Chapter Text
The first time Hirose noticed, it was during lunch.
Nakamura was sitting by the window — the same window he always sat by, the one with the view of the courtyard that Hirose had once caught him staring out of with that look on his face, that soft, faraway look that used to make Hirose feel strangely warm and uncomfortable at the same time. The kind of look that made Hirose think: he's looking at me, isn't he.
But Nakamura wasn't looking at him now.
He was reading something — a small booklet, stapled at the spine, hand-drawn cover. His expression was unreadable. Not the dramatic, blushing, internally-monologuing Nakamura that Hirose had grown used to. Just... still. Nakamura was simply still.
Hirose watched him for a moment, then looked away.
It's nothing, he told himself. People change.
---
It had started about two weeks after Hana became his girlfriend.
Hirose remembered the exact morning. He'd walked into class and Nakamura had looked up from his desk and said, clearly and without any visible suffering, "Morning, Hirose."
Just that. Morning, Hirose. No red ears. No knocking things off desks. No elaborate internal collapse.
Hirose had blinked. "...Morning."
And Nakamura had gone back to his book.
Hirose stood there for three extra seconds feeling, inexplicably, like he had missed something — like he'd looked away during a scene in a movie and when he looked back, the whole plot had shifted and no one was going to explain it to him.
He told himself it didn't matter.
But it kept happening.
Nakamura in the hallway — tall, composed, that dark hair falling across his forehead the way it always did — nodding at Hirose the way you'd nod at a classmate you were perfectly comfortable with. Not flustered. Not urgent. Just... easy.
Nakamura in group discussions, speaking calmly, making a dry observation that made half the class laugh, not looking at Hirose any differently than he looked at anyone else.
Nakamura walking home, once, in the same direction, and Hirose had called out to him — "Hey, Nakamura!" — and Nakamura had slowed down, waited, and walked alongside him for six blocks talking about a documentary he'd seen about deep-sea fish, and it was a perfectly normal conversation, and Hirose couldn't figure out why it left him feeling so unsettled.
---
"You seem different lately," Hirose said one afternoon.
They were at the vending machines. The after-school crowd had thinned. Nakamura pressed the button for his usual coffee drink and caught it with one hand, and turned to look at Hirose with those dark, steady eyes.
"Different how?"
Hirose opened his mouth. Closed it. What was he supposed to say? You used to look at me like I was the only thing in the room and now you don't and it bothers me and I don't know why it bothers me.
"I don't know," he said finally. "Just... more relaxed, I guess."
Nakamura considered this. Something passed across his face — not pain exactly, just a flicker of something deep and briefly visible, like a fish turning in dark water. Then it was gone.
"Maybe I just grew up a little," he said, and smiled. It was a real smile. That was the worst part — it was completely real. "Hana seems nice, by the way. You should bring her to the culture festival."
"...Yeah," Hirose said. "Maybe."
Nakamura picked up his bag. "See you tomorrow."
Hirose watched him go.
Grew up, he thought. That's all it was.
He almost believed it.
---
The aquarium was forty minutes from school by train.
Nakamura went on Saturdays, usually in the late afternoon when the elementary school crowds had gone home and the tanks glowed blue and quiet in the dimming light. He always ended up at the same tank. The octopus enclosure. Third one from the left.
Icchan was exactly where he always was, draped over a rock like something half-dreaming.
Nakamura sat on the bench across from the glass and looked at him for a while.
"He walked home with me on Thursday," he said eventually. His voice was very quiet. There was an older couple two tanks over but they weren't paying attention. "Just. Out of nowhere. We talked about fish, actually. You'd have found it relevant."
Icchan moved one arm with great philosophical slowness.
"It's fine," Nakamura said. "It's getting easier. I think." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I don't blush anymore. That's progress, right? I can look at him and just see — a person. A friend. Someone I like being around." He paused. "I just like being around him a lot. Still. That's the part that's — "
He stopped talking.
He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth for a moment, very briefly, the way you do when you're keeping something in.
"It's fine," he said again. "Hana makes him happy. She laughs at all his jokes. She texts him those little stickers he pretends to find embarrassing." He exhaled slowly. "He deserves that. He really does."
