Chapter Text
The first time Aiki Hirose saw Okuto Nakamura, he stopped breathing for approximately four seconds, which is a genuinely dangerous amount of time to stop breathing in the middle of a church pew with your mother's elbow in your ribs.
"Sit up straight," she hissed, not even looking at him, because thirty-one years of raising Aiki Hirose had given her a sixth sense for the exact moment he was about to slouch.
He did not sit up straight. He could not sit up straight. Sitting up straight required muscles, and all of his muscles had apparently relocated to his stomach, where they were now doing something complicated and humiliating.
Because there, at the altar, moving through the incense smoke like he'd been poured into existence rather than born into it, was a man in acolyte's robes.
Aiki had been to enough churches in his life — courtesy of a grandmother who believed faith was best administered like medicine, in regular and unwelcome doses — to know what acolytes usually looked like. Acolytes usually looked like teenagers who'd been handed a costume two sizes too big and told to carry a candle without setting anything on fire. Shapeless. Beige. Forgettable.
This was not that.
The robes clung where they should cling and floated where they should float, sheer black-on-black layers drifting off broad shoulders like something out of a dream he hadn't had yet but was absolutely going to have tonight. Underneath, when the chiffon shifted — and it shifted often, with every measured step toward the altar — Aiki caught the suggestion of a fitted tunic, black velvet stretched over a chest that had clearly never met a treadmill it didn't dominate. Thin leather straps crossed beneath all that holy fabric like the man was wearing armor under a shroud, like he'd been built for two completely different purposes and had decided, with terrifying confidence, to wear both at once.
Holy shit, thought Aiki Hirose, in the house of God, with his mother's elbow still in his ribs. Holy. Shit.
The man's sleeves were long, ending in cuffs stitched with silver thread that caught the light every time he lifted the censer. His hands — Aiki was going to need a moment for the hands — were gloved in something fine and pale, a single silver ring glinting on one finger like it was daring someone to ask what it meant. His hair was dark, almost blue where the light hit it, falling messily over eyes that stayed fixed on the altar with the kind of solemn focus that should not, by any law of physics or decency, have been attractive. And yet.
He moved like he was barely tolerating being looked at. Like every step was a private negotiation between devotion and the urge to bolt. And somehow that made it worse — better — Aiki didn't have the vocabulary yet, he was twenty-six years old and apparently still capable of being struck stupid by a man holding a candle.
The boots. Aiki noticed the boots last, polished to a mirror shine, with small metal accents at the ankle that chimed, soft and unhurried, every time the man crossed the altar. Tall, fitted, the kind of boots that suggested the wearer could either kneel in prayer or kick a door off its hinges, and Aiki found himself with absolutely no preference between the two outcomes.
A silk sash cinched the robes at the waist — narrow waist, Aiki noted, clinically, scientifically, the way a man notes the load-bearing capacity of a bridge he is about to drive directly off of — and beneath the outer layers, dark fitted trousers traced a line down toward the boots that made Aiki acutely, painfully aware that he had a body, and so did the man at the altar, and the two facts were currently in conversation with each other in a way his mother would not approve of.
"Aiki." His mother's voice, lower this time, more dangerous. "You're staring."
"I'm appreciating the architecture," Aiki said, without looking away.
"The architecture," his father repeated, deadpan, from her other side, in the exact tone of a man who had once been a twenty-six-year-old staring at someone in a church and knew precisely what kind of architecture his son meant.
The acolyte turned, just slightly, to receive something from the priest — and the movement sent the sheer outer layer sliding off one shoulder, just for a second, just long enough for Aiki to see the curve of where neck met collarbone, the dark ink of a hairline, the absolute audacity of a man who dressed like a sacred mystery and then had the nerve to also have a jawline like that.
What's under all of it, Aiki thought, helplessly, sinfully, sitting in a pew with a hymnal in his lap. Like — okay. Layers. There are robes. Under the robes there's the — velvet thing. The tunic. And under THAT —
He did not finish the thought, because his mother elbowed him again, harder, and hissed, "We are singing," and thrust a hymnal page number at him like a weapon.
Aiki stood. Aiki sang, badly, off-key, with all the focus of a man whose every higher cognitive function had abandoned ship the moment he'd walked through the doors of St. Cecilia's. Across the church, the acolyte lit a final candle, stepped back into the shadow of the altar with his hands folded in front of him like he was trying to take up less space than God had given him, and did not look at the congregation once.
Aiki spent the rest of the service trying to figure out his name.
He found it out from the bulletin. Acolyte: Okuto Nakamura. Two words, printed in small type between the readings schedule and a notice about the bake sale, and Aiki stared at them like they were a love letter.
"Okuto," he said to himself, in the car, ignoring his mother's running commentary about the sermon. "Okuto Nakamura."
"What was that, honey?"
