Chapter Text
Kanji Tatsumi was never good with words.
It would've spared his parents a lot of heartbreak if he could say what he thought and say it right. Alas, the smooth-talking gene seem to skip him entirely, and he turned the most well-intentioned of statements to acid. Instead, he was a "doer", whatever that meant. He was a guy whose hands moved on their own, whether it was to corral fabric through a sewing machine or his fist through another guy's skull. Thinking about things too long made his head ache. Actions were quick. It only took a few seconds to get his point across. He was a live wire, nerves propelling his muscles forward before he even knew what set him off. He was a quiet boy, lost in the repetitive loop of yarn and needle, rows of stitches materializing without a thought. When his classmates laughed at that boy, he stuttered incoherently and buried the part of him that gushed at sappy animal movies. He learned to swear and replaced his whimpers with expletives. Actions offered more protection than words ever could. Nobody needed to see his test scores to know he lacked the most basic of eloquence. But, as far as he was concerned, nobody needed to hear from Kanji Tatsumi at all.
"Even now, you reject me . . ."
There were problems his fists couldn't solve. He knew as much, because beating the shit out of people never made him feel all that great. There was a chasm in his chest that never closed. It felt a little less gaping these days, as if he'd taken his needle and stitched it up. But he'd done a crap job, because the golden eyes of his shadow still taunted him. They stared from the blank sheet of paper he was crouching over. He took a heaving breath as his heart pounded. Part of him wanted to keep running, to pretend he didn't know what happened in that world. The task at hand wouldn't allow that. No . . . there was something he had to do, something bigger than his own dumb feelings. He forced his gaze back to the page, desperate for words that weren't his own, and began to write:
"Naoto-kun . . ."
The embarrassment was too much to bear. He crumpled the paper furiously, face growing as hot as that damn bathhouse. He pitched it across the room and grunted. It was a brutish act. The only comfort he had was that subject of his letter wasn't there to see it. Naoto was an intellectual, a detective. He knew so many words Kanji didn't know. Behind every ordinary conversation, Naoto was thinking three steps ahead, always leaving with more information than the other person intended to give. Kanji's cheeks flushed again, remembering their first meeting. He had found Naoto suspicious, yet he couldn’t keep his eyes away. There was an elegance to the way he approached him, dark eyes watching his with mild amusement. What had he even said? All that came to him was a racing heart, as Naoto pried his subconscious from his head and dissected it on a table, and Kanji was stammering some lame request to see him again.
A person like that was not interested in what Kanji had to say.
He was not interested in Kanji. Not the way Kanji was interested in him.
Unfortunately, thoughts of his shadow self were impossible to avoid, and this latest incident was making it worse. The night Naoto appeared on the Midnight Channel would never leave him. Never in his life had he felt so hollowed out as when he sat up waiting, knowing it meant that kid was in danger. His heart pounded with every tick of the clock, nervous his mom would wake up to his classmate's deepest secrets playing out on TV. Waiting for Naoto to come onscreen was like waiting for the biker gang’s punches to rain down on him, before he’d trained up to take them on. The anticipation was always the worst part. He could deal with a blow to the face. Flinching first was unacceptable. That gave him time to think. If what he was about to see play out was anything like his secret, it would be like receiving a kick in the groin.
Kanji ate his insides when Naoto’s shadow appeared maniacally in a lab coat. His heart pounded more with every second, louder than it ever had with any moment he’d spent with him. The surgical equipment on screen ripped it out of his chest. The shadow then began to talk. He didn't quite get what he was saying. So much went over his head. But he recognized something in that beautiful person’s desperation to change—and then he went in and learned the truth of what was going on back there. Maybe he was stupid for seeing something in the way Naoto felt so small, so childish, so incapable of becoming the man he wanted to be. Of becoming a man at all.
Kanji groaned, flopping onto the floor. Why the hell would he want to talk about this—and with me? This was something Senpai should do. He was great with words. He could uplift people and protect them in their vulnerability. Short of Naoto, he was the only person Kanji trusted with his . . . thoughts. Don’t go there, man. He was another source of this damn confusion, and thinking about him wouldn't help.
