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There’s a memory here: Grass turned to packed dirt under his feet. You don’t hear it right away – it’s always strange, to Reki, how magic doesn’t mean immediate. Like his grandma’s simmering pot of dye, his pop’s rhythmic strike of the small garden shovel, the way his mom’s sewing light flickers before turning on fully, magic comes on in a swirl, a burst of something accumulated. There’s no magic without anticipation. There’s no magic without seeking.
Reki remembers, always, running across the hills down near the mine, grass to bare dirt to grass again. He used to do it so often, running. As kids do, his mom’s said, once, laughter in her voice, while Reki tried flipping the croquettes in the pan without breaking them. Every kid runs after something, every kid tumbles and rolls and mucks around, every kid hears the tantalizing voice of stories and goes on little adventures.
They just, often, also get there in the end. They do something stupid and reckless, worry their parents for a day or a week, cry, and grow up to one day reminisce. The story goes that Ryukyuan grass was grown by a kid’s wish too, so their parents wouldn’t have to waste money buying them shoes.
Reki was never so selfless. After a time, he’s learned: most people aren’t. Most people, when growing up, just tumble and roll and bring dirt inside and wish for a treat or a very big tree they can climb or more firework. Reki, when he was a kid, ran across the hills, chasing something. He was always late home for dinner. He never found anything to bring back.
Reki was, to the surprise of literally none of his friends, a champion at rigging kites.
It was… something he’s forgotten, to be absolutely honest. It was just another little fancy kids had, trying to one-up each other, to become larger, tougher, take up more space, be less deniable. He was briefly a sensation back then, with the kids from his neighborhood, because he was very willing to slog through pages of an obscure foreign forum to dig up unimportant details that’d help a toy run just a bit better. A kite fly just a bit higher. He ground crayons into the grains of the paper so the colors’d still be visible through all the clouds, and he figured out a good way to tie a whistle to the top. He saw a TV craft show episode about making fake flames from fabrics, and added trails of red to his kite. He made a phoenix, a bull demon staring down from the sky with a frown, a goddess in swathes of colorful fabrics. His kites were coveted by his… friends, would be the word. They bargained with him and with each others, in the way children do, and they ran, too, just like him, until suddenly they found it, the zeal, and the kite lifted. They were mean things, all of them, clawing at each others and shrieking and not understanding how to be gentle; he remembers the boys screaming at their kites, commanding them to fly higher, higher, until they looked down and the string was already gone, disappeared into thin air. Reki could still hear the phoenix whistling sometimes.
It… fell through sounds so dramatic. It was nothing. Every kid’s made a toy they then destroyed by carelessness. Reki just got sick of it one day, making kites and not flying them. He didn’t even really like flying kites; after a bit it was just standing around. So he moved on to other things, and the neighborhood kids forgot about him after some tantrums.
It’s brought back because he can’t believe Langa’s never done it. Flying a kite. “Seriously? Not once?”
Langa looks a bit uncomfortable. Reki mentally smacks himself. “Uh.”
“Hey, it’s-- I’ve only done it like, twice, too.” He pushes at Langa’s shoulder, jostling him a bit. “That’s much more egregious than you, we’ve got like kilometers of beach here.”
“Canada has a coastline.”
Reki grins. Langa being difficult means he’s not mulling over how he’s not keeping up with the conversation or whatever. “Sure. I’ll accept it when I see it myself. Anyways, d’you want one?”
Langa makes to shrug, but then he looks at Reki’s face, and whatever it is he sees there makes him nod decisively instead.
It’s not something new, in any regard; Reki still makes kites sometimes, and lanterns and other toys for his sisters. Langa’s included in anything Reki tries his hand on, ever since the guy showed up. They hang out in his workshop just as much as in each of their room, even though it’s really not at all conducive to normal, inside-voice conversations. Langa’s even there for the boring part, the choosing paint, making a shitty blank and mottled prototype, staring at the fan waiting for the glue to dry because Reki will literally forget his own hands if he doesn’t see them in his range of vision every other hour. Langa’s kite is weather-proof, just so Reki can feel like his skill has actually improved, made and painted to be a hawk-thing with bold strokes of colors for feathers. Reki draws it looking straight ahead, not down at the ground, because hawks look goofy head-on. And he wants this one to… be serious. Or something like that.
