Archive of Our Own

“I’ll be in New York next month,” his mother starts off with during one of their weekly telephone calls. “There’s a week-long conference I’m attending.”

 “Uh,” he replies. She’s speaking in a patchwork of Japanese and English, and the tonal shifts are muddling his brain. “Okay. That sounds fun?” Then, because he is beginning to detect the creeping note of determined, unequivocal expectation in her voice, he adds, “The holidays are starting, so I should be able to come over. I’ll be there to help out.”

“Hm,”she affirms, satisfied. “It’s not that I don’t trust your father, you know. He can take care of himself.”

“I know.”

“It’s just. To be sure.” She coughs. “I’ll be leaving on the eighth.”

“Got it.”

“You can bring that boy you were talking about, too, if you want. Take him sight-seeing. Eat nice food.”

Nijimura snorts into his coffee. Some of the beverage sloshes onto his keyboard, but he can’t bring himself to panic. “Right. Okay.”

“So it’s settled then. You figure out the flight details yourself. And don’t drink so much coffee—your hair’s going to fall out, and then this boyfriend of yours is going to run for the hills, and I’ll never get to see him.” His mother titters, hanging up before he can reply, and Nijimura has the deep, residual bemusement of one who has been overwhelmed on many fronts.

He tells Mayuzumi first. On hindsight, this reeks of a spur of a moment decision, but he dislikes doing things on a whim, so it really wasn’t; they’re roommates, and roommates are supposed to tell each other stuff if they were to survive another year in the same living space without throttling each other.

“I’m going back to Los Angeles in two weeks,” is what he begins with, matter-of-factly. He sticks the broom under the cabinet and pokes around with less than stellar sweeping technique.

There’s a rustle as Mayuzumi, splayed out on the floor with half his body stuck under the kotatsu, looks up from the pages of his latest light novel acquisition. “Oh,” he replies, eyes quickly flickering back down again. “Okay then.”

Nijimura wonders, not for the first time, if he’s supposed to feel as if he’d just been thoroughly dismissed, or if it’s his building irritation giving rise to an overactive imagination (he also wonders, not for the first time, if Mayuzumi resembles Akashi far more than the former would like to admit).

He straightens back up and pokes Mayuzumi’s exposed feet at the opposite end of the kotatsu with the broom handle. “Oi. Are you even listening? If the landlady comes by to start shit again, you’re the only one left to deal with it.”

Mayuzumi makes a grumbling noise from the back of his throat, and prods the broom away with his big toe. “You’re the one who argued with her about the heater. Not me. She likes me.”

“She tolerates you. You don’t even pretend that you’re not ignoring her whenever she’s here.”

Mayuzumi doesn’t glance back up, but Nijimura sees him roll his eyes and momentarily sport the look of one who’d throw his ten thousand yen limited edition figurine at Nijimura’s face, if it was the only thing within reaching distance.

Nijimura, to his credit, only sighs and runs a hand through his hair. He’d gotten it over and done with; if Mayuzumi died sometime in the midst of wallowing in 2D depravity while he was away, it was no longer under his jurisdiction.

He returns to sweeping. There’s a brief spell of peace, and then Mayuzumi looks up, as if hit by a sudden realisation, and faces him with the beginnings of a leer, the slow burn spread of a smirk patented and perfected down pat. “Hey,” he drawls, the most tonal variation heard from him all day. “Have you told Akashi yet?”

The irritation is immediate and instinctive. “None of your business,” Nijimura snaps, the line of his shoulders stiffening, and realises his mistake only when Mayuzumi’s eyes glint.

“You are so whipped,” he declares, very seriously, with a grin. Nijimura grimaces, but doesn’t react, and Mayuzumi is lucky his resolve to remain the better man is alive and kicking two years on.

He really does mean to tell Akashi sooner. It’s just—life got in the way, and when they did finally get more than a few minutes alone together, Akashi had seemed more preoccupied with systematically stripping him of his clothing than discussing travel plans. Enthusiasm had been the only reasonable way to respond to this development.

