Chapter Text
Both of Osamu’s pockets are bulging and almost spilling over with coins, the clang of which is only audible in his mind through the feel of them tapping gently against his leg. The weight incessantly attempted to pull at his shorts, and so he now finds himself waddling into the dim neon lighted room of the arcade with his hands in his bethoops, hiking his waistband as high as anatomically possible.
He loves summer for all of the superficial reasons any ten year old loves summer: no school, lots of ice cream, and endless possibilities. At this age, summer vacation is a precious commodity that must be cherished and protected and spent wisely. It’s a time when great adventures can take place and life can be truly lived—not suffered through as a teacher complains about his penchant for falling asleep in class, terrible penmanship, swinging back in his chair, and chewing all his pencils. It is freedom incarnate.
Despite the invincibility afforded by a lack of school and temporarily free of his brother, today is laden with frustration, the type that makes him want to stamp his feet and throw something. Something fragile preferably. On the floor.
Because he also likes very much to win, and there is one game in the local arcade that’s been denying him this pleasure.
So today he is armed with a battalion of coins and sheer willpower.
He walks into the familiar atmosphere, dodging around people until he finds it: the object of his anger. He can feel the need to win welling up inside of him, causing his hands to twitch and stomach to squeeze. This was the only inanimate object to ever raise such a feeling in him—the only animate object being his brother. Volleyball too but he doesn’t really know which of those categories it fis into.
He slots the first coins in, hears the soft tinkling clink of the coins falling into the bed of metal already established within its belly, and watches the game beep to life. He can already feel himself biting his tongue in concentration, his eyebrows furrowing so much it would make his grandmother tell him he’d get wrinkles—fine, he would reply to that, at least then I won’t hafta look like Sumu no more.
He holds the joysticks, already feeling his palms getting sweaty, and repeats the same actions he’s been following for the last two days. Jump, run, jump, jump, attack, attack, attack, run, jump etc. etc. and on and on. He had played it so much the day before that the pixels had replayed themselves over the canvas of his eyelids as he’d tried to sleep. But neither the re-runs nor eventual sleep afforded any answers as the boss knocks down his little character—crosses on its eyes and a ghost rising out of it. An offensive GAME OVER rises into the centre of the screen and he sets himself to play again.
And again.
And again.
He stops keeping count after the third attempt, eventually becoming wary of how his shorts have become lighter, how they need fixing more infrequently than when he began. Rubbing his eyes roughly with one hand, he reaches into his pocket for two more coins when a small voice says something.
He turns to the boy beside him, shocked back into the world of three-dimensional real people.
“Wha?” he asks.
The boy looks about Osamu’s age, a little shorter than him maybe, with dark, moppy hair that lies flat on his head except for the random pieces that stick out haphazardly towards the back. He points to the screen and says, “you need to jump and attack at the same time.”
Osamu looks at the screen and tilts his head to the side, “you can jump and attack at the same time?”
The boy nods.
“Oh,” Osamu says and lets two more coins drop into the little slot without another word eager to finally win. Truthfully, he wasn’t really used to losing.
He goes through the motions what he hopes is the last time, aware he’s being watched, until he gets to the same place as always.
“Now jump and press the button over and over,” instructs the small voice from beside him.
Osamu squints his eyes, leans in close, and begins to slam the button and jumps.
But he’d been so wrapped up in learning this revolutionary new attack combo, he forgot to actually move forward, resulting in the re-emergence of the cursed GAME OVER.
The boy sighs loudly beside him and his shoulders hunch more than they had been, giving him the appearance of curling in on himself. This makes Osamu wonder if he actually was taller than him or if it was just his terrible posture. If Osamu did that, he knew for a fact his granny would be annoyed.
Looking up from beneath the hair once again covering his eyes, the boy asks, “want me to press the button while you do the rest?”
Osamu nods quickly and sticks his hand back into his pocket, pulling out two more coins while the boy takes his position beside the machine, finger over the button.
