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The reunion banner sagged at one corner, half its tape giving up against the humidity, so that “WELCOME HOME, CLASS OF 2013" read like a question rather than a greeting. Pond stood under it with a cup of peach milkshake and the specific exhaustion of a man who had hugged eleven people he didn't recognize in the span of twenty minutes.
Phuwin found him by the gate and Pond started to complaint immediately about how life has unfaired him.
"There's a woman in there who keeps calling me Toon. Did she seriously meant cartoon? I am not Toon! Oh my God, I'm getting frustrated!.”
"Maybe you look like a cartoon now."
"Nobody looks like a cartoon. Toon isn't a face, it's a personality disorder."
Phuwin laughed, the kind that came easy because it was old, worn smooth from twenty years of use.
"You want to get out of here for a bit?"
"God, yes."
They left through the side gate without telling anyone, the way they used to leave class early when Mr. Aou's lectures ran long, cutting across the courtyard where the banyan tree had grown so much wider that its roots had started to buckle the concrete walkway. Pond touched the trunk as they passed it, an old habit.
"Remember when you fell from this tree?" Phuwin said.
"I remember you laughing for eleven minutes."
"It was a good fall. Very dramatic. You screamed like you'd been shot."
"I sprained my wrist."
"You screamed like you had been ‘shot’, Pond."
They wandered without much direction, past the old gymnasium with its busted scoreboard, past the cafeteria that smelled the same, somehow, after all these years, like rice and bleach and something fried. It wasn't until they reached the edge of the field, where the grass turned patchy and gave way to a strip of dirt near the fence, that Phuwin stopped walking.
"Wait."
"What?"
"Pond." He turned, slow, like the thought was arriving in pieces. "The time capsule."
Pond blinked. Then his whole face changed, the way it used to when he remembered an answer right before a test, somewhere between triumph and disbelief. "Oh my god."
"We buried it right here. By the fence post, remember, the one with the red mark."
"There's no way it's still there."
"There's no way it isn't. We buried that thing like we meant it."
"Phuwin, that was thirteen years ago. It's probably rotted into the earth. It's probably fossil fuel now."
"Bet you twenty bucks it's still there."
Pond looked at him for a long second, the kind of look that weighed pride against thirty seconds of self-respect and found pride heavier, as always. "You're on."
Which was how, fifteen minutes later, two grown men in slightly wrinkled reunion clothes found themselves crouched by a rusted fence post, digging into damp soil with a stick, a tent peg someone had left behind near the old camping shed, and, eventually, Pond's bare hands.
"This is insane," Pond muttered, dirt creeping under his nails. "We look like we're burying a body."
"We look like we're unburying a body, which is worse."
"If someone walks by right now and calls the cops, I want it on record that this was your idea."
"It was your tent peg."
"That doesn't mean anything and you know it."
The peg struck something solid with a hollow little knock, and they both froze like they'd heard a heartbeat. Pond looked up first, eyes wide.
"No."
"Yes."
"No way."
"Pond, dig."
They dug like criminals, fast and clumsy and laughing too hard to be efficient, until the corner of a metal cookie tin came up out of the dirt, rust spotted, the lid dented from where they'd hammered it shut with a rock in 2013 because neither of them had owned a hammer.
Pond held it like it was a small, sacred animal. "I can't believe this worked."
"You owe me twenty bucks."
"I'll pay you if I find a gold coin in there. Deal?"
“We certainly didn’t agree on this, Naravit.”
"Okay let’s open it." Pond ignored Phuwin’s sentence the way people ignore thorns of a flower.
The lid screamed when it came off, hinges long since fused with rust, and a smell rose out of it that was somewhere between old paper and a basement nobody had opened in two decades. Inside, everything had gone soft and yellowed at the edges but mostly intact, preserved by the tin's stubborn little seal. Photographs curling at the corners, folded notebook paper, a drawing on construction paper gone the color of weak tea, same as the school's old paint.
Pond pulled out the photographs first, and the laughter started immediately, before he'd even fully seen them.
