Archive of Our Own

     The shopping street smells like roasted sweet potatoes this week, which means it's officially cold.

     The old man at the corner stall has his drum roaster going by three every afternoon now, stones clicking around inside the barrel, a hand-lettered sign that says YAKIIMO in letters that lean like they're tired. Sakura thinks about buying one every single day. Then he thinks about his wallet and keeps walking.

     Patrol, on paper, means walking the length of the arcade twice, checking in at the shops that asked Bofurin to check in, and looking tough enough at the mouth of the street that anybody from out of town thinks twice. In practice, it means Sakura gets handed things. A pack of tissues from the pharmacy lady. A warning from the butcher about an omen he saw. Somebody's grandmother wants to know if he's eating enough, and she doesn't wait for an answer before she drops a mandarin orange into his jacket pocket.

     He's getting better at saying thank you. He still says it to the ground.

     Suo walks on his left, the side where Sakura's hair is black, the side Suo always seems to take. (Sakura has never asked why. He's decided he doesn't want to know, since the answer is probably something awful and considerate.) Suo's hands are in his coat pockets.

     Then, one of them isn't.

     It happens the way it's been happening for two and a half weeks. There's a gap between the florist and the shuttered pachinko place where the awning drops low and the light goes grey and, somewhere in the middle of it, Suo's fingers find Sakura's and fold around them. Warm, like always. Sakura doesn't look down. He doesn't look at Suo, either. He looks straight ahead at the dry cleaner's sign and lets his hand be held for eleven whole steps.

     Then the florist's door chimes behind them, and he lets go so fast he nearly smacks himself in the thigh.

     Suo doesn't comment. He puts his hand back in his pocket like nothing happened. The corner of his mouth twitches, though.

     "Shut up," Sakura says.

     "I didn't say anything."

     "You were thinking it."

     "I'm always thinking something, Haruka. It would be strange if I weren't."

     They come out the far end of the arcade where it opens onto the canal, and the wind off the water goes straight through Sakura's uniform. He's wearing two shirts under it. It doesn't help. The cold here always finds a way in, thin and mean, sneaking up his sleeves at the wrists. He jams his hands deeper into his pockets and finds the mandarin.

     The canal kids are out, of course. There are four of them today, crouched on the stone steps by the water with a bucket and a net that's honestly more hole than net, and the second they see Sakura they abandon both.

     "Sakura-san!"

     "It's Sakura-san!"

     He lifts two fingers off his pocket and looks the other way. They whoop and cheer.

     The smallest one, a kid with a gap in his front teeth and a jacket two sizes too big, marches right up and squints between the two of them. He looks at Suo. He looks at Sakura. He looks down at their hands, both firmly in pockets now, and back up with the deep suspicion of an eight-year-old who has seen something he wasn't supposed to.

     "Is that your boyfriend?"

     Sakura's whole body goes hot at once, like somebody's dropped him in a bath.

     "What—"

     "What do you think?" Suo asks, pleasant as anything.

     The kid thinks about it for maybe two seconds, which is apparently all the time the question deserves. Then he shrugs, says "Okay," and runs back to the bucket, where one of his friends is shouting that there's a crab, a real crab, come look!

     Suo watches them go. He doesn't look bothered at all. He looks like somebody asked him the time and he told them and nothing more. After a moment, he starts walking again, down along the railing toward the bridge, and Sakura has to hurry a couple of steps to catch up.

     He doesn't say anything for the whole length of the canal.

     He checks, and he isn't angry. The kid's question just got into what feels like his hollow skull and it's rattling around, and every time it hits a wall, it thuds and ricochets. Is that your boyfriend? And the answer he'd give is... what? He doesn't know.

     He goes back over it, looking for the place where somebody should have voiced it. There was the veranda and the rain, and Suo saying I just want to stay by your side. There was Sakura's hand going out across the gap between two futons and Suo's coming up to meet it. There was the camphor tree, and Suo's head on his shoulder, and Is this okay? ...Yeah. There's been the gap by the florist almost every day since, and Suo's hand tucked into his under the desk while the class watched a documentary about rice farming, and the one time Suo fell asleep on the train with his head on Sakura's shoulder and Sakura sat so still for twenty minutes that his neck cramped for a day.

     That's it. Nobody asked, nobody labeled, nobody confirmed that the intensity of emotion was matched on both sides, nobody, well, anything.

     Suo seems fine with that, Sakura thinks. More than fine, even? Suo told that kid ‘what do you think?’ like it was an answer, after all.

     But Sakura isn't fine with it and he doesn't know why.

     (He does, sort of, underneath. He's spent his whole life in places where nothing ever got a name. He was staying with this family for now; that one could take him ‘for a while’. Nobody called him their son. Nobody ever said he belonged anywhere, so nobody ever had to apologize when it turned out he didn't.)

     He went home with Suo that day after sitting in the tree together (as promised) but lost his nerve to talk to Suo’s parents as soon as he reached the front door. It took three more visits before he tried again. It was in a gap when Suo had gone upstairs to change that Sakura blurted out, "I might have a different goal. Now. Other than being the strongest."

     Hua Cheng looked up, an elegant eyebrow arching up. "Oh?"

     Sakura opened his mouth and, devastatingly, nothing came out. Overhead a floorboard creaked, and his eyes went to the ceiling, tracking Suo’s footsteps. Being overheard wouldn’t do.

     Hua Cheng's eyes followed. Then they came back down to Sakura's ears, which were going red, and stayed there.

     Xie Lian set a bowl of something grey in front of Sakura. "Eat first," he said kindly. "Some things take a while to say out loud."

     Saved by the gruel. A disgusting savior, but a savior nonetheless.

     Hua Cheng let him get several mouthfuls in, amused at Sakura’s persistence in the face of Xie Lian’s dubious culinary exploits, before he spoke. "If you don't know what your goal sounds like yet," he said, "go look for it.”

Xie Lian nods. “Come tell us what you find when you are ready. There’s no rush."

     Sakura hasn't told them — hasn’t even found out — mostly on account of having no idea how to look for it in the first place. He works himself into knots over brushes of hands and stray words in the meantime.

     They reach the bridge. The florist's stall is shuttered for the day, a blue tarp tied down over the crates. Suo stops at the railing. It's grey and slow today, swirling in small eddies that seem both perfect and random all at once.

     "You're quiet," Suo tells Sakura.

     "I'm always quiet."

     "You're really not." He says it fondly, and turns his head. "Did the boyfriend thing bother you?"

     "No."

     Suo waits.

     "...No," Sakura says again, less sure. He scowls at the canal. "Did it bother you?"

     "Not at all." Suo smiles, easy. The wind catches the tassels on his earrings. "It's a reasonable question. He's a very observant child. I respect it."

     Once again, that isn't an answer. Sakura almost points that out and then doesn't, because pointing it out would mean asking the question himself. He doesn't even know what dating is, really. He knows it's something people do. He's seen couples at the mall and in movies and on the train, and some of the second-years talk about it at lunch like it's a sport, but he's never paid attention. It never had anything to do with him.

     He takes the mandarin out of his pocket and peels it. He hands Suo half without looking at him. Suo takes it.

     That, at least, Sakura knows how to do.

     —

     Nirei's phone buzzes for the fourth time in two blocks.

     He's been doing a thing where he glances down, smiles, and thumbs out a reply without breaking stride. Sakura didn't think he could do that. Sakura has watched Nirei trip over a painted line on the ground. But apparently he can walk and text just fine, depending on who's on the other end.

     Sakura looks over his shoulder. He doesn't exactly mean to. The phone's right there in its scratched green melon case with the screen lit up, and it's hard not to.

     It isn't MOM with three hearts. It's MEI ♡, and the message says did you eat lunch?? 🍙🍙, and under it is a sticker of a rabbit holding a heart bigger than its whole body.

     "Who's that?"

