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Temperatures of over 35 °C for the third week running- reads the news headline on Mitsuba’s phone screen, like the heat-shimmer that settles upon the horizon isn’t evidence enough. Temperatures of over thirty five degrees, no rain in weeks, and Mitsuba Sousuke just lost his summer job. 

Admittedly, he’d only had the job for a month at most, so he wasn’t all that attached to it. Admittedly, getting fired was partially his fault. Admittedly, the customer whose drink he’d filled with salt instead of sugar had totally deserved it. The weather forecast laughs in the form of sun motifs and predictions of the longest heatwave on record. The summer to trump all summers before- pack sunscreen and water bottles please and thank you.

Though karma appears to be conspiring against him, Mitsuba is just glad for the afternoon off.

He hauls his speaker system and microphone setup through the doors of the ice cream cafe down the road, sighing as the air conditioning ushers away some of the suffocating humidity. From the front counter, Aoi’s face splits into a bright grin- removing her hands from the ice cream freezer and shaking off the water that clings to her fingernails. 

“Sousuke!” She greets, always casual, always acting a little too much like Mitsuba’s mom for him to face her with his usual attitude. “Here to sing?” 

There’s a stage at the back of the cafe, tucked between the tables and the door to the alleyway outside, and it’s Mitsuba’s favourite spot in the whole of Tokyo- minus his own bedroom. There’s a power outlet to set up his speaker system, patrons who listen to his voice, and, if Aoi is on shift, a free ice cream to eat once he’s done. The whole setup was her idea, after all. Akane Aoi- former vocal major, local sweetheart, and the platonic love of every singer in the area’s life. 

“What else would I be doing with this?” Mitsuba quips back, brandishing his microphone. “ Here to sing .” He echoes under his breath, because he just lost his job and summer is conspiring against him. He has every right to feel irritable.

Mitsuba ties up his hair, watches the cyclists cruising down the riverside street beyond the cafe window, and begins to sing.

Sousuke has been singing before he could talk- Mitsuba’s mom used to boast to work colleagues and strangers on the monorail, pointing towards the humming three-year-old clambering all over the seats and putting sticky handprints on the windows. Mitsuba’s earliest memory is falling off a climbing frame aged five, so he’s always taken her claims with a pinch of salt or two. 

Child prodigy or not- Mitsuba loves to sing. 

He loves the music, the crescendos and lulls, the heart and wonder put into each note. He loves the applause each time a song closes and he lowers his microphone. (He loves the attention, all stage-fright melting like ice cream the moment the first word rings out.)

Mitsuba sings to the cyclists on the street outside, to the cafe patrons at their tables, to Aoi nodding along with her hands back in the ice cream freezer. When he closes his eyes and sways into the melody, he sings to his mom back home- who bragged about him to strangers on the monorail and always taught him to follow his dreams of music and the city skyline.

(He also sings to his former-workplace, because really, they don’t know what they’re missing.)

Aoi sidesteps from behind the counter with a bottle of water after Mitsuba’s voice cracks embarrassingly in the last note of his sixth song, the vocalist in her ever attentive. 

“You’ve added some new stuff to your repertoire since I last saw you,” She praises, tossing him the bottle. It slips out of Mitsuba’s less-than-functional right hand and goes rolling off the stage, much to his distaste. “You’re good at choosing songs to cover.”

“I was bored of my old stuff,” Mitsuba chases after the water bottle, once again reminded of Aoi’s evil streak. “My adoring fans were too.” Adoring fans being the decent online following Mitsuba has amassed over time, charmed by his cute looks, stellar personality and total sense of modesty. (He can hear his mom laughing, somewhere in the back of his mind.)

“Any songs of your own yet?” Aoi asks, smiling like she hasn’t just hit a spot that’s almost as sore as Mitsuba’s recent unemployment. “You mentioned last time you were here that you wanted to sing something of your own.”

Last time- when Mitsuba traipsed into the cafe ten minutes before closing time in the wake of the worst vocal exam ever, and swore through his tears that he never wanted to sing another person’s music ever again.

“I don’t know any songwriters good enough for me to trust them with my precious voice,” Mitsuba sniffs, after swallowing down half of the water bottle in one go and almost spilling it down the front of his dungarees. “It’s not just something I can hand over to anyone.” 

Mitsuba knows his talent for singing is rivalled only by his talent for not knowing a single thing about music production. No matter how many online courses he’s paid for, he’s never been able to figure it out. Music is for feeling, not for fancy technical words and mixing software. If he knew how to do everything, then he’d be far too perfect- he told himself resolutely, after almost crashing his laptop with a bootleg alternative to GarageBand. 

“If you ever do produce something, make sure to come by and play it here first!” Aoi smiles knowingly, and saunters back over to the countertop in a way that often has Mitsuba suspecting that she can predict the future. (Sakura’s creepishly accurate tarot readings are more than enough.) 

Mitsuba shakes his head, downs the rest of the water bottle, and the show goes on.

He packs up once the temperature outside rises close to forty, and the air conditioning does little to stop the way his hair sticks to the back of his neck, even while pinned and tied into place. Cyclists cruise past the riverside walk at a significantly slower pace, the air feeling like syrup- humid and unpleasant. There’s a dog barking outside, most of the cafe patrons have vacated their tables in favour of some fresh air, and the weather forecast laughs on the screen of Mitsuba’s phone.

“I’m going to get some air, don’t let anyone steal my things.” Mitsuba announces, heading out the back door and into the merciful shade around the side of the cafe. No sooner than he’s made it out of the door, he stops, and he stares. Because, perched on a bin at the other end of the alleyway, there’s a boy having a one-sided argument with a dog.

Mitsuba wonders if the heat is finally getting to him.

He blinks, rubs his eyes, and there’s still a boy having an argument with a dog at the other end of the alleyway.

“I promise you, I don’t have any food!” The boy calls, brandishing his hands in the same way a magician would perform a disappearing act. The dog barks louder, a scruffy thing with sharp teeth and a hungry growl. “See, nothing here!”

The dog scrabbles at the base of the bin, snapping at the boy’s shoelaces. Mitsuba almost feels bad for him as his perch wobbles dangerously- gravity doing him no favours.

“Please, I can’t go and get you anything to eat if you keep trying to bite me.” The boy pleads. The bin almost tips. The dog growls, hungry and wild. Mitsuba sighs, curses everything to do with summer, and throws a broken shard of brick at the wall behind the boy and the dog and the bin.

The brick piece shatters, and the dog swings its hungry jaws right in Mitsuba’s direction. 

“Ah.” He says- in the same way a person might say oh, fuck- before he turns on his heel and runs .

The dog takes chase, and the boy takes chase too- scrambling down from the bin and catching up to Mitsuba in a few quick strides. Before Mitsuba can think, there’s a hand gripping the striped edge of his right sleeve, a boy running alongside him, and a dog looking for a snack trying to bite his heels as they burst out onto the highstreet.

They dodge the cyclists along the riverside walk, take the steps two at a time, cut under the pedestrian bridge and weave through the park until the dog is nowhere to be seen and Mitsuba can barely breathe through the humidity. The boy looks no better off, releasing his grip on Mitsuba’s sleeve and collapsing bonelessly into the fence skirting the side of the river.

Now in the daylight, Mitsuba regrets not leaving him to be eaten.

He’s wearing a plastic rain poncho despite the near-forty-degree weather, carrying a backpack that’s almost half his size, and there’s a traffic safety charm of all things hanging from his ear. He’s a disaster at best and an insult to Mitsuba’s eyes at worst, and Mitsuba decides resolutely that he doesn’t want anything to do with him.

“Thanks!” The boy says breathlessly, grinning like one sun in the sky isn’t enough. “I totally had it under control though.” 

“If that’s your idea of under control then I really don’t want to know what disaster looks like to you, lame earring boy.” Mitsuba huffs, because really, that thing is awful. 

“My name’s Minamoto Kou- and my earring isn’t lame!” He grabs it with one offended hand as he speaks, his rain poncho crinkling unbearably under the movement. “My brother got it for me.”

“Your brother hates you then, lame earring boy.” Mitsuba replies, matter-of-factly. He joins Kou in leaning against the railing, watching the water as it laps steadily at the banks of the river. 

Kou shoves him in the arm, not quite hard enough to hurt, but definitely hard enough to warrant the shriek Mitsuba lets out, hand flying to his heart with as much dramatic flair as he can summon in the midsummer heat. 

“Pervert!” He points an accusatory finger squarely into Kou’s chest. “Putting your hands all over my delicate-”

“Oh my god, you’re terrible, ” Kou interrupts, smiling like he means anything but. “At least tell me your name before you start making accusations like that.”

“Why would I tell a pervert my name, huh?” Mitsuba takes a step back, turning his nose up in disdain. He doesn’t want to look at Kou, not when he’s grinning so widely. The summer is bright enough as it is, without boys in plastic rain ponchos to make it worse. “For all I know, you could be a stalker, or you could be trying to sell my organs, or you could-”

“Or I could just want to know your name.” Kou finishes for him. Mitsuba sticks out his tongue in a way that’s definitely not childish at all, then yelps loud enough for heads to turn when Kou pinches him in the arm in a way that does hurt. His grin errs a little too close to wicked.

“Fine- it’s Mitsuba Sousuke,” He admits reluctantly, after dipping his head in an apology to the elderly couple he almost scared into cardiac arrest. “Don’t wear it out.”

“Mitsuba-kun.” Kou says it as if they’re friends, trying the name out upon his tongue. He smiles again (he smiles too much ), like the brushstrokes have a sweet aftertaste. 

“I said don’t wear it out,” Mitsuba frowns. The summer heat and Kou’s sharp canine teeth are making him nauseous. “Why were you in the alleyway behind the cafe anyway- are you a stalker? Did you steal something?”

“Actually, I-” Kou starts, then cuts himself short. He’s not looking at Mitsuba, staring straight over his left shoulder towards the roadside, where a black car pulls to a halt between the cyclists. Sleek and expensive, with blacked-out windows and the air of something that belongs in a spy movie, rather than a midsummer afternoon by the river. “I need to go.” 

When he hikes his bag over his shoulder and sprints off down the street, Kou isn’t smiling any more.

In the place where Kou stood only seconds beforehand lies a notebook, clearly left behind in his hasty exit. It’s got a battered cover, a threadbare ribbon sticking between the pages, and the sides are fit to burst with battered newspaper clippings, train tickets and receipts. Mitsuba tells himself that he’s not curious- that he doesn’t care for a second about boys with terrible earrings and their poorly kept notebooks.

Mitsuba Sousuke has a bad habit of lying to himself, and so he picks up the notebook.

When he opens it to face the sky, each page is overflowing with music. 

Guitar chords scribbled in the margins, newspaper clippings annotated with lyrics, haphazard poetry about heatwaves and comets and good breakfasts crammed into every corner of every page. To the sound of children skimming stones across the river, Mitsuba reads from static electricity to journeys unlimited to caged birds unleashed , leaning unconsciously backwards into the railing as if he’s forgotten how to hold himself upright. 

Each page is a living, breathing experience and Mitsuba learns what it feels like to reincarnate- a new life lived in each line and lyric. Music or poetry, he’s not sure. Music or poetry, he doesn’t care .

And then, a double spread across the last filled pages. BE BRAVE, it reads. (your heart can move mountains when you let it sing.)  

