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Yuuji always spends weekends with his other dad. Nanami knows this.
That was the first thing they established in the divorce. Not the house, not the car; no, it was always going to be Yuuji above anything else.
Nanami knows this, but he can’t help the ugly feeling festering inside of him when he opens the front door at 7pm sharp and Higuruma is standing there in his rumpled suit, absently examining his fingernails.
“You’re on time, for once,” Nanami says, just to hide the open wound under the surface.
“The law decided to take a break today.” Higuruma’s as wry as ever, his usual irony bleeding into his words, giving him a stand-offish air even when there is nothing to be distant about.
Nanami wants to laugh. God, does he. Higuruma’s always been funny, in a subtle way that goes above a lot of people’s heads, but never Nanami’s. He doesn’t think he’s allowed to laugh at Higuruma’s jokes anymore, though. That was another thing lost in the divorce; Nanami’s ability to laugh with Higuruma without feeling like his world is uprooting itself.
“Ah, well I must thank the law for giving me a whole evening to myself,” Nanami says. “Yuuji’s just getting his things together.”
Higuruma nods. He puts his hands in his pockets like he’s an aloof teenager and not a thirty-six year old man.
“You look good, Kento,” he rumbles.
Nanami scrubs a hand down his face, fights the tightness in his chest. “Don’t do this today. I’m not in the mood.”
He’s had a long week. It’s a small blessing that it’s Friday, two whole days without work stretching ahead of him, but as worked to the bone as he is, the respite doesn’t feel as relaxing as he needs it to be. He can’t entertain the borderline flirtation, the what if’s and the just this once’s. Higuruma is too good at this, knows him too well, and Nanami’s resolve is already flimsy at best. He doesn’t deserve it.
Higuruma’s mouth twists, a little sardonic, a little sad. He also looks tired, eyelids drooping just so until he’s looking at Nanami through his eyelashes. “Are you ever?”
Before Nanami can respond, probably with something weak and faltering that shows just how undone he is at the moment, Yuuji pops up behind him, hefting a backpack over his shoulder.
“Hi!” he says, smiling that wide, sunny grin of his. Nanami has no idea where he gets it from; neither he nor Higuruma are the most active smilers, and the past year has been a particularly rough one for all of them after he and Higuruma called it quits. Even though Yuuji tries to outshine the gloom around them, Nanami knows it drags at him sometimes, living in the mourning period of the only solid family he’s known.
It’s not like Nanami can blame him. He and Higuruma had been together for three years and married for one before Yuuji came into the picture. It was a fantastic three years, between Nanami’s dry humour and immutable fallacies and Higuruma’s lovely, solid hands and oceanic nonchalance. They were both driven and persistent and didn't do love in halves. Marriage suited them - at least it did, for a while. Almost a decade isn’t a bad run.
Yuuji was an accident, in the way a formal adoption can be an accident, a mere slip of the hand signing five or ten or twenty papers.
It was Higuruma, actually, who came home from work one day talking about the child neglect case he was covering, a ten year old boy suffering at the hands of a manipulative mother, and Nanami had latched on like it was blood in the water and he was a particularly starving shark.
Nanami had given into his own whims, just that once, had let himself imagine and hope and long for something outside of a soul-crushing salaryman 9 to 5 and evenings waiting for his husband to come home, something to cultivate and dedicate himself to.
Five years have passed since they adopted him, once a shy child with a bone to pick, suffering from volatile mood swings that would have him smashing plates one second and sobbing on the floor the next. Nanami, perhaps despite his better judgement, knew that he had to protect this little boy, see him through to the other side. With how Yuuji has turned out, cheery and curious despite the weight of his past, Nanami hopes that their efforts were enough.
Above all, he wants Yuuji to know that the world is still good and kind people are not in short supply, despite the fracture between his parents.
“Your father was surprised at my punctuality,” Higuruma tells Yuuji. Snitches, really. He wilfully ignores the glare Nanami gives him.
“You can be pretty late sometimes,” Yuuji agrees, but it’s said affably enough that it doesn’t feel like an attack, unlike Nanami’s pointed comment. Not that Nanami meant to attack, but he’s a little frayed at the moment and he doesn’t want to spend too much time dealing with his ex-husband. Higuruma looks as good as ever in his suit, despite how ill-fitting it is.
Nanami grips the doorframe and tries to contain himself, takes slow, measured breaths around the simmer beneath his skin. He’s been getting tangled up in the past more than usual this week, lost in the murky memories of when it all fell apart.
They’re both driven, but that makes them both ruthless. They’re both the damage. There has to be someone who takes the lead in fixing things up and neither of them were prepared to do it.
