Work Text:
“What’re you working on?” Langa asks as he takes the second seat in Reki’s workshop. There was a time where he’d linger awkwardly until Reki pushed him to get comfortable, now all he has to do is see Reki in the room before the comfort washes over him.
Reki’s hand's fiddle with his tools with his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth before he turns his seat to face Langa and says, “There’s this thing you do when you skate, it’s like you’re scared of your height in relation to the board so-” and Reki launches into a great spiel about the new board he plans on making for Langa. His eyes are sparkling, arms animated and all the warmth is spilling out like his body can’t contain it.
Langa can feel it, the soft kiss of it on his skin, the slight thawing of the ice, and the way his body wants more of it until the ice is gone. Take more, his mind whispers, he won’t miss it, and it’s true Reki has so much fire in him that Langa could take and take and it still wouldn’t leave a dent. But it would be selfish, Reki doesn’t deserve that, so he takes only what lingers in the air and what is left every time Reki touches him, to prove a point to himself.
He nods as Reki speaks, to show that he’s paying attention even though most of the technicalities are lost to him, there’s way too much to be gotten from the unrestrained excitement to even think of blanking out. Some parts of him get envious at times of Reki’s ability to burn so brightly, to find fun in the most mundane things in his life. Outside of Reki and skating -which are so heavily intertwined that he hardly knows where Reki ends and skating starts- there’s little that he finds fun in. It’s only a tiny part of him though, it doesn’t affect how much he enjoys being around him.
Langa watches as he makes what seems to be finishing touches and then Reki is holding his hand and dragging him to dinner with his family. The Kyans in general have a certain warmth to them, it is different from Reki’s warmth which is the sun's flame but they are warm all the same.
Their morning routine goes like this; Langa skates to the corner where they meet, where Reki is always waiting, their hands will touch briefly, palm lines to palm lines, for that moment he’ll let himself revel in it before pulling away. He’ll skate beside Reki and be in his orbit until class calls for attention. Sometimes they hug, after weekends where they couldn’t skate or after Reki and his family go to visit their grandparents. Langa likes that, the feel of Reki’s body pressed flush against his, his hands on Reki’s back. There are times where he likes it a little bit too much when he can feel the fire seeping into him, that's when he knows to pull away with his cheeks all hot.
One time in elementary school, Langa had come back home with tears in his eyes. His mom had been worried when she picked him up but there was little she could do to make him talk. His dad had brought him a popsicle, even though it was late fall, and asked him what was wrong.
“The other kids, they said I’m too cold, and that I take too much.” Langa quietly said to him, he hadn’t understood then, what it was to take too much, just that he felt sad.
His father had sighed and said, “Sometimes, we just have to restrain ourselves around other people until we meet the ones that just let us be. There’s a person out there who will be warm enough, who you’ll never be too much to. They call this sort of people soulmates, I doubt you’d understand now though.” Truth be told, Langa had barely understood what he meant and even now he didn’t.
“Will they cook for me too?” He’d asked with wonder in his eyes and the need for maybe three more popsicles in his stomach. Langa’s father had laughed, the deep belly kind that also made him laugh too, his worries nearly forgotten. Yes, yes they will, his dad had said before scooping him into his arms, sticky popsicle hands and all.
“Do you believe in soulmates?” Langa asks during their lunch period. Reki sits nearly across him but not quite, with his legs crossed inwards.
In Langa’s hands, there’s a bento box that Reki has just handed to him with a smile and something along the lines of, “Since you like my food so much I made you this.” He’s not sure why he’s asking but he knows it has something to do with the bento box he’s holding and the person that gave it to him.
“Ah Langa, I didn’t think you’d be into stuff like that. I find the idea a bit weird, how do you just see someone and know that they’re like, your other half or something? The whole thing seems kinda girly,” Reki sticks his tongue out after he says that.
“That's not the only thing about soulmates though,” Langa points out, bento box still in hand, “they’re someone you can never be too much for, at least that's what my dad told me.”
“...But that just sounds like a really good friend. Like you!” Reki says after a few moments of silence. Langa can swear that Reki seems to be blushing and he wills himself to not hone in on the fact that Reki thinks they’re soulmates, he absolutely will not.
He drops the topic after that, letting it move to thoughts that don’t make his palms itch for something he can’t have.
For almost two weeks, Langa’s thoughts consist solely of a bento box made just for him, a conversation he had with his father when he was six, and Reki indirectly calling him his soulmate. There’s also the fact that he’s suddenly hyper-aware of every time they touch.
“There’s a lunar eclipse happening next Friday, do you wanna sneak out to watch it at the park?” Reki asks about a week after the bento box incident. Langa is surprised that he’s being asked because why wouldn’t he? He tries not to notice that it got extremely hot when Reki asked, like he was burning up and the heat went straight to Langa.
