Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Yes, I know it was late.

We were greeting the sun,

before long.

(Challengers, The New Pornographers)

The notification pops up on Ryosuke’s phone at 3:47 AM, right as he’s trying to body-block the last teammate he has in Apex Legends.

His eyes flick to the phone screen for a fraction of a second. In the next, he’s yelling at the monitor.

“Behind the—behind the building!” He grips the mouse a little too tightly. “The one on the right! No, not the—ahggg!”

The teammate gets knocked. Ten seconds later, Ryosuke goes down too.

He deflates into his chair.

“Sorry. Kinda new here,” the guy (Ryan? Reinald? whatever) says through Yamada's headphones. He’s a few-words player, almost no questions, voice deep enough to be mid-twenties. His Japanese is okay but unmistakably foreign. Their third stayed silent the whole match, so it felt like just the two of them—fine by Ryosuke because it was fun.

“It’s fine,” Yamada says. “Good game!”

“Good game, yeah.” A beat. “Need to go, though. Good night.”

“Me too. Good night.”

Ryosuke checks his stats once more and calls it a night. Or morning. He glances at the time.

It's 3:55 a.m. Fuck. Hikaru is going to murder him. He can already hear it the second he walks into the practice room with bloodshot eyes and a coffee big enough to cater the entire staff. He groans and opens the group chat to pre-apologize for arriving as a semi-functional zombie. Maybe it’ll soften the blow. Probably not.

Before he taps in, the notification is still there, waiting. He reads it.

(Nakajima Yuto has left the group chat)

“What an idiot,” Ryosuke mutters into the dimness of his room. He opens their private thread.

You > Yuto (my giraffe of a rival)

You: hey, bakajima

You: kinda late to be up, don’t you think?

You: (yes i’m up too. shut up. pls don’t tell hikaru)

You: anyway, you accidentally left the HSJ groupchat

You: did you lose a bet against takaki-kun again?

You: loooooooser

He locks the phone and tosses it onto the bed without giving it a second thought .

It’s Thursday. Normally that would mean a weekend in sight and a scrap of rest, but with A-nation breathing down their necks it means another week of rehearsals, meetings, fittings, sound checks, dressing-room hours. Rinse, repeat. A small voice (his mother’s, terrifyingly clear) tells him he should be used to it by now because he’s done this his whole life. But a month of non-stop prep stacked on zero recovery after his solo tour has finally caught him and his body feels like it’s wearing a backpack of rocks. He drags raccoon slippers to the bathroom, turns on the shower. After, toothpaste foaming in his mouth, he studies his face and wonders if the money he spends into skincare will mask his sleep deficit. Probably not.

Pajamas on, he gets back in bed. And like any average person whose neurons are fried by screen time (again: his mother’s voice), the second his head hits the pillow his thumb is scrolling. A new notification in their private chat. The screen’s too bright; he lowers the slider, then opens. One message.

You > my giraffe of a rival

Yuto: I’m sorry

And nothing else. He stares at it. Sorry for what?

He waits for the typing dots. They don’t come. He distracts himself with a handful of TikToks, a scroll through Twitter, Instagram, YouTube—hell, he even falls into Facebook. Every ten seconds he reopens the chat, even though he knows he’d get a ping if Yuto replied. It stays empty. Absent.

Sometimes Yuto goes through… phases. He can be the personification of a golden retriever, a midday ray of light on the exact kind of warm-breezy day everyone wants. Sometimes he’s so much momentum that the whole group steadies just because he exists. If superpowers were real, Yuto would bottle feelings and release them tenfold. Which is why, when the tide goes out for him, it goes out far and the beach becomes dark glass. Ryosuke has watched him sink to black waters and take an age to come up. However, he always, always swims back, staggers to shore, and returns home. When they were younger he needed help. Now, in their thirties, Ryosuke knows he can do it himself.

So he doesn’t worry more than necessary about the message. Anyone would be wrecked after the last month. The idol rollercoaster yo-yos you to the top just to drop you for sport.

He considers typing hey, don’t overwork yourself, but then he registers the time—almost 5:00 AM. Did he really spend an hour staring at one line of text? Oh, my god, what's wrong with him, he’s not twenty anymore—

—the phone lights up the room with an incoming call.

Not Yuto's.

Their manager.

Ryosuke hangs up immediately, like a knee-jerk reaction.

Here’s the thing: their manager has called him personally exactly three times. He always handles them by email or through Yabu. Never one-on-one.

The first was when the Ryutaro scandal blew up the internet. Their manager called each of them to script their lines and sketch the fallout. Translation: he’s out. Keep moving.

The second was when Keito decided to leave. Technically it was a group call—Keito included—to formalize what Ryosuke had known since a café on the outskirts years earlier, when Keito stared out the window for a long time and said there was a chance he’d go to drama school in New York. Ryosuke knew then there was nothing to be done.

The third was darker. The Johnny-san scandal cracked the company open. A real bloodbath with the execs and the press; suits and closed doors and the same blame ricocheting from wall to wall. Ryosuke never felt more like a puppet: events rescheduled, tours canceled, contracts threatened, renewed, press conferences multiplying like mirrors. Accusatory lights and microphones everywhere the word “Johnny’s” still meant something. Something tainted.

Now, this.

What is this?

The screen goes dark, then another call buzzes in. Instead of hanging up, he lets it ring out in his hands. He can’t make himself answer it. A feeling, cold and sinking, unfurls under his ribs and pulls everything with it.

I’m sorry.

Why did Yuto apologize?

The phone stops ringing. New messages flood. Not Yuto's. Not their manager's.

Daiki's.

You > Daiki (do not answer until he gives you the netflix password)

Daiki: ryosuke

Daiki: ryosuke

Daiki: shit are you there???

Daiki: ok listen to me, please for the love of everything

Daiki: i’m coming to your place right now. i'm not joking.15 minutes tops

Daiki: manager called me. called everyone. he says you’re not picking up

Daiki: don’t pick up, please. don’t do it until i get there ok?

Daiki: and please don’t fight me on this one, do NOT open the email

Daiki: please DO NOT. i’ll be there in no time. i’m here, ryosuke. i promise

By the time he finishes reading, his breathing is ragged and something cold spiders across his chest, threads his lungs, cinches his throat. What is this, what is this, what is this, his brain repeats like a metronome, because no bad news has ever felt like this: a bomb in his hands, target painted over his heart. He sits down on the bed. Dawn picks through the blinds and lays a stripe of pale light across his left cheek, the only light in the room. It doesn’t feel quiet because his heartbeat is so loud the neighbors could file a complaint.

I’m here.

Daiki said not to open the email.

Ryosuke takes three deep breaths and tries to steady the vertigo roaring through his head. He counts to eight, like a prayer. He opens his eyes. He didn’t realize he’d shut them until the after-image floats across his vision.

He hesitates for three seconds. Then he opens his inbox.

Right then, an email lands. 

Subject: Internal notice for STARTO STAFF ONLY: Hey! Say! JUMP member update.

His fingers shake as he starts reading. 

And the world beneath him disappears. 

To all related staff,

We would like to express our sincere gratitude for your continued support of our company’s artists and their activities—

What is this. What is this. What is this.

—This is to inform you that, effective immediately, Nakajima Yuto will no longer be participating in activities as a member of Hey! Say! JUMP—

He doesn’t stop. He can’t. His eyes strip the text without letting meaning in.

—Nakajima will remain affiliated with our company and will continue his career focusing on acting projects. Accordingly, all matters concerning Nakajima will henceforth be handled by the Acting Department.

Hey! Say! JUMP will continue its activities with seven members: Yabu Kota, Yaotome Hikaru, Inoo Kei, Takaki Yuya, Arioka Daiki, Chinen Yuri, and Yamada Ryosuke—

(“—and last but not least important, Nakajima Yuto”, the manager said with a pleased smile. “From now on, you will be known as Hey! Say! JUMP.”)

In connection with the above, we respectfully request that you refrain from using Nakajima’s name, image, or voice in any future promotional materials, advertisements, or broadcasts pertaining to Hey! Say! JUMP—

(—Yuto appeared from nowhere behind Takaki, Ryosuke, and Hikaru while they rehearsed a new sub-unit song, exaggerating steps until Ryosuke’s focus shattered and he bursted out laughing because Yuto could be the most ridiculous person alive.)

—make the necessary adjustments to all schedules, rehearsals, and media appearances to reflect the seven-member formation—

(—the click-click to his left woke Yamada from a power nap between recordings. Yuto with the camera, delighted, like a kid who found treasure. “Ryosuke this is gold, this must go in the photobook, ‘cause, I mean, it’s crucial for the fans to know that their DiCaprio sleeps with his mouth and neck so bend it will probably stay like that forever—” Another flash, Ryosuke tried to be mad and failed.)

—and confirm with the relevant departments regarding the handling of any existing footage, photography, or recordings that feature Nakajima—

(—a hand extended over him where he lay on the floor, gulping air after a brutal choreography practice, eyes glazed with tears. Yuto’s outstretched hand above him. Behind it, Yuto smiling, saying—)

—We regret the sudden nature of this notice and deeply appreciate your understanding and cooperation.

Sincerely,

STARTO ENTERTAINMENT

Talent Management Division.

Ryosuke can’t feel his heart. It’s gone. He stands. A minute later, he sits. He stands again. He walks to the door and closes it, even though he knows Daiki will be here any second. Somehow he’s on the floor now, back against the bed, phone clutched like a life float even though the screen has long gone black. Seconds, minutes, whole years pass until Daiki is there, dropping to his knees beside him. Daiki’s usual bright face is swollen-eyed and pale. It doesn’t suit him, Ryosuke thinks dimly, he looks awful. The look on his face says Ryosuke looks worse.

“Hey,” Daiki says softly. Ryosuke looks at him like he’s not sure who he is, and after a beat Daiki touches his face with careful hands. For an instant, Ryosuke is five, fresh from a nightmare, his mother wiping tears and promising none of it was real, just shadows.

Daiki isn’t that merciful.

“Ryosuke, look at me, please” he tries again, voice thin and steady at once. Ryosuke closes his eyes and more tears spill. He wants to say a thousand things. He wants to ask what kind of joke this is, wants to laugh, wants to scream. There aren’t words in any language that can inventory the weight crushing his chest. Daiki wipes his face with his palms.

Outside, the city wakes, engines, voices, a too-loud phone call, birds. The world turns. Through the wall of memory, a hand reaches out to him again.

Ryosuke is gulping air after a brutal choreography practice, eyes glazed with tears.

Here in the present, Daiki’s hands come away wet.

“I’m so sorry,” Daiki whispers.

Yuto’s outstretched hand above him. Behind it, Yuto smiling, saying-

A voice that belongs to another time. Another life.

“Look at me. Just look at me,” Yuto had told him, almost twenty years ago. “I’m here.”

I am here.

I’m sorry.

*

(august, 2004)

If someone were to ask Ryosuke what his earliest memory is, he’d lie. He’d say it was the harvest day in his elementary school garden when he was five. He stole a tomato, mistaking it for a bigger, seedless strawberry and crammed it into his mouth. Minutes later he had one of the worst stomachaches of his life and a lifelong grudge against anything remotely tomato-adjacent.

(“Why do you tell that story like it actually happened?” Mama Yamada would cut in. “Ryosuke, you ate an entire strawberry tart by yourself, fell asleep, and dreamed a giant tomato tried to kidnap you. That’s why you hate tomatoes.”

“Sure, Mom. Because that story definitely makes me sound super cool in front of the fans.”

Chihiro would chime in, too. “Here’s a crazy question: shouldn’t you actually be cool to be cool?”

“Crazy idea,” Misaki would add.

“I know, right?”

“Now, now, girls,” dad would try to come to the rescue (keyword: try). “Don’t be like this with Ryosuke. My boy is cool! I mean, remember when… huh.”

“Yes! And when he.”

“Oh, and that time he—yeah.”

“You are all dead to me.”)

The truth was, Ryosuke wasn’t the most reliable narrator of his own past. He was terrible with names and faces. As a kid, learning days of the week, hours, months, seasons was pure torture. His mother brought in speech therapists, tutors, private teachers—anyone who might shore up his memory. His childhood was full of gaps, most memories fraying at the edges, each one carrying some invention that shifted over time.

But he could tell you about his first most important memory.

It began like this:

Ryosuke was crying.

He was in the back seat of the old Chevrolet his grandfather used to drive. Mom always complained the car was ancient, but when dad suggested replacing it, she looked personally offended. Apparently, Ryosuke inherited every ounce of her sentimentality and drama.

“But I don’t want to go!” he blurted between sobs, again.

“Ryo-chan, I already told you. It’ll only be for a moment,” his mother said. “An hour at most. You can wait an hour, can’t you, sweetheart?”

“An hour is like… a thousand hours.”

“Ryosuke, that doesn’t make sense.”

“It’ll be like a thousand hours!”

At a red light, she glanced back. “I doubt it’ll take that long. Auditions are short. I’ll spend more time finding an available parking.”

“That’s not the point, mom,” he dragged his hands down his face. “I don’t want to go.”

How did he end up here? He’d come home from soccer to find his mother in the kitchen, staring at an envelope like it had spoken. Next thing he knew she was grabbing his hand, telling him to put on his best clothes (“The Ultraman T-shirt does not count, Ryosuke. Don’t even try it.”), and whisking him to an audition. She explained in a rush—Johnny’s, idols, singing, try anyway, honey, you have to try. Remember that KinKi Kids song you like? Sing that one. And move a little, whatever you do, make it look like you want to be there.

Ryosuke did not want to be there.

“I don’t want to be there,” he muttered again. His lip trembled. Mom met his eyes in the rearview and sighed.

A handful of traffic lights later, she pulled over, turning fully to him. 

“Tell you what. If you do this for me—behave, do what they ask—I’ll buy you that blue Nintendo DS you want. Early Christmas.”

He perked up. Now they were talking.

“Isn't Christmas in, like… four months?”

“Think of it as an early present. We’ll go buy it after the audition.”

“And will dad know?”

“Ehh—we’ll tell him it’s… a present. For your good grades.”

“Even if I got a 60% in math?”

“That’s not so—wait, what?!”

“Nothing!”

“Yamada Ryosuke!”

“Mama, who in their right mind understands algebra?!”

“Okay—fine. We’ll tell your father the truth. Just… do this, Ryosuke. Please?”

He sighed in defeat. He knew the minute he got in the car there was no turning back.

The building was massive. His mother led him through a maze of hallways and staircases, up and down, left and right. At the counter, a receptionist smiled.

“Here for auditions?”

Mom nodded.

“Name of participant?”

“Yamada Ryosuke.”

Forms appear, names, details, questions. Ryosuke understood none of it and cared even less. He would smile when told, answer what he was asked. The faster it ended, the sooner the Nintendo DS.

While mom chatted, Ryosuke wandered.

His sneakers squeaked too loud on polished floors. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, flickering like they were thinking about burning out. Posters lined the walls—SMAP, TOKIO, Arashi—smiles too big, sequins catching every bit of light. Superheroes in human skin.

From a half-open door, a sharp clap.

“Once more, from the top!” boys—twelve, thirteen—stumbled through steps, sneakers scraping wood. Faces red, shirts soaked, eyes pinned to the mirror. Ryosuke felt like he was intruding on a secret world.

He slowed by a bulletin board crowded with schedules. His own name could be there one day. His stomach twisted. He thought about the Nintendo DS, about doing this quickly, surviving this maze where every eye seemed to weigh each boy that passed.

He drifted on, fingers trailing the cool wall, then stopped. In a small window set into a heavy rehearsal door there was a storm of movement.

