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When Aizou was young, he imagined love like a crescendo. Love was his father on his guitar and his mother on the piano, melody and counter melody flowing together in a rush of brilliant feeling. Love was the thing that waited with open arms at the end of the day, inevitable and certain as the sunset. A man and woman framed prettily in a photograph, smiling and perfect.
Love was the thrill of standing onstage in his best clothes, searching the crowd for his family and knowing they would be looking back at him. It was the music that lingered in the air all around him like the heartbeat of a great slumbering monster, and it was the golden feeling that bloomed in his heart when he heard the announcer call him forward to affix a shiny ribbon to his clothes. It was in fairy tales and love songs and the earthy scent of freshly cut flowers sitting in a vase in the middle of the kitchen table.
“I loved your mother from the moment I first saw her,” said Aizou’s father wistfully as his younger son ruffled through the pages of his picture book. Across the room, Ken put down his toy train and mimed throwing up. “I looked at her and I just knew.”
“Okay.” Aizou inspected the illustration of a dashing prince on one knee in front of a blushing princess. He wasn’t sure if this whole love-at-first-sight thing was for him, but it seemed to make people happy. Aizou liked making people happy.
His father patted his head fondly. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“Okay,” Aizou repeated, and wandered off to where his brother was hunched over in concentration. One of the trains careened loudly into where four others were carefully arranged in a vaguely circular shape. Ken made an exploding sound and sent the entire collection flying.
Love was heartbreak, Aizou would decide a few years later. If his parents were a crescendo when they were together, they were equally explosive as they fell apart. Ken gripped his hand tightly as they sat on the floor of their shared bedroom, pretending not to hear their mother’s shaky sobs.
Love was his father’s treasured guitar left forgotten in its place by the window, collecting dust. Aizou waited for his mother to leave the apartment before dragging the guitar off to his room, where hopefully she wouldn’t remember to throw it out in a fit of rage. Some days her anger burned through all the air in their home, clumsy and directionless, leaving broken glass on the floor and swollen red welts on Aizou’s arm when he forgot to turn off the music before she got home.
Love was the heady stink of perfume and alcohol on her breath every night as she staggered through the front door. Sometimes the drinking made her kinder, warmer, more like the woman he remembered at the piano, and she would hold Aizou to her chest and make him promise not to leave her. “Promise me you’ll never fall in love,” she mumbled drowsily, wrapping her fingers too tightly around his wrist. “I’ll never forgive you if you leave me, too.”
Aizou learned to make himself scarce on those nights. He bought a pair of cheap headphones with the money his mother left out for him and Ken. He kept music like a secret and wondered if one of these days he would drown in it.
Ken fell in love every other week. At least, that was what Aizou heard him saying over the phone, the same sweet words repeated over and over to girls that never stayed long enough for Aizou to remember their names. “They’re all the same to me,” he said as Ken held up a picture of another girl with long shiny hair and glossy lips. “Why do you even bother?”
Ken just shrugged. “I’m just having fun,” he said, leaning back in his chair. His drawl seemed to mimic the men who would come knocking some nights with their ugly clothes and stinking breath. Aizou’s mother liked them because they didn’t remind her of his father, she once confessed as Aizou held a glass of water to her lips without making eye contact. “He’s not pretending to be someone he isn’t,” she mumbled drowsily. “That’s good enough for me.”
Love was a game, Ken told him. Love was a lie, his mother said. Love was showing another person exactly where to hurt you and letting it happen. Love was hurting them back.
Aizou meets Yuujirou and there is no grand crescendo.
Yuujirou is neither a dashing prince nor a blushing princess. Aizou first sees him at the Möbius idol auditions, sitting primly with a book—who brings a history book to their idol audition?—in his lap, choppy asymmetrical bangs over round blue eyes that seem altogether out of place with his sour expression. When he speaks, Aizou is reminded strangely of a cornered little cat, ears flattened and fur bristling.
