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It was a good day. It was such a good day.
The sort of day that’s sunshine-sweet, flavoured with spring-strawberry and melon soda even though it’s two months into Autumn. Sky so blue it stretched for miles, not a cloud in sight. A breeze so gentle it was closer to a first-lover’s kiss. Picturesque, and so, so fucking fortunate — like the world itself had deigned to reward them—
They had the day off. Both of them.
Hibari could spend a month crossing days in red marker. He could ball up two whole sheets and shoot them for the trash. And still, the blocks in his timetable would stretch past dinnertime. Dance practice, recording, band rehearsal, cover meeting, mission. With luck, a half-day free on Sundays.
That’s not even factoring Kanato’s schedule.
Best they could hope for was a late-night visit, if the energy wasn’t wrung clean from their bones. Showing up on each other’s doorstep cutting too close to the train curfew, often half-asleep or with their soul threatening to crawl out their throat with exhaustion.
Around ten in the morning with his hands thrust in dish foam, Hibari’s phone chimed from the kitchen counter. An unsuspecting speech bubble from a little round picture in his LINE— peeking barely into frame, a blonde boy in a dog-eared hoodie.
[ KNT: hey r u free today ]
Fingers slippery with water, all Hibari managed was a pathetic:
[ uea ]
[ KNT: nice ]
[ KNT: coming 2 get u half hour ttyl ]
++++++
Kanato picked him up in a loose hoodie and jeans.
Bags under his eyes, hands shoved in his pockets. Blonde strands listing at odd angles like he’d just rolled out of bed. Two at a time, Hibari thudded down the apartment building’s steps— socks mismatched, still tugging his jacket over his shoulders, breathless like he always was when overexcited.
Kanato lifts his hand— not in the usual wave or two-fingered salute— but a lazy thing, barely wiggling the tips. Voice thick with drowsiness, he greets,
“Yo.”
“Yo,” Hibari chirps back, bouncing on his heels. Stupid and bright and gold like the sun.
Huffing through his nose, Kanato elbows Hibari’s side.
“You left your phone on read.”
Hibari elbows back. They poke at each other even as they start down the street.
“Was doing dishes.”
“Lame,” says Kanato, as he catches Hibari’s thumb where it had moved to wedge under his ribs, and laces their fingers together. “You know the rules. Hood up.”
++++++
They snagged an empty carriage on an outer-loop train, trundling toward the quieter edges of the city. Buildings gave way to trees, where the roads funnelled narrow and the vending machines began to croak from the ivy creeping in the lower chutes.
Kanato didn’t tell him where they were going— he never needed to.
Half the fun was in the guessing game. Scenery rushing by in streaks, Hibari would press his nose to the glass with a knee up on the seat, trying to spot landmarks. Train timetables were knotty on the platforms— big tangles of organised, colour-coded lines— and he was always too caught up in the shape of Kanato’s profile to pay much attention.
When urban turned suburban, he leaned into Kanato’s side to sneak a peek at the phone screen. And at the battery— reading a paltry forty percent. Not enough for a day out.
“Dude, your phone’s going to die.”
“All good,” Kanato replies, flippant. “We’ll use yours.”
Hibari clicks his tongue, and then giggles. Warmth spreads under skin where Kanato flicks him for his dramatics.
“Fine. Let me see the map?”
“Idiot, it’s supposed to be a surprise.”
Kanato let him, of course. Kanato let him do a lot of things.
++++++
It’s easy to forget the city can be this quiet.
The train rumbled on; familiar lull, unfamiliar absence of bodies jostling in the carriage. Just the scenery scrolling by: passing half-forgotten houses and shuttered corner stores; quiet parks with rusted swings, and waterways speckled silver where the sun caught and burnt.
It’s barely public, yet still Hibari only teased the seams of his hood with his free hand. Knuckles bumping when the train’s inertia snags, his other stayed tangled on the seat between them. The pad of Kanato’s index ran absent, habitual circles over Hibari’s skin.
Canting his head, Hibari craned forward a little, fingers tightening. Lank and curiosity, watching the pressed line of lips detailing Kanato’s focus. Waiting until the glint of those gem-blue eyes flicked to him, cloudy with the phone screen’s reflections. Another pretty moment with the most stunning jewels in the universe, all Hibari’s own.
“What?”
Hibari propped his chin on the hand that didn’t hold his world.
“Nothin’.” Lie.
Truth: his heart was too loud. That’s weird.
It made him nervous.
++++++
Three stops later— out where the roads slimmed and the air softened— they bumbled out after the hiss of the doors, Kanato patting at his own head to quell the fuzz from his hoodie. No crowds. Hibari got the sense there hardly ever were. Just kids skipping club after lunch break. And adults loitering in their own front yards, sizing up hedges for trimming.
