of tea feels too earthy and wrong as he remembers the first time that he noticed cardboard boxes piling up in Riku’s kitchen, two weeks ago, and realised what they meant.

“You’re moving away soon.”

Riku nods, and presses his lips together into a sad smile.

“In a week.”

There are a lot of things Yushi wants to say. Why did you wait so long to tell me? Why are you leaving me alone? I don’t want you to go. They bubble up inside his chest and get jumbled by the time they reach his tongue, dissipating into the back of his throat, getting caught on his uvula. He doesn’t say anything at all. He curls up, sets the ceramic mug down onto the hardwood floor, and hugs his knees to his chest. Riku rests his head on his shoulder, and he lets him. 

“I’m sorry, Yuuchan,” Riku exhales. Yushi knows he means it. He also knows that Riku will leave anyway. He knows that once Riku sets his mind on something it is impossible to stop him. He knows that it would be selfish to try and change his mind.

Riku pouts and wraps an arm around Yushi’s own, clinging to his bicep. “I’m going to miss you the most. More than anyone.”

Yushi thinks that that’s true. Riku is friendly — he's amiable. He's cute, and cherubic, and charming. Lot's of people like him. Riku is clingy, too. He is with everyone, once you get to know him. Affectionate like a delicate flower bud, that once cupped in gentle hands, blossoms. He likes attention and he likes to feel the solid proof of a warm hand against his, but it's only with Yushi that he's so - that he sticks to him like sand upon wet skin. 

With Yushi, he hovers. He rests his chin upon his shoulder, he rests his hand on top of Yushi's knee when they sit side by side. Even when they part ways after hanging out, when Riku leaves Yushi at the winding junction where their walks home separate, he doesn't ever really leave. He can still feel him ; the ghost made by Riku's expensive perfume walking with him, the sound of beaded blue crystals clinking against each other. 

There will be pieces of Riku left on every footstep Yushi takes after he is gone. Riku is sand in his shoes — he's sure that months down the line he will see something; camouflage trousers, a pair of thin-framed sunglasses, a stray black cat running across a high wall, and he will be reminded all over again. 

He nods and lets his nose rest against the top of Riku's head. Inhales the scent of his shampoo — notes of wood sage and sea salt — and says the only thing that he can think to say ; I'm going to miss you, too. 

                                        —  

When Yushi was young he asked his mother this ; if his brain were to be transplanted into someone else, which one would still be him? The body — the body he’s always had — or his mind, in someone else's?

 

They were sitting on the curb by a pitstop, loooking out over a neverending and winding road, as his father filled up the tank of the car with gas. His mother had ruffled his hair and told him that that was a silly question, but he was very smart for his age. She didn’t give him an answer.

He still thinks about it, sometimes. Some variation of the question. What it means to be him, to be Yushi, and what it would mean to be someone else. He spends years thinking that maybe somebody did swap his brain out, and replaced it with something alien, and that’s why he’s - why he feels the way he does, sometimes. Anomic. Because his brain isn’t his, it’s someone else's. Because his brain doesn’t work quite the same way that humans do. 

When he was twelve years old, Yushi used to sit on the playground's swing alone. He'd stare at his shoes, or at the other children playing, but he never went up to join them — he never asked. He never was asked. Yushi lived his life behind a chalk line upon pavement, comfortably removed and sitting upon the sidelines. He watched the world through what sometimes felt like blurred glass. He could reach out to touch it ; could feel the cold against his palms, but he couldn't quite get through.

His family moved around quite a lot — his mother always packed his bags, and Yushi always sat in the car and stared through the window and pondered if he would have to learn how to be a person again. If he would have to try to transplant his brain again. The answer was always yes. He always had to start all over — like teaching himself an entirely new language, trying to sound out every new syllable, everywhere he went. He never quite got it right. 

Elementary school wasn't so bad. When kids are that small it doesn't quite matter yet if you're different or not. Yushi was still quiet but he was athletic and fast, which was apparently what mattered more, because everyone would crowd around him and ask him to run the length of the school yard top to bottom, and cheer and clap him on the back when he did. He was on the soccer team, and everybody liked him, and for a fleeting moment it felt the way things were supposed to feel, Yushi thought. He reminisces about it sometimes. He wonders why his brain is different now. 

Back then, in Elementary school — maybe the only time Yushi can recall this kind of feeling —  he didn't feel the cold behind frosted glass. 

 

Instead, he felt a glowing kind of warmth, the sun when it shines through a window, hot and spanning out across his skin. It felt nice to be loved, as it always does. It feels as good as it does overwhelming. An embrace that becomes suffocating, pats on the back and high-fives feel like burn marks on skin. Yushi was so young back then. And, of course, kids grow up fast. They move on. Being fast and having strong legs and being the soccer team's best score isn't quite enough anymore.

 

 The world keeps spinning. Sometimes it moves too fast.

Yushi was six years old when he posed a question to his mother. He was ten when the question rolled itself around in his head again. He was ten when he started to think that maybe someone had taken his brain out of his body and replaced it with something else, and that’s why things weren't quite the same anymore. Why he fell behind, why he felt sometimes as if he was too slow and too sluggish for the blur of the people around him. His brain just wasn't his anymore, sometimes. It just wasn't his. 

Yushi moved from Tokyo to Fukui, and nothing much changed save for the landscape. He was still alone on the swing set. He still dug his palms into the harsh rusted metal just to feel the searing heat of it against his skin. He still kicked his shoes against the dirt, and he didn't really ever swing himself, just let the wind sway him back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth.

Sometimes gap-toothed kids with knobbed knees and grating voices would ask him to move — you're not doing anything, anyway. Sometimes, most of the time, they looked at Yushi as if he was something alien and otherworldly. He always moved. He never minded much. He always found a patch in the grass, and sat with his legs crossed, and watched them swing each other so high that they would fling their little bodies and bleed in the dirt. He never felt much of an inclination to join in.

A late summer's morning — the week before middle school began — Yushi found himself back in the playground, alone. It was hot and his legs stuck to the  red plastic swing. He rocked himself back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth. Another kid, one with a crisp ironed shirt and choppy black hair, had walked through the gravel dirt and stopped pointedly in front of him. Yushi waited for him to say something - to swing an insult, to ask him to leave. His bony fingers dug deeper into the metal, and he felt the grit against his muscle, felt the hot sun find its way into his veins 

Round and cat-like eyes met Yushi's own, and the boy spoke. He was only the smallest bit taller than Yushi, and the look in his eyes told Yushi that he wasn't like the rest of them. He looked small and insecure, as if he had never had a self aggrandising thought in his life. Like he wanted to believe in himself, but he just hadn't quite got there yet. He stared down at the scuffs on his shoes, clenching his little hands into fists,  as he asked Yushi if it was okay if he took the swing to the left of him. He didn't ask him to leave. All that he asked for was to exist beside him, gentle and silent, even if Yushi was quiet and alien and strange. 

The boy's name was Maeda Riku. He had lived in Fukui all his life. He had two older sisters, and he liked the colour blue. He was thirteen years old, one year above Yushi, and he had plastered himself to Yushi's side ever since the day that they met. 

What started as friendly conversation became Riku finding him at the park any time he came ; sitting next to him and swinging his legs, kicking the sand. It became finding out they were going to the same school — Riku was a year above, and so he said he would show Yushi around — it became arranged playdates after school, became Yushi's mother kissing the crown of his hair and telling him how happy she was that he made a true friend. She tried to hide the relief in her face, but Yushi could see it in the cracks of her worry lines. 

 

Yushi dyed his hair blond the same day that Riku pierced his ears. Washed-out blond that became a seasick green in the summer, and sparkling silver studs.  Everything they did — teenage rebellion, stealing bottles from Riku's older sister's room and drinking them down by the pier, stumbling home in fits of laughter and hoping their parents couldn't smell it off of them — they did it together. Somewhere along the line Riku became more a part of Yushi than Yushi himself. 

 

One winter's night, the year Yushi started high school, Yushi found Riku sitting on the wall by the old park's entrance. A simple text asking Yushi to come had him out of his bed, throwing a fur-hood winter jacket on over plaid pajamas, and sneaking out through his back garden to meet him. Riku sat alone on the grey stone, hugging himself with a thick black coat, his cheeks red and bitten by the cold. He looked spaced out and alone, the kind of look that Yushi can't seem to decipher, but he smiled when he saw Yushi, his eyes turning up into little crescents.

 

He rested his head on Yushi's shoulder and they talked, and they talked, and they talked. Meaningless words that they both would forget, but that didn't ever matter with Riku. Talking was just enough. Resting his head on his shoulder was just enough.

 

Soon enough, the early hours of the morning crept up. The sound of cars had soon dissipated, and the lights in the living rooms of surrounding houses had gone with it ; the only light being the orange glow of a flickering streetlight nearby, and the iridescent glow of the moon. Yushi hadn't noticed until they stopped talking. Things start to disappear whenever Riku is around.

 

With a pensive look, Riku then shifted his body to look Yushi in the eye. He rolled his bottom lip between a sharp canine tooth, and spoke.

 

"What do you want, Yushi?"

 

Yushi blinked once, twice. His face twisted into question, eyebrow raised and head tilted to the side. 

 

"Like — " Riku ran a hand through his hair. Suddenly fumbling and quiet ; like the little boy who hadn't quite found his footing yet, who hadn't yet learned confidence. Yushi later learned that Riku hadn't quite found it. He just got better at pretending. "Just in general, you know. When you grow up. What do you want?" 

