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The air in northern Scandinavia is biting and frigid, even in the spring. It’s not yet April and the peak of Bjørnfjell is covered in snow, glittering in the sunlight. The glare reflects harshly past his tinted goggles. Azumane Asahi squints into the brightness and takes a deep, frozen breath, still adjusting to the altitude - to everything, really. That has always been a constant for him, but it is especially true now, looking out over a world that seems too pristine to touch. The mountains rise around him, looming upward and then rolling down to meet the water far below, clear and shining like everything else.
“The world is so big,” he breathes, suddenly overwhelmed by it.
“Yeah,” comes a voice from beside him that is fuller and braver than his could ever be. “That’s why I like it.”
Thank god for the ski lift, is all he can say. For all his size and athletic ability - though it has faded in the years since high school - Asahi is not a fantastic climber. The enormous red puffer jacket that hinders his movement isn’t helping and the goggles he wears feel clunky on his face, though not all the winterware is awful. The chunky knit of his scarf captures and reflects his warm breath and the smell of toothpaste and when the wind picks up, he buries his nose and mouth against the soft fabric.
A smaller figure leads the way, as he always has. Noya’s bigger now than he was in high school, though his height hasn’t changed much; all that time fishing for marlins had its effect, not that his bulk is easy to discern when he’s wearing a similarly enormous coat in painfully bright orange. His steps are lighter than Asahi’s, quicker, but he slows himself frequently to make sure he doesn’t leave his old friend behind. It makes the bigger man smile against his scarf. When Nishinoya turns around he is beaming past his winter gear and it doesn’t matter that his copper eyes are hidden behind his goggles. He is - as ever - radiant when he smiles, face flushed with cold and breathless from exertion.
The scenery is beautiful, but the company is more so.
“You ready?” Noya asks, hoisting up the sled in his left hand.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Asahi replies with a weak smile and the grin he gets in return is like coming home.
Plastic meets packed-down snow and a whoop rips out of Noya’s throat as the two of them careen down the side of a mountain. It’s not a steep enough slope to be truly terrifying, but that does not stop Asahi from whiteknuckling his hands around the rope that does not feel securely enough fastened to the sled he’s riding. Even with his stomach in his chest and his heart in his throat and his face stinging from the wind, he grins the whole way down - an unavoidable effect of his companion’s infectious laughter.
The mountain lodge’s website promised a chic but authentic atmosphere and it manages to deliver on both fronts: all the charm and warmth of a wood cabin combined with modern angles and amenities, including a full kitchen, bath, porch and even an outdoor hot tub. They dropped their bags earlier in the day and went out before check-in, but now that they’re post-sledding and icy cold, it’s time to collapse into the heat of their room. Lunch was at the lodge’s restaurant, but Noya insists on cooking dinner (he’s gotten good, or so he claims). Asahi smirks and obediently takes a seat at the small, round table that occupies the open living space in their cabin, then lets his eyes wander.
Nishinoya is… different. Still himself, of course - Asahi hopes that won’t ever change. He’s loud while he talks about the last leg of his trip in California, about the food and the music and the shows he saw while he was there. His voice bounces off the hard surfaces of the cabin and Asahi leans back in his chair, a soft smile on his lips. No matter how long it’s been or how tired he is from travel, that voice still warms him, fills him up with cotton and butterflies.
“How was Thailand?” he asks during a break in conversation, rotating the bottle of beer in his hand so that he has something to do with his fingers. Nishinoya pauses, half a lemon suspended in his hand above a filet of cod, and the smile that occupies his lips is soft and warm and meaningful.
“It was good,” he says finally and turns towards his companion. “It was really good.” His bright, copper eyes almost look wet and Asahi feels his heart thudding hard against the inside of his rib cage. A smile spreads across his face too, slow and warm, and the two of them just look at each other for a moment, and then another and another, until Noya sprouts a grin and turns back towards dinner.
He is still him, but he is different. Asahi lets himself take note of the changes - the way his shoulders have broadened, the muscles in his arms visible where they strain against the long sleeves of his undershirt. There are times when he goes quiet now, as though something that was restless has eased into contented softness. When silence blooms between them, neither of them feels a need to fill it.
They talk about Tokyo over dinner - fresh cod and wild rice, local vegetables. Noya really has become a proficient cook. Asahi’s latest release comes up and Yu has a shockingly good grasp of the fashions. When he says he keeps up with it just to follow his friend’s career, said friend turns very pink and smiles around a mouthful of broccoli.
By the time their food is gone, darkness has fallen. Nishinoya is practically vibrating out of his seat; the years have not tempered his eager nature, apparently. He watches out the wall of windows that span the back of their cabin, eyes on the sky, electric copper reflecting the incandescent of their interior lights.
“You ready?” Asahi asks, a smirk pulling on his lips, and gets a beaming grin in return.
The deck spans the back of the cabin, weathered wood with a sturdy railing and two chairs. In the far corner sits a covered hot tub - a perk, Asahi thinks, of the two of them having splurged on this getaway. He hurries outside, already freezing in the Scandinavian night, and pulls back the cover before hopping into the gently bubbling water. It smells strongly of salt and his hair, tied up in a low, loose bun, thanks him for the lack of chlorine.
