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Dating Miyano for 9 months had created some particular routines he had never expected to ever experience. Rants about your partners day aren’t usually filled with references from BLs, but if Miyano’s weren’t, Sasaki would be concerned. Rants about said BLs had also become such an integral part of his daily routine that he wouldn’t know what to do without them. Even not reading them would upset his routine, even if the only reason he had even been remotely interested in the genre was to have a conversation topic with Mya. He had grown quite fond of a few. Every month for their anniversary he tried to recreate a date from whichever couple Miyano was hyperfixated on. He also tended to give him Doujins or mangas that weren’t that easy to find on regular bookstores.
Funnily enough, for someone who always let him borrow at least one manga a week, Miyano had never given him a manga for their anniversary. He always gave him little trinkets like his favorite candies, perfumes or a new bracelet, but never the books they spent so many hours discussing. Maybe that’s why a view he should be completely accustomed to, had caught him off guard on their 9 month anniversary:
Mya heading towards him looking as cute as ever, bringing the infamous blue bag that Sasaki had learned to hope for. Even after all these months Miyano had never stopped overthinking when lending a volume. Sasaki had learned to notice it on his face and reading it in his thoughts. ‘Is that kiss too corny, is that plot too predictable, is the storyline too boring…’ As if a bad recommendation would be all it took for Sasaki to start judging him for his tastes. Like his biggest interest was his biggest weakness. Like the way Miyano’s eyes lighted up talking about his favorite books weren’t enough reason for Sasaki to feel like reading every BL ever created just so the conversation and that light that came with it could be never ending.
But it wasn’t a random day, and it wasn’t a random manga. It looked like a much simpler cover than he was accustomed to. More discreet too. The two boys were back to back with each other, one of them seemed to be holding a BL with a more conventional cover. He wasn’t looking at it, too busy trying to look over his shoulders to the boy behind him, who tried to do something similar.
So many interesting details that made that cover so unique and yet Sasaki didn’t notice a single one of them, too wrapped around trying to figure out why said boys on the cover looked exactly like him and his boyfriend. He didn’t even notice the cursive blue letters spelling: ‘Sasaki and Miyano’.
“Did you do this Mya???”
Only then he noticed how nervous Miyano seemed. Not his usual apprehension, more like he was physically ill trying to find a way to explain the thing he had put on Sasaki’s hand. Well now that Sasaki thinks about it maybe he hadn’t exactly given it to him, more like Miyano was just holding the usual bag and with his excitement Sasaki might have forgotten manners for a second and immediately taken it away from his hands before he had even time to protest. Oops. They did have a whole date planned; this time based on an animated BL that Miyano loved.
It wasn’t anything special, just a picnic by the river. He loved how Miyano’s mind worked. Sometimes when the casual conversation seemed to run out, Sasaki found a way to make Miyano fill the silence with hypotheticals. This date had been planned in one of those conversations. He had made a joke about how they should recreate a date from ‘Merman in my tub’. It wasn’t one of his favorites, but it was one of Miyano’s that had read the whole thing and watched the anime countless times.
“I know it’s a shallow plot but it’s pretty comforting to think that even if Wakasa is just a fish out of the water stuck on someone’s bathtub, sort of just existing with no big purpose, someone can still see value on him. It takes the pressure off trying to be something in life and helps you being okay with being yourself.”
That’s what Miyano had replied when Sasaki asked him why he liked it so much when he was rewatching the anime for the 13th time after failing a math test. With just two sentences he felt himself falling impossibly more in love. He liked those stories sure, but nothing would ever beat seeing them through Miyano’s eyes. From that day on he had started to appreciate ‘Merman on my tub’ a lot more.
Still, when he had suggested a dated based on that one, it had simply been to make Miyano blush over the idea of a date on a bathtub. Instead, he had smiled excitedly and said he’d love a date by the river.
“Not the bathtub?”
“That’s just where they live, the story would have never happened without a river.”
There are several types of attraction, most of them Sasaki had felt before, even if only in a small fraction of what he now knew they could feel like thanks to Miyano. There was one that he was not aware of before: Intellectual attraction. The desire to engage with another in an intellectual manner, such as engaging in conversation with them; an irresistible urge to dive in their brain.
