Archive of Our Own

Love, if that is your name,
I’m a practiced hand. I’m good at waiting.
And meanwhile, the sugar maples, miles of them,
flushed and damp between us.

— Cameron Awkward-Rich

Kaoru is painting practice commissions in the disquieting silence of September when Kojiro tells him he’s leaving for Rome in three weeks.

There is a tremor beneath the words, as if Kojiro is waiting for a rebuttal. Some kind of argument, a barb from Kaoru’s sharp tongue. He wouldn’t be surprised if he was. Kojiro has always been the person to tear up at movies where one chases after the other, begs them not to leave. Kaoru hates them. He sits through them all the same.

Kaoru looks up from the sheets of paper, the tangled wires of Carla where she sits as a prototype, scanning his strokes one by one. His hair is loose around his face - four months ago it would have caught on the hoops and bars through his ears, tugged at the bars through the tender cartilage. Now it just brushes past the empty holes and tickles at the back of his neck.

Kojiro has been sitting beside him for the last half hour fucking around on his phone - in between his calligraphy, Kaoru sees snippets of skating videos, recipes, the few seconds of a longboarder wiping out on a wave. There is the brief memory of a teacher talking about how social media algorithms are the extension of your truest self. Past the persona, past the shadows. 

Kaoru thinks about what makes up the most secret parts of Kojiro, according to his phone, and realises that he knows about all of them.

Now, though, his phone is black screened and Kojiro is looking at Kaoru with some kind of apology in his eyes. There’s a rising worry in the back of Kaoru’s throat.

“How long will you be gone?” Kaoru asks. He wants to hear a week. He wants to hear a month. 

Kojiro smiles guiltily, the light catching on his chipped teeth. It looks a little bit like a court sentence.

“Ah,” Kaoru supplies, unhelpfully, and turns back to his ink. 

—

Kojiro leaves Japan with little fanfare - Kaoru sees him off at the airport along with Kojiro’s family, and then the deed is done. Kojiro’s family piles into their car with a wave, Kaoru having declined a lift home. 

Instead, he turns away from the departures terminal, where he’d pressed an omamori into Kojiro’s hand with uncharacteristic politeness between the two of them. 

“Fly safe,” he’d said, and Kojiro had laughed at the gap between the two of them, pulling Kaoru into a bone crushing hug. 

“That’s beyond my control, Kaoru.”

“Fine, crash then. See if I care.”

“You’re too sharp for your own good,” Kojiro had said, but he had been laughing as he said it. Kaoru had ignored the tight pangs in his chest at it. 

And then he had left, half his life packed into thirty kilos of carry-on luggage and a backpack. 

Kaoru drops his board to the ground beneath his feet, the wheels catching on the rocks of the parking lot. There’s a prototype of Carla fixed to the deck of the old board - it glows purple, and lets it carry him home.

Well. As much as his house can be home when the person he’s known to fill it for so long is on the other side of the planet. 

—

The next few months are a lesson in recalibration. 

Kaoru hadn’t realised how used to Kojiro’s presence he is. He’ll never voice it - Kojiro’s ego is big enough as is, and knowing that Kaoru misses him would inflate it to record size. Even so, there is a space by Kaoru. Life moves on around him - he fits himself into the flow and lets it take him along. When classmates had been applying to colleges in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Kaoru had been holding himself up with his calligraphy teacher and working on pieces to enter in competitions, to learn how to run business, to take commission. 

He's running commissions out of his bedroom right now - he scarcely has the money to rent a studio, so immediately out of high school, and loathes the idea of asking his parents. Kaoru will do this his way or not at all. 

Even so, there is the possibility in the near future. The world is changing - businessmen are as interested in a boy and his AI technology as Suzuki-san from town is in his traditional calligraphy. There are always emails to be answered. There is a slowly filling savings account that was once being dipped into for silver hoops and skateboard trucks. 

There are nights where Kaoru does not sleep - as if he would, anyway - and works until the darkness gives way to pooling light on his windowsill. There are permanent ink stains on his hands, now. They are close enough to the visible chaos of his piercings to make him feel as though he has not thrown everything of his high school self away. 

One of these days, Kaoru gets the message that he has been awarded first place in one of the calligraphy competitions - something he had done toward the end of high school, a sosho piece in angry slashes and ink. Something fierce. 

雨降って地固まる

There is a discomfort in the way that Kaoru has to call Kojiro to tell him rather than just climb through his bedroom window. Kojiro congratulates him, for all he sounds exhausted, before teasing Kaoru about the saying for another minute and a half.