An old lady sold melons at the fruit stall on an honesty system, out of season but still good for eating. A slice or two to stave the hunger— which the old man out back took for compost, after they were done— before they found the nearest café. Nobody batted an eye, even when Kanato wandered in looking like he’d walked a guy out of a store at gunpoint.
They bought cheap grape soda in paper cups. Got hungry again. Split some convenience store sandwiches and stumbled around because Kanato’s map was lagging due to dying phone power. Until they came up on the garden and found a bench by its edge.
The old sort, with stones worn flat and moss-bedded between bricks. With koi so fat and slow they barely bothered to circle when Hibari tossed some two-hundred yen bonito flakes into the pond.
It was still early afternoon. The light stretched long across the water. Still, no clouds gathered. Hibari leaned back on his elbows in the grass, blowing hair from his eyes and brushing aside the dandelion he threatened to crush.
Squinting at Kanato through the gaps in his fingers, he said,
“You sure you didn’t bring me here so you could drown me in the pond?”
Kanato snorted, “Why, you suspicious?”
“I’unno. Should I be?”
He cracked a half-hearted smile:
“Not my kind of place for that sort of thing.”
Yikes, Hibari mouthed at him. Morbid. Kanato snickered. Alright, Hibari could entertain this.
“‘Kay, so where would you go?”
Kanato puffed a breath, something between a chuckle and a hum. Glanced away, lashes catching in loose in his fringe, and back again. The facets of two-tone eyes smoothed by shade.
“Obviously,” he began, with none of the pomp Hibari had come to expect— just plain, undressed truth. Stripped of the snark. Stripped of the smug. “Somewhere you’d never find me.”
“Like where?”
Kanato kicks him in the ankle like it’s just another one of their stupid jokes.
“If I told you, that’d defeat the point.”
And Hibari, so darling. Who loved too hard and trusted too sweet, laughed like it was one.
++++++
The garden sprawled lazy around them— paths winding in loops, flowers past their prime still leaning stubborn into the mid-autumn sun. Hibari had wandered ahead, lured by a patch of blue blooms crowding around a crooked lantern.
Kanato watched him go. Hands in his pockets again— where they’ve been all day, save for the minutes he couldn’t resist reaching. Watching the way Hibari crouched on long legs, his touch ghosting petals cautiously, as if not to bruise them.
Sunlight caught in his hair. Made it look stupidly soft. Made his skin look warm enough to bite. Made him look like he was stitched together by nothing but threads of safe and happy.
Not fair.
Drifting, Kanato’s fingers brushed the edge of his phone, where he felt blindly for the power switch before being forced to rip his eyes away. Two percent battery— the screen went black before he could even open the camera. He pressed the button. Pressed it again. Nothing.
Fair enough.
“Hiba.”
Hibari looked up— bright-eyed, easy-smiling, that gold-drenched idiot — completely oblivious. Always, utterly so oblivious. Always glowing with that big beaming—
“Yeah?” Cocked grin, snaggletoothed. Languid and feline and so fucking perfect.
Not fair.
“Phone.”
Hibari’s nose scrunched. “Hah? Yours die?”
“Yeah, I want a photo.”
It wasn’t unusual. Kanato took pictures sometimes— dumb things, mostly. Aquarium fish pulling faces. Weird manhole covers. Once, infamously, a pigeon eating a cigarette butt.
But he didn’t usually ask. It was tough luck, because the one time Kanato pointed at a streetlamp bent at a right-degree angle and said hey take a pic, Hibari— mouth full of pizza or something other he can’t recall— had snorted and said, no that’s stupid.
To his eternal detriment, the one time it mattered: Hibari kept grinning like a fool.
“Ahh, sure.”
What if he’d said no? Would it have changed anything? But he withdrew his phone and half-tossed it over without a shred of suspicion. Like the act wasn’t handing over a tiny piece of himself.
Kanato took it carefully. Already knew the password, and punched it in all the same. 1412. Played with it a little, looked up from his fiddling and just— watched. Watched like he had that second earlier.
Breeze tugging at the pink down at the base of Hibari’s neck. The way his jeans creased where the threads, bleached and worn, threatened to pull a hole. How he shifted the toe of his shoe so as not to crush the smallest flower, young and learning to lift its head.
In the white guidelines of an iPhone past overdue—
The shutter clicked.
Framed forever, this something precious. Kanato stared down at the screen for a long time. Long enough for Hibari to trot over.
“Hope I looked good,” he said, like an idiot. Like the fucking moron he was.