 

Yushi inhaled sharp, icicle air into the back of his throat. He didn't think about that a lot, not really. It's not as if he wasn't a passionate person. Sometimes Yushi felt it — wanting — so strongly inside him it's as if that was all that made his heart beat. He wanted a lot of things, once. He wanted to be a soccer player when he was a kid ; cared for nothing but the feel of grass beneath cleats, for the feeling of air gnawing at his skin, dirt staining his knees. He saw singers on TV and he wanted to be one of those, too. He stayed up late with his eyes glued to a screen, pretending a hairbrush was a microphone. His mother wanted him to be a dancer, and so he tried that too. 

 

Somewhere along the line, though, he lost it. The want. To be something more, at least. He still had desires somewhere. He wanted to not be different. He wanted to understand himself. He wanted to be able to say these things without them getting lost somewhere inside his oesophagus. 

 

Like rising bile, sour inside his body, Yushi realised something small that would probably follow him all his life ; since he met Riku, he never wanted anything more than to exist beside him. He never wanted anything more.

 

That was another thing that would go unsaid, naturally, as he filed it somewhere hidden inside his mind. After beats of silence, with only the wind whistling through trees, Yushi answered.

 

"I don't know," He said plainly, and before Riku could rebuttal — you must want something, Yuuchan — he added, "what do you want?"

 

Riku hummed. He stretched his legs out, interlocked his palms and stared at them. He avoided Yushi's eyes.

 

"I want to mean something," he told him, quiet and shy, "to anything. Anybody." His gaze looked off across the horizon, so as not to let Yushi read him. "I just want to mean something."

 

Yushi didn't tell him so, and perhaps now he wishes he did, but Riku had always meant something.

 

But, like all things gone unsaid, it  doesn't really matter as long as Riku doesn’t know. It just dissipates into the pool of Yushi's mind – how Riku's full-body laugh feels like sun splitting through branches, through Yushi's sternum. How the sound of it rings through his head like a bell that rings every hour, how the curve of his lips and the squint of his eyes when he smiles feels like seeing the glitter of light against the sea. How, more than that, Riku is — his heart is so — it's so full, and yet so delicate, so overflowing, yet so chastised and private, and Yushi thinks he might be the most interesting person he's ever met.  He doesn't know how Riku could meet anybody, and not have an everlasting impact on their life. Yushi thinks he's luckier than most to get to know and to remember these intricacies. All of it, the little miniscule things, they mean so much. But Yushi can't say it, and Riku will never know, and so none of it matters at all.

                                —

Yushi leaves Riku’s apartment before dawn. When the world is still eerily silent, like a blanket has enveloped the streets. A soft blur still emits from the street lights outside — Riku usually wakes up right as the sun kisses the horizon, but Yushi leaves when the sky is still pale and blue.

He doesn't know why he does it. An itching, nervous feeling crawls up the back of his neck as he sits and stares at Riku's peaceful, sleeping face. He wants to reach out, trace the line of his nose. Etch the features of his face into his mind, so that when he goes away, he won't forget. Most of the time, Yushi is the one curled up on a spare futon until Riku kicks the door and demands that he wakes up, because he made breakfast and he'll be upset that he let it go cold. As he quietly gets dressed, he watches the steady rise and fall of Riku’s chest. Something sharp and painful takes hold in his own. 

He pads through the kitchen and trips on a cupboard box, one with a scrawled marker label reading “essentials”. The room suddenly feels crowded — overwhelming and stuffy — because everywhere he looks is a piece of Riku, and none of them are pieces that he's leaving behind. 

Yushi softly clicks the back door closed and makes his way down a tranquil and empty path, his fingers brushing against bushes that surround it. He hums a quiet song to himself as he rips leaves off of stems in his path.  Something like a children's game ; he loves me, he loves me not. 

Eventually, he walks long enough that the path merges into the beachfront, and he keeps going. The sun is still yet to creep over the horizon, but the sky is lighter, and it paints the sand beneath his shoes in a muted shade of blue. The air is cold and a coastal breeze flutters through Yushi's shirt, through his hair. He takes space by the shoreline and crouches, looking out across the mass of sea. He picks up wet sand and moulds it into something solid, then crushes it between his hands. He thinks about Riku. 

When Riku was sixteen, and Yushi was fifteen, Riku had his first girlfriend. She was a nice girl. An outspoken kind of person, but sweet around the edges. She was in Riku's homeroom class and on the women's volleyball team. She liked the things that he liked, and she really, really liked him. She never spoke to Yushi much. They never had anything to say.

Young love is always the same. It feels all consuming, until it's over. 

 

For about a month, Riku was lost to the outside world. He'd still come over to Yushi's house after school, like he always did, but he was somewhere else in his head. He'd show pictures he took on their dates together — photobooth strips, tasteful cafés, cute little souvenirs that Riku said reminded him of Yushi, so he had to show him. Yushi nodded along, sprawled on his front over his comforter, and tried to find out where exactly the growing black pit inside his gut was coming from, why every swipe of Riku's fingers clouded his voice more, and made him feel like curling up and clutching his stomach tight with in his palms.

Yushi hadn't meant to say it — “you only want to hang out with her,” — but it came out more bitter than he had wanted it to. The words felt ugly inside his mouth, sharp and scraping the roof of  it, leaving a metallic taste in the back of his throat. Contorted vowels and consonants filled the air and lingered like a heavy fog . They crowded inside Yushi’s head, constricting his brain, batting against his skull.  He fixated on embroidered stars that dotted his comforter, traced lines around them with a lithe finger. When Riku spoke, it was meek and feeble in a way Yushi hadn't seen him since he was thirteen. It was the first time he had ever really seen Riku hurt because of something he said, and the feeling of it lodged somewhere uncomfortable and painful inside his chest, like a splinter poking in through the gap in his ribs. 

“Don't be jealous, Yushi,” Riku told him, and Yushi tried not to notice how  his jaw tightened as he held it high. Then softer, quieter, “you know that's not true.”

It kind of was, but Yushi didn't tell him so. A month later, she broke up with him through a half-hearted text, and Yushi had sat very quietly and held Riku's hand as he cried and told Yushi he was right, that he was sorry. Yushi hates to see Riku cry because he’s so good at putting on a brave face for everyone else. He’s so good at putting on a brave face for Yushi. At plastering on something palatable, something kind and generous and strong, getting washed away with the salt staining his cheeks as he buried his face into the side of Yushi’s neck. Yushi first realised how much he hated to see Riku cry the most in his bedroom, after his first shallow and fleeting love had been destroyed through a screen. Because following it came a feeling of a heavy weight being lifted off of his shoulders, knowing now that he had Riku's undivided attention back within his grasp. 

 

The relief of it felt like warm water poured over aching muscles. The guilt that followed suit felt like drowning.

 

The nauseous feeling — the one he had first felt when Riku had mentioned a girl that he liked, the one that ate away at his stomach’s lining when he was introduced to her. The one that tore a hole through his gut when he realised she was actually nice, and there was no reason for an empty and cold feeling to plague his bones whenever he saw her — returned. Found its home inside him, rose through his chest, as he realised he was almost relieved to have Riku back, to have Riku to himself. He wrapped his arm around Riku’s shoulders, squeezed a little tighter, feigned comfort when he was truly trying to remind himself that Riku was there, was beside him, that he wasn’t going away again.

The ocean’s water is ice against his fingertips as the tide slowly wades in. Yushi is still crouched over, letting sand wash off of his hands, letting his shoes get soaked by the incoming, gentle rolls of waves, when Riku’s voice cuts through the gentle song of seabirds.

“Yushi!”

Yushi, still stuck inside a reverie, takes a moment to turn around, stand up, and when he does, Riku is jogging across the beach’s expanse to meet him. 

“Don’t wander off on me like that,” Riku breathes. It’s still early morning, but the summer is hot and oppressive, so sweat glistens and rolls down the side of his neck. Yushi doesn’t mean to, but his eyes follow it as it meets his collar, then they flutter back up to meet Riku’s own. Riku reaches to hold onto Yushi’s wrist, long fingers pressed tight against blue crystal. “You scared me.” 

Yushi blinks. He makes a face. His eyebrows knitted together, a sharp breath inhaled carefully. He stares at the lines of Riku's face as if to figure out what’s going on inside his head, as if to ask ; do you feel it too? That awful knot in your stomach? Does the null pull at your insides when you look at me in the face, too? But Riku is looking out across the horizon, and so Yushi can’t tell.

“I didn’t mean to.” 

Riku snaps his head back around and the sun catches his smile. A part of Yushi thinks he's faking it — hopes he's faking it — wants to ask him how he's being so normal about all of this, as far as Riku goes. A myriad of fleeting questions leave his mind as Riku hooks an arm around his, and drags him back onto the path. 

They walk in tandem with each-other, footsteps creating a rhythm against cracked pavement. A little dip where a weed grows through the path trips Yushi up and he wobbles, but Riku catches him. A gentle, firm hand presses into Yushi's skin and he wishes that it would melt into his, that the feeling of Riku's palm against his forearm wouldn't ever leave. 

"I have a friend coming over," Riku tells him, flippantly, as he makes a show of dusting off Yushi, finding imaginary creases in his t-shirt from a fall that didn't happen, an excuse to have hands on him.  Hands are off him, then, and shoved into the pockets of Riku's shorts as he continues. "To help with some boxes — just for a bit." 

Yushi feels something gross inside him — jealousy's bile coating the back of his throat, at the mention of someone new. Yushi didn't know about him. Riku hadn't mentioned him before. But Riku laughs like the clearance between the clouds, and the rainstorm leering over Yushi dissipates, if only for the time being. 

"He's nice. You'll like him." Riku reassures.

