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Hirose almost doesn't recognize him.
That's the first thought, standing just inside the banquet hall doors with a plastic cup of lukewarm sparkling wine sweating in his hand, watching Nakamura Okuto walk in like he owns the room he's walking into. Same dark hair, a little shorter now, styled instead of just existing the way it used to. Same quiet mouth. But the posture is different — straighter, easier, a man who has stopped flinching at the idea of being looked at — and the gray button-down he's wearing fits him in a way that makes something in Hirose's chest do an undignified little stumble.
Huh, Hirose thinks, with the distant, almost clinical surprise of a man noticing weather changing. Okay. Wow. Okay.
Ten years is apparently a hell of a thing to do to a person.
And then Nakamura laughs at something the alumni coordinator says, head tipping back, hand coming up to rub the back of his neck — some things never change, that gesture is exactly the same as it was at sixteen — and the light from the chandelier catches something gold on his left hand.
Hirose's stomach drops about four floors.
A ring. A plain gold band, unmistakable, sitting right where rings like that always sit, glinting every time Nakamura moves his hand, which he does constantly, because Nakamura has always talked with his hands when he's comfortable, and apparently — apparently — he's comfortable now, the way you only get to be comfortable once you've stopped waiting for something.
Oh, Hirose thinks, and the thought arrives with a strange, hollow flatness, like a held note going suddenly silent. He's married.
He doesn't know why it lands the way it does. He has no claim on this information. They haven't spoken in three years, not really, not past the occasional comment on each other's old photos, the kind of contact that's really just two people agreeing not to fully let go of each other's names. Nakamura getting married is, by any reasonable accounting, none of Hirose's business and not even slightly surprising — Nakamura was always going to be the kind of person somebody wanted to keep.
And yet Hirose finds that he cannot stop looking at the ring. Can't stop looking at Nakamura's whole, easy, settled face. Can't quite find the bottom of the feeling currently sitting in his chest like a swallowed stone.
⸻
"You look good," Hirose says, twenty minutes later, when he's finally crossed the room and they're standing together near the drinks table like it's the most natural thing in the world, like ten years haven't happened, like Hirose's pulse isn't doing something faintly humiliating.
"You too." Nakamura's smile is easy, unguarded in a way Hirose doesn't entirely remember it being. "You haven't changed at all. Still look like you're about to start trouble."
"I resent that. I am extremely mature now." Hirose gestures vaguely at himself, at his slightly-too-formal jacket, like that proves anything. His eyes drop, helplessly, to Nakamura's hand again. "So. Uh. Congratulations, by the way."
Nakamura blinks. "For?"
"The ring." Hirose makes himself smile, makes it sound light, the way he's always made everything sound light, the way he learned to do a long time ago because it's easier than the alternative. "When'd you get married?"
Something flickers across Nakamura's face — too fast for Hirose to name it, gone almost before it arrives — and then he just huffs a small laugh and looks down at the ring himself, turning his hand slightly like he's only just remembering it's there.
"It's a long story," Nakamura says, which isn't an answer, but Hirose doesn't push, because pushing feels dangerous right now, feels like it might crack something he isn't ready to look at directly.
They drift to a quieter corner instead, drinks in hand, falling into the old rhythm almost immediately — Nakamura still listens the same way, head tilted slightly, like every sentence Hirose says is worth the full weight of his attention, and Hirose finds himself talking more than he means to, the way he always used to, filling silences that don't actually need filling because Nakamura's quiet has never once felt like disinterest.
It's good. It's so easy it almost hurts. And then, somewhere in the middle of a story about a coworker's disastrous karaoke choices, Nakamura goes quiet in that specific old way — the falling-into-himself way Hirose used to catch and ask about, back in high school, and never once got a real answer to.
"What," Hirose says, soft.