Mitsuba decides that Kou must have filled his notebook with songs he overheard on the radio, because there’s no way that a boy arguing with a dog down an alleyway could write such things. There’s no way that Minamoto Kou could be the reason unshed tears cling to Mitsuba’s eyelashes.

He snaps the notebook shut, and the overflowing pages shiver like they’re daring him to cry.

“You must have needed a lot of fresh air.” Aoi teases when Mitsuba steps back in through the cafe doors and the stray dog in the alleyway outside barks and barks and barks.

The dog days of summer are here to stay- proclaims the radio in the corner, and Mitsuba swears he can hear it laughing.

-

“Can you at least give me some prior notice before you decide to hold an impromptu concert?” Despite the weather, Nanamine Sakura is still dressed like a vampire, still stirring sugar into a scalding cup of tea, and still looking just as nonplussed as ever. Mitsuba has long since suspected that they’re not entirely human- but this takes the cake. 

He holds his lemonade glass against his forehead, and sighs in a way which he hopes reveals every bit of frustration he’s ever felt. “There was no prior notice- I just wanted to sing.”

Sakura raises their eyebrows, judgemental and disbelieving rolled into one. Anyone who has ever claimed that Sakura is expressionless has clearly never spent longer than a few minutes with them. Over time Mitsuba has learned the meaning of every hum, every slow blink, every tiny eye-roll- constant witness to Sakura’s quiet, awful brand of disapproval.

“A text would have been nice.” They prompt, and Mitsuba thinks he might just wither under their measured stare. 

“You’re not my manager.” Mitsuba huffs in response. Sakura is , in fact, Mitsuba’s manager- in all aspects aside from the name. A student at Mitsuba’s old school who happened to move to the same part of Tokyo a few years beforehand- reconnecting when Mitsuba broke down in tears outside of the broadcasting studio over some lost keys. They help Mitsuba edit his videos, organise places to record, and stop him getting fined for illegal street performances. In return, Mitsuba gives Sakura something to put on their resume, as well as an excuse to avoid Natsuhiko and his awful pickup lines. (They value one benefit more greatly than the other.)

“A text still would have been nice,” Sakura smiles, small and rare, around the edge of their teacup. The intricate rings on each of their fingers catch the light from the stained glass windows, throwing sun-patterns across their unsettlingly amused face. “Also, the glass is leaving a big red mark on your forehead.” 

Mitsuba returns the lemonade to the table faster than he can blink.

-

The temperature climbs into the high thirties once more- the plants which line the pavement in the park cracking and wilting under the cloudless skies. The humidity has promised a summer storm for two weeks on end with no results, and the local convenience store has been out of handheld fans for just as long. 

Perfect weather for the beach! Claims one magazine in the store window. The end of the world as we know it? Asks another. 

“Hey,” Calls a voice from the doorway of the convenience store, backlit by fluorescent lights and the hum of the AC. “You’re the guy who saved me a few days ago! Mitsuba, right?”

Mitsuba turns his head, and there stands Minamoto Kou, shopping bag in one hand, guitar case in the other, traffic safety earring bright as ever. Eyes meet across the place where the pavement shimmers in the midday sun. Mitsuba scoffs, loud as he can manage.

“I’ve never met you before in my life, stalker.” He walks off down the road, suddenly all too aware of the fact that Kou’s notebook still sits in his backpack, read cover to cover by the light of Mitsuba’s desk lamp one humid night. Kou jogs to catch up with him, somehow keeping up despite his pile of luggage. Mitsuba wasn’t aware that Kou could play guitar. (He doesn’t want to entertain the thought that someone so haphazard could be responsible for making his heartbeat soar.)

“No, it’s definitely you,” Kou grins, just as unforgivingly bright as Mitsuba remembered it. “You’re not the sort of person I’d forget!”

That makes Mitsuba stop, two feet taking root into the pavement. Passersby flow around as if he’s just a stone in a stream, forgettable to everyone aside from Minamoto Kou, with his battered guitar case and his brilliant smile. 

Ask Mitsuba Sousuke why he truly loves music, and he will say the same thing every time- it makes me feel unforgettable. That’s all he’s ever wanted to be.

“Are you trying to confess to me?” Mitsuba narrows his eyes, forcing indignance to hide the terrible skip-jump drumbeat of his heart. Everything, he blames on the summer heat. “I’m sorry but you’re totally not my type. I don’t like stalkers with terrible fashion sense.”

“And I don’t like rude guys with bad personalities,” Kou flashes sharp canines, a bright smile for a bright day. “So I guess we’re even!”

Mitsuba knows that he should argue back. That he should let Kou know that his personality is great, that he’s a delight to be around- ask his mom and maybe not anyone else. But it’s too warm to stand outside any longer, midsummer draining all the fight out of him- and he definitely does not take pity on Minamoto Kou and his pile of luggage.

“Buy me iced tea and I’ll give you your notebook back.” Mitsuba bargains, and wishes he didn’t catch the way Kou’s entire face lights up like the sky after a storm.

They step into a cafe just off the highstreet. Kou fumbles with a pile of coins by the front counter, pulling them out of his pockets then almost losing them down the cracks between the floorboards, apologising profusely like something out of a comedy act. Mitsuba focuses on the guitar case instead- sleek and expensive yet clearly well-used, a scuff taken out of the side and a hand-made sticker plastered on the front.

BE BRAVE, the sticker proclaims- a message or a reminder, Mitsuba doesn’t want to know. 

( your heart can move mountains, an uninvited voice sings back.)

“You chose the most expensive thing on the menu.” Kou frowns when he falls back into his seat; as if that wasn’t Mitsuba’s plan entirely. He grins around his straw, a mocking imitation of Kou’s own smile, then almost chokes when Kou plucks an ice cube from his own drink and bites down on it hard.  

“You’re disgusting as well as tacky,” he grimaces to the crunch of shattering ice and the rustle of orange polythene as Kou struggles free from his rain poncho. “You do realise it’s not forecasted to rain for at least another week, right?”

Kou blinks, bemused. A break in the sunshine. 

“You can never be too prepared, though!” He then announces, with a sweeping gesture towards his backpack and his guitar case and his balled-up rain poncho- more suited to a hiking trip in the mountains than a city vacation. Mitsuba wonders if Kou is an international tourist, though his accent doesn’t sound foreign. More than anything, Mitsuba doesn’t want to sound curious- so he doesn’t dare ask. 

“Yeah, prepared to get heatstroke,” he replies instead. Schooling his expression into something neutral around the admittedly terrible taste of his drink, Mitsuba pulls the notebook out of his bag. He surprises even himself with the care he takes of it, setting it down gently as if the lyrics and breakfast receipts inside are sacred. 

At the sight of the notebook, Kou’s entire face lights up- his smile spreading to his eyes until they look as if they’re filled with fireworks and summertime lightning. “I was so lost without this,” He says, picking it up and holding it to his chest. “I resorted to writing stuff down on my arms and the back of old travel maps.” He brandishes a forearm smudged with blue ink, as if to prove a point.

Before Mitsuba is a firm believer that Minamoto Kou is the worst person he’s ever met, he is a singer in need of a songwriter.

In the same moment that Kou asks “where did you find my notebook?”, Mitsuba asks “where did you find these lyrics?”

“Oh,” with a sheepish laugh, Kou tugs on his earring- fingers curling around the kanji for traffic. “I wrote them myself!”

He wrote them himself- echoes the traitorous voice in the back of Mitsuba’s mind, which sounds like the man from the 9AM weather forecast. Temperatures hit above 35°C for the third week running. He wrote them himself. 

A boy in a rain poncho wrote the only lyrics that have ever made Mitsuba want to hand over his voice. The dog days of summer are laughing.  

So, at eighteen years old, Mitsuba does the responsible thing. He looks Minamoto Kou in the eye and tells him, resolutely, that he’s lying.

“I don’t believe you.” He reiterates, taking a disdainful sip of the pink sugar-sweet mess at the bottom of his cup and forcing down the urge to grimace.

“Hey, I’m telling the truth!” Kou releases his grip on his earring, slapping a palm down on the tabletop hard enough to turn more than one head. Loud as ever. “Why would I be carrying a guitar and a travel keyboard around if I didn’t actually make music?”

Mitsuba loathes that he has a point. “Maybe it’s all just an elaborate scam.”

“I can bring up my music production software if you want,” Kou offers. Then his hand returns to his earring, tugging on it in the same way that Mitsuba taps on his knees and his mom pulls at the ends of her hair- a nervous habit that is in no way endearing. “I’ve been writing music and lyrics since I was a kid- I’m just not much of a singer myself.”

Mitsuba sweeps him up, then down again, taking in the unruly hair, the wild grin, the constant fidget of his feet under the table. “I can tell.” 

“What would I have to gain from lying to you, anyway?” Kou asks, crunching on another ice cube. 

“I’m a singer and I’m the cutest person around- for all I knew, you could have just been trying to impress me.” Mitsuba prods at the syrup-coated ice in the bottom of his cup. This time, it’s Kou’s turn to stare.

“You’re a singer?” The sun filtering in through the window is the least of Mitsuba’s problems- it means nothing when Kou’s face lights up like a supernova in the middle of the cafe. Mitsuba puts him down as a health hazard, as well as a pervert and an idiot and quite possibly the best lyricist he’s ever had the misfortune of meeting. “Can you show me?” 

Kou’s enthusiasm knows no limits. 

“We’re in public, I can’t start singing here,” Mitsuba reminds him.

Kou’s grin morphs into something wicked- sharp-toothed and delighted. “How do I know that you’re not lying to impress me, then?”

“I-” It’s not often that someone matches Mitsuba’s admittedly terrible attitude word-for-word, meeting him head on with no complaints. He denies that it’s a refreshing change. He denies that he likes it. “Fine. I have a youtube channel- hell of mirrors, don’t ask about the name. Check that out if you want proof.” 

“Can I have your number too?” Kou then asks, because he likes to push his luck.

Mitsuba doesn’t like Kou. He’s got the same enthusiasm as a poorly-trained puppy, no sense of self-awareness, and the tackiest fashion sense Mitsuba has ever seen. He puts a second star in the sky, has Mitsuba wishing he brought his sunglasses, and he makes the mid-July heatwave all the more unbearable. But he’s also a songwriter. He’s a songwriter, Mitsuba is a singer, and summer is already about as weird as it’s going to get.

“Fine.” Mitsuba says, not as reluctantly as he’d like. (What’s one more thing to tip the world off balance?)

-

It’s past midnight and Mitsuba is still awake, searching for vacant summer jobs, when Kou calls him.

He fumbles on the other end of the phone line, his unintelligible mumbling almost drowned out by the white noise of the AC unit as he fusses excitedly with something in the background. 

“You’d better have a good reason for interrupting my beauty sleep,” Mitsuba frowns, ignoring the fact that he’s done nothing but scroll through job ads since early that evening. Cross legged on his bed in a pair of cat pyjamas, windows propped wide open to make up for the fact that his ceiling fan broke a week ago and his dorm has felt like living inside of a glass furnace ever since. 

“Your singing-” Kou manages to get out, before fading into static again. “Just give me a moment-” He sounds excited, or at the very least hyped up on coffee- Mitsuba begins to suspect both after a crash and a laugh sounds on Kou’s end of the line.

“I’m hanging up.” Mitsuba tells him.