Because Higuruma broke down under the weight of the injustice in the world, and Nanami, instead of being his crutch, stayed longer at work each night to avoid having to look at him, to avoid having to confront the fact that he was right on the precipice, too.
Higuruma broke down and Nanami couldn’t bear to fix him, and thus lay the rocky road to a separation that was, in the end, tired but amiable, no fight left after a period of sleeping in bathtubs and pointed criticisms. And the silence, and the silence, and the silence.
Higuruma is too good at playing the devil's advocate, too level-headed from a lifetime of life-or-death professional arguments, that Nanami could never bring himself to shout. That was a small blessing, at least; no screaming or crying, just long-winded, excruciatingly mature conversations about how this wasn’t working.
“If our positions were reversed,” Higuruma told him, on the day they signed the last of the divorce papers, after he picked himself back up and moved out, “I would have tried to help you. I would have fixed this.”
That's what haunts Nanami the most; that the balance was so skewed, even after all this time, even after they’d been beaten down and spat back out by the world. If Nanami lost himself then Higuruma would have walked through hell just to guide him home, and Nanami couldn’t do the same in return, because he’s burned down to the wick and there’s nothing left for him to give except to Yuuji, except to a boy who needs some stability.
Nanami has been seeing a therapist. He'd never reach this conclusion on his own, squandered in the safe bubble of his everyday routine that doesn’t force him to question anything, doesn’t force him to put his heart out on the line.
He’s unsure if the counselling is doing him good, or rather just forcing him to confront every single excruciating way he’s fucked up. There’s a lot to unpack.
Higuruma pulls the car keys out of his pocket, jingling them in his broad palm. Nanami knows his hands will be warm, if he reaches out and grasps them, because Higuruma runs hot, always has, but instead Nanami stands there and watches Yuuji follow Higuruma to his car, parked up the street. The flash of the headlights when it unlocks illuminates the two of them, side by side, for the briefest of moments. Father and son.
Nanami hovers in the doorway until they’ve driven off, and only then does he allow himself to relax, shoulders slumping.
He loosens his tie, still done up after getting off work. It doesn’t get easier, somehow. He still knows the shape of Higuruma off by heart, still longs for it, even after viciously stamping out the last of the embers of their marriage.
Nanami sighs. He needs to take off his tie and collapse onto the sofa and put on a podcast. He needs to quell the persistent loneliness, needs to fight the longing that rears its ugly head. He needs a drink.
Higuruma got the car, because Nanami commutes to work on the metro each day. Nanami kept the apartment, because he was the primary tenant before Higuruma moved in for good. Nanami gets Yuuji during the week, because he’ll be damned if he stays at work late and he’s guaranteed to always be home in time for dinner. Higuruma gets Yuuji on the weekends, because the law is fickle and relentless, and he will more often than not get swept into a case without realising that midnight has come and gone. The weekends force him out of it, make him look up and see the sun and help Yuuji with his literature homework.
“How are your friends?” Higuruma asks Yuuji as they embark on the fifteen minute drive into the suburbs. “You know you can have them come over any time. How is Kugisaki?”
Yuuji gives him a look across the centre console. “You just like Kugisaki because she’s good at hammer throwing.”
“It was a very enlightening arcade visit,” Higuruma says diplomatically. “That girl’s got passion.”
“I’ll tell her you asked about her.” Yuuji laughs. “She’ll be stoked. She thinks you’re soooo cool .”
Even though Yuuji is talking and smiling like usual, there’s something a little heavy hanging around him. Higuruma wants to shake it out of him, put him under interrogation until he can figure out exactly what to do to help, but instead he just drives, the news channel crackling quietly in the space between them.
“Dad’s been pretty low,'' Yuuji says, leaning against the passenger window as the buildings begin to space out, concrete giving way to scraggly bushes and low houses. “I think he’s bummed out by work. They keep giving him more stuff to do and he doesn’t have time to do it all.”
Higuruma hums. Now that Yuuji’s mentioned it, he could see it in the way Nanami held himself earlier, like he was one step away from snapping. Despite the fact that it’s not really Higuruma’s business anymore, he can’t just let these things go when they come to his attention.
Maybe that's why it’s been so hard to let the memories of their marriage go, even though Nanami doesn’t want him anymore. Higuruma wants him still, wants him more than anything, but he understands that a relationship can’t be built from one side. It’s just like the law, he thinks; it’s multi-faceted. You can’t have one side without the other, can’t continue to judgement when the other side is willing to parley.
