Chapter Text
This is the first day of my life
Swear I was born right in the doorway
I went out in the rain, suddenly everything changed
They're spreading blankets on the beach
Yours was the first face that I saw
I think I was blind before I met you
And I don't know where I am, I don't know where I've been
But I know where I want to go
And so I thought I'd let you know
Yeah, these things take forever, I especially am slow
But I realized that I need you
And I wondered if I could come home
First Day of my Life - Bright Eyes
If you asked Kojiro Nanjo about his aspirations in life, what he desired, what he wanted, there were many answers he could give.
He could say that he wanted to improve on his skating techniques. He could say that he wanted to get stronger, that he was pleased with his deltoids but thought that his triceps could use a bit more isolated progress. He could say that he wanted to expand his business, and that he had been considering hosting special events on the occasional evening to draw in new clients.
While all of those aspirations would be truthful, none of them were truly what Kojiro wanted the most.
Ever since he was a child, Kojiro wanted to be cool.
He wanted to be the guy that other people looked up to. The sort of person who everyone wants to eat lunch with, who has to promise a group of hopeful students that he’ll hang out with them next time because he already said he’d be spending the afternoon with another crowd of classmates. The one who is always one of the first ones picked for team sports.
He only ended up reaching that status when he was a fully grown adult. Through all the years of his childhood, he remained painfully average.
He was never a social outcast, but he never managed to stand out from the crowd. Other students liked him, but they never were awed by him, or sought him out.
And it wasn’t for lack of trying. As soon as Kojiro found out about a new trend, he’d devote himself to joining in on it. If a new type of sneaker was in style, he started saving his allowance for it. If all the other boys were cutting their hair a certain way, he’d show his mom and beg her to help him style it in the same fashion.
And despite all of the effort, as soon as Kojiro managed to join in on the trend, everyone else had already moved on to something new.
That was the reason he first picked up a skateboard.
The idea came to him one afternoon in primary school. He was on his way home, when he passed by a park and saw a small gathering of high school boys skateboarding together. He stood on the other side of the chain link fence, eyes wide and fingers snared in the metal loops as he watched the boys fly past one another. Any time one of them pulled off a stunt, the others would whoop and holler, and clap each other on the back.
They looked cool. Really cool.
And Kojiro realized that none of his classmates skateboarded.
The excitement he felt at that moment was overwhelming. He knew, without a doubt, that this was his chance to get ahead of the pack. There was no doubt that skateboarding was cool. And if he could learn how to do it before everyone else in his age group realized how cool it was, he’d be way ahead of the game while others were still trying to learn how to balance on a skateboard.
He sprinted the rest of the way home so he could look at how much money he had saved up, and figure out how long it would take for him to get a skateboard of his own.
The good news was that he had enough saved to afford a used board within the course of two weeks.
The bad news was that skateboarding was a lot harder than he had imagined.
Learning to balance on it and move around wasn’t the difficult part. He managed to get a good grasp on that within a few weeks. But Kojiro hadn’t gotten into the sport for transportation. Standing on a skateboard wasn’t cool. He wanted to be able to pull off the tricks he had seen those high school students doing. He looked up every video tutorial he could, read tips and hints online, sat by on park benches and watched local boarders when they were too engrossed in their activities to notice an observer.
He spent hours on his own in abandoned alleys and parking lots, and time and time again it ended with him wiping out and eating pavement.
It took a few months for him to hit a breaking point.
It happened one afternoon. His usual routine right after after school let out. He'd walk to the school gate, scoop up his skateboard, and run out to practice again.
At the time he had managed to shakily learn some of the basic tricks, ollies and what technically counted as a kickflip. But before he felt ready to show off his efforts to his friends at school, he had decided he needed to learn how to do a rail grind. Pulling off something like that was the sort of thing that would drop everyone’s jaws. It might even get them cheering. Word would spread like wildfire throughout every class about his talents, and Kojiro would cement his status as the coolest guy in school.
The biggest problem with this plan was the fact that failing an ollie or a kickflip meant you stumbled back onto the ground. At worst you could slam your ankle into the side of the board, or lose your balance and fall on your knees or butt before getting back up and trying again.
Failing a rail grind meant crashing to the earth from at least 3 feet off the ground.
Kojiro had just failed his 9th attempt of the day, slamming his elbow and hip into the pavement while his skateboard skidded away from him.
The pain ringing through his body was bad enough on its own, even with his protective elbow pads. But then something worse happened.