Older boys, dancing. Thudding sneakers. Counted beats. Fast, confident, taller.

He almost looked away—until he saw him.

One boy, maybe Ryosuke’s age—eleven, twelve at most—too young to stand among them and somehow exactly right where he was. He moved like the steps were stitched into him, like the music lived behind his ribs. He grinned at his reflection, wiped sweat from his brow, and Ryosuke thought he belonged there.

Where others stumbled, the boy flowed. Where they looked strained, he looked free, like his body wanted this, like it was always meant to do this. Hair damp, eyes fierce, mouth set in concentration.

And underneath, unmistakable joy.

Ryosuke’s hand slipped from the wall. He leaned closer to the glass, hardly blinking. His heart sprinted.

The boy—no name yet—hit the final step, sharp and flawless. For a second Ryosuke saw stage lights, heard a crowd, saw this boy at the center, shining. The vision was so alive it made him feel smaller and, somehow, more awake than he had ever been. His mouth hung open, his breath fogged the small window but he didn’t notice. 

He couldn't look away.

“Ryosuke.”

He startled, jerked back. Mom stood with the receptionist, both smiling.

“You’ll fog the glass if you breathe on it like that,” mom teased. “What’s got you so focused?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it. 

How do you say I saw the sun?

The receptionist followed his gaze. “Ah. Him.”

Ryosuke turned back just in time to see the boy dive into the next routine, sharp as lightning.

“He’s… amazing,” Ryosuke blurted, cheeks heating.

“Funny thing,” the receptionist said. “He’s been a trainee for only five months.”

Ryosuke’s eyes went wide. “What?”

She shook her head, smiling. “He's sort of a raw talent. The dance instructors said he caught up so quickly with everyone his age that they had to make him rehearse with all the seniors. And even there, he outshines most of them.”

Mama raised her brows, impressed. “So determined at that age. Isn’t that something, Ryo-chan?”

Ryosuke swallowed hard, eyes glued to the boy who was just a rookie but moved like he was born under a spotlight, already punching the air out of Ryosuke’s lungs.

He didn’t have words for it at that moment, but he knew that, whatever happened after today, he wouldn’t forget this moment. He wouldn’t forget him.

Because Ryosuke’s first most important memory started with him crying.

And it ended with him learning what a real star looked like.

*

“The decision has already been made, Yabu-san. The matter is closed.”

“I understand the situation, and I appreciate you calling this meeting. But—” and here, Ryosuke swears Hikaru rolls his eyes “I think I speak for everyone when I say that we deserve to know why. Yuto has spent practically his entire life in this group. We need to know the reason—”

“Yabu-san. I’ll repeat myself once more, though it seems the message hasn’t been understood. Nakajima Yuto will no longer be a member of Hey! Say! JUMP. He will devote himself exclusively to acting. That is the final word.”

“I understand, but what I mean is—was this truly Yuto’s choice? Or… maybe it wasn’t—”

“I cannot provide you with that information.”

“But why? Isn’t it natural that as his teammates, as his friends, we’d want to know—”

“The decision has been made.”

“Then at least tell us if we can speak with Yuto, just once more—”

“I’m afraid that will not be possible, Yabu-san. If you and the rest don’t have anything else to add, then we should bring this meeti—”

“What is this?”

Everyone turns to where Chinen Yuri, seating to Ryosuke’s left, is staring down at his phone. For a moment, Ryosuke hadn't register that it was Chinen who spoke.

You see, it’s very difficult to know when Chinen is angry. Inoo always says Chinen is an idol from head to toe because he has mastered his expressions in a way few people ever do. Over the years, he’s buried most of his emotions beneath sweet smiles or a perfectly neutral face. If Chinen is angry, he usually goes quiet. It passes almost unnoticed, like a wave breaking softly against shore.

But when Chinen finally raises his eyes to the manager, Ryosuke knows at once.

Chinen isn’t angry. He is livid.

“What is this?” he repeats, lifting his phone. The screen shows a banner. Seven faces. Not eight.

Ryosuke’s veins turns to ice.

Before the manager can speak, Chinen’s voice cuts through, faster than anyone had ever heard it.

“Manager-san, I understand—no, I try to understand logistics, protocols, whatever. I know how this works. I’ve seen it. I follow it. But this?” He shakes the phone, breath catching. “This is not logistics. This is cruelty. This is erasure. Yuto gave eighteen years of his life. His whole youth. His life. And in less than twenty-four hours you make it look like he was never here.”

“Chinen-san—”

“No, please let me finish!” The words are sharp and unstoppable. “I don’t care anymore if it was his decision or yours. I’m sorry but I don’t care. Because either way, silence makes it worse. We can’t speak to him, there’s no explanation, and we’re left with a void it’s impossible to ignore. And when you leave us with nothing, we’re forced to imagine everything.”

“Yuri—” Hikaru tries, but the tide has him.

Chinen’s hands clench on the table. “Whatever the reason, Yuto deserved more. More than this. More than being erased like a typo on a screen. He deserved a farewell. He deserved respect. How could you fail to negotiate a decent farewell for the Nakajima Yuto?”

“Chinen enough.” Yabu warns.

“He deserved recognition for every single day he gave to JUMP-”

“Chinen!”

“-to this company,” he leans forward, breath unsteady, words like glass. “To you.”

*

(october, 2006)

The beat began again. And again and again, stubborn as a heart that refused to quit. Tape X’s marked center, the mirrors were full of boys moving in the same direction, jumping at the same time, spinning with the same force. Again and again. The sound of the sneakers against the floor was as loud as the music itself.

The choreographer clapped once, sharp. “Again from the top.”

Ryosuke tried to make his lungs remember their very freaking purpose and breathe. From the top felt like a cruel joke by now. The song’s opening hit and his body tried to answer—step, cross, clap, pivot. Only that, somewhere between “cross” and “clap”, his timing slid and the whole sequence was ruined. He chased it, caught it, lost it again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Yuto nail the steps down the line and felt the old stomach-drop of being half a beat late again. 

Again and again.

“Stop,” the choreographer said and he pointed to Ryosuke. “You—watch the knees. And smile like you mean it.” 

Right. Please just let the ground swallow him whole.

“Five, six—”

They ran it until Ryosuke’s calves shook and his shirt stuck to his back. 'Seishun Amigo' demanded a very specific cool—shoulders loose, feet precise, that snap that only looked easy when your body had signed a secret contract with the music. Yuto absorbed the corrections like water. Ryosuke felt every note like a bruise.

On the tenth one more time, his feet lied to him so completely he couldn’t even pretend it was salvageable. The music cut. The room breathed. 

“Water break,” the choreographer announced.

Ryosuke dropped where he stood, not dramatic, just done—on his back, arm flung over his eyes to block the fluorescent glare. The ceiling buzzed like a neon insect. He could hear the others stumbling off for water, the soft scrape of sneakers, somebody’s laugh. He told himself the sting behind his eyes was sweat. He told himself a lot of things.

He might have stayed there until the janitor turned out the lights if the floorboards beside him hadn’t whispered under new weight.

“Hey,” Yuto said, breathing still fast, voice low like he knew the shape of this kind of tiredness. He sat down without asking, their shoulders almost touching. Up close, Yuto was drenched too, hair plastered to his forehead, chest rising and falling like a bellows—and somehow he still looked like he had four more runs in him. It made Ryosuke want to kick something. Like himself.

“I’m fine,” Ryosuke said into his elbow, which sounded like a lie even to him.

“Okay,” Yuto said, slowly. A beat. “You want water?”

Ryosuke shook his head. Silence settled. But because Yuto was, well, Yuto, he could not be quiet even if his life depended on it.

“Do you know how long it took me to learn that chorus?” Yuto asked, eventually.

Ryosuke huffed. “Five minutes?”

“Three days,” Yuto said. “And two extra nights with the guard pretending he didn’t see me in here after everyone left.”

Ryosuke lowered his arm enough to squint at him. “You don’t have to—”

“I’m not being nice,” Yuto said, almost amused. “I’m telling the truth. I wasn’t a prodigy, Yama-chan. I just…wouldn’t go home without memorizing every detail until I was sure I could be sleeping and I would still get the choreography right. That’s all.” He tilted his head toward the mirror. “You’re fighting it. The steps. Yourself. Pick one fight.”

Ryosuke stared up at the light and tried not to cry in front of someone he was supposed to be competing with. “It’s easy for you.”

“It isn’t,” Yuto said simply. “I get that your head sometimes feels…loud. And when it’s loud, I try to make it small.” He lifted his hands, counting off with his fingers. “Practice with the music. Or no music if you want. Take the choreo apart until it stops being a monster.”

Ryosuke didn’t answer. He didn’t trust his voice not to break into pieces he couldn’t pick up.

Yuto waited. He was good at that, Ryosuke realized distantly. At giving silence.

“You know the part where you keep tripping?” Yuto continued, gentler. “Your right foot wants to run away. Tell it to stay. Put it down, then pick it up. Don’t let it pick you up.”

“That’s dumb,” Ryosuke muttered.

“Extremely,” Yuto agreed, grinning. “Try it.”

Ryosuke let his arm fall all the way. The room looked different from the floor. Yuto’s face was open and maddeningly patient, an expression Ryosuke had decided to resent on principle and kept failing to. He sat up slowly, dizziness flaring and then falling away. 

Yuto pushed to his feet and then hovered, as if aware of the line between helping and humiliating.

“I can leave you alone,” he offered. “But I’d rather not.”

Ryosuke stared at the floorboards until they stopped blurring.

“Why do you care?” It came out meaner than he intended.

Yuto took it without flinching. “Because we look better together when you’re tired of hating yourself,” he said. Then, softer, “Because I’ve been where you are. Because nobody gets good alone.”

Something in Ryosuke’s chest loosened, not much, just enough air to try again. 

Yuto stepped closer. A hand extended over him while Ryosuke was still on the floor. Yuto’s outstretched hand above him. Behind it, Yuto smiling, saying: 

“Look at me. Just look at me,” Yuto told him. “I’m here.”

*

Contrary to popular belief, Ryosuke is afraid of the dark.

(“What do you mean, ‘contrary to popular belief’?” Chinen cuts in. “Everybody knows you hate the dark.”

“Now, wait—”

“I certainly know. Everyone in JUMP knows. Hell, even my family knows,” Chinen continues. “The sweet janitor in your building knows she has to switch on the hallway lights by the elevator just for you when you come home at night.”

“The hallway—wait a second, aren’t those motion-sensor lights? She told me they were motion-sensor!”

“Nope. She told me she has to turn them on herself because otherwise you’d never make it up fourteen flights of stairs. She actually kinda pities you.”)

Scratch that, then. It is widely known that Ryosuke hates dark rooms.

Of course, over the years—through countless variety shows and staff pranks and the way the company as a whole has always taken advantage of how easily scared Yamada is—a good portion of the Japanese population probably has at least some vague knowledge that Yamada hates dark rooms and all their variations: escape rooms, haunted houses, dark hallways, dim backstage corridors. The irrational fear of losing one of his most essential senses and not knowing what lies beyond his nose simply because he can’t see it.

That’s why Yamada should have phrased it differently. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t the darkness itself that frightens him.

It’s the unknown.

Not knowing what you’re facing because you can’t see it, and missing all the things you’d need to know in order to confront it. Yamada considers himself a believer if you use the term broadly. He isn’t the kind of person who dedicates every day of his life to God, but once in a while he gives thanks for the things that exist clearly in front of him. For the success after a hard work. For the smiles of his nieces. For the health of his family. For the love of his fans. For the fate that placed him on stage with the members of JUMP.

“Fifteen minutes to stage,” a staffer calls, slicing through his thoughts like a knife.

Ryosuke stands a few steps off the wing, not lined in formation but hovering near the curtain’s seam where the light leaks in. Same clothes as the H⁺ Tour—only it isn’t the same. His mic in his right hand wears the red band at the bottom, but the color looks wrong to him tonight, like a word mispronounced. Like an open wound.

The past few hours have like a vivid nightmare. As if he’s watching himself from somewhere behind his own shoulder, minutes away from stepping into thousands of people.

God. The fans. The chance to show JUMP without guardrails, open to an audience that doesn’t just belong to them. Broadcasted live, clipped and posted and stitched. All the things that had twisted nerves in their guts for months—yet they’d told each other, again and again, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter if they made a mistake (Hikaru had squinted at that and muttered that it’ll be perfect. Of course it’ll be perfect). Three weeks before everything detonated, the eight of them had pulled into a group hug and had promised each other they would have the time of their lives. Because they loved this. They love, love, love—and since the beginning, they’ve found every way to say thank you for getting to do it.

When he debuted, Ryosuke had a trick. Right before a show or an interview, he would count in his head: one to ten, like the number of them. Ten wasn’t just a number, it was a shape he could put around his fear. Years passed and the count thinned. Ten to nine. Nine to eight. He told himself it was confidence. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn’t. Tonight, his mind reaches for the ritual out of muscle memory and slams into a wall at seven. He refuses to finish at seven. He can’t. The number turns to glass in his throat and won’t go down.

“Ten minutes,” someone calls.

They gather.

It happens the way breathing happens: nobody says the word, but their feet know the path. Yabu looks at them once, just a glance, and they move in, forming a circle in the wing where the concrete floor is scuffed from years of wheels and feet. Hands go in, right over left, left over right. Palms warm and damp from makeup room lights. The circle closes, and even with everyone pressed shoulder to shoulder there is a space you feel rather than see. A silence the size of a person.

He used to count here, too. Eight. He tries again, soft and invisible. One—Yabu’s steady grip. Two—Hikaru’s restless tap against the back of his hand. Three—Inoo’s fingers cool and soft. Four—Takaki’s calloused palm, squeezing twice. Five—Daiki’s quick pulse under skin. Six—Chinen’s small hand, iron strong. Seven—

He stops. The rest of the numbers refuse to be numbers. He keeps his palm flat in the pile and says nothing.

Now, Ryosuke feels like he’s about to step into the darkest room he’s ever faced. So dark he can’t even see his own hands, can’t even recognize himself there. The roar of the audience is already building, a storm on the other side of the wall. And for the first time he finds himself on the edge of a stage and simply…doesn’t know what to do with his face.

Smile? Of course. He tries one on and it tastes like a lie. He lets it drop.

He flicks his gaze toward the arc where a body is missing. The empty notch where a hand should be. Yuto would be here already—no. Maybe he’d be doing a final lap with the camera, catching a string of backstage laughs to post later. Maybe he’d be double-checking a step with Yabu and Takaki, running it one, two, five, ten times, even though he’d had it on day one. Maybe Inoo and Chinen would be dozing in recliners, gel masks on, and Yuto would tuck random objects into their palms the second sleep won. Hikaru and Daiki on a sofa, swapping playlist finds and Yuto stretched across them like a long lazy cat, head on Daiki’s thigh, legs slung over Hikaru’s knees, humming, his jukebox-brain spilling classical and pop and metal and grunge and K-pop and musicals and reggaeton and jazz and blues. There wasn’t a music genre he didn’t know.

Instead, now there is just hollowness where sound used to be. The circle holds and the gap holds with it.

Ryosuke inhales and something tightens around his throat, unseen and unkind. What an idiot, he thinks, and the thought has no teeth for anyone but himself. He never pictured a day he’d have to face a dark room without that hand brushing his on the count. He took it for granted—the idea that when the lights died and the audience spilled into night and the curtains fell, there would be a weight by his side that matched his own.

Out there, the fans are furious and tender and loud. He can feel it saturating the air. He feels it too. He is supposed to be the face that steadies things, but every part of him wants to rattle. Alone is the word his body keeps choosing, even inside a circle of people he loves.