"Oh no."
"What, what is it?."
"Phuwin. Phuwin, look at your hair."
He held up a photo of the two of them at twelve years old, arms slung around each other's necks, Phuwin's hair gelled into a shape that defied both gravity and good taste, Pond's missing a front tooth and grinning around the gap like it was an achievement.
"That was a good haircut," Phuwin said, with no conviction whatsoever.
"That was not a haircut, that was an emergency."
"You're missing a tooth in this photo."
"I lost it by being brave."
"You lost it falling off a chair trying to reach a shelf."
"Brave," Pond repeated, "and tragically misunderstood."
There were more, each one worse than the last, a photo of them attempting some kind of dance move that had clearly ended in disaster off camera, a photo of Phuwin mid-sneeze that Pond insisted on holding up for a full thirty seconds, a photo where they'd both attempted to look "cool" by leaning against the school wall and instead looked like they were being detained by it.
Then came the drawings, and those were worse still. One was labeled ‘US WHEN WE'RE OLD’ in Pond's careful, looping twelve year old handwriting, depicting two stick figures with canes, sunglasses, and, for reasons neither of them could now explain, capes.
"Why capes," Phuwin said. "Why did we think we'd have capes?"
"I think I thought being old meant being a superhero."
"That's not how aging works, Pond."
"I was twelve. I thought a lot of things that weren't how things worked."
Underneath the drawings, folded into careful quarters the way only a child trying to seem official would fold something, were two sheets of notebook paper. Pond unfolded the first and went very quiet for a second before a slow, delighted grin spread across his face.
"Oh, this is going to be good."
"What is it?"
"Our goals, Phuwin. Our future goals. Twelve-year-old us, writing down our dreams." He cleared his throat with theatrical seriousness. "Pond's goals. Number one. Become rich."
"Bold start."
"Number two." Pond's grin widened. "Own a dinosaur."
"You wanted to own a dinosaur."
"I want a lot of things, Phuwin, that doesn't mean I get them."
"How were you going to own a dinosaur? They're extinct. You were aware they were extinct, you were twelve, not four."
"I assumed science would catch up to my ambition."
"Number three?"
Pond looked at the paper, and his ears went faintly pink, the tips first, the way they always had since they were kids, a tell he'd never managed to train out of himself. "...Number three is private."
"Pond."
"It's private, Phuwin."
"We just dug up a time capsule like fugitives, there is no private."
Pond sighed, long and put upon, and turned the paper around like he was presenting evidence in court. "Number three. Marry Taylor Swift."
There was a beat of silence. Then Phuwin started laughing so hard he had to sit down on the dirt, which he immediately regretted given the dirt, but stayed there anyway, doubled over.
"You wanted to marry Taylor Swift."
"She was very talented, Phuwin, I had taste."
"You were twelve. She didn't know you existed. She still doesn't know you exist."
"That's not the point. The point is ambition."
"The point is you had no plan whatsoever and called it a goal."
"Let's see yours, then, since you're so smug."
Phuwin's smile faltered slightly, a flicker of memory crossing his face like he was only just now recalling what twelve-year-old him had been capable of. He unfolded his own sheet with significantly less confidence than Pond had shown.
"Read it," Pond said, already delighted by the prospect.
"...Phuwin's goals. Number one. Become cool."
"Oh, this is rich coming from a man who once wore his shirt backward for an entire school day and didn't notice until lunch."
"That was one time."
"It was memorable."
"Number two." Phuwin's voice had gone slightly flatter, the tone of a man reading his own indictment. "Become taller than Pond."
Pond looked at him, looked down at the five inch height difference that had only grown more pronounced with age, and looked back up with the slow, cruel satisfaction of a man who had won a war he hadn't even known he was fighting. "How's that going for you?"
"Shut up."
"No, genuinely, how's that going, Phuwin, I'd love an update."
"Number three," Phuwin said loudly, talking over him, "Punch Pond once."
"Excuse me?"
