IN THE CLEAR SKY

chapter 4

He decides, on Sunday evening, that he is going to be normal about this.

Kei sits at his desk with his homework open in front of him — history notes he has been staring at for forty minutes without reading — and makes the decision with the quiet, practical certainty he applies to most problems. He is going to be normal. He is going to go to school tomorrow and sit in his seat and take his notes and eat lunch at the windowsill with Ryuu and everything is going to be exactly what it has always been, which is fine, which is enough, which is what he knows how to do.

The peach drink thing was nothing. The notes were nothing. The seventeen minute walk was nothing. He has simply been paying too much attention to small things because small things are what he notices, it is just how he is wired, it doesn't mean anything beyond that.

He picks up his pen. Writes a date at the top of his history notes.

His phone lights up on the corner of his desk.

He turns it face-down without looking at it.

Normal, he thinks. Completely normal.

Monday starts well enough.

He takes the direct route to school — fourteen minutes, no detours, no corners to turn and nearly walk into anyone. He arrives before Haru, which feels like a small tactical victory he is not proud of counting as a victory. He sits down. Gets out his books. Focuses on the board with the disciplined intensity of someone who has made a decision and intends to keep it.

Haru arrives four minutes before the bell.

Kei does not look up.

He is aware of Haru crossing the room in his peripheral vision. Aware of the point at which Haru would naturally glance toward Kei's desk — the way he always does, just briefly, a small automatic check-in that Kei has apparently been unconsciously waiting for every morning without realising it until right now when he is actively trying not to notice it.

He keeps his eyes on his notebook.

A beat passes. Two. The moment where a note might land on the corner of his desk comes and goes.

Nothing lands.

Haru sits down. The bell rings. Homeroom begins.

Kei tells himself this is what he wanted. It is, in fact, exactly what he wanted. He feels terrible.

He eats lunch with Ryuu.

Just Ryuu, the way it used to be, the two of them on the windowsill with the courtyard view and the May light coming in at its afternoon angle. It is normal. It is fine. Ryuu is talking about something — a game he's been playing, a level he can't get past, the specific injustice of the final boss — and Kei makes the appropriate noises in the appropriate places and eats his lunch and does not look down the corridor.

"You're not listening," Ryuu says.

"I am."

"What did I just say."

"Final boss. Very unfair."

Ryuu points his chopsticks at him. "I said that four sentences ago. What did I say after that."

Kei says nothing.

Ryuu lowers his chopsticks. He looks at Kei with the careful, unhurried attention of someone who has been reading this particular person for most of his life and finds the current page interesting. Kei looks back at him with the expression of someone who would very much like to be an entirely different topic of conversation.

"Where's Haru today," Ryuu says. Casually. Dangerously casually.

"How would I know."

"You always know."

"I don't always — " Kei stops. "I don't know where he is."

Ryuu says nothing. He picks up his chopsticks again and resumes eating with the serenity of someone who has made his point and is happy to let it stand there unaccompanied.

Kei looks out the window at the courtyard.

He does not, for the record, know where Haru is. He is not keeping track. He has made a decision and he is being normal and whatever Ryuu thinks he sees on Kei's face right now is a misreading of available data.

"It's nothing," Kei says.

Ryuu, who did not ask, says: "Okay."

By Wednesday the notes have stopped entirely.

Kei tells himself this is also fine. He never asked for the notes. They were unsolicited. Their absence is simply the restoration of a prior equilibrium, which is what he wanted, which is good.

He opens his desk drawer before first period for a pen and sees the three folded notes sitting there and closes the drawer again.

He gets a pen from his bag.

Haru is not cold. This is the thing that makes it harder rather than easier.

He doesn't ignore Kei. He doesn't withdraw in any obvious way. He is exactly as warm with everyone else as he has always been — Kei can hear it, the laugh, the easy back and forth, the way a conversation with Haru always sounds like two people who are genuinely glad to be talking to each other.

He is just — quieter, with Kei. More considered. Like someone who has recalibrated without making a scene about it.

He still nods when their eyes meet across the room. Still says good morning if they arrive at the door at the same time. There is nothing to point to, no specific thing to feel guilty about.

Kei feels guilty anyway.

On Thursday afternoon he is packing up his bag after the last bell and he becomes aware, without looking, that Haru is nearby. He can tell by now — he hates that he can tell by now — by a kind of atmospheric shift, the way a room feels different when a window is open.

He keeps packing his bag.

Haru stops at the end of Kei's row. Not close. Just — present.

"Hey," Haru says.

Kei looks up.

Haru's expression is open, uncomplicated, giving nothing away and not asking for anything. He has his bag over one shoulder and he looks like someone who made a small decision and is simply carrying it out.