A hand closes over his. Not from the right.

From his left.

Chinen stands straight and composed, eyes forward like always when he’s trying not to break. The grip is firm, unyielding, white-knuckled, like an anchor thrown in a storm.

Yamada wants to cry.

“Shut up,” Chinen mutters, almost bored.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Oh, please,” he says, the corner of his mouth lifting, sad. After a beat he finally glances at Ryosuke. “You know I feel it too. That damned black hole.” His eyes flick to the space that used to be Yuto’s.

Usually Hikaru is the one who talks, but not tonight. Yabu scans their faces. He closes his eyes for a breath. Opens them. His smile is a small light in a room that needs one.

“Today too,” Yabu says, voice warm and even, “we’ll give it our best, right?”

Apparently, that’s enough to crack something open.

“Are we really going to do this?” Takaki blurts, eyes bright, voice wobbling as he looks at Yabu. “Are we seriously going through with this?”

Hikaru and Inoo break the circle to fold him up between them. Takaki hides his face against Inoo’s shoulder.

“I’m not gonna lie. I’m way too nervous,” Daiki says, voice shaky. “This must be what brides feel like when they suddenly decide they don’t want to get married and bolt down the street in a giant white dress.”

“That’s a horrible comparison. What is wrong with you?” Hikaru fires back without heat.

“Actually, that makes it funnier,” Inoo says dryly. “Considering he kind of knows how it feels like to be a bride.”

“You feel like a runaway bride at A-nation, Daiki?” Takaki mumbles from Inoo’s shoulder.

“Ugh. You know what I mean,” Daiki sighs, throwing up his hands. “This sucks. This really freaking sucks.”

Silence clicks into place. Somewhere down the wing, someone warns: five minutes. Hands slide back into the pile. Takaki wipes at his face. More than one of them does.

Daiki’s right. A-nation looms, and this really fucking sucks.

Ryosuke’s gaze catches Yabu’s, a small ache flaring in his chest. Memory cuts in—the meeting when Yabu, level as always, asked for reasons and hit a wall.

The memory shuts like a door, hard. The present weighs more.

Back in the wing, Chinen’s grip on Ryosuke’s hand hasn’t loosened. Inoo adjusts his in-ears and breathes in sharply. Takaki’s shoulders rise and drop, rise and drop. Hikaru’s jaw works like he’s swallowing words whole. Daiki looks to the ground, but he seems focused. Yabu stands steady.

The air is heavy with what none of them can say here. And something else begins to spread through Ryosuke’s chest, washing over the raw edge.

Staff calls. “Thirty seconds!”

Resolve.

They were denied answers. They were denied a goodbye. But they weren’t denied this: to stand together, even with a space that won’t be filled.

The crowd surges, a living thing. The walls shake.

Ryosuke’s lungs burn. His fingers twitch around the mic and the red band bites into his skin. The unknown looms like the darkest room.

He looks left. Chinen is still there. He looks around the circle. The others are still there.

“Stand by!”

Seven shadows gather against the blinding white. Seven voices tuning themselves to a single breath.

“Three!”

Not eight. Never again eight.

But still together.

“Two!”

Hands tighten once.

The curtain lifts

“One!”

*

(april, 2008)

The practice room smelled like floor cleaner. Mirrors sweating at the edges. They’d been running the same chorus for an hour—shift, snap, slide—when the choreographer clapped twice and let the track die mid-beat.

“We’re missing something,” she said. “We need a change.”

Everyone went very still. Ryosuke felt the air thin and thicken at the same time.

The choreographer’s gaze walked the front row, then the back, then stopped. 

“Yamada,” the choreographer called. “Center.”

For a second it didn’t mean anything. Then it meant everything. 

The JUMP members hid their surprise with sips of water or looking away. Chinen’s eyebrows jumped and then smoothed, like he’d always known. On the far side, Yuto went motionless—halfway through capping his bottle—and then finished the motion as if he’d never paused. When he turned, his face wore the easy smile he used in front of the cameras. The one that sometimes didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Okay, shift,” the choreographer said, already pointing. “Yabu, right. Arioka, left. Nakajima, slide to Yamada’s flank.”

Ryosuke’s legs moved before his brain did. He stepped toward the black X on the floor as if it might vanish if he blinked. The tape felt warmer than the rest of the wood. His mic pack thumped against his spine like it wanted to climb out.

“Breathe,” Yuto said, not loud, from just behind his shoulder. It was friendly, neutral, the kind of encouragement you can’t argue with. 

“From the top,” the choreographer called. “Yamada, hold the first count. Everyone else has to move around you,” the choreographer looked at the others. “Don’t chase him. Let him be the anchor.”

The track hit. From the center, everything looked like a new city. The mirrors sent back a version of Ryosuke he didn’t recognize yet. He hit the first pose a fraction late, corrected on the second, felt his ribs forget what to do and then remember. The formation shifted around him, Yabu’s line taking half a step wider, Daiki’s travel softening, and Yuto—closest—adjusting with the invisible math that made the picture hold. 

“Again,” the choreographer said. “Smile like you mean it, Yamada.”

He didn’t know if he could. His face felt like it belonged to someone else. He flexed his mouth anyway and focused on the count, the downbeat behind the synth, the breath between four and five. On the next pass his feet and the floor finally agreed with him.

Break. Bottles hissed. Towels moved. Ryosuke kept his eyes on the X because looking up felt like stepping off a roof.

“You’re fine,” Yuto said, appearing at his side like he’d always been there. He kept his voice level, eyes on the mirror, as if talking to his own reflection. “Just remember not to rush the pivot—your right foot still wants to run. Tell it to wait.”

Ryosuke nodded. His throat hurt. 

“I know,” Yuto said, before the apology could finish dressing itself. He tapped his own shoulder in the glass. “I’ll soften travel on the pre-chorus. It will be easier for you.”

“Set!” the choreographer called.

They ran it again, then again. By the third pass, the center started feeling less like a mistake and more like a job. Ryosuke’s body found the small door under his ribs the song kept knocking on. On the chorus, Yuto slid in harmony with exactly enough skill to lock it, exactly enough closeness to steady the picture without stealing it.

They landed the last hit clean. Silence. 

“That,” the choreographer said to Yamada. “Hold that.”

The room exhaled. Ryosuke kept his weight on the X for one extra breath, then looked up. His eyes found Yuto’s in the mirror.

Yuto’s smile was there, bright and professional. Behind it, for a second, Yamada still could find surprise. Contained confusion. Maybe denial. 

“Again,” the choreographer said.

Ryosuke set his feet on the dark X and nodded. 

“Again,” he echoed.

Yuto rolled his shoulders, slid to the flank without a sound. 

They moved. They sang. They did it.

And the practice room met the new center. 

*

“Nakajima Yuto VANISHES: From Center Stage to Radio Silence — What Happened to JUMP’s ‘Hidden Ace’?”

Nakajima Yuto’s abrupt absence leaves fans uneasy, answers pending

Nakajima Yuto—often described by supporters as Hey! Say! JUMP’s quiet standout—is currently absent from idol activities. There was no farewell event and no detailed statement from him or his management, a silence that feels abrupt given his long tenure.

In that vacuum, speculation is inevitable. Some fans read this as a career pivot—perhaps toward acting—while others worry about behind-the-scenes decisions or the group’s longer-term direction. None of these theories are substantiated, and no changes to Hey! Say! JUMP have been officially announced.

What’s clear is the mood: for many who have followed him since childhood, this doesn’t feel like a planned “graduation” so much as a light going out between songs. Until there’s an official update, questions linger—and an empty place on stage is doing most of the talking.

-

What does JUMP lose without Nakajima Yuto?

For nearly two decades, Nakajima Yuto has been more than just a member of Hey! Say! JUMP. He was one of its founder members— the quiet center of gravity that held the group steady. Onstage, he dazzled with effortless skill. Offstage, he was the one cracking jokes, lightening the mood, capturing memories with his camera, keeping spirits high through grueling rehearsals and endless tours. His departure is not merely the absence of a figure in formation. It is the absence of a presence. A spirit. A heartbeat.

The company insists JUMP will continue as seven. And they will — professionalism demands nothing less. But fans already know what the press release will not admit: there will always be a gap. There will always be one light-blue glowstick missing in the sea of colors.

And perhaps the heavier weight falls not on the stage, but in the silence. Why has Nakajima not spoken? If this was truly his decision, why no farewell to his fans, no parting words for the bandmates who grew up by his side, no acknowledgment of the world he helped to build? Until that silence is broken, it will echo louder than any song. And it will remind us, with every performance JUMP gives, that one voice is still missing.

-

@xxxxxxxx:
i’ll never forgive the company, yuto gave them his entire youth and this is how they treat him??? disappeared overnight, no farewell, no explanation

@zzzzzzzz:
Replying to @xxxxxxx
hey, he chose this! he’s an actor now, get over it. Idols can’t be idols forever.

@yyyyyyyy:
Replying to @zzzzzzz
noooononono no, if it was his choice he would’ve at least said goodbye :( please don’t tell me “get over it.”

@qqqqqqqq:
Replying to @yyyyyyyy
do you really think they let him talk? look at how fast they deleted him from the site!! this has starto’s horrible management written all over it

@wwwwwwww:
Replying to @yyyyyyyy
guys, he’s probably filming something HUGE in secret. Just waittt, he’ll pop up in some hollywood movie and we’ll all shut up

@vvvvvvvv:
Replying to @wwwwwwww
even if that’s true, how does that excuse leaving JUMP like this? It’s betrayal, plain and simple.

@mimi:

yutoyama, my shayla </3

-

Interviewer: “You’ve recently worked closely with Nakajima Yuto-san. Given his sudden departure from Hey! Say! JUMP, may I ask what your impression was of him, both as an actor and as a person going through such a big change?”

Itagaki: (pauses, then smiles faintly) “To be honest, I didn’t see someone who had ‘left’ something. I saw someone who was beginning something. Of course, I understand that for the fans, the shock was immense. He grew up with that group — eighteen years is more than half his life. And I think that’s the living proof of Nakajima-san’s professional essence. Commitment. A very quiet, very steady kind of strength. Personally, I don’t think he's running away from music, or from his group. I believe he is walking toward something that maybe needed to prove to himself.”

Interviewer: “There has been speculation about whether he made the right decision. Whether acting alone can carry the weight of such a sacrifice. What do you think?”

Itagaki: “Sacrifice is a heavy word. But art is art, whether you sing it or you play it or you live it on stage. Watching him work, I never once thought, ‘This is an idol trying to act.’ He came in with respect for the craft, prepared, thoughtful, and willing to listen. If you ask me, he isn’t trying to compensate for anything. He’s simply continuing in another form. And I think people will see that soon enough.”

-

“Crisis in Hey! Say! JUMP: Did Tensions Between Yamada and Nakajima Lead to Yuto’s Departure?”

The sudden exit of Nakajima Yuto from Hey! Say! JUMP has left fans reeling, and while the official statement claims it’s all about his acting career, whispers from behind the scenes suggest something far more dramatic.

Of course, none of the members have addressed any of this, but the tabloids are eager to fan the flames: “Yuto’s departure might not only mark the end of his journey with JUMP—it could mark the beginning of the end for the group itself.”

According to an alleged staff insider, Yuto and Yamada Ryosuke had been clashing for years. Arguments had escalated to the point where the group’s unity was compromised. “The 20th anniversary was coming,” another supposed insider said, “but not everyone shared the same vision. For Yuto, staying under those conditions became impossible.”

“They were like water and oil,” the source insists. “Yamada, always the perfectionist, would lose patience with Yuto’s more laid-back style. And Yuto felt constantly scrutinized by Yamada. You could feel the tension at rehearsals and backstage—”

-

—Ryosuke stops reading. He closes the window, shuts down the app, locks his phone, slips it into his pocket, and continues walking through the streets. All actions that, lately, have become routine.

Time passes. People like to represent the pain of losing someone as that weight you carry in your pocket wherever you go. Over time, the stone can change its shape: sometimes it’s small, barely noticeable throughout the day. Other times, it’s so heavy it won’t even let you get out of bed. Yet this is not the grief one normally experiences when someone dies. This must have another name, some word for this very specific kind of pain. Yamada knows that Yuto is fine, objectively. He’s out there in the world. Doing things. Feeling things. Living. But not from a place that Ryosuke—or anyone—can witness anymore.

One Thursday in late august, Nakajima Yuto put a stop on his nearly twenty-one-year career as an idol and left the world in a state of indefinite radio silence. No interviews, no Instagram posts, no messages, no appearances. The agency’s silence doesn’t help either, because in the absence of answers, people naturally begin to formulate their own responses to fill in the dark spaces. In less than a month, Ryosuke has come across countless headlines from sensationalist media questioning JUMP’s future, asking if Yuto’s departure means the group should reconsider continuing. If things were in Ryosuke’s hands, he would have already sued those damned journalists.

As for the members, each of them is trapped inside the sphere of their own grief. For over eighteen years, Yamada and the others had had front-row access to every moment when Yuto came up with a new joke, a ridiculous dance move, a beautiful note in the recording room, or a particularly aesthetic photograph for his collection. The emptiness in Yamada’s chest seemed to grow with every passing moment, like a black hole devouring everything every time things disappeared: old posters vanished, his name clipped from setlists, photos deleted from official accounts.

But It isn’t until the last week of September that news about Yuto finally breaks: a new drama, familiar director, and lots of expectations. It’s the same story that’s played out countless times whenever one of the members lands a lead. Yamada’s fingers ache with the urge to grab his phone and call Yuto, the way they always did whenever one of them booked a drama. At least, that’s what they’ve done since the day they finally set their differences down and decided to try being friends.

Now, every time he crosses the streets of Shibuya, Yuto’s face—fresh, composed, so, so gorgeous—flickers before Ryosuke like a reflection on glass, as if mocking him. He tells himself it’s just the LED billboards and the crush of strangers, the way a city projects ghosts on anyone who will look. He fixes his gaze on the crosswalk lines, on the red-to-green blink, on the steam lifting from a ramen shop vent, and keeps moving. A scooter darts past; someone laughs behind him, a train thunders overhead like a quiet dare. He shoves his hands deeper into his pockets and walks on, pretending the warmth in his chest is only the weather.

Yamada gives no one the satisfaction of a reaction, because twenty-one years of experience in his body have forced him to adapt to the hardest of situations, as if all that experience had been accumulating solely to endure this exact moment. They say you got to fake it until you make it.

Ryosuke did. Hell yes, he did.

To the rest of the world, Yamada is having the time of his life. The moment the lights and the camera are on him, the smile reaches his lips automatically, as if he had just won the lottery. He does it. He does the work.

Magazine covers? Pose. Interviews? Laughter, jokes, kindness. New album? Yamada hits all the right notes. Yamada Ryosuke becomes nothing but perfect. Ruthless. Flawless. Efficient.

He wants to die.

Because he knows that when the lights go out, the camera points elsewhere, and the day ends, it’s just him and his thoughts. Him and the void.

In the first days of September, it’s like an obsession. The moment he steps into his apartment, he throws his things onto the bed, half-eats something, showers, and scrolls through his phone. He looks at old photos. Rereads interviews from his recent years. From his early years. He spends hours going over old videos and past concerts, searching for a sign. A glance, a gesture, a forced smile. A secret hiding in Yuto’s last message. Something to help him make sense of this mountain of shit, these endless doubts about whether it was truly his fault. If maybe he didn’t listen enough. If maybe, in general… Yamada wasn’t enough.

Then the day begins again. Rinse and repeat. Yamada fills every second of daylight keeping himself busy and every second of the night sinking into the deepest darkness he’s ever known.

