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Even with his eyes closed, Riku couldn't disconnect from the city around him — its heartbeat trembled through the air, the restless hum of traffic crawling across bridges, the faint rattle of a subway deep underground, the occasional cry of a siren slicing through the night. New York never slept, and yet, in this moment, the rooftop felt like a fragile sanctuary, suspended by steel beams and concrete up to the height of old, rusted cranes and white clouds sailing through the sky; between the chaos below and the empty heavens above.
After the clock has gone past one in the morning, he kept sprawled across the cold concrete slabs covered by a worn blanket that recounted its story through the marks left by time, feeling the warmth of another body pressed lightly against his ribs. It was not the kind of warmth that lulled him into comfort; it was sharper, more vivid, as if his skin were suddenly aware of every nerve, every line where their bodies almost — but not quite — fused into one. He let the sensation linger, softly clinging to it with the same uncertainty as the last drags of the cigarette burning slowly between his lips.
He inhaled, the smoke filling his lungs with a sting that was both punishing and indulgent, before passing it into the waiting hand of the boy beside him. The cigarette moved between them like an unspoken language, the silence stretching taut in its wake. Riku wondered, not for the first time, if words could ever hold the same weight as this; the simple exchange of breath, of smoke, of presence. Avoiding gazes that desperately pleaded for time to stop right there; their lips remaining muffled, inconsolable.
The skyline sprawled endlessly before them, skyscrapers with their bright lights swallowed the faint memory of stars until the sky became nothing but a dark void lit by metal and glass. Manhattan glimmered like a constellation of its own design: bridges pulsing with red and gold veins of traffic, the Empire State rising like a sentinel out of the haze, its crown lit pale against the darkness. From here, the city seemed infinite, and yet so unbearably small, because all Riku could see was an approaching farewell, something close to an out-of-body experience; his perspective on in what could probably be considered the end of the world — the moment when the warmth at his side would be gone and the rooftop would be nothing more than stone over his shoulders, a painful memory buried deep in his vault of memories.
Tears had already betrayed him earlier in the night, carving uneven streaks through the cheap eyeliner he had smudged onto his eyes in the bathroom mirror hours before. Now the remnants clung stubbornly to his lashes, shadows of a vulnerability he had wanted to hide. He thought about explaining it — about admitting why his chest had ached so violently that he had folded into Sion’s arms instinctively, without hesitation, sobbing like a child. But what words could possibly explain the feeling of being unwelcome, that his presence was a temporary relief before it simply vanished into thin air; of packing away his entire life into boxes only to abandon them to the dust of an empty apartment? What could be said to bridge the distance that made Fukui and New York seem like they belonged to different worlds?
So he kept his lips sealed, letting the silence press against his ears until even his own heartbeat felt too loud. And beside him, Sion said nothing either — though the weight of his presence, the heaviness of his gaze now facing Riku's direction, told the younger that he was waiting, aching, for a truth that neither of them dared to touch, trying to dodge the flames as they walked over the fire; but it was impossible not to get burned. The embers had already left their mark.
The night pressed on, carrying with it the restless murmurs of a city that refused to quiet down. Somewhere far below, a car horn blared in irritation, answered by another in a duet of impatience. A faint gust swept across the rooftop, not cold enough to bite, but insistent, tugging strands of Riku’s hair across his damp cheek. He closed his eyes against it, trying to pretend that this fragile stillness could last forever, that dawn would never come to steal it away.
Then, at last, the silence fractured.
“Are you cold?”
The question came softly, discreet as though dragged reluctantly past a knot in Sion’s throat. His voice was frayed around the edges, heavy with exhaustion and something else Riku could not name — grief, maybe, or longing disguised as a casual concern.
Riku let the words linger between them before opening his eyes. He tilted his head just slightly, enough to catch the glint of Sion’s gaze in the faint halo of citylight that bled across the rooftop. There was no pretending that the question was only about the breeze. Sion never complained about the weather; rather, it was his frozen heart that was the real cause for concern, molding itself into ice with every passing moment that Riku's body warmth could not compensate for the emotional distance he was already trying to put between them.
“No,” he answered, his voice steadier than he felt. “And you?”
“Yes,” Sion whispered after a pause that felt much too long. They couldn't afford to waste time like that. “It's been cold for a while now, I can feel it in my bones.”
Riku’s chest tightened. There was no trace of resolution in the way Sion said it — no attempt to hide the tremor in his tone, to minimize how afraid he felt. For a fleeting moment, the admission seemed to hang over the city like a confession, heavier than the hum of traffic, louder than the grind of subways below.
“What will become of us,” Riku murmured, the words breaking through him almost like a wound, “when we can no longer ask each other stupid things like that?” His voice was sharper than he intended, a cruel echo against the intimacy of the night. The sound of it hurt his own ears, as if he had flinched from his own honesty.
Sion didn’t recoil. His eyes — impossibly large, impossibly dark, filled with something too vast for the rooftop to contain — stayed fixed on Riku’s shadowed face. “I’ll keep asking you stupid things,” he said, quietly but without hesitation. “No matter where you are in the world.”
