Chapter Text
You tell yourself it's raining
The clouds are in your head
You tell yourself it's better
To jump before you fall again
Before you lose it all again
-Joy Oladokun, look up
Langa is staring at him again.
It's been months, now, since everything went down. Their classmates have stopped needling them for information - they’re convinced it’s a breakup, and everyone’s siding with Langa no matter what either of them say - and things are almost back to pre-Langa normal for Reki.
Almost.
There’s this one small problem: Langa won't stop trying to drill a hole into the side of his head with just his eyes.
Even without seeing his reflection in the window, Reki can tell Langa is looking. His pointed gaze casts a chill onto Reki, one that travels down his spine before spreading through the rest of his torso and body, leaving him desperate for more layers even when the sun is pouring in through the windows. Langa’s stare shoots a core of ice directly into the side of his head, straight from the Canadian mountainside, courtesy one SNOW.
It’s a distraction - but at least it’s one that’s more a problem for Langa than Reki, when he thinks about it. Reki can compartmentalize. He did it well enough before Langa came into his life and everything came crashing together. He’s used to not paying attention in class, and now - forced to at least entertain the notion of understanding calculus instead of acknowledging his gaze - his grades are, if not skyrocketing, arcing upwards in a gentle incline.
Langa’s, meanwhile, are heading straight downhill toward the finish line at Crazy Rock. Reki only knows this under duress, their teacher pulling him aside during lunch one day to ask if everything’s alright, if he needs to move Langa’s seat.
“No, no, it’s fine, I’m fine. Everything’s chill!” Reki had said, grinning, like a liar.
(Langa, offered the same proposal with a slightly more pointed and direct speech, also refused.)
So now they’re here; Langa’s staring at him again, but it’s not his fault, honest!
Okay, maybe it’s a little bit his fault - he knows that Langa’s eyes aren’t on his whole face. He’s not sneaking glances below his lowered lids, hiding his face behind a book to look at Reki through a sideways stare.
No, he’s full blown torso turned, books closed, pencil hidden somewhere in his desk, staring, both of his eyes laser focused on the small, silver ball nestled in the meat of his earlobe.
He knows exactly what Langa’s staring at, he knows exactly how it got there, and he knows that this is definitely, absolutely, without a doubt, his fault.
Reki Kyan’s a little fucked.
---
It’s a long story, and it all kinda started the same way everything else did - Reki trying, desperately, to hold on to what makes him happy.
Freed from S he learns to love skating again, to propel his body through the world like he’s flying. He’d forgotten what it was like to skate free of pathos. Absent the ever present tang of competition, unmoored by the ego-hit of comparison - without that burning desire to win at all costs, it’s almost like soaring.
When you’re not trying to win , Reki realizes, there’s no way to fail.
In the bright light of the morning after quitting S, it’s hard to care that it took him two months to learn an ollie, that he’ll never reach Langa’s heights on the gantry wall. It’s more than enough to feel the asphalt rumble against his wheels, let every bump and crack in the pavement roll through his whole body.
To feel connected, all at once, to the world around him.
Learning to love again is a hard process; learning to be loved is harder still.
But Reki finds that the world agrees with him like this; that maybe he is still a favored son of Okinawa. He might not burn as brightly, not soar as high, but he’s still part of something beautiful. With every push against the pavement, every grind, every gravity defying leap into the air, he redefines and transforms the world around him.
Skating is an act of creation.
And the world Reki creates - imbued with his own love - loves him in return.
He just has to see it first.
---
He’s still working at Dope Sketch. So is Langa.
All things considered, it could be worse.
He goes in after school, on the weekends. He tunes up boards, tightens wheels, fits kids barely older than 10 for helmets so they don’t scramble their brains across the pavement while their nervous parents look on. Bravery at that age is less stupidity and just a lack of knowledge; they’re fearless, because they don’t know what to fear. Reki, covered in scars and bruises and cuts, gives them a taste of the future they’ll learn to love.
(Reki knows what to fear - the pain, the injury, the selfish isolating loneliness - but he thinks he knows what to love, now.)
Ghosts from his past come by like he’s in an American holiday film.
First, and most often, is Miya.
“Hello Mr. Slime,” he greets, pushing open the door with his shoulder and cradling his board like a precious kitten.
Reki, leaning against the counter like Manager Oka doesn’t have an ever growing to-do list, taps his fingers against his chin. “Ah, but I thought I was upgraded to a golem,” he says.
Miya holds his board out for Reki to grab. “If you fix this, you’ll level up,” he replies. When Reki takes the board, it’s obvious there’s nothing wrong with it. A little tightening of the wheels, a quick buff to wipe out a scrape, and it’s as good as new, maybe shines a little brighter. It's trust, is what it is.
He undercharges Miya, only accepts a few hundred yen coins that he throws into a jar marked Miya’s Protein Milk Fund, and watches him try and fail to pet Oka’s fox, before taking pity on him and showing him the best places to scratch to provoke affection. He thinks that's what Miya needs more than anything else - something unconditional, soft, sweet. A distraction from the crushing need to be the best, from the lonely point at the top of the hill, from the friendship he's partially severed from him.
It’s always when he hands the board back that Miya dithers. He wanders around the shop, looking at wheels, knee pads, other equipment. Miya figured out his ideal set up years ago; he’s definitely not looking to change it. Reki learns to let Miya take his time, that sometimes you need to let a wild animal come to its senses, or tire out, or something.