"It says punch Pond once."
"Why was that a goal? That's not a goal, that's a crime. Why did twelve year old you have premeditated violence as a life ambition."
"I don't remember! I don't remember why I wanted that, I just know I wrote it down with complete confidence."
"Did you ever do it?"
Phuwin thought about it, genuinely thought about it, scanning fifteen years of memory. "No. I don't think I ever did."
"So that's two failures and one mystery crime you never committed. Strong showing."
"You wanted to marry a pop star and own a dinosaur, Pond, I don't think you're in a position to grade my paper."
"I never said I succeeded either. I'm simply saying my failures had vision."
They went quiet for a moment, both grinning down at the papers, twenty years old and twenty-two pounds lighter and somehow still entirely themselves in a way that made something in Phuwin's chest go warm and strange. Then Pond reached back into the tin and pulled out one more item, folded smaller than the rest, tucked into the corner like it had been hidden on purpose even from themselves.
A notebook. Thin, spiral-bound, the cover soft with age. Written across the front in Pond's looping handwriting, underlined twice for emphasis.
‘FUTURE SPOUSE REQUIREMENTS’
"Oh, no," Pond said, but he was already opening it.
"What is it?"
"I think... I think we made lists of " He flipped to the first page, his own name at the top in a different colored pen, like he'd come back to add to it more than once over some stretch of childhood. "My list. Right. Okay."
"Read it."
"Number one." Pond's voice slowed slightly as he read, like he was seeing it for the first time even as he spoke it. "Pretty smile."
Phuwin didn't say anything. He just sat there, in the dirt, very still.
"Number two," Pond continued, oblivious or pretending to be. "Nice voice."
A beat.
"Number three. Kind."
Phuwin's jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly, his eyes fixed somewhere just past Pond's shoulder, at nothing, at the fence.
"Number four." Pond's finger traced the line, and for just a second, just a flicker, something in his own expression shifted too, some small private recalibration happening behind his eyes that he didn't say out loud. "Smart."
The wind moved through the field. Somewhere back near the school building, faint music drifted from the reunion, someone's bad speaker playing something from twenty years ago like it had never stopped being relevant.
Phuwin cleared his throat. "That's, uh." He didn't finish the sentence.
Pond flipped the page before either of them had to sit in it too long. "Your turn. Page two should be yours, we wrote it the same day, remember, sitting under the banyan tree."
"I don't remember writing this at all."
"Convenient."
"I genuinely don't, Pond."
Pond turned the notebook around, holding it out, and there it was in Phuwin's own twelve year old handwriting, neater than Pond's, hard to read at the edges where the damp had gotten in, but unmistakably his.
"Read yours," Pond said, and his voice had gone slightly careful now, the teasing edge sanding itself down into something quieter. "Come on. Fair's fair."
Phuwin looked down at the page. Looked at Pond. Looked back down.
He didn't say anything for a long moment.
"Number one," Phuwin said finally, and his voice came out steadier than he felt. "Pretty smile."
Pond went very still.
"Number two." Phuwin kept his eyes on the page, because looking up felt like a different kind of danger entirely. "Nice voice."
Nobody said anything. The bad speaker back at the school had moved on to a different song, something slower now, and somehow that felt unfair, like the universe was choosing a soundtrack on purpose.
"Number three." His thumb had gone damp against the corner of the page. "Kind."
"Phuwin."
"Number four." He didn't stop. He'd started, and stopping felt worse than finishing, the way ripping off a bandage was supposedly better than peeling it. "Smart."
The field was very quiet. Even the wind seemed to have the good sense to hold still.
Pond looked at his own list, still open in his lap. Then he looked at Phuwin's. Then he looked at Phuwin, who was very deliberately looking at the notebook and not at him, and something passed over his face that he didn't bother trying to hide, because honestly, what was the point anymore.
"Huh," Pond said.
"Yeah."
"That's, uh." He cleared his throat. "That's a coincidence."
"A wild one."
"Statistically speaking."
