Work Text:
there was a thump.
the sound of the moment we fell.
the sound that says
we can never go back to
the moment before.
—The Eyes, The Ears, Rinko Kawauchi
The realization that this is, in fact, a concerningly less-than-stellar idea for a first date cracks over his head like an egg yolk and runs viscous and slimy through his bones as Osamu staggers over a positively evil nick in the ice and goes careening face-first over his rental skates. The bitter, wet slick of dirtied ice crawls happily into his mouth, and Osamu groans. Then water trickles guilelessly into alarming nether regions of his lower body. He groans. Again.
You're an idiot, the dampness is crooning. It sounds a god-awful lot like Atsumu. Except on steroids, or something.
“Miya-san,” Akaashi starts calmly.
Osamu looks up and for the fifth time in half an hour is struck clean across the jugular with the image of Akaashi Keiji standing over him. Lurid ice rink lights somehow still haloing gorgeously around the crown of his head. Dappling down soft black curls. Akaashi extends a hand and Osamu accepts, heart lurching out his chest as he hoists himself up.
Akaashi’s touch lingers for a crippling, scorching second before falling away. “You’re placing too much weight on your toes, Miya-san.”
“Right,” Osamu manages, half-breathless. “Yeah.”
With a kick, they resume skating at a glacial pace around the perimeter together, guided by the dirtied yellow strip encircling the rink. “Ya sure know a lot about this.”
Akaashi makes a noncommittal noise. “My younger sister used to take figure skating lessons. Sometimes I was dragged along.”
“Oh. Yeah?”
Divvying his attention between maintaining even a semblance of spatial awareness while upholding conversation is fleshing out to be a goddamn Herculean task. “S’cool,” Osamu finally lets out, heaving a breath after they complete the arc around the corner. “Did you, like, did ya also—”
Then he rams into the rink wall. The sensation shocks down to the very tips of his cramped toes and the core of his twenty-three-year-old existence, and lends itself to yet another defeated groan. He steadies himself against the rim, fingers melding sticky into the ledge as he takes five painstaking, bladed steps counterclockwise to face his date again.
“Miya-san,” Akaashi says, gently. The overhead fluorescence is still hellbent on stringing its way through Akaashi Keiji’s entire body and rendering him some sort of holy, radiant prophet. There’s a faint glimmer that frays around his pupils. Amused, almost.
Osamu sighs. “I feel like you're laughing at me.”
A slant of the head. “I’m not laughing at you, Miya-san.”
“Okay,” Osamu acquiesces. Rephrases. “But like, ya want to. Probably.”
A pause billows over them. Time suspends like spider silk in midair, twining tight around the two of them and cocooning the moment out of reach from the other thirty or so skaters. Osamu whittles his focus down to Akaashi's blink. Once, twice. Something sweeps over the planes of his face, a split-second plume of emotion immediately smoothened out into impassivity.
“Your words,” Akaashi says finally. Simply. Flecks of light are still wading in the lakes of his eyes. Then his lips lift up, snag onto the tail-end of amusement. “Not mine.”
With that he ducks around and propels forward, leaving Osamu in stunned silence. Only the scrape of an expert blade against ice cutting through his joints like a gunshot. The not-quite-denial registering in his brain with a heated stamp.
Oh. His heart is seconds away from hitting boiling point and combusting into kitchen fire. Warm and bubbly and scalding his body from the inside out. That was—that was flirting, almost. A smile, almost. A close encounter with cardiac arrest. Almost.
"Hey," he just mutters, kicking off the wall and pitching his weight forward to sail shakily after him. "Hey. Wait. Akaashi. Slow down, will ya?"
The thing with first dates, he knows, is that conversation isn't always going to lock into a perfect groove immediately. Or even at all, for that matter. The date itself is an inherent gamble, hurling yourself brazenly out onto the green-felt poker table with no absolute certainty that a victory will be claimed.
