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"Man... Osaka is the best..."
"Yeah."
"Did you see the ferris wheel on the way here?"
"This is the fourth time ya mentioned it..."
It isn't as though you'd missed it, but to his credit, everything around you feels novel and overwhelming — the Tempozan Ferris Wheel was only one of countless things to catch your attention alongside a giraffe made of Lego bricks, multiple shops and restaurants, and an overwhelming amount of vehicular traffic. As much as you hate living in the country, your trips to Tokyo are few and far between and the bustling of a city with any population density to speak of is an overwhelming and overstimulating hodgepodge of sights and sounds. Your whole body feels like an exposed nerve and you've been feeling background nausea since about 20 minutes after boarding your first train.
Osakako station is three transfers and about two and a half hours from the station in Kibougayama. Luckily the ride was simplified at least somewhat by Yuuki allowing the two of you to stash your bikes in her yard instead of having to lug them with you across 100 kilometers of train commute.
Despite everything, you want to be here. It was your idea, actually.
Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan is the second-biggest aquarium in Japan, and when it opened in 1990 it was the biggest public aquarium in the world. It spans a massive eight stories and boasts a total tank capacity of 10 million liters full of creatures from all across the globe. You remain optimistic that the social discomfort you're feeling right now will prove to be worth it.
Even your arrival time had been deliberate. If you hurry, in just a few minutes Hikaru will be able to watch the employees while they feed the otters.
Already, though, you're not confident that there will be much hurrying happening; you haven't even made it past the Aqua Gate and Hikaru has already shouldered past several strangers to press his face and body to the glass and doesn't seem interested in moving any time soon. You don't blame him; the tunnel is captivating. With the exception of the floor you're surrounded on all sides by acrylic glass — beyond it, water, and all that which inhabits it. Only about a yard away from you in any direction you're surrounded by yellow tang, puffers, surgeonfish, silver moony, and cherry porgy — and those are only the ones you immediately recognize. A shadow falls over you briefly as a cownose ray swims overhead, but the long hallway is otherwise cast entirely in luminous blue. It's beautiful.
"Yoshiki, check it! This guy looks stupid as hell!" He's currently transfixed by some kind of unicornfish. He's right.
The escalator up to the top of the building makes you motion sick, but it pays off. The open air and the sound of the waterfall at the Japan Forest exhibit calms your nerves innately. With the way Hikaru braces himself against the chest-high barrier you worry for a moment that you'll have to stop him from bodily entering the enclosure for how enthusiastically he watches the small clawed otters chip away at blocks of ice to access the river shrimp encased within them. He grabs your shirt at the shoulder and physically shakes you when one of them drops a chunk down a slide-shaped hollow log and eagerly chases after it, demanding you pay attention as though you aren't just as amused as he is.
This pattern continues for a while: at the Aleutian Islands exhibit he eagerly draws your attention to several tufted puffins swimming directly up against the glass like broken pathing in a video game; at the Monterey Bay enclosure, you teach him to distinguish between a seal and a sea lion; at the Gulf of Panama exhibit he nearly doubles over watching a red coati chase after its tail and inadvertently roll into a ball; the penguins and dolphins at the Antarctica and Tasman Sea displays respectively are the first things in recent memory to leave him at a loss for words, eyes wide and lips slightly parted.
For the first time in a while you find yourself really laughing.
Yeah. This is good. Coming here was good.
The Pacific Ocean exhibit is by far the biggest and most involved of all of those present and it immediately shows. Hikaru again squeezes through a small crowd of families to get as close to the tank as possible. This was one of the biggest reasons you wanted to come here, too: the Kaiyukan is one of the only places in the world where whale sharks are kept in captivity, and it is one of the leaders in research on the species.
You're unlikely to see anything like this again in your life, but you find yourself not paying attention to it at all.
It's only by chance that you looked away in the first place. Sometimes you like looking at Hikaru so much that you can't stand to keep doing it. Instead, your eyes settle among the crowd: parents accompany their children; teachers haphazardly wrangle groups of students; a group of young women gather to take photos together; two men in their early twenties stand with linked hands, one's head resting on the other's shoulder.
You can't look away.
Any moment you're going to be called out and you'll be made a fool, but you can't look away. You're staring — you're embarrassing yourself, but you're staring and you can't stop.
You stare, and you wait for the other shoe to drop, and it doesn't. Your moment of public humiliation never comes. There are dozens of people in the room and not a single one of them is looking at you — and not a single one is looking at them, either.
