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1. It may’ve started like this:
Eiji got a new gift.
It was the summer – a day at most past his birthday, it never took any longer than that. The thing with Eiji and Reki, Eiji-and-Reki, EijiandReki, is-- was that neither of them was high on the priority list of anyone. Eiji’s parents were busy with so many things, deals to settle, speeches to appear at, another house to pretty up, another garden to talk about for hours, another sign hung up like stars in the sky. Reki had a kid sister, who was doing great in school and looking at the prospect of being tutored on a violin. Eiji did well enough at anything assigned to him, while Reki did passable enough to be left mostly alone. Eiji was quiet – sometimes Reki couldn’t believe he really was quiet, he was so bold outside of the classroom, full of bravado, making Reki feel brave just joining in on the things he pushed – and Reki was… well acquainted with by his class and his teachers. Reki laughed so Eiji could be angry for the both of them. They were, together, pretty tolerable. But there weren’t many reasons for them to receive gifts of any kind; they were not exceptional or precious little darlings. They were just kids.
For years, giving one of them something was the same as giving it to both – punishment, prank, assignment, even chores, sometimes. Gifts. Reki’s birthday gifts were usually clothes he didn’t want to wear and writing tools he’d lose two days later anyway, if he didn’t give it to Eiji (Eiji basically had both of their pencil cases, at one point). Eiji’s birthday gifts were a lot of trendy, fancy trinkets, toys, and games, all of which he shared with Reki without a single thought. They used to spend afternoons putting models together, Reki doing most of the work while Eiji shuffling through tracks on his phone, watching glue dry into a crust on Reki’s hand without ever telling Reki.
They used to spend whole days outside too, just… being in places they really shouldn’t be in. Running everywhere, climbing trees, Reki remembers wearing shorts underneath longer skirts he took off once he was outside and shoved inside Eiji’s backpack, so that he didn’t lose track of it. Remembers washing his face and hands off the muck he got in at Eiji’s place, before putting the skirt on again and let his hair loose to go home. Of course it was Eiji and Reki. Reki and Eiji. EijiandReki. Who else?
On his twelfth birthday Eiji (they both) got a skateboard. Reki spent a week messing around on it with Eiji before he decided he needed his own. Eiji put half his allowance that month into Reki’s save-up fund for his first board. They figured out their ollies five months after, hands and knees chipped to bits only to heal up to be marked all over again, laughing themselves silly over stupid poses while bailing and stupid, inconsequential mistakes and the taste of freedom. Reki remembers the feeling well – it’s baked into the bones of every movement he makes on a skateboard – but he doesn’t remember the way Eiji said his name.
2. Maybe it isn’t fair to say that was where it started. It wasn’t fair to him or to Eiji – there was a time before EijiandReki (there’s a time after too). Eiji was not Reki’s entire world, it’s unfair to make it seem so after the fact, after he’s ruined it and come out unscathed. They were just kids. They didn’t have that kind of power on each other.
Maybe it started like this: he submitted a sketch to Oka at Dope Sketch. Back then the ideal’d be to get a new board, but Reki didn’t deserve that, he didn’t deserve to shrug off all of that history, so he saved up for a repaint instead. Oka’s known his face too well by then – and without ever seeing it obscured by too-long, unkempt, neglected hair, he’s always gone to Dope Sketch with it all tied up under the hood of his sweatshirt before he cut it. He knew enough about EijiandReki to just nod and take the sum Reki’s saved up and dress up the cold corpse of something important in bright warning colors. He even knew Reki well enough to show him into the workshop, caution him to wear a mask, and let him watch the whole process.
It wasn’t complicated, just pretty dangerous. For the first time in two years Reki thought, I have a chance to get good at this, and a day after his fifteenth birthday he started taking a shift at Dope Sketch. He’s been messing around with the spare paint in the workshop for months at that point, adding to and eventually repainting his board himself.
That itself could’ve been a beginning on its own already, a piece of the play nobody but Oka himself could’ve shown Reki, but Reki was still feeling it, the half-a-monthly-allowance in the wooden plank under the paint, in the trucks’ axles, rolling with the wheels. He still felt it, when the board finally broke, the final trick it couldn’t perform spitting him onto the pavement and scratching his cheek to bleed. He still has that board – the pieces – in a box in his workshop at home. He can never decide if it’s done all it could. The new board he bought with his own pay still, somehow, felt like a betrayal. Until S.
The first word Dr. Hyde said to Reki was, “If you don’t sit still I’m putting you in a barrel.”
That was the first time Reki understood the idea of charisma, or air. He wasn’t a very attentive person – still isn’t. He used to misread the situation a lot, until he learned to assume people just de facto don’t like hearing him talk, and then he got better at excusing himself. He didn’t really catch vibes, or whatever people communicate in while they’re extremely polite and nice to his face.
Dr. Hyde was the same height as Reki then, with a round, soft face and a woolen sweater two sizes too big for them. Every word they said sound like a not-very-committed-but-still-somewhat-responsible teacher’s lecture on the Meiji restoration. Observed from afar they’d seem fit to be pushed over by a running toddler and only get mildly miffed about it. When they said they’d kill Reki for being annoying, he immediately believed them.
They’ve then been swatted at by one of their companions – the only thing Reki remembered about that person was the bright pink denim jacket – and told to “be nice to the kid”, at which they only shrugged. They had a board, as well as a beat-up plastic bag that came from a 7-11 a long time ago, and they sipped on an old ramuné bottle full of something decidedly not ramuné the whole time. Reki was told to wait – by Oka, who’s left him with this crew to run to a delivery – and to sit still – by Dr. Hyde, very, uh, specific name for such a person – but he had his board with him, and everyone was skating at the half-pipe he was sitting at, so it’s taken him at most three minutes to join in.
It was fun. S is, always, at its core, fun. It was like a midnight carnival to 15-year-old Reki, and even when he’s learned that the secrecy was much more loosely held than he was making it out to be at first, it was somehow still magical. It’s a lawless place, but there’s still an underlaying code of conduct of sort: if you have a board, skate. Everyone laughs at everyone, including you. Play into the aggression, and then slap your opponent’s hand when it’s extended. You’re who you say you are. At least until you eat mud on the track and they make you the clown for a week.
When Reki made to introduce himself, most of Dr. Hyde’s crew tutted. Some started singing almost aggressively, probably as a joke, but a number of them told him to never ever tell them his real name. Dr. Hyde themself didn’t directly contradict or confirm any of the advices, but when they went to park out at a point on the track to watch that night’s beef, he was sat next to them again, and they hummed something while waiting for the feed on their phone to load. Reki noticed they painted the back of their phone pure black.
“We started going out here way later than this,” they said while Reki was too busy getting caught up in the details.
“Hm-- yes?”
“I was 17 when I was let in.”
Reki opened his mouth to say, I’m already 15, I just look like this, but it was Dr. Hyde and they really impressed upon you the correct answer telepathically, so he closed his mouth again and shrugged.
Dr. Hyde grinned. It was not a nice grin, despite their kind face, but Reki felt like he was finally in on the joke. “Smart kid.”
Reki thought, despite everything, he liked Dr. Hyde. He never learned their real name – nobody ever did, it seems. Not while they were showing up at S at least once a week, and not when they apparently went missing more than a year after.
3. The easiest point to pin a beginning on’d be Langa. Maybe just because that was the second-most-recent mark, and the more pleasant one. Maybe just because it was the most pleasant one, out of everything. Maybe just because Reki wants to attribute everything to Langa, every easy moment he’s had in the last year.
It was a bit of a manoeuver for Reki and his mom, between his 9th and 10th grade; they switched district after Mom and Pops got married, and an oops-the-papers-went-somewhere-while-we-were-moving got Reki in his high school registry with a new spelling for his name and no doubt about how he should be regarded in class. He was still odd – he did bleach his hair until it was more hay than hair in texture and dye it a red that didn’t match the color on the box at all – but, like before, people got used to it. There were many more odd things about him than just the paper mix-up and the voice cracking a bit late. Even his mom didn’t notice the voice thing. Until too recently.
Langa’s only ever known Reki as the new spelling dictated. Reki, skateboarding Reki, S fanatic Reki, Reki who has more tools in his shed than sense sometimes, Reki who’s still scared of a corpse in a box in there. Reki who wears too big hoodies under his uniform shirt in 30 degree Celsius weather, Reki who meticulously plans and holds to a schedule to cut and re-dye his hair, when he can’t remember fuck else. Reki who picks up plastic bags from a few people every month or so at S, holding them between himself and Langa when they ride home together on the borrowed moped.