"Nothing." Nakamura shakes his head, then seems to reconsider, the way a person reconsiders something they've decided, after ten years, they're finally allowed to say out loud. "I was just thinking about how funny it is. Being here. Like this." He gestures between them, vaguely. "I used to have a — " a short laugh, almost embarrassed, but steady, the laugh of a man who has made his peace with an old story " — a really big, fat crush on you. Back then. In high school."
The room does not stop. The music does not stop. Somewhere, somebody's chair scrapes and somebody else laughs too loud, and none of it touches the sudden, total silence that has opened up inside Hirose's skull.
"What," he says again, except this time it isn't soft at all.
"Yeah." Nakamura's still smiling, rueful, easy, a man describing a fever he survived years ago. "Embarrassingly big. Like — genuinely, I thought it was kind of obvious? I used to memorize your schedule. I had a photo of you as my lock screen for, God, way too long. I cried about you to my octopus on a weekly basis, that's a real thing that happened, I want that on record." He shakes his head, fond and faintly bewildered at his own younger self. "I figured you knew. Or — not knew, exactly, but suspected. I wasn't exactly subtle."
Hirose feels something static-shock through his chest, sharp and sudden, the electric jolt of a wire crossing where it never should have touched. Liked me. He liked me. He liked me and I never—
"You—" Hirose's voice comes out strange. "I didn't — Nakamura, I had no idea."
"Yeah, I figured, eventually." Nakamura shrugs, like it costs him nothing, like the words aren't currently taking Hirose apart at the seams. "It's fine. It was a long time ago."
It is not fine. Nothing about this is fine. Hirose is doing rapid, frantic, useless math in his head — every lunch they shared, every time Nakamura went quiet and Hirose let it go, every flinch and every careful joke he'd noticed back then and filed away as just Nakamura being Nakamura instead of what it apparently actually was, which was a boy quietly loving him and being too scared to say so, right there, close enough to touch, the entire time — and underneath the math is a colder, simpler thought that swallows everything else whole:
He's married now. Whatever this was. Whoever he is now. He's married. I'm too late. I was always going to be too late and I didn't even know there was a clock running.
"Oh," Hirose says, and it comes out so small he barely recognizes his own voice.
Nakamura looks at him for a second — really looks, the old way, the close-attention way — and something passes behind his eyes that Hirose is too underwater to read.
"...Oh," Nakamura echoes, quieter, and laughs — a short, awkward, oddly uncertain sound, nothing like the easy laugh from before. He doesn't say anything else.
⸻
Hirose doesn't remember deciding to start drinking. He just remembers, somewhere in the haze of the next hour, that his hand keeps finding a fresh cup every time the last one empties, and that the room has gotten warmer and louder and somehow farther away, like he's watching the reunion happen through the wrong end of a telescope.
Too late, keeps surfacing, stupid and relentless, every time he tries to think about anything else. If I'd noticed. If I'd just — looked. I was right there. He cried about me to an octopus and I never even —
And then, cutting through the fog like a knife: Matsumura Kosei walks in.
Hirose remembers Matsumura distantly — right— his old friend from junior high, quiet, sharp-eyed, used to follow Nakamura around with the kind of low-grade, unspoken devotion Hirose, in retrospect, recognizes uncomfortably well now. Matsumura's company is apparently one of the reunion's sponsors; there's a ripple of polite applause as he's introduced, a few handshakes, the easy choreography of someone important arriving somewhere.
And on Matsumura's left hand, plain and gold and unmistakable, catching the light exactly the way Nakamura's does: a ring.
The room tilts. Hirose's cup is empty again, he isn't sure when. Oh, he thinks, distant and ringing, like a bell struck somewhere far away. Oh. Oh, of course. Nakamura and —
He doesn't finish the thought. He doesn't ask anyone to confirm it. He doesn't need to; the shape of it has already assembled itself behind his eyes, complete and devastating — Nakamura, who loved him once and said so calmly like it was a story with an ending, married now to someone who actually showed up, someone who actually noticed, while Hirose was off being charming and oblivious and completely, catastrophically blind to the one thing that might have mattered most.
