Chapter Text
JUN 06 2007
Ryo’s gotten pretty good at not thinking about anything this year.
The front porch rocking chair's exactly the same, still a little too big for him, its sun bleached plastic baking in the outside like it has for every summer of his entire life. Ryo sits in the warmth anyways, knees jammed up into his chest as he watches the sky bleed from pink to a bruised blue, and tries very hard to not think about a single thing.
Illinois doesn't have light like this. Illinois has flat gray cold that comes early and stays late, and Ryo spent most of winter convinced his blood had thinned out permanently, that he'd go the rest of his life unable to feel a sunset the way he used to. It casts back through him now, though, despite the stubborn spot of chill in his spine that hasn’t quite melted yet.
His suitcase is sitting in the hallway where he dropped it after mentally swearing he’d deal with its insides tomorrow. Right now his whole body feels too much like it's made of wet sand, and the idea of folding a single shirt sounds about as enticing as amputation.
Ryo watches the sky sink, tucking his head into his shoulder.
Nineteen doesn't feel any different from eighteen the way he thought it would. He thought a year at college five states away would do something to him. Like, toughen him up maybe, sand something off, leave him a little more bulletproof than when he left here. Instead he just feels like the same kid folded up into the same chair, except now all hollowed out somewhere behind his ribs, as if somebody had reached in and scooped a fistful out of him.
The landline rings inside. He hears his mom's voice, muffled, and then, "Ryo! Phone!"
Hope leaps into his chest so fast it's almost nauseating - there's only one person alive who'd bother calling him. He scrapes his toe hard against the porch scrambling to a stand, and the chair bounces and smacks him right in the ass on the way up. He hops on one foot the rest of the way inside, making grabby hands at the phone from his mom.
"Yeah?" Ryo says into the phone the instant she hands it to him, still wincing a little.
“Ryo!” Sion exclaims loud enough that Ryo pulls the phone an inch away from his ear. “You’re back?”
That hope gutters out instantly. Okay, there are only two people alive who would bother calling him.
“Yeah, like, four hours ago.”
“And you didn’t call me first?”
“I just walked in the door, man.”
“Excuses,” Sion says, and Ryo can hear him grinning. “Hey, come by the shop tomorrow. I’m bored out of my mind here, and dad’s making me restock the whole back wall by myself.”
Ryo tries not to groan directly into the phone. “I just got off a flight.”
Sion laughs. “You’re nineteen, not ninety. Come on, I haven’t seen you since Christmas.”
Ryo doesn't have anything better to do tomorrow. Or really anything better to do for most of the summer. As things stand right now, his schedule is looking free. He gives in pretty quickly.
"Yeah, okay. I'll come by."
"Bring snacks, I'm starving and dad's cheap." A beat, then, before Ryo can answer, “Okay, bye, love you."
Sion promptly hangs up, and Ryo stands there holding the dead receiver against his ear, dial tone humming for a second before he carefully sets it down without thinking about anything.
He goes to bed not thinking, either. He doesn't think about the shop, or who else might wander in while he's there, or anything like that. Ryo lies on his back with the window cracked, crickets chattering outside in long waves. He watches the sky melt from soft blue into pitch, and doesn't think about any of it at all.
It takes a long time for him to fall asleep.
Here's the thing about leaving that nobody tells you, which Ryo has had almost a year to figure out the hard way: it doesn't work.
You pack your stuff up in boxes and you drive away or fly away or whatever version of away you've arranged for yourself, and for approximately the first two weeks you feel like a completely different person because everything around you is different and difference is easy to mistake for change. New city, new people, new lecture halls full of people who don't know your name yet. It feels like becoming.
And then the newness wears off, which it always does, and then you're still you, just in a different place.
Ryo had genuinely believed - and this is the embarrassing part, the part that he hasn't said out loud to anyone - that going to school for physics was going to change something fundamental about how his brain worked. Like the rigor of it, the learning to think in proofs and measurements, was going to translate into some larger, clearer version of himself. He thought it’d be a no brainer that with enough elbow grease, he’d become someone who understood things. Someone with answers.
What actually happened is he got a D in intro mechanics and spent most of second semester sitting in the back of a lecture hall on the universe and feeling, somehow, more confused about his own life than he'd been before he understood anything about dark matter. The universe, it turns out, is mostly things too far away to touch.
He'd called his academic advisor in April, sort of in crisis, and said I'm not sure this is right for me in the tone of someone hoping to be talked out of it, and his advisor had said that's normal, everyone feels that way, you're a freshman, give it time in the tone of someone who says this ten times a day. Which wasn't wrong, exactly. It just wasn't helpful. Give it time is what you say when you don't have a better answer, and Ryo's spent most of his life surrounded by people giving him time, and all time's ever done is pass.
