Work Text:
Chicken stew is easy to cook. If Nagi had to choose to cook something, chicken stew easily ranks as one of his favorite recipes because it’s hard to mess up, he can make big batches of it, and it offers comfort for solitary winters. He bought a slow cooker at his mom’s recommendation, and the actual parts he has to do with his hands takes less than ten minutes: all he has to do is toss in chicken, spices, and the plethora of ingredients he can usually find pre-peeled and chopped up from the mart, and wait.
He’s just rounded hour five of the seven hours the slow cooker needs to do its job, having spent the day fading in and out of naps and gaming, when his phone rings. Nagi ignores it in favor of pressing the buttons of his console for a gacha roll.
His phone rings again, and again, and again. He pauses his game and painstakingly rolls over, hand hovering over his phone screen, poised to reject the call—
It’s Reo.
But that can’t be right; Reo hasn’t called him since Reo rang him awake for their high school graduation, petulant and assured that Nagi would change his mind and attend the same university as Reo.
Nagi never did change his mind, and thus, Reo never deemed another occasion worth a call. Until now, it seems.
Nagi stares at the contact card lighting up his phone screen in disbelief... but Reo’s name and contact picture persists. The ringing resounds straight into his skull and Nagi’s stomach somersaults—he regrets downing that jelly pack earlier. He eyes the game he’d paused. He takes a breath. He quits the game.
Nagi has spent a lifetime as a quitter. And then, he spent what feels like a lifetime, trying to get over one Mikage Reo. The one thing he couldn’t—can’t—quit.
Nagi takes hold of his phone and presses the green accept call button.
The line connects, and static roars to life. Nagi thinks he hears the sound of glass clinking together.
“Hi—Hey,” Reo says, his voice hiccuping. “Can you pick me up? I’m at a party, I texted you the address.”
Nagi checks his text notifications. There’s nothing there.
Over the sound of people cheering, Reo continues, “Sorry to bother you about this, Ba-ya.”
Nagi blinks at his phone, not quite sure he isn’t hallucinating. This seems like the sort of lucid dream that Nagi would wish upon himself.
“I’m not Ba-ya,” Nagi says.
“Hold on,” Reo says. There’s an extended pause, and the background noise snuffs out into a muffle. “Sorry, I couldn’t hear you earlier,” and this time, the line delivers Reo’s voice with searing clarity, “Can you please come get me?”
Nagi mentally rehashes the two hour distance between his university and Reo’s.
“Okay,” Nagi says. “Where are you?”
There’s a brief bout of silence, and then:
“…Nagi?” Reo’s voice shines with disbelief. “Oh my god, did I call you?”
“Yes.”
“Huh,” Reo says. “I’m drunk.”
“Mhm,” Nagi agrees. “Is there anyone with you?” he asks.
“Club President was...” Reo says and now that there’s less background noise Nagi can hear how Reo’s words form slower than Nagi remembers, sloping and slurred. Selfishly, Nagi hopes it’s due to the alcohol, and not something he missed out on seeing change for himself. “But I haven’t seen him in—” Reo pauses. “Shit, that was two hours ago?”
Concern seizes Nagi’s chest. He stands up from his bed.
“Text the address to me,” Nagi says.
“Oh, no, it’s okay, I’ll call Ba-ya,” Reo babbles. “She would know what to do. Don’t worry about me, Nagi. Did you know I’m forty minutes away from your university right now? This is the closest I’ve ever been, I wonder who chose this place for the party.”
“Reo,” Nagi says. “Address, please.”
“Why?” Reo asks, curiosity sticking to his tone like syrup, and it lures the weighted truth out of Nagi’s lips.
“I want to make sure you get home safe.”
Another pause, and it nearly wears Nagi out.
“What if I don’t want to go home?”
Nagi pulls his shoes on, his heartbeat picking up.
“Is there somewhere you want to go, then?” Nagi reaches to turn his door knob.
“Can I sleep over at yours?” Reo asks.
Nagi stops in his tracks. He turns his gaze back to his room. It’s a cramped studio apartment: there’s a kitchenette, a desk that the last tenant left behind, and a mattress on the floor. All in all, a shitty apartment, and not one worth going back to, save for Choki on his windowsill.
Nagi wonders if Reo would like to see Choki again.
“Whatever you want,” Nagi says. “But first, I need your address.”
His phone vibrates with a text. Nagi inputs it into his map app and, true to Reo’s word, it’s forty minutes away.
Nagi makes it down the stairs of his apartment building to the ground level when he remembers he doesn’t have a way to get to Reo. In his intoxicated state, Reo must have forgotten that Nagi doesn’t have his driver license, or maybe Reo thought Nagi had gotten one in the seven months they haven’t spoken.
