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It was Christmas Eve.
The evening was dark, and the crisp air bit at Atsushi's nose as he hurried through the streets. His scarf was close around his neck, and his gloved hands pressed into the pocket of his heavy coat, sliding smoothly against the wrapping of the box that sat there. His breath made white clouds in the air; the only clouds. The sky was alive with stars.
And the starriest nights were also the coldest. As he turned into the gate of Kin-chan's house and rang the bell, he could feel his nose threatening to drip. He touched it with the back of his glove, hoping nobody would notice. En-chan's mother would just have thrown a tissue his way, laughing as it tumbled to the floor a metre short of him. But this... this wasn't the sort of house where you could get away with being improper.
"Welcome, Kinugawa-sama," came a voice, clear as a bell from a concealed speaker; the junior maid's voice. "Please come to the house." Atsushi obeyed, hands still in his pockets. These days, Kin-chan's household was always so unnerving. He hadn't noticed it so much when he was small. But then, he hadn't noticed a lot of things back then.
Kin-chan himself met him at the entrance hall, wearing house slippers. He looked at ease, which meant he was pleased. Atsushi must not have done anything immediately wrong.
"Am I okay?" he asked, half-laughing, half-worried.
Kin-chan gave him a puzzled look. "What do you mean?"
"Oh, you know," said Atsushi, not quite teasing as he took off his gloves and scarf. "Sometimes you look at me like you want to know where my school tie has gone."
Kin-chan drew back slightly, considering this, then his peaceful look returned. "I'm sure I still have mine, somewhere. I could lend it to you." It was as close as he would get to teasing in turn.
Atsushi shook his head fast. "No, that's fine! How are things?" he rushed to add. "Your father's not here?"
"No, we're quite to ourselves," Kin-chan assured him. Atsushi's eyes went briefly to the maid who'd greeted him, passing by further down the corridor, silent and unobtrusive except for her little bow. "I heard he might be back for the New Year, if nothing's amiss."
Denuded of his winter clothes and his shoes, Atsushi stepped into the slippers set ready for guests, and came inside. Kin-chan lit up around the eyes, around the corners of his lips, just in passing; then his smile slid back into seclusion as he led the way through the corridors to his room.
* * *
Atsushi still half-expected to see Kin-chan's room as it had been when they were twelve, painfully old-fashioned like the rest of the house, with the tatami floor and the futon folded away in the chest beneath the window, with shelves of books and only the odd, improving toy here and there. It had seemed as if, for all his wealth, Kin-chan's father begrudged spending a single yen on such frivolities. But that couldn't be the case, since at some time since then, the room had been redecorated at what looked like lavish expense, modern and strangely aggressive with all the dark wood and stark lighting, and one wall that was, by now, almost nothing but glass.
It didn't look like a room Kin-chan would be comfortable in, and Atsushi had said as much. Kin-chan had replied, without as much as turning a hair, "Anything else would be a distraction", and Atsushi had felt his stomach sink. How much of this was his fault? All right, Kin-chan had always been serious, but he'd known how to have fun, once. He'd known how to devote himself to things besides duty and care—and, until so recently, his own misery.
He remembered the long-ago weeks, and then months, when Kin-chan had refused to look up from his books unless a teacher called him, sat on his own with his face just a bit twisted. He'd been startled to see that the books had all gone from Kin-chan's bedroom, and he'd exclaimed at it before he could catch himself. But Kin-chan had just said that there was no point keeping them; he didn't read them more than once, anyway. Atsushi had known that wasn't true, and had opened his mouth to protest, but then he'd caught himself. After all, what did he really know about Kin-chan, by now?
Some time after Atsushi's first visit, a second chair, identical to the one there already, had materialised by the sliding door to the gardens. It had suggested to Atsushi that Kin-chan didn't receive many visitors at home, but he'd tried not to think too hard about that; after all, things were much better now.
Not long after they sat down, there was a quiet knock as the maid presented a tray with two mugs of hot chocolate. Atsushi thanked her with a beaming smile. Kin-chan acknowledged her as if people in uniform waited on him every day. Which, Atsushi reminded himself, they did.
"Did you run out of tea?" he teased, once she'd gone. Kin-chan blinked.