He gets another drink. And then another. The room blurs further. Somewhere in the static of it he's aware of laughing too loud at something, of someone's hand briefly on his shoulder, of his own voice sounding strange and far away even to himself — and underneath all of it, relentless, the same four words on a loop: too late, too late, too late, too late.
His small body, never built for this kind of evening, gives out faster than he expects. The last thing Hirose is reliably aware of is the floor tilting sideways and someone's voice — low, familiar, achingly gentle — saying his name like a question.
⸻
Nakamura has been watching him for the last twenty minutes, and he does not like what he's seeing.
He'd meant the joke kindly. That's the thing he keeps turning over, watching Hirose get progressively more unsteady across the room, watching the bright, easy charm visibly fraying at the edges — he and Matsumura had cooked the whole bit up on the train ride over, half a joke, half an old, half-buried hope: let's see if he even notices. Let's see if it still matters to him at all. A harmless little experiment, Nakamura had told himself. A closed chapter, reopened just enough to see if anyone still cared what was written in it.
He had not expected this. He had not expected Hirose's face to go white and then carefully, badly composed, the same old trick from high school except worse now, dressed up in adult fluency and therefore much easier to miss until it's already collapsing. He had not expected the drinking. He had not expected to feel, watching it happen, like something in his chest was being slowly, deliberately wrung out.
I didn't think he'd care this much, Nakamura thinks, throat tight, watching Hirose sway dangerously near the buffet table. I didn't expect this. I just wanted to know if it would land at all. I didn't want him to fall apart.
He catches Matsumura's eye across the room. A small, silent exchange — the kind only two people who've known each other a long time can manage — and they meet by the bathroom corridor a minute later, away from the noise.
"Well," Matsumura says, dry as ever, "I think the prank worked."
"It worked too well." Nakamura's already pulling the ring off his finger, turning it over once in his palm before holding it out. His hand isn't quite steady. "I didn't think he'd take it like that."
Matsumura takes the ring back, sliding it into his pocket instead of his finger, and studies Nakamura for a second with an expression that's equal parts amused and unsurprised. "You really didn't expect him to care."
"I expected him to laugh it off. Or not even notice." Nakamura exhales, long and unsteady. "I didn't expect — that." He glances back toward the hall, toward the general direction of Hirose's slumping silhouette. "I can't just leave him like this."
"No," Matsumura agrees, not unkindly. "You can't." He claps Nakamura once on the shoulder, already turning to go, already letting himself out the back the way he'd planned to from the start, since he'd only really come for the company event in the first place. "Take care of him."
"I will," Nakamura says, and means it more than he's meant almost anything in a long time.
⸻
Getting Hirose out of the banquet hall without an audience is its own small, undignified operation — an arm around his waist, a murmured excuse to the few people who notice, Hirose's head lolling against Nakamura's shoulder the entire walk to the taxi, mumbling something that might be an apology and might just be noise.
"You're an idiot," Nakamura tells him quietly, in the back of the cab, not unkindly, brushing damp hair off Hirose's forehead. "You're such an idiot. You have no idea."
Hirose doesn't respond. He's already half asleep, breath uneven, one hand fisted loosely in the front of Nakamura's shirt like he's afraid of being left somewhere.
Nakamura's apartment is quiet when they get there — Icchan's tank glowing its familiar pale blue in the corner, one curious arm drifting up against the glass as they come in, like he's checking who's arrived. Nakamura gets Hirose's shoes off, gets him onto the bed, pulls the blanket up over him with the kind of careful, practiced gentleness of someone who has imagined doing exactly this, exactly once, a very long time ago, and never let himself believe it would actually happen.
Hirose is crying. Not awake — not really — but in his sleep, soft and broken, the kind of crying that happens when a person's guard has finally, completely given out, tears slipping sideways into the pillow, small hitching breaths that make something in Nakamura's chest ache fiercely.
"Hey," Nakamura murmurs, sitting carefully at the edge of the bed, thumb brushing one tear away and then another, gentle as he can manage. "Hey. It's okay. I'm here."
