Chapter Text
When he was little, Kei thought everyone was like him.
Sitting in front of the television, it felt like there was a kaleidoscope of color in front of his eyes, shifting and twirling and inverting, distracting and more fascinating than whatever could possibly be going on in the program.
His mother spoke in soft pinks and roses, fuzzy along the edges like cotton candy and with the hues that made him think of warm blankets. His father was all crisp clearness, a deep, oceanic blue that felt like the shock of stepping into the freezing ocean.
And Akiteru, Akiteru was his favorite. His voice was like sunshine and clementines, sweet and tangy and filling him up with warmth, a golden yellow shot through with bronze and brown that felt like elation, like arms that held him and laughter that always made him feel like he could fly.
The first time he noticed that maybe, maybe he was different, was when he met his paternal grandfather for the first time. He was a strict mind, his voice like steel, sharp grey with jagged edges that made him quiver where he stood, tugging on his fingers and closing his eyes, although all it did was throw the colors into even sharper relief.
Later, when the children had been excused to play in the courtyard, he turned to his brother and said, “I don’t like grandpa’s color”.
Akiteru was digging through the supply shed, supposedly in search of something they could occupy themselves with, but he stopped at Kei’s words, eyebrows drawn down in a frown. “What do you mean? Like, you don’t like his shirt?”
“No, his color,” he said, emphasizing the word like that was all it would take, but all he received was a blank look. “When he talks. His voice color.”
His brother blinked slowly, studying him like he was really looking at him for the first time. “Are we playing a game?” he asked, and even though his voice wasn’t condescending, Kei could feel his cheeks burning.
“No, I’m not playing!” he said insistently. “Everyone sees it, right? The colors, when people talk. Grandpa’s are scary, and I don’t want to talk to him again.”
Akiteru put his hand on top of his head, ruffling his hair and smiling. “Yeah, you’re right, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s okay now, though. We don’t have to go back inside any time soon. Let’s see if we can find that volleyball he said was in here.”
Suitably placated by the mention of volleyball, Kei let the conversation slide away, completely forgetting his brother’s reaction until later, when they’d gone back home, and he could hear Akiteru talking to their parents when Kei was supposed to be down for his nap.
“Is there something wrong with him?” The cotton candy of his mother’s voice felt damp, weighed down by the tears he could hear her holding back. “That’s...that’s not normal, is it?”
“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Akiteru insisted, voice rising, and he was immediately shushed.
“It doesn’t seem to be bothering him much,” his father observed, voice just as pure blue as always. “Kei is still a smart boy, and I think if these...colors were hurting him, we’d know. He’s just even more special than we thought.”
His mother exhaled a shuddery sigh. “I still want to take him to see a specialist, just in case.”
Out in the hallway, Kei’s chest felt tight, his already fuzzy vision blurring further with tears, because this...this thing about him, wasn’t normal. Was making his mother cry, and his father speak in soft, placating tones. All his life, he’d loved the colors, loved having something so pretty to associate with the people he loved.
But it was bad. He needed to see a...a specialist, whatever that meant, and he probably should never have told Akiteru.
The door slid open, and his brother visibly startled at the sight of him sitting against the far wall, chewing on his lip with his cheeks damp and his hands clasped over his ears. Akiteru sat down next to him, drawing him into his arms and stroking his hair while he cried.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he reassured, and with his hands over his ears, the colors were muffled, almost like someone had put a glassy film over them and was distorting them, muting them. “I promise, Kei. I promise.”
It turns out that a specialist was a fancy name for a doctor, and his mother twisted a tissue between her pale fingers as they sat in a waiting room that was far too serious for his liking. There were no toys, no books, just chairs and tired looking people. They sat in there for what felt like forever, and even though he was bored, Kei was too nervous to ask his mother for something to do.
When they were called back, it was just like going to see any other doctor at first. They took his temperature, wrapped the weird cuff around his arm and inflated it, and measured his height or weight. The room they put them in had lots of pictures of brains in it, with different areas highlighted or shaded different colors.