Kaoru hangs up the phone and something squeezes strangely inside of him. The moment is not an outlier.

There are days at S where Kaoru will turn to the side habitually with a comment on his tongue, something sharp and scathing and wholly theirs. He is always disappointed to find negative space. It’s one of these days at S when he turns to the crowd after winning a beef and no one comes to collect him under an arm that the illusion snaps.

It’s one of these nights at S when he turns to the crowd after winning a beef and no one comes to collect him under an arm that the illusion snaps. 

Kojiro isn’t coming back. Kaoru’s been treating it as something shorter than it actually is. There are still twenty three months before Kojiro comes home, and Kaoru has barely survived the first two.

Kaoru sits there one night in the heat of Okinawan summer with Kojiro's breathing on one end of the line and the cry of cicadas out the window. The distance, in that small, strange moment feels vast.

Kaoru has known life with Kojiro longer than he has known life without him. Without him pressed close beside him in all aspects of life, the days are too short and the nights are long and never ending. 

It’s that age old cliche. Distance makes the heart grow fonder . Or maybe its older, bitter sibling - you never know what you have until it’s gone.

—

So, here’s the thing - Kaoru’s in love with Kojiro.

Oh, it’s not all that dramatic. 

To set the scene; they’ve known each other since they were six and thrown into the same class together. Kojiro had shown Kaoru his action figure, and Kaoru had told him that the show it was from was boring, and then they had been friends. They took classes together, they started skating together, they caught twin colds the day they decided to walk home and it started raining. 

Kojiro calls Kaoru’s mother ‘auntie’. Kaoru had called Kojiro’s mother ‘Nanjo-san’ as is proper, until she had turned to him in the kitchen at breakfast one morning and told him to call her Atsuko. 

Kojiro is a living testament to Kaoru’s life, and Kaoru is the same. Kaoru knows Kojiro inside out, and for all that it is terrifying, Kojiro knows him the same way. 

Even so, loving Kojiro isn’t something he’s known forever. There’s fiction, of course, of friends who love each other from the ages of six to sixty. Who never have to wonder, because it’s been there all along. Kaoru, on the other hand, has never really gotten the idea of liking someone. Sure, he got his fair amount of confession letters in high school - he turned them down politely in middle school and junior high, and then sharply in high school, once his appearance finally matched his temperament.

Kojiro always laughed about it - “Who would like you?” he would tease at lunchtimes, tugging at the fresh piercings in Kaoru’s ear, before smoothing a thumb over the tender cartilage when Kaoru whined in pain.

“Why do they even like me,” Kaoru would snark, later. “They start tearing up when I decline. What are they expecting?”

“You’re pretty,” Kojiro said, “but man do you have a mouth on you! I don’t know what they were expecting when they confessed.”

That’s where Ainosuke had come into it, flipping some unseen switch in the back of Kaoru’s head. He had loved that broken glass mouth of Kaoru’s, had bled saccharine sweet into it. And Kaoru, all of seventeen years old and foolish, was convinced that Ainosuke was whatever god left behind when he crawled back up into the sky.

He had left, anyway. A split second of violent change, everything normal and then it wasn’t.

Kaoru wonders if that’s when he’d realised it. Halfway through their third year, with Ainosuke somewhere in the States and Kojiro there, right beside him as always.

Kaoru built his heart back up from the rubble of Ainosuke’s leaving, and in doing so found a bunker, three layers deep and unbudging. 

It wasn’t a surprise really, at that point. As he’s said - it’s not that dramatic. No change, no violent and bloody brushstrokes on his calligraphy paper at club after school. 

Kaoru never really fell in love with Kojiro, which is to say it wasn’t a fall. It wasn’t a climb, either, because that implies effort and more work than the other man is worth. 

No, Kojiro had always been a constant. It made sense, then, that loving him was one too. Something that had been born of itself, something that had grown through the cracks in the pavement for all it was concrete and the dirt from their childhood knees. 

Kaoru Sakurayashiki is not one of the girls from his high school though, and he knows how to keep an unwelcome secret. After all, Kaoru doubts Kojiro could ever love someone with a barbed wire mouth. 

So he buries that knowledge under his skin, and makes biting comments about Kojiro’s skating and his cooking, and keeps everything he knows. Kaoru has never been a fan of change. 

Kaoru dreams of it though, sometimes. Being able to call to Kojiro in the darkness of the night, to have him so close that a whisper would wake him. 

