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"Want to go for a ride before class?"
"Heh, like I've got anything better to do."
By the time Arakita had thrown off his shirt and vest and dived into his locker for his jersey, Kinjou was only just putting his bookbag away. They didn't really have enough time to go riding -- a few laps around the campus at best, maybe up the nearest hill and back -- but they were going to do it anyway, even if they only had a few minutes.
Zipping up the front of his jersey, Arakita looked back over his shoulder at his fellow first year to find him still hoodied and buried deep in his locker. His prescription racing shades had been laid out and then left unattended on an otherwise empty workbench.
Arakita's eyes flicked from the glasses up to the back of Kinjou's head.
Kinjou, his classmate, his boss's old rival, the wildcard-playing magician who'd stuck a first-year climber on his team and stolen the Inter-High away from Hakone Gakuen's three years of hard work, was muted mustard seed. Not in color, physically, it was more his texture. When Kinjou spoke, the air seemed to slow down to match the rhythm of his voice, deliberate, oaky, absolutely unhurried.
Arakita had assumed he was going to hate that about him. When he didn't, he'd looked instead for why that fact irritated him, and came up empty as well. Kinjou was yellowed paperbacks and hand-me-down leather jackets, the scuffed old playing cards he would slip between his fingers and then somehow pull from Arakita's breast pocket. The knot of scar tissue Arakita sometimes saw in the showers after practice, ghosting like water rivulets down dark and hardened muscle.
Kinjou tended to do things in a set order, at a set speed. He wasn't slow, exactly; he was actually very efficient, Arakita had realized after a couple weeks of watching him. It was just that it was impossible to rush him. If you could take the solid block of iron that made up Fuku-chan, hammer it into something with a wicked edge and a diffused gleam, then leave it in a poorly-trafficked antique shop for a few decades, you would have Kinjou Shingo, Snake of the Stone Path. He had angled shiba inu eyebrows, a soul older than even his old man face, and a laugh that tingled along the back of Arakita's neck.
("It sounds like synaesthesia," Toudou had said, snapping closed her intro psychology textbook.
"Sin-as… what?" Arakita's lip curled. "You're makin' that up."
"Arakita, it's a real thing! You should try googling something before opening that awful mouth of yours. No one's sense of smell is that good. Your brain just crossed a few wires somewhere and now you taste colors or something."
"Bullshit, most colors are bland as hell.")
Glasses hung on to a human's scent very well, especially the temples and around the bridge of the nose, where they had the most contact with the skin. Even if a person were fastidious about their glasses and cleaned them constantly, the scent would hang on them much longer than on clothing, the metal or rubber or whatever soaking up oils and sweat and dead skin acting like some kind of pointy information sponge. Arakita had once nicked a kouhai's reading specs and only had to hold them up to his nose to tell the kid was thinking of cheating on his next exam. Humans, when they think a thing hard enough, share their thoughts through every pore.
Kinjou's shades were not meant to be worn by anyone who just picked them up. They were prescription, same as his regular glasses, and when Arakita slipped them into place and pushed them up his nose his vision swam out of focus, falling into a red haze of distorted geometries. But the scent hit Arakita like an adrenaline shot to his heart.
The texture of his sweat. The darting undernotes of old traumas, like freshly mowed grass jabbing at the bare soles of his feet. Yakisoba with oil-sodden laver dissolving between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Everything was there, every pound of Kinjou's overtaxed heart and body-wracked shudder pushing down pedal after pedal, rotation after rotation, up hills and across asphalt. Wavering heat-streak images of split-second decisions, every tear and drop of blood spilled for three Inter-High summers, and Kinjou certainly had spilled more than most.
Power like a loosely coiled muscle. Carefully mediated confidence, a lime-green sprig of boyish humor, Arakita didn't know why he hadn't expected that one. Magicians are people-readers, social engineers to a fault, high in empathy and curiosity, and Kinjou's scent up close like this was tart and acrid, with an underlying full-bodied smoke that settled deep within the lungs. Heavily masculine, not like Fuku-chan's exactly, there was that edge again, the buzzing on the tip of Arakita's tongue like, like--
"Kinjou."
He saw the back of his classmate's head begin to turn.
In that moment Arakita soaked in every bit of Kinjou's scent that his glasses could confer. He felt his backbone transubstantiate into steel, the liquid self-assurance rising to his throat as he allowed Kinjou's bastard wickedness to take over, just for a second, just to play, open mouth pulling into a grin right as Kinjou's expression faltered into alarm.
"These aren't half bad!"