Work Text:
(金継ぎ) Kintsugi
[ kin-tsoo-gee ]
noun
Also called kin·tsu·ku·roi [kin-tsoo-koo-roi]. A traditional Japanese pottery repair technique in which lacquer mixed with precious metals, especially gold, is used to fill cracks and replace missing pieces.
✦
2003
I. The inevitability of you
From the moment they meet, it’s do or die.
Their eyes catch across the hall, and Ryomen knows that it’s him, and no one else. It cannot be anyone else. The kid- Toji Zen’in , he later comes to learn- looks like a ghost of an old mobster even at the ripe age of thirteen. Haunted, sunken cheeks and a split lip to match. Attitude evident in the cruel twist of his mouth and the way he looks like he has a forest fire in his chest and sweet violence sunk deep into his flesh. Eyes as hard as flint.
A careless insult, thrown out to the dank, musty air of the middle school hallway, is all it takes for it to ignite.
Ryomen doesn’t remember the exact words- they’ve been lost to the hazy, rose-pink daze of nostalgia and the slow passage of time; buried under the sand grains in the metaphorical hourglass. But he remembers the fallout, because it’s impossible to forget the closest thing he’s seen to a supernova.
Toji, in his memory, is a firework explosion gone wrong. A vicious flame, where there should’ve been colours and shapes and laughter. Burning everything in his path, ruthless in the way his body arcs as he prepares for gleeful destruction.
Someone throws the first punch- Ryomen can’t quite recall who, or the specifics of why. Just the taste of blood in his mouth after. The pain lancing through him, the dull ache rushing through his body in rivers of blood and exhilaration.
From the moment they meet, it’s like finding a new sun. Pulled into the gravity of something bigger, and even escape velocity isn’t enough to tear the both of them away from the inevitability of each other.
There’s a scuffle after, and someone’s back hits the floor and then there they are- limbs locked as they grapple with each other, rolling across the cold tile of the hallway. Toji bites down, Ryomen backhands him across the face for it. Ryomen kicks his knee up into Toji’s groin, Toji retaliates by bashing his head into the floor. More blood, more adrenaline. More agony, sparking up his spine.
But fuck, if he doesn’t feel alive . Excitement, as palpable as cigarette smoke, snakes down the column of his throat as he feels Toji pin him down and then he’s surging up, landing an uppercut on his sharp jaw and then more blood. Floods of it- spurting out of his nose, trickling down his mouth, leaking into Ryomen’s own until he can’t be sure if the metal on his tongue is his or Toji’s.
“You’re slow as hell, aren’t you?” Ryomen remembers mocking, even as his whole body throbs with the force of Toji’s punches and he feels like serrated knives stab into his sides where Toji’s fingers dig in. His nails might have been blades, with how he wielded them- Ryomen’s skin had bunched under the calcium surface because of how hard he scratched.
Toji growls something fierce, teeth bared and glistening under the washed out hallway lights, and then proceeds to smash their heads together.
Pain blooms, as beautiful as a red-gleaming flower, where their foreheads meet. Darkness is a sticky, tenacious thing that pulls at the edges of Ryomen’s vision as he struggles to swim up, up , get back into the thick of it and finish the fight.
But it’s useless. Toji’s face, pulled into a merciless grin with cracked teeth and split lips, is already hazy above him. He’s swimming in a sea of cotton, and the water’s tugging him under.
He gives in just as a pair of bigger hands- panicked teachers, attempting to pry them apart- grip onto his shoulders and pull him away from Toji.
Ryomen passes out with metal in his mouth and blood on his hands and his heart snagged into Toji’s orbit- like a shirt, hung on a stretching clothesline, helpless to the summer winds blowing in the sweet taste of change. Of companionship.
He wakes up in the nurse’s office, lying on the cot and smothering a delirious sort of smile into the dirty pillow.
Later that day, Toji will find him in the only playground in their town, legs swinging as he sits on top of the monkey bars, rust brushing off of the metal and onto his wrinkled shorts. Ryomen won’t acknowledge him, at first- in that petty way of slighted, offended children growing into the sharp edges of their teenage selves, baby fat still clinging to the hinges of their jaws and cheeks.
It won’t take long for Toji to effortlessly haul himself up and onto the bars right beside Ryomen. It won’t take long for him grin at him, still slightly feral and fired up from their fight earlier, and say:
“Wanna go again?”
There will be silence. Between them, silences will soon become a comfort that is uncountable in number, peppered throughout their every conversation. But it will not be now.
Right now, Ryomen will tilt his head back, the way a too-proud swan might, exuding superiority with every breath like he was taught to and say: “No.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I got blood on my shirt. My mom will kill me if I do it again.”
A slanted gaze, almost thoughtful. “I’ll lend you mine.”
A breath. The birdsong, and the trees rustling. The sun setting somewhere deeper into the forest, beyond the limits of their vision. Somewhere far, far away from where they are right now: miles and kilometers and light years. They’re just two kids in a playground playing God, the world is too big for them.
Ryomen will crack, break under the tide of Toji’s breathing and the violet sunset.
“Sure.”
They’ll fight again. Toji will break his nose again and Ryomen will cut his tongue open by biting down too hard on it. And at the end, Toji will dust himself off and then offer him a hand up, the dusk a quiet revelation behind his shadow-dark silhouette, and say:
“You’re not half bad.”
Their fingers will tangle, twist into one single mass of writhing flesh as Ryomen accepts the hand and he’ll say you’re not either .
That is where it begins, for them. That’s where their lives collide in a mass of teenage anger and blood and twist together, irrevocably intertwine until they are binary stars, forever caught in each other’s gravity. Unable to escape, even at light speed, escape velocity.
In Ryomen’s head- it’s like that picture. Two eagles, talons interlocked. Falling and flying at once, spiraling towards sky-blue infinities, but never without each other.
From that day, they are inevitable.
✦
2006
II. In another life
It’s when it rains, where everything feels a little bit like magic.
It’s when the late evening is folding into itself, ripening like an already rotten food, and the air is thick with humidity and he can feel his own sweat mix with the rainwater that Ryomen feels the closest to infinity. Like he’s mixing into the cloying mid-monsoon wind and losing himself in the heat of it all.
It’s during these times that he understands his grandfather’s devotion to religion, because what can make the light-hazed rain puddles on the street, the late-summer clouds rolling in with fury and the dirty rivers that the pipe-water carves across the asphalt other than something supernatural? Something beyond human?
Humans are fickle, partial to perfection. Only something above mortal can make something so beautifully flawed: grimy sewage mixing with the clean rainwater, the flickering lights outside of the gas station, and the McDonalds across the street that’s always open but never has any customers. Locked in a state of perpetual abandonment.
Ryomen is sixteen, and finding God outside of a seven-eleven; the rain soaking his shirt through, until the cloth becomes a second skin as it clings to his frame, and he thinks he’s going to die. That maybe, if God is real, he’ll take pity on him and take him away from this place.
Humans are fickle, partial to death. Why would he be the exception?
And it’s right here, when it rains, that he thinks the world is going to end. That everything will simply collapse back into a single point of blackness- and that will be it. His body quantifying infinity.
The rain continues. An incessant patter, beating the agonizing tempo of a migraine into Ryomen’s skull and he thinks please let this be the end .
Ryomen is sixteen, and looking for heaven outside of a seven-eleven. Hoping for forgiveness.
And then there’s a quiet rustle of cloth. And then there’s a hand, sinking down into his shoulder. A familiar warmth, one that he’s grown used to leaning towards over the past three odd years. Scarred fingers from countless fights, nimble as snake up the length of Ryomen’s arms, press into the hollow of his throat.
Ryomen’s shoes are wet, sneakers filled with water. They squelch when he sags against the torso pressing up against him, and he feels like he might dissipate into smoke. Like he’s already halfway to becoming air and infinity and nothing more.
“Ryomen.” Toji says.
He doesn’t say anything. He can’t. His tongue feels like it’ll fall off if he does.
“ Ryomen .” He says, more insistent.
“Yeah?” Ryomen rasps.
A deep, shuddering breath. Toji’s heart is going rabbit-fast. Like it's racing against time. Ryomen wishes he could do something, press his palms over the red flesh and tell him it’s okay . And we’ll be okay, don’t be scared. “You can’t keep doing this.”
“Why not?”
“Yuuji needs you.” He says. “Your brother needs you.”
“He’s ten. He doesn’t understand shit.”
“Yeah he fucking does.” Toji says. Presses closer to him, and his fingers are now twisting together on the nape of Ryomen’s neck. “He’s sat outside my door. Crying. Wanna explain that?”
Ryomen grunts. “They were arguing again.”
Toji levels a sharp look down at him, but Ryomen knows the mask he puts on intimately. This is concern. This is worry, from him. “Did they-”
“I got Yuuji out before Dad could hurt him. Or anyone else.” He says, letting his head drop down into the hinge of Toji’s shoulder. The soft place made of paper-skin where his neck meets the rest of him. “Don’t worry.”
“And you- what? Left him outside my door?”
He shrugs. “Sure. Didn’t know where else to put him.”
“You have to go back.”
A gentle shift of his head, a barely there denial. As vapid as the rest of him feels at this moment. Like he’s mist, masquerading as human. An abandoned doll, instead of a person. Dented plastic where there should be flesh. “A minute. Gimme- a minute.”
Toji’s breath hitches, but he doesn’t say no. Pulls him closer, until they’re two commas, curling into each other. The sidewalk is wet and their clothes and shorts are wetter, and they stick like heavy mercury to his body and it’s still raining. Still magic. And Ryomen is still finding heaven through rainwater and pipe sewage and dirty puddles.
“Hey, Toji?” He whispers into Toji’s skin, voice run ragged. Like it’s been marathons, by itself. Always racing against time, both him and Toji.
“What?” Toji says. Against Ryomen, he’s shivering slightly, but he’s nothing if not goddamn stubborn, so he’s doing his best to not let it show. Shoulders clenched, tense as he keeps holding on, as if he’s the only thing keeping Ryomen afloat.
And he might just be.
“Do you think there are other lives out there?” He says, instead of thinking about home. Thinking about the divorce. Thinking about everything that sends bugs and worms and hellfire crawling into his stomach, until he feels half-dead and bloated with ugly, ugly things. Like his body is a cage made to quantify pain.
“Like alternate universes?” Toji says, and Ryomen knows that under any normal circumstance, Toji would just scoff and brush it off. That he’s only doing this because he knows this is Ryomen’s way of falling apart, of vomiting up the blight growing on him, the bile perpetually pooling in his stomach. On any normal day, they would be lounging against their bikes at the vending machine and Ryomen might ask him this question and Toji would scowl and say stop being fucking stupid .
But right now, he’s a ship sinking. Right now, Toji knows he’s his only anchor.
“Yeah. Other lives.” Ryomen says. He still sounds wrecked. The hull of a boat, breaking under the force of the dark water- that’s what this is.
“Sure.” Toji murmurs, pressing his jagged nose into the tender skin of Ryomen’s neck. “Why?”
He pauses, takes a hitching breath. More rain, more God. If he opens his eyes, right now, leaves the safety of Toji’s warm skin wrapping around him like a comforting duvet, he knows he’ll see the lights of the seven-eleven sign blinking, a hazy green blur of green and moon-white, even as the real moon hides behind the evening-dark clouds. Tap-tap-tap . The soft pitter-patter of the raindrops as they hit the asphalt. Shattering into dazzling sheets of water. A thousand, a million small deaths, flowing into rivers on the street. An echo of a storm still approaching.