Ryosuke always thought of his work as a home he could return to. Within it, every door led to spaces that filled his soul. Two of those doors closed along the way—one abruptly, the other slowly, inevitably. And now, this. You’re not supposed to have favorites, but Ryosuke had his favorite place: the brightest room in the house, the one that made his eyes shine, the one where his smile spilled everything he had been feeling for years, no matter how hard he tried to hold it back. 

Ryosuke is no longer allowed to go there. He can’t even glance inside, because all he finds is silence. All the smiles, the fights, the lingering eyes, the hopes that one day, maybe someday, the what-ifs, the possibilities, the potentials. Yamada is no longer allowed in the brightest room of the house.

So, no one should blame Ryosuke if, for the first time in his life, during the longest nights when sleep refuses to come, he also feels tempted to reach for the knob of his own door.

*

(september, 2008)

The cameras are rolling. Scrap teacher, episode 1, scene 14, take 19. 

“Action!”

Chinen opened the bathroom stall door, and the camera focused on Yuto, who sat on the toilet seat, still in his school uniform, drenched from head to toe. Yuto lifted his head to see who had opened the door and found Daiki, Chinen, and Ryosuke’s unreadable face staring back at him. Yuto stepped out of the stall and met Ryosuke’s eyes. The orange of the sunset bled through the windows, staining everything in gold.

There was a long pause that followed Daiki’s comment about how dirty the men's toilets were and Chinen offered Yuto a tissue to dry himself. Ryosuke and Yuto didn’t pay much attention to that because—because they’d gone over this scene a thousand times already. Part of the reason was because the director would almost always cut right when Nakajima's and Yamada’s eyes met, claiming that Ryosuke was “saying too much.”

“But I only have one line in that scene!” Ryosuke complained to Yuto after the director called for a break.

Yuto walked by his side, thoughtful. They stopped in front of a vending machine. Ryosuke dug for coins to buy a cereal bar, and that was when Yuto said:

“Mm. I think I get what he means.”

Ryosuke’s hand froze midair, the coin halfway to the slot.

“You’ve got to be kidding me? Who’s side are you on?” Ryosuke said, feeling a little betrayed. “What does he mean then?”

“It’s just that… the scene itself carries a particular intensity. It’s the first time Takasugi and Kusaka meet. I guess all the dialogue you need is what happens in the way they look at each other.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I mean—okay,” Yuto said, snatching the cereal bar from Ryosuke’s hands, taking a bite before giving it back.

“Hey!”

Yuto swallowed, inhaled deeply. “Okay,” he repeated. “Close your eyes.”

Ryosuke raised a brow. Yuto rolled his eyes.

“Come on, I’m not gonna do anything. Just try not to be tense. Trust me.”

Ryosuke closed his eyes.

“Stop frowning, grandpa. Loosen up a little.”

“Promise you’re not eating my cereal bar while I can’t see.”

“I’m not—just relax!”

Ryosuke tried to relax, and stopped pinching his brow together.

“Okay, think about Takasugi. You’re a transfer student in a school that’s falling apart. The system is corrupt. The students are a mess. The teachers do whatever they want. And what you want, Takasugi,” Yuto said, “is justice.”

Back on set, Ryosuke tried to remember this. To untighten, to not clench his fists. He thought about Takasugi. He was Takasugi. And the moment Yuto and Ryosuke’s eyes met, there was a pause.

Look at me, Yuto’s eyes seemed to say. Just look at me.

Ryosuke looked at Yuto. They were standing at quite a distance, but for some reason, Ryosuke felt as though Yuto were infinitely closer. As though they should be infinitely closer. Yuto’s dark eyes looked into Ryosuke’s, full of questions, searching his face as if Ryosuke held all the answers. Ryosuke only stared back. The director didn’t yell “cut” this time. Finally, Ryosuke could deliver his line.

“Did you feel it?” Yuto asked afterwards, grinning ear to ear.

Ryosuke blushed. “We just looked at each other—”

“And that,” Yuto said, slinging his bag over his shoulder as they headed home, “was all the talking we needed.”

*

It’s during the end-of-year period that what Ryosuke once thought was a fast-paced life suddenly feels like nothing more than a stroll through the park, and work begins to resemble a F1 race. With the tour season getting closer along with the end of 2025, casting directors for new dramas and films begin to ask about him, and Ryosuke once again finds himself caught up in scripts, auditions, and chemistry readings with other actors.

That’s how he meets her.

Mizuhara Kanaru is chosen to play the co-lead role in the drama Mirror Streets, a psychological thriller in which Souta (Ryosuke) wakes up one morning in an altered Tokyo, discovering that he is trapped inside a massive psychological experiment. Miyu (Kanaru) appears mysteriously in the middle of the experiment, and although the two of them are both fighting to survive and don’t trust each other at first, they soon form a solid bond in order to restore the original reality.

She looks like a fairy, her presence so quiet that at first Ryosuke almost overlooks her in the middle of the set. But that is left behind the very second he actually meets her.

“Yamada Ryosuke, they told me you wouldn’t arrive on set until later in the afternoon. It truly is a pleasure to meet you!” Her dark hair falls like a cascade and her smile is wide.

“The pleasure is mine, Mizuhara-san,” Ryosuke replies with a small bow of his head.

She waves her hand. “No need to be so formal. I was honestly so happy when I found out I’d be working with you. I’m a fan of JUMP!”

That brings a genuine smile to Ryosuke’s face. It turns out this is Kanaru’s first role in a televised drama. She debuted in a small play last summer and landed this job after many attempts and failed auditions. 

Working with her truly is a pleasure. Kanaru has a bubbly, cheerful personality, she’s very good at reading the mood of scenes, and she never fails to make Ryosuke laugh out loud backstage. Despite the shoot being intense and emotionally demanding, the whole process ends up being rather enjoyable and free of problems, largely thanks to Kanaru.

“Sorry, was I too much?” she asks after a particularly difficult scene.

“You’re doing fine. Don’t worry, You don’t need to be an expert at this—we can rehearse as many times as you want,” Yamada reassures her.

“I know, but sometimes it can really be frustrating, don’t you think?” Kanaru sighs. “I honestly don’t know how you do it. What was it like the first time you acted?”

“I was constantly nervous. They used to redo whole scenes because I would stutter over my lines all the time,” Ryosuke confesses.

“I honestly can’t even imagine that. You always look so confident!”

“Ah,” Ryosuke can’t help but blush a little. “That definitely took years to master.”

“When did you get your first leading role?”

“It was in a series called Scrap Teacher.”

“I remember that one! Although honestly, back then I didn’t watch much TV. Was it hard to be the lead? You were so tiny!” 

“What is this? Are you secretly an interviewer?” Ryosuke teases.

“Of course, Yamada-san! Tell me everything you’ve done in your life since the moment you were born,” they both laugh. Kanaru seems less nervous now, and Ryosuke counts that as an achievement. “Seriously, though—it’s like you were born to play lead roles.”

Ryosuke laughs. “Isn’t that a bit much?”

Now it’s Mizuhara who blushes. “Don’t tease me! See if I ever compliment you again,” she pretends to pout. Ryosuke gives her an affectionate pat on the head. “But really, was it difficult?”

Ryosuke complies. “At first, yes. Needless to say, I didn’t have much experience.”

“But you were already an idol, right?”

“Eh, sure, but being an idol and being an actor are two different things. Sometimes you need to be an entirely different persona.”

“What helped you get better at the role?”

“The atmosphere was really good. Everyone was very kind to me, they looked after me and guided me a lot,” Yamada says. “Ah, of course, there’s also the fact that I worked with a lot of people I already knew.”

“You knew your co-star?”

Ryosuke opens his mouth, but the words are stuck in his throat.

The memory pierces through him like a bullet.

Golden sunset bleeding across the bathroom. Yuto drenched from head to toe. Dark eyes meeting dark eyes and a voice from another life. Look at me. Just look at me.

Ryosuke shuts his eyes now, summoning all his strength not to physically shake the memory out of his head. He opens them. 

“He was my bandmate in JUMP,” Ryosuke says.

“And what was it like working with him?”

Suddenly, Ryosuke feels like laughing. Laughing until hysteria. Or until tears.

“He was great,” he says instead. He swallows. “He still is.”

The words hang in the air, heavier than they should be. Kanaru tilts her head slightly, curious, but doesn’t push. The staff calls for a reset of the cameras, the crew shuffling around them, voices echoing through the soundstage. Ryosuke feels the weight of the memory still pressing on his chest, like sunlight bleeding through after a storm, warm and unbearable all at once.

Kanaru offers him a small smile, the kind that doesn’t demand an explanation.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she says softly, almost drowned out by the bustle of the set. “But I can tell it mattered to you.”

Ryosuke exhales through his nose, a half-laugh that isn’t really a laugh at all. Mizuhara gets ready, right next to him. 

She really is a nice girl.

He straightens, gets ready to work and forgets all about Yamada Ryosuke. After all, there are lines to rehearse, scenes to shoot, cameras rolling. 

And yet, somewhere inside, the past refuses to loosen its grip.

*

(february, 2010)

The school bell dumped a hundred voices into the corridor and then let them scatter. Horikoshi turned into its usual mid-morning maze—shoe squeaks, laughter ricocheting off trophy cases, a teacher calling someone back by full name like a fishing line. Yamada and Chinen cut down the side hall with a soccer ball in hand and no plan beyond killing twenty minutes.

“Ten goals each. Loser pays for the melon bread,” Chinen said, light as ever.

“Fine,” Ryosuke answered, not bothering to negotiate because the point was moving, not winning. The gym doors yawned open, the air inside heavy with varnish and dust and the ghost of a last night’s practice. Light from the high windows laid long strips across the floor. The bleachers were pulled out like a wooden cliff.

They were halfway to the center circle when Chinen’s hand landed at Ryosuke’s elbow.

“Wait.”

Under the lowest tier of bleachers, two figures stood too close for it to be casual. Ryosuke recognized the profile first: the neat line of hair, the posture that could pass inspection in any class photo. Class president posture. Yuto.

Beside him, a girl from Ryosuke’s homeroom, fingers plucking at her sleeve like it might unravel into courage.

Chinen and Yamada ducked back on instinct, flattening into the slice of shadow by the equipment cage. Chinen’s eyes were bright, conspiratorial.

“Oh my god,” he whispered. “Actual high school content.”

Ryosuke rolled the ball under his sneaker to keep it from escaping, suddenly aware of the rubber squeak like an alarm. He could hear the girl’s voice in blurry pieces, soft and fast. He caught words: “always admired you from afar… since spring… I know it’s stupid—” and then the quiet that meant she’d finally said it.

Yuto’s reply was nothing at first. He rubbed at the back of his neck. Even from here Ryosuke could tell he was flustered in that polite way he did everything—apologies shaped like full sentences, the grin that arrived whenever he didn’t know where to put his hands. He started to speak, stopped, started again.

Chinen elbowed Ryosuke like a kid at a fireworks show. “He’s actually shy,” he breathed, delighted. “This is gold, oh my god.”

Ryosuke’s stomach went cold. The ball felt wrong under his sole, too round, too loud, too much. He didn’t want to play anymore. He didn’t want to stand here watching something private happen to a person he claimed not to care about. He didn’t want to be in this gym, in this school, in this city.

“Let’s go,” he said, but it came out thin.

“Wait—” Chinen’s eyes were glued to the scene. “She’s going to—oh, she bowed. This is so pure. We’re living in a drama.”

Ryosuke stopped hearing the words. He heard the thud of his own pulse and the small, wild thought that he could leave his skin like a shadow and walk away.

He stepped out from the hiding before he could stop himself and strode into the bright middle of the court. He didn’t look at them. He didn’t look at anything. He put his laces through the ball and sent it screaming against the bleachers. It slammed the lower part of it with a percussive crack that shot up the wooden spine and rang in the rafters. The girl yelped, stumbling back. Yuto’s hand shot out to steady her, a palm hovering at her elbow. Both of them swung toward the echo.

Yuto ducked out from under the bleacher lip in three long steps. Up close, his expression was a neat, furious thing controlled by effort, the way a lid sits hard on boiling water.

“What is your problem?!” he shouted. The words had teeth. “You can’t just hit a ball like that! You could have broken something! You could have hit someone! Hell, you could have hurt yourself, Yamada!”

Ryosuke shrugged. He kept his eyes on the scuffed paint of the center circle. “Didn’t see you there.”

“That’s the point,” Yuto said, with that class-president clarity that made teachers love him and Ryosuke want to argue with him on principle. “You didn’t look.”

Ryosuke set his foot on the ball again and spun it slowly.

He didn’t look up. He didn’t trust his face.

Behind Yuto, the girl hovered with apology in every line of her body. Yuto glanced back, softened, and then looked at Ryosuke one last time like he was choosing not to say something itched onto his tongue.

“Whatever,” he said, flat but not cruel. He carefully took the girl’s hand and led her toward the side exit.

The gym swallowed their footsteps. The ball under Ryosuke’s shoe finally stopped moving.

Chinen slid out from the shadows and crossed the court, eyebrows up around his hairline. “What the heck was that?!”

Ryosuke didn’t breathe for two beats. He made a show of squinting at the mark the ball had left in the bleacher.

“He shouldn’t be doing that here,” he said, aiming for boredom and hitting brittle. “If someone saw them, it’d be a field day for paparazzies. Headlines. Scandals. You know how people are.”

Chinen looked at him for a long second, like he was reading a page with invisible ink. “Uh-huh,” he said finally, eyes squinting. “We’re suddenly worried about school property and media ethics.”

Ryosuke reached for the ball and came up empty-handed before he realized he’d already kicked it halfway across the gym.

“I don’t care,” he said, to the air. To no one. To himself. “I don’t.”

“Sure thing,” Chinen said gently, because he could be kind even when he was right. “Soccer’s off, I’m guessing?”

Ryosuke shook his head, jaw tight. “I’m fine.”

When the bell rang again, Ryosuke walked toward the doors with his head down, repeating a sentence that didn’t change its meaning no matter how many times he said it.

He didn’t care. He didn’t care. He didn’t care at all.

*

“What are you doing?”

With a soft plop, Takaki drops down beside Yamada on the practice room couch. Without lifting his gaze from his iPad, Yamada shifts slightly to give him space, even though the couch is small enough that there isn’t much to give.

It’s Monday night. The practice room is dark except for the corner where Yamada sits. JUMP’s rehearsals for their new single have just wrapped, and most of the members have already gone home.

“Brainstorming some ideas for the radio talk show,” Ryosuke answers, scribbling something across the iPad screen.

“Right,” Takaki nods. “I’ve heard it’s going well. A little too well, maybe,” he chuckles.

That’s one way to put it, Yamada thinks. The radio program he hosts has turned into the breakout of the season, topping all audience ratings. Ryosuke still has war flashbacks from the time he saw the station’s inbox collapse under the flood of letters sent in by fans. Hard not to feel sympathy for the poor staff who had to read through every single one, filtering out the ones that might actually make it on air.

Even so, it doesn’t exactly surprise Yamada. From the very moment his radio slot was announced, the show had been promoted everywhere, so the number of listeners matched expectations and… well, also Yamada’s innate popularity.

What did surprise him, though, was how natural, authentic the space became for him. The ability to speak casually and openly with the audience has had a nearly therapeutic effect on his routine. A far cry from what he’d imagined at first, since before going on air for the very first time, he thought it would be yet another of those occasions where he’d have to force cheerfulness, put on composure, and maintain the posture of a perfect public figure. But then he started reading the letters—letters not just from fans wishing him success, praising his looks, or asking about new music (which he doesn’t mind at all), but from ordinary people. People who maybe hadn’t even heard of him until that moment. People going through situations that leave Yamada utterly at a loss for words.