Kanato’s shoulders rocked with the shape of his sigh. Heavy, silent. Not enough for Hibari to notice, too love-drunk to even fucking consider—
Because Kanato smiled, crooked. Small and boyish and all round edges from the lint on his clothes that swallowed his arms in sweater-paws.
“You did.
Like always.”
++++++
Always is such a nice word, isn’t it? It was such a good day.
They flounced around in the garden. Made it halfway down a walking trail before Kanato decided it was too far to walk and whinged for fifteen minutes. Tried for a butterfly house, but were thrown out after Hibari screamed when a beetle flew too close to his face.
(“It buzzed— it was going to fly in my mouth —”
“Ew! Hiba, I don’t need that mouthfeel, man.”
“I’m your boyfriend , do not call me ‘man’.”
“You called me ‘dude’ earlier.”)
It was dumb. It was so dumb; it was perfect.
And Kanato laughed the whole way back like he’d won something— like some sort of reclusive triumph had snuck up his throat and was bursting out in sets. Like Hibari making a fool of himself was some rare species of good luck charm.
Then— the sun was gone.
Like a polite party patron, leaving without saying goodbye. Slipped off while they weren’t looking, too caught up in the fortune of mundanity. In its place, the street lamps hummed low in the key of electricity. Quiet windows glowing square and yellow behind second-storey curtains, as the train pulled back into the station they’d started from.
They walked together, shoulder-to-shoulder, hushed whispers in the space of shared breaths. Giggling, no room between their arms. The dark is good cover for this sort of thing. They took a back alley, and then another and then a third, barely wide enough for two, but a good excuse for—
Just a bit longer, please?
Hibari drew his jacket tighter. Hardly noticed the tips of his fingers turning red. Not holding Kanato’s hand, this time. Hands that kept burrowing into the pockets of that oversized hoodie. Squirrelling away the sparks Hibari loved feeling skitter across his palms. So instead, he wedged his own in the much tinier pockets of his skinny jeans.
It was only kinda, maybe cold…ish.
Neither of them said much on the walk back.
Hibari basked in it. The glory of it, that is. Mumbling this or that occasionally under his breath, that was fanning in pale clouds. Not loud enough to break the silence, like syrup coating his brain— all jello and fairy floss, made funny and weird by the sheer domesticity of it all.
Made weird by the sight of Kanato’s flyaways under streetlight. By Kanato’s silhouette— somehow soft in sun and sharp in the shadow. By Kanato in general, who kicked a rock and perked up when it landed in a neat, rock-shaped putt in the concrete.
“I don’t wanna go home yet…” it slipped from Hibari’s lips by accident. A thought running afoul.
Kanato did not look at him. Just hummed.
“Stay out with me then.”
“Easy for you to say,” Hibari said, laughing. Just a little. “You don’t sleep, do you?”
Kanato smiled. Didn’t correct him. Didn’t say why, or how, or fucking where.
The air settled again— that familiar tang of petrol and smoke that makes up the city aroma— as they stopped meters shy of the steps to Hibari’s apartment complex.
“Checkpoint,” said Kanato, offhand.
“Checkpoint,” echoed Hibari, and leaned in. Eager for the reward at the end of every day.
Instead, cold fingers bit into his skin. Firm, squeezing his cheeks, so Hibari spluttered indignation.
“Whaf the bib ijea?”
Kanato spared a chuckle, then. One that lilted on the finish, toning down into a fade. Pressure loosening, his grip fell away entirely.
Hibari faltered.
“Kanato?”
Thumb innerside, Kanato rubbed at his wrist. Felt his pulse to measure the beats like checking a music score for hiccups— if only to smooth them up.
“Hiba,” he started, then bit his lip. “Watarai,” he followed, and then grimaced.
And Hibari was forced to stand there, perpetual smile dropping. Brows knitting in anger that hadn’t quite kicked to life yet. Suddenly feeling the temperature of mid-fucking autumn eating jacket through to goosebump flesh.
Kanato settled on “Hibari,” steady but shuddering on the first letter. Not matching how his fists clenched, hugging wrist to chest now.
There were no spring crickets or summertime cicadas. Just autumn, and the sheer nothingness of autumn but the distant sound of late-night traffic, everything alive going dead so it can be bones by winter.
“What?” Hibari rasped, and then cleared his throat, because he hated the way it came out small , and wretched , and pathetic , like it was choking —
“I think we should stop seeing each other.”
Or maybe it had been Kanato’s voice that sounded that way. He doesn’t remember clearly.