"Nice?" Yushi asks, "How… " he bites his tongue, furrows his brow. 

"How do I know him?" Riku — who always knows what Yushi is thinking, sometimes before he even knows it himself — jests, "he's my neighbour, Yuuchan," Riku's long fingers  interlock with his — fingers that can still a rabbit heartbeat, that can wave heavy fog from a still morning — and squeeze. "So you can put your claws away." 

Yushi rolls his eyes and nudges the sharp corner of his shoulder into Riku's as he laughs, a little exhale through his lips. He digs blunt nails into the back of Riku's hand in retaliation and Riku slaps his hand away, mockingly scandalised. They descend into a fit of delicate laughter as their elbows knock against each other, crossing the street and turning the corner into Riku's apartment complex.

                                             —

At Riku's front door, Yushi is met with a young man — one that couldn't be much younger than himself — with birch trees for legs and the round face of someone kind and honest. He looks a tad flustered as Riku greets him, unlocking the door and hustling all three inside. It's quite obvious that this is the friend that Riku had been talking about, but Yushi didn't expect him to be so — to be — Yushi doesn't know, but he doesn't like it. The sticky feeling of jealousy finds its way back to him as he lingers in the hallway, silent as a ghost, and watches as Riku and him discuss which of his things needed to go in which boxes, and which boxes need to go where. 

 

The boy is nice, Yushi notes. He's polite, listens well and diligently, and Yushi probably would like him, just like Riku said, if it weren't for the numbness inside his brain when he watches their fingers  almost touch upon passing a roll of tape. 

 

"Thank you," the boy says as Riku's fingertips graze his. He points to a box overflowed with Riku's old clothes, most of which he doesn't even wear anymore. With tape between his teeth, he asks, "it's this one you wanted?" 

 

He speaks as if he's tripping over himself to be polite, to make a good impression. Yushi's jaw clenches. His fingernails dig crescents into his palm.

 

That frosted-glass feeling finds its home again in Yushi's bones, and he crosses his arms, watches them as if he's made of the distasteful wallpaper leftover from the previous tenants.

 

Their words become background noise as Yushi tries to figure out something to say, to join them, but he can't think of anything at all. He wonders if the boy thinks he's weird . If he's, like, alien, or whatever the other boys used to say. This one looks pretty run-of-the-mill, clean cut, like someone who's never had to have a thought like that twice in his life. Yushi wonders if he's noticed him at all. 

 

About thirty minutes into their arrangement, Riku pulls at his collar and makes a comment about how it's too hot in here, that he needs some air. Yushi knows that it's code for a smoke break, but he also knows how Riku can get about impressions sometimes, so he doesn't make a comment about it. He just watches as Riku pats down the pockets of his shorts and excuses himself, waving his hand behind him.

 

"Be good, Yuuchan!" he calls through the door, "make friends!" 

 

The soft click of the door shutting echoes across the silent space. The room suddenly feels stifling, and while Yushi would love to blame it on relentless humidity, he knows it's because his buffer — Riku — has left. What remains is that kind of itching anxiousness that claws at the inside of your chest, a balloon that expands until it's pressing against Yushi's sternum.  The apartment feels impossibly empty without Riku in it, and that emptiness replicates itself inside Yushi’s skull. He reminds himself that soon this is how it will always feel. The thought makes him feel static and dizzy.

 

"Sorry,"  the boy's voice breaks through the silence, and his hand extends to greet him. Yushi takes it gingerly, shakes it only once. It's a little sweaty. "I should have introduced myself before! I didn't mean to- um- I'm Daeyoung. I just moved here. From Korea. Last month." 

 

Yushi blinks at him. One long blink, like a cat.

 

"Yushi."

 

"Right," Daeyoung laughs and runs a hand through his hair, with that stiff kind of awkwardness that he wears like a dry cleaned and ironed shirt, "and you're a friend of Riku's?" 

 

Yushi nods. Sure, if he wants to put it that way. There isn't really — there isn't really a word for him and Riku — definitely not in any traditional sense, but it's not as if anything has ever been spoken, never out loud.  Only ever in Riku's breath pressed against his neck as they sleep side-by-side, and in the gentle lull where Yushi can watch him in the morning. The little things – a feather-light touch, a glance from the corner of his eyes — that make him think that perhaps they're closer than they should be. Too intertwined. 

 

Yushi thinks it's normal for Riku, maybe, to hold hands and to share beds and to share clothes, and to blur the lines. Because Riku is close with everyone and Yushi isn't. That's the difference, maybe. He's never had a friend like Riku before. He probably never will again. So he doesn't know, not really, he just knows that Riku is Riku  — his Riku — and it's something far too complicated to explain to the fresh-faced boy next door, so Yushi settles on yes, even though it lodges somewhere uncomfortable inside him.

 

"That's nice," Daeyoung says, "Riku's um- he's nice, he's really nice. How long have you known him?"

 

The silence is loud. Suffocating, really. Yushi picks at his cuticles, tears off a hangnail. He finds comfort in the sting.

 

"Um," he clears his throat. "Like ten… ten years? Maybe."

 

Daeyoung's eyes scan the ceiling,  like he's sorting through boxes in his mind of something appropriately small-talky and simultaneously not boring enough to say.

 

"Ah," he says eventually, "That's sweet. It's a long time, you know- he must mean a lot to you."

 

Yushi presses his lips together. He does. Daeyoung couldn't ever possibly understand the way that he does. 

 

"Something like that,"  Yushi tells him plainly,  "I'm going for a smoke."

 

He doesn't wait for a response before he turns to leave, letting the door fall shut behind him. He should — he does — feel a little guilty for leaving poor, rosy-cheeked Daeyoung in there all on his own, but the room had started to feel claustrophobic and that kind of thing makes Yushi feel itchy all over, a sensation only soothed by stepping away, or sometimes a cigarette, or most of the time Riku. 

 

The heat is immediate and sweltering as soon as Yushi leaves the apartment building. Riku is crouched at the bottom step that leads out towards the parking lot, cigarette between his lips and scrolling ildly through his phone. He rolls his eyes, affectionately, and smiles as he hears the faint footsteps of Yushi joining him. Yushi watches how the smoke curls into the air, how Riku's lip wraps around the end of his cigarette. Despite the overwhelming heat, a shiver runs up his spine. He tries to will himself to look away, but his eyes drift as Riku's lithe fingers pull away, and his lips part to exhale.

 

"You didn't make friends?" Riku teases, nudging him with an elbow.

 

Yushi smiles, stares at his hands placed neatly atop his knees. 

 

"No."

 

"Ah, Yuuchan," Riku reaches over to ruffle a hand through Yushi's hair. He smells of smoke, but Yushi doesn't mind. He kind of hopes that it lingers — that it sticks to his clothes. "What're you gonna do without me?"

 

The question is meaningless. It's — it's just a turn of phrase. Yushi knows that. Yushi knows that Riku knows that, that it's not what he means, but regardless it aims and shoots for the sensitive underbelly of Yushi's exterior, and lodges itself right there. Yushi doesn't like to be like this sometimes — petulant and touchy — but when it rears its ugly head he can't control it, and so he closes his body off, crosses his arms over each other and hugs himself like a child.

 

"I don't know," he pouts, "you tell me." 

 

"Yushi," Riku exasperates. He wraps his arm around his shoulder, pulls him close. He lets his cigarette drop to the ground and singe on the concrete as he nestles Yushi's head onto his shoulder. "Yushi, you know I didn't mean it like that. I'm sorry."

 

Yushi doesn’t usually let himself get angry. He doesn't usually, well, he doesn't usually let himself feel anything at all. Sometimes it's just so — it's not that he feels nothing, it's just that it's all so something that he can't find a name for it, can't place it, and so it becomes nothing.  The heat is too stifling. The birds are chirping too much and the traffic is too loud. Riku’s arm around him, for once, feels suffocating rather than comforting. Everything feels like static beneath his skin and it's too — it's so — it must be anger, right? It feels like anger.

 

He pushes Riku off of him with little to no force, but it's still enough to take him aback. 

 

"Why didn't you tell me?" Yushi's throat feels heavy, like something's stuck inside, but he still manages, meek and wobbly, eyes glued to his shoes, to ask. "That you were leaving." 

 

"I —" Riku starts, and stops. Yushi hears the flicker of a lighter and a sharp inhale, then an exhale. "I'm sorry." 

 

Yushi watches the way his fingers shake a little, the way his upper lip just barely trembles. 

 

"I didn't – I knew it would hurt you. I didn't want to, and it just - I just kept thinking that maybe it wouldn't happen, and I wouldn't have to tell you."

 

Yushi feels kind of numb. Riku's voice feels far away, like he's speaking to Yushi through a Styrofoam wall. Everything comes out muffled and wrong. 

 

"It was always going to happen, though." 

 

There's a moment of heavy silence.

 

"I —" Riku tries to say, but he stalls. "I guess it was."

 

Riku's hand — his free one — finds Yushi's, and squeezes it tight. Usually it would feel nice, it would bring Yushi back to earth.  Oftentimes it feels as if it's the only thing Yushi needs to centre his gravity when it goes off kilter. Now it feels — Riku slips his cigarette between Yushi's fingers, and he lifts it to his lips. He tries not to think of Riku's lips pressed against the paper — it feels overwhelming in a way that it hasn't ever felt before.  He inhales and it hits the back of his throat. Itchy and acrid. He feels dizzy. He swats Riku's hand away and before he can think, he's standing up, taking another rushed inhale through shaky fingers. 

