Archive of Our Own

Sakuya’s not there when it happens.

Apparently, Ryo had been attempting a cross between a dance move and a joke between the late hours of dance practice, something with way too much movement and way too much height. Apparently, it had been pretty blink and you’d miss it. A slip, a thunk, and a harsh snap right in his left leg. Apparently, everyone freaked out immediately and rushed him to the hospital for the doctor to say yep, it’s broken. Apparently, at least.

Sakuya doesn’t know for sure, though, because he wasn’t there. While everyone else was panicking, he was stuck all by himself on the opposite side of the building in a recording booth for their upcoming title track.

“Did it hurt a lot?” Sakuya asks, later when it’s just them in the dorm. 

Ryo’s cast is firetruck red, already scribbled over with chaotic signatures and colorful drawings. Sakuya had calmly written his name in dark, capital letters across the side as soon as it was offered, larger than everyone else’s.

“Nope!” Ryo chirps.

When he mentions that to Yushi the next day between dance breaks, he gives Sakuya a strange look.

“Oh. He was crying, though.” He says breezily, like it was something that had happened and passed and was over with. 

And that’s that, they return to practice without Ryo.

The words follow after each twist of his limb, anyway. A leg kick, he thinks about Ryo crying. Sliding into his placement, he thinks about Ryo not telling him. Making lazy gestures with the air where Ryo should be, he thinks about not being there.

It’s fine, probably. Ryo’s tears don’t have to be Sakuya’s business if that’s what he wants. He doesn’t have to know everything. That’s okay.

“Sorry,” Sakuya sniffles, feeling stupid and childish and only fifteen years old. “This is probably really weird.”

“It’s not weird.” Ryo assures him, very clearly lying. His voice is wreathed thinly with the discomfort of a stranger crying in his bed. But he doesn’t say that. Instead, he’s kind.

It feels like the first bit of warmth Sakuya has felt since he left his mother’s arms for good, leaving his family to follow a dream that only barely has wings. He can’t help but be greedy over it.

He’s been trying to covet that warmth since the moment it first smiled at him months ago, often to little success. Every time he tried, it felt like throwing a bottle into the ocean, hoping it would reach Ryo, hoping he’d notice. Here, for the first time, when Sakuya asked if he could sleep in Ryo’s bed, it does.

“It kind of is.” Sakuya says, shifting his face into Ryo’s pillow. Which is probably even weirder.

“It’s okay,” Ryo insists. Sakuya hears him moving. “I was scared, too, at first. Well, I still am.”

“Who said I was scared?” Sakuya turns an eye out to look at him. When Ryo laughs, he does too, something like fulfillment swelling in his chest.

“Your tears, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

“Um,” Ryo starts when his giggles have dwindled. He fidgets like he’s searching for the right words. “It’ll be okay. It’s kinda like learning to swim. You know, back home?”

Suddenly Sakuya’s tears don’t feel like the bite of missing his mom all sticky to his skin. They taste like salt and sea, like wading into the water for the very first time on his own, his parents watching behind him. His heart grows several pounds lighter.

“I don’t know how to swim.” He grunts into Ryo’s pillow, sounding stupidly obstinate even to himself.

“Isn’t that great, though?” Ryo replies, eagerness in his voice. Sakuya peeks over at him, and the breath of air that passes through him is as clear as Ryo’s smile. “You’ll learn.”

Sakuya isn’t as sure. Learn what? What could he possibly learn here that would soothe this chasm? But Ryo is smiling. True, and real, and Ryo. 

“Yeah.”

“We can go to the building together tomorrow, okay?”

“Yeah.” He agrees. His tears feel like a lifetime ago now.

Really, it isn’t anything. It isn’t anything. Sakuya feels it anyways, the same way he feels everything else - huge, and important, and unbearably real. He takes the moment and tucks it carefully between his ribs, and it’s his forever.

Love is a limb, Sakuya figures.

He figures that’s just how it is. After puberty, when your voice has dropped and you’ve gotten as tall as you’ll ever be, it bursts from you. Another boy, rooted at Sakuya’s ribs and growing from bone to vein to skin. One day, Sakuya looks down at his own right hand, and there he is. An inseparable constant named Ryo. There’s never been anyone else. Like that, being in love is a matter of the sun rising or the tide falling. He just is.

And when a boy is your limb, Sakuya finds he’s never had to search very hard for him. Not when nearly every moment together has Ryo draped over him. Even apart, all Sakuya’s had to do is lift his head - and there, across the room, their eyes always met.

Raising his head right now feels as easy as lifting cement, hair taped to the back of his neck with sweat. He meets his own exhausted gaze in the mirror.

“Sorry, that was me again.” Sakuya raises his hand. Sion kicks playfully at the back of his heel.

“No worries,” their choreographer gives them an encouraging thumbs up. “Right back to the start. You’re all killing it!”

Sakuya can only feel the enthusiasm like an axe. His toes are gone by this point, surely. He passes a careful glance to the others, and tries to feel motivated by the determined expressions he’s met with.

With their comeback two weeks away, they’ve made thorough work of running through the title track choreography relentlessly so that the new changes will stick. As if Ryo was never there, they’ve cleanly redistributed his positions and parts until all the gaps have been filled.

Despite the less than stellar timing of Ryo’s injury, they’re making it work. Despite making it work, Sakuya still feels like something is off. It’s only temporary for as long as it takes Ryo to recover, he knows, but it’s still as weird as it is totally disorienting. More often than not, Sakuya feels his footing slip whenever he realizes he’s now linking up with Riku in one part, or fitting into what was Ryo’s spot in a formation.

There’s this strange itch caught in his chest, past his organs to somewhere dark and intangible. It slips away each time he tries to feel for it, to place it between ache or irritant. The harder he focuses, the more he falters.

By the time practice ends, he’s lost count of how many times he’s messed up. He knows it should bother him, and it does, but he also knows that Ryo is sitting back home. So even though he can feel the gazes of the others on his back a little too close, he’s the first one out the door and into their car anyways.

When they all get back to the dorm, the door to their room is wide open, a column of warm light and soft beds that Sakuya immediately speeds straight through.

“Saku,” Ryo coos halfheartedly, lazily turning his head. “How was practice?”

“Exhausting,” Sakuya replies, making a show of stretching his worn muscles until his face pinches with pain. He shuts their door behind him with a soft click. “You’re lucky you get to be in bed. Put your leg down.”

Ryo is lying on his stomach in bed, broken leg extended high into the air because he’s stupid, face shoved into a random volume of Hunter x Hunter. Sakuya’s eyes catch on the mess around him, clothes and snacks and a dozen different manga volumes.

Ryo carefully shuffles back into a safer position. “‘M not lucky. I’m bored.”

“It’s only been a few days.”

“I know,” Ryo groans. “I think I’ve read everything twice now.”

Sakuya laughs, settling beside him and picking up Ryo’s manga with feigned interest. In two page flips, Ryo is tucking himself against his side - head on his shoulder, legs pressed together. He’s warm.

“You’re warm.” Sakuya murmurs.

Ryo snuggles harder. “You’re warmer. I like it.”

Sakuya likes it, too. He’d never say it out loud, but he likes being able to come home to Ryo and melt into his bed with him. He likes thinking about Ryo waiting for him with a story or a secret to share. The ache of practice has vanished, along with the taut sensation of something out of place.

“It must be nice,” Ryo says thoughtfully after a stretch of silence, his voice far away. “I miss dancing.”

He’d been put on hiatus quite immediately. With an estimated twelve week recovery time and a big, fat cast slapped over his shin, there wasn’t much to argue. SM had released the notice within the next day, and Ryo was basically bed bound.

“I’d rather be in bed.” Sakuya attempts, going for comfort but instead sounding kind of thoughtless. Ryo goes tense against him.

“I wouldn’t,” Ryo replies shortly. He feels him exhale. “It sucks, you know? I feel trapped.”

Sakuya knows it’s not what he wants - Ryo’s the last person yearning to be bedridden. He doesn’t know how to tell Ryo that it’s okay, though, when he knows it isn’t. But then what? He can’t exactly just tell Ryo to stop feeling restless.

“It won’t be for very long.” Sakuya says, quietly. Ryo doesn’t relax.

“I know that,” he says. He moves his head from Sakuya’s shoulder. Then, all low and whispered, “I’ve been thinking of practicing in secret.” 

“Don’t be an idiot.” Sakuya launches back. 

Ryo retaliates by smacking him with a stuffed toy.

“Hey!” Sakuya frowns when a beaded eye bludgeons his arm. “Hey, have you really? Don’t be stupid.”

“What d’you mean stupid?”

“What are you gonna do if you break something else?”

“I wanna come back as soon as possible.”

“By breaking another leg?”

Ryo’s wide eyes narrow huffily, and he turns around to pout.