“Got it!” Kou replies, triumphant. “Listen to this.”

And then, he begins to play.

A piano melody drifts down the phone line; soft and lonely and hopeful all in one. The sound of a summer that has dragged on too long, and a boy whose voice has not been his own for the longest time. It’s the sound of BE BRAVE, written across two notebook pages and stuck to the side of a guitar case, and Mitsuba feels as if his heart truly could move mountains if he just opened his mouth and sang. Kou fumbles over some of the notes, the AC whirrs unbearably loud in the background, and a tone-deaf hum accompanies the melody, but Mitsuba doesn’t care.

Listen to this- Kou had said. 

How could anyone not- Mitsuba thinks in return.

“So, do you like it?” The music stops, and Kou’s excited voice returns- puppy-dog smile audible even down the phone line. “I wrote it with your voice in mind.”

Minamoto Kou has rendered Mitsuba speechless twice in one day, and the thought is almost overwhelming. He yells into his phone- a loud, horrified “You’re shameless!” - and then hangs up the call without another word. 

(Mitsuba presses a shaking hand to his chest, and feels his heartbeat pound.)

-

“A boy I’ve only met twice composed a song for me,” Mitsuba complains to Sakura as they shuffle their tarot deck, sliding cards through the warm summer air. “What do I do?”

Sakura looks up, eyes haloed with dark eyeliner that somehow stays put despite the heat. They pull a card from the deck, and the fool stares up at Mitsuba from the tabletop like an omen of things to come.

“Sing it.” Sakura says, and they make it sound so easy.

-

For such a large city, Kou has the uncanny ability to run into Mitsuba regardless of where he goes. First the alleyway, then the convenience store, and now the footbridge- running down the pavement to catch the tail-end of Mitsuba’s final song before he packs up to avoid the midday heat.

“I knew I recognised your voice,” he’s not got his backpack or his guitar case this time, just a travel keyboard tucked under one arm and his notebook hanging from his pocket, dangerously close to falling out all over again. “You didn’t respond to my texts.” 

Another thing Mitsuba has learned about Kou: he’s so dense that it hurts. 

“That’s because I was ignoring you,” Mitsuba tells him, winding up the cord of his microphone as the small crowd he had gathered with his voice disperse in all directions. “You can’t just write a song for someone you’ve barely met- it makes you look like a stalker.”

“I’ll just have to get to know you, then!” Kou grins, missing the point by a mile and then some. 

He’s so dense that it hurts, and he’s stubborn. (A combination straight from Mitsuba’s worst nightmares.)

Sakura’s voice replaces the weatherman in the back of Mitsuba’s head- a wry smile and a sing it to accompany the fool staring up from the tabletop. There’s no arguing with Nanamine Sakura, so Mitsuba puts on a grin- condescending as he can manage. “Take me somewhere cool for lunch, then I’ll think about it.” 

It’s a challenge, and Kou rises to meet it with all the enthusiasm that he’s got.

Mitsuba declines the first cafe because he doesn’t like the menu, the second because Aoi is on shift and he doesn’t want to deal with her teasing, and the third just because he wants to be fussy. The fourth and final is the most expensive but Kou doesn’t bat an eyelid, simply pulling the right change out of his wallet in the form of handfuls of cash once more. Mitsuba picks a table that looks out over the river, the cityscape rising from the opposite bank in heat-twisted spires that catch silver in the sunlight, and he raises his phone to snap photos while ignoring every one of Kou’s miserable conversation starters.

When small-talk doesn’t work, Kou swallows down a piece of bacon and tells Mitsuba; “I want to write a song for you.”

“You already did,” Mitsuba deadpans, pointing in the direction of Kou’s keyboard. “Because you’re a stalker.”

“I mean a proper song, lyrics and all,” Kou elaborates excitedly, the stalker comment slipping right past him as if he’s grown used to Mitsuba’s insults already. “I’ll make the best piece of music that you’ve ever listened to, mark my words!” 

Sing it, says Nanamine Sakura’s knowing smile.

“I’ll pass,” says Mitsuba Sousuke, stubborn as they come.

-

Kou is persistent, Mitsuba will give him that.

First it’s texts- snippets of audio delivered to Mitsuba’s phone in the middle of the night, all of which he leaves on read. Then it’s phone calls at equally inappropriate times, all of which Mitsuba declines. Then Kou is sitting at a table in the cafe while Mitsuba sings to the cyclists outside and Aoi taps her fingernails on the ice cream freezer to the beat. He sways and scribbles down notes into the pages of his overflowing notebook, and Mitsuba’s voice cracks around a high note he can usually hit.

“Can you take a look at these lyrics for me?” He asks when Mitsuba takes a break, seamlessly catching the water bottle that Aoi throws and passing it to Mitsuba with a bright grin. Somewhere on the news in the background, the weatherman announces a climate disaster in the wake of the fifth week without rain. “I need to make sure that you like the concept.”

“I’m not looking at them.” Mitsuba turns his nose in the air, downs the rest of his water, and keeps singing.

They run into each other at the bus station, both heading to the same outdoor concert in a park across the district. Mitsuba picks at a thread hanging from the bandanna tied around his wrist, and Kou falls into the seat right beside him. Kou scribbles down notes into the few free spaces left on the page, glancing up occasionally to watch the cars cruising past and the billboards advertising sunscreen and beach balls. If they stick side-by-side throughout the whole performance, then Mitsuba would never admit it out loud. If Mitsuba almost takes a peek when Kou slides the notebook into his lap on the bus ride back, then he’d never admit that either.

A few days later, Kou grins sunnily up at him from the pavement of the footbridge, playing wordless tunes on his guitar into the sweet summer air and monopolising Mitsuba’s usual busking spot.

“We could always perform together.” Kou suggests. Mitsuba almost agrees.

The breaking point comes on a night where the weather runs too hot to even think about sleeping, Mitsuba standing in his cat pyjamas on the rooftop of his ten-storey dorm complex. His ceiling fan is still broken, and he blames it on the heat when he accepts Kou’s phone-call for the first time in a week and a half. 

“I wanted to ask,” Kou prefaces, the hum of the AC significantly less overwhelming this time. “Why do you love music?”

It’s late- too late for Mitsuba to be awake when he has a job interview the following morning, and too late for Kou to still be working on music. He doesn’t sound excited or enthusiastic this time, just mellow, curious. Two new items for Mitsuba to add to his mile-long list of things he maybe dislikes about Minamoto Kou .

“You’re so obsessed with me,” Mitsuba jokes, the words carrying fondly into the star-filled sky.

“You only seem to smile genuinely when you sing,” Kou continues, and from the rush of cars in the background, Mitsuba wonders if he’s stood underneath the starlight too. The two of them, staring up at the same summer sky. “Music can reveal a lot about a person.”

“People notice me when I sing,” Something about the city below and the air above draws a rare piece of honesty out of Mitsuba. (For all his faults, Kou loves music, and so surely he’ll understand.) “When I act like myself, people think I’m rude, and when I tone myself down, I get lost in the background. When I’m singing, I get to be myself; but people like it. People pay attention to what I say, even if the words aren’t my own.”

“My family wanted me to become a lawyer like my brother,” On the other end of the phone line, Kou laughs. “At first, I thought I was just doing music to prove to them that I’m my own person, but it became more than that, eventually. I get to tell my own stories, but I get to tell other people’s stories too. That’s the bit I like most.” 

“How noble of you, prince lame-earring,” Mitsuba teases, leaning into the railing. “Is this where you ask me to let you write a song again?”

Kou hums, the sound travelling down the phone from one rooftop to another. “Let me tell your story too, Mitsuba.” 

For all his faults- Kou isn’t a stranger any more.

“Okay,” Mitsuba breathes, lying to himself that a love of music is the only thing that connects them. (He ignores the sky and the notebook and the fact that Kou has met every piece of his bad attitude without hesitation.) “You’d better make it a good one.”

(In the heat of midsummer, there’s a story waiting to be written. Mitsuba ends the phone-call, and turns the first page.) 

-

They meet up properly the next afternoon- once Mitsuba has bombed his job interview and Aoi has sent him a better luck next time text, having seen him traipsing forlornly past the cafe window. It’s still too humid to stay inside, so Mitsuba tells Kou to meet him by the river, where the buildings are less crowded and the air is marginally more breathable. 

“You have sunscreen on your nose,” Mitsuba greets when Kou hops up to sit beside him on the wall, propping up his guitar case and revealing a plastic bag full of chilled drinks. While Kou scrubs at his nose, Mitsuba makes a dive for the melon soda. 

“I did some more work on the melody this morning,” Kou says, fishing his laptop from the depths of his backpack. “Tell me if any of the parts are out of your range.” 

“They won’t be,” Mitsuba assures. If there’s one thing he’s confident in, it’s his ability to hit a note just right.

“Still, give it a listen,” as he speaks, Kou has a pair of earphones in one hand and a delighted grin on his face. Smiling like he could wipe the sun from the sky if he wanted. “I can’t wait for you to hear it.”

Mitsuba puts on the earphones and Kou misses the play button on his laptop in barely concealed excitement, laughing sheepishly before the music begins properly. The song is different to the last time Mitsuba heard it- the tune is similar and the notes the same, but that is all. The piece feels lonelier, yet more defiant- fit for a voice which sings alone, yet commands the whole world to listen and moves mountains in its wake. The piece swells, boats drift across the flat river surface, and Kou has somehow turned Mitsuba’s thoughts into music.

It sounds like the time he finally hit the highest note in his mom’s favourite song, the day his highschool band decided his personality was just too much to bear, the applause after he stood upon the stage in Aoi’s cafe for the first time, with a karaoke microphone and a song to sing. It sounds like falling in love, then out of love, then in love all over again. 

It starts off lonely, and then it grows. 

The song ends, and the space between Mitsuba’s ears and his heart feels far too quiet.

“Do you like it?” Kou asks, as if the answer isn’t written clearly across every feature on Mitsuba’s face. He’s wearing a new smile, a softer one that’s about as nervous as a human supernova can be. Mitsuba wants to tell him to keep smiling like that, that it makes the summer just about bearable.

“It’s alright, I guess.” He lies. (He knows his voice will betray his thoughts, anyway.)

-

“He almost made me cry in public, then seconds later he nearly dropped his laptop into the river,” Mitsuba tells Sakura despairingly, lying bonelessly against their side while they edit the script for the next episode of their radio show on the occult and terrifying. “I hate him and his stupid songs.”

Nanamine Sakura is cool, puts up with Mitsuba’s complaints, and always lends him their makeup when he asks. Nanamine Sakura is also terrible. 

“You talk about him a lot for someone that you hate, Sousuke.” They reply, more amused than they’ve been in weeks.

-

By the time the song is done, the heatwave has entered its sixth week and the fan in Mitsuba’s bedroom is still broken. With his heart beating two-time in his chest, Mitsuba smuggles Kou and his travel keyboard into one of the university-owned vocal practice rooms. He swears it's only for the acoustics- not because he doesn’t want to subject Kou to the overwhelming heat of his dorm room. He swears that he’s not excited.

( This is it , the foolish voice of the weatherman says in the back of Mitsuba’s mind. There is a song here and it’s yours. )

“I’m just going to set up, and then-” Kou’s hands shake as he tries to flip open the lid of his laptop, doing just as bad of a job at concealing his excitement as Mitsuba. “You can look at the lyrics while I do this.” 

