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“By the way,” Reo’s mother says, tapping on her phone. “Your engagement party is this Friday.”
“...what?”
And that’s how Reo finds out he’s engaged.
“Engaged,” Reo splutters out on the phone a panicked few minutes later. “Engaged—I’m engaged—my engagement party is this week, and I—why the fuck didn’t anyone tell me—?”
He’s pretty sure Chigiri is snacking on something on the other side of the phone. “Wow.”
“I’m not even—I’m not even an adult yet. I’m 17—is this even legal? I should check if this is legal. You know, I really don’t think—”
“Does Nagi know?”
“—this is actually legal—what?” Reo pulls away from the phone to blink at the screen before bringing it back to his ear. “Does Nagi know?”
“Yeah.” A shuffling on the other end of the phone. “Surely you told him before me, right?”
“Uh…” Reo trails off. “No, I… uh, not yet. I haven’t told him yet.”
A surprised pause. “Really?”
“Yeah, I forgot,” Reo says quickly. “Anyway, isn’t it ridiculous? Surely I’d remember getting engaged?”
“At least it’s not a wedding?” Chigiri offers, which doesn’t make Reo feel much better. He tells Chigiri as much, and Chigiri sighs. “I don’t know, man. You live in a totally different world. Isn’t this just how things work there?”
“It’s—” Reo falters. Chigiri is not entirely wrong—Reo has known his entire life that marriage is expected of him, but he’d at least thought he would be given prior notice instead of having an engagement unceremoniously dropped in his lap. Even within the Mikage family—wasn’t all of this happening way too quickly? Shouldn’t Reo at least know who he’s getting engaged to? He considers voicing this to Chigiri, but it’s been a largely unproductive conversation so far, and Reo finds himself deflating a little. “Yeah. I guess.”
“Um,” Chigiri says. “Anyway, good luck with that.”
“Thanks,” Reo says dully before hanging up. He tosses his phone to the side and slumps back on the couch to squint at the ceiling.
Really… why hasn’t he told Nagi yet? Reo always shares big news like this with Nagi first, but for some reason, after fleeing to his floor, he’d hesitated and called Chigiri instead. Reo can’t think of a reason why off the top of his head, and it bothers him more than he’d like to admit. Why wouldn’t he want to tell Nagi that he’s engaged? It’s not like Nagi would really even care.
Well. Maybe that’s why.
Reo shakes his head and goes back to thinking about more pressing matters—namely, getting himself out of this engagement. When his mother had first dropped the news on him, he’d been too stupefied to say a single thing, and by the time he’d remembered how to actually speak again, his mother had already left the room, costing him a chance to grill her on the important details or maybe even bargain a compromise out of this situation. He supposes he could try the same approach on his father, but he suspects the elder Mikage would be much less receptive to the idea.
After all, if he dealt with the situation himself, there wouldn’t be anything at all to tell Nagi in the end.
“I’m not getting married,” Reo declares when he enters his mother’s flat.
“Oh,” she says, glancing up from her phone. “Really? But you were so excited about it before.”
Reo opens his mouth. His mother’s words register in his mind, and his carefully planned speech dissolves on his tongue. He closes his mouth. He squints.
“E… excited?”
“I was telling your father I thought it was a bit early for this, to be honest,” Reo’s mother murmurs, seemingly to herself. “But you seemed so enthusiastic about the idea that I felt bad telling you to wait.”
Reo has never felt so lost in a conversation before.
“Uh…” He trails off. His mind is completely blank. He’s not used to losing control of a conversation, never mind this quickly, but nothing Reo’s mother is saying is making any sense. She must get bored of waiting for Reo to respond, because she turns back to her phone. Reo frantically wracks his mind to think of something, anything to ask that would make this situation make sense. “Who… was I excited to marry?”
“You know,” she says without looking up from her phone. “That Nagi boy.”
“Uh,” Reo says.
“Oh,” she muses to herself. “I guess I should start calling him Seishiro.”
“What,” Reo says.
Reo feels crazy. This entire conversation is crazy.
Reo’s mother must see that on his face when she looks up, because her eyebrows raise. “What, you don’t remember?”
“That you got me engaged to Nagi?” Reo croaks out.
Reo’s mother looks a bit bewildered at this question. “We didn’t do anything.” She tilts her head to the side. “That boy Nagi—Seishiro, I mean, proposed to you a few months ago, right? And you said yes, didn’t you? We’re only doing our duty as parents by helping arrange the engagement party.” She frowns. “Honestly, I thought you would have taken the initiative to plan that yourself.”
“Okay,” Reo says.
Reo’s mother blinks at him.
“Okay,” Reo repeats. “Okay. So, no. Nagi has not proposed to me. Um. What—” He cuts himself off. He presses a hand to his mouth and then lets it drop. “What. Gave you that impression.”
Reo’s mother’s expression is growing increasingly confused. “You… said it yourself, didn’t you? That he asked you to stay with him until the end. And you called it a promise.”
“That,” Reo starts. “That is not—that was not a proposal, uh—” He lets out a high-pitched, slightly panicked laugh. “Nagi—Nagi didn’t mean it like that. We’re—we’re not even dating?”
“Oh,” Reo’s mother says. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” she says again. She squints at Reo. “You two aren’t getting married?”
“N… no.”
“I… see,” she says carefully. “Um… right. Then, I… I have a lot of things to cancel. Excuse me.” She moves past Reo to the door, but she hesitates before leaving completely. “You’re… sure?”