Lightning flashes, and blankets their shadows in a flickering sea of paleness. Only for them to reappear when the sky's anger ebbs.
“What do you think those other versions of us are like?” Ryomen says, into the tenderness of Toji’s flesh.
More lightning, a thunderclap so loud that it sends the birds in the tree growing, against all odds, from a crack in the asphalt, into a frenzy. They squawk angrily, and take off into the night. Their wings are a spiral of black that mixes itself easily into the cresting darkness.
“I don’t know.” Toji says, voice ragged. He’s being thoughtful about this, which by itself a rarity. Combined with the way he’s still sitting here in the rain, holding onto Ryomen while he falls apart- it sort of feels like a small miracle. Though, he supposes Toji’s always been good at those. “There’s a reason we’re here and not there. ”
“What the hell does that mean?”
A hand comes up to flick at the side of his face, only to soften the blow with an absentminded touch to his ear. Curling a stray lock of pink hair behind the shell of it. It’s the gentlest touch Ryomen’s had in days, and the thoughtless way Toji offers the quiet movement up to him leaves him winded. Breaks him, a little bit more.
“If you’re going to be asking stupid questions, I’m gonna give you stupid answers.” Toji grunts.
Ryomen grumbles into the hinge of his neck, and they can almost pretend that this is a normal day. That they aren’t soaking wet right now and they aren’t outside a seven-eleven sitting on the sidewalk, and they can almost pretend that Ryomen didn’t want to die less than ten minutes ago and that his brother isn’t sitting outside of Toji’s doorstep- probably still crying.
“Just tell me. Stop being fucking stubborn, bastard.” He says, punctuated with a tug to Toji’s shirt. It’s heavy with water, and the fabric clings to him even as Ryomen pulls stubbornly at it.
“God, you’re so annoying.” Toji groans. Burrows his nose further into the stubble-coarse edge of Ryomen’s jaw. “Why do I even hang out with you?”
“Because no one else can stand you.” A tug. “Tell.” Another one, a little rougher this time. “ Me .”
“Fucking- stop doing that.” Toji scowls, and pinches the soft skin of his neck. Ryomen hisses low, and pulls at his shirt again in retaliation. But neither of them make to extricate themselves from the embrace, like it’s almost instinctual to stay wrapped around each other like this. Like there’s no other way for them to be, no way for them to be more human without each other than the whole they make right now together.
“Tell me.” He says, stubborn to a fault.
“Fine.” Toji scoffs. “Just- stop doing that.”
“Fine.” He says, and lets his hands come up, resting on the nape of Toji’s neck. Tanging with the soft, stubbly hair there. Still, for once.
A moment passes, where the two of them just breathe, chests rising and falling against each others’. More rain, more God. Heaven can’t be far away. The 7-eleven sign hasn’t stopped flickering, like an electric candle flame. Or a broken flashlight on a camping trip into the darkest parts of the woods. An old lighthouse at sea, that just can’t bear to keep going anymore.
“I meant-” Toji pauses, letting the words settle on his tongue like snowflakes on a winter morning. He’s always careful with what he says, when he means it. When he knows Ryomen needs all of him, and not just the untouchable mask he likes to put on. “I meant that we’re here- in this world, in this life, for a reason. Maybe, we don’t need to think so much about the other ones.”
“Why not?” Is the question pressed into his skin.
Toji hums, and to anyone else this thoughtfulness would be sudden. Would be unexpected and unexplainable from someone like him- with all of his damage and also the damage he likes to inflict. To Ryomen, it’s just another puzzle piece that makes up the complex tapestry of his best friend.
“I think we only live one life to spare us the grief.” Toji says. The rain almost drowns him out, but Ryomen is always listening to him, always watching him. It’s hard for him to miss anything about Toji, much less such a bold declaration. “Can you imagine feeling this-” A hand skims up the length of Ryomen’s torso, settles on his heart and presses down. A warm weight, full of emphasis. “This ache, more than once?”
“No.” Ryomen says, honestly. “No I can’t.”
“Then be happy that you have a single life, and stop wondering about the million other ones, dumbass.” Toji grunts. “We already have too much shit to deal with here. Like your crying fucking brother.”
And the divorce , goes unsaid.
Ryomen sighs, but starts pulling away. Toji’s right, they have to go. They can’t leave Yuuji alone for too long.
They extricate themselves from each other and push off of the sidewalk, into a standing position. When they get up, their wet clothes trace rivers and waterfalls down their bodies.
The 7-eleven sign blinks a goodbye, as they walk away and leave the gas station and the asphalt behind.
As they fall into step together- maybe they aren’t intertwined into each other anymore, but Toji stays close, as he always does. Their shoulders bump as they walk and their shadows merge into a single blue, and the rain still blankets them in a wave of surging water- tap-tap-tap . More rain, more God, and maybe Ryomen doesn’t want heaven anymore; isn’t quite ready for it yet.
They go back, and right before they’re stepping into Toji and his mom’s apartment building, Ryomen stops him with a quiet hand pressed to the jutting knob of Toji’s wrist.
Toji’s eyes flick up. Jade green, startling in its clarity. It’s like being submerged in a frigid ocean of leaves. “What is it?”
Ryomen swallows, letting the words crawl up into his throat until they feel a little less sticky, until they taste a little more like air and sound than bile. “Do you think- in those other lives. Do you think we’re still like this?”
“This again?” Toji sighs, irritation evident in the way he arches a single, sharp eyebrow.
A tug to his wrist. “Do you?”
And then- Toji cracks a rare smile. Something like lightning cutting his face through. Amusement making his lips tick up into a grin that’s quickly smothered into his usual mask of boredom. It’s these flashes of Toji, the visions of his vulnerability that flit by like startled fish in a koi pond, that keep Ryomen mesmerized with him.
“Nah.” He snorts, and swings the door open. Somewhere inside, there’s a kid crying: Yuuji, probably. “I’d hate you in every life except this one.”
Ryomen rolls his eyes, and pushes him in. Their wet shoes make a puddle of refracted light by the doorway, and he’s sure that Toji’s mom is going to kill them both come tomorrow, when they’re both a little less emotionally volatile and a little bit more like their usual idiotic teenage selves.
Outside- the rain still patters on. Tap-tap-tap. Trickling in rivers of street-lit water down the glass window panes fitted into the apartment hallway.
More rain.
More God.
Still can’t find heaven, but he really isn’t trying anymore.
And a year later, when they’re done with lawyers and courts and when their grandfather manages to get custody of him and Yuuji, given that none of their parents particularly wanted either of them to be born in the first place: Toji is the one that puts him back together again.
Apart in every lifetime, except this one.
✦
Interlude: 2003-2006
Ryomen never really figured out where the lines between schoolyard rival, annoyance, and friend began and ended
Evidently Toji didn’t either, because after that first fight of theirs, they just kept going. More fights, growing less and less violent in nature and more playful. More about getting their blood-pumping, getting that rush of heady adrenaline flowing into their veins than resolving any sort of real animosity between them.
So, that’s how it went. Meeting under the burning veil of sunset in the playground that they would eventually start to think of as theirs. More fights, more uppercuts, dull-bladed punches splitting their teeth open. More broken noses, and countless vitriolic insults. Thrown at each other with the fury of two raging storms, unhesitant to tear each other apart.
Maybe, that’s where the divisions started to blur. 2003 passed in a haze of heat and knee-scrapes, and then 2004 did too and then 2005, until Ryomen and Toji couldn’t tell each other apart in terms of the spaces between them on the pointless social hierarchy that teenagers love to perpetuate.
Until their fights became not-fights and more scuffles engaged in for pure enjoyment and nothing more. Then they became a language in itself.
A sharp elbow, jabbing into Toji’s gut. I’m angry.
An uppercut, delivered with deadly precision. I can’t do this.
A kick, caught by the tender-hard skin of a stomach. I’m tired.
Toji catching him, as he sags against the dirt, heaving bile and spit and blood. A calloused palm, pressed into the soft skin at the nape of Ryomen’s neck. I know . Fingers, tugging his hair up and out of his face as he vomits into the dirt. It’s alright .
That’s how it becomes, with them. From schoolyard rivals to annoyances, and then stumbling into a friendship that becomes, throughout their youth, something of an anchor to both of them. They’re both volatile, ragged at the edges and jagged at the heart and the soul- but, together, some of that damage starts looking a lot less like destruction and more of a choice.
Acknowledgement: I am not good, you are not either. There is comfort in that solidarity.
And at the end of all of that, this:
A sunset. Bright and golden and blazing, the burnished dusk light caressing their aching jaws, the blood on their knuckles. The wind in their hair, as they sit on the monkey bars side by side and watch the twilight surge around them. It’s like looking at a city on fire: the cherry-blossom pink clouds, the flushed, orange sky. The sun dying a fiery death at the infinitely violet horizon.
Ryomen’s memory of these moments are the clearest, out of everything in their friendship. Passing a busted Poland Spring bottle back and forth, drinking down the cloudy water trapped inside. Watching the way the plastic glows a soft, buttery yellow when he holds it up to the light.
Sometimes, they’ll beat each other up real bad. Sometimes, Toji will be hissing with pain and Ryomen will have to hand him a scrap of cloth to bite down on while he dabbles antiseptic into the scrapes on his elbows, his knees. The jagged cuts running up his hips from where he hit the edges of the swing seats or bruised his skin on the nails wedged into the rickety jungle gym in the playground. Other times, Toji will bandage up Ryomen’s fingers as he valiantly bites back agonized tears.
They’re just a couple of teenagers, after all. The world always feels a little too big for them. Like a loose-fitting shirt, sliding off the shoulders to pool at the waist. It’s a difficult balancing act, trying to keep it on even as your feet are swept out from underneath you.
And so, he doesn’t even notice the fall. Neither of them do. One moment, they’re flicking insulting notes at each other across Kenkaju’s fifth period Biology class, and then three years have passed and Ryomen’s half asleep out on Toji’s bed on a late-summer Sunday afternoon, and Toji’s slumped next to him, leaning against the headboard, watching the electric-blue sky and absentmindedly running his fingers through Ryomen’s hair. The clouds crawl overhead in rivers of milky white, and the dust motes look like little forest fires, suspended in the sun and there’s nowhere else he’d rather be. Nowhere else he can imagine being but wrapped in this warm cocoon of familiarity and daylight they’ve built for themselves in a world so hostile to people like them.
That’s the beauty of their friendship, he supposes. The inevitability of it all. It’s like a rocket ship, seeing the moon and realizing that that’s my destiny . A submarine, letting the water sluice over its metal surface, and embracing the sea. A bird, leaving the nest, and finding the sky. Nowhere else they’d all rather be, because that’s what they were crafted for: escape velocity, sinking, and flying respectively.
If Ryomen was built for a greater design, he imagines it’s this: carefully tugging cloth bandages over Toji’s bloodied palms. Arguing with him whenever he plans to do something stupid- which is always. If Ryomen has a purpose, but not independent of him. Never beyond him.
Whenever he tells Toji these things, he scoffs. Turns his head towards Ryomen where they’re lying down on the bed together. A sliver of moon skims its gentle fingers over his scarred face, and his eyes are as green as the tropical seas. The silver light cuts him in shapes of gentle darkness, and it looks like he’s half melting into them. Every part of him blue, except for his forever-luminous face.