"Hey, Yoshiki! Look! There's a dude in there!" Hikaru pulls your soul abruptly back into your body. Sure enough, there is a guy in there — a diver who appears to be taking a blood sample from an ocean sunfish. Hikaru waves, but the employee pays him no mind. You lose track of time.
A hallway leads you to a downward escalator. The room that follows makes you feel like you're suspended in space and time.
It's dark. The only sources of light are the exhibits themselves — several small tanks of jellyfish — and countless blue pinpoints on the ceiling reminiscent of stars.
Again, Hikaru is quiet. For a while he lingers with you just inside the room's entrance. He looks at the spectacle, and you look at him. The moment is brief; it isn't long until he's moving again, flitting from tank to tank, always glancing behind him to make sure you follow. You do.
"Hey, Yoshiki... look." He stops to marvel in front of one display in particular, but his arms are slack at his sides. The creatures bobbing inside are mostly transparent, but the light shining through them highlights their multicolor reality: the blue of their bodies; the yellow-green of their internal organs; their numerous tendrils, tipped with purple and fluorescent pink. The placard beneath the tank reads 'Flower Hat Jellyfish'. "This one kinda looks like me."
He's right. They're beautiful.
An impulse rushes through you — a compulsion. You act on it in a fraction of a second, knowing that if you dwell on it any longer you'll deny yourself again — and again, and again, and again. With your left hand you reach forward and clumsily grab at his right; already having averted your eyes you only succeed in anchoring yourself to two of his fingers, cool to the touch.
You want to look at him — you want to look at nothing but him forever — but your gaze is locked on your shoelaces; you've been audacious enough already. Your body burns from your chest to the zenith of your scalp and you hope your bangs cover for you where the dim lighting can't.
This was a terrible idea. This was a terrible idea. This was a terrible idea and you're the worst person alive.
He pries his fingers from your grasp more gently than you deserve—
—in order to hold your hand properly.
Your heartbeat accelerates. Your chest gets tight. Your breaths become quick and shallow. Your hands start to shake. Your field of view darkens and narrows.
"S'this alright?" His voice reaches you from far away.
"Y—" Your mouth is dry. Your throat feels like it's closing. You swallow hard, willing the last molecules of saliva in your mouth to lubricate your vocal chords at least one last time before you die, which is definitely what's happening to you right now. "—Yeah. S'fine."
When you look back up, he's smiling. He swings your arms and pulls you along to the next exhibit. Somehow, you don't black out.
Together you step back into the light and you're still holding hands and the Earth doesn't explode.
In the following room under blue lights shaped like icebergs Hikaru watches ringed seals swim above you through a clear panel in the ceiling and your hand is still in Hikaru's hand and the Earth doesn't explode.
An escalator takes you to a long white hallway where the walls are windows and you look out over Osaka Bay and Hikaru adjusts his hand so your fingers lace together and the sun and clouds can see you and the Earth doesn't explode.
You approach the stingray touch tank and Hikaru wants to put his free hand in but the signs say to wash your hands first and he doesn't want to because it would mean letting go of yours so he doesn't and you can still feel your heartbeat where your palms touch and no one is looking at you and the Earth doesn't explode.
At the gift shop you tell Hikaru he can have whatever he wants because you've been saving for this very thing for weeks and he smiles and you're still holding hands and when you bump shoulders with a college-aged woman at the register by accident she accepts your apology and her eyes don't turn to coals when she looks at you and the ground beneath your feet doesn't rupture like a blister and pull you under and the Earth does not explode.
Under Hikaru's free arm he carries the biggest, roundest seal plush you've ever laid eyes on; in the plastic bag wrapped around his wrist is a ¥5,500 t-shirt and a box of cookies shaped like penguins. In your own free arm is a stuffed manta ray purchased as a souvenir for Kaoru, and attached to one of your belt loops is a zinc keychain of a whale shark.
While you were at the aquarium you were more than happy to let Hikaru pull you along according to his whims but now that you're outside again it's time for you to lead. You've got one last surprise in store before catching the train home and you don't recall the last time you were so sure that you were doing something right — something that he would enjoy. Your stomach already lurching, you wordlessly queue up for the ferris wheel. The Kaiyukan was for both of you; this is for him.
"Huh? Huh?! Yoshiki— fer real?!"
"—There was a discount. If ya bought an aquarium ticket n' a ferris wheel ticket at the same time... there was a discount."
