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Kindaichi is starting to think that the only way he and you will hold hands is in the chalk drawing on the sidewalk the two of you drew when you were five.
It’s raining while you wait for him outside the gym, your bag leaning against your shins to ward off the droplets that leap from the asphalt. Apparently you deemed your dry feet more important than your textbooks. Relatable. Your eyes watch the rain as it descends, whatever commotion in the gym too familiar for you to focus on. A side effect that comes with your best friend being in the volleyball club.
The lights pulse, even brighter than usual in contrast to the murky gray sky outside. Kindaichi pushes the ball cart into the storage room and bids everyone goodbye, getting an echo of ‘nice work today!’ in return. He dons a jacket over his thin jersey and shoulders his bag before lightly jogging to you, shoes squeaking.
“Took you long enough,” you grumble as he stops beside you, bending to pick up your bag and slinging it over one shoulder. He shoots you a grin and extends a hand to catch the raindrops as you fumble with the zip.
“Did you bring your umbrella?” you ask as you pull out your black one. He blinks, realising that he did not, in fact, bring his umbrella.
“Uh, no.” He flashes you a sheepish smile and shakes his dripping hand.
You sigh in exasperation and shake your head, reaching into your bag to pull out the extra you always brought with you.
(He likes to think that it’s specifically for him, given his tendency of ignoring the weather forecast and not bringing umbrellas when he should. He also doesn’t want to get too far ahead of himself.)
The walk home is silent save for the pitter-patter of raindrops bouncing off the dark blue umbrella you lent him. The cool air swirls around the crooks of his elbows and his shoes kick up water onto his calves. He glances at you out of the corner of his eye, your head bent, umbrella threatening to swallow your slouch.
He sighs, shifting the handle in his grip. “Your grade isn’t that bad, you know.”
You sniff. The sound skids between the raindrops and slips under the dark blue sky held up by the shaft mimicking Atlas. It sounds a little wet. “Not bad. Just one that could’ve been better.”
He curls his lip, then bumps his umbrella with yours, shaking a stream of droplets onto your arm. You whip the black canopy backwards to glare at him hotly.
He reaches out to pat your head on instinct, the rain wetting the expanse of skin exposed to its mercy. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s never known his way around eloquent words and prettily woven sentences. All he knows is how to be there for you, silent as you cry on his shoulder through the night. And after it all ends, he’d curl his palm on the side of your head and bring you close to lean on him, and you’d fall asleep.
That’s how it’s always been. It’s comfortable. This friendship is comfortable.
Is it bad that he wants it to crumble?
It’s almost winter. A crumpled-up ball of paper hits the back of his head. Outside the window, the branches are bare, spiderwebs across the expanse of the painfully white sky. He whips around and glares at you, two seats behind him and one to his right. You pretend not to see him, the teacher’s droning entering one ear and going out the other. Kindaichi huffs through his nose and turns back to his textbook.
Video games tonight? the note reads in your lazy scrawl.
He picks up his pen and scribbles this is why you don’t get better grades.
Your mouth drops when you read the addition to the note, eyes narrowing and writing a playfully furious how dare you. Kindaichi rolls his eyes even though you can’t see it, comes up with a reply, and passes the note back. Another exchange is about to occur when the teacher turns. Kindaichi is reminded funnily of a shounen manga scene as her sharp eyes latch onto his outstretched arm.
“Kindaichi-san, Y/N-san.”
Whoops. Haha.
He retracts his arm, comically slow, and turns to face the teacher’s upturned eyebrows.
“Yes, ma’am.” He’s struggling to keep his face straight and he knows you are too.
“Exchanging love letters over there?”
The laugh in his chest dissipates. His face burns, the heat spreading to his neck and below his eyelids. “No, ma’am.” The stares and snickers of his classmates cling to his shirt and weigh it down.
“Throw that away, and focus on the lesson.”
Your chair scrapes as you stand, making your way to the wastebasket. In a rare moment of rebellion, you aim and throw the ball of crumpled hanging-out (date, he thinks in the safety of the confines of his mind) promises, just the way the teacher hates it.
“Y/N-san -”
“Threw the note away, ma’am,” you adopt your most innocent tone. Kindaichi mimes gagging at your fake compliance. “We’re sorry.”
You are most definitely not sorry, Kindaichi thinks as you make your way back to your seat, subtly high-fiving his palm beside his desk.
No sooner had the teacher turned back to the blackboard than another paper ball smacked the back of his head.
“You suck at this.”
“Why’d you invite me over then?”
You smash his avatar with overdramatic vigour. “I’m lonely.”
Kindaichi places his controller on his lap and raises an eyebrow. “That’s painfully honest of you.”
