Work Text:
Nino was not mooning. Or at least, not like his sister did. When his sister had a crush, she would spend weeks talking about the boy, bringing him up in every conversation, practically wall-papering her room with purikura and love letters. It was frankly annoying as hell, but he sort of understood it. He definitely understood the way in which his sister perked up every single time the phone rang, hoping it was for her.
Which was why, indirectly, Nino was parked at the kitchen table with his Gameboy waiting for the phone on the wall to ring. They’d promised to talk again in a week during their last call; at first, Nino tried to smother the excitement in his voice, but he’d given up on it when Ohno said something funny and Nino was overcome with giggles.
When the phone did ring, Nino threw his Gameboy down on the table without hesitation, nearly dropping the receiver in his hurry.
“Hello?” he asked.
“Nino?” Ohno’s voice responded. Nino grinned into the handset.
“Hey!” he said with great enthusiasm. He couldn’t hold it back even if he wanted to. He felt like he could somehow hear Ohno’s answering smile.
“So how was your week?”
“Aiba-chan tripped going up the stairs yesterday and knocked down like three other guys and Sho had to come and rescue him from the mess.”
Ohno laughed and Nino’s heart flipped over. He glanced at his fingers and noticed he’d wrapped them up in the cord over and over, getting them hopelessly tangled. He knew his face was split by a huge smile, a rare sight these days after long hours at rehearsal.
“He can still dance though?” Ohno inquired.
“No, but let’s be honest, he couldn’t really dance to start with,” Nino pointed out dryly. Ohno laughed again, and there was a thumping sound followed immediately by an “Ow!”
“What?!” Nino asked, grabbing the receiver with both hands. “What happened!?”
“I laughed and sat up,” Ohno whined, “and I smashed my head on the ceiling. The roof over the bunks is really low.”
“You’re in bed?” Nino asked, before immediately wishing he hadn’t. It filled his head with visions of Ohno lying shirtless in a rumpled bunk. Nino had only in the past few years begun to appreciate the magazines his sister bought when she thought their mother wasn’t looking. (Their mother was always looking; she was just less inquisitive about things they clearly didn’t want to discuss with her.) He had also surprised himself just a few months earlier, when Ohno had slung a sweaty arm around his shoulder and Nino could not stop thinking about how warm and heavy Ohno’s body felt pressed against him. He’d had attractions before that made him wonder about himself, but it hadn’t ever come up so strongly until Kyoto.
“Yeah,” Ohno said, apparently oblivious to the mental image he was providing. “Lights-out is in about twenty minutes, but Macchin isn’t back yet.”
“Where is he?” Nino asked, wrenching his brain back on track of the conversation.
“Dunno,” Ohno said. He sounded slightly annoyed; Nino could picture the way his eyebrows pinched a bit in the middle. “Probably trying to buy cigs.”
“Won’t he get caught?” Nino asked. “They watch you guys so closely.”
“They ignore most stuff though,” Ohno explained. “If nobody sees you doing it, it’s not such a big deal. A bunch of guys got caught drunk last fall, but they’d already finished drinking so they only got sent home. It could have been worse.”
“So you can smoke and drink as long as they don’t actually see you? That’s pretty... convenient.”
“Smoking, drinking, girls—the usual.”
Nino went quiet. He tried not to think about girls, just as he tried not to think about boys. It was confusing and worrying and he wished he’d never started noticing the way he did now.
“I don’t—not the girls,” Ohno said. The speed in which he said it made Nino wonder what made him clarify so quickly.
“But the smoking and the drinking?” Nino asked with a sideways grin. Ohno huffed into the phone.
“Sometimes? I don’t know. When we’re not rehearsing there’s not really a lot to do,” Ohno confessed. “I always feel kind of bad about it, you know? But Macchin’s doing it, so I should at least...”