Nagi installs the taxi app on his phone and requests for a ride. It’ll be pricey to go there and back, but... Reo called him, so this is a special occasion.
Nagi climbs into the backseat of a taxi and has just seat-belted when he realizes that Reo hasn’t hung up.
“You still there?” Nagi asks.
“I am—” Reo hiccups. “Still here—Stay on the line with me?”
“Yes, boss.”
Apparently, that was the right thing for Nagi to say, because Reo starts babbling again. “I didn’t really want to go to this party, but after seeing that it was close to your university, I couldn’t not go. That’s silly of me, isn’t it? I can’t call you when I’m sober even though I know there’s no way you would have changed your number, but sober-me made all these decisions that would lead me to you.”
“It’s not silly,” Nagi says.
“I guess not,” Reo says, trailing off, then continuing, choppy and slow, “But I don’t even like parties. Too many people recognize me. I don’t like being seen.”
“I know,” Nagi says.
“I know you know,” Reo replies, and then Nagi can hear him yawn.
The taxi pulls into a nice neighborhood, bathed in shrubbery and dimmed street lights.
Nagi had forgotten what it felt like being a middle class savant in the midst of Hakuho High’s elite—but the feeling is back now. It feels like this: being inside a taxi with peeling leatherette vinyl seats, with smooth asphalt sliding underneath the worn tires that carry Nagi past manicured, fenced-off front yard gardens. A temporary, expensive ride in, nothing worth gawking over, but don’t forget you don’t belong. You’ll be in and out of here in no time.
Reo starts humming, and Nagi savors every static-filled note. If he closes his eyes, he can still feel his cheek resting in Reo’s lap, the fabric of his steam-pressed Hakuho uniform trousers softer than Nagi’s linen-cased pillow.
The taxi’s engine stutters as it pulls to the curbside of a three-story house that bleeds music.
The two melodies are a cacophony. Nagi prefers Reo’s steady hum. He brings his phone closer to his ear as he motions for the taxi driver to stay—he’ll be right back.
“I’m here,” Nagi says, wandering up to the house. “Where are you?”
“Right here.” Reo’s crystal clear voice nearly makes Nagi’s phone slip out of his fingers. Nagi turns, and is confronted with the sight of Reo sitting languidly on a cobblestone bench in front of a man-made pond. “You were pretty quick,” Reo adds, with a dwelling lilt stretched over upturned lips.
Mikage Reo, in the flesh.
Relief floods Nagi’s bloodstream and washes all over him, and he barely registers himself ending the call and pocketing his phone as he drinks in the sight. Reo’s hair—it’s longer than Nagi remembers, it ghosts the tips of his shoulders. Reo’s cheeks, despite the chilled air, are flushed pink, and his eyes are wide and dilated, the violet hue shimmering.
It makes Nagi weak. He’d gone so long without the sight of Reo, and now he’s swathed by it.
“I wasn’t quick at all,” Nagi says. It has been forty minutes, on the dot. Nagi feels a faint smile tug at the corner of his lips. He didn’t expect for someone as planned and punctual as Reo to lose his sense of time when released from his inhibitions.
Reo hums at that, tilting his head, and it makes a baby hair fall across his forehead.
“Come on,” Nagi says with a short gesture of his chin. “I got us a taxi.”
“Okay,” Reo says easily, and knots his brow as he attempts to get up from his cobblestone perch. He wavers and wobbles and then his legs fail him, and Nagi lurches forward to catch him.
Nagi barely holds in a surprised gasp as warmth envelopes him. He grasps onto Reo’s forearms, steadying him.
Reo leaning on him is somehow worse than the mere privilege of looking at him. Heat spreads throughout Nagi’s veins, melting his chilled winter bones. Nagi wills himself to stay upright. Those high school soccer muscles couldn’t have atrophied that quickly.
It’s hard to believe that they used to touch so casually. Nagi basks in it, beholden by nostalgia. He’s not sure how he got so far away from everything he knew he needed at seventeen, but he never wants to let go ever again.
“My card is my pocket,” Reo says as he places all his weight into Nagi, fisting the front of Nagi’s hoodie, and the soft blow of Reo’s breath burns Nagi alive. “We… can use it for the taxi.”
Classic Reo. Even in a bodily state where Nagi would willingly be his arms and legs, Reo finds a way to be the giver.
“Sure, boss, if that’s what you want,” Nagi says and Reo leans away from Nagi then, just slightly, to offer him a brilliant smile, and then curiously looks around.
“Which way is the taxi?”
“Behind me,” Nagi says.
Nagi reluctantly lets Reo pull away and stand on his own two feet.
“I’m quite a functional drunk... I think,” Reo says as he walks in a line that’s just shy of straight towards the taxi. Reo even manages to open the door to the taxi on his own; manages to climb in, click on his seatbelt, and—
Then promptly falls asleep in his seat, head lolling to the side.