“Ready when you are,” he says.
Osamu pays the fare and resumes his own position—face set and ready to win.
They go through the motions and it’s stunted at first, trying to sync up their attacks and movements. But then it just clicks and they flow through the game seamlessly until they get to the final battle.
“Okay,” the boy says and Osamu pauses, “Now… go.”
Osamu moves the little red sticks, the character on screen charges forward and Osamu flicks the second controller, throwing the character into the air and over the head of the beast. The boy beside him bides his time, hand stiff but clearly alert. Suddenly, he begins to furiously slam on the red button for the attack. On screen, the little character jumps into the air over the monster, does a little flip and slams down with its little sword pointed downward.
They hit it and it stumbles.
“Again,” the boy instructs and Osamu obliges.
Again it stumbles. Again they attack.
On this third try, the character slices down and the monster stumbles, takes a step back, wobbles, collapses to its knees.
“Attack!” The boy says louder and more animatedly than he had said anything else in their brief encounter.
Osamu pushes on the joystick again and drives the knight forward as quickly as possible, and the boy slices repeatedly at its belly using his little button until it falls dead.
Green letters now travel up the screen declaring YOU WIN, and the boy turns back to Osamu again, messily palming his hair out of his eyes, grinning sheepishly, “see?”
But Osamu’s attention is drawn to the steady stream of tickets that start to slither their way out of the machine. He grabs them as they come out and meticulously folds them, as his father had shown both him and Atsumu so many times. Then he splits the stack down the middle, focusing especially hard on this part, feeling his tongue sticking out of his mouth as he does so.
He reaches out, one half of the small stack balled in his fist. But the boy isn’t there anymore.
Osamu holds onto the tickets, bringing them to the arcade with him everyday, looking for the boy, hoping to give him his share. He wouldn’t have won without him and so it was only fair for him to share them. And Osamu, with Atsumu as a brother, is far too knowledgeable in unfairness to not to.
“Jus’ use ‘em yerself,” Atsumu says on the last day of summer, frowning as a Charmander plush is precariously carried towards the drop box of the claw machine he had been working on for over an hour. When it slips from the grasp of the metal legs, hitting the edge of the box and bouncing back into the collection of stuffed toys, he kicks it. Forcefully.
“Miyas!” They hear from behind them. Both freeze, haunches rising up to their ears, a dangerous smirk on Atsumu’s face.
“Well I can’t use any of ‘em now,” Osamu mumbles into his hand as they sit on the pavement outside, “ya got us banned. Again.”
Osamu has learned his mistake. He is a year older, a helluva lot smarter than his older by five minutes twin brother, and now has a bum bag strapped around his waist for all those coins and eventual tickets.
This year, he has a goal, he’s going to win the bumper prize: a shiny new Nintendo Ds Lite because he is absolutely sick of having to share one with Atsumu who is most certainly not going to be allowed to touch it with his horrible, grubby hands. This one would be his and Atsumu can have the old one which Osamu hates because the screen doesn’t stay open properly after Atsumu threw a tantrum and shook it too hard playing Mario Kart.
Of course, it takes some convincing for the manager to allow him in with a threat of his (and by the nature of their identicality, Atsumu’s) face being plastered as banned for life along every door and wall of the place, should there be any issues.
At the age of eleven, he believes this is a genuine possibility and promises some invisible force he’ll get good grades this year if Atsumu doesn’t get them kicked out for a third year in a row. He doesn’t really have much hope for that, and decides to get his DS as quickly as possible.
So he has a plan.
He walks towards the back corner purposefully. He can’t remember the name of the terrible game (there’s a reason there’s only one copy of it in the arcade) but it's easy and therefore he is guaranteed to collect a lot of tickets. Quickly. He also still has all of his unspent tickets from last year and he heard from someone at school that they don’t change the tickets every year and—
Someone’s playing his game.
And as mentioned, there’s only one copy of it. And it’s taken.