Langa’s only ever known this Reki, with all of these rituals, and he never says a thing. Langa’s been in Reki’s room while he patched up his binder (he only had two, then, and they aren’t easy to get just off the bat), entirely focused on either a video or a snack he’s chewing on, absentmindedly learning the words for all the sewing tools he didn’t know or care that much about before. Langa’s never known Eiji’s name. EijiandReki. A foreign, meaningless word.
“I had a friend I used to skateboard with,” was how it actually ended. Reki said those words like the opposite of a naming. But the story is this: one day this nameless person took a fall, and here I am, my name written differently and no more skirt to hide in someone else’s bag.
It was unfair. Those weeks were the most unfair Reki’s ever been, to everyone around him, to himself. To Langa. Three months of knowing each other and he’s managed to push all of it over yet again, not just Langa, but Miya too, and Shadow (Hiromi), and Cherry (Master Sakurayashiki), and Joe (Chef Nanjo from that one Italian place). After Langa’s finals (it was his, in Reki’s head. Everything else fades away. It was just Langa’s run.) Reki’s spent an evening in his shed, alone, thoroughly emotionally exhausted, knowing Langa’s eating dinner with his mom and then taking a well-deserved nap in his own room. He’s cleaned up the place a bit – had to ride the excess energy as much as he could, before it dropped again – and found the box with the old board’s pieces in it. His first board.
Reki’s closed his eyes in front of it, and said out loud, “I’ve been so fucking angry, huh.” And then corrected himself, “Scared. I’ve been scared shitless.”
Everything always has to do with all else. When he apologized to Langa, everyone else came back for him, even when he hadn’t properly apologized to any of them yet.
The end of it, proper, the burial, was when Reki actually told Langa about Eiji a few months later. Gave him a name, and maybe not a face but-- a silhouette. Talked about Eiji, the years (six. He counted six) spent next to each other, the big but vacant house, the perfect but quiet garden, the hills and trees climbed, the gifts shared, the way Eiji held onto whatever Reki gave him steadfastly. The first board, his first board, the fall. He didn’t cry, at the end, but words left his mouth like a boy possessed,
“He wanted me to quit too. He was like, we should make better choices. It’s taken this much from us already, months I won’t be able to leave this bed. I don’t want to--” he mimicked the choked-up pause, unconsciously. It was mean of him, he was so angry. He’s still so angry. “I don’t want to lose more. You’re already--”
He blinked his too-dry eyes, and waved a hand at the general state of himself. Langa only hummed, sitting up against the headboard next to him, shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip.
“Complicated,” Reki concluded. His hand dropped onto his thigh.
“His word or yours?”
Reki laughed, more on reflex than anything. “I don’t know man, I’ve been paraphrasing the whole way. I don’t remember which way the number 3 turns, let alone exact words.”
Langa hummed again, small. “’s not true,” he said, eventually. “You’re-- there are plenty I don’t understand about you. But that’s the same with anyone. And being friends with you is simple.”
Reki couldn’t help his laughter. Stars, he’s been so fucking angry. Scared. “After I dropped you like that for weeks?”
“We fixed it. I fumbled too, but it still worked out.”
“You really didn’t do anything I didn’t provoke.”
“My nature is fumbling.”
Reki laughed again. His head dropped onto Langa’s shoulder – for a bony-looking dude he’s always very comfy to lean onto – and, after a heartbeat, Langa tilted his head on top of Reki’s, his pale hair flowed down to curtain Reki’s eyes.
“You dropped me, but you picked me up first.” His voice rumbled differently in this position, with their head touching. “And you picked me up again. That’s twice more than it’s ever happened before.”
Reki swallowed (Langa probably heard, but didn’t say anything). You really deserve better, he wanted to say, but in the end he just reached up to muss up Langa’s hair and make him squeak instead.
He stopped at the box again the next day in his shed. On a whim he put the pieces out on the floor in their relative original place, and all he could think was, it’s a lot smaller than I remembered it to be.
4. It starts with a punch.
Reki’s gotten into fights before. Just not at school. A lot of idiots thought he’d be easy to fuck with when he was a scrawny little shrimp with shaggy hair and something precious he held close to his chest every day, and people from school always thought Eiji’s quiet meant he’d take anything. It’s turned out Reki’s precious thing had two bars of solid steel attached to the underside, and Eiji got really fucking scary when provoked. Reki’s noticed that, before. Eiji always played around like there’d be no consequence to anything he did under the sun, except with the stuff Reki gave him. Until he fell.
So, despite everything, moving district and going to this high school has been relatively peaceful. Everyone here’s nice – they don’t love him, certainly not. Not much to love, there. But they’re kind to him. The teachers are as harsh to him as they are to any other under their charge, and he can trust some guys in his class to role call for him and share notes after class if he misses. Everyone makes fun of each others, the security’s lax, the administration handwaves a lot of paper stuff. Reki, sometimes, when the tests don’t stress him the fuck out, feels like it’s a kind of theater. A nice version of S.
So it really is kind of a surprise to run into a fight in one of the supply rooms. Reki should’ve known his brain’s been a tad cooked after the English test (hope the teacher can read whatever the fuck he wrote down in there) when his first thought at the sight of a whole overturned cupboard was, Really? Over what in this place?
Langa, from behind him, steps forward to block a punch with his board. Reki does the same.
Their arrival spooked the room’s population into silence. Reki looks around, and then at Langa, then because it’s been quiet for too long he says to no one in particular, “I’m looking for a spare chalkboard eraser?”
One of the boys – class 1-C Tomoda, if Reki can recall correctly (he probably can’t) – glares at him, and then at the kid he was beating up, and says something Reki cannot be bothered to register but makes the kid jump. Then he and his two friend file out of the room. Reki shrugs and turns around to think of fixing up the cupboard. He comes face-to-face with a balled-up fist, held back at the wrist by Langa.
“No fucking way,” he says out loud, at the same time as the kid’s “Let me go!”
Langa lets him go, but he does go to stand between him and Reki again. Reki wants to punch Langa just as much as hug him. Maybe suplex him a little bit.
“Can you stop doing that,” he says and settles with pushing Langa lightly by the shoulder. Langa uses the rebound force to kinda lean on him instead. “Isn’t this guy like,” he turns over to the kid, who’s still visibly seething, “you’re a first-year, right?”
“What’s it to you?” The kid spits back.
“I don’t know, I want to get a goddamn chalkboard eraser so me and Langa can go home for the day,” Reki has his hands on his hips. “What’s it to you? You want glass in your shoulder, fighting in here? Go to, like, the track.”
The kid deflates a little bit. Reki and Langa heave the cupboard upright again while he thinks. In the end he just says, sullenly, “I can fight wherever I want.”
Reki laughs, almost dropping the tray he’s gathering the chalk boxes into. These are all probably broken into five pieces each already, but that’s not gonna be his problem. He looks over at Langa, who also seems amused. “I can eat dirt wherever I want too,” he says, stashing the tray back inside the cupboard. Langa’s got a chalkboard eraser already. They both make to leave. “Take care, bud.”
They go back to their classroom. Push the chairs up to the desks, check the lock on the teacher’s locker (Reki leafs through the attendance record, just to catch his name with the tick next to it here and there), wipe the board, sweep up. Reki puts on some videos he has saved while they do it; it’d remind him he’s left his phone out, when they leave, and it’d let security know there’s still people in the block. He thinks about the kid the entire time.
At some point he asks Langa, “Isn’t that room usually locked?” To which Langa only shrugs.
Reki knows Langa’s… either used to that stuff, or doesn’t care. Reki picks a lock, usually the one on the door out to the roof where they eat lunch, in front of Langa at least once a week. They skip class at about the same rate. They go to an illegal underground skateboard ring together. Hells, Langa was there last time Reki picked up the patches. He’s slept over.
Reki sometimes wonders if Eiji’d have stuck with him through S. Through the first shot. And remembers Langa’s words, on the day it’s started to end, that story. Even if I’m hurt I won’t stop skateboarding.
While they’re putting their head together to figure out a design that night (it’s mostly Reki saying whatever comes to his mind while Langa nods. He’s supposed to shake his head sometimes, too, but it’s like he doesn’t know how to do it) Langa suddenly says, “I set a tire on fire once.”
