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1.
Reki likes savoury snacks over sweet ones. Reki taps his foot whenever he has to sit in the same spot for more than a few minutes. Everything Reki owns with strings gets hopelessly tangled, even if it’s just been laying in his hoodie pocket the whole time. Reki holds things in really specific and peculiar ways.
Langa has grooves worn into the hours of his life, the fabrics of his existence, by these details. He’s good at it: remarking on the tidbits, but only when nobody expects him to. When what he’s observing actually draws his attention. It doesn’t happen often – once upon a time nothing’s been able to beat the hold snowboarding had on him, bodily, sensorily. When you go that fast, things don’t stick to you long enough to bother you; it’s just you, your well-worn clothes and tools selected and treasured over years of use, and the wind that tells you everything you need to know about the course. And the laughter of someone who was happy that you were having fun.
Maybe it’s why it took him so much to-- move on. He didn’t even know he loved – he never called it love, his therapist was the one naming it such – what he did (does) was remembering. An almost perfect copy of the mountain range, of the way his board bended, of the sound nylon fabric made in the wind, of the glare of sunlight reflecting off of ice filtered through goggles, of a man who loved him. Langa doesn’t really call it love in his own head, but Oliver did. Oliver did it out loud many times, because Langa has the sound of his dad’s voice in his mind, the rough texture of it so close to the static of a casette tape years old and falling apart now, saying, I love you, Langa. Got like three more hours of driving, don’t wait up for me, ‘s gonna ruin your biological clock, love ya. Don’t run after those people, okay? I know it’s hard to imagine, but in five years this won’t even matter. I love you. Happy birthday, kiddo. Dad loves you. You’re having fun there?
It’s not… a hole Oliver left behind. It’s a different world. It’s an alternate dimension, that Langa was looking at everyday, to see where the split could’ve not happened, and the wind weren’t empty. He was seeing it every time he left the house, back in Calgary. What if, what if… He was barely leaving the house, then.
He leaves the house every day now, in Okinawa. He leaves the house even when it’s not really necessary. Everything’s easier to do – ignore what he doesn’t like, run after the little fascinations, shrug off the small disappointments, wake up to see the sun just the other side of his window – here, an ocean away from his old home, because nothing would be as hard as the mere act of taking another breath back there, back then. Langa survived, he survived the act of moving on. He continues on remembering.
It’s one thing he’ll never stop being thankful for, because he enjoys remembering things so much. Everything seems easier now, but remembering little details has become effortless – he bumps into them so often. He knows what food Reki likes (dried natto, salted almond, trail mix, egg in any manner of preparation, the cabbage rolls and squid cakes in oden – with the broth!) and what he absolutely will not eat, even under threats of bodily harms (a very specific fresh herb that he ate once by accident and never again) because they share at least every meal but two every day. He knows the way Reki taps his feet on whichever surface they’re resting on, because he’s seen it (heard it too, not by ears as much as in the vibration, through the ground connecting them) so many times – he can even pick out the rhythm for a specific song from a video they just watched together here and there. He knows Reki cannot be trusted to keep a pair of earbuds or a handful of cables in the condition they’re given to him, because he’s usually the one they get handed to, to be untangled (he doesn’t mind, it’s calming). Day after day after day, like drops of water wearing an indent into a rock, making their nest there.
He knows the way Reki holds things, because Reki does it a lot. He doesn’t shy away from holding anything, even if he sometimes recoils after actually coming in contact with them. He balances glass cups and vases with an abandon that worries even Langa sometimes, but so far Langa hasn’t witnessed any accident. And that’s the thing, too – Reki’s usually very sure-handed with anything he’s using. Langa was struck by it the first time he watched Reki use a circular saw; just the noise alone was a bit overwhelming for Langa, yet Reki acted like he was using a pair of scissors. To cut a very intricate and pretty pattern, granted – Reki really was very proud of that first board he built for Langa – but still, casual. He treats his tools in the same way, a kind of well-worn confidence Langa recognizes, vaguely, from a different world. A different dimension.
His grip on his board while skating is different. Maybe it’s because of the gloves, or the activity, but Reki seems to always hold onto his board with a death grip. Arm- and wrist-related injuries not counting, Reki has never dropped his board without meaning to, for the time Langa’s known him. It feels like, at times, it’d take a train’s force to rip his board out of his arms.
