Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Kazuya wakes up in the morning to Sawamura humming one of Second Year’s songs in the lowest part of his register. He’s tracing the outline of Kazuya’s pendant with the tips of two fingers, repeatedly brushing the same skin with his short-cropped nails.

The amber is hot, like the ceramic mug holding a fresh cup of coffee, and Kazuya’s first flickering thought, before he can rationalize it away with logic, is that around Sawamura, it’s always thrumming a little more warm.

Kazuya keeps his eyes closed as he takes stock of himself: They’re on the floor in his living room, and his arm is asleep underneath the weight of Sawamura’s head. His feet are cold and his back hurts and his mouth still feels kiss-swollen from the eternity he’d spent exploring Sawamura’s mouth last night, teaching him how to really kiss.

“Is that your favorite Second Year song?” Kazuya asks, voice morning-rough. He feels Sawamura start, and then a sudden chill as Sawamura sits up beside him, facing him, abandoning the pendant and spreading his hand flat on Kazuya’s belly.

“You’re awake!” Sawamura says, and Kazuya opens his eyes. He’s still wearing his glasses, and so the world comes into immediate focus, Sawamura the first thing he sees as he looks down at Kazuya with a ready smile.

“It’s still creepy,” Kazuya tells him, but self-preservation dulled by the last vestiges of sleep, he reaches up to cup Sawamura’s cheek, like Sawamura had cupped that actress’s face in his drama, just to see how it feels. Sawamura’s cheek is soft and smooth. “The way you’re looming like that.”

“I can see you better like this.” Sawamura presses his cheek into Kazuya’s hand, encouraging the touch. “It’s not my fault you’re very pretty, Miyuki Kazuya!”

“Too early for shouting.”

Kazuya trails up Sawamura’s face to brush his shorter bangs away from his forehead, missing the weight of Sawamura’s shaggier hair even if he enjoys the unfettered glimpse of his eyes, glinting gold in the early morning light. He smooths along Sawamura’s hairline, and traces it back down to the shell of his ear. When Sawamura shudders, Kazuya quirks the corner of his lips into a smirk and goes to drop his hand again, his chest tight and uncomfortable at the intimacy of the moment.

Sawamura whimpers in protest, curling his fingers into Kazuya’s chest, gathering a handful of his shirt. “Don’t stop!”

“I don’t really like being told what to do,” Kazuya replies, but he scratches back behind Sawamura’s ear anyway, burrowing his fingers into the softest, thickest part of Sawamura’s hair at the crown, and Sawamura lets out a low growl of satisfaction that vibrates down Kazuya’s arm with a certain musicality of its own.

“More,” Sawamura says, kneading at his chest, his eyes closing halfway as he continues to look Kazuya. “Touch me more!”

“So demanding,” Kazuya murmurs, because even with his heart in his throat he can’t help but tease. “Why should I?”

Sawamura grins at him, unrepentant. His eyes catch the sunlight and hold it. “Because I like it,” he says. “And it’s not like you have anything better to do!”

“I could be kissing you,” Kazuya says, pulling slightly at the handful of hair in his hands.

Tilting his head, Sawamura slides his hand up from Kazuya’s belly to curve around the back of his neck, until he’s slipping his fingers into Kazuya’s hair. “Isn’t this nice too?” he asks, as he scratches at Kazuya’s scalp.

And Kazuya might have had to teach Sawamura how to kiss, but Sawamura’s teaching him how to do this: how to share something simple without it going anywhere, without any goal at all beyond making the easy moment stretch.

“Yeah,” Kazuya admits, and this isn’t what he signed up for at all. He’d anticipated six months of tolerating someone and spending the least amount of time he could get away with on ‘Trial Marriage’ while his band promoted their album.

Not whatever this is, with Sawamura. Kazuya never gets attached, because he doesn’t have the energy or the time, and he’s sure this will only end in disaster, like every other shell of a relationship he’s ever had.

Something about Sawamura makes him ignore his gut instinct to back away. A familiarity Sawamura shouldn’t have, and a safety that Kazuya can’t explain. It’s almost like he’s known Sawamura for much longer than he has.

There’s a flash, then, at the back of his mind, of a boy holding a baseball, sitting next to Kazuya with his mitt on stone steps, of offering him the ice cream that would eventually melt between his fingers, of—

“Kazuya?” Sawamura says, and it’s gone. Kazuya blinks to clear away the ache behind his eyes. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Kazuya exhales, and then tugs down on Sawamura, bringing him sprawling down to his chest at an awkward angle, heavy and warm. “Do you have to work today?”

“Not until two,” Sawamura replies, adjusting his legs so that one dips between Kazuya’s and the other is on the outside, their hips almost aligned. “I have a table-read for my new drama—”

Suddenly, Sawamura pushes himself back up onto his knees, dislodging Kazuya’s hand from his hair and turning to stare at the door.

It takes another thirty seconds before Kazuya hears the footsteps, and he stares up at Sawamura skeptically as Sawamura starts to make a low growling noise in the back of his throat until the footsteps have passed by completely, headed to the apartment next door.

“Sawamura,” Kazuya says, fighting back a laugh, “were you going to start barking if someone knocked on my door?”

“No!” Sawamura says, but he doesn’t sound sure about it at all. His cheeks flush pink, and there it is, that blush that’s surprisingly hard to draw out of him.

Kazuya relishes it. “Protecting me in my home?” He settles a hand on the flat of Sawamura’s thigh, and, on a whim, scratches at the denim with his nails. “Such a good boy.”

“Miyuki Kazuya,” Sawamura says, “you’re very bad at flirting!”

“You’re here anyway though, aren’t you?” Kazuya replies, and laughs when Sawamura ducks down, tucking his face under the curve of Kazuya’s jaw, and licks.

Sawamura leaves a little after one, and Kazuya retreats to his shower, washing himself off and making sure to scrub extra at his neck, where Sawamura had spent the rest of the morning focusing a considerable amount of his attention, licking and biting until the skin had felt hyper-sensitive to even the slightest brush of air.

Picking up his hairbrush, he casts a glancing look in the mirror, and stops, dropping the brush back to the countertop, his eyes fixed on his blurry reflection in shock.

His dog pendant, amorphous without his glasses, is glowing, pulsing to a steady beat, those tiny hairline threads of gold he’d noticed before spilling out light from the center. It’s hot, far too hot, against his skin, and the only reason he hadn’t noticed before was the lingering heat from his shower.

Kazuya brings a hand up to cup around it, and the light leaks through the small gaps between his fingers.

”It’s a protection charm,” Sawamura had said, and Kazuya remembers spending hours at the old baseball field near his house, walking home past the shrine. The old priest often waved at him from the top step, his hair pushed back from his face and a biwa in his lap, and sometimes, Kazuya would stop and—

It burns and burns, pain flaring up so powerful that it arcs down Kazuya’s spine, but this time, Kazuya pushes through it, wanting to see the rest, wanting to fill the holes in his memory more than he wants to avoid the fire.

There’s a dog, sitting on the pitcher’s mound with a baseball in his mouth, just like in Sawamura’s drawing but in full color. The grass is green, and the dog is a chocolate brown, furry and matted with mud on its paws, and… Then nothing but darkness as Kazuya braces himself on the edge of the counter, hip digging into the granite.

He stands there and breathes, in and out and in again, until the pain dulls to something manageable enough for him to attempt to open his eyes again. When he does, the first thing he sees is his own reflection again, one hand clutching his pendant and his teeth digging into his lower lip hard enough that he’s surprised not to have drawn blood.

Kazuya makes himself let go of the pendant, opening up his hand to reveal it again to the light. It isn’t glowing, now, and he fumbles for his glasses, shoving them onto his face and lifting his pendant up so he can observe it.

There isn’t any gold running through it at all, and it looks the same as it always has, trapped there between Kazuya’s fingers for closer inspection.

Kazuya’s heart is still beating too fast, and he’s still dizzy. His stomach and head both ache, both of them singed from an imaginary fire. In the mirror, his wet hair hangs lank on his flushed face, and he can see his hands are shaking.

He looks down at his pendant again. No glowing. No gold. Just ordinary amber, carved into the shape of a sitting dog.

“Maybe I do need to get more sleep,” Kazuya says aloud, to the empty bathroom. His voice reverberates from the tiled walls, and with determination, he picks up his hairbrush, ignoring the insistent warning pushing at his ribs from the inside that tells him this is more than his imagination.

“So,” Kuramochi says, as Kazuya is getting into the passenger side of his car, careful not to jolt the honey cake he’d packed carefully in a plastic container for transport.

Kazuya waits until he’s fastened his seat belt to answer. “So…?”

His phone vibrates. It’s Sawamura, probably sending Kazuya pictures of his lunch or some other mundane thing, like he does at least four times a day. Kazuya will reply later, when Kuramochi can’t see him.

“Want to tell me why Sawamura Eijun was photographed exiting your apartment building in the morning yesterday?” Kuramochi asks.

“You’re the one that said I should talk to him when there aren’t any cameras,” Kazuya replies, settling the cake on his lap before pointedly checking his watch. They’d told Kuramochi’s mom that they’d be at her house by four, and it’s nearly three-thirty.

With a sigh, Kuramochi puts the car into drive, taking Kazuya’s hint. “The tabloids are having a field day. They can’t decide if it’s true love or a publicity stunt.” He snickers. “They’ve yet to come to the galaxy brain conclusion that it’s both.”

“Between all the dramas you watch and all the junk-press you read, it’s amazing you find time to do anything else?”

“I multitask,” Kuramochi says. “Cardio is boring without dramas.” He shifts the car up a gear as he speeds up on the long stretch of nearly empty highway. “Was it a good date?”

“It wasn’t a date.” Kazuya knows what Kuramochi is fishing for, but he’s not going to go out of his way to make it easy for him. Instead, he turns on Kuramochi’s digital radio, flipping through stations until he gets to an American rock station that’s playing the ‘60s music Kazuya’s mother had liked. “Sawamura had no opinions on my desk chair, if that’s what you were wondering.” Kazuya smirks. “And he was absolutely horrified that you put your feet up on my tansu. That means he’s a hundred percent more welcome than you are to come over again.”

Grunting impatiently, Kuramochi sneaks a look at Kazuya out of the corner of his eye. “Are you guys seeing each other officially now, or what?”

“We’re married officially,” Kazuya replies, prevaricating, tapping his toe to the beat of the Elvis song that’s playing, tinny, through Kuramochi’s shitty car speakers. “You were there, remember?”

Kuramochi sucks his teeth, annoyed. “You don’t invite people over to your place, Miyuki.”

“That’s because you assholes just show up. Invitations aren’t a thing I have to worry about, apparently.”

“Yeah, but that’s us,” Kuramochi says. “You’ve known us since high school. You’ve only known Sawamura like, what, three weeks? Four?” He slaps his steering wheel for emphasis. “That’s like five minutes in Miyuki-time. In the interview your ex gave, he said he’d only ever been to your apartment three times, and you were fucking him for like, a year.”

“He snored. I liked it better when I could leave.” Kazuya slams his head back against the headrest. “Why are you so invested in this? You’ve never had an opinion about who I dated before.”

“That’s because your version of dating has always been more like long-term fuckbuddies. Sawamura came right outta left field! It’s like you’ve got your first actual boyfriend or some shit,” Kuramochi says. “My best friend is all grown up and playing nice on reality television and having conversations with boys he likes instead of just blowing them in the bathroom and then deleting their numbers from his phone. It’s meaningful.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

Kazuya licks his lips. “I… don’t know what else there is.” He blinks his dry eyes to moisten them. It doesn’t really work. “I feel like I’ve known him a long time, or something. I don’t know. It’s weird, how familiar he is.”

“It’s just like in ‘Letters from Across the World’,” Kuramochi says. “Your eyes met across a crowded room—”

“Not like that,” Kazuya says. “I thought, at first, it was because I didn’t remember meeting him at the bar, but…” He shrugs. “It’s probably just his personality. He’s overly friendly.” ”I forget that I have to act like a person sometimes.”

“You need more friendly people in your life,” is Kuramochi’s decisive reply. “Although I worry about that guy. I saw the video you tweeted. He’s been your fan a long time, so I’m deeply concerned there’s something wrong with him.”

“He just knows talent when he hears it.” Kazuya thinks back to the look in Sawamura’s eyes in that first interview clip, bright and hopeful and determined as he blurted out how much he admired Kazuya. “He asked me to play piano for him.”

“Wow, you serenaded him?” Kuramochi taunts. “Someone call the CIRO, we have an imposter on our hands.”

“Not really. I played him Rachmaninov,” Kazuya replies. “And he cried.”

“That sounds more legit. I told you that shit was depressing,” Kuramochi says. “It’s never brought me to tears, though.”

“He told me… I played it like someone else,” Kazuya says. He reaches up and touches his pendant. “Exactly the same.” He laughs. “The only person I’ve ever sounded like is my mother.”

“It’s not like Sawamura ever knew your mom,” Kuramochi replies. “Hell, I never even knew your mom, ‘cause we didn’t meet until we were twelve, right?” He takes the exit leading to his childhood home, less than a kilometer from Kazuya’s. “Maybe he doesn’t have the ear for really differentiating between performers.”

“Maybe,” Kazuya replies, but he doubts it, because though Sawamura doesn’t play the piano very well, Kazuya knows he can hear the nuances from the way he speaks about music, and the way he’d sounded so absolutely sure about Kazuya’s sound.

Kuramochi’s mother is watering the flowers potted on the front step when Kuramochi pushes open the gate. She stops the hose, twisting the spout closed, and smiles at them in turn. “Kazuya, is that honey cake?”

“I finally tried out the recipe,” Kazuya says. “You’ll have to taste it and tell me what you think.”

“I’d be happy to,” she says, dropping the hose and reaching out to take the cake from him. She looks at Kuramochi. “Youichi, could you roll the hose back up for me?”

“You only invite me home to do chores,” Kuramochi complains, but he picks up the hose anyway, already starting to wind it around his arm.

“That’s what I had children for,” she says. “You should take a piece of this to your father, Kazuya. Honey cake is his favorite, if I recall correctly.”

“He probably isn’t home,” Kazuya replies.

“You still have a key to the old house, right?” Kuramochi’s mom asks, turning around to head back into the house. “It isn’t that long a walk, and you could leave it on the counter as a surprise.”

Kazuya gives her back a suspicious look as he follows her into the house. “You’ve been talking to him.”

“Well, yes,” she admits, setting the cake on the kitchen table. “We still talk occasionally.” She raises her eyebrows at him, in a very Kuramochi expression. “He mentioned he’d spoken to you recently, about his project to clean out the basement.”

