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Parties were terrifying ordeals filled with loud music, too many people and paved a rocky road to regret come morning light. Asahi can count the number of parties he’s been to on one hand—including his own birthdays, which were less parties than they were sedate gatherings anyway—and he could’ve gone the rest of his life without ever changing that…
But here he is, pressed into a corner, trying his hardest not to whimper as two drunken brawlers roll around less than five feet away from him. There’s a pool of vomit far too close for his liking, so much alcohol that it almost drowns out the stench of weed floating in from an open window, and—was that someone streaking in the front yard?
I knew I shouldn’t have come, Asahi bemoans internally, trying and failing to curl in on himself. Only the guilt in knowing that he’d be leaving Daichi and Suga behind keeps him in place—he’d promised to be their designated driver, after all, and leaving his friends here seems rather… ill-advised.
Definitely ill-advised, with a side helping of get me out of here when no less than thirty people dressed only in fishnets burst through the front door.
So Asahi doesn’t notice someone’s talking to him until there’s a hand clamped around his wrist.
Asahi’s fairly certain he jumps about three feet into the air and screams—as much as he can scream through the tightness of his throat—but the hand’s still on him, except it’s disembodied. As in, he can’t see a face attached to it.
“I’m too young to die,” Asahi pleads with the powers-that-be—
And then there’s a boisterous laugh before a stranger’s voice asks, “Did you drink too much? You don’t really look drunk, though.”
It takes him a while to spot the owner of the voice, but Asahi finally sees a face hovering in front of him. He’s definitely a stranger, barely even comes up to Asahi’s chin and looks absolutely tiny in the seething mass of bodies in the party—but then he smiles and leans into his space without so much as a by-your-leave.
“Hey, you alright?” the stranger asks next—and there’s a little more to his smile, like it’s less of a neon light and more of a banked fire, instead.
Asahi’s no literature student, though, and the comparison he’d made in his mind only serves to make him flush and mumble, “Y-Yeah, I’m fine. I just have to find my—friends. Somewhere.”
Most people would probably laugh at the obvious panic in his voice or ask him to repeat his too-soft words, but the stranger only furrows his brow at him and tugs on his arm a little. “So what’re their names?” he asks with easy cheer, as though finding two people in the chaos wasn’t the daunting task Asahi saw it as, and—
Instead of tugging away from the unfamiliar hand and stumbling out to get some fresh air, Asahi manages a tremulous smile and replies, “I don’t know if you’ve heard of Sugawara Koushi or Sawamura Daichi, but Suga-san has silver hair and Daichi-san’s pretty solidly built.”
And as they wade through the crowd, Asahi offering more on his friends while the stranger leads him along—he finds that it’s not so hard to breathe, after all.
“Hey, you!”
Asahi doesn’t look up from the textbook he’s perusing, certain that the yell’s for someone else—but then there’s a shadow looming over him and a cheerful voice saying, “I recognize you—you’re that guy I helped out at Ryuu’s party the other day!”
He glances up and spots the stranger beaming down at him, hair tousled far beyond the light breeze would warrant and eyes scrunched up from the width of his smile. Asahi had known he was short—but with the haze of panic replaced by bright sunlight, it’s clear that his hair had made him seem a little taller than he’d really been.
“So what’s your name, anyway?” the stranger asks, as though Asahi isn’t blinking up in confusion at him. “I don’t think I ever caught it before you went off with your friends.”
“Oh,” Asahi replies intelligibly, and blushes to the roots of his hair. To forget to give his name to someone that helped him…
But the stranger doesn’t laugh when he colours up. All he does is tilt his head a little, blink down at him—and then flop onto the ground next to Asahi, saying, “This is a pretty nice spot for studying.”
“It is,” Asahi agrees before he can help himself—it’s grassy, which means sometimes he’ll find ants crawling over his bag, but the sun’s partially obscured by an awning and it’s not a particularly busy patch of lawn. He finds himself watching the stranger instead of fiddling with his sleeves, like he usually would in a situation like this, and before long he blurts out, “I’m Asahi, by the way.”