There is no shortage of sparkling, sunny would-be idols in the room. Aizou pretends not to notice them flitting about, sizing up the competition, making friends. Aizou doesn’t have friends, not really; he has classmates that sometimes invite him to play basketball and clap him on the back when their team wins, but they don’t think to pry into his life and he isn’t interested in theirs. It’s simpler that way. His headphones are a protective barrier: Here is Aizou, and there is everybody else.
Yuujirou cuts through the barrier without even trying. Maybe it’s because Aizou sees something of himself in the other’s tightly wound isolation, but he just doesn’t know how to leave Yuujirou alone, not when he’s so cold and infuriating and smug. He seems to relish the way Aizou recoils at his taunts, and Aizou thinks he wants nothing more than to tear him down to size. That same day, Aizou sings in front of a real, breathing audience for the first time in years. He can’t remember the last time he felt so alive.
He dreams of blue eyes that see right through him and something else, too, something brand new and electric humming just beyond the reach of his fingertips, still not quite close enough to hold in his hands but almost there. Like a star about to fall into his open palm.
He sees Yuujirou again because of course he does. Yuujirou looks at Aizou like he wants to claw his eyes out, and Aizou hopes it’s obvious that the feeling is very mutual. To everyone’s confusion, President Tamura is more than delighted with them both. Instead of debuting a solo idol as planned, she wants them to be a unit, a duo, a pair. “When I saw you together at the auditions,” she says rather cryptically, “I knew you two would have a lot to learn from one another.”
Aizou will never understand that woman.
Much to his chagrin, Yuujirou is brilliant. Aizou knows this. He was brilliant during their auditions and he’s just as brilliant now. He carries himself with a practiced grace that Aizou has never seen in anyone their age, and his voice is sweet and warm and everything that his personality is not. Aizou watches as Yuujirou repeats the same choreography over and over, brow furrowed in deep concentration. “Can’t let you win,” he hisses under his breath when he catches Aizou looking at him. “Good luck with that,” Aizou replies without thinking, and instantly regrets it.
“You sound good together,” says a young man with an intimidating number of piercings, some company senior tasked with babysitting him and Yuujirou as they fumble through their lessons. He’s right, but Aizou is afraid he’ll never live it down if he admits it aloud. As much as they can’t stand to be in the same room as each other—they really can’t—there’s a strange kind of magic that happens in those rare moments when they fall into the same rhythm and Aizou can almost believe in whatever it is that President Tamura says she sees in them—potential, perhaps, or fate.
He thinks about fate again when he finds himself wandering through an unfamiliar neighborhood in the rain—a complete accident, he swears—and glances around a fence to see a blue shape crumpled on the wet pavement outside a large traditional-style house. Aizou is too far away to make out any of the words being said, but he recognizes the slump of Yuujirou’s shoulders as the sleek black car drives away, and he has the sinking feeling that he has witnessed something too intimate, too fragile to fit within the strained partnership they have. The rain continues to pour in heavy sheets, and Aizou turns to run home.
Aizou remembers hearing something about Yuujirou’s family—they were like kabuki royalty, someone had exclaimed. Yuujirou just winced and changed the subject, which had confused Aizou at the time. Surely Yuujirou would love the chance to dangle something like that over his head, he thought. He should have known then that they were the same, that families had countless ways of breaking your heart again and again.
He can’t bring himself to make eye contact with Yuujirou the next day. The other boy is still missing a signature for his contract, the sheet of paper warped and torn from exposure to the elements. Yuujirou’s expectant glare bores into his skin. Well? Aizou imagines him saying, Aren’t you going to say anything? Out of habit, Aizou opens his mouth to speak, remembers Yuujirou’s trembling silhouette on the ground, and says nothing.
Aizou can’t stand Yuujirou. This has always been true. But lately, he finds that he can’t stay away from him, either. He puzzles over Yuujirou the same way he would approach a particularly difficult math problem: Why him, out of everyone? How can he go from sweet and charming to sullen and argumentative in an instant? Why does Aizou always feel like he’s looking right through him? Does he do that to everyone else?
“We’re going to have to get used to each other eventually,” he says when Yuujirou notices him running to catch up as they leave the company building. He doesn’t say, I want to know more about you because you’re not like anyone else I’ve met and talking to you is annoying but it doesn’t make me want to crawl out of my own skin, which is an improvement, because that would be weird.