"You'd prefer tea..?" he asked. It hurt to see him so painfully careful all the time, so much more than he'd been when they were small. "I'll have some brought."
Atsushi hurried again to demur. "No, no," he said, lifting the cup. It was warm against his hands after the chill of outdoors, and tasted of thick, swirling cream, and faintly of cinnamon.
Kin-chan got up and dimmed the lights. The room fell into darkness, and even through the glow of the gentle lights in the garden, the stars shone bright. He rummaged for a startlingly long time in his desk drawer, then returned to place something small on the table between them, dead centre.
It was a candle, taller than it was wide, but only just; glossy, white and perfect in its elegant cradle of matte black ceramic. It didn't seem like something Kin-chan ought to have to hand, Atsushi thought, except then Kin-chan produced, of all things, and as if it was nothing, a long, narrow lighter, finely wrought in silver.
"Where did you get a thing like that?" Atsushi asked, peering as Kin-chan lit the candle.
"A gift," he said, rather curtly. "From Akoya."
Atsushi tried not to shift in his chair in too much of a telltale way. "But what do you use it for?"
He had visions, disturbing visions, of Kin-chan clustering with the scruffier boys who traded cigarettes back and forth, out of sight in the secluded copses of small trees that lined the wall of the school grounds here and there. He'd caught En-chan there once, but only once; En-chan had concluded, with Atsushi's most unimpressed scowl right on him, that smoking was too much of a pain.
"Candles are useful things," Kin-chan said. "For meditation, mainly. Sometimes we use them in tea ceremony."
"And you like them, Kin-chan," teased Atsushi, very gently. But Kin-chan didn't say anything more, just looked away tightly with what, in the dim light, might have been a blush. Rather than push it, Atsushi sat back, with his hot chocolate, and watched the little flame burn.
* * *
They sat there for a little while, watching the candle, trading careful talk and, on Atsushi's part, talk that sometimes wasn't as careful as he meant. They talked until a single streak of light blazed across the sky. It lasted a second or two, no more, then it was gone, leaving brilliant green traces in their vision..
It was impossible, surely?—but no. They caught each other's eye, just briefly, astonished, then looked back to the starry sky. Make a wish?
"That was a—a Geminid?" Kin-chan was asking.
"I don't think so," Atsushi said. "I think it's too late. I suppose right now it would be what ... an Ursid? They're rare, Kin-chan!" he added, excited, before continuing more thoughtfully. "I guess Yumoto would say it was Santa Claus."
Kinshirou gave him a very sharp look, but then turned his attention again to the sky. "Isn't it his birthday?" he asked, almost idly.
"Yumoto's? He hasn't said anything." Atsushi just had time to wonder how Kin-chan would know when he didn't, before remembering that Kin-chan knew all the student records back to front.
"Atchan!" The little candle flame guttered in the face of Kinshirou's exasperation. "Not him. I mean—Christmas itself. Isn't it..."
Understanding hit Atsushi all at once. He stared. "You mean—is Christmas Santa Claus's birthday? Really, Kin-chan?"
Kin-chan looked away, pursing his lips. "Don't laugh at my question."
"No, no, I wouldn't," Atsushi reassured him. He would not laugh. He would not even giggle. He would be a model of stoicism. And he certainly wouldn't mention this to En-chan, later.
No, really, he wouldn't. He cleared his throat. "Christmas is, um—it's one of the Christian festivals. The birth of Jesus Christ, right?"
He'd worried that Kin-chan might be embarrassed to miss something like that, but no; Kin-chan was staring at him, momentarily agog. "Jesus Christ was born?"
Atsushi blinked at him, further taken aback. "Kin-chan, don't you know that? Don't you remember them telling us the story in school?"
Kinshirou lowered his eyes, gracefully lifting his cup to his mouth. "I remember you asking why there weren't more robots in the story. You asked the teacher." And then, as Atsushi opened his mouth to protest that, assuming that any such thing had, indeed, happened, Kin-chan had agreed that a story with robots would have been better, Kin-chan cut through his protests with the precision of a scalpel. "It's not that I don't remember the story. I simply... didn't think it was a real event. Not one that would have a date associated with it. I thought it was just another myth. Like Izanagi and Izanami."