Toji scowls, like he just tasted something particularly unpleasant. But even that is soft. Ryomen wants to touch his mouth to his edges, see if they are as sharp as they really seem from so far away.
“You’re just saying that because you’re sixteen and stupid, dumbfuck.” Toji grumbles, clicking his tongue and then there’s his hand, flashing with more spilled moonlight, as he reaches over to flick Ryomen in the nose.
Ryomen sighs, and kicks him lightly with his foot, rubbing his toe into the tender skin at the jut of his ankle, just to be annoying- which Toji hisses at, and also earns him a sharp poke to his stomach. “You’re so fucking boring, you know that?”
“I’m realistic.” He argues. His prodding fingers turn gentle, all of a sudden, and he presses his palm against Ryomen’s chest. Right over wear his heart is, where it should be if they haven’t ripped out too much of their humanity a little too early. “You’re gonna get out of this shithole of a town one day, and find other, better people and forget all about me.”
Screwing his face up with bafflement, Ryomen catches Toji’s hand against his own. Two pulsing warmths, not intertwining, but beating steadily against each other. “Why the hell would I do that?”
“You should.” Toji says. “That’s what you should be doing.”
Outside, the spring air buzzes with birds of the night and the gentle, unwavering humming of crickets. A primal sort of constant, one that never goes away come spring, or summer- just like Toji. He seeks comfort in both.
“Nah.” Ryomen says, voice lowered to a rasp against the cresting night. “Not unless you come with me.”
Toji scoffs, but doesn’t argue. He knows how bullheaded Ryomen can be about these things, and it’s impossible to try to sway him otherwise. “You’re really, really stupid, you know. You’re gonna end up stuck here forever if you wait for me.”
“Then I’ll stay here forever.” Is the reply- quietly confident in the way of gods and the youth thinking that they have forever, and some more.
“What if I don’t want you to?” He grunts. “You ever thought about that, smartass?”
Ryomen tugs up their hands, now interlocked. Grins into the combination of their skins. A physical whole from two halves, where their minds were already a single unit together. “You’ll get too bored without me.” He says. “I’m the only one who can put up with your bullshit all the time.”
“I’m fine being alone.”
Even the crickets are quieting now, as if sensing the need for silence. It’s so late that even the nocturnal creatures seem to be slinking back into the shadows for rest. It’ll be dawn soon. The sun will be reborn soon, a phoenix against the bleach-white sky.
“No, you’re not.” Ryomen says easily, and tugs Toji closer.
He comes willingly: forever drawn into each other’s orbits. Helpless to do anything but give in. The moonlight slips over him again, and paints his jagged silhouette in figures of tapered mercury. His skin glows in the pale moonlight, scarred and calloused from countless fights, and Ryomen knows every one of them intimately. He could map the shapes of Toji in pitch black darkness and with his hands tied behind his back.
“You’ve been hanging around me every fucking day for three years, asshat.” A snickering laugh, smothered into the sum of their skins and flesh and the places where their bodies meet. Toji frowns, but doesn’t protest because he knows that Ryomen is right. “You’re not used to being lonely at all.”
And so, that’s the story of them: the beginning that was a fistfight and a wildfire, the middle where the flame mellows into sunlight, and an ending that is yet to be.
And on the bed, their curved shapes are two commas again. Moon-lit and silver. Burning fierce with the promises they make to each other just by the virtue of trusting each other with their youths. The blue shadows lap at their feet, threaten to pull them under, but they’re both flying too high to notice.
✦
2007
III. A lesson in flying
Toji picks him up in his perpetually beat up truck. It’s falling apart in every single visible way: doors creaking ominously when they swing open, engine sputtering and exhaust pipe coughing up heaps of smoke whenever it pulls out of the driveway. The tires screech whenever Toji turns too fast, a little too hard and sometimes when Ryomen drives it, he thinks that the steering will just rattle right out of where it’s screwed into the front of the car and into his hand.
“You need to get rid of this thing.” Ryomen grunts, wrinkling his nose and waving his hand in front of his face to clear away the acrid smell of smoke and dust. “I’ll pay you to get a new car, I really will. This thing is gonna give me lung cancer.”
“Get the fuck in.” Toji says, ducking his head down to squint up at Ryomen through the rolled-down windows from the inside of the truck. “I don’t have all day.”
“We’re skipping school, dumbass.” He says, even as he pulls the door open and slips smoothly into the passenger seat. Without even looking up, he knows where the busted mouth of the seatbelt will be, and he pulls it down and lets it click into a place with a familiar movement. It’s practically muscle memory after a year of riding in this thing. “We do have all day, actually.”
Scowling, Toji levels a scathing look at him. His hands twitch on the steering wheel, as if he’s contemplating the merits of punching Ryomen, right there in the car. “I’ll drive you out to the highway and drop you off and leave you there, if you don’t shut the hell up.”
“Jesus, you’re touchy today.” Ryomen snorts as he twists his torso, tossing his backpack absentmindedly into the backseat. It lands on the edge of the cracked leather with a gentle thud , but slides down onto the floor of the car anyway. He sighs, but doesn’t bother unbuckling his seatbelt to pick it up. “The fuck happened to you?”
Toji grunts, and starts the car. “Just be quiet and let me drive.”
“Alright, man.” Ryomen shrugs, but eases off. It’s pointless to argue with him whenever he’s in one of these moods.
The drive passes in a haze of hazy tree-bark, the vivid blue sky, and autumn leaves blowing so fast that they become something of their own rocket ships, blurring into streaks of rusted orange as they streak past the windows. Making their own destinies, flying even as they were born for stasis.
Ryomen wishes he could say the same for himself, but he’s always been more of an anchor than the ship that holds it. He’s stationary, more often than not. More like tracks, rather than the train screeching over them- a thousand pounds of metal, also meant for stillness, flying despite it all. Because all good things find a way to fly, no matter how many times you clip their wings or whether they were born with them at all.
Take Toji, suspended in this moment. He’s going fifty, and neither of them bothered to read the speed limit but Ryomen knows it’s too fast, because that’s just how Toji is: gunning it like he’s got something to prove, sharp turns that send you sprawling. The windows are still rolled down and the wind catches his ink-dark hair and sends the strands flying into the electric sky, into his eyes and his mouth but he doesn’t seem to care. His eyes: green like nothing Ryomen’s seen before, flashing ruthlessly as he watches the road. The way his fingers rest on the wheel like its second nature, like he’s built for going fast and nothing much else.
Like this he looks- for lack of a better word- completely and fiercely alive . And if Ryomen had to point out how to live, how to be better, do better at the subtle art of living- he would point to Toji, immortalized in this moment. Going fast, fast because he can’t do much else. Going fast because he’s learning how to fly.
It doesn’t take more than ten minutes to get to the cliff, but in that time Toji’s posture completely unwinds. The dark cut of his mouth relaxes into something close to his usual apathy. Going fast, as a defense mechanism. Because he doesn’t know what else to do.
“Come on.” Toji says, as he unlocks the door and steps out. “I gotta tell you something.”
“Could’ve just told me in the car, instead of being pissy about it.” Ryomen mutters, but obliges, following him out the car and out into the cool autumn air, the now-retrieved backpack swinging easily from his left shoulder.
They settle down in their usual spot: underneath the big oak overlooking the cliff. Toji kicks the rocks near the roots away, and spreads the ratty blanket that’s always in the boot of his car out. The sheer fabric glows a soft, buttery yellow in the daylight as it flutters downs and onto the dirt.
Ryomen drops his backpack down, and it lands on the blanket with a harsh thud . Inside, there’s the sound of plastic containers knocking together. Toji gives him an exasperated look as Ryomen drops down beside where he’s already made himself comfortable.
“You’re gonna break the tupperwares, idiot.” He grunts, as he tucks his legs tighter under him. He’s sitting cross legged, and it looks uncomfortable as hell to be sitting like that on a bunch of sharp rocks and pointy roots, protected only by a glorified scrap of cloth with enough holes in it to be classified as a net. But, as Ryomen has come to learn, Toji has never grown out of the strict manners conditioned into him while he still lived with the Zen’ins- so this isn’t particularly uncommon for him.
Ryomen huffs with dry amusement, though it comes out sounding more fond than anything. “You sound like my grandpa.” He says as he stretches his legs out in front of him, resting them in Toji’s lap.
“Fuck off.” Toji grumbles, narrowing his eyes at him, but lets his hand drift down to hold Ryomen’s foot in a loose grip. His thumb digs into the sharp jut of his ankle, and he begins rubbing at the tender skin lightly, his other fingers squeezing gently at his heel. It’s a familiar motion, more muscle memory than anything conscious that he’s actively decided to do. “Do something useful for once in your life and take the food out.”
“Now you really do sound like him.” Ryomen snorts, grabbing for the bag and unzipping it, making quick work of taking each of the containers out. “ Ryomen- you useless lump of a boy .” He parrots, as he spreads the tupperwares out across the space between them, popping the lids off one by one. “ Look at Yuuji! He’s ten and he’s already more useful around the house than your sorry ass. ”
Despite himself, Toji’s mask fractures and he barks out a laugh, eyes glinting with mirth. Ryomen feels his chest swell, and he thinks he’d do anything to hear that sound again- over and over. “Does he really say all of that shit?” Toji smirks, catching the plastic-wrapped sandwich that Ryomen chucks at him with a quick flick of his wrist.
“Yep.” Ryomen groans. “Old bastard hates me, I swear. Can’t leave me alone for two goddamn seconds without hopping on my ass about something.”
There’s a stretching second, as Toji bites down into the flaky bread of the sandwich and chews on it contemplatively. Ryomen frowns down at his own, and watches the ketchup drip out of it and onto the now-unwrapped, wrinkled plastic.
The at least he’s better than your parents goes unsaid, but the heavy weight of it settles between them anyway.
“I mean.” An easy shrug, and the tension is dissipated. Toji’s voice is muffled as he swallows down the food. “He isn’t wrong.”
Ryomen scowls, and throws a stray piece of lettuce that was perilously hanging out of his sandwich at him. Toji bats it away with another half-laugh, grin as knife-like and sharp as ever. “I’m not useless, you bitch.”
“Eh.” Toji says, dry amusement threading his tone. “Debatable.”
“See if I ever cook shit for you again.” Ryomen says, and this time it’s a tomato that he flicks at Toji. It lands on his shirt with a disgustingly wet noise, and Toji watches with vague horror as the sticky redness smears down the dark fabric.
A snarled out “ I’m going to fucking kill you. ” Is all of the warning Ryomen gets, before he’s tackled down onto the ground with a sharp oof .
They grapple with each other in a familiar rhythm, a dance so practiced that it’s become second nature, more instinct than choice. Toji jams a hand into his ribs, he retaliates with a palm to his face, pushing him away. They kick at each other until their legs tangle, throw punches that go nowhere and hurt no one, but only serve to intertwine their bodies further. They go rolling across the dirt, and by the end of the scuffle, they’re both sweaty, exhausted, and have sticky tomato juice all over their shirts and their faces.
Toji has him pinned down, thighs bracketing his body, legs pressing down insistently on Ryomen’s torso, as if daring him to throw another punch. There’s a minute where they both look at each other apprehensively, gauging whether the fight is over or not.
Something gives, and the moment passes. The fight drains out of Toji’s body, and he collapses against Ryomen’s chest with a winded breath, fitting the sharp edges of his nose into the hinge of his neck. Breathing in deep.
Ryomen lets his hands come up, and loosely drapes them across Toji’s back. A gentle pressure, steadying in its warmth- a reminder that they’re both each other’s anchors. No matter how turbulent the seas, or how fierce the storm.