“He wants me to take a look through some of Mom’s boxes. I don’t know how long it’s going to take so I’ve been putting it off.”

“And you don’t want to do it,” she surmises.

“And I don’t want to do it,” Kazuya agrees, flexing his fingers. “Do you need help with dinner?”

“Not tonight. You can keep me company while I work, though. Tell me about filming your show.”

Kazuya groans. “Please tell me you haven’t been watching it.”

“As if I’d miss it, sweetheart. Especially now that Youichi’s told me you got paired off with the boy you were pining after the last time I saw you.”

“I don’t pine,” Kazuya replies. “Can’t I keep you company by playing something, instead?”

She laughs, loudly, and then, because she’s an angel sometimes, allows Kazuya to slip away from the conversation. “The piano’s ready for you. I had it tuned last week.”

“Perfect,” Kazuya says, and he kisses Kuramochi’s mother on the cheek, making her grin.

After dinner, though, she does cut off a thick piece of the honey cake and put it onto a plate, wrapping it carefully in paper. When Youichi starts to play video games with his youngest brother, she gives Kazuya an arch look. “Ready to take a walk?”

“Fine, fine,” Kazuya says, after he pulls out his wallet, opening his change purse to check and make sure the key to his dad’s house is still there amongst the few scattered coins.

He picks up the cake and heads out the side door instead of the front one, intending to take the shortcut through the small forest that backs onto Kuramochi’s house and separates it from the baseball field.

He skirts around the field to the main street that leads down to his childhood house, walking quickly past the diamond. A part of him is afraid if he looks at it too long, he’ll see a dog sitting on the mound, and he doesn’t want to tempt fate like that, when he’s been seeing so many other things lately.

Upheaval, Kazuya remembers, from the mandatory counseling sessions he’d attended from age ten to age fifteen, had always been one of his weaknesses. In the wake of everything that’s been going on in his life over the past few months, he’s been slipping back into old habits, imagining things that aren’t there. At least this time, he knows better than to mention it to anyone else.

He keeps his eyes on his shoes and on the newly re-paved asphalt until he’s clear of the field. When he looks up, though, he finds himself walking past the entrance to the old shrine, marked by a single thick old ginko tree with shime paper decorated rope, and carefully tended orchids, white, growing up beside a stump and the small, handmade sign by the steps.

Kazuya comes to a stop, and turns to look up the narrow, high stone steps, the cake on its plate trembling along with his hands.

He hasn’t walked past this shrine in years. His mother liked to bring him here, when he was very small, and she’d sit in one of the small rest areas and write in her journal while Kazuya pushed through the grass in search of ladybugs. Kazuya had given this place a wide berth, when he’d been in middle and high school, instinctively wanting to avoid it. And…

He takes the first step, then the second, ascending slowly, looking around as the trees thin the higher he climbs. At the top of the stairway, there’s a long stone landing leading to another set of steps up to the actual shrine, and Kazuya’s mouth goes dry.

They are the steps from his fractured memories, and as Kazuya approaches them, he remembers the crack in the third step under his fingertips, and the feeling of a warm head on his lap, muddy fur rubbing against his belly. His breath hitches as an urgent swell of Bartok, ‘Piano Concerto No. 3 in E major’, rises in him, only the cake keeping him from playing a phantom piano with his right hand against his hip to calm his nerves.

“Miyuki Kazuya?” asks a voice from the top of the second flight of steps, and Kazuya looks up, tearing his gaze from that long crack in the stone to look at the priest staring down at him from above. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” Kazuya says. “You recognize me?”

“Aren’t you famous now, young man?” the priest replies. He smiles. “It’s a bit late to be here, isn’t it?”

“I was walking to my father’s house and I…” He grips the plate tighter, and the paper Kuramochi’s mother had wrapped the cake in crinkles under the pressure. “I remembered it had been a while.”

“It has,” the old priest says. “I haven’t seen you since you were a little thing. I can’t blame you, after how they found you.”

Kazuya remembers screaming, remembers his father trying to grab his shoulders, remembers refusing to let go of the pendant in his hand despite how it dug into his palm, and burned, even when the paramedics had tried to take it from him. “Yeah,” he says. “Not the best memory.”

The priest makes a thoughtful, understanding noise. “You should head home, though; I’m about to lock up the gates.” He smiles, nodding in farewell, and Kazuya turns on his heel to go, and return down to the bottom of the stairs to continue on his way, when Sawamura’s voice pops into his head, pushing out the Bartok. “Do you remember when you got this?” first, and then: “It’s a protection charm.”

“Wait,” Kazuya says, turning back around. The priest stops, too. “Can you…” He looks around, and decides on the top step, setting down the plate of cake before pulling his pendant out from underneath his shirt, turning the leather cord in his hand so he can unclasp it. He feels naked as the pendant leaves his skin, but he gulps back the distrust and holds it out to the priest. “Can you take a look at this?”

The priest descends two steps to take it from Kazuya, and as soon as he touches it, his eyes widen. “Where did you get this?”

“I don’t know,” Kazuya says. “I’ve had it since…” Since he’d been found at the shrine, he doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to, because the priest is already nodding. “Someone told me recently it was a protection charm.”

“This is very old,” the priest says. “An antique. Tokens like this, in the shape of shrine deities, are usually considered to be powerful magic, if you believe in that kind of thing. They were popular back in the Meiji era.”

“Shrine deities…” Kazuya takes the pendant back as soon as the priest offers it out to him, relief running through him as soon as it’s back in contact with his skin.

“Yes,” replies the priest. “Our local deity is a Kai Ken. A wolf dog.” He looks again at Kazuya’s pendant. “It’s a blessing.” He smiles tiredly. “All things considered, maybe it was an apology, too.”

An apology for what? Kazuya thinks, as he puts his necklace back on, breathing out as the comfortable feeling of rightness settles back across his shoulders and centers in his gut.

He picks up the cake, and murmurs “thank you” to the priest.

“I wouldn’t take that off, if I were you,” the priest says, as Kazuya turns to leave. “They’re rare.”

“I’m good at taking care of antiques,” Kazuya replies, and he takes the stairs two by two down to the main street, and doesn’t look back once on the rest of the walk to his father’s house.

As he expected, there’s no one home. His father has always spent more time at work than he’s ever spent here, and Kazuya can’t begrudge him for it, because he’d always felt the same. That’s why, after he’d met Kuramochi, he’d spent most of his time there, as far away from this mausoleum as he could get.

Kazuya leaves the cake on the dining table along with a note. I’ll come back to look at the boxes sometime soon, he scribbles.

When he gets back to Kuramochi’s mother’s house, she’s waiting for him in the kitchen. “Kazuya! What took you so long? Was your father home?”

“No,” Kazuya says. “I… stopped by the shrine. Just to see it.”

“The shrine? Isn’t that where you…”

“Yeah,” Kazuya says. “Don’t worry. It was only a whim.” He presses his hand flat over the pendant. “I left the cake on the table.”

“Good, good,” she says, ruffling his hair. “And you’re just in time. There’s a re-run of a Sawamura Eijun drama on, and I hear you’re a fan these days!”

“I’m not,” Kazuya replies, but he lets Kuramochi’s mom, and eventually Kuramochi too, tease him until the frightening, aching feeling from the shrine retreats, and Kazuya is left only with the steady warmth of his pendant, and the dig of Kuramochi’s elbow into his side as they watch Sawamura play a high school student on TV.

Sawamura texts him later that night, a few minutes after he gets home. Are you okay? the text reads.

why wouldn’t i be? Kazuya replies.

Had the feeling a couple of hours ago that something was wrong! You better not be lying to me, Miyuki Kazuya!!!

isn’t it past your bedtime? Kazuya lies down in his bed, on top of the covers and still dressed, watching Sawamura’s blinking ellipsis as he types a reply. A couple of hours ago, Kazuya thinks, he was at the shrine.

It must be a coincidence.

It’s your bedtime too! I’ll see you tomorrow!! He adds a heart-eyed emoji again.

Kazuya replies with a heart, and then, after a moment’s thought, adds a music note and a moon, hoping Sawamura will understand what he means without him having to say it.

He wakes up in the morning to an e-mail from his father. The cake was good, it says. See you soon.

Filming for the fourth episode of ‘Trial Marriage’ doesn’t take them far—they’re left at Yomiuriland after an early closing, all the rides and walkways lit up bright with LEDs, and the park itself empty of any other visitors except for their filming crew.

They’d had dinner at Shakey’s, splitting a pizza between the two of them. Sawamura had gotten cheese and sauce all down the front of his shirt, and Kazuya had laughed and mopped at his face with a napkin as Sawamura apologized profusely to the producer about messing up his clothes, ruining the footage for broadcasting.

There’s something magical about an amusement park at night, and Kazuya forgets about the stress of album crunch and the constant, lingering curiosity that’s been pounding in his veins since he went to the old shrine as Sawamura pulls him through the park hand-in-hand to fulfill their challenge requirements, wearing a fresh shirt that almost matches Kazuya’s.

Sawamura is as overly enthusiastic as usual, tugging on Kazuya’s arm so hard Kazuya wonders if he’s in danger of having it yanked out of the socket, like he’s got an untrained puppy on a leash.

“Give me a break, Sawamura,” Kazuya says eventually, cackling, when Sawamura turns around to squint at him impatiently when Kazuya digs in his heels to slow them down. “We’ve got all night!”

“It smells like rain!” Sawamura replies, but he does fall into step with Kazuya’s slower pace as they approach their third challenge goal. They’re supposed to take a picture together at the top of the last drop of the rollercoaster, Kazuya’s pretty sure. He’s not sure why it qualifies as a date challenge but it’s simple enough. “We’re going to run out of time!”

“It’s not going to rain. The forecast for tonight was clear. Besides, you can’t really smell things like that.”

Sawamura shakes his head furiously. “I can smell it,” he says. “Just trust me?”

“I don’t know you well enough for that,” Kazuya replies, and laughs as Sawamura gets flustered and outraged, and starts tugging on Kazuya’s hand again, a reminder that he’d never let go.

At the top of the rollercoaster, Kazuya kisses Sawamura’s cheek instead of grinning at the camera with a peace sign like they’d planned, and Sawamura’s spluttering turns to screaming as the rollercoaster races to the bottom of the loop.

“You get copies of the picture,” the board attendant says, when they get off the ride, Sawamura still shouting about Kazuya deviating from the original plan. He hands Kazuya and Sawamura both novelty keychains, and that shuts Sawamura up; he gapes at the photo before a smile blooms wide across his face, and he clutches the keychain to his chest.

“Miyuki Kazuya!” Sawamura’s eyes are brighter than all the LED displays around them, shimmering in the dark. “I thought you were being mean, when you tricked me, but this is…” He rocks forward, bumping his nose against Kazuya’s, and only the tiny gasp of one of the camera crew keeps Kazuya from closing the last of the distance and kissing him. “It’s really nice,” he finishes, in a softer voice, and Kazuya’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. “This Sawamura Eijun appreciates your gesture!”

The park music is brassy and obnoxiously loud, and Kazuya can’t really think around it, but he doesn’t need to think to reply. “Maybe I’m mean and flirting,” he says, and when Sawamura pouts at him, Kazuya scratches under his chin, only stopping and pulling away when Sawamura’s eyes go too dark for public, and it gets dangerous for his self-control to stay this close.

He jerks back, and then whaps Sawamura gently on the forehead with the challenge card. “We’re not done yet, Noisy.”

“You’re the one that said we have plenty of time!” Sawamura replies, and then he’s taking the card, authoritatively deciding which part of the challenge they should complete next.

But true to Sawamura’s predictions, their evening is cut short: about twenty minutes later, the sky opens up and it starts to pour, rain coming down in sheets and drenching them instantly, as well as the scrambling camera crew. The lights at Yomiuriland all go out at the first crack of thunder, and the production assistant hurriedly ushers them out of the park and into the crew van.

“We’ve probably got enough footage,” the production assistant says. “We might have to send you home early. It doesn’t look like it’s going to stop.”

“But we haven’t completed all the challenges!” Sawamura replies. He shakes, and water sprays onto everyone around him until Kazuya throws a towel over his head to catch the flyaway drops. Sawamura pushes the towel down around his neck with a scowl.

“The challenges are more to generate content than an actual competition,” replies the production assistant. “You don’t have to worry about it.”

Sawamura looks extremely put out about the idea of the challenges not actually mattering. Kazuya is more disappointed about the early end to filming, if he’s honest. He’d been having fun, playing like this, and now they’ll probably go their separate ways. They’d arrived separately today at Shakey’s, instead of meeting up at the NTV lots, and so as soon as the rain abates, they’ll likely leave separately, too.

He pulls out his phone. “I’m going to call a taxi, then.”

“You live really far from here, and it’s still raining a lot,” Sawamura says. “You should just come home with me.” Ignoring the towel around his neck, he wipes rainwater from his hairline with his shirtsleeve.

“Wow, a proposition,” Kazuya jokes, when a sudden hush falls over the van. He can feel the eyes of the whole crew on them, and Kazuya’s not sure he wants them to realize that what’s between them is more than Kazuya ‘being a good sport’. “How forward.”

Sawamura scowls at him. “Jerk,” he says, and the tension breaks, laughter rippling through the cluster of them. “Is that a yes or a no?”

“It’s a yes,” Kazuya replies. “I’ve been wanting to see how messy your apartment is anyway, after you had such strong words about mine.”

“It’s not messy, it’s lived-in,” Sawamura says. “Do you hear me? Lived-in!”

“Sure, sure,” Kazuya says, and as soon as the downpour lightens a little, the production van drives them back to the main parking lot, dropping them off by Sawamura’s car.

Sawamura drives them home at a glacial pace, unwilling to take any chances on the road. “Better safe than sorry!” he tells Kazuya at least four times, and he drives with his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, with none of Kuramochi’s easy confidence in the driver’s seat.

It’s a short drive, though, and Sawamura bounds out of the car after he’s pulled into his spot in the parking garage, like sitting cooped up in the van and then having to devote so much attention to driving home had given him a build up of too much energy. He runs over to the elevator leading up from the garage and then, upon looking back and realizing Kazuya’s walking more sedately in his wake, runs back so that they can walk to the door together.

“It looks like I taught you to heel,” Kazuya teases, as Sawamura calls for the elevator.

“I didn’t come back because you wanted me to,” is Sawamura’s reply. He juts his chin out stubbornly. “I came back because I wanted to.”

Kazuya curls a hand around Sawamura’s neck, and it immediately calms him, his dewy eyelashes, thick with rainwater, dip slightly as Kazuya applies pressure and then slides his hand into the hair at Sawamura’s nape. “Works out the same for me either way.”