He wanted to cry again. Were they going to cut his head open? Were his colors that bad?
The woman who came into the room was older than his mother, with a kind voice that was colored like blossoms in the spring, lavender and pale yellow and pastel pink. It made him like her immediately, and she didn’t say anything about cutting his head open.
Instead, she asked him about his colors.
“How long have you been seeing them?”
“Always.”
“What kind of noises make you see the colors?”
“Talking. People talking.”
She keeps writing things down on her clipboard. “Is it something you see in front of you, like you can see me and your mother, or is it something you see inside your mind, like your imagination?”
“Um. In front of me. But I can still see everyone else. It’s, um...see through?”
The doctor seems pleased with his description, and she turns in her chair to the box she carried in with her and produces a pad of paper and a box of crayons. “Kei, would you feel comfortable drawing for me?”
His tongue feels like it’s glued to the roof of his mouth, and he turns his panicked gaze to his mother. She gives him a reassuring smile, but he still makes no move to go forward and take the items from the doctor.
“I just want to see what it looks like to you,” she says, her smile soft and patient. “I can’t see the colors, so I’m really, really curious to see how pretty the world is to you. You can draw your mother’s voice first, if that makes you feel more comfortable.”
It does. Her voice is the one he sees the most, that he loves the most, so he finally gets up from his chair and shuffles forward, putting the paper on the floor and plunking down with the crayons. “These aren’t right,” he says after he opens them, a frown creasing his forehead.
Something about that makes both of them laugh, but their colors are still bright, not ashy or dark with displeasure, so at least they aren’t laughing at him.
“Just do your best,” his mother encourages, so he does. There are pinks and reds and whites, and even if it’s hard to do with crayons, he tries to make it as fluffy as possible, with just a little red at the corners and bright, sweeping arches of white cutting through the pink. He can feel their eyes on him, and it makes his shoulders tense, but he still fills the paper with cotton candy as best he can.
When he’s finished, he hands the paper to his mother first, lips pressed in a tight, nervous line and his ears hot. Her eyes are misty as she takes it from him, but there’s something like awe in her gaze as she looks at the colors sweeping over the page, bleeding off the edge of the paper and disappearing into nothing.
“Is this really what it looks like when I talk to you?” she asks, and he just nods in answer. “It’s...it’s beautiful, Kei.”
The doctor looks incredibly pleased, but a bit regretful when she takes the picture from his mother and attaches it to his clipboard. “He’s perfectly fine,” she says after another long moment of writing on her papers. “What he has is a form of synesthesia, which is when the experience of one sense triggers a matching experience in a second sense. For Kei, voices cause him to see different colors, which is called chromesthesia.”
The words are big, far too big to mean anything to him, but they make his fingers tingle and his chest feel warm. There are words for him, special words, for him and his colors.
“It’s completely harmless,” the doctor continues. “It’s possible that he may have some issues with over-stimulation when he starts school, but he’ll adjust. I want to keep an eye on him, though, if he starts getting headaches, and you’ll want to get his eyes checked, since his form of chromesthesia might be causing some mild eye strain...”
He tunes them out, letting the colors flicker in front of his eyes and their voices fade to nothing but noise. It’s harmless. He’s okay. He has chromesthesia.
Later, at home, he sits on the floor of Akiteru’s room, lip between his teeth and surrounded by almost a hundred different crayons. Even still, he can’t find his brother’s shade of yellow, so like in the doctor’s office, he just does the best he can.
“It’s called chrometesus,” he says, tongue fumbling over the too-long word that he can’t completely remember. “The doctor says it’s not hurting me.”
“I knew you were just special,” Akiteru says proudly from his place on the bed, his eyes bright and his color sparkling like fizzing bubbles with excitement. “This is so cool.”
Smudging gold into the bright yellow, Kei feels like it’s as good as it’s going to get, and he hands the paper to his brother, who positively lights up.
“Kei, that’s awesome!” he crows, holding the paper up, lips stretched in a wide smile. “I’m...my voice is so bright! Like the sun or something!”
Oh.