But Akaashi is interesting. And genuine. And ridiculously attractive. And ridiculously easy to talk to. And Osamu nods along to quiet explanations of a frankly pity-inducing work schedule, the simultaneous joy and migraine that is an Udai Tenma, soft-spoken words a jarring contrast to the image of an explosive, upcoming volleyball manga. Finds himself increasingly more invested in each syllable that spills out of Akaashi’s mouth—his attention clinging steadfast to the dips and coils of a low voice.
And Akaashi listens, too. He listens to Osamu complain about Atsumu’s calamity of a love life. Listens to him recount his latest expedition to Kita-san’s farm. Listens, and asks, and reacts, and fine, maybe these are normal responses, yeah, but Osamu still reels from the setter-sharp focus of dark, curious eyes affixed to him each time he slants his face to the left.
Not that it’s bad. Definitely not bad.
But three-quarters of the way into the comprehensive narration of exactly how to compress rice into shapely little triangles he realizes Akaashi Keiji likely does not give a flying fuck about the poetic intricacies of onigiri-making. The thought cleaves off the end of his sentence like an axe and leaves his mouth hanging open stupidly for a second, before he pulls himself together with a cough.
“Sorry,” he laughs. “’m rambling. You prolly have no idea what I’m talkin’ about.”
Akaashi shakes his head. “I don’t mind. It’s very interesting.” A beat of silence settles over them, before there’s a faint smile dragging the slant of his mouth up and punching a crater through the fog. “I’d like to learn more. You could teach me, next time, if you’d like.”
Right. God, this is worse than when Atsumu had that thing for Kita-san. God, he just compared himself to Atsumu. “Oh.” Osamu blinks. Swallows down his heavy, oil-slick pulse. “Wow. Wait, fer real?”
Akaashi nods. “I don’t know much, but it’d be interesting to learn more about Onigiri Miya’s technique. And to try it myself.” They round another corner, barely dodging a trio of tussling middle-schoolers. “Especially since the Tokyo branch has yet to open.”
Osamu snorts despite himself. “You're really persistent about this.”
“It would increase profits,” comes the placid reply.
“I mean, I know that, but—”
The universe has a goddamn vendetta against him, Osamu thinks as he trips gracelessly over his skates and flops down like the heaviest sack of rice known to man. He barely rights himself with a sigh, knees pummeled by a million little black-blue gremlins. Sits mournfully on the ice with his legs splayed out in front of him.
It’s not even mortification, at this point. Just defeat. He tracks the motion of a young girl near the center of the rink; she’s doing some sort of intricate twelve-step spin that’s beginning to strain his eyes, honestly. Figure skating, he decides with finality, is overrated.
“Oh,” comes Akaashi’s voice. “Your laces, Miya-san.”
Then he’s gingerly folding his legs and setting himself down besides Osamu. Two pale hands cut into his space, slender fingers and pinked knuckles a blur as they re-tie the embarrassingly damp laces laying limp across his right skate. Nothing but calm, steady concentration lines the slope of his cheeks, the shadows tapered over his mouth.
Osamu’s doing a horrible job at not staring. His gaze tumbles down the gentle incline of Akaashi’s nose. Huddles at his cupid’s bow. Clings like sticky honeyed fingers to the curve of his neck; entranced.
Blue eyes drift up and he startles. Clearing his throat clumsily, he scrambles through disordered ropes of thought and settles on a tepid “I keep tellin’ ya. You can call me Osamu, ya know.”
Akaashi stills for a second, hands hovering atop his lap. Then: “Alright.”
Osamu’s eyes take some sort of comical nosedive from his sockets. A shuddery bud of warmth petals out pink and giddy behind his chest. “Wait. Wait—what. Really?”
There’s a noticeable pause that steeps through the air. Slow-sprawling like the wetness of the ice blooming beneath his thighs. He’s looking at Akaashi. Akaashi’s looking back. His gaze deafens the rake of metal against ice, magnetizes every iota of Osamu’s attention.
“Maybe after you stop falling,” Akaashi says at last, mild.