Icchan blinked at him with ancient, alien patience.
"I'm not going to do anything about it," Nakamura told him. "I already decided. I'm not going to say anything or make it weird or — or ruin what we have now, because what we have now is actually good, I think. I think we're actually friends. And I would rather have that than — "
His voice cracked. Just slightly. He cleared his throat.
"Than nothing," he finished.
He sat there until the aquarium lights shifted to their evening setting, everything going a deeper, slower blue, and Icchan drifted to the other side of his tank, and Nakamura watched him go with something like recognition.
Yeah, he thought. Me too.
---
Kawamura had made him a manga.
He didn't know when exactly she'd started it — he'd found it in his desk one morning, tucked under his textbook, hand-stapled with a cover that just said, in her small careful lettering: For Okuto.
He'd read it on the train home with his bag on his lap and his face very controlled.
It was about two boys. One dark-haired and quiet. One bright-eyed and unaware. The quiet one spent a lot of the manga standing slightly behind the other one, watching him laugh, watching him reach for things, watching him exist in that careless, golden way some people have of existing. The quiet boy's face in Kawamura's panels was done with very few lines — she drew his expressions mostly through posture, the angle of his head, the way his hands hung at his sides — and somehow that made everything worse.
At the end, the dark-haired boy didn't confess.
He just walked home alone in the last panel, in the rain, and his expression was — it wasn't sad, exactly. It was something quieter than sad. The kind of face you make when you've accepted something and the accepting still costs you something every single day.
Nakamura had closed the manga and held it in both hands for the rest of the train ride.
When he got home, he put it in the drawer of his nightstand.
He lay on his bed for a while looking at the ceiling.
Then he cried. Quietly, the way he did everything now — not the dramatic, gasping, teenage kind of crying, but the low and careful kind, the kind that doesn't make much noise because it's coming from somewhere deeper than noise. He pressed his forearm over his eyes and let it happen because it was better to let it happen at home, alone, where no one could see.
He thought about Hirose's laugh.
He thought about the way Hirose tilted his head when he was confused about something.
He thought about six blocks walking home and deep-sea fish and *you seem different lately* and the fact that Hirose had noticed, had looked at him and noticed something had changed, and hadn't been able to name it, and for one single terrible second Nakamura had wanted to grab him by the collar and say: it's because I decided to stop. It's because loving you was eating me alive and I chose you as a friend instead because that's what I can have and I will take it, I will take every single ordinary second of it, and you will never know what it cost me.
He didn't say any of that.
He'd said: maybe I just grew up a little.
And smiled.
He was getting very good at that.
---
The next Monday, Kawamura found him before class.
She didn't say anything at first. She just walked up beside him at the shoe lockers and stood there, and Nakamura looked at her sideways, and she looked back at him with those steady eyes behind her glasses.
"You read it," she said.
"Yeah."
"...Was it okay?"
He thought about the last panel. The rain. The boy walking away.
"It was really good," he said honestly. "Your line work on his jacket was — "
"Nakamura."
"I know." He closed his locker. "I know what you're asking."
She reached over and very gently patted him twice on the back. That was all. Just that. Two small pats, like she was acknowledging something that didn't have a name yet.
He stood up straight. Adjusted his bag strap. Looked down the hallway toward the classroom where Hirose was probably already seated, probably already talking to someone, probably already smiling at something.
"Come on," Nakamura said. "We'll be late."
Kawamura fell into step beside him, and neither of them said anything else, and that was enough.
---
It was Matsumura who said it out loud.
They ran into each other near the station — Nakamura coming from the aquarium, Matsumura apparently coming from wherever Matsumura went on weekends, which based on his expression was somewhere deeply self-satisfied.
"Nakamura," he said, with that grin that was specifically calibrated to be irritating. "Fancy seeing you."
Nakamura looked at him. "Matsumura."
"Heard Hirose has a girlfriend now." Matsumura fell into step beside him uninvited, hands in his pockets. "Hana, right? She goes to our old junior high. Sweet girl." He paused for effect. "Guess that means the competition's over, huh."
Nakamura kept walking.