Sawamura’s apartment is a riot of clashing colors. Every piece of furniture is a different shade, conflicting with the multitudes of rugs layered on top of each other at the center of the living room in various patterns and hues.

He has throw pillows from multiple baseball teams on the sofa and piled up on the floor, and there is no cohesion to the groupings of knickknacks and clutter on every available surface.

Kazuya isn’t remotely surprised. “It looks like someone gave you a pack of crayons and told you that it was necessary to use them all,” he says, stepping out of his shoes and up onto the dark cherry colored hardwood. He runs his hand along the back of the plaid sofa, taking in the softness of the material. “You didn’t need to have a complete rainbow set.”

“I see colors differently,” Sawamura replies, already having moved into the kitchen. “I chose the pieces by fabric, not by what they looked like.”

“What do you mean, differently?” Kazuya asks. The kitchen is just as clashing and cluttered. “Are you colorblind?”

“No…” Sawamura has put a pot of water on to boil, and set two packages of instant ramen on the counter top, next to a giant jar of cookies and an open tupperware container filled with reusable straws. “I don’t know how to describe it! I see them less intensely than other people! The only bright one is blue!”

“I see,” Kazuya says, watching as Sawamura takes his new keychain out of his pocket and pins it to a bulletin board next to the kitchen entryway. “That explains why it looks like this.”

“What’s wrong with it?!” Sawamura says, putting his hands on his hips. “At least you can tell it’s my home!”

At that, Kazuya’s teasing smile slips, and he shivers. “Yeah,” he says, “you can.”

Sawamura stares at him, unblinking, and Kazuya wonders if Sawamura, with his muted colors, has any idea about the vivid brightness of his own eyes. “You need dry clothes,” he says. “Come on.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Kazuya says. “I’m only staying until the storm stops. I probably could have made it back to my apartment.”

“You’re my husband, aren’t you? I wouldn’t have made you trek all the way home in rain like this when I only live about fifteen minutes away.” He wraps a hand around Kazuya’s wrist and pulls. “It’s only dry clothes, Miyuki Kazuya! You wouldn’t want to get sick!”

Kazuya capitulates, letting Sawamura shove soft sweatpants and a flannel shirt into his arms, casting a quick look at the unmade futon as he changes, taking in the pile of brightly colored quilts and oddly shaped pillows.

When he comes out of Sawamura’s room, dressed in Sawamura’s clothing, Sawamura is setting the bubbling pot of ramen on a cloth at the center of his wooden table, along with two sets of chopsticks, water, and small serving bowls.

“You didn’t have to make food, either,” Kazuya says, sitting down across from Sawamura, who is already filling his small bowl with noodles and broth.

“Miyuki Kazuya gets cold,” Sawamura replies. “So I turned up the heat and made something hot to eat, so you’d be warm all the way through!”

Oh, Kazuya thinks, pressing his bare feet down flat on the warm rug underneath the table. “The husband part’s still only for television, you know,” he says. “And there aren’t any television cameras here.”

Sawamura sets down his chopsticks, and sloppily licks his lips. Kazuya wishes it turned him off, but apparently he’s lost to puppy-dog charms. “Then how how about boyfriends?”

Kazuya takes a sip of water to buy himself time. “I’m not very good at that,” he says, eventually, after he’s swallowed. “I’m busy a lot, and my music stuff is always going to come first.”

“I know,” Sawamura says. “It’s already like that, isn’t it?” He furrows his eyebrows. “But even when you’re busy, you reply to my messages.”

“Is that enough?” Kazuya asks, looking at Sawamura carefully. “It’s… That’s never been enough.”

Sawamura hums, and then starts checking off things on his fingers. “You should also play with my hair,” he says, “and kiss me.” He grins. “You should also play the piano for me sometimes, and maybe we can play music together, too!”

“What instrument do you play?” Kazuya asks, adding the list up in his head and wondering if that’s really the sum of it. None of it seems impossibly hard, but he refuses to believe it could be so easy.

Sawamura’s eyes flash. “The kokyuu,” he says, “and the zither, and the lute.” He sticks out his lips. “Most traditional instruments with strings.”

“You’re such a weirdo.” Kazuya spoons some broth into his bowl, and then sips it slowly. It’s hot going down his throat, and warm in his belly. “What about when filming is over?”

“What do you mean?” Sawamura asks. “For ‘Trial Marriage’?”

Kazuya nods. “We’ll no longer be fake-married.”

“But we’ll still be boyfriends,” Sawamura replies, kicking him under the table. “So it doesn’t matter.”

Kazuya clicks his short nails against the side of the small bowl. It isn’t a song, just an aimless beat, his nervousness refusing to be contained. “What if I start smoking again?”

“That’s gross, Miyuki Kazuya!” Sawamura kicks him again. “Role model, role model!”

Kazuya’s lips lift at one corner, twitching into a crooked smile.

They leave the dishes on the table and settle into a pile of pillows in front of the couch, all of them with various iterations of the Yakult Swallows logo on the front and one of the team colors on the back. Sawamura lies with his head in Kazuya’s lap, drowsy, and it’s enough of an excuse to keep Kazuya from convincing himself it’s time to go home.

Instead, he just plays with Sawamura’s hair, and lets Sawamura ramble about his new drama, his voice lulling Kazuya to sleep.

If his pendant is warmer than usual again when he wakes up, Kazuya takes pains not to notice it, focusing instead on the enchanting newness of being content.

Dating Sawamura for real isn’t all that different than the whimsical, oddly slow dating they’re doing for ‘Trial Marriage’.

In the face of ramping preparations for Second Year’s new album, Kazuya’s free time is at a minimum, but somehow, he finds himself continuing to constantly message Sawamura all throughout the day.

Sawamura worms his way into Kazuya’s daily life like he’s always been there. He brings scripts back to Kazuya’s apartment after filming, and leaves them around the living room after he’s doodled on them, one stack on the tansu and another on the floor next to Kazuya’s bed. Soon they’re joined by ballpoint pens and hoodies and souvenirs from their filming adventures, bringing a little bit of the chaos of Sawamura’s apartment into the sterile white and glass of Kazuya’s magazine home.

Kuramochi notices it before Kazuya does.

The day they film their promotional PV, he drives Kazuya home and stays so they can finish watching Sawamura’s drama. He sets up Kazuya’s laptop while Kazuya gets them drinks from the kitchen and grabs a couple of bags of the shrimp chips that Sawamura’s obsessed with to snack on.

After Kazuya sets the tray down on the tansu table, he looks up to find Kuramochi holding up the keychain from Yomiuriland to the light. “Aww,” he says, “this is fucking adorable.” He surveys Kazuya’s apartment with an amused grin. “Look at all this clutter.”

“What are you talking about?” Kazuya asks, but then he copies Kuramochi’s glance, and his eyes immediately dart to all the things that are out of place. “Oh.”

It’s territory marking, Kazuya thinks, like the way Sawamura always takes his time to run his hands along the doors, or to bury his face in Kazuya’s neck. An instinctive ritual that Kazuya allows to become something normal, despite how strange he’d found it at first.

Sawamura is marking Kazuya’s apartment in a new way now, and without even noticing, Kazuya had let him.

Kuramochi pats his shoulder. “It had to happen eventually,” he says. “You couldn’t live in that tiny fraction of your apartment forever.”

“I could have,” Kazuya disagrees, but his eyes linger on the tiny carnations in a small whisky glass with water, balanced precariously on the thin sill of his large picture window that overlooks Omotesando. They’re a token that Sawamura had insisted on keeping from this week’s filming at a botanical garden, and he lets the cheerful chorus of Second Year’s upcoming first single repeat over and over in his head, resonating perfectly with the beat of his heart.

Maybe Kazuya should buy a vase.

“He is your actual boyfriend, now, right?” Kuramochi asks, slapping the remote into his bare palm. “If you haven’t locked that down yet, you’re pathetic.”

“Yeah,” admits Kazuya, and he carefully doesn’t mention that Sawamura had been the one to bring it up.

And Kazuya is so busy, with the album and Sawamura and filming schedules, that he forgets, sort of, that even outside of the show the nation has their eyes on him, now.

Rumors surge when Kazuya and Sawamura are spotted out together at a vintage record store without a camera crew, after Sawamura convinces Kazuya to help him find new music to play on an inherited player from his grandfather that lives in the living room at his colorful apartment.

Kazuya looks at the pictures and remembers, with a smile, that they’d taken back a selection of jazz albums that Sawamura had gotten in a bulk box for less than 10000 yen, a complete steal, and listened to them all evening until Sawamura had convinced him to go to bed, kissing him chastely to sleep on top of Sawamura’s oversized double futon, Kazuya’s hands knotting in Sawamura’s hair and Sawamura’s nose buried in the curve of Kazuya’s neck.

Are things for Miyuki and Sawamura, this season’s most popular pair, heating up behind the scenes? reads the headline of the article Mei sends him the next day, and Kazuya sends back a row of winking faces.

Mei replies with the vomit-emoji.

Second Year’s promotional video drops twelve hours before the album goes live for streaming, and within two hours their first single has topped the charts.

Praise flows in from every direction, think-pieces popping up over the next few days about the new direction of Kazuya’s songwriting, about Second Year’s still maturing sound, and about whether the band’s continuing popularity is thanks more to Kazuya’s scandal and subsequent appearance on a variety show than the band’s actual album quality.

“It’s bullshit,” Maezono says, when he drops by the lounge to see if Kazuya wants to take a break from arranging set-lists and finds him thumbing through an article about it. “You know that.”

“I do,” Kazuya says. “It’s not a big deal. Things like this are rarely unanimous. There were bound to be detractors.”

His phone buzzes in his hands. A call, not a text. Kazuya smiles lopsided in apology and answers it. “What do you want?”

“Miyuki Kazuya!” Sawamura shouts, and Kazuya moves his phone reflexively away from his ear. “How are you on this fine afternoon?”

“Busy,” Kazuya replies. “Maezono and I were about to go get lunch.”

“Oh, I see!” Sawamura’s tone is less enthusiastic, and Kazuya wonders if Sawamura had wanted Kazuya to get lunch with him, or something.

It’s still new, to try and fit someone else into his schedule. Kazuya’s never really made time specifically for anyone but Kuramochi outside of a professional context. “Sawamura,” Kazuya starts, uncertainly, and Maezono knocks his knuckles against the lounge table to get Kazuya’s attention, almost knocking over Kazuya’s fresh cup of coffee.

“Ask Sawamura if he wants to come with us,” Maezono says. “We can get Nabe and ‘Mochi to come too.”

Suspicious, Kazuya eyes Maezono, pondering his motives, but it’s fine. “Did you hear that?”

“Yes! This Sawamura Eijun would be honored to join you for lunch at…” He trails off, realizing he has no idea where Kazuya is or might want to go to eat, and Kazuya chuckles.

“I’ll text you the location,” he says, and hangs up before Sawamura can shout another cheerful agreement.

They meet at TOM’S, near Daikanyama station, a little less than half an hour later.

Sawamura’s cheeks, when he waves at them excitedly from outside the shop, are flushed with exertion, like he’d run all the way from home to make it here on time and still has plenty of energy to spare.

“Energetic thing, isn’t he?” Kuramochi asks, shooting Kazuya a leer, and Kazuya gives him a playful look back asking if Kuramochi really wants to go there.

“No sex jokes over lunch,” Maezono declares firmly, throwing an arm across Watanabe’s shoulder companionably as they approach Sawamura, who’s still waving at them, even though it’s obvious he’s been seen. “It’s the law.”

Kazuya just shakes his head and speeds up a little, into a slight jog, coming to a stop right in front of Sawamura and reaching up to put a hand on top of his head. “Hi there,” he says, his breath catching when Sawamura beams down at him. He scratches at Sawamura’s head twice before dropping his hand.

“Miyuki Kazuya! It’s been forever!”

“We filmed two days ago,” Kazuya reminds him. “So not really.”

“It feels like a long time!” Sawamura pouts at him. “And I had two night shoots back to back so I couldn’t even call you to remind you to stop drinking coffee and go to sleep!”

“The hypocrisy of that is amazing,” Kazuya tells him, as Kuramochi, Maezono and Watanabe catch up. “Plus, don’t tell me what to do. Bad dog.”

“You always listen, though,” Sawamura says, bluntly, reaching out to poke at Kazuya’s eyebags. “Now look, it’s purple again!”

“That’s because of my schedule,” Kazuya replies, and before Sawamura can yell, he points to his bandmates with his thumb. “You aren’t going to introduce yourself?”

Sawamura bows in that old-fashioned way of his, and when Kuramochi greets him, Sawamura looks up through his bangs to consider him carefully. “You have a dog,” he says, “that runs around Miyuki Kazuya’s apartment.”

“Hime-chan,” Kuramochi confirms. “Don’t let Miyuki lie to you. He loves dogs.”

“I know,” Sawamura says, gaze flicking to meet Kazuya’s, dropping only for a moment to his pendant. “Miyuki Kazuya loves a lot of things he pretends he doesn’t!”

“He’s sure got you pegged,” Kuramochi says, and then he’s pushing open the door to let them into the sandwich shop.

Watanabe and Kuramochi pepper Sawamura with questions throughout lunch as Maezono watches, and Sawamura answers all of them with that same blunt and earnest charm Kazuya’s grown used to. He’s more mature, around Kazuya’s friends, slightly more guarded, and Kazuya wouldn’t have noticed that a month ago but now it seems obvious.

Sawamura doesn’t hide anything from Kazuya, and Kazuya’s not sure he ever has, even if he doesn’t know what marks the difference.

Sawamura gets a phone call from his manager, the man he calls ‘Chris-senpai’, toward the end of their meal, and he steps outside to take it.

“He doesn’t suck,” Maezono says, when the door’s closed behind him, and Kazuya arches a brow at him.

“Excuse me?”

Kuramochi muffles a laugh with his last bite of sandwich.

“I know you don’t need anyone’s approval and all that, blah blah blah, but…” Maezono makes an even uglier face than usual. “Sawamura. He doesn’t suck. Every other guy you’ve ever been seeing sucked. Not him. He’s…” He sighs. “He’s good for you. You’re happier. It’s nice.”

“I was happy before,” Kazuya replies. “I don’t need a boyfriend to be happy.”

“I know that,” Maezono replies, indignant, and Watanabe smoothly intervenes.

“You don’t need a boyfriend,” Watanabe agrees, “but you really like him, and he thinks you’re actually every star in the sky for some reason, so… Maybe you don’t need a boyfriend, just to have one, but this boyfriend is good for you, and adds to your life.”

Maezono hesitates. “You’ve noticed he’s a bit… weird, though, right?”