“Just one name, Asahi?” the stranger laughs, but he nudges Asahi with a shoulder when he flushes again. “Sorry, man, I didn’t mean to make you embarrassed,” he adds with a grin, “but you’re cute when you blush. I’m Nishinoya Yuu, by the way, but everyone calls me Noya.”
“I-It’s nice to meet you, Noya-san,” Asahi says with a dip of his head—a little too quick to be a proper bow, given the sheer amount of blood rushing to his face from being called cute, but the sentiment’s mostly there.
“And it’s pretty nice to see you without all the chaotic party stuff, Asahi!” Noya replies, and leans back on his hands with another beaming grin.
Noya, Asahi’s quick to discover, smiles a lot—and his laughter is loud and frequent, triggered by the smallest of things. Even though it’s just Asahi sitting by himself, textbook in his lap and homework half-done beside it, Noya doesn’t seem bothered by his silence. He just talks, asks him questions here and there that Asahi mumbles replies to every so often, and watches people pass by the lawn.
It’s… nice. Far different from the easy banter between Suga and Daichi, when he’s together with them, but comfortable nonetheless.
It’s almost like Noya had always known him, instead of helped him out at a party some days ago, and he doesn’t prod Asahi to talk more than he’s ever comfortable with.
“Why?” Asahi finds himself asking, a little after Noya had waved at yet another of his many, many friends. “I-I mean,” he adds, shoulders hunching a little when Noya turns to look at him, “don’t you have anywhere else to be?”
Why are you here, with me, when you could be with anyone else, Asahi can’t quite bring himself to ask, but Noya doesn’t call him out on the awkward rewording. All he does is hum, soft and considering, and lie back fully on the grass.
“Not really,” Noya replies after a while, when Asahi almost turns back to his homework. “And it’s pretty nice here, you know?”
“It… is?”
“You’re quieter than most people I know,” Noya says—and there’s no derision in his voice, or anything remotely like disdain. Just a simple sort of thoughtfulness, like he’s pointing out something he’s been mulling over for a bit, and it’s a gentle undercurrent in his voice when he adds, “I’ve never really sat down like this and chatted with someone since I’ve started here.”
So Asahi asks about Noya, and Noya answers without a single hint of impatience or frustration for the way Asahi has to mull over each question or pick over his words. He’s a college sophomore—only a year younger than Asahi, for all that he could blend in with high-schoolers—and he’s taking a few general engineering courses while he figures out what he wants to major in, but he’s thinking of transferring to another discipline, not too long after transferring over from another college.
“It must be boring to hear me natter on about myself, huh?” he abruptly asks, after Asahi had learned he was tossing up between social work and health sciences.
“No, I like hearing you talk,” Asahi says, and surprises himself with how true that is.
Because it is—even when he’s complaining about mathematics, his voice is bright and upbeat in a way that lightens Asahi’s mood. He’s nothing like Asahi, could probably find more scintillating company elsewhere, but…
When Noya glances up at him with a question in his eyes, Asahi lets himself meet his gaze when he says, “Thanks for helping me out back then, Noya-san.”
Asahi gets to see Noya’s cheeks flare pink, at that—but when he smiles, brighter and warmer than the sun, he finds himself looking back with a smile all the same.
People don’t really understand how Asahi and Noya can get along when Asahi always gravitates to the walls and corners whenever he’s at a party and Noya hasn’t figured out his indoor voice yet. They look at the differences—their disparate heights, their polar opposite personalities—and dismiss their friendship as a short-term curiosity. Give them a few weeks, people say, and they’ll be strangers once more.
But people don’t notice the quietness that comes easier to Noya when he’s around Asahi, or the way Asahi holds his head up a little higher around Noya. They don’t see the comfort in each other’s presence that’s different to the closeness Noya shares with Tanaka or the ease Asahi shares with Sugawara and Sawamura.
It’s okay, though—Asahi doesn’t need them to see what he sees in Noya, or what Noya manages to see in him. They don’t need to look closer into their lingering touches or their prolonged eye contact, because it’s theirs for now.
One day, Asahi thinks, he’ll be able to pull Noya over to his side and introduce him as his boyfriend, but until then…
He opens the door for Noya, glances around for witnesses, and then draws him in for a warm and solid hug.