He pushes his notebook into Mitsuba’s hands, somehow even more full than it was the last time he saw it. As he flips through the pages, Mitsuba recognises the receipt from the cafe they visited for lunch, the bus ticket from the day of the concert, his own phone number scribbled down in the margain. The final page is the neatest, filled only by a sheet of lyrics penned in excruciatingly careful handwriting, as if Kou had been afraid to put a single stroke out of place. Hesitant and controlled, the writing of a person trying to be careful for the first time in their life.

“Your normal handwriting sucks, but I can read it just fine. You don’t need to go to that much effort,” Mitsuba tells him, and hates the implication that there’s going to be a next time.

Be Brave, reads the song title. Mitsuba holds his breath.

Mitsuba drinks in each line, and finds that he doesn’t yet know how to connect the songwriter Minamoto Kou, who somehow understands every piece of him and puts it down into music, with the boy-from-the-alleyway Minamoto Kou, who fumbles with his laptop and almost trips over the mess of wires he’s created. There’s an eternity between them, two boys in one body, and Mitsuba denies that he’s fascinated.

“How did you learn this much about me in such a short amount of time?” Mitsuba asks, as each line hits closer and closer to home. “Are you sure you’re not a stalker?”

“Music reveals a lot about a person,” Kou replies in echoes of the night on the rooftop, sitting himself down behind his keyboard. “You’re not as impossible to read as you think, either.”

“What’s music revealed about me then, Minamoto?” Mitsuba challenges. He holds the notebook in his hands, and thinks he might already know.

“You’re cocky and full of yourself,” Kou starts, earning an indignant splutter from Mitsuba. “You say the opposite of what you mean, and you only act nice to get people to like you.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask you to insult me!” Shoving Kou in the arm hard, Mitsuba frowns. An unphased Minamoto Kou smiles on.

“I wasn’t finished,” he shoves back, light as air. “You’re lonely and you’re scared of being lost in the crowd, so you’ve turned yourself into something unforgettable. You’re bright and arrogant and interesting , and you make the whole world want to listen to you. That’s the story I wanted to tell.”

The practice room suddenly feels far too small. Mitsuba releases a breath he didn’t realise he was holding, and tears his line of sight away from stupid, honest Kou and his stupid, honest smile. (He refuses to cry, not before he’s even started singing.)

“At least take me out for dinner before you confess to me,” Mitsuba swings a half-hearted kick in Kou’s direction. “How long does it even take you to set up, anyway?”

“I’m done now- I’ll play the melody first so you know how the lyrics are meant to sound, then we can start properly,” Kou speaks all in one breath, as if he’s embarrassed for talking so freely. He tugs on his earring again; definitely a nervous habit, and definitely not endearing.

He plays the song from start to finish, Mitsuba reads the lyrics along with it and taps his foot to the rhythm- pouring it into himself until he’s sure he has it mostly memorised. He wants it to be perfect, unwilling to let Kou have the upper hand. He’s going to make himself unforgettable, just as Kou had predicted.

“Ready?” Kou asks, finger hovering over the record button. 

Mitsuba nods, and then he sings.

This time, it’s not a cover. This time, the song was made for him, created for his voice, his lungs, his story. He puts his heart and his soul and every other cell in his body into it, because he’s the one who constructs the guidelines here. Though he sits in a tiny vocal practice room, with only Kou playing the piano beside him, Mitsuba sings as if the whole world is listening. (Maybe it will, one day.) 

I’m brave, Mitsuba thinks, as the music swells to fill the room. My heart is moving mountains.

Three minutes and twenty seven seconds has never felt so short, yet so much like an eternity.

Mitsuba cries easily, and he feels no shame when he lowers his microphone and finds tear-trails upon his cheeks. He lets a smile slip out, because one more bit of honesty couldn’t hurt, and he raises the striped sleeve of his shirt to make a futile attempt at drying his eyes.

When he turns his head, pulling himself back above the surface of the water, Kou is staring at him, and Kou is crying too. 

“That’s the first time anyone has sung my lyrics,” he admits breathlessly, so quiet for someone who is usually the loudest thing in the room. “Don’t laugh.”

“You’d better not cry like a baby every time I sing it, then,” Mitsuba tosses a packet of tissues at him, and decides he wants to keep singing Kou’s music until there’s not a single note left. 

-

“What about the original song you’ve been working on?” Aoi sidles over as Mitsuba packs up his speakers in the corner of the cafe, no free ice cream in sight. Mitsuba doesn’t want to know how she found out about his and Kou’s song, although he has a distinct feeling it has something to do with Sakura.

Mitsuba does have a backing track for the song, and he’s sung the lyrics to himself enough times while making breakfast to know them off by heart. But it’s not just his song- it’s Kou’s music as much as his own, and as infuriating as he is, it doesn’t feel right to debut it without him standing right at his side. ( Maybe we should perform together? Kou had asked him earlier, sat in Mitsuba’s busking spot with his guitar in his lap.)

As lovely as she is, Aoi isn’t likely to take no for an answer when music is concerned. Mitsuba pulls out his phone.

“Hey, Minamoto,” Mitsuba says as soon as Kou picks up. “Are you free right now?”

No more than ten minutes later, Kou’s head peeks around the doorway of the cafe, hair unruly and his breath catching in his throat like he’s been running. He’s wearing the rain poncho again, and Mitsuba wonders how mad Kou would be if he tore a hole in the back till it became unusable. After an enthusiastic greeting, Kou begins to set himself up by the side of the stage, hooking up his keyboard to the outlet and propping it up on a table. The cafe regulars, used to Mitsuba’s solo performances, watch in bemused silence when Mitsuba prods him in the shoulder and tells him to hurry up. 

It’s been years since Mitsuba has performed live with another person, and he’d be lying if he said that he wasn’t nervous. 

Pulling up a chair, Kou sends him a grin and a thumbs-up, an unspoken I’m ready when you are.

“I know I just said I was finished,” Mitsuba announces into the microphone, moths with fluttering wingbeats filling the pit of his stomach with static. (He hasn’t felt this nervous about singing in a very long time.) “But Akane-san has bullied me into debuting my original song earlier than planned,” He pauses for a laugh. “So, this is Be Brave- written by Minamoto Kou, and performed by the lovely Mitsuba Sousuke.” 

The theatrics do little to ease his anxiety, so he closes his eyes and counts down from ten the way he used to do before elementary school performances- eight years old and clinging to his mom’s skirt with shaking hands.

The first note sings out, and Mitsuba lets everything aside from the music fade from view.

For three minutes and twenty seven seconds, it’s just Mitsuba, Kou, and the song that connects them. They perform for each other and the whole world all at once- Mitsuba pouring his heart into each word, and Kou pouring his soul into each note. Mitsuba is distantly aware of more people stepping into the cafe, lured in by the music from the propped-open front door, but each new face and raised camera screen does nothing to shift his focus.

It’s his song, and nothing in the world could stop him from singing it.

When the music fades it feels like coming down from a reverie, pulled by his sternum back into the world of the living, and Kou grins at him from across the stage with eyes that are filled to the brim with stars. Mitsuba is acutely aware that he’s uncomfortable- it’s too warm, his hair is in his eyes and there’s sweat stuck to his forehead, but the applause makes it all worthwhile. 

“That was certainly something,” Aoi laughs from behind the counter, a hard-won genuine smile clear upon her face. “You were straining a bit in the second verse, though.”

“I want ice cream now,” breathless and alive, all Mitsuba can do is grin.

-

After Kou admits that he’s yet to take a train ride into Shibuya, Mitsuba takes him on a whirlwind tour by night- the air still humid but slightly more bearable than the heat of midday. Mitsuba finds it odd that Kou has never mentioned where he’s from, what he’s doing in the city, or why he carries his belongings with him more often than not, but he doesn’t pry.

Everything about Kou is odd- Mitsuba knows this by now.

As he stands under blinking billboard lights amongst the streets of a city that never seems to sleep, Kou laughs like he’s never been so happy to fade into the background. They get lost- Mitsuba has always failed to navigate the shopping district- and they have to call Sakura for directions, but Mitsuba finds that losing his way is far less scary with Kou’s confidence that the station is surely just around the corner.

“We should keep performing together,” Kou tells him half-way across the Shibuya crossing, swept along by the crowd on all four sides.

“Yeah,” Mitsuba agrees breathlessly, and the city lights overhead shimmer like stars. “Yeah, we should.” 

-

The next time Mitsuba performs on the footbridge across the river, Kou is right there beside him. Plucking out tunes on his guitar, matching Mitsuba’s voice, making music- just as they were made to do.

-

“Who's your favourite singer?” Kou asks from the vending machine outside of the music building, feeding coins into the slot to obtain the last remaining bottle of milk tea. He’s learned quickly that small-talk only works when music is involved.

“I’d be here all day if I told you that,” Mitsuba replies. “My turn- why do you keep carrying this thing around with you?” He prods Kou’s bag with a disdainful finger. It takes up an entire third seat on the bench- like a free-loading guest who doesn’t contribute to the conversation and makes Kou’s walking pace unbearably slow on the best of days.

Kou tosses the milk tea to Mitsuba, and cracks open his own can of cola. “I’ve been moving between hotels since I got here, so I need to carry my stuff with me,” he admits, tugging on his earring. “I have to switch every few days, so the bag comes with me.”

Mitsuba narrows his eyes. He’s long since suspected that there’s something Kou isn’t telling him- from his seemingly infinite supply of spare cash, to his refusal to mention why he came to the city in the first place, to the car with the blacked out windows on the first day they met. There’s something which feels fundamentally not right- a secret that’s too heavy and terrible for Mitsuba to understand. As much as he hates to admit it, he’s grown used to Kou’s bright smiles and unrelenting enthusiasm, the sound of his guitar and the voice memos he leaves on Mitsuba’s phone. So, foolish as it may be, he turns a blind eye.

The heatwave shows no sign of relenting, and Mitsuba assumes that the weather must have made him delirious when he turns to Kou and tells him he’s welcome to crash on the sofa in his dorm, if he ever gets fed up with hotel food.

“The fan’s been broken for the past few weeks,” he cautions. “And I’d make you do all the chores to earn your keep- but it could be your payment for writing that song for me.”

When he lowers his bottle of milk tea, Kou is staring at him over the top of his backpack, and Mitsuba doesn’t think he’s ever seen him smile so bright.

-

It feels like a collision between two planetary systems when Kou steps in through the door of Mitsuba’s dorm and drops his backpack heavily onto the ground. He slips off his shoes in the genkan and looks around- taking in the collection of posters on Mitsuba’s walls, the stack of plushies from back home on his bed, the view of the main road out of the fifth-storey window.

“This is really nice,” he concludes, settling down his guitar against the blanket-covered sofa. 

Mitsuba goes to tell him that it’s not nice, that it’s nothing compared to the safe haven of his bedroom back home, but Kou is already making a beeline for the kitchen, scanning over the appliances and the equipment in the drawers. Mitsuba watches him with raised eyebrows.

“I’ll cook dinner tonight,” Kou then announces, turning around with Mitsuba’s spatula in his hand and an excited grin on his face. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve had access to a proper kitchen.”