He gives an affirmative nod before realizing he doesn’t quite know what a lunar eclipse is.
“Do I need special glasses?” Langa asks because he’s seen those in movies before.
“No dude, you’re thinking about a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse is when the earth gets in between the sun and moon… or something like that.”
“Ohhh. Bring me snacks.” Langa says, and that’s that.
Langa has known many suns, none quite as bright as Reki. There is an image of the pale Canadian sun and his father's pale sickly hands trying to warm the ice in Langa’s veins. The Okinawan sun is something else, seeing him up close, his brightness, sometimes it almost feels too much, like if he stays too close, he just might melt and burn. He can’t imagine what could get between them.
Reki claims that he can read palms, Langa knows that it’s probably a lie but still he puts his hands out for the other to take.
They’re sitting cross-legged on Reki’s bed and peering into Langa’s palms intently. Rather, Reki seems to be interested in Langa’s palms and Langa’s just reveling in his touch.
Reki uses his index finger to trace a particularly long line on Langa’s left palm and says, “I see loads of skateboarding in your life,” his hands trace another line, “many confessions from girls you don’t like-”
“You’re just saying things you already know, Reki.” Langa interrupts a soft smile on his lips, with no bite in his words.
“Ahh dude you just killed my flow, now I’m gonna do it again and you can’t interrupt me. Koyomi taught me this, imagine what she’ll do to you when I tell her that you think it’s fake.” Reki outright threatens him, he’s still holding Langa’s hands, softly and delicately.
The fear of what Koyomi might do to him makes Langa tell him to continue with his palm reading.
“Like I said before I was rudely interrupted, there will be skateboarding and crying girls in your future,” he shifts his gaze to Langa’s right palm and traces two lines that converge near the center and says, “There’s also just the two of us skating together, like a lot, and no girls in sight ‘cause we don’t like girls.” Reki hums as he speaks, his finger idly tracing Langa’s palm.
Langa almost doesn’t notice the implication in Reki’s sentence, he never really notices things until it’s too late so this is a first. He tries to think of anything that could indicate that Reki didn’t like girls and it hits him with an internal jolt. Reki only ever talks about girls when he talks about the ones that confess to Langa, never about them concerning himself. His heart starts racing and he thinks, Reki, do you not like girls the same way I don’t like girls? Are we the same?
“Langa?” Reki says softly, bringing him back into the room where his hands are still being held, Reki’s hands are warm and extremely so. He looks up to meet Reki’s gaze and, oh, Reki is looking at him like he might kiss him. His lips are slightly parted and he’s looking at Langa like there’s a question being asked and an answer being expected.
Langa is rarely ever attuned to what others want or what they're thinking so when he moves forward it’s with the expectation that Reki will shift back and they’ll laugh this off.
Reki doesn’t shift backward, if anything, it seems like he meets Langa halfway, and just like that they’re kissing. It feels all warm and fuzzy and Langa thinks this will probably be the death of him. He pulls away first because it feels like he might burn if they kiss any longer and Reki just looks at him like he’s still waiting for an answer.
They don’t talk about it, like the kiss never happened. Langa thinks about it a lot, so much so that he thinks it might be an obsession.
Gaining flight on the half pipe feels like gasoline being lit in his veins, there’s a heady rush, the feel of the wind in his hair, the knowledge that Reki is watching him.
Higher, he thinks, he can go higher. There’s the image of Adam in front of him, always out of reach. He desperately wants to reach what seems like the peak of skating. What’s the rush like when he goes faster? Fast enough that if he falters for even a second, he’ll be met with pain. He wants to know what it would be like to skate Reki like this, not like their small races on the way to school but something with high stakes.
There’s no race going on but Langa is racing like there is. His head is close to the rocks as he turns at the curve, he can hear people shouting but nothing is discernible to him. All he hears is Reki’s words about balance and the phantom feeling of his hands guiding him and correcting his posture. When he crosses the finish line he feels slightly woozy so he doesn’t notice the slight sag in Reki’s shoulders.
Langa doesn’t notice many things so when Reki screams that he’s scared of Adam, that he’s nothing like the two of them, it shocks him. Who else would he be like if not the person who taught him how to live in the moment.
“We’re nothing alike.” Reki whispers and somehow Langa hears him. He wants to say, isn’t that the point of us? That we are different and yet we fit so well.
“You and I, we aren’t a good match anymore.” Reki says as if they aren’t a complementary pair like they aren’t fire and ice. It’s raining, of course, it's raining the way it does in music videos, dramatic, it feels like a breakup. He feels like he’s been shifted off his axis, veering off course into what is, ironically, a collision written in the stars.
He reaches out to touch Reki because if he can, maybe he’ll remember all the days and nights where they have matched.
