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New York is beautiful in the spring.
It’s nothing like Moscow, where frost would cling stubbornly to the grass outside the practice studio that Lev’s been playing at since he was ten. He eyes the group of kids chasing each other around the green, and suddenly he’s hit by a wave of homesickness that passes as fast as it had come.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing, halfway across the world, dropping in in the middle of the term to start school in Juilliard, of all places, but he’s here now, going to college at Juilliard, brushing shoulders with some of the best musical talents of his generation, and he’s not going to be homesick little Lyovochka any more, hiding behind Alisa and her brightly-coloured cello case.
He forces himself to look around the campus, focuses on the neatly trimmed rows of hedges, the sidewalks dotted with trees, and Lev feels a little guilty for not paying as much attention as he should’ve to his student guide, who’s been rambling on about studio rules for a while now: don’t smoke in them, especially not weed, don’t put your drinks on the pianos, don’t let Kageyama Tobio enter them—
“Wait,” Lev stops in his tracks. “Is that, like, an actual rule?”
And then his student guide’s looking at him, like Lev is stupid, or something, which Lev finds quite a bit insulting, because, sure, people think he’s weird for saying that Tchaikovsky is stupidly flashy on, like, Russian national televesion when he was seven, but he’s not stupid, is what it is. Anyway.
“No,” says Sourface Guide, who probably plays tuba, now that Lev thinks about it. (Alisa always says that the bigger the brass, the more of a bastard they are. Lev is beginning to see it now.)
“Suga said so,” he adds, as if that would explain everything.
It does not, although Lev catches on to the name, wracks his brain for a Suga before—
“The Sugawara Koushi?” Lev is maybe shrieking.
Sourface Maybe Tuba Player Guide gives him a look, as if to say, keep up.
` ` `
Lev meets the actual Sugawara Koushi three days later, on complete accident, bumping into a silver violin case as he searches for a table in the tiny coffee shop off campus.
He catches sight of the BAM label as it starts to slip off the chair, and he maybe panics a little, because his sister is a cellist , for God’s sake, and BAM is literally the brand as far as string instrument cases go, and the instruments they house have even larger price tags on them, and he does not look forward to breaking someone else’s instrument on his third day in New York, because then he’s going to really be the second coming of Rachmaninoff, the way people have taken to calling him— in that he’s going to go into crippling debt, and then he’s going to have to sell his liver or something. He’s considering black market options when a hand reaches out, snags the straps of the case an inch before it hits the floor, and Lev lets loose the breath he’s been holding.
He turns to thank his (the violin’s?) savior, and promptly feels like dying, like, on the spot, because Sugawara Koushi, as in, two-time Menuhin winner Sugawara Koushi, is looking at him all amused, fingers idly tapping on the case of what is most probably his five hundred and fifty thousand dollar Amati.
And Lev has a lot of things to say, ranging from my sister and I grew up idolising you how are you even real, to I’m really sorry I nearly wrecked your very historic and very expensive violin please don’t kill me, but the first words out of his mouth end up being, “did you really ban Kageyama Tobio from the practice studios?”
Sugawara Koushi blinks, and God, he’s even prettier up close, in real life, Lev is not straight enough for this.
Sugawara Koushi huffs out a laugh.
“Kageyama likes to overwork himself, and then he’s going to pull a muscle one day, and then I’ll have to bash him on the head with my violin to keep him on bed-rest,” Sugawara Koushi says, looking positively cherubic, which is a little disconcerting, to say the least, for someone threatening what Lev thinks would constitute as pre-medidated murder.
` ` `
Anyway, the point is: don’t let Kageyama Tobio into a practice studio.
Except it’s barely Friday, and Kageyama Tobio is in the doorway of the practice studio Lev is in, and his face is all scrunched up in a way that says, I’m very obviously judging you and I don’t really care if you know that I’m judging you. (It’s a little intimidating, to say the least.)
“What the fuck,” says Kageyama Tobio, literal piano prodigy, youngest classical musician to win an Emmy, ever, and one Lev Haiba's incredibly awkward bisexual awakening at age thirteen— “are you playing a fucking Bösendorfer?”
Okay, so maybe Lev’s a little miffed, because there's nothing wrong with Bösendorfers, Kageyama Tobio is a well-known Steinway supremacist, this is exactly why that godawful crush killed itself in its nascency. God, Lev is so sick of classical pianists and their weird obsession with Steinways.)
But then Kageyama looks as if he was about to enter the studio, and Lev may have been told that he’s socially inept, and really bad at reading between the lines, but he’s been at Juilliard for five days, and he decidedly does not want to invoke the ire of generationally talented violinists who look like they could get away with vehicular manslaughter.
So he does what he does best, and starts running his mouth.
“Okay,” Lev feels like he’s about to start rambling, and he tries to keep it to a short please get out of the studio, but it ends up coming out as something like: “I know that you’re, like, literally the best pianist of our generation, and I would take a bullet for you, and also I had like a super awkward crush on you when I was thirteen but one, I’ve outgrown that phase, two, I don’t want to be murdered by a two-time Menuhin winner today so can you maybe take two steps backwards and out of the studio?”