Atsushi couldn't help being relieved by that mention of the old creation myths. He wouldn't have been surprised to hear that Kin-chan took every line of the Kojiki to be holy writ. "No, I think Jesus is meant to be real."
"And so they have a festival on his birthday." Kinshirou stared into the candle flame, hands neatly folded in his lap. "I suppose that makes sense of the chicken."
Atsushi blinked. "The chicken?"
"Yes." Kin-chan's nose had wrinkled in distaste. "Jesus was born in a stable, isn't that right? There would have been chickens in the stable."
"Would there? Huh." Atsushi nodded. "I never thought of it that way before. I suppose that makes sense. Have you ever had KFC, Kin-chan?"
The nose wrinkle became far more pronounced. "I have not," said Kinshirou stiffly. "We don't celebrate Christmas here."
Oh. That made Atsushi feel quite a bit more uncomfortable about the little box he had hidden away. But something was definitely wrong. He leaned in a little. "But you are celebrating," he said. "What's the candle for, otherwise?"
Kin-chan scowled again, and looked down at his hands, clasping one with the other. Two spots of pink colour sprang back to his face. Atsushi raised his eyebrows, inquisitive, and Kin-chan began to mutter something; then it was lost. Without looking up, he swallowed, and clenched his other hand tight in his lap, and it was then that Atsushi decided that, since he had sat himself well and truly in the boat, there was no getting out until he'd crashed right down to the bottom of the waterfall.
He slid the box out of his pocket, resting it on the table. The lavender ribbon on top was half-crushed, but the paper still gleamed, subtle like old bronze. There was a silence. Kin-chan looked at the box, surprised out of his discomfort, and Atsushi looked at Kin-chan, considered him briefly, the unending, frustrating puzzles he presented, then he, too, looked down at the box.
"What is this?" asked Kin-chan, at length.
Atsushi's stomach shivered. Was he really going to turn it down? "It's, ah. It's a present, Kin-chan."
"I know that," Kin-chan snapped back. "I mean—It's a Christmas present?"
His tone had shifted, pieces falling into place. All at once, and all again, Atsushi saw the uncertainty that hid behind his friend's elaborate polish. His heart filled up at once. "It is," he said, hopefully not too gently. "It's for you."
Kin-chan reached out carefully, taking the small box in the tips of his fingers. "You wrapped it well. Except for the ribbon, here." He indicated the squashed bow with a tap.
Atsushi thanked him, unconcerned. "I guess I should have put it in a bag," he agreed. "But then you'd have known I had a present for you."
Kin-chan snorted, but just a little. He turned the box over in his hands. "Should I—"
"You can if you want," Atsushi encouraged.
The ribbon fell away with a twist of Kin-chan's fingers. It landed on the table, seeming almost to fold itself. Kin-chan unfolded the gift wrap with exquisite care, as if he could sense what was inside by touching the paper. Atsushi couldn't help but contrast how En-chan had torn into his gift—slowly, yes, and lazily, with nothing of care about it but with so much more enthusiasm.
"I suppose," Kin-chan was murmuring, not looking up, "you're going to tell me I should tear the paper."
"That would make dust, I guess," said Atsushi, not unkindly. "Actually, I was going to tell you it wouldn't explode and kill us both—"
He cut himself off, as he realised what he'd said. The silence was oppressive. Kin-chan looked up uncertainly, but then looked back down, at the glossy black box that was finally sitting in his hands.
It was nothing special, just cardboard. It didn't make a sound when Kin-chan turned it over. Atsushi felt something tremulous beat in his chest. He could already hear Kin-chan lecturing him on what he'd got wrong, and why, and how, and why had he ever thought this would be a good idea?
Kin-chan touched the box with the barest tips of his fingers, as if feeling for a pulse. Then, with another, quicker glance to Atsushi, he took off the lid and laid it on the table.
Inside, there was white tissue, another of Atsushi's painstakingly wrapped layers to gentle aside. And then there sat Atsushi's present, reflecting Kin-chan's careful curiosity in its glass. Kin-chan's face slackened as he looked down at it, and his mouth fell a little open. On tenterhooks, Atsushi drew his chair a little closer, so he could see what Kin-chan was seeing.