They had that, for a moment in high school. Days where one of them would stay the night, the futon on the floor abandoned and the two of them flopped on top of the one person bed, still in their uniforms. Deep into the night with the blue light of their phones playing video after video of tricks and stunts. The hollow clatter of boards through the speakers. And then the dark silence of sleep, the both of them tucked close.

Anyway. It’s not like he can have more than that. 

Kaoru knows that he and Kojiro’s relationship is one that cannot shatter. It is too deep rooted - it has its foundations in core memories and their personalities, and the backyard of Kojiro’s childhood home, his mother plunking away at the piano inside.

Instead, if this went horribly wrong, it would stagnate. Something unwanted but unable to be gotten rid of, like a sweater your grandmother made you for Christmas that you can’t get rid of because there are connections there that cannot be severed. Kojiro would still be there and yet they would never have the ease of existence they have curated over thirteen years.

Even so, Kaoru wants it so badly it pains him. A strange, searing kind of ache, nestled deep within his throat and the spaces between his ribs. He wants it back. To love Kojiro in person, and not yearn across oceans and exorbitant international calls. 

I miss the sound of your voice , he thinks hazily. I miss the sound of you. 

But Kojiro is ten thousand kilometres away and holds the sun in his hands when he goes outside. He’s everything good with the world, and everything wrong with it - he is incessant, and loud, and annoying. Kojiro gets on every single one of Kaoru’s nerves, and Kaoru endures silently. 

And yet he is the one that will sleep on Kaoru’s floor for two nights straight because Kaoru can’t sleep, even if he complains about his back. He was the one who sat in silence with Kaoru, when Ainosuke left, staring out at the ocean in the dipping sun, and his presence was all that was needed.

Kojiro has patched up Kaoru’s knees more times than he can remember. Has endured the spitfire words as he pours iodine over the shredded skin and then laid gauze over the wound. 

When Kaoru thinks about it, he feels like he’s loved Kojiro as long as he can remember. It starts and it ends and it circles all the way back around to the beginning, but it will always come back to the clumsy kindness of Kojiro’s hands. His reflex-like tenderness. 

Kaoru has never been reasonable with the things that he wants. He's never been lucky with them, either. Really it’s hopeless, love. It hasn’t learnt a thing.

—

“Do you ever miss me?”

“The silence is nice. I don’t have you barging into my room at midnight to show me a new video.”

“You used to do the exact same thing, smartass. It’s not like I ever woke you up, anyway, you damn night owl.”

“How do you know I wasn’t just staying awake because I knew you were going to show up?”

“Yea right. You haven’t changed, either. Isn’t it like two am in Okinawa? You should go to bed.”

“And let you forget how to speak Japanese? As if, I have a duty to you. Plus, I have work to do on Carla for a demonstration tomorrow.”

“That damn robot girlfriend of yours. Does she even know how to cook?” 

“She’s an AI, you dope. She doesn’t have arms.”

“That’s good. Couldn’t imagine the betrayal of coming back home to find myself replaced in the kitchen.”

“So you are coming back?”

“Of course. Can’t leave you to starve longer than I already have.”

“Kojiro?”

“Yea?”

Sometimes I do.”

“Huh?”

“Miss you. Don’t make me say it again, dunce.”

“Got it. For the record, I miss you two, foureyes. No one here can match your ability to insult me within an inch of my life.”

“I will hang up on you.”

“You’d never.”

[CALL HAS BEEN DISCONNECTED]

“What- KAORU”

—

When Kaoru was five, he misplaced his stuffed toy on the train. Someone on the train found it and the railway returned it to him but he still spent those five hours crying. He thought he would never see the little sheep again, the fear a panicked ache. 

That feeling has come back, time and time again. The week that Kojiro’s family went on vacation to visit family in Hiroshima and Kaoru thought they were leaving for good. When his aunt moved from Okinawa back to Tokyo for her job. 

The months and months after Ainosuke left, having ripped himself away from Kaoru so violently that Kaoru thinks he took part of his heart with him.

The feeling is almost the same now. For all Kaoru has grown used to it in the past months, the domestic heartache is still there. He knows the spaces that Kojiro has left behind like an open wound.

—

He writes letters, sometimes. Never in his calligraphy style though. That is something of a world removed from the two of them.

Kojiro is sent paper full of slanted scribble and lazily scrawled kanji, the blue ink of the pen running out midway through the page. Still something refined and practiced, but in a way different to the slashed ink and strokes of Kaoru’s calligraphy. This language is only for them. There is nothing to connect Sakurayashiki and Kaoru but the name; even that takes on a different form when Kojiro calls him once the letters arrive, Kaoru warm and rounded in his mouth. 