Langa’s eyes have been getting steadily rounder as the toy takes proper shape, and he almost fumbles with it when Reki holds it out for him. “This,” he blinks, at the bird Reki drew with no pre-planned design, sealed in now so he’s not even allowed to feel bad, and then at Reki, “this is so pretty.”
Reki’s learning, so he only coughs, and crosses his arms. “You haven’t seen pretty yet.” Langa’s eyes only seem to shine brighter at that – in no time he’s learned to decipher Reki’s circle-talk too well. Reki chases the thought away with a few flaps of his arms, in Langa’s direction. “Well, fly it! What are you waiting for!”
“In here?”
“Why not? You can just--” Reki holds out his arms, and Langa mirrors the pose. And then they both throw their arms up, the kite leaving Langa’s hands, imagined confetti leaving Reki’s. They stand there and watch the kite sail up for a second, before flipping around and nosediving. Langa scrambles to catch it before it touches the ground.
Reki can only laugh in disbelief. It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s nothing…
“Let’s go to the park instead,” he suggests next, and Langa nods, and they pick their board up and go. Langa hugs the kite to himself the whole way, trying (and mostly succeeding) to steer without his arms. Reki makes Langa try again, to let the kite fly, and then makes Langa let him try; still no dice. Langa just kinda leaves him to it the whole time, except to catch the kite every time it falls, determined to not let it get all the way to the concrete.
Reki doesn’t understand it, but he’s also out of patience. So he huffs and says, “we can do this the boring way, then,” and teaches Langa how to catch a wind instead. The kite’s tug on the reel in his hand is just as insistent as if he’s asked it to take off, like every other kid, but for once he doesn’t think about it too much. Not when Langa’s there too, looking up at the hawk-thing like he’s seeing something incredible. It’s so-- something, it makes Reki laugh.
“Dude, it’s a kite.” Weather-proof and meticulously crafted to never fall apart, but a toy, nonetheless. Reki knows there are pro kite players out there. It sounds stupid, but Reki knows stupid better than most people, and he’s seen the flute racks on some of those. It’s engineering.
Langa shakes his head, still not looking away from the hawk-thing. “Kites are like, the diamond-shaped flap of fabric with a ribbon tied at the end,” he says, the words dismissive but the tone reverrent. “That’s a bird.”
Reki knows what he’s talking about. It doesn’t make it less funny. “They don’t have birds in Calgary?”
Langa finally looks away from the kite just to give Reki a deeply unimpressed glare. Reki only laughs harder.
They skate out in the park for the rest of their afternoon off. Langa ties the reel to the slide’s support pillar, despite Reki’s hand-waving that it wouldn’t disappear. When they pick up their board, the kite’s fallen down on top of the slide, sticking half-out like an actual perching bird. Reki has no idea how it managed to get all the way in the slide’s tiny cabin.
Langa walks backward out of the park, catching a small wind; Reki sees it this time. The kite lifts, not too high, just enough that the whole block can see the colorful wings burned into the twilight. Langa keeps it flying while they skate home, riding fast on his board to fight the tug of the bird wanting free. Reki matches his speed. Langa seems really good at finding.
Reki’s not good with dates – there are more important things to keep his note paper and graphite for, c’mon – so he never really notices almost a whole year coming and going with his… new company. Reki’s not good with new, either. He’s awkward around new, unless he just thinks of it as gonna be old or be gone and take it in stride.
Langa arrived in Okinawa around spring, so this’d be his first Christmas in Japan. Reki regrets a bit that he wouldn’t be able to show Langa the finer points of Christmas delight here – namely the karaoke parties and the mall strolling, because you gotta have, ahem, company for all those things – but he thinks he can at least bring Langa to see what KFC has cooked up this year, and get him and Mrs. Hasegawa a cake. There’s not much otherwise, unless you’re a kid; it won’t even snow.