 

"Yushi," 

 

Looking down at Riku like this, Yushi feels nauseous. He looks small. Frantic and teary-eyed, blinking it all back so that Yushi won't feel bad for upsetting him. It only serves to make him feel worse.

 

"You know I can't. You know I didn't want to - "

 

Yushi knows. He remembers the conversation like it happened that morning. Riku's older cousin got him an internship at some fashion firm in Tokyo. He'd been mulling over the decision for weeks because he was petrified to uproot his entire life, but it's too good an opportunity to let up, and it's something he wanted for so so long, and he's so so sorry, and he wanted to tell him sooner, but he couldn't figure out how-

 

It was the first time Yushi felt selfish when it came to Riku. He was so used to following Riku's footsteps that his brain had never entertained the thought that there would be a time that came where there would be nothing to follow. It's not as if he could just come with Riku to Tokyo — though he entertained the idea — it was far too short notice, and it wasn't the kind of decision he was ready to make. He could only stand in Riku's kitchen blank faced and nod, and wish that something would happen — that his train would get cancelled, that the internship would fall through, that Riku would realise how much Yushi means to him, and put a pause on his life to stay forget his dreams with him. 

 

"Yushi," Riku repeats, standing to tug at his arm. "Don't be like this, please."

 

Yushi blinks in quick succession. He knows that Riku is looking at him, he can feel round eyes scanning the sharp edges of his face, but he can't bring himself to meet them.

 

"Say something," Riku pleads, "Yuuchan."

 

Yushi swallows an uncomfortable and heavy thing in his throat. He exhales as if to rid himself of every ugly feeling inside of him.

 

"It's okay," he tells Riku, feeble and monotone, "let's go back inside."

                                                                      —

Yushi and Riku haven't spoken much since Yushi left Riku's apartment. Things mulled over quickly, all things considered. Riku plastered on a smile and apologised to Daeyoung for taking so long, and Yushi sat quietly on the couch until he left. They ordered food and spoke about mundane things until Yushi declared it late and went home. Riku called through the door to text him when he got home safe, and he did. Nothing should be out of the ordinary — nothing is, maybe, but he's not delusional enough to believe that that's true — and yet Yushi feels a tension inside him now that's coiled tighter than it was before.

 

Life resumes like normal. It's hard to remember sometimes that the world does not stop just because you want it to. 

 

Yushi works at a small souvenir shop tucked inside a mall. It's the kind of place that tries to sell itself as something quaint and kitschy, but is really just a gaudy replica of every other store that's the exact same, just nicer. It's really not that popular in comparason to the myriad of others within a ten-minute walking distance, so not many people other than wandering tourists stop by, and most don't stay for long. It's quiet, though, so Yushi doesn't mind.

 

The interior is warm and inviting. Rows of glass ornaments and things adjacent, laid out on wooden shelves to replicate something tasteful and antique. The low orange light is installed to make Yushi forget about the damp sweat that's sticking to the back of his neck, and the fact that the store's only  fan hasn't worked properly in a week and a half.

 

"Stupid-" Yushi hears his coworker smack it, "fucking -" and smack it again, "thing- " and again, until the machinery makes a mildly concerning noise, then jostles to life. 

 

Yushi, who's crouched behind some shelves, stacking various cheap, tacky ornaments, stifles a laugh. Sakuya is only here for the summer, having freshly graduated high school and needing a job to occupy his time. He's funny. Yushi likes him. He's the kind of person who's good at all of the things that Yushi isn't, someone sociable and bubbly. He gets along well with customers, the few that do come to buy something. He's an amazing actor, Yushi notices, when his high-energy attitude and flashy smile drop the minute the small talk he's been roped into ends when an older woman and her kids leave the store. 

 

Him and Sakuya typically work the same eight hour shifts. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Eight hour days four times a week means that Sakuya has honestly become attuned to Yushi's behaviour. They get along well. He's even tried to get Yushi to buy cigarettes for him and his friend from the convenience store around the corner, tugged at his shirt when Yushi was going out for his lunch break, and promised he wouldn't tell. 

 

He's bold, Sakuya is, like the world hasn't quite smited him yet. He's a good kid, though, so Yushi kind of hopes that it never does. 

 

The evening drags around in a way that makes Yushi feel like the day might not ever end. Business is slow. His work is repetitive. Even in a bare shop-floor, he must look for something to do. Check stock, dust off shelves, stand in front of the barely-working fan for thirty seconds of relief, and repeat. 

 

It gives him a lot of time to think. Too much time, maybe, trapped inside of his brain. He thinks of mundane things, mostly. What he's going to have for dinner, the convenience store ramen he hasn't tried yet but looks good. It's easy for him to zone out and continue to work as if on auto-pilot, robotic and in his own world, until his thoughts inevitably ( as they almost always do ) roll back around to Riku. 

 

The thought of him - of Riku - freezes him in place for a moment. Paralyses him and the all-purpose cleaner in his hand that was wiping down a glass shelf that has been cleaned three times prior.

 

Riku leaves in two days. He hasn't spoken to him, properly at least, in one. 

 

It feels funny as much as it does miserable to have an epiphany this late. Yushi is in love with Riku, he realises. He probably always has been. 

 

It's funny how something you've ignored for years can weave its way into your life so seamlessly, how easily it slips beneath the cracks. It's always been there, and that's what makes it so difficult to see.

 

The feeling doesn't come with anything grandiose and all-consuming. It doesn't feel like his life has changed. It rolls over Yushi's body like the tide rolling into the beachfront,  like something natural. It feels like there was never any other option. 

 

Except that there is no use in it. Being in love with Riku feels fickle and fruitless because there is not enough time. Not anymore. There is only time wasted, and Yushi sits with that feeling uneasy and painful in his stomach. There are only years to remember. What good are memories to anyone?

 

His shaky hand swipes a crystal ornament off of the shelf — a model dinosaur,  one of about fifty lined up — green and delicate, and it hits the floor, and pieces scatter everywhere. Yushi looks down and its head is in two pieces. He doesn't know why, but his bottom lip trembles. 

 

Sakuya nudges him with an elbow, dustpan and brush in hand. He looks down at the shattered pieces on the ground and frowns. 

 

"Poor guy," he says, before handing the brush off. 

 

It takes Yushi a few moments before he springs back to life. They're past closing time so there's really nothing much for him to do but sweep and head home, but Yushi feels his brain is running behind. Like it isn't him in the room. Like his brain is somewhere else. Running back to and trying to chase after the boy who sat next to him on the swingset when he was twelve years old.

 

His body moves like it's being controlled by someone else. In slow, repetitive movements, he sweeps the broken pieces into the pan. He ignores the incessant sting behind his eyes.

 

"Hey," Sakuya says as Yushi idly dumps everything into the trash-can behind the register. He's sitting cross-legged on the desk, swiping mindlessly through his phone. A smile tugs faintly on his mouth as he sends a text, but quickly fades when Yushi's eyes meet him. "Are you…like, okay?"

 

Yushi swallows. He hums dismissively, but Sakuya's eyebrows raise in reaction.

 

"No seriously," he insists, "did something happen?"

 

Not really. Kind of. Yushi doesn't know. He kind of feels like he's suffocating. The fan makes another concerning noise and shutters to a stop.

 

"Nothing that you'd care about." Yushi answers, because the truth is too heavy to offer.

 

"You never look this shit," Sakuya says, switching his phone off and putting it in his pocket. "Smoke outside and talk about it?"

 

Despite himself, Yushi laughs through his nose.

 

"You're not smoking," he shakes his head. He trails off, chews on his bottom lip. Everything inside him feels - it feels so heavy. He exhales as if to let it all out. "Sure. Yeah, fine."

 

Sakuya jumps off of the desk and grabs the shop keys. They haven't really closed up properly, but Sakuya says he's opening tomorrow, so it's fine. It's not quite dark yet when they step out of the mall, but the sky is darkening slowly and the air is starting to bite.

 

"So…" Sakuya watches intently as Yushi lights a cigarette and brings it to his lips. It's from the end of a packet that Riku gave to him about a week ago. The smoke hits his chest and makes it feel tight, like his ribs are too close together. "What's up with... " Sakuya waves his hands around in one swift, dramatic movement. "You."

 

Yushi exhales slowly. He doesn't speak for a minute. The only way he can put it is something  simple, and it sounds stupid and childish when the words leave his mouth.

 

"Do you like someone?" Sakuya asks, with a brave and naive kind of bluntness reserved only for teenage years. 

 

"No," Yushi starts. Sakuya's eyebrow raises, and with a roll of his eyes, he gives in. "Yes." 

 

He cringes as he speaks, wishing he hadn't said anything at all. It's more than that. It's so much more than that, but there's only so many words that can express exactly how he feels, and none of which have the courage to leave his lips.

 

Sakuya's eyes light up, mischievous and teasingly. He opens his mouth as if to comment, but when Yushi scowls at him he snaps it shut. 

 

"But he … " Yushi frowns, and takes another sharp inhale. "He's moving away. This week. And, I don't know - " he trails off and stares at the scuffs on his shoes. All of his problems feel so small when he says them aloud. "I feel like it's too late, so … "

 

"Where?" Sakuya asks, head tilted to one side.

 

The enormity of Yushi's emotions start to catch up on him. Tokyo really isn't that far — Sakuya tells him so — but it's not about how far it is, not really. It's that Riku won't be there at all. A three hour train ride whenever either of them can afford it isn't enough to suffice the emptiness in his life that will take Riku's place. It's hard to explain that to someone who's only seen the sides of Yushi that he's allowed him to see.

 

"I think you should tell him," Sakuya says, blunt and innocent all in the same breath. "Won't you regret it if you don't?" 