This is one of those days - Kojiro, who knows him by all his names, waving around paper with the most important one signed at the bottom. Even across the video, Kaoru can see the bags under his eyes, the exhaustion in his frame. They’re offset by his smile, the crinkled lines at the corner of his eyes, but it’s still there. 

“Anyway, the poor guy basically set fire to his whole meal,” Kojiro is saying, and Kaoru lets loose a mean little laugh, something vindictive and private. Sakurayashiki is not allowed to be anything less than the cool, polished image he gives off for work. 

Kaoru on the other hand, in the company of Kojiro, is able to laugh at the misfortune and poor luck of the guy who messed up using a flame torch in Kojiro’s culinary classes. 

“Oi, four eyes, don’t be mean; you couldn’t cook that dish if you tried,” Kojiro says, but he’s laughing even as he says it. A false outrage; they have never really known true anger in their friendship, only petty frustrations and arguments. They micro-dose, instead. Kaoru doesn’t even know if they’ve ever realised it. To eke out their rage in the small, rather than letting it build up. 

“I never asked; how did your meeting today go?” Kojiro asks, and the conversation flows as easily as it ever has between the two of them, even over Kojiro’s bad wifi. They know how to work the spaces between them, how to fill it and pull the other back close.

It’s late in Okinawa, but early evening in Rome. Kojiro has finished class for the day, and as they’re talking he’s running a brush through his hair to prepare for his shift at a restaurant in the evening. 

It’s a system they’ve set up, a constant routine. Kojiro calls Kaoru after classes, before Kaoru goes to bed. Kaoru sets his evening clock to the rhythm of Kojiro’s voice.

“Fine,” he says, fiddling with the wires of Carla, split open and laying on the pillow beside him. “He wants something big and fancy for a new office building - Carla’s not really capable of doing something that huge at the moment, so I’m going to try and update her before agreeing to the commission.”

“Wow, what a hotshot,” Kojiro says, and Kaoru clicks his tongue. Moments like this are another reminder of the physical distance between the two of them - Kojiro would nudge him as he said it, and then Kaoru would throw something at Kojiro, and they would tussle over the table for a moment before settling back. 

“What else have you been doing?” Kaoru asks, settling back under the covers where it’s warmer. Okinawan winter is balmy, but the nights catch you by surprise. Kaoru’s always run cold, too. “You said you were going to start swimming more?”

“Well, the beaches out of the city are really windy at the moment because of winter, but there’s an indoor pool somewhere in the neighbourhood that-“

He doesn’t even realise when he slips into sleep - Kojiro's voice is deep and calm on the other end, and the quiet shuffling of his footsteps is enough to delude Kaoru’s brain into believing that Kojiro is there. Close enough that he’s safe to sleep. 

Kaoru thinks he hears him say something, but he’s too far away under the veil of sleep to parse the words out.

—

In the minutes after losing his toy, his mother told him it was okay to be sad about losing it. 

“That means it’s important to you,” she had said, voice calm even over his hiccuping sobs.“You love it enough to miss it.” 

—

September marks a halfway point of some kind - Kojiro has finished his first year of classes, but his work at the commercial kitchen he works in keeps him too busy to come home. 

Kaoru, too, is busy - within the year and a half he’s been working, business has bloomed. The client who had asked for the office building entrance piece had recommended the work of Sakurayashiki to some of his clients, and now there’s a wait list for his work. 

Carla had done wonders; her purple light blinks quietly from Kaoru’s wrist, where she lives when she’s not plugged into her apparatus for calligraphy or her skateboard. 

With all of this, Kaoru’s found it enough to finally settle into the profession - gone is the quiet, unsaid fear of his unworthiness. There’s an open building space on the other side of town that he’s looking at; tucked into a residential area where it’s quiet in the daytime, and too far away from the central city for there to be any traffic. 

It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. It is unbearably lonely. 

His laptop is open to an airline's webpage when he lets himself into his apartment, the colourful gifs blinking cheerily. Kaoru sets his bag down next to it on the low lying table, and minimises the tab. 

“Carla,” he says, quietly, tiredly, “play music, please.”

There is the faint sound of a piano from the bluetooth speaker set up in the kitchen - there is the echoing sound of the music coming from his bedroom as well. It bounces off the walls in some kind of a mockery of how empty the place is, no one else there to fill the space with breathing and chatter. 

It’s six pm in Okinawa - eleven am in Rome, where Kojiro will be starting the lunch shift. Kaoru will call him later, mask his loneliness with sharp barbs at Kojiro’s hair, his idea of getting a tattoo, but for now there is work to do and dinner to be eaten. 