The words should have comforted. Instead, they stung, because Riku could hear the ache beneath them — the promise made against all odds, stretched thin across oceans and continents. He swallowed hard, looking away, aligning his gaze once more with the skyline as though the city might offer him an escape. Sion was fooling himself, being so damned stupid again.
But escape was impossible, not with Sion’s hands still moving across his abdomen in slow, absent circles. The touch was delicate, deliberate, as if mapping him piece by piece, committing every angle of his body to memory. It was a touch that reminded him of waves against the East River’s banks — constant, rhythmic, inevitable. And though the air was cool with the whisper of spring, Riku shivered, not from the temperature but from the unbearable truth of being held onto so tightly by someone he was already beginning to lose.
Sion’s fingers never stopped moving — slow, reverent, sketching invisible constellations across Riku’s skin. Each circle, each delicate shift of pressure seemed to ask its own question, wordless but impossible to be distracted from. Riku’s breath caught every time, held tight in his chest as if the slightest sound might shatter the fragile spell around them.
It felt almost like that first night.
The memory flashed unbidden: the cramped bathroom of a bar, the floor sticky with spilled liquor, the walls vibrating with bass from the DJ set outside. They had stumbled into each other by accident — a bump of shoulders in too small a space, an apology half-formed on Riku’s lips, a brief small talk that did not match the intense desire in their shared looks just before his words were cut short by the sudden heat of Sion’s mouth, swallowed up by his insanely good kissing skills, easing himself into Riku's desires until he was the only thing left there.
There had been no hesitation, no barriers, just the taste of alcohol mingling on their tongues and the reckless urgency of strangers grasping at something nameless. For so many times, Sion charmed his way to being the other's firsts with his soft words and caring nature — and even though this isn't the first time Riku's heart has been broken, he is certain he'll never feel anything as bitter as what that fucking New Yorker has made him endure.
And yet, when Riku replayed it in his mind now, what struck him wasn’t the hunger of that kiss, but the silence after. The way Sion had stared at him, wide-eyed and uncertain, as if he hadn’t expected it either. Wondering if the hard liquor and packs of mint cigarettes would be enough to justify the way his heart was racing like an engine about to melt down. As if neither of them had understood what had just begun.
Weeks later, they found each other again — not in the blur of a drunken night, but beneath the fluorescent lights of a classroom. Their names were paired together on an assignment, a stroke of chance that bound them in ways neither had imagined. Sion, with his halting Japanese and patience like a steady flame, had taken it upon himself to guide Riku through the unfamiliar currents of academic English. It was obvious for Riku that a man who knows how to use his own tongue so well would be interested in linguistics and phonetics — and therefore, all stubborn and determined, he answered with hours of effort all the questions raised by that gorgeous Korean-American boy, refusing to let language become a wall between them.
Their conversations grew in fragments — first in broken English, then in halting Japanese, then in the strange hybrid of both. And somewhere between the laughter at mispronunciations and the quiet victories of understanding, something else had taken root. Something neither of them dared to name.
Now, on this rooftop, with Sion’s hand pressing lightly into the curve of his waist, it all came rushing back. Every promise whispered late at night. Every assurance that oceans could be crossed, that distance could be endured, that love would find a way to stretch across maps and borders. All the times they've crossed the line, acted carelessly with regard to their feelings and didn't worry about the impending day when it would all end, now charged interest on top of the emotionally costing mess they were in.
But with each promise came the shadow of doubt. It lingered in their unfinished conversations, in the topics quickly changed, in the silence that fell whenever the future was mentioned too directly.
Riku turned his face toward Sion then, just enough to see the glimmer of tears threatening at the corners of those vast, unblinking eyes. His throat tightened. He wanted to believe in the words they had spoken, in the vows they had whispered into the dark. He wanted to.
And yet, the question pressed at his chest like a blade: Did they love each other enough? Enough to give meaning to all those promises?
The city roared below them, alive and merciless, but here — in this fragile cocoon of naked skins, smoke and silence — the only sound that mattered was the quiet rhythm of Sion’s breath, trembling with the weight of all the things they had left unsaid.
The city’s heartbeat pulsed faintly beneath them — sirens kept weaving through traffic, bridges glowing like veins of light, the constant hum of a million lives continuing without pause. Yet for Riku and Sion, time had slowed into something unyielding, trapping them in the fragile stillness of a moment that refused to break.
Riku shifted slightly, his body curving into Sion’s touch as if he could carve permanence into something already slipping through his fingers. The warmth of their closeness felt cruel now, sharpened by the knowledge that soon there would be no more rooftops, no more whispered questions in their shared bed — soon to be occupied by a new tenant, a complete stranger, oblivious to the life they shared on that annoyingly creaky mattress. The distance waiting for them wasn’t measured only in miles or hours of flight; it was the vast stretch of years they had no power to shorten, years that youth itself would not forgive them for losing while waiting for each other.
Sion’s hand stilled on his abdomen, lingering there as if it could hold him in place, keep him from dissolving into departure. His eyes, wide and desperate, searched Riku’s face for an answer neither of them had the strength to voice. The rooftop breeze carried the faint scent of tar and burnt gasoline between them, and it was unbearable to think that this — this — would become memory before it could ever become a future.