Mitsuba doesn’t have high hopes for Kou’s cooking abilities- too haphazard and too impatient to possibly have the skills to impress- but he’s not going to turn down the offer of a free meal. ( The best meals are ones you don’t have to pay for, his mom used to tell him with a teasing spark in her eyes, always full of the best-worst advice.)

“There’s a convenience store just down the road,” Mitsuba instructs, gesturing out of the propped-open window. “Pick up some ice cream while you’re down there.”

One thing Minamoto Kou is good at; proving Mitsuba wrong.

Come dinner time, he serves up the best oyakodon Mitsuba has tasted in his life- trumping even the restaurant he ate at for his thirteenth birthday- and it takes every last piece of his self restraint to avoid asking for seconds. Kou watches him eat with a satisfied expression, the same sort of smile he wore when Mitsuba first listened to his song by the riverside, and Mitsuba wonders if food and music are one in the same to him.

(Kou likes to help others, Mitsuba knows this by now. Enthusiastic to the point of recklessness, fuelling himself on music and the knowledge that others are well-fed and singing along.)

“I’d normally make dessert too, but I already bought ice cream, so-” Kou gestures towards the tiny freezer in the corner of the kitchen.

Mitsuba decides that, if he keeps cooking like that, then Minamoto Kou can stay for as long as he likes.

-

Later that night, Kou curls up on the sofa with his guitar in his lap, plucking out soft tunes and scribbling down notes in unintelligible handwriting onto the pages of his book. Mitsuba hums his way through drafting up an email to Sakura about a potential radio slot, and the humid summer air sweeps in through the open fifth storey window. 

Kou holds up the front page of a newspaper stashed in the side pocket of his backpack- Temperatures of over 35 °C for the third week running, reads the headline. Mitsuba recognises it from the day he lost his job and Kou argued with a stray dog in the alleyway behind Aoi’s ice cream cafe. Though third week running has only just become seventh week running , Mitsuba feels like he’s known Kou for an entire lifetime.

“I want to write you another song,” Kou announces, holding the newspaper into the syrup-heavy air. “One about summer.”

“Don’t you think we’ve all had enough of the heatwave by now, Minamoto?” Rolling over to meet Kou’s eyes, Mitsuba laughs- like there’s something about Kou’s smiles that is dangerous and contagious.

Kou strums a soft note on his guitar. “It’s not all bad though,” he reasons. “We can perform outside, and eat ice cream every day, and I met you.”

“You’re so cheesy, ” Mitsuba groans, and tosses a strawberry plushie at Kou’s head. It misses, almost flying right out of the open window, and Kou smiles fondly through the lowlight of the room. 

“Write about whatever you want,” Mitsuba continues. “I’ll make everything sound stunning.”

“ You’re so full of yourself,” Kou counterracts. He pauses, the silence filled only by traffic rushing through the roads of the sleepless city, busy as ever even with the sky dark and moonlit. “I don’t doubt that for a second, though.”

There’s an unrestrained fondness buried under his words, and Mitsuba feels a continental shift occur inside of his chest.

-

Living alongside Kou is not the unpleasant experience Mitsuba assumed it would be.

Sure, he wakes up at inhuman hours, but he always has breakfast waiting on the table for when Mitsuba finally hauls himself out of bed. Sure, he buys stacks of newspaper and sticks headline clippings between the posters on the walls, but his very presence makes the room feel more alive. Sure, he makes the worst suggestions when Mitsuba announces that he’s still looking for a summer job (Mitsuba suspects that Minamoto Kou has never worked a day in his life), but he upholds his side of the bargain and does the dishes while Mitsuba searches. 

He cooks the most brilliant dinners, fills every corner of the tiny dorm room with music, and even offers to make Mitsuba a flan after their song sings out over the local radio station- courtesy of Sakura and their uncanny ability to convince Natsuhiko to do everything they say. 

Kou has more than a few odd habits. He stares intently at the road when they walk down the highstreet to get to a new busking spot outside of the train station, he rarely uses his card, chooses to pay for a new and expensive full-sized keyboard in cash, and he keeps his phone switched off from the moment he turns the corner into Mitsuba’s street. 

Mitsuba wonders if he’s a spy on the run, or perhaps a prison escapee. He doesn’t ask- because that would require admitting that he’s in any way curious. (He’s also scared- terrified of all the ways that the truth could shake their still-fragile foundations. As much as he will only ever admit it in the form of music, Mitsuba has started to like having Kou around.)

Change is a cold, cruel thing- the bringer of bad news- and Mitsuba has grown comfortable with the new routine they’ve forged.

“You’ll have to invite me over so I can meet your new songwriter one day,” Sakura proposes when they next meet to discuss recording studios, live performances and Natsuhiko’s new pet cat. 

“Never,” Mitsuba swears resolutely, because Sakura is a terror with a nonchalant smile, and would likely try to scare Kou half to death if they ended up in the same room. (He’s definitely not afraid of all the embarrassing stories Sakura might unleash, should Kou ever meet them. Not at all.)

“Don’t be stubborn, Sousuke,” with a subtle raise of Sakura’s eyebrows, Mitsuba knows he’s not going to be able to avoid it forever.

-

“The Perseid meteor shower starts in a few days,” Kou announces, pressing another newspaper headline cutout between Mitsuba’s band posters. “If the weather is clear, then we should be able to see it from the rooftop.”

He looks excited- so much that Mitsuba forces down a condescending statement about how there’s been no sign of rain for a month and a half now, that they’re more likely to die of heatstroke than the weather is to ruin the meteor shower. Perseids visible for the first time in three years- reads the news headline. Mitsuba turns up the speed on his handheld fan, and melts further into his mattress. 

Kou makes a big deal of it- setting trays of ice-cubes to freeze overnight, making a batch of homemade lemonade which leaves the whole dorm smelling of lemon zest, whipping up a veritable banquet of picnic food. Smiling and tapping his foot along to a soundless beat as he goes.

“Is this a date?” Mitsuba jokes when Kou passes him a castoff onigiri that didn’t turn out quite right. “Because I’ve already told you that I don’t date perverts with terrible taste.” 

“I’m just excited,” Packaging food into tupperware boxes, Kou doesn’t even try to refute the statement like usual. “I’ve never seen a meteor shower before. I promised my little sister every year that I’d take her to see one, but I never got the chance.”

Though Mitsuba can’t see Kou’s face, the way his smile slips is audible- every one of his emotions worn upon the surface. Heart on his sleeve, cardiac muscles beating for the world to see. “Do you miss your siblings?” Mitsuba asks, as gentle as he can manage. Kou’s older brother and younger sister are the only two pieces of life before the city that he’s ever offered, so even Mitsuba, an only child for all his life, can feel how important they must have been.

“Of course I do,” Hands falling still upon the lid of the tupperware, Kou’s voice takes on a note that’s sad and tired and Mitsuba never wants to hear it living behind his words ever again. ( When did he start caring so much? ) “I miss them every day, but I can’t-”

Kou cuts himself off with a shake of his head. The heat from outside feels like it’s suddenly too much to bear. ( Unprecedented temperatures expected to continue long into the night- laughs the weather alert on Mitsuba’s phone screen.)

“The sun is going to start setting soon,” Kou then says, cheerful, but too much like he’s lost a piece of himself somewhere along the way.

Mitsuba doesn’t ask further, because he’s never been an older brother or a younger brother. (Mitsuba doesn’t ask further because he doesn’t know how to.)

The trek up to the rooftop turns into four separate treks- first with the food, then with the lemonade, then with the picnic blankets and a fourth time because Kou left his notebook behind and Mitsuba didn’t trust him with the door keys. They settle by the railing with their backs to the TV aerial, and watch as the final pieces of sunlight sink below the cityscape- preparation for the main event as daylight turns rose-gold around them. 

Even after sundown the temperature is still sweltering- the hottest night of the year in the middle of the worst heatwave on record- and Mitsuba makes a fifth trip downstairs to change into the only short-sleeved t-shirt he owns. He knew deep in his chest that he wouldn’t be able to put it off forever.

“From a car accident when I was fourteen,” Mitsuba explains when he catches Kou staring at the scars on his right hand. “It can still grab and hold things, but it’s not much use as a hand any more.” He flexes the fingers, painfully slow. 

“I’m not bothered by it,” Kou tells him, as if he can read Mitsuba’s worries like they’re lyrics on the pages of his notebook.

They drink lemonade filled with ice cubes that melt in minutes, and the city lights blink below in shades of white, red and blue. Overhead, the stars wink back, cloudless skies never quite as bright as they were back home, but pretty nonetheless. They eat their food, wait for the meteors to fall from the sky, and Kou writes about the sunset and the smell of lemon zest and comet Swift-Tuttle’s orbit around the sun. 

The first meteor streaks by overhead, a flash of silver past the starlight, and Kou turns away from it to face Mitsuba- as if somehow he’s more important than the Perseids Kou has been looking forward to his entire life. “There’s something I need to tell you,” Kou admits, as the stars around them fall from the sky.

“You’d better not have been using my shampoo,” Mitsuba jokes, a nervous laugh bubbling at the back of his throat. 

“I saw you busking on the footbridge, days before we met beside the cafe,” Kou continues, eyes bright and blue in the dark. “You didn’t see me, but I heard every note that you sang, and I knew right then that I wanted to write a song for you. I came up with the melody for Be Brave in the alleyway behind the cafe while you performed, right before the dog started chasing me- I lied that I’d never seen you before because you weren’t meant to see the lyrics before they were done.”

BE BRAVE- Kou’s notebook had told him by the riverside. A double page spread for the boy singing on the footbridge- for Mitsuba, and nobody else. Kou stares into him with his stupid smile and his genius lyrics and his awful nervous habit of tugging on his awful traffic safety earring. Mitsuba stares back, and hates that he feels something like hope rising bright and warm inside of his chest.

“I always knew you were a stalker,” Mitsuba laughs shakily, and swears that he will not cry. (Not up here. Not in front of Kou.) “Writing songs about guys you’ve never met is so weird.”

Kou laughs, and turns his focus back to the meteors overhead. “Perhaps it is,” he agrees, wearing that soft smile again. “I don’t regret it, though.”

“You’re shameless,” Mitsuba hugs his knees close to his chest, and, because he doesn’t know how to say the words he truly means, he begins to sing. Soft and gentle, scattered pieces of the music Kou has started to construct for him over the weeks. Fragments of Be Brave and Ice-Cream Days and Shibuya Station. He leans in a little closer, until he can see the fading sunburn on the bridge of Kou’s nose and the chip next to his left canine tooth, until he can nestle his head against Kou’s shoulder and watch the Perseids fall.

Thank you, he lets his music say, for making me unforgettable. 

It’s too hot to sleep and too hot to go back inside, so they work on songs into the night. Kou takes another trek down to the dorm room (Mitsuba trusts him with the keys this time) to retrieve his guitar, and he strums out new melodies about lemonade and meteor showers until the sun begins to breach the skyline once more.

Mitsuba stares bleary-eyed into the first light of dawn- sundazed under Kou’s tired smile- and wonders when it was that he fell so hard.

-

Mitsuba sits under the AC unit in the local laundromat, watching as his clothes spin head over tails to the sound of city pop through the old speaker system. Kou perches wordlessly beside him, watching his own shorts and T-shirts spinning endlessly around, and tapping his foot along to the beat. 

