Work Text:
"Yo! Your hair is really bad."
This is the first thing Mitsu's new neighbour says to him. The kid is dangling from the top of their shared garden wall, scabby elbows and a toothy grin. Mitsu is nearly thirteen, old enough to know that kids are a pain but young enough to rise to the bait.
"At least I haven't got things stuck in mine," he points out, abandoning the flowers he was supposed to be deadheading and folding his arms.
Tugging at one of the threadbare feathers stuck in his wild locks, the kid sticks his tongue out.
"It's on purpose," he says seriously. "I'm fashionable."
"No you're not."
"How would you know?"
Mitsu can hear his mother singing to herself as she does the dishes in the kitchen. He's supposed to be fixing the garden. Instead, he runs a hand through his new trendy hairstyle and smirks.
"Because I'm older than you."
The kid considers. He has impossibly wide golden eyes and a far-off expression, putting Mitsu in mind of a small animal. He slips slowly down until those eyes and the straggled feathers are all that can be seen.
"Not by much though," the kid says at length. "You're twelve."
"How did you-"
"I'm six."
"That's half of-"
"So when you're thirty I'll be twenty four."
"What has that got to do with-"
"Whatcha doing to those flowers?"
The kid's hitched himself back up and is leaning forwards, bare feet kicking up at the sky.
"Dead-heading." Mitsu reconsiders before he can be asked any questions. "Giving them a haircut."
"Can I help?"
Before he can answer the kid is over the wall and has stolen his scissors.
"We just moved in," he announces. "You're Mitsu. Our moms are gonna be best friends."
Apparently their moms talk too much. Resigning himself to having to put up with the little critter, he holds out a hand.
"Yeah? What's your name?"
"Taikogane Sadamune."
"All right, Taiko-chan," Mitsu says, turning to the flowerbed. "First you have to-"
"Mom calls me that. Pick something else."
"Taiko-kun?"
"Dad calls me that."
"...Sada-chan?"
He visibly brightens. For such a pushy kid his moonlike chubby face is adorable when he's happy. Mitsu just knows he'll get away with murder.
"Then you'll be Micchan! Do I cut the petals off?"
And so it's decided. They only lose a handful of blooms before they're both called inside for lunch.
"Your handwriting is really messy."
Mitsu is fourteen and being insulted by an eight-year-old. They've been friends long enough now that he knows not to take it personally.
"It's because I'm rushing," he explains, setting one for worksheet aside and picking up the next.
"You never used to be late with your homework."
Sada is stretched out on Mitsu's bedroom floor, his own school exercises finished. For the past hour he's been doodling on the back page of a work book, mostly superheroes with excessively flashy capes. He's turning out to be pretty good at arts and crafts, having come a long way since butchering the flowers, and Mitsu sometimes lets him colour the diagrams for his geography homework.
"Did you start hating school ‘cause you think it's cool?" Sada asks.
"No. Who gave you that idea?"
"Mom said all teenagers hate everything because they think it's cool to be angry."
"Your mom has some wild theories, doesn't she?"
"But you got that haircut because you said it was cool. And those jeans. And that punk rock album. And-"
"I don't hate school," he says firmly. "Here, want to colour this chart for me?"
"Can it be pink?"
Mitsu manages not to wince.
"Sure."
"All right!"
Pink is definitely not cool and his friends are definitely going to laugh. They already laugh at him for hanging out with a kid so much and for living with just his mom. He'd not minded until they insulted a doodle Sada had left on the back of his workbook and wouldn't back down until fists had started flying. It's not a big deal, he thinks, and he didn't get any visible bruises.
It's a standard week. He watches Sada colouring and resolves for the hundredth time not to tell him that the reason he hasn't done his homework is because he's been out with friends after school, trying to look cool, jeering at other gangs and fighting among themselves when they get bored. It's cool, sure, but he doesn't want to get the kid involved. Sada has enough trouble with his parents without having stories to tell about fistfights.
"Micchan?"
"Yeah?"
"Think my mom'll let me wear a cape?"
Sada is bright and full of ideas. Mitsu has already decided he won't let anyone change that.
"Yo! Your window's really high, give me a hand!"
It's eleven at night and Mitsu is pulling Sada into his bedroom over the windowsill. He had been on the phone to the cute girl he sits next to in science class but this is more important. Firstly because Sada has a strict curfew and his brothers are sent to get him if he's late by even a minute. Secondly because the almost ten year old is carrying a battered suitcase. Something is wrong.
"Can I sleep here tonight?"
Mitsu slides the window shut and gives Sada's reflection a once over before answering. He's in jeans and a thick puffy coat, clothes that can weather the cold, and his hair is wild but free from the decorative feathers he still sticks in it. More striking is the way he sits down and curls in on himself, missing his usual smile and energy. Sada loves attention. He doesn't sneak around or ask permission. Something is very, very wrong.
"Of course you can," Mitsu answers with a careful smile, sitting on the bed as well. "What's up?"