     "Hm?" Nirei looks up. "Oh! Mei-chan."

     "Who's Mei-chan?"

     "My girlfriend," Nirei says, the way somebody would say my cousin or my math tutor, and goes back to typing.

     Sakura stops walking.

     It takes Nirei three more steps to notice. He turns around, phone still in hand, and blinks. "Sakura?"

     "Your girlfriend."

     "Yes?"

     "Since when?"

     Nirei thinks about it. "The end of July? We met at the summer festival in Kurohama, her cousin goes to my cram school. So... four months? Four months next Thursday." His face goes soft. "She wants to do something for it. I keep telling her four months isn't really an anniversary, but she says every month is an anniversary if you're doing it right."

     Sakura doesn't know how to react to any part of that sentence, and settles for going slightly pink. "You never said anything."

     "You never asked," Nirei says reasonably. "And you get kind of weird when people talk about dating stuff. You make that face." He points at Sakura to emphasize his point. "That one. Like you ate something bad."

     Sakura rearranges his face. He isn't sure into what.

     "Okay," he says. "Okay. So she's your first..."

     He trails off, because Nirei's expression has gone very apologetic very fast.

     "Um," Nirei says.

     "...What."

     "Well, Mei-chan's great, she's really great. But before her there was Rina-chan, only that was just a few months, because she moved to Sendai for her dad's job and long-distance is really hard in middle school, everyone says so. And before Rina-chan there was Haruna-chan from cram school. The first cram school, not this one. And before that..." He's counting on his fingers now. He runs out of fingers on one hand and moves on to the other. "Sayaka-chan, and Momo-chan, but Momo-chan was only three weeks, so I don't know if that counts... and then Kanako-chan, in fourth grade."

     "Fourth grade."

     "We held hands at the aquarium!" Nirei says, a little defensive. "It counted! We both agreed it counted!"

     Sakura stares at him.

     He's trying to make it fit. He really is. This is Nirei, who squeaks when delinquents look at him, who apologized to a vending machine last week when it ate his change. Nirei, who was lying on a filthy floor in a KEEL hideout with his face split open and still had his notebook clutched to his chest. Sakura has carried him on his back. Sakura has watched him walk into a door. And while Sakura was getting passed from one foster family to the next, Nirei was...

     "How long," Sakura says slowly, "have you gone without a girlfriend? The longest."

     Nirei considers it seriously."About four months? Between Haruna-chan and Rina-chan. That was a really hard time for me."

     "Since fourth grade."

     "Since fourth grade."

     "That's six years."

     "About that." Nirei beams like Sakura has complimented him. "My sister says I'm a serial monogamist. I looked it up. I think it's mostly a nice thing."

     Sakura starts walking again, mostly so his legs have something to do. Nirei falls in beside him. The phone buzzes. He glances down, smiles, and types I ate!! did you? with both thumbs.

     Sakura's brain is making the noise a car does when it won't start.

     Six years. Nirei Akihiko has had more girlfriends than Sakura has had foster families, and Sakura has had a lot of foster families. Nirei knows about month-anniversaries that aren't anniversaries. Nirei knows about long-distance relationships and their rates of success in middle schoolers. Nirei knows whatever it is you're supposed to know, whatever everybody else seems to have been born knowing, and Sakura has been walking next to him every day since April with no idea.

     The phone buzzes again. Nirei laughs quietly at whatever it says.

     Sakura looks at the sidewalk. The words come out before he can stop them.

     "How do you do it?"

     "Do what?"

     "That." He waves a hand at the phone. "How does it even start. How do you go from not doing that to doing that."

     Nirei goes very still beside him. Sakura can feel it. It's the same stillness Nirei gets in a fight right before he writes something down.

     Then, blessedly, he doesn't look over. He looks straight ahead at the road and tucks his phone into his pocket, which he hasn't done once this whole walk.

     "Well," he says carefully, like he's picking his way across ice. "It's different for everybody. But mostly..." He reaches into his bag and pulls out his notebook.

     "You're kidding," Sakura says.

     "It's just a small section." Nirei flips past the Bofurin fighters, past the Shishitoren pages, past a whole chapter of dense handwriting labeled KEEL (DO NOT READ AT NIGHT). Near the back there's a tab. It's pink. It says, in Nirei's slanting, excited handwriting, RELATIONSHIPS ♡.

     "Nirei."

     "It's for research!"

     "Whose research?"

     "Mine! Mostly mine. And some for my sister. And Tsugeura-kun asked me once about a girl who works at the ramen place, so I made him a copy of page three." Nirei turns a few pages. There are diagrams. There's a list titled GOOD FIRST DATE PLACES (MAKOCHI) with nine entries, four of them crossed out, and a note beside the aquarium that just says (Kanako-chan) (nostalgic). "Okay, so. First, you should figure out if they like you back. But lots of people skip that part and it's fine if you do, some people like being surprised. Then you want somewhere comfortable. Not too loud, because then you can't talk, but not too quiet, because then it's weird if you don't talk. Somewhere that means something is good. And you should be yourself, but like, the version of yourself that brushed its hair. And if you get nervous, it helps to have something to do with your hands. Rina-chan liked when I brought snacks. And flowers are nice, but some people don't like flowers, Haruna-chan was allergic, so check that first..."

     He goes on. He goes on for a block and a half. Sakura's head starts spinning somewhere around the part about whether to text the same night or wait until morning (it depends, apparently, on at least four things), and he stops listening entirely around "the thing about holding hands is—"

     "Nirei."

     "—and it's really important that—"

     "Nirei."

     Nirei stops. He looks up from the notebook, a little pink.

     "Too much?"

     "Yeah."

     "Sorry." He closes the notebook and holds it against his chest with both arms for a second, the same way he held it on that floor. Then he says, quieter and much more simply, "Honestly? You just ask them. Out loud. That's the only part that really matters. Everybody likes being asked out, Sakura, even people who act like they don't. Especially people who act like they don't."

     Sakura doesn't say anything.

     They've reached the corner where Nirei turns off. Nirei stands there a second longer than he needs to, and Sakura braces himself. Here it comes. Who is it? Is it someone in class? Do I know them? And Sakura is going to have to lie, badly, to Nirei's face, and Nirei is going to write the lie down.

     The world might be imploding because the questions simply don’t materialize. Nirei just smiles, warm and a little wobbly around the edges, says "Good luck!", waves, and turns down his street with the notebook still hugged to his chest.

     Sakura watches him go. This is the guy who once asked him eleven follow-up questions about a bruise, the one who has a page in his notebook on Umemiya-senpai’s youngest foster brother (that boy is six), the one who could be a professional detective for the depth of curiosity in his tiny body.

     Not a single question. That's how Sakura knows Nirei knows exactly who it is that Sakura was thinking of asking out. He puts his face in his hands right there on the corner and stays like that until a bicycle bell makes him move.

     —

     The trouble starts at the tomato lady's stall. It's Saturday, and Sakura and Suo have the late-morning patrol through the market by the bridge, which is mostly old women with shopping carts and one very aggressive pigeon. Sakura hears it before he sees it: a crate going over, a spill of something heavy and wet hitting the pavement, and then a laugh he doesn't like. Three guys he doesn't recognize, older, second-years maybe, from some school on the other side of the river. Their jackets are a green he's never seen in Makochi. One of them has a tomato in his hand and is tossing it up and down, grinning at the tomato lady like she's the punchline to a joke.

     "C'mon, auntie," he says. "It's one bag of tomatoes. Put it on Bofurin's tab."

     The tomato lady is very small and very old and doesn't come up past the guy's chest. She stands with her hands folded over her apron and her mouth set in a line. She isn't scared, just tired. Around her feet, a whole crate has split open on the ground. Somebody's already stepped on three of the tomatoes.

     Sakura moves towards them at almost inhuman speed without a single conscious thought.

     "Put it down."