When it happens, it happens. The store is always empty when it does, Langa out on a delivery, Oka in the back. Miya sets his board up against the wall, steels himself. “You never… anymore,” he hedges. “Why don’t you come?”
Reki knows Miya deserves an honest answer he can’t give right now; one day, maybe. “It’s not my place anymore,” he shrugs. “But I’ll come to your next exhibition,” he says, moving closer to Miya, poking him in the shoulder, then squishing his cheeks. “I’ll be your one man cheer squad. I’ll have a big sign, confetti, get the most embarrassing pics from your mom. Your number one supporting slime, that’s me!”
He monologues, spouting nonsense, until Miya blooms with a surprised giggle that turns into a shameless, wild laugh, then they’re hugging each other and smiling and laughing until Oka comes out from his office to see what havoc is being wrought upon his store.
Miya leaves, but Miya always comes back; one day, Reki will have the right answer for him.
---
Second, and less often, is Cherry.
It takes him a while. Reki missed it somehow, somehow, in the midst of everything, but when he strides through the doors of Dope Sketch he does it without Carla, accessorizing with a dark scar across his face and a thicker than usual wrist brace.
Reki doesn’t ask, but he can guess.
Cherry’s first purchase is a classic, simple skateboard. With his typical gravitas, he magnanimously allows Reki full authority to design the art on the bottom of the deck.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything special?” Reki presses. “Traditional designs? Calligraphy? I might need your help with that, though.”
Cherry closes his eyes, hums absently in thought. “I know what I don’t want,” he says. “No blue.”
There goes the sky, Reki thinks. And the sea.
Reki wavers over it for days, putting together moodboards and daydreaming of color stories in class. He doodles flowers endlessly across the outer edges of his notebooks. When his fingertips grow cold he knows that Langa is watching them grow in graphite. He sees something like approval and understanding in Langa's reflection in the window. I don't need that, he thinks.
But it is nice, he acknowledges later, on the precipice of sleep, cocooned in blankets.
He wants it to be good for Cherry; wants it to be something special, something he can love.
The design Reki chooses interweaves pop art cherry blossoms with twining branches of bamboo, and a hidden hibiscus or two. It’s flashy - far from the traditional aesthetics Cherry coats himself in. It carries a little bit of Reki in it, and he hopes that’s enough to make up for whatever he’s so clearly missed. When Cherry picks it up, he stares at it for almost five minutes, smiling something soft Reki feels nervous seeing.
“What happened to Carla?” He asks, while Cherry taps his card to pay.
He looks pensive for a moment, piercing him with his eyes. “I’m going back to basics,” he says. “Figure out what I love.”
And Reki can only nod. Everytime he comes afterward - for a tune-up, for new wheels, for anything - Reki overcharges him a little bit, and Cherry bites back his snipe.
---
It takes a long time for Joe to come in. It's a while after Cherry's first visit; sometime after everything's finally finished, if he reads between the lines of Cherry's words and the disappearance of the Monday morning dark circles under Langa's eyes.
(Once or twice, though he's loath to admit it, he'd grabbed a can of Langa's preferred energy drink and left it at his seat, leaving enough time for it to still be cold enough to drink but not cold enough to sting. Every time, Langa would look at the can with awe written across his face, running his hands across the label, like he knew who put it there.)
When he comes in, there's no real pretense. Joe picks up spare wheels, looks down at him from his towering height. "I'm sorry," he says.
Reki would wave it off, say something pithy and self-depreciating in response, but just as he's trying to get the words out, he actually looks at Joe.
There's something in his eyes - something a little blank and haunted - that transports Reki to a time and a place. Suddenly it's years ago, and he's staring at himself in the mirror of a hospital bathroom after visiting his friend for the first time since the accident, too drained to cry but still wounded enough to feel.
It's not something he'd wish on anyone. He wraps a blanket around his defensive inner core to muffle the sound, dampen it. Then he scans Joe's wheels and grabs his arm when he hands them back, takes a deep breath. "You have nothing to apologize for; you've helped me more than you could ever imagine."
And Joe - who definitely isn't wrung out as much as Reki thought, oh no oh no - starts leaking tears. "Yeah, but I don't think I helped you enough," he says, gamely refusing to acknowledge what his eyes are betraying.
If he has to build up to honesty with Miya, something about Joe commands it. Maybe it's because he's older and seems to have been through it before. Maybe it's because Miya's not the type of person to have a complete crying breakdown in public.
Maybe it’s because no one’s ever treated Joe with a soft touch, but a rock that is only tumbled with other rocks loses its harsh edges eventually.
Regardless, Reki looks around at the shop - specifically, for the empty space where the motorbike is to make sure Langa isn't coming back for a while, and takes a deep breath.
"There's," he starts and stops immediately, reaching under the counter to hand him a box of tissues. "There's nothing you could have done differently, Joe," he begins again. "I think this was bound to happen sometime - and it's for the best, for me, at least. Which is maybe a little selfish, but sometimes maybe that's what we need?"
Joe nods. "Selfish," he repeats, stream of tears slowing. "I can get behind that."
---
He hasn't seen Shadow in weeks.
---
There are moments when Langa and Reki are in the shop together that feel like muscle memory.
When things are slow and they're flipping through a new skating magazine at the front counter. Their shoulders are almost pressed together, a scant inch of space between them, and the air between them is superheated. Langa remembers exactly how long it takes for Reki to read a page with only text, versus a page filled with diagrams he wants to examine. Reki, too, knows when Langa’s eyes want to linger on a spectacular vista or trick, and when both of them are bored out of their skulls and just want to move on.
