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If you asked Akito three things he knew about Touya, the answers would be randomly selected from a pool of over two thousand Cool Touya Facts, including but not limited to:
- His hair has a completely natural colour split.
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- He uses two-in-one apple-scented shampoo and conditioner.
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- He can full combo 31s one-handed.
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- He’s more of a cat person.
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- He doesn’t know how to ride a bike.
- He also doesn’t know how to skateboard.
- He took figure skating classes at some point.
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- He knows a lot about fish.
Which is why Akito is currently in an aquarium with his partner, who is rambling about Cool Fish Fact #407 which isn’t even about a fish. He’s barely paying attention to the fish facts, instead opting to listen to Touya’s voice.
He likes Touya’s voice a lot (would he have asked him to be his singing partner otherwise? Probably not). It’s deep, and smooth, like the smooth lumpfish which is found at depths of down to 1,700 metres below sea level , Akito thinks, or rather he hears as the two pass several more deep sea fish.
They arrive at a slope that slowly spirals down into a cylindrical milkfish tank. There are a lot of milkfish - Akito counts at least probably around a hundred, and Touya’s somehow figured out that there are exactly one hundred and forty-seven fish. His partner’s on Cool Fish Fact #413 now, something about milkfish being the only species left in its family, and that morphs into Cool Fish Fact #414 which is about milkfish travelling in schools.
Cool Fish Fact #415 is about clownfishes' behaviour of living inside anemone to deter predators. Cool Fish Fact #416 is about symbiotic relationships within ecosystems or something, and Cool Fish Fact #417 is about manta rays. Akito wonders how many Cool Facts Touya knows about fish, and how he manages to remember that many.
Cool Fish Fact #431 is told while the two are inside of a tunnel passing through the aquarium’s largest tank, in which Akito asks his partner what his favourite fish is. Somehow, Touya forgets that being asked a question about his favourite fish does not mean going on to say around twelve more Cool Fish Facts.
Cool Fish Fact #445 is about seahorse reproduction. Akito simply replies ‘based’ as Touya talks about how it’s the male seahorses which give birth, and they pass a tank with a leafy seadragon which Akito struggles to find. This leads to Cool Fish Fact #446 about camouflage, Cool Fish Fact #447 about natural selection which is barely fish-related, and Cool Fish Fact #448 which was not fish related at all and was about human technology mimicking nature.
Cool Fish Fact #449 happens when they walk past a Japanese spider crab, which was undoubtedly very large, and Touya brings up the irrelevant Cool Fish Fact #450 about mantis shrimps’ range of colour vision. Akito wonders if Touya would be even prettier if he had mantis shrimp vision, and realises that he already hit the threshold for prettiness and therefore physically could not be.
Cool Fish Fact #451 describes sharks’ wanderer nature, needing thousands of kilometers of open sea, and feeds into Cool Fish Fact #452 about the difficulty of keeping sharks in captivity. Akito’s pretty sure Cool Fish Fact #453 isn’t even a fish fact as Touya talks about how seals keep afloat through blubber, which doubles as keeping them warm, and Cool Fish Fact #454 is definitely not a fish fact and is instead on something about walruses.
Cool Fish Fact #461 is delivered when they arrive at the enormous glass pane looking into the main tank. It’s even more definitely not a fish fact as it only talks about water pressure and how a thinner piece of glass than the ones they used would shatter from the weight of all that water. Cool Fish Fact #462 is finally more on track and talks about how stingrays - of which Akito can see several on the tank floor - sift around the seafloor looking for food.
The Fish Facts do not stop when they leave the aquarium. Akito tries to ask Touya about his favourite fish again, which is the hammerhead shark, and is accompanied by Cool Fish Fact #467 about hammerheads’ wide range of view from their unique eye placement. Akito drags his partner along with him in the gift shop. He finds two matching hammerhead shark keychains - one blue and one orange - as Touya lets out Cool Fish Fact #469 about how golden hammerheads’ distinctive colour tends to fade with their age.
They’ve left the gift shop and Akito gives the orange hammerhead shark to Touya. This, of all things, is somehow what snaps him out of his cool-fish-fact-reciting daze.
“Huh? Akito, wouldn’t you want the orange one for yourself?” Touya tilted his head in confusion.
Akito laughed, “No, dumbass, it’s for you. And the blue one kinda reminded me of you, so I’m keeping it for myself.”
The speed at which Touya slips on the shark to his keychain is amazing.
“Oh, also, how’d you remember five hundred-ish fish facts and just recited them almost non-stop when we were inside?”
“I did?”