Right. Okay. This is—this has to be flirting. Maybe. Osamu’s stomach makes a horrendous attempt at whatever loop-de-loop category-four-hurricane-nonsense that girl was doing earlier. His heart: a stuttering, amorphous thing slinking up his lungs and perching atop his tongue.
Weeping romantic ballads start pouring sickly-sweet down his auditory canals. Drenching through skin and heart and bone and soul. Akaashi offers a single blink, rink lights pearling pretty on his lashes like dew. It's the best blink that has ever graced Osamu's goddamn life.
“Miya-san?”
“Akaashi,” he manages, swallowing. “Can I kiss ya?”
Three more blinks in rapid succession. Akaashi's mouth opens. Closes. Cold-reddened lips part in time with the barest arch of a brow. "Right now?"
Osamu stills. “Oh." Because right, they're sitting soggy-jeaned and noodle-limbed at the edge of a public ice-skating rink—bodies in motion weaving around them to spell out a reminder of their distinct lack of privacy. "Sorry," he tries. "Didn't mean ta make you uncomfortable, or—"
"Osamu," Akaashi cuts in quietly.
There isn’t even a second for recovery before Akaashi is tipping forward, searing into his space and kissing him gently. So gently. Mouth warm, plush, the kiss so cloying it dizzies every nerve in his body.
His hand has barely skimmed the side of Akaashi’s face when the other pulls away with a soft noise. The sound injects unadulterated lava into his veins, while pink dusts the apples of Akaashi’s cheeks. Unfurling slow and addictive out to his ears. Cradling his jaw with a faint glow.
Osamu’s reasonably sure he isn't much better. His face all but stings with warmth, so furious in its heat that the frosty rink air seems to dissolve at once into dust. Or knowing laughter. Maybe both.
"Akaashi," he forces out, pulse pummeling a storm out his chest.
Akaashi's gaze floats back up. The slightest trace of embarrassment feathers the creases around his eyes. "Miya-san."
“...what happened to Osamu?"
A stretch of silence. Akaashi clears his throat. Cheeks still faintly cherried, but voice steady when he says, “Maybe after you stop falling.”
Oh. Wow. Oh shit. Osamu likes him. Osamu really, really, really fucking likes him.
He stares. Akaashi’s eyes are ripe with too much he can’t parse out—a watercolor blend of silent amusement and maybe-fondness and every other wondrous thing in the world compressed into gunmetal blue. The corner of his mouth carves out a half-smile and presses it iron-hot to Osamu’s sternum.
“Alright,” Osamu says finally, not bothering to hide his grin. Giddy. Childish. “Fine. I’ll stop fallin’ when ya show me, then.”
Akaashi smiles—small, careful, but complete this time. A warm sprawl across his face that switchblades clean through Osamu’s chest. “Okay.”
Osamu stretches out a palm. Akaashi takes it.
They pull each other up like that; setter hands on onigiri hands, lithe fingers twined with his as they kick start into motion once more. Akaashi’s touch is paralyzing, freeing, comfortable all at once as he guides him around a bend. Osamu glides across the rink with all the time in the world. Hands and body and heart tugged helplessly along by a thin white string of infatuation.
Some bouncy, rambunctious song is blaring out the rink speakers and blanketing over them. It’s cheesy, probably. Ridiculous like the warmth corkscrewing in his gut and fluttering up into his ribcage. Ridiculous. Silly. He’s on a first date with Akaashi Keiji at an indoor skating rink and everything’s soaked through: his pants, by melted tidbits of ice; the air, with gold-white light and blade-edged dizziness and the pressure of Akaashi’s thumb scraping along his pulsepoint.
Osamu’s watching the fold of his mouth. The way it’s been pinned up into a quaint little almost-smile for the past five minutes. Unwavering. Unbudging.
Akaashi’s eyes slide over to him. “What is it?”
He shakes his head. “S’nothin’.” Runs a finger over the hills of Akaashi’s knuckles and grins. All teeth, all hearth. All worth. “Nothin’ at all.”
Yeah. It’s a fucking stellar first date.