     The three of them turn. The one with the tomato looks him up and down, takes in the hair, takes in the eyes, and his grin gets bigger, the way it always does on guys like him.

     "Oh, wow. Is this one of them? The heroes of Makochi?" He laughs, and his friends laugh with him. "What happened to your head, man? Your mom drop you in bleach halfway through?"

     A year ago, that would have been it. Sakura would have been swinging before the guy got to bleach. He can feel the old heat climbing the back of his neck now, the old familiar red.

     A hand touches his elbow. Just touches it, and lifts away.

     "Excuse me," Suo says pleasantly, stepping up on Sakura's left. "I think you owe this lady for a crate of tomatoes. And an apology. I'd start with the apology, if I were you. It's cheaper."

     The guy's grin falters. Then he looks Suo over, the earrings, the eyepatch, the pressed uniform, the smile, and something in his face decides that Suo is the easy one.

     People always make that mistake. Sakura almost feels sorry for them.

     The guy throws the tomato at Suo's face.

     Suo tilts his head four centimeters to the right. The tomato sails past his ear and bursts against the side of the stall with a wet smack, and in the half-second it takes all three of them to look at it, Sakura's already inside the first guy's guard.

     It isn't much of a fight. Sakura goes in straight and low and fast, and puts the first guy down with an elbow to the stomach and a knee that folds him in half. The second one comes at Sakura's back, aimed at his blind spot, and never gets there, because Suo's there instead. Sakura doesn't see what Suo does, just hears a step, a scuff, then a whoosh of cloth, and then the second guy is on the ground with his arm twisted up behind him, shock radiating off him before it turns to anger.

     The third guy is smarter, or luckier. He's got something in his fist, a key or a ring with a sharp edge, and while Suo's kneeling on the second guy's back, he swipes wildly at Suo's face.

     Suo jerks back. He's fast. He's alwayssofast. Still, the edge catches the strap of his eyepatch where it crosses his cheekbone, and the strap parts with a small, soft snap.

     Suo's hand is over his eye before the patch hits the ground.

     Sakura has seen Suo take a punch. He's seen him bleed, seen him tired, seen him angry three times now, counting the veranda. He's never seen this. Suo's whole body has gone rigid, one hand clamped over the right side of his face with the fingers spread wide, like he's holding something together. His other hand has come off the guy on the ground. His visible eye is wide and wrong, and for one terrible second it looks so young that Sakura nearly gasps.

     The guy with the key sees it too: a crack, a weak spot, an opening. He takes a step toward Suo, craning his neck to get a look.

     Sakura's between them in an instant.

     He doesn't turn around. He doesn't look at Suo. He puts his back to him, square in the middle, blocking the line between the guy's eyes and Suo's face with his whole body, and he hits the guy holding the key so hard that the key goes one way and the guy goes the other and neither of them gets up for a while.

     The second guy, the one Suo let go of, scrambles to his feet. He looks at his friends on the ground, then at Sakura's face, and runs.

     Sakura doesn't chase him. He stands there breathing hard with his fists still up, the rush of blood roaring in his ears. Behind him, he can hear Suo breathing too, a little too fast.

     He doesn't turn around.

     He reaches back without looking, finds Suo's free wrist, closes his hand around it, and pulls.

     There's an alley between the tomato stall and the fishmonger's, narrow and dim and smelling like wet cardboard. Sakura tugs Suo into it and keeps going until they're past a stack of crates and out of sight of the street. Then he lets go and turns his back again, facing the mouth of the alley. Standing guard. His heart is going like he's run a mile.

     Out on the street, he can hear the tomato lady fussing at the two guys on the ground. There are other voices now too: the butcher, the old man from the sweet potato cart, somebody sending somebody else to fetch an officer to arrest the unconscious men. Somebody laughs, relieved. Normal noise. Nobody comes into the alley.

     Then footsteps do, small and slow.

     The tomato lady comes around the crates with her apron held up full of something. She looks at Sakura, planted there like a wall. She looks past him, at Suo, and Sakura hears Suo's breath catch slightly. Then the tomato lady simply looks away again, polite, like she hasn't seen a thing. She puts a tomato in each of their hands without making eye contact, pats Sakura's arm twice, bows in thanks, and goes back out to her stall without a word.

A moment later Sakura hears her start sweeping. He looks down at the tomato he’s holding. It's a good one, round and heavy and still cold from the crate. He wonders how many tomatoes she has given him over the course of this past year.

     Behind him, very quietly, Suo says, "You didn't look."

     Sakura keeps his eyes on the mouth of the alley.

     "...It’s not mine to look at," he says.

     For a while, neither of them says anything. The alley is surprisingly quiet given the bustle of the market around the corner. Water drips off the fishmonger's gutter into a bucket somebody left out, uneven plink, plink sounds reverberating into the dark. Sakura holds the tomato too hard, wondering if it’ll splat dramatically if he squeezes too tight. Instead, he forces himself to loosen his fist before he bursts it.

     He's never asked Suo about his eye or his past. He's wanted to, a little, the way you want to press on a bruise, and he's never let himself because he knows exactly what it's like to be the thing people stare at. What happened to your hair. What's wrong with your eyes. Are you sick or something? He's been asked so many times by so many people that he stopped hearing the words and only heard the tone, and the tone was always the same: explain yourself.

     Hua Cheng told him to ask. He might tell you. He'd probably tell you.

     Sakura opens his mouth, closes it, and tries again.

     "...Does it hurt?"

     He meant to ask something else. That's what comes out.

     Behind him, Suo lets out a breath that's almost a laugh. "No. Not for a long time."

     "Okay."

     "That wasn't really the question, though. Was it?"

     Sakura shrugs one shoulder. He still doesn't turn around.

     He hears Suo lean back against the wall. Hears cloth rustle.

     "I had a different name, before," Suo volunteers. His voice has gone back to pleasant, mostly. It sounds like he's reading off a card. "You've heard it. Sun Fei. My parents died when I was very small, and the family that raised me after that had money. Quite a lot of it. And they'd been working with some people who weren't very nice."

     Sakura waits.

     "Red Chanpuru," Suo murmurs.

     He's heard the name. Everybody in Makochi has. It's the kind of name people lower their voices for, even the old men at the sweet potato cart.

     The water goes plink into the bucket.

     "When you work with people like that, they expect things from you," Suo says. "Favors. Help. Children, sometimes, if you've got any you don't mind spending." He says it lightly. It lands like a stone. "So I was with them for a while, when I was still Sun Fei. This happened then." There's the smallest tap, a fingernail against something, maybe the edge of the hand still over his face. "And when diē and bà saw me with it, that was the end of that. They took me, and they kept me. I don't think they asked anyone's permission."

     That's all. Sakura waits, but there isn't any more. Suo doesn't say what happened to the previous family. He doesn't say who did anything to him or to them or anyone else, or what hell Hua Cheng raised afterwards.

     Sakura doesn't ask. Suo doesn't want to say, and that's enough.

     Behind him, there’s a tug of a zipper. The rustle of a bag with a small piece of cloth inside.

     Sakura works out what it is a second before Suo says anything, and he turns his head until he's looking at the fishmonger's crates and the damp brick and nothing else. He shuts his eyes for good measure. His ears are burning.

     For a moment, neither of them move.

     "Haruka," Suo says with a fond smile. "You can look."

     Sakura doesn't move.

     "You don't have to," Suo murmurs. "But you can."

     It takes Sakura a long time to turn around.

     Suo is standing against the wall with his bag open at his feet and a new eyepatch in his hand, black, identical to the old one. He isn't holding it up yet. His other hand has come away from his face and hangs loose at his side, and he's standing very straight with his chin raised a little, like somebody waiting to have their picture taken.

     There's a scar.

     Suo watches Sakura look at him, and something in his gaze reminds Sakura of the way Suo looked on the futon that night, when Sakura came back in from the rain: like he's bracing for something and doesn’t know what he’ll find.