“It isn’t fair,” Sion murmured, the words cracking in his throat. It wasn’t a protest against Riku, but against everything else — the cruel logic of visas and finances, the indifferent stretch of oceans, the merciless ticking of time.
Riku closed his eyes, wishing he could silence the world, stop its machinery long enough to rewrite what was inevitable. But he couldn’t. They both knew it. Their youth was not a gift to be thrown at an uncertain future. They could not spend years waiting, suspended between continents, only to find themselves older and emptier for it.
So what lay between them now was grief — raw and unnameable. They were mourning not a relationship that had ended, but one that had never been allowed to begin. They mourned the nights they would never spend together, the mundane arguments they would never have, the laughter that distance would steal before it could ever reach them. They mourned the possibility itself, a life they had glimpsed but could never consummate in tangible actions.
He wondered to what extent those arteries of silica and fluoride glass, buried deep beneath the oceans, could truly carry the weight of connection. The underwater cables that pulsed invisibly across the planet, stitching continents together in a web of promises — and yet, to Riku, they felt fragile, like veins too thin to hold the warmth of a heartbeat. No matter how close the signal brought him, it would never compare to proximity — to the gravity of touch, the quiet assurance of breath shared in the same air. He feared that no current could ever replicate the immediacy of presence, the simple, devastating proof that someone was there.
Riku drew a shuddering breath, memorizing the shape of Sion’s weight against him, the faint tremor of his fingers, the way the city’s light carved shadows across his skin. He thought of Fukui — the quiet streets, the mountains in the distance, the festivals where lanterns floated against the night sky. It seemed impossible that such a place could coexist with this rooftop in Brooklyn, that he could constantly switch between cultures so far apart. And yet it was there, waiting to reclaim him, to pull him away from this fragile piece of forever.
Sion leaned forward until his forehead rested against Riku’s temple. His breath was hot, uneven, carrying the sting of unshed tears. Neither of them spoke, because there was nothing left to say. The city roared beneath them, unfeeling, endless — and above, the sky stretched on without stars.
They stayed like that, two boys pressed together against the inevitability of loss, clinging not to love itself, but to the brief illusion that love might have been enough if the world had only been kinder.
The hours bled into each other, quiet and heavy, as if time itself had been reluctant to move forward. The streets outside grew stiller, emptied of voices and footsteps, until even the neon signs seemed tired of burning. When they grew tired of that place under the moonlight, both went back to the hollow apartment, the tension between them carried its own language — a fragile pact to stay together in the fragments of night that remained.
They drifted between touches and pauses, between words they could never quite finish. Sitting in front of the large windows in the living room, Sion’s head would rest against Riku’s shoulder, only to lift again as though trying to memorize every angle of his face in the faint, blue-grey pre-dawn light. Riku’s hand lingered at the small of his back, as though keeping him there could stop what was coming.
When the first pale streaks of morning filtered in through the curtains, their time collapsed into urgency. The inevitability of daybreak pressed against them; the world outside would not wait. Riku’s black suitcase sat by the door, accusingly ready, while neither of them was.
The goodbye itself refused to take shape. It wasn’t a single act but a series of unfinished gestures: the tightening of Riku’s grip, the way Sion’s voice caught whenever he tried to speak, the unbearable weight of each glance that knew it might be the last. It was grief disguised as tenderness, mourning for all the love that was to blossom within a dead garden, for everything their distance from each other would swallow before it could come to life.
As they stood in the narrow hallway, the air itself felt heavy, dense with everything left unsaid. Sion’s hand clung longer than it should have to Riku’s arm, fingertips trembling as though reluctant to believe that skin could ever stop touching skin. When his touch finally slipped away, it was not with ease but with a slowness that made the parting unbearable — a fall measured in heartbeats. Riku leaned close, his lips brushing against the shell of Sion’s ear.
The whisper that followed was small, a secret crafted for him alone, weighted with a tenderness that neither of them could afford to speak aloud. It was a fragment of eternity, something fragile enough to vanish with a breath, yet powerful enough to echo in memory long after departure. Sion closed his eyes, trying to hold onto the sound even as it faded, as though clutching at smoke.
The horn outside cut through everything, sharp and cruel, reminding them that time would not bend for grief. The driver waited, indifferent, while upstairs the echo of Riku’s voice still lingered. He lifted his bag at last, the gesture clumsy, like someone moving underwater. He had not changed clothes; he could not bear to.
The thin t-shirt clung to him not as fabric, but as evidence — still carrying a faint trace of Sion’s scent, proof of his existence in a world already conspiring to erase it. Sion followed him down the narrow staircase, their steps mismatched, each footfall another farewell. At the curb, Riku gave one last look, a hesitant, fractured smile that tried and failed to reassure. He got inside, the door shut with a soft finality, and the engine pulled the car away.
Sion remained rooted on the pavement, arms crossed tightly against the chill that was no longer just the cold of morning. The yellow taxi turned the corner slowly, then was gone. The street was empty, but the silence still hummed with Riku’s whisper — a secret sentence, both a gift and a wound, left behind to haunt him long after the sound of tires on asphalt had faded.