Hirose doesn't wake. But something in his face eases, just slightly, at the touch — and Nakamura, watching him, feels the old familiar ache rearrange itself into something steadier, something that no longer feels like grief at all.
He leans down and presses a kiss to Hirose's cheek, soft and unhurried, the kind of kiss that doesn't ask for anything back.
"I'm sorry," he whispers. "I didn't mean to do that to you."
Then he slips under the covers beside him — fully dressed, careful, deliberate — and wraps an arm around Hirose's middle, pulling him gently back against his chest. Hirose makes a small sound, half-asleep, and turns into the warmth without waking, settling like something finally, finally allowed to rest.
Icchan waves a slow tentacle against the glass, as if approving, and the room goes quiet.
⸻
Hirose wakes up slowly, with the specific, ominous heaviness of a hangover not yet fully arrived but clearly on its way, and the first thing he registers is warmth at his back. A weight. An arm.
His brain, still thick with sleep and old wine, jumps immediately and unhelpfully to the worst possible conclusion. Oh no. Oh no, did I — did something happen? Did I go home with someone? Whose bed is this? Oh god, oh god—
He goes still, heart hammering, and does a careful, panicked self-assessment. Fully clothed. Shirt still buttoned. Belt still on. Nothing about his body suggests anything happened at all except sleep.
Relief washes through him, fast and dizzying — and then, right behind it, confusion, because there is very definitely someone in this bed with him, an arm slung warm and familiar over his waist, breath stirring soft against the back of his neck.
Hirose turns his head, slow, bracing.
Nakamura.
Nakamura, asleep, hair mussed, face soft and unguarded in a way Hirose has genuinely never seen it before — no careful composure, no easy adult smoothness, just open and quiet and impossibly close, one hand still loosely curled against Hirose's stomach like he'd fallen asleep mid-thought.
Hirose's pulse does something complicated. We're — we slept together. Not — not like that. Just. Together. In a bed. He's holding me.
And then his eyes catch on Nakamura's hand, right there in front of him, fingers loosely curled.
The ring is gone.
No gold band. No glint. Just a faint, pale line of untanned skin where it used to sit — the only evidence it had ever been there at all.
Hirose stares at it for a long moment, the gears of his hungover brain turning slow and disbelieving, last night reassembling itself in fragmented, drink-blurred pieces — the ring, the confession, Matsumura's matching ring, the drinking, the crying, none of it quite fitting together the way it had seemed to last night, and all of it now circling, with dawning and entirely unwelcome suspicion, around one single, glaring, ring-shaped absence.
"...Nakamura," Hirose says, voice rough with sleep and the first stirrings of something that might be betrayal or might be hope, he genuinely cannot tell which yet. "Nakamura. Wake up. What happened to your ring?"
Nakamura makes a small, sleepy sound against the back of his neck, not yet awake enough to lie, and mumbles, muffled and half-conscious, the kind of honesty only morning fog can produce:
"...Wasn't real."
Hirose lies very still.
"I'm sorry," Hirose says slowly, twisting around properly now, fully awake, fully alert, staring at Nakamura's face with the dawning, electric realization of a man who has just understood he was played, and somehow cannot bring himself to be entirely angry about it. "What."
Nakamura's eyes open. For a second he just blinks at the ceiling, the fog of sleep clearing fast as he registers exactly what he's said and exactly who heard it, and then he groans and presses the heel of his hand against his eyes, looking — for the first time all weekend — genuinely embarrassed instead of effortlessly composed.
"...That came out wrong," he mutters.
"Did it, though?" Hirose pushes himself up on one elbow, and whatever fragile hangover-fog had been slowing him down is gone now, burned off by something sharper. "Nakamura. Was the ring fake?"
A long pause. Nakamura lowers his hand and looks at him — really looks, the old way, except there's nowhere left to hide behind this morning, no careful adult ease, just him, caught.
"Yes," he admits.
