Chapter Text
Hayato is seven years old when he falls in love for the first time.
It would be far from the last, but the most curious thing about it is that, without fail, he always falls in love with the same boy.
For a seven year old Suo Hayato, school isn’t good, but it’s not bad, either. It just is, like a lot of things tend to do.
The teachers are nice; easy to talk to and patient enough to explain things for a second, third and even fourth time whenever someone is having trouble understanding something. They don’t mind that Hayato tends to finish his work earlier than his classmates and spends the rest of the time gazing out of the window. His classmates are nice too, and he even calls some of them friends. They always invite him to play during break and don’t mock him too much when he sometimes says he’d rather just stay in the classroom gazing out the window. Sometimes, he watches them play and wonders if he should feel upset by the fact that they are having so much fun without him, even though it was him who rejected their invitation in the first place.
Instead, he feels… nice? Hayato has never felt much of anything, so he’s not entirely sure what he feels most of the time. But he smiles, he’s always smiling, so that must mean that he’s feeling nice…?
(“Little Suo… he’s odd, isn’t he?”
Adults, Hayato has come to learn, are a little stupid. They treat kids like they are stupid just because they aren’t big enough yet, don’t know enough words yet, but they are the stupid ones for forgetting that smaller ears work as good as big ones and little brains remember harsh words just the same.
He doesn’t tell them that, though. Instead, he keeps smiling, keeps trying to find the juice brand his mother likes the most and keeps pretending that he can’t hear the pair of ladies standing just behind him, not even an aisle away. Hayato is good at pretending, definitely much better than at standing up to someone.
“Yes, yes, I noticed it too! It’s the…”
“The way he’s always smiling, yeah?” juice in hand, Suo moves down the aisle to get the canned peaches. Perhaps because they are the only ones at the konbini, or because his brain thinks that a conversation with him as the main topic is one worth tuning into, the conversation follows right alongside him. “I used to wish for my Tobio to be more pleasant-mannered like him, but…”
“Who wants a kid that looks like a robot?”)
There’s this boy. Sakura Haruka, according to Tanaka Chikako, and Tanaka Chikako is never wrong about these things. He’s Hayato’s age, although they don’t belong to the same class, and his half black, half white always makes him stand out in the playground. He’s always the last to come and the last one to leave too, and Hayato wonders if it’s just something he likes to do, like how his front door neighbour always likes to put clothes out to dry late in the afternoon, when there’s almost no more sun.
Hayato doesn’t know much about him. In fact, no one seems to know much about him, besides the fact that he’s a freak. Gross. Once, he asks Tanaka what’s so gross about Sakura Haruka. ‘His hair’, she says, followed by ‘his eyes’. He doesn’t really understand, but he doesn’t ask again.
Sometimes, Hayato looks at Sakura Haruka, who always finds a spot for himself at the edge of the playground, right by the bushes where his monochrome hair doesn’t stand out so much, and wonders if the other boy is the same kind of odd as him. If when he goes to the store there’s also a pair of ladies talking bad about him right behind his back, unaware or maybe simply uncaring that he could hear every word.
He could ask, but then again he could not. It’s a curiosity he’s willing to live with, and Suo Hayato has always been an observer first and foremost. It’s not like him to walk up to Sakura Haruka and ask him if it hurts him to be called odd too.
There’s a bridge between Hayato’s school and his house. It’s not very high but its length more than makes up for it, and it’s always nearly deserted too. Sometimes, he likes to stop there on his way home and simply look at the water running below for a while.
Today it’s not one of those times. It was not supposed to be one of such times, at least, but Hayato still finds himself coming to a stop when he hears a commotion up ahead and recognizes some of the voices as being the kids from a couple of grades up that had been going around messing with younger ones lately. They haven’t messed with him yet, but one of their favourite targets…
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?!” up ahead stands Sakura Haruka in the flesh, held in place by a couple of boys nearly a head taller than him. From the looks of it, he’s put a violent struggle, what with their tousled appearances and the blotch of red under one’s nose. In front of the trio, with his back to Hayato, stands a fourth boy with a weird black and orange jacket that Hayato would recognize anywhere. Tanaka Hanzou, his classmate’s older brother. He's holding something in his arms, although from the distance Hayato can’t quite figure out what.
“What’s it to you, freak?” Tanaka taunts, shaking whatever it is that he has inside that supermarket’s plastic bag right in front of Sakura’s face “Huh? What d'ya think you can do about it?”