He settles for turning the oven grill on, settling against the bench in a rare display of sloppiness while it heats. The linoleum of the surface is soft and rubbery where it sticks to the back of his yukata, and Kaoru presses into it in an attempt to alleviate some of the aches he’s earned from kneeling at a desk all day.

Across from him, tacked to the fridge with a magnet of Santa Monica Pier, is a photo of two eight year olds standing knee-deep in the water of Shiokawa beach. 

Kaoru lets out a slow breath, before reaching out to tug the image out from under the magnet, and settles back against the bench to stare at it.

There’s others, obviously - hundreds of ones of them from the ages of six to eighteen, from graduation photos to the ones of them when they both got chickenpox and stayed at Kojiro’s house to try and pass it onto Kojiro’s younger siblings. This one has the two of them gap-toothed and grinning; well, Kojiro is grinning. Kaoru’s younger self is staring with apprehension at the pile of sand in Kojiro’s hand. 

They had been kids, small and carefree with scabbed knees and rusty skateboard trucks, before one day Kaoru had turned around to see that Kojiro had disappeared from where he trailed around behind him. Time plays its tricks.

Even so, the memories remain - clumsy hands in the darkness, the soft whisper of summer wind. The sting of a piercers needle, the cool pressure of a calloused thumb against the skin. The sound of Kojiro’s voice, calm and clear over the roaring of the wind as they would hurtle down the hill on their boards. 

There is none of that, now. Just the choked sound of Kaoru’s breath catching, and the beep from the oven grill echoing in the emptiness of the apartment.

—

Kaoru checks the scrap of paper in his hands against the apartment number in front of him, the silver of the plaque almost blinding in the sun, before he dials the number he knows by heart. A few seconds of ringing, and then the telltale click of someone picking up the phone.

“Kaoru?”

"Are you at home?" Kaoru says, the confused hum of Kojiro's voice on the other end of the line. There's no noise beyond the apartment door, until Kaoru hears slight shuffling, the sound of moving furniture. 

"Yea, why? Do you want to video call or something?"

"No, I want you to open the door, you dope. It's boiling out here."

There's a bang, from indoors, another thump, and then the door is opening to reveal a shirtless Kojiro, flushed from Roman summer and the apparent lack of aircon in Italy. He looks tired. He looks deliriously happy. Kaoru has a second to shoot him a sharp grin, before Kojiro is surging forward to pull him into his chest. 

For a second, Kaoru lets himself believe in something more than this, before Kojiro lets him go, taking a step backward. The phone is still in his hand, and Kaoru realises belatedly that they never hung up the call. In the space between them, the yellow plaster walls of the apartment building and the wooden doorframe, he raises his own phone to his ear. Still looking at Kojiro, he says into the phone, "are you going to let me in now?"

Kojiro laughs, tilts to the side so that Kaoru can drag his suitcase into the small apartment. There is the beep of the call disconnecting, and Kaoru lets his phone drop to his side. There is no tinny echo of Kojiro's voice when he says, "you're here." There is no hollow, distance noise in the background. Only the round edges of his words, half warm and half scalding at Kaoru's edges. 

"No thanks to customs," Kaoru snarks, and lets Kojiro shut the door behind the both of them. 

—

Sometime in the week that Kaoru has in Rome, Kojiro tugs him away from the tourist spots and down to the suburban areas that run along the river, nearby where he works at the restaurant.

Even as they walk in the relative peace of the riverside, the quiet bustle of the people around them, Kojiro is incessantly talkative. Points out the buildings, the people, the bits of history he learned from one of the other students at his school. Kaoru, as always, listens enough to poke holes in Kojiro’s words and tangle them enough for an argument.

“Okay, well if you know so much about it then why don’t you conduct the tour?’

Kaoru jumps away from Kojiro’s sloppy blow, and dances away from the next, spurring a race across the next bridge. Kojiro’s laughter echoes behind him, and Kaoru does not struggle when Kojiro latches onto his arm after a few more metres of chase.

Loving Kojiro, at this point, is a dull ache that never goes away. It travels slowly through bone marrow and sinews, just loud enough to be heard. Proximity does not reginite it. Fires like this one do not need tending to. 

The bridge gives way to more and more cobbled paths, the river now to their right as they wander further down the sidewalk.

Somewhere just off the riverside is a small skatepark; and when Kaoru says small, he means small. A bowl, a couple of half pipe ramps. He stops a moment, though, to stare at it - something recognisable even ten thousand kilometres from home.