Yuujirou looks at him strangely anyway. “Fine,” he says. Aizou studies the little crease in his forehead that appears whenever he’s trying to work something out.
“Hey.” Aizou puts a hand on Yuujirou’s shoulder as they walk, just for a moment, and they both stutter to an awkward stop. This is new for the both of them. “We could get a snack before heading home. I’ll pay,” he offers, even though he doesn’t exactly have the money to spare.
“Oh, really? Can I pick?” Yuujirou has a gleam in his eye that Aizou recognizes from that time he hadn’t noticed the meeting room door was marked pull and slammed his poor shoulder into the glass in front of the company president and a gaggle of her underlings.
“W-wait, no, I mean I’ll pay within reason! Don’t take advantage of my kindness!”
In the end, Yuujirou shepherds him towards an ice cream stand that is only slightly overpriced and orders a sugary monstrosity that’s obviously just on the menu to bait all the food bloggers into taking cutesy photos to post on Honeygram. And he doesn’t even take a picture of the thing before inhaling it all, the asshole.
Aizou is frowning at what’s left of Yuujirou’s dessert when it hits him. “Manager Uchida is not going to be happy about us eating all these sweets,” he says, thinking of how the staff had recently started tracking their diets.
Yuujirou shrugs, his usual demeanor softened by the satisfaction of free food. “I won’t tell if you don’t,” he says breezily, a slight smile playing around his lips.
Aizou smiles back in spite of himself. Months later, he’ll wonder if that was where it all began.
Slowly, quietly, Yuujirou finds his way into the empty spaces of Aizou’s life. Or, to be accurate, Aizou invites him in without fully realizing he’s doing it.
Aizou’s favorite hideaway in the park is a repository for all of his sorrows, his dreams, his fears. It’s where he goes to be alone, really, when the apartment and all of its memories are collapsing in on him and he’s overcome with the urge to run, to get anywhere else so he can finally breathe. There, away from the glittering lights and frenzied movement of the rest of the city, Aizou feels the most like himself.
By now he knows at a glance when Yuujirou isn’t ready to go home for the day. He already looks faint enough to collapse, partly from physical exertion and partly from frustration at himself for not having mastered their latest choreography fast enough. He’s always hardest on himself, always acting as if he has something to prove, and something in Aizou aches when he looks at him.
It can’t be gentleness or kindness or warmth—Aizou gave up on those things a long time ago—but he goes to Yuujirou, both of them exhausted from school and practice, and shows him the park, the trees, the endless sky. They’ll keep dancing here, together, and the wind can carry both of their burdens.
Yuujirou becomes a familiar presence in the practice room, in the park, in the music shop with the owner who lets Aizou do homework at his desk and try out the new guitars after closing up for the day. There’s a reverence in Yuujirou’s eyes as he takes in the crowded walls of instruments old and new, admires the way the light reflects off finished wood and gleaming brass. He runs an elegant finger absentmindedly along a keyboard, lost in thought.
“Do you play?” Aizou asks curiously.
“A little bit.”
Aizou thinks of his mother’s piano left untouched at home and the woman who used to play it. “Maybe someday we’ll play something together. Me on guitar and you on the piano,” he says, almost wistful. “After we debut.” It’s a phrase they’ve been trading back and forth more lately, something between a wish and a promise. After we debut, we’ll come here again. After we debut, we’ll settle this debate. After we debut, we’ll do everything we dreamed about.
Yuujirou holds his gaze for a moment. “That would be nice.”
Aizou may not know what it’s like to have a friend, but he’s beginning to understand what it means to have a partner. For better or for worse, they have no choice but to put their trust in one another. And for all his faults, he can’t imagine doing this with anyone but Yuujirou.
Yuujirou, too, changes with the seasons.
He smiles more, for one—his real smile, not the fake, angelic one he plasters on easily for photoshoots and business meetings. His genuine smiles are still rare, smaller, more tentative, a moonbeam peering out through heavy clouds.
