Chapter Text
The sun slanted into the cafe, warm rays glowing with the reds and oranges of sunset. The chairs were already propped up on the tables, legs pointing up and intersecting with the sunlight to form stripes of light and shadow against the walls. Koyanagi ran a cloth over the coffee machine, scanning the bench for anything else that hadn’t yet been put away. From behind him came the clinking of ceramic where his coworker and friend, Kagetsu, was washing the dishes.
“Oh actually, I got an interesting text this afternoon, Koyanagi, I gotta show you!”
Koyanagi hummed an agreement, turning to wipe down the bakery display case. Sure enough, Kagetsu kept going without much prompting, “You know my best friend, Inami, the one who moved to the East? He and his band are releasing a mini-album for the first time, so they have a big celebration among friends coming up soon.”
Koyanagi felt a bad premonition settle into his stomach.
“I was invited, but I can bring a plus one, so do you want to come with me?”
The bench now clean and dry, Koyanagi set down the cloth and turned to face Kagetsu. He raised his eyebrows, finger pointing at his face in incredulity.
“Are you sure you know who you’re talking to? Why would I want to go all the way to the East for a party with no one I know but you? I would just be encroaching on all the celebrations.”
Kagetsu rushed through drying the last plate, setting it down with a rough clink that had Koyanagi cringing. He reached for his phone with still damp hands, tapping rapidly before shoving it at Koyanagi eagerly.
“But it’ll be so fun! It’s just their close friends — I think it was 6 of them in total? — so it’ll be really chill! I only got a plus one because Inami didn’t want me to be too lonely! Oh, and you have to see the place that they booked -”
Suddenly, anything that Kagetsu was saying stopped computing in his mind as Koyanagi caught a glimpse of one of the people in the photo. Pastel purple hair limned with pale blue framed a face lit up with a large grin. A large, familiar grin.
Kagetsu took his phone back to seemingly switch to another photo, but Koyanagi’s hand shot out to grab it, the action rougher than he had intended. Out of the corner of his eye, Kagetsu seemed to be shooting him a weird look, but Koyanagi couldn’t tear his eyes from that face in the photo. The hair was completely different, and the eyes were an inhumane blue-grey hue lined with red where they should have been a gentle green, but those features were inexplicably Hoshirube Sho. That tall nose, those thin lips, that slim chin… the 17 year old forever imprinted in Koyanagi’s mind had grown up, the features now lining up properly, baby fat nowhere to be seen, but there was no way Koyanagi wouldn’t recognise him.
Kagetsu shuffled around to look at the phone from beside him, eyes darting between Koyanagi and the photo.
“Is there something wrong? Do you know one of them?”
The words suddenly cut through the static buzzing in Koyanagi’s mind, and he blinked rapidly, pointing at that bewitching face. A smile, frozen in time, beamed back at him, and Koyanagi couldn’t tear his eyes away, even as his mind was screaming ‘wrong, wrong, wrong’.
“What’s his name?”
Kagetsu craned his head to peer closer at the photo.
“Oh, that’s Hoshirube Sho, one of the people in Inami’s band! He shows up often in Inami’s social media. Do you know him from somewhere?”
Hearing that name from someone else’s mouth, when it had long been buried deep in Koyanagi’s mind, felt surreal. And it only lent credence to the idea that this, indeed, was one and the same as the ghost that occupied a terribly large part of Koyanagi’s mind. A name like that was anything but commonplace.
Koyanagi saw the phone start to tremble in his hands, and handed it back to Kagetsu so he could shove his traitorous hands deep into his pockets.
“Let me get back to you on that tomorrow.”
Koyanagi averted his eyes from where Kagetsu was staring at him in concern, hurriedly sliding his bag onto his shoulder and heading to the door.
“Sorry, could you lock up today? I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Kagetsu lifted a hand to wave hesitantly at him. “Yeah sure, but you better talk to me properly tomorrow!”
Koyanagi just nodded, slipping out the door and taking in a shaky breath of fresh air.
“Hoshirube…”
The whisper was whisked away by the wind, leaving him cold and alone, and Koyanagi tucked his chin into his collar, stepping forwarding and disappearing into the crowds.
———————
The white glow of the numbers on his alarm clock mocked him silently, and Koyanagi cursed softly under his breath as he clicked into another post.
This one was of Inami Rai, Hibachi Mana and Hoshirube, the three people who made up the band, and another friend named Saiki Ittetsu. It was a collection of photos from what seemed like a trip to the seaside, each photo warm with laughter and the chaos of four young boys left free to their own wits.
Koyanagi stopped on one particular picture, where Inami was kicking up seawater at Hoshirube, who had his arms up to block the spray and body curled away to dodge. His face was immortalised mid-laugh, eyes pushed up into crescents by the roundness of his smiling cheeks. His hair was down, curling gently inwards at the tips, with the longest sections reaching all the way down Hoshirube’s back.