Maybe, maybe—and this Nijimura will acknowledge with the greatest reluctance—he might possibly be nervous. He’s not a coward—there’s nothing for him to be afraid of, really—and the words were simple in theory, but formation and execution became two unusually separate entities when it came down to it. Akashi Seijuurou, he knows from experience, has the remarkable ability of being able to send a vast number of things off-kilter with a great deal of carelessly concealed, self-serving smugness and very little effort.

If nothing else, it’s only their first, what, three months together? Some leeway should be given for a healthy dose of irrationality, he reasons (and tried to explain to Mayuzumi once, when they were both very drunk and feeling particularly embittered about the world. His roommate, ever encouraging, laughed until he puked).

So Nijimura finds himself staring up at the ceiling of Akashi’s apartment the week before his flight. It’s one in the morning, the fan creaking overhead is muffled by the patter of rain against the roof, and he’s not asleep. Episodes like these have occurred before; nights where his eyes were peeled open, unwilling, and wouldn’t shutter close, infrequent enough that he never saw the need for medication or doctors. There were worse ailments to suffer from.

He doesn’t keep track of how long he lies there, breathing shallow and body still. He’s jolted into movement only when Akashi shifts next to him.

The air’s bogged down by humidity and early summer rain, and the momentary feel of Akashi’s skin against his when he moves is sticky with sweat. Nijimura scoots closer to the edge of the bed to make room as Akashi kicks the blankets off, pushes himself halfway into a sitting position and rubs his face with both hands.

(There are parts of their lives they do not acknowledge, that Nijimura acknowledges their selective avoidance of, and it includes nights like these—where Nijimura lies in the same bed, under less than ideal circumstances; where he lies on his side, eyes closed, counts every rise-fall movement of the bed and taps the beats of Akashi’s breathing pattern on the fabric beneath him; where he traces circles into the cold notches of Akashi’s wrist, sometimes, when he doesn’t want to have to wait for Akashi to drift back to sleep.

And, see, Nijimura’s far from non-confrontational by nature, but he has both common sense and the fortune—or lack thereof, depending on who you asked—of falling for a man who forces people to overthink even the subtlest flicker in expression. So in the morning, he doesn’t ask why the dark smudged underneath Akashi’s eyes is more pronounced than usual. Akashi’s hands brush his as he reaches for the coffee, and they are not warm.)

Ghosting a hand over Akashi’s knee without thinking, Nijimura waits. Akashi’s breaths come out short and quick, and then ease into steadier inhales, not so much gulps of air as a simple, steady rhythm evening out to match Nijimura’s own. He huffs out something like a shaky exhale meshed with a laugh, wavery and wheezing—he still surprises, despite it all—then nudges Nijimura’s calf with a lightness so gentle, it almost feels calculated.

In the dark, he noticed, the colour of Akashi’s irises is washed out, glossed over behind fogged up glass he can touch but can’t quite decipher. He thinks of fire in the place of gold-sheened slate, and does not try very hard.

“Mayuzumi informed me that you’re going to Los Angeles, next week,” Akashi says.

“Oh.” Huh. He rolls over to face him, trying to decide if he should finally butcher Mayuzumi in his sleep, or thank him, or do both one after the other—heaven knows they all needed the occasional catharsis—but he settles on the latter when Akashi lifts a hand and cards it through Nijimura’s hair. It’s a soothing feeling. “I mean, yeah. To Los Angeles.” He shrugs. “Mum needs me there—”

“You’re a surprisingly responsible son.”

“Right? Don’t make fun of me.” He pokes him playfully in the side, and grins when the corners of Akashi’s lips curl. “Tell me to take care, at the very least.”

Akashi’s fingers thread through his hair once, twice; the skin of his scalp tickles. “How needy,” he murmurs. “You can take care of yourself without me reminding you, Nijimura Shuuzou.” When Akashi tucks a strand behind his ear and lets his hand fall, he finds himself sorely missing the contact.  