Kou is not pretty. He’s got flyaway hair, his limbs are too long for his body and he grins like a shark on the best of days. Mitsuba still likes him. For all his off-beat humming, selfless habits and tendency to spend a small fortune on groceries each week, Mitsuba likes him. Kou drums his foot, one-two-three, then his face splits into a wide grin.

“I could use this in a song,” he announces.

Mitsuba shoves him, almost hard enough to tip him off the side of his stool. “I’m not singing a song about a laundromat.”

“You said you’d make anything I wrote about sound brilliant, though,” When Kou smiles, his eyes crease at the corners a little, and there’s a chip at the side of his left canine tooth. When he’s nervous, he tugs lightly at his earring. When he sits on public transport, he fidgets unbearably and presses his palms against the window as if he’s a kid riding the bus for the very first time. Little details that Mitsuba never noticed he was learning, like the lyrics to his favourite songs.

“That doesn’t mean I want to sing about laundry,” as Mitsuba speaks, the timer goes off on the washing machine, and the spin-and-thud fades into silence. “Less laundromat songs, more helping me load all of this into the dryers.”

It’s strangely domestic, unloading a mix of his and Kou’s clothes from the washing machine while Kou sprints down the length of the room to secure a vacant dryer before anyone can beat them to it. The voice over the speakers sings about summer to the sound of 80s synth tracks, and Mitsuba wonders if it’s too early to let Kou into a phonecall with his mom.

“Is it too heavy?” Kou calls down the aisle of washing machines, voice echoing into the drum of the tumble-dryer. 

“You wish,” Mitsuba shouts back, deciding that his thoughts can wait for another day.

-

They’re performing by the station under a billboard advertisement for toothpaste when Kou stops playing mid-song. His hand falters over the strings during the second verse of Fallen Stars And Lemonade , staring into the crowds that have gathered as if he’s seen a ghost. On the other side of the road, there’s a car with blacked out windows and a man standing on the pavement beside it, phone raised to his ear.

Kou shoves his guitar into Mitsuba’s arms, and runs .

He’s swallowed up by the crowd before Mitsuba can even think to chase after him, leaving him stood under the billboard with a guitar in his hands and more questions than he can even think to count. He leans into the microphone with a sheepish laugh, trying to crush down the worry in his chest.

“Sorry to cut the performance short,” Mitsuba has never struggled to inject false cheer into his voice, not before now. “Technical difficulties.”

The walk back to Mitsuba’s dorm is a challenging one- the temperature has hit the peak of midday, the plants in the park are all dying from the lack of rainfall, and Mitsuba struggles to carry both his and Kou’s equipment. The worry doesn’t help in the slightest. He settles on a park bench and leans Kou’s guitar case against his legs to keep it upright, burying his head in his hands and untying his hair to avoid getting sunburn on the back of his neck. 

Kou has been lying to him about something huge and greater than either of them, and Mitsuba allowed himself to become caught in the eye of the storm. He calls Sakura from the park bench, because somehow they always know what to do.

“I think my music partner is a member of a crime syndicate,” Mitsuba laments down the phone line as soon as Sakura picks up. “Or maybe he’s a spy, or he’s on the run from the government, or-”

“Sousuke,” Aoi’s voice comes through the speaker, a little distant. Mitsuba is certain that he dialed the right number, “I don’t think Kou-kun is part of a crime syndicate.”

“Why are you on Sakura’s phone?” Mitsuba then asks, attention effectively diverted. There’s a laugh from the other end of the line, one that sounds like Sakura this time. If Mitsuba had anywhere else to turn, he thinks he would have hung up without another word.

“We’re having afternoon tea together,” Sakura says, voice measured and about as amused as Mitsuba has ever heard them sound. “Would you like to join us?” Aoi’s teasing and Sakura’s calm disdain sound like a match made in hell, so Mitsuba declines vigorously. 

“Minamoto just ran off in the middle of a performance because a big fancy car pulled up at the side of the road,” he explains, feeling worry and frustration rising up like the summertime heat. “He’s been hiding things from me because he’s stupid and awful and I hate him.”

“You sound awfully worried about him for someone that you hate,” Aoi pipes up. I know things about you that not even you’re aware of, says the undertone of her voice, always a little too observant, always a little too aware. Her musician’s attention to detail and her job in a cafe where people like to talk makes her terrifying on the best of days.

This time, Mitsuba does hang up without another word.

Kou doesn’t return home ( home, because the dorm is as much his as it is Mitsuba’s now) when the temperature begins to fall, when the sky makes a futile promise of rain around dinner time, when the sun begins to nestle lower into the skyline. Mitsuba makes himself instant ramen for dinner for the first time in weeks, and finds that the room is all too quiet without Kou’s hushed piano notes and out-of-step humming.

He doesn’t come home, and Mitsuba denies that he’s worried.

(His instant ramen doesn’t make him feel nauseous, he doesn’t sing louder than usual to fill the gaps, he doesn’t pace from the kitchen to the bedroom and back more times than he can count.)

The sun has almost set when a text from Sakura lights up Mitsuba’s phone screen, through the orange dusk spilling past the open window.

Sousuke, it reads. Turn on the local news right now.

He scrambles to his laptop, flips to the news broadcast, and there on the screen of his desktop is Minamoto Kou.

Boy rescued from the river by emergency services after jumping from the footbridge- the headline across the bottom of the screen reads. Mitsuba feels sick. Kou’s face- hair slicked wet against his forehead and a towel wrapped around his shoulders as he’s bundled into the back of an ambulance- stares back at him. Mitsuba snaps the laptop shut, almost hard enough to break it.

He doesn’t know what to think- whether to feel betrayed or sad or angry, whether he wants Kou to come back and tell him every sad, awful thing he’s ever hidden, or whether he never wants to see him again. It’s too much all at once, so Mitsuba just sinks to the floor and cries harder than he has in a very long time. When his highschool band decided they no longer needed his voice, at least his mom was there with hot chocolate and a conspiratory you were always too good for them. This time, there’s nothing but the stumble of the broken ceiling fan for company.

Then the doorbell rings and Kou is standing there- exhausted and waterlogged but still putting on a smile. Waiting outside with his shoes in one hand as if Mitsuba’s dorm hasn’t been his home since the moment he first set foot through the doorway. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, in the worst, most broken voice to ever come out of Minamoto Kou’s throat. “I ruined the performance.”

The statement is so ridiculous and selfless and so much like Kou that Mitsuba can’t stop himself from crying all over again. He scrambles to his feet and hurtles directly into him, wrapping arms around Kou’s shoulders so he can’t run off again and crying messily into his shoulder. It’s too warm- it’s always too warm because Kou belongs in midsummer- but when he’s this close Mitsuba can feel the pulse-point at Kou’s neck. Heart beating, proof that he’s alive.

“If you hated it here that much,” Mitsuba sobs, as angry and messy as he’s ever been. “Why didn’t you just tell me? Why did you-” He cuts himself off, the headline still making him feel dizzy with heatstroke. Jumped from the footbridge- it laughs, malicious in a way the weatherman and his prediction of sunny days for weeks to come never was.

When Kou untangles Mitsuba’s shaking arms to look him in the eye, he has the nerve to look confused, bright eyes narrowed and vacant. Then something alike to horror spreads to each of his features- first the eyes, then the rest- and Mitsuba decides he never wants to see Kou look so haunted ever again. 

“Mitsuba, I wasn’t trying to-” when he lifts his hands to tug restlessly at his own hair, bright, unwavering Kou is shaking. “I love being alive, I love making music with you. I even love your broken ceiling fan and the fact that your microwave always makes my leftovers explode. I love-”

“Why would you do something so stupid, then?” Mitsuba cuts him off, certain that his tears would never stop if Kou said anything more. “You made me carry all your stuff home, and then you made me cry, and now you’re apologising for all the wrong stuff!” He hits Kou in the shoulder, weak and trembling. The room around feels as if it’s caving in, atmospheres of pressure crushing close on either side until the whole world narrows to Mitsuba crying, Kou shaking, and a summer heatwave with two months of no rainfall outside.

“I’m sorry,” when Kou pulls Mitsuba back into a hug, the room folds in on itself again- closer. (There’s a whole city outside of the kitchen window, but to them it doesn’t mean a thing.) “About everything.”

Mitsuba always believed that Kou was most vulnerable when he played music, pouring his heart and pieces of Mitsuba’s too into his lyrics and melodies. He’s proven incorrect, when Kou grabs him by the wrist and offers a small, broken don’t leave me- not a single melody in sight. 

Mitsuba is still angry, and Kou is still hiding things. It’s scary, just how hard saying no has become.

They curl up on a sofa which barely has enough room for one, limbs tangled and not quite certain where Kou ends and Mitsuba begins. There’s a bed only meters away, but the space between feels like an eternity- too vast to cross without one of them becoming lost along the way. So Mitsuba just leans back, presses his forehead against Kou’s to the broken hum of the ceiling fan, and notices how the sunburn on his nose hasn’t quite faded yet.

“What are you hiding from me, Kou?” Mitsuba asks into the silence of a room usually filled with music. The name tastes unfamiliar, too honest and just as certain as the fact that Mitsuba Sousuke will sing as long as there’s breath in his lungs. 

“I’ll tell you in the morning,” Kou’s response is quiet, yet truthful. No more secrets, it promises.

“You’d better,” leaning his head into Kou’s shoulder, Mitsuba sighs.

He’s asleep before Kou even has the chance to respond.

-

When Mitsuba wakes up, every one of his limbs creak in protest from where he’s curled up at the very end of the sofa. Kou is already in the kitchen cooking breakfast, and the whole scene would feel scarily domestic were it not for Kou’s promise from the previous night hanging heavily around the ceiling fan. Kou flips a pancake over the stovetop, cheering to himself quietly when it lands neatly back in the bottom of the pan- then startles and almost drops the whole thing on the floor when Mitsuba coughs to catch his attention.

“So,” Mitsuba starts, twisting his neck to ease out some of the stiffness.

“Can we talk after I’ve cooked breakfast?” There’s a worried, unfamiliar look in Kou’s eyes, and Mitsuba can tell that he’s trying to put things off. He’s never been hard to read, his panic worn on full display. It’s not an expression that looks at home on Kou’s face, so Mitsuba just nods in acceptance and sits himself down at the table. He’s already waited this long, and the instant ramen from the previous night did little to fend away his hunger, after all.

Kou flips more pancakes, now silent even when gravity works in his favour, before presenting a plate to Mitsuba with less of a flourish than usual. It feels as if the sun has passed behind the clouds, and Mitsuba wonders if he’ll miss the summertime this much when it’s finally gone. 

Three bites into his stack of pancakes, Kou closes his eyes and lets out a sigh- the sort that could only come from carrying the weight of the world upon his shoulders for far too long. 

“I ran away from home,” Kou admits, more defeated than he ever should sound. “My father is in the government- high up in the government- and he’s been dealing in all sorts of shady business to get ahead ever since my mom died years ago. He’s spent my whole life conditioning me to work for him, teaching me and my brother all his secrets to success, but all I’ve ever wanted to do is make music.”

The syrup on Mitsuba’s pancakes suddenly feels nauseatingly sweet. Kou bows his head and continues.