S is a familiar beast; Kaoru created it with his own two hands and watched Kojiro and Ainosuke fit it together beside him. He knows every detail by heart - five wire fence, a post every few feet, staples old but tidily hammered in. 

The skate park here is rundown and open air, the bowl dug into the ground right beside where people wander the riverside. The landscaping around it is clean concrete and tall grasses in their plots, nothing like the tangled weeds and rusting metal of the mineshaft that S has made its home in. 

But there is the call and answer of screams and whoops, the grinding noise of plastic against concrete, the hollow clatter as Kaoru watches a teenage girl stumble out away from the half pipe to run after her board. From the bowl, there is the echoing laugh of a boy who calls after her in sharp syllables, the words barely distinguishable from each other. The thick graffiti. The noise.

And there is Kojiro right beside him. Maybe it isn’t so different after all. 

Kojiro throws up a hand to wave at one of the guys on the edge of the bowl, who gives a wave in return before dropping back into the bowl on a skateboard hat looks so ruined by time and skatepark that Kaoru wonders how it's holding his weight as he skates a run of the bowl and back up to the side of it.

"Someone you know?" he asks Kojiro as they turn away from the park, the cheering of the teenagers watching as one of the older guys pulls off a half decent rail grind.

"Yea," Kojiro says, tugging at Kaoru's sleeve to direct him around a corner down a small street he'd almost missed. "I met him in the first couple of weeks. He's a local - helped me hunt down the local skate store here, too." As he speaks, they walk further from the riverside into the streets. Rome is like a maze - even having been here a week, Kaoru still gets confused when he wanders down the street to the cafe on the corner, in the mornings when Kojiro is still asleep on the bed beside him.

In a one bedroom apartment that can barely fit Kojiro, there's no space for a spare mattress on the floor let alone a spare bed. But Kaoru and Kojiro have spent enough nights crammed on a single bed for this to be an issue. It's a tight squeeze, now; Kaoru is still gangly and thin, but Kojiro is wider from the gym he's been frequenting, and they're both tall.

It's summer, too. Kaoru has gotten used to waking up in the mornings dripping in sweat, the sheets kicked to the end of the bed and the two of them as far apart on the mattress as possible.

He's gotten used to actually waking up, too. Too many nights back in Okinawa has Kaoru seen the sun rise before he manages to succumb to sleep - here, with Kojiro, he's out like a light as soon as he hears the breathing of his best friend beside him. This morning, he'd woken up with Kojiro still asleep, the sun already high in the sky and his head pounding from the drinks at the bar the night before. A moment of privacy, a moment to stare.

This is how he knows devotion; listening to Kojiro sleep in the dense heat of his tiny apartment, gaze catching on where his eye lashes are soft and soot-stained against his cheekbones.

“Hey Kaoru?” Kojiro says, breaking the silence that settled between them while Kaoru was trying to reorder the jumble of words inside his skull. They were never the type of friends to coexist in silence, although Kaoru has wished they were on multiple occasions. Kojiro used to be terrifyingly loud and energetic 24/7. They are getting older now, he supposes.

"What?" Kaoru asks, nonchalant and balanced. Ahead of them, the apartment blocks rise up, spires of concrete and engraving, the architecture here a work of art.

“Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it.”

Kojiro sounds embarrassed, almost, at the admission. Kaoru's not surprised - they're rarely been ones to speak actual gratitude to each other. They reciprocate in much the way they offer help; a slap around the head, bullheaded words covering up genuine care. Spending the night on the other's floor. Rewriting the other's homework because their handwriting is too messy for the teacher to accept it.

As such, Kaoru does not know how to respond to those words. He doesn't deserve words like that. Kojiro's face is open and smiling and something else, almost too bright to look at.

Don’t conflate my selfishness for generosity, Kaoru thinks, almost angrily, staring at Kojiro across from him. This is all for me.

Kaoru does not know how to love gently. Sure, he can ascribe pretty words to the feelings, can speak about Kojiro with some form of tenderness, but the love itself is something vast and namelessly sharp. It is something unbearably selfish. Kaoru wants Kojiro all for himself. He wants to be near him forever, in whatever capacity he's allowed.

“Don’t mention it.” Kaoru says, instead, turning away for a moment under the guise of shielding his eyes from the sun. The words are weak, in contrast to what he thinks. There is no way he can give a sharp response to a statement like that. He has gotten used to sanding his words down, sometimes.