Toji’s body is a line of blazing heat against his, but it doesn’t burn. It never does, with Toji. Because no matter how brash he is, how jagged his edges are with others: they will never cut Ryomen. He’s too careful with him, almost obsessively so.
He watches the sky, and lets Toji catch his breath.
The autumn is cool, gentle in the way it wraps around their interlocked silhouettes. The late-afternoon sun is dipping just below the blue tree-line, and its light caresses their skin with delicate fingers made of spun gold. Their violet shadows fan out behind them like the most vapid of wings- susceptible to disappearance at any moment. Like they’re still doing their best to fly, even now when their flesh might just grow roots in the earth.
“Toji?” Ryomen murmurs into his shoulder. Toji’s shirt has slipped down, exposing the tender skin at his collarbones, and Ryomen nudges his forehead against it once, for emphasis.
“Yeah?” Is the reply. It’s quiet, mellow against the late fall day.
“You said you wanted to tell me something.”
Toji takes a moment, letting the words settle on his tongue. He’s so careful, whenever they’re together that it breaks Ryomen a little bit: like he’s just waiting for Ryomen to up and leave him. He tightens his hold on Toji’s body, fingers slipping down to squeeze gently at his waist.
“Don’t hate me.”
Ryomen grins. “Nah. I’ve dealt with your shit too long for that.”
“No, seriously.” Toji squirms, breaking Ryomen’s grasp on him, and props himself up on his elbows, eyes as hard as flint as he stares down at him. Their faces are mere inches apart, and Ryomen’s traitorous heart wants to close the distance. Until they’re sharing the same breath, until they’re the whole they were always meant to become. “Don’t hate me after this.”
Narrowing his eyes, Ryomen tears his gaze away from Toji’s lips, and meets his expectant stare. Something like fear lurks deep underneath, and it’s such an uncharacteristic and foreign emotion on Toji that Ryomen almost makes a joke- did you kill someone? Just to ease the tension. Just so they’ll get back the comfortable harmony they’ve crafted together over the years.
“I won’t.” He says, instead, voice pitched low with solemnity. An anchor; someone, something to hold on to- that’s what Toji needs right now. And Ryomen would give everything to him, for him. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to hate you, you’re my best friend.”
Toji’s eyes remain unreadable, but some of the tautness in his shoulders leaks out. Ryomen reaches up again, and catches his face between his hands, brushing his knuckles over the soft skin at his waterline. Toji shudders- it’s a split second thing, blink and you miss it, but Ryomen has never missed anything about Toji- and he leans into the touch.
“What is it?” Ryomen asks. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”
A hitching breath. “Fucking- hell .” Toji says, his words like smoke, tremulous and unsteady, like they just might slip between his fingers if he isn’t gentle enough. “Ryomen, stop looking at me like that. It’ll hurt like a bitch when you leave after this.”
Ryomen thins his lips. Slips his fingers under the hinge of Toji’s jaw and tilts his head down so that their eyes catch. “I’m not fucking leaving, asshat. No matter what you did. Tell me.”
Toji’s eyes flutter shut, and he grits his teeth, like he’s steeling himself for something.
The sun keeps setting, behind them, and burnished gold light dapples his skin, sheening the jagged lines of his face in a soft red glow.
“I’m-” Toji’s breath hitches, and he turns his face away. The sun’s in his hair now- painting it in haloes of honeyed yellow. A few dark strands brushes Ryomen’s mouth, and he blows them away with a soft huff.
“Calm down, idiot.” He murmurs. Brushes his thumbs over the blue hollows of Toji’s cheeks. “I already said I wasn’t going to leave.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Toji says, voice thick with an unknown, unreadable emotion. He’s coiled as tight as a snake in Ryomen’s grip, just shy of trembling. “Ryomen, you don’t fucking understand.”
“Then help me understand.” He says. More sunlight spills out across Toji’s silhouette as he shifts, and the warm amber light pools at the tender hollow of his throat.
Toji breathes, one, two-
“I’m gay.”
Ryomen’s heart stutters, in his chest. Traitorous, traitorous heart. Betraying him so easily, and he’s always subject to its whims.
It chokes Ryomen, the weight of this sudden confession. There’s another flood of sunlight as Toji pushes himself away even further, and Ryomen thinks his eyes burn with it. Like he’s a body, made of fire.
“Ryomen?”
He realizes he’s been silent a beat too long, and his eyes snap back to meet Toji’s expectant gaze.
“Toji.” He breathes more than he says. “Hey.”
Swallowing, Toji shifts, as if to extricate himself from the tangle of limbs they’ve made of themselves. There’s naked fear, in the way his throat bobs, in the way he seems to withdraw back into himself so far that it’s reminiscent of that boy Ryomen saw that first day, in the middle school hallway. A startled animal, prone to lashing out.
“Hey.” He says, once more- with feeling. Ryomen catches Toji by the shirt, before he can peel himself out of their embrace, and lets his fingers curl softly into the fabric. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“You’re disgusted.” Toji says, voice carefully blank. A mask, one that he hasn’t worn around Ryomen in so long- years, at this point- falling back neatly into place. It stings, like he’s taking back four years of friendship, and maybe parts of Ryomen’s heart along with it. “You’re fucking disgusted, you have to be.”
“Why would I be disgusted?” He asks, pulling Toji closer, until they’re back to where they were before: face inches apart. Breathing in each other’s air, warmth and sunlit dust motes pulsing between them.
“It’s not-” Toji scowls, takes a deep, shuddering breath. “It’s not normal. It’s not normal for-”
“Toji.” He murmurs. “Hey, Toji.” A hand, slipping up to the hinge of Toji’s jaw, brushing a stray lock of hair behind the shell of his ear. Ryomen lets it linger there, and he thumbs absentmindedly at Toji’s earlobe. “I don’t care about that.”
Something close to hope seeps back into the fissures, the fault lines in Toji’s composure, his heart. Kintsugi: the art of fixing cracked, shattered things by filling them with gold. That’s what this is.
“Don’t lie to me, asshole.” Toji says, even as his body rebels against him, wanting desperately to believe it. Ryomen can see it in the quiver of his lips, the way his eyes narrow with suppressed agony. “You better not be fucking lying to me.”
The sun slips further below the tree-line. It’ll be touching the horizon soon. Their violet shadows lengthen behind them, and it’s like their wings are growing. Like they could catch the wind and mix into the sky, even as Ryomen lays with the dirt beneath his back.
Together, they’re still learning how to leave the ground behind them, because all good things fly.
“I’m not lying, idiot.” Ryomen says. He lets his hand drift to the soft baby-hairs at the nape of Toji’s neck, slipping under the longer, darker strands that cover it. His fingers press a gentle, unwavering warmth into the tender skin there- an anchor. That’s what Toji needs right now, and Ryomen would give the world for him. “When the hell have I lied to you? I really don’t care.”
There’s a breath, a stretching second where Toji just looks at him. Searches his face for something, and he must find it, because before long he’s collapsing back against Ryomen’s chest, nose buried skin at the base of his throat.
A shudder wracks Toji’s frame, and there’s something wet and slightly warm dripping over Ryomen’s neck and blooming in darkened spots across the fabric of his shirt: tears.
Ryomen just holds him tighter, presses his fingers into Toji’s nape harder. Until he can feel him, feel that he isn’t leaving.
He watches the sky, and Toji muffles choked sobs into his shoulder. It’s almost dusk now. Sakura-blossom pink is blooming across the sky, while the clouds ebb from a milky white into shades of blazing orange and bloodred crimsons. Their shadows, and by extensions their wings keep growing as the sun keeps setting. Through the canopy of the oak tree above, light filters down in dusty bars, and paints the world in gold. This, too, is a form of kintsugi.
This, too, is a lesson in flying.
✦
IV. New Years Eve
They spend the entirety morning of New Year's Eve stocking up on food.
At the convenience store, Ryomen buys heaps of ice cream, while Toji looks on in vague horror at the sheer amount of plastic cups and popsicle sticks he shoves into his shopping basket. Toji drags him to the snack aisle, and picks up too many bags of potato chips- flavors ranging from barbeque to fucking vinegar, of all things- and three bottles of soda.
“That’s too much soda.” Ryomen argues pointlessly. “If we drink all of that, our bladders are going to explode and our livers shrivel up and give up on us.”
Toji just shrugs carelessly. “You’re paying for my hospital bill, then.” He says, as he keeps strolling, occasionally picking up a bag of pretzels or a bar of candy that looks interesting to him.
“Why the fuck do we need so much soda?” He says, again. The sheer amount of soda bothers him entirely too much.
“Why the fuck are you so hung up on the goddamn soda?” Toji fires back instantly, eyeing up one of those big cylindrical potato chip cans- Pringles, if the logo at the front is anything to go by.
“There’s so much, assface.” Ryomen grunts, and pokes gingerly at one of the bottles inside of their basket. The liquid inside is bright orange- Fanta- and cool water has condensed on the plastic surface. “This is way too much.”
“I know, you’ve said.” Toji says flatly, as gets up on his tiptoes to try and swipe a big Cadbury milk chocolate bar from the top shelf. He doesn’t quite succeed, and rocks back onto his heels with a frustrated huff. “You drink the gross-ass Fanta shit. I’m not drinking that, so that one’s for you.”
Ryomen stifles a groan, and comes up behind Toji, slotting himself comfortably against him. He reaches up, and being taller than Toji’s already impressive height, he manages to easily pull down the chocolate from the shelf. Toji’s body is a line of warm heat against him, and he lingers for a moment, before stepping back and tossing the Cadbury into the basket.
“Do you really to drink Coke and Sprite?” He says.
Toji scowls at him, but there’s an unspoken thank you in the way he bumps up against Ryomen’s side, and stays there. Walking in tandem with him as they make their way deeper into the store. “Yeah, I do.”
“You’re gonna get kidney stones.” Ryomen warns.
“Like I said, you’re paying for my hospital bill.” He grins, his smile crooked and pulled tight across his jagged teeth. “Might as well cash in on it.”
“No, the fuck I’m not.” He says, and gives him a light shove with his side. They’re stepping in perfect rhythm with each other, and even as Toji stumbles, sending a withering glare his way, he recovers easily and it’s like he never lost his balance.
The realization of how in sync they are with each other winds Ryomen slightly. This harmony, this equilibrium is something that has been building up for a long time. Slow and steady, from the first fight they had to the present, where they knock elbows and knees and jostle each other and exchange sharp jabs back and forth. It hasn’t come out of nowhere but it’s still disquieting to see how much of this now instinctual synchronization there is between them.
It means something, Ryomen is sure of it- but he isn’t sure what. He isn’t even sure what he wants it to mean, and that’s what stops him from pointing it out. If he doesn’t even know himself, who is he to question Toji about his desires, his motivations?
But that’s the crux of the issue: Ryomen doesn't simply want to know Toji’s desires or what he wishes this friendship was. Instead, Ryomen’s questions lie in a deeper, more convoluted vein of thought.
Do you see the same things in me- the things I see, when I look at you? He wants to ask. Do you see my eyes, and feel like you’re watching a galaxy?
And: When you look at me, do you see the future, the same way I see mine when I see you smile?