Sakura growls in response, surging forward for all of a second before he’s mercilessly tugged back into place. Even so, he doesn’t let himself go easily, but in a flurry of limbs that makes both of the boys holding him groan; one from the kick he got to his knee and the other for the elbow he caught to his side.
“Well, would you look at that” the least injured of the pair huffs, holding himself away from Sakura’s wild elbow “who’d guess the freak still had some energy in him!”
“Maybe we didn’t beat him up enough” says the other, already gearing up a fist “we could fix that up now.”
“Yeah, not like he has anyone at home to do something about it.”
Hayato watches it all, the taunts and the snickers and the jabs and the punches and kicks that follow. He knows feels like he should interfere, should go call someone, should try to scare them away, should do literally anything else besides standing glued to the spot as he wordlessly watches the three against one fight.
Is it still a fight if the opponent can’t even fight back? One more thing to add to the list of things he doesn’t know.
Hayato looks around. Someone is bound to pass by, right? An… an adult or maybe even a teenager, some who can break up the one-sided fight better than Hayato himself ever could.
“I think that's enough, guys” Tanaka says as he takes a step back from the mass of entangled limbs that are his minions and Sakura. Hayato has to stiffle a gasp at the state the other boy's face is, one eye almost closed and lines of red running down from his forehead and mouth. He's not crying, though, just still stubbornly staring at Tanaka like he barely even noticed the beating he took.
For a wild little moment, Hayato feels a stab of envy for Sakura Haruka. How is it that, even after being held down and beaten, he's still far more brave than Hayato will ever be?
“It's getting late anyways, and we actually have folks who care about us getting home” he continues, drawing the duo's laughter. Then, taking a step back, Tanaka reaches for the supermarket bag he had thrown to the ground earlier.
It squirms in his hold.
“You bastard!” Sakura squirms against his restraints, looking not unlike those American heroes in the action movies Hayato's older brothers love to watch. “You told me you'd let them go if I d-”
“And you actually believed me?” interrupts Tanaka with the sort of cruel laughter no kid should have. “Not only are you a freak but you're dumb too, is that it?”
Multiple things happen at the same time. Tanaka throws the plastic bag out of the bridge, Sakura frees himself from the pair of minions and sucker punches him in the face, an enraged man screams something from the street that connects the other side of the bridge.
Hayato freezes in his place, as do the three older boys, but not Sakura. No, instead he takes the momentum from punching Tanaka and soars over the bridge, not faltering for even a second.
Distantly, as if on the other hand of a very long tunnel, Hayato is aware that the world keeps on spinning just as it always did. The trio runs away from whoever yelled at him, nearly knocking into him in their hurry. Hayato, however, has been sucked into a parallel universe of his own, where nothing exists but him, a bridge and the water running underneath it. And Sakura Haruka.
His fall plays in slow motion in front of Hayato's eyes, almost as if he's levitating. It's something that will always always stay engraved in his mind, he thinks, bets, hopes; the way Sakura's hair waves against the wind, catching the setting sun in a kaleidoscope of colours that have no right to come from monochromatic hair. From this far, Hayato can't quite distinguish his features, can't tell if Sakura has closed his eyes or not, if his mouth is set in firm resolution or perhaps a leftover snarl. He can, though, see the way his hands are closed into fists by his head, how his shirt rides up just so and exposes the red hue of a bruise spanning all the way from his hip up to his ribs.
It's like the whole world is wrapping itself around Sakura and saying ‘look, Hayato, look; look at this boy and don't you dare look away again’. Inside his chest, his heart thump, thump, thumps like it's learning how to beat for the first time, throwing itself against his ribcage like it finally realized the jail it is.
Sakura hits the water and takes their own pocket universe right alongside him. A little dazed from the whiplash, Hayato rushes to the bridge guard and looks down, just in time to catch Sakura emerging from the water with the white plastic bag grasped in one of his hands. He doesn’t lose time before swimming to the shore, a little awkward from being unable to use both arms but still faster than Hayato thought he would be.
He wants to call out to him. For some stupid, idiot, unfunded reason, Hayato really wants to call out to him. Stop being a spectator for once in his life and run to the other end of the bridge to help Sakura rescue whatever it is that is inside the bag. Even if he doesn’t yet know how to swim very well, even if he has never spoken a word to Sakura Haruka in his life, even if he wasn’t strong enough to help prevent the bag from being thrown in the first place. He wants it so much that he almost aches with it. Or maybe it’s not quite it what’s making him ache all over, maybe it’s just a residue of whatever feeling is still keeping his heart on a run, more overworked than when he watches a horror movie or spends physical education running.