Reki jumps in his seat, then turns over to look at him. “What?”
“Fire? Like, arson.”
“When’s this? Was I around for that?”
“No, in Canada.” Langa scribbles something on the side of Reki’s main motif mock-up. Reki’s too attached to this new information to decipher that shape right now. “Someone dared me to do it. Almost threw his phone in there too.”
“Dude,” Reki says, “that is the coolest string of words possible to ever leave your mouth.”
Langa fake frowns at him. “No, it’s cooler when I say your name.”
“Shut up, let me bask. You didn’t get caught, right? Did that guy tattle?”
“I never found out.” Langa looks back down at the piece of paper they’ve been scribbling all over again. “If he said anything, he’d get punished first. We were the same there.”
Reki looks at him, for a moment. Really looks at him. The first word out of his mouth after is, “What’s your original hair color?”
Langa blinks. The line he’s trying to coax out halts on the paper. “Same as my dad’s.”
It makes sense. It’s that about Langa, always; for some reason he just makes sense, to Reki. Or, rather: everything’s easier with Langa there, even making sense of him. Of them. If it weren’t Langa, maybe fixing them, a year ago, would’ve been impossible. It’s easy now to nudge Langa’s shoulder with his own and offer in return, “Yeah, mine too, texture to color. I was like an upside-down broom when I was ten. It’s fucked up.”
Langa glances at his head, now, and smiles. “Now you’re a cooler broom.” Reki laughs.
5. Reki really doesn’t want to call it, but there’s still a chance that it started like this: his dad left, on a summer night, when the whole house was supposed to be asleep. He remembers barely anything of it, really. He remembers barely anything of him, who he was as a person, what channel he switched to when turning the TV on, how he wanted the rice, how he closed the car door (the car that he took with him, too, that night) when he arrived home. He doesn’t remember how his name or Koyomi’s was said, either.
What he remembers is halfheartedly combing his hair, the plastic headband that dug into his scalp, and keeping a pair of uniform joggers in his school locker at all time. Learning how to deep-fry things, standing on a stool to reach the stove, getting the oil burns on his hands tutted at and then waved off. Barely usable novel pens that pissed him off to write with, tiny rulers with the prints that made seeing what was underneath them impossible, the stupid cutesy desk lamp he couldn’t replace because it was still working well enough. Going past the living room and out the door in shorts under a long skirt that then got balled up and shoved in someone else’s backpack and loose hair that then got tied up too tight. Holding Koyomi in his lap and then listening to her talk from his bed when she got a bit older, hearing her call him big sis Reki while his hands struggle to not reach for his held-up project, pull scissors and pins and dangerous tools out from the desk drawer furthest away from the door to make something. Never even telling Mom he was skateboarding whenever he was going out, cleaning off the mucks in a home not his before walking back.
Reki’s not a genius or a presentable person in general, but he’s not stupid, either. He doesn’t remember a lot, but he can guess well enough. He could guess the impending departure from the bags in the hallways on that day, just like he guessed Pops and Mom’s wedding two years later from her laughs in the living room late at night and from the little gifts preceding a gentle, sleepy-looking man who’s always preoccupied with the plants growing in the new place’s garden. Mom always seemed to want to explain both to him, but he’s only ever laughed at something else inconsequential and hurried the conversation onto another subject. Still, he knew, when Pops called him a well-mannered young man first time they met, that Mom was trying. That Mom saw, if not all of it then at least a bit, enough for her to do all of these things. That Dad really was someone they were free of.
There were whispers of it on Reki’s mind the first year he went to S, where everyone goes by whatever they state. He still hangs out with Dr. Hyde’s friends, even after they disappeared (their friends’ words, not his). Not just for the shots, though he’d be lying through his teeth if he said he weren’t immensely grateful for that part; everyone who talked to Dr. Hyde is a character. They really do whatever they want with how they look, and they laugh at the names they choose for themselves. There’s a Lassi in a sun hat (at S!) and shoes customed to pieces who’s a genius on the ramp, there’s Jang with a circular poem etched on the bottom of his all-black board and the ability to never run into anyone while riding backward on it, there’s an Eevee (the English spelling) who color coordinates her whole outfit to the day of the week and has old-school phone charms on her old-school jitterbug and can get insane air off the practice ramp, almost enough airtime to rival Langa. There are many of them. So many of them. Reki doesn’t think he’s met every single one Dr. Hyde’s ever talked to.
And then they all go out the gate at the end of the night and fade away into the morning sun.
Reki goes to S in his school uniform or his Dope Sketch tee. When he leaves the old mine ground, nothing about him changes. He’s still Reki. When he announced his name to the entire S population in the middle of that beef with Adam, he knew he’d get scuffed and scolded by at least five people, but it felt too right at that moment for him to hold onto that fear.
6. It starts like this: Reki looks down at the orientation survey on his desk, and every fucking thing on Earth comes the fuck back to him right there all at once.
Langa looks over at him quizzically, in the middle of pulling the mangle of lines in the characters on his own form apart, and Reki can give him nothing but an anguished groan. “The paper stuff,” he says, morosely. “My name’s written entirely different in the family registry.”
Langa gives it a think for two seconds – catching the other implication fast – and draws a breath through his teeth. It reminds Reki too, of the patches in the box in his closet drawer. Dr. Hyde’s been gone for months with no sign of resurfacing yet, but they left their friends with a lot. They left Reki with the memory of them smashing a board into someone’s face, outside of the track, for snooping on someone they knew. As well as a word on how to share what everyone’s saved up.
He doesn’t think, what a fucking mess this is gonna be. He refuses to.
He fills out the survey halfheartedly – the truth is he doesn’t think that much of the future. Reki sometimes makes fun of Langa for having not a single bit of a visual imagination, but in some ways he himself’s worse. He has troubles holding onto the numbers he puts into place in a math problem, he forgets where he’s put a tool down if it’s not exactly where he always leaves it, he doesn’t understand the flow of time. School is-- fine. Reki’s Reki at school, Reki with the skateboard he’s never more than two steps away from, Reki with the dyed hair and basically a chatelaine attached to his belt and the hoodies, Reki who’s not really that exceptional despite all that. Reki who gets hurt way too much, who gets chased around the school ground by security twice a week, who has just-barely-acceptable attendance. Reki who talks a lot and who nobody listens to. Just Reki. He doesn’t know if he wants even more school after this.
Their homeroom teacher looks through everyone’s form at the end. Reki can hear the tutting when his form shows up. He grinds his teeth through the rest of the school day.
Langa comes over that evening to do homework. It’s probably considered cheating, but Reki’s literally on unlicensed hormone therapy right now, so he’s not giving too much of a shit. He and Langa’ve been doing homework as a unit for a year by this point – it keeps both of their scores from getting too drastic, and it makes things go faster. Reki can answer English homework questions when Langa read them out loud for him, he susses out the logic of the math problems while Langa keeps track of the numbers, Reki translates any word Langa doesn’t know in their literature assignment, they just suck at history together. Reki doesn’t understand how the flow of time works at all; the school day lasted a thousand years, but doing homework with Langa takes minutes. They even have the time to run out to the skate park for a bit.
On the way Reki asks, “What uni did you write in?” He clarifies when Langa looks over in confusion, “In the survey this morning.”
“Oh.” Langa does a kickflip, probably to jumpstart his brain. “None.”
“No? No idea, or?”
“I can barely write.”
Reki rolls his eyes, to look away from the guilt threading its tendrils through the tissue of his liver. If Langa hangs out with, for example, their class rep, he’d be reading classics with his eyes closed by now. “Being an idiot didn’t stop half our school from dreaming all kindsa things.”
“I don’t know any uni here either.”
Reki laughs. “There you go.”
He spends the time at the skate park watching Langa mostly. They both have way too much on their mind. Langa thinks better when he’s skateboarding. Reki skateboards so he doesn’t think. It’s a system.
In his room that night Reki tells Langa, “you can probably talk to someone about that. Teacher, Suzuki, someone on the board even. They know you’ve just been back.” It’s been a year, but it’s also only just been a year. “They’ll be cool to help you.”
Langa’s quiet for a while, even though his phone screen turns dark. “About the… uni stuff?” He hazards a bold guess at the end. Reki huffs a laugh.
“No, about the cold front coming in this month. Yes, the uni stuff, Langa. We have two more semesters.”
Langa’s hand finds his. “Don’t put it like that. We have our whole life.”