He still hasn't told his parents any of this. He's not sure what he'd even say. I left home and went five states away to study the stars and I think I might've been running from something and I'm not entirely sure what doesn’t seem like great dinner table conversation, especially not with a dad who went to the same school for engineering, a mom who cried when he got in, and an older sister far away interning for some big magazine. It’s stupid to be the kid of the family who still doesn’t have a clue.
He doesn't have an answer for any of it. He's starting to think that's the actual answer, just the perpetual loop of being lost, and he hates that more than the D.
JUN 07 2007
Oh Records smells exactly the way Ryo remembers - dust, old vinyl sleeves, and an unfortunate cardboard mustiness that's never once been ventilated in all the years he’s been there.
The bell over the door jingles sharply when he pushes in around two that afternoon, a plastic shopping bag full of gas station snacks swinging off his wrist, already sweating through his shirt from the walk there. Sion's head pops up from behind the counter like a gopher. His hair's shorter than Ryo remembers, bleached at the tips now and sticking up in a funny way that only Sion could pull off.
"You're alive!” He vaults the counter - actually fucking vaults it, knocking a stack of flyers to the floor - and crushes Ryo into a hug that smells like cigarettes and the ocean. "You feel thin."
Ryo squeezes out a laugh. “Mom keeps saying that, too.”
“‘Cause it’s true,” Sion pulls back, looks him over once, then grabs the bag out of his hand and rifles through it. "Okay. Acceptable offering. You can stay."
Ryo makes a face, rubbing at his shoulders to will the bones back into place. “Not like you were begging me to be here, or anything.”
But Sion’s already traded the bag for a box of CDs, shoving it into Ryo’s chest. “Here. And don’t put the Sonic Youth with the Sigur Rós again, dude.”
“I was fourteen, dude.” Ryo defends, heading to the back before Sion can reply with anything else irritating.
It’s easy to fall into routine, even if it’s been almost a year. Ryo's hands know what to do before his brain really catches up. Flip, check, then slot. Flip, check, then slot. The old AC unit rattles overhead as he works, rusted and wheezing out stale air. A burned playlist plays tinny off the shop computer - some emo shit Sion's clearly been into lately, all minor chords and somebody screaming about a girl.
"You remember the Joy Division box set my dad got conned into buying a couple years ago?" Sion says, kicking an empty crate over to sit on, munching loudly on the chips Ryo brought. "It's still here. I think it's cursed."
"You guys still haven't sold a single one?" Ryo says, distracted. His hands fumble with Death Cab CD in his grasp. Ugh.
"Sold two. To the same fuckin’ guy. He came back a month later, said the first one skipped. We gave him a replacement, and he just - never came back again. Do you think he’s still listening to it?”
Ryo laughs, actually laughs, the first real one since he's landed. It surprises him a little, how easy it still is here. "Remember when we tried to get that couple to buy the singles and they just stared at you?"
"They stared at you,” Sion makes a face at him. “I wasn't there for that one, that was you and -“
Sion stops, catching himself half a second too late.
Ryo knows exactly whose name was supposed to land at the end of that sentence. He keeps flipping through the box in his arms like he didn't notice, though, even though the not noticing is its own kind of noticing, gratingly loud in the gap where the name should've been. Ugh.
Sion clears his throat and moves on fast, starts in on who got fired from the gas station, whose band broke up over some girl, who already left for fall semester early and who's stuck here the whole summer like the rest of them, and Ryo lets himself get carried along in it.
And then, because Sion has never once in his life known how to leave a closed door shut, he says it anyway a little while later, crouched over a box of singles with his back to Ryo like that's somehow gonna soften it.
"Is Sakuya still working at that theater? You should bring him by sometime, I haven't seen him here in forever."
The CD case slips out of Ryo's hand. It hits the floor hard enough that the crack of it makes Sion turn around.
"I don't know.” Ryo says, bending down to pick it up slower than he needs to. He really doesn’t. He had no idea Sakuya had been working at the theater, or even - he doesn’t know.
"You don't know?" Sion's frown is immediate. "What do you mean you don't know?"
"I mean I don't know.” Ryo sets the case back on the shelf. He lines it up very deliberately, edges flush. His voice is strangely composed even to himself. "I haven't talked to him."
"Since when?"
"Since I left."
Sion straightens up fully. The teasing's gone out of his face now, replaced by something Ryo doesn't love being looked at with - like he’s something that needs to be handled carefully. Like he’s a kid in need of guidance, or whatever.
"You guys had a fight?"
"No."
"Then what happened?"
Ryo doesn't answer right away. He goes back to the box, pulls out the next case, and flips it over to check the spine even though he already knows where it goes.
"Nothing happened," he says finally. "We just stopped talking."
"Bullshit. You guys used to call each other about, like, what kind of cereal to buy.”
"I guess." Ryo shrugs.
"That's so weird, man. He hasn't said anything either. I figured you guys were just busy, college schedules not lining up, whatever -“
"Can we talk about something else." Ryo says it flat and a little too fast, but Sion seems to hear that, finally, because he stops.