Sakuya puts the manga down and stares at Ryo’s sulking back for only a second. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“It shouldn’t be that hard dancing in a cast, right? I can kind of still stand already,” Ryo jumps back around. His eyes are glittering again. “I think learning with a handicap may actually make my moves more fluid, too.”

Sakuya waits for him to finish. He fidgets with the edge of a blanket. “The fastest way for you to come back is to let yourself rest, Ryo.”

Ryo looks at him. He flops backwards with a sigh. “Really, ‘s not a big deal.”

“I’m only saying to be careful. Not - you know, not to say you can’t ever again.”

“I already feel like that, though. Like I can’t ever again, if I let this stop me. You don’t get that?”

Sakuya hates the way Ryo says it immediately - like Ryo knows something Sakuya doesn’t, like there’s something he isn’t part of. He thinks about the tears he didn’t see, and feels his ribs tighten like a fist around his lungs.

“Then tell me.” He says, nudging Ryo softly. He wants Ryo to talk about it more than he had before, suddenly. He wants Ryo to bare his unease, and then let Sakuya settle him.

Ryo just lifts a shoulder, composed. “It’s no big deal. I’m not gonna let myself fall behind, ‘s all.”

It’s hard to imagine that for Ryo at all, though easier now with half his leg wrapped in plaster. Still - it’s silly. Ryo is Ryo. What on earth could possibly tie him down?

“You won’t fall behind,” Sakuya’s reassurance feels as impactful as smoke hitting a wall. Ryo only hums in response, and picks up the manga from Sakuya’s lap.

Sakuya watches him for a moment, waiting for him to say something else. Ryo looks perfectly normal relaxed against the pillows, flipping lazily through the pages like the conversation hadn’t happened. That feeling returns, a disorienting stretch beneath his ribs.

In Japan, time passed in summers.

The wind came with heat, dusting off beaches to breeze through twining rows of trees and sprawling hills of green. From Ishikawa to Saitama, sea brine to inland, the sun was all Sakuya anticipated.

By the time he got to South Korea, time passed in beat counts.

He felt each tick as a pulse, veined into his heartbeat with new, hotblooded fear. These were people he didn’t know, a language he didn’t speak, and a sun that didn’t shine through streets the same way it did back home. Time passed anyway, like a mallet dropping, like a firm clapping together of palms.

Five, six, seven, eight. Don’t stumble. Don’t falter. Get the moves right. Five, six, seven, eight. Raise your shoulders. Fix your hair. Smile, and don’t stop. Prove yourself, or you’re dead weight melting into the linoleum.

Yet between every count, from the tides of trainee regimentation to the maw of televised survival - Ryo. Always Ryo, always there. Sakuya wouldn’t be here if Ryo wasn’t there to straighten his shoulders, to fix his hair, to correct his Korean, or to make him laugh. He’s way too aware of that, in a way that Ryo has never seemed to get.

Ryo calls him a miracle child, as if Sakuya spawned on this earth one day with the express purpose of performing. When Ryo tells him that there’s no one like him, he doesn’t quite know how to stomach it. What Ryo sees is what Ryo made of Sakuya. That’s all.

Even the fact that Ryo doesn’t understand is kind of incredible to him. Ryo isn’t the type to be prodded by praise or reassurance - he’s never needed someone to tell him he can, not like Sakuya has. There’s a wonder to it, that Ryo just wants and then does. Somehow, everything he touches becomes certain.

Yellow probably isn’t the right color, Sakuya thinks. It’s just the closest he can get - something like sunlight breaking over the water, catching and scattering. A brightness that everything else seems to follow. Sakuya begins and ends exactly where Ryo does. 

The song is already halfway through when Sakuya manages to catch the beat again. Five, six, seven -

“Riku, that looked good!”

The voice cuts across the track, and Sakuya’s head is lifting before he can think.

Ryo is slouched against the front mirror, one leg stretched out, his multicolored cast loud even from across the room. Tufts of hair stick out from his beanie, like he’d just rolled out of bed and settled for hiding the mess. His half zipped hoodie falls open when he claps enthusiastically. 

Sakuya blinks. If it weren’t for the cast, it’d be like Ryo was just taking a break from dance practice. It’s like he’s been there the whole time. Had he? When did he get there? Something in his chest pulls sharp and quick, like a stitch. He drops his arm a fraction too late.  

“Especially that part,” Ryo adds, gesturing loosely. “Really clean.”

Sakuya’s gaze follows Ryo’s hands without meaning to.

Riku grins, breathless where he replies still dancing. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Ryo says. “It used to feel kind of cramped, but this looks better.”

Better?

The word lands wrong, and Sakuya misses the next count entirely. He comes in half a beat late, his foot hitting just off center. The impact jolts up his leg.

“Again.” The choreographer calls kindly.

Sakuya nods before the instruction even finishes, already moving back into place. The music stops, and rewinds. He barely feels it when Sion claps his shoulder.

Five, six, seven, eight.

He hits everything harder this time, sharp like there’s something to compensate for, all exact angles and clean lines. His breathing goes shallow without him noticing, every inhale too quick and high in his chest.

It still feels wrong. There’s that itch again, that tightness. It’s like he’s forcing something into place that’s too big to fit. 

“Nice!” Ryo says, voice somewhere to his side.

Sakuya doesn’t look. He keeps his eyes on his own reflection - sweat slicking his temples, hair stuck to his forehead, his mouth pulled tight.

Again. Five, six. Again. Seven, eight. Again.

By the time they finally stop, his limbs feel heavy in a way that has nothing to do with practice. He bends forward, hands on his knees, breathing through his mouth. The room is buzzing around him - voices, laughter, someone asking for water - but it all feels a little distant, like it’s happening just out of sync.

He straightens, and slowly lifts his head. Ryo is still by the mirror, talking with Daeyoung and laughing full body, head thrown back at whatever the response is.

Sakuya wonders why he’s smiling. He can’t tell. Ryo isn’t looking at him.

They all leave together, later. Everyone’s steps are slow to match the pace of Ryo and his crutches, and Sakuya lingers at the back to study his profile as subtly as he can manage. He’d offered to support the weight of Ryo’s side, but Ryo had poked him with a crutch and insisted he needed the movement.

It feels like Ryo smiles a lot these days. Sakuya feels crazy for noticing it, for wondering why. No one else seems to.

But he had cried, and then he didn’t say anything. Sakuya knows it’s probably not that big of a deal, but the thought still thickens in his mind like tar - hot and swallowing up reason. 

Distracted between a missing spot in his chest and the consuming thought of Ryo stitching himself up wrong so that no one looks too close, Sakuya doesn’t know where to put his hands. He doesn’t know what to do, or even if there’s something he should be doing at all.

He wishes Ryo would turn around and look at him.

Sakuya is under water.

It’s shallow, only up to his ankles if he would stand up. But it’s nice. The water presses cool against his ears, dulling everything into far away softness. Sometimes he’s glad he can’t swim.

“You’d benefit a little by staying behind and practicing extra some nights, Sakuya.” Their choreographer tells him. There’s a hint of apology in his voice, but Sakuya finds he’s not very bothered.

He sinks a little deeper.

The first thing he notices when he gets back from solo practice is that the lights of their room are still on.

A thin strip of yellow spills from beneath their door, filtering warmth across the dark hallway. Automatic and thoughtless, something in his chest lifts to life again. Ryo is awake.

He pushes the door open with his shoulder. “Ryo.”

He stops short as he realizes the room is decidedly empty. Both beds are still unmade, sheets kicked loose and half hanging off the sides. Ryo’s blanket is twisted into itself, his pillow dented but cold when Sakuya presses a hand against it. 

He drops his bag to the floor, and the sound of his keychains clang too loud in the quiet.

Ryo’s phone charger is still plugged in, his hoodie thrown over the back of the chair. A bag of chips sits half open on the desk, like he’d meant to come back to it.

Sakuya pulls his own phone from his pocket. There aren’t any messages from him.

Like second nature, he opens up his chat with Ryo.

where are you

He stares at it for a second, then adds,

?

The room hums softly around him. Their overhead light buzzes faintly, flickering once then stilling. Somewhere down the hall, he hears the sound of Yushi humming before it fades with the pattering of footsteps. 

Sakuya sits on the edge of Ryo’s bed without really deciding to, staring at his phone. He leans back slowly, his gaze moving towards the ceiling as the mattress dips under his weight. The light presses against his eyes, blinking once, then twice. He turns his face into Ryo’s pillow. It still smells like him. His face heats up, but he doesn’t move.

He feels stupid for the edge sliding through his nerves. Ryo is probably out getting food, probably for the dorm, probably with the others. Sakuya could go ask, Yushi’s still moving around the living room, at least. All Sakuya can wonder is if Ryo is smiling.

The thought sits on his chest, heavy. He doesn’t move.