In the present, in the now rather than the increasingly intricate scenarios that Ryomen has built up in his head, Toji is swearing up a storm- something about the new Math teacher being an absolute ‘bitch of a woman’ who deserves nothing but to ‘rot in hell for the rest of her sorry life, ’ but Ryomen is barely listening, too busy watching the way, against the pale glow of the refrigerators, Toji looks like something right out of a hazy daydream that he’s had too many times.
“Hey.” Toji says, snapping his fingers in front of Ryomen’s face. Once, twice. “Hey, dumbfuck. You listening?”
Ryomen blinks dumbly, and gradually, Toji’s scowling face comes back into focus. “What?” He asks, tilting his head. The basket jostles with the motion, and in his hand it feels significantly heavier than before. He must’ve zoned out for longer than he thought.
“You-” Toji breaks off with a frustrated huff. “You’re a fucking freak, you know that?” He starts walking again, significantly faster, hands jammed into his pockets and looking a little sullen.
“What did I do this time?” Ryomen says dryly, and catches up to his brisk pace easily. Even after all this time, Toji is trying to outrun difficult conversations, difficult feelings.
“You were staring at me.”
“I mean.” He shrugs. “You looked kinda ugly. I was trying to figure out why.”
“Bastard.” Toji growls, and kicks him in the shin. It’s a little impressive how he manages to do it without losing his balance or falling out of step with Ryomen, but he’s too busy hissing in pain to make note of it. “Creepy as hell bitch.”
“Hey.” Ryomen wheezes through the agony lancing up his lower leg. He considers pushing Toji into one of the refrigerators, but relents when he realizes that there are actual glass root beer bottles in the shopping basket, at risk of shattering. “I’m not the fucker who stares at Shiu’s ass in the locker room before gym.”
Toji’s face burns dangerously red, and Ryomen just barely manages to dodge another kick. “Fuck you.” He spits out. “Stop saying that shit so loud.”
“Oh- shit.” He clamps his jaw shut. “Forgot- sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Toji grunts, and sends him an unreadable sort of look that makes heat coil low in Ryomen’s gut. “Just don’t- scream about it like that. In the middle of a goddamn grocery store.”
“Right, yeah.” Ryomen swallows. Keeps walking, and only relaxes when Toji bumps their shoulders, and presses their sides back together in reassurance. “I didn’t think.”
“I said it was fine, didn’t I?” He says, thick exasperation lining his voice. “Thanks for not being weird about it.” He adds, too quiet, too layered with meanings upon hidden meanings for it to be anything close to an afterthought.
“I told you.” Ryomen murmurs. “I’m not leaving you. Especially over something as stupid as liking boys.”
When Toji looks back up at him, his lips quirked up at the edges, Ryomen thinks that maybe, just maybe, he’s starting to believe him.
It’s late afternoon by the time they get back to Ryomen’s house- courtesy of the massive lines at the checkout counter at the store from all of the people doing their shopping last minute.
They unpack quietly, moving with, against each other like parallel tides of the ocean. One lapping at the shore, while the other recedes deeper into the water, and vice versa. It’s a dance that’s familiar to them, a routine assembled, as everything is with them, with dozens upon dozens of repetitions. An instinct that has been built on the foundations of compromise, rather than something intrinsic.
Toji messily shoves the soda bottles into the fridge to cool them, and Ryomen sifts through the countless bags of snacks and organizes them meticulously into the pantry.
“Do you really have to colour-code the fucking pretzels?” Toji says, coming up behind him, evidently having finished his task.
Ryomen rolls his eyes, but keeps going, half of his torso practically buried in the shelf as he organizes the bags by- yes- colour. “Yeah. I do.”
“Why the hell would you do that?” Toji snorts. It’s sarcastic on the surface, but there’s a subtle undercurrent of genuine curiosity threading it- something that only Ryomen would pick up on.
“Yuuji likes ‘em this way.” Is the explanation he offers, as he pushes the last of the snacks into place, and pushes himself up off the floor and into a standing position, rocking back on his heels and dusting off his shorts as he does. “The old bastard does too.” He lightly kicks the pantry doors shut with the toe of his socks.
Toji trails him as he walks out of the kitchen. “That’s so goddamn weird.” He says, but lets the subject drop. They settle on the ratty couch in the living room- Toji on one end of the sofa with his legs tucked up against his torso, chin resting on his knees. Ryomen on the opposite end with his feet stretched out in front of him, jammed against Toji’s shins.
“Where the hell is your grandpa and Yuuji, anyway?” Toji says, arching an eyebrow. “We usually spend New Years at my house.”
Ryomen wrinkles his nose. “They went to visit Ma and her new boyfriend- dunno what state she’s in right now. It’s real far though, somewhere up north. Maine, I think?”
Toji whistles, and nudges Ryomen’s foot lightly with his own. “Shit, she got a new one already? What happened to Matthew the Motherfucker?”
Groaning, he tips his head back against the arm of the couch. “Don’t even fucking talk about him.” He grumbles. “I swear, I still remember the sound of them having sex, even now.” He shudders, and does his best to once again repress the memory of that single night spent in his mother’s apartment, Yuuji crammed into the bed beside him, while they desperately tried to drown out the- sounds .
“Still?” Toji barks out a laugh. “It was like- a year ago, dumbass.”
“So?” Ryomen says. “That shit’s scarring, you know?”
Grinning, Toji does the thing where he tries to smother it into the fabric of his pants when the smile grows a little too wide, a little too sincere for his tastes. “I still don’t fucking understand why they decided to have sex on the one night that you guys were there.”
“You think I know?” He snipes back, and burrows further into the threadbare cushions of the couch. When Toji opens his mouth to fire back a response, Ryomen deliberately digs a toe into the tender skin at the jut of his ankle. “Can we please stop talking about this? I might throw up if we keep going.”
Toji hisses with pain, and glares, but obliges and changes topics smoothly- going on about the weird new kid in his martial arts class, or something equally mundane.
The afternoon slips into dusk in this way: trading sharp jabs back and forth, banter flowing easily between them. They peter off into silence sometimes, but pick the threads of their aimless conversation back up easily, without much thought put into it. Tracing valleys and meandering rivers with their words, drawing constellations and spiral galaxies with their voices and their dreams and not much else. And it’s this unremarkability, this familiarity that makes everything with Toji seem a little like magic. It cements in his mind that yes, yes - this is forever. Forever is mundane, forever is ordinary. And because of all of this, forever means Toji.
Right before the dusk fades into the cresting darkness, there’s a single, breathtaking moment where everything is suspended in amber light. The sun falls in streaks, in dust-mote thick bars through the cloudy glass of the balcony doors, and everything is thrown into sharp, yellow-glinting relief.
Toji, in this moment, is something golden. The edges of his jagged silhouette, the sharp shapes of him, they’re all lit in sheets of honeyed light that, if Ryomen thinks hard enough, can be gold. But only if they fly high enough, if they leave the ground fast enough.
All good things fly, after all- and maybe by extension all things layered in gold do too. Maybe Toji is a product of that type of kintsugi: the gold-fed restoration that youth, that the simple act of being and feeling young, brings.
Maybe, that’s what they do to each other, when the world draws fissures and fault lines into their paper skin. They put each other back together with rivers of gold, and call it a form of kintsugi. A form of taking flight. Maybe that’s all they can do, being so young and ignorant of everything beyond the present, beyond the twilight that they’re in right then.
“What are you staring at, idiot?” Toji grunts, his head pillowed on his arms, which are propped on his raised knees. Despite his ire, he’s staring right back. The blue shadows pool sticky at the hollows of his cheeks, at the seam of his lips. “You look like a fucking creep. You’re always staring.”
Ryomen opens his mouth to respond, maybe fire back an insult or two- I’m not staring, you’re seeing things-
“I kind of want to kiss you, right now.” Is what comes out, instead.
Immediately Ryomen feels his chest constrict with dull panic. His heart, always so disobedient to his need for control, kicks into overdrive. Starts beating double, triple time. He feels like there’s thunder caught in the hollow of throat, splitting him apart.
Toji, sitting across from him, looks equally shocked. His eyes widen almost comically, cheeks taking on a ruddy colour, ears pinkening where they peek out from under the inky mass of his hair.
“The fuck?” Is his strangled response. “Ryomen, what the fuck?”
Swallowing, Ryomen barrels on. Because now that’s this- the truth , a traitorous part of his mind whispers- is out, there’s nothing he can do but keep going. There’s no taking this back, no going back from this. Because, despite the abruptness of his declaration, he feels the irrefutability of the statement coil low in his gut.
He can’t lie to Toji, never has been able to, and he certainly won’t be able to now. Because, as he realizes now, he does want to kiss him- to hold him and slot their bodies together until they’re a single, interlocked silhouette. Until their flesh is no longer something that belongs to each of them individually; their selves bleeding together until it is indistinguishable where Toji ends and where Ryomen begins.
A single whole, both body and mind. And maybe it’s naive to think Toji would want the same thing, but Ryomen is nothing if not hopeful, almost to the point of it circling back around and becoming a disadvantage, a cage of his own making.
“I do.” He says. “I really do.”
“You-” Toji blinks, and against the twilight it’s like he’s burning. His face twisting into a fierce scowl. “You can’t just say that shit. You don’t- you don’t fucking know the implications of that.”
“Toji, listen to me-”
And then, there’s Toji’s anger. Blazing, violent. Bloodred as the light from the sun that blades him in ruthless, jagged shapes. “No- Ryomen, you listen to me.” He spits out, as he pushes himself up and off of the couch- away and effectively out of reach of Ryomen. Even this distance is a defense mechanism, Ryomen knows. What is far is unfamiliar, and what is unfamiliar hurts less than the things you know intimately.
Toji paces restlessly across the carpeted floor for one, two tight, controlled breaths, before he’s whipping around and directing his fury back at Ryomen. “You can’t- just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I wanna get with every fucking boy I meet okay? Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean- doesn’t mean I can’t have friends who are guys without wanting to goddamn bone them, or something. Just because I’m the only gay guy you know, doesn’t mean you get to practice on me, alright?” Toji’s voice is hoarse, as he spits vitriol into the dusk-lit air between them. “Practice for kissing girls- that’s not what I’m fucking here for, okay? I’m your- you’re my best friend. I don’t want-” He rocks to a sudden stop, and there’s a crack in his mask of carefully, meticulously targeted anger. His voice breaks, as he says the next few words. “I can’t be your fucking- experiment. I can’t be that person for you.”
When he looks back at Ryomen, there's something heart-wrenchingly tender about him. His gaze is like a peeled peach, bruised and delicate. So, so easy to crush with a single push. A house of cards, ready to topple even as it fights to be something less than fragile, struggles to define itself to be more than its breakability. “You can’t ask that of me.” He whispers, more than he says, and it’s a coda. A finale, to the cresting, crescendoing song of his heartbreak.
Ryomen swallows, and steps softly off the couch too. “Toji, that’s not what I fucking meant, and you know it.” He says, as he pads across the carpet, easily breaching the distance between them that previously stretched like infinity. That Toji presented like it was impenetrable.
Like this, Ryomen effectively breaks down his barriers in the simplest and least complicated way possible. It’s less painful too, for the both of them. The aftermath hurts less, this way.
“Then what the hell did you mean?” Toji breathes, more than he says. Fissures lining the false hardness of his voice. Ryomen wants to take the shards of him and press it back together: kintsugi, with the gold of their youth.