“Oh my god, you sap, yes, our whole life.” Reki resolutely doesn’t acknowledge the way he’s blushing. Not like Langa can see it either, with them both in the dark, phones face down on their pillows. “The uni stuff! Don’t you think about that even a little bit?”
Langa chews on the question for a second. When he starts speaking again it’s in English, so Reki knows he’s angling to be rude. “Gonna be real with you, Reki, I don’t give much of a shit about it.”
Reki is so exasperated he can’t believe he’s laughing. “How,” he rolls over, slapping Langa lightly on his shoulder with the hand not held in Langa’s, “how are you doing that. How can you not care? ‘cause it’s not skateboarding?”
It takes another moment for the answer to come. “It’s gonna cost money,” Langa says, light as a whisper, “a decent amount of it at least. And there’s nothing I really want to study. I’d rather stay with my mom while she works.” Another beat of silence, and then, “I don’t wanna leave. At least just yet.”
Reki lets his hand go slack on Langa’s shoulder. His next breath in shakes, but he lets it go.
“I’m happy,” he says, when it’s been quiet for too long, “and I’m fucking mad that I’m happy. ‘cause you’re not going either.”
Langa’s hand around his tightens. “You’d get in with perfect score. It’d be unfair to the rest of them.”
Reki laughs.
7. It started with Adam, in a way. S started with Adam and Joe and Cherry Blossom. AdamandJoeandCherryBlossom. Reki sees in the ashes of it a familiar corpse.
He hated Adam. For months. And then he said his own name, Reki (out loud with no spelling to differentiate between versions of him), to the blur of colors that was the S attendance that night while Adam slipped around in the mud, and at the end of it he wondered who he’s been hating. He didn’t know a lick of this person. Adam evaporates every day under the sunlight, like Joe and Cherry and Shadow, like Lassi and Jang and Eevee. Like Snow.
The first time he met Shindo Ainosuke was at Cherry-- Master Sakurayashiki’s office. He came over to deliver a custom board – supposedly for Nanjo, but for arcane, obvious reasons he wasn’t at the restaurant. He was trying desperately to moderate between Shindo’s sneering and Master Sakurayashiki’s growls instead.
Nanjo grabbed his entrance immediately, probably entirely out of all other recourses by then. “We aren’t fighting in front of the kid,” he announced, gesturing mildly frantically at Reki, who was debating on whether to shield his face with the board or not. He didn’t make a decision in time to avoid Shindo’s eyes.
Reki knew who Adam was outside of S by that point. He could make an educated guess from the terrible poker face Master Sakurayashiki and Nanjo try to keep whenever the news switch over to talking about what a certain Shindo Ainosuke is doing in his campaign. The S costume is definitely effective – the pauldrons hide the exact width of his shoulders, the mask sharpens the lines of his face as well as hides the shape of his nose and eyes, the shoes and pants muddle up the ratios of his body, and the hair draws the eyes away from small details. Reki’s familiar with most of these techniques. He just uses a more permanent dye than the blue powder that washed away in that rain.
Adam, on the other hand, probably didn’t give a shit who he was then. Most possibly. Reki being an annoying little obstacle in his worldview aside, he must know the nature of S better than anyone else. He was the one who created it, designed it to be that open secret. To be impermanent. Things in S aren’t supposed to matter outside of S, and vice versa.
The sheer outrage in Shindo’s eyes when they caught his in that office almost broke him up. Seeing a politician, in a perfectly tailored suit with perfectly groomed dark hair, glare at him – without moving a single finger to actually do anything – was somehow the funniest thing to Reki right then. He had to cope by grinning at the man and waving.
“Hi, delivery!”
“That’d be for me,” Nanjo said, while Master Sakurayashiki cooled down and Shindo seemed to start simmering in his own suit. “Tell Oka I’ll wire the sum over.”
Reki didn’t wanna leave yet – wild thing to happen, given who was in the room with him – so he walked over to the window, looking down to where Oka was parked curbside, and yelled, “Client says it’s on the tab, Boss?”
Oka, bless his beautiful, loving heart, yelled back, “Tell him to go fuck himself?”
Reki turned around, looking in the vague direction of all three adults to repeat, “Go fuck yourself,” and then directly at Shindo with the biggest smile he could muster to add, “Mr. Shindo Ainosuke, sir!”
Nanjo was trying very hard not to laugh. Master Sakurayashiki looked mildly impressed, which Reki would remember until the day he dies. Shindo’s eyes narrowed, and then he huffed and squared up his shoulders.
“You don’t seem like the observant kind,” he chided, “given I’ve been here the entire time.”
Reki’s learned a number of things too, inbetween their beef and this day, so when he said “Oh, I’m so sorry, sir,” it was in the right tone to make Nanjo grip Master Sakurayashiki’s upper arm in his hand. “I must’ve just been worrying about the weather,” he said, channeling Miya’s lost child act. “Really hope we can make it back to the shop before it starts raining…”
Shindo actually looked out the window to check, and Reki had to garble out a “I must be off!” before bolting down the stairs to where Oka was waiting for him, or he’d break right then and there.
The first word he said when returning to Dope Sketch and a supremely bored Langa manning the counter was, “You wouldn’t fucking believe who I just saw.”
He hasn’t had a nightmare about Adam for weeks by that point – they’ve ceased after their beef. Reki’d guess it had more to do with stress than anything, he’s always had really graphic, oppressive bad dreams whenever he gets too stressed. Seeing Shindo in Master Sakurayashiki’s office that day seared the knowledge in for him, though: whatever that was before was done with. Over. Almost by design, for S, the physicalities of those moments bleeding away until only the memory’s left. Reki honestly wouldn’t even have the memory, after long enough. He sucks at remembering.
Langa, however, frowned at the knowledge that Adam was a politician in real life. “You don’t approve?” Reki asked, hanging around the counter for way too long between restocking the shirt shelves and hanging up the new boards.
“What’s that have to do with it?”
Reki didn’t even know what that question meant. “It happens,” he said, putting a shirt on a hanger. “Rich people are weird.” He thought of Eiji, when he spoke. Of a big house full of toys and distractions and devoid of familiar voices.
Langa only tilted his head in acknowledgement.
Reki thought, after their shift that day, on the way home, about the way Shindo could only sneer at him at most, when Adam dragged his back across twenty meters of sharp rock twice. He thought of Master Sakurayashiki’s dyed hair he’s kept since his high school days, and then of Shindo’s dark hair under the fluorescent light of the office. He ran a hand through his own hair absently – the texture was truly atrocious – and thought of the next hair-thing date on his calendar. It was coming up real soon.
8. It starts, here, with hanging the beddings out to dry with his mom.
Reki’s gotten into the habit of helping with the laundry since the twins; when they were tiny he was kind of afraid of holding them. They looked so fragile, so small – Koyomi was never so small, was she? Was he, too, once? And he drops things so much. So he assigned himself helping his grandma with everything else in the house while Mom and Pops focused on the babies, and the habit sticks, even now when Chihiro and Nanaka aren’t tiny anymore. He and Koyomi figure out their own bento after dinner (Koyomi’s been insisting. Reki can guess she’s sharing with someone), they run their own laundry load, he cleans his work shed and his room himself. Dinner’s always a two-person task now, sometimes three-person.
He thinks, sometimes, if he moves up to Nago he’d probably be able to manage himself. Somehow. Find a dirt-tier apartment, a job at a convenience store. Run down to S every weekend, hood up over his head, never looking anyone in the eye again.
“So,” Mom asks. When Reki looks over, she’s making busy draping the duvet cover flat across the wire. “You and Langa?”
Reki almost drops the pillow cover he’s shaking out. “Me and-- What?” He coughs, hiding his face behind a hand. “I mean, yeah, him? What about him? Langa?” Great start, Reki. Good job.
The severe caution in Mom’s eyes lighten a bit, though, so Reki can’t be too fussed with being a bit of a fool. A lot of a fool. “You know, I was rowdy too, when I was your age. If--” a tug on the duvet cover stutters, “if he makes you happy… it never has to be anything permanent, you hear. If you’re happy right now-- then I’m happy.”
Tall ask. Reki can’t tell her that, though. “We aren’t dating, Mom.”
“Oh.” A hand falls away from the wire. Clothing clips point straight up at the bright sun. “You aren’t?”
Reki sighs. He finally hangs the pillow cover up, just to keep his hands busy. Just the idea of trying to explain whatever it is that’s between him and Langa hurts his head. Maybe he can… make a compromise, or something. “I mean, I guess. If he proposes I’d probably marry him. He… he doesn’t seem keen on studying up right now, so. We’ll be sticking around for a while.”