He does remember the nausea of it. The way his stomach lurched so hard it twisted his guts. The way his throat instantly dried; cloying, jammed with words he hadn’t even the capacity to consider ; much less speak into existence. How his spine locked, how his toes turned numb. How the concrete dropped out from under him and he had to pretend there was ground to stand on even if he couldn’t feel it.
How he asked himself, did I mishear? What does he mean? Did he really just say that?
Did Kanato— did Kanato, really just say that?
Kanato, of all people. Of all— people. Kanato, whose eyes were glassy.
He remembers that— because he hated them. For being translucent and hazy and farseeing— far-looking, really. Not seeing anything. Detached from himself; a disseminated warbling on the surface of a lake. The fucking nerve, to be like that— when saying— what was it he said?
“Sorry, Hibari. I’m sorry.”
And then, because Hibari was frozen, bolted in place, cold to the marrow, Kanato turned to him. Shattering, in the moment, at the edges. Jaw tensing, teeth gritting. He reached up and scrubbed a fist through blonde locks, matting them. His eyes squeezed shut, steeling himself. Ironclad and untouchable, the deliverer of ultimatums.
The leader, who makes the hard decisions.
“Sorry. I can’t— I can’t date you anymore.”
Iron-fucking-clad.
The joy punched out of Hibari’s chest. The sunshine in his eyes winked out. The snaggletoothed grin flattened into a line, lips faintly parted for nothing but a hoarse whimper:
“ Why?”
Kanato didn’t answer at first, tilting his head the smallest degree away. Like Hibari was physically painful to perceive.
“Why?” Hibari repeated again, sharper. The cavity in his chest started to whistle with wind suction. “Kanato, you’re my best friend— I thought…” and he trailed off, because he knew the look. The lowered gaze that stubbornly avoided.
Kanato is not changing his mind.
Voice dropping, Hibari’s stance curled. “Look at me.”
Too quick— “It’s for your own good.”—
— Kanato said. He said.
Then the cavity turned to a vacuum, howling. Screeching, because—
“What the fuck does that mean?” And before he knew it, his feelingless fingers curled in the front of Kanato’s hoodie. He was pulling, hard, shaking, almost. So tight his knuckles bleached, “What the hell, Kanato?”
“Hibari,” Kanato growled. Warning, as his reflexes tried to pry himself free. He grunted as Hibari jerked him again, digging his heels.
“That’s bullshit,” Hibari hissed, “That’s bullshit and you fucking know it. Voltaction will—”
Kanato tugged, trying for space. A tepid attempt at best. “Get off. If Voltaction could do anything about this—”
“You don’t get to decide that, we’re a fucking team—”
“I’m the leader!” Kanato snapped, shoving hard.
Hibari did not let go. Latched on like a splinter wedged under a nail.
“That’s not—”
Kanato shoved harder.
Not rough — no, never— but enough to stumble Hibari back, reclaiming air he’s wheezing to breathe in. Hard enough to land with a pitiful whump against Hibari's chest. Hard enough to make something snap in Hibari’s ears.
Hibari’s breath came rattling, white in the cold.
The grip on Kanato’s hoodie sagged, before it twisted tighter. Desperate, feral. Final, he hoped. Because he didn’t care— couldn’t care wouldn't care— didn’t give a shit about what fucking lie Kanato had told himself this time, about Voltaction, about Hibari not being enough to solve whatever moronic problem—
“Hibari.” It came again. Flat, non-compromising. Knowing, as if listening in on the spiral.
Hibari bit back, “You’re not serious,” then heard himself laughing. Bubbling up wrong and tearing out of him in choked gasps, horrible and cracked and ugly because there was nothing beautiful left to make it so. “You’re not fucking serious.”
Kanato’s expression didn’t change.
“Kanato, please— please, please, ” —cracked again— “you can’t be fucking serious right now.”
He wanted to yell. It didn’t come out right. Distorted and quiet, maybe. High where the oxygen pinched between his teeth and grating where it got stuck thick under tongue.
Kanato’s expression did change— bleary in Hibari’s vision, wet and wobbly. Hot on his face, salty in his mouth. Smudging Kanato into colours of coin-gold and jewel-blue.
“Go home,” he said, “ Please, Hiba.”
How? Hibari wanted to ask, how am I meant to go home?
Usually, usually, on good days like that one— always on good days like that one— Kanato was there, mumbling café stock— like mantra— into the pink mug he always chose from the kitchen cabinet. How can Hibari go home, when Kanato won’t be there, fingers splayed over Hibari’s back like an anchor?
There are a lot of things in him somewhere. Ascribing a place had always been too much, even for him. All the sentiments that once tied pretty ribbons around their pinkies. Dazzling promises wrapped up in a ball of yarn.