 

Yushi wants to tell him that it isn't that simple, but really it's - it kind of is. When you put it that way. Is it not better to tell Riku now, when there's not much else to lose? Yushi doesn't know. He can never quite place his feelings where they're supposed to go, he can't ever really figure out where to put them, how to say them so that they make sense to others the way that they make sense to him. Riku was always better at that. Knowing what Yushi means to say.

 

He flicks his cigarette to the ground and steps on it, twisting the butt around with the sole of his shoe.

 

"Maybe." he hums.

 

The crisp ring of a bike's bell spins both of their heads around, and a small brown-haired boy — Ryo, Yushi thinks, he's the one who always picks Sakuya up after work — waves frantically from the end of the little alley-way they had been standing in. Sakuya turns to Yushi, hand in pockets, and offers him a sympathetic smile.

 

"Sorry," he says, fumbling with his bag, "I gotta go." He notices Yushi's frown and tugs on his sleeve reassuringly. Yushi almost feels bad for relying on him. 

 

"Hey," Sakuya tells him, "You won't fuck it up. What's the worst that could happen?" 

 

The noise of keychains hitting against one another fills the enclosed space, bouncing off of painted brick walls, as he half-jogs over before turning to wave Yushi off.

 

"Good luck!" he calls, "You got it, Yushi!"

 

Yushi watches as Ryo pulls Sakuya into a hug, making him stagger backwards and have to catch them both. He hops on the back of Ryo's bike and, with another wave, they disappear into a blur along the sealine. Something about it feels so familiar that a smile tugs on the edge of his lips, before the feeling is replaced with something ugly in his gut. 

Yushi is left to walk home alone, as per usual. He doesn't usually mind it, but he feels a kind of overbearing loneliness as he does so this time. The chill of the evening air makes  him hold himself close. He kind of doesn't want to go home, but he doesn't know where else to go. 

 

He misses Riku so much that it feels as if it's carved a hole into his chest. It's melodramatic, it really is, but without him it feels as if something inside of him is missing. Riku has always been the only constant in his life. From middle to high school. Throughout summer, winter, autumn. It’s always been Riku there, in the corner of his sight. On the swingset to the left of him.  He thinks that's probably why a three hour train ride — an eight hour drive — feels like ripping his heart out and stomping on it.

 

Yushi's phone springs to life, interrupting the spiral of his thoughts. His ringtone is something obnoxious that he never had the care to change and it rings through the silent streets, making his shoulders jump up a little bit. His heart freezes a little in his chest as he sees Riku's name on the caller ID. His finger shakes a little as he answers.

 

"Hello?"

 

"Yuuchan," Riku's voice crackles through the speaker. It daggers into Yushi's skull because he sounds awful. Nasally and congested, trembling over the vowels. He sniffs once, twice, over the silence and Yushi realises that he's been crying. "Sorry, I'm so - I'm kind of drunk right now." The laugh that follows sounds choked-off and miserable and Yushi's phone feels hot to the touch. "Fuck, my apartment's so empty Yushi. I hate it. Are you working?" 

 

Yushi knows that Riku knows his schedule, but he tells him that he isn't anyway. 

 

"Can you come over?" Riku squeaks. As if it were ever a question. As if Yushi would ever say no to him. 

 

"Obviously," Yushi says, despite the black pit growing in his stomach. The air smells of sea salt. It smells like Riku.

 

"Thank you," Riku exhales. "I have - I have beer. You can stay the night."

 

Yushi lets out a small, quiet noise of acknowledgement and hangs up. His stomach ties itself into a knot, unties itself, then wraps back up until he feels sick.

 

The walk to Riku's isn't far, and it's all the more shorter now that he's speed-walking his way through small lanes and turning sharp corners. When he gets to Riku's door he's uncharacteristically out of breath. He gives himself a few moments to collect himself, inhaling so sharply that it sends a shooting pain into his chest. Maybe he should stop smoking. He only ever started because Riku did. 

 

Yushi only knocks one and a half times before Riku's door swings open and he's engulfed in his body. Riku hugs him so tight he thinks he might break, and pulls him inside. The door shuts ungracefully behind them but Riku doesn't let go. His shoulders shake as he does so, leaving a wet patch of tears on Yushi's work shirt. 

 

"I missed you," Riku whispers into Yushi's neck, and all he can do is wrap his arms around him, pull Riku close and tight like the weight of a heavy blanket. 

 

Before Yushi can speak, Riku slumps next to him and rests his head on his shoulder. His movements are languid and ungraceful, and he leans his entire weight onto Yushi. He sniffles and hides his face in the fabric of Yushi's shirt.

 

"Do you remember," Riku's voice shakes as he brings Yushi into the living room, hardly parting from his side. He hands him a can of beer. Yushi feels numb as he opens it, hears the sharp crack and fizz. "Do you remember your seventeenth birthday?"

 

Yushi swallows. It's hazy, his seventeenth birthday, but he remembers.

 

It was a cloudy evening — April weather in Fukui is always plagued by a consistent overcast — Yushi doesn't like to do anything special, really, so he and Riku had simply gathered at his house for cake, then had dinner together at a quaint seaside restaurant. Riku has a way of making even the smallest things feel special, and so he had insisted on treating Yushi to everything. Once the sun had set, Yushi asked to walk along the beach. It was almost an unspoken tradition at this point — Yushi, Riku, and the beach. It's Yushi's favourite place to be with him, still. It's the place he feels the most calm — he feels the most himself. He doesn't have to worry about - about the way his brain is wired, the way with anybody else he feels unsocialised and wrong. 

 

He knows the beach will be tainted now that Riku is leaving. He doesn't want to find anywhere else to find solace in.

 

Yushi had hopped up onto the rocks littered around the outskirts of the beach. Arms outstretched, mist began to seep in through the wind and catch in his hair. What started as a light drizzle quickly began to pour down relentlessly, grey rain-bearing clouds laying heavy over the sky.

 

"Yushi!" Riku called through the rain, which had started to stick his hair through to his face and collect droplets on his lashes, "Come back! Be careful!"

 

Yushi looked behind him, turned to move, and slipped on the jagged stone beneath his feet.

 

The following happened in a haze. In movements like a cloudburst, Yushi remembers a sudden, sharp pain that turned his vision white. He remembers a ringing in his ears, piercing and reverberating around his skull. He remembers the trickle of blood dripping down the back of his neck, the crimson stain on his white t-shirt and on the stone below, washed away by the sheets of rain. 

 

He remembers Riku by his side. Flushed and panicked, shaking his shoulders and cupping his face in a panic. Being dragged into the passenger seat of Riku's car and letting his head rest against the cold of the window, watching droplets race down the glass. 

 

The clean, sterile lights of the hospital waiting room. The hushed crowd ; pensive faces, children crying. The  young doctor with ash-blond hair and kind, round eyes who took him in for scans and stapled his wound together. Riku's sweating, shaking hand intertwined in his own. Riku's fingers drew circles onto his skin with his thumb. His mother arrived late. She sat on a seat in the corner, watched him with teary eyes from a distance. It was kind of ironic, the way that she didn't take Riku's place on the edge of the hospital bed. She always worried too much and not enough. 

 

In the end, the injury was nothing serious.

 

Yushi was told to take it easy, limit physical activity, keep his wound clean, but that he would ultimately heal quickly. That he was lucky.

 

He still felt - he felt something was off.  When they left, it was late at night — dark and silent — and Yushi watched his feet as he walked across the gravel, hand still interlinked with Riku's, counting each step. His brain felt wrong. It was - it was just the injury - but it made him think about being six years old and sitting on the curb with his mother, and asking if it was possible to switch his mind with someone else's.

 

"Did you see the scans?" Yushi had asked, quiet and pensive. Riku turned to face him. His face was still littered with worry, and his lashes were now stained with what looked like tears. 

 

"Huh?" he asked, "Um… yeah?"

 

Yushi worries his bottom lip with his teeth. The only secret he could ever keep — one thing he had never told Riku about — or the one thing he was never able to figure out, was this . The feeling that something was terribly, terribly wrong inside him. The kind of something that was inherent to him, to the way that he was wired, and that alienated him from everybody else.

 

"Were they normal?" Yushi's voice was so small that it was almost overpowered by the passing cars. Riku held his hand tighter, pulled him closer. "The scans…my. The brain - thing. It was normal?"

 

A long silence permeated the parking lot. Yushi stared at his shoes again. Counted his steps — two, four, eight. 

 

"Of course it was," Riku answered. He spoke as if approaching a small child, as if Yushi was something breakable. It was the second time Yushi had ever seen Riku uncomfortable, or upset, because of something he said. He wished he could put all of the words back inside of him, so as not to worry, to not let Riku think of him any differently, but they were already there. 

 

"As normal as anybody's, Yuuchan." He put on a smile, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. His hand reached to ruffle through Yushi's hair, careful to avoid the unsightly metal poking through blond. "So no need to worry, yeah?" 

 

Yushi felt tense. Maybe Riku would never know. That was the one thing that he would not understand. And that was okay, he thought. This was Yushi's to carry. It was something for him to figure out, on his own. It made the feeling all the more isolated. It made him feel all the more trapped within the confines of his skull.

 

"I was so worried, Yushi," Riku, the one cross-legged on his living-room floor and beer in hand, confesses. "About you."

 

Yushi hums. He brings his can to his lips, brushes them over the sharp edge of the lid.

 

"That was so long ago."

 

"I know," Riku sniffs and purses his lips, "I think about it all the time." 

 

Yushi doesn't know what to say. 