He only peers at Ryo for another beat before he crouches back down to his crate with a nod. "Okay."
Ryo swallows a breath of relief, and keeps working through the box. The light piercing the front window's gone gold, starting to lean towards evening, and embedded beneath his sternum there's a stupid persistent ache he doesn't examine too closely.
They don't talk about it again. Sion brings up something else a few minutes later, and the conversation moves on, mostly. Save for the carefulness to it, like they’re taking turns walking around a hole in the floor.
Apparently, Sion’s dad is threatening to make him take over the shop full-time instead of letting him do whatever it is Sion's pretending he wants to do - and something about that arrives weird in Ryo's chest, the whatever it is Sion's pretending he wants to do, the way Sion says it with a laugh that's about sixty percent real. He's twenty-five and he's been helping run this shop since he was in high school and he's never once, as far as Ryo knows, talked seriously about what he actually wants. It's just a thing that's true about Sion the same way certain things are true about everyone.
Ryo wonders if that's what happens. If you just - stop. Stop becoming, at some point, and just start being whatever you ended up, and call it enough. The thought makes his heart twist a little in the solid cradle of his ribs. He's nearly twenty and he's supposed to be figuring it out and instead he's standing in a record shop alphabetizing CDs and not knowing any more than he did when he first left.
By the time Ryo leaves, the sky outside's bursting in orange flares. Sion hugs him at the door, says same time tomorrow, I'm not doing this alone, and Ryo says yeah, sure, and means it, and doesn't say anything else about the hole in the floor, because there's nothing else he could say without cracking it the rest of the way open.
He really doesn't mean to walk past the theater on his way home. It happens anyways, his feet taking the long way through the route that cuts three blocks out toward 9th instead of straight down Alder. Sweat gathers on his arms in the still, thick air, gnats hanging in a loose cloud under each streetlight he passes under.
Unsurprisingly, it’s still there. The marquee, the faded red awning, that crooked B in the sign out front that's been fucked since before Ryo can even remember. There's no real reason for his stomach to do anything about that. It's a building. He's walked past it a hundred times in his life and it never used to mean a singular thing.
He doesn't go in. He doesn't even really slow down, glancing quickly at the glass doors and the dim lobby behind them. There's nobody behind the counter he recognizes. He’s not sure why he even came here, what he thought would happen. He’s not sure why he thought something would happen.
It's not till he's three blocks past it, marquee already swallowed up behind him, that the evening light slips low and golden pink through the trees, catching everything at an odd slant. His chest does something stupid and sudden in response, like his whole body remembers the color before his brain's even caught up to why it should matter.
He was standing on his front porch in light almost exactly like this about ten months ago, the night before his flight, surrounded by boxes he still hadn't finished taping shut. Sakuya had walked over after dinner like he always did, holding a six-pack he had definitely stolen from Sion or Riku. They split a beer sitting on the steps with their knees almost touching, the sky gone hazy and not quite night before them.
Ryo remembers laughing about something. He doesn't remember what. He remembers Sakuya going quiet in the middle of it, and Ryo had nudged his shoulder, said what, and Sakuya didn't answer.
He just turned, grabbed Ryo's face with two hands - which had never happened before, not since they were kids, Sakuya didn't touch people's faces, barely touched Ryo at all unless Ryo started it first - and smashed their teeth together so hard that Ryo tasted blood, copper and shock. He felt the ache of it lodge inside his jaw the next morning, the entire plane ride to Illinois, and then the rest of the school year until it was summer and the sun turned pink again.
It had lasted maybe a grand total of four seconds. Ryo's brain hadn't even fully caught up to what was happening by the time it was already over, by the time Sakuya had already pulled back, already stood, already said nothing, and walked himself home down the exact sidewalk Ryo's standing on right now.
Ryo's flight left at six the next morning, Sakuya’s teeth still stinging on his lips. He texted from the gate, an inoffensive hey, just to test it, just to see, and got nothing back. Not that day. Not the next day. Not once, not for ten months, all the way up until right now, walking home down the wrong color of street with his stomach like acid in his throat.
He stops walking for a second, standing in the almost night in the middle of the sidewalk. It’s kinda funny that nothing about this entire town has changed even slightly in a year except for probably the single most important part of it.
Not like that matters, though, clearly.
His mom's left a plate covered in foil on the counter for him when he gets back. He eats standing up at the sink, and tries not to think about pink light, hands on his jaw, or the sound two front teeth make when they click together too hard.
It doesn't really work. But he finishes the plate anyway, rinses it, and sets it in the rack to dry.
He flips his phone open one more time before bed out of habit, scrolls down to the contact he hasn't deleted and hasn't messaged in three hundred-something days, just to look at Sakuya’s name sitting there doing absolutely nothing. He doesn't text it. He doesn't even open the old thread. He just looks at the name like that'll tell him something the silence hasn't already told him a thousand times over, then shuts the phone and drops it facedown on his nightstand.
