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For the longest time, Tetsurou’s convinced the boy next door doesn’t have a face.
He only knows what he sees through the window—skinny frame, stick-straight black hair. It’s the hair that gets in Tetsurou’s way most of the time, because the boy next door keeps his head bowed as he walks around his room, and that makes the locks slide forward like a curtain, hiding his face. Or what would be his face, if he had one.
(Tetsurou likes the desk he does his homework at pushed right under the window. He’s always enjoyed watching the sky change when he gets home from school in the afternoons, blue to gold to a red that burns above the roof of his house, or peeking out to check on the cats that he knows live in the alley below his room.)
He’s noticed that some days the boy next door sits by his window. Most of the time he’s playing a game on some handheld Tetsurou can’t make out. Sometimes he does homework too, hunched over books and drawing paper at a desk that looks like a twin to Tetsurou’s own.
He never looks out the window, though. Or at least he hasn’t so far, though something inside of Tetsurou whispers that he might catch him one day soon, if he watches hard enough.
The first day Kenma skips practice, Tetsurou finds him on the stone steps leading down to the creek two streets away from the train station. He’s doing that thing again where he makes himself small, hunching down with his arms around his knees, head bowed. Tetsurou can’t see his face at all.
He knows not to get close. He’s seen what happens to the cats he sometimes encounters outside the school gates, or in the alley between their houses, when he goes up to them too fast—how more often than not they spook and bolt, or puff their fur at him, hissing.
Sometimes, though, if he stays quiet and lingers, brings himself down as close to the ground as he can, they quiet down and come to him. In the years that they’ve known each other, funnily enough, he’s found that Kenma’s much the same.
“You’re not going to quit on us, are you?” Tetsurou sits on the same step, careful to keep a safe arm’s length of distance between them, and not to look at Kenma when he speaks, eyes staring straight ahead like he’s addressing the air.
He doesn’t get an answer. He tells himself that’s okay.
“You’re—” Brilliant, he wants to say, but decides at the last second that it’s risky—he wouldn’t know what to say, supposing Kenma thought to ask in what way.
It’s stupid sometimes how hollow the nightly phone calls make him feel. Tetsurou thinks of Hinata, nearly five hours away by train, and how he and Kenma seem to get by on even the most perfunctory of text messages. He figures that unless there’s big news—a game, a love confession, whatever else passes for excitement out in the countryside—Kenma hears from Hinata maybe once a week. Once every few days if there’s a tournament on. It seems to be enough.
Tonight Tetsurou’s listening to the rain thrum in bullets against his window, to the answering echo he can hear on the other end of the phone line. They’re still in the same city, he thinks. Sharing the same shitty weather. Breathing the same air.
“Kuro?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m still here.”
“You have to look up. Like up to the sky,” Tetsurou tells him, and nudges Kenma’s chin upward with one hand for emphasis. “How are you gonna see the ball?”
“My neck hurts,” Kenma grumbles under his breath.
He stays, though, even if this isn’t a real volleyball game—just two boys out in the yard with no marker but a stick laid out on the ground between them, batting a half-deflated ball back and forth with their hands. He doesn’t tell Tetsurou this is a stupid game and go back into his house, even if he looks like he wants to sometimes, especially when Tetsurou hits the ball too high and the only recourse is for Kenma to catch it with his face.
“It’s soft, at least,” Tetsurou says, in lieu of a real apology. He figures Kenma knows what he means, anyway.
Tetsurou remarks once on the train ride home that there’s something he’s noticed about the games Kenma plays.
“Hmm?” Kenma’s fingers are busy tapping out a sequence of buttons to slay a virtual dragon. He glances up, sideways out of the corner of one eye—a cue that he’s listening, and to continue.
“The heroes,” Tetsurou says. His own gaze falls over Kenma’s shoulder—past the curve the shell of his ear makes under his hair, past the downward slope of his neck as it descends under his collar—to fix itself on the screen of Kenma’s PSP. “They’re all blond. Most of ‘em, anyway.”
A digital broadsword bites into the soft flesh at the base of the dragon’s throat. It collapses with what must be a roar, but Kenma’s muted his game out of consideration for the other passengers. He spares Tetsurou another sideways-glance, as if to ask, What’s your point?
That’s an easy way to mark a hero, Tetsurou figures. Give him hair like light. Is it any wonder, then, when he starts killing dragons?
“It’d be cool if you went blond like that, I think.” It’s the only way he can think to say that Kenma’s golden to him.
Kenma lifts one shoulder in a little shrug and doesn’t answer.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Kenma’s sitting on the floor of Tetsurou’s bathroom, wrinkling his nose at the plastic bowl in his hand as he whisks the contents to a blue froth with a fine-toothed comb. “That stinks.”
“Hey, do you want my help, or do you want my help?” Tetsurou retorts, dry. “I’m good with hair, you know.”
“You don’t even comb yours.”
“Do, too.”
“Do not.”
“Do, too.” He finishes whisking and plops down onto the tiles next to Kenma, cross-legged, wondering if somehow time has started winding backwards—that he’s twelve again, and Kenma only eleven. “Now shut up and go back to your game—this is going to take a while.”
