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It’s barely even afternoon, but Kou already feels the need to lie down.
Exam results day always drags past like nails against chalk-boards; a little noisy, a little painful, always worse for some than others. Kou falls, without a doubt, into the ‘ worse for some’ group. And it wasn’t for lack of trying- he studied hard, or at the very least, harder than he ever has beforehand- but his teacher still handed him his paper face-down against the desk. Nene had told him once- people don’t need to get good grades to be smart in other ways , although he has the feeling those were words of self-comfort after she bombed her chemistry test, more than anything else.
Teru had told him once- just do your best, I’ll take all the pressure. And that’s the thing- Kou doesn’t want him to. Teru-nii has perpetual dark circles and Kou still sees the glow of his desk lamp when he goes to stop Fairy from escaping their hutch at one in the morning. He’s already under about as much pressure as he can take, no matter how deeply he tries to bury it. (Emotional intelligence- that’s what Kou’s been told time and time again that he has. It can’t do shit to scrape the remains of his maths grade off the floor.)
He’ll have to show his parents, they’ll ask him why couldn’t you be more like your brother, and Teru will try to take the fall. He can already hear the raised voices, the slam of the living room door. He knows he won’t be getting much sleep, tonight. None of them will.
“Could you look any more miserable?” Kou will never quite overcome the spark of panic he feels, every time he turns his head and sees Yugi Amane with one leg dangling out of the third floor window. He acts like he’s a boy born to defy gravity, forever leaning over railings, stretching his hand out as if he can skim the clouds with his fingertips. Amane never falls. (Kou is terrified that he won’t be there to catch him when he does.) “What’ve you got there?”
Amane snatches the exam paper out of Kou’s hands before he can protest, dodging any attempts to retrieve it with practiced ease. He winces when he flips it over, exposing the grade on the front in red warning-sign ink.
“ Ouch ,” Amane’s voice is one part pity, one part amusement. “You’re screwed once you get home, boy.”
In the moment it takes for Amane to open the front page of the exam paper, Kou shoves it back into his bag- before it can cause any more damage. “I’m aware,” he sighs, and can’t crush down the disappointment that bleeds into his words. “I studied for this one and everything.”
“Maths is hard,” Amane shrugs, like he’s not the one who could easily come top of his class in both maths and sciences, if he actually put his mind to it. ( Astrophysics- he’d said sheepishly, when Kou once asked what the future meant to Yugi Amane. Who needs earth when there’s a whole universe waiting for us out there? )
Kou’s grip around the strap of his bag tightens, until his nails dig crescents into the flesh of his palm. Something dull and anchoring. “That’s never stopped Teru-”
“There’s a new cafe that opened in town last week,” before Kou can say another word, Amane’s arm curls around his waist and tugs him firmly out of the door to the third floor bathroom. He’s grinning in that usual, infuriating manner of his- but there’s something urgent behind his movements. “Buy me donuts, kid.”
“I’m only a year younger than you,” Kou attempts to worm his way out of the quick pace Amane sets for them towards the stairwell, familiar as the warmth at his side is. “And we’ll never make it back in time for class.”
When he turns, Amane’s eyes are moon-bright- a challenge that Kou has never been able to refuse. “And?” He asks, because skipping class is no big deal for a boy who sees the earth as just a fragment of a wide, brilliant universe. “It’s not like you’ll be able to concentrate anyway.”
Try as he might, Kou can’t argue with that. Left to his own devices, he’d spend his last few lessons staring distractedly out of the window, and Yokoo and Satou would probe him with questions because they’ve always been able to see right through the cracks in his exterior.
The first time Amane convinced him to skip class, Kou had felt terrible for the whole two hours they’d spent skirting around the local shops, hiding their uniform under coats and scarves that didn’t suit the weather. Now, he only feels slightly reluctant when he lets Amane shepherd him down the corridor towards the highschool shoe lockers. Yugi Amane is an acquired taste after all- something you build up tolerance to over time. Kou has just about grown accustomed to his clinginess, his wicked smiles. (The distant look in his eyes, like he’s staring five weeks into the future- Kou is used to that too.)
“Hurry up, or it’ll be super busy and we won’t get a table,” Amane drums his hands on the side of the locker, and against his better judgement, Kou already feels a little bit lighter.
