Chapter Text
Reo keeps his eyes on his phone as he walks, navigating UA with a practiced ease even while half distracted. The halls are filled with students that he weaves between, a mixed crowd of second and first years making their way towards classrooms. His gaze flickers up, checking for obstacles. His eyes catch on a face he doesn’t quite recognize instead, a passing student in the crowd.
Emerald hair and crinkled eyes, a constellation of freckles that litter smiling cheeks as he laughs with the person next to him. There’s starshine in that smile, viridian suns in those eyes. It’s a face that feels more familiar than it should. There’s a cosmic understanding here, that perhaps they must have known each other at some point, several universes ago. And for a moment their eyes meet, emerald and amber, like binary stars falling into orbit. But Reo’s gaze slides off him like opposing magnets, and so too does the boy’s pass over Reo— They fall out of orbit just as easily as they’d fallen in.
Two strangers brush shoulders as they pass and there’s an immediate sense of loss when they break apart. Neither look back, neither question the feeling for long.
The universe eases them away from one another— here, they are destined to be nothing more than they are now. Two passing comets, two faces in a crowd— Strangers until the next universe decides they should be something else.