“I want to kiss you because-” Ryomen trails off as he reaches where Toji is still standing, his shoulders tensed, coiled tight like a prey animal ready to bolt. One of those gazelles, in the nature documentaries Yuuji likes to watch so much. A sudden movement, and it’ll startle and skitter away- so far away that you can no longer catch it between your palms. So, Ryomen reaches up as gently as he can, and rests his fingers against the soft nape of Toji’s neck- catching him before he runs. “I want to kiss you because you’re you, Toji.”
Toji clenches his jaw. “What the fuck are you trying to say?” The dusk light paints the sharp edges of his figure in lines of burnished red, and his face is awash in a soft, buttery glow that Ryomen wants to press his palms against like it’s a bonfire, to soak up Toji’s warmth. “Stop speaking in riddles, dumbass.”
“I’m saying.” Ryomen murmurs, and pulls Toji closer. Until their foreheads touch, and until their breaths mix together, the light and dust distance between them shrinking until it’s almost nothing. From this close, Toji’s eyes are jade fires, burning ruthlessly even when the violet shadows envelop the rest of his body. “I’m saying that I want to kiss you, and no one else, idiot.”
“Yeah, cus’ I’m the only gay guy you know.” Toji says, but even he sounds like he doesn’t believe it much anymore. There’s no real heat to his voice, all of it has been lost to the dusk.
“Nah.” Ryomen says. “You’re not.”
Narrowing his eyes, Toji bumps their joined foreheads together for emphasis. “Who the hell else do you know?”
Ryomen grins, and huffs out a soft laugh. They’re so close that his warm breath fans out over Toji’s mouth, and he parts his lips like he wants to swallow the sound. “Me.”
“The fuck?” Toji breathes, vivid disbelief colouring his voice. “You can’t- Ryomen stop shitting me.”
“I’m not, dumbass.” Ryomen says, and lets his other hand come up to curl into the front of Toji’s shirt. His thumbs absently at the rough fabric- Toji must have washed it recently, it smells like his usual vanilla-scented detergent. “I’m not shitting you. You already know I don’t lie to you.”
“You can’t be gay.” He says, still sounding dumbfounded.
“‘Course I can.” Ryomen says, narrowing his eyes. “Are you gatekeeping a sexuality?”
“No that’s not-” Toji scowls, and his nose does that thing where it wrinkles slightly, almost cutely . Ryomen kind of wants to bite it, but he resists the urge in light of the rather serious conversation they’re having. “You’ve never- I don’t know- talked about boys you like. Or even shown interest in one.”
“And you have?” He shoots back. Toji sighs with irritation, but doesn’t argue, seeing as it's the truth. “We’ve never had a single conversation about crushes, or even who we think is hot.”
“Still.” Toji frowns, in all of his stubborn glory. Always resisting the tide, a fish swimming against the current even as a deluge, a flood threatens to overwhelm him. A single stone on the shoreline that refuses to wash away with the waves. “You’ve never fucking said anything.”
Ryomen’s heart stutters. Always betraying him, always so disobedient to what he wants, as opposed to what he needs.
“Because there’s no one else. There’s been no one else.” He says, and it’s confession- I am yours, always have been. Might always be . And it’s permission- take me apart , in the way you have put me back together so many times before. “Who else would I talk about?”
“What the hell?” Toji’s eyes widen, his breath hitching. If Ryomen lets his hand press into Toji’s chest, he knows he’ll find that Toji’s heart is beating just as fast as his own. There’s comfort in that, to know that solidarity is just a brush of his fingers away. “You mean-”
“Yes, dumbass.” Ryomen says, fond amusement threading the low rasp of his voice. “It’s only ever been you.”
Toji blinks, and swallows. In Ryomen’s grip, he’s still as tense as a coiled viper, but his hands tremble when they come up to brush at the tender skin at the hinge of Ryomen’s jaw. “Why the fuck didn’t you say anything?”
“What would I even say, Toji?” Ryomen murmurs. They’re pressing even closer together, if that’s possible. Their noses slot together comfortably, and their chests press together and the baby-fuzz that Toji’s forgotten to shave is rough against Ryomen’s skin when their chins brush. At their feet, their shadows are stretching, violet and bright. Growing wings, even now. Tangled together, they’re still trying to take flight. “What the hell do I say?”
“Anything.” Toji says, voice thick like molasses. Just as sweet too. “Goddamn- anything . Anything at all.”
Ryomen laughs. Toji really does swallow the sound this time, and breathes in the warm air that fans out across his lips. “I’m saying something right now, dumbfuck.”
“Before.” He says. “Why not before?”
“You ask too many questions.” Ryomen says. “Do you want to kiss me, or not?”
“I need to know.” Toji says, more forcefully this time. His hands settle at the back of Ryomen’s neck, fingers threading firmly into his hair, and he gives his head a gentle tug, as if to emphasize his point. “I need to know that you’re not- that this isn’t some fucking- experiment, or a sexuality crisis you’re taking out on me.” His voice breaks again, at the last word. And it’s like Ryomen’s back in that fall day when Toji first told him about being gay- like he’s expecting to be left behind, thrown aside for something so simple.
“Idiot- you’re not worth so little, you know.” Ryomen breathes. Tilts their heads until their mouths brush. Toji shudders, but doesn’t pull away, leaning into the touch as his eyes flutter shut. “Why do you think so lowly of yourself?”
“Answer the fucking question. Please.” Toji breathes.
It’s little more than a plea, and the simple fact that he even has to ask something like it breaks Ryomen apart, a little bit.
Because someone like him, someone closer to flying than the rest of them, someone who goes fast and turns too hard and someone who looks at home with the wind in his hair, like he’s built for the sky more than for being human, shouldn’t be so hesitant to seize what he wants. He should barrel into this like he brute-forces through everything else- fast, too fast. Going light speed even as his feet don’t leave the ground. Flying even as he’s growing roots into the earth. Yet, the reality that Ryomen is faced with is different.
Toji’s approach to this- to the simple, innocent act of liking someone enough to want something more with them- is made of indecisiveness, the kind that builds and builds when you have lived a lifetime of losing. Of things being taken from you, and being told that the act of taking is a kindness because you simply do not deserve to have good things in the first place.
All good things fly, all good things shatter only to be put back together with gold. And from the day Ryomen has met him- Toji has been golden and closer to touching the sky than anyone else he’s known.
“I didn’t tell you before because it didn’t really hit me, before today.” Ryomen murmurs, sucking in a soft breath to steel himself. It tastes like vanilla, like the quiet yet physically palpable sort of joy that comes with having Toji against him: body-warm and blood-close and ruthlessly alive against the crimson dusk. “I just thought- I just thought I would be okay with just having the parts of you I have right now. Just the best friend parts, not the rest.”
“Then what changed?” Toji says. Questions, so many of them. All rooted in that hesitance to let himself feel, and to be known in return. The cracks in his facade are gaping fissures, and it’s up to Ryomen to fill them with rivers of gold. Kintsugi, even in this. “And don’t say nothing, because I won’t fucking believe you.” Something has to give , is what he means. Everything is born out of something else.
Ryomen lets the vanilla fill his tongue, as he parts his lips wetly. The sunlight is dimmer now, less of a blaze and resembling something closer to a flickering, old streetlamp, or a lone firefly in a distant summer night. It eclipses their silhouettes just the same, and turns their bodies into twin flames.
“It’s nothing that poetic, dumbfuck.” He huffs. “You just- looked pretty like that. In the daylight.”
The disbelief showing on Toji’s face is mirrored in his voice as he replies. “You said you wanted to kiss me because I looked goddamn pretty ?”
“I didn’t think.” Ryomen protests. “I wasn’t really thinking at all.”
“So you don’t mean it.” Is his flat reply. He makes to pull away, hands unthreading from the hair at the nape of Ryomen’s neck- but Ryomen catches him before he can widen the distance between them. He knows if he lets go now, it’ll be much, much harder to bridge the gap later on.
“That doesn’t fucking mean I don’t mean it.” Ryomen says, exasperation lacing his tone as he brings their foreheads back together. Vanilla, and sunlight. Their lengthening violet shadows behind them perpetually taking flight. “I do mean it, Toji. There has been no one else- and I don’t think there will be. Not unless you leave first.”
Toji breathes, and it’s like he’s fraying at the seams, even as Ryomen stitches him back together. Maybe there’s another kind of healing, in that: in coming apart as you’re being carefully mended. Maybe it’s catharsis, or something close to it to let yourself be something less than fully human, even if it is just for a moment.
“You can’t just say shit like that, Ryomen.” He bites out, even as he drifts closer to him. Closer, closer. Like they’re trying to melt into a single being- like they can make up for being subhuman by becoming a whole, a complete person together.
“What? You scared you’ll finally start believing me?” Ryomen says, and despite the sharpness of his words, there’s no real heat to it. All of it is lost in the space between them: the pocket of dimming dusk light and warmth they’ve built for themselves here. Of skin and bones and flesh that seek to intertwine, despite the cosmic impossibility of it all. “Or do you have commitment issues like your dad?”
And it’s this stupid, innocuous little joke that finally pierces through the infinite distance between them.
Toji unwinds, and blooms under Ryomen’s touch. Helpless laughter spills out his mouth, and his shoulders shake with increasingly loud snickers. He just about collapses against Ryomen, burying his head into the crook of his neck, laughing like his goddamn life depends on it. Soft, desperate little wheezes escape him as he tries to rein back his amusement, only to fall to pieces again the moment Ryomen as much as breathes into his ear.
“That was such a stupid fucking joke.” Ryomen says, voice dry. “You have the worst sense of humor, I swear to God, Toji.”
“No-” Toji finally manages to piece his composure back together, and pulls back to look at Ryomen with flushed cheeks, wind-mussed hair and mirth glinting in his eyes. “It really wasn’t funny at all. It was a goddamn awful joke.”
Looking at Toji feels- a little bit- like looking at a fond memory. A single suspended moment in time that you just can’t help coming back to, because of how you felt when you were in it. How you still feel, when you think about it. It feels like greeting an old friend, a lover. It feels as familiar as the grooves in the floor of your childhood home, and it tastes as sweet as sticky orange popsicles in the summertime.
Ryomen feels winded, with the weight of it all. How he never quite noticed this feeling, he doesn’t know. Maybe he just became too familiar with it. Maybe, somewhere along the way, feeling- this - way about Toji became second nature, a simple fact of life: the sun rises at dawn, the tides go back to the sea, and Ryomen feels some way about his best friend.
“Then why’d you laugh?” Ryomen says, even though he’s still in that sun-lit haze. “If it was a stupid joke.”
“Because you made it.” Toji says, and for the first time, he doesn’t look like he’s being crushed by the weight of his emotions. For the first time in this entire conversation, he looks the way he does when he’s going fast and touching the sky. Trying to find his wings. “It was stupid, but you made it so-” He shrugs, and pokes a finger into Ryomen’s chest. “Of course I gotta fucking laugh. Or else you’ll get all pissy on me and stop letting me copy your homework because I hurt your goddamn-” Another jab, right to the heart this time. “Big man-baby feelings.”
“I’m not a man baby.” Ryomen scowls, and it’s this, this simple act of trading familiar insults back and forth that eases the tension between them. It feels like coming up for air, like drinking cool river water while after a long hike. “And that was one time-”
“It still happened.” Toji grins, and it’s quicksilver, knife-like. Ryomen thinks he could trace the crooked edges of that smile in his sleep, in the dark and with his hands tied. “So I’m gonna make fun of you for it.”
“I fucking hate you.” He says, flatly.
“Nah, you don’t. Not if you wanna kiss me, you know.” Toji laughs, more than he says. As he moves, the sun catches in his inky hair, and haloes it in a flood of amber heat.