Getting out of the school building is simple enough- Amane has taught him all the best places to hop the fence without getting caught- and Kou barely has any time to feel guilty when Amane grabs his wrist and pulls him along the street in a quick march towards the town centre. It’s a bright day; sunny but cold in a way that feels like spring against Kou’s face, and he lets his exam paper lie forgotten in the front pocket of his bag for a little while.
“I watched a documentary last night,” letting go of Kou’s wrist to balance on a wall by the side of the road, Amane smiles in the way he always does when he talks about the universe. “About black holes. you know, once things cross the event horizon, there’s no getting out for them until they get ripped into quantum spaghetti by gravity. Cool, right?”
Kou can’t think of anything less cool than being torn into space pasta, but he still nods. He understands the feeling in a way- tipping over a point-of-no-return, catching a boy with stars in his eyes before he fell out of a third floor window, doing all the things that a proud Minamoto should not be doing. Teru never skipped class or stole worksheets from the teachers office or hid in the haunted girls bathroom and snacked on stolen candy. Yugi Amane is a centre of gravity in the worst possible way, and Kou thinks he might not have much choice about the whole quantum spaghetti business.
“You must be really upset about that grade,” hopping down from the wall, Amane sighs. “You’re no fun when you’re quiet.” He links his arm with Kou’s again, dragging him down to his own height with little regard for the fact that it makes walking really difficult.
Kou just stumbles, and tries his best to keep up.
“It’s not like school matters in the long run,” Amane continues. “If we’re lucky, a meteor will hit the earth before we do our final exams and then we won’t need to go anywhere.” There’s a distant note in the back of his voice again, one Kou never knows if he should ask about, never knows if it's his place to question. He doesn’t get the chance, when Amane pulls his wrist hard enough to hurt and sprints towards the cafe like it’s the last thing he’ll do.
Kou can understand Amane’s excitement- even outside the door, the smell of the cafe is enough to make his mouth water, and the sight of the cakes through the window doesn’t make waiting patiently in line any easier. They order cake and donuts for lunch, because Amane is a terrible influence, and pile into a table at the back in case anyone questions their uniform once they shrug their coats off.
(He’s long since stopped trying to get Amane to pay him back for the food he buys. Kou isn’t sure if it’s the grim acceptance that Yugi Amane is an unavoidable con-artist, or the sight of his usual cheap lunches from the conbini down the road that does it.)
He blames it on thinking too hard when he almost chokes on a bite of his cheesecake and Amane laughs so hard he swears he’s cracked a rib or two.
While they eat, Amane rambles some more about his black-hole documentary; jargon about singularities and condensed mass and quantum mechanics that flies spectacularly over Kou’s head. Amane has always been a surprisingly good teacher- ever enthusiastic in his explanations and strange analogies- but now he makes no attempt to break things down like he usually would, a stream of consciousness designed to fill the space between them. Regardless of the intent, Kou doesn’t think about his family or the argument to come for a second.
(Knowing Amane, it’s likely just a ploy to distract Kou long enough to steal bites of his cheesecake, even if he does have an entire donut selection box spread out in front of him. Kou still smiles a little brighter, in a wordless thank you. )
(Amane still steals his cheesecake. Kou still hits him over the head with the laminated menu. The cafe waitress still tells them to settle down or else they’ll have to leave. Business as usual.)
They head to the park once they’ve eaten, only a short walk down the road from the cafe. Despite the sunlight, it’s too cold for it to be particularly busy- filled mainly with dog walkers and salarymen catching some fresh air on their lunch breaks, all in too much of a hurry to pay attention to two boys clearly skipping class. Amane makes a beeline for the swings because he’s a child trapped in the body of a too-skinny too-short sixteen year old, kicking off the ground hard enough to hurt.
Kou would normally challenge him to a competition- who can swing higher, faster, longer- but his usual ambitious spark is a dull ember in his gut. Instead, he sits and he watches, as Amane kicks higher, higher, higher.
He’s grinning in the same way he grins out of top-floor windows, legs hanging out into space, taking his chance with gravity. Even after almost falling, after the only thing stopping him from spilling out broken onto the school steps was Kou’s fast reflexes, he’s never been afraid of heights. Amane never talks about his family, his home, the things that go on behind the scenes. Kou doesn’t think he wants to know what could make a boy so unafraid in the face of gravity.
“Kid,” Amane’s voice is an entire lightyear away. “Watch this!”