It’s brought up at S by Shadow, mostly grumbling about the surge of ridiculous displays and personal gift orders that he’s taken on so his manager can have the breaks. Reki’s laughed and bumped knuckles with him – Dope Sketch won’t see that much difference, with the staff and the clientele made up of weirdos with atypical calendars, but he’s seeing it in his future too, three guys milling about in a mostly empty shop for one odd day. He sees himself spending the day hammering out the last of the year’s commissions, honestly.
Joe’d also be in the commiseration circle; perks of running a fancy restaurant there. Cherry supposedly has a demonstration at a fancy tower, but Reki doesn’t know how long those actually run for. Do calligraphers stick around to mingle and stuff like at galleries? Cherry honestly doesn’t seem the type anyway. He seems the type to finish his job then walk directly out the door in front of the whole audience. Miya’s class is doing something Miya sneered at.
That leaves Langa. It’s a bit weird, that Reki didn’t hear Langa mention anything then. Maybe a bit weirder too, that he got to Dope Sketch a few days later just in time to hear Langa tell Oka he’d be available on the day.
He asks Langa about it, once it’s cooked into something coal-hot and restless in his chest, while they climb up to the roof for lunch. The door out’s got a new lock. It takes Reki three minutes this time. “Isn’t that a big thing over there?”
Langa waits patiently on his side, holding both of their lunch for him, while he cajoles the pin into place. “We weren’t religious.” Reki doesn’t get to see him frown, but he can kinda hear it in his voice. “Uh, aren’t, still.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
A solid minute of silence follows his question. “Christmas is a Christian holiday.”
“Is it? I thought it’s about like, Papa Noel. Santa. Giving gifts and stuff.”
Langa doesn’t say another thing until Reki gets that door open and they settle out under the noon sun. It’s windy up here, in this season. Reki feels it again, the urge to run, run until he finds. Until something weaves itself through his fingers.
“Reki,” Langa’s voice catches his attention instead. His bento box is returned to his hands. “Did you not know about the Christian thing?”
Reki shrugs.
“It has Christ in the name.”
“In English!” Reki busies himself opening his lunch instead of looking at Langa.
“How do you know about Papa Noel and not the Christian part?”
“What are you, the Christmas cop? Eat your damn lunch.”
When Reki finally looks up from his bento, Langa’s smiling. He looks good in daylight – well, he’s Langa, so he looks good literally whenever, but his pale hair shines under the sun, and his eyes are so, so clear. Reki’s suddenly caught by the realization that if Langa floats up, into the clear sky, it’d become impossible to find him again. He’d become an inseparable part of the immense blue.
“We didn’t do much on Christmas,” he offers out of nowhere while contemplating the rest of his sandwich, pulling Reki back to where they’re sitting. Reki blinks at him; it feels like his eyes have been open for minutes straight. “We got four weeks off around the time every year, but Mom couldn’t afford to go too far away from the city, and Dad was too attached to the slopes. I think we spent a Christmas at my grandparents’ cabin once. Uh, paternal.”
Reki rearranges himself into a slightly different sitting position. “Once?”
“They just lived really far away.” Langa’s smile softens. “The literal middle of nowhere. It was fun, but Dad and Grandpa couldn’t be cooped up in the same space for that much time. They mutually agreed to never do that again.”
Reki hums. “Oh yeah, I know how that is. I, uh,” he scratches his cheek, suddenly not sure of offering this part of him. The least important thing on Earth. “I keep telling my parents I can’t skip school so they’d go see relatives on their own.”
Langa, to his immense and precious credits, only nods. Langa’s always really considerate. Reki can kinda guess what he’s thinking about. He remembers, still, not even really telling him about it, Langa’s just known from the binder. Remembers the shouting match he had with his mom when she found out the same thing.
He shakes his head a bit to dislodge the thought. “Did you guys do, like, gifts, anything like that? On the day?”
Langa shakes his head. Then elaborates, “We went to Christmas markets on the days leading up, for the food and the cider mostly. We actually got a lot of Asian food around then every year.” He smiles again. “’cause they’re the only people still opening.”
“Huh.” Reki leans back onto the rooftop’s chain link fence. Looking away from Langa just lets the sky’s blues flood his vision again. He can’t even look away for that long. “Hey, that works out for the cake, at least.”