Sometimes a particularly rude customer comes in - almost always a parent - and their eyes find each other from across the store while Manager Oka tries to soothe the person yelling. They both shudder in unison.
And they share matching yelps of glee when someone nails a particularly difficult trick on whatever skating video the store is playing that day.
But all muscles ache, and when they reach the end of the magazine, or the customer leaves, placated, or the video loops back around, things are back to normal. Reki can feel the chill of Langa's gaze as it follows him around the store. They make stilted conversation when they pass the mop and broom around.
They're cordial; and Manager Oka, watching, despairs.
---
It took a solid week of early morning skating, alternating with moping, after turning in his pin for his oldest younger sister Koyomi to get really, really upset.
"You have to stop being such a slug, what is wrong with you?" She yells - or really, raises her voice a little bit over her normal speaking volume. She's old enough that she doesn't throw tantrums anymore, but young enough that showing genuine human emotion is considered a moral failing. She's settled on disaffected coolness for her general cadence.
If their mom hadn't already gone through Reki's younger adolescence, tumultuous and traumatic as it was, she'd be kicking rocks by now. As it stands, she rolls her eyes fondly and tells them to get back to their chores - Reki pruning the hibiscus, Koyomi watering the vegetable garden.
As she goes up and down the plots, soaking the soil until it gets dark and heavy, she's silent. They work accompanied by the sounds of the spray of water, the clipping of shears, the occasional squishing sound their shoes make in the dirt.
Then, chore completed, she's suddenly at Reki's side, biting down loudly on a cucumber she harvested too young. Reki gasps and almost drops his shears.
Ignoring his convulsions, she asks a question as she chews. "Reki," she says, allowing the most delicate touch of a lilt to her voice. "Can you teach me how to skate?"
She finishes off the cucumber and, almost like an afterthought, adds on a "Please?"
And how can he say no to her?
---
Koyomi takes to skating like Reki took to skating, which is to say: slowly and passionately, with a great amount of joy.
Kyan’s are, historically, craftspeople and artisans, great with their hands. The home they live in was built by their grandparents, stones laid by hand to form the outer fence. Their dad is a ceramicist, shaping teapots and cups and all sorts of dishware in a nearby studio, painting glaze onto their edges. Their mom, a Kyan by nature if not by birth, makes and sells infinitely intricate wooden puzzle boxes. It was at her side that Reki learned how to carve and shape wood, and at his dad’s feet that he learned how to wield a brush; it's with his family's skills in his hands that he crafts Koyomi's board.
She ends up loving it; it's small, multipurpose. A great board for beginners, especially one who isn't sure if she wants to do tricks or cruise the endless streets of their city yet. With her input, he coats the bottom with layers upon layers of summer sweet strawberries, and camouflages his little red angel in so there's a part of him always with her.
He watches her take her first brave steps onto the board, making her wobbly way up and down the sidewalk, before all of a sudden she’s tackling corners and carving the streets.
He’s filled with an overwhelming sense of pride; skating next to his sister is joy itself. It reminds him of how he felt watching Langa learn to skate, before he surpassed Reki's plateau, but it's not tinged with the dark morass of envy.
The trouble really begins when a pack of Koyomi's little friends - a gaggle of girls in braids and pigtails and one boy with hair clips in his bangs - camp out at their door one weekend, helmets and beginner boards in hand.
Koyomi looks bothered when they arrive, but Reki can detect a hint of joy in the way she tries to uncurve her impulsive smile.
Reki, meanwhile, is terrified. Kids are so loud!
"-please Koyomi, you're so cool! I wanna-"
"-so unfair that you have a teacher-"
"-ome on, come on, you promised us you'd share him! Let him teach us-"
"-ah, Koyomi! You didn't say your older brother was cute, I can't believe you kept this from us-"
He’s standing behind his sister - he’s not using her as a shield, but he kind of is, and coughs. This gets their attention, and suddenly he has a pack of middle schoolers staring eagerly up at him. “So, you wanna learn how to skate from Big Brother Reki, huh?”
“Koyomi,” the boy says. “Your brother is cute, but he’s not cool at all.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” she agrees, and drags Reki by the hand out into the throng.
---
The first thing he does is dig through his shed, pulling out spare pads for everyone.
The next thing he does - to a croaking chorus of groans - is walk them through all the different parts of a skateboard while checking their own to make sure no trucks are ready to fall off, no missing bolt to lead them to immediate despair and doom.
"The only way to keep yourself safe is to know your equipment by heart," he says, gesturing to a deconstructed skateboard he's arranged on the ground. They're all squatting around it, rapt with attention. "Your board is the only thing keeping you going when you're traveling that fast! The only thing propelling you forward, keeping you from being gashed across the pavement."
He grimaces, and the kids do too. It's maybe overkill, but he'd rather they be overprepared, rather than send them off into the sunset with no idea of the risks.
"The least you can do to respect your board and yourself is to know what everything does."
No skating happens that first day, but everyone leaves with their own wrench and an invitation to stop by early the next morning. Reki takes the evening to stock up on cute band aids and watermelon.
The next day, and the weekend after that, and then the evenings, and sometimes in the morning when Koyomi can convince a friend or two to wake up way earlier than they need to and dog pile Reki awake, is spent teaching them all how to skate.
Reki starts small - teaching them how to fall correctly, how to balance, how to stop. The basic ways to protect the body when it launches through space.