"Extremely unlikely," Phuwin agreed, still not looking up.
Neither of them moved to close the notebook. It sat between them in the dirt, open to two nearly identical lists in two different handwritings, thirteen years old and somehow still warm to the touch, like it had been waiting this whole time for someone to finally read it out loud.
It was Pond who reached back into the tin first, mostly, Phuwin suspected, because he needed something to do with his hands. His fingers brushed against two envelopes near the bottom, beneath a rubber-banded stack of trading cards neither of them had thought to look at yet. The envelopes had gone soft and brown at the edges, sealed shut with the particular stubbornness of cheap glue that had spent two decades curing into something closer to concrete.
"Letters," Pond said, voice gone a little strange.
He turned them over. One read, in Pond's looping hand, ‘TO POND, 10 YEARS FROM NOW. DO NOT OPEN EARLY.’ The other, in Phuwin's messier scrawl, read simply ‘TO ME. FUTURE ME. PRIVATE.’
"We wrote letters to ourselves?" Phuwin said. "I don't remember that either."
"You don't remember a lot of things, apparently."
“Not you speaking like you remember everything, Mr. Memory specialist."
Silence.
“Let’s read each other’s. What do you say?” Pond suggested innocently, not knowing his suggestion could cost him blood shot ears or maybe even something better.
Hesitation flushed across Phuwin’s face but he nodded nevertheless, because there’s no point in hiding things now.
Pond handed Phuwin his own letter, the one addressed to him, and held onto Phuwin’s. For a second they just sat there with the sealed envelopes in their laps, the glue resisting under their thumbs, both of them suddenly aware that whatever was inside had been written by a version of themselves with absolutely nothing left to lose and absolutely no idea anyone would ever actually open it.
"Should we read them out loud?" Pond asked.
"No," Phuwin said, too fast.
"No?"
"I mean. Let's just. Read our own. Privately. First." He was already working his thumb under the flap of his envelope, glue cracking like old paint.
"Fine by me," Pond said, already doing the same.
They turned slightly away from each other, an instinct, the same one that made people angle their phones away in a crowded room, and unfolded the single sheets of paper inside.
Phuwin read the first line and felt his stomach drop somewhere into the dirt beneath him.
“Dear Future Me,
I think I like Phuwin.
Don't tell anyone. Especially not Phuwin.
If you're married to him when you're reading this, congratulations, that's actually kind of cool. If not, you're probably stupid, because he's literally the best person I know and you had thirteen years to figure that out and you probably didn't.
Anyway, this is embarrassing. Burn this letter if you have to.
Love,
Past Pond Naravit Lertrakosum.”
He read it twice. He read it a third time, mostly to confirm it hadn't somehow rearranged itself into something less catastrophic on a second pass. It hadn't. The thirteen year prediction, scrawled by a child with apparently better foresight than either of them had ever given him credit for, sat there on the page like it had been waiting patiently this entire time for the math to catch up.
Beside him, Pond made a small sound. Not quite a word. The kind of sound a person made when the floor changed shape under them without warning.
Phuwin looked over before he could stop himself, and Pond was staring down at Phuwin’s letter with an expression that had nowhere left to go but stillness, the particular blankness of someone doing very fast, very desperate calculations behind their eyes.
"What does mine say?" Phuwin asked, even though some old, slow, terrible part of his brain already had a guess.
Pond didn't answer right away. He just turned the letter, very slowly, so Phuwin could see it.
“Dear Older Phuwin,
Okay so. I think I like Pond. Like, like-like, not friend’s like.
Please don't tell him. Please. If he ever finds this letter, deny everything, say it's fake, say someone else wrote it as a prank.
If by some miracle you guys end up together, hi, you're welcome, I called it first. If not, idiot, what happened, he was right there.
This is so embarrassing. I'm never speaking of this again. Goodbye forever.
Past Phuwin.”
The field went very, very quiet.
15 seconds passed in silence.
Phuwin handed over Pond’s letter to him and Pond gave away Phuwin’s.