More than once he’s found himself standing in his kitchen, breakfast forgotten on the table, completely absorbed in a letter that the staff approved. Stories people want to tell. Stories people need to tell.

“People have really interesting stories,” Yamada admits. Takaki listens closely, his hair still damp from the shower after rehearsals for the new EP. “And sometimes, I can’t just show up with nothing prepared to say. You have to choose your words carefully, because they’re waiting for a response that’s…”

“Useful?” Takaki tilts his head.

Yamada nods slowly, finally tearing his eyes from the iPad. “Yeah. Useful. But also… genuine, you know? People can smell fake from miles away. If I just say ‘ganbatte’ or something, it feels cheap. Like throwing glitter on a wound.”

Takaki lets out a small laugh, the kind that says he knows Yamada’s being dramatic but also that he gets it. “So what do you do then?”

Yamada shrugs, tapping the end of his pencil against the screen. “Sometimes I don’t have an answer. I just… tell them that. That I don’t know what the right thing is, but that I’m glad they trusted me enough to write it down. Somehow, that honesty seems to mean more than advice,” Ryosuke smiles a little. “I wish I had a magic wand to fix every problem in the world. Including mines,” he lets out a dry laugh, not much humor in it.

For a moment the practice room feels heavier, quieter. The buzz of the fluorescent light is the only sound.

“That would be a cool superpower, huh?” Takaki agrees, just as Inoo wanders over, toweling off his hair. “For example, I’d start by erasing from existence that shirt Inoo-chan insists on wearing after practice.”

“What’s your problem with shirts?” Inoo asks, plopping down on the floor in front of them. “Do you have some kind of shirt-related trauma? Did shirts murder your family when you were a kid?”

“You’ve been wearing that thing since before the pandemic, dude. It has more holes than a colander. I can literally see your right nipple from here.”

Inoo shoots Takaki a teasing smile. “Just admit you want to see me without a shirt, Takaki-kun. It’s not that hard.”

Takaki makes a strangled noise like he’s been punched. Inoo bursts out laughing.

After scribbling and erasing something again, Yamada throws them both a reproachful glance. “If you two lovebirds are done flirting, I’d appreciate some silence. I need to think.”

“What are you doing?” Inoo asks.

“Yamada’s making notes for his radio show. Which is the most Yamada-like thing possible,” he adds. “Only Yamada would prep notes for a program that’s live.”

Ryosuke pulls his knees up and props the iPad on them, hiding part of his face.

Inoo raises an eyebrow.

“Is that what he told you?” Inoo says.

“Huh?”

“Shut up, Kei,” Yamada mutters.

“He’s not writing notes for the radio talk show,” Kei announces. “He’s sketching ideas for the 20th anniversary concert.”

Takaki straightens, eyes wide. Ryosuke hides himself more.

“Ryosuke!” Takaki says. “You bastard.”

“Crazy anxious bastard,” Inoo adds.

“Wait, how did you even know?” Takaki asks Inoo.

“Caught him the other day doodling Chinen’s pink costume,” Inoo shrugs. “Also, when he starts thinking about tours, Yamada gets this look—”

“Oh, I know the one,” Takaki laughs, his eyes darting side to side like a ping-pong ball. “It’s like…” He squints and scrunches his nose.

“You look like my grandma.”

“No, but seriously, already? That soon?” Takaki leans over to peek at Yamada’s notes. Yamada dodges, sticking his tongue out. “As expected from our ace.”

“Very anxious ace,” Inoo echoes.

“Well, no pressure, but the 20th is just, I don’t know, probably our biggest milestone yet,” Yamada scratches something out on the iPad a little too aggressively. “So yeah, I’m anxious. Sue me.”

“Did the manager tell you to start brainstorming ideas?”

“We can help,” Takaki suggests. “I mean, of course we should help.”

But Yamada shakes his head.

“No one told me anything, I just… wanted to take my mind off things,” he says.

It’s true. But what’s even truer is that he doesn’t want to go back to an empty apartment, with too much space, too much time in his head, and too many thoughts that could bury him alive six feet under. And there’s something in Inoo’s and Takaki’s eyes that tells Ryosuke he doesn’t need to elaborate.

Silence spreads across the room, and it isn’t uncomfortable because no one speaks. Ryosuke has known these people all his life, silences have always been natural, a relief, a pause to rest, to breathe. But now silences weigh a thousand pounds. They straighten your spine and tense your shoulders. They make the emptiness real, and sometimes Ryosuke can’t breathe.

“This is kind of stupid but today, in between songs, when we had our first break to rest, I went downstairs to the second floor to refill my water bottle. Without realizing it, I stopped at the vending machine and bought a lemon cereal bar. I don’t even like cereal bars.” Inoo laughs, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Yamada stops writing on his tablet. Takaki tilts his head back, but doesn’t really look at the ceiling. “I used to bring Yuto a cereal bar during breaks, even before debut. I kept doing it all these years and always… well. I guess I don’t have to anymore.” His voice trails off, words nearly dissolving into a whisper.

“Every time it was my turn to train with weights, we’d compare results,” Takaki says after a moment. “He’d send me a screenshot of how much he could lift. I’d send mine back and the brat always doubled it.”

“God, do you remember when I was so nervous for the piano performance during the last tour? I’m not kidding, I think my hands shook every single time I had to sit down to practice,” Inoo recalls. “Yuto always stopped by and stood there, watching, until I got used to it and finally caught the rhythm.”

“Wait—was that why he kept sending piano tutorials to the group chat? Didn’t he send us, like, twice a week, different versions of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ on piano?”

“I told him so many times to stop,” Inoo laughs, louder this time.

“I thought he was just messing with us!”

“Oh, he was. I think he only stopped when Chinen threatened him because he said one night the video auto-played and scared the shit out of him.”

They both laugh.

Silence again.

Yamada thinks he should’ve gone home.

The thing is, Yamada doesn’t blame them. He couldn’t. He’s found himself in their exact position more times than he can count. Suddenly Ryosuke is walking down the street and there’s a Star Wars poster in the shop next door. Suddenly he’s watching a movie at home and the main actor has a mole under his left eye. Suddenly he’s driving and the sky is so clear, so bright, that the pale blue swallowing everything. Suddenly he’s reading a script and struggling to figure out how to deliver a line, and his mind immediately asks what would Yuto Nakajima do here? 

Suddenly, the unanswered chat from Yuto feels heavier than any other pain in his life.

Sometimes Ryosuke thinks he’s okay. That time will heal it all.

Suddenly, Ryosuke is not okay. He’s nowhere near okay.

Takaki speaks, exhales heavily. 

“My god. How the hell did we get here?”

*

(january, 2012)

Desk in obedient rows. Chalk and hot lights. Fake daylight through the windows. A fan was humming to replace the wind. Tape marks on the floor—green for Yamada, blue for Nakajima.

They didn’t speak unless it was required. Not because they couldn’t. It was because words would pick at stitches.

The wardrobe girl straightened Ryosuke’s tie. He thanked her without lifting his eyes from the script in his hand. Yuto leaned against a desk and was spinning a pencil. Their bodies kept finding ways to avoid each other like incompatible magnets.

“Camera rolling,” the director called.

Risou no Musuko. Scene 23, Take 2.

“Action!”

And suddenly, this was as easy as breathing.

On the first line, Ryosuke turned a fraction more than rehearsal and the lens loved him for it. On the second, Yuto slid into the space he had left like it was written in the script and not improvised. The banter was light, natural. Easy. Yuto’s eyes found Ryosuke’s at the end of a joke like they were never incompatible in the first place. Ryosuke held it for exactly the heartbeat the editor would need. The crew laughed in the right places. The boom mic dipped, rose, hovered like a curious moth.

“Cut. Nice,” the director said, pleased. “Again from the chalkboard moment.”

Back to one. Ryosuke’s script edges had softened from being held too hard. He adjusted his blazer cuff. A makeup brush ghosted across Ryosuke’s cheekbone. A sound tech stepped in to snake Yuto’s mic cable flatter against his shoulder. Yuto caught Ryosuke’s sleeve with two fingers to keep him from stepping off his mark—quick, reflexive, gone. They both pretended there wasn’t a spark under it.

“Action!”

This time Ryosuke let the joke land and didn’t smile until Yuto did. Their grins arrived like matched stamps. When Ryosuke had to look away—as per script—Yuto’s smile stayed half a second too long, not for the camera. The lens took it anyway.

“Cut. Good. One more for safety,” the director said. “If we have it, we’ll move to the next scene.”

Someone cracked a window flat and real air sneaked in. For a second the set became what it was pretending to be.

Ryosuke’s tie had gone crooked, but before he could fix it, Ryosuke saw Yuto’s hand twitch for a second, then relax. The distance stood. 

After what felt like forever, they got the scene right.

“Cut.” A beat of quiet, then the soft, satisfied sound a crew made when they’ve caught it. The director’s pen stopped moving.

Ryosuke stepped back from the green. Yuto stepped off blue. Their gazes passed like trains, each carrying too much cargo to risk stopping. 

On his way to the wardrobe, he found Yuto pretending to check his mic pack. Between them, the air held a shape that only existed when the red light was on—chemistry like a private frequency, tension like an unanswered text. They carried it into the next scene, and the next, and the next, working as if the answer might be in the next take if they could just get there fast enough without saying a word.

*

It’s one of those nights when Ryosuke just stumbles into his hotel room completely wrecked. They’re filming in Nagasaki for the drama, and after Kanaru and him had to spend hours shooting an action sequence where they ran for their lives through an endless tunnel of ruins, Ryosuke feels like he doesn’t even have the time to hear his own thoughts.

So he dissociates. Moves on autopilot. Eats half a sandwich and leaves it abandoned, showers, changes clothes, and drops into bed. The noise of the TV works as white noise, drowning out any unwanted drift of thoughts. Ryosuke feels closer to the zombies they had to escape from than to an actual human being.

Outside, it begins to snow, and suddenly Ryosuke realizes—it’s Christmas. Snowflakes fall lazily past the window, vanishing into the dark. It’s not the first time he’s worked on Christmas. Hell, he’s worked through New Year’s, his birthday, and pretty much any holiday that happened to land in his schedule. But this time, Ryosuke feels it differently, like he’s just now realizing how merciless and fast time really is.

It clicks then, why Kanaru had insisted, a little more than usual, that they went out for dinner tonight. Why she’d looked slightly deflated when Ryosuke told her he was too exhausted.

Ryosuke sighs and reaches for his phone to call Chinen.

Of course, Chinen thinks Kanaru is a good girl. A phenomenal girl. Ryosuke has gone out with a couple of actresses and even models in the past, but Kanaru is the kind of person you just naturally feel drawn to. They’ve gone out for dinner a few times—sometimes with the crew, sometimes just the two of them—but Ryosuke feels so buried in his grief he doesn’t have the space to think of anything else.

“And that’s exactly why I think you should try,” Chinen tells him across the videocall. The boy is also in bed, the light of the TV and his phone throwing shifting shadows across his face. “She’s got a great personality, she’s talented, and from what I know she’s very pretty too. You should give her a chance. Hell,” Chinen stresses, “you should give yourself a chance.”

“Right, as if I actually had the time to squeeze a girlfriend into the hurricane of things I’ve got ahead of me.”

“You used to.”

“Please. I’ve gone out with, what, three? Four girls in my entire life, Yuri,” Ryosuke deadpans.

“All of them were very nice, too.”

“I know, but all of them broke up with me for the same reason. They said I never had time, that I was never present, and that when I was, my head was always somewhere else,” and saying it out loud stings, guilt gnaws at him. “Kanaru doesn’t deserve that.”

“Then make time. God, Ryosuke, sometimes I swear you’re your own worst enemy.”

“How—” Ryosuke sits up in bed, face twisted with frustration. The upbeat jingle announcing entertainment news from the TV feels painfully out of place with what he’s feeling inside. “Chinen, tell me how in the world I’m not supposed to do that?”

If this were anyone else, Ryosuke would’ve hung up ages ago. Fuck manners. But he knows Chinen Yuri like the back of his hand. The Chinen who usually stays quiet and lets things work themselves out naturally. The Chinen who has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him, laugh after laugh, tear after tear. He knows damn well that the only reason Chinen is pushing him like this is because he’s fucking worried about him.

“You’re right,” Chinen finally says. “Maybe you shouldn’t date her.”

“Gosh, don’t agree with me,” Ryosuke laughs weakly. “That’s not how our arguments usually end. I always end up agreeing with you.”

“Well, not my fault I’m always right,” Chinen laughs too, but his expression tells Ryosuke there’s more he wants to say. Something he’s holding back.

“I feel like there’s a but hiding in all this,” Ryosuke says.

Chinen takes his time before answering, torn.

“I didn’t know that was why your other girlfriends broke up with you,” Chinen says.

“Yeah, well. It’s always easier to just say it was mutual instead of explaining every single argument they gave me about what a shitty boyfriend I was.”

“No—I mean, I don’t care that you didn’t tell me. It’s just…”

“Just say it, Yuri.”

Chinen sighs. “Ryosuke, have you ever thought that maybe the reason things never worked out with them wasn’t just your chaotic life, or your bad habit of mixing emotions and work?”

“What do you mean? Besides the fact that I suck at balancing everything—”

“Sorry, let me rephrase.” Chinen’s tone sharpens, then softens. “Have you ever thought that maybe—just maybe—the reason you felt so disconnected in those relationships is because… they simply weren’t what you want?”

“I am not following,” Ryosuke says, instantly defensive. “They were all really good girls, Chinen. Isn’t it kind of unfair to say that?”

“Ryosuke,” this time Chinen’s voice is gentle. “They were all wonderful girls. Perfect, even. And no matter how much you deny it, you’re also a good guy. A great guy. Someone who loves until you can’t anymore. I say that because I’m your friend—I’ve seen it, I’ve felt it with you. Your work, your life—it has nothing to do with that.”

Ryosuke swallows hard.

“So even if they were ideal, perhaps they just weren’t what you wanted. Not what you truly want.”

Ryosuke shuts his eyes.

“Because even if Mizuhara-san is perfect, she’s not—”

“Stop.”

Chinen exhales, the sound quiet but heavy.

They stay in silence for a moment. Ryosuke hears the news begin on TV again, the sound of snow outside, the rustling of the sheets around his body. Chinen doesn’t say anything, not because there’s nothing more to say to make Ryosuke understand what he really means, but because he knows there’s only so much of Ryosuke’s sanity that can take. Ryosuke curses him and thanks him in the same breath, because it’s terrifying how well Ryosuke knows Chinen like the back of his hand, but it’s even more terrifying—and wonderful—how Chinen knows Ryosuke just as well.

But then, suddenly, Chinen speaks again. Frantic. Urgent.

“Ry—Ryosuke,” Chinen’s voice cuts in. “Ryosuke, oh my god, the news. Look at the news!”

Ryosuke rips his eyes from the window and looks at the television in front of him. The anchor is speaking, and beneath him, the headline screams:

Nakajima Yuto to Star in Major Hollywood Film “BLACK WATERS” Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Ryosuke holds his breath.

“—who began his journey as a trainee at Johnny’s Entertainment agency, has steadily carved out a remarkable career. From starring in hit dramas and plays in Japan to leading roles in major television projects, Nakajima has proven himself as one of the country’s most versatile young actors. This Hollywood debut marks the next bold step in a career—”

Suddenly Ryosuke has to press a hand against his chest because his heart feels like it’s about to burst out of him with how violently it’s racing.