Kenma’s hair is matted with sweat by the time practice lets out. He’s sitting on the floor trying to catch his breath after the cooldown, hands pressed flat in front of him to brace his weight.
Tetsurou comes up from behind and drops the towel, the white fabric making a veil over his head and shoulders. He wants to laugh at the way Kenma’s head dips down toward the floor, lank salt-streaked threads swinging down in front of his face. But he finds his stomach all snarled up in knots all of a sudden, his own breath stuck at the back of his throat, so he doesn’t.
Instead he circles around and offers Kenma a hand up.
When he visits Nekoma again it’s like he’s only just remembering how to breathe.
He’s hyper-aware, suddenly, of all the things he has to relearn—the walk to the gym, sneakered feet and volleyballs on the varnished floor, the air sweet in spite of everyone’s red jackets each smelling like a different shade of teenage boy. Friendly faces turned to him halfway through a round of practice serves, mouths stretched wide in greeting. A few curious pairs of eyes he doesn’t know.
“Nice visitor’s pass,” says a voice by his elbow.
Tetsurou looks down, plucks at the battered laminated card clipped to his lapel, and grins.
“On your knees for me, now,” Tetsurou says, and laughs when Kenma rolls his eyes. “C’mon, we need to rinse this out, or it’ll fry your hair.”
Kenma’s face looks pinched and sour but he obeys, turning to kneel by the bathtub, head bending down as if in prayer. Tetsurou detaches the showerhead and turns the water on, lets it run down over Kenma’s head as he moves his fingers in slow circles over Kenma’s scalp.
He doesn’t feel quite so much like laughing when Kenma closes his eyes and leans his head a little against Tetsurou’s palm. There’s a hum in the back of his throat Tetsurou can barely hear, almost a purr, and he bites his lip at the sound, suddenly shy.
(He’s thankful Kenma can’t see him. He knows he’d probably get a tongue-lashing for being weird.)
“Is this okay?” he asks. Then, just so there’s no room for doubt with regard to what he means, “Too cold?”
“It’s fine,” Kenma says, and everything goes quiet again, except for the water.
He thinks about buying a toothbrush to keep in his bathroom for Kenma, like the one that’s probably still standing next to his in a cup at his parents’ house. He figures he might as well do it so the toothbrush he uses now doesn’t look so lonely by the sink.
But he doesn’t. He’s an hour away by train and his little apartment’s too cramped to sleep two anyway.
(They haven’t slept in the same bed since Tetsurou turned fourteen and Kenma thirteen and they both came to the conclusion that it was getting kind of weird, albeit not in so many words.)
He doesn’t get the toothbrush, but he does get the shampoo Kenma’s told him he likes. Tetsurou doesn’t care what he uses on his own hair—there’s no taming it, really—but the smell seems to help… something. Seems to make him feel better, even if nothing feels bad in the first place.
Kenma has his hair in a ponytail at Tetsurou’s graduation.
He hadn’t noticed from the stage. The rest of the team hadn’t looked like much more than a cluster of black and brown dots where they sat all in a row in the guests’ section at the very back of the gym, Kenma’s head an even smaller dot of gold, dark at the crown.
Now that they’re out of the gym and done with team photos, though, everything looks too clear, too close.
“You look good today,” he says, voice strangely light for such an important day.
He thinks Kenma’s going to duck his head down like he always does, mumble something evasive and barbed at the toes of his shoes, but instead he looks up, all the way up into Tetsurou’s eyes.
“Not as good as you.” There’s something sly about the way he says it, almost an imitation of Tetsurou’s own joking drawl: See anything you like? And Kenma looks so silly making jokes like that with his hands in the pockets of a blazer he’s probably borrowed from his father, wispy bangs escaping the short cattail at the back of his head to feather around his face, but Tetsurou doesn’t think he’ll ever forget this anyway. “Congrats, Kuro.”
Tetsurou’s not sure if he wants it to be a joke. Later he’ll think Maybe I should have kissed him, but that’s okay. He can count on his fingers the number of times they’ve held gazes like this.
Then Kenma smiles, the small smile that’s Tetsurou’s treasure, and all the numbers disappear.
In a few minutes he’ll have to head over to his graduation dinner at some restaurant uptown, where he’ll stuff himself with fancy sushi at a long table ringed round by his parents, his brothers and sisters. There’ll be an extra seat for Kenma at that table, but Tetsurou already knows it’s a celebration he’ll have to miss in favor of homework.
It’s weird to remember that school’s starting up again like usual tomorrow for Kenma, even if Tetsurou won’t be there. If nothing else, when he gets home tonight he’ll still have get the chance to crack his window open and call out across the alley to the other side.
That’s all he could have ever asked for. It doesn’t matter, really, that it’s not all he wants.
He has the good sense now, at least, not to deny the voice at the back of his mind that wants him to crush Kenma to his chest, bury his face in the curve of his shoulder and ask if he can stay, just stay.