For someone who was never a big fan of hearing what people had to say, having enough on his head to worry about, when Miyano talked his whole brain went silent, desperately clinging on every word. They weren’t random rants about fictional couples, it was watching the person you love turn into water, when you’re fainting in a desert.
That was one of those moments. Such a simple, stupid moment. From an outside perspective it was pathetic even, how easily Miyano’s way of thinking could tear him apart. If it was in any BL, they both would have agreed it was highly unrealistic for someone to panic that much over such a simple sentence. Maybe it wasn’t the sentence itself, but the way Miyano looked at him when he said it. The story would never have happened without a river. He wondered what would be the river equivalent for their story. Violence, he concluded. Without that fight there’s a big chance their paths would never have crossed. A wave of gratitude and appreciation for the invisible string that ties the right people together on the lines of destiny flooded him.
“A picnic by the river next month it is then.”
And here they were a month later, standing in Todoroki Valley, Sasaki carrying a backpack with some sandwiches and wasabi sweets, holding the mysterious manga.
Upon noticing Miyano’s apprehension, he decided to put it back in the bag and return it to Miyano.
“Sorry, got too excited, let’s sit down and eat something first I’m starving, okay?
Miyano felt some relief hearing that. It wasn’t uncommon for Sasaki to catch him off guard, but this was another level. He had been trying to find the perfect moment to bring it up since the day he had found the first manga. They had been dating for almost 8 months and Miyano noticed he was running out of mangas for Sasaki to borrow. He could have just said that, that he had finally ran out of his favorites and now if Sasaki wanted to read the genre, he could just read them online as they waited for new volumes but something in him revolted against that idea. It was a silly little ritual, but he couldn’t imagine his Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays starting in any other way than by handing Sasaki a new story and anxiously waiting for his opinion. He’d also miss the feelings on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays when he searched his collection for the perfect next choice.
It was in one of those Sundays that this conundrum hit him, and to delay the inevitable he remembered that while Sasaki had gone through every single manga in his room, he kept the ones he didn’t like that much in the attic to have space for new ones.
Going upstairs he found five boxes filled with BL’s that he was less than proud to own. ‘Yarachin bitch club’ and ‘I became a gal, so I fucked my best friend’ weren’t exactly titles he was willing to admit he had read, much less ready to share with Sasaki.
Yet a 6th box managed to be more terrifying than all the other ones. This one contained 9 volumes of something called ‘Sasaki and Miyano’. The awkwardness of having 9 mangas named after him and his boyfriend didn’t stop there, because every single cover starred both of them progressively closer. The first eight weren’t that bad even though he couldn’t help blushing at the seventh, remembering what it felt like to drift to sleep on his shoulder. Volume 9 in his turn, was far too obscene for his liking. Even if every single cover of his precious BL’s were by norm far more obscene, it was different seeing himself caged between a wall and his boyfriend while he fed said boyfriend.
With no idea where those came from, feeling a bit lightheaded like breaking the 4rth wall had left him with a concussion, he did what any person in his place would do: he opened the first one, and was immediately confronted with the moment he met Sasaki. It was scary, seeing himself surrounded with balloons describing his thoughts. It was addicting, reading Sasaki’s. Did he really think he was that cute from the beginning? It was a breach of privacy, a rupture of reality he didn’t know how to deal with it. He didn’t know how to tell it, nor how to keep it a secret. Why was his love story contained in black and white pages? How far did it go? Wait, could the future be contained in those pages as well? Should he even verify it?
Ignoring the one rule time travel movies had taught him, he let curiosity win and went straight to the last volume. Relief mixed with horror filled him when he realized it was completely blank. After a quick flip through the pages of every volume, he noticed in panic how the story abruptly stopped in the panel where he could see himself accept Sasaki’s proposal of dating leaving a few pages of the 6th volume and the entirety of the next ones completely empty.
He couldn’t help but overthink why the fuck it stopped there. Were the memories they had made since then not worth being remembered? Had this mysterious writer gotten bored of them?