Awash in the light, Toji reminds Ryomen a little bit of a well-loved T-shirt- bleached pale and the colours peeling off of it.
The hold he has on Toji, his hands having moved down to cradle his waist in a pressing grip, feels just as familiar too. Vanilla, and sunlight- like he was meant to have this, like he’s had this a hundred, a thousand times before.
“Does that mean you believe me?” Ryomen says, arching an eyebrow. “That I really do wanna kiss you because you’re it for me, and that I’m not just trying to satiate my repressed homosexual desires, or whatever absurd fantasy you came up with?”
Toji bites back another face-splitting grin, and instead lets his amusement leak into the dryness of his voice as he speaks. “I wasn’t joking, asshole. It was a real concern.” He grunts, and swats at Ryomen’s chest. Ryomen’s more prepared this time, and catches his hand between his own fingers, letting them intertwine them in the tiny distance between their bodies. “But, yeah.” His voice dips down low, into something a little quieter, a little more gentle- yet thicker with unknown emotion despite it. “I believe you. Is that what you fucking wanted to hear?”
“Yeah.” Ryomen says, and grins, feeling endlessly pleased. “Yeah it is.”
“God- stop looking so goddamn smug about it-” Toji tries to poke at his stomach this time, and growls with frustration once he realizes that their hands are tangled. He settles for bumping his forehead against Ryomen’s, not forceful enough to sting, but enough to emphasize his point. “Your face looks so fucking punchable sometimes.”
“Does that mean you wanna kiss me too?” Ryomen says, using Toji’s forward momentum to press their bodies together even more securely, until he can’t tell where he begins and Toji ends. Until their bodies might really be growing roots into each others’ flesh. “Tell me you wanna kiss me too?”
“What if I don’t?”
“You do. Stop lying.”
A grunt. “Fuck off.”
Ryomen bites back a laugh. “Do you wanna kiss me because you want to satiate your repressed homosexual desires too or-”
“I hate you, absolute goddamn asshole -”
“Or is it because I’m it for you too?” He finishes, voice quiet, and a little more earnest as he trails off.
Toji blinks, and his eyes widen, like he’s been caught off guard, like he didn’t expect to be asked this question so directly. He’s always so afraid to let himself feel, to let himself be known beyond the untouchable facade he likes to project, always communicating in riddles and gestures more than words.
It would be lonely, if he were anyone else. But Ryomen has made sure that it will never be like that for Toji- always willing to meet him halfway.
There’s a stretching breath, the air between them delicate and heavy with the weight of things unsaid. Toji’s throat bobs as he swallows- and there’s a small sun, at the hollow of his neck, made of the honeyed light that pools between his collarbones. He looks like he’s steeling himself- the way he does before a martial arts match, gaze sharpening with the same single-minded determination that always seizes him like a seething storm before his competitions.
He flicks his eyes up- emerald green, glinting something fierce in the late-twilight- and releases a quietly resolute breath. Vanilla and sunlight- that’s what Ryomen tastes.
“You-” Toji clenches his jaw, inhales one, two . “You’re a lot. You’re a lot for me, to deal with-” He breaks off, sending Ryomen a sharp glare when he tries to pull away, already pushing back a wave of heartbreak. “ No , I’m not fucking done. I listened to you, now listen to me.”
Ryomen frowns, but stays as he is, their bodies and limbs still tangling, breaths mixing.
“It’s not a bad thing.” Toji grunts. “You being a lot isn’t a bad thing because- God, I’m so bad at this- it makes me feel like I can take some of the things you feel and make them my own. I always feel so fucking empty, and when you feel so much- it’s like I can borrow your emotions. I don’t- I don’t feel like a goddamn leech, when I’m with you. Things are- okay , they’re good, when you’re around.”
As Toji speaks the dusk slips into the violet of early evening. Outside, the crickets, as unwavering in their song as ever, have begun humming. Behind them, their winged shadows have been eclipsed by the cresting darkness.
And despite that, Ryomen never felt so close to flying.
“Does that mean-”
Toji shuts him up with a thumb pressed gently to his lips. “I told you to listen, didn't I? Noisy bastard.”
Ryomen swallows around the black-hole steadily growing in his throat.
“That’s all to say-” Toji continues, in that same tone from before. Mellowed with the evening light, a little raspy, a little hoarse. Like he’s peeling himself apart just to hand Ryomen the pieces, when intimacy or any form of reciprocated affection has always been difficult for him in the past. “That’s all to say I feel safe around you. I don’t feel like I’m too little of something or too much of something, when you’re there.”
“Is that a good thing?” Ryomen murmurs, despite the finger digging an insistent weight onto the seam of his mouth. “I can’t fucking tell.”
“Yes, it is you idiot.” Toji huffs. “It’s a good thing, because you’re it for me too. I don’t think- I don’t think there will be anyone else.” Ryomen’s own words, being parroted back to him- because Toji said that he felt safe enough to borrow feelings, emotions from Ryomen, whenever he’s lacking in them.
This too, is a form of restoration. To give each other pieces of themselves, so that they can build a complete person from the wreckage of their fragile bodies. A form of kintsugi, with flesh and fickle emotion. Of course, there’s gold here too: because everything good flies and everything good is gold. And what Toji and Ryomen have- it’s undeniably, irrefutably good , before it is anything else.
Toji frowns, and something unreadable flashes over his face, quick and intense as lightning during a summer storm. “Unless you leave, of course.”
“How many times have I told you-”
“You’re not leaving, I fucking know that, dumbass.” He grunts.
Ryomen frowns too, and reaches up to flick him in the side of his face. “Then stop saying it. Stop saying stupid shit like that.”
“Fine.” Toji grunts, and tries to look away, despite how close their faces are. “Asshole.”
Biting back a grin, Ryomen catches Toji’s face between his hands before he can turn away. “Not an asshole if you wanna kiss me, though.”
Toji keeps frowning. Ryomen gives in to the urge, and squishes his face with his palms- he looks fucking adorable . Toji scowls and tries to push him away, but ultimately gives up as Ryomen keeps holding on to him, huffing out quiet little laughs that makes the usual apathy in Toji’s eyes soften into something a little tender. Like rain on dry, cracked soil; the fresh scent of petrichor rising like phantom hands.
“I hate you so much.” Toji grouses, as he finally manages to pry Ryomen off of him. “Goddamn clingy bastard-”
“Can I?” Ryomen says, breath caught in his throat, voice dipping into something quietly determined, all of a sudden. “Kiss you, that is. You never said if I could or not.”
Swallowing, Toji clenches his jaw- but drifts closer, until their mouths almost brush. Until all Ryomen can taste is vanilla, and the faint bitterness he recognizes as the Coke Toji chugged while driving back from the convenience store.
“Ask me at midnight.” He murmurs. “I’ll have an answer for you then.”
And then he’s slipping away- smoke between Ryomen’s fingers, river water slipping through the cracks in his fingers. Elusive, hard to catch. A bird uncaged, and he’s flying away- too fast, like always. Touching the sky even with his feet planted firmly on the ground- because all good things fly. All good things are golden and all good things fly, and Toji is both.
“Asshole.” Ryomen says, even as he feels a breathless grin split his face. “You’re such a bitch.”
Toji hums and slants a look back at him over his shoulder. The pale evening glow lines him in sheets of vivid blue. His shadow stretches behind him, and grows wings like it always does.
“Still wanna kiss me, though. Wonder what that says about you as a person.”
“Fuck off .”
✦
Interlude: New Years, 2008
They’re on the balcony, when midnight strikes. Toji is leaning against the railing, a bottle of half-finished Coke cradled in his palm. Ryomen is next to him, standing close enough that their shoulders press together and warmth passes as easily as breath between them.
Toji’s watching the sky, as the fireworks go off. Shades of explosive reds and yellows, and blazing blues and golds. They all fill the night with their thunderous roars, and bloom like fiery flowers across the cresting darkness.
Ryomen is watching Toji. The way the light refracts off the windows of the apartments in front of them, and hits his face at just the right angles- until it looks like he’s a boy made of fire. Of jagged edges and gold light. Kintsugi, even here. Even in this.
“Hey.” He murmurs, and bumps his shoulder against Toji’s.
Toji hums in acknowledgement, but doesn’t look over. His green eyes are wide, and their glassy depths look like supernovas because of how the fireworks reflect off of them. He paints a pretty picture, looking like this. Something right out of nostalgia-hazed memory someone looks back on, rather than something flesh and blood and present. Something right out of a triumphant ending sequence in an obscure coming-of-age movie, where the main character figures out they’ve made it, after the worst of the worst has passed.
And maybe, Ryomen has. Maybe he did make it, if the warmth gilding his chest is anything to go by. If the way his heart swells with contentment, until he’s full to bursting with it, is anything to consider.
“Can I kiss you?” He breathes, more than he says.
Tilting his head towards him, Toji narrows his eyes, but Ryomen can tell that he’s biting back a sharp smile. Quicksilver, something more like a knife than an expression of earnest joy. The sight of it sends mini-fireworks bursting in Ryomen’s chest anyway, because it’s always been Toji, and it always will be him. He knows that with a certainty that can rival destiny, can butt-heads with fate.
I am yours, and always will be .
“Fine.” Toji murmurs. “Only if you’re good at it, though.”
It doesn’t take much more than that. One moment they’re standing side-by-side, shoulder to shoulder, and the next he has Toji pressed against the railing, his body a searing line of heat against Ryomen’s. Their blue silhouettes tangling, and their shifting shadows on the concrete of the balcony growing wings. Always trying to take flight.
Once again, as their noses slot together and their breaths mix, Ryomen is reminded of the two eagles. Talons locked together, spiraling downwards into endless unknowns. Falling and flying at the whims of gravity, but never without each other.
That’s how it is, with him and Toji.
When their lips meet, it doesn’t feel like something grand. It doesn’t feel like the end of a chapter of his life or the beginning of a new one. It doesn’t feel like a skyfall, or a hurricane.
It just feels like coming home.
Toji makes a soft noise, tilts his head and just like that, Ryomen’s gone. He tastes like vanilla. Like store-bought Coca-Cola, and sunlight. Like everything golden and flying and thus by extension good .
Kissing Toji doesn’t feel like all of the grand things the books, the movies said like it would. True-love’s kiss, or a fairytale one- it’s nothing like that. There’s something human about the way Toji kisses, a little hungry, a little trembling. Their foreheads bump, and they laugh into each other’s mouths as they adjust positions once Toji’s back starts cramping but it’s better because of the earnestness, because of the imperfections.
Kissing like this, Ryomen finds, where they’re both awkward and out of their depth but still doing their best- it’s better than the movies tell him. It’s taking flight, and staying grounded at the same time. It’s taking the parts of a sixteen year old you left behind outside of a seven-eleven on a rainy night and stitching it back together with gold: kintsugi, as a form of kindness to your past.
But, before everything, it’s coming home. Because that’s what Toji is to him-
Home.
✦
2009
V. Epilogue: Our Youth
Sometimes, we aren’t even trying to fly. Sometimes, we’re just trying to break free and the sky is the easiest canvas to tear through.
Maybe that’s what they’re trying to do right now, him and Toji, crashing through the dirt path through the forest that leads to the cliff. The cresting night is a storm of darkness around them, swallowing their shadows and silhouettes alike. The moon above is their only source of light, dusty beams of rusted silver falling through the thick forest canopy and dappling the ground in shards of shattered mercury.