"I mean — not that it was ever really a competition." Matsumura glanced at him sideways. "I've known Hirose for years. We have history. Actual history. You were always kind of a... long shot, weren't you."
Nakamura stopped walking.
Matsumura stopped too, smirking, clearly expecting an argument — the fire, the pushback, the whole Nakamura-declaring-war thing that had become a kind of ritual between them.
Instead, Nakamura turned and looked at him. Calmly. Completely calmly.
"Sure," he said.
Just that. Sure.
And then he kept walking.
Matsumura stood there.
Sure.
Not shut up, Matsumura. Not I haven't given up. Not the flash of wounded pride he'd been banking on. Just — sure. Like it was already decided. Like Nakamura had looked at the board, assessed the game, and quietly put down his pieces.
Something about it made Matsumura's smirk feel cheap.
He caught up to Nakamura in three long strides.
"Hey," he said, and his voice came out less pointed than he intended. "Hey, seriously — "
"I have a train to catch."
"Nakamura." He grabbed his sleeve, briefly, and Nakamura stopped and looked at him with those dark, unhurried eyes, and Matsumura — who had never once in his life not known what to say — found himself staring at this person he'd spent months trying to get a rise out of and thinking: *when did you get like this.*
"You really just — " He gestured vaguely. "That's it? You're just. Done?"
Nakamura looked at him for a long moment.
"Hirose is happy," he said simply.
Matsumura let go of his sleeve.
Nakamura walked to the train station. Matsumura watched him until he disappeared through the turnstile, and then stood there on the sidewalk for a while with his hands in his pockets and something uncomfortable sitting in his chest.
He thought about texting Hirose.
He didn't know what he would even say.
Hey. Your friend Nakamura. You should look at him sometime. You should really actually look.
---
Hirose did look.
He couldn't stop, actually, now that he'd started. It was like once you noticed the absence of something you couldn't un-notice it — he kept catching himself tracking Nakamura across a room, cataloging small details: the way Nakamura laughed at things without covering his mouth anymore, the easy way he held himself, the fact that he and Kawamura had this quiet comfortable shorthand that Hirose had never noticed before.
"Are you and Kawamura close?" he asked one day, out of nowhere.
Nakamura looked up from his notes. "Yeah, I guess. Why?"
"Just — you seem like you understand each other."
"Mm." Nakamura considered this. "She's easy to talk to."
Hirose looked at his own notes. "What do you talk about?"
A beat. He glanced up and found Nakamura watching him with something he couldn't quite read — something careful and old, like a question that had already been answered a long time ago.
"Stuff," Nakamura said. "Books. Life. Fish." The corner of his mouth turned up. "Nothing important."
Nothing important.
Hirose looked at him.
For one strange, suspended second, he wanted to say — he didn't even know what. Something. Something about how Nakamura used to look at him and how he didn't anymore and how the absence of it had turned into this odd persistent ache, like a tooth that was fine except for when you pressed on it.
"Cool," he said instead.
"Cool," Nakamura agreed, and went back to his notes.
---
On the train home, Nakamura sat by the window and watched the city go dark.
His phone had a text from Kawamura: a small drawing she'd sent as an image, just a doodle — the two manga characters from her story, sitting side by side on a bench, not touching, not looking at each other, just there. Existing in the same space.
Underneath it she'd written: you're doing really well, you know.
He stared at it for a long time.
Then he typed back: thanks for the manga.
And: i look at it sometimes.
And: it helps, weirdly.
Her response was just a small star emoji. Then: you deserve a story that doesn't end in the rain.
He smiled at his phone screen. Then he put it away and looked out the window again.
The city lights blurred past, gold and white, and Nakamura let himself feel it — all of it, the whole complicated weight of caring about someone who was never going to know the full shape of what you felt — and then, slowly, he let out a breath.
The train moved on.
Icchan was probably sleeping now, back at the aquarium, draped over his rock in the blue dark.
It doesn't have to be anything, Nakamura thought. It just has to be bearable.
And most days — most days now — it was.
---
To be continued.
---
— this story does not end in the rain. it ends on a train, going somewhere, which is different.