     Sakura doesn't know either. He doesn't say anything, because nothing seems worth saying about it, and Suo wouldn’t like empty comfort even if Sakura knew how to give it. He simply looks without flinching, and watches Suo’s shoulders slowly drop, tension fading. Then Suo lifts the patch and settles it back over his eye. He bends to tuck the broken patch away and zip his bag. When he straightens up, he's smiling again.

     "My parents have seen it," he says. "And the man who did it. And now you." He tilts his head. "That's it."

     Sakura's throat does something complicated.

     "...Okay," he says, like an idiot.

     They stand in the alley a minute longer, holding their tomatoes. Sakura looks at Suo, who is watching the mouth of the alley with his new patch on and a bruise coming up along his cheekbone where the key nearly caught him.

     Before today, Sakura was worried about being embarrassed. That was the whole problem, as far as he could tell. He'd ask, and his face would do the thing, and his voice would crack, and everybody would know.

     It seems small now. Stupid, almost.

     The list of people who know what's under Suo's eyepatch is four people long. Two of them stole him out of the worst place in the world. One of them put him there. And the fourth is Sakura, who has never kept anything alive in his life, not a plant, not a friendship, not a single foster placement past eighteen months. Suo has already lost a name, and a family, and an eye, and he still stood in this alley and said you can look.

     Sakura doesn't want to be bad at this. He doesn't want to be the next thing Suo loses.

     He still wants to ask. He wants to more than before, even.

     He just wants to do it right, and he doesn't have the first idea what would look like.

     —

     The roof of Furin High is the only place in the whole school where anything grows on purpose.

     Umemiya's garden has gotten bigger since spring. As far as Sakura knows, it started with a few pots of tomatoes and some sad basil, and now it's two long raised beds built out of scavenged boards, a row of planters along the fence, and a tangle of trellis in one corner where something with enormous leaves has taken over and is planning to take over more. Most of it has gone brown and quiet for the winter. Umemiya is out here anyway, humming, tipping the green watering can over a row of spinach that looks surprised to still be alive.

     Hiragi is sitting on an upturned crate by the door with one arm pressed across his stomach and his eyes closed. There's a paper packet of antacid on his knee. He doesn't open his eyes when Sakura comes out. He doesn't need to. Hiragi has a sixth sense for incoming trouble, and it lives in his digestive system.

     "Sakura-chan!" Umemiya's face lights up like somebody flipped a switch. "Come to help? The daikon need thinning."

     "No."

     "The other radishes, then."

     "I didn't come to help."

     "Everybody says that," Umemiya says cheerfully despite the rejection, and goes back to his spinach.

     Sakura stands at the fence with his hands jammed in his pockets and glares out at Makochi. From up here you can see the whole town: the long curved roof of the shopping arcade, the canal cutting through it all, the hill where Suo's house sits behind its walls and trees. He finds the spot without meaning to, and makes himself look somewhere else.

     He almost leaves twice. He had it all worked out on the stairs, and every time he gets to the first word, it dies in his mouth.

     The watering can hisses gently.

     "So," Sakura says to the trellis.

     "So?"

     "Hypothetically."

     "Oh, I love hypotheticals."

     "If a guy," Sakura says, "wanted to..." He has to stop. His face is getting hot. He pushes through, because if he stops now he'll never start again. "Ask somebody. Out. Hypothetically. How would he... what would he..."

     The watering can stops.

     Sakura can feel Hiragi open his eyes.

     Umemiya barely looks up from the spinach.

     "Suo, right?"

     Sakura whirls around so fast he nearly takes out a planter.

     "It's not about anyone, damn it! I said hypothetical!"

     "Mhm." Umemiya sets the watering can on the edge of the bed. He's grinning so wide it looks painful. "Of course. Hypothetical guy. Hypothetical somebody. Who has an eyepatch, and who you want to make into your housewife—"

     "I don't—"

     "—and who you make a great couple with, I said it once and I'll say it again, it warms my heart—"

     "I'm leaving!"

     "You literally just got here, Sakura-chan!"

     "Umemiya." Hiragi hasn't moved from his crate. His voice is flat and pained. "You're making it worse."

     "No, I'm not," Umemiya says, laughing, one hand pressed over his heart, "I never make things worse! I make everyone better. It's my whole thing. Ask anyone!"

     "No, you make things worse," Hiragi grumbles, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

     "Hiragi-san!" Umemiya sounds so affronted that Sakura almost wants to laugh, but he’s at the door now, hand on the handle, face so red he can feel his pulse in it and nothing feels funny right now. He should go. He should go right now and never come up here again, and graduate without speaking to Umemiya one more time. He could do it. It's only two more years.

     "But seriously." Umemiya’s voice has changed. Sakura's hand stays on the handle, but it doesn't turn. "Suo spends his whole life reading people. You've seen it. He can look at a guy and tell you what he had for breakfast and who he's scared of. He reads what's under what people say, all the time. I don't think he knows how to stop." He tips the watering can over the next plant, gently. "So give him one thing he doesn't have to read. Say it plain. Say exactly what you mean, and don't make him dig for it."

     Umemiya isn't grinning anymore. He's wearing the other face now, the one Sakura doesn't see as often, the one from the day Sakura first came up here and Umemiya talked about Makochi like it was this garden, like every person in it was something he'd planted and was going to keep alive whether they liked it or not.

     "That's all I’ve got," Umemiya shrugs. "It's not complicated." He smiles a little. "Doesn't mean it's easy."

     The wind comes across the roof, cold, and rattles the dead leaves on the trellis. Sakura looks at his shoes.

     "...I don't know how to say things plain," he mutters. "I just yell them."

     "Then yell them plainly." Umemiya chuckles. "He won't mind. Trust me."

     He sets the can down and wipes his hands on his pants, leaving two muddy streaks, and looks across the garden at Sakura for a long moment. His face is so kind that it's hard to stand there and take it.

     "You know, in April, you came in here wanting to fight the whole town. You walked into Furin like you were heading into a war."

     Sakura remembers. He'd wanted to be the strongest person here so badly he'd been ready to break anyone who got in his way, and he hadn't much cared who.

     "And now you're up on my roof," Umemiya smiles, voice soft around the edges, "asking me how to ask somebody out. I'm glad, Sakura. That's all. I'm really proud of you."

     Sakura can't look at him, eyes threatening to water. He turns the handle and shoves the door open with his shoulder and gets halfway through before Umemiya's voice catches him.

     "And remember what I said about using protection after, okay?"

     The door bangs shut on Sakura's strangled noise.

     Through it, faintly, he hears Hiragi’s groan of "Hajime!" and Umemiya laughing so hard he has to sit down in the dirt.

     —

     Café Pothos closes at six. At a quarter past, Sakura is standing behind the counter in a faded green apron, holding an egg with a measure of gingerness that would be more appropriate for bomb defusing than cooking.

     "You're holding it like it owes you money," Kotoha says.

     "It does. It cost me thirty yen."

     "Twenty-eight. I gave you the bulk price." She takes the egg out of his hand, cracks it one-handed on the rim of the bowl, and drops it in without looking. "Like that. Don't think about it. The more you think, the more shell you get."

     He'd asked her that morning over breakfast, with his wallet already out on the counter. It took him three tries to get the sentence out, and she listened to all three with her chin on her hand. I want to learn to make it. The omurice. For... somebody. He insisted on paying for the eggs. She let him. She knows him well enough by now.

     She didn't ask who the somebody was. She just raised both eyebrows at him until he left.

     The plan came to him on the walk home from the roof, somewhere around the vending machine by the canal. Suo's family has fed him again and again. He's sat at their table and eaten more in one night than he usually eats in a week, and gone home with leftovers wrapped in cloth, and once with a whole jar of pickled something that Xie Lian swore he'd made himself (he hadn't; Hua Cheng had). Suo cooked him breakfast. Suo keeps putting food in his bowl.