That’s Yuto. Nakajima Yuto.

The very first star Ryosuke ever met in his life.

“—has been chosen as the lead in a major Hollywood film. The film will be directed by acclaimed Denis Villeneuve, renowned for masterpieces such as Dune and Arrival. Joining him in this stellar cast are Tom Holland, Florence Pugh, and Emma Corrin.”

Holy shit. Holy shit.

The screen shifts from old photos of Yuto, the director, and the rest of the cast, to images of Yuto that Ryosuke has never seen before.

They’re new. Very recent.

Yuto smiles at the cameras of the press. Still as tall as ever, taller than life itself. Dark freshly cut hair. The mole in the same place. The scar on his lip, unchanged.

Still just as handsome as ever.

“While details remain tightly under wraps, audiences can anticipate a film filled with breathtaking visuals, hallmarks of Villeneuve’s signature style. This project is expected to catapult Nakajima into international stardom.”

The news transitions to other topics, but Ryosuke’s eyes stay glued to the screen. He hasn’t even blinked the entire time. He feels like he could stay there, frozen, for another dozen years.

“Goodness,” Chinen breathes. Ryosuke is violently pulled back to reality. “This is—I mean, I knew Yuto wanted to do big things, but this… this is—”

“Chinen, I have to hang up.”

“Ryosuke—”

“Sorry, Yuri,” Ryosuke says, and hangs up.

Best friend of the year. The very second he ends the call, Ryosuke knows he shouldn’t have. Chinen must be drowning in a storm of emotions after this news too, but Ryosuke can’t help it. He needs time to calm down and he needs to do it alone.

Yuto.

Nakajima fucking Yuto.

“Damn it,” Ryosuke mutters into the empty room. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

He was doing well. He was doing so well. These last couple of months, Ryosuke had finally found a rhythm that didn’t shatter his heart with every step. But Yuto always finds a way to take his whole being and shake it like an earthquake, until Ryosuke can’t tell where his thoughts scatter and his entire heart feels torn into pieces, spread everywhere.

Because Yuto is out there, living things. And Ryosuke no longer has a front-row seat to witness it.

Now, he is leaving to God knows where, and Ryosuke has no way to reach him. Gone. Maybe forever if things work on Yuto’s favor. They’re on completely different planes. Parallel worlds.

But the thing is—he can’t help but feel so fucking proud of him.

He wants to scream to the entire world that Yuto deserves every single achievement he’s ever gotten, that Japan should never doubt for a second that Yuto would rise to international fame in no time. That no tabloid would ever again dare to question his worth, or reduce his sacrifice to crude speculation. The truth is here for the whole world to see, and Yuto will prove it to everyone. Including Ryosuke.

The television hums on, but the room has already fallen into silence. Snow keeps drifting past the window, dissolving into the dark. Yuto’s smile still lingers on the screen of Ryosuke’s mind, bright and unreachable, like a star glimpsed through glass. Pride warms him, grief hollows him, and in the space between the two, Ryosuke stays motionless—caught in that fragile pause before the credits roll, before the lights return, before he has to breathe again.

*

(december, 2013)

The pub had a back room they didn’t advertise—old wood, a door that clicked shut, a neon moon sign, low music that kept other people’s business out of your head.

Two beers landed with a soft thud. The server nodded and vanished.

“Thanks for coming,” Yuto said.

“Always down for free beer,” Ryosuke answered. He tried to make it a joke. It mostly was.

They both reached for their glasses, both stopped. Silence. Then, they both laughed at themselves. 

“We should talk,” Yuto stated once their voices died. “Before this turns into… a thing.”

“An irreversible thing,” Ryosuke agreed and sighed.

People laughed somewhere in the background. Glass clinked glass. Footsteps echoed and faded.

“I wanted to be center,” Yuto said, like the grass was green. He didn’t look away. “I wanted it so much I decided that meant I deserved it. When they moved it, I told myself it was fine. That it didn’t bother me,” Yuto laughed weekly. “It almost destroyed me.”

Ryosuke let the words hold for a moment. “I used to hate you,” Ryosuke finally said, like he had been holding it for a very long time. He had. “Everyone’s position is important for the group. Being center doesn’t mean you are above someone else. I wasn’t competing with you, and even if I was, that… wasn’t the kind of winning I would want. I knew we could have been good together if our egos weren’t in the middle. I just…I was so angry you couldn’t see that. And I became so worried about being a good center I also forgot that we used to be good,” Ryosuke breathed, a bit shaky. “So good.”

Yuto huffed a laugh. “We’re good at pretending we’re fine.”

“We’re professionals,” Ryosuke said, with a shrug.

Silence, but not the old sharp kind. This one felt like fresh air after rain.

“I admire you,” Yuto confessed, steady. “The way you hold a stage is just—how a camera listens to you and only you decide when it has to. I’ve learned a lot from—huh, looking at your back.”

Ryosuke looked down at his glass because looking straight at Yuto was dangerous. “I admire you, too. A lot,” Ryosuke said, too. “The way you make space for yourself, without asking for it. Your presence is like a pillar to me. Wherever you are standing, you make it better just by being there. I lean on that a lot.”

Yuto nodded. “Yeah, but ego gets loud.”

“Mine too,” Ryosuke admitted. “Sometimes it protects me. Sometimes it stabs me.”

They drank to that. Late honesty that tasted forgiveness.

“Hey! Say! JUMP is strong,” Yuto said, picking on a napkin. “We don’t have to be strong in spite of each other. We can choose to be strong because of each other.”

“I watch the front, you watch my back. When I get to the center, you build the frame.”

“What is this, geometry class?” Yuto joked and Ryosuke couldn't help but burst out laughing. 

After they calmed down, Yuto added. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For looking at you like you took something you didn’t steal.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Ryosuke said. “For avoiding this conversation. We used to be attached to the hip before—” Yamada gestures with the hand, “all of this.”

“I missed you,” Yuto smiled. He glanced down, then up. “Not Yamada Ryosuke, Hey! Say! JUMP’s ace. Just…you.”

“Were we friends?” Ryosuke teased.

Yuto’s smile folded into something warmer. “We were colleagues, rivals, teammates. Two people who knew where the other would land without looking.”

“And cowards,” Ryosuke said, gentler than the word.

“Also that,” Yuto agreed.

They let both truths sit on the table.

“To new beginnings,” Yuto said finally, raising his glass. He held it where Ryosuke could meet it or leave it.

Ryosuke lifted his. “To a new friendship.”

The glasses touched with a clean, hopeful note.

Plans came easy once the air was clear: an early run-through tomorrow to lock the new formation, a check-in with the choreographer, shared notes without turning them into weapons, check in before checking out.

They sat a little longer. The music of the bar shifted to a slow bass line. At some point, Yuto’s hand rested open on the table, not reaching, just near. Ryosuke looked at him the way you look at a word you’ve used your whole life and suddenly see clearly. In Yuto’s eyes there was relief, pride, a question, a yes—something that didn’t fit under friendship no matter how neatly he tried to tuck it.

He didn’t name it. Not tonight. But he recognized the shape, so he grabbed it and hid it under the rug of his heart. 

“We’re going to be okay,” Yuto said, a genuine smile that almost took Ryosuke by surprise. 

Ryosuke’s answer came fast. “We’re going to be better.”

They finished their beers. The server appeared and they waved off another round with the same gesture and laughed at the symmetry. Jackets on. Chairs scrape. The door clicked them back into cooler air that smelled like wet pavement after a spring rain.

On the sidewalk, they hovered in that funny nowhere where goodbyes meant more than good night. They had to walk away in opposite directions but that somehow felt like the same one.

“See you tomorrow. Don’t stay up late playing videogames! I’ll tell Hikaru,” Yuto waved.

“You traitor,” Ryosuke said. “Is this how you treat all your friends or am I just special now, Yuto?”

Yuto stopped. Looked at him, surprised for a moment. Then, he laughed. 

It was a sound that resonated inside Yamada’s chest but had to shut down before he became obsessed with hearing it again. 

“You should know by now, Ryosuke,” Yuto smiled, “that you are always special.”

-

(december, 2015)

After getting beers and sorting things out, things shifted. 

In Yuto’s eyes, there wasn’t resentment anymore. 

Now, there was—

The camera strap cut a diagonal across Yuto’s chest, worn soft where it hit his collarbone. He lifted the camera to his eye and the lens made a small, private world where Ryosuke was the only thing in it.

“One more, Ryosukeeeee,” Yuto pleaded, laughing behind the camera glass.

Ryosuke tried to stay neutral. The flash popped—too fast to dodge—and caught him mid-eye roll, mid-can’t-help-it grin that climbed his face without his permission. The kind that made his heart do the stupid lift. Ryosuke wondered if in another life it was the heart of a fucking acrobat. 

“Good,” Yuto said, already checking the screen, pleased in a way that felt like heat more than praise.

Ryosuke tipped his chin, pretended to adjust the jacket, and pretended the smile was for the job, for the camera, for the idea of being seen. Not for the person holding it. Not for the thumb that steadied the lens, the voice that kept asking for one more like there was a version of him only Yuto knew how to catch.

“Last one,” Yuto promised, which was a lie and they knew it.

The flash bloomed again. Ryosuke held the look, just a breath longer than he would for anyone else.

-

(december, 2019)

Now, there was—

Studio lights hummed like insects. Small mics pinched at collars. The host’s cue cards flash white at the edges when he laughed, and the red light of the big camera in front of them made everyone brighter than they were.

“Funniest rehearsal mishap?” the host asked.

Ryosuke gave the safe version—someone missed a step, someone else slid, nobody died—and the room laughed in all the right moments. He kept his eyes on the host, on the little black dot of the camera, on anything that wasn’t the space just to his left.

Then Yuto laughed.

It was a small thing, caught like light in his mouth, sharp, then soft, and Ryosuke felt the room tip toward it. Yuto’s smile opened, blindly bright, the kind he wore sometimes like it was keyed only to Ryosuke’s presence. The cameras got simple joy. Ryosuke got something underneath it, that private pitch that made his name fit in the shape of Yuto’s.

The host said something about chemistry. The crew laughed again. Yuto kept his face forward, chin tilted, answering follow-ups with a practiced ease. But the light in his smile stayed tuned to the side, to the exact place where Ryosuke was breathing.

-

(december, 2022)

Now, there was—

Backstage, the cue lights died and the stage exhaled into black. In-ears hissed with the stage manager’s countdown (thirty… twenty… ten), threaded with crowd noise on the other side of the curtain. Someone brushed past and murmured, “Formation B.” Now, it’s just waiting for the curtain call. 

They got into formation. A shoulder brushed a shoulder, a mic pack clicked, a fabric whispered. Ryosuke stepped two paces left, then angled his face to the front and checked his surroundings because if he tripped with a cable and fell, he would seriously consider flying to another country and would never show his face again.

His fingers ghosted over a wrist by his right. 

Callused. The kind of hands that drumsticks leave behind. Warm. Yuto.

It was honestly nothing, backstage was a thousand accidents like this every show, except this one landed right on the hinge of Ryosuke’s ribs, and the tingling feeling made him hear bells inside his head.

In the dark, Yuto tipped his head like he heard them. Ryosuke didn’t take away his hand, still brushing Yuto’s. He kept the touch half a second longer than any choreography could excuse, thumb finding the small ridges time left there. His mind started counting again: one (Yabu, three spots away, fixing his mic), two (Takaki checking his nails), three (Hikaru talking to the staff), four (Inoo suppressing a yawn), five (Daiki laughing at something Chinen said), six (Chinen smiling at Daiki), seven (Ryosuke, living and breathing), eight (Yuto—

Yuto found Ryosuke’s pinky finger in the dark and gave it a small tug. Even with the lights out Yamada could make out his smile.

Coms crackled.

“Stand by… go!.”

House lights on. Green, purple, orange, light blue, red, pink, orange and blue. The crowd exploded. Yuto and Ryosuke intertwined their fingers for a second and then they let go. Ryosuke was already moving. Yuto slid behind him with a half-smile, like he just remembered something.

They hit the downbeat together. The song began. 

-

(december, 2024)

Now, there was—

'Seishun Amigo' again. The mirrors of the practice room remembered it from when they were young but now it had to fit the men they’ve become. The room smelled like cleaner, old wood, sweat and stubbornness. The agency was mostly asleep but only the lights from the room were on. Earlier, Yabu had tapped his watch and told them to go home, and Chinen gave them the you’re insane look over his scarf. The door clicked shut behind everyone else. They stayed.

“From the top,” Yuto said, breathless. No grin, no joke. Just work.

The click-track tapped in. Right foot, left foot, hit, drag, the shoulder-snap swagger that was only effortless when your calves were on fire. In the mirror, Yuto ghosted behind Ryosuke, taller, looser, the collar of his practice tee dark with sweat. He held the count like a secret the room trusted. His eyes hooked into Ryosuke’s through the glass and didn’t let go.

It was a bit shameless, if Ryosuke was honest. His heart drummed louder in his ears than the track because it felt like Yuto was undressing him with only his gaze. Yuto’s pupils, wide and bright, the tendon that jumped in his throat when he swallowed, the grip of his forearms, the stupid boyish aura that refused to admit how dangerous he was on a stage. Every detail threaded straight into timing. When Yuto mouthed silent numbers—one, two, three, four—Ryosuke’s feet landed exactly there as if the count had to pass through Yuto to reach him.

They ran the chorus again. Hit. Slide. Pop. The room shrunk to the width of their reflections. Yuto’s stare pinned Ryosuke to the rhythm and  Ryosuke mouthed through the mirror look at me. Ryosuke does, of course he does, heat climbing under his shirt.

The song ends. 

“Once more,” Yuto murmured, already resetting.

“Once more,” Ryosuke breathed, and it came out tighter than he meant.

The track kept playing small in the speakers, and Yamada was embarrassed it wasn’t the loudest thing here. Ryosuke’s chest was a metronome he couldn't tame. He reached to adjust his angle and—

Yuto was suddenly there, closer. Not touching—then touching. He stepped in behind, a gentle and warm hand flat on Ryosuke’s lower back, the other hand sliding to his hips like he was picking up an instrument he knew by memory.

“You are too tense,” Yuto said, voice low enough, close enough to skim the skin at Ryosuke’s nape. In the mirror, his eyes are dark and steady, the resentment that used to live there was long gone, melted down into something else. “Let the beat come to you. Here—”

His fingers settled, guiding, bare pressure at the hinge of Ryosuke’s hips, the smallest nudge on the slow drag that locked the step. The touch was technical, precise, nothing anyone could call anything else but Ryosuke’s vision whites out for a blink anyway. Heat bloomed fast and greedy, his body tilted toward the wanting before his mind could crash it down. Turn me. Kiss me. He did not say it. He swallowed it whole and moved like a man who knew he couldn't afford to lose it all.

“There,” Yuto said, and he was smiling in the mirror now, soft, proud, a little ruined. 

Ryosuke found the rhythm and held it. Their breaths synced without trying. Yuto’s thumbs pressed once—good, hold—then lifted as he stepped back a fraction, the ghost of his palms still keeping the angle. The air between them bright with everything unsaid.

“From the top?” Yuto asked, calmer than Ryosuke felt.

Ryosuke nodded, because speech was a complicated thing now and the word he almost used was not even a possibility in this moment, maybe in this lifetime. He locked onto Yuto’s gaze in the glass and let it take him to the beat. “From the top.”

The track started. The room obeyed. They moved, two people who stayed when they were told to rest, who are stupidly good at this together. Ryosuke knew this. Yuto knew it, too. 