Kei finds himself returning the giddy smile, his fingers dirty and smudged with crayon. “Yeah. Yeah, just like the sun.”
That summer, they were even more inseparable than normal. Akiteru buys him a sketchbook and some special colored pencils that blend really nicely, letting him do a better job of creating the colors he needs. They sit at the park and listen, and Kei draws swirls of purple and jagged oranges and bright pulses of green. On the fridge, there are three pictures, one for everyone in his family done with his new pencils, and the first picture he did for Akiteru in crayon is proudly hung over his bed.
And Kei feels like magic, like he’s special.
But then he starts elementary school.
And it’s loud, cluttered with too many voices and too many colors. His new glasses make it easier to see through the swirl, but it’s still there, making him feel nauseous and out of touch. On the first day, he spends lunch in the bathroom, his hands over his ears and his eyes squeezed tightly shut. It’s just so much, and when he doesn’t answer the teacher’s questions because he can’t decipher them, it just makes them angry.
Everything is jumbled and awful and he cries when his mother picks him up, saying he never wants to go back.
She walks him home, her hand tight around his, valiantly ignoring how he flinches and clutches her tighter every time someone walks by them, laughing loudly or talking on their phone. When they get home, she takes him straight upstairs, wrapping him up tight in his favorite blanket and rocking him in her lap, his head tucked under her chin and the house utterly, completely silent.
Something about the blanket helps, makes him feel like there’s less to try and focus on, and the quiet is so nice he almost falls asleep, the shaking gradually leaving his limbs as he relaxes, sagging against her as she wipes the tears from his face.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says, speaking so softly that the cotton candy is a distant color, just barely a pink filter behind his eyelids. “You’re so smart, Kei, and we’re going to figure this out.”
His parents have a conversation in the kitchen when his dad comes home, and Akiteru distracts him by playing Monster Hunter with the volume turned off. Eventually, they come out, his father flipping his phone closed and both of them smiling like nothing is wrong.
The next day is just as bad, but his parents show up half-way through the day, making him elated and eager to wash out the disgusting swirl of colors with their crisp blues and soft pinks. But they’re here to talk to his teacher, not him, and recess goes extra-long that day because whatever it is they’re discussing takes a long time. At the end, he gets called in, and even though his teacher’s expression is pinched and confused, she’s clearly been persuaded by whatever his serious father and determined mother had to say.
“You’re going to start eating your lunch in the staff room,” she says. “And even though I can’t let you leave class, if you start...” she fumbles, unsure of what word to say, “uh, if you need a break during recess, you can come inside and lay down. Just come straight to me, okay?”
Kei nods, and something about being treated different from his classmates makes him feel less special and more like a nuisance, but he’s just so happy to get away from the noise that he doesn’t linger on it.
After that, things get better. With the opportunity to clear his head several times during the day, he starts to learn how to separate all the colors, let them flicker from one to another when his classmates are having discussions, and how to seek out particular colors so he can better pay attention in class. His teacher’s voice is a muddy violet, like a flower that got knocked from it’s stem into the dirt during a rainstorm, so it’s harder to find than something more vibrant. But his mother was right; he’s smart, and he learns.
He stops skipping lunch and eats with the rest of the kids, blinking through the rainbows and kaleidoscopes and colors that flicker by so fast they’re almost nothing but a blur. It’s nicer, he finds, to let them flicker like that than to let them layer up, because then it gets hard to see, his head hurts, and he can’t pay attention. The flicker is annoying, like a film that keeps skipping, but by the end of his first year, he’s gotten used to it.
Things at home keep getting better, too. Akiteru takes it upon himself to start teaching Kei volleyball officially, something he’d been nagging him to do for as long as he’s been old enough to toddle after him, a volleyball clutched in his chubby fingers as he calls “K’iteru, K’iteru, ball! Ball!”. The focus is great for him, and his brother is the captain of his middle school team, so who better to teach him?
