Work Text:
The pool is a mess by late November, when the lagging tail of typhoon season that never seemed to end has finally petered out and given them a few uninterrupted weeks without rain. Seeing to it is technically within the purview of Tadashi’s father, de facto promoted from gardener to groundskeeper when Ainosuke-sama downsized the house staff after the former master’s death; Tadashi’s already been in his usual strained contact with him about hiring some temps to help with that and other miscellaneous upkeep when, one brisk afternoon when the ladies are out of town, Ainosuke-sama decides he simply must skate in the pool right then and all but drags Tadashi out through the garden on his mission.
Ainosuke-sama doesn’t listen to any protests about the work that needs to be done—not unusual in and of itself, but he doesn’t often ignore him quite so blithely. It’s only when they actually reach the pool and Tadashi sees the tools and cleaning supplies laid out in wait for them that he starts to realize the meaning of Ainosuke-sama’s smug smile—and only when Ainosuke-sama doesn’t hesitate to roll up his sleeves and pick up a large broom himself that his mind catches up to what he’s seeing enough to react.
“Ainosuke-sama, what are you—?”
“Kikuchi had everything we’d need,” Ainosuke-sama says; he says “Kikuchi” as if there’s no relation. “It shouldn’t be that much work.”
“I was making arrangements with the groundskeeper already,” Tadashi says, because he can claim no high ground in regards to how he speaks of his family, either. “There’s no reason for you to trouble yourself with something like this.”
He’s not sure if the slight defensiveness he feels leaks into his tone, or if it’s even warranted. A few months ago it would have been easy to call this passive-aggressive, his mercurial master spiting him for not having the pool tended to quickly enough—like something Aiichiro-sama might have done, perhaps, even though Ainosuke-sama’s imitations of the kind of casual cruelty that had come so naturally to the former master when Tadashi served him had never quite stopped feeling like watching a child playing pretend in his father’s clothes.
But things are different now. There’s no spite in Ainosuke-sama’s eyes when he laughs, warm and more… unburdened than he’s been in years, maybe as long as Tadashi’s known him.
“This place is one of the only things in this godforsaken house that’s mine.” Ainosuke-sama sounds proud, happy even through the bitter—and undeniably accurate—descriptor, and when he smiles, there’s a softness in his eyes that Tadashi’s not sure he’ll ever be entirely used to seeing on his adult features, least of all directed at him. “I ought to take proper care of the things that belong to me, wouldn’t you agree?”
He twirls the broom elegantly in one hand despite its unwieldy size and weight, brandishing it like a rapier to point at Tadashi’s chest. The soft smile turns playful, mischievous, making Tadashi’s heart flutter in a way that the Tadashi of a few months ago wouldn’t have believed it still could.
“As you wish, sir,” he agrees, and Ainosuke-sama huffs, amused.
“Then be a good dog and make yourself useful,” he says, and Tadashi realizes he’s smiling to himself, too, when he takes off his jacket to obey.
Clearing out the pool isn’t overly hard labor for two fit men by any means, and though it is tedious, Tadashi finds it more gratifying than he’d expected to be out on the grounds working with his hands again. He’s always liked structured, tangible tasks, being able to do something and immediately see the results in front of him. Of course his typical work for Ainosuke-sama is fulfilling—he’d always been proud of his service, even for Aiichiro-sama, and Ainosuke-sama relies on him for far more than his father ever did—but the bone-deep, physical satisfaction is something he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed in the decade and change it’s been since Aiichiro-sama had set his sights on him.
Ainosuke-sama seems satisfied, too—he hums Mozart and Beethoven to himself as they clear away the leaves and debris, doesn’t balk at getting his trousers dirty to get down on his knees and pluck out the weeds that have started to grow in the cracks in the cement. Even with the chill of autumn in the air, they both still work up a sweat scrubbing every centimeter of the pool clean, but Ainosuke-sama wears that exertion well; his face is attractively flushed, and with the product mostly melted out of his hair, it hangs long and loose in his face, leaving him looking casual and unguarded in a way Tadashi only has minutes to see him when he first wakes him in the morning—but Ainosuke-sama at the crack of dawn doesn’t have this life to him, a jaunty, almost child-like energy in every movement and expression, even after hours of work, that’s far more Adam than he usually lets himself be without the comfort of his mask.