Every night for two weeks he had consulted those last volumes, rereading the 6th one trying to find an explanation, until a few more months worth of memories became compacted in volume 6 to 8. He tried to skip Sasaki’s thoughts, as he felt guilty enough by keeping this from him already. He just wasn’t sure how to even start that conversation. ‘Hey, don’t freak out but I’m pretty sure the universe created a BL about us and it magically appeared in my room, and I have no idea what it means and I think the universe lost interest in us, so I can’t help but wonder if you’re loosing interest in me too.’
He thought he’d get some relief if only those blank pages mystically filled, but when they finally did, all he felt was dread. Even if he could be okay with this undesired miracle, the limited number of volumes stressed him to no end. The box didn’t get any other volumes, even after all but the 9th became complete. He couldn’t help but feel like there was a sign somewhere that he was missing. A crucial reason that would make their story so short. A breakup, a time skip or the most common one on BL’s under 20 volumes; death. But he didn’t know how to present the subject.
After weeks of overthinking, he had finally reached the decision to give Sasaki the first volume as an anniversary gift and explain the phenomenon. He wasn’t sure if he should mention the last volume being blank, so he decided to take it anyways, in a different bag, and depending on Sasaki’s reaction to the first he’d reach a conclusion.
Unfortunately fate seemed to be against him lately, and he didn’t even have time to read whatever reaction must have been plastered across Sasaki’s face, too concerned on trying to figure out how the content of the bag that was safely secured in his hands mere seconds ago was being examined in Sasaki’s. He didn’t even have time to come up with a reaction himself before Sasaki noticed his discomfort and being the caring person Miyano had fallen in love with, found a way to change the subject, going as far as to give the manga back.
Those little details, the way Sasaki subtly had always found a way to take care of him, even in specs of situations that could have potentially be uncomfortable and turn them into moments he would cherish for a lifetime, those were the things that made it impossible for Miyano to hide something for long. The tip of the iceberg of reasons he had to have fallen irrevocably in love with Sasaki.
They ate in friendly banter surrounded by nature so unbelievably majestic that it was hard to believe it was real. Hell, maybe he had read the situation all wrong and the universe wasn’t conspiring against them, maybe they were simply characters in just another typical BL manga that some bored fan was making a weird kind of meta fanfic about. Sasaki’s hand softly tucking his hair behind his ear brought him back to reality. It was time.
Out of all the possibilities Sasaki had been going through mentally while silently munching his sandwich, thinking about what could be making Mya so nervous to give him such a thoughtful gift, the one Miyano had presented him with was not one of them.
“And this isn’t a prank?”
At first, he was scared. He had never seen Miyano look so serious and perturbed. Maybe he was having a psychotic break. That would be more plausible than the explanation he was giving. Maybe he had made the cute manga about how they met and afraid Sasaki wouldn’t like It, entered some delusion about finding it in an old box; that possibility, albeit more likely, felt more upsetting to Sasaki than to believe in a glitch in the matrix. If Miyano was that scared of him there was something deeply wrong In the relationship that needed to be fixed.
Luckily Miyano quickly disproved that theory by explaining in an anxiously spoken speech that even Sasaki, used to Miyano’s frantic rants had a hard time keeping up with, that in reality there wasn’t just a volume, but rather 8 of them, and that the issue was the 9th.
If it weren’t the watery eyes Miyano displayed, the ones that were piercing his heart like a poisoned arrow, Sasaki probably would have laughed at the way he gave him the 9Th volume in an exaggerated bow, resembling someone’s first love confession behind the school. Being as it was he simply accepted it, making a valiant effort not to blush noticing the type of cover they were displayed in. Curiosity beat decency as he flipped through the pages and shame was quickly replaced by confusion when he noticed the lack of content you’d expect after seeing a cover like that. In fact he was presented with no content at all. 130 blank pages consolidated Miyano’s divagations on Sasaki’s mind. Sort of. He didn’t have enough time to reach final conclusions before Miyano started hyperventilating saying that he didn’t want Sasaki to die.
Focus. One single deep breath. That was the routine every time Miyano had a panic attack. He had to ground himself to be able to ground him. He tried to organize the scrambled mess that was his brain. One deep breath. Focus. This wasn’t the first time Miyano had spiraled about being a character in a BL. Never this bad, but it wasn’t a concept he had ever been comfortable with. Since the conversation they had on an unremarkable warm spring day, Miyano resting his head on Sasaki’s chest, hearing his heartbeat, bathing in shadow from some cedar tree. He had turned his head up to look at Sasaki and with an unguarded smile said something like:
“When I’m with you, life feels too good to be real.”