The rain is deafening now, Okinawa might flood this evening without warning but he’s still standing there, waiting for Reki to come back. If Langa doesn’t leave now, it’ll get colder and colder until there’s ice piercing his skin.
It won’t do for him to get sick, his mother will worry, and it’s this thought that pushes him to turn in the general direction of his house.
There’s this: skating with Adam as the ice in his veins spread. There is no warmth to feed on during their race, not even his lingering touch during one of his lecherous moves thaws him. With Reki there is almost tangible fire that slithers into his skin and curls around his heart, with Adam there is nothing, nothing but ice. He is primordial, almost, and with the way Langa's body freezes faster when he’s with him, he thinks of Adam as liquid nitrogen, complimentary but detrimental to him. He likes who he is with Reki, he misses it.
Langa soars like he always does, he hangs for a moment in the sky and stretches it out to the milliseconds, the ice has spread, he notes calmly. It almost leaves his fingertips in a flurry of snow but he restrains it.
His heart is nearly still, there’s no rush in his blood. He can almost feel it, but it’s only an almost, a not-quite. He has to get Reki back.
Langa has to be the one to look for him, the way it is the moon that orbits the sun.
The moon looks orange almost, like the sun has set up camp in it. Langa knows thats not exactly why it looks the way it does because Reki-
“There’s a lunar eclipse happening next Friday, do you wanna sneak out to watch it at the park?”
Langa finds Reki sitting listlessly at the park with his arms wrapped around a skateboard that seems to be smoking.
Reki looks, for lack of a better word, red. It’s not in the way he gets when Langa compliments him and it’s not in an angry way. Reki looks like the sun is trying to shine through the crack in his skin and briefly, Langa can see the ends of his hair burn.
Just from his presence, Langa can feel the thawing begin, the way his body takes in the warmth that permeates the space around Reki. They haven’t spoken but he can’t help but feel like it doesn’t matter because Reki is here, isn’t he? He’s at their skatepark and he’s found him after all this time at the place where it all started. That has to mean something.
There are things he wants to say desperately but the words vanish and all he's left with is his mouth agape. Words aren't needed, he finds, because when they skate, it's like nothing has changed.
Then there’s this: a kiss. Except that’s too simple to describe what happens.
First, Reki says, “I need you just as much as you need me y’know. There’s no one else who stays with me long enough to take it, no one who listens to me the way you do. You saw how I looked when you found me, it just builds and builds, because there’s nowhere for it to go. And I think, if it's anyone that should take it, it should be you.” He looks to the side when he's done, almost as if he's embarrassed.
Langa lets his hand touch the side of Reki’s face, he watches as the flames dance eagerly up his arm, he realizes that he hadn’t always been taking from Reki, they’d also come to him freely.
His heart is so warm, he feels so hot and it amazes him that this is what Reki must feel like all the time. A constant buzz to show love and warm people up, delicately breaking their glass, and melting their icy veins.
“Can I kiss you? Just this once.” Langa asks because it’s the most logical thing he can think of. The eerie glow of the moons light does wonders to the planes and shadows of Reki's face, beautiful and ethereal. His hand is still cupping Reki’s face and he feels the nod and takes the dive. Reki’s lips are warm, hot even, and perfectly suited for the coldness within Langa. He feels a heady rush, a bubbling thing in his chest threatening to escape.
“Do it again. Please, Langa.” Reki asks, his hands are gripping Langa tightly as if there's a chance he would ever leave.
He does, and then he does it again, and again, until he's lost count.
-
Now he knows that fire burning isn’t always good, and that sometimes it needs to be cooled down, never to a simmer, but just enough so that the host doesn’t get burned. So he speaks of the things he loves about Reki because yes it is love that he feels and he watches in delight as the flames dance just underneath Reki’s skin.
In the end there’s this: a race between just the two of them. Reki is just ahead of him, seemingly skating into the rising sun. Langa is giving it his all, at least the part of his all that isn’t entranced with the soft light encasing Reki’s back and the small flames dancing at the end of his hair. Reki turns his head and gives a wide grin.
“You better not be going easy on me Langa!” Reki shouts, even though there’s no need to. They’re the only ones here for a reasonable distance.
“I’m not, it’s just that you’re very distracting Reki.” Langa uses the momentary embarrassment his words cause to pull slightly ahead of Reki, close enough to feel everything about him that's spilling out with no abandon,
There’s no telling who wins -it could even have been a tie- because Langa is off his board the moment he knows he’s crossed the finish line and kissing Reki like they’re at the dawn of the world.
Reki laughs against his mouth when they separate to breathe and says, “There’s no time for this Langa, we’ve got school!”
Langa thinks they can make time for this in their little pocket of the cosmos.