“Really?” That’s genuine surprise. “That boy, so nice, and yet…?”
“He is nice,” Reki bites out. “Circumstances just suck for him.”
They hang up more beddings in silence. Then Mom offers, quietly, “If you go, then he’ll probably make an effort too.”
Reki almost laughs. No, fucking god, no way. “Mom, I’m a paperwork anomaly.”
“You can’t-- you shouldn’t let these kinda things stop you, Reki. You’re bright, you love tinkering. Just-- think about it?”
“Believe me,” Reki says, flapping a blanket open, “I’ve been mulling way too much on identity fraud.”
“You don’t have to, y’know. You can go as--”
“I’ve been on T for two years, Mom.”
When he looks over, Mom’s standing silent, staring at him. Well. Reki wouldn’t know how to react to that, either, so. He just grits his teeth and finishes hanging up everything in his basket, then goes back to his room and pulls out the travel bag.
Shit way to tell Mom there, but. Reki can-- needs to be honest to himself: he never really intends for her to know. How? Of course she wants him to get into a university. He knows she’s been saving up, especially with Pops here now, too. She’s just been too light-handed with him, ever since Dad left, he must’ve-- he knows he was a scary sight, before that. Nothing nice about a sullen, unkempt, spacey child. She’s always too lenient on him. She’s probably regretting it now.
Reki puts a few spare changes of clothes in the bag, along with the patches. He can go to Langa’s first, then he’ll-- check up with Joe or Cherry, if needed. He’ll figure something out with Dr. Hyde’s crew at S. They’d know what to do. Did Mom ask about him and Langa because-- He returns the textbooks trailing about on his bed to the backpack. The charger. Did she think that was what he and Eiji-- too--
Three light taps on the door he’s closed behind him. He turns towards it. “Reki.”
He steps in front of the opened travel bag.
“Reki, I’m not-- I’m not mad. I promise.”
Fingernails dig into his own palm. He can’t even really feel the sting, mostly the pressure. He’s always been a bit too hard-headed, whichever spelling of his name--
“We figured your high school entrance out, didn’t we? We can hash this out too.”
“I’m not going,” Reki says, through gritted teeth.
“It’ll have to happen anyway, your insurance, your license, your lease too, eventually-- do you intend to just--” A hand rests on the other side of the door. Reki can hear the paper rustle. “Are you really happy, like this?”
Reki drops himself down next to the travel bag.
“I just-- I just wish you’d tell me, when you do these things.”
Reki drops his head into a hand. Rough and scuffed from handling thinner and sealant and concrete ground and gravel and himself. Blindly, with the other hand, he reaches for his phone.
“You’ll-- we’ll keep you on dependent insurance, but that can only extend until you get a job, and. Reki, Mom and Pops, and Grandma, we’ll all… one day we’ll be gone, too.”
He doesn’t even have to unlock his phone. He has Langa on speed dial. Not Mom, not an emergency service, Langa. His hand just about remembers where the buttons are on the touch screen. Eevee has the right idea, he thinks, a jitterbug seems mighty convenient right now.
The call connects.
“It’s just-- it’ll be so much easier. Your life’d be so much easier, if you can…”
His phone’s completely silent. He knows Langa heard. You should’ve told the other Reki that, Reki thinks, but what he says is, “Thank you for not kicking me out.”
Mom’s silent on the other side of the door.
“I’ll be at Langa’s tonight, though. Schoolwork’s heaping up this time of the year, y’know.” And then, “’m sorry, Mom.”
When he walks through the door with the travel bag, the hallway’s quiet. The living room’s vacant when he walks past it. Reki gets outside, his own bag full of his own things in hand, under the bright sun, and still he thinks, when it rains it pours.
10. It starts, again, like this: The kid finds them both on the roof a week after they first met. He’s definitely gotten into another fight, a jacket sleeve torn open, but the scratches safely bandaged. He sets himself on his knees in front of Reki and Langa.
“I’m Kaneda Toshihiko, from class 3-E,” he says, to a Reki with his mouth agape and a Langa who’s blatantly staring, “and I want to learn how to be brave--”
“You can’t-- Do not kneel in front of us! Sit down, right now!” Reki points frantically at the ground. The kid – Kaneda – sits down where he’s pointed to. “Never do that to anyone, alright? That’s, like, supremely weird!”
Langa looks like he’s writing that onto the surface of his brain. Don’t kneel in front of people, it’s weird. Reki wants to smack his own face on a hard surface.
“I’ve been hearing about you,” Kaneda starts up again, determined to get through his whole speech. Reki holds in a sigh. He shifts to be less sprawled out on the ground. “Kyan Reki, class 1-B, you like skateboarding. Everyone knows who you are. But nobody messes with you.”
“Hold on. What do you mean, everyone knows me?”
Kaneda nods. “I asked around, everyone knows to point me to your class. Or the roof, here.”
Reki’s first thought after the hard reboot is, what did I do? And then, I’m famous? And, then, There are like eleven people in this school. C’mon, Reki. He yelled his name to a crowd last year. What do you mean, people know about me?
“Are we compromised?” Langa asks, from next to him. Reki acquires another thought.
“Man, okay. If you’re asking about being brave, you’ve got the wrong guy.” He points to Langa, who startles at the finger, for some reason. “There’s the brave one.”
Langa telegraphs Don’t throw me under the bus clear as day back at him. “Reki’s very brave” is what he says out loud, “but you’re… What you’re asking for isn’t about being brave.”
Kaneda blinks at Langa, clearly not expecting him to actually talk. Reki bristles a bit at that, on force of habit. People often talk in front of Langa like he’s not there – Reki was guilty of that, too. Langa deserves better, much better.
“Hasegawa…?” Kid looks like he can’t believe Langa’s even talking to him. In a slightly-too-awestruck way. Reki waves a hand at the both of them and returns to opening up his bento. He finds he’s more comfortable here. Strange – why did it feel so right, to be talked about and recognized at S, and here he’s struggling to wrap his head around a single person coming up to him for something?
“That’s my name,” Next to him Langa confirms. He then tears the packaging open on his midday bread, Kaneda fully off his mind immediately. Reki’s struggling badly to not laugh at the kid, who’s looking from Langa to him, as if to confirm that just happened.
“I-- that’s what I was talking about!” Kaneda bursts out. “Hasegawa arrived, and you just started hanging out with him! I-- this school’s like, your turf. How do you do it!”
Reki sets his bento down in his lap. He elbows Langa – already making eyes at the egg rolls, of course – and… chooses his words. “I’m gonna be honest with you, Kaneda, I have no fucking clue. But… most of the people I go to school with are kind. Nobody cares about turf or whatever, we’re all running after something, here. My advice’s just to, I don’t know, care about something else.”
“Like skateboarding,” Langa adds. Reki laughs.
“Yeah, exactly. Pick up a hobby, run after something too. You wanna try? I can get you a newbie board, I know a guy.”
Kaneda looks, sullenly, at the boards leaned against the wire fence next to Reki. “It won’t make me fight better.”
“You think nobody sticks around me because I’m good at fighting?”
“What else’d it be?” What reputation does Reki have with the first years, here? What the fuck’s happening behind his back? How is this a mess, already?
Reki sighs, again. Sets his bento to a side, before he accidentally drops it. “Kid, I’m just a weirdo who carries around a skateboard. That’s why people don’t hang out with me.”
Kaneda looks from him to Langa with doubt. Reki looks over too, and-- Langa seems hurt. He hastily rewinds whatever he just said, but Langa beats him to it, by holding his hand and saying a lot louder than his usual speaking tone, “Everyone in our class went to the same middle school too, except for a few of us like Reki and me. People like Reki, because he’s friendly and he helps out whenever he can. But people don’t mess with him because there’s no incentive.”
It’s true. It’s better advice too, than Reki’s potential other one, which is to bash their face in once or twice until they get the memo. Not everyone’s used to hiding like him, before. Not everyone’s become too much of an expert at it.
He changes his pose again, resting an arm on a raised knee. Thank fuck Langa never minds him wiggling around all the time. “Yeah, ‘s why I told you to get a hobby. When people pick fights with you they’re just looking for something you’re giving them easily. If you find something you’re ready to run after with all of your focus, you won’t be stopped by just some nosy idiot, and then they’ll get bored and leave. And you won’t waste your time swinging fists either.”