     Sakura can't pay that back. He's done the math. There isn't a stack of coins on any counter that would cover it.

     But he could cook. Once. In his own apartment, which is small and cold and has a window that won't close all the way, but it's his. He could feed Suo there for once, instead of the other way around.

     He cracks his own egg. It sort of explodes. Some of the shell goes in.

     "Fish it out with the half-shell," Kotoha says. "Not your finger."

     He fishes it out with his finger.

     She sighs, but she doesn't stop him.

     They go slowly. The rice first, fried in the pan with ketchup and little pieces of chicken and onion that Kotoha makes him chop himself, even though he's bad at it and the onion comes out in an atrocious array of sizes. Then the eggs, beaten with a splash of milk until they're pale and streaky. Then the part he's scared of, pouring the eggs into the hot pan and pushing them around with chopsticks until they're barely set, then turning the whole thing out over the rice without tearing it.

     He tears it the first time. And the second.

     The third time it holds, mostly. There's a rip down one side and the whole thing leans a little, but it's recognizably an omurice. He stares at it on the plate like he wrestled it to the ground.

     "Not bad," Kotoha says, and means it. "Now the ketchup."

     She hands him the squeeze bottle. He stands over the plate with it for a long time.

     Then he says, very fast, to the omurice, "You always do the heart thing."

     Kotoha stops wiping the counter.

     "On mine. Every morning. You always draw the..." He makes a vague shape in the air with the bottle. "Heart. And it's always crooked."

     "It is not crooked." But she's smiling. She comes around and stands beside him. "It has character."

     "It's crooked."

     "Took you long enough to say something." She puts her hand over his, the one holding the bottle, and guides it. "Start at the top. Two bumps. Then down to the point. Don't squeeze too hard or it goes everywhere. There."

     His heart comes out worse than hers, of course. One side is much bigger than the other, and the point wanders off to the left like it's lost. It’s shaky enough that it looks like it was drawn by a kid in the back of a moving car.

     Sakura looks at it, and his chest does something he couldn’t name to save his life.

     "Perfect," Kotoha says.

     He cleans up. She lets him. When he's done, she packs a paper bag for him: a carton of a dozen eggs, a bottle of ketchup, and, on top, a little crinkly bag of caramels from the jar by the register.

     He reaches for his wallet.

     "Nope," Kotoha says.

     "Kotoha—"

     "You paid for the eggs. You paid for the ketchup this morning. The caramels are a gift." She pushes the bag across the counter at him. "You don't get to pay for gifts. That's not how gifts work."

     He stands there with his wallet in his hand. He can feel the old part of him that sits in his stomach and counts out change preemptively. It wants to put the coins down. It wants to settle up right here, right now, so there's nothing left owing.

     Kotoha just watches him. She doesn't push.

     After an innumerable moment, Sakura puts his wallet back in his pocket and picks up the bag.

     "...Thanks," he mutters.

     "You're welcome," Kotoha says, and looks so pleased that he has to look away. She turns back to the counter and starts wiping it down again, though it's already clean. Over her shoulder, casually, she adds, "He's going to be so smug, you know."

     Sakura nearly drops the bag. Kotoha giggles at him and Sakura storms out without saying goodbye, and doesn't realize until he's halfway home that she never said a name either.

     —

     The shrine up the hill from Suo's house is smaller than Sakura expected.

     In fact, it's barely a shrine at all. A short flight of stone steps worn smooth in the middle, a little wooden building with a roof patched in different colors of straw, and a torii that's more grey than red at this point. An offering box with a slot in the lid sits below a bell that doesn't look like it's been rung in years.

The rope is frayed, so that may be for the best.

But somebody has cleared the dead leaves off the steps and swept the path, and there's a small cup of fresh water sitting on the corner of the offering box. There's a dainty, silver butterfly perched on the rim of the cup. This late in the year? Sakura decides not to think about it.

     Suo said his diē wanted to look after it. Said he used to look after a place like this, a long time ago. Sakura wonders what that was like.

Xie Lian is humming as he scrubs the steps of the shrine. As Sakura comes up the path, Hua Cheng steps forward and takes the rag out of his hands.

     "San Lang, I’m not done." Xie Lian sounds on the verge of whining.

     "Gēge, that’s not going to get any cleaner than it already is, and you have a visitor."

     "Sakura-kun!" Xie Lian spots him and brightens. "What a nice surprise.” A glance. “Sun Fei isn't with you?"

     "He's at home. I think." Sakura stops at the bottom of the steps with his hands in his pockets. He walked all the way here from his apartment rehearsing what he’ll say and, now that he's here, all the bravado has drained out of him. "I wanted to... I wanted to talk to you. Both of you."

     Xie Lian's eyebrows go up. Hua Cheng’s gaze settles on Sakura with quiet intensity.

     "Of course," Xie Lian says, and plops himself down right there on the steps he just cleaned, and pats the stone beside him. "Sit with me."

     Sakura sits, though not quite beside him: a step down and a little to one side, since he’s not used to being so close to people. It’s damp. He notes that Hua Cheng opts to stand instead, even though the man can apparently stay magically dry. (Sakura still has no idea how he does that.)

     It's quiet out here. The trees around the shrine are nearly bare, and the light coming through them is thin and yellow. Somewhere in the distance, birds drive a crow from the vicinity of their nest, the squawking and flutter of wings lost to the white noise of leaves rustling on the ground. Sakura struggles to find something to fixate on to make himself feel less awkward, and eventually gives up.

     "I don't know if I'm any good at it," Sakura says, voice and gaze directed at his knees.

     "At what?" Xie Lian asks gently.

     "At..." He waves a hand vaguely. "Loving people. I guess. If that's what it's called." His face is burning. He keeps going anyway, because if he stops now, the words will stay stuck in his throat forever. "I never really had to, before. There wasn't anybody to… to practice on? I got moved around a lot and nobody stayed and I didn't stay, and I was fine with that. I figured that was just how it was for me. And now there's..."

     He can't say the name. He doesn't need to.

     "I don't know if I'm any good at it," he repeats. "But I want to try. I really want to try."

     Neither of them says anything. Sakura digs a thumbnail into the seam of his pants.

     "And you two..." This is the hard part, the part he practiced most, and it still comes out in pieces. "You're the only ones I've seen up close. Who do it right. So I figured I'd... use you. Not! Not use but like.As, um. An example. To follow." He winces. "If that's okay."

     When Sakura finally looks up, Xie Lian's face has gone soft and sweet, like it did when he toweled Sakura off the night of Suo’s confession. He looks over at Hua Cheng, and Hua Cheng looks back, Sakura is fairly sure that he communicated something with that gaze but he has no real idea what it was.

     "That's very kind." Xie Lian sighs gently. "I'm not sure we're a very good example, Sakura-kun. It took us a very, very long time to get it right." He laughs, soft and rueful. "Longer than you'd believe, honestly. There was a lot of running away, on my end. And a lot of waiting, on his."

     "Only a little waiting," Hua Cheng interjects.

     "A lot," Xie Lian replies stubbornly, blaming himself for every year they spent apart.

     "It was worth it," Hua Cheng says simply, one of his hands coming to rest on Xie Lian’s shoulder warmly.

     Xie Lian goes pink to the ears and looks at Hua Cheng like he hung the moon in the sky, then clears his throat and goes back to studying Sakura’s expression as he speaks. "What I mean is, love is the most complicated thing in the world. I don't think anyone's ever good at it. You get things wrong, and you misunderstand each other, and sometimes you hurt each other without meaning to, and then you have to fix it, and then you get something else wrong. It never stops being complicated." He smiles. "You keep going anyway."

     "And it's the simplest," Hua Cheng adds.