His phone buzzes twice in quick succession. Sakuya’s head lifts too fast, neck twinging with the movement.

with sion
back later!

He stares at the message. After a beat passes, he locks his phone, lets it fall against Ryo’s bed, and closes his eyes. For a moment, he imagines the door opening. He imagines the soft shuffle of Ryo dragging his foot across the floor, flopping down without warning and burrowing into Sakuya’s arms.

When the door finally clicks open after what feels like both fifteen minutes and fifteen years, Sakuya doesn’t move.

“‘M back.” Ryo says quietly, like Sakuya’s asleep and he’s trying not to wake him.

For some reason, Sakuya doesn’t open his eyes. He hears the sounds of Ryo ambling around the room, fabric rustling and the soft thud of something being set down. The bed dips slightly, and warmth seeps into his side.

“Practice was okay, right?” Ryo murmurs.

For some reason, Sakuya doesn’t answer. And after a moment, Ryo exhales and settles in.

The space between them is small enough to cross, as easy as it’s always been. For some reason, neither of them do.

When their album releases, Sakuya almost doesn’t notice.

The days leading up to it had narrowed, circling instead around Ryo’s recovery - two days before release, his cast comes off. Bright, clumsy thing replaced with something duller and smaller. A walking boot. It looks less serious, somehow. 

Ryo is moving more. 

As soon as the album drops, he’s immediately darting around the dorm listening to it. He’s in the kitchen when Sakuya wakes up, music already playing from his phone, humming under his breath. Later, he’s in the living room, folded over a Lego set, the same track looping until it doesn’t sound like anything anymore. In their room, he’s pulling his shirt over his head and still mouthing the words.

Boot aside, he’s not cleared to come off hiatus. Promotions begin without him.

The stage feels wrong. The lights are too bright, their music too loud, and their formations too clean. Every step lands where it should, but there’s this gap threaded through it all - a space shaped exactly like Ryo that no one else seems to dwell on. Sakuya fills it when he has to, moves through it when he doesn’t, but it never quite disappears. Even when the crowd cheers, it sounds like it’s coming from somewhere far away.

The sounds of applause and squeaking shoes lingers in his ears all the way back to the dorm.

Ryo is in their room, lying down on his side, singing along to the lyrics like he’d been there the whole grueling schedule, too. He looks up. 

“How was it?”

Sakuya stops in the doorway. For a second, the stage is stuck behind his eyes - lights, counts, empty spaces mapped out in rigid lines. In front of him, Ryo.

“Um. Good.” he says.

“Yeah?” Ryo smiles. He pushes himself up a bit, his interest lifting. “Did my part look okay?”

Sakuya hesitates, then shrugs. “Sion always does good.”

“Mm,” Ryo tilts his head, thinking. “Better?”

The words bounce from him like a joke. Sakuya’s chest tightens.

“It wasn’t better.” He denies quickly.

Ryo blinks at him. Then he grins, waving a hand. “Relax, ‘m kidding,” he flops back against the mattress. “I’d be kinda mad if it was, though.”

“Well,” he settles next to Ryo. It’s important to him that Ryo hears this. “It wasn’t.”

The days begin to blur together.

It’s like salt in his eyes. The clean sting of the ocean drying, crusting at the edges and pulling every time he tries to blink. Even looking straight ahead feels like forcing something open that wants to stay shut.

He’s forgetting how to be entertaining, somehow. It’s like he gets into an interview or a variety moment, and he forgets he has to smile. He forgets he can’t be walking off every stage feeling it like a broken rib - painful when he breathes too deeply.

Ryo is always there when he gets home. Sometimes he talks about nothing, about everything, about parts of the day that Sakuya missed. Sometimes he doesn’t. 

Sakuya tries, once or twice, to say something about promotions. He stops trying after it doesn’t come out right the first or the second time. It’s too much like he’s asking for something he can’t quite name. He can’t make it not sound like he’s bleeding out a bit over it.

When Ryo asks if he wants to go out, Sakuya goes.

They’re behind the dorm building, right where the pavement gives way to a thin, uneven stretch of ground that’s cracked under the sun and smells of dry air. The city drones, muffled and far, far away.

Ryo sits down first, dropping down with a soft grunt as he adjusts his leg. Sakuya lingers before lowering himself beside him, the brush of their shoulders just one too deep breath away. For a while, neither of them say anything. Quiet folds around them, thick like a quilt.

Ryo absentmindedly nudges at the ground with the toe of his shoe, back and forth and back and forth. The dirt shifts easily, loose with summer night warmth.

It reminds Sakuya of home, almost. There isn’t any sea, or wind, or old buildings, but the quiet feels just like the way time would stretch on and on with nothing to press against it. Like when he was young and the world still couldn’t reach him.

Ryo leans forward, brushing his fingers through the dirt like he’s done it a hundred times before, and draws a line between them.

“Saku. Like this,” he says. “We’re like this.”

Sakuya looks at it, and feels a heavy drop in his guts, like he’s missed a step. “Hm?”

“We’re really different, you know?” Ryo idly traces the line with his finger. Back and forth, until it deepens into a trench. “I think that’s why it works.”

“Is it?” he asks.

Ryo glances up. “Yeah. Aren’t we?”

Sakuya hesitates. Ryo says it so definitively, like that’s exactly how it is. Sakuya doesn’t think so. Or - he doesn’t think that’s the point. It’s not the distance, or the difference. It’s - he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how to say it.

Ryo runs his finger through the line again, widening it without looking. 

“Otherwise we’d just be the same person.” He says lightly.

Sakuya nods. It smells like dirt around them. He kind of wants to vomit from it.

It feels wrong, later, to try to climb into Ryo’s bed. Sakuya watches him curl under his covers, and wonders how he had gotten so comfortable with it in the first place.

A moment passes. He turns to his own bed instead, and presses his face into his pillow. The fabric smells sharply like detergent, like something clean that doesn’t belong to anyone. It smells like it hasn’t been slept on in months.

Sakuya doesn’t need to be told they’re different. He’s always known that. 

Everything about Ryo is as straightforward as a line. He says exactly what he means, goes where he’s going, and doesn’t hesitate over the things that Sakuya can never stop turning over, worrying them down until there’s nothing left but the shape of the question. 

Ryo doesn’t seem to need that. Things arrive to him already decided, like the answer was there from the beginning and all he had to do was follow it through. He doesn’t stall at the edges or press at the seams to see what might give. He accepts, and he moves and moves and moves, and just keeps moving. 

Sakuya doesn’t know if it’s honesty or something else entirely - something like never having to doubt what anything means once it’s in front of you, never having to question if there’s an underneath, an inside, or an end. 

So it isn’t that. It isn’t the difference or the distance. It’s that Ryo drew it.

Turning onto his side, he stares at the thin line of light slipping under their door. It cuts the room in two between the bed the floor. Ear to the mattress, the steady pulse of his heart washes the rest of the world out.

He tries to think of a before, of when it didn’t feel like this. When he didn’t have to check where Ryo was, didn’t have to look up to find him, didn’t have to wonder if he’d still be there when he did. There had never been a line. Or maybe there was, and Sakuya just hadn’t seen it. Maybe he’d stepped over it a hundred times without noticing. Maybe he stood on the wrong side of it without realizing that there was a right one at all.

Ryo had drawn it like it explained everything. Like that’s all they are - two separate things that just happen to fit side by side. 

Is that what everyone sees? Ryo, so very bright and certain, moving forward without looking back. Sakuya, just behind, close enough to follow but never close enough to join him. He swallows against the thought, flattening it to his ribs.

He wants to ask if Ryo is happy right now. The question sits on his tongue like a trigger, weighted and choking. He can’t tell if he wants the answer.

If Ryo said no, Sakuya knows he’d try to fix it. He’d have to. He thinks he’d do anything, or probably even everything. He’d bend himself into something better, something easier, something that fits without leaving space behind.

But if Ryo said yes - the thought is almost worse. That would be it. This distance, this line, this quiet space between them that Sakuya keeps feeling for and coming up empty, it’ll all be enough. Sakuya presses his hand flat against his chest, fingers curling into the bones. 

Things aren’t supposed to be like this, all shifted out of alignment and slipping from his vision. It feels awful. It’s like a step landed half a beat too late, like his body had moved expecting something to meet it and instead found only sinking.

Sakuya closes his eyes.

He thinks, distantly, that if he just reached out, he could fix it. Close the space, erase the line, and step right over it. He’s done it before, why is now any different? But the moment stretches and stretches, paralyzing him from spine to muscle. Sakuya doesn’t move. He sinks.

Riku ambushes him quietly one morning before everyone else is awake, before they have to leave to practice for the upcoming tour.

“You don’t sleep so much in Ryo’s bed anymore, huh?” Riku says, passing a glance to his and Ryo’s shut door.