“Cake?” Langa’s voice has immediately done a 180° from wistful to eager. Reki laughs.
“Yeah, bud. It’s another excuse to eat cakes here. And buy your girlfriend gifts and stuff.”
“Do you think S’d take the day off?”
Skies above. Langa’s not offended by Reki laughing, thank fuck, because he really can’t help himself. He hopes it means Langa knows he’s funny, and not that Langa thinks himself ridiculous and is just too used to it to have an opinion.
When he recovers, he puts a hand on Langa’s shoulder, and very seriously intones, “Do you honestly think Adam would have even half the thought to call off S on Christmas of all days.”
Langa tilts his head in acknowledgement.
Reki remembers, a few years ago, it actually snowed on the island for a brief while. It was honestly kinda underwhelming, but that was the extent of his contact with snow, so that’s what he knows about snow.
What he’s learned from that, really, is just that snow doesn’t seem like hugely his thing. He prefers rain; it’s straightforward and usually heavy enough in the season to wash away the mud after. Rain, like magic, releases the valve of a tension accumulated. Snow, when it came about that one time, didn’t feel like anything on his uniform jacket, and still his clothes ended up damp, and then it didn’t even get noticeably warmer after it left. Reki didn’t understand a lick of it.
Still, for a while after, snowflakes dropped here and there in their backyard. It’s the fancies of kids who thought it was pretty, Reki knows. That’s all. Koyomi was entranced by the snow, but after she’s got her fills, she let it go and Pop’s trees were allowed to live again.
Reki’s never done that. His mom can vouch for him on this – he was a surprisingly agreeable baby, apparently. He’s never wished for anything fervently enough to make it real. He’s never seen something beautiful and dangerous lurking in the waves or blending in with the forest’s foliages, despite knowing, in his bones, that they’re there, because other kids know they’re there. It’s just a part of being a kid. He’s run, oh was he a little runner when he was tiny, but he’s never been fast enough to catch.
His mom’s got enough grief with him in other departments. Reki can be thankful for that, not hurting her more over some silly childhood whims.
He just… wishes, sometimes. That he can get to know what the feeling of actually catching that runaway thing is like. This, too, ends up never being something fervent. Among the millions (must be in that number, by this point) of thoughts and ideas that burn to hold, that closure ends up fading into the background. Not that important, against the traffics blaring horns and causing pile-ups in his head.
A few months into knowing Langa, he’s thought his friend to be the type of person who enjoys finding. Has to be, to get so good at it – just reaching out and there it is, the explosion, the fission, the consequence. Reki sees it in the way he takes to what he likes and lets the rest of it go. If it’s not that his whole being roils with all of it, the magic, then he must have an insane sense for it. He’s wondered, for a while, if to Langa it was just the act of reaching out and collapsing heights into something to crush under his heels, just the act of walking up stairs invisible to everyone else and stand, above all of them, above Reki. To… see the stars? To chase something, it’s all just pursuit in the end.
And then Langa’s tackled him, days after saying all of those too nice things about him too, and Reki’s thought, wow, I was a fucking idiot. Langa bleeds magic, strings of cause and effect slip from his hands in a constant flow, because he has a code error. Because there are things he wants so, so fucking badly, that’ll never be realized.
Langa’s actual deal with magic is that he never fucking quits. Reki can do nothing but match the pace. He owes Langa that much, for pushing his own problems with his shit capacities on him.
Langa brings the kite out with him to the park again, a week after it was made. “Can we try again?” He asks, way too politely in Reki’s opinion, while Reki sips on the bottle of green tea he got on the way out here. “That thing you wanted to do. With the… flying the kite.”
Reki has a think about it for a minute. Troubleshooting with party tricks is hard, it’s not like it’s a science, like board building. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, and that’s it. But Reki suspects Langa knows the illogic of magic better than he does, so he’s not gonna lecture him on it.
“I did see it, though, when you were flying it last time,” Reki waves at the thing in Langa’s hold, “the kite. You should try again! I think you had it.”