They spend ages cruising around the flattest, quietest stretches of roads Reki can find. Sometimes it’s the whole pack of them, and they’re a rowdy, raucous mess - more than enough tweenage energy to make up for Koyomi. Sometimes it’s just him, Koyomi, and Asahi, the snarky boy with the hair clips, and Reki makes up for their energy too.
He learns a lot of the most pressing junior high gossip - the secret crushes, the witnessed confessions, whatever weirdness is going on between the tennis and basketball clubs.
They talk about the teachers too - his old homeroom teacher, Mrs. Yamashita, has taken up salsa dancing in her spare time and launched a club. Koyomi's friend, Yuka - who always wears her long, brown hair in a strict french braid hanging down her back, and triple checks that her shoelaces are tied before she starts skating - keeps getting approached about joining, and is running low on ways to refuse.
“Tell her you’ve joined a street gang,” Reki suggests. “If you mention that I’m leading it, maybe she’ll remember me and back off.”
Yuka actually considers this for a few moments, taking a break from trying to nail an ollie, before Hatsuko - who always steals clips from Asahi to pin back the bangs of her short hair - bounds off her board next to her, joyous, loud laughs filling the alley. “Why would they think you’re a gang member?” She asks. “You’re so…” and she waves her fingers at him.
Looking between Hatsuko’s hands and Reki’s smiling face, wrapped up in a bright yellow hoodie despite the afternoon heat, Yuka nods, as if it makes perfect sense. “You’re not really intimidating,” she agrees.
Reki throws a hand over his heart, makes exaggerated crying sounds as he goes to his knees, wounded. “Cut through the heart! Betrayed, by the kin of my ki-” Hatsuko kicks him, gently, in the gut. “Ow!”
The two girls are looking down at him now, refusing to let him go without answering. It’s weird , he thinks, to feel trapped by two kids, as if they care about what he’s going to say. “I think all the junior high teachers think I’m a delinquent. I’d skip class to skate sometimes - not a good example to follow! - and, well.” He shrugs, as if to fill in the gaps surrounding his old friend, the accident, and the rumors and whispers that seemed to crowd him, like a miasma, following him from homeroom to homeroom.
Their family doesn’t talk about it much, but he spent a whole month and a half not going to school, a counselor dropping off and picking up his homework every few days.
When he finally went back, he couldn’t hear the whispers anymore. But the silence - the loneliness - hurt more than the rumors.
Yuka and Hatsuko both shrug. “Koyomi's insta is full of pictures of you sleeping in weird places. No one believes you’re a delinquent, dude,” Hatsuko says.
Dude, Yuka mouths.
Reki beams.
---
Sometime later, he trusts them enough to bring them to a skatepark. The skatepark - the one he taught Langa at, the one he and his friend spent hours at. Every inch of that place is full of memories.
Back to basics, he thinks to himself. Thinks of Cherry and how his scar has slowly been fading, and how he seems to smile more freely and openly than before.
Before he can bring them, though, he meets the parents of the kids he’s been teaching. Hatsuko’s weirdly severe mom and dad, both lawyers; Yuka’s incredibly chill uncle who runs a snack shop Reki’s stopped at many times; Asahi’s welcoming mom, who makes him stay for a long and elaborate dinner and doesn’t let him leave without engulfing him in an extended hug and a soft, whispered thanks; and finally Sara-Call-Me-Spike’s quiet, mousy father, who doesn’t really know what to do with the burst of energy Reki brings to any given room.
He sits with Spike’s dad for a while, showing him safety videos and clips of tricks they can easily learn at the park, before the older man sighs. “I don’t often understand my daughter,” he says, gesturing toward a wall of pictures that show a blonde girl dying her hair progressively darker and darker, until it’s reached the mix of black and green it currently is, “but I want her to love whatever it is she’s doing. So thank you, for helping her be happy.”
And isn’t it a funny thing, huh? Loving what you do? Being happy?
---
In class, that next day, Reki’s grin stretches across infinity. Langa can’t stop staring. And even though Reki is cold, wrapped in his sweatshirt and school jacket, he can’t stop smiling.
“Hey, Reki,” Langa asks. When Reki turns to him, Langa’s pale face flushes, his eyes go wide, and he also goes silent.
“Hm? Do you need a pencil or something?” Reki asks, concerned, forgetting for a moment their split history. It’s hard to feel so mournful about something when he’s so fueled with joy, about to share his happiness with his sister and her friends.
Langa shakes his head, but Reki drops a pencil on his desk anyway. He looks away when Langa cradles it in his long, elegant fingers, but he catches glimpses in the window anyway.
Clouds dot the sky, blotting out the sun; it might rain later, but the air is thick with heat. He wonders, for a moment, if Langa feels warm in this weather, or if his flame burns cold.
Maybe one day he’ll be able to ask again.
---
Reki knows almost all the regulars at Dope Sketch. He knows their names, their preferences. The younger ones proudly demonstrate their progress to him, waiting for his feedback - tips, and wide-eyed honest praise. The older ones show him videos of tricks, and he breaks them down piece by piece, until they have a whole map guiding them to where they want to be. The oldest customers talk to him about skating way back when they were younger, how the scene has changed and how it’s stayed the same, how cool the new kids on the scene are, and hey did you see what Tony Hawk just did?
There’s one regular he can’t quite grasp, though, and it’s frustrating. He comes in on random weekday evenings, never the same one twice - Reki even checks with Langa, sometimes, to see if he comes in when they have different shifts. The man has dark hair and sad, downcast eyes, a mole dotted just under his right one. He wears nondescript tee shirts, nondescript shoes, and if pressed, Reki couldn’t even describe what his voice sounds like.