The night is light and airy, blowing in through the open window and carrying with it the glimmer of the moon. He remembers the day you dragged the television in the upstairs lounge into your own room. There was no one to reprimand you. The light from the screen blends and swirls in your eyes, traces the arch of your nose, settles in the dip of your cheekbones. (He’s staring, he knows, yet he can’t look away.)
You toss your controller onto your pillow once you’re done winning the game and lie down on your back, arms thrown wide open on either side of you. “It’s true,” you shrug, swinging your dangling legs. “They’re not coming back even though they said they would.” You turn your head away from him and fix your eyes on the dot of orange emanating from the streetlamp outside the window.
Kindaichi thinks for a while before answering. “When did you sleep last night?”
You twist your neck around. “How is that -” you pause, then sigh and raise your palms in surrender. “Okay, okay, you got me. I slept at… three? Four? Sometime around that.”
He flicks your forehead. “You have to stop thinking so much, especially at ungodly hours of the morning. You’ll fry your brain one day soon.”
You rub the red spot with a pout. Sitting up, you bring your knees to your chin and rest it in the hollow, staring at your toes. “How can I stop? When there’s nowhere to escape, one ventures into their own mind and gets trapped all the same.”
He massages his temples. “Don’t talk philosophy with me. MY brain is going to fry.”
(You both pretend that you don’t realise he’s moved closer to you.)
You roll your eyes and shift your body, inching closer to him. He can feel your warmth enveloping his skin like a plastic wrap. “Of course it is, volleyball-for-brains.”
You’re both silent for a minute, then two. He brings his knees up and mirrors your position.
“Mind letting me into that brain of yours?”
You burst out laughing, the sound floating like dust beneath the sun’s ray. “That is the most Kindaichi way you could ask.”
He smiles a little. “So? Do I have a pass?”
Your mirth slips off your face and disappears under the bed. You settle your head on the crook of the folded elbow resting on your knees.
“They’re just - never around anymore, you know?” Your voice takes on a dangerous wobble. “Who am I kidding, of course you do. They’re not here for any of my award ceremonies, so what’s the point of all those achievements? What’s the point if they’re not even here for me? Why am I working so hard if no one—no one who matters—is ever going to see it?”
He flicks your forehead again.
“Ow!” You glare at him, for real this time. “And here I was, baring my heart to you!”
He rolls his eyes, then pulls you close to lean on his shoulder, like all the nights you’d choke on your thoughts, bubbling and suffocating like tar.
“Idiot,” he mutters, rubbing small circles on your shoulder with his thumb. “You’re not doing this for them. You’re doing this for yourself. All your good grades for your future. All your certificates are because you’re damn good at whatever the heck you do. I’m proud to have you as my best friend, you know. Are you saying I don’t see your hard work? Are you saying that I don’t matter?”
(The ‘best friend’ tastes like the bitter gourd his mum made for dinner yesterday.)
You put the full weight of your head on his shoulder and heave a deep sigh. “Trying to guilt me into loving myself, huh, Yuu?”
His shoulder shakes with a silent laugh. “You know it.”
The smile that slipped under the bed earlier peeks out from the darkness, its yellow eyes regaining its shine as Kindaichi tells you the jokes Shinji cracked today at practice. You’re laughing with tears in the corners of your eyes when his phone pings. He reaches for it and the screen lights up as he swipes.
“My mum’s inviting you over for dinner.” He shows you the text message. “And we’re going to a movie later since it’s Saturday tomorrow, she bought your ticket.”
Your smile slips off your face again, but he can tell that you’re not upset anymore. You still cry though, because that text could have, should have, been from your parents who were on the other side of the world instead of downstairs in the living room.
It starts snowing soon. Kindaichi sticks his hand out the window and watches as a flake of snow lands lightly on his fingertip.
“Yuu, if you don’t come back here, your avatar’s gonna get smashed.”
He trips over the toy his little brother left in his room on the hurried way back to his game console. It’s too late; you’ve already pulverised his character, a wicked and self-satisfied grin on your face.
“No fair!” he whines, pressing the blue X for another round. “You told me it was snowing! You know my weakness!”
You reach out a hand to poke his waist, right where he’s the most ticklish. A giggle tumbles out through his lips, and he wrenches the smile down to glare at you.
It’s one week into winter break, and he’s been over at your house almost every day since it started. Usually you study and do homework together, but that ends when his concentration snaps and he plays around with a volleyball or his phone while waiting for you to finish. Sometime in the afternoon, he’d be playing games with you again, like now.
“I don’t want to play anymore,” you throw the console onto your pillow carelessly. (Now where has he seen this scene before?) “Let’s play another game.”
He raises an eyebrow but switches off the TV obediently, turning to you and drawing his legs onto the bed in a cross. You snatch your phone from beside you to search for the questionnaire a friend had sent you yesterday afternoon.
“Okay, first question,” you clear your throat in a humorous attempt at formality. “‘When-’”
“Wait, we’re doing questions?” Kindaichi interrupts.