It’s neat. These little things, the dichotomies of Reki. Especially when Langa has witnessed him dropping something and then just staring at it in defeat a number (seven) of times now.
He doesn’t know how a gear in a clock can make a more interesting sound than the rest, but the noise this one makes comes back to him often. Tick-tick-tick. He stares at Reki’s hands sometimes, at his arms and the arc they move in, at when Reki’s hands shake and when they don’t. He-- doesn’t make sense of them, not yet. The split of what is and what could’ve happened is freezing to his touch, and right now it’s unbreachable. For now, he just remembers.
2.
Langa wasn’t a lonely child.
He hazards a guess, now, that he needs to have absolutely nobody in his corner to actually start feeling lonely, and that’s just never been the case. He’s really lucky there – there’s always someone who loves him. Even if there’s always been at most two people who loved him, before Okinawa.
Langa is thankful for that much, because he’s not really that affectionate in general. He’s bad at small talks, he’s usually indifferent to outright annoyed by touch, and most people assume to never ask him to share his food. He can’t really get interested in the majority of the things his peers talk about, and after his first year at school, he’s stopped trying. He didn’t invest much of his time into figuring this interpersonal relationship stuff out, which made all the complicated rituals even more complicated and meaningless to him, which fed back into his lack of desire to try. And now… and now.
Maybe, sometimes Langa thought to himself, maybe if he actually felt lonely, then he’d have more motivation to reach out. Langa’s tried to stop talking to his parents for a bit – a few days – and he didn’t end up feeling lonely, just. Silly. All he did was making his parents worry, and it got him nothing.
Langa, at heart, is deeply complacent. He bleached his hair in the months after, thinking it’d change the world, his world, enough, that he would stop seeing the way the wind whipped across the empty what-ifs outside his window. On the slopes. He ended up never even picking out a color he wanted to dye his hair in, because it didn’t work.
He wasn’t a lonely child. He wasn’t lonely, even for those months in Calgary right after. His mom was always right there – what he remembered of her didn’t change just because Oliver was gone. The knowledge that she was always just a call and at most an hour away was worn so deep into him it’d take more than the world revolving to erase it. More than the force of his dad’s absence; afterall, the grooves of Oliver’s love are still here as well.
He’s never lonely – never in Calgary, and especially not now, in Okinawa – but he remembers, he remembers every single hour of the time he spent looking for Reki, after their fight. He remembers the way concrete turned to packed gravels under the sole of his shoes, the sound and the feel of it different just a tiny bit, as he walked, from spots they usually hang out at to spots they wanted to skate at to spots that just seemed like Reki’s kinda location to Reki’s family house. People who are lonely, he’s heard, don’t really know what exactly they’re looking for. Langa wasn’t lonely, walking those meters with a single-minded goal. He just lacked.
He’s a deeply complacent person. He’s a deeply ungrateful person, never recognizing what he has until something rocks the boat. But when he tackled Reki that night at S, he’s almost crushed Reki in his arms. He notices how strong he clutches at anything in his hands now, anything he gets to have. Anything he’s doesn’t want to fall.
3.
Reki sometimes attempts to teach him how to draw.
“It’s easy!” was what Reki says, about anything he does in general, except for skateboarding. It never ceases to baffle Langa, because nothing about anything Reki does - casually, confidently, as if it’s all just an afterthought to him, except for how much he cares, all the time – is easy. Langa’s tried all of them, because everything’s easy to try now, compared to just the act of blinking his eyes in those months in Calgary, and objectively said whatever result he managed to procure is always barely recognizable as what he aims for them to be, let alone measure up to anything Reki makes. Reki can whittle – whittle! - a little fox or owl out of a piece of wood in an hour or so, if he doesn’t get distracted while doing it, and he’s said “eh, I’m not that good at it, my uncle’s better” when he showed Langa. Langa almost cut his hand trying, and the lump he ended up with could be compared to too many animals.
Langa can’t really invest that much into any act of creation (ha) too intensive, but drawing’s something Reki hasn’t stopped trying to teach him. Reki compares it to skateboarding a lot – “It’s the same! You can do it anywhere, it’s as serious as you want it to be, and you just gotta be willing to learn. Infinity!” - and Langa’s too happy to listen to what he has to say forever to actually bring forth that he doesn’t think that makes sense. Well. He’s never tried to make a shape out of skateboarding or snowboarding. Maybe that’s something people do.