There has to be a cleaner reason for this than nothing happened. He knows something happened. He just doesn't know what it was supposed to mean, or why it ended exactly where it ended, or why ten months later he's flat on his back in his childhood bed doing mental gymnastics on one single four second moment as if there's some hidden variable in it he just hasn't found yet.
Not like it matters. Sakuya would probably rather die than talk to him again, Ryo thinks. He probably will die, refusing to even glance at him, and Ryo will never get to hear him say sorry, or it happened, it was real, I did it, or this is why.
A part of him thinks never knowing why is worse than Sakuya never being his friend again. Not like it fucking matters. The earth will spin and spin until it runs out of heat and quickens down to nothing, and Sakuya will still never talk to him. Their atoms could end up in the same place, caught in the same dead orbit, pulled through the same dark, and Sakuya’s stupid atoms still wouldn’t say a word to Ryo’s. It doesn’t matter why Sakuya did it because he will never talk to Ryo again, anyway.
He thinks about his advisor. Give it time. He thinks about Sion saying whatever it is I'm pretending to want with that sixty-percent laugh. He thinks about the chair on the porch that's been too big for him all his life and is still out there, still the same, waiting for him to sit in it again tomorrow.
He thinks, I left, and I'm still here. I’m still this.
It’s not like things had been perfect between them even before the night Sakuya kissed him and irrevocably changed their friendship forever. Or, well, nuked it entirely. Same thing.
But maybe that’s not fair to Sakuya. If Ryo is forced to sit down and try to deduce the exact moment it all went wrong, it roughly goes all the way back to about a year before the kiss even happened: right outside his AP history class, Sakuya handing him a textbook he borrowed and Ryo just -
“I’m gonna go to college out of state.”
The textbook slipped to the tile floor as loud as a gun going off, and the hallway around them hushed for long enough that Sakuya went red. Not that Ryo could fully see, though - just the flaming tips of his ears where he quickly crouched down to pick it up.
“Really?” Sakuya said.
Truthfully, he hadn’t been confident of the decision until the moment he said it out loud to Sakuya. For as much as everyone else knew, he was going to apply to Caltech’s physics program. Not too far from home, and he could come back every weekend and visit. It was in the back of his head for months, though - leaving. Escaping. Becoming.
“Yeah.” Ryo replied when Sakuya finally stood back up. There wasn’t anything Ryo could read on his face, not excitement, or disapproval, or sadness. Just Sakuya, looking at him.
“Cool. Uh. Where?” Sakuya handed him the textbook properly, and Ryo suddenly found its hardcover front very interesting to look at.
Ryo shrugged. “Illinois?”
“Illinois?” Sakuya repeated incredulously.
“Yeah?” Ryo said, finally looking back at him and trying to keep the nerves out of his voice. “Is that crazy?”
“Not crazy, just - far. That’s far.”
“It’s not that far.”
“A whole different timezone, dude.”
“You’re acting like I’m heading to Switzerland.”
Sakuya rolled his eyes. “I’m not, I just - it’s… that’s different.”
“Well, duh.”
Sakuya tossed a weak kick to Ryo’s ankle, more of a brush than anything. “It’s not home.”
Another duh was on the tip of Ryo’s tongue, but he bit it back. He knew what Sakuya meant. It wasn’t the open, sunlit suburban streets they’d met each other on as children, or the cool sea, or the warm sands. It was as far away and as opposite from any of that as Ryo could get.
“That’s kinda the point.” He said quietly.
“Oh.” Sakuya replied. The bell rang, classmates brushing past them. “Well. Cool. That’s cool.”
“Yeah. Uh -“
“I’ll see you later,” Sakuya said, already turning. “Bye, Ryo.”
Ryo stood there a second with the textbook still warm from where it must’ve been rotting for days in Sakuya's backpack, watching him go down the hall without looking back once. He couldn’t place what just happened there, only that he was sure something did.
He almost called after him. Almost said that's it? Almost said say something else. But the second bell rang, and the hallway swallowed them both up into two different directions, and Ryo went to class instead and sat through sixty minutes of a lesson he didn't absorb a single word of, running that oh, well, cool, that's cool over and over in his head.
It wasn't like Sakuya stopped talking to him after that, or like anything dramatic happened that Ryo could've pointed at and said aha!
Sakuya still came over. He still messaged him first most of the time, some dumb thing about a show or a song or a useless thought. But somewhere in there he'd started leaving a half-second before answering things, like he was deciding what was safe to say and what wasn't. Ryo noticed it and didn't say anything, even though it hurt, even though he wanted to. If he said something that would've meant admitting that he was tracking it, which felt like its own sort of accusation. He didn’t wanna be petty or clingy or - worse, crazy.