Langa’s brows furrow – it’s almost cartoonish, the way he does that, it’s so cute – but he obliges. Holds the kite out, throws it up in the air, and watches it fall right back into his arms. He stares at it forlornly, but Reki doesn’t laugh this time, because he’s just seen it again.
“Okay,” he claps his hands together, “what did you feel, right then? When you caught it.”
Langa mulls his thought a bit. “Mm.” He hums, and then says like he’s trying out the word, “Frustrated.”
Reki takes a breath. Well, serves him right to make Langa name the things he feels. Communication’s always so damn shaky, there. “You’ve been practicing?”
“Throwing the kite at the sky? Yeah.”
Reki lets himself laugh at this. “Well, there it is, it’s not really… that. Ah, I keep forgetting you don’t, like, know anything about kites.” He’s gotta show Langa the insane builds some guys down South have. Now those are kites. “Still wild to me, to be honest. Kids love kites.”
“They keep flying away.”
“Hm,” Reki hums. Langa’s definitely not wrong there. “That’s about what kids do with kites. Didn’t stop most of us. But hey! We’re grown ass children now,” he grins, pointing at the pretty decent kite he made in one afternoon, “we can one-up those snots.”
Langa smiles back at him, and then his face’s all serious again, staring at the hawk-type bird on the kite. “How does this work, then?”
Explaining this is hard. Everyone in Reki’s life so far’s just kinda… known how to do it. And it’s not really comparable to anything that’s not already in the same category-- well, there’s a lot to pull from, there, actually. Langa’s well known for those feats. “Do you… recall how it feels at the starting line? At S.”
Langa nods, his focus entirely on Reki’s words. It’s almost absurd. This is nothing, isn’t it? Supposed to be.
“Is is a… pulling to the finish line? What kind of-- motion, I guess, is there in that thought? You gotta do the same here.”
Langa’s brows furrow again (man, he’s cute), and he looks from Reki down to the kite in his hands. “How?”
“…Imagine the kite’s a board?”
“Sounds dangerous.”
Reki laughs. “Oh man, you’re difficult.” He runs a hand through his own hair, fluffs it up again so it stops crowding his scalp. Having thick hair is such a pain sometimes. “I’m no good at explaining this… Not like I can do it reliably anyway.”
Langa hums softly to himself. To Reki he says, “You said you’ve done it twice.”
How the hell does Langa remember that? Reki doesn’t even remember telling him. “Well, yeah. I mostly make kites for other people. Flying them kinda sucks, people used to make fun of you if you can’t launch it.” He means kids, mostly. No adult cares about this shit. And he means used to in the sense that he’s not letting Chihiro and Nanaka be bullied in front of him. Not that they need his help; they can fly a damn kite well enough. “I managed to sling it up once, and I’ll tell you, that’s not many times enough to get a good feel for it. You can ask literally any toddler and they’d have a better grasp on this than me.”
Langa only clutches the kite closer to his chest. “No,” he says with a level of determination Reki thinks undeserved for the idea of dealing with a kid for a few minutes. And then he surprises Reki by actually suggesting something, “What did you feel, then, when you did it that time?”
“Told you, it’s fuzzy. I was, what, ten? Younger. I barely remember last year.”
Langa chews on his lower lip for a second, not thinking as much as gathering courage. “Can you try again?”
Reki… must’ve nodded, because then he’s holding the kite. There’s nothing he can do for a moment but stare at it, at the not-very-well-concealed brush strokes on the main body (he should’ve probably used a stencil and roller instead), at the way the gradient starts out kinda uneven until the later layers where he’s gotten what to do, at the random diamond pattern on the bird’s back, maybe coincidentally masking too much of its real eyes. Real. Isn’t it all paint?
Still, he steels himself, and closes his eyes. The litany isn’t please fly, but please work. Of course when he lets go, the kite nosedives.
“Gonna start feeling stupid any moment now,” Reki announces to nobody in particular. The perfect iron in Langa’s eyes, though, when he looks over again, startles him. “I-- you good?”
Langa’s gotten a few steps closer, much closer, probably to catch the kite. Reki blinks at him, at the calm he knows is masking some furious computing in there, the way the light cannot manage to change the colors of his eyes, no matter how hard twilight tries to burn. “There was… something,” he says in English first, and then again in Japanese, “I saw something.”