He heard the sound of snickering and laughing from somewhere behind him.
He turned himself on the ground, looked back, and saw a group of older boys. They all had skateboards of their own, colorful shirts and flashy sneakers, the very image of what had initially inspired Kojiro to start skating in the first place. And they were all pointing in his direction, and openly laughing at his failure.
“Aren't you supposed to be at daycare right now, young man?” one of them said in a mocking authoritative tone, which made the group of them go from snickering to howling.
“Hey, try pulling the strap on your helmet tighter! Wouldn’t want to get a concussion, would ya?” said another.
Kojiro put a hand up to his helmet, staring back at the other boys.
None of them had helmets on, or protective gear.
Kojiro hadn’t even wanted to get the protective gear in the first place. But his mom had bought it for him, insisting he wear it once she realized his new hobby.
Kojiro wasn’t a crybaby. But something about the pain still searing through the newly forming bruises on his hips and ribs, the multiple failures with no sign of progress on the horizon, and the sheer humiliation of being mocked by the people who he aspired to be like snapped something in him. He started to feel moisture welling up in his eyes, clenching his fists as he put every ounce of willpower into holding back the floodgates.
He wanted to shout at them to shut up. He wanted to stand up for himself. He wanted to get up, show off the tricks he had already accomplished, and prove that he wasn’t a joke.
Instead, he scrambled up, grabbed his skateboard, and ran as fast as his feet could take him. But not even the pounding of his feet on the ground, or the blood rushing through his ears, could drown out the final shouts of ‘Yeah, run home to mom!’ and the whoops of victory from the high schoolers he left behind.
Kojiro ran, and ran, with no sense of direction, until he finally found a stretch of road with no one else on it. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath, gasping in and letting out shaky wheezes.
He felt stupid, and weak. And now that the shock had passed, he started to feel angry at himself.
The first thing he did was take off his helmet, and flung it furiously as far as he could away from him. The same followed with his elbow pads, his wrist guards, and his knee pads. His mom would surely be upset at him when he went home without them, but he didn’t care. At that moment, he hated all of that gear for reminding him of how fragile he was. How he was something that needed to be protected, coddled, how he wasn’t man enough to take a hit without something softening the blow for him.
He wanted to punch something. He wanted to scream at someone, to prove he was better than what those boys were accusing him of.
Instead, he sunk down onto the side of the road. He sat down, curled up until his face was buried in his knees, and hid while the tears he could no longer hold back finally came gushing out of his eyes. Crying on its own was humiliating enough, so he focused his efforts into being silent about it.
He wasn’t planning on staying for long. He just needed to wait this out, and get his composure back together before he went back home.
But just about a few minutes after he had sat down, he heard a new voice speak up in front of him. Not the same voices as the boys he had left behind.
“Hey,” it said.
Kojiro tensed up all over again. He did his best to keep his face hidden, wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands behind his knees, before he peeked out over them to see who had disrupted him.
It was a boy. He seemed to be around the same age as Kojiro, with neatly combed pink hair and a bored looking expression on his face. As soon as the other boy realized he had Kojiro’s attention, he held out a hand with one of Kojiro’s abandoned knee pads in it.
“You dropped this,” the boy said.
Kojiro scowled, and uncurled himself.
“No I didn’t!” he shouted, with a bit more force than he meant to.
The other boy wasn’t taken aback, or intimidated. He merely frowned a bit more, pressing his eyebrows together.
“Yes you did. I saw you,” he said informatively.
Kojiro really didn’t know what to say in response to that. He had clearly been caught red handed, but he wanted nothing less at that moment than admitting to owning a full set of protective gear when cool guys definitely didn’t wear that.
So after a few moments of desperate deliberation, he concocted his genius response.
“Did not!”
The other boy either had a strong sense of grace and kindness, or did not possess the energy to keep debating. Either way, he only stared at Kojiro inquisitively for a few moments longer before he shrugged and tossed the kneepad aside.
“Do you live near here?” the boy asked suddenly, pivoting topics.
Kojiro’s anger subsided for a moment, thrown off by the comment. He took a look around, trying to figure out where exactly he had ended up.
He wasn’t quite sure, but knew the streets around town well enough to know that he would only need to wander a few blocks before he found a street he recognized. Either way, he didn’t want to look like even more of an idiot and admit he didn’t know where he was in relation to his home.
“Yeah,” Kojiro said, and crossed his arms to give off the presence of someone with authority on the topic. “Why do you need to know?”