"Oh," Pond said.
"Yeah," Phuwin said.
"Okay."
"Okay."
"So we both," Pond started, and then stopped, like the sentence had run out of road halfway through.
"Yep."
"Twelve years old."
"Both of us."
"At the same time."
"Apparently."
"Under the same tree, probably," Pond added, glancing toward the banyan in the distance like it might confirm or deny this.
"Probably," Phuwin agreed.
Neither of them moved. The tin sat open between them, photographs and drawings and goal lists scattered across the dirt like evidence at a crime scene nobody wanted to be first to comment on. Somewhere behind them, faint and tinny, the reunion's terrible speaker kept playing its slow, unhelpful song.
"So," Pond said eventually, folding his letter back along its old crease with hands that were not entirely steady. "That happened."
"That happened."
"We're not going to talk about it."
"We're absolutely not going to talk about it," Phuwin agreed immediately, with the relief of a man being handed an exit he hadn't dared hope for.
"Cool. Great. Good talk."
"Great talk."
They both stood up at the same time, brushing dirt off knees that didn't need it nearly as urgently as the gesture suggested, and for about four minutes, walking back toward the school building with the tin tucked under Pond's arm, it almost worked.
Then Pond, apparently incapable of leaving anything alone for longer than four minutes, said, "Remember when you gave me your jacket? At the winter festival, in tenth grade, you said you weren't cold but you very obviously were, your teeth were actually chattering."
"Can we not discuss evidence right now?"
"I'm just saying, in hindsight, that tracks."
"Pond."
"I'm simply reviewing the historical record."
"The historical record can wait until we are not currently standing four feet from the place where we both confessed our love at age twelve."
"We didn't confess anything, we wrote it. To ourselves. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
Pond opened his mouth, then closed it again, because apparently there wasn't, not really, not in any way that mattered now.
They reached the courtyard in silence after that, a silence that had teeth in it, sharp little ones, because suddenly everything had become evidence. They reached the hall room where everyone was present and pretended as normal as they could.
One moment, Phuwin caught Pond's eye for half a second near the gymnasium doors and immediately looked away like he'd touched something hot.
Another moment, Pond went to throw an arm around Phuwin's shoulders in the easy automatic way he'd done a thousand times since they were children, and stopped halfway through the motion, arm hovering in midair like it had suddenly remembered it was supposed to be self-conscious, before awkwardly converting the gesture into a stiff pat on the back instead.
"What was that," Phuwin said.
"What was what?"
"That. The arm thing."
"There was no arm thing."
"You looked like you were trying to land a plane."
"I was being normal."
"You've never patted my back in your life, Pond, we hug like normal people, what was that?"
"I don't know!" Pond's ears had gone fully red now, no longer just the tips. "I don't know, okay, everything feels different now, you ruined side hugs for me, you ruined a perfectly good side hug with a twelve year old letter."
"I ruined it? You're the one who insisted on reading them at all."
"I didn't know what was in them!"
"Neither did I, that's the entire point of a surprise, Pond."
They glared at each other for a second, both of them too aware of how close they were standing, how easy it would have been, a year ago, a week ago, an hour ago, to close that distance without a second thought, and how suddenly, mortifyingly impossible it felt now that they both knew exactly what it might mean.
The reunion noise spilled out from the hall, somebody's aunt laughing too loud, the bad speaker finally switching to something upbeat, and neither of them moved toward it.
"This is stupid," Pond said finally, dropping down onto the low wall that ran along the courtyard's edge, setting the tin down beside him with more care than the rusted thing probably deserved. "We've known each other for fifteen years. We've slept in the same tent. You've seen me throw up. I've seen you cry during a dog food commercial."
"That commercial was emotionally manipulative."
"That's not the point. The point is we know everything about each other already. This shouldn't be different."
"It's different because now there's proof," Phuwin said, sitting down beside him, close enough that their knees nearly touched, an inch he was suddenly, painfully aware of in a way he hadn't been an hour ago. "Before, it was just a feeling. You can ignore a feeling. You can't really ignore a notarized document."
