Chapter Text
Langa wiggles his toes. They barely budge, held tight by the thick layers of socks wedged between them and the walls of his boots. His mother finishes tying them off with one last tug and pats his knee, looking up at him with an exasperated smile.
“We come all the way to Japan to visit family and all you want to do is snowboarding? You know we can do that just fine in Canada, too?”
Langa just shrugs, and stomps his feet. “I hate rentals.”
“We couldn’t very well bring your equipment on the plane now, could we?” She switches to Japanese as she flags down one of the attendants to ask something that Langa doesn’t take the time to mentally translate. Turning back to Langa, she pats his head and tells him, “Wait here just one second while I go find some helmets and goggles.”
He sits there, staring down at his boots as people clomp around him with their heavy boots. The faces and language are unfamiliar to him, but he finds solace in the familiar rustle of ski pants brushing together and boards thwacking against the ground.
Looking up, he sees a group of kids his age milling around, pushing each other over as they trip in their boots, still unfamiliar with the extra weight on their feet.
One of them with bright red hair and a ridiculous smile shouts loud enough to reach Langa’s ears as he calls out, “Watch this!”
Squinting his eyes, Langa watches with a snort as the boy hypes himself up, attracting the attention of all of his friends and a few other onlookers, only to do a pathetic little jump in place that results in an echoing thud as his snowboard flops against the ground.
“Come on , Reki. Obviously you can’t do a kickflip on a snowboard.”
“Shut up,” the red head, Reki retorts, face now matching his hair. “It’s because we’re inside right now, obviously. Snowboarding and skateboarding are like the same thing. S-boarding, they’re cousins! Brothers, practically.”
When his friend only rolls his eyes in response, Reki quickly unstraps his boots and lifts up his board, tucking it under his arm to stomp outside. His friends tag behind and their little group stampedes through the waiting area, bumping into Langa on their way out the door.
Langa sits there for a few more minutes, fidgeting with his zipper absentmindedly until he feels sweat trickling down his neck and sighs, standing up. His mother is still nowhere to be found, but he slips out the door anyway, feeling suffocated under all his layers.
Outside, the air is crisp and cold, reminding him of home. The snow crunches softly beneath his feet, and though it doesn’t compare to the meters of snowfall they sometimes get back in Canada, Langa can’t help but be drawn out to the top of the slope, staring down at the tiny specks of people scattered across the hill as they zigzag this way and that.
A familiar flash of red catches his eyes, and he looks over to see that barely half of the group from before have managed to strap their skis and boards on in this whole time, too busy caught up in a snowball fight.
Keeping one eye out for any stray clumps of snow flung his way, Langa sits down to methodically strap on his boots, frowning when he checks the fit to find it’s just barely wider than his board from home.
This is why he hates rentals.
He’s distracted from his work when he hears a loud whistle to his right and looks up to see the redhead has his hands raised as he gets his friends attention.
“Okay guys, watch me! I’m gonna kill it out here—“
“More like get killed. Get ready to eat dirt, Reki. Or should I say eat snow?”
“Avoid yellow!”
“Don’t you need to stand first to do a kickflip?”
“We solemnly swear to play Avril Lavigne’s Sk8er Boi at your funeral when you inevitably fall down a ditch.”
Some of their comments pass by too quickly for Langa to catch but even he can’t help but crack a small smile at the heckles.
“Alright, alright,” Reki answers with a laugh, reaching out a hand. “Somebody help me stand already, my butt’s freezing.”
His friend from earlier tugs him up with ease, and Reki lets out a small whoop, only for it to turn into a yelp as he begins sliding down the hill.
“Wait, wait, stop! How do I stop, I can’t stop, why is it just sliding on its own? Did somebody push me?” Reki shouts out, but his friends can’t help him as he slips further out of reach.
Langa watches for a second more, frowning as he notices a small kid in a giraffe parka speeding right in front of Reki’s path, and lets out a sigh as he hops up with practiced ease, untucking his fingers as he glides forward.
The snow is soft and crunchy under his board. The wind whips against his bare face as he turns sharply to a halt, coming up just in front of Reki and catching him by the elbows.
“Woah.”
“Shit, that was pretty cool.”
“Reki, betcha you can’t learn to do that by the end of the trip.”
The words flutter too fast by Langa’s brain as he stares into amber eyes which blink owlishly up at him. There’s a small dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose, although Langa isn’t entirely sure why he notices it.
“Uh. Thanks,” Reki stutters out, falling flat onto his ass the minute Langa lets go of him.
Langa rolls his eyes with a shrug, pointing behind him.
“Be careful,” he says in rusty Japanese. As good as he is at understanding his grandparents’ chatter, his responses have always been limited to monosyllables when possible.
Reki’s eyes widen even further as he stares down the slope with a gulp, as if just now realizing how long he would have slid before the hill plateaued out again. “Sorry I—“
Cutting him off, Langa points to the short path he cut from the top of the slope, just a few meters above. He arcs his arm wide, to mimic the motion he took, and then taps his knees with both hands, showing their bend.
“Curve, slow,” he explains, then points down at the snow at his feet where the edge of his board has dug a little trench, leaving a platform for him to stand on as he continues his explanation. “Dig, stop.”
“Um,” Reki starts, but before he can finish, Langa lifts his right foot until he’s tilting down the slope, keeping eye contact with Reki until the slow curve he draws has him turned to face the other way.
After that, well.
He tries to forget about missing poutine and his dad as he scrapes across the mixture of real and artificial snow, whipping down the slopes until his face is red from cold and exertion, his torso burning up while his ears feel like they’re about to fall off.