Chapter Text
Here is how it goes: the day after RAD BLAST, their team gathers once more at Weekend Garage for practice with Ken. When he walks through the doors, he takes a long look at them all in the midst of their warmups, before heaving the biggest sigh. The sound brings them all to a stop.
“Dad?” An asks tentatively.
“Already back to practice, huh?” Ken murmurs, seemingly to himself. He keeps looking at them with an uncomfortably penetrating expression—some mix of sentiment, exasperation, and sadness that feels too personal for any of them to directly ask about. It takes him a moment before he can gather himself together. “Okay. I have my next assignment for you all.”
Akito tenses up as the room becomes palpitant with anticipation.
“You all are to have a week off from practice,” Ken intones slowly, and seeing Akito begin to open his mouth, firmly continues, “as a mandatory assignment. I don’t want to hear a note of song from any of you. We’ll resume practice next week.”
“Ken-san,” Toya starts to reason, confusion bleeding into his voice.
“ No singing ,” Ken stresses, hand dropping to An’s shoulder to immediately shut her protest down next. His eyes land on Kohane at the same time, silencing her before she can even start. “You all are so insistent, it’s almost scary. Listen. You’re not working on a timer. I know it feels like you have to accomplish everything that you possibly can in your youth, but you have the rest of your lives for this next step, taking on the world. You can afford, and do in fact need, the rest. Do you understand?”
The way they’re all reacting, it’s as if his proclamation was for a death sentence—and for some reason, it almost feels like one. Toya has a perpetual frown on his face, and Kohane’s hanging her head. An’s brows remain furrowed. Akito has to swallow past the dry lump in his throat before he can answer for them all. “We understand, Ken-san.”
“Good,” Ken says firmly. He seems to nod to himself, like he’s giving himself a pat on the back for doing the right thing. He pats An’s shoulder instead. Says, in a softer tone, “You all can hang out here if you’d like. But we’re not having practice today. I’ll see you all next week.”
With those words, Ken walks back out the doors and leaves them all to finish processing their “assignment.”
There’s a beat of silence as they all glance around at one another.
“Miku might let us practice in the sekai?” An suggests hopefully. Should Akito be concerned that An’s first instinct is to find a way around her dad’s orders?
Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, Akito doesn’t know how to feel about this all yet, the aforementioned virtual singer materializes into existence by An’s side, startling a yelp from her. “ Miku will not be letting you practice in the sekai, or anywhere else for that matter,” Miku says, the glitch of her voice somehow still conveying her incredibly dry tone. Amusement dances in her eyes. “Not a note of song, remember? We’ll be making sure you all follow that instruction.”
“Miku-chan, you heard that?” Kohane asks her with a trace of dismay, her arms wrapped around a still startled An.
Miku smirks. “I did. No practice for the week. But, of course, you’re always welcome to visit and hang out.”
Akito squeezes the bridge of his nose, feeling a dull throb starting in the back of his eyes. “I . . . I think I’ll take you up on that offer right now.”
One by one, the rest of their team gives their own murmur of agreement. They all need some time, it seems, to figure out what to do with themselves without practice taking up every second of their day.
Before Akito follows the girls into the sekai, Toya moves over to his side. By instinct, Akito’s hand opens to let Toya intertwine their fingers, but Toya only briefly squeezes his hand before he lets go. “I’ll meet you there soon,” Toya reassures him, immediately catching his disappointment before Akito can hide it. “I’ve just got to go back home first. There’s some assignments I have to catch up on that I plan to bring to the sekai to work on.”
So the first thing Toya wants to do with all his free time is homework. It’s so utterly unsurprising and characteristic of him, Akito can only huff out a fond laugh. “We were told to take it easy, you know. But all right. See you in a bit, then.”
The last thing he sees before the world fragments into colors is Toya’s lips tugging up into a smile.
—
Four days into their practice ban, Akito feels almost ready to crawl up the walls.
Is it a bad thing that his sanity hinges on being able to sing his throat hoarse? Maybe so. But right now he feels so restless with unreleased energy, and his daily runs and workouts are only the most temporary of outlets.
There’s Toya, of course, always there for Akito; being around him is guaranteed to instill a sense of peace and calmness that no one else can give him.
But still. None of these things—thank Toya for trying his best—can fill in the space in his heart shaped solely for his passion to sing.
He’d caved in the other day and tried sneaking out at night to sing a little in a secluded alley of Vivid Street. Before he could even start warming up his voice, Meiko had appeared over his shoulder.
The scream he’d let out is one he is taking to the grave.
“Pack it up,” she’d said sternly, only the twitch of her lips betraying her mirth.
Akito packed it up, feeling like a criminal caught red-handed the whole while.