"I'm leaving home."
At fifteen, Mitsu has said the same words more than once. The difference is that he has always had a destination in mind, a father and brothers to dream of. Sada's whole family is on the other side of the wall.
"Oh yeah? When are you coming back?"
"Never."
Sada's voice is thick with misery and he drops his head to hide against his knees. Mitsu places a hand on the back of his head and gives his hair a ruffle.
"You can't do that."
"Why not?"
"I'd miss you too much."
It's kind enough that Sada starts crying and the whole story comes out between sobs of frustration.
The Sadamunes have clear plans for the future of their sons. Sada's own ideas just don't fit. He likes fashion and drama and music, all of which he's been told are useless, and he's only nine. Mitsu's heart is softer than he lets on to his friends and it hurts to watch Sada cry like this.
"How about this," he says when the words have run out and Sada is sniffling into a tissue. "When you're old enough to leave home, I'll help you run away."
"We can run away together?"
It's not quite what he'd meant but it's close enough. He nods and Sada blows his nose loudly.
"Can I still sleep here tonight?"
“Of course.”
He tucks himself against Mitsu's side during the night, one hand clutching at his shirt.
"Yo."
Wincing at the sudden noise, Mitsu drops his weekend bag in surprise.
"You're really bad at sneaking."
Sada is hanging out of his bedroom window, eyes narrowed and voice low. It's way past his bedtime, near four in the morning, and Mitsu can guess why he's awake. His ears are still ringing with the sounds of his own mother shouting.
"Sorry," he whispers, inching closer to the window and hoisting his bag back over his shoulder. "I didn't mean to wake you."
He offers a smile but he can see that Sada isn't buying it. For a ten-year-old he's surprisingly shrewd.
"What happened to your eye?"
Mitsu touches a hand to the compress the emergency room had given him, the bandage winding around his head, and his smile falls.
"I tripped up," he lies.
"Right. And what about your hands?"
His hands sting and ache, knuckles still caked in blood.
"They broke my fall."
"Right. Micchan, what's going on?"
It's not like it's a secret anymore. His mother had shouted loud enough to wake the dead. Gang violence. She had spat the words out as if she understood and wouldn't look at him even as he tried to explain that he'd only ever been in a few fist fights, it wasn't serious, he doesn't know why that guy came at him with a knife this time, he doesn't want to be a criminal.
It's the truth, too. It's why he can't bring himself to tell Sada what's been going on. Not yet.
"I don't like your friends you know," Sada says when it becomes clear that Mitsu isn't going to answer.
"Neither do I."
"You should hang out with me instead."
"I know."
But it isn't cool to hang around with someone so much younger, some kid who gets into trouble for liking musicals not because of anything worth breaking the rules for. Mitsu regrets ever having believed any of that matters. He has one real friend and he's about to lose him as well.
"I'm leaving home," he says.
"When are you coming back?"
"I...I'm not coming back, Sada-chan."
Deja vu crashes over him violently enough to make him nauseous. The way Sada's voice has turned very small, very young, hurts far more than his injured eye.
"You can't," he says. "I'd miss you too much."
"I have to. I'll call you okay?"
"But what about running away together?"
It hurts. It's the hardest thing he's ever had to do. Turning his 'friends' in to the police had been easy when it came down to it. Disappointing his mother was expected, something that had been coming a long time. Deciding to leave had been natural, sensible, the only option.
He reaches up and ruffles Sada's hair. It's the first and only time he's let his best friend see him cry
"I'm sorry. I have to go."
"Yo! Your timing is really bad. Hang on a sec!"
In three years plenty of things have changed. Sada's lightning fast response to phone calls is not one of them. Mitsu can hear distant shouting and then a door closing with a snap. Before he can ask what's going on, Sada is bombarding him with questions.
"What's up? How did the interview go? Did you get my e-mail? Any news on your brothers?"
It’s been three years since Mitsu left Sendai and he makes these phonecalls at least once a week. He quietly takes a drag of his cigarette so that Sada can’t hear and starts from the top. His interview had gone well, like they always did, but he doesn’t think he’s cut out for office work. He’d read the e-mail and really did like the co-ords Sada had put together on a fashion website. And he’d made no headway on finding his brothers at all but that isn’t a surprise by now.
“You’ll find them,” Sada says, like always. “Don’t give up!”
He won’t. He can’t. He moved this far away from home and lives in a shoebox apartment, most of his money going on cigarettes and coffee. Being independent is great and all – especially when his father had turned out to be a waste of time and he has no choice – but it would be nice to have enough money to really try find his brothers and to sneak back to Sendai to see his best friend.
“Kikkou’s getting chewed out right now,” Sada is saying, lowering his voice and letting Mitsu hear shouting in the background. “Turns out he’s been working at a strip club after college. He’s like really popular but yeah, mom and dad aren’t happy.”
“How’s Monoyoshi-kun?”