     Sakura looks at him, but Hua Cheng is still looking at Xie Lian, expression.

     "You want to be there," he murmurs. "So you stay there. That's all it is."

     Sakura doesn't know what to say. His throat has gone tight. He nods instead.

     "Oh!" Xie Lian says suddenly, and starts patting his pockets. "Wait, wait, I have... here." He pulls something out of his coat and holds it out.

     It's a charm, a small one: a loop of red cord strung with beads, some wood and some glass, and one tiny silver bell at the bottom that makes no sound when it moves. The cord is a little frayed. It looks like it has lived in several pockets, well worn and well loved.

     "For luck," Xie Lian says. He looks slightly embarrassed. "I should warn you, I'm not the luckiest person. I've had terrible luck for... well, for a very long time. Things fall on me. Roofs, mostly. Once a whole cart?" He looks at Ruoye on his wrist and tugs a little at the white silk, careful not to uncover the markings below. "But I've been told a charm works better coming from someone who needs luck, because they know how precious it is. So maybe this one will work twice as hard for you."

     Sakura takes it. The beads are warm from Xie Lian's grip.

     He doesn't know if charms work. He doesn't know if luck is even a real thing, or just what people call it when things happen to go okay. He's never had enough of it to find out.

     He clips it to the zipper of his backpack anyway, right there on the steps, fumbling the clasp twice. It hangs there, swinging, the silver bell silent.

     He might not be sure that it’ll work but it’s not like he’s not going to try.

     "Thanks," he mutters.

     "Good luck, Sakura-kun," Xie Lian says warmly, and pats his shoulder twice. "Truly."

     Hua Cheng nods. "Good luck." The words are spoken breezily. Hua Cheng walks a few steps over to a basin where he deposits the rag that Xie Lian had been using to clean the steps, and then he turns and looks at their visitor. "And Sakura Haruka-kun," Hua Cheng says, still terrifyingly pleasant, "if you hurt my son, a fate worse than death awaits you."

     Sakura stops breathing.

     "Not death," Hua Cheng clarifies. "Death is too simple." He smiles. "I thought you should know."

     A week ago Sakura might have taken that for a joke. Now, he knows better. And dear heavens, is this where Suo learned to be as terrifying as he is while smiling?

     "San Lang," Xie Lian reproaches his husband, "don't frighten him."

     Hua Cheng replies airily. "If he does things right, he won't need to be frightened." He says it to Xie Lian, but he's looking at Sakura.

     Sakura thinks about it and finds that he agrees. If he ever hurts Suo, he'll deserve whatever comes after. Hua Cheng could do anything at all and Sakura would stand there and let him (not that he’d have much of a choice). So he nods, once, and Hua Cheng nods back, and the butterfly lifts off the cup on the offering box and flutters up into the bare branches and is gone.

     Sakura walks home with the charm swinging off his backpack.

     At the corner by the vending machine, he stops and takes out his phone. His thumbs are cold and his heart is going hard and fast, like he's about to walk into a fight. He opens his messages with SUO before he can think about it and types, deletes, types again, deletes again, and finally sends:

     come over saturday? 6. im cooking

     He shoves the phone back in his pocket before he can see if there's an answer.

     It buzzes almost right away. He doesn't look until he's home, and then he stands in his doorway a full minute before he makes himself check.

     I'll be there. Should I bring anything?

     He reads it four times, fighting a smile and losing, before he can type back no.

     —

     The apartment is clean. Sakura has checked at least half a dozen times.

     It's still small: one room with the kitchen along one wall, a futon folded in the corner, a bathroom the size of a closet, and the window that won't close all the way no matter how hard he shoves it. But it doesn't look the way it did in the spring.

In March, it looked like somebody was camping in this apartment. Now there's a table.

     It's a real table, low and square and a little scratched, and sits between two chairs that don't match. The table came from the old man at the sweet potato cart, whose daughter was moving to Osaka, and the chairs came from two different secondhand stores, and Sakura carried all three home himself, one trip each. There's a framed photo on the corner of the counter, the one Nirei made everybody pose for at the start of second term: all of class 2-1 crammed onto the front steps of Furin, half of them making peace signs, Tsugeura's arm hooked around Sakura's neck, Sakura glaring straight into the camera like it owes him money. Suo is right behind him, smiling. Nirei gave it to him in a frame from the hundred-yen shop. He hasn't moved it since.

     On the table, there's a pile of sticky notes.

     He didn't used to keep them. People started leaving them for him sometime over the summer, and he doesn't know who started it. Kotoha's, stuck to his to-go bags: EAT A VEGETABLE. Nirei's, on his desk before tests, covered in exclamation points. One from Umemiya on his shoe locker that says SAKURA-CHAN ♡ next to a drawing of what's probably a Doraemon but may be some kind of alien, it’s hard to tell. One from Kiryu that's just a sticker. A bunch from Suo in that perfect handwriting, left inside his textbooks: you're thinking too hard, and page 47, and good job today, and one that says Thank you, Haruka, which Sakura found in his pencil case in October and still doesn't know what to do with.

     He's never thrown any of them away. He's never exactly decided to keep them, either. They just ended up in a pile on the table, and the pile keeps growing.

     He thinks about hiding them before Suo gets here. He doesn't.

     The first omurice burns.

     It isn't entirely his fault. He's nervous, and the heat's too high, and he's staring at the door instead of the pan, and by the time he smells it the egg has gone brown and crackly and welded itself to the bottom in a way no amount of scraping will fix. He dumps it in the trash, opens the window as far as it goes, which isn't far, and flaps a dish towel at the smoke.

     Fifteen burned batches of rice before he learned to make it right. Apparently he's starting over from zero.

     There's a knock at the door at exactly six.

     Suo is standing on the walkway in his long coat, with his scarf wound up to his chin and a cloth-wrapped bundle held in both hands. He smiles when the door opens. Then his nose twitches, and the smile gets bigger.

     "Don't," Sakura says.

     "I didn't say anything."

     "You were gonna."

     "I was going to say good evening." Suo holds out the bundle. "Tea from home. Diē insisted. I told him you probably had tea, and he said, I quote, 'But you like this one and he should keep some,' and packed this."

     Sakura can’t tell one tea from another; it’s all just bitter. He takes the bundle and stands aside.

     It has been months since Suo has been here. He takes off his shoes in the tiny entryway, steps up into the room, and stops, and looks around slowly under Sakura’s nervous gaze. The chipped table. The mismatched chairs. The photo on the counter; Suo's eye stays on it a moment. Then he spots the pile of sticky notes, with Thank you, Haruka in his own handwriting lying right on top (where Sakura definitely didn't put it on purpose) and his expression shifts minutely. Sakura isn’t skilled enough to tell what Suo is thinking, and Suo doesn't say anything about any of it. Instead, he takes off his long coat and looks for somewhere to put it, finding the hook Sakura screwed into the wall by the door two weeks ago for exactly this reason and hanging it there.

     Then he goes to the window. It's still open from the smoke, letting in a thin cold draft. Suo looks at it, and at the gap along the frame that still has the piece of paper wedged into it that Suo left there on his first visit, and smiles. "What are we having?"

     "Sit down," Sakura says.

     "I can help—"

     "Sit. You're the guest."

     Suo looks at him for a second. Something tugs at the corner of his mouth, and he folds himself into one of the mismatched chairs with his hands in his lap. He sits very straight and very still.

     Sakura knows that posture well. He turns back to the stove before Suo can see his face.

     The second omurice doesn't burn.

     He does everything the way Kotoha-san showed him. Chops the onions, still uneven but getting better. Fries the rice. Beats the eggs with the splash of milk until they're pale. He keeps the heat low and doesn't take his eyes off the pan. When it's time to turn it out, his hands are shaking a little, and he takes a breath and does it anyway, and it tears minutely down one side but holds together.

     Behind him, Suo hasn't said a word. He's been watching the whole time. Sakura can feel it.