“Also, you praise him like he’s a dog,” Kuramochi adds, flatly. “That’s weird too.”

Kazuya snorts. “Don’t kinkshame us, Kuramochi,” he replies. “You have far too many skeletons under your bed to even try.”

“Don’t tell Sawamura,” Kuramochi replies blithely. “He’ll probably go looking for them so he can try to bury them in my mom’s backyard.”

It’s Watanabe’s turn to muffle a laugh, and Maezono just looks deeply discomfited.

"I need a drink," he says.

"It's one in the afternoon, Zono," Watanabe replies. "Remember what happened last time."

"Yeah, Miyuki got a pet," Kuramochi replies, and Sawamura looks confused when he returns to a table of laughing bandmates, and Kazuya with his head in his hands.

That night, Sawamura sends him the link to a restaurant not far from his apartment, along with a question mark.

what's this for, Kazuya types.

This Sawamura Eijun was honored to meet Miyuki Kazuya's friends! Won't you meet mine?

Kazuya opens the link to the restaurant again, thinking about his schedule, and bites his lip. It's never mattered to him, that someone might not like him, but he wants Sawamura's friends to. next monday, he replies. after six.

He finishes the last of a fifth cup of coffee, and then sends a message to Kuramochi. sawamura wants to introduce me to his friends now.

be useful for once in your life and get me aotsuki wakana-chan's phone number, Kuramochi responds within seconds. and don't worry about it. his friends are probably as weird as he is, which means you'll fit right in.

Kazuya laughs, putting his cup in the sink, and then goes into the living room, sitting down at his work computer and loading up Logic Pro. He's got unfinished songs to work on, and without a deadline he can play around with arrangements all he wants.

He gets another text right before he puts on his headphones, and it's from Sawamura. Don't worry, it says, they already know you're kind of a jerk!

Chuckling, Kazuya relaxes back into his ergonomic desk chair and starts his clip from the beginning, closing his eyes as it plays and letting ideas push everything else away.

Narumiya Mei’s apartment is at the edge of Ginza, in an exclusive building with a team of guards working around the clock and an elevator that can’t be accessed without a swipe of a resident card or a guard key, even after Kazuya’s been buzzed in.

Mei is lighting up a cigarette and wearing a pink silk house coat when he answers the door. “What took you so long?”

“It took me ten minutes extra to get from the front door of the building to your apartment. Don’t you think this is overkill?”

“No,” Mei replies, taking a puff of his cigarette and blowing the smoke in Kazuya’s general direction as Kazuya unlaces his sneakers and sets them neatly by the door. “A smoke? I only have unfiltered, sorry.”

“No thanks,” Kazuya replies, knowing Sawamura, with his inhumanly strong nose, is already going to smell it when Kazuya goes to his apartment later tonight.

“Oh, you quit, that’s right,” Mei says, like he doesn’t actually believe it. “A drink, then?”

“I thought,” Kazuya says, following Mei through his living room toward the adjacent apartment that he’d bought and converted a few years ago into an insulated and soundproofed practice room, “that we were going to play.”

“Yes, yes,” Mei says. “We are. I have sheet music for you to mark up, you know I tend to play very my-pace.”

“As always.” He follows Mei into the practice room, moving past him toward the baby grand piano. Kazuya runs his hand along the smooth lacquered surface. It’s a gorgeous thing, wasted on Mei, who rarely plays it. “You have zero consideration for your orchestra.”

“It’s their job to keep up with me, not the other way around,” Mei replies, putting out his cigarette in the full ashtray. “I’m the soloist. It’s not as though I’m playing second chair.”

“Hmm,” Kazuya says, sitting down on the piano bench. He glides his hands along the keys, playing a quick scale, enjoying the firmer weight of them. He loves real pianos, even though the only one he regularly plays these days is the one at Kuramochi’s mother’s house. “Which orchestra are you performing with, for this?”

“The NHK Symphony Orchestra. We’ll practice with them next week,” Mei says. “Are you available on Tuesday, or should I shuffle things around to give you Thursday or Friday afternoon?”

“Tuesday’s fine. I have filming in the morning but I should be finished by noon.” Kazuya looks through the music, freshly printed and unblemished, without any of Mei’s usual snotty little asides scribbled in the margins. “Mendelssohn? Really? Ray Chen just put out a really definitive version on CD a few years ago.”

“A few years ago? Kazuya, please, we were twelve when that came out.” Mei waves a hand dismissively, setting his violin case down on the low, elegant sofa that stretches across the front wall, next to the door. He opens it, taking out his bow first to check the tension. “Also to call that version definitive instead of trendy is an insult to the timeless ability of classical music to reinvent itself over and over again in the hands of different musicians. Don’t be so plebeian.”

“My apologies,” Kazuya says, mocking Mei’s cadence, “I mostly meant that Ray Chen’s version was well-received, and recently. Fifteen years is nothing when we consider it was written in, what, the 1850s?”

“1845,” Mei corrects him, bringing his violin up to rest on his shoulder, fitting his chin into place. He plays a few long notes, and makes a small adjustment for tune. “Are you ready?”

Kazuya moves the sheet music back to the first page, spreading out the first three to prevent a clear page-turning problem. “Yes,” he replies, and they begin.

Sitting here like this, speeding up and slowing down to accommodate Mei’s furious pace, makes Kazuya feel like he’s back in junior high again, when he and Mei had played their first duet. Kazuya had been a different person, then, clinging to music because the rest of his world was in chaos, going straight from therapy appointments to practice and back again. The challenge of matching Mei, who refused to play things exactly as they were written, correcting speed and connecting notes at will, had been something to pull him out of his complicated thoughts, and distract him from poking and prodding at the terrifying holes in his memory that even months and months of counseling hadn’t brought him any closer to filling.

”Trauma,” his therapist had told his father over the phone. “He’s still conflicted over his mother’s death. That’s what led to his episode.” Kazuya had listened to the rest of their conversation with his eyes closed, leaning back against the wall of the stairwell with his head pressed to his knees, and wished more than anything he could remember.

Mei hadn’t cared about any of that. The moment they were in a practice room together, it was always the music, Mei getting more and more demanding as he realized Kazuya could keep up, and Kazuya had just been relieved that there was one more person besides Kuramochi who wouldn’t treat him like glass.

The first movement of the Mendelssohn comes to a close, and Mei lowers his bow. “Ugh, it was perfect,” he says, meeting Kazuya’s gaze with his pale, watery eyes. “It’s infuriating that you left this, Kazuya.”

“Have you listened to our new album?” Kazuya asks, mildly, turning the page. “It’s been well-received.”

“I heard that was because your fangirls think you and Sawamura are legitimately boning.” Mei rolls his eyes. “Are you, by the way?”

“Not yet,” Kazuya replies, resting his fingers on the keys in preparation.

“How boring.” Mei smirks. “My favorite track was the fourth one. The classical inspiration was obvious, and your piano solo at the bridge was quite lovely, especially in contrast to the abysmal wailing of Kuramochi’s guitar playing.”

“I’ll pass on your compliments,” Kazuya says, and Mei ignores him, raising his bow to start again.

On Kazuya’s way out, run-through completed, Mei stops him at the door right after he straightens up from tying his shoes. “About your album,” Mei says. “It was good, as a whole. A lot of impressive work with the arrangements, and the overall mood isn’t what I’ve come to expect from your sound.” He frowns. “I still think you’re wasted, doing that, but… Not completely.”

“I appreciate the concession,” Kazuya replies, unsure what else he can say.

Mei hesitates, but then he squares his shoulders, pushing aside whatever was holding him back. “Tell Sawamura to come see you play with me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m curious about him,” Mei says. “You wrote and arranged a lot of that album after meeting him. I can tell. The general mood of it is lighter than your previous work.” Mei shrugs, adjusting the lapel of his house coat. “And if he’s going to claim to be such a big fan of your musical ability, he should hear you play on a real piano, on a real stage.” He winks. “With a real violinist.”

“I’ll consider it,” Kazuya says, and then he leaves Mei’s apartment.

He makes it to Sawamura’s place in forty-five minutes, announcing his presence with the back of his hands, first knuckles hitting the wood with a satisfying hollow knock.

Sawamura opens the door with flour all over his face and sparkling eyes, and Kazuya just sighs, reaching up to wipe the white from his chin before he even takes off his shoes.

“You smell like cigarette smoke,” Sawamura announces, angling his head for scratches before Kazuya has a chance to smear away more of the flour from his cheeks. Kazuya gives in, as he’s wont to do with Sawamura most days, and digs his nails into the soft waves just behind Sawamura’s ear. His hair is growing out again, Kazuya notes.

“Mei was smoking,” Kazuya replies, breathing right into Sawamura’s face. “See?”

Sawamura laughs, and kisses him, open mouthed and messy from the beginning, gathering a handful of Kazuya’s shirt to reel him in. “I see,” he says, backing up. “I’m making cake!”

“Should I help?”

“No,” Sawamura replies. “You can tell me about your day, instead.”

Kazuya sits backwards at one of the chairs in the kitchen, his chin resting on the spindled back as he tells Sawamura about the Mendelssohn concerto, and about Mei’s reaction to his album.

“I want to go and see you perform,” Sawamura says, when he gets to the part about Mei wanting Sawamura to attend his concert. “I’ve never seen you perform with Narumiya Mei.”

“Have you ever seen me perform at all?”

“You play for me all the time,” Sawamura replies. The batter that he’s awkwardly filling the loaf pan with is suspiciously lumpy, but amused, Kazuya lets it slide. “But not with Narumiya Mei, and so I’m interested!”

“We played together a lot when I was younger,” Kazuya says. “He’s bossy, as a soloist. A lot of other piano players refused to work with him, and he wrecked a number of duets.” He plays a short sequence from the second movement along the side of the chair-back, using both hands. “He’s really talented, though. And playing with him can be fun, under the right circumstances. I prefer to be the one who sets the pace.”

Sawamura sucks a batter-wet finger into his mouth, getting it on his lower lip, adding to the mess that had been created by the flour. “You’ve known him a long time. As long as you’ve known Kuramochi?”

“Almost. Kuramochi is my oldest friend.”

Sawamura’s nose wrinkles, and his eyes dart away, to the bulletin board mounted on the wall, where their keychain from Yomiuriland hangs. There are also, Kazuya notes, several of their challenge card envelopes from ‘Trial Marriage’, all of them illustrated in blue ballpoint pen, images stacked on top each other, leaving Kazuya only sure about the one on top. Another baseball.

“What about before middle school?” Sawamura asks, gaze flicking back to pin Kazuya in place. “Who were your friends, then?”

Kazuya shrugs, and thinks about those last two years, with the therapy and the whispers and the way he had seen gaps in every direction, knowing something was missing and having no idea what. He hadn’t had time for friends. He’d been too busy trying to stay on the staff paper, and not scatter into hundreds of disparate, cacophonous notes.

“Who knows,” he says, lightly, and he subconsciously reaches for his pendant.

Sawamura stares at it when Kazuya takes it out from under his shirt, and then, hands still covered in cake batter except for his index finger, he crosses the kitchen to touch it.

Kazuya grabs his wrist to stop him. “Your hands are too messy,” he says, bringing Sawamura’s hand up to his mouth, then licking up the line of Sawamura’s thumb, lapping at the batter. It’s salty, and the baking powder is clumped, astringent on his tongue. “That is going to be an awful cake,” he says, before repeating the treatment on Sawamura’s other batter-slick fingers.

“There’s no such thing as an awful cake,” Sawamura replies, his voice a low growl.

“There definitely is.” Heat simmers in Kazuya’s belly, but he and Sawamura still haven’t moved past kissing, and maybe he’s gone too far. Reluctantly, he lets go of Sawamura’s wrist, but Sawamura doesn’t step back, doesn’t move away. He presses his fingers to Kazuya’s mouth, resting the first two of them on Kazuya’s lower lip for a moment before dragging them, wet, down Kazuya’s throat, all the way to his original goal of the pendant.

Kazuya shivers as Sawamura lifts it from his chest. “I think,” Sawamura says, deliberately, “that you had at least one friend before middle school.” He tilts his head, and his eyes are narrow, shifting and shimmering, shot through with gold. “After all, someone gave you this.”

“What makes you think I got it before middle school?” Kazuya asks.

Sawamura blinks at him. “You told me that.”

Kazuya can’t remember that, and he sifts back through his recent memories. “At Victory Bar?” That doesn’t make sense, he thinks, because Sawamura had asked about his pendant weeks later. Had told him it was a protection charm before anyone else. “Sawamura…”

“I guess I didn’t hear you right!” Sawamura drops the pendant, letting it bounce against Kazuya’s chest, and Kazuya hadn’t realized that his head had been starting to ache, right behind his eyes, until Sawamura smiles at him, breaking him out of his thoughts. His eyes are crinkled at the corners again, and Kazuya feels the most eerie sense of loss.

“Are you interested in it because it’s an antique?” Kazuya asks him. Sawamura is obsessed with his tansu, after all, leaving candies and origami turtles made from the corners of script pages in the numerous small puzzle drawers.

“Antique?” Sawamura’s small, narrow oven dings, indicating it’s warm, but Sawamura doesn’t move away from him. “What do you mean?”

“Old, traditional thing,” Kazuya clarifies. “Like futons. Like playing the Kokyuu.”

“Maybe.” Sawamura hunches forward again, resting his forehead against Kazuya’s. “But I’m interested in plenty of other things, too.”

Kazuya hums, and tugs on the hem of Sawamura’s T-shirt. “Like what?”

“Like you,” Sawamura says, and he licks across Kazuya’s mouth, and then cups his cheek to lift his face to lick into it, curling the tip of his tongue against the palette of Kazuya’s mouth the way Kazuya had taught him.

“You know,” Kazuya murmurs, “if you keep acting like a dog, I’m going to keep calling you one.”

Sawamura just laughs, and Kazuya kisses him quiet until his oven beeps again, a reminder to put the nasty cake in.

The manage to eat less than a third of it before Sawamura pushes it away in absolute disgust for the trash. Then they curl up on the floor in Sawamura’s nest of baseball pillows, and Kazuya lets Sawamura decorate the inside of his arm in blue ink, pen dragging slowly and methodically along skin as he texts back and forth with Kuramochi with his free hand.

He looks at the drawing when Sawamura’s pen lifts with a measure of finality, and then he stares. It’s the same drawing as the first time, the time Kazuya had been blackout drunk for: Two ginko trees, tall and narrow, with shime-paper hanging from ropes, leaves in delicate clusters to decorate the branches.