Even so, when he turns around to face Kaoru, there’s a moment of pause; Kojiro smiles at him and it’s noon around his mouth, mid-august sunshine dripping from his teeth. This much will sear itself, whether he likes it or not, upon his memory - the golden, backlit image of Kojiro in the heat of Roman summer. Kaoru swallows down the image, keeps it as vivid as he can. There is a cresting feeling of loneliness that in another week this will all end.

But for now, Kaoru pushes it away, somewhere deep in himself where they won't rise back up his throat. He has this, for now. Kojiro's grin, the way the sun glints off of that almost unreal shade of his hair. That has always been enough.

—

In the few months between Kaoru's flight touching down in Tokyo and Kojiro's return home, time seems to slow even further. It's unbearable, even with the phone calls, the letters, the dumb postcards that Kojiro took to hunting down around Rome and on his culinary school trips sometime in the sixth month of him being gone. Kaoru counts the days like someone locked in a cell, scraping tally marks into the wall with a stolen fork. These last two years have felt nothing like a life.

Kaoru thinks of it as a waiting room, and abhors the realisation that anything without Kojiro is nothing worth living through correctly.

He fills the days with anything he can find. Finishes his commissions in advance and clears out two weeks of time in which he has nothing to do. Cleans out his cupboards, the old inks and the frayed brushes he's had since high school and hasn't used since. He tries to teach himself how to cook more complex meals and burns the fish. He replies to emails in record time,

Carla's new upgrades are completed a month ahead of schedule and then she has two more on top of that; he's finally managed to code her into a program that lets him transfer her between devices without having to transfer her actual physical chip. It's not perfect yet. It's getting there, though, and Kaoru spends three days without sleep on it.

The busier he is, the less he has to think about the days counting down; the thoughts that creep in at night after Kojiro has hung up on the phone to go to work that tell Kaoru he isn't actually ever coming back. That Kojiro is going to build a life on the other side of the world and never return to Kaoru, and he will have to live off of Kojiro's phone calls until they dwindle and he never hears his voice again. So Kaoru clears out his entire fridge and resorts everything three times over until all the packages of tofu are in neat little lines.

He goes to S, too. Kaoru sheds his skin, breathes through a layer of black fabric, and tries to pretend that Cherry Blossom is someone that isn't hopelessly in love with his best friend who's thousands of miles away. Isn't someone that waits all day foolishly and stupidly for a fifteen minute phone call with patchy reception.

It fails, as expected. No matter what name or identity he takes on, Kaoru will always love Kojiro in some way.

But S is still some kind of a distraction. Kaoru lets himself tip the nose of his board over the hill and hurtles down into the darkness of the course. There are other racers, of course, but none of them compare to Ainosuke or Kojiro - Kaoru turns and grinds and shoots down the straightaways toward the finish line and finishes leagues ahead of anyone else.

Kojiro watches the races, sometimes, when he's not too tired after a shift. The recordings, at least - will send Kaoru clips of himself along with commentary. It's usually insults, a jab at the growing gaggle of teenage girls that Kaoru seems to have collected for himself at the sidelines. Sometimes it's over Carla, sometimes Kaoru's skating itself. It always comes with a congratulations.

"We'll have to race when I get back," Kojiro says over the phone one night, and the words settle something deep inside of Kaoru, a recognised fear.

"I'll thrash you," Kaoru says, and grins to himself, unseen, as Kojiro starts to argue from the other end.

Someday soon, Kojiro will come home, and the mineshaft will be dry and screaming, and when Kaoru trips Kojiro will be able to reach out and catch him.

For now, Kaoru waits, and waits, and waits.

—

On the day that Kojiro is set to arrive back to Okinawa, Kaoru is working.

Kaoru is pissed . But Kojiro tells him that he'll meet Kaoru at his studio, and that under no circumstances should he cancel the consultation, and Kaoru has never been good at saying no to Kojiro. He wishes he was, sometimes. Maybe then he wouldn't have spent the last two years listening to Kojiro's voice through a phone line.

So he lets his clients in, and offers them tea, and thinks of this as the final hurdle.

If Kaoru were a lesser person he would be vibrating out of his skin. He is not Sakurayashiki for nothing, though, and so he sits through his meeting straight backed and polite. He taps his fan on the table, instead, while the hotel owners across from him discuss the size of the commission, and tries not to stare at the clock. They drag the meeting out needlessly long, and Kaoru misses the days where he could sneer at people and they would run away from the silver studs in his face and his beat-up skateboard.

They leave, finally, and Kaoru staunchly does not look at the clock - just packs up his papers and computer, and sets them to the side. Collects up the empty teacups and pot and takes them to the back of his studio, where the sink is set up behind a paper screen.