 

Realistically, he knows that Riku thinks of him. He's his best friend. He looks out for him all the time. It still comes as a shock to his system, foolishly, to think that he might occupy Riku's mind just as much as he does his. It makes Yushi hopeful, in a way he almost never is, for the smallest moment. Like a scene from a movie ; where Riku confesses so that he doesn't have to, where he tells him he never wants to leave, where they spend the rest of their lives confined only to each other. The thought leaves moths in his stomach ; the fantasy soured by reality, by knowing it's selfish of him. By knowing he cannot possibly keep Riku to himself forever.

 

He finishes his beer, then another, then another. They don't taste great and they unsettle his stomach, but Yushi has always been a lightweight. He feels warm all over, tingles beneath his skin, exemplified by the night's humidity. 

 

"Ugh," Riku says, before standing up. "I feel trapped here. Come with me for a walk, Yuuchan?"

 

Yushi doesn't answer. He stands  and wobbles a little on his feet. Riku catches him with a soft smile. 

 

When they're outside Riku pats down his pockets for a cigarette, lights it, then passes it to Yushi. It's childish of him to think of their lips touching and blush, but Yushi does it regardless. Again, they are accompanied by nothing more than cicadas chirping and the distant noise of traffic. Yushi hums a simple song, just to fill the silence.

 

"I like your voice," Riku tells him. He looks beautiful against the night's backdrop. Yushi wants to tell him so, but he can never quite find the words the way Riku does. "It's pretty."

 

It feels childish, again, for Yushi to look down at his hands and bite back a smile. 

 

"Um - " he swallows, and starts again. "Thanks."

 

"No, really." Riku insists. "It's like - I don't know. I'm gonna miss it."

 

"I'll still call you."

 

Riku frowns. "I know. It won't be the same." 

 

They turn a corner and walk into familiar scenery. The park — the one where they met — now ten years older and withering. The swingset was replaced with rusted metal bars, and the dirt and bark now overrun with long grass. It sends a stinging pain into Yushi's chest to see it, to think of the boy who sat in a crowd of other kids on his own. He sits down on the grass, grounds himself by running his hands through the blades. Riku places himself next to him, and like a magnet, his head rests against Yushi's shoulder. 

 

"I haven't been here in years," Riku muses. It's wistful and Yushi sees tears start to form in his waterline. Riku has always been an emotional drunk. "It's changed, huh?" 

 

A soft breeze ripples through Riku's hair as it falls over his eyes. This close, Yushi examines his face. The way the moonlight reflects the surface of his skin. The line of his nose, the curve of his cupid's bow. It places something painful into his heart ; rusted scrap metal into his sternum. As if he can feel him watching, because he probably can, Riku turns to face him and his lips part.

 

They're so close that Yushi can count Riku's eyelashes. He freezes — scared that if he moves the bubble they're in will break, and Riku won't be there anymore.

 

"I shouldn't do this," Riku whispers, like he's afraid to speak any louder.  His voice breaks upon the next sentence, like glass falling and  shattering on the floor.

 

 "Promise me you'll forgive me, Yuuchan. Promise me."

 

Yushi doesn't need to answer because Riku's lips are against his, and nothing else in the world matters. It's slow, at first, tentative. As if he's scared that Yushi could back away. As if there were any universe where Riku would hand him this and he would deny it. His lips are soft — he tastes of cigarettes and mint chapstick, fresh and enveloping like summer in June. Yushi finds the back of his neck and he holds him closer like he's trying to meld two bodies into one. 

 

Riku's hands grasp onto Yushi's t-shirt for solace, bunching up the fabric between his fingers. One of Yushi's hands snakes down Riku's bare arm and over the back of Riku's hand, his own fingers slipping between the cracks of Riku's knuckles and holding him there. 

 

Riku kisses like he's in love. Yushi doesn't know if this is always how it was, he was always too scared to look, too scared to ask, or if it's — and he lets himself be hopeful again, when Riku licks across his bottom lip — if it's because Riku is in love with him, too. Riku's body shifts, then, until his thighs bracket Yushi's. He's panting and he's desperate, as if unravelling a bandage made of every moment gone unspoken. Yushi feels it too. Riku's tongue is in his mouth and Yushi whines, grappling for hold on Riku's slim waist.  

 

"Yushi — " Riku breathes in the split second they disconnect. He says it just to say it, just to have Yushi's name on his tongue. He rolls his hips with a certain kind of precision, Yushi doesn't want to know where it had been learned, and Yushi throws his head back against the grass. 

 

"Riku." He replies, holds Riku by the back of his head, and crashes their lips back into each other. 

 

He supposes he should feel like he's unlocked some kind of life lesson, but he sort of feels like he's drowning.

 

Riku's tongue is in his mouth, his hands are riding up his shirt and across his back, and there's water inside his lungs. He can't catch his breath, doesn't want to. He can only breathe in the gentle gasp that elicits from Riku's mouth when he bucks his hips upwards particularly high, and in return expel whines into his. It's not - it's not romantic, fully-clothed and grinding against Riku beneath open-air, but it feels good, and Yushi has always been greedy, and all he ever wanted was Riku — in any way that he could get him — and so he doesn't stop, can't find the will within himself to stop.

 

Riku, who has always been eager to please, cups Yushi's face in gentle palms. 

 

"Does it feel good?" He asks, and his voice breaks on the last syllable. Yushi doesn't know how it could possibly feel bad, not with Riku, but he knits his eyebrows together and nods regardless.

 

"More," he whispers, "more."

 

Riku — still seeking approval, all these years later — beams. It's so easy with Riku, sometimes. So much that Yushi can forget just how easy it is. Fingers dip below Yushi's waistband and he hisses. Riku blinks at him, wide eyed, until he gets a nod. 

 

"You too," Yushi winces when Riku wraps a loose hand around his cock, "please, you too."

 

"Me?" Riku asks, choking, until Yushi pulls him closer and tugs at his waistband and he gets the picture.

 

They've always done everything together — Riku and Yushi, Yushi and Riku. Yushi can't stand to think about doing anything alone ; not even this. 

 

Faced inches apart, breathing hot air into each other's mouths, Riku takes both of their cocks in his hand, and sets a frantic pace. 

 

It should hurt. It does, a little bit, but pain melds into pleasure where Riku's cock slides against his, and where Riku melds into him. No beginning, no end. Just Riku and Yushi. Yushi and Riku.

 

Yushi doesn't last long. There is no world in which he would. He spills over Riku's hand and sinks his teeth into the flesh of Riku's shoulder, cascaded by his shirt, as he waits a few, overstimulating moments before Riku throws his head back and comes, too.

 

"Yushi," Riku says, breathless, above him. "I shouldn't - I feel so - "

 

Yushi wants to kiss him. He wishes he were gentle like a stream to wash his anxieties away, but he looks so frightened and delicate that Yushi is scared of breaking him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the fear of ruining ten years of what they once had grasps him. He feels sticky and uncomfortable and regretful all at once,  and it creates a whirlpool in his stomach. The feeling crashes into Yushi and he grabs Riku's hand for comfort. He doesn't pull away.

 

"This doesn't change anything." He tells Riku. To convince himself more than to convince him — to not sever what feels like such a delicate ribbon holding them together. If change means waking up tomorrow and not hearing from Riku, not seeing Riku until he's on the train and far away, if it means the flurry of texts from him slowly disappearing into two a day, then one a day, then none, then Yushi doesn't want it. It doesn't have to be a movie. Things don't have to change. 

 

"What do you want, Yushi?" Riku asks him. He blinks and Yushi realises he's about to cry. 

 

It's the most simple answer in the world, and somehow the most complicated. It's both. The only answer that Yushi would ever give, no doubts, but the hardest to explain. He rolls it over in his head, again, and again, and again, until his mouth gives way for him to speak.

 

"You."

 

"Yushi," Riku chokes, with tears staining his cheeks. Yushi doesn't want to tell him so, but he looks beautiful. "You can't only have me."

 

"Riku," Yushi says, because he can't think of anything else. It plays over in his head like a broken tape, on loop. "I just want you."

 

Riku gives him a look that's painful — like he doesn't want to push too far. He knows Yushi like that. He's known him far too long.

 

"You don't." He says, delicate like glass.

 

Yushi's heart feels like it's trying to escape through his sternum. "I do."

 

"Yushi, you can't — I just — " 

 

"Let's not talk here," he says softly, before wobbling to his feet. He blushes bright red and embarrassed as he pulls up his shorts, before extending a hand after Yushi does the same. "And let's shower," he says between a laugh. "I feel gross."

 

They walk home arm in arm, but the closeness is only skin-to-skin. Riku feels far away, sparkling eyes glassy against the night sky. Yushi sits idle on the couch as Riku showers. He stares at his palms, bites his lip until it bleeds. It feels wrong, almost, to think of Riku naked after he had shown him vulnerability, but Yushi had only got so much of what he's always wanted and he's — he's greedy, he realises. He always has been. With Riku. Especially with Riku. Even in thinking he was selfless — going along with any of Riku's whims — it was always because he wanted all of him. He wants it more now. 

 

Riku leaves the bathroom to give way for Yushi, and Yushi shivers against the cold tiles as he steps inside. He turns the shower as hot as it will go as if to wash off Riku's touch, but it doesn't leave. It won't ever leave, now that he's had him. He scrubs until his skin turns pink but he can't — it doesn't go away. He's not sure if he wants to go outside to face him.

 

"Hi," Riku says as Yushi steps outside, drying his hair with a towel. "I left clothes for you in my bedroom. If you want them." 