So maybe Lev’s rambling a little.
“What the fuck,” says Kageyama Tobio, who is, apparently, not very eloquent— which explains a lot, actually.
And Lev starts, but Kageyama Tobio is, apparently, not quite yet finished.
“I’m going to murder Suga,” he says, and Lev thinks, maybe this is what the best musicians of their age do, threaten first-degree murder on a regular basis; maybe this is the secret to musical genius and he should be taking notes, and he thinks he should probably be concerned, but Kageyama Tobio looks awfully close to pouting, and Lev has never been a strong man.
“If you, y’know, really want, you could use the studio?” Lev offers, tentatively, before remembering that Kageyama Tobio is probably one of those people who’d never touch anything that was not a Steinway without a ten-foot pole, and he can’t help but roll his eyes, “but it's a Bösendorfer, so.”
And, maybe he sounds a little mocking, and Kageyama Tobio's face does a complicated thing, and Lev thinks, yeah, he’s totally screwed up whatever chances he had of making friends with the person who’s literally been his idol since he was four and barely able to reach the pedals on a piano— but then Kageyama’s laughing, snorty guffaws that sound nothing like the stilted laugh he uses with reporters at the competitions they compete in.
“I probably shouldn’t,” he tells Lev, after a while, “Suga's an ass—” (which, says literally no one in musical circles, ever, and not for the first time that day, Lev wonders if Kageyama Tobio is, perhaps, short of a marble or two) “—but he’s right.”
“Usually is,” he adds sullenly.
There’s a beat of awkward silence, then:
“Oh wait,” Kageyama says, and looks at him like he’s seeing Lev for the first time. “You’re that Russian with the crazy reach.”
And before Lev can process the fact that the literal Kageyama Tobio knows who he is, he’s steamrolling on ahead, asking, “can you show me your Rachmaninoff techniques?”
` ` `
So, it becomes a thing.
Suga lifts the apparently campus-wide ban on Kageyama and practice rooms, and they hang out maybe once or twice in the studios, comparing techniques and debating muscial movements, and then Kageyama drags him to a “nicer studio”, which is just a studio with some windows and a Steinway instead, and Lev socks him in the arm, lightly, because fuck Steinway elitism, what the fuck, this is why people think musicians are snobs.
(Kageyama rolls his eyes at that. He tends to do that a lot, actually. “Yeah, because we actually are better than everyone else.”
“People like you,” Lev tells him, very solemnly, “are the reason why we have revolutions back in Russia. I think.”)
And then Kageyama's sitting next to him in their shared history slot, being all judgmental when Lev starts doodling in the margins of his handouts, and, in one particular instance, turning a rather worrying shade of puce when Lev had drawn a particularly awful moustache on a black and white render of Tchaikovsky.
They're not quite friends, Lev thinks, because Kageyama still mostly keeps to himself. (And Suga, maybe. They are, by far the oddest pair of friends on campus, and Kageyama Tobio is like Sugawara Koushi's angry little baby duckling, but they're both so insanely talented that no one really dares to bat an eye at the weird dynamic they’ve got going.)
Except Lev finds himself lying face down on the floor of his dorm one day, while Kageyama sits on his comforter eating the weird vegan chips that he'd stolen from his roommate (which had been totally justifiable, Kageyama had said, because Semi is, apparently, an asshole who likes playing Bon Jovi way too much, I can’t fucking write an essay on the evolution of opera with Livin’ On a Prayer blasting so loudly my ears are bleeding, open the door, Haiba, this is a study party now).
And Lev pauses, mid-rant, about the cute barista at the nearby Starbucks who snaps at him, like, all the time, and asks, “wait— are we friends?”
Kageyama throws a vegan chip at him.
“No,” he deadpans, “I sit in the rooms of all my classmates and let them rant really pathetically about the cute baristas that they've got no balls to ask out, like, all the time.”
“Firstly,” Lev holds up a finger, “I don’t even think he likes me, which is a tragedy , because his hands look so small and I really want to hold them—” Kageyama crinkles his nose at him— “secondly, you’re Kageyama Tobio. You don’t do all that friendship thing, everyone thinks you’re too cool for that.”
Kageyama snorts. “Guess I’m too cool to be telling you that saying, ‘wow, you’re, like, really ,short’ to a short person will not win you any brownie points with them.”
Then he quirks a smile, and there it is, his evil smile, and Lev has a bad feeling about this—
“So I’m going to take my vegan chips and my great relationship advice and also Yaku Morisuke’s number, and go, then.”
“Oh my god.” Lev feels like he’s having an epiphany, right here on the hardwood floor of his rental, “you’re my mean friend.”
And maybe Lev still doesn’t know half of what he’s doing, halfway across the world, but he’s got a mean friend, now, and suddenly New York doesn’t feel as much like a whole other different planet from Moscow. He’ll be fine, he thinks, except something suddenly clicks, and Lev bolts upright.
“HOW DID YOU GET HIS NAME?”
And Kageyama is chortling now, in that really endearingly annoying way of his, and Lev feels like throwing the entirety of the vegan chips into his bag.
“AND HIS NUMBER?”