His parents, too, accept the changes that school has brought with surprising grace. One day when he gets home, he sees a whiteboard on the wall next to the door, three large, colored magnets on the bottom and Kei Feels scrawled across the top in his mother’s perfect scrawl. There’s a box drawn underneath the words, and he has no clue what it means until they all sit down for a family meeting after supper.
“I talked to Dr. Inoue today, and she gave me a great idea. We all know that school is tough on Kei sometimes, but he has trouble telling us about it.”
Kei scowls, cheeks hot and his stomach an unhappy knot, but it’s true. Even after that first day when his mother brought him home, he’s had trouble telling his family when it’s too loud, when school was especially tough due to group activities or a fight at lunch.
“So the board by the door is going to be our cheat sheet,” she says, smiling at Kei. “The magnets are like a stop light. If the green magnet is in the box, that means Kei had a good day, and we don’t have to worry about him. We can talk like normal. The yellow magnet means we need to keep our voices down, and give Kei space, but we can still talk to him and eat dinner together. The red magnet is the most serious, because it’s the “stop” magnet. That means Kei had a very bad day, and we need to not talk to him and let him have quiet time in his room and eat his dinner there.”
His father is looking at her in a way that makes him remember fairy tales, and the way the prince and the princess always fall in love at the end. He doesn’t think his parents ever stopped the falling in love part. “That’s a really smart idea,” he says, lips curling into a small smile, and his mother beams at him.
“I have a question!” Akiteru says, raising his hand. “What about volleyball?”
“That’s up to Kei,” his mother says, and three pairs of eyes fall to him.
“Um,” he says, pulling at his fingers. “I...I think it’s okay on green and yellow, but not red.” It feels like he always wants to play, but if he’s having a “red” day, his head hurts too bad and he misses the ball a lot, which just makes him upset and frustrated.
“Perfect!” his mother exclaims, leaning down to ruffle his hair and kiss his forehead. “So the new house rule is that you have to check the Kei chart whenever you come in the door, because he’s allowed to change it whenever he wants.”
And even though it takes some getting used to, he soon learns to love the magnets and his chart. Now that the rules have been set, he feels...more secure, like he isn’t going to get in trouble for needing that time to himself. Most days are green or yellow, and as his first year continues on, the red days get fewer and far between.
And on the first day of his second year, he makes a friend.
Satoshi is loud and colored red like fire, crackling with blues and whites like his teacher says fire gets when it’s really, really hot. Kei likes that his colors are so vibrant that they eclipse everything else, and when they sit next to each other in class, he can see the teacher’s muddy violet through the flames, throwing it into an almost shadowy relief that he can focus on more easily.
They play after school sometimes, running through the park and playing with sticks like swords, climbing trees and scraping their knees, and Kei can’t remember the last time he had so much fun with someone who wasn’t his brother.
He takes out the nice, rough paper and his special pencils for the first time since that summer before he started school, working until his glasses are smudged and his mother laughingly cleans red lines off his cheeks from where he rested his head on his hand while he worked. She gives him a folder from his father’s office to carry it to school in, and he’s never been so excited to get to school.
Throwing his backpack in his seat, he rummages around until he finds the cool plastic of the folder, shifting from foot to foot as he waits for Satoshi to come running in, the cowlick in his hair as stubborn as ever and his eyes bright.
“Kei! Good morning!” he says happily, moving to his own desk and extending his hand for a high-five, their customary greeting. “What’s that?”
Kei hands over the file folder, his expression equal parts excited and nervous. “I made something for you.”
Satoshi pulls out the picture, blinking at the bright red and smears of white and blue, dancing across the page. “What is it?”
“That’s your voice,” he says, proud and practically quivering with the fact that he’s sharing this with someone, someone who he knows will find it just as cool as Akiteru did the first time he drew his colors. “I have chro-mo-the-sia,” (he has to take extra care to pronounce the word correctly) “which means that when people talk, I see colors. Everyone has a special color, and this is yours.”
He was expecting excitement, he was expecting a barrage of questions from his curious friend, but instead, all he gets is a blank look, Satoshi’s hands slowly lowering so he’s no longer looking at the paper.
“You see colors when people talk?”