He doesn’t really know what to do, this is throwing the whole plan off course. The plan had been simple; play this game for all it’s worth or until he became so sick of it he couldn’t anymore, and then move on. He needed to play it first though so he could see just how many tickets he could get from it and then decide what to do from there. But now even this minimal plan was gone, destroyed, KO’d, game over’d.
The obstacle to Osamu’s plan and happiness throws a quick glance over his shoulder, before returning to the game, a pew pew pew sound repeating constantly until it almost becomes one long, continuous hum.
Osamu recognises those sharp eyes and that mussed hair—it hadn’t improved at all in a year, it was longer though if that meant anything.
“It’s you!” Osamu declares, proud of himself for remembering considering his parents often noted he and his brother lose interest in things too quickly and that they would ‘forget their heads if they weren’t screwed on.’ This was something he could brag about to Atsumu, definitive proof that he is in fact the better brother.
The boy’s shoulders jolt and stiffen, and he begins to curl in on himself, but remains focused on his game.
“Oi,” Osamu says, one hand fidgeting with the zip of his bum bag, “I looked everywhere fer ya.” The zip opens and he pulls out one of the neat stacks in it and sidles up beside the boy, waving them in front of his eyes.
The boy ducks and weaves, trying to see past the hand sporadically blocking his vision.
“Move,” he grumbles, trying to flick the hand out of his way. But Osamu’s sibling senses kick in and the desire to annoy and do the complete opposite becomes so overwhelming he sticks up his other hand and begins to wiggle that through the stranger’s field of vision too.
“Stop it!” The boy says loudly and turns to Osamu as the game tolls his loss.
Osamu is grinning, that perverse joy garnered through successful harmless torture stretching his grin wide, until he looks at the furrowed brows of the other boy, the scrunched nose, the cheeks puffed out in anger, the deep furrow in his brow.
Maybe Osamu had forgotten that not everyone deserves to be teased and tortured as much as Atsumu.
“Sorry,” he mumbles weakly, looking down at his shoes ashamed of himself and silently redacts his better brother status from himself. Then he slowly remembers why he had started being an idiot in the first place, and raises the tickets.
“These are yers. From last year.” Osamu looks at the boy from beneath his lowered head and eyes, “I heard they haven’t changed the tickets so you can use them this year.”
The boy looks at him blankly, the irritation having settled and blended back into his face, the ripples in the water once again becoming still. His eyes are fixed on Osamu’s proffered fist, but he doesn’t make to take them, tilting his head in silent question instead.
“You kept them?” there’s almost judgment in his voice, but there’s also a sliver of amusement.
Osamu heaves a sigh and pushes them against the boy's chest, forcing him to finally accept them.
“My brother got us kicked out before I could use ‘em, not that I was gonna.”
“Why?”
Osamu narrows his eyes at him suspiciously, he doesn’t think he’s ever met someone like him before; he asks a lot of questions, his eyes seem to ask more. Most notably, he’s not jumping on the offering of free tickets.
“He kicked a claw machine.”
“No, why wouldn’t you have used them?”
“Ohh,” Osamu nods, “ya helped me win ‘em so some are yours.”
The boy looks down at the tickets now in his hands, “oh” he says softly and looks back up at Osamu. “Thanks.”
Osamu nods again, knowing his convictions were right all along and that maybe this meant he had regained the title of better brother. At the very least it was another point in his favour.
“Yer welcome.” He sticks out his hand once again, now empty and open, “my name’s Miya Osamu, but ya can call me ‘Samu.”
The boy shakes his head, “no that’s rude.”
“Not if I tol’ja it’s okay,” his hand is still waiting in the air in front of him.
Finally it’s taken and the boy smiles faintly, “my name’s Suna Rintarou.”
“Yer not from around here are ya Suna-san?”
The boy, Suna, shakes his head, hair falling into his eyes. “No, my granny lives here, we’re just visiting.”