He tries, anyway, whenever Reki’s in the mood to get him to. Reki’s been teaching him using the yeti he paints on Langa’s boards (they’ve named him Ollie), and the ones Langa drew in the latest session were almost recognizable. “You’ve just got a bit of a steep angle when you end your line,” Reki’s judged, when he looked over, “and your momentum’s a bit stilted. That comes with practice, anyways.” He’s grinned, and Langa’s forgotten about how awful his Ollies looked immediately. “Y’know, just like with skateboarding!”
“And the,” Langa took a second to remember exactly what Reki’s brought up before the smile, “angle thing?”
“Oh, just uh, turn your piece of paper. Even seasoned doodlers forget about that, actually, so you’re all set. After a while people just kinda, find a range they’re comfortable moving in, and they set themselves in there. Each their own, all that.”
Langa’s a bit obsessed with the way Reki talks about drawing, actually. Seasoned doodlers. Reki really seems to have so much fun whenever he draws some inane (but really sharp and cleanly-rendered) things into the corner of his textbooks, and when he teaches Langa he’s so careful. It’s like he wants to wrap up all the happiness he feels doing it and give it to Langa in a fancy gift box.
He sadly doesn’t feel any more affinity with the activity, despite Reki’s effort, but he never turns it down, because it’s easy to try, and he likes listening to Reki talk. And small words start infiltrating his vocabulary just from being said by Reki so many time – rendering, flat colours, hue, shading, outline, texture, gradient, stencil, curing, sealing – to make the way he remembers a drawing different. He can actually tell Reki’s style experiments apart now, from a little more thickness in outline or colours chosen to bump the contrast, instead of just by the date Reki shows them to him. He still doesn’t have a concrete opinion on any of them really, beyond liking round, bubbly things more than the jagged corners of some types of lettering; but then Reki’s just good at what he does, so anything he does is good.
At its core, it’s just more things Langa gets to share with Reki. He’s never made the effort for someone before – his dad and him both enjoyed snowboarding, and his mom and him both enjoy cooking and eating – so it surprises him a bit, every time, that it’s so easy. Reki makes it so easy, by always meeting Langa where he is and making all the stakes seem so low (he’s so good at teaching), but at the same time, Langa thinks he can like doing anything, as long as it’s Reki who’s showing him how. He draws, scrawling weird, shaky approximations of Ollie all over his notebooks when the effort of translating things back and forth in writing gets too much and just the scratch of his uniform’s high collar bothers him, and he remembers, Reki taught me this.
4.
Reki drops things a lot. Langa thinks it’s endearing, and also Reki’s not tall enough to cause serious damage when something falls from his hands anyway (he can hear the offended Hey! at the joke, when he makes it in his head), so it’s really just another part of hanging out with Reki. But Langa does notice. He remembers anything he can about Reki.
It’s the same, he’s noticed, with things that aren’t skateboarding and his friends. Reki draws, and he has the skills to figure out any of the art stuff he gets his hands on (Langa’s seen him sculpt a 3D model of a really cute toony T-rex with the clunky VR tools once, when they were hanging out at Cherry’s), but he picks up and puts down mediums at a breakneck pace. It’s there with sport too – seems every team of their school has Reki as a fill-in in emergency cases, he’s just really good at parsing the rules while already in the ring for anything – but it’s more noticeable with art. Reki’s stipend is split between custom skateboard parts for something he doesn’t want to test on Oka’s dime, food and snacks, and any prospective art venture’s beginner tools. Langa almost never sees them get more than a few uses, just enough to make three or four pieces. He has a coaster Reki made out of fuse beads and one lizard-shaped with its tongue out made out of normal plastic beads, a scarf in pretty intricate patterns that’s a bit short but he uses anyway, a small notebook Reki glued together himself in one night with an Ollie on the cover, a buncha bracelets with truly random English words woven along their length, a lot of animals folded out of thick paper (he’s kept every single one Reki handed him absently during that week he was doing origami), and a little clay model of the plumpest bison he’s ever seen. Langa’s bedroom is around thirty-percent knicknacks Reki gave him, taking up most of his bookshelf.
Langa… doesn’t ask about it. He thinks, sometimes, maybe he should, but there’s that glimpse of the fissure again, ice cold and still as death.