He lets go of the swing, tumbles into the open air, and Kou feels as if his heart has risen into his throat. Amane lands on his feet and topples backwards onto the grass with a laugh of surprise. Kou’s grip on the swingset is white-knuckled.
(“You’re gonna get yourself properly hurt, some day,” Amane had said, once, after Kou had taken a punch for him. It had been an impulsive thing, really- the brand of recklessness his parents had always laughed about. Climbing trees to rescue cats and falling out of them, wading into the pond up to his waist to fetch Yokoo’s missing football, getting punched in the face because for once, Yugi Amane hadn’t done anything wrong. “And you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself.”
Kou had brushed him off with a laugh and a wave of the ice pack pressed against his cheek. He thinks he understands what the strange look living in the back of Amane’s moon-bright eyes meant, now.)
“Stop staring at me like you’ve seen a ghost,” when Amane peels himself up from the ground, he’s not quite smiling. Snatching his bag from the base of the swingset, he waves for Kou to follow him without another word. You’ll chase after me, anyway; the gesture says. Who else would stick around long enough to catch me?
The path which Amane leads Kou down is one he hasn’t seen before, a back entrance to the park that’s overgrown with brambles and foliage. Kou doesn’t ask Amane how he discovered it, because even he knows a futile question when he sees one- Amane’s secrets are buried six feet deep, and Kou can already hear the stupid joke or rude statement he’d get instead of a straight answer.
Unless invited, don’t ask questions. Rule number one of tolerating Yugi Amane.
Leading down to a small stream which slips quietly between two rows of houses, the trail is a muddy, overgrown thing. Kou can already feel the complaints which will surely follow when he gets home, already dreads the hour he’ll spend stooped over the hosepipe outside, scrubbing mud from beneath his laces. Amane walks the path with the confidence of someone who could navigate with their eyes shut, ducking under the tree branches and letting them swing back into Kou’s face.
They’re practically walking in people’s back gardens, by now- hidden in the foliage while Amane assures Kou that they’re not far off now, yet refusing to announce their destination all the same. The path picks up the flow of the stream again, weaves under a bridge which Kou recognises from his morning walk to school, and then finally Amane spins on his heel with a flourish, splattered up to the back of his knees with mud.
There’s a tiny wayside shrine nestled in the clearing, with a faded moss-covered roof and ivy crawling at its base, some relic of a time before the town became criss-crossed with roads and infrastructure. Amane perches on it’s worn stone pedestal and pulls the leftover donuts out of his school bag, tossing one to Kou before he can even ask.
“Romantic, isn’t it?” The tone of Amane’s voice borders on insufferable . “Just you, me, and whichever cranky deity is going to smite me for using its dwelling as a chair.”
“Any reason why we’re here?” Kou cuts to the chase, before Amane can say anything else stupid that makes him want to smile. The clearing isn’t unpleasant- it’s clean and quiet aside from the dull to-and fro of cars on the bridge just beyond- but it’s also confusing. Of all the strange places Amane has led him hand-in-hand, this one tops them all. “I didn’t think you were religious.”
“I’m not really,” shifting along with the murmur of the trees overhead, Amane pats a space on the stone next to him. “I just find it interesting that there’s shrines everywhere if you know where to look. Did you know that the school was built on the site of one? Makes me wonder if the place is haunted by vengeful spirits or something.”
Though there’s barely enough room for him, Kou settles down next to Amane. The stone is cold and damp and incredibly uncomfortable, but the spring birdsong in the branches almost makes it worth it. “I don’t think so,” Kou replies, mildly. “If there were vengeful spirits, then I think someone would have been cursed by now.”
Amane laughs, but it’s a strange, half-empty sound. Something worrying that Kou hasn’t heard in quite some time.
“Boy,” he says, and the gravity of his words is almost terrifying. “Do you believe in the afterlife?”
Kou freezes, at the same time as the breeze seems to hold its breath. Amane stares down at his hands, waiting. “Why do you-” Kou starts, because there’s a million questions pushing up daisies beneath his tongue and he can’t figure out how to voice a single one of them.
“No reason,” Amane’s voice is heavy, and it tells Kou anything but. “If there is, though, do you think there’s requirements? Do you think they’ll care if someone steals candy, or hates their parents, or keeps getting bad grades on their math tests?”
