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The sun is setting when he arrives, washing everything in orange and catching alight on the line of his neck. It makes his eyes glow catlike when he twists to find something in the bag slung around his shoulders, blindly grabbing through the contents until he produces something from the clutter. His hair looks nice like this, hanging over his shoulders, down his back. Effortlessly ethereal in the way Baji Keisuke was often to be, and boyish all the same. Messy.
He's not unattractive: dark brows, heavy eyelids, a nose just barely crooked on the bridge from a break Kazutora remembers watching happen. A strong jaw, a smile that promises mischief, and— he’s been caught staring. He keeps looking anyway because he does that now, unapologetically acts, as if daring anyone to stand in his way.
And Baji would never. Baji would be standing beside him.
Kazutora likes that contrast, likes how pretty and poisonous Baji can be at once and how he never seems to realize it. Because Baji looks at all his damage and sees something worth fixing, but accepts him as broken despite it.
“I brought it,” Baji mutters, brow quirked and clutching something tightly in his left fist. Kazutora hums, and steps back from his doorway— an invitation.
They walk down the hallway in silence, sleeves touching, a familiar path in an altogether unfamiliar place. He had never thought of it as home before, and in the two years that have passed, the distance has only widened. Still, Baji interrupts the stagnancy of the atmosphere simply by existing within it, making it more tolerable than it has ever been.
Even now as they enter his room, the pull of Baji’s lips reveals a hint of fanged teeth and Kazutora feels satisfaction settle into the pit of his stomach. His room is no mere sight— loud, clashing, decked out with every imaginable color and pattern possible— anything to avoid the claustrophobia of blank walls, reminiscent of his time away. It feels reactionary, like a contradiction, and he likes that too.
“It looks like Hanma threw up in here.” Baji drawls, fingering the end of his cheetah-printed comforter. The look in his eyes says that he knows why, though.
“You don’t like it?” Kazutora grins and throws himself onto the bed. “It’s my favorite.”
That earns him a snort and an eye roll as Baji climbs onto the bed next to him, close enough that their shoulders touch and Kazutora can compare the sizes of their feet next to each other. He wants to invade his space, wants— irrationally— to crawl inside him, closer.
Instead, he stays where he is as Baji unceremoniously drops the object in his hand between them— their reason for meeting today.
The MP3 player has seen better days, the edges battered from being dropped too many times, but he knows how valuable it is to the boy next to him. He thinks of Baji staying up, pirating sound files from the internet, carefully curating mixes meant only for his own ears because they reminded him of his friends— thinks about how he only knows because some letters were more confessional than casual, consequential.
He’s never been all that considerate of boundaries and he’s selfish all the same. He wants pieces of Baji no one else will ever have. Pieces only he will be given.
A track has already loaded onto the display of the device as Baji digs through the pockets of his bag again. His embarrassment is obvious, his refusal to make eye contact even more so.
“It’s kind of stupid,” he says, yanking out a pair of headphones with a frankly unsalvageable tangle in the wires. He makes one flagging attempt to pull them apart before giving up and connecting them to the port.
“Sure it is,” Kazutora agrees, blunt because he’s fifteen and it’s the truth. “I don’t care though. You said you’d show me.”
Baji scoffs at that, but his cheeks are red as he passes one earbud to Kazutora and shifts to lean fully against him, the knotted cords not allowing any further distance. Despite himself, Kazutora can feel his own face warming too.
Having desires is one thing; physicalizing them is another entirely. The mild scent of Baji’s sweat and deodorant permeates the space and awakens something base inside of him.
“Well?” he pushes, swallowing around the feeling in his throat. “What’s so special about this one?”
It’s a question posed with the sole purpose of undercutting the tension, but the way it makes Baji straighten his shoulders makes Kazutora think that he was just waiting to be asked.
“It makes me think of everyone. All of them— us. You.” Baji pauses to steal a look at him. “It made me think of you.”
Kazutora feels faint. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Baji says, and it has a distinct weight to it. “But it’s more of a feeling.”
With that, he presses play.
