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Shou always kind of knew. Looking back, yeah, he definitely knew before now. He knew it from the start, but he didn’t really realize what it was. He remembers stories from Fukuda’s medical textbooks about people who walk around with mysterious moles knowing that they’re probably cancer but never getting them checked out, and he figures that it’s like that.
But that’s not important now because now he knows, knows in a knocking the wind out of him kind of way. Ritsu has his hands in the pockets of his yellow hoodie (Shou never liked yellow, but now he sees it on Ritsu and he suddenly thinks yellow is actually pretty cool) and he’s not looking at Shou and the light of the fire is behind him, making him look glowy and surreal in the sunset. Maybe he’s not real at all; maybe Ritsu is just some elaborate hallucination and Shou’s finally losing his grip on sanity, something that was always a little tenuous anyways and only maintained through constant practice. Ritsu’s yellow and red and blue and black and brown and breathing and pissed and alive in this ordinarily glorious way that makes Shou feel dizzy. He’s everything in the world all at once, all he knows of existence compressed into one person with unmanageable hair and a flair for the dramatics.
So it’s pretty reasonable, all of that considered, that Shou’s in love with him. That he has, in fact, been in love with him from the start. But before this, Ritsu was just in black and white: The black hair, the black school uniform, the ash of Claw all around him, the spots of blood so obscured by the darkness that they might as well have been ink. Now he’s here in all of his colors, every color in the world, and Shou wants to exist in this moment forever, where Ritsu is vivid and next to him and they’re walking to the same place and Ritsu’s not looking at him at all but is instead seeing something beyond all of this, something Shou can’t even pretend to see.
“You burnt down my house.” He says, and he stops. They’re in the middle of Ritsu’s neighborhood, hidden from the rest of the world by Shou’s aura. The grass is a little less green than before, discolored by the smoke and the setting sun, but it’s still a Ritsu color. He still loves it very much. Ritsu’s eyes are empty, glassy, like a doll’s. They’re hiding some great and fantastic something, some rush of emotion, and Shou wants to see it come to the surface.
“I did.” Shou grins at him, opens his mouth to explain the plan to him, to give the speech that he totally didn’t practice or anything, and then he sees all of the emotion come right back to him. And wow, Ritsu’s pissed-pissed. The fist, skin colored with a hint of blue for all those veins, comes flying towards Shou’s face and he could easily stop it, could easily turn this into a fight, could turn this into a kidnapping, a murder, a whatever, but he doesn’t. He stands very still and lets Ritsu hit him. Logically, he knows people tend to be attached to their houses, even though he doesn’t get why, so it’s fair that Ritsu hits him.
Shou also knows the rules of fighting: you hit, and then you get hit back. Any time someone hits you, you hit back. That’s how fighting works, and whoever throws the first punch always knows that, too. You don’t just hit people and not get something in return. Law of equivalent exchange. He should hit Ritsu back, give him a punch he can’t see coming, beat him to a pulp and drag him back to base by his earlobes. This is what Ritsu expects. This is maybe even what Ritsu wants.
Shou does not.
Love, he’s figured out by now, does not come with fists to the face. It’s a little contrary to what he’s seen of it, but it’s something he knows. Kind of like how he always can find his way back to HQ without reading a map. And Ritsu doesn’t love him yet, not in the pink-red-gold-everything way that he loves Ritsu, but that’s fine. Shou has utmost faith that Ritsu eventually will.
But Shou loves Ritsu very much, perhaps more than anyone, and so he has to play by the love rules. The love rules say that hits like that are banned. Ritsu’s on a different level, playing a different game, but Shou will catch him up. It won’t be hard. He’s certainly not going to play the rival game, not with all that’s blooming in his chest, here at the dawn of the end of the world.
He steps back from the force of the blow. Not just a good runner, but a decent hitter, too. Shou spits blood out onto the grass along with his last baby tooth, a pearl-white molar that had hung on far beyond its life expectancy. It looks obscene in the smoky green grass. When he looks back at Ritsu, his eyes are closed and his hands are in front of his face, bracing for a hit that’s not going to come.
“I have a lot to tell you about.” Shou says to the flinching thing that’s passed over the love of his life. “Mainly about how I’m going to kick my dad’s ass. But you want some ice cream first or somethin’? You look like you need it.”
Ritsu lowers his hands and looks at Shou like genius kids on TV dramas look at math problems. Shou wonders if Ritsu has math problems he has to do, if he looks at his the same way.
“Tell me on the way.” Ritsu decides, and he starts walking like he has any idea where he’s supposed to go.
And so Shou takes his yellow-covered elbow, leads him in the right direction, and does.