Kojiro sends him a text, when he's near arriving - a smiley face emoji just underneath a location pin down the street from Kaoru's studio. Another line of smiley faces and a house tacked on at the end.

Kaoru absolutely does not run down the stairs.

The street the studio is built on is paved and quiet, with carefully kept bushes and swept sidewalk. Kaoru looks between the street and the lampposts rising up to meet the sun, high in the sky this time of day, and then looks to the taxi pulling up along the curb. The squeak of tires. The glint of sunlight off the front window.

And there; Kojiro, hanging out the side window like a hastily scribbled exclamation mark.

"Kaoru!" and god how he's missed hearing his name from Kojiro's mouth. Kojiro wrestles the door to the car open, throws a 'thanks!' back to the driver, and then runs to where Kaoru is standing with breath caught in his chest to collect him up in his arms.

Between the places that are hard and terrible they have always come crashing back to each other. Kaoru breathes in the incessantly strong cologne that Kojiro always wears, the smell of airplane air conditioning; focuses in on the feeling of Kojiro's arms around him, before he untangles his arms from where they're pinned to his sides by Kojiro to hug him back properly.

"Miss me?" Kojiro asks, teasing, and Kaoru could almost sob at the way his words vibrate through his chest, through Kaoru's cheekbones where they're pressed against it.

“Don’t you ever leave again,” Kaoru bites out, but the ferocity of the words is spoiled by the lump in his throat and the way he’s pressed his face into Kojiro’s shoulder.

“Why? Missed having someone cook actual meals for you?”

“No, you fucking idiot,” Kaoru says. He contemplates pulling away, but the words crawling up his throat feel too private to be let out into the open air. “I’m in love with you.”

There is a kind of embarrassment in confessing something Kaoru feels has been obvious since they were children. His confession letter, two years in the making. Maybe even more.

There's a catch in Kojiro's breath; Kaoru feels it from where he's pressed close, and then feels the exhale move his bangs when he steps back.

Kojiro looks like he's in shock, or like he's turned into one of those gargoyle's he'd sent Kaoru a postcard of, somewhere eight months into the move. He looks like he's trying to form words - a response, an apology.

Kaoru doesn't really care. He doesn't regret the words. He just needed to say them.

As long as he has Kojiro in front of him, close enough to reach out and touch, that's enough. It doesn't matter what shape their relationship is in.

"Do you mean that?" he hears, eventually, from above him. Kojiro's voice is smaller than Kaoru has ever heard it - the other man usually speaks like he's trying to make his voice fill a room without an echo. Now he sounds like he doesn't want the sounds to be heard outside of the two of them.

"You know me," Kaoru says. It's the truth. "Why would I say something I don't mean?"

Kojiro doesn't waste time with words for his answer. He's always been the person to act, between the two of them. For all Kaoru was the bolder one in high school, he was all bluster and bark. Kojiro was the one to reach out with his hands and do something about it.

Kaoru hums into the kiss when he's pulled into it, Kojiro leaning down to meet him. His lips are chapped and dry from the dry air of the plane and the airport, and his breath smells like konbini gum, but Kaoru could care less about any of that.

Kojiro’s teeth catch on the raised scar at the edge of Kaoru’s lip, souvenir of his long lost piercings. The hole is closed over but the little patch of scar tissue remains, and Kaoru hums at the feeling.

When Kojiro bites at his lip, Kaoru is acutely aware that he was there for the first piercing in his lower lobe, and the last piercing in the conch of his ear, and all the ones in between.

He was there to watch them close up, too.

Kojiro eventually pulls away for breath, and when Kaoru looks up in annoyance, his expression is almost delirious. Hair a mess from where Kaoru had mindlessly wound a hand up into it, pupils blown out and his eyes almost black from it.

“You love me” Kojiro says, that incessant smile on his face. "You really love me."

"I guess I do," Kaoru says, tries to fight his own grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. "Unfortunate."

"Don't be like that," Kojiro laughs, squeezes where his arms are wrapped around Kaoru, who lets out a humiliating squeak at the pressure.

"Fuck off brute, I'll say what I like. It's not like you're any different."

"I guess I'm not, am I? Look at us, two fools in love with each other. How tragic."

Kaoru looks away at the sudden admission, feels his cheeks go furnace-hot. There's an embarrassment in admitting this. There's an embarrassment, too, in hearing it reciprocated.

"Kaoru," Kojiro says, grinning, tipping his face back up with fingers under his chin. "Kaoru, Kaoru," over and over until it is barely a name, just a sound between the two of them.

"Kojiro," he says, and leans back in, closing the distance.