By early summer, plans that used to just happen started needing an actual text exchange first, a little negotiation, like they'd become people who had to check. Ryo told himself it had to be normal. Everyone got busier before leaving for college. Everyone's schedule stopped matching everyone else's eventually, that was just what happened, that was just growing up. For as little as he knew about growing up, he was pretty sure some distance was part of it, no matter how much it fucking sucked. Which it did. A lot.
By August, most nights they still ended up on Ryo's porch anyway. Sakuya laughed less on his own and more in response to Ryo forcing it out of him. He'd go quiet sometimes mid sentence, like he'd walked right up to the edge of saying something and then thought better of it, and Ryo would let it go. Pushing felt like it might collapse whatever was left standing between them, and he desperately wanted whatever was left standing to survive at least until he was actually on the plane.
So much for that. Sakuya clearly didn’t care like Ryo did.
And that was - fine. Whatever. There was the newness, the lacerating cold of the Midwest, and there were intensive classes that required most of the free time he would’ve spent obsessing, and he met other people, and - it still sucked. None of it was Sakuya. Which fucking sucked.
There was nothing he could do about that, though, except imagining throwing rocks at Sakuya every time he remembered his face, or the fact that he hadn’t contacted him, or the fact that he kissed him and then didn’t contact him.
What could he do, when he really had no idea what had even happened? When silence meant that he probably never would?
JUN 12 2007
In the short time Ryo’s been back, Sion’s dad’s store has been a sort of curated safety bubble. He knows, realistically, it's gonna have to pop soon. He’s gonna be hearing from everyone else any day now.
That Tuesday, Ryo gets back from the record shop, flips open his laptop out of true boredom, and signs onto AIM mostly to see if anyone he kinda remembers from high school's still using the same dumb screen name. RikuRollz83 is predictably the first buddy to pop up online, his away message already changed three times in the time it takes Ryo to load his buddy list - POOL DAY AT YUSHIS THIS WEEKEND. mandatory. text me if u dont have aim anymore ryo - and underneath that, in smaller text: ryo's back!!! everyone better show up.
Ryo stares at it a second, then closes his laptop without responding. If he opens that conversation now he already knows where it's gonna go, and he'd rather have at least one more night of pretending he hasn't thought about it yet.
His flip phone buzzes maybe twenty minutes later, though - an actual text, which from Riku is basically a national emergency, Riku hates texting ‘cause it costs him too many of his allotted two hundred a month - and it just says: u in or not. saturday. yushis.
Ryo thinks about it for exactly as long as it takes him to type yeah ill be there and hit send, and then immediately regrets it the second the message goes through. The little sent confirmation sits there menacingly on his screen, taunting him.
He sifts through his buddy list one more time before bed, stopping on Kuya39. Offline, the away message blank - no song lyric, no inside joke, or even a little cryptic line for Ryo to obsess over for an hour. Just nothing. A name with nothing attached to it.
He tries to ignore the sinking feeling in his bones. Saturday's four days away. He's got, by his own rough math, ninety-six hours to figure out what his face is supposed to do, and exactly zero new information to work with in the meantime.
JUN 14 2007
"So," his dad starts during dinner, over salmon that's slightly too grilled on one side. His tone already has Ryo tensing up for some sort of impact. "You given any more thought to next semester?"
There it is.
Ryo has given a great deal of thought to next semester, almost none of it productive. "Some."
"Your advisor emailed your mother, you know,” He continues mildly. Unaccusing, but Ryo's stomach still drops. "About registration deadlines?”
"I saw it."
"Did you respond?"
"I'm gonna."
His dad nods slowly like that’s a sufficient answer even though they all know it isn’t, reaching for the rice. "You'll figure it out. You've got time."
Give it time, Ryo hears, and he has to look down at his plate for a second so his face doesn't do anything about hearing that again. Here, from the person whose approval he's apparently been secretly failing to earn since the day he called from a dorm room and said I don't know if this is right for me to nobody that counts, because he never actually made that same call to his parents at all.
"Your sister called," his mom says, changing the subject. "The magazine's sending her to some conference in the fall. She sounds excited."
"That's awesome.” Ryo says, and means it, mostly, underneath the immediate, small ugly twist of feeling like a stupid kid again and somehow behind.
"How's Sakuya?" His dad asks, a moment later, entirely unrelated and somehow a much worse conversation switch. "Haven't seen him mowing the yard in a while."
"Fine," Ryo says. Too fast, probably, though no one seems to notice. "He's around."
"Good kid," his dad says, already onto the salmon again, already somewhere else entirely. "You two still thick as thieves?"
"Yeah.” Ryo lies, covering it by reaching for the pitcher of lemonade, and nobody asks anything else, because there's no reason anyone would think there's anything else to ask.
JUN 16 2007
Yushi’s place hasn't changed even slightly in the time he’s been gone.