Lying there in Kin-chan's hands, against its bed of white tissue, was an old photograph in an understated frame. Two little boys, almost close enough to touch the camera, one beaming as if he hadn't a care in the world, the other quieter, glowing, as if he had a secret.
One of Kin-chan's hands had come to rest on the edge of the box, as if he was afraid to touch the glass. He still hadn't looked away.
"What do you think?" asked Atsushi, trying not to sound as nervous as he was. Kin-chan rested a fingertip on the tissue paper.
"Why this picture?"
Atsushi swallowed. Kin-chan sounded distant, but then, Kin-chan always sounded distant. Almost always.
"I wanted, uh," he tried, swallowing to clear his throat, feeling not quite as stupid as he ever had. "I wanted ...."
He took a long sip of his hot chocolate. His hands were tight on the cup, and embarrassment was stinging in his cheeks. "I guess I wanted you to know I always had it."
Kinshirou was still looking down at it, still holding the box in the tips of his fingers like a precious thing. "You look very young."
Atsushi craned his neck. "So do you." Even if you acted like an old grandad half the time, he didn't add.
"Perhaps," said Kin-chan, clearly thinking about something other than the pale smudge of face smiling shyly back at him from the frame. What it was, Atsushi couldn't tell. Kin-chan took the frame by its edge and set it on the table so the two little boys could watch them. Atsushi beamed his delight—and his searing relief—as Kin-chan accepted his gift, and Kin-chan blushed.
"Last year Akoya insisted," he explained. "The presents for Christmas. He said it would be crude and unbeautiful"—he paused wryly over Akoya's pet insult—"not to observe the season. I told him he was being a fool." He took his cup back up and his fingers shifted on the porcelain, unsettled with nervousness, here and there and there again before he quickly finished the story. "But the next day Arima showed up with a fir tree in a pot, and Akoya was delighted, and that was that."
"That sounds like Arima-san," Atsushi agreed. It warmed his heart, these stories of how somewhere, somehow, despite everything, other people had been looking out for Kin-chan all along.
"That's why I've nothing for you," Kin-chan added, a fresh flush rising in his face.
"It doesn't matter, Kin-chan," Atsushi said. It was true; even though his heart had sunk a bit, he would have been startled to get a present from Kin-chan. "If you're giving presents only to get them back, you're doing it wrong, you know?"
"But that's just it!" Kin-chan burst out, faltering as he heard himself, clinging to his half-empty cup. Atsushi raised his eyebrows.
"I wanted to get you something exceptional," he said, looking away. The flush in his face had turned into a full-scale blush of shame, painful to see. "Something that would... would remind you of what we'd been to each other, and are again. I wanted to give you something that was equal to you."
He looked down into his cup, away from Atsushi, away from the picture. Atsushi's eyebrows had vanished into his hair. Despite all his determination to be proper and strong, Kin-chan was curling in on himself, ashamed, worse than ever to watch, and worse again because Atsushi so badly wanted him to feel only good things, and it seemed like such an impossible goal. "But everything I saw, everything I could find, was inadequate," Kin-chan finished.
Atsushi couldn't think what to say, so he said the first thing that came into his head. "Kin-chan, it's okay," he tried to explain. "You don't have to give presents at Christmas, or get KFC or anything like that. You don't even have to decorate, if it's not your thing."
Kin-chan's eyes had lifted from his cup. He was giving Atsushi a fragile, curious look. It felt rather like being tickled by eyelashes, uncomfortable and tentative.
"But it's a time for thinking of the people you—well," Atsushi broke off, aware of some unwelcome colour rising in his face. "The people you like a lot," he finished lamely. Wow, he was an idiot. At least En-chan would have told him to shut up. Kin-chan was respectful enough of his sensibilities that he just let Atsushi keep digging forever.
But Kin-chan's eyebrows had risen in thought, faint silver lines sketched beneath his wispy fringe. His face had cleared in understanding. He placed his cup on the small table before the flickering candle, without so much as a clink, then rose to his feet. Atsushi watched him, uncomprehending.
"Let me show something to you," Kin-chan said. And he crossed around the bed, heading for his desk. He opened up the top drawer, and began to lift things out onto its immaculate surface.