Shyer than he had been five minutes ago, he’s barely able to keep eye contact. Osamu feels a little sorry for him, being dragged to a place that he didn’t know during what should be the happiest days of the year. Somehow he doubts he has any friends here.
The thought of a Nintendo DS lite posits itself in his mind's eye: the shiny prize he’d waited all the end of school term to chase after.
He has a choice to make.
“Good thing I am,” he declares without hesitation, and a slow smile grows on his face, “I’ll show ya all the best places.”
By the end of summer, his bum bag and pockets of change are almost empty, and he does not have near enough tickets for his prize. But his summer wasn’t wasted.
Sitting on the pavement outside the arcade, the thrill of video games not holding as much weight as they had all those days ago, he and Suna silently work on their ice creams.
“Should we really have left him?” Suna asks.
“Hmm?”
“Atsumu, should we have left him?”
“He’s fine,” Osamu says, taking a bite out of his ice cream as soon as Suna looks at him, which always earns him a grimace, “he owes me.”
“Yeah but… should we really have ran away and left him to pay.”
Osamu rolls his eyes and squints, “ya feelin’ sorry fer him or somethin’?”
Snorting, Suna takes a lick of his own ice cream, and eyes just how little Osamu has left already, “no. Think he’ll find us?”
“I hope not,” Osamu smiles. Then, “what time ya leavin’ today by the way?”
Suna takes a moment, distracting himself by catching some of the ice cream that had begun to melt before it ran onto his hands.
“Soon.” He hesitates while Osamu begins working on the wafer of his cone with a small content smile, all of the ice cream already devoured. “I eh...”
Osamu looks at him, mouth still full and chewing so that when he tries to say something which sounds vaguely like ‘spit it out’, it doesn’t quite translate correctly through the mush.
“I’m not coming back next year,” he sees Osamu pout and swallow but continues, “My granny’s moving to Tokyo with us.”
“Oh,” Osamu says, the deflation clear in his voice. He’d spent all summer trying to make up for his rudeness at the beginning and had come to actually really enjoy Suna’s company. They’d realized they had a lot more in common than just video games and a preference for the indoors. Volleyball was one of those things, torturing Atsumu was another.
Suna begins to chew the inside of his cheek, wanting to say some of those things that kids don’t understand, but of course he didn’t yet know what those things were.
So instead he looks down at his ice cream that’s quickly melting and focuses on not letting that happen. When he finishes it down to the cone, he wordlessly offers it to Osamu, who accepts it eagerly and takes a large bite from it. This had become habitual along with calling to each other's houses in the morning and not saying goodbye until the sun had begun to set.
“So,” Osamu says when he has the second cone finished, “yer not comin’ back? Ever?”
Suna shakes his head and decides to stare at the ground.
“Ya’ll hafta come find me if ya ever do.”
“How will I find you?” Suna asks quickly.
Contemplating this, Osamu lets an elbow rest on his knee, one hand tucking under his chin; his thinking face. Suddenly, he perks up, eyes widening and mouth falling open slightly.
“Stay here.” He instructs and scrambles to his feet running into the arcade. He pulls out the small row of tickets he still has with him and slaps them on the prize counter. The teenage boy working there quirks an eyebrow, an amused smile on his face.
“What can I get ya?”
Osamu scans the display and points to a pen of some knock off superhero that was probably supposed to resemble Spiderman. The teenager nods, counts out the required number of tickets from the little bundle, takes out the pen, and hands it to Osamu along with whatever tickets are leftover.
Scooping up everything, Osamu runs back outside, and jumps down to sit beside Suna again, grimacing when he lands a little too hard. Suna lets out a short sharp laugh before covering his mouth—Osamu tries to fix him with a stare, but ends up smiling too.
“Here,” he says eventually and pulls off a ticket to hand Suna, and one for himself too. “We’ll write the kanji fer our names and we can use that ta look fer each other.” It felt like a brilliant plan, foolproof, all they would need was each other's names. Obviously.