“That’s not fair,” whispered Hibari, hoarse. Unseeing, staring at the pavement wide-eyed and struck. “That’s not fair, Kanato. That’s not fair.”
Unravelled, now. Threads everywhere but leading to nothing. Ribbons undone but only void inside.
Kanato sank with it. Shoulders, knees, voice, eyes, expression. Like the weight was caving him legs-up. Like he’d spent the whole day memorising Hibari’s shape just so he could carve it out of his chest that night. Where it lay at his feet in a tangled mess of morbid entrails; the viscera that came with his heart, ripped out by the handful.
Finger by finger, Kanato peeled out of Hibari's grasp. He could only stare with those fogged eyes of his. Tanzanite blunted to a dead fish purple.
“I know. I’m sorry, Hiba.”
++++++
Hibari doesn’t remember anything after that. It’s all very grey. He remembers Kanato didn’t come into work. He remembers Seraph and Akira pressing him, concerned and cautious and delicate. As if Hibari was a fragile thing; as if he was something that would fold in on itself the second they spoke a word with the wrong kind of sound.
He didn’t think he was. He still doesn’t think he is.
But he must be, because he remembers reaching for his phone after two weeks of radio silence. Two weeks of private questions by coworkers, hey, where’s Kanato? And the pieces of himself Hibari managed to pick up can only ever say,
Sorry, I really don’t know.
What did he do again— ?
Oh, right.
Reached for his phone, scrolled over to the favourites page in LINE, thinking. Because even though Akira and Seraph had told him they couldn’t get a hold of Kanato, he thought, stupidly, wishfully, that he might . And he wondered, Where are you, will you even answer, what are you doing, I hope you’re okay, I miss you I miss you I miss you. And finding—
Nothing.
No little circle with the boy in the dog hoodie. No little tag with KNT. And he remembers, he remembers—
Hiba, phone. I want a photo.
And Hibari doesn’t remember anything after that.
Just the salt on his lips and the migraine that followed.
Which is why he finds himself here, now.
Two nights after Hibari realised that fucking bastard deleted his contact from his phone— here.
An apartment on a floor not high enough for the man who used to live in it. With security at check-in and at the elevator and then again, at the door itself—
Not even locked. Idiot. If someone really wants to get in, they’re just a formality, so said his leader.
Like who, Hibari had always asked. Giddy, because Kanato had always followed—
Like a phantom thief, for instance.
It was a joke. The door was always locked anyway. Because Hibari knows if a phantom thief wants to get in, picking the lock is half the fun.
And here Hibari is. Really fucking wanting.
And the door’s not even locked.
The place smells like nothing. Not like Kanato at all— vanilla and coffee and sometimes frozen-pack spaghetti. The air’s too stale. The hoodie on the back of the chair, the one he’d worn the day of the garden, had never come home.
No shoes at the door. Shock-pink mug abandoned on the counter, a waiting shot of espresso two weeks overdue congealing in the coffee machine.
He’d gotten distracted. By the thing Hibari steps on, probably. The thing that doesn’t crumple the way paper should, hard like a tile underfoot.
A manila envelope, standard yellow. No return address and no stamp, but Hibari recognises the insignia all the same. The cute pinwheel that’d been stapled to Kanato’s person since highschool. Lapel to necklace and back again, over and over.
Inky black now. Not Kanato’s specific brand of elegant. Not Kanato’s at all.
Hibari leans down, picks it up gingerly. The mouth is sealed with a patch of sticky tape— too thick to close, too keen to share its contents. Though it’s already been torn open, it’s rubbed back down as if to silence it for good.
He doesn’t think, just tears it open, because it’s suspicious. And anything suspicious, Hibari blames for the ache so deep it lives in his blood. For the empty apartment and the empty space that used to breathe and laugh and make awful jokes beside him.
The weight of the envelope shifts, slides, and Hibari fumbles. Squares spew out and flutter on the floorboards— he curses under his breath, knees hitting hardwood as he reaches. To pile them up as if Kanato is here to chide him for dropping them in the first place— but his fingers stutter.
Photographs. So many fucking photographs.
Of him. Of Akira. Of Seraph.
But mostly, overwhelmingly, him.
In the station. At the park. Leaning too far over a bridge railing, because he’d seen a duck that was mottled blonde and reminded him of someone. Biting into convenience store bread with too much cheek showing. Walking home at dusk with his guitar slung over his back, oblivious to the little red bead of a laser sight painted between his shoulder blades.
Far, far too many.
“That’s not fair,” Hibari whispers.
He turns the envelope between his fingers. Stares at that unsightly mark on the front, black and not at all the flawless gold— the way Kanato wore it.
“That’s not fair.”