“Maybe we aren’t. Maybe we are just another couple from those mangas.” Sasaki said with a shredded smile plastered on his face not foreseeing consequences in a statement that in his head sounded romantic.
“I hope ours is a slice of life with no angst.” Miyano’s voice came out as just a whisper, like he was being dragged far away to the place people go to face their own perception of reality.
Sasaki didn’t notice it then, but after a frantic call in the same night with a farfetched explanation on how their concept of life was a lie and they were just specs of ink splattered on paper he realized how much the idea upset Miyano. It was 5 am when they finally hanged up. He didn’t know how many hours he spent trying to prove to him that they were real by giving every example that he could muster of things that they did and knew that manga characters didn’t. He wasn’t sure if it was helping but Miyano seemed to calm down enough to fall asleep and never mentioned it again, so Sasaki assumed it did.
But that was then, and this was now, and this time Miyano’s fear had materialized into a box filled with evidence corroborating with him. Even Sasaki in all his common sense fueled skepticism wasn’t completely sure what to believe in that moment.
One single deep breath. Focus. Maybe he was looking at the situation all wrong. With his hands on Miyano’s shoulders, repeating some breathing exercises he had memorized for moments like this, he waited until Mya’s heartrate went back to normal. He made sure Miyano sat back down on the bench they had ate before confessing to the most confusing secret Sasaki had ever heard and only then said something that could potentially make the situation worst while drawing circles on his hand with his fingertips:
“Mya I’m really sorry, I don’t have a logical explanation for what happened. I’m just as confused and while I don’t think were characters in a BL I don’t have a better explanation for how or why those books appeared. But can I ask you something? Even if we were, why would that be such a bad thing?”
Miyano shook his head. He didn’t exactly have an answer for that. The idea of being fictional was horrifying. How could not being real be anything other than bad? Sasaki must have noticed he didn’t plan on verbalizing an answer, so he carried on with his reasoning to a very skeptical Miyano:
“What if we really are characters in a BL, what would change? Even if someone’s writing our story and it isn’t real from their perspective, does it feel any less real to you?” Without warning, without explanation or apparent motive, instead of waiting for a reply, Sasaki kissed him. Not a particularly life changing kiss that you tell your grandkids about, but the kind you hold most dear in your heart when you reminisce, thinking about how pure life can feel when you’re in love. That magical moment where lips against lips feel like hearts beating in unison. Just as quickly as he had started it, he ended it, pulling back and leaving a blushing Miyano to answer yet another question:
“Didn’t that feel real?”
“You know it did.” Miyano replied in the most offended voice he could muster. “It really doesn’t bother you?”
“What?”
“The possibility that any choice we make was never ours to begin with?”
“Not at all.” Sasaki said with an effortless genuine smile and Miyano found himself whishing he could live inside someone’s voice, that a house could be built on the sound waves that he desperately clung to for peace.
“How?”
“Because either way it led me to you. It led me to this moment, to holding your hand in the prettiest place I’ve ever visited, it led me to being able to kiss you and hold you and if it wasn’t my choice, I’m okay with that because there’s not a single thing I’d change. If the only explanation for my life to be this good, for my life to have you in it, is that we don’t really exist in whatever others consider reality, then I’m happy I don’t exist.”
Miyano was speechless. Maybe they weren’t characters after all. He lost count of how many mangas he had read in his lifetime, but none of them, not even the ones with his favorite couples, could ever describe how much he loved Sasaki. Not even himself, feeling it with every bone of his body could ever be able to put into words how rapturously in love with Sasaki he actually was.
If Sasaki could peacefully believe they were fictional because they got to meet, then Miyano would fiercely assume they couldn’t be anything other than real for that same reason. Love like that just couldn’t be made up. There was only one thing worrying him:
“Even if we aren’t real, I’m not ready to lose you. I keep looking at that volume every night, waiting for those pages to fill up so I can prepare myself for the worst. Even if I could accept that we are just characters, I can’t accept that our story only has one volume left.”