     He slides the omurice onto the good plate, the only one that has a nice border and no chips or cracks anywhere on it. He picks up the ketchup. He stands with his back to Suo, holding the bottle over the eggs, and his heart is going so hard he can feel it in his jaw.

     Start at the top. Two bumps. Then down to the point.

     It comes out worse than the one at Pothos. The left side is enormous. The right side is small and shriveled. It is the ugliest heart anyone has ever drawn.

     He puts the plate down in front of Suo before he can lose his nerve.

     Suo looks down at the heart. He hasn't touched his spoon. His hands are flat on the table on either side of the plate, and Sakura sees the fingers of the left one press down into the wood, just slightly.

     Sakura sits down across from him. His knees knock the table, dislodging the top sticky note, and he forces himself not to scramble to grab it. There’s something more important to do right now. He knows his words are going to come out a tangled mess, nothing like he practiced, because practice really gets him nowhere when it comes to conversations, he’s tried—

     Suo looks up at him.

     Say it plain.

     "So," Sakura starts. His voice cracks. He clears his throat and tries again. "So the thing that you said. At your place. About wanting to stay by my side."

     Suo doesn't move.

     "I want that too," Sakura says. "I mean, I never said it, but you know I want that. I know you know. But I don't..." He's losing it. He grabs the edge of the table to stabilize himself, letting the wood dig into his skin painfully to distract him from the buzzing that has taken over his entire being. "I don't want it to just be a thing we never talk about. That kid at the canal asked if you were my boyfriend and you said ‘What do you think?’ and I didn't know what I thought so how could he? And that's stupid. I should know. I want to know, Hayato."

     His face is on fire. He doesn't care.

     "So I'm asking. I like you. I want to be with you. Will you go out with me? Like, properly. Be my boyfriend. Or. Whatever. If you want." His throat is so tight that it hurts. The heater ticks. Outside, somebody's bicycle goes by, the chain rattling.

     Suo doesn't respond.

     He's just sitting there, staring, his mouth a little open, pink splashed across his cheeks, and it's the most unguarded Sakura has ever seen his face, more than in the alley, even. His one visible eye has gone huge. He looks like somebody hit him. Sakura wonders if this will be the end of it. Maybe I pushed too fast, maybe I shouldn’t have asked, it’s not like I wasn’t happy with just knowing he wanted to stay, maybe I’m worse at figuring this romantic shit out than I thought but I just wanted—

     "...You," Suo interrupts his thoughts at last. "You asked me out."

     "Yeah?"

     "You asked me out."

     "I know, I was there," Sakura snaps, because he's going to die if this goes on any longer.

     Suo laughs, startled, breathless and high, and he slaps a hand over his mouth to get it under control. He doesn’t want Sakura to think he’s laughing at him.

     What Sakura doesn't know (and won't for a long time) is that Suo had fully planned to wait. He had decided that he would give Sakura as long as he needed, months or even years if it came to that. And then someday, when it was safe, Suo would be the one to ask Sakura out with a quiet reassurance that nothing had to change. It was the only way he'd ever pictured it going.

     "Haruka." Suo sounds a little breathless. He's still laughing a little, and there's moisture glistening at the corner of his eye. "Do you know what you just did?"

     "Asked you out," Sakura mutters. "Badly. Will you just—"

     "Out loud." Suo shakes his head slowly, still staring. "In April you couldn't say thank you without looking at the floor. And you just drew me a heart, and said all of that to my face, and you didn't run away after." His smile wobbles. "Do you know how..." He doesn't finish. He just looks at Sakura like Sakura has done something incredible, something he's proud of, and it's so much that Sakura has to look down at the table.

     "So is that a yes or what," Sakura mutters to the sticky notes, finally grabbing the one that fell and restoring its position at the top of the pile.

     Suo’s cheeks threaten to flood with color as he softly murmurs, “Yes.”

     Sakura's head comes up.

     "Yes, I will," Suo says again, louder, and reaches across the table.

     His hand finds Sakura's in the middle, right on top of the sticky notes, and holds on. It's warm. Sakura turns his hand over, palm up, and lets their fingers slide together, and holds back.

     Neither of them says anything else for a few moments, while Sakura lets his brain break over the fact that this is real. He can’t bring himself to look away from Suo, though part of his brain is begging him to tell Suo to eat the damn omurice and get on with life.

     Then Suo gets up and comes around the table without letting go, which is awkward, and kneels down beside Sakura's chair, which is even more awkward, and before Sakura can ask what the actual hell he's doing, Suo leans in and rests his forehead against Sakura's.

     Sakura stops breathing for a moment.

     Suo's forehead is cool against his. His hair tickles. This close, Sakura can see every one of his eyelashes, and the black edge of the patch, and the faint bruise fading on his cheekbone from the alley. Suo closes his visible eye, breath slowing.

     Sakura closes his eyes too, a little terrified.

     They stay like that. Sakura doesn't know how long. Long enough that his neck starts to ache from the angle, and when Suo finally sits back on his heels, he's smiling so radiantly that he doesn't look like he knows how to stop.

     "Your omurice is getting cold," Sakura mutters, because the silence is unbearable. He’s not wrong.

     Suo looks down at the plate like he forgot it was there. He goes back to his chair and picks up the spoon. He hesitates over the heart, and then carefully starts eating around it, beginning from the edge where the egg tore.

     "It's the best thing I've ever eaten," Suo says.

     Sakura knows it isn't. Besides, he's had Hua Cheng's cooking. He's eaten Suo's. He knows exactly how much he doesn’t measure up in that regard.

But it's the same loving lie that Hua Cheng tells about Xie Lian's green buns. Delicious, gēge. Better than last time. So Sakura doesn't argue. He gets up and makes a second one for himself, and tears it worse than the first, and doesn't bother with the ketchup. It's a little too salty. He eats the whole thing anyway.

     Across the table, Suo eats around the ketchup heart very carefully until it's the only thing left on the plate. He looks at it for a long time before he finishes that too.

     —

     Suo is waiting outside his building the next morning.

     He's leaning against the railing at the bottom of the stairs with his scarf up to his chin and two cans of hot tea from a vending machine, and when Sakura comes down, yawning, he holds one out without a word. Sakura takes it. It’s not half as good at what Suo has at home, but it’s better than anything he ever buys, and he wonders where Suo found it.

     They walk to Pothos. At the bridge, the tomato lady is setting out new crates that the whole street chipped in for, and as they pass she reaches under the counter and hands Sakura a paper bag with his name on it in careful kanji. (She’s still getting one stroke backwards, not that Sakura can tell. It makes Suo smile though.)

     There are two tomatoes in it.

     Sakura looks at them, then up at the tomato lady. She's already turned back to her crates, humming. "How does she know?" he mutters under his breath, fighting off the urge to curse.

     "She's a very observant woman," Suo says serenely, still smiling.

     In the gap by the florist, where the awning comes down low and the light goes grey, Sakura takes his hand. He holds on for the whole stretch, and doesn’t let go when the door of the dry cleaner's opens.

     The bell over Café Pothos rings. Kotoha looks up from the pan.

     She looks at Sakura. She looks at Suo, right behind him. She looks at the two of them standing in her doorway together at ten past eight, holding cans of the same tea, hand in hand, and sets down her spatula.

     Then she reaches over and cracks two extra eggs into the bowl.

     "Sit anywhere," she says. She's grinning so hard it looks painful.

     Sakura pulls his hand away before they get through the doorway and sits on his usual stool. Suo takes the one beside it without prompting.

     "Well, well~!"

     Sakura puts his forehead down on the counter preemptively, suppressing a groan.

     Umemiya is in the booth by the window, where he was obviously lying in wait, because Sakura has never seen him there that early before. He's got a caramel tucked into one cheek like a chipmunk and dirt on his hands, and he looks like Christmas has come early for the second time this season. Hiragi is sitting across from him, already reaching for his antacid.