“Support him, kind of?” Nino suggested. He was thinking about sitting in a tiny green room with a series of cans in front of him, Aiba sipping from one with a scrupulous expression and Jun holding one in his hands at the same time as staring at the doorway like he thought it was about to spring open. Toma had his half-empty already. Nino picked one that was supposed to be umeshu, but one sip made him re-examine the can because it didn’t taste like it had ever been introduced to an actual plum at any point.
“I guess,” Ohno agreed softly. “I don’t want to get in trouble, but if he does, I just—I don’t want him to get in trouble alone.”
Nino hummed, sitting in the kitchen chair and leaning back against the wall, lifting the front legs off the floor. It was hard to know what to say; sometimes Ohno wanted to just air his thoughts with Nino, but other times Nino felt like Ohno was quietly testing him, trying to see how he thought.
“Is it worth it though?” Nino asked quietly. “The risk, I mean.”
Ohno was quiet for a long moment, and Nino wondered if he’d gone too far.
“Oh-chan?”
“It’s not worth it,” Ohno said. “You’re right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why?” Ohno said with a small laugh. “I asked.”
“He’s your friend,” Nino said. He knew how he’d react if someone suggested he let Aiba, Jun, or Toma do something incredibly stupid alone. It wouldn’t be nice.
“He is,” Ohno agreed. “But he’s stupid sometimes. We all are.”
Nino stayed quiet; Ohno wasn’t finished. He wasn’t sure how he knew that—it felt like instinct, but a little different. He’d gotten some sort of sense of Ohno, a very basic idea and picture of how he worked in Kyoto, and now the miles separating them forced him to rely on that memory in the absence of the real man.
He just got the feeling that the understood Ohno on a level he’d never really felt before.
“You’re not, Nino,” Ohno said finally, interrupting Nino’s reverie.
“I am often stupid,” Nino protested. “Very stupid. Incredibly stupid, in fact.” Like telling a friend that his other friend was dumb. Like talking on the phone to a guy that he’d only really spent time with for eight weeks as if they were close friends. Like thinking about Ohno’s warm body and long hands, leaning on his body and holding his hands.
Like being fifteen and stupid, thinking he could keep up this game of being interesting to a guy who was seventeen and fun.
“Nah,” Ohno said. “You’re smart. That’s why everybody trusts you. They know you’ll get them out of whatever mess they’re in somehow.”
Nino bit his lip. “Do you trust me?”
“I don’t give my phone number to just anybody,” Ohno said with a laugh. Nino felt the little ball of happy warmth in his stomach stir at the sound; it was so easy to pretend that every tiny little attempt at flirting he was making was even slightly returned when Ohno talked like that.
“Joke’s on you,” Nino informed him. “I’m actually a stalker. I’m standing outside your dorm right now. I’m going to watch you sleep.”
“That’s okay,” Ohno said, yawning around the words. “If it’s Nino, I don’t mind being watched.”
Warm curls, down to his fingertips.
Nino heard a knock, then a slight clatter of a door opening and closing quickly. Ohno greeted the newcomer warmly, but with a touch of annoyance.
“Macchin’s back,” he said. “I have to go.”
“When should I call you next?” Nino asked. They alternated weeks to even out the long-distance bills.
“Thursday?” Ohno suggested. “Same time as tonight.”
“Thursday then,” Nino agreed with a smile.
“It’s a date,” Ohno said. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight. Don’t get caught.”
“Don’t fall up the stairs.”
The phone went back on the hook, and for a long moment Nino simply stood there, staring at it, wondering what Ohno meant when he said things like that. Did he know? Was he joking? Was he playing with Nino’s feelings? Did he know Nino had feelings? Did it matter if he knew?
“It’s a date,” Nino said to himself, happy for the promise, but sad for the wait.
Someday, Ohno would come back to Tokyo. And if Nino still felt like this, he’d have to deal with it. But for now, just these phonecalls would be enough. Just Ohno’s voice, soft and serious, peppered with laughter, squeezing Nino’s heart just enough to make it beat a tiny bit faster.