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Aoyagi clutches the wide portfolio to his chest. Not tight enough to risk bending anything, but he feels like his fingers are going numb anyway.
He isn’t even going for his interview right now. That’s not for another two days. But maybe this is good practice—walking into a situation this unfamiliar and nerve-wracking, trying desperately to remember the talking points he’s memorised beforehand. In fact, this is almost more scary than the concept of a university interview in a country he’s never stepped foot in before. If he can get through this in once piece, he can probably get through anything.
It takes him a few silent moments standing in front of the apartment door to realise he hasn’t knocked yet. He takes a deep breath and pounds on the door just twice.
When the door swings open with a loud screech of hinges in need of oiling, he is exactly as Aoyagi remembers. Peculiarly prismatic green hair spouts in gentle waves from a high ponytail that’s slightly off-centre. The rest of his former senpai seems to follow that (lack of) alignment, the wide collar of his t-shirt slipping further down one collarbone than the other as he stands at a long slant in the doorway.
“Hi,” Makishima says, in English. And then grimaces. Opens his mouth to say something else, but he must decide against it because he just leans to the other side, turns, gestures for Aoyagi to come inside.
Aoyagi can almost imagine he can smell the clutter, the empty and abandoned cardboard boxes and scraps of neon fabric that seem to have migrated to all corners of the room, away from their origin around a big boxy sewing machine on a spindly desk that seems to fragile to hold it. But whatever he imagines is shortly replaced by the scent of tea leaves as they unfold in a ceramic teapot that Makishima pours steaming water into. Aoyagi likes the scent of tea. It makes this strange space feel more like a home, a place that someone comes to be safe and breathe deeply.
“Sugar?” Makishima asks.
Aoyagi shakes his head, mostly just to spare Makishima the trouble. He can drink it either way. He finds a place to sit at the little nook table by the kitchen, smooths his hands over his knees. He hasn’t said a single word this entire time.
And so, after what seems like a reasonable amount of time has passed between the sugar query and now, Aoyagi tries, “Thank you again. For letting me stay.” Speaking from the stomach, the way Tadokoro taught him. Trying to banish the breathy uncertainty from his voice.
“Don’t mention it,” Makishima says. When he sets the teacups down, Aoyagi thinks for a moment that they’ll both spill. They teeter before settling, but do not. Makishima is the one who seems to spill, awkwardly but fluidly, into the place opposite Aoyagi. One ankle hooks around the back of a leg of his chair.
One sentence in, and Aoyagi doesn’t know what to say. It’s like being back in the body of someone he used to be. But he’s trying, he’s trying.
“...You’ve changed,” Makishima offers. Because he’s trying too. His tone even sounds casually conversational.
“You haven’t,” Aoyagi offers in return, and gives smiling a try. Just a small one, so he can retract it quickly if it turns out to be the wrong move.
Makishima returns it, crooked and harsh like a photograph taken at the wrong moment, and it’s the biggest relief Aoyagi has felt since stepping onto the plane to England. It’s slipping into bathwater that’s the exact right temperature.
He always thought they could have been close. That they’re incongruous with what the world expects in a lot of the same ways. That their wariness and watchfulness, if not identical, are at least cousins of a sort. But they never were close. Drifted around each other with no conflict or friction, but no real bond either. Maybe the pressure of knowing what might have been was part of it. Aoyagi had learned over the past few years that he’s better at falling accidentally into meaningful relationships than he is at trying to approach the possibility of depth with a set image, a ghost of a possible future, looking over his shoulder.
Sipping slightly too-hot tea in a cramped London flat, listening to the sound of a downpour he just narrowly escaped getting caught in was never the image he had of how he might bond with this person. Maybe that’s why it’s finally working.
“Do you like it here?” he asks.
“Ah.” There is no joy in Makishima’s expression, nor in his voice. But he says, “I love it.”
And Aoyagi can only believe those words.
“I like the sound of the rain,” Aoyagi says. It sounds like an intimate confession to his own ears, as simple as it is.
“You’ll hear that a lot if you end up here,” Makishima tells him, syllables layered over his bark-like laugh. Aoyagi can conjure it to mind so easily—a collection of storms as the backdrop to a life he might end up in. “What did you bring?”
Aoyagi follows Makishima’s vague gesture to the portfolio, now balanced awkwardly on Aoyagi’s lap.
“Watercolours, mostly.” And then, in case he was asking about subject matter rather than medium, “Landscapes. Plant details. A few portraits.” The last, he is less confident about. Maybe it shows in the dip in his voice. If it does, Makishima doesn’t draw any attention to it.
Instead he says, “I have some charcoal I never used, if you want to borrow that while you’re here.”
Aoyagi’s portfolio is set at this point, but he knows that’s not the point of the offer. His fingers have been itching to make things more and more with each moment he’s been taking in the new sights, and he imagines Makishima might know that, even though their fields aren’t the same. It’s like racing—Makishima always had his hills, while Aoyagi gravitated towards pushing himself to higher and higher speeds without the incline of a slope grinding against him. But there was always a similarity to the way they approached their differing realms.
“If you’re sure it’s okay.” Aoyagi watches Makishima nod, and the way he does even something as simple as that manages to be off-balance. “I like charcoal.”
Not as well as he likes more familiar things like the soft touch of watercolour or the easy and predictable revisability of pencil sketches, but there is a controlled chaos to charcoal. Bold and dark. The kind of thing he could see himself falling for if he gave it more of a chance.
Half an hour later, charcoal dust on his fingers has already formed the most interesting contrast to the taste of black tea still lingering on his tongue. And he learns that way a sewing machine needle rains down in bursts can sound like it’s trying to teach water droplets pelting a roof to keep rhythm.
It doesn’t feel like a beginning. It feels like being dropped right in the middle of something that has always been. Like walking through a scene in a dream where every detail is taken for granted without questioning what came before.
What will feel like a beginning will come five months from now, on an evening with no rain at all, when he learns the shape of Makishima’s thin lips pressed against his own. And the tickle of long hair falling over his shoulders. And how the sound of his heart pounding in his ears doesn’t always have to be the drum beat laid under trepidation, but can also give life to the score of something much more like liberation. That moment will be the one that feels like a prelude to the days sprawling behind it. The first chapter of a book whose pages were bound all out of order.
“It’s like I never knew who you were,” he’ll whisper to the crook of Makishima’s pale neck. A thought that had no shape until it found words.
After a sharp laugh, Makishima will reply, “Maybe you always did.”