"At this rate we're gonna be gettin' back pretty late... is it really okay?"
"S'fine. I already told our moms, so..."
The expression on his face isn't one you've ever seen before. He wears a toothy smile but his head hangs slightly and for once it's him who has trouble looking you in the eye.
"Well, if yer sure..."
"I'm sure."
In order to board you're forced to let go of his hand for the first time in two hours.
The view from the passenger car is as impressive as you knew it would be — the view of the water is great, and there are mountains to the north and the east — but you don't spend much time appreciating them. The higher you get into the air the more you focus on the space beneath your feet, focusing on your breathing and keeping your stomach under control. You never had any illusions of the heights agreeing with your nerves, but you can wait it out. In your peripheral vision the lights of the attraction double as a weather beacon, their disorienting green glow indicating to all who can see it that tomorrow is projected to be cloudy.
"Yanno... the aquarium... I really loved it."
"Thank goodness..."
His arms rest wrapped around the stuffed seal in his lap. It easily comes up to his clavicles; it squishes into an oblong pancake as he leans forward slightly, resting one of his cheeks against its fabric.
"But... I'm glad we're alone now. I've been thinkin'... this whole time, I've been thinkin'..." You might throw up. "... Nah... It can wait."
"—It doesn't have to. Whatever yer thinkin'... I always wanna hear it."
"S'just... this might seriously be the best day ever. I don't remember the last time I had so much fun... so I wanna say... thank ya. And..."
Whatever this feeling is, you want to sear it into every cell of your body. Every sensation, every hope, every nervous thought — you want to etch it on your mind. You want to stop time and live right here forever.
"... I think ya could kill me now. If that's whatcha wanted to do."
What?
"But... ya don't gotta. I can figure somethin' out— I can do it myself, so—"
What?
"—So... don't ruin yer own life—"
"—Stop—"
"—not 'cause of somethin' like me."
"Stop!"
Your head snaps up. You look to him for anything that might ground you back in a world that makes sense.
"Yoshiki...?"
"That's not what I was thinkin'— that's not what I was thinkin' at all!"
He looks at you with half-lidded eyes, mouth agape, brows knitted upward into a worried peak.
"Sorry— Yoshiki, sorry— I just— then— why?"
"Why what?"
Have you made him this miserable? Have you been so cold to him that every moment of warmth between you is so steeply associated with a knife in his side?
And whose fault is that?
"This— today— everythin'—"
"Because I wanted to!"
You wanted to watch him lean haphazardly over the edge of the exhibit while the otters had their meal. You wanted to laugh with him when the penguins collided with each other zipping around the underwater corners of their enclosure. You wanted to look at him illuminated by the light of the tank of the flower hat jellyfish while he saw himself in something wonderful. You wanted to make him happy. You wanted to hold his hand.
"Yoshiki, I—"
"—Because I wanted to. Because I want to spend my time with ya!" Your eyes are stinging. Your stomach is lurching. You swallow bile. Not now. Not now. Not now. "I already told ya—"
You think about him gripping your arm from across the booth at Casual Diner America, the capillaries of his eyes bursting from the strain of trying to protect you. You think about sitting on the floor of the Takeda family home cradling his severed head in your arms. You think about the promise you made to yourself in the dilapidated shack over Hikaru's makeshift grave.
"—I wanna go to all sortsa places and see all sortsa things with ya—"
You think about the ocean.
"—so never— never think about somethin' like that again!"
"Yoshiki... I'm really an idiot, ain't I? Sorry."
Yeah. He's an idiot. The two of you are the stupidest things alive.
"Ya ain't gotta—" you rock forward and put your head in your hands in a way that makes the passenger car lurch and your stomach flip. "I ain't gonna pretend ya never did nothin' wrong... but I already told ya... anything ya done that ain't right... I'll help ya hold it!"
"Yoshiki..."
"So if it's just bein' happy... ya don't gotta apologize... please..."
"Thank ya... I'm happy. Ya make me so happy I don't even know what to do..."
"Then ya don't gotta do anythin'. Don't apologize... don't think 'bout goin nowhere... jus' stay with me..."
"Is it really alright?"
"I dunno... I don't care! I don't care... so just..."
"Yeah. I'll stick with ya... if ya want me by yer side, I'll be there no matter what."
On the way back to the station you hold his hand again. When you get back to Kubitachi you can never do this again and you don't know how you'll make him understand that, but for now... just for now...
On the train ride home, he rests his head on your shoulder.