Kei nods, and he’s still smiling, even though he can feel it starting to wilt.
“That’s...”
Something in Satoshi’s expression twists, and Kei’s lungs are suddenly so tight he can’t breath, his stomach lurching in a way that makes him taste bile in the back of his throat.
“...weird.”
When he gets home, he throws the red magnet so hard against the white board that it breaks, and he sobs in the empty house to the memory of a flame-covered piece of paper lying crumpled in the trashcan of their classroom.
After that, things are different.
His classmates whisper about him when they think he isn’t listening, and Satoshi doesn’t talk to him anymore. He switches seats with one of the girls, and pointedly looks away from him, mouth in a hard line and his shoulders tense. They think he’s weird, they think he’s making it up for attention or...or something, but they all stop talking to him, and the absence of their voices after so long is so bizarre that he struggles to re-adjust.
At home, he uses the red magnet (taped back together by his mother when she got home from the store and found it laying in the entryway) every day, hiding in his room and avoiding his family. There’s nothing special about him, nothing cool. He’s just the weird kid who sees colors, and no one wants to be his friend.
Akiteru still stubbornly makes him practice, ignoring the rules and the red magnet to bring him outside sometimes, tossing the ball to him for Kei to practice his recieves and his blocks. They don’t talk, but being together is like a balm to his heart, and Akiteru lets him spend time in his room too, usually just curled up on the bed reading but sometimes playing games together. It’s nice, and even though his parents clearly have no idea what to do about it, they try their best too.
And even though he was convinced that the hurt would never go away, that he’d never be able to watch Satoshi leave with the other kids and leave him behind, it eventually dulls. Akiteru gives him a pair of headphones and his old MP3 player, loading it up with classical music that doesn’t trigger his colors and lets him hide from the whispers, lets him act aloof, like the plastic covering his ears is armor and he’s much more interested in what he’s listening to than anyone else.
His brother is the only friend he needs, anyways. If his classmates aren’t going to make an effort to understand his colors, then he isn’t going to make an effort to get to know any of them either. He gets a reputation as not just the weird color kid, but as the kid with the headphones, the one who doesn’t talk to anyone else unless he’s sneering something mean and cutting. Kei never actively goes after anyone, but if he thinks anyone is getting too close, he cuts them down.
It stays the same as the school years progress. He’s smart, and his teachers are always happy to report back to his parents how intelligent he is, but they also mention that he’s distant, and makes no effort to befriend his classmates. They say he works poorly with others, and has a bit of a mean streak.
His mother sits ramrod straight, her eyes cold, and he hates the gray that has started spreading through her cotton candy like a disease. “But is he causing any problems?”
The teachers always hesitate, looking at the sullen boy sitting next to his mother with his arms crossed and his headphones slung around his neck, and sigh. “No.”
When they leave, she hugs him tight, and sometimes she cries and sometimes she doesn’t, but he never pushes her away. Instead, he pretends that he’s five again, when the colors were wonderful and all he wanted to do was share them with people, and curls into her until his glasses press uncomfortably against his face and he has to move.
The winter of his third year of elementary school, he meets Yamaguchi Tadashi.
It’s autumn, starting to edge into winter, and Kei just wants to get to school as quickly as possible. This time of year, it seems like he’s always too cold no matter how many layers he puts on, so the sooner he can get into the school building, the better.
But just outside the school gate, he sees three boys by one of the trees, one of them with their back against the bark and the other two standing in front of him.
“Why are your clothes so old?” The voice is deceptively bright, a kind of pink that makes him think of candy that’s so sweet that you gag on it. “They look funny.”
“And they’re dirty, too.” This voice matches the words, at least; a gross, muddy brown shot through with pea green and underlaid with black, like a swamp. “Even your face is dirty. Why are you so dirty, Yamaguchi?”
The third boy looks like he would sink further back into the tree if he could. “I-I’m not-”
Even though he only manages a couple stuttering words, it’s enough. His colors are beautiful, a soft green that makes him think of moss, underlaid with a warm brown like sunshine in the forest, casting a dappled pattern like light through the leaves. He can almost taste the green, smell the lushness of rain and soil, and he starts walking before he can stop himself.