Sakuya chews his eggs slowly, swallows even slower. “No.”

Riku pouts like he’s been personally offended. “You should stop growing up so fast.”

“I’m an adult.” He reminds. It’s almost funny how he sounds all the more childish for saying it.  He’d probably laugh at it, before.

“You’re both so little,” Riku shakes his head. His tone is a little sad, and Sakuya’s heart falters. “You should get a lot of sleep.”

There’s a lot of times that the older members look at him like that, both too close and far away at the same time. He wonders what they’re thinking - if it’s okay to ask, if it’s okay to comfort them. Whenever he asks Ryo, Ryo says they worry. He wants to ask Ryo now, too.

He just shrugs. “It’s hard.”

It’s a good enough response. Sleep is hard for all of them in comeback season, really. Sakuya’s bad sleeping doesn’t necessarily have to be because he forgot how to close his eyes without a bodily weight pressed against him.

“It doesn’t have to be.” Riku suggests cryptically. Sakuya shrugs at his eggs.

That night, he climbs into his own bed again. He doesn’t ask Ryo about it. If he did, he’d have to mention that Riku’s noticed their separate sleeping. Sakuya doesn’t really wanna know if Ryo’s noticed or not, too.

In the first couple fan calls and fan signs, they ask about Ryo.

He thinks about making up an answer. The injury was private just like Ryo’s recovery is, and it’s not really his business to run his mouth about it. The worry in their eyes hits a bit too keenly, though, just beneath his lungs. He doesn’t know how to assure them, not when he feels two degrees of separation from the truth, too.

He settles on, “Ryo is recovering really well.”

After a while, he stops getting asked. 

Sion’s not one for sugarcoating.

He corners Sakuya after a fan sign, moments after the curtains closed with an arm around his neck to tug him away from listening ears. Sakuya lets him, though averts his eyes the moment Sion turns on him with a quiet frown.

“Are you worried about Ryo?”

Sakuya noncommittally lifts a shoulder. Obviously, yes. Obviously he doesn’t want to talk about it until he’s sure it’s something to talk about. He’s not sure he’ll ever be sure.

“You don’t need to worry, Sakuya.”

Sakuya wants to agree. He also doesn’t want to lie, so he settles for just saying nothing.

“He’s been in the practice room with me a lot recently,” Sion continues. “I think dancing again is really bringing him back around.”

Sakuya neck snaps up. “He’s dancing?”

Surprise flickers over Sion’s face before he rearranges it still again. “He didn’t tell you?”

The question melts through his chest to stick nasty to his stomach. No, Ryo didn’t tell him.

“Like - really dancing?”

Ryo isn’t supposed to be going all out just yet. Even if his leg was completely, totally, all the way healed, he still needs to keep rebuilding the muscle to support the weight of their dances.

“You should talk to him.” Sion says instead of answering.

“I talk to him.” Sakuya insists. He hates the way it comes out like a lie. It isn’t.

“Really talk to him, Saku. You’re best friends.”

It doesn’t land so certain to Sakuya when Sion says it. Conversations replay in fragments - shorter than they used to be, lighter and skimming over the surface of things that were once effortless to dive into. He’s trying to retrace his steps, picking apart every recent interaction, but they blur together into something frustratingly normal.

There’s a hairline crack running through his thoughts that he can’t stop cutting himself on. Why didn’t Ryo tell him? Why does everyone know something before him? Why is he the last to find out, to be there? Why isn’t he allowed to be there? It isn’t fair.

It feels like there’s a version of Ryo he’s been standing in front of this whole time and somehow not seeing. As if there are conversations happening just out of reach, slipping past him unnoticed, leaving only the faintest trace that something is missing.

When Sion walks away, Sakuya thinks it - he does talk to him. It’s Ryo that isn’t talking to Sakuya.

The text comes from Sion.

don’t leave yet. ryo is practicing in the top floor far back dance room ＼(＾▽＾)／
play nice!

“Sakuya?” Daeyoung asks when Sakuya’s blocked his way into the car back to the dorm.

“Um. I left something behind.” He says, slipping his phone into his pocket and bounding back towards the building.

He walks quickly back through the front doors, and when he’s passed security, he’s sprinting to the elevators. Is Ryo still there? He couldn’t have possibly left within this time. Sakuya would have seen him, right? He’d see him on his way up, surely.

Sakuya isn’t sure what’s possessed him, but he needs to see Ryo. He needs - he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. He has to know.

The hallway is dark enough that Sakuya almost walks past it. If it weren’t for the sound, he would have. It’s not the music - low, tinny through the door - but something underneath it. A dull, uneven thud, out of time with the beat.

Sakuya’s hand jumps to the handle before he realizes it, door giving beneath his haste. The music spills out first, louder now, bass rattling faintly through the floor. And then -

Ryo, mid turn, wrong.

His balance goes halfway through it, weight shifting onto the boot - his angle is off, the boot too stiff to absorb it. The impact is loud, a crack of plastic against wood that makes something in Sakuya’s chest jump. Ryo stumbles and catches himself. 

Immediately he’s up and going again, as if that didn’t just happen.

“Hey, what are you doing?” The question comes out sharper than he intends, piercing straight through the track.

Ryo startles. His next step falters, rhythm collapsing awkwardly in on itself before he grabs for his phone and fumbles the screen. The music cuts, and the silence that settles is too clean.

“Oh,” Ryo breathes, like he’s been caught doing something minor. “Saku, you scared me.”

Sakuya stares at him. Up close, it’s worse. Sweat darkens the collar of his shirt, lifting rapidly with each fast breath. His hair is caught wet to his forehead, and his leg is trembling.

“You’re dancing.” Sakuya states flatly.

Really dancing, Sakuya wants to add. Dancing like he’s not in a boot, like he hasn’t recently just been cleared for only minor physical exertion. This isn’t minor.

Ryo glances down, like he might have forgotten. “Yeah? Just a bit.”

“A bit,” Sakuya echoes. “That’s not - what are you doing?”

“I told you,” Ryo shrugs. “It’s not that hard. Just getting used to it.”

He shifts his weight as he says it, and Sakuya watches his leg strain weakly to support him.

Sakuya’s stomach drops.

“Ryo,” His voice is unusually firm, even to himself. “Stop.”

Ryo frowns at him, like Sakuya’s being weird and difficult. “I’m fine. You’re overreacting.”

It goes off like a hot pop in his chest, something sizzling and coiling around lungs, stomach, heart.

“Overreacting?” he echoes. “You just almost fell.”

“I didn’t.”

“You -” Sakuya cuts himself off again, breath catching too high, too tight. “Then what happens when you do?”

Ryo rolls his eyes, turning away to grab his water bottle. “Nothing’s going to happen.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

Sakuya feels it then, sudden and sickening, knocking around his head. He wasn’t supposed to see this. He wasn’t even told in the first place. Ryo would have just kept going. Maybe falling, maybe hurting himself, and definitely not saying anything. All the while, smiling through it the next day like it was nothing. Like Sakuya didn’t need to know. How long had he been doing this? Did Sion know? Did anyone? Why didn’t he -

“Why didn’t you tell me?” The question slips out before he can stop it.

Ryo turns back, frowning slightly. “Tell you what?”

“That you were -” Sakuya gestures helplessly. “Doing this.”

“‘Cause it’s not a big deal? I mean - I’m recovering. I’m cleared for physical activity again.”

“Are you stupid? Not like this. What if you make it worse? What if you -“ he swallows, the rest of his words sticking somewhere behind his ribs. “You’ll be out even longer, Ryo.”

Ryo’s expression shifts, the line of his mouth growing taut. “I won’t. I know what I’m doing.”

“You could have told me. I would have joined you, and -“

“I don’t need you to,” Ryo snaps. “I’m capable on my own, okay?”

“I know you are,” Sakuya says, quietly. His chest is so tight it hurts. “I just meant you could have said something.”

Ryo doesn’t immediately reply, and Sakuya wonders if that means he’s right. That maybe this was purposeful. Maybe there’s a reason for all of this, something he can finally understand and fix. After a breath, Ryo exhales carefully.

“I just don’t wanna fall behind, okay?” He says, limbs stiff as he screws and unscrews his water bottle cap. “I don’t - you know? I’d hate that. I’d hate it.”

Sakuya doesn’t understand. How could Ryo ever? Everything about him is already so far ahead, far beyond where Sakuya can see him anymore.

“When you got hurt,” he says, the words coming out wrong, insufficient. “You didn’t - ”

He stops. Ryo is really looking at him now.

From joint to muscle, the silence stretches. Sakuya’s throat feels tight. There’s something there - something he could say, anything that would make this make sense, fix it, maybe - but it sits unmoving, too heavy to lift.

“You didn’t tell me, then, either.” He finishes lamely instead.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” Ryo shoots back, irritated. He’s looking at Sakuya like he’s being ridiculous. “It just happened.”