Kaneda frowns. “You didn’t even flinch, when I tried to punch you.”
“Ah!” Reki points a finger at him. “That’s not a good thing. Also I definitely flinched. Unlearn that immediately.” Really, what the hells does this kid think he saw? Reki can’t be an oldest child at school too, it’s exhausting.
“Then-- why did you interfere? If you were scared?”
I gotta wonder if you know scared, Reki thinks. Out loud he says, “Well… why not?” I have taken much worse. Don’t say that. “We had boards and you didn’t. You learn to do what you can.”
Kaneda just nods. He seems to be mulling over what he’s been told so far. Reki looks over to his bento, almost untouched, and mourns the lost break time. He waves at the kid’s torn sleeve.
“Are you gonna mend that?”
“Ah-- what?” Kaneda looks down to his wrist. His face immediately scrunches up. “Oh, no.”
Fucking hells. Reki wants to scream at the clouds. He settles with nudging Langa, who does have the emergency sewing kit with him, one single blessing about this whole lunch. “Alright, c’mere. At least learn how to fix shit up if you wanna pick fights. We can’t all be free of every consequence ever, y’hear?”
Kaneda stares at the sleeve the whole time Reki sews it up (a ladder stitch that’d hide the torn edge and quick hemming so it doesn’t fray and fall out for the rest of the day. If the kid wants anything fancier he’s gotta ask much nicer). Langa gives him pieces of his bread while he works, and Reki lets him pick through the bento in exchange. First afternoon period’s about to start when Reki cuts the thread.
When Kaneda stands up, he dusts himself off and takes a deep bow. “Thank you,” he says to the ground while Reki sift through literally anything he’s ever gone through to figure out how to respond to that. “I won’t trouble you any longer. Have a good day.”
Reki turns to Langa once the kid’s out the door.
“So,” he prompts.
Langa doesn’t say anything. He just stands up, Reki’s bento already wrapped up nicely again in one hand, the other held out to Reki. Reki uses it to level himself up as well. He picks up both of their boards.
“Do you think that?” Langa asks.
“Think what?”
“That you’re alone, and because you’re weird.”
Oh. Reki’s a fucking idiot, again. “I… I’m sorry, Langa. I didn’t think. It’s just-- that’s my shtick, right? At school.”
Langa frowns. “Untrue, with evidence.”
“I’m restructuring my whole understanding of what I’ve been up to here,” Reki tugs on his headband. He kinda wants to pull it all the way down to cover his eyes. “I’m-- I’m glad people’re kind, here. So nobody fucks with either of us.” So I don’t drag you down further.
“You’re not ruining me.”
Reki stares at Langa. “Can you read minds?”
“You’d be thinking that.” Langa’s hand around his tightens again. Reki doesn’t think he can ever run away from Langa again, on pain of death, but he knows how he’s hurt Langa. Langa deserves better. “You keep thinking you’re anything but completely amazing. I don’t understand it.”
The headband balls up in Reki’s grip. “Yeah? Amazing? Even the--”
“Including that. Especially that. You’ve always lept from taller cliffs than I can ever imagine, just because it’s right.”
“Don’t say it. Don’t fucking say I’m brave.”
“It’s not about bravery.” Reki refuses to tack on the but you are he can hear in Langa’s voice. “I want to be here with you. People want to be here with you. People like you.”
Reki thinks about the people who know his name at S. He thinks about Miya, and Shadow, and Cherry and Joe. He thinks about Oka, who’s the last person he still knows outside of his family to have seen him with that hair. He thinks about a tiny broken board in his workshop.
“Let’s go down before the teacher tears strips off our arms,” he says. But he returns the force of Langa’s grasp on his hand, just to let Langa know he’s heard what was said.
11. It’s very, very arguable if this’d be the start of anything, because it’s between Reki, an eighteen-year-old with so much paperwork troubles it’s insane, and a politician. And it’s also kind of a midway point, rather. Reki wants to say whatever flimsy, weird thing there is here between him and Adam’s started, and ended, at least a year ago.
But he’s not smart enough to be stupid on purpose; he has a question when he has a question. Adam doesn’t show up at S much anymore, and when Reki spots him he’s usually under some other costume than the Adam ones. He doesn’t skate when he’s not Adam, he just… stands around and watches people. Reki doesn’t know what he’s looking for, and he’s learned now, to not assume.
He did challenge Langa again at least a few times after the tournament. Reki hates to say it, but he recognizes something there: racing Langa is fun. Langa just loves skateboarding so much it’s hard to not get pulled into it with him, and that’s from one already-obsessed idiot. He’s so consumed by it, digging into every new nook and cranny of the sport with so much enthusiasm and ease that it feels like an adventure to trail after him. To put your whole into it too, find and show him new things. Langa keeps proclaiming how good Reki is as a teacher; Reki’s just lucky to get the ideal student who keeps up with everything and always wants to learn more. He’s always neck-and-neck with Adam, who’s still a bit too invested in the race, but that’s just S. Adam’s creation, there, from the get go.
It’s hard not to think about Adam, which Reki doesn’t enjoy, because that means Adam’s whole thing is working. It sucks. Reki’d like to think about something else more, really. It’s just… curious, learning about Shindo Ainosuke after the tournament. When the information was fresh, Reki couldn’t help thinking about Eiji too, whenever Adam barged back into his mind.
He thinks about Joe’s words, as well. From that tournament. We’re a bunch of muscle-brained idiot to be attached to this good-for-nothing sport. He thinks about Chef Nanjo, and Master Sakurayashiki of the new-media calligraphy workshop. About Hiromi, who started skateboarding for someone else, and then got a concussion after hour for it.
He needs to think less about Adam, because however much of that he’s done is enough to summon him in real life, apparently. Reki loathes that Adam’s managed to catch him off guard by showing up at Dope Sketch unannounced while he’s manning the counter, but he’s been behind this counter for years, so he’s not about to let Adam know that.
“Welcome to Dope Sketch,” he says, customer service smile on firmly, “newest arrivals on the far wall, are you looking for anything specific?”
Adam – Shindo – it’s a weird combination of both, actually, his hair’s blue of the same powder he uses as Adam but not spiked, and he’s definitely dressing down from both versions with the lack of a tie and a pretty plain pair of sunglasses. The client walks up to him and says, “I got the word here’s where I can find you at this time of the day.”
“You must understand that’s very weird,” Reki says, still in his retail voice.
Adam-Shindo frowns. “From Cherry Blossom and Joe.”
At least he knows someone’s tearing Adam a new one if something happens to him. Reki tries not to think about how this is one of the two shifts he doesn’t share with Langa, which means Adam’s really here to talk to him, specifically. He fails. He’s not smart enough to be able to do that.
Adam-Shindo glances around the shop. “You really do cling to this with everything, huh.”
Okay, he’s immediately getting on Reki’s nerves again. “Would you like to get anything specific, sir?”
“I want a custom repaint.”
“That will take a few days, would you like to put in a pick-up date or are we okay to call you when it’s done?”
Adam-Shindo’s eyes narrow behind the sunglasses. “I want it right now.”
Tough fucking luck, idiot. “We’re very sorry, but repaint service works strictly on a first-come-first-serve basis.”
“What’s the express fee?”
“Doesn’t exist, sir. Would you like to buy anything else?”
“How about I commission you directly?” Adam-Shindo’s voice is dropping to a growl. Reki lets himself feel just a little bit smug about that. “I’ve heard you’re handling most of the repaints here, anyway.” He seems disgusted by the idea of this establishment letting Reki do it, which Reki fucking adores.
“Very weird, sir.”
“From S! Half of S get their boards from here.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
Reki’s going to get punched, and it’ll be great because he can then use the broom on this man. He’s going to then be assassinated, but he’ll go out as the kid who made Shindo Ainosuke so mad he has to be killed off. Nobody’d know about it but him, and maybe Cherry and Joe, but he’d still go out happy.
It’s a bit of a problem, how fun annoying Adam’s turned out to be. Especially when he’s caught Reki off-guard and still can’t get the upper hand. This is not his playground.
Adam seems to realize that too, because he doesn’t punch Reki. He just stands there, hands in his pocket, until he figures out something.
In the end he just grits through his teeth, “I want to watch you work.”
It’s-- still weird. But Reki blinks, and remembers the feeling of holding an airbrush for the first time, of figuring out stencils and mixing paint to make a gradient with a roller. Of having an idea and pursuing it.