 

Yushi shouldn't feel so tense — he doesn't usually, not around Riku, but he feels a shiver up his back as he nods, and slips into Riku's bedroom. Technically, it looks the same, but it doesn't really. His bed is where it always is, only stripped of its usual patterned bedsheets and replaced with plain, crisp, white. The shelves are bare. The only trace of Riku is a folded black t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants placed atop the bedside table. If Yushi thinks about it for too long, it makes him feel cold inside, like his stomach is replaced with ice. He shivers in his towel and shakes his head, as if to rid himself of a stark, burning thought inside his mind ; nothing in this room feels like Riku anymore. It could be anyone's.

 

At the very least, Riku's clothes smell like him. Of the fresh laundry detergent he uses, of his cologne. Yushi presses his nose to the shirt before changing, he thinks of it like placing Riku's skin atop his own. 

 

When Yushi peeks his head back into the living room, Riku jumps. He fidgets with his hands, pressing his knuckles against each other. 

 

"Yushi," he says, his voice quiet, like coaxing an animal. "Come here."

 

Yushi does. Anything Riku wants, he does. 

 

"We should — " He starts, then stops. Yushi looks at him as if to climb into his mind, as if to figure it all out. He wishes he could give that to Riku — that kind of understanding — the way Riku does to him. "You want me?" He asks. Squeaks. "Like really?"

 

Without hesitation, because Yushi knows he has stalled for years too much, he answers. 

 

"Yes."

 

"Okay," Riku replies, pulling Yushi closer by his bony wrist, "Okay."

 

"For how long?" Riku asks, again. It's almost as if he doesn't believe Yushi at all. He fiddles with the chain of a necklace that dangles off his neck — a small locket that rests just above his collarbones. 

 

"Um," Yushi starts. His voice just barely breaks a whisper. "Always."

 

Riku's shoulders shake. Yushi can't tell if he's laughing or if he's starting to cry. 

 

"I wish you wouldn't say things like that, Yushi."

 

Yushi cocks his head to the side, and Riku pulls him in closer, closer, until Yushi's face is looming over his. Yushi's breath catches uncomfortably somewhere in his throat. 

 

"Wh — " Yushi starts, trying to fight his hands from cupping Riku's face in them, from swiping the imaginary, glittering tear tracks washed away by the shower.  "Why?"

 

Riku inhales, stares at Yushi with such intensity that Yushi is inclined to look at the plain wall behind his head. 

 

"It makes things so much harder," Riku breathes, "so much harder."

 

They kiss, again, and this time it doesn't feel so much like drowning. Its waves are calm and gentle, Riku's tongue lapping curiously against Yushi's mouth, Yushi not-so-cautiously letting him in.

 

"I want you too," Riku whispers to him. "So much, Yushi. I always have. Always." 

 

Yushi wants to tell him he has him, he always had, but Riku pulls him closer, and nothing but a whine can escape his mouth. They both know where this is heading — part of it feels inevitable, like everything with Riku does. It all just falls into place.

 

"That's why it's so — Yushi — " Riku says, interrupted by Yushi nipping at his bottom lip, over and over again, "it's so hard. I can't — I don't want to — "

 

And, to be honest, Yushi knows what Riku is going to say. He knows that he is going to leave. He doesn't want to think about it anymore. He wants to worry about it in the morning, when the heat slips through the curtains and he is forced back into reality. In the morning, he will face it. Tonight, under Riku's living room's dim lighting, Riku is his. Riku is his, and Yushi is Riku's. That's all that it is — all that he wants it to be. 

 

So, Yushi shushes him, by kissing him with enough force to knock their noses against one another and send an almost pleasant, buzzing kind of pain up into his forehead. 

 

"Bed?" Riku asks, in the brief moment that they part,  to which Yushi nods fervently. 

 

The time in which it takes to get to Riku's bedroom happens in a series of blurred movements. One moment Yushi is being lifted, carefully, as if he is something delicate, from the couch, and the next he is laid gracefully on Riku's pillow, and tugging impatiently at the hem of his tank top.

 

"Yushi," Riku smiles into his mouth, before parting to take it off in one unceremonious movement. "You'll stretch it." The locket — an ornate silver heart — lays bare on his chest. Yushi reaches out to touch it, lays his palm spread against Riku's collar. 

 

"Want you now." Yushi tells him plainly, words scratching the back of his throat, as Riku dips in between the space of his neck and his shoulder and plants his lips there, drags the sharp edge of his teeth against Yushi's unmarked skin. 

 

"Don't — " Riku says, punctuated by peppered kisses as he lifts Yushi's shirt up and off him, "don't be impatient, Yuuchan — " Yushi squirms, keen when Riku's knee finds its place in between his legs. "I don't want — I don't want it to be over so soon." 

 

Riku might want to drag it out, and Yushi supposes it makes sense — when you've wanted something for so long, is it not only natural to want to have it for as long as you can? To hold it safe in your hands, before, like water, it slips through the cracks of your knuckles? Yushi holds Riku by the back of his neck and pants heavy into his mouth, and he squeezes his eyes tight shut. He probably should have patience — but such a thing is practiced, and Yushi is tired of practicing, and he wants Riku, and he wants him now. He does not want to wait any longer. 

 

They should probably talk about this. Before it’s too late, before things go too far. 

 

"Now," Yushi says, petulant and childish, his mouth for once moving faster than his brain. Talking can come later, he supposes. "Riku, now."

 

"You're so," Riku's voice lilts, and Yushi can hear him laugh, really laugh, from his chest. It feels warm, like honey and liquor and all things smooth and saccharine when Riku puts his hands on Yushi's waist, holding the bones of his hips, "you're so sensitive."

 

Yushi whines, squirms, and makes a poor attempt to kick Riku in retaliation. Riku holds him down, cages him in, and presses a chaste kiss to the heart-shape of Yushi's cupid's bow. Yushi feels so, so wound up, like a string about to snap, that even a feather-light touch of Riku's lips to his is enough to make him exhale a shaky, rattled breath.

 

"Stay here," Riku tells him, as he manoeuvres himself off the bed. Yushi nearly lets out something pathetic, a release of the tight feeling in his chest that emerges when Riku's body is not pressed against his in the form of something high-pitched from his mouth. He throws his arm over his face like he's being blinded as Riku rummages through a leather handbag cascaded in the corner of his room, until Yushi feels the dip in the mattress and the click of a bottle cap that signifies his return. 

 

Yushi lifts his arm and stares at Riku, who smiles sheepishly.

 

"Sorry," Riku says, "too — too fast?" 

 

Yushi's stone face cracks into a smile — the pearls of his teeth on display — as he shakes his head, pulling Riku closer, back on top of him. 

 

"No," he whispers against Riku's ear, lifting his hips up so that Riku can feel the strain of his cock against his own. "Need it, Riku." 

 

"Okay," Riku smiles and presses his lips to Yushi's forehead. "You gotta let me move, though, Yuuchan."

 

Reluctantly, Yushi lets up. He lets go of his grasp — nails digging into Riku's shoulders like a cat — and lets himself relax, as much as he can. 

 

He feels jittery — heat beneath his skin that he can't quite get rid of, every touch exemplified a thousand times over when Riku runs his hands over his thighs, over the flimsy fabric of his sweatpants, dipping beneath the waistband and across his hips. He coaxes Yushi into lifting his torso up slightly, then he pulls them off — agonisingly slow and ungraceful, but Yushi cannot find the words within him to complain. 

 

Air hits Yushi's cock — already hard and sensitive, since God knows when — and he hisses at the sensation. Even more so when Riku strokes deft fingers over it's head, stroking him in focused grip. 

 

"Taking too long," Yushi tells him, knuckle-white grip on his shoulder. 

 

He winces like Riku's touch — or lack there of, or just not quite enough — pains him, and it kind of does. His body, the tips of his shoulders and his elbows, and his knees, are blushing pink and every stretch of skin gone untouched leaves a burning itch in his gut that he has to squirm to try and control.   "Do you always take this long?" 

 

Riku is languid. He's eager to please, but in a way that draws things out, like the way that his hands dance over Yushi's inner thighs but never quite where he wants them. Yushi finds, in Riku's crisp white bedsheets, that he needs Riku ; in him, on him, in any way he can have him, with such haste that it sort of feels like his heart is a freight train attempting to crash its way out through his chest. Yushi has never been a patient person. He has never waited for his tea or for his ramen to cool before he burns his lips, and he can't wait when he's grabbing Riku rough by the wrist and urging him to finally, finally, squeeze lube onto lithe fingers and — 

 

"It's gonna be cold," Riku tells him, before he kisses him softly and presses his index finger inside him. 

 

It is cold, Yushi whines, but his complaints are captured by Riku's breathing into his mouth. It feels — it's uncomfortable, at first — but not an unwelcome intrusion. Not when it's Riku rubbing circles into his thighs and soothing him, staring at him with dark eyes and a smile that's almost aghast, that says he can't believe that it's Yushi laid out in front of him and in his hands. 

 

Soon enough the discomfort passes, which is an easy feat with the repetitive motion of Riku's tongue licking into his mouth, mapping out the pattern of Yushi's molars, and Yushi trying his best to keep up, kitten licks across Riku's canines. Riku kisses like he's holding back something bigger than himself — gentle in the way that feels like if he wasn't, he would knock his nose against Yushi's so hard that it would bleed. Yushi wouldn't mind if he did, really. He'd take a bruised nose or even a split lip if it meant that he could have Riku like this, hot against his body, always. 

 

One finger becomes two, scissoring against his walls with careful precision. Yushi is awfully reactive like this — vocal in a way that he almost never is, never has been. When Riku's fingers leave, he lets out a broken wail, the kind of noise that he never thought he would be able to produce. 