“Humour me,” he insists, and Akashi laughs, and hums a whisper, lowly, in his ear.

Nijimura squints up at the flight schedules displayed above him, and wants to make some comment on shrinking airport screen sizes and the whittling away of taxpayers’ money (wants to hear Akashi make snide remarks about his eyesight, and look at him beatifically when he opens his mouth to retort) but he can barely hear himself think through the chatter. He squints some more.

“Your flight is departing in an hour,” Akashi supplies, when he has stood there staring at the departure schedule for a questionable period of time. “Going through customs now would be advisable.”

Nijimura startles slightly, fumbling with his boarding pass and almost dropping it entirely. He can feel the flush creeping up his neck, reddening his ears and the sweep of his jawline; he coughs and adjusts his jacket collar. Akashi’s lips are pressed together, the raise of his eyebrows almost unnoticeable, and recognition blooms—they’ve sat through enough bad Saturday night television for him to tell when Akashi’s doing his best not to laugh. 

Embarrassment seeping through his indignation, he tries to straighten out the fresh creases in his boarding pass with a frown. The paper stays crumpled. “Right,” he says shortly.  “My last flight here wasn’t that long ago. I know what to do. ”

Akashi’s mouth is a thin, even line. “I am aware.” He reaches out to fold Nijimura’s coat collar back down, steps back, and then taps on his upper lip, just a little bit forceful. “Don’t make a face.” 

The departure hall is a few hundred metres away; quick strides. How had he done this, the last time? Hassled goodbyes—he hardly remembers those, now—and the clumsy unreality that came with ten thousand feet leaps into the clouds and a taste of hope, bitter, at the back of his throat. This is different, he knows; there’s nothing urgent left behind on either end, no spaces left gaping where others had to be forced full. This time, Akashi’s movements are prim, deft, eyes gleaming red-gold, sharp flames and burnished metal and warm and sparking—Nijimura admits, decisively (and a bit forlornly), I’m being kind of stupid. 

He leans in and kisses Akashi, a chaste, dry pressing of lips together. Akashi’s eyelashes flutter, but his eyes stay open; around them, people try not to stare.

Nijimura pulls away. “I’ll be back in a week.”

Akashi blinks, shifts the pieces of his expression back into a collected whole in the entire span of that action. His hands are steady. There's no flush to his skin. Nijimura, for once that day, is unsurprised.

Akashi clears his throat. “Give your family my best.” And he smiles then, small, cold metal rather than fire, but Nijimura takes comfort in how it almost reaches his eyes. 

He’s not fifteen anymore, so he takes a cab from the airport to the apartment building, speaking decent enough English to be sure he isn’t getting conned out of taxi fare. The security guard mumbles something to him as he passes through the lobby, and he keeps his head down and pretends not to hear; he’s never had a good grasp of the language in the first place, but now he has an extra three years of pitiful usage and a boyfriend who read Steinbeck untranslated but knows zilch about conversational English to add to that.

Nijimura lugs his luggage up the stairs and digs around in his pockets for the key. Inside, his father is hunched over a vacuum and muttering to himself, back bent at an angle far too sharp for Nijimura’s liking. He winces involuntarily and tries to simultaneously shove his luggage to the corner and wrangle his shoes off at the same time.

He trips sideways into a wall. “Oi, old man! Stop doing that.”

Upon hearing the commotion, his father straightens up. “Ah.” His eyes narrow. “Excellent. The prodigal son is back.”

Nijimura stuffs his shoes onto the shoe rack, wedged above his siblings’ mud-crusted sneakers, and tries to look more offended than he actually is. “A prodigal son wouldn’t help with faulty household appliances. Give that to me.”

The vacuum is bulky, and old, and for all appearances long past expiration, but Nijimura tries: he shakes it a bit, kicks it forcefully, and nudges the buttons with his feet. It stays tenaciously quiet. “Just buy a new one already.”

“You’re an adult. Learn to be frugal,” his father scoffs, but the curve of his mouth is soft and relaxed, almost lilting upwards; experience wisens, and Nijimura has only begun to pick up on these cues over time.

