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A person’s handwriting told you a lot about them. Hailey’s was full of unnecessary spirals and loops, letters messy and all in different sizes. Her sentences were wonky, trailing up and down the paper like it was trying to conduct its very own treasure hunt. Sometimes, they ended up forming intricate little pictures of mushrooms and squirrels, making the actual words illegible. Eddie’s was straightforward and thin, light and lanky just like he was. He refused to use regular pencils, instead carrying around a mechanical one wherever he went. Bear was almost the exact opposite; shorter and thicker letters with signs of breaking lead. He was heavy handed and often found that mechanical pencils didn’t work for him in the same way traditional ones did.
Katie’s was neat and small, almost too small for the untrained eye to read. She always tried her best to make it as efficient as possible, often cramming words into spaces they didn’t quite fit into; but even then, people came to her the most when they’d forgotten they had homework and needed someone to copy off of. (Nate more often went to Buck, but the ginger was one of the people who forgot they had homework and copied off of Katie.)
Nate’s writing in Japanese was fairly average; not the best and not the worst. It was the kind of writing that your eyes would naturally skip over if you weren’t already interested in whatever it was he wrote about. There was nothing special about it and nothing bad about it; it sat perfectly in the middle, a perfect medium in between the neat freaks and the scribblers. Nate’s writing in English however was a completely different story.
More often than not, people would take a glance at his essays and research papers, squint their eyes, and then give up entirely on reading it. Even though Nate had spent years and years of his life trying to leave the pocket of average he grew up in, he was bummed out that he’d gone down the negative side rather than the positive. It wasn’t even his fault; he tried his very best every single day to improve his English handwriting, but nothing ever seemed to help. He had no idea if a Yo-Kai that improved handwriting existed, but if it did he didn’t want to cheat at this anyway. It was one of those things he’d rather get better at on his own; it was a life skill, and he knew that the Yo-Kai might not be around for him forever.
It had gotten to the point where most handwritten assignments he received in BBQ came with an attached note that he was allowed to type up his homework instead. He tried not to be insulted by that. (He was insulted anyway.) English itself wasn’t the problem; he was up to par with the native English speakers in his classes, which he took pride in. It was the one thing he was exceptional at, and it had nothing to do with wanting to talk to Buck without Yo-Kai help. (Nate is a liar. He’s not even good at lying. He’s a liar lying to himself, and he’s doing it badly.)
And so here he was, sitting in their treehouse, hunched over the table. In his left hand was a pencil (he was on the regular pencil side of the argument), and his right steadied the paper against the desk. Usually, he preferred to write with his right hand but it had gotten sore with all the writing, erasing, and rewriting he’d been doing so he inevitably switched to his left. It didn’t make a difference anyway because his writing looked the exact same. (Read: terrible.) At this point he had the entire essay memorized because of all the times he’d tried to write it over and over and over again, trying to make it legible to anyone who wasn’t Buck, who seemed to have the entirely useless superpower of being able to read his handwriting. Go figure.
Speaking of the ginger, he was on the other end of the table, hunched over an identical sheet of paper. Nate knew he’d already finished his paper and was just doodling in the margins as one does. Sometimes, he stole glances at Buck’s essay to remind himself of what he knew English letters looked like. It didn’t help much because the page was upside down. If anything, it just made him feel worse that he couldn’t replicate it even with an example right in front of him. And what a perfect example it was; Buck had the neatest handwriting out of anyone Nate knew, which made no sense once you considered the mess of a person he was. (Nate didn’t say that to be mean, he meant it as a compliment. If you could consider that a compliment.)
The thing that made it arguably worse was the fact that Nate had seen Buck write in multiple different languages, and in every single one his handwriting was perfect. His Japanese? Flawless. His Chinese? Magnificent. Arabic? Awe-inspiring. His Greek? Amazing. The list continued. Nate once asked him why he knew so many languages, and Buck had chuckled and said he had a linguistics phase in middle school. He’d said it as if he was discussing the weather and it was no big deal. Nate ignored how inferior that made him feel and instead focused on making his lower case Hs different from his lower case Ns. It was infuriatingly difficult for absolutely no reason. He had half a mind to give up entirely and just hand in a mess of scribbles and lines, but he schooled himself and kept going.
At some point he had gotten so mind-numbingly frustrated and mind-numbingly bored at the same time that he’d zoned out and hadn’t even noticed. When he blinked back into focus, school paper in the very back of his mind, he found himself watching Buck draw. God, even his doodles were perfect. The lines were rough and messy, but they were smooth and confident at the same time. Nate didn’t even know what he was trying to draw, but somehow that didn't matter because it was beautiful anyway. You’re beautiful anyway, is something he’d never voice but had thought several times. Nate felt a gentle flutter in his stomach as he gazed at the sight in front of him; tousled ginger hair, smatterings of freckles, a small and curled grin. A pencil (Buck was on the mechanical pencil side of the argument) roughly carving lines into paper, bringing stories and creatures that only existed in his wonderful mind to life.
His clothes were tattered and covered in the mud from the adventure earlier in the day, and his tongue poked out from between his lips in concentration. It was cute. Buck was cute, and Nate was way past pretending that he wasn’t. His eyes flicked from Buck’s face to his drawings to the paper he’d finished an hour ago to that maddeningly perfect handwriting. It was maddeningly perfect, and it was perfect because it was Buck’s. It was bold, it was steady, it was self-assured. It looked free-spirited, it looked peaceful, it looked like it was meant to describe rolling mountains, roaring waterfalls, and the softest of clouds. Nate felt a warm fluttering feeling in his stomach, his heart slowing to a calming beat in his chest. Those words, boring, mundane, scholarly, felt like they were fluttering off the page and wrapping him in a hug. He felt a smile creep onto his face.
Nate knew how silly it was to feel his way over handwriting of all things, but he couldn’t help himself. He liked Buck, and he was damn tired of pretending he didn’t. He liked Buck, and Buck liked him, and they were stuck in this sort of limbo. They beat around the bush, they danced the most beautiful of dances, and they fell a little bit more in love every time they looked at each other. Somehow, that was all Nate wanted and all he needed; someone to love him in the way Buck did. It didn’t matter that they weren't exclusive and it didn’t matter that neither of them had ever said the words, because they both knew. They both knew, and one day Buck would realize that. Nate was daydreaming about rolling hills and roaring waterfalls. He felt like he was floating on the softest of clouds.
“Nate?” He was snapped out of his very friendly gazing by Buck himself, who had caught him staring. “Do I have somethin’ on my face?” Nate blinked once, then twice, and then shook his head fondly.
“No,” he said, “I was just lost in thought.” Buck accepted that answer readily, and smiled. He looked like the sun, the moon, and all of the stars. Nate looked back down at his paper, the one with messy scribbles and smudges, and his mood dropped a little.
“Would ya like some help?” He glanced back up, blue eyes meeting brown, and hesitated. But as he basked in the warmth of a smile, the hesitation melted away like butter. He nodded. Instead of getting up and walking over to Nate’s side of the table like a normal person, Buck slid over it instead, brushing his own paper to the floor in the process.
They both watched as the page fluttered to the ground in near silence, landing on the wooden floor with a barely-heard rustle.
“Treehouse’s haunted,” he stage-whispered. Nate laughed, moving to the left to make space.
“Ghosts or aliens?” He asked as Buck settled in beside him.
“Both,” he replied, “now what’s givin’ you trouble?”