By now, that’s sorta exactly what Ryo's come to expect from everything - his soles still catch against the cracked concrete of their driveway, there’s still the patio umbrella with the rip in it that's been there since he was fifteen and Sion put a bottle rocket through it on a dare, and around him there’s the familiar rhythmic chirring of the cicadas going off in the trees along the fence line. The summer air presses in around him like a hot glove.
What's changed is the fact that Ryo's standing at the gate with his hand on the latch for a full minute, trying to figure out the risk to reward ratio of opening this gate. If there's a version of this afternoon where he gets fifteen, twenty minutes of just the easy part - Riku's laughter, Daeyoung’s bad jokes, Yushi’s mom bringing out a trays of actual food instead of their usual junk - before the one variable he can't account for walks in and changes everything.
He doesn't get that long. He gets about two minutes.
He's got a hand half raised in a wave at Riku, who's already shouting his name across the yard like Ryo's arrived at a parade thrown specifically for him, when the gate creaks open behind him and someone says, "Hey."
His whole ribcage constricts at once, heart suddenly everywhere - throat, ears, the flat of his tongue. Ryo turns around already knowing whose voice that is, even if it’s been nearly a whole fucking year.
Ryo sees blonde first. Longer than he remembers it and blonde. Actually, full on, fucking bleached blonde. Sakuya and his head of sandy blonde hair is standing in the gate behind him with a pack of Sprite dangling from one hand, looking exactly like himself and also like someone Ryo's never met before in his entire life.
There's a beat where neither of them says anything, and Ryo just stares kinda mostly at Sakuya’s blonde fucking hair. It takes him a second to come back to himself.
"Hey.” Ryo says, and hates how small it sounds. He hates that ten months of I deserve an explanation collapses down into one syllable the second Sakuya's actually standing in front of him.
"You're back.” Sakuya says, which is such an obvious, stupid thing to say that Ryo almost laughs, except his chest is too busy doing somersaults to let any sound out. Blonde.
"Yeah. Couple days now." Ryo replies, instead of you’re fucking blonde, I can’t believe you went blonde, who even are you.
"Cool." Sakuya holds up the thing of sprite, gesturing vaguely towards the cooler by the fence. "I'm gonna -“
"Yeah," Ryo says again, because apparently that's the only word he's got today. "Um. Go ahead."
Sakuya goes. Ryo watches him, the way he still walks - shoulders a little hunched, like he's trying to take up less room than he actually does - and then turns back around to find Riku already barreling toward him with both arms out.
"You good?" Riku says, low, right against Ryo's ear in the half second before the hug actually lands.
"Yeah.” Ryo says, for the third time in two minutes, and this time it's even less true than the last two.
Riku pulls back, looking at him long and hard. For a second, Ryo thinks he might say something he doesn’t wanna hear. But then, “You feel thin.”
Finally, Ryo laughs. “Everyone keeps saying that.”
Riku smiles at him. “Lucky for you, you got here before Yushi could eat all the skewers.”
They walk into the backyard with the arrangement more or less pretty settled. Yushi's crouched silently at the edge of the deep end of the pool, watching Daeyoung paddle by on his pizza float with focused patience - and then, without any warning at all, he leans and shoves the float clean sideways, dumping Daeyoung into the water with a yelp. He’s already scrambling backward before Daeyoung even resurfaces, delighted with himself and failing to look casual about it.
"Yushi!" Daeyoung sputters, indignant, chasing the float down. Yushi only laughs quietly at him.
Sion's stretched out on a pool chair with sunglasses on, technically present but also like he might be asleep. Ryo beelines past him to the table with all the real, actual food, grabbing a steak skewer like he’s never seen real, actual food before in his life.
“Oh my god, I missed these.” Ryo moans, fitting as much of it into his mouth at once as he can manage.
"I made them." Sion says from under his sunglasses.
"You did not make them," Riku corrects, sitting carefully at the edge of Sion’s chair. "You watched Yushi’s mom make them and then carried the tray outside."
"I helped season them."
"Still not the same."
Riku interrupts any further rebuttals by grabbing his own skewer and handing Ryo a second one for good measure. Ryo takes it, even though he’s only finished about half of the first.
"So are you smarter now, Ryo?” Riku says after a long, thoughtful chew.
“No,” Ryo replies through a mouthful of steak. He swallows. "I got a D in a class."
Sion gasps, abundantly fake. “You? Top of the class?”
“That was middle school.” Ryo lobs a soft kick to Sion’s bare calf, rolling his eyes when Sion fakes an agonized cry.
“You’re still smart,” Riku supplies, poking Sion with the tip of his skewer to quiet him. “You did well otherwise, yeah?”
Ryo casts a furtive glance towards the pool, where Sakuya’s sat at the far end with his feet in the water, laughing with Yushi. Like this, they’re far enough apart that the distance doesn’t seem suspicious.
“Uh. I guess. Yeah,” Ryo shrugs, because yeah. Technically, when it came to most of his classes. When it came to ‘otherwise’ was where it got more subjective. “What about you? How’re your sisters?”