Kojiro had looked away from the stranger, so did not see the boy’s response. It was so quiet, Kojiro almost thought that the other boy had walked away, until he caught something else being held out in his direction from the corner of his eye.
Kojiro looked back, and saw the end of an umbrella, pointed down at his chest.
“It’s going to rain soon,” the boy said, in the same bland and uninterested tone.
And he was right. Kojiro hadn’t realized it, but he could already feel a few stray drops of rain starting to fall on his shoulders and his head.
Kojiro looked back up to the boy’s face, confused. Then he looked around for any sign of a second umbrella, finding none.
“... It’s fine, I live right down the street,” Kojiro said.
“No you don’t.”
“How do you know?!” Kojiro snapped, frustration flaring up again.
“Because you’re a liar,” the boy responded. He moved the umbrella forward, poking Kojiro in the chest with it.
“Am not!” said Kojiro, and grabbed the end of the offending umbrella so the other boy couldn’t move it forward again.
The stranger didn’t respond. Instead, he just let go of his end of the umbrella, leaving Kojiro to fumble with it so it didn’t smack down onto the ground.
He then turned to the side, and started to walk off down the road.
Kojiro was too shocked to respond at first. He just sat on the ground with the umbrella in his arms, the gears in his head turning as he tried to catch up with the strange circumstances he found himself in.
Finally, he struggled to his feet.
“Hey! Wait!!” he shouted. The rain was starting to come down harder. It wouldn’t be long before it moved into a downpour. “Isn’t your mom going to be mad if you go home soaking wet with no umbrella?!”
At this, the other boy stopped. He turned around, and smiled for the first time since their meeting began. It was a sly smile, the sort of mirth that reminded Kojiro of old folk tales of ancient fox trickers.
“It’s fine. She gets mad at me no matter what I do,” he said.
Without another word he turned around, and retreated once more.
Under any other circumstance, Kojiro would have chased him down and shoved the umbrella back into his arms. He wasn’t the sort of person to put other people at an inconvenience for his own comfort or needs.
But he was left frozen, watching the other boy move away down the abandoned road, until he disappeared around a corner.
Once the rain started to come down in sheets, he finally opened the umbrella, and wandered in the opposite direction to find his way back home.
Years after that encounter, Kojiro would sometimes think about the boy he met that day.
Sometimes his mind would wander and he’d see flashes of a fox-like smile. He’d taste the scent of rain approaching in the distance, and look around for any sign of a school uniform and pink hair.
He wondered if he would ever see that boy again. Wondered if he lived in the area, or if he had just been visiting. The only thing he knew for sure was that he had to be japanese, due to his lack of accent or difficulty speaking the language.
Kojiro kept the umbrella. He never used it beyond that first time it was given to him. Something about using someone else’s property felt wrong to him, but it also felt wrong to throw it away. So it stayed in his room, in the back of his closet, occasionally reminding him of the surreal encounter.
Kojiro continued school, and continued skateboarding. He eventually got a hold of more intermediate tricks through practice, and just as he envisioned, was praised and celebrated when he finally got good enough to show off in front of his friends and classmates.
Unfortunately, just like every other cool new thing at his school, his glory was short lived. Everyone loved watching him show off and wanted to join in on the fun, until the next new and exciting thing entered their lives. All of the other boys who had purchased skateboards gave up on their quest to learn the sport, and moved onto collecting trading cards from a game everyone was playing.
Unlike the others, Kojiro didn’t stop skating. His board no longer held the promise of popularity, yet he still felt drawn to it. It had sparked something else in him, a desire for something more than the praise of his peers.
It was the rush of adrenaline he felt any time he went soaring through the air. The rumble he felt in the soles of his feet as he sped over unfinished streets. The sting of falling down, yet knowing he’d get right back up and that no amount of bruises or gravel digging into his skinned wrists could stop him.
And while all the boys in his class had given up on the sport, Kojiro went to junior high school and found a small number of new acquaintances who also skateboarded. He made new friends, and his life developed into a new pattern.
It was a bit more fun than before, and yet it still felt just as average. He woke up. He went to school. He met with his friends to skateboard. He went home for dinner. He studied. He went to sleep.
And then one day, as he was leaving the front door of his school, he saw something that nearly made him miss the last 4 steps down the stairs.
It wasn’t unusual for him to see students he didn’t recognize. All of them had just entered high school, and plenty of them had come from different primary schools.
But this was the first time he ever saw a male student, with fair pink hair.