“There’d be an outrage if people knew all the things he’s done to get where he is now, so when I packed my bags and left, he sent people to bring me home- in case I let anything slip. They almost caught me yesterday- I couldn’t come back here while I was being followed because I didn’t want to get you involved, so I jumped in the river to get them off my trail,” He pushes an overcooked piece of pancake around the edge of his plate. “I understand if you want me to leave. I never wanted to get anyone else mixed up in this, I just-”

Before Kou can creep any closer towards saying something that sounds like goodbye, Mitsuba tosses a balled-up napkin at his head, as hard as he can manage. 

“You didn’t think that I could handle telling some stuck-up bodyguards that I’d never seen you before in my life,” Mitsuba frowns. “So you decided to jump off a bridge instead?”

“I-” Kou shrinks into his chair. “It sounds stupid when you say it like that.”

“That’s because it is stupid!” Deciding that the environment is already bad enough as it is, Mitsuba scrunches up another napkin to throw at Kou, then a third. “You made me think that you were part of a crime syndicate! You made me cry! ” He can feel tears welling up all over again, out of frustration or relief, he can’t quite tell.

Kou doesn’t say a word- sitting at the table and staring into his half-eaten pancakes as if they hold the secrets to the universe.

“I don’t care if your dad is some dodgy politician, just-” Mitsuba kicks Kou’s ankle under the table, some poor imitation of a fond gesture. “Don’t do anything that stupid ever again. I’ll never forgive you.”

“You’re not even scared?” Kou then asks, speaking for what feels like the first time in an eternity. “I’ve been avoiding my phone and my card so they don’t have a lot to track me with, but they’ll find me again eventually. I don’t know what-”

“Believe me, I’m terrified,” There’s a small, selfish piece of Mitsuba’s heart that wants to tell Kou to leave, that doesn’t want to get involved in things bigger than he’ll ever be. But Kou has given him music and sunshine and made him feel unforgettable. He can’t just turn his back and pretend that he was never there. (That’s the thing about heatwaves- you can’t just walk away.) “But we’ve still got music to make, don’t we?”

Though the nervous and selfish feelings in his chest almost put Mitsuba off his breakfast, Kou’s face splits back into a smile- exactly how things are supposed to be.

“Actually, I was thinking about the laundromat song in the hospital yesterday, so-” he starts, enthusiasm flooding back.

“Don’t you even dare, ” Mitsuba groans, though he can’t hide the way that he’s smiling,

-

Mitsuba was not lying when he said that he was terrified. He’s always been a coward, scared of big vehicles, heights, and rats- and the prospect of shady government bodyguards breaking down his door at three in the morning is another thing to add to the list. He tells Kou as such, berates him for not having a better family, then calms down as soon as Kou lets him taste-test his cake mix.

Despite the looming threat that Kou’s family isn’t far behind, Mitsuba doesn’t think he’s ever felt better. He no longer searches for a part-time job, earning enough money from videos and busking and local radio appearances to live comfortably, especially with Kou’s endless supply of cash covering his grocery costs. He gets home-cooked meals most nights, Sakura’s unsettlingly accurate tarot readings have all predicted bright things to come, and Mitsuba thinks he understands lyrics about love a little better than he did at the start of the heatwave.

The ceiling fan is still broken, the plants outside are dead, and the river levels are lower than they ever should be. But writing songs around a table-top fan, Kou playing haphazard melodies on his keyboard and Mitsuba singing along, just about makes the summertime bearable.

Kou writes the song about the laundromat.

Love makes people do foolish things, so Mitsuba sings along.

-

“There’s something I want to tell you,” Kou says in the middle of the night, fully aware that neither of them are sleeping. The tabletop fan hums and the traffic flies past outside, white noise drifting into Mitsuba’s dorm room. 

“Wait till the morning,” Mitsuba cautions. Sakura drew the wheel of fortune from their deck earlier in the week, and Mitsuba is not yet ready for fate to change. For better or for worse, the world can stay steady on its axis till the morning, at least.

-

When Mitsuba gets back home from talking to Sakura about a potential new performance spot, Kou’s things are gone. 

His backpack is no longer propped up by the sofa, his spare clothes are no longer draped over the back of the chair, his toothbrush and shampoo no longer reside in the bathroom. The only things left: his keyboard, his guitar, and his notebook. 

The first indicator that something is very, horribly wrong is that Minamoto Kou would never leave without saying goodbye. The second indicator is that Kou would never go anywhere without his notebook. Yet there it sits, face-down on the tabletop, surrounded by the scattered receipts and train timetables that tell the story of every song Kou has ever written.

Mitsuba feels nauseous- when the weatherman’s voice predicted change and Sakura’s tarot deck did the same, the sudden absence of Minamoto Kou was not what Mitsuba had expected. All attempts to call Kou’s number go straight to voicemail, and there’s no note tucked under the dying houseplants which Kou swore he could look after. The room feels too silent, traffic fading into background noise, and Mitsuba can’t tell if he wants to pull his hair out in frustration, call his mom for advice, or just sink to the kitchen floor and cry. Something about the absence feels terrifyingly final, a gaping black hole torn above the sofa.

Mitsuba doesn’t pull out his hair or call his mom or cry, because there’s something pinned to the wall, tucked between the posters and the articles on the Perseid meteor shower. Something which wasn’t there that morning.

Appeal put out to find the missing son of the Minamoto family- reads the headline, hastily torn from the newspaper and stuck like a centerpiece in the middle of the wall. Any information on the whereabouts of Minamoto Kou should be directed to- 

The article cuts off, and though he may have failed highschool mathematics, Mitsuba knows enough to put two and two together. Kou is gone, his father has gone public with his search, the notebook was left behind. As certain as sun in the sky and the river lapping at its banks, Kou is already on his way back home- wherever that may be.

From where he dropped it on the kitchen table, Mitsuba’s phone screen lights up once, then once again.

I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye- says the first text, from an unknown sender who couldn’t be anyone but Kou.

The second text: an address. 

If you ever want to find me- the message says, with no words needed- then this is where I am.

Mitsuba still wants to pull his hair out from frustration, and he still wants to sink to the kitchen floor and cry- but at least hope feels closer than the end of summer has ever done.

-

“Kou got taken back to his family,” Mitsuba announces, sinking into a chair opposite Sakura with a defeated sigh. He feels significantly out of place, sitting in his dungarees amongst what appears to be the entire classic goth population of Chuo City- although, standing out like a pastel pink-and-blue sore thumb is the least of his issues. Kou is the very worst of Mitsuba’s problems. (As he always has been. As he always will be.) “His dad is some shady politician who doesn’t approve of him doing music and potentially spilling his secrets.”

“Well, I knew that,” Sakura barely even blinks. “His family name is Minamoto. I don’t know how you didn’t figure it out earlier.”

Mitsuba stares into his tea, and doesn’t say another word.

“Are you going to do anything about it?” Sakura then prompts, gentle and curious. It feels like a push in the right direction- like they agree that he shouldn’t give up on Kou’s music quite so easily. (Reluctantly, Mitsuba will admit that he doesn’t want to give up on Kou as a person, either.)

“Kou-kun isn’t around to do reckless things any more,” Mitsuba says, heart rate picking up behind his ribs. Once he puts it into words, there’s no going back. “So I’m just going to have to do something stupid instead.”

There’s a plan that’s been sitting in the back of his mind, ever since texts from an unknown number that weren’t quite a goodbye lit up the screen of his phone. It’s a stupid plan, undoubtedly one of the worst ideas that he’s ever had, and Mitsuba decides that Kou is a bad influence through and through. It’s terrible, but it’s the best idea he’s got.

He has to be brave if he wants to move mountains, after all.

-

The first part of Mitsuba’s plan involves getting a part-time job. With the long summer months drawing to a close and students heading back to school and university, Mitsuba finds the task easier than in the heat of midsummer. He secures a place stacking convenience store shelves on Mondays and Thursdays, sorting instant ramen by flavour and brand then hiding in the fridge aisle when the weather gets too warm.  

Then comes a second job, wiping down the floors at the back of the ice cream cafe by the river and complaining to Aoi that he’s being subjected to unfair labour. Then, a third short-lived stint as a dog-walker, in which he gets pulled into the heat-withered grass by an enthusiastic golden retriever, and quits on his own accord after a week.

Mitsuba performs whenever he can, singing along to a recording of Kou’s guitar that’ll never be the same as the real thing, collecting all the spare change and donations he can gather. On the footbridge across the river, which Mitsuba knows he’ll never see the same way again, a girl stops him between songs and asks about Kou, because the two of them have become something of a pair over the sunsoaked summer months. 

“He’ll be back soon,” Mitsuba promises, as self-assured as he can make it.

He posts more frequently than ever on the hell of mirrors channel, and decides that, when Kou gets back, he’ll stop going by the name of his old highschool band once and for all. ( You can’t live with your head in the past forever, Sousuke his mom once told him, during a long winter's night where Mitsuba swore he would never sing again. You don’t always get things right the first time.)

Though he hates to admit it, Mitsuba thinks that, this time, he’s found exactly what he was looking for.

Habits are hard to break, Mitsuba finds, as he wakes up to expect the smell of pancakes cooking over the stovetop. He forgets about grocery shopping until there’s barely anything left in the fridge, because Kou usually picks up ingredients on Friday afternoons. He keeps waiting by the riverside after work for a boy who will never come. Mitsuba can’t tell what feels worse- the fact that he’s become so used to having a second sun in the sky, or the fact that he misses Minamoto Kou in the same way a person would miss a limb that got removed.

(He wonders if, hours down the shinkansen line, Kou misses him too.)

Mitsuba takes his part time jobs, edits videos late into the night, chases Sakura for even more opportunities to perform, and checks the news every morning for a head of blonde hair and the most ridiculous earring ever. Aoi commends his hard work, Sakura reminds him to get some rest like their own sleep schedule is anything to be proud of, Mitsuba decides he hates how quiet his dorm is without Kou’s loud, unmissable existence to fill it.

Summertime storm set to hit after almost three months with no rain- announces the 9AM weather report on the day that Mitsuba gathers up all the money that he’s saved, and purchases train tickets to Kyoto. One for the way there- and two for the way back. 

-

On the last day of August, Mitsuba gathers up all the things a singer could need for a rescue operation.

He packs train tickets, money, Kou’s notebook and a temporary new SIM card- because Mitsuba Sousuke has seen enough spy movies to know how these things go. He ties his hair up like he’s about to perform, plugs in his earphones, and settles into a seat for the three-hour-long ride to Kyoto. 

His own voice sings through his earphones, playing the songs he and Kou haphazardly recorded in the university practice rooms- not out of narcissism, but because it reminds him why he’s spent all of his money on three train tickets, why he’s taking a trip half-way across the country to break the son of a politician out of his own home. Mitsuba plays each song from start to finish, then dips into the multitude of voice memos that Kou sent him over the weeks- guitar riffs and piano melodies and off-key singing of potential lyrics. The chorus of Shibuya station, the bridge from Coin Laundry, the initial, lonely chords of Be Brave. 

It doesn’t make the journey pass by any faster, but it just about staves off the traitorous thoughts that maybe he’d be better off going home. That if Kou wants to come back, then he can handle it himself. ( He’s selfless enough to jump into the river to keep you safe, Mitsuba reminds himself through the off-beat hum of Kou’s rendition of Ice-Cream Days’ second verse . He’s not coming back on his own. Not if it puts you in danger.)