The sound of the door opening and closing draws his attention. There, standing in the moonlight, is Nishinoya Yū as Asahi has never seen him before. He’s tan, for one thing, golden even in the silvery light, his defined collarbones set between two broad shoulders and below a graceful neck. His abdomen is taught where it slopes into the waistband of his almost painfully bright blue swim trunks bearing a cartoonish banana leaf print. Despite the cold, he stands in his bare feet with his towel around his neck and admires the scenery, the million-billion stars suspended in the dark above them.
Asahi does not admire the scenery. He admires Nishinoya Yū, the perfect boy who has grown into a perfect man, made more so by the two pink scars that run along the base of his pectorals.‘I’m going to Thailand,’ he remembers reading in an email. ‘I finally saved up enough.’ Kinoshita went with him, kept him company through the first parts of the recovery process. Asahi’s brown eyes survey the healed incisions and a smile creeps slowly onto his lips, warm and contented.
Nishinoya Yū, made whole.
“Looks good, huh?”
A familiar voice summons him out of his reverie and he blushes when they make eye contact, his own smile going sheepish.
“Sorry for staring.”
“Nah! In fact, I want you to stare!”
Asahi tries not to let his heart jump up and out of his throat. (He manages, but barely.)
“I look damn good!” The grin Noya wears is wide and proud, his hands on his hips, chin tilted up. A familiar laugh reverberates out of his throat and then a shiver interrupts it when the wind picks up. “Okay, enough of this though,” he announces and scurries over to the hot tub, sighing when he climbs in. “Fuck, it’s cold.”
“Pretty though,” Asahi points out. He is only half talking about Scandinavia.
“Prettier now you’re here,” Noya replies, his voice gone soft, and then there is a moment where both of them turn rigid with shock. “You know what? Forget I said that,” he adds and Asahi glances over, catching the strip of pink draped across the smaller man’s nose.
As much as he’s grown over the years, there are still things that terrify him - things like losing the friend he’s loved since high school - so Asahi lets it go. He swallows back the butterflies raging in his stomach that threaten to burst out of him as a rushed confession, stows them in a box to be dealt with later. He clears his throat and wrenches his eyes back to the darkened sky and the two of them sit in silence for a minute, then two. Asahi uses the time to scrape himself back together, ignoring the six-year crush hammering adamantly on the inside of his ribcage via his heartbeat.
“You know, I’m really glad you came up here with me, Asahi-san.”
Hearing his name in that voice does something to him, something that doesn’t happen with anyone else. He feels his chest warm from the inside out and looks up to find Noya, his expression lax and peaceful and his eyes turned up towards the sky.
“Yeah?” he asks, just to hear him say something else.
“Yeah,” Noya says and his smile gets broader, focused on something beyond the stars. “I missed you.”
That fierce gaze finds him, softened by food and drink and the closeness of old friends, and Asahi feels his stomach trying to escape. He wants to say something, but he’s suddenly got a mouth full of marbles, his words strangled in a dry throat before they can make it out. Noya’s expression doesn’t darken at the silence; he only smiles, wide and unrestrained, and after a few more moments he looks back out to the sky and leaves his companion to sort himself out.
Asahi stares, because how is he supposed to look at anything else?
“Ah! Asahi!”
He jumps, startled by the sudden outburst, but then he sees the shifting green and blue light being cast against the outside wall of their cabin and remembers what he’s supposed to be looking at. He turns his head and finds it, the phenomenon they came to see: a night sky alight with color, stars behind a translucent curtain of greens and blues and purples. The pictures can’t do it justice, he realizes, his breath stolen by one of the true marvels of this world.
“Man,” Noya breathes after several minutes of awestruck silence, his voice soft with wonder. “I don’t think I can come up with anything funny to say about this.”
Asahi laughs, a sound that catches in his throat and sputters past his lips, his body hunched forward with the suddenness of it. It turns into a proper chuckle, wheezing and half-smothered by the back of his hand, and he’s too taken by it to notice that Nishinoya is watching him.
“What? What did I say?” he asks, amusement in his voice.
“Nothing,” Asahi manages after a moment, breathing in through an open-mouthed smile. “Nothing, I don’t know, it just--” he trails off, glances up, meets a pair of bright eyes and feels the wide grin he’s receiving right in his chest. “You just make me laugh, I don’t know.”
Noya looks at him for a long moment, his expression somewhere between excited and bemused, and then shrugs his head towards one shoulder. “Well good,” he says. “I like when you laugh.”
There’s meaning in it. Neither of them knows it consciously, but parts of them do. Asahi’s heart knows that it’s important, even when his brain tries to convince him otherwise; Noya’s stomach knows too, twisted up into knots he never forgot, no matter how far he traveled from Miyagi. They smile, chuckle at their own foolishness, and then they look up.
