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The stars are bright when Ainosuke first meets Tadashi, the sky clear and open and nearly cloudless. Eerie for how empty it is, uncanny for how they twinkle at the same, slow pace.
He's sleepless and fearless; instead of turning his head to his pillow and counting sheep, he slips out of his room, footsteps nearly silent in the wide, normally echoey halls.
There are bruises on his arms and an ache in his heart because he knows he’s loved. He carries both with him under the long sleeves of his sleep shirt when he pulls open one of the side doors to the garden. The hinges are oiled and silent like a still pond, a testament to the dedication and service of their staff.
This isn't his first time sneaking out. He's done it before, because something about the hazy scent of the gardens - the riotous symphony of fresh cut grass and roses, the heady sage and the cut of mint - can soothe him more than lullabies. His day is full of lessons but at night his mind still races, stressed from what he's learned but there’s enough space for thoughts to run rampant.
Strange thoughts; tumultuous ones. Things his aunts or his father don't want to hear about. Like how sometimes he looks at his classmates, the way they’re partnered and trio’d at playtime, and feels something roil within him, burning. It makes him feel like a volcano - they just learned about them - always hot inside, magma churning, gasses thickening until the whole top blows off a mountainside.
Their teacher showed them a picture of a volcano - somewhere in America, just an ocean away but not close enough to touch - where the crater cuts into the perfect shape of it. You can tell, from its absence, what used to be there. When he lets his mind race at night, he feels like the missing piece, the remnants scattered across the Cascades, the perfect symmetry of it destroyed. The debris ruinous.
When the heat inside makes him feel like he’s about to explode, he comes to the garden. Normally it sucks the stress, the pain, the unspoken feeling like loneliness from him. Out here, he can pretend he’s a witch and the plants are components for a spell that will heal him and fill in the missing piece. A rose petal, a mint leaf, the sharp stem of an unknown flower. A waking dream of another life.
But tonight is different. Tonight the few clouds in the air hang perfectly still, the stars seem caught and frozen in their celestial orbits, and there’s the luminous shape of a boy standing by Ainosuke’s favorite bench.
He stops in his tracks. He’s never seen him before.
The stranger must be older than him, just a grade or two, and his hair is as dark as the shadows between them. His skin is pale and his clothes are funny looking and old like he’s seen in pictures, faded embroidery of leaves and berries flashing green and red and moonlit silver, a frayed sash tying his jacket shut. There’s a single mole on his face. It’s an impossibly penetrating black, smoky like ash.
From his frozen distance, the stranger raises his hand and waves at him. Ainosuke, unfailingly polite, crushingly lonely in a house full of people, waves back.
Emboldened, he walks towards Ainosuke, who finds himself mirroring the movements; they meet in the middle, just under the banyan tree, and the boy reaches his hands to Ainosuke. They’re colder than he thought they might be for how warm the night is. There’s sweat on his own collar already, whether from nerves or from the heat he can’t tell, but inside him he can feel the swirl of toxic fumes start to settle a little, this silent stranger a siphon for the storm.
The night is so still - Ainosuke barely breathes, and he can’t see the rise and fall of the boy’s chest. But between one pulse of starlight and the next, the boy breaks it so softly that Ainosuke can hardly believe he’s spoken.
“Do you want to be my friend?” he asks. Ainosuke’s never had another kid clasp his hands like this, look down at him with wide, green eyes and ask so bold a question. “I’m lonely tonight, and would like your company.”
He’s so polite that it shocks Ainosuke into nodding; kids don’t request favors from him like this, ask him for his time and only want his presence. When they talk to him, they want his answers to math questions, a copy of the notes he took in history, a picture of his careful science diagrams. He’s a diligent student, and his father has been teaching him how to get on people’s good sides so they can help him later, so he gives them what they want.
His aunts say they’re raising a charmer; a boy so full of love he can send it back out into the world, but cautious about that sharp double edge. “Don’t get too caught up in what they say to you,” they warn. “Only worry about what they can give you in return.”
Well, this boy can give him friendship and rest his mind, and he didn’t even need words to do it. There’s no trap here, only the hidden dangers of an impossible night. “Come on,” Ainosuke says, wrapping his hands tightly around the boy’s. “Let me show you my favorite places.”
If Ainosuke doesn’t question the strangeness of it all - a night so quiet he can’t even hear the crickets, a night so still there’s nary a wind to cool his neck - it’s because everything feels so right. He needed a friend to fill the gap of loneliness in his heart so he got one. He wanted and the world gifted; he is loved by the universe and spirits alike.
They play until morning.
Lying in the basin of the empty pool, Ainosuke points at the stars and tells him his favorites, making up stories to go along with the shapes they paint in the sky. As his friend drags his fingers in wonder along the masonry of the garden wall, Ainosuke eagerly tells him about his favorite horse, the one who eats carrots and apples from his hand and lets him brush out her hair as long as he’s soft and careful with her.