"And Matsumura's ring—"
"Also fake. We did it together. As a — " Nakamura winces, hearing himself say it out loud for the first time in daylight. "As a joke. Kind of. Half a joke."
"A joke." Hirose's voice climbs slightly. "Nakamura, I cried into approximately six plastic cups of bad sparkling wine because I thought you got married without me ever even knowing you liked me. I thought I missed it. I thought there was a whole — a whole window, and it closed, and I didn't even know it had opened in the first place."
"I know." Nakamura sits up properly now, the laughter draining out of his face, replaced by something quieter and much more careful. "I know, and I'm sorry. I didn't think — " he exhales, dragging a hand through his already-wrecked hair. "Honestly? I didn't think you'd care. I thought I'd tell you about the crush, you'd laugh, maybe feel a little weird about it for five minutes, and that would be that. Old news. A funny story from a reunion." His jaw works. "I didn't expect you to fall apart over a fake ring. I didn't expect — " he stops.
"Didn't expect what?"
"That it would matter to you," Nakamura says, quiet now, none of the easy reunion-charm left in his voice at all. "That you'd care this much. About me. Now. I spent so long assuming you never noticed back then that I just — kept assuming it. Even now. Even after ten years. I told myself the story so many times that I stopped checking if it was still true."
Hirose stares at him. Somewhere across the room, Icchan drifts lazily against the glass, utterly unbothered by the gravity of the conversation happening near his tank.
"I didn't notice," Hirose says slowly, "because you never let yourself be noticed. You smiled through everything. You made it look easy. I was sixteen and an idiot and I took every single one of your careful, composed smiles completely at face value, because why wouldn't I? That's what you showed me." His voice softens, cracks slightly at the edges. "And last night, for about four hours, I thought I'd lost my chance to ever find out what was actually underneath all of that. I thought it was just — gone. Permanently. Married-to-someone-else gone."
"It's not gone," Nakamura says, and for the first time all morning his voice isn't careful at all. "I'm right here. I've been right here the whole time, Hirose, the ring was never — there was never anyone else. There's been no one else, really, not in any way that mattered. I just got tired of being the only one carrying it, so when you walked in last night looking like that, I thought—" he laughs, short and helpless. "I thought, fine. Let's see. Let's just see if it's still there, on his side. I told myself it was a joke. I don't think it was actually a joke. I think I just wanted an excuse to find out."
The silence that follows isn't heavy. It's the other kind — full instead of empty, charged with everything neither of them has said yet.
"You're an idiot," Hirose says finally, but it comes out fond, wrecked, entirely without heat. "You're a certified, grade-A idiot, and I say that as someone who got blackout drunk over a hypothetical."
"I'm aware."
"You made me cry over a thrift-store ring."
"It was actually from a vending machine," Nakamura says, and the corner of his mouth twitches despite himself. "Matsumura insisted. Said it'd be funnier."
"I'm going to kill him."
"You'll have to get in line, he already knows."
Hirose huffs something that's almost a laugh, scrubbing both hands down his face, and when he drops them again he's looking at Nakamura with an expression that has nothing careful left in it at all — open, a little raw, ten years and one very long night stripped down to something plain and unmistakable.
"So," Hirose says. "Hypothetically. If the ring's not real, and there's no husband, and you apparently spent all of high school quietly losing your mind over me without telling me — what happens now?"
Nakamura looks at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, like he's testing whether the floor will hold, he reaches out and laces their fingers together — bare hand to bare hand, nothing gold between them, nothing to glint or lie or hide behind.
"Now," Nakamura says, "I'd like to actually try. For real, this time. No vending machine rings. No pranks. Just—" he huffs, a little embarrassed, the old awkwardness creeping back in around the edges of his new composure, which Hirose finds he likes even more than the polish. "Just us. If you want that."
Hirose doesn't answer with words. He answers by closing the last of the distance between them and kissing him — slow, certain, ten years overdue — and somewhere behind them, Icchan waves a tentacle against the glass like he's been waiting just as long for someone to finally get it right.