The student who had caught Kojiro’s eye was far away when he spotted him, already exiting through the front gates by the time Kojiro made it out the front door. So after Kojiro recovered from the fall he nearly took, he sprinted the rest of the way across the school yard, making it to the front gate as fast as his feet could take him, hopeful to see more than back of the other boy’s head.
Luck was on his side. Just as he reached the gate, a group of students in the school yard started to make a ruckus. The sudden shouts and hollers caught the attention of the surrounding students, including the pink haired one, who turned to look back at the cause of the chaos.
Kojiro knew right away. That was him. The boy with the umbrella. He had grown taller, and his face had thinned out, but there was no mistaking those golden eyes and his thin delicate eyebrows.
Kojiro heard the faint tinkle of bells, and felt his heart skip a bit. He thought he had lost his mind for a moment, until he saw a female student nearby, holding up a charm with bells on it to show it off to her friend.
He let out a small sigh of relief, thankful for his continued grasp on sanity. But by the time he looked back to where he had seen the pink haired boy, he was already gone.
The next day, Kojiro brought the umbrella with him to school.
This earned him some gentle teasing from his friends, but it was explained away easily enough when he told them he was simply returning something he had borrowed. They dropped it, and Kojiro spent the rest of the day anxiously checking the time as he waited for classes to let out.
His plan was simple. Wait by the front gates until the pink haired boy came by and return the borrowed umbrella. Not only would be able to confirm for sure that this other student was in fact the kid he met 3 years back, he’d also be able to clear his conscience. It was the right thing to do.
Not to mention, he never thanked the boy for his kindness on that day. So he’d return the umbrella, give him a proper apology and express his gratitude, then part ways and bask in the delight of his good deed.
So when classes were finally dismissed at the end of the day, Kojiro walked as fast as he could for the front gate of the school. He had already explained to his friends that he would join them later after returning the umbrella, to make sure he didn’t miss his chance to meet the pink haired boy at the gates.
As it turned out, his precaution was completely unnecessary. The first flood of students made their way out of the school, with no pink haired boy in sight.
Kojiro waited diligently, but started to fret as the last stragglers made their way past him.
There was a back entrance to the school, but it didn’t lead anywhere besides a series of dirty alleyways and dumpsters. Surely the other boy didn’t leave through there. Unless he was trying to get to the closest convenience store, in which case the most direct path would be going through those alleys. But that shortcut only shaved about a minute off of one’s travel time, surely no one would subject themselves to passing by the dumpsters full of discarded cafeteria food just to avoid turning a few extra corners on the main roads. Or, what if Kojiro had simply lost him in the crowd? There was an especially packed wave of students who all exited through the gates at the same time. Kojiro had made a point to inspect all of them as carefully as he could, but what if the other boy was behind someone taller than him, and had remained out of Kojiro’s line of sight?
That was when a loud whistle from the side of the school snapped him out of his thoughts, and Kojiro remembered something. After school programs. Of course! He was probably a part of some club, and had stayed behind for club activities. That made sense.
So Kojiro had a choice. He could decide to abandon his mission, and try again tomorrow. If such a thing was the case, clubs usually only met once per week. He’d be able to bring the umbrella again tomorrow, and would probably catch the stranger at an appropriate time.
Yeah. He could just go home. Any time he wanted to. In fact, he didn’t really need to return the umbrella at all. They hadn’t made any promises to one another, after all. They were simply two strangers, and the other boy had abandoned his umbrella, probably expecting that he would never see it again. Kojiro had friends waiting for him. He could even just leave the umbrella at the front gate. If the other boy saw it and recognized it he could pick it up, or a janitor would come by and dispose of it. Easy solution. Case closed.
Kojiro ended up sitting down on the ground, umbrella in his lap, and waited on his own for another two hours until club members started to exit the building.
Once the first group of students started to file out, he sprang back to his feet, on alert again. Pink was a rare hair color to have, and with the low volume of students leaving the building, Kojiro was confident it would be easy to spot his target.
One another another, small groups of students left the building. No pink hair in sight.
Kojiro had almost lost hope by the time a half hour passed. It had been about 10 minutes since anyone had left the building. He’d have to head home to make it on time for dinner soon.
But just when Kojiro was getting ready to leave the front gates, it happened. The front door of the school opened, and a solitary student was making his way down the stairs.
Kojiro was so excited, he wasn’t able to wait until the boy made it to the front gate. He jogged down the pavement, and met the other halfway.