He gives Nijimura a once-over. Nijimura feels like he’s in middle school all over again, reckless and stupid and well looked after with warm brashness and the occasional punch. “How’s school?”

“Okay,” Nijimura replies, scratching his chin when he’s levelled with a flat look. “I’ll graduate,” he amends. And then amends again, “Pretty easily, I think. No worries there.”

His father remains unimpressed, but lets it go; his son could come up with an effective basketball game plan in half the time it took for him to do high school math problems, and he’s long learnt to take it in stride.  “There’s fried rice in the microwave. Eat if you haven’t had lunch.” He begins to shuffle away to the kitchen, but pauses. Turning, he looks at his son, and then pats him on the shoulder, quick and brusque. “Welcome home,” he says.

There’s more white peppering his hair now, Nijimura notices, more than the last time he’d seen him. Wrinkles, too; the past few years, difficult, have aged him, and he tires easily now, but his eyes do not. They’re still unrelentingly sincere, and he’d been redeemed by those eyes, once—he still is, sometimes. His father has changed very little, familiar ground on foreign land.

“I’m back,” he replies. His arm is released with a brief, fleeting smile.

That night, he sends Akashi a picture of his old room, with the yellowing sports posters peeling off the ceiling, and his brother’s books crammed everywhere except a two inch strip of walking space left for him to struggle through.

Quaint, Akashi messages back.

Alone, in the dark, a grin flickers across his face unbidden. The sprawling penthouse apartment will not be missed.

I’m sure.

When he first starts going to the same international school as Himuro, they talk basketball. A lot. Professional NBA matches, local street games, Japanese middle school basketball—Himuro is pleasant, but it’s when he’s talking about the game that his face really lights up. An easy starting point, then, and at sixteen, Nijimura misses being easily charmed.

It’s through Himuro that he is able to watch the old Teikou matches. Akashi tells him about it too, of course, curled around and against him on the couch, in the car on the drive home from dinner, under the covers after sex—he touches his lips to the curve of Nijimura’s neck, in the hollow of his collarbone, and murmurs as if he could convey emotions through the humming vibrations of skin against skin, with only concerted, doctrinaire determination.

Watching it for himself is different. The camerawork is shoddy, the players blips on the court, but the tapes make a different part of his heart sink in a way words cannot.  

“You regret not staying in Los Angeles?” Himuro asks him during their ritual meet up, over cheap booze and chips and Alex snoring loudly on his lap (the apartment is theirs, and Kagami’s too, when he’s not busy in Japan—Nijimura infers but doesn’t pry). “I’ve always thought you’d have had a lot less trouble if you just didn’t go back.”

“What? To Japan? I’m not the type of guy to do stuff based on convenience, no matter how lowly you seem to think of me.” Nijimura sips at his beer and mourns; too much expensive champagne dulled the taste-buds. He eyes Himuro. “Besides, you’re one to talk.”

Himuro laughs.

(And Akashi, Akashi whispers thoughtfully, too prone to overthinking post-coitus, “I was never cut out for royalty, anyway.” And Nijimura tells him, “I know,” but they had both been there at the beginning. He hadn’t known. The suitability of posture to a crown is only very easily determined on hindsight.

This is all in the past.)

“Busy?” Nijimura asks when he picks up; he does not think.

There’s a furiously persistent rustling in the background—books, newspapers, paper to abuse; no typing sounds. Not busy, then, Nijimura reconsiders as Akashi snips back, irritably, “If you have to ask, then it should already be evident.”

His voice is meaner than he might have intended, serrated, salient angles sharper than usual. This is unusual—time has not acquainted Akashi with overt sentimentality, but it wears him down, smoothens out the surface and hews the edges down to a gentler, less painful bluntness—but it is not unexpected. Occurrences are infrequent, and if they occur, better hidden. This is not unexpected, but it is sudden.