Child-like—that’s exactly what this is, Tadashi realizes, what it reminds him so much of. Ainosuke-sama had snuck out to join Tadashi and his father in the garden more times than Tadashi could count when they were young, demanding, even ordering if he had to, that he be allowed to help with chores far beneath his station. Tadashi had found it baffling, even frightening—as had his father—but he’d relished every stolen moment in Ainosuke-sama’s company too much to complain, and in hindsight he knew that that had been exactly why Ainosuke-sama did it, even knowing the punishment looming over them both for breaking the taboo that stood between them.
They’re together almost every waking minute when Ainosuke-sama is in Naha, these days; it isn’t as if Ainosuke-sama has to sneak around and make excuses to be in Tadashi’s company now. But it’s one thing to be together as boss and employee, master and servant, and another altogether to be together as the peers they’d once been young and naive enough to play pretend at being—that he can almost believe they are now, here in the little world apart from the rest of their lives that the pool had always been when they were children. Not Representative Shindo and his secretary, no longer Adam and Snake, just—them, whatever they can truly be to one another when no one else is watching.
It’s been a long time since Tadashi has been able to just be anything, to anyone, Ainosuke-sama most of all. It’s a dizzying thought; it’s almost a relief when Ainosuke-sama sends him back to the house to have one of the maids prepare some cold barley tea to cool them off, the familiar mundaneness of following instructions giving him a few moments to remind himself of the life they’ll soon have to return to before he lets himself indulge in the escape from it any longer.
He comes back to find Ainosuke-sama kneeling over the mark they’d left on the bottom of the pool, ghosting his hand over it with such a strange reverence that Tadashi feels vaguely like he’s intruding on something sacred. The mark had survived surprisingly well, and without so much as a word they had both mutually agreed be especially gentle with it when they were cleaning, but twenty years of the elements have left the paint chipping and fading all the same.
He’d used to think that was darkly fitting, that they’d left a mark Ainosuke-sama swore meant forever in such an impermanent way, but now…
“We should repaint this sometime,” Ainosuke-sama says. Tadashi blinks; he hadn’t realized Ainosuke-sama could have heard him coming, but the years have given him incredible reflexes for when someone’s approaching him from behind. “Properly, this time. I want it to last.”
Yes, that’s right—how transient their promise of eternity had been seemed fitting, once, but now Ainosuke-sama had taken that childish vow and made it again, determined to honor it with the power to make it so, at least in theory. The day might come that something other than death parts them—it has been many years since Tadashi has been innocent enough to believe that the Shindo family wouldn’t eat their own if Ainosuke-sama was no longer an advantageous investment—but this time, it won’t be their choices, their cowardices, their sins.
“I’d like that very much,” Tadashi says, and the grin on Ainosuke-sama’s face as he hauls himself up onto the edge of the pool is like looking at the sun.
“Look at that.” Ainosuke-sama loosens his tie and pops the top button of his shirt, taking the cup of tea. “My dog has opinions after all. Would you have told me if you didn’t like it?”
Tadashi sits next to him, watching his bare throat work as he takes his first grateful drink of his tea. He has seen much more of Ainosuke-sama than this, in far more vulnerable states, but the simple act of unbuttoning his collar still feels like a gesture of trust from a wild animal.
“I can’t imagine why I wouldn’t,” Tadashi says, honestly, and feels something warm and pleasant curling in his stomach when Ainosuke-sama throws his head back to laugh again.
“I’ve been thinking,” he continues, when he’s caught his breath, “I’d like to fill this again someday. In the summer, maybe. We’ll need to have repairs done on it first.”
He kicks his feet over the edge, as if there’s already water in the pool. It’s been empty for nearly as long as Tadashi can remember; Aiichiro-sama’s orders, orders that Ainosuke-sama had never made any move to recant. The mistress of the house had drowned when Ainosuke-sama was three and Tadashi was barely six, and he’d been an intelligent enough child to understand that it hadn’t been an accident.
She’d been twenty-six. By summer, Ainosuke-sama will be twenty-seven. One suicide can hardly be considered a curse, but something about Ainosuke-sama speaking about this now—when he must know Tadashi knows who the funeral beef was really for—feels like lifting one.
“I’ll speak to the groundskeeper,” Tadashi says, and watches the shadows grow longer as they finish their tea, listening in quiet, rapt affection as Ainosuke-sama idly rambles about how he’d like to teach Langa to swim the way he’s been teaching him to dance.
By the time they’re done drinking, the sun is properly setting. Ainosuke-sama stands and tells Tadashi to fetch his practice board, apparently finally remembering what he first said he was coming out here for.