Holding the ticket down between two fingers on the footpath, Osamu leans in close and attempts to write his name as neatly as possible in whatever space he can find without ripping it against the stone. When he’s done, he passes the pen to Suna, who does the same on the ticket in his hand. When finished, they make the exchange, each putting them into their pockets carefully.
“Ya hafta keep it safe,” Osamu warns him.
Suna glares at him and goes to answer, probably insult him, when they hear a voice calling out to them. Looking up, they see Atsumu jogging towards them and it only takes a glance for them to decide, and they set off running in the opposite direction.
“No fair!” Atsumu whines uselessly from behind them.
True to his word, Suna hadn’t returned the next year. Not long after that, Osamu had stopped returning to the arcade. The lights seemed to lose their lustre, the games lacked intrigue, the prizes grew mustier, and he’d gotten a new DS all for himself as a present on his twelfth birthday.
Summer was spent in new ways, more age appropriate ways each year. At sixteen that mainly meant playing volleyball and complaining about something. Usually Atsumu.
But summer ended yesterday, leaving him sitting in a new classroom today. He’s actively ignoring the clatter and squeak of chairs, the high pitched hi’s and grumbled hellos, the sighing of chairs and teenagers, choosing instead to focus only on the little textured triangles he’s scribbling on the back cover of an unused copy, the paper too smooth, the cover still in tact.
A chair drags beside him, but he doesn’t look up. He doesn’t care. Instead he’s mentally already noting the hours until lunch as another triangle takes shape beneath his pen. His classmate sits down quietly, no show like everyone else pretending they care about each other’s summer or getting to know each other. He lets his head drop onto the desk, already tired from the effort of what’s to come. He probably should have sorted his sleeping pattern out a lot sooner, but there was something far more gratifying in kicking Atsumu’s ass in Pro Evolution Soccer after 12am.
He only pulls himself up, moving his shoulders first and the rest following, when he hears the hushing of voices and the rushed shuffle of feet and chairs around him. Their teacher stands at the front of the room, writing her name on the whiteboard before the bell rings and class begins, but Osamu’s attention is already lost, focusing instead on a bird flitting about on the window outside until his name is called.
“Here,” he replies statically, and a few heads turn to put a face to the name. A few linger.
It’s only the first day, but he’s already resigning himself to a lot of eventualities. There would be the whole issue of making new friends now that he’s moved from middle to high school, maybe keep up old ones, maybe lose some. A new routine would have to be made, most urgently would be the need to fix his sleeping pattern, figure out how to fit in volleyball and extra practice alongside homework and videogames. Try and force himself to pay at least some attention in class. Take care of his brother probably. Clean up after his messes more than likely. Deal with any fall outs that are most definitely going to occur whether intentional or not.
“Suna Rintarou?”
His back straightens and his head snaps to attention. That name, he knows that name.
“Here,” the bored voice could almost make Osamu’s own tired with life inflection sound excited.
That voice, he also knows it. It’s changed, but he knows it too. And it’s right beside him.
He turns slowly, letting himself finally take in something other than himself in the classroom. It’s him, the kid from the arcade, his best friend from when best friends were as plentiful as coins in a slot machine.
His hair is still a mop on his head, sticking out at the back, but styled a little more. He’s older. Of course he’s older, it's been five years.
He’s slumped down into his chair, the too big blazer hiking up at the back and he’s grinning; a sharp canine barely visible beneath the stretch of his lopsided grin, eyes resolutely focused ahead of him.
Osamu feels a phantom pain in his wallet where a little orange ticket stub sits in its own slot, having been transferred there from a pocket to every wallet he has owned since with a precision unnecessary for a childhood memory of a boy he was never to see again.
“Guess ya lied to me,” Osamu says, regaining an air of disaffection as his body begins to mirror that of the boy beside him.
“Guess I did,” Suna replies easily, as if they’d known each other every day for the five years in between this and their last meeting. Finally he looks at Osamu. “Good to see you again.”