The initial synthesized beats of the song reverberate through his ears and echo around his ribcage like another organ. He can see Baji watching for his reaction carefully, gaze boring into the side of his face. It is just overwhelming enough to prompt him to close his eyes.
There’s a story in these words, of reckless youth and devil-may-carelessness, something familiar and sharp and grounding all at once. He thinks of the sound of rubber squealing on the asphalt and the burnt smell of a turn taken too quickly— and it’s electric in the same way static shocks buzz between their forearms from the rub of their shirts on the comforter, much softer than the concrete jungle of their chosen stomping grounds.
It is more of a feeling— the same as when Baji had come to him that day and abandoned history for his sake, or when he had watched him beat Matsuno Chifuyu’s face to a pulp, the grimace on his lips set with determination.
The nauseating sound of a certain bike. A name. A promise to stay. Every time, every place. Baji, who always chose him, and that was more than he could say about anyone else.
Yes, a feeling.
The music is nice, but the rapid pace of his heart is far out of time with the tempo and far too loud for him to hear anything else, shallow breaths punctuating the low thrum of a guitar. He likes this song, he thinks, likes how it feels and where it’s taking him. He knows this road.
Some sentiment must show on his face because he feels the bump and brush of rough knuckles on the back of his hand, and his eyes flutter open. When warm fingers find his own and press their palms together, he doesn’t pull away. His hands are clammy, he knows— his entire body fraught with it— and he wonders if it’s puberty or something else that is responsible for the prickling under his arms and spine and everywhere else.
Already, Kazutora feels too there in his skin, hyper-aware of the proximity they share like even breathing might break whatever’s building between them.
He squeezes his hand, once, as if to confirm that Baji is there, and then does it again just because he wants to. It feels gross, objectively, and uncomfortable, in theory, and if he were to get aroused from this, he wouldn’t be able to explain it away because they’re just holding hands. They’re just holding hands and he is on fire.
He feels a little sick too, like there are bats flying against the lining of his stomach instead of those promised butterflies, and his mouth is so dry, so he runs his tongue across his lips even though it doesn’t help.
Once, twice, he catches the flicker of Baji’s lashes from the corner of his eye as he watches the motion, three times for good measure. The longest four and a half minutes of his life pass like that, and when the song ends and loops to start again, Baji lets it happen and Kazutora lets him let it happen, and so they stay.
The singer croons into the silence, twilight peeking through the blinds and darkening the room with an irreversible intimacy. And— there’s a lot that goes unspoken between them, a lot that is already understood. This is no different, a natural progression in its own right.
Something nudges against the side of his neck, Baji’s nose— the tip of it is cold, but he leans into it, tilts his head back ever so slightly to expose his throat further. His lips follow, ghosting over the skin, slightly chapped, delicate, never lingering. Goosebumps prick at the skin of his arms at odds with the heat pulsing in his veins.
Kazutora wishes for a smoke, just to have something to hide behind. He feels a few screws looser in this stability, and knows his shamelessness can’t save him now because this is too tender for someone so torn apart. Every point of contact runs a current through his bones like a live wire, and it has never been this way before but it has always been there. He’s never been alone, he realizes. Not with Baji. Not with this.
The day he got out and he had been waiting for him felt like an exhale of a breath he hadn’t known he was holding— the painful grip of his hands on his shoulders too good to be true as he was crushed against him. He knew then, probably, that he would want it forever, to be taken apart and put back together by this boy in front of him. Reduced to nothing because he was meant to be something greater in his eyes.
Oh, how he would love to only be the person Baji Keisuke thought him to be.
The bridge of the song swells and he realizes that they have been moving infinitely closer, slowly coming together like two magnetic poles bound to the laws of attraction. Bound. Maybe they are— maybe this is another force of the universe at work.
“So what do you think?” Baji asks, voice a little raw and almost desperate, and Kazutora knows it isn’t about the music anymore.
Maybe it never was.
“I like it,” he whispers. “I like it.”
When he turns, Baji’s face is already there, waiting— he’s always been waiting, hasn’t he? Kazutora can feel the exhale of his hot breath pass over his own lips and doesn’t dare speak, lets himself succumb instead to what he’s known to be inevitable all this time.
Fading out, fading in.
The song plays again.