“Yours, too,” he adds, cutting Tadashi off midway through a yes, sir. Tadashi blinks a few times, not even bothering to try to hide his surprise, and Ainosuke-sama continues.
“You didn’t think I was just going to let you quit, after that showing in the tournament?” He crosses his arms, though even in the fleeting light, Tadashi can see that his face is more amused than genuinely stern. “You owe Snow and I both a proper fight, at the very least. And according to him, even the little redhead wants to take you on.”
“I forfeited. I didn’t think…”
Tadashi trails off, at a loss for anything else. Glad as he’s been to see Ainosuke-sama so happy skating alongside the others, he hasn’t seriously considered going back to it himself after everything that had happened; he’d merely, however misguidedly, attempted to do what he thought was best, and he’d adapted and withdrawn when he’d understood that his return to skating had been a means to the entirely wrong end. It had been Eve who’d freed Adam from his twisted garden after all, as Ainosuke-sama would surely say, so Tadashi didn’t need to play the Snake any longer, and yet—
“Tadashi.” Ainosuke-sama puts a hand on Tadashi’s shoulder; it might be the most gently he’s been touched by anyone who wasn’t trying to bribe him in years. “I want to skate with you.”
“Ainosuke-sama,” Tadashi murmurs, and feels himself flush as Ainosuke-sama slides that hand down his upper arm, flashing his sharp teeth in a grin.
“Someone keeps telling me it’s no fun to do it alone,” he says with a wink, and pats Tadashi’s elbow. “Just indulge me. I know you love it as much as I do.”
Love.
He did love skating. He loved it before Ainosuke-sama did; he loved it before he loved Ainosuke-sama. He’d offered Ainosuke-sama his board out of love, he’d helped him paint his own out of love, he’d laughed and held his hand and bandaged his scraped knees out of love—and then at some point he’d started hating it instead. When he thought of skating, he heard Aiichiro-sama’s voice scorning it as a hobby for stupid children and future criminals, he thought of broken necks and cracked skulls, of Ainosuke-sama dead in an alley or paralyzed in a hospital bed, a black mark on his family’s name that Tadashi had put there because he couldn’t keep his pointless, reckless hobby to himself.
He’d thought that love was lost to him forever—but so had Ainosuke-sama, and Tadashi had known better by the end. Why, even when he’d fought for Ainosuke-sama to regain that love, when he’d seen Langa risk his life to prove that he could do just that, had he never considered that he could love it again himself?
Why hadn’t he realized that he never should have stopped?
“I want to skate with you too,” Tadashi says, and the way his heart leaps to say the words out loud is all the proof he needs that he means it.
Skating with Ainosuke-sama again is simultaneously stranger than he thought it would be, and more natural than he could have imagined. He hadn’t been skating with anyone in the tournament; the most serious he’d gotten was in his race with Miya, and he had largely been ignoring that he had an opponent in the first place, relying on his own skills and his own grim goals and trying to clear his mind of the shade of twelve-year-old Ainosuke-sama clamoring at his heels. A race allowed that, but this is different; they’re not competing, not striving independently toward a goal. He’s always aware of Ainosuke-sama, but he’d forgotten how aware of him he has to be in the pool, always conscious of where their bodies are relative to each other, ready to course correct in an instant.
But even as his brain tries to adjust, the muscle memory kicks in within a minute. His body remembers, even though they’re both older, taller, broader. Ainosuke-sama can’t dance on his old street board the way Adam does on his custom longboard, but it feels like dancing all the same, the way they weave past each other, mirroring each other’s movements as the slope of the pool’s walls carries them in loops and figure eights, sometimes on opposite ends, sometimes nearly close enough to touch.
It doesn’t take long before they’ve warmed up enough for Ainosuke-sama to start showing off; his usual style has always belied his talent for jumps, and he’s clearly been picking things up from Snow as much as he’s been teaching him, too. Tadashi simply has to match him, of course—and not just match him, but give him a challenge, pushing each jump a little higher, a little faster, each angle a little sharper. Ainosuke-sama pushes back, laughs and jeers and eggs him on to do better, he knows he can do better than that, and Tadashi proves him right.
They don’t have the stamina of teenagers anymore, but neither of them let it slow them down as they ride out the last minutes of daylight, hearing nothing but their breathing and the sounds of their wheels on the concrete. Tadashi’s not sure how he ever forgot how good this could feel, the cool wind in his hair and his heart roaring in his ears and Ainosuke-sama’s bright, delighted voice carrying on the breeze. He’d practiced by himself—during the tournament, and even before, even when Ainosuke-sama was gone and Tadashi spent his sleepless nights on the estate alone, never quite able to stay away from his board even when he hated himself every time he stepped on it—but it really was nothing like this.