“Back the way we came,” Nagi tells the taxi driver as he pulls the backseat door shut after him. The taxi’s engine revs up. Nagi reaches out—because he’s allowed to, right? Reo wouldn’t have called if Nagi wasn’t allowed to—and guides the willowy line of Reo’s frame to rest against him, carefully slotting Reo’s head into the crook of his shoulder, his stomach in shambles as he catalogs the flutter of Reo’s lashes and the soft sigh as Reo nestles into place.
The taxi drops them off right where Nagi had been picked up nearly two hours prior. Nagi gently nudges Reo awake, then circles his fingers around Reo’s wrist, guiding him forward as Nagi, with his other hand, fumbles with his keys.
He unlocks the entryway and Reo marvels at the stairwell.
“I don’t know if I can make it up those steps,” Reo says, his lips pursing in concentration.
“I’ll carry you,” Nagi says.
“My knight in shining white armor?” Reo teases. And for that, Nagi swoops down to grab Reo by the knees and lifts him up. Reo’s laughter bubbles up as Nagi takes the steps two at a time, Reo’s hands absently finding purchase in Nagi’s hair.
Nagi lowers Reo back down to open the door of his apartment.
“So this is where you live,” Reo says with delight, surveying the space.
Nagi tenses, despite himself.
He’s never been one to collect or collate. Most of his worldly possessions outside his phone were given to him by Reo, but even his soccer cleats have been tucked away in his closet, collecting dust because he hadn’t bothered joining the university team (there was no point in playing, if not with Reo). He doesn’t have the fine upholsteries that Reo is used to, and Nagi knows that Reo is the one that asked to stay over, and could call Ba-ya any moment he wants to, but Nagi can’t shake the feeling that he’s being laid bare, as if he’s telling Reo I have nothing to give you, but I’m asking if you want me anyway.
It’s a terrifying feeling. His heart is in his throat, a noose around his neck that he put there himself. It’s no one’s fault but Nagi’s own that he’d grown attached to Reo like this.
And seven months ago, it was this very feeling that led Nagi to this apartment.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Nagi says, mostly because he doesn’t know what the proper procedures for having a guest over are, but Reo always made do whenever he stayed over at Nagi’s place in high school.
“Thanks Nagi, I really appreciate it,” Reo says, kicking off his shoes and then wanders around his apartment in a small circle, poking his head into the closet, sitting experimentally in the desk chair, then plopping down on the mattress. Nagi blinks. Okay, maybe Reo is getting comfortable a little too fast.
Beep.
The slow cooker’s lights flash green. Nagi meanders over to pop the lid open. Steam wafts out and the scent of chicken stew takes over Nagi’s tiny studio apartment.
Oh good, Nagi remembered to use garlic this time around. Sometimes he can’t be bothered and it tastes fine. But it’s better with garlic.
“Did you eat yet?” Nagi asks Reo. Reo sits up on the mattress, staring at the slow cooker almost accusingly; it’s evidently something he’d skipped over in his initial survey of Nagi’s apartment.
“You can cook?”
“Sort of,” Nagi says. “I can make survival food when it’s more cost efficient.”
“It smells good.”
Nagi nods and is relieved he’d had the foresight to get two bowls for his cupboard—one for normal use and the other for when he’s too lazy to wash the first—or at least that’s what he told himself when he bought it.
“How much?” Nagi asks.
“Just a little,” Reo says. “I usually don’t eat this late.”
Nagi fills the two bowls, sticks in spoons, unplugs the slow cooker, places the entire appliance in the fridge, then walks over to where Reo is still staring at him, brow furrowed.
Nagi hands him a bowl.
“Thank you,” Reo says.
“Mhm.”
Nagi settles down next to Reo on the bed. The mattress dips a little to accommodate both of their weights and they come to rest with the line of their legs pressed against each other and then, when their elbows knock together, Reo takes it as an invitation to lean into Nagi as he scoops up spoonfuls and slurps.
“Nagi,” Reo says.
“Hm?”
“This is really yummy.”
Nagi looks down at Reo, who is slouching into him. Nagi leans against the wall for support and—oh—wait—
“Reo,” Nagi says. “Please don’t cry.”
“It’s—” Reo hiccups, and droplets spill down his cheeks. “Really, really yummy.”
Nagi puts his own bowl down on the ground—he wasn’t hungry anyway, not with the circus his stomach has been today—and steels himself against his wall to support the onslaught of Reo’s weight. Nagi takes his thumb and runs it along the worry on Reo’s bottom lip, trying to smooth out the tension so Reo doesn’t bite down too hard and break the thin skin of his lips.
Reo sniffles.
“Do you hate me?” Reo asks.
“No,” Nagi says. He could never.