"Nothing." He looked out the window. "Are we coming back next Sunday?"
His mother turned around in her seat so fast she nearly gave herself whiplash. "You want to come back? You haven't willingly gone to church since your confirmation, and that was because there was cake afterward."
"There's cake at this one too, probably."
"There is no cake, Aiki, it's not your confirmation."
"Then I guess I'm just developing a rich inner spiritual life," Aiki said, and his father laughed so hard he had to pull over.
Okuto Nakamura, for his part, had absolutely no idea any of this was happening to him, because Okuto Nakamura had been actively avoiding looking at the congregation since approximately his first week as an acolyte, four years ago, on the theory that if he didn't make eye contact with anyone, no one would notice he existed.
This theory had a flaw, which was that Okuto Nakamura, despite his very best efforts to be invisible, looked like that, and people had in fact been noticing him for four years. He simply didn't know it, because he never looked up long enough to see them noticing.
"You had a fan club in the third pew today," said Hifumi Kawamura, perched on the edge of the vestry table where she absolutely was not supposed to be sitting, swinging her legs like she was twelve and not, in fact, twenty-six years old and the parish's most competent altar coordinator. "New family. Tall guy, mid-twenties, brown curly hair, looked like he was going to fall out of the pew."
"I don't know what that means," Nakamura said, hanging up his outer robe with the careful, reverent motions of a man who treated even mundane tasks like ritual.
"It means," Hifumi said, "that you had a man staring at you so hard his mother had to physically restrain him."
"That's not — people don't look at acolytes." Nakamura frowned at his own reflection in the small vestry mirror, tugging self-consciously at the sash around his waist. "We're supposed to be— it's not about being seen."
"Sure," said Hifumi, in the tone of someone who had personally seen Nakamura nearly walk into a pillar because three separate parishioners had complimented his hands in one week and he hadn't known what to do about it. "Sure, Okuto. Nobody looks at acolytes. Especially not the ones who dress like that."
"It's the regulation vestments."
"Nothing about you is regulation," Hifumi said, not unkindly, hopping off the table. "Father Inoue's other three acolytes wear a robe and a rope belt and that's it. You special-ordered silk."
"It was a gift. From my mother. For my ordination as senior acolyte." He said this defensively, the way he said most things about himself — like an apology that had accidentally come out as a fact.
"I know, I was there, I cried," Hifumi said. "I'm just saying. You can't dress like a Renaissance painting of temptation and then act surprised when grown men forget how to use their pews."
Nakamura made a sound like a man being slowly deflated and did not respond to this, because there was, genuinely, nothing to say.
Aiki came back the next Sunday. And the Sunday after that. By the fourth Sunday his mother had stopped asking questions and started bringing a thermos of coffee specifically so she could elbow him awake during the homily, because apparently spiritual devotion did not extend to staying conscious through twenty minutes of Father Inoue discussing the Parable of the Talents.
"You're not even subtle," said his childhood best friend Kosei Matsumura, who Aiki had dragged along on the fifth Sunday under the pretense of "wanting company" and who had taken exactly one look at the altar before turning to Aiki with the expression of a man who has just solved a murder.
"I'm extremely subtle."
"You made a noise. Audibly. During the opening procession. I heard you make a noise."
"That was a cough."
"That was not a cough, Aiki, I've known you since we were nine, I know what your coughs sound like, that was a man having a religious experience that wasn't about religion." Kosei followed Aiki's line of sight to the altar, where Nakamura was lighting candles with the kind of careful precision that suggested he treated open flame as a personal enemy he respected too much to underestimate. "Okay. I see it. The acolyte. Got it."
"I don't even know if he's—" Aiki started, and stopped, because he genuinely didn't know. He'd come to four services and the man had never once looked at the congregation. Not once. Aiki had started to wonder if Nakamura had some kind of religious vow against eye contact, or possibly against joy in general, because he always looked faintly like he was bracing for the building to collapse.
"You don't know if he's what? Gay? Single? Real?" Kosei smirked, the particular smirk he'd had since they were teenagers, the one that meant he'd already decided to be unbearable about this for the foreseeable future. "Only one way to find out."
"I am not going up there and asking the acolyte for his number in the middle of Mass."
"I didn't say during Mass. I said find out. There's coffee hour after. You've been coming for a month and you haven't even tried to talk to him?"
Aiki's silence answered that question more thoroughly than words could have.
Coffee hour was held in the parish hall, a low-ceilinged room that smelled permanently of drip coffee and the particular dust that accumulates in buildings that host bake sales. Nakamura usually skipped it. Today, for reasons he would later blame entirely on Hifumi, who had physically steered him by the shoulders out of the vestry and into the hall before he could protest, he did not.
"Why," he said, in the flat voice of a man being led to his execution.