“You’ve got dirt all over your face,” the pink voice says, reaching out to rub his hand hard against the forest voice’s (Yamaguchi, he reminds himself) cheek and across his nose.
The whole scene rankles, and he stands up as straight as he can when he approaches, hands in his pockets and his eyes narrowed. Three sets of eyes snap to him, and even though he hasn’t hit his growth spurt yet (Akiteru says he hopes he shoots up like a weed), he’s still tall enough to look down on them.
“Pathetic,” he sneers, jerking his head towards the gate in an obvious indication that they should get lost. And clearly, his reputation as weird and mean precedes him, because they glower and mumble unhappy little bursts of color under their breath, but they move on.
Kei turns to Yamaguchi, and his cheek is red from the rough handling of the pink voiced boy and his eyes are damp, but then the boy manages to pull a smile from somewhere inside him, and it’s the first time one of his classmates has smiled at him in years.
“Thanks,” he says, voice soft, but it’s still enough to paint that green across his vision, lighter but still just as wonderful as that first glimpse he caught. As the irritated red begins to fade from his cheek, Kei notices that it wasn’t dirt on his face, but rather freckles, a generous spray of them across his nose and cheekbones. “I’m...I’m sorry to trouble you.”
The words sound rehearsed, like they’re something Yamaguchi has to say a lot, and Kei just shrugs in response. “I don’t like bullies.”
Kei doesn’t consider himself a bully. He’s mean to pretty much everyone, and only when they deserve it. He’d never seek someone out and do what those two were doing, which was being purposely cruel.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” Yamaguchi continues. “I-I just moved here, so I’m still learning who everyone is.”
“I’m Tsukishima Kei, from class three,” he said, looking at his feet and the dirt on his sneakers.
“Yamaguchi Tadashi, class one,” the other boy answers, that smile still on his face. “I guess that explains why we’ve never met, huh?”
“Yeah.”
The awkward, one word answers don’t seem to bother the other boy, and he follows happily when Kei heads in the direction of the gate; the warning bell just rung, so they need to hurry. Changing from their outdoor shoes to their indoor shoes, they head down the main hallway until it’s time for them to part ways.
“Thanks again, Tsukki!” Yamaguchi says, and Kei likes the way the sharp syllables look shaded against the moss green of his voice, so he doesn’t bother to correct him. Just nods and goes to his classroom, actively having to bite down a smile.
Yamaguchi latches onto him immediately, waiting at the school gate for him every morning and afternoon so they can walk together. He does most of the talking, but Kei is okay with that. Even though they’re soft, Yamaguchi’s colors are easy to focus on, like laying down in a clearing in the middle of the forest and just letting the calm wash over you. It’s nice to have something so effortless to filter everything out with, and part of him wishes Yamaguchi was in his class.
He learns that Yamaguchi moved to Miyagi from Tokyo with his mother, and that he’s never met his father and his mother works three jobs and is never home. All his clothes are second-hand, given to them by the neighbors in their apartment complex or by people at his mother’s jobs. They moved around a lot, but his mother seems happy here, even though he never sees her. Yamaguchi likes action figures and anime, and most importantly, volleyball.
He also made the mistake of telling Kei that he mostly lived off of instant noodles and dinner bentos from the corner store their apartment is above (since his mother was never home to cook), and he just couldn’t let that stand.
“I don’t want to impose,” Yamaguchi sputtered, following Kei as they turned down the street that lead towards the blond’s house, not his friend’s apartment.
“I told you already, it’s fine,” Kei insisted, scowling at the other boy. “Stop whining.”
Yamaguchi sighed, giving him a resigned smile. “Sorry, Tsukki.”
All his life, Kei hadn’t thought his house was that impressive, but Yamaguchi looks up at it like he’s entering a palace and not a house, and that makes him wonder. His dad is a lawyer, a very well known one, and they’d always had money for clothes and toys and special treats. Their house was two stories, with extra rooms for his father’s office and his mother’s sewing room in addition to their bedrooms, and maybe that was more than what most people had.