     "Good morning, Sakura-chan," Umemiya says. "Good morning, Suo. How was your weekend? Anything happen? Anything at all? Anything you'd like to share with your beloved senpai?"

     "No," Sakura speaks directly into the counter.

     "It was lovely, thank you," Suo says pleasantly, and reveals nothing else despite the blush at the tips of his ears. Umemiya waits. Suo smiles at him. Umemiya waits longer. Suo keeps smiling, calm and polite and completely impenetrable, and eventually Umemiya throws his head back and laughs so loud that Kotoha has to tell him to keep it down.

     The omurice comes. Both plates have hearts. Suo's is neat and even. Sakura's is crooked, the same as always.

     He has never been so grateful for anything in his life.

     School is worse.

     It starts at the shoe lockers, where two guys from 2-1 stop talking the moment Sakura and Suo walk in and start whispering instead. It gets louder in the hallway, where somebody Sakura doesn't even know yells "Congratulations!" and runs away. By the time they reach homeroom, it's a wall.

     "Is it true?"

     "Are you guys dating?"

     "Kiryu said Umemiya-san said—"

     "I knew it, I told you, you owe me a melon bread—"

     "Suo-san, when did you ask him?"

     Sakura stops dead in the doorway.

     "Yeah, Suo, how'd you do it?" Tsugeura is standing on his chair with both fists in the air, cheering. "Did you get down on one knee? You totally did, I could see it!"

     "No way Sakura answered right the first time," somebody says from the back. "He can barely even say thank you."

     "Suo definitely wore him down."

     "Months of patience."

     "Years."

     "It's been like eight months since they even met, it can’t be years!"

“Yeah, and Sakura would have run away at the beginning if he did.”

     Suo walks to his desk unconcerned, like he’s just ignoring the bad weather around him. He sets down his bag, takes out his notebook, lines his pencils up along the edge of the desk, and sits without a word. He doesn't tell anyone anything; he never would. But he's smiling the whole time, a small, genuine thing that hasn't faltered since the bottom of the stairs, and it only makes the whole class scream louder.

     Sakura makes it to his own desk too. He sits down very carefully.

     Nirei is at the next desk over with his notebook open. He's writing something with enormous concentration and not looking at Sakura at all. When Sakura leans over to look, it's the date, and the time, and a tiny drawing of an omurice with a lopsided heart on it.

     "How do you know about the—"

     "Kotoha-san," Nirei says without looking up. He adds another little heart beside it in green highlighter.

     Sakura's phone buzzes. It's the Bofurin group chat. Kiryu has posted a sticker of two cartoon cats holding paws, no comment, and there are already forty-three replies under it. The most recent is from Sugishita. It just says WHY IS UMEMIYA-SAN HAPPY ABOUT THIS, and under that, Umemiya has replied with a thumbs up.

     "Did he cook for you, Sakura?"

     "Suo-san can cook, right? I heard he's really good—"

     "Was it romantic? Were there candles?"

     "Did you cry?"

     "Sakura definitely cried but he won’t admit it."

     "Suo, what's your secret, man, I've been trying to get a girl to look at me for two years—"

     Sakura can feel it coming. It's been building since the tomatoes. Since the two extra eggs. Since Well, well~! It climbs his chest and his neck and fills his face and his ears until it feels like it's going to come out the top of his head, and Suo's sitting there, calm, smiling, getting credit for the one thing Sakura actually managed to do all by himself, and every single person in this room thinks—

     He stands up so fast his chair slams into the desk behind him.

     "Fuck off, I asked him out and we're dating, okay?" he yells. "Leave us alone!"

     The room goes dead silent. Somebody drops a pencil. It rolls across the floor uninterrupted for several seconds, the only sound amid the collective hush.

     Sakura stands there breathing hard, fists clenched, face burning. Every single person in class 2-1 is staring at him. Tsugeura is still on his chair with his arms halfway up, looking like a terrible poster for a sporting event. Nirei's pen has stopped, mouth agape.

     Beside him, a chair scrapes loudly.

     Suo stands. He doesn't speak, just leans over, calm and unhurried, in front of the entire class, and kisses Sakura on the cheek.

     It's quick. It's warm. It’s the first time he’s done that and Sakura's brain is on fire. I’m going to die, I’m going to die but it’ll be worth it, it’ll be worth it because Suo is my boyfriend and can just do stuff like this, holy shit.

     Then Suo sits back down, picks up his pencil, and opens up a book that Nirei gave him a couple of weeks ago.

     For another second there's no sound in the room at all. Then the whole class explodes.

     Tsugeura falls off his chair. Somebody screams. Somebody else is pounding on a desk, three guys in the back have started chanting Sakura’s name, and Nirei has his face buried in his notebook and is making a noise like a kettle. It's so loud Sakura can feel the floor vibrating. Out in the hallway, people from other classes are crowding the door to see what happened.

     Sakura sits down. He folds his arms on his desk, puts his head down on them, and doesn't move.

     His face is on fire. His ears are on fire. He's never going to be able to look any of these people in the eye again. He'll have to transfer schools. Maybe move to another prefecture. He could go back down south. He could change his name.

     Next to him, Suo turns a page.

     Sakura lifts his head a centimeter and looks over.

     Suo doesn’t appear to be reading. His eye isn't moving across the words. He's just looking down at the page and smiling to himself, the smallest, softest, most delicate smile Sakura has ever seen on him, like there's something warm tucked inside his chest and he's holding very still so it won't spill. He doesn’t look embarrassed at all (doesn’t look embarrassed of Sakura, which makes his head spin a little and his heart feel very full). The whole room is screaming, and Suo is somehow sitting in the middle of it, happy.

     Sakura watches Suo and, for a second, the noise fades away. He doesn’t even realize that he’s smiling too, awestruck and full of affection.

     Then Nirei says "Aww!!" at full volume right next to him, and it all comes rushing back, and Sakura puts his head down again, wishing he hadn’t come to school at all.

     —

     It rains that night.

     Sakura notices it around nine. He's lying on his futon with the lights off and his phone on his chest, listening to it come down on the roof, and at first nothing about it seems strange. It's been raining on and off for a month.

     Then he realizes he's warm.

     The window is shut. The folded paper is still wedged in the gap where Suo put it, and it's holding, and the draft that's been sneaking in all autumn has stopped. The rain on the other side of the glass sounds soft. It sounds like the rain down south, the kind that used to soak you through and leave you feeling like you were drenched in sunlight despite the clouds. He hasn't heard rain like that since he came here.

     Maybe the rain isn't what's different. He's not going to think about it too hard.

     His phone buzzes against his chest.

     Haruka, go brush your teeth and get some rest. I'll see you tomorrow morning. Goodnight. <3

     Sakura reads it.

     He reads it again.

     He lies there in the dark a long time with the phone glowing on his chest and his face doing something comically sentimental that he's glad nobody can see.

     Then he sits up and opens his contacts. The list is still short, but it's longer than it used to be. Kotoha. Nirei. Umemiya, still saved as UME ♡. Kiryu. Tsugeura, who put himself in as TSUGEURA TAIGA (YOUR #1 FAN). The tomato lady's grandson, for some reason. And at the bottom, SUO, in capital letters, because Sakura typed it in a hurry back in the spring and never went back to fix it.

     He taps it. He taps edit. He holds down the backspace until the capitals are gone.

     He types Hayato.

     He looks at it. He adds a little heart after it, the way Umemiya did. He looks at that for a long time. Then he deletes the heart. Then he puts it back. Then he deletes it again, and puts the phone face-down on the futon, and picks it back up, and puts the heart back, and saves it before he can change his mind.

     He goes back to the messages and types ok. night., and stares at it, and adds you too, and sends it.

     Then he gets up and goes to brush his teeth.