“That’s not - this isn’t the same.”

“It is,” Ryo insists. “It’s not a big deal.”

Sakuya looks at the space between them from doorway to mirror. He looks at Ryo - the set of his shoulders, the way he’s standing just slightly off to compensate, the tightness he’s trying to pass off as nothing.

Ryo didn’t talk to him then. He’s still not talking to him now.

“Right.” Sakuya says. The word is acidic in his mouth.

Ryo relaxes a fraction, like that settled it. He reaches for his phone again and turns the music back on. “Anyway, I was just -”

“Ryo.” Sakuya says.

Ryo pauses. Sakuya doesn’t move closer. Every muscle held too tight, he stands there, rooted.

“Please don’t.”

For a moment, it looks like Ryo might argue. Then he exhales, shoulders dropping. He shuts off the music. “Fine.”

The heavy silence that follows is only cut up by the sounds of Ryo gathering his things, limping between stereo to mirror to breeze past Sakuya.

“Are you going back?” Sakuya catches him around the arm. “I’ll text our manager.”

Ryo jerks uselessly against him. “I can walk back. It’s not even that far.”

“Walk? You -“

“Sakuya,” Ryo says, sharp like a warning. “Seriously.”

Sakuya’s not sure Ryo’s ever looked at him like that before. Like he’s pushing too hard against a boundary, a line. The moment he thinks it he feels it like a snap at his wrist, twisting and pulling until the tendons go taut. Sakuya releases his grip, and watches Ryo leave.

It sits in his joints. A twinge, a realization, a separation of body parts. When he tries to roll it out from the bone, to smooth it into muscle, to reach out forward, it calcifies.

He hadn’t realized he could be overbearing to Ryo before. That Ryo could look at him and say enough in as many syllables as Sakuya’s name, digging into his wrist and peeling out a vein. He didn’t know his name could sound like that.

Everything is wrong. Any conversations between them die too early before they can reach substance. Ryo brushes him off when Sakuya tries to hang around him, like suddenly there’s something else he just remembered to do. Sakuya slowly forgets how to approach him the way he could before.

Are you still practicing? he wonders, every time Ryo pulls on a hoodie and a mask. Alone? Hard, when no one else can see? If I ask, will you tell me?

The friction between wanting to ask and knowing Ryo wouldn’t want him to is unbearable, chafing at him until he feels more scab than skin. Why doesn’t Ryo want him to? Where did he misstep? When?

No matter how many times he retraces his steps, he comes up empty. The days slip from his palms like water, and Ryo doesn’t say anything.

Sakuya follows Ryo’s lead, and they settle into the stifling, mutual normalcy of when both people silently decide not to touch what’s clearly gone wrong.

Dance practice runs long. Sakuya looks for him, but Ryo doesn’t come.

When he gets back to the dorm, there’s a plastic bag on his bed. It crinkles when he picks it up, light and cheap. Inside the packaging is a convenience store pastry that’s slightly squished at the edges. Sakuya stares at it. He turns it over once, lifting it up to his nose to sniff the sweetness. It used to be his favorite. He hasn’t eaten it in a long time.

“Oh,” Ryo says from behind him. “You’re back.”

Sakuya’s heart skips pace, and he turns as if compelled. Ryo is halfway through taking off his hoodie, hair sticking up in uneven directions. He doesn’t look uncomfortable to see Sakuya at all.

“I got snacks.” He adds, nodding toward the bag.

“For everyone?”

“Mm. Mostly,” Ryo shrugs. “That one’s yours.”

Sakuya looks back down at it.

“You remembered.” He says before he can stop himself.

“Of course,” Ryo replies, like it’s a given. “You always used to eat those.”

Sakuya nods, and sits down on his bed to peel open the wrapper. The pastry is still a little warm. When he takes a bite, it tastes just the same - too sweet and slightly artificial. It’s like biting into a memory. It doesn’t feel comforting.

Ryo flops onto his bed with a sigh, scrolling through his phone. Sakuya watches him. It’s as if their argument didn’t happen, and the space between them isn’t sitting there, quiet and untouched.

Sakuya chews slowly. He wants to say thank you. He wants to say something else, too - something bigger, something that explains the tightness in his joints, the way that everything still feels slightly off center.

Instead, he swallows. “Thanks.”

Ryo hums. “‘Course.”

And that’s it. It should feel like being forgiven, rather than something being set down and left there.

The living room is a cavern of shifting half shadows, the TV a lone glowing eye that blinks with the frantic colors of a game Sakuya isn’t playing. His head is draped over the edge of the couch cushions, the living room and everything else in the world turned upside down. Like this, he can hear the ocean. He thinks if he stays still long enough, he’ll sink through the couch entirely.

“Everything feels like water these days.” He says, when the blood rushing to his head starts to sound like the crash of a shower, of a stage, of too many pulses. 

“Like water?” Yushi repeats. The game menu pops up, his cursor hovering over save and quit.

“Mm.” Sakuya doesn’t elaborate.

“Like water…” Yushi says again, like he’s chewing on the thought. “Good water?”

“Is there good water?”

Yushi nods, shifting to peer down at Sakuya. Sakuya watches his chin while he talks. “The beach, right? Or swimming at the pool.”

“Not if you don’t know how to swim.”

“Ah. That’s right. You don’t know how to swim, do you?”

Sakuya brings a knee up, poking blindly at Yushi. “You’re not good at metaphors.”

Yushi laughs like he doesn’t care. He probably does, though, Sakuya thinks. He’s looking at Sakuya closely like Sakuya might really drown right now.

“I don’t know.” Yushi says.

“Me neither.”

“You could ask for a hand.”

“Not when you’re drowning,” Sakuya denies, the words tasting like salt. “And you don’t have a hand.”

Yushi thinks some more. “I don’t know. Aren’t you making it harder than it is? Just swim.”

The ceiling is the floor. The floor is a vast, dark sky. Against it all, Sakuya closes his eyes.

The tour starts like a current.

Lights surge and flatten everything into something performable and repeatable. Hotel rooms stack door-to-door into each other, identical down to the hum of air conditioning and the drag of unfamiliar sheets. Sakuya’s body keeps time even when he doesn’t, yanked forward by the ankles.

Ryo stays home. 

He’s in just a brace now, but the doctor won’t clear him to come back yet. Sakuya tells himself that’s for the best because it is, but he still can’t help but look for Ryo. He still can’t help but be disappointed when he doesn’t find him. Behind him, beside him, in front of him, Ryo is there in the way that he’s not. Sakuya still turns his head to share a laugh, or lifts his gaze to share a look. 

The stage feels empty even when it’s filled still by the five of them. Even when the crowd is loud enough to shake the floor beneath his feet, there’s a hollow carved clean through the center of it.

After shows, when the adrenaline fades too fast and leaves behind a rawness, Sakuya finds himself reaching for his phone without thinking.

“Sakuya,” Ryo says one day over the phone, and Sakuya can’t see his face. “You don’t need to worry so much about me, okay?”

He doesn’t know what to say. There’s too much of it, all tangled together, none of it coming out right.

Sakuya presses the phone closer to his ear, like that might help. “I want to.”

Ryo laughs, but the sound is short. “It’s embarrassing. I can handle myself.”

His grip tightens. “Okay. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Ryo says lightly. “Just focus on yourself, okay, Saku?”

Focus on yourself.

Sakuya turns the words over, slow and careful, like they might change into something that makes sense if he handles them right.

He doesn’t really know what that looks like. When Ryo says it, it sounds simple. Like there’s a clear edge somewhere, a line that he can step back to. Like everything else can be set aside without much trouble. But when he tries to follow it, there isn’t anything there.

There’s no point where he can separate it out - this is me, this is you, this is where I stop. Every thought circles back and loops in on itself. Even now, trying not to think about Ryo feels like thinking about him anyway, just from a different angle.

He tries, once.

He keeps his head down between schedules. He doesn’t look for Ryo in reflections that aren’t there, shuts his phone off to cut the urge to check, and doesn’t linger on the strange, hollow expectation sitting in his chest after performances. Nothing changes.

If he pulls back just enough to stop reaching, to stop looking, there’s nothing that takes its place. Nothing settles differently. The space still doesn’t close, too split open to be sutured back together with the scolding of focus.

It isn’t just missing Ryo - diluting it to that almost feels insulting. It’s missing a limb. Sakuya doesn’t know where he ends without Ryo, not when Ryo isn’t looking at him.

He keeps thinking it will correct itself. That whatever shifted will return if he just waits long enough, if he keeps moving the way he always has and doesn’t look at it too directly. Like tripping over your feet, something that feels wrong in the moment but evens out as long you just keep going. There’s no other choice but to keep going.