In turn, his friend walks him through the garden and makes it more familiar, more known to him. “Crush the mint leaf between your fingers, just like this,” he says, rolling Ainosuke’s hands between his. “Then cup your hands to your mouth and breathe in.” When he does, he can feel more stress - more of those fumes - escape from his body; his shoulders relax, his muscles soften. He opens his eyes, though he hadn’t realized he’d closed them, to the boy’s knowing gaze, something a little too old for how young he is, and the soft hint of a smile. He shares more secrets - rose hips for tea, sage for burning, valerian for sleep, and how to slice open aloe to soothe wounds - and Ainosuke’s world widens.
It’s when Ainosuke’s explaining to him how volcanoes work - about the difference between magma and lava, because he wants to talk about the American crater - that his friend’s eyes go wide again, but with something unfamiliar. Not the kind and friendly gaze of earlier, but with something more biting - like fear. It’s like he’s a spooked deer, caught in headlights.
“I’m sorry, Ainosuke-sama,” he says, rising off the bench, making him go cold where their knees were touching. “I need to go now.” As he starts to walk away, headed towards the rose bushes in a back corner, Ainosuke gathers his wits despite how sleepy he is and grabs at his friends wrists.
“Will I see you again?” he asks, desperately, and he can feel all the fumes rise in him again. That tension, hyper-warm.
To his credit, the boy looks sorrowful, apologetic. “I don’t think so,” he says. “There’s no telling when I’ll be back.”
There’s a million and one things Ainosuke wants to say, but he can’t pick one to start with; in his silence, the boy slithers like a snake out of his grip like it’s nothing, like he’s nothing, like they spent a meaningless, empty night together when he knows this means everything. A taste of real friendship, the give and take, a medicine for which the aftertaste will linger on his tongue forever.
He turns a corner and disappears. Ainosuke chases after him, but when he reaches that corner there’s nothing and no one - just a dead end. A wall. An empty space where someone could have been. He stands there for a long moment, staring, before he starts clawing frantically at the dirt, the bricks, staining his pants and sleeves.
“I hate you,” he says, tears welling in his eyes, dripping down his cheeks. “I’ll never forgive you,” he promises to the silent sky, the empty air. “Don’t come back!” he yells, and the sky cracks open. Sunlight bursts through.
The sunlight of high noon - the kind where almost no shadows are cast, where everything loses structure - blinds him, so suddenly it comes. He hears his aunts yelling for him, some staff too, because he must have missed class, must have woken up missing.
When he inhales, all he smells is mint, burning in the cruel, cruel sun.
---
Years later, he’s almost written it off as a dream - the fanciful imaginings of a lonely child who grew into a lonelier adult.
He’s back at the estate for his father’s funeral. Something about Okinawa makes him restless, and again he finds himself crawling out of bed in the dead of night, slipping softly down the echoing halls, and out into the humid morass of a suspiciously still night. It feels crushingly familiar, like that dream he once had, like that friend who once broke his heart.
In the back of his throat he tastes that burning mint; how it cools and warms in equal measure.
There’s a luminous boy at his favorite bench.
“You,” he breathes out, breaking the stillness of the night, and the boy turns. “I told you never to come back.”
He’s wearing those same clothes - the leaves on his jacket crawling up his arms, the color a faded shade of his eyes. His mouth opens, like he wants to say something; his hand held out, like he wants to reach for someone.
Ainosuke steps forward, and forward, and like a puppet the boy walks forward too. They meet again under the banyan tree, and Ainosuke sinks to his knees in the rocks and dirt. “I told you I hated you,” he says, and takes the boy into his arms.
He can feel the small shape of him - impossibly tiny, and Ainosuke still can’t believe he was ever that young once - the hands clutching his pajamas. His eyes slowly blink where his head is pressed into his shoulder.
“You were telling me about volcanoes,” the boy says, words muffled. “About how impossibly hot they must be to make rocks melt. Can you tell me more?”
As Ainosuke tells him about volcanoes - about the missing piece of the one in America he can never find, about the Icelandic one that choked half the Earth for days - he can feel the boy in his arms rumble and grow, and grow, and grow. The embroidery bursts from leaves to the full tree, like the banyan they’re under. He can only just wrap his arms around his shoulders now.
When he finishes, he pulls back. His hands rest on the shoulders of a man with the same green eyes, the same luminous skin.
“Hello Ainosuke,” he says, and runs his hand along the side of Ainosuke’s face, pins some of his loose hair behind his ear, a touch that feels like fire rain. “I need a friend again.”
Elsewhere the sun bakes the earth; here, the night is frozen forever.