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If you handed Akito a marker and a calendar, he could mark out every single day where his life was changed. They’re points with defined beginnings and ends; chapters where he’s never the same as the one prior. More importantly, he can make sense of them, could probably tell you exactly what happened to make them worth remembering.
There was Ena, and then there was his first dream, but that one was more of a prologue. Then there was the dream that changed his life, and the day he found out the truth of it. Of course, people passed in and out of his life, and if you caught Akito on a day where he was feeling particularly honest, he’d say the people he’s spent the last few years of his life with are the ones he treasures most. It’s a little more complicated than that, though.
If you asked Akito to instead mark the day he fell in love, he couldn’t do that. He could tell you the day they met or the day they first kissed, but to ask for the day he realized it is to ask for him to search for something that doesn’t exist. Not because he doesn’t -- because there isn’t a single day for it.
Love isn’t something he ever had to search for, or had explained to him in some massive revelation that made every missing puzzle piece click into place. It was more like something that was always there, and instead had to be named as such.
It was Kohane who had to point that out to him, actually. “It’s a little different,” she had said, sitting across from him in a cafe while the others were outside, “when you grow up with it. Ah, not -- not that I had a bad childhood or anything. But when you know what you want to do with yourself so early… then it’s a little hard to imagine not having that, right?”
The other half of the conversation, strangely enough, came from Mizuki. “She has a point,” they’d said, hanging upside down off of An’s couch, when Akito mentioned it. “Well, she was probably thinking of An, but that’s ‘cause An’s the same as you. She’s always known who she is, and has so much love to give, but those things are the same to her. So she couldn’t really realize it until it was right in front of her face… or something. Hey, can you pass me that color?”
That was more or less the end of the useful advice Mizuki had to give, but it was enough to get Akito thinking. The nail in the coffin, more predictably, came from An’s father. “The fact you got two different people to think of the same person is probably proof enough,” he said while cleaning a glass. “But the fact you’re still coming to this old cafe is proof too -- don’t look at me like that. You’re still here because you love music and you love this town, even if it didn’t love you back at first, right?”
Ken-san sat the glass down and picked up another one, making the same sweeping motion with his rag. “Love is a lot of things. You just didn’t see that until now.”
Those words still rattle in his brain from time to time. Maybe it’s more apt to call it a headache that flares up when he thinks about it for too long, or an itch whose presence he’s suddenly aware of. Because when he looks at Toya, he doesn’t know what definition is right.
It doesn’t feel right to call Toya his better half, or the part that makes him whole, or the person he can’t live without. That’s not why he loves Toya. It’s not because Toya accepted his hand when he extended it that day, leading him out of the cage that shackled him, and not because Toya had become hellbent on paying the favor forward ever since then.
Akito loves the bird that has flown free of its cage for being able to spread its wings, not because of how often it returns to visit.
Toya is his own person -- he’s learned how to be unapologetically himself again, able to stand on his own two feet and reclaim what was kept from him. Everything that he had to stifle, every simple joy he wasn’t able to experience until now, and maybe Toya made the realization before Akito did, after all.
Akito is his own person, too. Always has been, and has always known that. Even still, they don’t know everything about each other. There’s still burdens that Akito keeps to himself, or secrets that Toya is strangely determined to keep, but they’re more or less at peace with that now. It’s not necessary for them, just as a lot of things aren’t.
“It’s less that we can’t do anything without each other,” Toya had said to him one night, sounding more like he was reciting something rather than just saying it outright, “and more that there’s nothing we can’t do together.”
When Akito asked where he’d learned a line like that, he laughed and shook his head. “Something I read a while ago,” came the answer, and it ended there.
A lot of their conversations have ended like that, lately. Maybe a few years ago Akito would’ve pushed harder for an answer, trying desperately to understand this person who’s so different from him, but it doesn’t seem all that necessary now.
The first day they met, Akito couldn’t make sense of the boy with so much determination in his eyes and hesitation written across every other feature, or the hands that sat firmly in his lap, never thinking to reach out.
It’s so much different now. Maybe Akito was the one who helped Toya up from the ground, but it’s by Toya’s own effort that he’s able to smile and laugh the way he does now, and seeing that might be the thing Akito loves most about him.
Even in a universe where Toya doesn’t love him back, even in a universe where they only cross paths for the briefest of moments, Akito thinks he’d still feel the same. As long as they get the chance to meet each other, then Akito would love him, because love is a lot of things.
Love is what he felt when Ena would patch up his scrapes and bruises and grass stains every other day, despite her complaints. Love is what he felt when he walked onto Vivid Street and heard music from every corner. Love is what he felt when he first picked up a microphone, and when one microphone turned into two, and two turned into four. Love is what he felt when he stepped on stage and the concerned whispers of years ago turned into roaring, thunderous applause, because he finally, finally understood.
And every time Toya opened up to share a part of himself, every time Toya took back a piece of his life with his own hands, and every time Toya turned to look at him after a successful live with a smile that could rival the stars, Akito understood that was love, too.
Because he sees it now, with the crowd at a fever pitch and what feels like a million spotlights shining in his eyes. It’s there when he grabs Toya’s hand in his own, and the others follow suit as he leads them into a bow -- this, all of this is love, and he couldn’t imagine a single world where he lives without it.