Frustrated, he decided to take a break and step out onto the street. The sun was just beginning to set. It used to be a lot busier. At one point, he would weave in and out of crowds on weekends, trying to cling to his mother's kimono. He remembered getting lost as a child during the summer festival. This familiar street turned alien. He could place every shop, but his parents were nowhere to be seen. He'd ended up following the wrong woman, and now the world was a tangle of vibrant floral fabrics, many of them bought from Tatsumi Textiles. The fireworks were supposed to start soon. If he couldn’t find his parents, they’d watch them without him, and the first bang would throw him off guard and his mom wouldn’t be there to hug him—food stalls and festival lights closed in on him, his legs were quivering, strangers swam in and out of his vision . . .
“Is that Kan-chan?” He froze. As if that moment couldn’t get any worse, a girl who’d laughed at his stuffed bunny found him. She’d brought her friends. Kanji had fixed one of their backpack straps just a week ago. It became a source of mockery, teaching him the most important lesson of his young life: even when he tried to do good, he was doomed to mess it up.
“Is he gonna cry?” She drew out the word mockingly. Kanji shook his head and backed away, into a takoyaki stall. His eyes were wet. He was not going to cry. At least, not here. “You know, my brother says Kan-chan’s an—”
He hit his back against the vendor’s table. As a tall child, he’d sent napkins and chopsticks flying. An older man who didn’t like him very much had reprimanded him.
“Can’t you damn kids play somewhere else? Hey, where’s your mother, Kan-chan? You lose her?”
“Is that why you’re crying? You lost your mommy—wait!”
Actions were far more reliable than words. There was nothing he could say to convince anyone he was a good kid. Running was the only way to save himself. It was the only thing that ever worked.
He didn’t know what compelled him to remember this. The street was far more desolate. Those shops were boarded up and crumbling now. They stubbornly remained as he kicked loose asphalt. It was impossible to lose track of his parents in this empty expanse—his mother was the only one left, anyway. Instinctively, his eyes found the old bike shop. The sight, though familiar, never ceased to churn his stomach. Gang activity had died down recently. Perhaps they were as bored here as everyone else. Though you can’t really call it boring these days. But that shop stayed like the others did, smugly bragging that it got Kanji on TV and thrown into this mess. Stop looking at it. Just go home.
A chill crept up his spine as he imagined Naoto at midnight, finding Kanji’s shadow self giving his show. As far as he knew, his own secret would be safe. If Naoto had seen any of that . . .
But he knew. Naoto was too smart not to. Kanji had made a big deal of them being out together, just two guys alone. He never knew the implications of the things he said. This should humiliate him. Months ago, anyone even catching a whiff of it would’ve made him whack the living daylights out of them. Yet somehow, he watched orange bleed to yellow and felt relieved. It wasn’t fair if he got to know Naoto’s secret, but he didn’t know his. In fact, he almost wished Naoto had seen his shadow self. As cripplingly embarrassing as it would’ve been, he’d realize that “Kan-chan” was not so different from “Naoto-kun”. Maybe he’d even seek him out to talk about it—
No. There was no way Naoto didn’t see it. If he wanted to talk to Kanji, he would. But there was something about the situation he simply couldn’t ignore. Kanji cracked his knuckles, as if squaring up for a brawl. Didn’t he promise he’d stop running away? If he was going to make good on his word, he had to do this. He had reluctantly reached out to his shadow—the naked, battered man on the floor—and promised he would let him stay. Not like he had a choice. After all, that Kanji liked Naoto. Was that really such a bad thing? Besides, he needed his words if he was going to do this. As if he was picking a fight and not a pen, he forced a few sentences onto a page, hoping to get to the gist of everything he was thinking. It was a drop in a vast ocean of everything he wanted to say.
That would have to do. He’d have to fold it quickly before he thought about it too long. Already, he was reading and rereading it, wondering if there was any way he could say it without the Kanji-ness of it all. His hands moved on their own, transforming the stationary he’d picked into a paper crane. He tucked it inside an envelope and pulled out his sticker drawer. Instinctively, he peeled one off and sealed the thing. Now he couldn’t break it and overthink. He’d better slip it into his bag before he chickened out.