Light moves across the sky and Asahi sees a dancer in a splendid gown, layers of chiffon that never quite blend together. He watches with a quiet smile and feels it all around him - the cold air, the warm water, the closeness of the boy beside him. He feels it like weight in his bones, a heavy blanket dragging him into peaceful sleep, letting him feel whole.
“Ah!”
He looks away from the shifting lights and finds Noya’s face lit up instead, bright and eager and pointed towards the sky.
“It’s snowing!”
Fat, white puffs float into his field of vision, but Asahi does not turn to look at them. His eyes stay on Nishinoya, on his wide smile and the northern lights reflected in his eyes, and he feels the thudding of his heart even more strongly than he did when he was in high school.
“Man, that’s too perfect,” Noya says. Delicate crystalline flakes catch on the long, dark strokes of his lashes and in the strands of his soft hair, his lips pink with the cold and his cheeks faintly flushed.
“Too perfect,” Asahi agrees. He is not talking about the snow.
The chill eventually becomes too much, even in the hot tub. Nishinoya makes the executive decision that it’s time to go inside when he notices Asahi shivering beside him. They climb out and wrap themselves in towels as they sprint for the back door, both of them grinning without knowing why. The inside of the cabin feels like summer against their frozen skin, melting away the lingering flakes in their hair while they towel off, surrounded by soft yellow incandescent. The laughter fades when their focus shifts to getting dry. When Asahi finally looks up from behind his towel, he freezes - but not from cold.
Noya is different now than he was in high school, harder in some places and softer in others; here in their cabin in the warmth and the low light, the changes are highlighted. His muscles look carved from stone, marble sculpted by loving hands and endless hard work. His posture is straight and proud and his stance is wide, personality too big for his small stature. The expression on his face lies in sharp contrast; it is all softness, rounded cheeks and a warm smile, eyes half-lidded with sleep and… calm, a sort of unfocused tranquility that might have seemed foreign years ago, but now looks perfectly at home.
Asahi doesn’t stop to think. He always does that - he is the one who overthinks until he’s sick - but now, he doesn’t. He can’t. All he can do is reach, and hope that Yū reaches back.
A broad palm finds a hard jaw, fingertips barely brushing through the fine hairs of Nishinoya’s sideburn. The touch is a spectre, feather-light and hesitant, but it pulls his attention anyways, lifts his eyes off the ground to meet Asahi’s instead. For a long moment, they stand there. They stay in place and drip onto the hardwood, and any other time Asahi would be worried about the floor but he can’t be bothered now , not when Noya is looking at him the way he looks at something wonderful.
“I missed you too,” Asahi says, his voice very soft, and a smile spreads across Noya’s face. It’s warm.
After all this time, they don’t need the words. Those will come later - whispered confessions shared between the sheets as sleep pulls them under - but for now, there is no need. They just know, because how could they not?
Nishinoya is the first to step forward, a hand covering Asahi’s while the other reaches for him. Asahi leans down to meet him halfway. They’re smiling, both of them, breathy, nervous laughter exchanged as they brush their noses together. Asahi refuses to close his eyes when Yu leans in; he will not miss a moment, not of this.
Noya leads the way, as he always has. His fingertips slide into Asahi’s hair, calloused palm against his cheek, guiding him the rest of the way down. There’s hesitance from both of them, a fear that this dream will evaporate just like all the others - but this one doesn’t. This one is real, tangible, and they feel it when they press close, when they brush their lips together for the very first time, when they taste lemon and salt and feel the warmth of an embrace six years in the making. It’s chaste and sweet, a lingering kiss that pours warmth down Asahi’s front, wraps him in fleece and shuts out the storm.
“Wow,” he breathes when they part, his voice a whisper. They lean their foreheads together and he keeps his eyes open to watch Noya’s face, his eyelids fallen shut and his smile bashful.
“Yeah,” Yū agrees. His smile gets bigger. His lips part, and Asahi’s face mirrors the blissful expression. The gentle giant shifts closer, brushes the side of his nose along Noya’s, traces the apple of his cheek with the edge of his thumb and feels something in his chest twist up and pop when Noya leans his face into the touch. He can’t hear anything over the sound of his own pulse, thrumming fervently through his veins.
“Took us long enough,” he says and Noya laughs, bright and unrestrained, and Asahi doesn’t care that it’s too loud for how close they are. He just smiles, leans his cheek against Nishinoya’s and sets his broad palm on the smaller man’s waist.
“What’s that saying about ‘good things come to those who wait’?” Yu asks.
“You were never very good at the waiting part.”
“Hey!” Noya protests, but he’s laughing, poking Asahi in the side when he chuckles low in his throat. He wraps his arms around Asahi’s waist anyways and the taller man goes with them, leans in until he can put his own around Noya and hold him to his chest, curled over his smaller frame. They stand there a while, wrapped up in each other, before Yū speaks again.
“I waited for you, didn’t I?” he asks and Asahi lets his eyes fall shut, presses his face into the smaller man’s shoulder and breathes deep.
“Sorry it took me so long.”
“Don’t be,” Noya says, “I’d do it again.”