“That sounds tough. Life’s tough. Maybe we’ll move to the mountains, get away from it all,” he offers. “The law is also shit, Yuuji. Don’t go into it. Be a cog in the machine like your dad.”
“It's cool. I want to be an athlete anyway.”
The corner of Higuruma’s mouth twitches up. Yuuji has never been worried about going with the grain. Isn’t that what parenthood’s about, after all? To slave away so that your children can be whatever they want?
Yuuji changes his mind on what he wants to strive towards every day, and Higuruma and Nanami can only encourage him with barely concealed fondness. If anything positive comes from their broken marriage, it’s going to be Yuuji, shining and successful.
The wheel slides under Higuruma's hands as he takes a sharp turn and pulls into the driveway.
“And what sport will you be competing in for the next Olympics?” he asks as he puts the gearstick in park and they step out of the car.
Yuuji hums, following Higuruma up the stony path to the front door. He kicks a stray pebble and the skittering sound echoes; it’s always so quiet around here. “Fushiguro, Kugisaki, and I recently joined the jujutsu club. That's pretty fun; our senpai are really cool too! I could do track as well, but the coach is kinda mean. At least Gojo-sensei’s funny.”
Higuruma unlocks the front door, ushering Yuuji into his very sparse home. He doesn’t have much time for decorating, and it’s not like he has an artistic eye anyway. It’s all bare walls, empty pockets of space, harsh lights, but it’s a place to sleep and store all of his things at least.
Not that Yuuji seems to mind. He's always trying to find the bright side, putting up posters on the walls and hanging strings of light in his bedroom to warm up the place. Higuruma doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he isn’t interested in looking at Yuuji’s pictures of the half-naked actresses he likes, but he leaves them as is because they remind him of his son when he isn’t there.
“Takeaway?” Higuruma asks, pulling out a stack of leaflets from a drawer in the kitchen. “I can't be bothered to cook.”
“Sure,” Yuuji says, always agreeable. Higuruma fans out the cuisine options in front of him like a magician with a deck of cards.
“Pick a restaurant, any restaurant.”
Yuuji grins. “I'll pick the food if you can find a movie to watch.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” Higuruma says, faking contemplation. ”I’ll accept.”
If he has nothing, if he’s single and over-worked and fed up with everything he’s been handed, at least he has Yuuji. Nanami lingers around him like a ghost, but surely it’s nothing a bawdy comedy can’t fix, Yuuji’s peals of laughter filling a house that otherwise feels so very cold and empty.
On Sunday evening Higuruma drops Yuuji back off at Nanami’s place, just like every Sunday evening before that and likely every Sunday evening after.
However, today Nanami is the one to break their drop-and-go Sunday routine. Once Yuuji has bounded inside, calling over his shoulder that he’s going to catch up on an episode of his favourite reality show and not to disturb him (they exchange a glance at that - they’d both been fifteen once), Nanami poses an abnormal question.
“Would you like a drink?” he asks, clutching the doorframe, chin ducked like he’s almost shy, but Higuruma knows him, knows that Nanami is not prone to shyness. He agrees, as long as Nanami can promise to be quick.
Nanami breaks out the nice bourbon, a crystalline bottle older than their relationship. He pours it out in silence, sliding one glass across the sandalwood IKEA table he and Higuruma had put together in the first six months they’d been dating.
“How are you?” Nanami asks, settling into the chair opposite Higuruma.
Higuruma raises his eyebrows. “Fine. You?”
“Yes,” Nanami says, which doesn’t really answer the question. He amends himself. “I’m fine.”
“I was telling Yuuji that we should move to the mountains,” he says, because Nanami is currently too stiff and unyielding, and Higuruma needs him to relax, take a breath, clear his mind of whatever is troubling him tonight.
“That’s stupid.” Nanami's response is immediate and scathing.
“My dear Kento,'' Higuruma sighs. “How I’ve missed your brutal honesty.”
Nanami kicks him under the table, a light thing that doesn’t hurt because he’s only wearing socks. When Higuruma attempts to nudge him back, Nanami rests his heel down on the top of Higuruma’s borrowed house slippers, a silent warning.
He’s more playful than anyone would realise from his blunt demeanour, sneaky in his intimacies. When they still lived together, he would leave notes everywhere for Higuruma to find, neat handwriting spelling out requests to buy milk or inside jokes or the occasional coy innuendo that would lead to a romp in the bedroom or occasionally the sofa, if Yuuji wasn’t home.
Despite the hurt, he’d give anything to go back again. One little note. That’s all he wants.
“We can’t move to the mountains,” Nanami follows up.
“Why not?”