Stage to stage, city to city, fan to fan. He smiles when he’s supposed to, talks when prompted, and laughs when everyone else does. He lets the current of entertainment carry him forward, hoping that eventually, without him having to force it, everything will slip back into place.

It doesn’t. If anything, the distance stretches thinner and thinner until it’s almost invisible, until he can’t even tell where it is anymore. Only that something isn’t where it should be.

He might be acting stupid about this. He knows Ryo would say as much, if Sakuya could just gather the strength to shove his pride down and say something.

Isn’t it only logical, though? When you lose a limb, you bleed.

Ryo’s laughter carries brightly over the wind. Sakuya’s eyes blink awake to find him tripping backwards over the shoreline to avoid Sion’s apparent pursuit.

It’s been a week since Ryo rejoined them for the Japan leg of the tour. Already, he’s moving like he was never gone, like a bone had never been broken. Sakuya watches his legs and finds nothing there but bare skin coated in sand and wet.

Their team had decided to double Okinawa as a photoshoot and tour stop both, with one day of fast paced camera clicking at scenic parts of the beach bleeding next into the stage. For the moment, in the stillness of the director looking over what they’ve taken so far, Sakuya sits in a beach chair against Riku as the others play in the waves.

He feels himself drifting between sleep and wakefulness, Riku carding his fingers affectionately through Sakuya’s hair.

“I like the sea.” He murmurs. Somewhere off to his right, Ryo cackles at something too far to make out.

“Why?” Riku asks, like there’s a reason.

Sakuya didn’t think there was one, really. But - he doesn’t search very hard, “It never changes. It’s always here, waiting.”

Riku hums. “It changes all the time.”

“I guess so, yeah.” Sakuya agrees sleepily.

“In Fukui, the tide would come in, and go out. Water, waves, temperatures, all of it changed,” Riku recalls, threading his fingers gently through Sakuya’s hair. “It just didn’t leave.”

The words settle on Sakuya, washing gently from scalp to fingertips. In front of them, the sea crashes with the motion of endless shifting, reshaping itself over and over again. He doesn’t see Ryo anymore.

“What if you change too much?” he asks quietly.

Riku pauses. “Who?”

Sakuya doesn’t answer, and Riku doesn’t push. His fingers continue their tender motions.

“Then you learn them again.” He says simply.

Sakuya closes his eyes. He doesn’t know if he could, not when he’s already trying so hard to hold onto what’s in front of him.

The tide pulls somewhere far off, steady and unbothered, Ryo even farther ahead. Could he follow that far? Could he trace the shape of its movements, fit his feet step for step, and reach enough at all?

He wants to. Would Ryo let him?

The sun burns low on his shoulders, sand sharp and stubborn under his fingertips. Ryo’s voice drifts over the shore, a vivid current moving ahead.

Sakuya would love him no matter what. But what about Ryo? When Sakuya stumbles, when he doesn’t keep up, would Ryo still look back? Would he still care for him the way he used to?

He doesn’t know.

Even with Ryo back, it isn’t enough.

It’s still there. Sakuya feels him like a broken bone, a missing vein, a nerve buzzing stubbornly beneath his skin. When he tries to reach for it, there’s nothing to grasp except the phantom.

Even like this, he’s bleeding out.

They’re backstage again; moving between schedules, staff calling directions, members weaving in and out of rooms. Sometimes it feels like the only time he truly sees Ryo now is backstage. Between hotel rooms, everyone’s faces are to their pillows before anything else - on the stage, Ryo is a little too bright to look at, to catch.

“Ryo -“ Sakuya starts when Ryo zips past him, catching his sleeve.

Ryo turns, distracted. “Hm?”

“For our part, can we -“

“Ah, wait,” Ryo cuts him off, shrugging off his touch. “Sion asked me to run through something real quick.”

Sion waves from across the hall.

Ryo glances briefly back to Sakuya. “I’ll come find you after, okay?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He’s already moving. Sakuya’s hand drops slowly back to his side, the pulse beneath his skin throbbing like it’s emptying. The hallway feels too long.

Sakuya nods belatedly, even though no one is looking. Ryo doesn’t find him until they’re all heading to the stage.

He sees it in everything.

In the way Ryo walks ahead without checking. In the way conversations start and end without Sakuya. In the way their eyes don’t meet unless Sakuya looks first.

Even when Ryo’s not there - especially when Ryo’s not there - he feels it. The distance, the certainty of it. He sees the shape of Ryo’s retreating figure behind his eyelids when he blinks, the square set of his back getting further and smaller and further.

An hour passes. A day, a week, then two. Every moment, the silhouette of Ryo being washed away by passing time. 

After the show, everything feels a half beat off.

Sakuya ends up by the outside wall without meaning to. He’s waiting for Ryo to be done getting his make up removed and clothes changed so that he can, too. His phone is held loosely in his hand, making little effort to actually scroll or even look at it. He stares at the weather app’s meaningless forecast numbers.

The hallway is too bright. People pass him in fragments - staff, voices, laughter - but it all slides past without catching, like water over glass. 

“Saku.”

He looks up immediately. 

Ryo is right next to him, too close for someone who hadn’t been there a second ago. His hair is still damp with sweat and curling at the nape, hoodie slipping off of one shoulder. Sakuya’s eyes flit, briefly, to the sharp line of his collarbone. He looks the same as always after a stage - lit from the inside, glittery at the eyes.

For a moment, Sakuya forgets everything.

“Oh,” he says. “Hey.”

Ryo glances down the hall, then back at him. There’s a weighted pause, placed with intention like he’s deciding something.

“The rest are already heading to the car, I think.” He says.

“Mm.” Sakuya nods, waiting. He doesn’t know for what.

Ryo bounces between his toes. Sakuya’s eyes flicker down to his shin, lifting when Ryo speaks again.

“I was gonna go get a drink before we leave,” he says. Then, casually, almost like an afterthought, “You can come.”

Sakuya feels it then, sharp and quiet, sitting wrong in his skull. Ryo wouldn’t have said that before - he wouldn’t have needed to, Sakuya thinks. He would’ve just moved, and Sakuya would’ve followed. Or maybe Sakuya would’ve moved first, and Ryo would’ve just been there anyway. It didn’t really matter.

“Do you want me to wait?” Ryo asks.

The question comes too precise, like it’s carving something out clean between them.

Waiting means a lot of things. Sakuya’s brain flips through the options as if they were pages. Waiting means there’s a version where Ryo doesn’t. Waiting means Sakuya has to choose. Waiting means this isn’t something they share unless he reaches for it.

He hesitates. The second passes like a brittle stretch, something that’ll snap if he breathes wrong.

Ryo tilts his head curiously, his features unburdened.

“No, no,” Sakuya says quickly. “Don’t worry about it.”

Ryo shrugs. “Okay.”

For a stupid second, Sakuya waits. For a tease, a push, a reach. He waits for a hand at his wrist. He waits for Ryo to take a certain step like it’s obvious Sakuya will follow.

“I won’t be long,” Ryo says. “Bye, bye!”

“Bye.” Sakuya replies.

Ryo gives a small wave, half there, already leaving, and turns down the hall. The distance opens without resistance, far and clean and gone. At the corner, Ryo disappears. He never looks back.

Sakuya exhales. He thinks, for a second, about following. About catching up, and saying he changed his mind. He thinks about saying anything else. It’s too late, though. It’s not like going now would patch the moment. He already answered and Ryo already accepted.

Sakuya presses his lips together.

Is this it? Is this what they grow into? A reality now where Ryo offers instead of assumes, where Sakuya hesitates instead of moving, and where nothing stops either from happening?

He looks down at his hands, at their strange, imperceptible emptiness.

After another breath, he pushes himself off the wall. He steps towards the dressing room, nothing following behind.

Sakuya and Ryo’s hotel room is louder with four people in it instead of just two.

Someone’s dragged snacks onto the table, spilling over take out boxes. The TV is on too loud, some variety show flashing bright colors across the walls. Sakuya lingers in the doorway for a second before he steps in, shutting the door behind him with a soft click.

Ryo’s sprawled across the couch, one arm thrown over the backrest like he owns the space. Daeyoung is wedged against his side, half arguing, half laughing about something Sakuya didn’t catch. Yushi is sitting quietly on the floor, munching on ramen with singleminded focus.

“I’m serious,” Daeyoung insists, smacking lightly at Ryo’s shoulder. “You said you’d watch it with me.”

“I did watch it,” Ryo shoots back, his brows raised. “I just fell asleep halfway through.”

“That doesn’t count!”

“Doesn’t it? I was there.”

“You were snoring.” Yushi adds simply.

Ryo balks at him. “Snore?! I don’t snore.”

“You did,” Daeyoung laughs. “Seriously.”

“Like an elephant.” Yushi nods.

“Ask Sakuya,” Daeyoung says suddenly, glancing up. “He’d know.”