Reki stares back. “Really?”
“Can you do it again?”
Reki’s honestly helpless to do anything but try again. And again. Frustration – guess Langa’s right about that, too – wells up with each toss of his arms, he feels his movement get more violent, striking a pang through him, and he’s just back there again. Reki’s not good at this. At meeting the end goal, at meeting expectations, at seeking. Finding.
Stop making me stare at this, Reki wants to say, but what comes out instead is an exasperated “What’s wrong with doing it the other way, huh?”
Langa’s eyes have not gentled. Relentless, this one. “Nothing. But I wanna see… that. Again.”
“Do you know what they call doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome?” Reki tells him in English.
Langa answers in English too, his tone markedly different, “It’s a misquote.”
“It’s called being stupid. Stupid.” Reiterates in Japanese, just to get it across.
“Then I wouldn’t be skating if we weren’t being stupid.”
Reki throws his arms up. Imaginary confetti leaves his hands, but not the kite. “Fuck, dude, it’s nothing! Why’re you so gung-ho about this. It’s just a damn toy.”
If nothing, Langa’s determination hardens in the face of Reki’s whining. “It’s not nothing,” his voice is as loud as it’d ever get. It freezes Reki in place, arms still over his head, burning light filtering through colloquial, speckling feathers. “It’s really bright. I want to,” his voice falls again, to almost a whisper. “I want to see it fly like it’s supposed to. Please?”
Reki stares at him, and then at the toy, and then back at him again.
“Is it funny,” he says, and he doesn’t understand his own tone of voice either, “bringing up how it’s supposed to work with the guy who doesn’t have a fucking idea of any of that?”
He immediately feels bad. It’s the thing with Langa; Reki’s just louder, and sometimes he starts talking to himself instead of to his friend before he catches himself. Langa’s been so fucking considerate. Langa’s been bleeding, and still he humors all of Reki’s idiosyncracies, not just with patience but with enthusiasm. Fun looks so good on Langa. Fun also looks like iron determination, bull-headed focus, on Langa, sometimes.
His friend’s shoulders have fallen after his outburst. Reki scrubs the hand free of the kite across his face. “Sorry. That was… I was just, uh, frustrated. Hey, you were right about that too!”
He thinks, two guys standing around on the playground holding a kite. It’s like we haven’t grown up at all, huh. Except he doesn’t run that much anymore, now that he has a skateboard and the skills to do tricks on it. And-- and, and. He knows what it means now, to be careful with the things he makes. Maybe… maybe that’s why. It’s just a kite, to him. It’s just a toy.
Langa’s staring at the kite again. Reki sees something so wistful about it. He has the first fucking clue what he’s doing all day. “Wait-- what did you say about this thing, last time? The.” He snaps his fingers, trying to remember.
“It’s really pretty,” Langa repeats, and it just registers as a fresh compliment to Reki because he doesn’t fucking remember shit, ever, and he speeds along after the thread of some runaway thing to avoid thinking about that.
“No-- that, uh, thanks. The other thing. Later on? It looks like a bird?”
Reki looks up to see Langa’s eyes widen. Man, he looks like a child. A gentle, quiet one, brimming with wishes like dew drops soaking into his jacket. A runner, a successful one. One who saw the mountain giants and arrived home in time for dinner. “No, it was--” Langa whispers. “Not looks like. It’s a bird.”
The kite shoots out of Reki hand, and Langa kind of runs him over to hold onto the reel. It won’t leave, Reki’s told him, but that’s Langa’s thing now. His hands, in the physical world, grip the reel’s handle hard enough to break, while Reki watches him and holds onto the kite somewhere else. It doesn’t fly up very high, the colors running in the sky, stark against dimming blue.
Takes long enough, Reki’d think. To see it again, the flame tail of something lost, while he speeds down the track at S, further and further into Okinawa winter.
He was a runner once, until-- well, a lot of things happened. And then he started skateboarding, and the burn of it was so much more real than whatever it was he was chasing, he’s just forgotten. On a skateboard he can hammer at a trick until he understands the mechanics of it, until it eats into his muscles and bones and makes its home there. Skateboarding was present, when magic was… absent. They were-- Reki’s learned, now, they’re not at all comparable. Just two different things.