“Hey!” he shouted while waving one of his hands to get the other boy’s attention.
The pink haired boy was in the process of putting headphones on, but paused when Kojiro called for his attention. He stopped walking, and looked up just as Kojiro arrived in front of him.
The two stared at one another for a few moments, in silence.
“... Do you need something?” the boy finally responded, when it became clear that Kojiro was not prepared to start the conversation.
It suddenly occurred to Kojiro that while he had planned out his goals for the encounter, he had not actually considered how he would explain his intentions in the conversation. It seemed so reasonable at the time. But now that he was face to face with the person he had been waiting for, explaining himself suddenly felt way more complicated than he was prepared for.
“No!” Kojiro started, with a bit more gusto than he expected that declaration to come out with. He had a moment of fear that his first word was too aggressive for the other boy to handle, but he hadn’t even flinched. He just stood there, hands in his pockets, waiting for Kojiro to explain himself. Somehow, this made Kojiro even more nervous.
“I mean.. No- I don’t… Uh,” Kojiro stammered. He was trying to buy time, and come up with the right words on the fly.
He couldn’t come up with any sort of conversation segway that made sense. So in an act of desperation, he simply held out the umbrella.
“This is yours.”
The pink haired boy looked down at the umbrella, considered it, then looked back up at Kojiro’s face.
“No it’s not,” he said.
Kojiro frowned, somewhat annoyed by the other boy’s standoffish response. Still, he didn’t lower the umbrella, trying his best to remain polite.
“It is. I don’t know if you remember or not… it was a few years ago. I was sitting on the side of the road, and it was about to rain, so you gave this to me,” he explained.
The pink haired boy continued looking at Kojiro, before realization suddenly lit up his features.
“Ah. So that was you? The crying kid with the knee pads?” he asked.
Kojiro felt his face and ears turn hot with embarrassment.
“I wasn’t crying!” he argued.
At this, the corners of the other boy’s lips turned up. His eyes narrowed with mirth, giving him that same fox like appearance that Kojiro thought of any time he passed by a stall selling kitsune masks, or heard the faint jingling of bells in the distance.
“Liar,” the boy said.
Kojiro’s head was swimming with thoughts. This conversation wasn’t going the way he had prepared for it to go, and he was starting to feel lost. He shook his head to try to clear his mind, focusing back on his original intent.
The other boy clearly remembered their meeting. And Kojiro still had the umbrella in his hands. He had to give it back, and properly thank the stranger. Right. Of course. Simple.
“Well…. I… this is yours. I just wanted to thank y-”
“I don’t need it anymore,” the boy cut in before Kojiro could finish his thought.
Once again, Kojiro felt completely thrown off of his center of gravity. All he could do was blink, dumbly keeping the umbrella held out in front of him.
“But… it’s yours,” Kojiro tried to explain.
The boy tilted his head slightly, and asked “Did you think I spent all this time without getting a new umbrella? I have two at home.”
Of course he had gotten another umbrella in the meantime. Kojiro knew that, it’d be stupid to not replace the one he had given away. But Kojiro wanted to explain that it wasn’t about that. It was the principle of the matter, about doing the right thing and not keeping something that wasn’t rightfully his. The problem was that the longer this conversation went on, the more lost he felt, unable to put those thoughts into words to explain himself.
He could only stare down at the umbrella, wondering where he was supposed to go from there.
Kojiro was getting more embarrassed by the second. At first he had anticipated a simple and polite exchange, and now he was starting to fear that he had revealed some sort of weakness of character. Surely the other boy would now mock him for his lack of foresight, and for being a crybaby who needed a helmet and couldn’t properly apologize for his weakness.
Kojiro looked down at the ground, waiting for the final blows.
“You still skate,” the boy said instead.
Kojiro looked up.
“W… what?”
The boy pointed to a spot behind Kojiro.
“That’s your skateboard by the gate. Right?” he asked.
Kojiro looked over his shoulder, then back to the boy. He nodded.
It was at that point that he finally realized something he had missed before. He had been so focused on his mission, he had completely missed the fact that the other boy was holding onto a skateboard of his own, tucked under one of his arms.
This discovery sparked a jolt of excitement in Kojiro, causing him to smile.
“Ah! You skate too?”
The boy made an affirmative noise, before he let his skateboard drop to the ground and planted one foot on the board.
“Let’s go,” he said, casually rolling the skateboard back and forth on the ground.
“Right now?” Kojiro asked, still struggling to follow along the path of their conversation.
The boy shrugged.