Koyanagi’s thumb gently traced down the hair in the photo, mind whirring. Even if he didn’t consider the gentle, pale purple colouring, which could just as well have been the result of a dye, the sheer length of his hair was incomprehensible. Hair didn’t grow that fast in two years.
And even with that face, even with that same unique name, there was that niggling voice in Koyanagi’s head that said that this wasn’t the Hoshirube Sho he knew. That it was just all a crazy coincidence that the universe had cooked up to torture him, to dangle hope in front of him, just to whisk it away when he got closer. Koyanagi squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed that thought down roughly, resolutely switching his phone off and placing it far from the bed.
As he slipped underneath the covers, he wondered what he would even do if it was, indeed, Hoshirube. In the dark of his room, with just the muted sounds of the occasional car on the roads outside, his mind drifted, unbidden, back to lazy days in that classroom.
Back to his exasperated frustration as Hoshirube constantly fell asleep beside him during classes. To his ears complaining, but his heart full from the boisterous laughter and screams from their crazy class, and the constant pranks he had to put up with by virtue of being sat next to the class’s designated prankster.
And back to the sun warming the side of his face as he carefully blocked the light from disturbing Hoshirube’s sleep, and watching his furrowed brow gently ease as he did so. To the quiet discussions of the future as they sat against the firm trunk of the old ginkgo tree they always ate lunch at when they weren't feeling up to the energy of the cafeteria.
To a stilted, hesitant, but earnest promise made in the safe confines of their classroom when they were assigned cleaning duty, the words soft and private between them.
To that promise, that was never fulfilled.
Because Hoshirube had disappeared. Before they could graduate together and celebrate under the cherry blossoms the way that all the students always gushed about doing. Before they could enter the next stages of their lives side by side.
Before they could fulfil that quiet, hopeful promise. And finally give in to that silent but insistent tension buzzing in the air between them once they graduated. To try and be something more than friends.
Koyanagi’s throat was tight as he remembered, all too keenly, the desperate way he went around to ask anyone who was even mildly associated with Hoshirube if they had heard from him. He remembered going around to every place that Hoshirube frequented, hoping for even just a single glimpse of him. Remembered blowing up at his friends when they stopped running themselves into the ground to look for Hoshirube like he himself was doing. Remembered finally giving in to the dread and staking the news for any reports involving a blond schoolboy, hands clenched so hard that his nails left crescent imprints in his palm. Remembered finally giving in to the tears and sobbing uncontrollably, curled up inside the cold embrace of their ginkgo tree. Remembered graduating — not laughing together under the scattering dance of cherry blossoms as they had planned, but rather, terribly, inconceivably alone, with the salt of dried tears still caking his face.
Koyanagi had spent so long locking those memories away, but thinking about them now made the wound throb as if no time had passed at all; like a wound left to fester, the edges sealed over but never properly healed.
Sometimes, when grief reared its ugly head, showing up against Koyanagi’s best efforts, he wondered which part hurt more; losing Hoshirube, or finding out the real reason he left?
Because that letter had seared itself into his memory, one sentence that had flipped Koyanagi from grief to betrayal in one cold swoop.
‘He just moved out of the city, that’s all. Don’t take it personally.’
Hoshirube’s mother had always been eerily absent from his life, and was never there to see how close he and Koyanagi were. But the words still felt like a physical blow. As if what they had was just a simple playground crush, something to look back on and laugh at but ultimately meaningless outside of the confines of the school grounds.
He hadn’t believed it at first, renewed desperation fueling a new flood of texts to Hoshirube’s phone And then Hoshirube’s mother turned up at his family’s door, throwing the phone at him with an irate huff, along with a plane ticket to the East under Hoshirube’s name, dated the day he had left. The cold had set in, then.
The panic had drained, and betrayal seeped through the cracks to take its place. Betrayal that Hoshirube had chosen to leave instead of following through with their promise. That he was just being a coward instead of properly rejecting him.
Because that was so much better than the alternative — that something truly terrible had happened, and that Hoshirube Sho, no matter how upset Koyanagi got, would never again be able to soothe his tears.
And the Koyanagi now, wrapped in a blanket whose warmth did nothing to relieve the tremors in his fingers, felt that he could finally breathe past the perpetual fear that Hoshirube Sho was dead, and finally feel that his anger was justified. As soon as he had seen that face in the photo, he knew there was no way he would be able to turn Kagetsu down. He needed to see this Hoshirube Sho with his own eyes. He needed to finally get answers so that that younger Koyanagi Rou, still curled beneath that ginkgo tree, could finally move on.