Their eyes met again. It sat plain in Yuto's eyes, complete and unhidden, like he couldn’t disguise it even if he tried.

Because in Yuto’s eyes, there wasn’t resentment anymore. 

Now there was—

Ryosuke looked away. 

Devotion.

Chapter Text

Tour season always feels like a marathon Ryosuke never reaches the end of, until the finish line finally shows itself and he remembers it’s also the part of the year he loves most. The 2025–2026 run has been restless, ruthless, almost without any time to sleep. Life has narrowed to rehearsals that outlast the clock, meetings that create more meetings, interviews where questions start sounding repetitive, promo shoots under lights bright enough to make your eyes fall off. 

Every time the upcoming schedule drops into his phone, Ryosuke thinks he might lose his mind. Then they’re all together and life gets lighter. Easier. Daiki and Yabu tell jokes so bad under Takaki's horrified eyes. Hikaru likes to film TikToks of the new single in every possible dance style he knows and Chinen and Inoo like to appear behind him, doing ridiculous poses until Hikaru has to kick them out of the frame. The staff spoils them rotten with their comfort food, favorite snacks, extra gentle massages backstage and a little pampering on the make up chair. 

Ryosuke is…okay. Some days bite harder than others but he gives everything he has to JUMP’s future. When Yabu and Daiki clown, he laughs until his stomach hurts. When Hikaru wants to film, Ryosuke holds the camera or joins him and now their backstage concert vlogs are unreasonably popular. Sometimes he’s mid-book reading, mid-makeup retouching, or even mid-step, Kei or Chinen makes them silent company just for the sake of not being there.  

The path has been rough, but when Ryosuke watches them move as one—laughing, working like one organism—it’s like the permanent cold in his chest meets the first ray of sunshine of a spring day.

Maybe time really does gather up your pieces, stitch them back together, and heal what it can. Ryosuke needs to believe that. 

And tonight, he does. He truly does.

Winter’s gone. Spring pushes through not just outside but onstage. On this May night, the stage feels like a brand-new universe from last year’s nightmares and ghosts. The arena is alive, an ocean of penlights like fireflies in summer, sweeping left and right with chants that hit like a joyful thunder—red, blue, pink, yellow, green, orange, purple—waves of color crashing against each other in rhythm. From above, glittering red confetti falls like shooting stars, clinging to Ryosuke’s hair and shoulders. Hikaru tries to brush them off without success.

“JUMP’s dear prince charming cannot be seen in disarray!” he declares, and the arena laughs with them. “Happy birthday, Ryosuke!”

The members’ congratulations blend into the crowd’s own. A massive cake rolls out, staff grinning as they appear next to them. Yabu counts to three and everyone sings… or tries to. Chinen and Inoo commit to an aggressively off-key version while Takaki and Daiki attempt harmony. Yabu can’t finish the song—he’s laughing so hard he trips and goes down in slow motion, still laughing on the floor. Hikaru looks at him with scandalous eyes. When Inoo and Chinen pivot into a Spanish rendition and horribly try to pronounce the word cumpleaños, Hikaru physically covers their mouths. 

Ryosuke laughs until there are tears in his eyes, a breathless sound cut short that makes him bump into Takaki, making them both stumble and wobble dangerously close to icing disaster.

“Oh my freaking god,” Hikaru yelps. “Can we behave? The fans will think we’re drunk!”

“Guys, sorry!,” Inoo tells the fans. “We are not always like this!” 

“On the contrary,” Chinen says, “they know better than anyone we are exactly like this.”

“There goes our reputation,” Hikaru sighs.

Daiki looks skeptical. “Dude, what reputation?” 

“Can someone help Yabu?” Takaki asks, tugging at his sleeve. Yabu stays down for a beat, hands over his face. When he finally stands, his cheeks are red and he’s still laughing, though if Ryosuke lets his imagination wander, it looks a little like crying, too.

“Sorry, sorry, it’s just—” Yabu’s voice wobbles. 

He looks at Ryosuke, and something passes between them clean and wordless. 

“I’m so happy right now.” Yabu smiles.

Ryosuke closes his eyes and smiles, too. The laughter gets a bit quieter. Understanding moves through the group like a hush.

He swallows against the sudden heat behind his eyes.

Maybe time heals. And if it doesn’t—

He looks at his members. Daiki is bouncing like a kid on a sugar rush. Inoo suddenly opens his shiny jacket to show a shirt (when the hell did he change his shirt?) that reads PLEASE WATCH MIRROR STREETS THIS SPRING with a giant heart. Chinen bumps his shoulder against him, grinning so hard his eyes vanish. Hikaru is shouting something incoherent, half-laughing, half-crying as Yabu tries to climb up his back to get a piggyback ride. They start chanting Ryosuke’s name. The arena roars it back, a tidal wave of joy.

Ryosuke bows deep, chest heaving, thoughts spinning too fast to catch.

When he lifts his head, the view steals the air from him—thousands of red penlights, his color, blazing like a field of embers. Except for one. One penlight of another color. Another life.

For months, that red had been a wound. A reminder of loss and blank spaces and questions with no answers.

Tonight, under the roar of the crowd and the warmth of hands pulling him close, it feels different.

Not like absence. Not like grief.

Like a promise.

A laugh breaks out of him, bright and whole, and a single tear escapes anyway. This smile isn’t just for the audience. It’s for himself. For whatever’s next.

Because there, amid the sea of red, one light-blue penlight glows, small and steady and inevitable. A sliver of sky cutting through the storm.

*

@DramaTimesJP

January 2026 drama rankings are in: Nakajima Yuto’s “Sirius no Hansho” dominates with a record-breaking 15% average rating! Meanwhile, Yamada Ryosuke’s upcoming “Mirror Streets” is already the most anticipated spring drama. Rivalry? What rivalry? Japan wins either way.

@CinemaBuzzTokyo

From Johnny’s idols to acting giants: Nakajima Yuto sweeps the Newcomer of the Year Award in March 2026, while insiders hint that Yamada Ryosuke’s latest role might put him in the Best Actor race in 2027. Who’s the real “ace” of this generation? 

@qqqqqqqqq

yuto doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. one look, one line, and you feel it. that’s why he’s winning awards 

@zzzzzzzzzz

every time yuto’s on screen, it’s like the whole show breathes differently

@xxxxxxxxx

yamada didn’t spend 18 years carrying JUMP just to be overshadowed now. His drama hasn’t even started airing yet omg! watch him break records with Mirror Streets! 

@yyyyyyyyy

let’s be real: Yuto is good, but Yamada has range and star power. That's why brands and directors keep chasing him

@wwwwwww

DUDEEEE SNH last episode is the same day as the start of MS. I can’t make this shit up, they are so rivals coded

@vvvvvvvvvvv

every headline is “nakajima vs yamada.” can we not? they’re both talented af! but… lowkey it is kind of thrilling watching the media go crazy for them

@rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

funny how yamada suddenly talks about “supporting his juniors” whenever yuto trends. Coincidence? I think not

@sssssssssssss

i just KNOW the agency is loving this entire rival thing. Two of their biggest stars fighting for ratings equals $$$

@mimi

everyone fighting over who’s better and here i am… FINALLY getting feed by yutoyama <3

*

The press room is packed with journalists and photographers. Two nameplates—YAMADA RYOSUKE, MIZUHARA KANARU—wait behind slim mics. Kanaru slides into the chair beside him in a clean ivory white dress. Under the table, her hand taps his sleeve, steady. I’m here, she wants to say. Ryosuke smiles but doesn’t look at her.

“Thank you for waiting,” the MC bows. “We’ll begin the press conference for Mirror Streets.”

Flash, flash, flash.

“Yamada-san, first—your role. Souta wakes in a Tokyo that looks the same but isn’t. How did you build that disorientation without… losing yourself?”

Ryosuke leans in. “We rehearsed in ways that made my body disagree with my eyes,” he says. “Blindfold blocking. Earpieces with a delayed feed. We shot familiar corners at very late hours, like Shibuya at four a.m. I can already tell you, it’s super scary,” everyone laughs a little. “Even the traffic lights feel off. Our director would move things out of place and everything gave a sense of being in a dream. Or a nightmare. You learn to walk forward without knowing what’s ahead.”

“Mizuhara-san,” a bright voice among the journalists. “First major TV role. Miyu appears like a glitch in the middle of Souta’s journey, but later becomes an anchor to the protagonist. How did you prepare for the role?”

Kanaru’s grin is as clean as morning. “I followed Ryosuke-san around the set until he let me steal his rhythm. I looked like a puppy, honestly” she says, earning a smile from the journalist. “Miyu reads rooms like she knows where the end is headed. We played a game with Ryosuke-san, no dialogue unless the script insisted. He taught me how to speak with only our eyes. He was patient when I missed a beat or a line,” she tips the mic his way. “He made it easy.”

“Only because she is a brilliant co-star,” he responds. 

A journalist in a navy suit and ready notebook takes the next question. Ryosuke’s stomach drops as he recognizes the way journalists from sensational magazines look. 

“A lot of talk this season about ratings and a—” the smile sharpens “—friendly rivalry among actors of your generation. Some compare Mirror Streets to the winter hit led by a certain former groupmate. Yamada-san, what are your thoughts on this competition?”

The air tightens. The red light from the cameras blink, mercilessly. Ryosuke watches himself on camera smile. 

“The only competitor I met on this project,” he says, “was the guy who did all my stunts for the drama and looked way cooler than I did when I tried to do them myself,” laughter lifts the room. Even Kanaru laughs, surprised. “Audiences don’t need to choose one door. TV is for everyone, I’m grateful if people are able to choose what they like.”

Kanaru leans to the mic. “Also, the true enemy was our call time,” she deadpans. “Four a.m. is a villain,” now the whole room laughs, because they all can relate to that. The room loosens.

A hand raises at the aisle. “Yamada-san, I imagine training for the role must have been physically intense?”

“I did what our stunt team let me and followed the scene coordinators strict routine with discipline,” he says. “Everyone did a wonderful job. They are professionals.”

“Next—relationships on set,” someone says from the back. “Yamada-san, Mizuhara-san, your chemistry on screen and off screen is notorious. Any special preparation together?”

Kanaru laughs first. “We shared snacks on set so, naturally, we became good friends,” she says solemnly, with a smile. 

“Snacks are a sacred rehearsal,” Ryosuke agrees. “And she’s fearless about asking for another take when a moment can be more honest. That pulls everyone up.”

Another reporter, no grin. “One more for Yamada-san. Would you like to comment on your… feelings about the current success of your former colleague Nakajima Yuto-san? Many are framing this as a race.”

The MC inhales to cut but Ryosuke gets there first, voice steady. “I’m proud when people from our industry do well,” he says. “There’s room for many stories. Today I’m here as Souta from Mirror Streets. I hope you’ll watch what we made.”

The MC wraps and bows. Cameras flare like quick fireworks and fade. They stand, and on the monitor the ghost of him stands a fraction late—two Ryosukes stepping out of frame. Down the short stairs, the roar collapses into a curtain hush. 

*

Ryosuke makes it on time to the agency and almost wants to frame it. He catches all the green lights, traffic jam dissolves just in time of his arrival, the barista has his coffee order in record time. It’s not like he usually arrives late to rehearsals, but Mondays are always chaotic if you get lazy. When he enters the building, he hikes his bag higher, wonders if he packed the right sneakers and he’s just about to take the corner for the third floor when a hand snaps shut around his wrist like a clasp. 

It’s Chinen.

“God, you scared me,” he startles, turning. “What’s going on—?”

“Where are you going?” Chinen asks, eyes wide, already  wearing his practice clothing. 

“To rehearsal, duh. And so should you,” Ryosuke says. He tries to free his arm. 

“Not yet,” Chinen says, already tugging him down the corridor with that gentle brutality that never fails.

Three doors later, he deposits Ryosuke in a plastic chair by the vending machines like they’ve outrun a scandal and this is the safehouse.

“Stay,” Chinen orders because he knows Ryosuke will obey, then goes to quarrel with the machine. He returns with two bottles—strawberry juice for Ryosuke, and black coffee for himself. He sits down next to Yamada. 

“Thanks,” Ryosuke says, but he doesn’t drink. He rolls the cap under his thumb without opening it. He squints up and reaches for Yuri’s hair. “What is that in your hair? Glitter? Please tell me you didn’t try that glitter shampoo trend again.”

Chinen coughs. “I—god no. Inoo tried to paint my hair with pink eyeshadow.”

“Why—?”

“Never mind that.”

Silence bleeds through the room. Chinen smiles but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. Ryosuke tries to wait but he really sucks at it.

“Okay, I’ll cave,” Yamada finally says. “Why am I ditching rehearsal right now?”

Chinen’s face shifts a millimeter. Also, he’s drinking coffee. Chinen only drinks coffee when he’s stressed. He's trying not to freak out, Yamada thinks with a sinking feeling.

No—he’s trying not to freak Ryosuke out.

“So,” Chinen begins. “Something happened.”

Ryosuke rolls his eyes

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“I mean, it’s not like—it’s just a detail. Just something maybe, huh, worth mentioning.” 

“Jesus Christ, what is it? Something bad?”

“Nnnnot exactly? It doesn’t have to be,” Chinen glances down the corridor, back again. “But, um,” he hesitates and then adds, “well… he booked Studio 1, the big one on the seventh floor so I guess you shouldn’t worry about crossing paths with him that often. Stunt coordinators are here too and apparently they’re drilling fight beats for a new drama. The acting division gym is still being renovated, so production got him a slot here. He is…already in the building, actually.”

The information hangs in the air and it solidifies in Yamada’s lungs, making it difficult to breathe normally. Still, Ryosuke’s face barely moves an inch. Barely changes. The coffee machine behind them exhales a long, tired sigh. Somewhere above, someone counts five, six, seven, eight, and the wall hums faintly, like the building remembers how to breathe.

“Who,” Ryosuke says, though his thumb has stopped turning the cap. 

His heart already knows.

Chinen swallows. “Yuto.”

The bottle slips a centimeter from his hands. Just a little. Ryosuke takes it properly and tries to settle his hands. Settle his heart.

(And there, bright as a cut: a practice room years ago, mirrors fogged and the air tasting like citrus cleaner. Look at me, Yuto mouthed in the glass, not to the mirror but through it, and they held the beat with their eyes until the music had nowhere else to go but into them.)

“Did you see him?” Ryosuke asks. His voice is even, normal. 

Good. That’s good.

“Two juniors were talking about it, and they told me, like, ten minutes ago,” Chinen nods. “Apparently he was wearing a cap and a mask to not raise any rumors, but—” he shrugs. “You know.”

(Backstage. Cue lights dying, Ryosuke’s fingers brushing a wrist callused from drumsticks, the brush so small it should have been nothing, and yet it found the exact hinge of his ribs and unlocked something reckless there.)

“Okay,” Ryosuke manages, and now he opens the bottle and drinks without tasting. “Well. That’s fine by me, no problems. Good for him.” Two juniors sprint past, sneakers squealing on wax. “Really.”

(Camera strap slung across a chest, Yuto’s laugh behind the lens, one more, Ryosuke, the flash catching Yamada mid-eye roll, mid-can’t-help-it-because-you-make-my-hear-soar grin that he pretended was for the camera and not the person holding it.)

“Ryosuke,” Chinen says, softer. Ugh, that voice again. The one people use when they say his name but it’s like something will potentially break if they say it louder. 

“I’m fine,” Ryosuke says. He smiles. Not much—just enough to look like a normal human being trying to be truly genuine. “I’m fine, Yuri.”

Chinen doesn’t buy it, Yamada knows that before the words leave his lips. Hell, he’s pretty sure all the members would see right through him in an instant, too. He sets his drink down too carefully, as if it is made of glass and not plastic. 