“Sure. Why not? I was going to go to the park anyway. Come with me.”
The thought of skateboarding together made a flare of excitement light up in Kojiro. He wanted to show off what he could do. He wanted to see how this other boy matched up against him.
But as he pulled out his phone to check the time, a wave a regret washed over him.
“I can’t… I have to be home for dinner soon,” he explained, shoulders sagging.
“So? Text your mom and tell her you’re going to be home late,” the boy said.
Doing something like that was totally out of character for Kojiro. Even when he was having a blast with his friends, always left the group right on time so he wouldn’t miss dinner with his family. Not because he would be punished if he wasn’t home. The temptation had just never outweighed his sense of responsibility.
But with one look at the other boy, posed so casually with his foot on his skateboard, every doubt he had crumbled.
He started typing on his keyboard. ‘Sorry, I’m going to miss dinner today. I’m spending time with…’
“Ah,” Kojiro said, looking from his phone to the other boy. “I’m sorry, I didn’t even ask you for your name.”
“Sakurayashiki Kaoru,” the other boy said.
“Sakurayashiki-kun…” said Kojiro, testing the name out. “That’s a mouthful.”
“Is it too long for you to remember? You can call me by my first name if you need to make it easier on yourself,” Kaoru said, putting his other foot up on the board now.
“No! I’m saying it’s pretentious!” Kojiro shot back, curling a fist at his side.
Kaoru started to move away on his board, and Kojiro called out again.
“Hey! Don’t you want to know my name?!”
Kaoru swerved back, and moved in a circle around Kojiro.
“I already know what you are, crybaby,” he said.
“I told you, I wasn’t crying!” Kojiro argued. He swiped out with a hand to bat at Kaoru, but the boy was too fast for him. He managed to avoid the strike, and pushed off on the ground, and took off down the street.
Kojiro grabbed his skateboard, and took off after Kaoru.
And that was how he spent the rest of his adolescence. Arguably, even his adult years.
Always chasing after Kaoru, doing everything in his power to remain by his side. Finding excuses to reach out and make contact with him, even if most of the time that meant a playful punch, or messing up his perfect hair, or putting him in a headlock for saying something insulting.
It took years for Kojiro to become ‘cool’. And while he would never admit it out loud, that transformation began when Kaoru became his friend.
Kojiro was reserved as a child. But Kaoru had taught him to find his wild side, the part of him that got a thrill out of disrespecting authority. When he had problems standing up for himself, Kaoru pushed his buttons until it brought the fighter out in him. And when the weight of the world was on his shoulders and he pushed himself too hard, Kaoru was there to remind him that grades didn’t determine his worth as a person.
Years went by, and Kojiro still felt like he had never truly reached Kaoru. Every step he took forward, it felt like Kaoru took another step back.
Kojiro became more adventurous, but Kaoru became more reserved. Kojiro became more easy going, and suddenly Kaoru was the one with a dozen assignments at work he spent all his energy on executing perfectly.
Kojiro knew that he’d probably be chasing after Kaoru for the rest of his life. But he was fine with that. Even if he was one step away, Kaoru was never out of arm’s reach from him. So they were never alone.
In the end, the umbrella never made it back it it’s original owner. So Kojiro kept it with him, tucked in the back of his closet no matter how many times he moved, and promised himself that he’d get it back to Kaoru some day.
Kaoru was careful about the information he shared with other people.
Sometimes he kept information to himself because he didn’t trust the other person, and didn’t want to give them ammunition to use against him. Sometimes he kept his secrets because he simply didn’t see the point in revealing those parts of himself.
Over the course of his lifetime, plenty of people had asked him why he started skateboarding. He always gave the same answer: it was a challenge, and he liked challenging himself.
It wasn’t a lie, per say. That was a part of the reason.
But the whole truth, his best kept secret, was that he decided he wanted to skateboard the day he met a young boy his age just before a heavy rainfall.
A boy sitting on the ground, covered with scrapes and scratches even if he had clearly been wearing protective gear while he had been practicing. Someone who was so frustrated, that he chucked his helmet down an empty street.
He threw away his helmet, his knee pads, his elbow pads, every piece of gear that was supposed to act as a barrier between him and the consequences of his failures. But even at his lowest, the skateboard never left his side.
Before they had even exchanged one word between them, Kaoru knew that this was the sort of person that did not give up when he set his mind to something.
And even with tears still streaming down his face, Kaoru looked at that boy and could only think one thing.
He looked cool.