He always pays in cash, so Reki can’t catch the name on a card, and he always buys a cheap, basic set of wheels that they always have in stock, so he never has to special order anything for him. He never really makes conversation, accepting Reki’s greetings with a nod.
It’s beyond frustrating; there’s never been a nut Reki couldn’t crack, and there’s something about the way the man moves - how he walks, his gait, his reflexes, how quickly he seems to go through wheels, that tells Reki he must be an incredible skater. There’s the way his eyes lingered, once, over a longboard Reki painted with the image of an empty skate bowl, and the way they seemed to actually glow with something like longing when he went to pay.
When he next comes in, after Reki’s started taking the kids - they’ve been trying and failing to come up with a name for their group - to the skatepark, Reki tries making conversation with him again.
As he’s making change for the man, he stalls at the register, pretending to fumble. “Hey, sorry, I just. You look like you’re good with kids,” Reki says, and that’s mostly true. He has soft eyes and a softer bearing. Kids would eat him alive. “I’ve been teaching some to skate; got any tips?” he asks, putting his change in the little tray and sliding it over. When he looks up, the man is meeting his eyes for the first time.
Reki hasn’t felt terror like this in a long time.
His eyes haven’t changed at all, he thinks, but there’s a wild look on his face - at turns ravenous, at turns rangy, like he’s a rabid animal lured into a corner. There’s power in his gaze, almost pinning Reki into place, and his body is stilled into submission. His breathing goes heavy, and he grabs at the counter, digs his fingers into the wood. “Don’t,” he snarls, and Reki suppresses the urge to whimper.
Then, all at once, it passes. The man mumbles a “sorry,” at Reki, then grabs his money and wheels and turns on his tail out of the store.
Reki pretends he can’t see nail marks in the wood, and refuses to explain them to Manager Oka when he asks.
The man comes back nine days later, buys his cheap wheels, nods at Reki’s greetings, and leaves.
---
They make a weird crowd of regulars at the skatepark, coming by every weekend and multiple evenings. Somehow, Langa seems to notice that Reki hasn’t been going straight home after school, like he normally has. It’s in the wear and tear on his board, maybe, or the occasional cuts and bruises that have re-emerged on his skin, when he shows off a little for the kids, and fails on purpose to know they don’t have to be scared of falling.
He spends too much time in the morning staring at himself in the mirror, stretching his skin, trying to see if anything has changed there - if he looks more tired, more drained, duller, exhausted. But he can’t see anything. He looks the same.
When he says as much to Koyomi, she scoffs and calls him lame.
Langa actually follows Reki to the park after class one day, even though he’s more than outgrown it and still has the higher ramps and longer grinds of S to his name. Reki throws him a lemonade and nods at him, but the full pack of kids has joined them today, and at any given moment at least one of them is sitting by Reki as he calls out tips to the rest of them, demonstrates tricks and adjusts their footing, ready to glare Langa into frozen submission if he approaches them.
It’s overkill, and it’s weird to Reki to let kids fight his battles for him, but he has to admit he’s charmed.
It’s weirder still, to look over to the corner they’ve pretty much caged Langa into, where he idly fidgets on his board, to see that he’s smiling.
---
They’re not all about skating, all the time. When they’re bone tired, skin rubbed red, shins bruised and battle wounds bandaged, working up the energy in the evenings to skate or walk back home, the kids talk, comfortable around Reki like he’s a wall or a pillow and not their friend’s weird, lonely older brother.
Yuka asks him for girl advice one day, and he gives her a look, one that he hopes says “Do you think I know anything?”
Hatsuko notices and immediately asks him about boys, and he can feel his cheeks warm with a flush, before giving them gender-neutral advice. Nothing he’s ever tried has worked, after all.
It’s not always crushes, either - they’re all about style, or aesthetics, or whatever. When they find out Reki prints his own sweatshirts, they start hounding him for matching ones - so they need to have endless arguments on the design, because they have to agree, Reki, this is a democracy.
Hatsuko keeps yelling about American grunge music and the dream of the nineties, while Asahi suggests that they should keep their icons cute and simple. Koyomi's only contribution so far has been to demand that the base of the shirt is pink - which is fine, Reki can steal a bunch from Dope Sketch - and Yuka suggests that the shirt be symmetrical, at least.
Spike, meanwhile, is staring at something off in the distance, mouth gawping, like she’s seen her future all at once. Reki’s seen it on Langa’s face before, when he leaped over him on his skateboard that first day they knew each other. It’s longing, and awe, and happiness all at once. Reki wonders if he’ll ever feel something like that.
He tunes out the discussion - something about halftone patterns, but he’ll cross that bridge when they come to it - in favor of following Spike’s gaze, sitting up on his board and turning his head to look.
When he does, he makes direct eye contact with a group of classic punks, a couple of leather jackets slung over shoulders as a concession to the heat of the late afternoon. He’s certain they’re barely in their early twenties; it’s something about their bearing, the rangy look of their arms, all the time he’s spent with Shadow, watching confidence build in layers of greasepaint and leather.
They’re a riot of tight, ripped pants and combat boots - although the only one with a skateboard is wearing more sensible jeans, patched and torn, and sneakers. Gashes of color - some bursts of the same vivid green highlighting Spike’s hair, some pink, a taste of red - dot the whirlwind, and they’re all staring directly at Reki now.