That successfully launches Riku into a whole spiel on everything Ryo’s missed, distracting him from probing much further. And for a while, this works. There's a whole pool between Ryo and Sakuya and four other people to fill the space, and it works. Sorta.
A couple of times over the next hour, Ryo and Sakuya end up near each other by accident - reaching for the same can of soda in the cooler, or standing at the same stretch of deck waiting for Daeyoung to finish failing to convince anyone to race him in the pool. Every time it's the same agonizing charade: a beat of nothing, zero eye contact, a small stiff "sorry, go ahead," and then one of them finds somewhere else to be.
Sakuya's better at it than Ryo is. He has some sort of instinct for drifting toward whoever's loudest, like proximity to Daeyoung's enthusiasm is a kind of cover. Every time Ryo’s body even turns his way Sakuya seems to have already relocated three feet in some other direction.
It would be funny, two people this obviously choreographing their way around a backyard this size, if Ryo weren't one of the two people. Mostly he just tries not to be intensely bitter about it. He really hopes no one else is paying close attention.
Later, Daeyoung, after failing to get a swimming race going, announces with total sincerity that they should do chicken fights instead, "because it's more of a team thing, so it's fair.” Nobody has the heart to argue with that piece of logic. Daeyoung has a way of delivering everything with the same hopeful, easily-bruised optimism, and shooting it down is kinda like shooting a dog.
The teams get sorted badly, with Sion tapping out outright and going back to his chair to watch from a safe distance. Ryo’s suspicions are confirmed when he just pulls out a pack of cigarettes and waves at them, looking like he’s someone’s lame dad. Daeyoung volunteers to be a base and then immediately expresses concern about his own "structural integrity," which distracts everyone for another minute. Yushi quietly wades toward Daeyoung, interrupting him to shove him down into the water so he can climb onto his shoulders.
They’re left with an odd number, and Riku mercilessly points at Ryo and then at Sakuya. "You two together. Go."
Ryo doesn’t argue. Arguing would mean explaining why, and there's no plausible explanation that doesn't sound like exactly what it is. But he does silently curse everyone to death in his mind.
So Ryo and Sakuya end up in the shallow end, closer than they've been all day. Sakuya glances minutely at Ryo before crouching beneath the water for him, probably just as resigned to their fate as Ryo is, and Ryo hoists himself quickly onto Sakuya's shoulders without looking too hard at him. It’s the most physical contact they've had since the porch. The thought makes him slightly ill.
Sakuya's hands come up to steady his legs, and Ryo goes stiff beneath them like he's sitting on needles. Every point of contact fires separately - the heel of a rough palm, the drag of a thumb resettling its grip, five fingers pressing into his skin - until it feels like his whole leg's been rewired straight into his chest.
"You good?" Sakuya says, not looking up at him. He’s looking straight ahead at Daeyoung and Yushi, Yushi already perched on Daeyoung's shoulders.
After this long of not hearing Sakuya’s voice, of being almost sure he’d forgotten what it even sounded like, that he’d definitely never hear it again, Ryo has to take a breath before speaking.
"Yup." He decides on.
"You're gonna fall."
"I'm not gonna fall."
"You fell off the monkey bars in fourth grade doing way less than this."
"That was fourth grade."
"You also fell off Riku's bike in ninth grade."
Ryo makes an irritated face, squinting against the sun to frown down at him. "Are you keeping a list?”
"I have a good memory." Sakuya says, and there's something almost easy in it, a half-second where their old rhythm nearly surfaces on its own before he seems to hear himself, and it clips off. He goes back to holding Ryo's legs and staring straight ahead.
Ryo thinks vaguely about kicking his head clean off.
"Okay!" Riku calls, standing at the edge with both hands up like a referee at an actual sporting event. "Rules are there are no rules, first team to fall loses, Sion is judge and executioner -“
"That seems suspect." Sakuya interrupts. Sion sticks his tongue out at him.
" - Sion is judge and executioner, go!"
It's short and stupid. Daeyoung, giggling, can barely keep his footing before anyone even makes contact, and Yushi, on top of him, doesn't go for Ryo directly - instead feints one way and the other, clearly having the time of his life up there, and then, right as Ryo overcorrects trying to track him, darts in and shoves him square in the shoulder, already laughing before they've even started to go down.
Sakuya, underneath Ryo, staggers to keep them both up, and for one wild half-second it actually works, and then it very much doesn't, and all four of them go down in a tangle, ripping through the water in loud crashes. Sion’s shrieking with laughter when Yushi triumphantly resurfaces, hair plastered to his forehead and grinning like he just won something much bigger than a pool game.
"That's a foul," Riku announces. "Feinting is a foul, that's not a fair fight for anyone -"
"There are no rules," Sion calls from the deck chair. "You said it yourself."
"I know what I said."