Toeing their shoes off in the entryway, Kei immediately wants to go find his mother, but is stopped by a curious question from Yamaguchi. “What’s that?”
His gaze snaps to the “Kei Feels” chart and the three little magnets and his blood runs cold. Oh god. He’d been so focused on getting Yamaguchi to his house that he’d completely forgotten about the chart, about the pictures that still adorned their fridge, and he wanted to curl up and die.
“It-It’s nothing,” he says, and it’s probably the first time he’s ever been anything less than cool, calm, and collected around Yamaguchi, which would explain why the other was looking at him so intently. “Just something from when I was little that mom hasn’t taken down yet.”
Yamaguchi looks like it’s literally going to kill him not to know, but he just nods, whispering “pardon the intrusion” before following Kei into the kitchen where his mom is sitting at the table, flipping through a magazine.
“Mom,” he says, and she practically jumps out of her skin when she sees a second boy standing in the kitchen instead of just one. “This is Yamaguchi Tadashi, from school. He’s eating dinner with us tonight.”
She just stares at them, her hands frozen in the act of turning the page of her magazine as her eyes dart back and forth between her son, looking stubborn and maybe a touch nervous, to the fretful looking boy standing next to him, right at his elbow like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“Of course,” she says, and her colors blossom, going from ashy grey-pink to a bright bubblegum color that almost makes Kei start to cry, because it’s been so long since he’s seen it that he’d almost forgotten that her colors could be this bright and beautiful. “Of course Yamaguchi can stay. I was going to make pork curry; it’s Kei’s favorite.”
“I like pork curry,” Yamaguchi says shyly, and Kei can practically see his mother melt. She misses her sweet boy, he knows, and it makes a small, unknown part of him glad that Yamaguchi can fill that gap he left.
“Why don’t you two go play in your room? I’ll bring up some snacks in a little bit.”
It’s probably good that Akiteru has friends over more often than he does, because she’s being more normal about it than he expected. He just nods, and Yamaguchi gives her a polite bow before following him up the stairs to his room. It’s kind of messy, with stacks of CDs littering his desk and his shelves cluttered with dinosaur figures from his trips to the museum with Akiteru that summer.
“Your room is so big!” Yamaguchi says, walking around and taking it all in, picking up a few of the dinosaurs and smiling. “I didn’t know you liked dinosaurs, Tsukki!”
Kei looks away, picking up his volleyball just to have something to do with his hands. “They’re okay, I guess,” he mutters. “Our house got renovated this summer, so Akiteru took me to the museum a lot so we could get out of the house. One of dad’s clients gave him season passes as a gift, so it was free.”
Yamaguchi sits the figure down, his smile soft and sweet. “It sounds like you really like your brother,” he said, almost wistfully. “Which dinosaur is your favorite?”
That’s a very serious question. Kei considers it, tossing his ball to Yamaguchi to approach the shelves himself, studying the figurines intently before picking up a small one. “I like compsognathus,” he says eventually, handing the figure to Yamaguchi. “They’re really small, but they’re also carnivorous. They hunt in packs, and together, they can take out dinosaurs way bigger than them.”
“Comp-so-ganthus,” Yamaguchi says, stumbling, and ultimately getting it wrong. “Um. Compy?”
“Why do you have to shorten everything?” Kei grumbles, but it’s cute.
“How small were they?”
“Uh, like, dog sized?”
Yamaguchi looks thrilled with this answer. “And they’re still really good hunters? That’s so cool!”
Kei is looking at the ground again, but there’s something...something like hope unfurling in his chest. “You could come with us sometime, if you wanted. Technically dad got four passes, Akiteru and I have just been using two, so it. It wouldn’t be a hassle.”
The look on Yamaguchi’s face is priceless, even if it is a bit silly due to the fact that he’s holding the compy figure in one hand and the volleyball under his arm.
“That would be awesome.”
And Kei chances a smile.