“How would we afford it? Would we have access to food, internet? How would Yuuji finish school?” Nanami frowns down at his drink, swirling the golden liquid inside until a small whirlpool forms in the centre. He's tackling this with the same intelligent determination he tackles anything. That's what Higuruma likes about him; he doesn’t half-ass the minutia.
“Ah, so it’s the logistics,” Higuruma says, the rim of his glass pressed to his bottom lip, looking at Nanami over it. “Not the fact that it’s with me?”
Nanami falls quiet.
“No,” he finally says, soft. “I wouldn't mind if it’s with you.”
“What are you saying?” Higuruma asks.
“Nothing,” Nanami sighs. He hasn’t taken a sip yet, the amber liquid in his glass catching the overhead light, reflecting thin ribbons of gold over the table. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I’ve made my choice.” He says it determinedly, like he might be trying to convince himself.
“And it’s making you miserable,” Higuruma replies, eyeing him across the table.
“Misery loves company,” Nanami says, mockingly raising his glass. Higuruma watches the fluid bob of his throat as he swallows too long and too deep.
There’s nothing to be said, not really. Nothing to be said that hasn't already been said a hundred times over. They just share the silence, share a drink much too expensive for a Sunday night in domestic fracture.
Higuruma sticks to the one drink, because he has to drive home, but even without the slow burn of alcohol he feels calmer, more put together when he does get up to leave. They used to be able to spend hours together, just basking in each other’s company. Now even silence is a luxury they can’t have, existing on borrowed time alone.
Nanami trails behind him to the door.
“I won’t get lost,” Higuruma tosses over his shoulder. “I used to live here, too.”
Is Nanami haunted by the emptiness? By the space where Higuruma’s coats used to hang, by the lack of books on the shelf, by the half-empty closet?
At least Higuruma was able to start afresh, do up a house that was just a skeleton until it had a body that belonged to him and occasionally Yuuji. Nanami has only visited once, and that was just to drop off the last of Higuruma’s things; he didn’t come inside.
By the look in Nanami’s eyes, the joke doesn’t quite land. Higuruma pauses before he reaches the front door, turns around just to observe him.
His cheeks are hallowed, the lines around his mouth taut. Despite the neat parting in his hair, combed even though he hasn’t been to work, he looks like he’s barely holding himself together.
When Higuruma reaches out a palm and places it upon Nanami’s cheek, Nanami doesn’t stop him. If anything, he leans into it, eyelids fluttering just so until he regains his composure and looks at Higuruma the way Higuruma assumes he is looking at Nanami: with a frightened sort of vulnerability.
When Higuruma tugs Nanami into an embrace, Nanami goes easily.
“I'm tired,” Nanami admits after a moment, barely a quiver, more honest in Higuruma’s hold.
Higuruma breathes in deep, the smell of Nanami’s cologne familiar and comforting.
“Me too,” he replies, quiet. He presses a palm between Nanami’s shoulder blades, feeling the way he folds into him.
They stand together, soaking in each other’s warmth, for a stretch of time that feels like a golden, gorgeous eternity but likely lasts for less than a minute.
Nanami steps away and heaves a sigh.
“I’m here, my darling,” Higuruma says, also stepping back until he’s nearly pressed to the front door. The distance will do him good, right now. His hands itch to reach out again. “If you need me, I’m here.”
Nanami scrubs both hands down his face, scraping against pale, indiscernible stubble. He huffs out a laugh, even though it isn’t funny, not at all.
“I need you,” he admits.
Higuruma just looks at him, feels a spark of something fluttering and helpless roil inside of him.
“Good,” he says. “Need me. I need you, too.”
“You should get back,” Nanami says.
“I will,” Higuruma replies. He curls a hand around the door handle. He debates what to say next, unsure whether or not to present all of his evidence, all of his facts, all at once. A lawyer should always have a trick up their sleeve, one last measure to turn things around when backed into a corner.
Nanami’s no lawyer, though. He's unaware of the courtroom he sits inside in Higuruma’s head, unaware that he’s the judge and the defendant and the prosecution all rolled into one, an indiscriminate force.
This isn’t a mock-up of the system. This is real life, and if Higuruma’s on the road to recovery, building himself back up from his hollowness, he can at least be honest.
“I love you,” he says.
Nanami sucks in a breath, so subtle that Higuruma would miss it if he didn’t know every single one of Nanami’s tells.
“Good night, Hiromi,” Nanami says, which is what Higuruma expected. He does, however, squeeze Higuruma’s shoulder before he leaves.
That one small action, that one small kindness, is enough for now. It’s not final. There’s promise to it, tremulous and diffident.