Kenma’s hair looks weird now that it’s been bleached and toned. It’s not a bad weird, not at all. Quite the opposite, actually—the kind of weird that makes the inside of Tetsurou’s mouth go dry and something warm curl in the pit of his stomach.
Kenma’s still sitting on the tiles, leaning back against the side of the tub. Even bathed in the harsh white ceiling lights, his new hair is honey, is the late afternoon sun.
Tetsurou pulls a towel over Kenma’s head, fake-playful, and stands. He turns away, busying himself with cleaning the bowl and the brush and the combs in the sink.
“You look so—” Beautiful, he almost says, but his head overtakes his—heart?—whatever part of him this is, and supplies “cool” instead.
“What’d you do today?” Tetsurou asks, phone pressed to one ear, the words searching, strangely tentative. It feels odd to suddenly have to voice the question, when he and Kenma have known each other’s days like the backs of their hands for years and years.
“Got a haircut,” Kenma answers. It goes quiet between them for a while, slow breath and nothing else through the wires, before he adds, “It was getting kind of heavy.”
Tetsurou stares at the streetlight that shines through the gaps in his blinds, skinny yellow bars across his bed. He almost says Show me, but then he remembers Kenma’s not one alley’s breadth away anymore, that it’s that lamp he sees when he looks out his window.
“Be good. I’ll see you—” Tomorrow, he almost says, but the small non-stupid part of his brain that remains is just responsive enough to get his tongue around the word “soon.”
“Miss you,” Kenma says, so quick and so quiet Tetsurou almost misses it, and cuts the line before he can answer. He falls asleep with the words in his ears and the streetlight glowing behind his eyelids.
It’s summer by the time the boy next door finally lifts his head and looks at him.
Tetsurou doesn’t realize what he’s seeing right away. It’s still all hair at first, but then he finds the eyes through the strands. He’s never seen eyes like that on anyone before—wide and startled and slanting like a cat’s, and golden. Not yellow. The color of honey or the sun or a new coin, something that seems to have come right out of the pages of a storybook.
He wants to stand, to throw his window open and call out across the alley—Hey, tell me your name.
He doesn’t, though. Not yet. Something tells him he can’t move too quick, or he’ll startle the boy next door, make him disappear into the brightening air.
“We’re gonna have to fix your roots soon,” Tetsurou says, reaching out to tousle Kenma’s hair. It’s grown out a bit over the last couple of months, started to show a few finger-widths of black at the roots, blooming down into the gold. “You’re kind of turning into a pudding-head.”
Kenma shifts his eyes, makes a soft “mmmph” noise in the back of his throat, but doesn’t jerk his head away.
This is the only way he lets himself touch Kenma nowadays, fond and joking, easy to laugh at after. Never mind that his hands seem to arc to the curve of Kenma’s skull. Never mind that some days Kenma almost seems to move with the touch, like a cat casting about for gentleness.
This time it’s a big deal when Kenma comes to visit him.
Tetsurou hears the footsteps first—or maybe he’s just imagining them, because Kenma has the quietest walk of anyone he knows—then the knock on his door, then he’s straightening up where he’s been leaning against the wall of the entranceway and opening the door too quickly, and his breath puffs translucent out into the fall air when he says, “Hey.”
The boy in the doorway looks like he’s come from much farther away than next door. His cheeks are ruddy from the chill, as are the tips of his ears—and it’s here that Tetsurou has to step back a bit and swallow hard at the way Kenma’s hair’s been cropped close to his head, shorter than he’s ever seen it. There’s not nearly enough of it to hide behind, now, and Tetsurou finds his line of vision is full of Kenma’s eyes and Kenma’s face and the curious sideward slant of Kenma’s mouth as he smiles and steps through the door and into the apartment.
“Your hair,” he manages, voice a little croak in the half-dark, because of course in the midst of all this excitement he’s forgotten to turn the hall lights on.
“I told you, it was getting heavy.” Kenma’s still smiling—he looks almost like he’s about to laugh—and all Tetsurou can do is smile back and ask, knowing full well what an ass he must be making of himself right now, “Is it okay if I—?”
He doesn’t even know what he’s asking, but maybe Kenma does, because he does laugh then, gentle, rippling. Even if it’s not technically an answer Tetsurou reaches out a hand and slides it behind his head, threading his fingers through the short strands—black again now, black like before, though if he tilts his head and squints he thinks he can still see the faintest whisper of gold at the tips. And Kenma’s face softens when Tetsurou touches him, and his head moves with Tetsurou’s hand so that he’s looking up, and Tetsurou can see the pale slope of Kenma’s neck so clearly now he can barely breathe.
Can I kiss you? he almost says; by now he’s lost count of how many times he’s held the question back, bittersweet on the tip of his tongue. Kenma’s stopped laughing but his smile’s still there, warm in spite of the chill that’s lingering on his skin from outside. Tetsurou thinks he should ask to take his coat instead, but he doesn’t think about that when Kenma’s hands slide up his shirt front, curling a little in the fabric like they’re trying to grasp at his heart.
“You’re shaking,” Kenma says, and he’s still looking up when Tetsurou dips his head down and presses their lips together.