“He’s all right. I’ve been sneaking comics into his room for when he gets bored of studying. He’s peacekeeping right now. He saved my ass last week.”
Sada is a few months into being a teenager and already getting in trouble. Mitsu pretends not to but he worries.
“What did you do?”
“Fashion shoot in town with the girls. I’ll send you the pictures when they’re done. I’m really into shorts this year.”
Soon enough Sada is rambling about fashion and art and Mitsu is content to sit back and listen. His family still isn’t great and he never seems to have close friends but Sada is doing all right.
“Gotta go, I think Kikkou has broken something.
“All right. Stay safe, Sada-chan.”
“Go for that bar job, okay? You’d look great mixing cocktails.”
It’s been a long three years and he knows he’s changed, they both have, but some things have lasted the tests of time.
“Yo! You really need to visit so I can high-five you!”
It’s Mitsu’s twenty-first birthday and it’s a good day. He’s been offered a job as a bar manager on a college campus with a salary high enough for him to move somewhere nicer. He had started the day with a pretty girl in his bed and is ending it with a phone-call to his favourite person. For the first time in years he feels like he’s on the right track. The enthusiasm in Sada’s voice suggests he agrees.
“Soon,” he promises and he means it, he really does, he means it every time. “Once I’m settled at the new place.”
“You better!” He can picture Sada puffing out his cheeks in false annoyance. “Jeez, Micchan, it’s days like this that I miss you the most, you know? I wanna go sit in the yard and talk about stuff.”
“Sounds fun.”
“And I’m finally getting taller. You have to see.”
“A few inches doesn’t mean you’re-“
“Look, enough shit-talking, I need to tell you something.”
Mitsu worries. He remembers himself at fourteen, starting to get involved with The Wrong People and thinking he knew everything. Sada’s always seemed more sensible beneath his exuberant exterior but still…
“What’s up?”
“I made a friend today!”
It’s not the answer he had been expecting. Taken aback, he laughs and the sound echoes in his empty apartment.
“Yeah? What are they like?”
“He’s like four years above me and he doesn’t have any other friends.”
“Uh-“
“He has a tattoo how cool is that? Anyway he acts really tough but he’s a nice guy really. We watched cat videos on the internet together after class and he says we can share lunch tomorrow.”
An anti-social tattooed older guy with no friends. Mitsu had known his fair few. He measures his words carefully.
“How exactly did you become friends?”
“That’s the second thing I need to tell you. Some older kids were bullying me and he stepped in. Super cool!”
Sada’s been bullied on and off since Mitsu was gone, getting worse each year. His good mood draining away, he presses a hand to his chest to try ease the tightness there.
“What were they picking on you for?”
“That’s the third thing. Don’t laugh okay?”
He’s laughed at Sada even after being asked not to for all sorts of things ranging from clumsiness to over the top statements to bad karaoke recordings. His voice is different today.
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He hears a window being closed and a deep breath. What comes next doesn’t surprise him as much as it should.
“I’m gay, Micchan. Is that… are you cool with that?”
He just wishes he could be there. Phone-calls just aren’t enough to express the fondness he feels, the unconditional affection for someone so far away. He doesn’t ask if it’s a phase – even if it is he’s cool with that too – and he doesn’t fuss. Instead, smiling, he nods even though it can’t be seen.
“Of course I am. So are you dating this guy?”
“What, Kuri?” Sada’s laughter is a little manic, joyful with relief and amusement both. “No! Oh god, no! But it was so cool of him, Micchan. He’s kinda manly, I guess, and he was all if you have a problem with that then you have a problem with me and then he beat the shit out of them.”
They talk a little longer about this friend of Sada’s, about how bullies are stupid, about how once Mitsu is rich and famous he can host fashion parties and everything will be perfect. And it feels it, thinking of this ideal future, right up until Sada asks the wrong questions.
“So are you seeing anyone at the moment?”
The girl from the morning had left a number but he had thrown it away hours ago. It’s always the same, always has been. He’s been wondering if there’s something wrong with him, if he’s really just ‘too busy’ with work or if he makes himself that way.
“Not right now,” is all he says.
After they hang up he feels lonelier than before.
“Yo! Your hair is really bad!”
This is the first thing Mitsu hears as he gets out of the car in his old neighbourhood for the first time in six years. He’s been working hard, clawing his way up out of the ruins of his life so far, and finally it’s all been worth it. Not for the bar he’s left behind, not for the new friends he’s started to make and not for the family he can’t reconcile with.
“At least I don’t have things stuck in mine.”
Sada throws himself into Mitsu’s arms, a whirlwind of colour and laughter, and Mitsu is smiling so fiercely it hurts his cheeks.
“I’m fashionable.”
He is. He’s taller and well dressed and more confident than Mitsu could ever have hoped for. He’s missed so much. Never again.
“Sada-chan,” he says warmly.
“Micchan?”
“I’m home.”