“Then why haven’t you contacted me since we graduated?”
“I came running when you called me,” Nagi says. He doesn’t think it gets more straightforward than that.
Reo hiccups, and takes another slurping sip of stew. He stares down at the bowl, as if in awe by it.
“I missed you,” Reo says.
“Missed you too.” So, so much.
“Why didn’t you go to Hakuho University?” Reo asks.
Ah, this again. Nagi’s inability to articulate himself always bites back at him. Reo had made it so easy at first—he always seemed to know what Nagi was thinking before Nagi knew himself, until one day Reo didn’t, and Nagi spent seven months simmering on it, wondering when it went wrong.
What he does know is this: he depended on Reo so much it terrified him.
He knew he needed to stop handing Reo the steering wheel, just because it’s easy. Because what would Nagi have the power to do if Reo takes off to someplace Nagi can’t follow? Nagi could only ever ask to be taken along, and try as Reo might, no matter how much Reo wants it, even that isn’t guaranteed. He needed, and still needs, his own set of wings to keep up with Reo.
Hakuho High is Hakuho University’s feeder school. Hakuho High’s incredibly difficult entrance requirements is because once you were in, going to Hakuho University was a given. But if Nagi had gone to Hakuho University, nothing would have changed. He still would have been the middle class savant kid that was lucky enough to be picked up by Mikage Reo.
And he knows Reo never saw it that way. That to Reo, Nagi had always been just Nagi, to the same degree that, to Nagi, Reo had always been just Reo.
Nagi opens and closes his mouth, unsure how to explain any of this to Reo. He searches for the right words. He doesn’t think he manages to find them, but he does find these:
“I wanted to become better,” Nagi says, and, as the words leave his lips, he knows it’s true. “I was nothing, before.”
“You didn’t need to become anything,” Reo argues. “I would have accepted you as you are.”
“You did,” Nagi agrees. Maybe this is selfish of him. “But I don’t want to stand beside you as your plus one.”
“I never saw it that way,” Reo says, voice serrated.
“I know,” Nagi says. He knows it in his bones. “That’s not what everyone else sees, though. And I—I needed to try.”
“You’re a genius, Nagi. An actual treasure. Anyone who doesn’t see that doesn’t matter.”
Nagi sighs heavily. How is he supposed to get Reo to understand?
“You hate being seen, Reo, but you’re going to be seen all your life,” Nagi tries. “That’s just who you are.”
Reo tenses, tears ducts dried, and indignation makes its way across his face.
Nagi continues before Reo can cut him off, “And not everyone is allowed into that space in light—I don’t care how much you hate it Reo, you’re gonna end up standing there anyway and I can’t just hop over the fence and say I’m with you, Reo. It doesn’t work that way.”
Reo opens his mouth to argue—then closes it, a pensive look winning over the indignation.
“So,” Nagi pleads. “Let me try.”
Reo looks down into his empty bowl.
“Okay,” Reo whispers. “But you have to promise to come back to me, no matter what happens.”
“I promise,” Nagi says. Reo doesn’t have to worry, Nagi would come back to Reo even if Reo hated him.
Reo takes a deep breath, then notices Nagi’s bowl on the ground.
“You’re not going to eat?”
“Not hungry,” Nagi says honestly. Reo pins his gaze on Nagi’s face, and Nagi isn’t sure what part of his face that Reo’s eyes are tracing, but it makes Nagi’s neck burn.
“Okay,” Reo accepts. “I’m going to put it away in your fridge then.” Reo lifts himself off of Nagi and the bed and Nagi tries not to shiver in disappointment at the loss of warmth.
Reo smiles a little at Nagi’s stiff twitch though, so Nagi thinks he’s been found out. No shame in following Reo up, then. It’s only a few paces away to the kitchenette. Reo places Nagi’s uneaten bowl in the fridge and, as Reo goes to wash his own dish, Nagi wraps his arms around Reo’s waist. Reo hums and Nagi gets lost in the melody.
Reo dries his hands, then swivels around in Nagi’s embrace, snaking his arms up to wrap around Nagi’s neck.
Reo leans in, gives Nagi a peck on the lips, and leans back with a glint in his eyes. Nagi stares. Reo leans back in, and Nagi melts into the feeling of Reo’s soft lips against his. Nagi feels like his heart grew five times too large. It waltzes at the seams, threatening to burst in his chest.
Reo pulls away again with a sly grin.
“Are you still drunk?” Nagi asks.
Reo shakes his head. “I think I slept most of it off earlier. Or argued it off. Take your pick. But if you’re worried, we can wait until tomorrow for this part.”
“Slept it off,” Nagi decides. Nagi is tired of waiting. He’s been waiting for seven months and then more than that.
Reo laughs, grinning wide, and Nagi leans in to claim the smile for himself.