"It's not notarized."
"It's notarized enough."
Pond laughed, short and a little helpless, and looked down at his hands instead of at Phuwin, which felt, somehow, like the bravest and most cowardly thing he'd done all day at once.
"Do you think," he said slowly, "our twelve-year-old selves would be disappointed in us right now?"
"Why would they be disappointed?"
"Because it took us thirteen years to get here. And we're still just sitting on a wall not saying anything."
Phuwin turned to look at him then, properly, the way he hadn't let himself since the field, and something in his chest that had been clenched tight since he'd read the words, “I think I like Phuwin.” Finally, slowly, started to loosen.
"Thirteen years to what?" he asked.
"To realize they were right." Pond's voice had gone quiet, stripped of the usual performance, the usual deflection, just plain and a little scared and entirely honest. "Both of them. Both letters. Two kids, same tree, same year, writing down the exact same secret and being too chicken to ever say it to each other's faces. And then growing up, and somehow still being too chicken, for thirteen more years, until a tin can in the dirt did it for us."
"That's a very dramatic way of putting it."
"I learned dramatics from somewhere, Phuwin, and it definitely wasn't from owning a dinosaur."
Phuwin laughed, and it came out unsteady, caught somewhere between a laugh and something else entirely, and Pond was looking at him now too, fully, the way he used to look at him across a classroom when they were twelve and pretending very hard not to be looking at all.
"For the record," Phuwin said, "I don't think they'd be disappointed."
"No?"
"No. I think they'd just say it took us long enough."
"That's basically the same thing as disappointment."
"It's really not."
"It kind of is."
"Pond."
"What."
Phuwin didn't answer with words. He leaned in instead, slow enough that Pond could have pulled away, could have laughed it off, could have turned it into another joke the way he turned everything into a joke when he didn't know what else to do with his hands or his face or the enormous unmanageable feeling currently occupying his chest. He didn't. Pond met him halfway, smashed his lips onto Phuwin’s a little too fast, messy at the end like neither of them had quite trusted the other to actually go through with it, noses bumping slightly before the angle corrected itself, and then it wasn't messy anymore, just thirteen years of two letters finally getting their answer, two twelve-year olds under a banyan tree finally getting to be right about something.
They stayed pressed for a little longer than their breaths could handle. Not moving, just there, connected with each other like two starved crows.
When they pulled back, Pond was laughing again, breathless and a little dazed, his forehead dropping to rest against Phuwin's shoulder. And Phuwin nuzzled his face into Pond’s head, sniffing the smell he always loved.
"Twenty bucks," Phuwin said.
"What?"
"You still owe me twenty bucks. The capsule was there. I won the bet."
"You're bringing up the bet right now."
"I bring up bets whenever I win them, it's a personal policy." Phuwin laughed into Pond’s hair.
Pond wrapped one arm around Phuwin’s waist without a single moment of hesitation this time, no hovering, no awkward pat, just easy, like it had always been easy, like it always should have been.
"Fine," Pond said. "Twenty bucks. But I'm taking it out of the dinosaur fund."
"There is no dinosaur fund."
"There should be. Or else I'll have to pay by marrying you and sticking up with your ass until death."
"Do you have any complaints against that, Nara?"
"Not even a bit, Phu."
"You have the permission to pay in that way yk."
Pond said nothing, just smiled big and bumped their nose together and rubbed. And Phuwin kissed his nose tip in return.
Staring at each other's eyes, couldn't hold the overflowing emotions, their lips met again. This time in a proper slow and perfect kiss. A kiss that waited to happen for thirteen years.
Behind them, the reunion went on without them, the bad speaker cycling through another decade old love song, the reunion hall completely unaware that twenty feet away, on an old stone wall, two boys who'd buried a secret in the dirt at twelve had finally, finally dug it back up.
And there's an incredibly high chance for the two twelve-year olds’ wish to come true.
End.