Sakuya’s blinks, slightly startled to be addressed. His posture straightens at the entryway, tightening further when Ryo follows Daeyoung’s gaze.

Their eyes meet, and Sakuya feels it the same way he always feels it: that instinctive pull, like something reaching across the space between them. Ryo smiles.

“Saku,” he says sweetly. “When’d you get here?”

“Just now.” Sakuya replies.

“Come here,” Ryo adds, shifting slightly to make room on the couch. “Settle this.”

The space opens beside him. Sakuya looks at it.

“I’m fine,” he says. “I’m gonna shower in a second.”

Ryo shrugs. “Suit yourself. Anyway,” Ryo continues, turning away. “I don’t snore.”

“You drooled on me.” Daeyoung says.

“That’s different.”

“How is that different?”

Sakuya watches them, the space beside Ryo still open for a second too long before Daeyoung shifts and fills it without thinking.

Ryo glances back to Sakuya suddenly. “Do I snore?”

Sakuya tries to remember. Nights spent too close, shared pillows, quiet breathing in the dark. It feels like reaching for something just out of range. Does Ryo snore? He’s never noticed. He’s not sure.

“I don’t know.” He says finally.

Daeyoung laughs. “That’s not helpful.”

Ryo just grins, jumping forward to crowd around Yushi’s shoulders. “See? I don’t snore.”

“Mm.” Yushi says, a noise of disgruntlement as much as it is acknowledgment.

“Yushi.” Ryo croons, unrelenting even as Yushi tries to worm his way out.

Sakuya stops following the conversation after that. His gaze moves instead to Ryo. Ryo’s smiling at something Yushi just said, eyes soft, shoulders relaxed like nothing in the world is out of place. He looks away before anyone can catch him again, stepping towards the bathroom door and slipping inside.

Later, the room empties in pieces. 

There are plastic utensils and wrappers left behind. The TV is still on, loud and cycling through colors. Ryo is half asleep on the couch, his arm falling off the side. Daeyoung’s jacket hangs over the back of the couch, its sleeve brushing the awkward tilt of Ryo’s forehead. His leg has slipped from where it was propped, hanging at an angle that can’t be comfortable.

Sakuya pauses as he passes. He thinks about nudging him awake. Maybe flicking his forehead till he whines. His hand lifts, then stops.

Ryo shifts on his own, mumbling something under his breath, turning slightly toward the back of the couch. The space beside him opens.

Sakuya lowers his hand.

“Ryo, you should go to bed.” He says quietly.

Ryo hums, not quite hearing. Sakuya stands there as if waiting, but Ryo doesn’t move again.

Sakuya turns, and falls into his own bed.

Normally, he’d just steal Sion’s charger. That’s half the fun of sharing hotels, that they can just take each other’s stuff. Now, though, his phone is almost dead, his charger is snapped at the cable, and Sion’s charger is as nowhere to be found as he is. 

He pulls out his phone, and asks Riku if he can borrow his. Riku replies only when Sakuya’s phone percent ticks to a foreboding two.

not in my room now :<
ryo’s still there!! just knock

He doesn’t get the chance to. Their door opens up first, creaking away from his raised fist. 

Ryo stands there, framed by the low spill of light. For a second, Ryo just looks at him like he’s placing him.

“Oh,” he says, soft. He smiles. “Saku. Did you need something?”

The question settles between them, gentle and complete. There’s nowhere for Sakuya to step into it. 

He feels bad being here, suddenly. He could’ve asked someone else. He didn’t have to interrupt whatever Ryo was gonna do, or bother him with meaningless requests.

“Um. Yeah.” Sakuya says, a second too late. 

Ryo shifts back, hand still on the door, opening just enough space for him to pass, but Sakuya doesn’t move. The doorway stretches between them, thin and invisible and impossible to step through. Like if he crosses it wrong, something will close behind him.

“You can come in?” Ryo says, uncertain, like he’s filling in something Sakuya should’ve already done.

Sakuya nods, and steps inside, wading more than walking.

Their room is the same as his, down to the unmade bed and clothing slumped on the floor. Except, the air smells faintly different. Ryo’s side of the bed is more rumpled than it should be at this hour, like he’d been sitting there for a while.

It feels like entering the wrong room. Like he’d accidentally wandered into a stranger’s private space.

“What did you need?” Ryo asks, already moving toward his bed, already settling into a space separate from him. The door clicks shut behind him.

Sakuya opens his mouth. Charger, he thinks. The word slips under before it can surface.

Instead, he lingers just inside, like he hasn’t fully arrived. Like something in him is still standing at the door, waiting to be let in properly. For a second, he thinks if he stays quiet long enough, maybe Ryo will notice. Maybe he’ll look up, cross the space, and fix it without Sakuya having to say anything at all.

Sakuya looks at Ryo, at the distance stretching a million miles between them from doorway to bed. He feels it so closely. That, if he says nothing it’ll make it worse, but if he says something, it’ll ruin everything.

The thought comes as sharp as a breath he can’t quite take, 

What am I to you?

He’s never had the thought before. It had always seemed so irrelevant when Sakuya was so sure of his place in Ryo’s life. He had carved it out himself. It had always been his. Now, though, the question is choking out of him, a rush of dirt and salt.

Somewhere between his ribs, something gives, slow and inevitable.

Sakuya doesn’t say I’m scared. He doesn’t say I’m scared one day you’ll look at me and it won’t be the same. I’m scared you won’t recognize me anymore. He doesn’t say time has passed, and now you don’t hug me.

When he speaks, he means it to be a question. He means it to ask. Instead, so decisive it echoes back through him: “You don’t need me.”

Shock flashes over Ryo’s face until it settles into confusion. Sakuya’s hands starts to tremble, but somehow he doesn’t regret saying it. If he steps forward, he knows he’ll drown in the depth of the separation.

“What do you mean?” Ryo replies carefully, and even that deepens the pit.

Does Ryo really not see?

“I don’t know,” he lies. He knows. He doesn’t know to say this so that Ryo will, too. “You just… you feel so far, sometimes.”

Ryo stands up, and steps forward. “Sakuya,” he gestures obviously to the distance between them, as if it’s short. “I’m right here.”

He doesn’t feel it. He hasn’t noticed.

“I feel like,” the words rise, and then recede. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Sakuya -“

The sharp beep of the hotel door cuts through Ryo’s words. Riku steps through the doorway, pulling off his mask. “Sakuya? Did you find my charger?”

“Oh,” Sion grins behind him. “Sakuya is here?”

Sakuya swallows, chancing a brief glance back to Ryo. Ryo is staring straight at him, his brows folded.

“Yeah,” Sakuya says, clearing his throat when his voice still comes too serious. “I’m heading back now. Goodnight.”

That night, he lies awake with his phone face down on his chest, the battery long dead.

He thinks about finishing the sentence. He tries to imagine what comes after you don’t need me.

The thought drifts unmoored through his chest, until it becomes morning and it’s easier to just pretend it was never said.

They room together in Saitama because they’re the last two to pick a room, not because they’re each other’s first choice. Sakuya tries to tell himself that he’s being stupid. Still, as he drops his bag by a bed and glances at Ryo across the room, he wonders if Ryo notices the difference, too.

That night, Sakuya lies on his back, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sound of Ryo tapping at his phone in the bed just next to him. Normally, at this point, Ryo would’ve already dropped the full weight of his body on Sakuya’s chest. At this point, Sakuya would’ve been able to say something that would set them off chatting late into the night. 

His thoughts are cut short by the appearance of Ryo standing over him, a looming figure he has to squint at.

“Ryo?” Sakuya startles to a sit. He hadn’t even heard him move.

“Let’s go out. Show me some place cool.”

“Now?”

Ryo just looks at him. He must see something dumb on Sakuya’s face, because he smiles. “Yeah, now.”

Sakuya doesn’t really know the area they’re in, especially when it’s been so long since he called the city home. The buildings emerge like memories instead of something solid when they walk past them, familiar in their likeness more than anything else.

He ends up leading Ryo without much direction, yellow street lights blinking faintly overhead. The air is damp with earlier rain, stuck to the street corners and glittering off building windows. Their shoulders brush every couple of steps. By the time they reach a random park, it almost feels inevitable.

“Saku,” Ryo says, looking around. “This is a park.”

Sakuya shrugs a little. “There isn’t any place cool in Saitama.”

“Oh!” Ryo bounds forward a couple steps, leaping from mulch to soft ground until he’s at the swing set. “Here, here, Saku.”

“Are you a kid?” Sakuya laughs when Ryo gestures for him to follow.

“Aren’t you?” Ryo raises his brows like it’s a dare, plopping down. The swing beside him sits empty.

Sakuya follows him. The seat is dotted with raindrops, but he sits down even though he has his thinnest pants on. “Mm. I think so, too.”