Atsushi watched with some curiosity of his own, eager to see some of what managed to outweigh Kin-chan's commitment to minimalism. One of the first things to emerge was a long, silver tin that looked like it might have been a pencil case. But other than that, literally all he could see was boxes—some the width of a small paperback, others smaller or larger, all made of pale, heavy, inlaid card with no decoration. Or maybe it was wood. It was hard to tell.
It didn't take Kin-chan long to find what he was looking for—a large, flat thing. A large, flat box, of course. As Atsushi pictured him filling the small space with an unbroken, perfectly tessellated field of ivory card, he replaced all of the boxes and then returned to the table, with the two he'd deemed worthy of note.
"Kin-chan, you even keep the things in your drawers in boxes," Atsushi burst out, as soon as his friend sat. He couldn't help it. But Kin-chan didn't take offence this time, just gave him a gently chiding look.
"It's not a bad thing to be organised," he said, moving his hot chocolate cup out of the way so he could rest the things he was carrying on the table. "You could use a little more of it yourself."
"But, Kin-chan, you were always so bad at Tetris," Atsushi said, half-laughing.
"I was not," Kin-chan lied, with increasingly ruffled dignity. "Calm down and look at this, Atchan."
As Kin-chan lifted the lid from the larger box and set it aside, Atsushi leaned in, eager to see. Inside was a large, flat book, bound in plain black leather.
"A photo album?" asked Atsushi, mouth open in an o. Kin-chan nodded, and then opened it up with a small sound of assent.
Inside it was nothing Atsushi hadn't already seen—at least at first. It was more telling what wasn't there. He'd felt a spark of hope when Kin-chan took out the album, but this was nothing like the pictures in his mother's albums at home. Okay, so Atsushi had to hide those behind the couch when there were guests, lest he die of the shame of it, but at least they were there.
Kin-chan was turning pages without a word. No snapshots, these; each picture filled a page and looked professional. Atsushi remembered several of them from long ago—an unsmiling Kin-chan staring out of the frame, far too intense for a little boy, in his elementary school uniform, or his middle school uniform, or in hakama with a kyudo bow.
"What's that one?" asked Atsushi, as his curiosity got the better of him. He reached out to indicate, but not quite to touch, a picture of Kin-chan in a dark suit, with a necktie, aged about ten. He looked very small, and very serious, and very scared.
"The celebration when my father was first elected," said Kin-chan. Atsushi just had time to register that Kin-chan's father hadn't made time for a picture with his own son at his own party, when Kin-chan turned the page again—Atsushi caught a glimpse of a pale purple yukata, and then of an unfriendly-looking woman with Kin-chan's eyes as he turned another—and there he was.
Kin-chan's father was a severe-looking man, with spectacles on his nose and white-blond hair fading to grey; the sort of man, Atsushi thought, who never came home for all that Tokyo was only two hours away. In the picture, Kin-chan stood beside him in his student council uniform, stiff and guarded, with his chin lifted and tense. His eyes were like chips of green ice, and there was no sign of life in his face. His father's hand was on his shoulder, but it didn't look like a fatherly gesture, or one that Kin-chan, despite himself, entirely welcomed.
Atsushi thought it was probably taken in their second year of high school, when Kin-chan had become president of the student council by attrition after the old third-years had left. But he didn't remark it, and Kin-chan turned the page, and then they were staring at two heavy, blank, elegantly textured pages. Opposite them, the two tiny boys they'd been were still, each in their own way, laughing out of the picture frame.
"Wow," said Atsushi, looking down at the empty pages, trying to lift the mood—Kin-chan's, and his own. "I like that one."
Kin-chan gave him a look, pursing his lips, clearly not impressed with Atsushi's joke. He'd already seemed less calm as he reached for the smaller box; not the way he had next to his father in the old picture, but as if he could acknowledge, now, the deep desires that lay beneath his skin, enough to let them breathe instead of crushing them. His hands, lifting the lid from the box, seemed less at ease than they had before.
Atsushi rather thought that if he had to be so rigorously compartmentalised, if he had to live his life inside as many boxes as Kin-chan, he would die. But then he wasn't thinking anything at all besides oh.