He wonders if Shindo misses being Adam. “Sure,” he says, which still surprises Adam-Shindo. Isn’t this the result the man was angling for? “Do you need to message your chaperones or something, before disappearing to the back with a random cashier?”
“I’m here alone.”
Reki doesn’t trust him about that. But he still gives him a mask, and sends Oka a message before he goes to the workshop out back.
“Reki,” it starts like that, once Reki’s safely one primer layer done on one of the two boards he has for the day. “You’re Kyan Reki.”
“Whoa, that’s new information for all of us,” Reki says absentmindedly, picking up the pencil. He starts transcribing the assigned sketch over the second board while this weird mix of Adam and Shindo Ainosuke figures out how to dance this dance.
“You’ve gotten a lot mouthier since last year.”
“Thanks, worked hard on that. Can you get me the protractor?”
The protractor does actually drop into Reki’s open palm. Huh.
“Do you not care that I know who you are?”
Reki bites on his lower lip. He marks the angle he needs, then freehands the line. “If it were this same time last year I’d be out of my mind about it, yeah. Now that I’ve shouted it to a hundred people you should pretend to not know me. That’d make me mad.”
“It didn’t.”
“Yeah you’re right, it didn’t. Fun to be petty, though, isn’t it?”
He can hear the scowl. “I’m above that.”
“Not above being in here, though,” Reki says to himself inbetween pencil strokes.
He really doesn’t know who’s in the room with him right now. Adam-- Adam is a part of S. A figment of someone’s imagination, untenable under the bright sun. Shindo Ainosuke, on the other hand, can keep an illegal gathering running untroubled for years – since he was a teenager, according to Joe and Cherry. Shindo Ainosuke has a spotless political profile. Neither of them would be in this workshop with a filtration mask on.
Reki thinks about it while the sketch takes shape on the board. He thinks about Joe and Cherry and Shadow and Miya. He thinks about Dr. Hyde, about their friends who adamantly refuse to remember anything too descriptive in the way they look. He thinks about Langa, who’s Snow to everyone there but one person.
He thinks about the sprained wrist and three stitches on the head he got, in his first beef against Adam. His wrist has sprained again once, and he’s gotten more head wounds. Muscle-brained idiot, the lot of us.
Even if I get injured, I won’t stop skating.
“Was it your idea to get a job here?”
“Being hired must be a foreign idea,” Reki says, not even looking up. “Yes. I’ve been here for three years.”
“So you just-- decided to make skateboarding your whole life.”
“Correct.” Not exactly. Reki was given skateboarding, too, and then the only thing he’s done is to not let go. He doesn’t know if he even has the ability to, now. Last time he felt like he wanted to, he took a beating and got run over by a car, and then Langa promised him infinity.
“Isn’t it about to ruin everything for you?”
Reki puts the pencil down and turns around on the workshop stool. “What do you mean?”
Adam-Shindo has his arms crossed. He’s taken off his sunglasses, but the filtration mask still makes his face unreadable. He’s blatantly staring at Reki. His voice has a forced evenness to it when he speaks. “I know about your circle. It’d be dangerous to not know at all about what you pass around at S.”
Reki doesn’t like the implication. “Did you report Dr. Hyde?”
“No! No.” Adam-Shindo actually looks somewhat outraged at the idea. “I look, I don’t tamper. Why would I care about anything but skateboarding, at my own skateboard ring?”
If you did report Dr. Hyde, someone’s putting you into the ground before the next S night ends, Reki thinks. It probably shows on his face (he doesn’t care). “So what’s this ruining my life here about?”
“You can’t really be this dense. Your family registry? Your insurance status? Your future?”
Reki stands up from the stool.
“Get out,” he says.
He’s satisfied to see Adam-Shindo actually startle a bit, but at the same time the same question as before returns to him. Who is this man? Reki doesn’t know him. Reki doesn’t understand a hair of him.
He sees more of Adam than Shindo in the seat when the man bites back, “Or what? What can you even do?”
“Or I’ll punch your light out and drag you out the back to leave in the trash.” Reki takes a step forward, to make sure Shindo understand he’s not fucking around. “This room has a live CCTV feed Oka has recorded. The footage will be in Cherry’s hand before you can reach it. You decide if it’s worth it.”
He hopes the lines around Shindo’s eyes means he’s clenching his jaws. “So you’d ruin your prospect further over trivial things like this?”
Abruptly Reki’s anger dissipates. The vacuum it leaves is so startling he can react with nothing but laughter.
He can tell Shindo doesn’t like that. “You’re such a detached asshole,” he says, more in Shindo’s general direction than at him. “Of course you’d think some light stalking is trivial. Of course you’d think about some punk’s prospect before you think about the way he LIVES!”
He takes off his mask. Lets Shindo see how he’s screaming.
“News flash, idiot, I’d never have any of that prospect stuff anyway!” His throat hurts the way it does when he cries. “It didn’t start when I started going to your midnight carnival! A freak isn’t spontaneously made, and a freak isn’t gonna go away because they get whipped enough by dickheads like you! I don’t stop being Kyan fucking Reki once I get out of S, I’ve always been Kyan fucking Reki, and I will be for as long as I’m alive.”
He swallows roughly.
“I’m not you,” he condemns. “I don’t do that washable dye shit. I don’t take off the costume I actually wanna be in at the end of the night. When I thrash some kid, I don’t get to leave in a fancy car and not see the consequence. I don’t get to throw an assistant at my problems to make them disappear. I just learn to get better at running away from the cops.”
Shindo’s quiet for a while after Reki’s done. When he speaks again, it’s much more careful. “All that, for a useless playact you aren’t even good at.”
Whoever you are is so fucking rude. Reki laughs, again. “Is that why you skate? Because you’re good at it?”
Shindo looks from Reki to the board behind him, and then to the floor. “No,” he says, more to himself than to Reki. “I started because Tadashi showed me. I kept doing it because it’s-- inconsequential.”
Reki huffs. He pulls the mask on again, and returns to his seat. “And then you stole a whole plot of land to feed your playact fantasy.” He picks up the pencil again.
“Yet all of you show up there.”
“We don’t disappear after the gates close, you know. You weren’t the first teen to skate in an abandoned house. Or even an abandoned mine.”
Shindo hums, and then falls quiet. Reki manages to focus on his job instead of the company until he’s ready to seal the second layer of paint.
“You can deny it all you want,” Shindo starts again when Reki hangs up the airbrush, “you’re squandering something, proceeding as you have.”
Reki holds onto the lessons he’s learned. “If you wanna tell Langa something, tell him face-to-face.”
“I’m here to talk to you. I can change anything you need changed in your family registry.”
Reki turns to the other board, the primer dried enough to sketch on. “Why’d you do that?”
“Why wouldn’t I? It’d take a phone call, nothing more.”
“No thanks. I don’t trust you.”
He feels Shindo’s eyes bore into the back of his head. “I can make any hospital you visit look away from any anomaly.”
“Rude fucking way to talk about it. No.”
“I can fund any surgery you want.”
“No.”
“I can protect your circle at S, too.”
“That’s your job from the beginning!” Reki’s not tracing very straight lines here. He turns around again. “You’re a Diet member. If you really wanted to be anywhere near us vermins you wouldn’t hide us. Are you done sitting around in here?”
He sees something fragile in Shindo’s eyes.
“There must be something for you outside of this,” the man says. “It can’t be worth this much pain.”
Reki looks at him. At the blue hair he’ll wash away at home, probably in a mansion somewhere on this island. He thinks about the applauses Adam gets that can’t follow Shindo home. He thinks about Eiji, about the skirt in the backpack, about the board they shared. About the board he broke.
“I made my choices, Mister Shindo,” he says, and returns to his work. “You can see yourself out when you deem fit. Oka should be out front.”
He gets to sit in silence that he doesn’t actually enjoy for a bit before Shindo-Adam-Ainosuke replies. “Don’t call me that. If you must refer to me, call me Ainosuke.”
Reki shrugs. “Alright. Mister Ainosuke.”
When he looks up from the finished sketch, Ainosuke’s already gone from the workshop. In the seat he occupied, the filtration mask lays, looking up at the ceiling.
12. It starts like this: Reki pops over to Langa’s place to re-dye his hair.
Langa’s scrunched his face all the way up the first time he touched Reki’s hair, which’s made Reki laugh until he almost fell off whatever it was he was perching on. Reki knows his hair sucks to touch. He has to sleep on top of it every night. He thinks Langa’s gotta be the most stubborn person on Earth, to still ruffle his hair every once in a while after that.