Kazuya drags his finger along the trunk of the left tree, and thinks, suddenly, of the stump of a second tree in front of the shrine near his house, surrounded by orchids. He shakes his head to clear that image away, and searches the wood grain instead. He sees it just where he had the very first time: The dog hidden in the grain of the wood, with eyes and a tail and soft furred ears. “I thought I had imagined it,” he says, pointing to the dog. “But it’s there, right? A dog.”

Sawamura presses a kiss to the center of Kazuya’s palm. “It’s so you don’t forget again,” he says. “I want you to remember.”

“It’s not like you’re very forgettable,” Kazuya replies, and he wonders why it almost burns as Sawamura starts to sing ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, mangling the retroflexes in the words more than usual. “With how absolutely bizarre you are.”

Sawamura grins at him. “That’s right,” he says. “This Sawamura Eijun is one-of-a-kind!”

Kazuya laughs, and folds their hands together. “Luckily,” he agrees, and he cackles as Sawamura wrestles him down with a rumble low in his chest, sharp teeth bared in challenge.

Kuramochi helps him lug the boxes up from the basement and into the back of his trunk as Kazuya’s father holds open the door for both of them. “You should get a car,” Kuramochi says, grunting as he drops the heavy box into the trunk.

Kazuya sets his down next to it, and wipes the sweat from his brow as his father lets the door swing closed, retreating back inside from the bright May sun. “Why would I do that? We live in Tokyo. There’s no lack of public transportation.”

“So that I wouldn’t feel fucking guilty for telling you ’hell no’ when you call me up and ask me to help you dig out and move five-ton boxes from your dad’s basement across the city.”

Kazuya bumps him with his elbow. “I’ll buy you dinner when we get back to mine,” he says. “It can even be Chinese food. If you stop bitching, I might not complain about the egg rolls.”

Kuramochi wipes his hands on his jeans, leaving lines of dust. “Love has changed you,” he says. “It’s disgusting and amazing at the same time.” There’s a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, but one look down at his still-grimy hands and Kuramochi visibly decides against wiping it away. “I’m gonna go wash my hands and find my dog. Let’s both hope she hasn’t dug up anything weird from your back yard.”

“I doubt anyone’s been back there in forever,” Kazuya says. “So there’s probably not much to find.”

“Hime’s sheer will to be a menace ensures that she’ll come up with something,” Kuramochi replies grimly. When he opens the house’s front door, he has to walk around Kazuya’s father, who has something else in his hands.

“This is the last thing,” his father says, holding out a small lacquered box, the size of a shoebox. “I don’t know what’s in it, but anything you want to keep from it is yours.”

“You never opened it?” Kazuya takes the box. It’s heavier than he expects it to be. “You weren’t curious?”

“It never felt right to look in it. She always told me it was her secret. Your mom adored secrets, actually. Secrets and superstitions.”

It’s the most Kazuya’s heard his father say about his mother in years. “What kinds of superstitions?”

“Old wives’ tales, lucky charms, stuff like that.” He straightens the collar of his shirt absently as he looks off into the distance. “She used to spend hours with you up at that shrine at the top of the hill. She and that old priest…” He shakes his head. “If you didn’t look just like me we’d have to check your parentage.” His dad’s lips twitch into a partial smile, letting Kazuya know he’s joking. “She told me once it’s because her guardian spirit lived there, but you know, you used to love it when she told you those sorts of stories.”

“That’s because I was a little kid,” Kazuya replies. “I probably thought they were fairy tales.”

His father nods, and Kazuya figures that’s it for the day. He isn’t a big talker even on the best of days, so Kazuya’s not disappointed. He’d learned long ago to take his father on his own terms, instead of comparing him to some ideal he’d never had in the first place.

His dad stops though, mid-turn, and looks back up at Kazuya. “That honey cake recipe,” he says, and it isn’t a question but Kazuya answers anyway.

“I got it from Kuramochi’s mom.” Kazuya runs his fingers along the smooth wood of the box. “It didn’t turn out quite right. Too sweet.”

“It was originally your mother’s recipe,” his father says. “You have to…” His lips press into a thin line. “She added rose water to the batter, I think. Or something like that.”

And with that, he’s done, leaving Kazuya to lean against the car with the lacquered box in his hands and wait for Kuramochi to come back with his dog.

They have to take multiple trips up to Kazuya’s apartment when they arrive. The first trip is to take Hime up, Kuramochi holding on to her squirming, wiggling torso as Kazuya gets a towel to clean her feet before she runs around and leaves muddy footprints behind.

On the second trip, they bring up the two boxes, stacking them just inside the door in the foyer and then stripping out of their dirty over-shirts and jeans, leaving them in a pile with the boxes before stepping up into the apartment themselves.

Hime is sniffing around the tansu table when Kazuya walks past the sofa on the way to the bathroom. He stops short of his destination when she starts to whine, rising up onto her hind legs and pawing at the side with furious huffs.

“Hime, no,” Kuramochi snaps, swooping down and picking her up before she does any damage. “Your life is not worth that table, silly pup. Miyuki would throw you off the fucking balcony.”

“I would not,” Kazuya replies. “She’s a dog. I’d throw you off the balcony. You’re the one responsible for her.”

As Kuramochi puts Hime out on the balcony so she can people-watch for a while through the wooden railing, Kazuya walks over to the tansu and lowers into a squat to investigate. There isn’t any damage. He presses the hidden latch to open the drawer around where Hime had been pawing, and finds one of Sawamura’s origami turtles, made out of script paper, sitting alone inside. “Huh.”

Kuramochi, closing the glass door behind him, comes over to look. “Just that?”

“She must smell Sawamura on it the same way he always smells her on me,” Kazuya jokes.

Kuramochi offers him an incredulous look. “You’ve gotta be fucking with me,” he says.

Shaking his head, Kazuya chuckles. “Nope. His nose is amazing. He can identify all sorts of things by smell.”

“You know that’s not normal, right?” Kuramochi picks up the turtle. “He’s pretty good at this, though. He’s good at all types of artistic shit. Drawing, origami, making you act like a person despite being a human dog—”

“Shut up,” Kazuya says, taking the turtle from Kuramochi and locking it back up in the tansu. “He plays a bunch of old instruments, too.”

“Are you sure he’s not a cryptid?”

“He has a Twitter?” Kazuya replies, and it feels like feeble evidence.

“My mom has a Twitter,” Kuramochi replies, with the air of someone who’d found that out by accident, and Kazuya snickers. “Don’t laugh, she follows you too.”

“I never post anything.” Kazuya stands, and takes out his phone, scrolling through his contacts to find the Chinese restaurant.

“Yes, but do you know the kind of garbage people tweet at you? The sheer number of overtly pornographic photo manips of you and Sawamura in your mentions is truly horrifying, my dude. And my mom? My mom has seen them. She asked about them.”

“My dad told me the other day that I left gay porn in his web browser history when I was in high school. Honestly, after that I’m unmoved.” Kuramochi looks simultaneously like he wants to laugh and throw up, and Kazuya stretches his arms up in an effort to crack his back.

“Yeah,” Kuramochi says, “I guess you win.” He elbows Kazuya. “Speaking of things in your mentions, apparently it’s Sawamura’s birthday soon. You have any plans?”

“We have filming,” Kazuya says. “I’m sure there will be something suitably borderline embarrassing for us to do on the day.”

“I can’t believe you’re learning how to date for the first time from a reality show and a boy that acts like a dog.” Kuramochi smiles at Kazuya. “We should order food now. And you can play me the song you were talking about this morning.”

“It’s a classical style piece,” Kazuya warns, and Kuramochi scowls at him.

“Just because I like Rammstein, doesn’t mean I didn’t play the viola for, like, ten years of my life,” Kuramochi says. “Don’t be Narumiya about it. I’m not all teary-eyed and gushing like Sawamura, but I like the music you make. So play it for me.”

Kazuya laughs. “All right, all right,” he says, and he takes out his phone to order the take-out.

Hours later, when Kuramochi and Hime are long gone, and Sawamura’s already texted him to say goodnight, Kazuya sits down at the center of his bed with his mother’s lacquered box in his lap. The clasp is tricky, and it takes three tries for him to open it, and when he does, it’s to find an odd assortment of treasures. There are two cloth o-mamori pouches, one blue and one a bright Shinto red, and a small cloth sack that when he opens it is filled with a strange collection of change.

Kazuya takes them out and sets them aside, moving on to the papers underneath. He unfolds the first one, and he’s surprised to find a note. The first handwriting, beautiful and elegant, belongs to Kazuya’s mother, and the second belongs to Kazuya, his own childish scrawl thats barely any more legible now as an adult than it was back then, kanji sharp and crooked on the page, pencil smeared. There’s a third handwriting, too, and Kazuya doesn’t recognize it all, the pretty, old-fashioned cursive looking straight out of another era, the strokes bridging from character to kana without the pen having lifted.

The rush of pain behind his eyes is the lowest note on the piano followed by the highest C, a sharp and terrible contrast that screams from the center of his forehead and spreads out to his temples as he curves forward over the box. He shivers with it, quakes, and the note crumples in his hands as he struggles to breathe.

In, and out, and in again, just like he’d been taught, and Kazuya unclenches his hands and his jaw when the pain abates as quickly as it had come. He opens his eyes and blinks away tears as he looks at the note again, tracing the unfamiliar writing with his eyes.

Then he sets it aside, and pulls out more of the papers, note after note after note, and then, at last, a concert booklet and a folded paper pocket with something hidden inside it.

The booklet is from his mother’s last professional concert, back when he was eight. Kazuya had sat in the very front of the audience, and worn a patterned tie that had scratched his neck. He remembers pulling his legs up into the red velvet seat and wrapping his arms around them without regard for how it would wrinkle his clothes.

Inside is a yellowed orchid, preserved, flattened in a book prior, and he carefully sets the booklet and the flower on his bedside table before moving on to the paper pocket.

He unfolds it slowly, wary of another headache, but it’s only sheet music: ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ for piano or jazz organ, marked up by his mother’s hand. There’s a heart drawn around the first Dm7, and a note to Kazuya scribbled next to it that says it’s easy to play, Kazuya, just count up by threes.

Kazuya laughs, and unfolds it further, searching for more tips, but the contents fall out into his lap, into the folds of his Adidas track pants. Dropping the sheet music, he picks the object up and turns his hand palm-side up to reveal it to the light.

Sitting there in his hand is a small, stone-like carving of a dog, and Kazuya’s eyes widen, his throat going dry.

It’s impossible, Kazuya thinks, looking at the carving in his hand, made from the same amber as his own. The edges feel the same against his thumb, even though the shape is different; the dog lying down, front paws outstretched, instead of standing tall and proud like on Kazuya’s. But it’s of the same make, he thinks, letting it sit in the center of his palm. In comparison to Kazuya’s, it’s shockingly cold.

Maybe, he thinks, amused and sarcastic and unsure, years of sitting in a box have let all of the magic wither away to nothing. He closes his hand around the carving. So his mother had had one too.

Kazuya is tired of mysteries, and tired of not remembering. With his free hand, he reaches up to take off his pendant, wanting to throw it across the room, and he’s almost gotten the clasp undone with his shaking fingers when his phone starts to vibrate. He crams everything back in the lacquered box and slams it closed, the latch clicking into place, before he roots around in his blankets for it.

It’s Sawamura. Kazuya takes the call before he even realizes it, so used to answering him that he doesn’t consider whether he should right now, with his head a mess and his heart in his throat.

“You’re still awake, aren’t you, Miyuki Kazuya?!” Sawamura chides him.

“Are you psychic now?” Kazuya asks, and his voice crackles. He swallows. “I thought you’d already gone to bed.”

“I’m going now, and you should too! No eye-bags! Take care of your health!”

“After I finish my coffee and smoke this entire pack of menthols,” Kazuya replies. He licks his lips, lying back in bed and closing his eyes. “I need to make sure there’s enough for you to be bossy about tomorrow.”

“You’re bossy too!” Sawamura says, and Kazuya can hear his smile. It’s soothing, and suddenly Kazuya is so, so tired.

“Yeah,” Kazuya says. “I am.”

“Hey,” Sawamura says, “should I sing you to sleep?”

“If you want to,” Kazuya replies, and the next thing he knows, it’s hours later, and his phone is crushed under his cheek, call still connected and Sawamura sniffling on the other end of the line, dead asleep.

No cameras from ’Trial Marriage’ accompany Sawamura to Mei’s concert. Sawamura sits by himself in the audience, right in the front with a reserved ticket that Mei had offered Kazuya pointedly last week, and though Kazuya cannot see him with the house lights down, he knows exactly where he is as he starts to play.

The Mendelssohn flows effortlessly from him as he accompanies Mei, and the entire time, and though Kazuya had always excelled on stage, it feels better like this, with Kazuya knowing that Sawamura’s bright eyes are fixed upon him, the full magnitude of his considerable focus on Kazuya as he performs. Kazuya can imagine him easily in his mind’s eye; he’s wearing the paw-print dress shirt that Kazuya had bought him as a joke for his birthday, and he’s completely still in his seat, his head tilted sideways, mouth soft and eyebrows furrowed, watching Kazuya’s hands dance across the keys.

’You’ve never sounded better,’ Mei tells him, later, in a flowery, pretentious ‘thank you’ note that is delivered with an assortment of chocolates and scented with a sweet perfume that makes Sawamura sneeze at least fifteen times when Kazuya offers it to him to read.

“You always sound that good when you’re happy,” Sawamura tells him, digging the heels of his palms into the small of Kazuya’s back where it’s ached for days, exacerbated by Kazuya’s shitty posture. “Your mood is always obvious from how your music sounds!”

“Maybe to you,” Kazuya says, his eyes closed.

“Especially to me,” Sawamura replies, kissing the nape of his neck gently, and then, wickedly, licking at the same spot, inciting Kazuya to flip their positions, trapping Sawamura under him.

“Oh, you think you’re special, don’t you?” Kazuya pecks Sawamura on the lips, then the nose.

Sawamura blinks up at him. “I’ve been listening to you for a very long time!”

Kazuya stares down at him, into eyes he still feels like he’s always known, and aches. “I wish I’d met you sooner,” he says, because he does. Sometimes it seems like he’s been waiting a long time for Sawamura to fall into his life, and though Sawamura can’t fix the way Kazuya longs for the missing pieces of his past, he makes it easier to be content in his present.

He’s the sort of magic that Kazuya can believe in, because he sees it in the clutter of his apartment and in the songs he writes and in the way he goes to sleep smiling and wakes up smiling still.

“We met at just the right time,” Sawamura replies, and he reaches up for Kazuya’s pendant, and uses it to pull him down into a kiss.