Three months; another first, then. Nijimura keeps silent, and lets Akashi speak. Akashi does not take him up on the offer; they remain in a sort of unsettlingly quiet, pointless stalemate, and then Akashi ends it with an exhale, his breath a tremor across the line. ”I—I’ll call you back,” he says.

“Okay,” he responds, and waits. Akashi breathes out again, sharply, once, before he cuts the call.

Wednesdays here are uneventful. His siblings attend supplementary class, and his father goes for, of all things, community club meditation lessons. Himuro is busy, and once he is deemed not an option, Nijimura reaches the bottom of this list.

He vacuums the whole apartment, sorts and folds the clean laundry, and then sits down beside a stack of old tabloid magazines. Every one word out of eight is unfamiliar, and he muddles up the dictionary definitions his phone gives him after two sentences, so he abandons the task and flops back onto the floor to stare up at the ceiling fan. Continents away, and familiarity’s still a comforting feeling.   

Akashi would be asleep at this time. Or should be; his voice had sounded strained when Nijimura had called last night, stretched thin by lack of proper sleep. Experience told Nijimura that Akashi would rather work through fraying ends and collect himself back together afterwards, when everything was settled; he was good at it. Somewhere along the way, Nijimura had ceased trying to correct that.

Remembering last night, there’s a feeling that rises in his stomach, sharp and prickling against the dream-like numbness of boredom.

Who else can he bother? There's Mayuzumi, but time zones are still a thing; the last time he accidentally woke the guy up, coffee spilled on his favourite jeans, and he was posed the challenge of operating a washing machine when the guy in charge of laundry was stonewalling you and refusing to direct you to the washing powder.

He’s probably getting laid, the bastard, Nijimura thinks, and reaches for his phone.

“What?”

Mayuzumi sounds uncharacteristically awake when he picks up, which is a surprise.  Still, the two of them make ‘getting inexplicably pissed off at each other for no justifiable reason’ an art form. “What ‘what’?” Nijimura says. In the background, he hears the sound of a toilet flushing, and bristles. “Th—What the hell. Do you have someone over?”

“Not all of us have the luxury of hooking up in an honest to God penthouse suite on a regular basis. And it’s that really cute girl I was telling you about. The exchange student? Looks a bit like Aragaki Yui, but with a smaller no—”

“You just had sex. In our apartment.”

“I just got dirty talked to—in Hokkien—in our apartment.”

“I’m pretty sure we had an unspoken agreement about this.”

“…There’s a first time for everything.”

Nijimura closes his eyes in exasperation, and envisions Mayuzumi rolling his eyes eight thousand kilometres away. It wasn’t a boring image, at least. “I’m hanging up.”

“Seriously?” Mayuzumi starts to practically leer over the telephone line. Nijimura has gotten tired of the conversation already, and lets him. “Didn’t you call to ask about Akashi? I’m the designated babysitter of the week, after all.”

Nijimura doesn’t even bother replying to that, because. Well. Perhaps he did call to ask about Akashi, subconsciously—he certainly can’t ask the guy himself, not now, when the tension in his fingers hasn’t quite subsided enough. Besides, there’s no one else he knows to pester.

(And he admits to himself that there’s no one else, because it’s a unique experience, being with Akashi, and this is a world where Nijimura has grown to love him dearly for it—but when he’d introduced him to Mayuzumi unwittingly, seen the hackles raised and grey eyes shuttered like steel, his first thought had been there’s something no one’s bothered to tell me, and then, without meaning to, I don’t know this man at all.

Now they’re past the initial stages of careful stepping around and prodding experimentally into place, and he doesn’t tell anybody this, but if he ever feels as if he’s going around in circles, three steps forward and two back, he swallows the meandering and plods along anyway. It’s why, even when the details have been laid out to him concretely, both revealing and prosaic, he’s never really asked Akashi, explicitly, why the colour of his eyes seem duller under certain angles of light. Answers are a gradual process. A one week trip to Los Angeles isn’t changing that.)