It means he sees, now, the trail of it, years in the making, whenever he goes fast enough down a straight part of the track and his surrounding blurs. Reki was a runner, but never a really successful one. He has a skateboard now.
Langa sees it, when they race down the stretch of pavement next to the beach. Reki looks at him, sees how his eyes sparkle, the sea brimming with refracted light. Langa sometimes looks like one of those beautiful, devastating things lurking out in the waves. When Reki reaches him and catches his hand, it’s miraculous.
Langa sees him, so-- he must see too, that Reki’s chasing something, again. Maybe he’d call it a spell, people don’t approach these matters head-on. It’s not how it works. The pattern of movement matters, Reki doesn’t know why, it just does; straight roads curl into spirals of whipping winds, his arms have to be out, left foot has to be forward, do not falter, you’ll lose it again. You’re so close. You’re so close.
Langa has his kite with him, when Reki finally catches-- something. His hands are heavy around it, the force of every blade of grass on this island pushing through the ground, and then he looks over at Langa and-- the ground erupts. It’s a flurry, disorienting, ice-cold; for a moment he forgets where he even is, seeing nothing but the glare of the sun against snow white ringing like a phone line severed. Until a hand melts out of the blizzard, and then a face and a torso, and suddenly Reki is shielded enough to see the snow rising through concrete into thin air.
He thinks all he says then’s a rather underwhelming “huh”, as Langa tugs him into his arms, taking the brunt of the icy cold. It’s a bit of an exaggeration – it wasn’t that cold, Reki’s realized. The snow’s not that cold. When it leaves, and Langa releases him from his arms, they’re both barely damp.
They look up, at the hawk-thing circling the snowflakes leaving. Langa’s hand that isn’t still in Reki’s raises a bit, as if reaching, before it falls. He looks over to Reki instead, who’s-- processing, thank you very much.
“Well,” he rubs his arm, looking at Langa’s board abandoned a few steps behind them. “One hell of a thing to catch.”
Langa’s hand in his relaxes, but Reki knows better than letting go. “That--” Langa looks down at the ground. “That might’ve been me. Sorry?”
Reki can do nothing but laugh. Do you hear yourself, he almost says, why’re you sorry for being my catch? Instead he punches Langa lightly in the shoulder. “Hey, merry Christmas.”
“It’s November?”
“Do you want an excuse for cake or not?”
Langa still looks at the sky through the café’s window they sit next to, while they demolish their table of treats. Reki has his chin propped up on a palm, watching him. The kite’ll probably be in his room tomorrow, if Reki knows what anything’s about. That’s the whole thing with flying a kite, and that’s the whole thing with Langa. It’s just a toy. If you don’t want it to leave, it won’t.
Reki wonders how far that can stretch. “Hey,” he says, dividing Langa’s attention between him and the éclair he’s chewing on. “Let’s go to this place after. I wanna show you something.”
They end up, on that November day, on the hills near the mine. It’s strange to Reki, how the grass feels the exact same under his shoes now. He gentles his steps.
Growing up can be this: fragmenting, roiling, restitching seams together, the final reaction not a flashbang but careful contact.
Langa looks around, for the thing Reki wants to show him. Reki laughs. He knows he’s made the wishes of kids out to be such important things, when ultimately it’s just… things. Not nothing, but not insurmountable differences. Pretty shells on the beach, pretty snowflakes leaving dark ground. “’s not gonna be in the trees, man.”
Langa seems confused, but his eyes shine with excitement. Reki knows he sees it. He ought to thank him, for stubbornly seeing it, even when Reki’s long looked away.
Reki taps his ears, smiles a smile he hopes looks adequately mysterious. “Seek the whistle.”
He sees Langa’s eyes widen, and then Langa’s whipping around, and Reki knows if he follows Langa’s gaze he’d see it again, the thing of paper with crayon mashed into the grains and trails of fire tied to the tail. But, in the end, he just looks at Langa instead. “It’s so bright,” Langa whispers, as sunset burns.