He looks at Spike, who is nervously thumbing the zipper of her dark grey hoodie - she’s got a series of patches on the back, safety pins running lengthwise up her sleeves that Reki is only a little nervous about. When he meets them after school to bring them to the skatepark, she always waits until they’re at least five blocks away from the Junior High to reach into her backpack and pull the jacket out, slipping it over her shoulders so it engulfs her like armor.
He pulls at one of the drawstrings on his own hoodie, and catches, from the corner of his eyes, a smirk on the face of one of the punks - this one wearing a dingy grey shirt, with a band logo he’ll never recognize, her hair shaved close to the scalp and bleached almost white.
There’s a lot of power in seeing the person you want to be reflected back at you at such a young, impressionable age. To know that you’re not forging a solo path, completely alone - to feel like a part of something, that people are walking alongside you, that you’re not bearing some invisible weight only on your shoulders.
It also takes a lot of energy to do that, and Spike - soft, shy Spike, who watches foreign films with her dad on Saturday nights while they touch up her roots, almost in complete silence - needs that final push to help her see that. It’s momentum - the first time you’re on a skateboard, trying to figure out how to work up the energy to push yourself forward. Sometimes it’s easier to have someone help you, push you forward, so you know the feeling you want to grow towards.
That’s something Reki can do. He can carry her bravery for her until she’s ready.
---
“It’s not going to hurt, right?” Reki asks, as he leans up on his elbows on the salon table.
The piercer - “Kazuo, but my friends call me Eyeball, don’t ask,” - levels an unamused stare at him from where he’s seated beside the table, laying out the equipment he’ll be using. He’s got long dark hair tied back in a ponytail, a mural of floral tattoos - and definitely a nipple piercing, Reki gulps - just barely visible through his white tee shirt, and a stampede of multicolored piercings running up his right ear. Maddeningly, there is absolutely nothing abnormal about his eyes except for how serious they are, how dark.
He leans back down, shoves his hair in his headband to reveal the full curve of his own right ear. Kazuo rubs a sanitizing pad across his lobe, and Reki can just imagine the black latex against the tan of his skin, the red of his hair.
“So why are you doing this, anyway?” Kazuo asks, leaning back to grab the needle. “Trying to impress a girl?” He asks, before taking a cold look at Reki’s face. “..Or a guy?”
“No no, it’s nothing like that,” Reki says, going to lean up before he’s pinned back against the table by Kazuo’s glare. “I just thought it would look cool,” he grins out, but Kazuo still doesn’t make a move, pausing his movements around Reki’s ear. Reki exhales. “And… my sister’s friend really wants one, but she’s young and scared of needles, so I thought I’d get one to show her it’s okay!”
Kazuo laughs behind his surgical mask - okay, he snorts a little bit, but Reki will count that as a win.
There’s the whole army of his sister’s friends - the weird group of children who have pack-bonded with him - waiting for him to emerge with a small silver ball dotted into his flesh, smiling like he normally does. They’ve got Kazuo’s friends - the punks from the skatepark, who were really nice and welcoming even though Reki looked like an absolute fool introducing himself and Spike, not at all helped by Koyomi butting in to call the pack of tweens a ‘street-gang’ and Hatsuko threatening to launch an Okinawan turf war, whatever that is - waiting with them.
He’s gotten here through an inexplicable series of circumstances, serving as the interlocutor between a group of highly motivated punk adults and impressionable school kids. When Spike shyly compliments the huge Sailor Moon patch on the back of one of their leather jackets, he prods her to show off work she’s done on her own hoodie; when the blonde one suggests that they stop taking up all this space at the skatepark, just chatting, it’s Reki who drags them to A&W as the happy medium between the Kyan family home and some weird underpass as hangout spots.
It’s tough, lonely work, but it only reminds him a little bit of the halcyon days at S.
After a few weeks of impromptu meet-ups, Asahi’s got little skull shaped clips pinned into his hair, and he sticks one on Reki’s headband too. It looks great. Reki never takes it off. Spike greets them all at the door of their Junior High, already wrapped up in her hoodie. Yuka’s experimenting with two braids, instead of one. Hatsuko has a battle cry, and Reki’s eardrums bleed.
He gets their story out of them, piece by piece. The punks - Dagger, Q, and Sniper - have been traveling across Japan for the last year or so, renting apartments and crashing on friend’s couches to get a taste of the whole country before they settle back into their hometown in the north.
Q - the tallest one of them, pale, with an undercut and the most piercings - is quiet because they’ve never quite been able to shake their hometown dialect, and every sentence Reki wrangles out of them feels like a win, even if he says a hundred words to one of theirs. Sniper is the skateboarder, and picked her name before she learned English - “it sounded cool,” she sheepishly admits to an unamused Koyomi while sipping on a rootbeer float.
She texts him one night and he comes to the apartment they’re splitting right now - which is a room in Kazuo’s apartment, he learns later - to help her buzz and bleach her hair, while Q is at a show and Dagger - long black hair, sharp bangs, canines filed into points - apologizes because he hates the scent of bleach.
He’s tired the next day at school, almost falling asleep in his math notes as a concerned Langa watches on, but it’s worth it for the way Q greets him with a pack of Hi-Chew when they return from their concert, for the laughter he shares with Sniper over pictures of her many ill-fated DIY haircuts, for the way Dagger pauses, a glint in his pale eyes, when Reki admits that Spike has wanted a piercing for a while but is pretty scared to get it done.
He thinks he may have made friends, even if they’re going to leave him eventually.
When Kazuo tells him to inhale and pokes the needle through his earlobe, chasing it with the labret, it doesn’t hurt at all. It feels a lot like being alive.