He shows Reki by other means, hoping Reki sees them, hoping Reki understands. He wears and uses all of the things Reki makes and gives him – not at all a hardship, they’re all pretty good quality, beside being nice to look at. He nods and listens whenever Reki talks about something new he’s doing, resolutely expelling the thought of it’s not gonna last anyway from his head. He goes with Reki to stores to pick stuff up, he holds the materials for Reki when he gets into it at the workshop, and when it goes away and the slopes of Reki’s shoulders seem just a bit steeper, he asks Reki to skate with him.
Reki talked, that time at the store they came to for printable shrink film, when Langa went to chip in the missing amount of the payment Reki didn’t have on him. He was quiet for a bit after that, while they were skating home, except for a simple, whispered thank you. But they stopped by Reki’s house to leave the newly acquired materials and pick up snacks, and then they left for the park, and then they sat down, at the foot of the slide. And then Reki talked.
“I… you shouldn’t have done that.” He scratched the back of his neck, even while his eyes were looking into something faraway, and added, “Probably.”
Langa just shrugged. It could be the same as chipping in for the cost of board parts, to him, he ended up using the things Reki made so often.
Reki’s face pulled up into a scowl that he didn’t commit to. “’m serious, dude. Don’t… spend your money on me. You know I’m just gonna drop this stuff a week in anyway.”
“But what if you don’t,” Langa said, carefully. He never really cared how he sounded to people, but he didn’t want Reki to mistake what he was saying for expectation, when it’s closer to giddy, simple-hearted devotion.
Reki didn’t. It still didn’t cheer him up much. “C’mon, no point in dreaming.” He rubbed at his left eye, pushing the bangs not held up by his headband off where they were, and propped his elbow on a knee. “Hasn’t happened before, most probably not gonna. Nothing’ll ever measure up to skateboarding, probably.”
He said that last part with such a sense of defeat. Langa never likes seeing those grooves in Reki’s being, the way they must’ve been carved out by a lifetime of it all happening again and again and again too, but all he could do then was nudging Reki a bit with an elbow. Reki’s hand at his own cheek slid up to card through his hair.
“’It’s always fun at first, really fun,” he said. “But it never lasts. ‘m scared sometimes that it’s just how fun is, y’know. The way it works ‘s that it,” he waved a hand, “goes away.”
Langa heard him. Langa always remembers Reki’s voice, the way it slowly rises in his excitement, the way it lilts and stresses some syllables like a presentation Reki’s practiced a million times before whenever they talk about something Reki loves, the way it morphs and echoes differently when he speaks English. Langa heard too, then, the things Reki didn’t say out loud. The things he probably thought himself stupid for thinking. He didn’t know exactly what to reply, but he wanted to try anyway. It’s easy to, with Reki – he forgives Langa too easily, Langa sometimes thinks – and he couldn’t imagine not trying.
He pulled out a pack of chips from the bag they picked up, maybe half an hour before, and tore it open to offer to Reki. “It can just be taken away from you too, one day,” he said, and immediately realized that was kinda morbid.
But Reki understood him anyway. “Oh, you’re right,” he said, reaching for a chip. Langa took three in a row for himself. “Yeah, it can just… ‘s life, right?”
Langa focused on the way the chips crumbled in his mouth, to distract from the ice of the split he was putting his hand on directly, right then. “So it’s not your fault.” It’s not your fault you’re still here while he’s gone. “’s fine to enjoy it for what it is, and then be done with it.” It’s okay that you had fun snowboarding with him. He enjoyed it, too. He loved you, and I didn’t know him personally, but I know how that works, Langa.
Reki ducked his head a bit. “Yeah, yeah… Still,” Langa heard the change in his voice, and the frost of the fissure disappeared under his mind’s fingers. “Keep your money for snacks, dude. We can circle back or I can drop the heat gun, it would’ve been fine.”
Langa once again shrugged. “You were gonna have fun with your project,” he said, and the way the light in Reki’s eyes gentled made a small crater in his memory, right then.
5.
It happened by accident. It was the only way it could have, between them – Langa always thinks it’s kinda fun, if you do it just for fun, but he knows Reki’s first experience with something really similar was… bad. So he didn’t bring it up, even though he saw videos of it sometimes, and it always did look kinda fun. Relaxing.