Speaking of Meiko. In the past four days, it feels like he’s been seeing her and the rest of his team far more than he’s ever been used to—Toya, for once, not an exception.
With nothing left to do after school, aside from schoolwork that Akito can’t bring himself to actually acknowledge, he finds himself frequenting Meiko’s cafe, only to realize he was absolutely not the only one with the same idea. The first time he’d shown up at the sekai, it was to the sight of An moping at a table and Miku fondly patting her head.
She’d looked up at him and let out a dramatic sigh so reminiscent of Ken, it momentarily stopped Akito from feeling offended.
Not a minute later, Kohane entered through the doors and nearly ran into his back. They’d both startled at the sight of each other.
Toya showed up around the end of his library shift.
It’s the same for the next three days. Their group chat has no mention of planning to meet up at the sekai, and yet Akito keeps bumping into all of them there.
“The hell,” he blurts out upon spotting An sitting there for the fourth time.
She simply raises her eyebrows back at him, an unspoken you, too? , before patting the empty seat next to her. Reluctantly, disgruntled, Akito sits down. Kohane briefly looks up to greet him with a smile before burying herself back in her textbook.
“Toya?” An asks him, absentmindedly running her fingers through one of Kohane’s pigtails.
“In a minute,” Akito guesses in resignation.
There’s a snort from behind the counter, where Meiko is fixing up what smells like his usual pancakes—like she’d already known he was going to be here for them. Kaito isn’t even trying to hide his grin. It’s Luka, lightly elbowing him, who finally speaks up. “You all keep showing up here,” she teases. “Miss us that much, do you?”
“Of course we do,” An teases back, before a sheepish look washes over her. “Although, um, at the same time, there’s nowhere else we really have to go.”
Why is An saying it like they’ve all been left homeless? Akito starts to retort when Meiko sets a plate of steaming pancakes down before him. There’s whipped cream, strawberries, chocolate sauce; the whole shebang.
“You’re drooling,” An drawls.
Akito hastily wipes his mouth, only for his hand to come away dry. He decides to be the bigger person by completely ignoring An’s snickering. “Thank you, Meiko-san,” he says in awe.
Meiko just shakes her head with a secretive smile. “A treat for what happened yesterday. I might have been a bit harsh . . . you weren’t the only one who tried to break the rules.”
“Who—?”
But once more, Akito’s interrupted, this time by Toya sweeping into the cafe with a textbook under his arm. As if this was not the fourth time in four days that he’s seen them all in the same place, his face lights up all over again with a happy little smile, and it’s so bright, so dazzling, Akito feels his eyes squinting just to take all of Toya in, and he nearly goes blind when Toya’s gaze lands on him. “Everyone . . . Akito . . . you’re all here,” he greets, pleasantly surprised.
“Yes . . . that’s us. All here, once again, like always,” An mumbles in a woeful tone, as Toya settles in across from her.
Wordlessly, Kohane shifts her textbook to the side to make room for Toya to open his on the table. Toya quietly thanks her.
Akito turns to him, sees Toya already looking back. “Hey,” he says quietly, and Toya’s expression shifts into that soft one always reserved just for Akito. It makes his insides flutter.
“Akito,” Toya greets simply, but his lips shape Akito’s name with so much warmth regardless. Then, his expression turns stern as his eyes fall on the rest of the table.
Akito stiffens. What’s wrong with his pancakes?
“I haven’t seen you or Shiraishi work on any schoolwork this past week,” Toya says with a small frown.
The temperature of the room drops. Akito glances at An and sees her shrinking rapidly in her seat. He has to fight the urge to shrivel up too when he realizes Kohane has finally looked up from her textbook—is looking at the both of them with all the channeled disapproval of eight high school teachers.
“That’s what I thought, too. An-chan, you said you would bring your homework today, so we could work on it together . . .” Kohane says with a small huff, and her voice, typically so gentle, only multiplies the trace of disappointment in it tenfold.
Akito is so glad to not be An at that moment. She looks close to tears as she scrambles to latch onto Kohane, warbling frantically, “I-I’m sorry, Kohane, I’m so sorry! I forgot—I mean, I didn’t forget, but I just didn’t want to study, you know, I can never make sense of it and I thought I could save it for tomorrow—”
Kohane just sighs again, immediately causing another flurry of distraught apologies and watery explanations to spill from An. Still, she’s entirely unresistant as she lets An climb onto her lap to continue crying apologies into her shoulder.
In any other scenario, Akito would point and laugh. But he can’t bring himself to move when Toya is still pinning him in place with that awfully small, yet enormously disapproving frown.
“Akito.”
Akito might as well start digging his grave. The weight of Toya’s stare is so heavy, he can only look down at his cooling pancakes. “I’m sorry,” he croaks. “I just—haven’t felt motivated to do anything recently. I know I have work to catch up on. I don’t want to almost fail this year again. But all I can think about is singing.”