"You okay?" he says.

Two words. Quiet. No performance behind them, no edge, no weight placed on them to mean more than they say. Just a genuine and simple question from someone who has been paying attention and noticed that something shifted.

Kei looks at him.

He thinks about saying fine, which is what he always says and what is always believed and what would end this conversation cleanly and efficiently and let them both go home and restore the distance Kei has been carefully rebuilding all week.

"Yeah," he says instead. "I'm okay."

It is functionally the same answer. He knows that. And yet something about the specific word — okay rather than fine, a fraction more honest, a fraction less armoured — makes Haru's expression do something small and quiet. A softening. An acknowledgement.

He nods once.

"Good," he says simply. And then he hoists his bag higher on his shoulder and walks out.

Kei stands there for a moment in the empty classroom.

He sits back down in his chair.

He puts his elbows on the desk and his face in his hands and stays like that for what is probably too long to be a completely fine person doing completely fine.

Friday evening, Ryuu comes over.

This is normal — Ryuu comes over most Fridays, has done since middle school, usually brings snacks he got from the convenience store with a disregard for nutritional balance that Kei has long since stopped commenting on. They play games or watch something or just sit in Kei's room existing companionably in the way of people who have been friends long enough that they don't need a reason to be in the same room.

Tonight Ryuu brings shrimp crackers and a look on his face.

Kei sees the look immediately. He says nothing about it. He takes the shrimp crackers.

They play a game for a while. Kei wins two rounds, loses one, and is halfway through the fourth when Ryuu saves and sets his controller down with the energy of someone who has been patient for an entire week and has reached the end of it.

"Okay," Ryuu says.

"I'm not talking about it."

"I haven't said anything."

"You're about to."

"I'm just sitting here."

"Ryuu."

Ryuu holds his hands up in surrender. Then immediately lowers them and says: "It's okay, you know. Whatever it is."

Kei looks at the paused game screen.

"I don't know what you think it is," he says.

"I think," Ryuu says carefully, in the tone he only uses when he means something exactly, "that you're scared of something that doesn't actually deserve to be that scary. And I think you're doing the thing where you put distance between yourself and it and call that solving it."

Kei says nothing.

"I'm not trying to make it a whole thing," Ryuu continues. "I'm just saying. Whatever it is. It's okay."

The room is quiet. Outside, the evening has settled into its soft Friday shape — distant sounds of the neighbourhood, a television somewhere, the last of the light going from the window.

Kei picks his controller back up.

"Can we just play," he says.

Ryuu looks at him for a moment. Then he picks his controller back up too.

"Yeah," he says. "We can just play."

They don't talk about it again. But when Ryuu leaves at nine thirty he pauses at the front door and says, without turning around: "He asked me about you, by the way. On Wednesday." A beat. "Just thought you should know."

The door closes.

Kei stands in his hallway.

He asked about me.

He stands there long enough that the hallway light, on its motion sensor, clicks off around him and he is standing in the dark, and he does not move to turn it back on, and his heart is doing the unreasonable thing again, louder than before, and he thinks —

He thinks —

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

He pulls it out. The screen lights up his face in the dark hallway.

It is a LINE message from Haru. The first one in a week.

It contains no words.

Just a single image — a photo, clearly taken this evening, slightly dark, a little unsteady in the way of something captured quickly without thinking too hard about it. The view from somewhere high up. Rooftops. The last thin line of sunset, barely there, going pink and gold at the horizon. The sky above it deep and clear, the first star of the evening just visible at the top of the frame.

And below the photo, after a long moment that Kei can somehow feel even through a screen, one line of text:

made me think of you. don't know why.

Kei stares at it.

The hallway is very dark and very quiet.

His phone screen goes dark too, after a while, the way they do.

He doesn't move. He stands there in the dark with the ghost of the image still behind his eyes — the rooftops, the fading light, the clear open sky — and feels the thing he has been holding at arm's length all week walk calmly through every defence he has built and sit down in the centre of his chest like it owns the place.

Like it has always owned the place.

Like it has just been waiting for him to stop pretending otherwise.

His hands are not entirely steady when he opens the message again.

He stares at the photo for a long time.

He opens the text box.

He closes it.

He opens it again.

His thumb hovers over the keyboard in the dark hallway of his apartment on a Friday night in May, and he has absolutely no idea what he is about to type, and he has absolutely no idea what it will mean when he does, and somewhere in the city Haru is waiting — not impatiently, never impatiently — and the sky outside Kei's window is the same sky in the photo, clear and deep and full of something that doesn't have a name yet but is very much there —

And then his phone buzzes again.

A second message from Haru.

Kei looks at it.

His breath stops.