Langa’s hair is pretty soft. It really shouldn’t be, given the way Langa’s treating it. “Please give me the fucking comb,” Reki says, after witnessing whatever motion that was Langa just performed onto his own head. “And sit down so I can reach.”
“How do I know I can trust you,” Langa asks, innocently, “when your hair’s like that.”
“It’s because I’ve been bleaching it since I was fourteen! Which means I can do this in my sleep. You, on the other hand, won’t have any more hair on your head in three months if you keep doing that.”
“It’s been working!”
“You’ll be bald. I’ll redraw your board to have a bald yeti.”
“I’m being bullied,” Langa whines, but still hands the comb over and sits down on the edge of the bathtub.
They figure out the process between them. Reki lets Langa finish up first, then he takes his turn. Langa’s hair has almost dried when he gets out of the bathroom and back into Langa’s bedroom. Langa blinks up at him, from the ground next to the bed.
“That looks nice.”
“It’s literally the same as ever,” Reki says, wringing out his hair with the terribly stained towel he brought over. He doesn’t think Mrs. Hasegawa would be into having a red-speckled towel around the house.
Langa blinks. “No, your binder. I haven’t seen this one.”
“Oh!” Reki looks down. He does have the new one on, the one he put together from a pattern someone at S passed to him. He actually found yellow spandex for it, which was fun. “Oh, yeah. I just finished it. So fucking glad I didn’t have to take off any seam, felling all that shit into place once was already torture.”
He looks up, and the way Langa’s looking at him freezes him in place.
“What?”
“You’re so cool, Reki.”
Reki tugs the towel down to put his face in. Maybe suffocate himself in the process. He groans, “You have to stop. You can’t keep doing this!” He shuffles over, not being able to see anything. Langa taps him on the shin to let him know he’s about to walk on someone. When he drops down to sit, he lands on Langa’s bed.
“Why’d I stop?” Langa asks, perfectly innocently. Reki gives him a light kick.
“My mom thought we were dating, dude.”
“Oh.” Reki gets to dry his hair in peace for ten seconds. “Is that a bad thing?”
He takes a deep breath. “Absolutely not. In no way, shape, or form. I just-- y’know.” He takes a hand of the towel to gesture at himself, the same way he did it some time before, in this same room. “You’d be stuck with this.”
When he takes the towel off his head, Langa’s leaned his dry head back on the mattress, to look at him. “Reki,” he says, “I chose this. I chose to be here. Because everything about here is amazing.”
Reki looks away from him, to the hem of the binder he made himself. He wraps the stained towel around his head again, before the water can drip down to reach yellow.
“I think my mom wants us to date,” he says, words leaving his mouth before his ears can catch up from under the towel, “so I can return to--” He waves a hand. “Y’know,” he finishes lamely.
Langa rolls over a bit to headbutt him in the thigh. “There’s nothing to return to,” he says, into the mattress cover next to Reki’s knee, “you’re Reki.”
“100% factual.”
“Exactly.”
“My mom thinks I’m gonna be miserable like this. It’ll all stack up, until it topples over.”
Langa stays still for a bit. His voice’s a lot softer when he speaks up again. “I don’t think you are. Miserable, that is. You wouldn’t let it just happen, like I did.”
Reki closes his eyes. His hair’s heavy on his head, with the water still in there. When he can’t hold back anymore, he asks, “Do you still think it was your fault?”
Langa shakes his head. Pale hair musses up into a tangle on Reki’s knee.
“Not anymore,” Langa says. “Sometimes it’s nobody’s fault. Not the dead, not the living, not the freak event that happened. But I really couldn’t even breathe right, afterward. I couldn’t even go outside for weeks. I couldn’t understand how I feel, at all. I didn’t know the first thing to do to pick myself up.”
“And then,” Reki says.
“And then we met.”
Reki folds himself down, letting his hair fall off the curve of his knees. Langa pushes his head firmer on where their bodies meet, too. “You keep dressing that up,” Reki says. “You’d’ve managed, without me.”
“I don’t want to. If you’re miserable, one of us’ll find a way to pick you up.”
One of us. Langa, Oka, Miya, Shadow, Joe and Cherry, Dr. Hyde’s friends, kids at school. Koyomi, who hasn’t called him anything but big bro ever since she’s learned. Pops. One of us.
“I want to be happy,” Reki says, muffled through the towel and through his own skin. “I really, really want to be fucking happy, even though I’m forever gonna be some good-for-nothing weirdo running after the fun stuff.”
He feels Langa’s arm on his back. Langa’s hair mixed in with his. “That’s what I am,” Langa says, “and I’m really happy to be with you.”
13. It ends like this: Reki and Langa crash by S one night to find Joe and Cherry talking to someone in a tank top, cardigan, and flowing dress. It’s not how they used to dress at all, and they have a brand new board, but Reki can’t help remembering that face.
He about screams at them. “You’re back!” He’d tackle them, if he didn’t know he’d get his ass kicked for it. He settles for waving his arms around a lot, to Langa’s amusement.
Dr. Hyde’s too, if their smile is anything to go by. “Can’t keep a bad doc down.” They then realize they have to look up to find Reki’s eyes, and their glance turns into a glare. “Spent the whole year I wasn’t here stretching?”
“Stressing, if anything,” Reki groans, draping himself back against Langa. “I got this much taller because Langa drags me out the door by my legs every day while I cling to my bed.”
“That’d just make your arms longer,” Langa states confidently. Dr. Hyde looks over to him. “Hi.”
Joe laughs. “That’s Snow,” he introduces Langa, “he got here after you went on sabbatical. And you know Reki.”
“Half this place does,” Dr. Hyde glares harder at Reki. He shrinks into his hoodie a little bit. “Thought you were the creative type, kid.”
“Sorry,” Reki squeaks, at the same time as Langa’s completely even “I like Reki.”
“The name! The name!” Reki punches him in the arm (lightly) while Joe chokes on something and Cherry takes a visible deep breath through his mask. “Can you think before you talk!”
“Yes. I do like Reki.”
Reki ought to bite him on the arm. He can’t even look up from his palms right now.
Dr. Hyde is still Dr. Hyde, even with the tank top and the dress, so he can feel their amusement when they say, “Eh, guess Reki works.”
14. It starts like this: he sits down at their dinner table when only Mom’s there. Grandma’s in the living room watching TV, Pops’ out in the garden trying to coax a new plant out of dew sickness, Koyomi’s done prepping her bento hours ago, the twins nap in their room. Reki sits down face-to-face with his mom, a bowl of tangerine in hand. He pushes it to the middle of the table after taking one.
“Reki,” his mom says, quiet. He wonders which spelling of his name she’s thinking of in her head, then shakes the thought off.
He starts peeling the tangerine. “I’m looking at a few apprenticeships after high school. I was recommended for three of them.” He recounts in his head. “Four.”
His mom blinks. She reaches for a tangerine, too. “Recommended? By who?”
Reki smiles. “My friends,” he says.
His mom looks up from the tangerine in her hand.
“I won’t stop my hormone course,” Reki says. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. But I’m--” He curls a hand around the piece of tangerine peel he just pulled off. “I’ve met a lot of good people, ever since I got to go to school as Reki. And we look out for each others.”
A hand reaches for his. He leaves the tangerine to take it.
“I’ll be looked after,” he says. Reki says. “And I’m-- I’ll manage to be happy.”
15. It starts here, too, in the future Reki doesn’t think too much about: Shindo Ainosuke kisses his assistant on live TV. Reki and Miya roll their eyes at the screen, while Joe and Cherry immediately start bickering over some kind of bet. Langa’s too busy finishing off his plate to even notice.
The lease or whatever for the mine S is built on is never straightened out, but it’d take more than the forces available on this island to snuff them out. Someone’s always lighting the course. There’s more places to skate at. Langa and Reki find at least three abandoned plots up in Nago, where they bring nets out to round up and put on a light for the drama of it.
16. It starts like this: Reki looks over to the drone following him, through the rain pouring down the track. His hair’s still red. His board’s still under his feet. “The name’s Reki,” he yells, cloth-bound lungs bubbling with something bright and gleeful and precious, “and don’t any of you forget it!” When he flies over the finish line, the rain itself chants, Re-ki! Re-ki! Re-ki! Re-ki!