The production crew opens several bottles of champagne when filming wraps on the last episode of their season of ‘Trial Marriage’.

“It’s a shame you’re both too busy to sign on for a second season,” the director says, clinking her glass with Kazuya’s. Sawamura is entertaining an entire slew of assistants, who all keep refilling his glass every time he takes a single sip. “Considering the ratings.”

“Six months was more than enough,” Kazuya replies. “I’m not a glutton for punishment.”

“You can admit that you had fun.” The director takes a sip of her drink. “Thank you for agreeing to participate. We’ve really wanted to add more types of couples for a while now, but there wasn’t anyone willing to do it. When Sawamura submitted his profile, right after everything happened with you, we thought we’d take the chance to ask you.”

“I…” Kazuya sighs, sloshing his champagne around in his glass. “I’m not good at reality, or interviews, or any of that. But doing this show wasn’t too bad. It was much better than I had any hope it would be.” He looks her in the eyes. “Thanks for that.” He looks past her, to their lead production assistant, and he raises his glass, smiling. Kazuya smirks back.

Sawamura is absolutely drunk when they get into a taxi back to Kazuya’s apartment from the NTV lots, his head lolling onto Kazuya’s shoulder, his tongue sticking out far enough that Kazuya has to grab it. He pulls on it lightly until Sawamura wakes up, glaring at him, trying to say Kazuya’s name without the use of his tongue.

“Mean,” Sawamura says—tries to say—and Kazuya chuckles, releasing his tongue.

“Always. Tsk, tsk, someone’s very drunk tonight.”

“I only had one glass,” is Sawamura’s mournful reply. “I don’t know how!”

Kazuya’s whole body shakes with the force of his repressed laughter, and he’s still laughing as he guides a wobbling Sawamura out of the taxi and into the sultry August night. Sawamura grabs at Kazuya’s shoulders with both hands for balance, and Kazuya instinctively grips his waist to help. “You’re a mess,” he says, far too much fondness in his voice.

“I’m your mess,” Sawamura slurs back, and then he huffs, pressing his nose against Kazuya’s hairline and breathing in. “Miyuki Kazuya remembers me!”

“It’s you that’s going to have the memory problems tomorrow,” Kazuya says, as Sawamura drags his nose down, bumping Kazuya’s glasses with his chin and then his lips.

“No, I always remember. I’ve remembered for so, so long, but Miyuki Kazuya didn’t remember me.” He smiles, and Kazuya can feel it against his cheek, along with Sawamura’s hot exhales. “But now he does!”

“He does,” Kazuya says, pulling Sawamura in a little closer, turning their balancing act into more of an embrace.

Sawamura curves into him, fitting against Kazuya perfectly, the strong lines of him so comforting, even though it’s far too hot to stand this close. “Love you, Miyuki Kazuya,” Sawamura says, then, right into Kazuya’s ear, and Kazuya’s heart stops, a rest that lasts two beats, three, four, and then it starts again, threatening to burst from his chest.

“You’re all right, too,” he replies, and Sawamura chuckles into Kazuya’s neck, licking at the tendon as one of his hands slides up to curl possessively around Kazuya’s neck.

They’re outside, and Sawamura is drunk, so Kazuya pulls away, earning a groan of displeasure from Sawamura. He taunts and teases Sawamura into following him into the building and onto the elevator. He leads him up to his apartment, navigating him around the boxes in the foyer, and into the bedroom, pushing him down on the bed.

“It’s bedtime, Sawamura Eijun!” Kazuya says, mimicking Sawamura’s cadence, and Sawamura, boyish, bright, grins back up at him with his sharp teeth.

“Are you coming too?” he asks, and Kazuya looks longingly at the bathroom, wanting his routine, but Kazuya’s weak for the look in Sawamura’s luminous eyes, and he gets into bed with him. Sawamura immediately rolls onto him, throwing an arm around Kazuya’s waist to pin him. “Now you have to stay.”

“This is my bed,” Kazuya replies, but Sawamura’s already nearly asleep, only the tiniest sliver of honeyed irises visible under his dark sweep of eyelashes. His lips are curled up, even in a drunken stupor, and Kazuya’s lips curl to match it.

When Sawamura’s eyes close completely, and his breathing evens out, Kazuya runs a hand once through Sawamura’s hair, grown out soft and shaggy again. Love you, too, Noisy, he thinks, reaching up to flatten that same hand over his pendant. It’s fine if he doesn’t say it aloud yet. He’s pretty sure Sawamura already knows it.

A text message from Takashima’s comes bright and early at noon the next morning. Sawamura is still asleep, his mouth open and drool pooling on the pillow under his cheek, and Kazuya takes a photo of it on his phone before he opens the message.

He puts on his glasses to read it. Check your e-mail, it says, and Kazuya sighs, opening the mail app. He blinks when he finds twenty new messages in his private inbox, four of them from Kuramochi and two of them from Mei. He navigates to Takashima’s first, opening it to a large attached image that loads slowly on his ancient phone.

When it’s displayed in full though, Kazuya has to bite back a groan. It’s him and Sawamura from last night, hugging out in front of Kazuya’s apartment building. Their faces are partially obscured by shadow, and from the angle the photo was taken, it looks like they’re kissing.

They almost had been, and only because Kazuya remembers every second of last night is he sure that it’s a trick of the light.

He opens a reply e-mail. Does this mean we have to have a meeting, he types back, and Takashima’s answer is a swift and uncompromising Yes.

He leaves Sawamura, bleary and confused and absolutely adorable, in his bed, promising to come back in a few hours, and takes a taxi to Seidou. The guard that hates him is gone, and the other guard, who is usually delightfully neutral, offers Kazuya a discreet thumbs up after he buzzes himself into the building.

Takashima has already started the coffee pot, and set out a clean mug next to it, when Kazuya walks into the glass office at the end of the hall. “You use it, you wash it,” she says, and then looks down at her watch. “You got here quickly.”

“It sounded urgent,” Kazuya replies, as the coffee fills his mug. It’s a plain black Costa Rican coffee this time, the nasty coconut blend nowhere to be found, and as soon as it’s done he brings it to his lips for a mouth-scalding sip.

He saunters over to Takashima’s desk, and this time, she moves the giant pile of paperwork on the edge to the other side in the seconds before he sits down. “Interesting headlines this morning,” she says, typing furiously on her laptop. She pauses to take a sip from her Second Year concert mug, and then starts again after she sets it back down.

“Apparently,” Kazuya replies. “We weren’t kissing.”

At that, Takashima looks up at him. “No?”

“Not at that time,” Kazuya says. “He was drunk and using me for balance, and then yelling in my ear while trying to whisper.” He keeps his tone light, but Sawamura’s confession is repeating in his head now, as catchy as the best commercial jingles, the kind that stick with you years and years after the commercial stops airing. “It’s the angle.”

“Kazuya, it doesn’t really matter. There’s nothing wrong with you seeing Sawamura outside the show.”

It’s such a strange thing, Kazuya thinks, after having a relationship reveal go so terribly that he’d been briefly discouraged from leaving his own home. To be told that everything’s fine, and that it doesn’t matter if people find out, when his prior experiences have made that seem like the worst possible outcome. “I don’t know what his manager thinks,” Kazuya replies, finally, taking another sip of his coffee.

“You’d better find out,” she says, and she pats his knee reassuringly before pressing the intercom on her phone. “President Kataoka, Kazuya’s here to see you.”

“Send him in,” Kataoka replies. He sounds tired. Kazuya wonders how many hours he’s been fielding calls this time.

Second Year’s new gold record is leaning up against the wall on the far side of the office, waiting to be hung, as Kazuya passes by on his way to the leather chair in front of Kataoka’s desk. He slumps into it, curling his hands around his coffee like a lifeline as he sits there, waiting for something to break the silence.

“I hadn’t realized,” Kataoka says, finally. “We’ve been systematically denying every request for confirmation of your relationship the press has sent us, on principle.”

“Ah,” Kazuya says, and he sheepishly runs his hand through his hair, and takes a sip of coffee to give himself an extra couple of seconds. “I wasn’t planning to make it public.”

“Is that still what you want?” Kataoka asks, mildly. “Seidou has confirmed plenty of artist relationships over the past couple of years. Do you know what his management agency thinks?”

“No idea. We hadn’t talked about any of that. Only…” Kazuya swallows. “Only the private, personal considerations.”

Kataoka’s tinted lenses make his eyes as unreadable as always. “Miyuki,” he says, “as always, you have choices. What would you like me to do?” He clears his throat. “Objectively, it’s good press. Your concert tickets are going on sale soon, and you and Sawamura are popular together. You constantly trend on social media and joint advertising opportunities have been pouring in lately.”

“I didn’t know that,” Kazuya says, but it makes sense. It’s the commodification he’d known he was signing up for. “Any good ones?”

“We’re still sorting through the options,” Kataoka replies. “You don’t need to take that into consideration.” He laces his hands together in front of him on the table. “It’s up to you. I can easily issue an official denial, to back up the previously issued ones we made over the phone to various news outlets previously. Or I can have Takashima contact Sawamura’s agency and officially confirm your relationship via PR representatives.”

It’s Kataoka offering to throw the ‘Trial Marriage’ contract in the trash all over again, only this time, there’s nothing riding on Kazuya’s answer but his own feelings.

And Sawamura’s, Kazuya thinks, suddenly.

He finishes his coffee, setting the now-empty mug down on the edge of Kataoka’s desk, and digs out his phone. “I’m going to ask Sawamura,” he says. “Can I just…? Not a call, a text.”

Kataoka nods, and Kazuya hurriedly scrolls down to their last text chain, from two days ago, opening up and pausing with his hand over the keyboard, trying to think about what to say. But in the end, it’s Sawamura, isn’t it? Kazuya doesn’t have to tip-toe around what he wants to tell him. are you okay with seidou officially confirming our relationship

Is that what you want!!! Sawamura’s reply text says, before Kazuya can hum more than two measures of Rachmaninov. It’s followed up almost immediately with I have to ask Chris-senpai, too!!

kataoka will ask your chris-senpai, Kazuya types back. i’m asking you. what do you want.

Sawamura’s reply makes Kazuya bite his lip to keep from laughing. I want kisses!! As long as I can have kisses, I don’t care!!

you’re too honest.

Kazuya looks up, and Kataoka is watching him with the smallest smile, almost imperceptible.

“Let’s go with confirming it,” he says. “Sawamura will probably blurt it out in an interview anyway, so…” He grins. “Might as well get it over with.”

“Good,” Kataoka says, nodding. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t forget that I need a final stage plan for your first concert by Friday.”

“Okay,” Kazuya says, and he sits there for a few painful seconds until Kataoka gestures toward the door. “Right.”

“Miyuki,” Kataoka says dryly, halting Kazuya at the door. “The mug.”

“Right,” Kazuya says, going back to hook his finger through the curved handle and carry it back out into Takashima’s office for washing.

The entire band comes over to watch the final episode of ’Trial Marriage’, despite Kazuya’s attempts to talk them out of it.

He knows his own interview was too revealing, and that, in the wake of both his and Sawamura’s agencies confirming they’re in an actual relationship, the ending montage is going to be the most embarrassing collection of behind the scenes clips that the camera crew have collected over the course of filming.

Kazuya knows that everyone he cares about is going to watch it anyway no matter what he says, but he doesn’t need witnesses to his live reactions, or to be hazed for the entire ninety minutes of airtime about the way he looks at Sawamura whenever they’re together.

But here the three of them are, anyway, sitting on Kazuya’s couch and floor and armchair, already laughing as the corny introductory music starts to play and plotting a drinking game that Kazuya refuses to participate in.

By the time it gets to the exit interviews, Kuramochi has had four beers, and Watanabe is patting a teary-eyed Maezono on the back as Maezono tries to cough out the piece of hard candy he’d started semi-choking on after an unexpected laugh at Kazuya trying to complete a ‘romantic gesture’ challenge.

Kazuya realizes, when Sawamura comes up first, though, that he should have been less worried about his own interview and more worried about Sawamura’s the moment one of the hosts asks her first question.

“Your fans like to joke that you’ve always been in love with Miyuki,” the host says, “and they have hundreds of interview clips of you to prove it! After doing the show, has your opinion of him changed?”

“Of course it has! Now I know more about him, so there are more things about him to like!” Sawamura beams at the camera, and Kazuya’s insides play a thousand different concertos at once, Rachmaninov and Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven all clamoring for space inside him, playing along the single keyboard comprised of his ribs. “And I’m greedy, so I don’t ever want to stop seeing new sides to Miyuki Kazuya! I want to discover everything there is, and then whatever comes after that, too!”

Kazuya’s staring at the screen, but he hears the click of a mobile phone camera. “Yep,” Kuramochi says, when Kazuya turns to look at him. “That’s the money-shot.”

“The money-shot for what?” Kazuya asks, all his muscles tensing as he prepares to lunge for Kuramochi’s phone. Hime, sitting at Kazuya’s feet, instinctively tenses too, but Kuramochi moves his phone far out of Kazuya’s immediate reach and tauntingly puts his feet up on the tansu coffee table.

“For Twitter,” Kuramochi says. “I already know what I’m gonna caption it, too. ‘Miyuki Kazuya is a hopeless sap about his fake-husband and is probably gonna marry him for real some day’.” He looks Kazuya dead in the eyes. “Send Tweet.”

Kazuya drops his gaze down to his knees as a section of his own interview comes on. ”I’m greedy,” he hears, in Sawamura’s voice, drowning out his own responses in his head, “so I don’t ever want to stop seeing new sides to Miyuki Kazuya!” He swallows, and lifts his chin up again, offering up his cheekiest grin. “You know,” he says, finally, “you still just sound jealous, Kuramochi.”

“Jealous of what?!” Kuramochi demands, as Watanabe snickers pettily over the turning tables and Maezono finally un-obstructs his own airway. “Of you and Sawamura?”

“Yeah,” Kazuya says, “and why wouldn’t you be? Didn’t Natsukawa Yui break up with you because she didn’t want to share the bed with your pet?” He winks at Kuramochi. “Not a problem I’m ever going to have~!”

“I hate you,” Kuramochi says, gravely, and Kazuya, happy, victorious, and utterly satisfied, smiles so widely that his cheeks hurt.

Kuramochi’s tweet, when Kazuya reads it later, is just the photograph with the caption ’happy for this asshole I guess, and Sawamura’s responded with a heart-eyes emoji.

Kazuya likes both tweets, and logs off the app.