“Very sure,” Reo chokes out.
“I see,” Reo’s mother says with a sigh. “That’s a shame.”
Yeah, Reo thinks distantly, it kind of is.
Reo retreats to his own floor after that, his mind still spinning. He intends to flop on his bed and spend the rest of the day spiraling in the comfort of his own room before dealing with the aftermath of all of that, but he doesn’t get much time to sulk before there’s a sharp series of knocks on his door. Reo rubs at his forehead when he hears the noise, already predicting that it’s his father coming to berate him for the wasted resources spent on planning an engagement party for him and Nagi.
For him and Nagi. God, at the very least, Reo had managed to kill this situation before the news got to him. Their relationship was barely back to normal, and Reo doesn’t even know how to begin explaining this situation to the other boy.
Another series of knocks, this time louder. Reo drops his hand from his forehead with a sigh and reluctantly trods out to the door with an apology on his tongue. As soon as he cracks the door open a sliver, though, it’s suddenly slammed open fully.
“What—”
“Are you engaged?”
“—the hell—oh.” Reo blinks. “Uh, hi, Nagi.”
“You’re engaged?”
“Ahahah,” Reo laughs awkwardly, leaning back a bit when Nagi leans forward. “How’d you, uh, find out?”
Nagi reaches into the pocket of his hoodie and presents to Reo a very wrinkled, slightly torn invitation with a cursive M as a seal. Reo winces. Of course, his parents would send an invitation for his engagement party to the person he was engaged to.
“Right,” Reo says slowly, trying to gauge how much of the situation Nagi was actually aware of. Nagi seems confused more than anything else, so Reo assumes he doesn’t know that he’s the one Reo’s allegedly engaged to. “Yeah, it’s a… long story. It’s okay, though, I called it off.”
Nagi pulls back a bit. “You called it off?”
“Yeah. So… don’t worry about it.”
“Why?”
Why do you care?, Reo wants to ask.
“My parents just… got the wrong understanding of something. It’s fine, it doesn’t matter.”
Nagi seems to grow more confused by this. God, what is he even doing here? Was the thought of Reo engaged to someone so horrible that he had to rush straight to Reo’s flat? As if Nagi would even care that much.
“But… who was Reo engaged to?”
Reo clears his throat. He could lie, but he’s pretty sure Nagi would find out the truth one way or another. Anyway, it wasn’t that big of a deal as long as Reo didn’t make it that big of a deal.
“You, actually.” He mentally pats himself on the back for sounding mostly nonchalant about it. “Isn’t that kind of funny?”
Nagi goes entirely and completely still. For a long few moments, he stares unblinkingly at Reo.
“...your parents thought we were engaged?”
Reo clears his throat again. “Yeah. Like I said, I cleared it up with them and called it off, though.”
“Why?”
Reo blinks. “Huh?”
“Why did you call it off?”
“Uh…” Reo laughs awkwardly. “I’m not really the type of guy to trap other people into marriage.”
If Reo didn’t know any better, he’d say Nagi almost looked disappointed at that sentiment. Before he can think about it for too long, though, Nagi speaks up again.
“So Reo doesn’t want to marry me?”
“What?” Reo’s eyebrows raise. “That’s… not what this is about.”
“Isn’t it?”
“What?” Reo says again with a laugh. “Nagi, you’re being weird. It’s not—it’s not that deep. My parents just misunderstood something you said and ran with it, and I just corrected them.”
“What did they say?”
“They thought you proposed to me,” Reo admits after a pause. “You know, back when we first joined Blue Lock. The whole… stay with me until the end?” He shakes his head. “It’s silly, I know.”
Nagi’s rapid fire questioning stops. Nagi stays quiet. Nagi stays noticeably quiet.
“That… wasn’t a proposal, right?”
Nagi continues to stay quiet.
“Right?”
“It could be,” Nagi blurts out finally. “If you wanted it to be.”
“If I wanted it to be,” Reo repeats faintly. “Um, Nagi, I don’t think you get what I’m saying. My parents think you were proposing to me. Like, you wanted to marry me. That type of proposal.”
“Yes,” Nagi agrees.
They wait. Neither of them speaks.
“That was a proposal?” Reo nearly shrieks when the silence grows too long. “You—what the hell? Nagi, we’re not even dating, you—you can’t just say these things—”
“I didn’t realize it was a proposal when I said it,” Nagi interrupts. He brings a hand to the back of his neck. “But, I guess that’s what staying with Reo until the end means.” Reo gapes at him. Nagi’s shoulders droop. “Does Reo not want that, too?”
“Of course I do,” Reo immediately blurts out. His mouth snaps shut after the words leave, and he looks away with a cough. “I just… I didn’t know you meant it like that. I thought it was just… you know.”
Nagi blinks at him. “So is the engagement back on?”
Reo lightly hits him on the shoulder. “Come on, isn’t that moving way too fast?”
“I proposed to you three months ago,” Nagi points out.
“Yeah,” Reo huffs fondly. “Six months after we met. That really isn’t too fast for you?”
“I want to stay with Reo until the end,” Nagi says stubbornly. “I knew that eight months ago, and I know it now.”
“Gosh,” Reo says, hooking his arms around Nagi’s shoulders. “You really like me, don’t you?”
Nagi gives him a flat, unimpressed look. Reo snickers.
“Don’t worry,” he murmurs before leaning forward. “I do, too.”