Mayuzumi, for all his dubiousness, is a perceptive man. “You know,” he hums; the girl who looks like Aragaki Yui with a smaller nose turns on the shower in the background. “If you miss him, just talk to him yourself. I’m single precisely because I don’t want any of this drama.”

 “Don’t you guys meet up sometimes, anyway? It’s not like I’m not asking you to run a marathon.”

“I can run marathons just fine, you hack.”

“You know what I mean.” The drumming of water on tiles stops. Nijimura tries to imagine how dirty talking in Hokkien would even go, and really, really wants to hang up.

“The whole of the old Rakuzan team meet up. For, like, weird-ass matches that Reo suggested when he was incredibly, out-of-this-universe drunk, and thought 'catching up' with the rest of us would be a good idea. It wasn't. They're awkward as hell." Mayuzumi clicks his tongue. "Oh, that's an idea—why don't you go ask Reo? Much more partial to babysitting former manchildren with questionable god complexes than I am, believe m—"

"Fuck off," he says, hangs up, and falls asleep in the middle of the floor.

He wakes up to three messages from Mayuzumi.

Mayuzumi: Sorry. I couldn’t help myself. It was kinda funny.
Mayuzumi: I mean, honestly.
Mayuzumi: The way it’s turning out, it’s like a really bad romance subplot. Contrived, with drama shoehorned in for effect.
Mayuzumi: Your relationship is becoming one giant clusterfuck of bad writing. Or maybe it already was one? Who knows.
Mayuzumi: Don’t feel too sad, though. I can empathise.
Nijimura: if this is your way of apologising, i’m deleting my phone

Nijimura goes back to sleep.

His father has an appointment at the pharmacist, and his siblings, normally agreeable but never less than opportunistic, decide to tentatively dig their heels in. They succeed—Nijimura bundles his father into a taxi, locates the nearest ATM and delegates himself with entertaining the kids.

Entertainment means treating them to ice cream, and then their movie tickets, and their bowling alley trip; he turns away during the latter, and one of them (exactly who was a sticking point between the two) drops the ball prematurely and hits a chair with a sickening crack. He pays for that too.

Afterwards, his sister wins at janken and drags them across town in search of lobster rolls for dinner. “You reek of tourist,” Nijimura grumbles, and she sticks her tongue out at him in return.

He’s not too fond of seafood, or mayonnaise, and certainly not together—neither is his brother, who abandoned them back at the bowling alley (guilt, his sister insists)—but he’s also a healthy college-going young man with a stomach of proverbial steel, as well as too much experience maximising the latter. It looks decent, anyway, chunks of bright orange-red peeking out between the bread. Edible enough.

He takes a bite. Mayonnaise dribbles down his chin.

There’s a vibration from his back pocket, violent and abrupt, as he leans forward to reach for a napkin; he nearly drops his roll fumbling for his phone. His sister, in recalling the reflexes of Nijimura’s better days, flings the sole remaining napkin at his face in the hopes that he can catch it. It lands on the floor in the ensuing disarray.  

When he returns from grabbing more paper napkins off the counter, he finds that she has taken the opportunity to pounce on his phone. “Who’s this? Boyfriend?”

“What? No, why are y—oi.”

She hums, looks up to meet his glare with an innocent batting of eyelashes, and her fingers don’t stop flying across the keys. Nijimura feels inexplicably dated. “His hair’s the colour of our food.”

“What are you doing.”

“It’s okay,” she consoles. “The red takes getting used to, but his face is quite nice. Very distinguished. It’s all in the nose, I think.” In another world, Nijimura would quite readily agree, would allow her to freely prod at his love life, might even offer up credible judgement on Akashi’s facial features; in this one, he purses his lip and plucks the phone out of her hands before she can protest.

The first message, from Akashi: Good evening. We should talk. And then a string of messages sent from his phone, many bordering on mild harassment—Who are you? Are you my brother’s boyfriend? Does he still talk in his sleep?—and capped off with a penultimate selfie, peace sign and wink and Nijimura’s mounting embarrassment included.  “I asked him if I was pretty,” she explains, preening.