“I don’t know-” Kou cuts his own words short. Because he doesn’t. There are questions he cannot answer, just as there are questions he cannot ask.
“I think, if it does care about stuff like that, then I don’t need the afterlife. I’ll just become space dust, and go floating around as a cloud of hydrogen for all eternity,” there’s a distant look in Amane’s eyes, and Kou is something close to terrified of the sight of it. Impulsive as ever, Kou grabs his wrist hard, like something so trivial could ever hold a person like Yugi Amane in place. (He swore, the first day they met, that one day he would touch the stars. Kou has never doubted it for a second.)
“I hope you’re not planning on becoming space dust any time soon,” Kou tries to joke, but every word falls flat. Sometimes he hates Amane, for knocking his feet out from beneath him.
“Nope,” Amane doesn’t look at him when he replies. “I think I like it here. I don’t want to go anywhere else.”
When Amane is concerned, Kou thinks that’s as close to reassurance as he’s going to get. He lets out a quiet breath, one he didn’t realise he was holding
“You, on the other hand, need to start planning,” when he finally turns, Amane’s eyes are moon-bright again, a grin on his face that flashes one too many teeth. “Who knows how much of you will be left over once your brother and parents are finished with you. I wouldn’t be surprised if your rabbit took a turn at chewing you out.”
The only benefit of sitting hunched up against the shrine is that Kou is already well in range to elbow Amane hard in the side.
It’s getting even colder by the time Amane finishes recounting his black hole documentary, putting all talk of the afterlife behind them in the same way they ignore most heavy things which outstay their welcome. Though spring has arrived, nightfall still comes early, and the car headlights glare through the branches of the trees, shadows of the treetops stretching long across the shrine’s crumbling sides.
“We should head back soon,” Kou suggests, because Amane has an awful habit of forcing him to play voice of reason for the first time in his life. “I don’t want to fall in the stream while we’re trying to make it back along that path in the dark.”
He stands, stretching out the stiffness which the cold and damp has set into his joints, and Amane’s hand pulls him right back down again. His blunt nails dig into the flesh of Kou’s wrist, something urgent and tense. “Let’s stay out a bit longer- you’re already in trouble, there’s not much you can do to make it any worse.”
I don’t want to go home yet sits unspoken, but it still rings loud as thunder.
Kou hates how quickly he softens, how easily he lets Amane pull him back down beside him. Yugi Amane is the worst influence that Kou has ever had the misfortune of meeting. Fact. (Kou feels a hundred times better than he did before he spotted him by the bathroom window. Also fact.)
“Can we at least find somewhere a bit warmer?” Kou proposes a compromise. Amane grins.
“Is the kid scared? Do I need to hold his hand?” Amane takes incredulous silence as an affirmative and laces his cold fingers between Kou’s own, pulling him in pursuit down the trail. Despite being a good few inches shorter, Amane walks fast and Kou almost slips in the mud while struggling to keep up, something which Amane throws back his head and laughs at. He smiles for real a lot more now, even more so than when they hang out as three with Yashiro Nene in tow. Kou does slip in the mud, then.
They go back to the same cafe, the waitress from earlier groans openly to herself at the sight of them, and Kou feels terrible when she plasters on a customer service smile and leads them to a table for two by the window. Amane orders a strawberry shortcake which he decides he hates three bites in, and forcibly swaps with Kou’s stack of pancakes.
Every time Kou finds his thoughts veering towards how to do better, how to make things easier for Teru, how to live up to the Minamoto family name, Amane finds something to cut him off with. The rush of the headlights along the highstreet outside, the old shrine the school was supposedly built upon, games of who can spot the most off-season winterwear out of the cafe window. He’s good at being a distraction, Kou finds, and he’s not entirely sure how to say just how much he appreciates it, without Amane taking it as an invitation to be even more infuriating than the norm.
He settles for sliding the tiny biscuit that came with his hot chocolate across the table, right into Amane’s open palm.
The clock on the wall reveals that time has already spilled into late afternoon, but Kou barely has the presence of mind to call Teru and let him know that he’ll be home late. It happens more often than not, now that Amane has barrelled his way into Kou’s usual routine.
“Where do you want to go next?” Amane clearly has no intent of heading homewards any time soon, twirling the straw from his milkshake between his fingers. The question is purely rhetorical- Kou knows by now when he doesn’t have a choice in the matter.