Two days after their first concert, which’d had them traveling to Osaka to perform for fifty-thousand screaming fans, Kazuya is happy to be back in Tokyo. Sawamura had spent the night, and left again early this morning to film for his new law drama: Kazuya had gotten a glimpse of the script, and all he really knows about it is that Sawamura’s playing a rookie prosecutor who falls in love with a defendant on trial for murder. Sawamura had tried to explain some of his character’s motivations pretty passionately as he shoved toast in his mouth on his way out the door, but Kazuya had only understood every other word, and he’d been too distracted by how gorgeous Sawamura looked in Kazuya’s oversized Second Year hoodie with the sleeves pushed up high above his elbows.

He meets up with Kuramochi at the gym after Kuramochi needles him into a workout, and then they gorge themselves on pastries afterwards as a reward.

“Are you ever going to open these?” Kuramochi asks, slapping the top box in Kazuya’s foyer as he walks past it. Hime jumps at the sound, barking twice before she realizes it wasn’t a knock at the door. She spins in a circle as Kazuya watches, completely bemused by how much she reminds him of his boyfriend.

Kazuya, sweaty from the gym and full from chocolate breads, looks at them with distaste. “I opened that small box my dad gave me as a bonus and had an existential crisis, so...”

“Well, this time I’m here, so I can remind you that you apparently exist purely to get on my fucking nerves,” Kuramochi says. “Wanna get it over with?”

Kazuya heaves a sigh. “Sure,” he says, and he and Kuramochi drag the top box down and drag it to a clear patch of floor. Kazuya gets a towel out from the closet for the contents, and then gets the scissors from the cup on his work desk and opens them, dragging one of the blades down in a cross to score the packing tape.

Kuramochi tears it open while Kazuya returns his scissors to his desk. “Is this a quilt?” Kuramochi lifts the blanket out and tosses it gently aside. Hime walks over and sniffs it twice before lying down on it. “This is your baby stuff, my guy.”

Kazuya comes over to look, and finds that Kuramochi is right: most of what’s in the box is for a small child.

They both laugh when Kazuya pulls out a brightly colored xylophone from the bottom of the box, along with a set of felt-ended mallets to play it with. “I’m going to keep this for Sawamura,” Kazuya says, looking at the rainbow metal plates in ascending order. “It’ll match the rest of his apartment.”

“Match?” Kuramochi asks, picking things up off the towel and putting them back in the box. “I dunno if I’m more curious or afraid.”

“He doesn’t see colors well,” Kazuya replies. “His apartment reflects that.”

Kuramochi pauses with a soft doll in his hand. “Afraid, then,” he says, but he softens it with a grin.

The second box isn’t taped, the flaps just folded interlocking, and Kazuya’s the one to open it. Sheet music is filed spine up, filling half the box, and the rest is piles of paperwork. Kazuya takes out a large section of the sheet music and starts to flip through it. Mostly jazz, he notes. He already has all of his mother’s annotated classical sheet music.

“This box is boring,” Kuramochi says, picking up handfuls of the paperwork to look underneath. “Contest forms and grant applications? Was any of this even worth—” He stops, setting the papers down on the towel, and digs deep into the box, emerging with photographs. “Score!” He waves his hand at Kazuya, who has looked up from the sheet music to see what he’s found. “Can I look through these?”

“Knock yourself out,” Kazuya replies, returning to the music.

Only a moment later, though, he looks up again at the sound of Kuramochi’s voice. “Aha! Proof that you had a dog when you were a little kid!” The sound of photos being shuffled to the back of the stack ceases as Kuramochi stops on one. “You never said, but I knew it in my heart!”

“I never said because I’ve never had a dog,” Kazuya replies, setting the music down and holding out a hand for Kuramochi to pass the photo over. “What are you talking about?”

“This?” Kuramochi sets the whole stack in his hand, and when Kazuya looks down at the photo currently on top, it’s—

It’s at the old shrine, at the bottom of the steps, where two tall ginko trees shoot tall up into the sky, branches sprawling out, shime paper decorating the ropes wrapped around both thick trunks. Kazuya’s mother is standing behind him, one hand on his hair and the other on his shoulder, smiling at the camera. Kazuya is grinning more mischievously, two of his baby teeth missing, their adult replacements yet to have grown in, and he’s wearing his elementary school Little League baseball uniform, clearly having stopped on the way home from a game.

Kazuya’s arms are wrapped around a giant dog, almost as big as he is, chocolate brown with ears like a wolf, eyes closed as it licks at Kazuya’s cheeks.

“I don’t—” Kazuya starts to say, and it’s there, the burning behind his eyes, but he lets it burn, tossing the picture aside to reveal the next one, and the next. The shrine, with two trees, not one, features in many of them, and so does the big brown dog. It’s never facing the camera, always caught from the side or at three-quarters, head in Kazuya’s lap or running to catch a baseball, or lying down with its head on its paws as Kazuya uses a stick to make staff paper in the dry dirt. “I can’t remember this,” he manages. “Any of it.”

“You should stop,” Kuramochi says. “Maybe sit down—”

“No,” Kazuya says, and he winces as the pain intensifies, sirens in his head replacing the frantic pounding of piano keys. He keeps shuffling through the pictures, looking for any kind of clue, and it isn’t until he makes it to almost the bottom of the entire pile that he finds one.

The picture is of Kazuya, with scraped knees and glasses sliding down sitting across from another boy in the dirt. The boy is reaching out to Kazuya, and Kazuya is reaching back, a baseball in his hand, and…

Kazuya has always said that Sawamura Eijun’s eyes are impossible to forget. “Eijun,” he says, and the fire burns so hot that Kazuya turns to ash for a moment, unable to move or think or breathe.

Then memories slam into him, of Eijun’s laugh and Eijun’s wild pitches and Eijun crawling under the piano while Kazuya and his mother played, Rachmaninov No. 2 in C minor blaring through the house, Kazuya’s mother helping him press the pedals as he moved his fingers with hers across the heavy keys. Eijun at the shrine, hiding amongst the trees, and Eijun on his back, staring up at the sun and looking more like a dog than a boy with his bare feet and hair untamed.

That big brown dog turning to look at him with Eijun's eyes.

Kazuya blinks, and tries to inhale, but all he can do is scream until the world fades slowly to black, Hime's furious barking the last thing he hears besides his own fracturing voice.

Kazuya wakes up in a hospital room, without his glasses and alone.

The first thing he notices is that the window is open, letting in humidity from outside.

His head is pounding in synch with the beeping of his heart monitor, but Kazuya determinedly keeps his eyes open in the dim room, staring at the ceiling as his thoughts carefully collect, individual notes coming together to form a new refrain.

They hadn’t taken off his pendant, and it’s a steady burn against his chest, in harmony with the pain behind his eyes. It takes him a minute to remember how to move his arm, but then he brings it up to touch the carved dog, pressing the fleshy part of his thumb against one of the pointed ears.

“Miyuki Kazuya?” Just like at their fake wedding, Kazuya doesn’t need to look to know the person speaking is Sawamura, but he wants to look anyway. Sawamura is curled up in a visitor’s chair, his body too big for the way he’s sitting in it, knees to his chest. Kazuya’s vision without his glasses isn’t nearly sharp enough to see Sawamura’s face clearly, but he can tell that he’s barefoot, and shirtless. His eyes peer at Kazuya through the fall of his hair, lantern-like in the dark. “You’re awake!”

“Where’s Kuramochi?” Kazuya asks, and he winces at the sound of his voice, ruined from screaming.

“He’s with your dad,” Sawamura says. “Doing paperwork stuff. They…” He tilts his head to the side, entire body stiffening as someone walks past Kazuya’s room, and only when the footsteps fade does he make a rattling exhale and continue. “I only came in because there was no one else here.”

“The hospital let you in without shoes?” Kazuya asks, because every single other question seems too big in the moment, larger than Kazuya can comprehend. He reaches for the bedside console, feeling around, trying to find his glasses. He encounters them with the tips of his middle and third finger, and drags them closer. “Seems like that’s against health policy.”

“I didn’t need to be let in,” Sawamura replies. “There’s a window.” His eyes flash as Kazuya puts his glasses on, bringing Sawamura’s expression into sudden, sharp relief. “But I wanted to come see you, so I—!” His lower lip trembles, and the gooseflesh has risen on his arms and stomach. Kazuya wants to reach out and slide his hands into Sawamura’s hair, but he can’t bring himself to actually do it.

The Sawamura in front of him has another, younger Sawamura superimposed on him, with the same eyes and the same sharp teeth. “I knew you,” Kazuya says. “I knew you.”

“I felt you remember,” Sawamura replies, and it’s a crackling mess. His eyes are so bright, and Kazuya can only take a breath when he blinks. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, and the skin on his lips is so cracked that Kazuya fears they might bleed.

“How?” Kazuya asks, and Sawamura reaches out and touches the pendant with the tips of his fingers.

“We’re connected, Miyuki Kazuya,” he says, his tongue curling around Kazuya’s name the same way it always does. It’s almost an anchor in the wave of memories that rush in with the power of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra at the climax. “I gave that to you. I hoped…” He swallowed. “I hoped it would help you hold on to me, when the world tried to take you away.”

Sawamura sitting next to a piano bench, both of them small, maybe six or seven, sheet music for Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ in front of them as Kazuya obeys his mother’s margin note, counting up in threes to hit the chords as Sawamura presses his face into Kazuya’s neck.

“I don’t understand,” Kazuya says, and his mind is still, even now, playing tricks on him, because the next memory is nearly the same, only Sawamura is a big chocolate colored dog, eyes round and bright as he lies on top of Kazuya’s feet. That isn’t possible. “Sawamura, I don’t—”

Someone like me wouldn’t be allowed, Sawamura had said, when Kazuya had asked about baseball. Or I forget that I have to act more like a person sometimes, when Kazuya’d demanded to know why Sawamura found it so easy to invade his personal space.

All the times that Kazuya had looked at Hime, and thought he saw echoes of Sawamura’s reactions.

“Everyday people aren’t supposed to know about gods,” Sawamura tells him, the words coming out so fast they almost seem to trip over each other. “But your mother was special!”

Kazuya’s mother, who loved fairy tales, and believed in shamans, and magic, and collected protection pouches from shrines.

Sawamura’s brows gather together, creating a thin wrinkle at the center of his forehead. “She was…” She’d had a carved dog too, Kazuya thinks, summoning up the image of the lacquered box. It had been cold. “When she died, you weren’t old enough to make a bargain!”

“That’s…”

Sawamura presses down on Kazuya’s chest, pendant trapped between Kazuya’s sternum and Sawamura’s shaking palm. “It wasn’t up to me, to take your memories away,” he says. “I’m not even fully a spirit, and I wasn’t old enough to make a bargain, either! There was only waiting, and waiting, and wishing that…” He shudders with his full body, and leans in to brush his nose against Kazuya. “But I couldn’t just wait. I had to climb up to you before you got too far away.”

“Then all along,” Kazuya says, fighting down a waver by infusing his words with ice, “you’ve known everything about me, known that I’d had so much fundamentally stolen, and you just led me along?” Sawamura whines, high in the back of his throat, but Kazuya presses onward, finding anger so much easier than confusion and fear. “You let me go on thinking there was something wrong with me and panic and… and live with the gaps while you knew all along why it was happening?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Sawamura replies desperately. “I didn’t want to hurt you! The magic is—”

“For not wanting to hurt me,” Kazuya says, and this time, he thinks, Sawamura won’t have to wonder whether or not his intention is to be cruel, “you sure were successful at it.” He puts a hand on Sawamura’s chest in a mirror of Sawamura’s position, but he uses all the force in his arm to push Sawamura away from him. “You don’t…” He swallows back a sob. “I trusted you, even when things didn’t add up, or you knew things you shouldn’t. I shoved all the weird things down to the bottom, because I wanted… You lied to me, over and over and over again!”

Sawamura seems to shrink in front of him, broad shoulders slumping forward, and he takes two steps back, tripping over the visitor’s chair and only keeping himself from falling by catching himself with a hand splayed wide against the wall. “I didn’t!” Sawamura says. “I didn’t want to!”

I don’t want you to forget me again, Sawamura had said, with so much misery in his voice, and Kazuya had been stupid enough to believe that he’d been talking about that night at Victory Bar, instead of thousands of other nights spent side by side, playing baseball, playing piano, lying in the grass, all under his mother’s watchful eyes.

Did Kazuya even really black out that night? Or did the magic Sawamura’s tangled up with take that from him too?

“You should have left me alone!” Kazuya says, and his heart monitor starts to beep more frantically. “You should have—”

Footsteps hurry down the hall, coming in their direction, and Sawamura gives Kazuya one last longing look. “I couldn’t,” he says, and he touches his own chest, right where Kazuya’s pendant hangs. The pendant thrums against his chest. “I couldn’t let you go!”

And then Sawamura is hunching over, his body shooting through with threads of gold that glow under the skin as his bones jut out, changing shape before Kazuya’s eyes. It’s grotesque, painful looking, and the sound of cracking bones makes an awful, haunting melody as Sawamura falls to all fours.

A few moments later, standing there by Kazuya’s bed, is a huge, brown dog, as big as a wolf. It has sad, familiar amber eyes that are still brighter than everything else in the room.

As the footfalls come closer and closer to Kazuya’s door, the giant dog comes up to him and nuzzles its muzzle into his hand, and leaves a last lick at the center of his palm, and then it’s leaping out the open window into the grass outside, gone from Kazuya’s sight just as the door opens.

It has to have been a dream, Kazuya thinks, as a harried looking nurse comes in, clucking as she checks his vitals. Kazuya doesn’t remember his dreams, but maybe this time he has.

The window is still open, though, and he feels wide awake.

His father is in the doorway, mouth curved in a deep frown, and Kuramochi is just behind him. “Is everything okay?”

“He’s fine,” the nurse says. “He probably woke up and panicked.”

“Probably,” Kazuya says, as they both enter the room. He looks at Kuramochi, who is sitting in Sawamura’s vacated visitor’s chair. “Sorry to freak you out.”

“Yeah, you’d better be,” Kuramochi complains, but he’s still pinched around the eyes, worry written in every line of his expression. “Also I think now I’m going to have to invest in therapy for my dog.”

The nurse leaves after making a few notes in his file on the computer, and his father comes over to him, resting a hand on his forehead. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought it had been long enough that going through your mother’s things wouldn’t cause something like this.”

“Yeah,” Kazuya replies. “I guess trauma’s like that.”

The room is quiet for a long minute, and then Kuramochi is squinting down at his jeans, and then lifting his thigh up to dust at the chair. “Dude,” he says, “why’s there so much dog hair in here?”

Kazuya swallows, and looks toward the window. “No idea,” he says, and he thinks about impossible things, and secrets, and his heart does a descending scale all the way down to the lowest A as his pendant continues to thrum.