The box contained what looked to be a dozen or so photographs, small enough to put in a pocket, if you didn't mind it curling a bit; small enough to fit into the same frame as Atsushi's gift. And from the top of the box, Atsushi could see himself, small still but somehow even lankier for it, pulling an embarrassed face and pushing what looked to be a very new set of glasses up his nose, clumsily at the bridge with the side of one finger. It had taken him a few weeks to realise people stared less if he lifted them by one side.
"Kin-chan," he said, far too loudly, half-wanting to cover the tiny Atsushi in the box with his hand, and half-wanting to exclaim that his mother had his copy of that photo in one of her more embarrassing albums. Kin-chan blinked around at him in startled surprise, but finished turning over the picture that was in his hand, and then Atsushi was lost for words all over again. There he was one summer, wearing shorts and tossing a blurred tennis ball in one hand; there he was with Kin-chan, in his home's entrance hall before it was redecorated.
Kin-chan turned a few more photographs over with determined grace—the "tent" they'd built in Kin-chan's vast garden, which had really been nothing more than the crawlspace under the teahouse; that ridiculous four-leaf clover plushie he'd refused to be separated from for the whole year he was six—and then Atsushi saw it, and it was all he could see. Not the soft glow of the lights in the garden; not Kin-chan's hands resting in the box, because there, in front of him, was the twin of the picture he had brought Kin-chan in the frame.
He floated forward as if on wings, and tried to find words, perfect words that would fit around the pressure of the moment in his heart and his mouth. But all that came out was a blank, rather stupid-sounding, "You kept it."
Kin-chan didn't seem to mind, and he didn't look up. He, too, was gazing down at the picture in the box. "I kept it."
For all those years?, Atsushi wanted to ask. But he didn't. Kin-chan was too easy to puncture, especially at such moments as these. And while Atsushi often, even now, bruised his sensitive feelings by accident, even Atsushi could tell he shouldn't come out with that.
"I was hoping," Kin-chan said, awkward as ever over things like this, almost impossible to shift from his reticence except when it really, really mattered. He cleared his throat. "I was hoping you might help me arrange these pictures in my album. I find I'd... like to have them there."
For all that he'd been so embarrassed by the pictures—the ones he hadn't pored over for hours with a hand over his face, choosing the one that would make him cringe the least to give to Kin-chan—Atsushi couldn't think of anything he'd rather do. He felt, actually, a little dizzy, like he was high enough in the sky to catch the falling stars. "Of course I will!" he cried, placing his own cup carefully on the floor. Kin-chan started with a small, cut-off gasp as if to object—but then he smiled too.
Their smiles hung around them for a few moments more, their secret, their oath. Both of theirs, this time. "You see, Kin-chan," Atsushi said, dropping his eyes to the picture in the box, still warm inside and unable to keep it from his smile, his voice. "You already gave me my present."
Kin-chan looked briefly astonished, as if he might have questioned it—then he turned even pinker, and nodded without a word.
One by one, side by side, they stuck the photos down in Kin-chan's record of his life. It felt warm, and good, and very much the right thing to do. Even though he knew he was grinning like an idiot, Atsushi found it hard to care, not when half the time he'd glance to Kin-chan's own soft smile and catch Kin-chan's eye, and know he'd been doing the same.
They took their time, and when they were done, Atsushi beamed down at all the little Atchans, some even next to their Kin-chans, and asked, "What do you think?"
Kin-chan thought about it, struggling for words. "I...," he said, "I think I like it."
Atsushi's eyebrow quirked. "You only think?" But then he looked yet again round to see Kin-chan glowing quietly, glowing like the tiny Kin-chan in the photo frame was glowing, touching one of the album's pages with care. Their eyes caught again, and Kin-chan's smile crept wider. He closed the book, and shut up the boxes, and set them aside. The small candle flame shone like a star in the dark, with the lights of the garden its pale reflection.
"Merry Christmas, Atchan," murmured Kin-chan.
"Merry Christmas," murmured Atsushi. And, unable to help himself, he added, "So, KFC?"
"Atchan!" sputtered Kin-chan, all at once. But Atsushi just laughed, and Kin-chan sighed forgiveness right away, and in the flickering candlelight, they drew closer together to watch the stars.