---
Piercings heal from the inside out.
They’re a puncture wound in the body, and what the body wants - what the flesh remembers - is for the wound to close, for the foreign object to get out and leave forever.
Healing is a waiting game.
---
Spike looks at his ear for a long while, in awe, and that weekend drags her dad down to the studio with Reki in tow. At the end of the day, she’s the proud owner of two matching lobe piercings - and a promise to switch them out to silver hoops, once they heal - and her dad has traded movie recommendations with Kazuo, who studied film in college and has the walls of the studio dotted with stills from old French movies Reki could never hope to recognize.
When they go to leave, Kazuo grabs Reki’s shoulder to stop him. He shrugs at Spike and her dad, and they wait for him outside.
“Listen,” Kazuo says, “I’m glad you have a street gang-” Reki cuts him off with a groan, shoving his face into his hands.
“They’re my kid sister’s friends, oh my god. I’m just teaching them stuff.” Kazuo actually laughs this time, and Reki can tell from the way the edges of his eyes wrinkle above his mask.
“The kid with the skull clips threatened to punch me in the balls if I hurt you.”
Reki pauses and sighs. “I’ll talk to Asahi about violence. I don’t think he’s punched anyone before.” Although, he thinks.
Kazuo laughs again. “Okay, okay, street gang or not, I think you need friends your age.” Reki tries and fails to suppress a wince, and Kazuo tries and fails to not notice it. “What I mean is, my sister also needs friends, is also a bit of a weirdo, and is also very kind.”
Reki thinks that maybe Kazuo needs friends too, friends who won’t crash in his spare bed for a few weeks before moving on, friends who can stick around. “I gave her your number; she’ll reach out. You’re not allowed to try to date her,” he finishes, smug.
“Yeah, haha, I don’t think we’ll have a problem there,” Reki admits, an image coming to his mind, unbidden. A boy flying through the air, the cold chill of snow flurries, a rare taste of winter in Okinawa. Langa’s ice blue hair haloing him, matching eyes piercing directly into his own. He gulps, and Kazuo’s eyes become searching, serious again, as if they’re reading something written directly off his face. He might as well be broadcasting, and Kazuo nods, as if he knows.
“We definitely won’t have a problem,” he says. “As long as you clean your piercing regularly and don’t touch it!” He shoves a paper bag at Reki’s chest - an extra can of wound wash - and pushes him out the door.
---
Kazuo’s sister is named Kazuko.
[Kazuko] our parents had no imagination you’re NOT ALLOWED to laugh about it ugh.
And she’s definitely a weirdo, but a popular one, in a world where weird kids thrive.
[Kazuko] It’s called art school, Reki! Read a book.
She texts him at odd hours, when she claims to be studying or working on a piece. Her messages are frenetic, as if she’s powered by caffeine and energy drinks. She sends him pictures of her works in progress - incredibly elaborate oil paintings and digital drawings of women and Reki wonders why Kazuo even tried to threaten him about dating her.
[Kazuko] He’s definitely projecting - he’s the one who needs friends.
Reki responds - not as often, but he definitely responds - with questions about what she’s studying, shares pictures of the boards he’s working on, occasional complaints about how itchy his piercing is. She gives him an impromptu critique of one of his board designs in a series of increasingly passionate voice messages, and apologizes immediately after. “It’s like a muscle,” she says. “A reflex.”
Texting is a muscle he hasn’t worked out in a while. It comes back to him eventually.
[Reki] It’s okay! What do you think of this? [see img. attached]
---
Eventually the body starts to accept that the piercing is in it for the long haul, and instead of trying to force it out, it rearranges the home to welcome it.
This is a long process, a trying time, and moving the piercing can easily upset the healing site, setting your work back weeks and leading to an increased risk of infection. Keep the site clean, without aggravating it.
Healing is an active process.
---
Kazuko invites him to an art student party after her exams.
[Kazuko] they told us to invite cool people and you’re the only cool person I know. it’ll be awesome. we’ll find you a cute girl or boy or something, you’ll have a good time.
[Reki] Or something, haha! I’ll be there.
The party is at some kind of abandoned construction site in the outskirts of a suburb; a planned community that went nowhere. The roads are half paved, so Reki can skate easily to the site. There’s a half poured foundation, cement structures that look like they could be sculptures but really could be anything, a couple of big drums with fire burning in the center. It’s very... “It’s super pretentious, but what can you do?” Kazuko says, throwing him a grape soda.
“If there weren’t people here right now I could skate all over it,” Reki says. For hours, probably, grinding on the concrete blocks and abandoned rails, riding the half rotted ramps until they give way, make it a place to be loved and used instead of abandoned and wasted. Kazuko looks at him with the same intense eyes her brother has, dark and inky in the scant firelight. Above the crackling Reki can hear someone strum a guitar; Kazuko notices and groans.
“Pretentious, like I said. Come on, let me show you my friends.” She grabs his wrist, casually and thoughtlessly, also like Kazuo, and drags him to a circle near one of the drums. Reki’s grateful he didn’t open his soda already, barely able to hang on to the drink and his board while she pulls him along. Her asymmetric bob - starting over one ear, revealing a long line of piercings, curving across and down the back of her head, ending below her chin - does not move at all.