“You choose,” he replies, quitting while he’s ahead. “Just nowhere weird. I still haven’t forgiven you after that dog chased us for ten minutes straight.”
(That’s a lie, and Minamoto Kou knows it. He forgave him the moment Amane collapsed onto a bench by the side of the road, breath heaving in his lungs and a giddy laugh exploding into the winter night air.)
“It’s a surprise,” Amane tells him when he asks later; eyes flashing bright in the dark, fingers a comfortable circle around Kou’s wrist. He’s never made things easy.
Kou worries for a second that Amane is dragging him back to the shrine again, slipping through the park entrance with a grin. But they stick to the main path instead, cutting alongside where the apartment block windows cast wavering reflections against the surface of the lake. It feels like the middle of the night though it’s barely turned evening- and the air is a liminal space of its own, mirrored in the expanse of the lake, the dip of the puddles, the surface of Amane’s phone screen as he pulls up the astronomical almanac, like he doesn’t already know the stars as well as the contour of his own hands.
It’s a strange place they’re caught in. Daytime which feels like night, spring which feels like winter, not-quite friends who feel like– well– something else . (There are things which even Minamoto Kou is afraid to look in the eye.)
The position Amane adopts on the park bench they eventually stop at looks far from comfortable- feet kicked out towards the lake edge, sprawled bonelessly against the back, head craned upwards to stare at the open sky. “This could almost be a date,” he laughs, then, because Yugi Amane has never been afraid of much- gravity or otherwise. Kou is glad Amane doesn’t see the way he almost slips off the bench in surprise, because he knows it’d be at least a month before he heard the end of it. “We went to a cafe, held hands, and now we’re stargazing- the whole deal.”
“Who says I’d want to date you?” Kou replies, all too aware of how weak the statement sounds. For once, Amane takes pity and lets that particular conversation die, before it turns into something terrible.
When Amane starts pointing out the stars, mapping a line across Orion’s belt, Kou wishes he’d bought a takeout cup from the cafe. It’s all too clear that Amane has no intention of leaving any time soon, and it’s just as certain that Kou has no intention of leaving him behind, either. Cold as it is, Kou is grateful- for the cafe trip, the welcome distraction, even the muddy pathway down to the shrine by the bridge. Though the inevitable backlash looms closer by the minute, he feels more prepared than he’s ever done before.
“Do you remember how to find Polaris?” Amane asks, face illuminated by the astronomical map on his phone screen.
“Thanks,” Kou grins instead of answering, because he’d rather give Amane a week’s worth of emotional leverage over him than admit out loud that no, he can’t remember how to find Polaris. “This was way better than staring at the classroom wall all afternoon.”
Amane seems almost surprised, before he smiles and melts back into the bench, condensation trailing off his laughter. “I don’t care about helping people, boy. I just needed someone to buy me donuts.”
Kou supposes it’s fate, that he’s always been good at reading people. He doesn’t think he could have survived a week in Amane’s company, otherwise. It’s all there behind the flippant statement- the tilt of his head in Kou’s direction, the comfortable sprawl he never adopts around others, the grin hiding in the corners of his voice. He’s never going to get a you’re welcome outright- but with Amane, words always come second to actions, anyway.
The air only gets colder as night encroaches, and Kou can feel his fingertips going numb in his coat pockets. Neither of them have gloves- Kou’s are never in the correct coat pocket and Amane’s are perpetually full of holes- and he’s not sure that adding frostbite to his list of offences for the day would go down well with his parents or his brother.
“Why don’t you come over for dinner?” When Kou speaks, Amane tears his sight away from the stars to watch him with moon-bright eyes. “My parents can’t yell at me if we have a guest, and you won’t have to go home for a while, either.”
The image of Amane sitting in his kitchen, eating his food, making fun of his bedding choices, is a strange one that doesn’t quite work no matter what angle he stares at it from- but Minamoto Kou has a favour to return. Amane has never mentioned his family, never spoken about his homelife- Kou doesn’t even know where he lives- but if Kou can convince him that gravity exists for a reason for just one more night, then that’s all he needs. ( The universe is timeless, he would say, if he knew what the words really meant. It can wait for you a little bit longer .)
“I like the way you’re thinking,” detaching himself from the park bench, Amane grins cold and bright and brilliant. An event horizon of a smile- all gravity and unspoken answers. “Lead the way, kid.”