It’s no fun to do it alone, indeed. Maybe he owes Langa Hasegawa even more than he thought.
He gets lost in it enough that he doesn’t actually see it happen, the moment when fatigue finally rears its head and Ainosuke-sama uncharacteristically fumbles a flip, his foot slipping off his board a little too much to recover from. By the time Tadashi hears him curse, it’s too late for him to try and make it to him to catch him before he hits the bottom of the pool face-first, not managing to do much more than try to shield his head with his bare arms.
“Ainosuke-sama!” Tadashi shouts, abandoning his board to rush to his side, cold terror rushing through him like a shot. He doesn’t think it was too bad a fall, but he wouldn’t be certain even if it weren’t dark, and Ainosuke-sama had hit his head badly enough in the tournament final that Tadashi really shouldn’t have been letting him take chances with another head injury so soon, least of all when he’d never had medical attention in the first place—but he’d wanted to, he’d been so happy, how could he have denied him when he’d seen him smiling, heard him laughing—
—laughing like Ainosuke-sama is now, rolling over onto his back without any sign of injury, even to his ego. Tadashi kneels down next to him, trying to survey him for any wounds he’s missing as best as he can in the low light; Ainosuke-sama’s forearms are scraped in a way that makes Tadashi’s stomach turn, but he can’t make out anything else.
“Are you alright?” he asks tentatively, not sure what to do with his hands—at least not until Ainosuke-sama grabs one of them, nearly toppling Tadashi over with him when he uses him as leverage to pull himself into a sitting position.
“You’ve seen worse,” he says, pushing his hair out of his face. There’s not so much as a scratch on him from the neck up; apparently he’d protected his head well enough after all. “Skating—really is fun.”
For a moment Ainosuke-sama looks surprised at his own words, which ends up just making him laugh again, taking years off his face—or maybe that’s just Tadashi’s memories, reminding him of how long it’s been since the last time he heard those words in Ainosuke-sama’s voice, since he’d been able to laugh the way he has today without anyone to judge him for his joy.
Since he’s held Tadashi’s hand like this without either of them having anything to fear.
“Perhaps we should return to the house,” Tadashi says, as much as part of him doesn’t want to break the spell—but if Ainosuke-sama is tired enough to fall once, it could happen again, and the next time might not be so harmless. “There’s time for a bath before dinner, if you’d like.”
“That would be lovely,” Ainosuke-sama agrees. Tadashi helps him to his feet, and misses it, just for a moment, when he finally lets go of his hand to roll down his sleeves, hiding any evidence of his fall. “Oh—just one more thing, Tadashi.”
“What is it, sir?”
Ainosuke-sama’s lips curl into the very same devilish smile he’d worn when he first led Tadashi outside. “Happy birthday.”
Tadashi’s heart skips a beat.
He had known the date, of course; he always knows Ainosuke-sama’s schedule months in advance, and a day with all three of the ladies out of the house would be particularly difficult to forget. He’s also, naturally, aware of his own birthday—it’s on his ID, it’s not a particularly uncommon piece of information for him to need to fill out on paperwork. These two facts had, somehow, not connected in his mind until this very moment, and yet—
Ainosuke-sama, who Tadashi has always had to remind of his own birthday, remembered. Remembered, and…
“Then all of this was…?”
“Who knows?” Ainosuke-sama says. “Maybe I just thought of it now.”
He waves a hand noncommittally—but the sly grin on his lips and the gleam of mischief in his eyes is more than enough proof that Tadashi had hit the mark. A whole afternoon, working together on the grounds, skating together, like they were children again, like nothing had ever broken between them in the first place—all as a birthday present, undoubtedly the best he’s ever had, and Ainosuke-sama hadn’t tipped his hand until the very end.
For a moment, he genuinely thinks he might tear up—but in the end he just smiles, wider than he realized he still could, his face warm and his heart in his throat.
“Ainosuke-sama, thank you.”
“Don’t get used to this,” Ainosuke-sama says. “It’ll take all the fun out of it if I can’t surprise you.”
“Of course, sir,” Tadashi replies.
If there’s one thing he’s more certain of than ever, it’s that Ainosuke-sama will never have to worry about that.