Her friends are fine - enjoyable to talk to, even, but he knows he won’t see them again after tonight. But he’s fine being part of something that isn’t dangerous - something normal teenagers do, where there’s no real risk of injury, no life or death stakes, no prodigies. They’re welcoming, even if sometimes they joke about things he doesn’t understand - he’s used to being out of the loop, or the butt of a secret joke, so it’s fine. He talks about skating a little, compliments a girl on the shirt she designed and lets a boy scribble symbols on his arm with a pen.
In the distance, he can hear the white noise of conversations, feel the thumping of bass below his feet from a makeshift DJ - an audio engineering student who already has a record deal, apparently - and the crackling hum of the fire. It keeps him warm, but he keeps his hoodie on, sleeves rolled up a bit as a concession to the heat.
And then, suddenly, he feels a burst of cold bloom on the side of his head, spread down the back of his neck, blossom over his back and encase him in chill. When he breathes in, the air feels cold and dry, like he’s on top of a winter mountain peak instead of a nameless suburb in an Okinawa summer.
Cutting through the sound is one crystal call - “Reki? Reki!” - and the circle of Kazuko’s friends turn before he does. It must be weird , he thinks, far away from them already. That I’m a stranger here, but someone recognizes me.
Slowly, he turns his head, though winter has overtaken his body. The flakes of ash crumble into snow, the smoke is the bitter, frozen bite of a cold morning, and the fire disappears entirely, and all he can see is -
“Langa,” he whispers.
---
They end up in a corner of the compound, where someone once built up a wall - the outer edges of a home, maybe, for all it’s crumbling now - a shield from the rest of the party, their own private world.
It’s just him and Langa again - they haven’t been alone like this, together, adrift in a new, exciting sea, in a very long time. At school, at work, in the skatepark, it’s been easy to avoid Langa, reject their once shared intimacy, the memory of their making.
But something about a friendship like theirs cuts right into you and never leaves; if they never spoke again, Reki thinks they would have matching scars, cut into the palms of their hands, of their broken promises. But there’s a potential for something better.
“Reki,” Langa whispers, reverent like a prayer, like they hadn’t seen each other in class that morning, like Reki hadn’t left the classroom that afternoon without talking to Langa again, like he hadn’t dropped a red bean bun at his desk in the morning before he came in, still warm.
Reki feels like a stranger in his own skin for the first time in a while, his heart beating patterns he doesn’t recognize. He once carried Spike’s bravery for her - who can carry his?
“Reki!” Langa says, louder, wrapping his arms around Reki in a proprietary grip, as if he fears Reki might disappear again; and honestly, it’s risky, since right now he’s far, far away.
But then Langa shifts, his shoulder accidentally knocking against his pierced ear. Reki winces but the pain grounds him, and he exhales the breath he’s no longer holding.
“How did you get here?” Reki asks.
“Oh,” Langa blinks, pulling back from him a little. Reki thinks this isn’t the question Langa thought he might ask. “Um, someone from S. You?”
Reki opens his mouth to respond, but nothing comes out. The truth is the truth, but telling Langa a friend invited him risks opening a lot of doors he’s trying to keep closed. “It’s… a long story,” he tries, and Langa nods. A lot has happened in the months between them - a lot of long stories.
Langa’s still touching him, running his hands up and down Reki’s arms like he can barely believe he’s here, examining the ink on his forearm, the skull pin on Reki’s headband, glinting in the moonlight, the -
“Reki,” Langa gasps. “Your ear.” Reki nods, laughs nervously, but he knows Langa won’t comment on it; their friendship is like a muscle.
Suddenly Langa is all questions, moving to examine it, close enough that Reki can feel his warm exhales of breath on his neck. He doesn’t feel cold anymore, but Langa’s fingers are where they gently anchor his head so he can examine the small metal ball shining on his ear lobe. “So cool,” he murmurs. “When did you..? Did it hurt? Can I touch it?”
Reki steps away from him abruptly, already mourning the loss of Langa’s fingers. When he risks a glance at him, he can see the sadness flow into his eyes so quickly. That’s always been the difference between them - one of many, Reki hedges. Langa wears his heart on his sleeve, but could never tell you how he’s feeling. Reki knows exactly how he feels, all the time, but would never let you see it.
This is why Reki couldn’t look at him when he yelled at him in the rain - he knew that one look at Langa’s honest, devastated face would leave him yearning to reach out, smooth over the wounds, fix everything he’d ever done wrong. It’s a power Langa doesn’t know he holds over Reki, and it’s why Reki can’t bring himself to look too closely at him in class, why he drops off snacks for him in the morning before he comes in, even though they both know the anonymity is a farce.
If Reki could - if he knew that he wouldn't set back the healing process - he'd let Langa touch his piercing, caress the outer shell of his ear, pepper it with whispers and cold touches. He told Joe once that he was selfish; he still has to be, if only to protect himself.
He gives Langa the next best thing - an explanation. "It's technically a wound, Langa," he says. "And it's still pretty fresh. It needs time to heal." He watched Langa nod, accept it, and then - wildly - he can see the gears, like clockwork, turn inside Langa's head.
"Reki," he starts. He's clenching his fists tight like he wants to be clutching something - not like he's preparing to throw a punch. "Have we… had time?" He asks.
Reki can fill in the blanks. He shakes his head, and does the hardest thing he's ever done - he meets him halfway. "Give me a bit more time," he says. "A bit more time and we will." I'll be good for you, Reki thinks. I'll be whole for you. I'll have a place for you.
There's so much Reki isn't ready to say, but despite all the space still between them - the silences, the secrets - when Langa beams, it's as bright as the sun.
Maybe, Reki Kyan isn’t so fucked after all.