In the wake of the oncoming storm, the air is humid and near-impossible to breathe through, turning the bus ride through Kyoto into something unbearable. Deciding that his situation is ridiculous enough as it is, Mitsuba rolls up his sleeves and puts both hands on display- one normal, one a reminder of an accident many years ago. If luck has it, then he won’t be returning any time soon. The heat-dazzled passengers at the rear of the bus can stare all they want. 

Kou’s family home is on the city outskirts, a large house at the far end of a large street filled with equally large buildings. Past the gunmetal-black gates there’s a long driveway, a clipped garden, and not a single thing to indicate that the house is a home. It looks like a display of money rather than a place to live- cold and grey and artificial- and Mitsuba finds it nothing short of a miracle that Kou managed to make it to eighteen before packing his bags and leaving. 

Steeling his nerves, running through a set of pre-performance breathing exercises that never fails to calm his stage fright, Mitsuba tosses his bag over the fence and scrambles over behind it.

Climbing with only one hand is difficult and it’s too warm to be partaking in strenuous activity, but Mitsuba manages to struggle over the top of the railings mostly intact. He tears the edge of his right sleeve on the spikes at the top, but he still lands with two feet firmly in the flower beds. Picking up his bag, trying to calm the way his heartbeat pounds, Mitsuba runs across the garden towards the side of the house. 

It quickly becomes apparent that the Minamoto family home has a lot more windows than a family home could ever need. Mitsuba tucks himself out of sight behind a meticulously pruned fruit tree, and realises to his despair that he can’t just walk up to the front door and ask which room belongs to Minamoto Kou. He stares, window to window to window, feeling more defeated by the second.

Then, he hears it.

Around the side of the building; an open window with music pouring from it. It’s the only window with the curtains open, the only part of the house that feels alive, and Mitsuba knows that it can’t belong to anyone other than Kou. So he rummages through his bag, pulls back his arm in the same way he once used to win prizes at the tanabata festival ring toss, and slings Kou’s notebook right through the open window.

There’s a crash, a shout, and the music cuts off abruptly, something which replaces some of Mitsuba’s nerves with an amused laugh that catches in the back of his throat. Kou’s face appears at the window, and Mitsuba watches as his bright eyes go wide, staring down from the upstairs window as if he’s only just realised he might still be dreaming. 

“You’ll catch an insect in your mouth if you don’t close it,” Mitsuba calls up with a cheshire-cat grin, completely unable to hide the fact that he’s never been more glad to see another person in his life. “I know I’m brilliant, but you don’t have to look at me like I’m something you dreamed up.”

“What are you doing here?” Kou asks. One of his hands is holding the notebook, and the other twitches as if he’s tempted to pinch himself- or something equally as ridiculous. Mitsuba hates just how fiercely he’s missed every one of Kou’s awful habits.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Mitsuba’s grin spreads to his eyes, his voice, his heart. “I’m stealing my songwriter back!”

At that, Kou laughs, musical in the wake of the oncoming storm. It’s different to his usual loud, room-filling laughs- something new that Mitsuba wants to sing about for seasons to come, and he finds that he no longer regrets coming in the slightest.

“You’re ridiculous,” Kou shouts down from his window, the laugh tugging at every corner of his voice. “ This is ridiculous.”

“We’re even, then,” Picking at the torn edge of his sleeve, Mitsuba nods toward the notebook in Kou’s hand. “Your train ticket is tucked into the back page- pack your bag and get moving!”

It barely takes fifteen minutes before Kou’s backpack- now as familiar as any of Mitsuba’s own belongings- topples out of the upstairs window, and Kou scrambles out after it. He swings onto the sloped lower roof, the drainpipe, then the branch of one of the fruit trees, and tumbles to the ground in a shower of over-ripe plums. He slips on one of the fruits, trips backwards over his bag and lands in a heap on the grass- then starts laughing all over again.

Something about it is contagious in the worst possible way, so Mitsuba starts laughing too, even as he leans over to help Kou to his feet, even when Kou pulls him right down onto the ground beside him. 

“What if someone catches us?” Mitsuba asks through the way his ribs ache, shoving at what he thinks must be Kou’s shoulder amongst the tangled heap of his limbs.

“I’m the only one home!” Rolling over to sit up, hair full of grass and plum leaves, Kou grins as if the answer is obvious.

“Why did you climb out of the window then?” Mitsuba shoves him a second time, and resents the fact that Kou was the one calling his ideas ridiculous. “The front door is right there!”

Kou pauses. “So it is.” He says, completely bemused, and Mitsuba falls into a fit of laughter all over again. 

After Kou has switched the SIM card in his phone card to the new one and hiked his bag over his shoulders, they take off across the garden, footsteps kicking up pieces of the immaculately-kept lawn in a way that’s almost therapeutic- leaving something that’s human and alive behind before they go. As they run, Kou starts singing. It’s off-key and it’s terrible, but Mitsuba still joins in, matching each strained note and dissonant harmony. 

(Music is about feeling, after all- and Kou’s music feels free .)

“Why didn’t you just escape on your own?” Mitsuba asks, when Kou stops to pluck two full, ripe apples from the boughs of a tree in the garden. “I was mad at you for leaving without bothering to say goodbye, but I wasn’t that mad. I still would have let you sleep on the sofa.”

“I just didn’t want to get you involved,” Kou admits, slowing to a walking pace under the humid, static-filled skies. “They could come after me again. I know they’ll come after me again, and you haven’t done anything wrong to deserve-”

Mitsuba aims a kick at Kou’s ankle, not quite hard enough to topple him and his overflowing backpack off balance. “You’re going to give my precious face worry-lines if you keep being so stupid ,” he berates, and considers kicking Kou a second time. “It’s insulting that you think I can’t handle myself.”

He takes a bite out of his apple, then promptly drops it onto the lawn with a grimace. “First you have me spending all my money on train tickets, then you try to poison me with gross mushy apples? You’re shameless. ”

Kou tosses his own apple onto the grass, and follows as if the whole world has been thrown off-kilter.

Mitsuba stands uninvited in the garden of a politician’s mansion- but there’s nobody home, so Kou takes the time to show him around. He takes Mitsuba to the tree he got in trouble for climbing, to the koi pond he got in trouble for wading in, to the flower beds he got in trouble for making mud pies in. The place doesn’t suit him in the slightest, restrained and artificial in all the places that Kou is a firework and a supernova. A boy in a home filled with do not touch signs, who found his comfort in music.

“Teru-nii used to pick flowers from that bush for mom’s bedside in hospital,” Kou points out, motioning towards the nodding flowerheads which have evidently been kept alive on the sprinkler system alone. “Dad always thought he was buying them- he’d blow a fuse if he found out.”

At that, Mitsuba hesitates. He’s always been an only child, but Kou talks about his siblings in the way Mitsuba talks about his mom- like they’re someone he’d never want to leave behind. “Don’t you want to say goodbye to them?” Mitsuba asks, hesitant.

Kou falters, as if it’s something he hasn’t dared to think about. Then, slowly, he shakes his head. “They already know why I’m leaving,” he says, speaking to himself more than anyone else. “Even if they don’t understand totally, even if they’re upset with me- if my music reaches them one day, then there’ll be no need for goodbyes.” 

Kou stands in the garden, mouth set in firm acceptance, and Mitsuba likes him so much that it’s terrifying. So he decides, once again, that summer is about as weird as it’s going to get. One more thing isn’t going to tip the world off its axis.

“Let’s make music together,” Mitsuba announces, the air tasting of static electricity in the wake of what is predicted to be the biggest storm of the decade. Speaking from his heart for once, without Minamoto Kou putting the words in his mouth for him. “ Properly, I mean. Let’s come up with a band name and go to a real recording studio and move every mountain we can find. Let’s become unforgettable.” 

There are stars in Kou’s eyes when Mitsuba grabs his hands, shining like he can see the future and every second of it is as bright as fireworks. He nods, speechless in the best possible way, because the drumbeat at the pulse-point of his wrist says everything he could ever need.

Mitsuba wants to try it too. Just once, he wants to know what it’s like to remove his heart from behind his ribs, and to wear it on proud display instead. 

“Hey, Kou,” he says, an act of bravery which he knows he’ll regret later. “When you write love songs- who are they about?”

The air is humid and electric, one last effort from a summer that feels like it’s lasted centuries.

“You,” Kou tells him, as if the answer has always been obvious. “Who else would I write about?”

Mitsuba has already given a confession of his own- because let’s make music together and who else would I write about are one in the same- so all he does is laugh.

“Making me sing love songs about myself? Do you think I’m some sort of narcissist? Is this a weird fetish you have?” He jokes, not wanting to find out how wide he must be smiling, how red his ears must be turning.

“Why do I even like you?” Kou asks nobody in particular, and Mitsuba kisses him hard beside the apple tree. 

What do you think will happen first- asks the grinning voice of the 9AM weatherman. The storm, the train leaving, or Kou’s family coming home?

“I think we should run,” Mitsuba laughs breathlessly into Kou’s ear, because he doesn’t want to stick around long enough to find out.

-

They stand on the rooftop of Mitsuba’s dorm once more, looking out across city streets which never rest and a skyline that’s so humid it feels like breathing underwater. There’s no meteor shower this time- instead the sky is filled with black clouds so heavy that it feels like night-time in the mid-afternoon, blocking the sun and spelling out the end of summer.

“What are we going to do when they come back for me?” Kou asks, leaning against the railing. “I don’t know if they’re ever going to stop.”

Normally, Mitsuba would be terrified. But he’s already staged a rescue mission, broken into the garden of a fancy house and stolen a boy from his bedroom. Something about it has made him feel brave . He shrugs, and turns to face Kou. “Who cares about the future? We can deal with that when it happens.”

Kou laughs, short and contagious. “I like that plan.” He smiles, in a way that feels like a promise. “I’ll come back next time. I’ll keep coming back until they realise that music is all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

Overhead, a clap of thunder sounds, one which shakes the earth to its roots and splits the sky in half. Then, finally, after three months of no rain; the biggest storm of the decade breaks the summer in two. 

It’s pouring within seconds, rain flooding down from the sky in sheets as Mitsuba swears and flips his wet hair out of his eyes. Kou is grinning, soaked to the bone and holding his hands up like a lightning-rod, summoning the storm closer. He spins across the rooftop, trainers almost slipping in the puddles- and he’s a bad influence in the best sort of way, because Mitsuba chases right after him.

“You’re going to get struck by lightning!” He shouts into the storm, as Kou catches rain in the palms of his hands and flashes his teeth in a smile that brings summer rushing right back for round two.

“So, you do care about me!” Kou teases back, ridiculous as ever.

-

(Mitsuba Sousuke might hate cliches, but kissing Minamoto Kou in the rain isn’t all that bad.)

-

“For our final song,” Mitsuba stands upon the stage of the ice cream cafe, microphone in hand. The cyclists hurry through the rain outside, while Aoi and Sakura perch by the countertop with matching smiles that have always known a little too much. “We’ll be performing Sundazed- sung by the lovely Mitsuba Sousuke, and written by the significantly less-lovely Minamoto Kou.”

From behind his guitar, Kou shoves Mitsuba in the arm, but he’s grinning as if he’s never been happier.

The first note rings out through the cafe- a warm chord which sounds like summer heatwaves and meteor showers and train journeys across the country. Outside; the storm rains on, the stray dog in the alleyway barks, umbrellas bob past the windows like sails on the horizon.

Inside; Mitsuba opens his heart and sings.