 

"Yushi," Riku smiles. He holds Yushi's face with a free hand, wipes his thumb across Yushi's cheek. The soft light in his bedroom makes Riku look warm and the sweat that starts to bead on his forehead looks like dew upon morning grass in the summer, or something poetic like that. Yushi has never been the type to wax poetic about things like this — but the light creates a halo around Riku's head, or maybe he's imagining things, because he blinks three times before realising Riku is still talking to him.

 

"You're okay?" Riku asks, always hungry for approval, "you want me?"

 

Yushi nods, holds Riku by the wrist and wraps both of their hands around his cock, and guides him towards his entrance. It's all the confirmation Riku needs, because he hisses and slides in slowly — too slowly — until he reaches the hilt. He stays there for a moment, breathing into Yushi’s mouth, until Yushi pulls at his shoulders and forces him to move.

 

Riku doesn’t move with much urgency, despite Yushi’s previous complaints, but Yushi finds quickly that he doesn’t really mind. Riku creates a soft rhythm, back and forth, and back and forth, inside him. It feels good. He hadn’t given it much thought before — whether or not Riku would feel good — perhaps due to not wanting to imagine him like this at all, knowing it would be with anyone but him. Now that it is him, it feels a little surreal. Riku’s head collapses into the crook of Yushi’s shoulder as his hips rock and Yushi has a feeling that he’s outside of his own body. Watching himself from the ceiling, watching Riku’s body atop of his own. He wants to freeze the moment in time and examine it. Watch the way his own face contorts and the ways in which the lines of Riku’s body look against him. Find the place where their bodies connect and keep them there, forever.

 

He had not intended to be vocal, really, but he didn’t realise he was making so much noise until Riku kissed him.

 

Although Riku is not rough with him, not by any means at all, it still feels like — well — it’s a lot. Skin upon skin, and hands gripped tight around his waist, and Riku’s tongue finding its way into his mouth. Yushi almost wants to push him away, so that he can lay silent and look up at the way Riku’s necklace falls above his face, but the more that Riku kisses him the more he becomes inclined to kiss him back. To close his eyes and let the feeling of it wash over him, through him. To stay in the present, here, with Riku inside of him.

 

It’s kind of a difficult thing to do when this is something that had not ever even happened in his fantasies, because he did not allow himself to even think of it. Now Riku is moaning wanton into his mouth and Yushi cannot help but think two steps ahead, or fourteen back. 

 

Of Riku on the boardwalk, or sitting atop of the wall cold and alone, of Riku splashing him with sea water and laughing so hard that he almost choked on it. Of Riku with his school bag slung over one shoulder and waiting, bright-eyed for seven in the morning, at the end of Yushi’s driveway. Of Riku whose hands always found Yushi  — his hands, his arms, his knees — but never dared to linger for too long. Riku at the platform of the train station with his back turned to him and stepping over the line that Yushi cannot cross. Riku finally going somewhere that Yushi cannot follow. 

 

Yushi feels salt on his cheeks and he thinks that he is crying. He squints one eye open he realises that, instead, it is Riku. His eyes are squeezed shut as his hips stutter without much drive, as tears fall atop of Yushi’s face.

 

“Riku,” Yushi manages to get out as he squirms. “Riku, don’t go.”

 

Riku bites his lip hard and shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut tighter. His hand finds Yushi’s cock and his thumb sweeps the head, making Yushi hiss. He’s trying to distract him. Yushi knows this. He knows this because it’s working, and any more pleas for Riku to stay fade as he bucks his hips forward, arching off of the stupid and plain and barren white-sheeted mattress, and spills into Riku’s palm. 

 

“I don’t want to, Yuuchan” Riku whispers, finally, as he reaches the crux of his own orgasm. He collapses on top of him and snakes his arms around Yushi’s back. “But I have to. I’m sorry. I just have to.” 

                                                                 —

It rains torrentially the day that Riku leaves. Yushi wakes to the sound of it thundering against his window, and where it should soothe him awake it sends a pit into his stomach quick and heavy. It's early morning — six, and the sun has only just started to peak through the clouds. The world is pale blue and grey. Weeping as if it too is experiencing the numbness that settles inside Yushi’s body and wraps itself tight around his bones.

 

He pads through his room and to his wardrobe, where everything is, well, not neat, but folded haphazardly and organised by colour  — black jeans, grey t-shirts, etc. He picks the t-shirt Riku gave him, and hopes he doesn't notice. The downpour of rain does nothing but emulsify the summer's humidity. As Yushi sprays notes of bergamot and mint onto his wrist, he examines the bracelet Riku gifted him. His wrists pause where they were rubbing together, afraid somehow, after all these years, he might break it. He chews on his bottom lip as he imagines the string tied together snapping, the beads scattered all accross wooden floor, having to scramble to pick them up. 

 

His wrist feels heavy with the weight of the crystals. His body feels heavy as he slips his shoes on, slips out his door, and pulls up his hood against the rain. It's the kind of thing that, despite being on his mind on loop since the day Riku told him he was leaving, just hadn't quite settled in, not all the way. Perhaps he had hope that things would change. Maybe if he had ignored his feelings, prolonged it long enough — maybe if he hadn't let Riku kiss him, hadn't kissed Riku back, it wouldn't feel so real. Reality takes hold of him like an anchor, weighing down his ankles as he walks. Like if he doesn't face Riku, it doesn't have to happen. He doesn't have to feel it.

 

He faces Riku nonetheless — drenched in the hallway of his apartment building, shoulders sagging as he knocks once, twice, three times. Riku swings the door open and he looks just as haggard as Yushi feels ; dark circles under his eyes that he quite obviously tried to cover up before Yushi came, hair unkempt, and the air is heavy with too many things, both said and unsaid, and there is nowhere to put them.

 

"Hi," Riku croaks, trying to crack a smile.

 

Yushi blinks, and takes one of Riku's bags from his hands. It's a leather cross-body Riku bought a few months back, when he took Yushi out on a shopping trip. It was the only thing he left with that he bought for himself. 

 

Yushi swallows what feels like acid in his throat, and nods, whispers back a hello.

 

The walk to the train station is heavy with silence. Nothing save for the patter of rain against the sidewalk, mimicking the drum of Yushi's heart against his chest as Riku hooks his arm through his and holds him tight against the weather. That night — in the park, in Riku's bed — they didn't talk about it. There's not much more to be said. Riku was always going to leave, and now he is. Whether Yushi kissed him or not. Whether Yushi humped him like an animal and came into his hand or not, whether they fucked or not. Whether Yushi told him that he loved him or not. Whether they had each other or not. It was always going to happen.

 

Riku's train leaves in twenty minutes, and it feels like all the time in the entire world. It feels like the only thing in the world that exists is the platform, the only people in the world that exist are Riku and Yushi. Yushi and Riku. 

 

Around the time the train comes around, Yushi feels as if the world has stopped. Time slows, and Yushi wants to capture it forever. Take a picture so that it never goes away. 

 

That was always Riku's thing. Maybe it can be his thing now, too. Capturing the pieces of Riku around Fukui that won't ever leave. 

 

Riku turns to him and there's tears in his eyes, and as Yushi blinks he realises that he's crying, too. He never really cries much anymore. He never really did before. Riku drops his bags to the floor and wraps his arms tight around his neck, squeezing as if he thinks that if he let go, Yushi would disappear. Yushi feels like he might. His palms shake as they find their place around Riku's waist and hold him tight there, too. They must look a little ridiculous — Yushi feels a little ridiculous — swaying each other back and forth and wetting each other's neck with tears, sticking to their skin like the ocean. 

 

And, of course, time keeps moving. It does not stop just because you want it to. The rain drizzles through a halt and the sun is stone-splitting when it peeks through the clouds. 

 

Yushi has to let him go. Riku clings to his t-shirt as he does, but he has to take a step back nonetheless. As they part — ugly and sniffling — a small, black cat, makes its way through the platform and brushes itself against Yushi's leg. Riku lets out a sad, choked laugh as he crouches over to pet it. It purrs as Riku scratches under its chin, and Yushi presses his lips together into some distorted kind of smile.

 

"Take care of my Yuuchan for me," Riku whispers to the little thing, and Yushi can hear him audibly swallow from above,  "okay?". It meows in response before it snakes through Yushi's legs and disappears into the building nearby. He feels an overwhelming kind of fondness for Riku, right there on the train platform in the sweltering heat, that he feels his heart shatter all over again.

 

Riku stands up and pulls him into another, swift hug, so fast that Yushi almost topples over.

 

"I love you so much," Riku whispers into his hair, and before Yushi can respond, he has to go. 

 

"I'll call when I get there!" Riku calls as he gathers his things and rushes towards the train's doors, "text me, okay? I miss you already!"

 

The doors slide shut not long after Riku steps on board, and Yushi swallows a quiet cry. The air stings his eyes. The train moves fast, and Yushi is left alone with nothing but the smell of  wood sage and sea salt that lingers on his clothes, and the buzz of cicadas from the near distance. 

Yushi stares at the empty train tracks for far too long. Like time will reverse, and Riku will still be in his arms. An hour passes, maybe. Yushi wasn’t paying much attention. Then two, then three. Still, nothing has changed. Nothing ever changes. This was not going to be a movie, Yushi reminds himself. He always knew exactly what the ending would be. The noise of the cicadas is now insistent and an irritating thing that drills against his brain. 

 

With no one to link arms with him and walk him home, Yushi turns on his heels, and with the tenacious chirping, he hums along.