Ryo comes up gasping, chlorine in his eyes, and for a second he forgets to be careful. He surfaces right next to Sakuya, both of them soaked and out of breath, and says, without thinking about it first, "I can’t believe he fucking - juked us. I can’t believe I fell for it.”
Sakuya laughs, sudden and unguarded. It’s a laugh that Ryo hasn’t heard once since he got back or for ten months before that, like it slipped out before whatever's been managing his face all summer had a chance to stop it.
Then Sakuya seems to catch himself. Something crosses his face fast and hard, like a door slamming shut behind his own eyes, and he looks away toward Riku, who's still debating the foul with Sion, toward the noise, toward anywhere that isn't Ryo.
“Yeah.” He says, too evenly.
"Yeah.” Ryo says, also too evenly, like this is their first time ever interacting. It may as well fucking be. Ugh.
"Rematch!” Daeyoung announces, already trying to climb onto Yushi, who lets him, clearly ready to do the exact same thing all over again.
Sakuya swims for the ladder instead of staying in, and doesn't get back in the water again. He sits on the same far edge as before watching everyone, as if the five minutes in the shallow end cost him something he needs to sit out the rest of the game to recover from.
Riku watches him go, then looks at Ryo for a second too long, and doesn't say anything. Ryo looks away.
He doesn't get him alone again for the rest of the afternoon. Sakuya's way more obvious about it now, Ryo realizes somewhere around five, watching him fold himself into conversations with Riku and Daeyoung at exactly the moments Ryo starts drifting close, like there's some internal alarm going off that only he can hear.
It really fucking sucks. Mostly, though, it just makes him tired, like he’s been bracing himself for something that keeps almost happening and never fully does.
By the time the sharp heat of sunset starts to get too much, everyone filters out. Daeyoung leaves first with a sunburn finally catching up to him, then Yushi disappears inside with Sion - until it's just Ryo and Riku left drying off by the pool's edge, towels around their shoulders. The gate’s already creaked shut behind Sakuya with a quick I gotta go, early shift directed at nobody in particular.
"You and Sakuya are being so weird." Riku says, not looking at him as he picks at a loose thread on his towel.
"No we’re not." Ryo denies, not believing himself either. They’ve been weird for ten months now. He just isn’t sure that’s really anyone else’s business.
"Ryo," Riku turns to him, and there's something steady in his face that makes Ryo's stomach drop a little. "I've known you guys since you were kids. I know weird when I see it."
Ryo is quiet. A cicada starts in the distant, evening dew, and within moments the silence is filled by a chorus of their low buzzing.
"I don't know what happened," Riku continues, gentler now. "But you guys have always been - I don't know. Easy. This isn't that."
"I guess." Ryo replies.
He doesn't say anything else. There isn't anything else he actually knows how to say, not with the question still sitting exactly where it's been sitting for almost a year - unsolved, close enough to touch now and still completely, utterly out of reach.
Ryo's back on his own porch by nine, sitting in the same chair he's been sitting in every summer of his entire life. The sunsets burned off, casting the darkening sky in lines of smoky blues and violets. Somewhere down the block, a sprinkler is going off in timed intervals.
He hears the bike before he sees it - that specific rattle Sakuya's has always had, a loose fender or a bad chain, something that's needed fixing since sophomore year and just never was. Ryo doesn't move.
It slows down across from his house.
Ryo is careful not to turn his head, like turning too fast might spook something. Instead he glances carefully to see Sakuya stopped at the curb, one foot down, bike between his legs, looking at the house. Not at Ryo specifically - Ryo's tucked back enough in the porch shadow that he's sure he's not even visible - just at the house, like he's checking that it's all still there.
He doesn't get off the bike, so motionless that Ryo wonders if this is one of those heat induced mirages. Why did he even come here? Had he been still, even after Ryo left?
Ryo could say something. He should say something, right? It would be easy enough to just say hey and see what happens next, to stand up and poke his head into the light. Instead, he sits so tightly still his muscles start to hurt. He’s not sure if he's protecting the moment or is just as unable to move first as Sakuya apparently is, for whatever reason that brought him here.
Then, before he can decide anything, Sakuya pushes off again like he was never stopped at all, riding on down the street until the rattle fades into the noise of the neighborhood and then into nothing.
He goes inside eventually, pointedly not looking at the street again on his way in as if Sakuya might be hiding in a bush somewhere to freak him out tenfold, and lies in bed with the fan turning in slow circles above him. The thought shows up uninvited, pulsing heavy in his chest - he knows where I am.
It’s not exactly new information. This house used to be just as much Sakuya’s as Sakuya’s house was Ryo’s. Ryo was just mostly sure his house was included in Sakuya’s effort to forget him; tossed away with their memories, with their jokes, with their plans, and with a stupid fucking kiss.
Ryo buries his face in the pillow hard enough that it's difficult to breathe, holds it there longer than he needs to, and pretends to die.