“Yeah.”
“Is it a truth or dare kind of thing?”
“No, but I’d appreciate it if you told the truth.”
“I always do.”
“I know.”
You turn back to the glowing words. “‘When did you last sing to yourself or someone else?’” Kindaichi cocks his head as he thinks, eyebrows furrowing and lips pinching.
Is it weird that you’ve memorised all the lines on his face? The angles his eyebrows would twist into when he’s angry, worried, frustrated. How his eyes melt into warm pools of chocolate as you lay your head on his shoulder. How there’s a barely noticeable mole underneath his chin that only you know about because you’ve stared at it through your tears as he comforts you. How he looks a bit soft around the edges now, like an age-weathered polaroid.
“I think it was yesterday night?” he answers, pulling you out of your reverie. “My little brother kept badgering me to sing the opening theme of Sunshine Kid.” He shudders at the memory. “It was horrible.”
You collapse into a fit of giggles, then answer the question yourself. “Mine was just now. I was humming the OST, remember?”
A fond smile tugs on his lips. “Yeah.” You never sing too loud or in public, and he thrums with joy holding the knowledge that he’s the only one who gets to hear you sing. A pity, really, he adores your voice, and he thinks everyone should hear it.
“Neeext.” You scroll a bit to the next question. “‘For what do you value most in a friendship?’”
The word ‘friendship’ thunks on Kindaichi’s chest. The guilt that’s been plaguing him since the day he realised he likes you as more than a friend returns full force. He cherishes everything about his friendship with you. He holds all the memories you’d made together as children like diamonds, treasures all the walks to school and nights cramming homework and everything in between and beyond. Does he really want to ruin that? Does he want to disregard all those years of platonic relationship because of his own selfishness? Does he really want to risk all these comfortable things for a ‘I like you too’ that might not come out from your lips?
(Is it bad that the answer to all those questions is ‘yes’?)
He clears his throat, forces down the bile that tastes like guilt. “Umm, our deep talks? You give good advice. Sometimes. And, uhh, just being c-comfortable around each other? Like we can talk about anything and everything to each other?”
“Can we?”
His heart stutters at the tone of your voice. It’s low and it holds something behind the thin veil of nonchalance and normalcy. He snaps his head up to look into your eyes, and they’re malicious, the way it does when you know you’re about to win a debate. It also looks uncannily like want, like the beast he sees in his eyes when he stares at his reflection after a game, the ‘I want to play more’, the ‘I want to score more’.
What do you want?
“Umm, y-yes?”
Your eyes darken more.
His heartbeat is loud. Loud like the flapping of pigeons’ wings when they fly too close to the window. Loud like the blare and screech of the train on his way home with you. The air vibrates between you, and he feels deep in his bones that something will happen in the next few minutes.
“‘Make three true ‘we’ statements each.’” You continue like nothing happened. Maybe that’s the case. Maybe he’s overthinking everything again.
He gulps and tidies out an answer. “We grew up together. We’re… friends. We…”
…want to be something more.
But do we? Does he? Do you? Five words. Three words. Anything could happen. His heart could burst into a cloud of happy sparkles like in his brother’s TV show, or it could shrivel and sink and never see the light of day again. Never see the light on your face again.
Does he really want to ruin this friendship?
He thinks of you, you and all the vulnerable parts of you that you’d shown him. He thinks of your face bathed in the glow from the television screen and the lonely street lamp outside.
And he thinks that, no matter what you were, friends or something more, he wants to protect you.
He swallows the confession. You open your mouth.
“My turn,” you ignore his sputtered protest. “We like corn, though you like it grilled and I like it buttered. We like rainy days, though you always forget to bring your umbrella.”
Your gaze is unwavering.
“We like each other, as more than friends, though you’re too kind and scared and stupid to say anything about it.”
His head is a whir, a swirling snow storm like the winter when the both of you were seven years old. He doesn’t know what to focus on, the ‘we like each other’, or the fact that you’d insulted and complimented and turned his world upside down and upright again in one breath.
“We…do?”
You sigh in exasperation. “Don’t we?” you snap, but he catches something flitting through your eyes. It looks like the uncertainty he’s tiptoed with all the time after he realised his feelings.
“We-we do!” he hurries. “I mean, I-I do, I just didn’t think that you did, and-”
“Yuu,” you stare him down, though your ears are flaming and you’re struggling to tamp down a smile. He remembers the note passing, remembers the same muscles twitching as you work on not laughing in the teachers face. He remembers the ‘love letters’.
You don’t kiss. You’re too young, too shy, too hesitant, too giggly. He reaches out tentatively, still unsure, his jerky movements screaming are you sure? Is it really me? even after you’d confirmed your feelings.
You meet him halfway. It’s you, your fingers thread through his. It’s always been you.