Toji’s running ahead of him, his dark hair a mass of ink, glinting with gun-metal where the moon touches it. Ryomen’s laughing breathlessly, trailing after him in a dead-sprint, trying and failing to catch up.
“Fucking- hell .” He pants. “Toji, slow the hell down.”
“Can’t help it that you’re goddamn slow, asshole.” Toji yells back, and throws him a quicksilver grin over his shoulders, somehow still managing to run straight despite it, not even stumbling once.
Ryomen tries to twist his features into something resembling a scowl, but gives up when his mirth crests into an unavoidable wave, and instead barks out another laugh. “God, if our corpses have to show up to our graduation instead of us because of you-”
“We’re not gonna fucking die, idiot.”
“We might, with how goddamn fast you’re going.”
Toji lets out a breezy hum that sounds more like a half-formed laugh. It’s careless, and it tastes like something close to electric-charged adrenaline- because they’re eighteen and carefree. Eighteen and immortal. “You’ll pull me back before I fall off the cliff.” He says, unwaveringly confident.
“I’ll fucking-” He wheezes low at the wildfire-burn blazing in his lungs- but he doesn’t let it slow him down, instead choosing to pump his legs faster, faster . Faster until their silhouettes will grow wings just like their shadows always have. Faster until they’re flying, and by extension breaking free. “I’ll fucking kill you myself, if you run off the cliff.”
“How do you kill someone that’s already-”
“Shut the fuck up-”
“No, Ryomen, I’m genuinely curious. How do you-”
“God, you’re so annoying -”
“Really? because that’s not what you said when you had my tongue down your throat.”
“I’m going to fucking break up with you-”
“No you aren’t, no one else can put up with your horrible fucking attitude-”
“ My horrible attitude? Look who's talking.”
“Yeah, actually. Your horrible attitude. Do you know that you drool all over our pillow when you sleep? I can’t imagine anyone-”
“Our pillow- Toji you fucker, that’s my pillow, you’re just always plastered up against me when we’re sleeping.”
“You can shove your semantics up your ass. Besides, you’re the clingy bastard, I didn’t do shit-”
They break through the edge of the woods, and Ryomen sees the infinite sky, yawning like a dark chasm of massive proportions above him. There are stars scattered around it, glinting in pinpricks of hot silver. Ahead of them, the cliff stretches, the edge a hazy blur that’s deceptively close. Beyond it, he can make out the rippling waters of the lake situated below.
“Watch out-”
“Always wrapped around me with your long-ass limbs-”
“Toji, watch out-”
They’re approaching the edge, and subsequently the drop below dangerously fast. Toji doesn’t even seem to notice, and keeps firing rapid fire insults back at him.
“Can’t catch a break without you sweating all over me like a-”
“ Watch the fuck out- ”
Ryomen catches him by the back of his shirt, a hair-breadth away from the edge. His fingers curl into the fabric, and he just about drags Toji back to a safer spot, pushing him against the bark of the oak tree- their oak tree- with a growl of suppressed anger.
“You fucking idiot.” Ryomen says. “You almost- you almost- you actually almost ran off that cliff.”
“Calm down, I would’ve stopped.” Is his huffed reply- Toji even goes as far as to roll his eyes and Ryomen, for a second, contemplates throwing the bastard off the cliff himself.
Ryomen bites back another snarl. His heart is hammering dangerously fast in his chest, swelling with rage- because he’s always been better at directing his concern into anger, than expressing any direct form of it. “I didn’t see any fucking sign of you stopping.”
“I would’ve done it, I’m not completely stupid.” Toji shrugs, nonchalant even when facing the full depth of Ryomen’s ire. He grins- sharp, knife-like. The scar at the edge of his lips pulls tight across his skin with the motion. “Besides, you caught me.”
“What if I didn’t?” Ryomen swallows. “What if-”
“You did, though.” Toji murmurs as his hand comes up, traces the sides of Ryomen’s face, and finally settles at the hinge of his jaw. A warm, grounding weight, a reminder and an anchor like always- I’m here, with you. “I told you to stop thinking up stupid scenarios a while ago, didn’t I? We only have one life to-”
“Spare us the grief.” He says, leaning into the touch, letting his eyes flutter shut. Here, cocooned in Toji’s arms and against the familiar backdrop of the cliff and their oak tree- everything feels lighter. A little less heavy. Even the weight of their future- which is a bullet-train, rapidly approaching them at breakneck speed- falls away under the subtle gentleness in Toji’s touch. “I know, I remember.”
“Then stop thinking useless fucking things.” Toji says. His thumb skims up the length of Ryomen’s jaw, to settle at the lobe of his ear. Absentmindedly, almost, he thumbs at the multitude of piercings threading through the flesh there. “Spare yourself the grief too, idiot.”
Ryomen lets out a breath that’s more of a shudder, than anything, but lets his tensed muscles unwind under Toji’s careful hands- he’s always so careful with Ryomen, despite how unapologetic he is at seizing what he wants from others, from life itself. To Ryomen, it always feels like something of a privilege, a gift to get to have this version of him.
“I don’t understand how you can be so flippant about these things.” Ryomen confesses, eyes still closed, finding the darkness behind his eyelids a cool balm to the turmoil brewing in his chest.
“What things?” His touches grow softer, take on a life of their own. Like he’s mapping out the mountains and the ravines of Ryomen’s body, the fissures filling with gold from their own form of kintsugi.
“Like- the future. What we’re going to do after graduation. Where we’re gonna go.” Ryomen says, and he feels cut open. As fragile as dragonfly wings. Something like a glass house in a storm, preparing to shatter even as he struggles to pull the shards of himself back together. “If we’re going to stay together.”
Toji’s thumbs at his eyes, until he lets them fall open. In the light of the moon, Toji’s gaze is flecked with fractured silver, his already pale face suffusing with an almost haunting glow. It gives a hazy quality to his features- makes a boy who already seems like less human and more dream look more like what he is: something beyond flesh and blood. Something made to fly, made to be golden. Made to be good. Always going fast, like he’s got nothing and no one left to lose.
“You’re complicating things, dumbfuck.” Toji says, but his voice lacks any real heat.
“How is- any of that simple?” Ryomen says, a little helplessly. “Tell me how the hell it’s not complicated.”
Toji lets his lips tug up into a smile- smaller than his usual blade-edged grins, but more genuine for it. “I already know what I want. So, not complicated at all”
“You do?” He breathes, and his heart snags in somewhere between his ribs in premeditated pain. Getting ready to be broken, to be shattered apart by the only boy he’s ever loved. He can picture it clearly- Toji living a better life, somewhere far, far away from this godforsaken town. Without someone like Ryomen weighing him down. “What is it?” He asks, despite himself. Despite the fear that crests like a bloodred dawn in his throat.
This time, he’s the one getting ready to be left behind.
“Stop-” There’s a flick to his forehead, as Toji frowns. “Fucking-” Another flick. “ Thinking so damn much.” Toji huffs. “Jesus, Ryomen. I’m not leaving you behind, so stop looking like a kicked dog.”
Ryomen swallows. “I’m not- you’re not gonna leave?”
“Not without you.” Toji says, without hesitation. Almost like it's as instinctive as breathing. Like he hasn’t pried apart and rebuilt Ryomen’s whole world with just three words.
“I thought you wanted to leave this shitty-ass town.” He says, even as hope blossoms in his chest- a rare-blooming flower, that thrives under moonlight. That thrives under careful touches and careful hands, that takes time to grow, but none to take root. A fickle thing that can dissipate between his fingers as easily as cigarette smoke. “I thought you hated it here.”
“I do.” Toji murmurs, and his palm slides over to the nape of Ryomen’s neck, the callouses in them leaving trails of razor-thin lightning and meticulously crafted wildfires in their wake. “But it’s not that fucking bad. You’re here too, you know?”
Ryomen hardly breathes, as Toji carefully, oh so carefully, brings their foreheads together, noses nudging and slotting into place as easily as two matching puzzle pieces. The way their silhouettes tangle a familiar pattern, muscle memory built on dozens, hundreds of repetitions. On the ground, their violet shadows grow wings. Trying to break free, trying to find the sky.
“You’d stay for me?” He says, voice sticky like milk taffy. Thick with unnamed emotions, ones that threaten to burst out of his chest and take flight. Hope, no matter how elusive, is one of them. “You’d really do that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Toji says, and lets the truth settle between them, as gentle as snowfall. “And if you decide to leave, I’ll follow right along.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
And then there’s a stretching moment where they let their breaths mix. Where they let their bodies speak for themselves, and their hearts pulse in tandem against each other’s.
Like this, wrapped in Toji’s arms and standing at the edge of their cliff, against their oak tree- Ryomen feels a bit delirious. A bit immortal. Like he could step right off the edge, and he would catch the wind with his shadow-wings, and break free.
It isn’t exactly clear who moves first- just that the motion happens, and they meet in the middle. Their lips slot together in a familiarly soft movement.
Toji, just like that first day over a year ago at this point, tastes like vanilla and sunlight. Like flying and falling. Like gravity in reverse, and touching the sky and feeling the electricity. A little bitter, but even that only serves to make Ryomen hungrier, makes him want more and more of this.
And, as always, kissing him feels like coming home. Like pushing a door open, and stepping into the foyer of a house so familiar that it’s almost nostalgic. It’s realizing- this is it. This is what I want. This is my forever.
Ryomen pulls away first, letting out a ragged exhale. Toji frowns quietly at the loss, but lets his eyes blink open- emerald green. A whole forest of colours. Supernovas, trapped in his gaze. He’s a little flushed, and a lot pretty. Ryomen wants to tear into his skin, until their blood mixes, until their guts and hearts are one big pulsating thing. Until he can’t tell where he ends, and where Toji begins.
“Hey, Toji?” He says.
Toji hums in reply. Under the silver of the moon, his hair is a fractured galaxy of stars, gleaming like gun-metal. “Yeah?”
“One day, if we make it, will you give me your forever?”
“The hell does that mean?” Toji grunts, but Ryomen can tell he’s biting back a smile. Stubborn bastard.
“Just answer the question.” He murmurs.
“It’s kind of a fucking stupid one, but fine.” Toji says, and pulls Ryomen closer with a gentle but insistent hand cupping the small of his back. Their bodies are searing twin lines of scalding warmth, pressed against each other. “I already gave you my youth, idiot. What’s forever compared to that?”
This time, it’s Ryomen who swallows back the grin that threatens to split his face. “You mean it?”
“I don’t lie to you.”
“Alright.”
A breath, and then-
“Hey, Ryomen?”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s get out of this shithole together, one day.”
“Sure.” A smile, pressed into sweat-sheened skin. “We have forever, though. So don’t get so impatient.”
As the night thickens around them, their silhouettes and their shadows become indistinguishable, mixing into the same ink-dark blue. And now, they’re both growing wings.
Sometimes, we fly to break free. Sometimes, we fly because we just can’t go fast enough on the ground. Sometimes, we fly because the sky is just the easiest way to lose yourself in a million infinities, all more beautiful and more golden than the last.
And that too, is a form of kintsugi- to lose the pieces of yourself to the gold.
✦
“It's no big surprise you turned out this way
When they close their eyes and prayed you would change
And they cut your hair, and sent you away
You stopped by my house the night you escaped
With tears in my eyes, I begged you to stay
You said, "Hey man, I love you, but no fucking way!"
-“Twin Size Mattress,” by the Front Bottoms; from “Talon of the Hawk.”