“Nice love letter, Kan-chan.”
Oh fuck. It looked like that, didn’t it? What if he got the wrong idea? Maybe he should throw it away like the first one, or just say it in person, or bury it the way he buried everything and never even try to find out if Naoto could understand his heart.
It’s not about me. He slipped the envelope into his bag. There’s a chance it could help him. So stop being a damn coward!
That was far easier said than done.
-
Naoto Shirogane pretended he was good with words.
On some level, he was. His grandfather's collection of mysteries sustained him where his peers could not. From an early age, he devoured books about adult characters solving grisly murders. Adults complimented him on his speech. By the time he graduated elementary school, he was reading real police reports and dissecting cold case files. But his topics of conversation were inevitably colored by such a fixation. He turned dollhouse games into whodunits. Shockingly, the girls stopped inviting him to play with them. But he didn’t have much luck with the boys, who deemed him an impostor, the weird girl exiled by the pack. Perhaps it was fault of Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot that his classmates—and later, police precincts—found his speech patterns idiosyncratic. If he were truly good with words, adults wouldn't look down on him so much. His peers wouldn't find him so mysterious. So worthy of . . . this.
He was staring at his shoe cubbyhole. Letters had poured in, presumably slipped in by classmates who thought they were being subtle. Their careless giggles and flushed faces gave them away. Come on. You'd think the ace detective title would mean something. Still, he had to commend their bravery. It must've taken a lot of courage to write something like a love confession. Even if they didn't know Naoto as a person, and if they did, would get weirded out by everything he was.
If they knew I wasn't a “real man”, they wouldn't bother.
It was why he never read them. Cruel as it was, he had been on this earth long enough to know he was just a fad, a shiny new thing in a town of a single street. Perhaps boredom fueled his admirers' boldness—so really, the only one of them he could commend was Kanji Tatsumi.
He was lurking awkwardly in the corner, pressing his back against the wall as if it would camouflage him. Naoto let out an amused huff. Kanji had curated his appearance the way poison dart frogs did. His pierced face and grimacing stare meant one thing: keep out. When Naoto initially investigated him, he had thought it'd be straightforward. He'd find a confrontational, defiant, brutish man who'd deflect all his questions. As he looked to the envelope clutched in Kanji's hands, it reminded him that the boy in question was far from what he’d expected.
"Calling another guy out here . . ." He'd stammered his words and refused to look him in the eye. At first, a part of Naoto chalked it up to police affiliation. But he hadn't mentioned his job as a detective at all. He'd artfully dodged it, instead leaving Kanji to offer up his heart on a silver platter, completely unintentional.
"I-If you want . . . we could meet up again?"
Honestly, Naoto hadn't known how to feel about that. He'd had plenty of girls express a passing interest in him. When the occasional boy had shown curiosity, it made him paranoid. Like they see through me. Yet Kanji Tatsumi did not evoke those feelings. There was something so earnest in his terror. He recognized that stammer. His shadow self used it against him. And when the moment of truth did come, Kanji took it in stride, swearing that he'd protect Naoto. As everything he was. A coward. A child. A man of his own invention. Now they were both standing here, fully realized. But the earth had shifted beneath their feet.
For days, they had tried to act normally around each other, despite the fact that Naoto had no idea if he'd been pretending to be someone he's not, or if he could really live like this. He didn't know if Kanji wanted thanks for all he'd done. Naoto would gladly give it. But what he could not give was an answer.
"How long are you planning to stand there?" This jolted the boy out of "hiding". Naoto could see why his persona commanded electricity—he moved quickly and sporadically, creating a lag between his movement and his understanding of it. He crushed the envelope in his hands and it took five seconds for him to realize. A panic ensued, thin brows shooting up.
"Ah, shit, fuck—I-I ain't doing anything weird! I'm just waiting . . . for Senpai, yeah!" A couple of onlookers snickered. He whipped around and they scampered off like terrified rabbits. The letter was now hiding behind his back. His face was bright red. "Uh, you doing anything right now? A-after school clubs?"
"No," he said bluntly. "Are you involved in any clubs?"