Sakura arrives at the shore. His whole body is shaking with the effort of his breaths, so much so that even Hayato can see it, but still he wastes no time pushing the plastic bag to dry land and only then pushes himself too. One knee on each side of it, he seems to fight with the bag’s knot for a minute and Hayato swears he can hear him yell something or another that sounds too much like an expletive. Suddenly, the bag is torn under Sakura’s hands, and Hayato squints to see what was inside.
Kittens. Or puppies. Hayato is too far to see clearly which one it is, but his heart still aches all the same. Who would even…? How could…?
Could he have prevented this? If he’d gotten involved in the fight, could he have stopped Tanaka from throwing the bag into the canal? Maybe he didn’t even have to get involved, maybe he could have just shouted at them or diverted their attention or….
His head swims with the possibilities of what it could’ve been. His only certainty, the middle stone around which swim all his half thought ideas and alternative realities and what if’s and what if not’s, is one:
He was a coward. He’s still being a coward. But he doesn’t have to keep being a coward.
However, when he goes to take a step, eyes squinting over the guardrails to locate Sakura (when had he become so distracted that he’d even taken his eyes off him?), the other isn’t there anymore. Only the white plastic bag and Hayato remain at the scene to tell the story.
Hayato has always been an observer. He’s the youngest of three, with an age difference to his two brothers that makes it hard to connect with them. His mother is gentle, his father not so much, but it doesn't really matter since they spend most of their time away from home. Observing people, he has long since learnt, is much easier than to try to connect with them. It's not like he's very interested in trying to connect with them either.
Sakura Haruka is the exception.
(He doesn't know it yet, but Sakura will grow to become a lot of Hayato's exceptions.)
There's something about the boy that draws Hayato to him, like the other is a star and he's a planet that got caught in its orbit. It feels inevitable, unavoidable, neverending.
So for the first exception of a person that he has ever come across, Hayato decides to make his very first exception too.
Sakura doesn't appear at school for the next three days. Rumour has it that he provoked a fight with some upperclassmen and got beaten up so bad he had to nurse his injuries at home.
Hayato thinks it's rather that he got sick from jumping off the bridge, but he keeps his suspicions to himself. It's not like anyone asked him, is it?
On the fourth day, it's by pure luck that Hayato sees Sakura as he walks into the school, nearly twenty minutes after the first class started. He'd been staring out the window as per usual, waiting for the teacher to finish revising the previous class’ topic, when he'd spotted a far too familiar black and white head, running through the front gate.
It'd taken nearly all of his self-control not to jump in his seat or do something equally as telling. Then the rest of it had gone down the drain during the rest of the class, as he tried his best to pay attention to the teacher and in the end didn't hear a damn word.
If his classmates had been surprised with the eagerness with which he’d followed them out of the classroom, they hadn’t shown it. But they did send a barrage of shouts his way when, as soon as Sakura stepped foot in the playground, Hayato left them without a word.
Hayato finds him by the edge of the playground, sitting on a pretty hidden spot. Had he not been keeping an eye on Sakura this whole time, he probably wouldn’t even think of coming to search here.
As he approaches, Hayato can see Sakura’s hands forming into fists, and only a second later does he look up, right into Hayato’s eyes. He keeps on walking, trying not to let it show how much the intense dual-colored stare affects him.
“Good morning, Sakura-kun” he offers with a smile, stopping just a step away from the other boy and probably far enough that he could dodge should Sakura decide to try to kick him. There’s an importance to first impressions, and Hayato doesn’t want to get out of this one with a sole pattern etched on his face.
“Ah?” but he does none of that. Instead of rising or trying to kick him or anything that Hayato had been pretending not to be preparing himself for, Sakura blushes. It’s an explosion-like thing, turning his whole face into the imitation of a crab in less than two seconds, and it makes Hayato want to laugh “Th-the hell are you? And h-how do you know my name?”
His words are loud but not angry, even if they might be taken that way at face value. No, instead, what Hayato hears is confusion and wariness talking. So, taking a chance, Hayato holds onto his answer for a little longer and instead makes himself a space besides Sakura, closer than he probably should, farther than he wanted to.
“My name is Suo Hayato. My classmates say that you’re odd, Sakura-kun” the other bristles at that, turning towards him with fire in his eyes and a scowl on his lips. Hayato doesn’t let it affect him, though. “People tend to call me odd too” and just like that the fire disappears, overtaken by confusion once more “I was hoping we could learn to be odd together?”