Kazuya’s mobile phone stays silent for days and days and days. He buys a pack of cigarettes, and smokes them one by one, convincing himself that space and distance is what he needs right now; that he needs time to process everything and Sawamura initiating contact would only make it harder. He finds himself checking his text messages over and over again anyway, out of a new habit, and feeling a thick surge of disappointment every time there’s nothing there.

His bandmates notice at practice, concert rehearsals for the upcoming Tokyo Dome show in full swing, and Maezono keeps looking over at him with thinly veiled concern each time he puts his phone away and then slams his fingers down too hard on the keyboard keys, playing the only way he knows to express his frustration.

“Okay?” Maezono asks, carefully, his gruff, angular face accentuated by the worried gather of his brows. “If you need some more time off—”

“I don’t,” Kazuya replies shortly, not looking up from the digital piano. “Let’s move on to the next song.”

Watanabe silently brings him a fresh bottle of water. “You were in the hospital a couple of weeks ago,” he says. “It’s all right to need a little time.”

Kazuya takes the water bottle, but he doesn’t reply, causing Watanabe to sigh and leave him be.

Kuramochi comes over to him after they wrap the next song and kicks his bench. “Don’t be an asshole,” he says. “It’s not bad that your friends don’t want you to be miserable, you big bag of dicks.” He rests a hand on Kazuya’s shoulder. “Also no one else wants to ask so I will. What’s up with Sawamura?”

“We’re not talking right now.”

“Shit,” Kuramochi says. “Is that temporary, or…”

“I don’t know,” Kazuya replies, and then he aggressively plays the opening notes to the next track to end the conversation.

The car ride home afterwards is quiet, the only noise Elvis playing from the tinny speakers, and Kuramochi doesn’t say anything until he pulls up outside Kazuya’s building. “If you need to talk about anything, you know I’ve always got your back, right?”

“Yeah,” Kazuya says. “I know.” He attempts to smile at Kuramochi, and then he gets out of the car and heads up to his apartment, still cluttered with Sawamura’s things, and underscoring his absence.

Two nights before the Tokyo show, Kazuya opens his mother’s lacquered box again, setting the brochure and pressed rose aside, and this time, he unfolds and reads every single note.

They’re all mundane, about simple things like new music or baseball games or a new nest of ladybugs at the shrine, and Kazuya reads each one slowly, savoring the way the memories flow back into him bit by bit, filling in the holes that had previously only caused him pain when he tried to remember.

He lets long afternoons spent playing with Sawamura Eijun, more dog than boy most days, unfurl inside his mind, and he’s suddenly struck with a memory. He and Sawamura, in dog form, at the bottom of the first stairway of the shrine. Sawamura had been digging into the dirt at the base of one of the ginko trees with his paws, and, when Kazuya had got down on his knees to see what he was doing, realizing Sawamura had been looking for something, uncovering it with his nose.

Kazuya had reached into the dirt and pulled out the small carving of a dog on its back haunches, as big as the palm of his hand. His pendant.

Hit with the urge to see if it matches up with memory, he calls a taxi and takes it to his father’s house, walking up the hill in the direction of the baseball field and stopping at the entrance of the shrine. Where the Sawamura in his memory had been digging, there is a patch of orchids.

Kazuya fingers his pendant.

“The tree died about fifteen years ago,” the old priest says, and Kazuya, surprised not to be alone, jumps, turning to look at him. He’s standing four steps up, looking at Kazuya speculatively. “Right after that carving got dug up, I suspect.”

“Were you waiting for me or something?” Kazuya asks.

“I knew you’d be back the moment I saw you were wearing that necklace,” says the priest. “Those are rare. They’re gifts, usually, to protect a nature god’s favored.”

“But I wasn’t,” Kazuya says. “I wasn’t favored. I was an extra, an add on to my mother and whatever… whatever bargain you made, and that’s why my memories got taken away, right?”

The priest shakes his head. “That’s not how it works,” he says. “You weren’t an extra to the spirit that gave you that charm. Dog spirits are loyal, just like real dogs.” He points to the pendant. “And it puts you under direct protection. The spirit that offers that to you will feel it, every time you’re afraid, every time you need them, and it holds them to the human realm. That’s what it’s for.”

“Oh,” Kazuya says, and then, after a brief hesitation, he speaks again. “He said… I wasn’t old enough to make a bargain, back then.”

“That’s right.” The old priest looks up at the sky. “Our guardian deities don’t elicit promises from children.” His gaze turns knowing. “Not even the half spirits, with more human in them than most. It’s easier, I think, for them to make the children forget, instead.”

“I’m not a child anymore,” Kazuya says, “and I don’t want to forget again. What do I have to do, to remember this time? What does a bargain entail?”

The priest looks at him with a faint smile. “If you remember right now,” he says, “the bargain’s already been made.”

“But I didn’t… I didn’t promise anything,” Kazuya says, looking down at the orchids and remembering that last lick of Sawamura’s rough tongue against his palm. “So how…”

“You’ll have to ask your spirit,” replies the priest. “I can’t tell you that.”

what was our bargain, then? Kazuya texts Sawamura in the taxi on his way back home.

The text goes unanswered, and Kazuya waits and waits and waits until he finally falls asleep, nothing in his head but an eerie, unhappy quiet.

He wakes up in the early afternoon to a message from Sawamura. You have to want me!! it says, with no emojis and no further explanation, and Kazuya looks back with confusion to the message he’d sent the previous night.

what does that have to do with a bargain? Kazuya types, and he stares down at the message, willing Sawamura to reply to it.

Instead, he gets a message from Takashima. Wake up and check your e-mail, Kazuya.

She’s sent him an itemized, and prioritized, list of all the brands that want Kazuya and Sawamura to do joint promotions with them, thanks to ‘Trial Marriage’.

He marks it unread.

You have to want me, Kazuya thinks, wondering what exactly that means. Wanting, before Sawamura, had been simple. It had been transactional and easy and he’d moved on afterwards without any compunctions to the thing he wanted next.

Sawamura is a whole new ballgame, and all of the things he’s come to feel for him the past half a year are made complicated by a past that he’s only starting to remember, ripe with secrets and magics he still doesn’t remotely understand, along with a bitter taste in his mouth that has him wondering how much of what has happened was coincidence or his choices at all. Sawamura, who isn’t even human, at least not completely, had followed him and his music, had made himself famous because Kazuya was famous, and then thrown himself into Kazuya’s path, and that’s…

Kazuya doesn’t know if he can trust his instincts, when he’s been wearing this pendant around his neck for years and years, connected to Sawamura without even knowing it this entire time.

You have to want me, Sawamura had told him, like it was that easy, the same way he’d laid out how a relationship had worked by counting off silly little things on his fingers. It had seemed too good to be true then, and it seems too good to be true now.

Because of course Kazuya wants the Sawamura he knows now, who makes his heart sing with a grin and lights him up with his eyes and looks at Kazuya like he’s the only thing that matters any time they’re in the same room.

It’s the Sawamura that can transform, the Sawamura that Kazuya had known as a child, and then disappeared from his life and taken every trace of himself with him, that Kazuya’s not sure about.

The Tokyo Dome is one of Kazuya’s favorite places to perform. It’s a completely different stage than the classical venues he plays with Mei sometimes, or filled during his teenage years when he still participated in competitions. It’s louder and bigger and more, and the screams of fifty-five thousand people, all listening to music Kazuya’s written, and that Kazuya is helping play, fill him with a satisfaction that he’s never been able to match anywhere else.

“The camera crew is all set up,” Kuramochi says, when he looks out over the audience at the start of the show. “I can’t believe they’re televising the whole thing live, and all these people still bought tickets.”

“It’s never the same on screen as it is in person,” Watanabe says. His hair is slicked back, the bowl cut and stern expression replaced by his stage look, makeup dark at the corner of his eyes. “They’re coming for the experience.”

“Then let’s give them a show!” Maezono slaps Watanabe’s back.

Kuramochi is fitting his earpiece into place, and winks at Kazuya. “Are you ready?”

Kazuya can’t help but spare one last glimpse at his phone. He still hasn’t heard from Sawamura again, and a desire to talk to him, to figure out where they stand, has been sitting in the small of his back, entwined with the tension from bad posture and overwork that lives there most days. “I’m always ready.”

The crowd roars as they run out onto the stage, and Kazuya lets the adrenaline carry him through the first half of the set, song after song from their new album mixed in with their biggest previous hits, his own voice joining Kuramochi’s lead vocal, both of them perfectly on pitch.

They always do their solos during the middle of the concert. Kuramochi goes first, singing an interesting and rowdy new arrangement of an old Beastie Boys song that Kazuya hates to the laughter and yelling of the enthralled audience. He comes backstage afterwards, drenched in sweat, as the crew rapidly moves to set up the stage for Kazuya’s solo.

Kazuya always has a full piano brought out to the center of the stage for his. For all the previous concerts on tour, he’s been singing an acoustic cover of Mamiya Takako’s ‘Love Trip’, a song from the ’90s that was was sampled in ‘Trial Marriage’s montage music that had gotten stuck in his head.

Tonight, though, as he sits down at the bench, Kazuya has something else planned. He doesn’t announce it, just starts to play: The first moment of Rachmaninov No.2 in C minor starts to resound through the Tokyo Dome, and the audience quiets to a hush.

You have to want me.

Kazuya glides his fingers on the keys, and thinks about how it had felt when he’d known Sawamura was in the front row at Mei’s show, watching him raptly, all his focus devoted to Kazuya’s music. Kazuya’s whole heart had melted out through his fingertips, and he’d felt every vibration of his instrument all the way down to his bones.

And Kazuya knows he’ll need to reconcile his past with his future, if he wants to build anything permanent with Sawamura. He’ll have to comb through his mother’s notes and delve into the rest of her secrets. He’ll have to learn about what Sawamura is, and an entire world that he’d apparently seen only glimpses of for his entire life, and then learn to live with it.

It’s outside his comfort zone, but so is everything he’s done for the past six or seven months, and Kazuya, despite everything, wouldn’t have changed any of it at all.

The audience cheers as he comes to the end of the first movement, and Kazuya grins, the weight on his shoulders easing. He looks out on the audience, squinting against the shock of their waving lightsticks, and transitions, easily, into the second movement, the heaviness of the first left behind them as the main through-line soars.

Nice of you to play some real music in the middle of all that noise, Mei texts him later that night.

I’ll tell Kuramochi you loved his solo, Kazuya types in reply. He’s just gotten out of the shower, and he towels his hair dry as he waits for Mei’s inevitable sarcastic response.

He ambles toward the kitchen in bare feet. Outside, Omotesando is still bustling, late summer nights encouraging more late-night wandering. Maybe Kazuya will sit on the long bench by the window and watch them walk by for a while, after he makes himself a cup of coffee.

There’s a short, loud knock at his door that stops him right at the kitchen doorway, and he looks down at his phone. It’s a little after midnight, and far too late for anyone to come by. He stares at the door, perplexed, until the person outside knocks again. “Miyuki Kazuya!”

Kazuya’s stomach flops, and all the remaining adrenaline from his concert tonight has his heart picking up to double-time as he walks to the door on autopilot, stepping down into the foyer to unlock it.

Sawamura is outside. He’s wearing his bright AKAGI hooded sweatshirt, and his hair is shorn shorter again around the ears. “You didn’t answer my text,” Kazuya says, and Sawamura narrows his eyes at him, pushing into Kazuya’s apartment and taking off his shoes, letting the door fall closed behind him.

He runs his hands along the closet door handles as Kazuya tries to collect himself, turning around to look at Kazuya with his steady, unrelenting gaze. “That dog has been here again,” he says, and he shifts his weight from foot to foot. Kazuya thinks it’s the only sign of Sawamura’s uncertainty until he sees the slight quiver of his chin.

“It’s my best friend’s dog. You’ll have to get used to it.”

Sawamura blinks at that, and Kazuya realizes what it implies after Sawamura does, but he doesn’t take it back.

Emboldened, Sawamura reaches up and touches the pendant at Kazuya’s neck. “You never took it off.”

“No,” Kazuya says. “Some habits are harder to break than others.”

“Like smoking.” Sawamura leans in, takes a breath. “You don’t smell like smoke.”

“I smoked a whole pack last week, sorry,” Kazuya replies. “You’ll have to start my tally again.”

“You should take better care of your health!” Sawamura brings a hand up to feel the dark circles under his eyes, visible now that the stage makeup has been washed away.

“Then what would you nag me about?” Kazuya teases, bringing his hand up to cup Sawamura’s cheek. Sawamura pushes into the touch, like he always does, and Kazuya’s heart breaks and comes back together again in a single moment, allegro. “Sawamura, I want you,” he says.

“I know,” Sawamura says. “I could hear it. In your piano, when you were playing. I can always hear your mood when you play.” He swallows. “And you remember me. You wouldn’t, if you didn’t.”

“You’ll have to tell me,” Kazuya says, “everything I don’t know. You’ll have to explain to me how…” He shakes his head to clear it. “I want to know as much about you as you know about me.”

“You will,” says Sawamura, plainly. “That’s what I want too! Because I love you, Miyuki Kazuya!”

“So loyal,” Kazuya teases. “Should I call you Hachiko, like the dog that waited for her master to come home from work for years after he died?”

“No,” Sawamura says, and he presses further into Kazuya’s curved hand, just like Hime does, and Kazuya can’t help but sink it into the soft curls and scratch. “Call me Eijun!”

“Eijun,” Kazuya tries, for the very first time since he was a child, and his reward is Sawamura’s best grin. “You waited a long time for me.”

“I did,” Sawamura says. “I waited years and years! I told you I was patient!”

Sawamura is too much. His eyes are too bright, and he’s too loud, and he’s too blunt, and one day, it will be the death of him. But, Kazuya thinks, this kind of happiness isn’t the sort of thing he’ll take for granted. “Good boy,” he murmurs, and he cards a hand through Sawamura’s hair, and rises up on the balls of his feet to kiss him on the forehead.

“I know,” Sawamura says, with an adorable lofty pride, and he leans down for a real kiss, slow and thorough just the way Kazuya had taught him. “So play me something!”

“Demanding,” Kazuya says, and he pulls Sawamura across his apartment over to the keyboard, then down next to the bench. “Are you going to boss me around forever?”

“Of course I am!”

Kazuya laughs, and without thinking, he rests his hands on the keys, the opening notes to ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ sounding through the apartment.

Sawamura, like it’s easy, like it’s simple, like it’s nothing, starts to sing along.

Kazuya posts a picture of a dog collar on his Twitter, with no caption or explanation.

Disgusting, Kuramochi replies, but he ReTweets it anyway.