Nijimura puts his head on the table. “You’re shameless.”

“Well, you’re pathetic, so you’re never going to invite him over to shame me. And it’s a test.”  A buzz. “There, he replied. Let me see.” She reaches out, but he sits up and leans back to circumvent the swipe of her hand before he unlocks his phone.

I think you look exceptional, he reads. It’s a painful read. The urge to laugh weighs evenly against the urge to cry.

If you’re going to sound so awkward doing it, don’t humour my sister, he replies. There’s a beat of non-activity, two—Nijimura can imagine Akashi, distinguished nose wrinkling, attempting to form a response that doesn’t immediately convey galled derision.

He manages. Awkwardness is relative. Besides, someone who once remarked, when asked for an opinion, that Chopin sounded like he was composing whilst high on LSDs has no right to critique my compliments.

I answered honestly.

And with very little basis. Your musical sense is atrocious.

 “Your face looks weird,” his sister points out, the tips of her fingers pressed to her lips. He realises he’s biting down a smile and has to resentfully agree.

Later that night, he calls Akashi. “You don’t date me for my taste in music, I hope.”

“No, I do not. You’re a lucky man.” Nijimura snickers and Akashi clicks his tongue. They linger there for a moment, comfortably secure; this part of Los Angeles is blessedly quiet tonight, and he revels in it—both the quiet, and the not-harsh sounds of Akashi’s breathing.

“I didn’t mean to snap at you the other day,” Akashi starts again, and hesitates. “My—family business came up. I was high-strung, and it was uncalled for.”

Nijimura blinks. His fingers might tremble a little where he clutches the phone. “It’s fine. I could’ve handled it better.”

“Don’t fault yourself. It’s unmerited, and you’re making it difficult to apologise.” There’s a pause; Akashi laughs, loud, a short, bright exhale through his teeth. “I was intending to do this by email,” he says, ruefully. “So you could take a screenshot of the conversation, for posterity’s sake, and neither of us would be subjected to this ever again.”

Nijimura recovers. “Neither of us? I’m here all night if you want to elaborate.” Akashi laughs again, quiet and airy, this time more suited to champagne glass parties than brittle late night phone calls. Nijimura realises that he doesn’t mind; tone and meaning do not often correspond (he has learnt this in three months, and intends to learn beyond that.) “I—thank you.”

“You don’t typically thank people for apologising,” Akashi points out.

“But I want to. Thank you,” he repeats, and—

—and when he hangs up, he allows himself to smile. There’s an inexplicable lightness in his chest, a weight clinging to his lungs like film—ignored, yellowing—now peeling off, and he doesn’t quite get it, but it’s as if they’re progressing in a linear direction, finally, one circle down.

Not finally, he tells himself. It’s just clearer now, somehow. Still going round in loops, that never quite ends, but things like this, you learn to take in stride—small strides—and not everything has changed, but not everything is different, either. Forget crowns; there’s comfort in this. It’s a worthwhile endeavour, isn’t it?

Alone, in the dark, he agrees.

Two days before he goes back to Japan, he’s helping with dinner when the doorbell rings; his sister answers the door and, without warning, screams. Nijimura drops the ladle he's holding.

“She’s dead,” his brother quips, calmly peeling onions. “Newly deceased. Bury her now while we still can.”

“Aren’t you helpful,” Nijimura gripes, and walks out to investigate.

There are few things he expects to see, and a few he doesn’t, the latter of which largely comprises of: a) His sister, face in hands, the very picture of mortification, and b) Akashi Seijuurou standing right outside the door.

He sees both, of course, such is his life; Akashi, who has insofar been standing there with a slight furrow in his forehead and a rigid curve to his shoulders—and it’s rare, to witness him so visibly out of place—relaxes when he sees him. His sister spins around, wretched, and hisses, “You did this on purpose.”

“I startled her,” Akashi explains. The smile on his face is usually reserved for the small children of important businessmen it would be inconvenient to offend, but he does look less tense.