The chains creak softly as they push off the ground, the rhythm uneven at first before it settles into something looser. The wind crawls up his skin, slipping beneath his clothes. A nearby tree, browned from the wet of rain, cradles the night stars in its thinnest branches when he glances up.

Next to him, Ryo leans back, his feet kicking toward the sky. For a moment, he looks weightless. Like within each swing, he could just keep going and going. He looks like he might not come back down. 

Sakuya’s swing slows. He drags his feet against the ground, watching the distance stretch between them at the peak of each arc.

Forward, Ryo disappears. Back, Ryo returns. Forward, he’s gone again. Sakuya’s not sure which truth is real.

The distance stretches, unbearable in its rhythm. Sakuya feels it like water. He feels it like staying still too long, sinking without noticing, wrinkles weaving into his fingerprints. He feels it like waiting for something to pull him back up instead of moving his own arms. 

If Sakuya doesn’t say something right now, then this is forever. The rhythm will settle, and the distance will stay, and this will become who they are. Could he learn to live with that? He couldn’t. He already knows he couldn’t.

His grip tightens on the chains.

“I’m sorry.” Ryo says.

Sakuya blinks, taken off guard. “Why are you apologizing?”

Ryo slows himself with a scuff of his shoes, looking vaguely embarrassed. “Um. I don’t know?” he laughs, a little uneven. “I just feel like… something’s gone wrong somewhere. And I’m sorry.”

Sakuya shakes his head quickly. “No, you haven’t done anything.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Ryo says, softer now. He sways a little, but doesn’t really start moving again. “I think… something’s happened, right?”

Sakuya stares at the ground, at the wet patch of dirt beneath his feet.

“Tell me, Sakuya,” Ryo says with quiet hesitation. “I don’t know what you’re thinking anymore.”

Sakuya can barely swallow. He has the strange, fleeting thought that this is what drowning must feel like - not the panic, not yet. Only the quiet certainty that if he doesn’t move, no one is coming to get him.

“I’m afraid,” he says, the words catching on the way out. “That you’re gonna leave me behind.”

Ryo’s brows knit together immediately. “Why would you think that? When have I ever?”

Now, Sakuya wants to say. Always, all the time.

Instead, what comes out is smaller, thinner, “You don’t talk to me.”

“I don’t understand,” Ryo says. “Is this - what, is this still about my stupid leg?”

Sakuya almost laughs, huffing out a sharp sound. “Yes, it’s about your stupid leg and how stupid I am for caring.”

“I never said that, Sakuya.” Ryo says quickly, thrown. “Sakuya, I don’t mean it like that.”

He presses his lips together. His hands tighten until they hurt around the chains, chafing against his palms.

“It’s not -“ he starts, then exhales frustratedly through his nose. “I don’t… know where I stand with you anymore.”

Ryo goes quiet, like he’s trying to find the shape of what he means. His brows are drawn firmly together as he searches for something in Sakuya’s face.

“Right where you always have.”

Where is that? Where?

Sakuya almost wants to grab him around the shoulders and shake him, to force something clearer out of him. Instead, the feeling folds inward. He wants to draw his knees up to his chest and sink into himself, disappearing before he has to hear another answer like that.

He wants, stupidly, desperately, for Ryo to tell him who he is.

“Ryo,” Sakuya says impatiently. It bursts from him. “I don’t know who I am if you don’t.”

Sakuya looks at Ryo. And Ryo is - Sakuya almost laughs. Ryo is looking at him like Sakuya’s taken a hat off for the first time in his life, like he’s seeing something he didn’t know was there.

The street light beside them casts a warm glow over Ryo’s features, illuminating his cheeks and the dusting of pink below his eyes. He’s got a food stain on his tee that his too big zip up almost nearly hides. When a cool breeze passes through his hair, his eyes are wide and shiny, his lashes starkly black.

Ryo looks, for all he’s ever been and all he’ll ever be, like a boy sitting in a park at night.

“Sorry,” Sakuya says, despite himself. He’s still ruining everything. He feels his hands tremble. “It’s just… I’m right here. I’m still here.”

Not with you. Where are you?

He sees the instant it clicks in Ryo’s eyes. Between baring his heart and Ryo picking through it, he sees when Ryo pieces him together. He sees when he’s been found out.

“I’m sorry.” He says again into the silence, like he can’t help it.

Ryo doesn’t answer. Instead, Ryo stands up and steps in front of Sakuya, the chains of his swing clanking back and forth at the motion. He brings his hands up, warm against either side of Sakuya’s face, leans down, and pulls him forward. 

When their lips meet, it feels the ticking of a clock’s hands passing over each other. It feels like something aligning at last.

Ryo pulls back, but his hands don’t fall away. Sakuya realizes, far away in another body that can’t be his, that he’s gripping Ryo’s wrists.

“Sometimes, Sakuya,” Ryo starts, and his voice is a little unsteady. “You’re the only reason I can stop worrying.”

“Oh.” Sakuya breathes, because what does he say to that? He still feels the sweet pressure of Ryo’s lips on his.

“You didn’t know that?”

“Can I kiss you?” Sakuya asks, like it hadn’t just happened. 

Ryo ducks his head, and Sakuya can only make out the flaming tips of his ears. He feels weightless. Ryo likes him.

“Please?” He adds. He tangles their hands together, tilting his chin up before Ryo can even reply.

“Agh, stop asking! Just -“

Sakuya kisses him. Softer this time with the certain press of intention. It doesn’t sound like fireworks, or taste like lemon, he thinks. It feels like the rising sun meeting the waves, like spilling into what was already there. It feels like being let into the fabric of another’s sheets, warm and close. It feels like a door opening inside of him.

Sakuya pulls away before he can do something hasty, and their foreheads rest against each other. In the silence, they share the same breath.

“I’m in love with you.” Sakuya whispers, because he can’t help it, and it’s spilling out of him, and it’s Ryo. It’s Ryo.

Ryo cringes, pulling away. His face is so pink. Sakuya can’t stop looking. “Ah, stop. I know. I thought - I thought you knew, too.”

“That I’m in love with you?”

Ryo makes a sound that’s halfway between an aborted squeal and an irritated groan. “That I’m in love with you.”

“No, I -“ Sakuya can’t catch up. He’s trying. “I didn’t realize.”

Ryo makes a real put upon face, but he’s so pink it doesn’t matter. He kicks Sakuya’s ankle. “You’re smiling.”

Sakuya feels his cheeks, and huh - he is. He didn’t even feel it.

“I’m happy.” Sakuya says.

Ryo allows a grin, sitting back on his swing and shuffling closer. He lifts a hand and places it gently on Sakuya’s head, guiding him down until Sakuya’s cheek rests against his shoulder. His hand remains pressed against Sakuya’s hair, warm.

“Sakuya,” Ryo says, matter of fact. “It’s never been a secret.”

“I guess it just felt like it,” Sakuya murmurs. “I didn’t think you took me serious. I didn’t think - I don’t know.”

“Didn’t think what?”

“That it was the same. I didn’t think it’d be - be right, to want it to be the same.”

“Sakuya, you’re everything to me.” Ryo says it like it’s obvious.

The words land too big and too absolute in his chest. For a second, it scares him. Ryo says it so easily for how much weight they carry. How does he do that? Sakuya doesn’t know what to do with something like that, doesn’t know how to hold it without breaking it.

“I -“ Sakuya starts, then stops, fumbling for something that feels true enough to give back. “I would have loved you even if.”

“Hm?”

“Just,” Sakuya gestures vaguely. He doesn’t know how to say this. “Even if it wasn’t like this. Even if we didn’t have time, or we got it wrong, or… I don’t know. As long as you were kind, I would’ve loved you. I love you now.”

“‘Cause I’m kind?”

Sakuya shakes his head. “Because you’re Ryo. There’s never been anyone else.”

Ryo doesn’t reply right away. He just smooths a hand over Sakuya’s hair, fingers pressing softly into his scalp.

“You don’t have to be there for everything to matter to me,” Ryo says. “You’re Sakuya.”

Sakuya feels his smile widen, and he wants to know. He wants Ryo to keep talking. He wants to listen to him forever. “What does that mean?”

“I just love you. That’s it.”

“Yeah.”

“Right?”

Sakuya lets his eyes fall shut. “Yeah.”

Ryo’s shoulder is warm beneath his cheek, solid and real as he listens to the steady rhythm of Ryo’s breathing.

He was so sure that loving Ryo meant never losing him. That Sakuya would know exactly where he stood, all the time, without question. 

But maybe it’s this. Uncertain and shifting, moving whether he’s ready or not. The water doesn’t feel any shallower. Time doesn’t slow. Ryo doesn’t stay still. Sakuya breathes in anyways.

And when he lifts his hand, Ryo is still there to take it. From Sakuya’s right hand to Ryo’s left, wrist to wrist, their pulses connect.