"Because you've worn the same haunted expression for a month and I want to see if it's about something specific," Hifumi said cheerfully, depositing him near the coffee table and immediately abandoning him to go talk to Mrs. Aokiyama about the flower arrangements.
Nakamura stood there. He was still in half his vestments — he hadn't had time to fully change, just shed the outer chiffon layers, so he was standing in the parish hall in the fitted black tunic and trousers, sash still at his waist, looking, to put it plainly, like he had wandered out of a different and significantly more dramatic century.
This is the exact state in which Aiki Hirose found him, holding a Styrofoam cup of church coffee like it was the most natural thing in the world for a man dressed like a sacred mystery to be doing.
"Hi," Aiki said.
He had planned more than that. He'd had, if he was honest, an entire opening line prepared, something about the homily, something normal, something that did not make him sound like a man who'd spent a month memorizing the way someone's sleeves moved. None of it survived contact with Nakamura's actual face up close — the narrow, dark eyes, the slight furrow of permanent worry between his brows, the way he seemed almost startled that someone was talking to him at all, like being addressed directly was a rare weather event.
"Hi," Nakamura said back, and then, because he had never once in his life known what to do with silence, immediately added, "You're the one who's been—" and stopped himself, horrified, mid-sentence.
"The one who's been what," Aiki said, delighted despite himself.
"Nothing. Coming. Here. To Mass. Recently. New." Nakamura was, by this point, holding his coffee cup with both hands like it was a flotation device. "Hifumi mentioned. That there was a— someone new. In the third pew."
"That's me," Aiki said. "Aiki Hirose."
"Okuto Nakamura." A beat. "I'm an acolyte."
"I noticed," Aiki said, and immediately regretted the warmth in his own voice, because Nakamura's ears went visibly red, all the way to the tips, in a way that should not have been as charming as it was on a grown man.
"It's just the vestments," Nakamura mumbled, apparently misreading — or correctly reading, Aiki genuinely couldn't tell — the comment as being about his appearance and not, say, the fact that he served Mass every single week without fail. "They're not — I didn't choose all of it. The sash was a gift."
"I wasn't going to say anything about the sash," Aiki said, even though he absolutely had several things to say about the sash, all of which he was, with monumental effort, keeping behind his teeth in a building dedicated to honesty before God. "I was going to say you're good at it. The whole— ceremony thing. You looked very focused."
"I'm trying not to drop anything," Nakamura admitted. "Or trip. I tripped during a Christmas Eve service two years ago and I'm still not over it."
"I'm sure no one remembers."
"Mrs. Aokiyama brings it up every December."
Aiki laughed — really laughed, surprised out of him — and something in Nakamura's shoulders loosened a fraction, like he hadn't expected to be funny on purpose and was relieved it had worked.
From across the hall, Kosei watched this entire exchange with the satisfied expression of a man watching a controlled demolition go exactly to plan, and elbowed Hifumi, who had wandered back over.
"Ten minutes," Hifumi said, checking her phone. "That's a record. Usually he's run away from a conversation by minute three."
"My guy hasn't shut up about him for a month," Kosei said. "Pun intended. He's never shut up. About anyone. This is new behavior."
"Mine's never managed to stay in a room with an attractive stranger for longer than it takes to set something on fire, metaphorically or otherwise," Hifumi said. "So this is also new behavior."
They looked at each other with the particular solidarity of two people who have appointed themselves unpaid relationship consultants for people who very much did not ask for the help.
It became, over the following weeks, a routine. Aiki came to Mass — alone, now, since his parents had quietly and gratefully reverted to their previous habit of sleeping in on Sundays, satisfied that their son's soul was in good enough hands without their supervision — and stayed for coffee hour, and found Nakamura, who had stopped pretending he wasn't looking for him too.
"You know," Aiki said one Sunday, leaning against the coffee table with the easy confidence of a man who had decided several weeks ago that he was, in fact, going to pursue this, "you could just talk to me during Mass. Like, with your eyes. Looking at the congregation occasionally. It's allowed."
"I get distracted," Nakamura said, before he could stop himself, and then went the particular shade of red that Aiki had started privately cataloguing, because it happened often enough now to merit its own taxonomy.
"Distracted by what?"
"Nothing. The candles. Fire safety."
"Right," Aiki said, grinning. "Fire safety."
"It's a real concern," Nakamura said, with the wounded dignity of a man defending an obvious lie.
"Okuto." Aiki said his name carefully, like he was testing how it felt in his mouth, which he absolutely was. "Can I take you to dinner sometime? Not, like, a coffee-hour dinner. An actual dinner. Outside this building. Where you're allowed to talk without worrying about catching the altar cloth on fire."
Nakamura looked at him for a long moment — long enough that Aiki started genuinely worrying he'd misjudged this, that four weeks of blushing and stammering had been nothing more than social anxiety and not, as Aiki had hoped, attraction wearing the same coat — and then said, very quietly, like it cost him something to admit:
"I've wanted you to ask that since the second Sunday."