Miyano kept divulging defeatedly. He could never keep his guard up with Sasaki. His oversharing habits weren’t exclusive to silly conclusions about mangas. Every little concern, every small achievement, every delusional overthinking, every boring detail of his day always reached Sasaki’s ear. He didn’t know why he shared so much when he used to be quite a private person before meeting him. Maybe it was the way Sasaki always reacted, like anything Miyano said was fascinating, because it was Miyano who said it.
“That’s what’s being worrying you? This volume?” Sasaki grabbed the 9th one incredulously. “Mya, I understand how scary it can be to see all your thoughts in the other ones, but this one…” He said flipping through the blank pages. “…This one has nothing on us.”
“It will have. That’s not just white paper. One day those pages are going to be filled with every thought we ever had that lead us to break up, or worst, you’re going to die and the only think I’ll have left is a book making me relieve it.”
“That’s easy to fix.” Sasaki got up abruptly and before Miyano had even time to stop him, he had already thrown the manga in the river.
“WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT???” Miyano shrieked in panic, with half a mind to jump into the river to get it back.
“Miyano.” It would never cease to amaze him, how his name on a specific voice could bring out so many different emotions out of him. A single ‘Miyano’ from Sasaki’s lips could make him panic, blush, cry, laugh, sigh and in this particular case, it could ground him just enough so that the spiral he was about to have seeing his paper version of a crystal ball being driven away by the river could be postponed just enough for Sasaki to explain his motives. He simply nodded, trying to keep his breathing in control and waited for the explanation that he sincerely hoped Sasaki was hiding.
“I’d like to keep the other volumes, the beginning of our story as mementos, but we can throw them away if you’d like. It’s cute to remember where we started, but I’m not interested in knowing the end. Maybe that’s why that one is empty, they couldn’t find a way to end us…” Miyano was ready to stop him right there, to contradict his wrongful statement, to explain how this had happened to other volumes too. But his boyfriend, his persuading boyfriend tucked his hair behind his ear, as a silent plea to let him finish. And how could Miyano ever say deny such a delicately put request?
“…And even if it isn’t, even if it ends up covered in our story, that just means those crazy magic mangas are over, not that we are. That’s the beauty of not existing. While the story ends with a ‘Happily ever after’ for everyone else, we get to live it.”
Miyano tried, he really did try to give an appropriate answer, to such a powerful statement. But all he could do was notice how blurry the world seemed to get as tears started to form. Sasaki didn’t seem to mind, simply opening his arms; waiting. Patiently waiting like he always did when it came to Miyano. Always so sure of what he wanted and never, not even once expecting the same certainty from him.
There was no particular rush, no particular reason he should run the three mini steps separating them. But another millisecond apart from Sasaki’s arms felt inherently wrong.
Objectively, he gave the best hugs Miyano had ever felt. He appreciated how Sasaki never seemed in a hurry to end it, like he would let Miyano live in his arms if Miyano ever chose to. It was in one of those hugs that he stayed comfortably tucked in until those misleading tears stopped. He was just so overwhelmingly happy. Real life or not he got to hide his face on his boyfriend’s shoulder when things got hard. What could anyone possibly want more than that?
Sasaki was right, a book didn’t dictate their lives, and even if it tried, there was nothing in the entire world, including the paradigms of reality, that could possibly take him away from Sasaki’s arms.
The sun had long set, in an uneventful night in Yokohama, when Ovan, during their nightly walk noticed a tiny chunk of paper stuck between some rocks, illuminated by a feeble streetlight who shined directly above the shore of the river they were walking alongside of. Ignoring how disgusting wet paper felt to the touch, they carefully grabbed what seemed to be a half-destroyed manga and decided to take it home.
At first, they only planned to throw it away, revolted by trash littering their favorite place for promenades, but upon further inspection they couldn’t helped being enraptured in curiosity. How ironic was it, to find a manga on a river, with the last page having a couple on the corner of the page, a short raven-haired boy walking away hand in hand with a tall ginger, while on first plan, right in the middle of the same page, a manga floated on the river they were walking past, showing that same couple walking away?