His confession, forced word after word from his mouth under the sheer pressure of Toya’s looming disappointment, seems to sober the atmosphere. It makes a bit of the sternness in Toya and Kohane’s expressions leak away in favor of sympathy.
“I guess you’re not the only one to feel like that, Shinonome-kun,” Kohane says, voice once again its usual soft tone. Her hand presses to the small of An’s back, a tender touch to accompany the way the corner of her lips tug up in a faint smile. Abruptly, Akito recalls Meiko’s words from earlier. “I think we’ve all been feeling a bit lost about what to do when we can’t practice. Which might be why we keep bumping into each other here.”
“We should do something,” An suggests quietly from somewhere in Kohane’s neck. She hunches her shoulders, somehow attuned without seeing to the way Kohane frowns, and her hold on Kohane tightens. “I mean, aside from studying! I’msosorryKohane. Um, but, I think we should all get a real break, including you and Toya from schoolwork!”
There’s a pause. Then, An draws back from Kohane with an excited cry. Akito can practically see the metaphorical lightbulb flash over her head. “I’ve got it! Let’s go to the beach!”
Akito stares.
“Why the beach?” Toya asks, voicing his confusion.
“Well,” An starts, craning awkwardly around to look at them. Kohane’s hands quickly grasping her hips are the only thing stopping An from completely toppling off of her. “Dad gave us this assignment so that we could take some time off to relax and celebrate, right? And it’s going to be super hot this weekend. I bet he’d be relieved to hear we’re actually going out for once instead of moping around like this. Plus, we haven’t been to the beach together before.”
“It’s a good idea for getting away from the heat,” Toya muses. In a quieter voice, he admits, “I can’t remember the last time I saw the ocean.”
The wistful look on his face makes something twist painfully in Akito’s chest. Before he can think about it, he bursts out, “Let’s go, then. We need to bring you there again.”
An looks at him for a stunned moment, before a grin curves her lips at Akito taking her side. “You’re right. It’ll be like the camping trip—we’ll give you the experience of it, Toya.”
The open surprise on Toya’s face, which blossoms into a shy eagerness, is worth everything Akito could possibly give up. “Thank you, Akito, Shiraishi. I’d really like that.”
“An-chan,” Kohane finally says, and An nearly flinches, timidly looking back at Kohane with an expression of apprehension. Kohane, Akito thinks privately to himself, can sometimes be downright terrifying. “What about your studies?”
An flounders. “Um, well . . .”
“I think it’s a good idea,” Luka pipes up. All four of them glance her way, seeming to suddenly remember that they are, in fact, not being utterly embarrassing alone. Kaito has been chuckling to himself for the past few minutes, and Meiko is just watching this all unfold with a raised eyebrow. “At this point, we were almost thinking about banning you all from the cafe. You guys need to go hang out together elsewhere for a change of pace.”
“As for your studies,” Meiko adds, glancing meaningfully at An and Akito. Her expression is stern, forcing the both of them to bow their heads, chastened. Meiko quirks her lips. “You both can promise to work on it, starting now, for the rest of the time up until your beach trip, and also after. That would be a good start.”
“I’m okay with that,” Akito says firmly. For Toya. He’s going to do it all for Toya.
An looks hopefully at Kohane.
Kohane bites her lip, but Akito suspects she’d already begun to cave when An first brought the idea up. She confesses, softly, “I’m sorry for being so harsh, An-chan. I’m just worried. I don’t want you to fail this year.” She looks at Akito apologetically. “You too, Shinonome-kun. But if you both really do promise to do what Meiko-san said . . .”
An responds before Akito can. She presses her forehead to Kohane’s, clasps their hands together, and Magnet starts playing in Akito's head because this is suddenly far too gay and intimate for him to be directly looking at. He catches the others in the room averting their eyes from the unbearable sight as well. The sheer mistake it was, leaving the two of them sitting on top of each other like this for so long.
“Kohane, I’m so sorry for worrying you,” An whispers, her apology, this time, carrying a heavy sincerity. “I really didn’t mean to make you feel like that, and I want to do better. It’s just been so easy to use practice as an excuse to not study lately, but now that I can’t, it kinda felt too hard to start. It’s scary,” An admits quietly. “And um, I really would appreciate your help with studying. If you’re still okay with helping me.”
A soft sigh. “It’s okay to be scared. And of course I am, An-chan,” Kohane reassures.
There’s a sniffle, and then when Akito dares to look at them again, he sees An having burrowed herself back into Kohane’s arms. Kohane gives him a sheepish smile as she rubs An’s back.