"The second Sunday? I thought you didn't even look at the congregation."
"I looked at you," Nakamura said, mortified the second it left his mouth. "Once. Twice. A few times. It's not — I don't usually. You were just very— there. Sitting. In the pew. Looking like that."
"Looking like what?"
"Like you were going to fall out of it," Nakamura admitted, and Aiki barked out a laugh so loud that three separate parishioners turned to look, and Hifumi, from across the room, did a small private fist pump that she would later deny under oath.
The dinner happened on a Tuesday, at a small place near the church that did not, blessedly, serve anything resembling Styrofoam coffee. Nakamura showed up in regular clothes — a dark sweater, jeans, nothing ceremonial at all — and Aiki was almost disappointed for exactly four seconds before realizing that Nakamura without the vestments was, if anything, more unfairly attractive, because now there was no chiffon between Aiki and the actual shape of him, and also because Nakamura clearly had no idea what to do with his hands when he wasn't holding a censer.
"You look different," Aiki said, sliding into the booth across from him.
"Is that bad?"
"It's extremely not bad," Aiki said. "I just spent a month assuming you slept in the robes."
"I do not sleep in the robes."
"Tragic. For me, specifically."
Nakamura made a strangled noise into his water glass that might have been a laugh, and Aiki decided, watching him, that he was going to spend a significant portion of the rest of his life trying to produce that exact noise on purpose.
They talked — about nothing, at first, the way first dates do, and then about real things. Nakamura had been an acolyte since he was twenty-two, had taken to it the way some people take to a hiding place, a role with clear rules and clear edges in a world that had never made much sense to him otherwise. He had a pet octopus, which he discussed with more open, unguarded enthusiasm than he'd shown about anything else all evening, and Aiki — who had braced himself for almost any answer except octopus — found himself charmed nearly to the point of injury.
"His name's Icchan," Nakamura said. "He's very smart. Smarter than most people, honestly."
"Higher praise than you've given me all night."
"You're still in the running," Nakamura said, deadpan, and Aiki nearly choked on his drink, because apparently underneath all that blushing and stammering there was a dry, sharp sense of humor that came out sideways when Nakamura forgot to be nervous, and Aiki was helplessly, hopelessly fond of it already.
"For the record," Aiki said later, walking him back toward his car, the night gone soft and cool around them, "I've been coming to an eight a.m. Mass every Sunday for two months. I am not, historically, a morning person. I am not, historically, a church person. I want you to understand the scale of the sacrifice."
"I know," Nakamura said. "Hifumi told me. The third Sunday. She said, and I quote, 'there's a man in the third pew who looks like he's having a religious experience that isn't about religion,' and I told her she was wrong, and she was not wrong."
"She told you that?"
"She tells me everything. Whether I want to know or not."
They'd reached Aiki's car. Neither of them moved to actually get in it.
"So," Aiki said. "Was she right? About the religious experience thing?"
Nakamura looked at him — really looked, the way he never let himself look at the congregation, like Aiki was the only fixed point in a room that otherwise wouldn't stop spinning — and said, with the particular bluntness that only ever showed up when he'd stopped overthinking long enough to mean something completely:
"I've spent four years trying not to be looked at. And then you showed up, and I started hoping you would."
Aiki didn't say anything clever back. He didn't have anything clever. He just leaned in, slow enough that Nakamura had every chance to step away and didn't, and kissed him there in the church parking lot under a streetlight that buzzed faintly overhead like its own small, indifferent hymn.
When they broke apart, Nakamura's ears were predictably, gorgeously red, and he said, a little breathless, "Father Inoue has a clear view of this parking lot from his office window."
"Then I guess we're giving him something to confess on our behalf," Aiki said, and kissed him again.
The following Sunday, Hifumi watched Nakamura process down the aisle, robes drifting, sash catching the light, the whole carefully composed mystery of him intact — except that this time, just once, just for a single unguarded second as he passed the third pew, he looked up.
And Aiki Hirose, sitting exactly where he always sat, looked back, and grinned like an idiot, and Nakamura had to bite down hard on the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling in the middle of the opening procession, which Hifumi would bring up, gleefully, for the rest of his natural life.
"Ten weeks," she whispered to Kosei, who'd come along again out of what he insisted was loyalty and Aiki insisted was nosiness. "Ten weeks to get the most repressed man in this parish to almost smile at the altar. I'm putting that on my résumé."
"Matchmaking, unlicensed, deeply unqualified," Kosei agreed. "Five stars."
Up at the altar, Nakamura lit the final candle, composed his face back into its usual careful solemnity, and thought, privately, that he had spent four years dressing like a sacred mystery so that no one would look too closely.
He found, rather to his own surprise, that he didn't mind one person looking closely at all.