Still, in the infinite amount of little moments they have, it’s bound to crop up at least once. It didn’t happen at S, that was too hectic for it, but on a stretch of straight road they usually ride past on the way home from school. Langa’s started skating with Reki all the way back to his home on days he doesn’t have dinner duty, and after a while Reki’s started doing the same under the same conditions. The road’s on the Hasegawa apartment’s side after the old waiting point, and usually quiet. They were in the mood to be rowdy that day, elbowing each other and trying to trip each other as if they were on foot, and Reki, as retaliation for Langa pressing his shoes wholesale onto his wheels, killing his momentum, stomped on the tail of Langa’s board. Except that he misjudged Langa’s speed, slowing down to wait for him, and ended up with a foot on the middle of Langa’s board instead and precarious balance.
Langa immediately held him steady by the elbow, startling him. He stared at Langa’s hand around his arm for a moment, and then started laughing uncontrollably.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said, when Langa made to stop both of their boards, still rolling slowly. “Hold on, do you remember-- uh, left foot-- wait, it’s already up--” He pulled his left foot, still on his own board right then, in a kinda sloppy slide up next to his right foot, and Langa could only stare at him. “C’mon Langa, try to--”
Langa tried to step over onto Reki’s board, the stillness of it unfamiliar to him, but he felt almost giddy about it; Reki’s laughter’s always been contagious. They, in an extremely awkward manner, shuffled until they were in something somewhat recognizeable as the starting position of the most basic waltz they were just forced to learn in PE.
They held each other like that, standing on each other’s board that has stopped rolling by now. Langa found he really couldn’t look away from Reki, maybe in anticipation, but maybe also in anxiety. Reki blinked at his expression, and then looked at his own hand on Langa’s shoulder.
“It’s different, don’t worry.” He said. Langa’s hand clenched around his without meaning to. “Hey, hey, I’m good, really,” he smiled, and Langa wanted to cradle his face so badly, but both of his hands were occupied, trying to balance on Reki’s board, “we’re like, messing around. Together. So I can, like, do this,”
and Reki stepped back, pulling on Langa just a little bit, and immediately Langa’s balance failed and they toppled on top of each other and their boards.
Langa heard Reki’s hysterical laughter again. They didn’t wear grooves in Langa’s heart, not these; they embedded themselves deep in its fabrics, instead. Langa wanted them to sprout into something ever-growing. Undying.
They got back on their feet after a moment of flailing, and Reki semi-jokingly got in place again. Langa could do nothing but follow his steps. Somehow, between them, in that one afternoon, they figured out switching boards pretty fluidly without falling over.
They keep doing it, sometimes, when they’re just skating next to each other, too exhausted to try more tricks. A hand on the other’s elbow, and they just turn to face each other, footwork terribly lazy, but balance cleanly maintained. Reki looks up other dances’ steps, because he thinks it’s the funniest thing on Earth, and Langa, of course, plays his partner. Langa sends Reki the videos he saved, of the girl on the longboard skating to music, and Reki comments “kinda hot,” and Langa replies “I can totally do this,” and Reki laughs and pushes at his shoulder. The tango sent them crashing onto the pavement when they first tried it, their foxtrot looks more like two rain charms tangled up by the strings than anything civilized, they like taking the two-steps until both of them fall off the boards. But they do the waltz the most. It lets them spin and really get onto each other’s board, and the steps are easy enough that they can match them to any of the music they’re listening to. Reki makes them both longboards to mess around with, and it becomes something that they get… arguably not better at, Langa bets they won’t score past low mid score if judged by the dancing part. But they get really, really used to it.
There’s one day, in the nebulous time of their youth, when their final semester in high school approaches and Reki is between new hobbies and Langa’s mom gets stuck at her office a lot, where they actually try to do it properly, Reki’s one hand on Langa’s shoulder, Langa’s one hand on the side seam of Reki’s uniform, their other hand intertwined. They’re both silent in concentration – the laughter’s died down by then – as they step, Reki calls out the rhythm in tick, tock, tick, tock. Langa thinks he’s holding Reki’s hand too tightly, but when he relaxes it a bit, he realizes Reki’s hand’s just as tight around his.
They stand on each other’s board for a moment between steps, their speed slowing down to just about the same as walking. Reki’s head of red hair drops on Langa’s shoulder. There’s no groove worn there. Langa thinks his shoulders are just made to fit Reki’s head perfectly.
“’m never gonna let go,” Reki mumbles into the fabric of Langa’s jacket. Langa takes a deep breath, and leans his head to muss their hair together.
“I know,” he says back. “I’ll remember.”
He feels Reki’s smile pressed against his shoulder.