Akito is just glad the gayfest is over. (Is it ever over with these two? With this squad?) Feeling equally abashed, he adds, lamely, “Gah. I’m, er, sorry for worrying you, too, Kohane. I’ll try harder.”
“We’ll help keep you two on track,” Toya promises, and oh no, that’s the closest thing to a threat coming from Toya if Akito has ever heard one.
Luka gently claps her hands together, drawing their attention to her once again. “We have a lot of studying to catch up on now, don’t we?” she says with a wicked grin.
—
The rest of the day and the following ones are a horrifying blur of textbooks, worksheets, study guides, and scarily intensive lectures led by Toya and Kohane. It is a living nightmare. A fever dream. He vaguely recalls An wailing in anguish, himself trying to bash his head into the table, Luka’s terrifyingly evil laughter, an attempt at escape that was thoroughly thwarted by Miku—but alas, the rest is far too traumatic for him to actively remember. So he simply chooses not to. Everything he studied—and has left to study—is for post-beach Akito to deal with.
What he does remember: An texts them the details of the trip in their group chat. She explains that Ken gave his approval and permission to use his car, and then adds a list of things she recommends everyone bring, from sunglasses to flip flops, which is clearly mostly beneficial for Toya’s lack of experience. Don’t worry about lunch, she and her dad will have that prepared, she finishes, but of course, it’s more fun if everyone brings their own snacks to share as well.
What Akito concludes from all of this, for some reason, is that Ken will be the one driving.
Akito is wrong.
He finds out only on the day of their trip when he arrives at Weekend Garage. He nearly drops his floaty at the sight of the wrong Shiraishi sitting behind the wheel of Ken’s car, window rolled down.
“Wait, you’re the one driving? Legally? You actually passed the driving test—you have a license ?”
An tips her shades up to fix him with a withering glare. If lesbians could explode things with their minds, Akito would be but a pile of ashes by now. “Are you going to get in the car or not?” she demands.
Akito gets in the car.
He finds Kohane sitting in shotgun and Toya waiting for him in the backseat, and Akito doesn’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that if they get in a car crash, it will be with Toya by his side. “At least tell me you didn’t just get your license this past week,” Akito begs, as Toya helpfully takes his floaty and backpack to arrange somewhere behind them.
“I didn’t,” An snaps, glowering at him in the rearview mirror. She quiets and seems to calm down a bit as Kohane adjusts her phone to display the GPS in carplay mode. “I’ve been driving for a year now, it just never came up, okay?”
“Okay,” Akito mumbles, feeling a touch relieved. “I’m trusting you with Toya’s life.”
Toya lets out a huff of a laugh, saving Akito before An can twist around toward the backseat to finally throttle him. “I trust you, Shiraishi. I’m really looking forward to this trip.”
The pure excitement radiating from his expression, the eagerness of a little kid surfacing shyly from a face so used to being subdued—yeah, Akito can see how it brings An to melt a little into the puddle of mush Akito has already become. “Well then, if we have everything, let’s not waste any more time,” she says, returning a grin.
—
The drive is about an hour, but the time passes easily when Kohane and Toya are blasting a playlist they created together the day before. At least that’s what they claim, but judging from the songs being played, Akito suspects most of this was picked by Kohane while Toya gave her his minimal attempts at feedback. He’s never known Toya to listen to anything beyond classical music.
He’s wrong for the second time that day when the most gritty mix of classical dubstep starts blasting in the car, and Akito has to throw his head back with a laugh at the pure Toya of it. “What is this?” he yells over the sound of both a heavy bass and a furious violin. There aren’t even any lyrics.
Kohane is giggling in the front seat, and An whoops as the windows roll down, letting the breeze carry the rest of his laughter into the air. “Aoyagi-kun wanted to add this just to mess with you,” Kohane confesses, and Toya confirms her words with the silliest grin on his face when Akito turns to him.
Akito can’t help it. He hooks his arm around Toya to drag him in, and then Toya is pressed close against him, shoulders bumping, his laughter warm and quiet into the side of Akito’s neck. It sends a pleasant shiver down Akito’s spine. “You got me,” he tells Toya, heart practically jumping out of his chest at the way it makes Toya’s expression light up further. This is the most playful, most openly joyous, that Akito has ever seen him.
When the song ends with a final burst of hooting trumpets, leaving the car in the shambles of laughter, the next song that plays is one of their own. Immediately, with all the passion of putting on a live concert, Kohane launches into her opening line.
“This isn’t breaking the rules, is it?” Toya asks with a chuckle.
“I am not stopping this car or this song for anyone,” An vehemently declares, before she picks up her part after Kohane at the top of her lungs.
That’s all the encouragement they need. Toya and Akito join in with the follow-up, as their surroundings rush by in a blur, as the sun shines down on them in the cool blue sky.