“It suits you,” Aizou says stiffly after Yuujirou gets his hair cut. It’s the objective truth. Yuujirou’s new haircut actually frames his face instead of hiding it, with the added effect of making the asymmetrical bangs look less like a teenager’s impulse decision and more like an intentionally quirky flourish.
Objectively, Yuujirou has a nice face. It’s better for both of their careers when people can see it.
Yuujirou turns away at the compliment, cheeks flushing faintly with embarrassment. “Why should I care what you think? Just go back to practicing,” he says, petulant.
“Whatever,” Aizou says. “Your personality still sucks.” That’s what I get for being nice, he’s thinking when he notices Yuujirou in the practice room mirror, seemingly lost in thought and smiling to himself.
Yuujirou’s kindnesses are similarly concealed. This sneaks up on Aizou like everything else does, in so many little things that accumulate over time—When did he start reaching out instinctively for the bottle of water he knew would be already waiting for him? When did his broken hair ties, hastily knotted back together so Aizou could keep using them, start disappearing and getting replaced by brand new ones?
There are no grand gestures, no flowers, no sweet words. Instead, Yuujirou guffaws loudly when Aizou slips on an unmarked wet floor and goes on ahead without him, leaving Aizou to forget about the incident entirely until a day later, when he overhears Yuujirou’s raised voice coming from behind a closed door.
“—lucky he didn’t hit his head or anything!”
Manager Uchida’s voice is apologetic. “I know, I know. I’ll talk to the cleaning staff when I have a chance, okay?”
Yuujirou mutters something unintelligible and storms out of the room to collide directly into Aizou.
“You’re late today,” Yuujirou says.
“You’re early,” Aizou responds, suddenly unsteady on his feet.
Yuujirou brings him back from the edge, again and again.
Aizou has never been able to mask his feelings the same way that his brother Ken always has with the girls he dates, or the way that Yuujirou effortlessly slips in and out of his idol persona like he’s shrugging off a jacket. He doesn’t have Yuujirou’s single-minded determination or confidence. He only knows how to be himself, unsure and imperfect and too sensitive for his own good.
All he knows is keeping his distance. He’s seen heartbreak from up close, and deep down he knows he’s not strong enough to withstand it, if he let himself care for something or someone and they pulled the rug out from underneath him. It would shatter him like a beer bottle against a wall. Another impossible problem: Aizou desperately wants to be the kind of person who brings others happiness, yet nothing scares him more than receiving that same joy in return. The closer he gets to his dreams, the more it eats away at him. An idol should be someone brilliant, unbreakable, a shining star in the darkness, not a boy from a broken home who can barely remember what it feels like to be loved. If anyone saw Aizou for what he really was, he’s certain he’d lose everything.
But of course, Yuujirou sees him. He always has. Every time Aizou thinks he’s falling apart, Yuujirou finds him and refuses to leave until Aizou feels whole again. He doesn’t want to do this unless they’re doing it together, Yuujirou tells him in the park with the trees under the endless sky like a vast dark blanket, and Aizou thinks, Oh, and he thinks, Me, too, and for a second he forgets to be scared.
Love, Aizou decides, is not always like a crescendo. Sometimes it’s grass stains and petty fights and being fourteen years old and so, so stupid. Sometimes it’s standing onstage hearing the crowd roar loud enough to make his ears ring for days, and it’s gripping someone’s hand as hard as he can and feeling them squeeze back, and it’s Yuujirou smiling at him under the blinding stage lights and knowing without question that he is not alone.
Love is being fifteen and then sixteen and still so stupid. It’s tormenting their junior manager and falling asleep studying and searching the audience even though he said he wouldn’t come and still finding him there anyway. It’s the fear Aizou feels every time Yuujirou goes off on his own to do something stupid and reckless and secretly kind, and it’s the overwhelming relief he feels when he comes back safe. It’s not knowing whether to call him a friend or colleague or partner, and it’s knowing that it doesn’t really matter because they have more than enough time to figure it out.
Love is the way Aizou understands Yuujirou without words. It’s fighting and coming back the next day and making up, as many times as they need to, and it’s the unspoken promise every time that one day they’ll be ready to talk about it out loud. At their own pace, in their own time, together.