"Oh, no," he refuted choppily. "I-I mean, I was kinda interested in one, but I ain't really wanted there, y'know? S-so I'm just waiting . . . here."
"For Senpai."
"Yeah!"
"You're going to wait until basketball practice ends?" Kanji froze in horror. Against his better judgment, Naoto smirked. He may not know who he was supposed to be, but he knew he liked to be right. Perhaps that’s what made this so painful. Uncertainty was fun when it was about other people—evidence to be stitched together, a code to crack. When that uncertainty pertained to himself, he filed it away in a locked cabinet drawer—or a superhero headquarters, apparently. "Who's the letter for?"
There was a moment of hesitation. Kanji looked like he was seriously considering eating it to erase the evidence. As he waited, it crumbled in his hand, cheeks pink. Naoto had to admit it was kind of cute. It was in stark contrast to how cool he held himself in that laboratory, while Naoto cowered to his own thoughts.
"Is it for Senpai—" Kanji shoved the note into their hand. It jolted them.
"I-it's not what you think! It's just—it's from Rise!"
Naoto quirked an eyebrow. "Really?"
"Yeah! Uh, she asked me to give it to . . . it's nothing, just throw it out—god damn it, you really are Moronji, aren't you . . ."
He punctuated this thought by bolting out the door. The paper was now in Naoto's hands. He was just trying to pick up his shoes. In the process, he'd run across three notes not unlike this one. But this was no ode to the mysterious Detective Prince. A confession from Kanji was, despite his classmate's blunt nature, unpredictable. He actually took the time to write something out? It was unlike him to put so much thought into anything, but this envelope reeked of carefully guarded sentimentality. Judging by its characteristics, it had been sitting in the Tatsumi household for a few years at most. The glue on the seal was not remarkably aged, though the paper had been pressed to look newer than it was. Aiding the seal was a puffy sticker—or perhaps its purpose was solely decorative?
Curiosity threatened to overwhelm him. Before he knew it, his fingers broke the seal. The bear and chick popped off and Naoto almost felt guilty. This feeling turned back to amusement as they remembered that Kanji did not have siblings. The toughest boy in school, undoubtedly, made that artistic choice. It made sense. He had grown up in a textile shop—and hung around the sewing club, never daring to enter—and he dyed his hair himself, which required artistic skill to execute. Pieces of Kanji were slipping through the cracks of a carefully crafted demeanor. Yet that was only the beginning. There was more to discover within: a neatly folded crane Naoto almost didn't want to disturb. To his shock, his heart gave a jolt. There was a kid hovering over his grandpa's oversized desk, following an origami book so he could hide his secret messages. Yeah, messages you had no one to send to. It stung, but his grandpa always played his game, trying his best to protect this poor kid from the loneliness he felt. Naoto kept all their traded notes. He saved his favorite in a box locked as tight as his heart:
“Okay. I’ll call you Naoto-kun from now on.”
Kanji could not have anticipated that he’d bring Naoto back to that time. It was all he could dwell on for the past week, as he fell in and out of sleep. Only an annoyed student trying to reach his shoes could pull him out of it. He resealed the letter, face growing hot as he attempted to grab his shoes nonchalantly. Once he’d walked out the school gate, he moved aside, realizing dimly that his heart was racing in anticipation. Once he was in the clear, deft fingers pulled at the folds carefully, leaving the creases intact. Naoto, however, would not be:
Naoto-kun,
The TV world's some crazy shit, right? I get it. Just wanted to tell ya you're a better man than me—if you still wanna be a man, y'know? I'm here if you wanna talk about it.
He was transported back to that room, that operating table, a child staring him over manically. He was going to cross the line. Naoto felt suddenly conscious of how tight his chest felt—was it hard to breathe, or was it the same dread he always felt when he became aware of what he really looked like? He never stared in the mirror too long. But reading this note felt like looking into one. Its cutesy floral paper turned to glass and Naoto saw himself—not a shadow, not a girl, but as Naoto Shirogane. Whoever the hell that was. Whatever the fuck that meant.
He folded it again and ran all the way home. If he ran fast enough, there would be no tears in his eyes.