This does nothing for Nijimura’s escalating bemusement. “How did you—” he starts to say, and then shakes his head. “Okay, wait. First of all, why?”

“I’m going to leave,” His sister says, and shuffles off, voice muffled behind her hands. Akashi’s smile slips off, slow and careful, but he watches her retreat with a pleasant sort of amusement.

“Your siblings seem nice,” he comments lightly.

Nijimura scoffs. “Nicer in person, you mean. Wait until you meet the other one.” He leans his weight against the doorframe with a sigh, takes in Akashi—clothes immaculately prim, the back of his hair sticking out just slightly. Nijimura reaches out to smooth his hair back down, and his fingers curl through easily, strands coarser than they look against the pads of his fingers. Akashi—the person, not the idea or the ideal—is real and immediate. “Don’t look so self-satisfied while you’re avoiding my question.”

“I’m doing no such thing.” The corners of his eyes soften, barely; a flash of white teeth, and then lips pressed tight in the ghost of a grin. “Maybe I merely wanted to see you?”

“You dropped everything to board a ten hour flight, unannounced, just to see me.”

“Flattered?”

“Very,” Nijimura admits readily, ruffles his hair—and there’s a glint to Akashi’s eyes at that, though he makes no movements. He hesitates. “And the thing you were busy with?”

There’s a pause; Akashi looks up at him, lips parting—Nijimura’s hand stills—and then, like gliding on ice, “I talked to my father.”

“Oh.” The father that rarely made it into any functional, efficacious conversation of theirs. The father that Nijimura would really like to tell to shove off, if given the chance and sufficient etiquette deficiency.

Akashi takes his unmoving wrist in hand, holds it loosely. His fingers are neither warm nor cold; lukewarm. “It wasn’t an urgent matter, so I delegated it to someone else. He was…fairly amiable to my decision.”

“Amiable,” Nijimura echoes.

“He acquiesced,” Akashi concedes. “And if he had not, it would not have mattered either way. The company will be my responsibility in the future, but on my own terms, not his.” He frowns, slightly, and lifts Nijimura’s hand up; his lips are cold where they press into the inner dip of his wrist (or, Nijimura realises with a shudder, his own skin is too warm). “I wanted to see you,” Akashi repeats, staring up at Nijimura from underneath his lashes.

Akashi’s eyes burn; Nijimura looks into them and remembers that he has seen shooting stars only once before, the same year he’d given up his captaincy to Akashi—the year where hope was eased into with little second thoughts and no fanfare (and, only later, a semblance of regret).

It’s a good memory. Not wholly feel-good on hindsight, not in its entirety, but good. He’s glad to recall it.

“Alright,” he says with the beginnings of a smile, just as his sister pokes her head out of the kitchen. Akashi lets go of his hand.

“Dad wants to tell you to invite your boyfriend in,” she informs them, having recovered from her earlier embarrassment (and recovering her lack of propriety along with it). “He’s making extra curry.”

“The proper kind,” his father calls out, on cue. He would only ever raise his voice for misbehaving children, or food. “It’s spicy!”

 “It’s spicy,” she parrots. “Also, your bed’s a single, so he recommends booking a hotel room if you guys are going to do anything funny.” She peers at Akashi’s expensive button down and slacks. “A fancy one, probably.”

“We are not—he did not say that.” Nijimura feels his face heating up.

“I did leave my luggage at the Ritz-Carlton,” Akashi interjects, mildly entertained. She perks up, pleased, and Nijimura wants to grouse about not encouraging her, but the shallow upwards arc of Akashi’s lips makes the words sputter and fizzle out in his throat. One circle down.

The smell of curry wafts from the kitchen. He sticks his hands in his pockets and gestures down the corridor. “C’mon, I’ll introduce you to Dad. You like curry, right?”

Akashi’s eyes are bright; his smile is tiny and crooked. “The sweet variant, unfortunately.”

“Oh. Well, same enough.” He shrugs and turns around, walks towards the kitchen. Behind him, Akashi follows.

(He looks back only once, to make sure.)