Chinen inhales. Exhales. Then, says “Just—promise you won’t run.”

(During an interview, a stray laugh caught like light in Yuto’s mouth, that fond and blindly bright smile he wore sometimes like it was keyed only to Ryosuke’s presence, a private frequency disguised as ordinary joy. A whole word opening just for them to see.)

Ryosuke stands, twists the cap back on without looking. 

“I won’t,” he says, determined.

It was bound to happen, he tells himself. Same agency. Same city. Thousands and thousands of people and still the same handful of hallways. You can live a lifetime here and every loop brings you back to the same turns. Of course there would be a day like this one.

I’m fine, he thinks again, pressing his thumb into the ridges of the cap until the skin remembers it. I’m fine. He stands there, in the middle of the hallway one breath longer, as if time might flinch first.

He is fine. And he will not run away.

He won’t.  

After all, running was never his part—that belonged to Yuto.

*

Ryosuke is halfway to the parking lot of the agency when he suddenly curses because his left pocket is way too light. His wallet. Yamada could survive without a lot of things but his entire life is in his wallet, so he pivots back into the building. The lobby guard lifts a hand and Ryosuke nods. The elevator doors do that old, theatrical closing, and he watches himself doubled in the steel—red hoodie, damp hair at the nape from a quick after-rehearsal shower, the look of a man who swears he’s not tired out his mind. 

The third-floor corridor is icy blue. He knows Yabu and Hikaru are still in the practice room because they made a pact to leave together and feed themselves something that wasn’t protein bars or vending-machine noodles. Ryosuke thinks it is an easy plan: in, grab, a “see you tomorrow”, and out. He fishes for the door handle without looking and the room answers with overhead fluorescents, mirrors sliced into rectangles, scuffed floor that would be white if it weren’t for the trainers’ marks. His water bottle is still sweating on the bench. And there, on the piano, his wallet sits like a small, like a waiting puppy left behind. 

But Ryosuke doesn’t move forward to grab it. He doesn’t even take a step inside, completely rooted in the door frame.

Inside is Yabu. And he is not alone.

They are talking. Yabu stands near the mirror, posture loose but protective, like he’s angling his body to keep the conversation steady, a small but fond smile playing on his lips.  

Across from him, cap off, mask tugged down to his throat, hair longer than last summer and pushed back like it got in the way. 

Not a rumor anymore. Not a big screen displayed on Shibuya’s streets.

Instead, a voice that isn’t supposed to exist in this room anymore, one that slips under the door of Ryosuke’s heart without knocking. Ryosuke doesn’t move, but everything inside him does.

It’s then that Ryosuke realizes with utter devastation. 

He had forgotten how Yuto’s voice sounded. 

Yabu sees him first. His eyes flicker in surprise, then that experienced calculation before they warm. 

Yuto’s mid-sentence.

“—so the beat falls on the half-step and—” 

“Ryosuke,” Yabu says, his voice carrying years of don’t freak out now, JUMP’s ace. 

Yuto stops sharply. Turns his face. 

For a breath, Ryosuke swears the world stops because Yuto’s eyes are the same and the way Ryosuke’s heart reacts to them is the same. However, he doesn’t flinch. Something ignites in him and gets him into motion. He crosses the floor like he walked in here for his wallet and not a small earthquake. He picks up the item.

“I forgot this,” he says, to the piano, to the room, to no one in particular.

He’s about to raise his hand to say goodbye and bolt the fuck out of here when—

“Since when do you forget things?” Yuto’s voice is careful, not soft. 

Ryosuke stops but doesn’t give the question the dignity of a look. He puts the wallet into the pocket of his hoodie swiftly. 

Ryosuke shrugs. “Long day,” he answers, which is true.

Yabu clocks him in the mirror and fills the air before it hardens, voice easy, almost playful.

“We were just discussing an old choreography I forgot about.” Yabu taps a pencil against his thigh. 

Yuto huffs, not quite laughing. “Maybe you are just getting old.”

“The audacity of this kid, I swear,” Kota punches Yuto’s shoulder but he’s smiling. “You know I took over almost all your cues now,” Yabu amends, glancing at Ryosuke with that careful, friendly smile, “I’m making sure I’m not mangling them, since Yuto did it flawlessly for so many years. I’d rather learn from the source than teach my legs a lie, so I asked Yuto to come and teach me,” then he glances at Yuto, with false anger. “Although he could have come to say hi some other time.”

“Sorry,” Yuto says, and it’s the most formal word he could have picked for a room that once knew them down to their breaths. “I didn’t mean to—I mean, I didn’t want to interrupt, I know you are all busy. I just. I didn’t know how to—how to—”

“This place is for work,” Ryosuke says, crisp enough to cut. “You’re working.” He adds, and because his mouth moves faster than his better judgment, “Congratulations on Sirius no Hansho.”

Yuto’s throat shifts as he swallows. “Thanks.” A beat. “I saw the Mirror Streets trailer. I mean, not only the trailer, of course, I also watched the entire thing, and I—” Yuto clears his voice, hands in the pockets of his long brown coat. “You looked good.” There’s a ghost of a smile that dies. “You looked good. Did good, too.”

A thousand tiny things are demanding Ryosuke’s body to do something. None of them get permission. He nods once, the way you nod at an interviewer you’ll never see again. 

“I should go,” Yamada adjusts the strap of his bag like it ever sat wrong on his shoulder. Yabu’s gaze grazes him, something like worry moving under it.

“Ryosuke,” Yuto starts, and he says it in such a way that makes all of Yamada’s sirens scream in his head.

No. No.

He can’t do this. 

He thought he could but—

He most certainly cannot do this. 

The door bangs open in a gasp of hallway air and Hikaru arrives the only way Hikaru ever arrives: mid-sentence, mid-laugh, mid-chaos. 

“CARBS OR DEATH—oh,” he stops, eyes hopping from Yabu to Yuto to Ryosuke and back, growing comically wider with each person he looks at. “Well. Um,” Hikaru says. “I guess this is happening.”

“Hi,” Yabu says, with a look that means please don’t say anything stupid.

Hikaru, blessedly, is Hikaru. “Okay, agenda check: ramen and beers. Especially beers. Yuto, you are coming, no buts.” Yuto opens his mouth and then snaps it shut. “Also, I personally hid Chinen’s glitter shampoo under the sink in the bathrooms of the third floor, so I expect you all to build me a shrine because that shit is hideous. And whoever left their definitely-not dry-towels hanging in the shower stalls is going to feel my wrath tomorrow.” He claps his hands once, too loud on purpose, like a cymbal crash and looks at Yamada. “Prince charming, you coming or what?”

Ryosuke breathes once—counting it without moving his lips one to four on the inhale, five to eight on the exhale. He turns toward the door, past Hikaru’s grin, past Yabu’s steady presence, past Yuto’s eyes that follow him like a magnet. 

He does not look at Yuto again.

Ryosuke knows he promised Chinen he wouldn’t run.

Well. Chinen Yuri doesn’t know shit. 

“Tired,” Ryosuke says. He drops a hand to Hikaru’s shoulder as he passes. “Maybe another day.”

Hikaru deflates, but Ryosuke doesn’t stay to apologize. He nods a goodbye at the room itself, as if it were the one that spoke. Then he’s out in the corridor, the door closing behind him. Steady stride, even breath, wallet warm and secured in his pocket. He keeps going and going until the coldness of the night welcomes him again.

*

Ryosuke has gotten mean with himself in the last year. If there’s a crack, he plasters it with a schedule. If there's silence, he fills it with eight-counts. If there’s a feeling, he cages it. 

He comes home and the first thing he does is strip the day off at the door: hoodie on a hook, keys in the bowl, phone facedown on the counter. The apartment smells faintly of detergent and the lavender candles Inoo swears are “calming.” He tells himself he’s calm. He tells himself he’s fine. He can be relentless when the want is measurable, when the conquest is a page with boxes to tick. He can be stubborn enough to bend the day to his shape.

And yet—what do you do with a want that won’t sit still? He tried to starve it. He tried to run it out of his body up fourteen flights of stairs until the world went white at the edges. He tried to drown it in work so loud it turned everything else to captions. He tried to bury it under new routines, new music, new routes home, new quiets. It keeps sprouting in the cracks like a weed with perfect memory.

He leans his hip against the counter and watches his hands. They’re steady. Good. He likes that about them, how they obey when everything else in him wants to refuse. 

How dare Yuto walk back into that room like gravity never missed him. How dare he bring the tone of his voice, the slenderness of his frame, the gentle darkness of his eyes, like it’s a new language that somehow still knows Ryosuke’s name. How dare he look the same in all the wrong ways: the longer hair, the damp curl at the nape that means he worked too hard, the way his voice still finds the seam between heart and reason. How dare he say “you look good” with that careful, civilian tone that doesn’t belong in that practice room anymore. How dare he make the air try to become the past for a second.

And how dare Ryosuke miss him exactly there. How dare his body remember before his mind casts a vote. How dare his eyes catch on the curve of a smile that once flashed like it was keyed only to him. How dare his hand remember the shape of Yuto’s hand. How dare his breath make that stutter like it forgot how to count without Yuto beside him.

He drinks a glass of water, and then wipes the sink though it’s already clean. 

Anger is easy to carry when it has an edge. He sets it down and it rolls, picks up everything in its path: the laugh behind a camera, the brush of a wrist in blackout, the lesson by the vending machines when they were young. He has no business digging up that grave anymore. 

He opens the bedroom but doesn’t turn on lights, letting the city write jittery patterns on the ceiling. He lies on top of the covers like sleep is something you decide, not something that comes. He hates that Yabu tried to make the air walkable with his soft smile and reassurance. He hates that Hikaru came in in like a cymbal and saved him from having to decide whether his mouth would be kind or a loaded gun. He hates that he didn’t look back. He hates that he wanted to. 

He has become very good at taking tasks, notes, directions, and applause. The problem is that the one thing he wants, doesn’t want to be taken. It wants to be met. It wants to be said out loud and answered, and he does not trust his voice with any of that. So he builds his little Babel of structure and climbs it. So he keeps his hands busy. So he over-waters the plant by the window and pretends it’s thriving. So he says I’m fine like a spell and hopes the room will obey.

He turns onto his side. The apartment creaks the way buildings confess to the night. Somewhere, a neighbor drops a pan, a car door shuts, a siren cuts across and is gone. He could text Yuri. He could call Daiki. He does none of that. He counts. He breathes, and after fighting it, he lets the thought come. 

I miss him. 

He does not assign it a destination. He lets it pass through and fall to the pits like a waterfall. 

He isn’t going to break. If his stubbornness is good for anything, it’s this: he refuses to be rewritten by someone else’s return. He will write himself. He will carry what’s his without making it anyone’s punishment. He will wake up tomorrow and go back to the practice room and touch the floor with the same respect he did today. He will be impossible to move unless he decides to move.

How dare you, he thinks into the dark, and the thought splits, clean as a clap, into two perfect halves. 

How dare you, Yuto.

How dare you, Ryosuke.

*

No, actually, scratch that—how fucking dare you, Yuto.

Because seeing Ryosuke seems to have unlocked a new quest in Yuto: try to talk to Yamada every time they cross paths in the agency building. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens just enough for Ryosuke to find it suspicious.

The agency smells like disinfectant and sweat and old tape. Fluorescents buzz. Somebody’s laugh ricochets off the stairwell and dies where the corridor narrows. Ryosuke keeps his eyes ahead like a compass pointing north. He has a charger to grab from the sound room, a jacket from the greenroom, and exactly zero time for ghosts.

But apparently, fate doesn’t give a shit.

Because for some reason, the first thing he sees when the sound room opens before him is Yuto’s big eyes and parted mouth. He’s apparently talking to the sound engineer. 

He doesn’t flinch. He pivots the way years of camera awareness taught him. He vows his head a little and turns to the sound engineer in charge.

“I apologize for interrupting,” Ryosuke says, politely. “Our choreographer from Studio 2A needs some chargers.”

“Ah, Yamada-san. Yes, I told him I’d have them ready. Here you go,” the guy says. 

Yamada bows again. “Thank you. Have a good day.”

“No problem.”

He closes the door. Turns on his heel. 

He’s ready to go but—

“Ryo—Yamada.”

Ryosuke curses under his breath how easily his body just paralyzes at the mere sound of Yuto’s voice. But he doesn’t turn around.

“Ah, sorry to—I mean. Um,” Yuto tries. “Are you busy now?”

“Yes” comes Ryosuke’s response, a little too fast. 

“Oh, yeah, yeah. I can imagine. But, do you…” Yuto swallows. “Doyouthinkwecantalksometime?”

Yamada turns to face him, eyebrows raised.

“I didn’t get it.”

Yuto looks ready to apologize again. “I understand if you—”

“No, wait,” Ryosuke stops him. “I literally didn’t get that.”

Yuto lets out a small laugh. It’s a bit hysterical, to be honest. 

“I said,” Yuto inhales and then exhales. “Do you think we can talk some other time?”

Ryosuke stares, stares and stares. 

“Sorry,” Yamada says, the autopilot kicking in. “Busy.”

And later he would cringe at his own reaction but right now it seems like the most logical thing to do under these circumstances. 

“Please don’t run away,” Chinen had said.

Goddamn it, Chinen.

Ryosuke runs. 

But then it happens again. 

And again.

And again.

*

Footsteps match him. Longer stride. Familiar. He angles right.

“Yamada,” Yuto calls softer now, closer in the hallway. “Can we—”

“Studio A, fifth floor,” Yamada tells the junior who was lost a couple minutes ago, still smiling. He tips his head like he didn’t hear it. The junior looks between them, eyes widening in recognition. 

“Oh my god,” the junior breathes. “You two—”

“Nope. Goodbye,” Ryosuke says and, okay, he definitely does not run this time, but huh—he power walks.

*

Stairwell has that cool concrete echo. Good for thinking. Bad for not being found.

He takes the steps two at a time anyway. 

“Yamada-kun,” Yuto calls from below. “Just a minute.”

He stops at the landing, looks down through the rail. Yuto’s looking up, hand on the banister and that hopeful face that Ryosuke cannot stand. 

“Okay,” Ryosuke says.

It’s evident that Yuto did not expect that answer at all. He opens his mouth and then closes it. Then he looks more sure of himself but it takes him a minute, trying to find the words.

“Look, I just wanted to—”

“Oh, shucks. Would you look at the time,” Ryosuke interrupts, looking at his inexistent wrist watch. “Your minute is up. Gotta go now. Bye!”

Yuto looks like he slapped him. 

“Wha—? Dude, what? Are you serious? Oh my god,” Yuto’s voice echoes even when Ryosuke reaches his floor and turns left in the hallway. “Yamada!”

*

At the vending machines the coldness of the upcoming winter lingers in the room and the glass turns every reflection into a smear. He presses the button for juice just to do something with his hands. The bottle falls with a loud thud.

“Do you still like strawberry juice?” Yuto asks behind him and Yamada almost screams.

“Holy freaking—what is wrong with you?!” Ryosuke holds his bottle like a lifeline, heart beating almost as fast as his legs are taking him away from Yuto. Very far away. Preferably to another dimension.

*

Gym. Arm machine. Ryosuke counts in silence, headphones on with Taylor Swift blasting.

A clank to his right. Yuto sits at the next machine. Yuto starts his own reps but he puts on too much weight, too fast. The trainer appears like he was summoned, adjusts Yuto’s elbow, and launches into a calm lecture on form. Three minutes of peace for Ryosuke guaranteed.

When he finishes. Yuto starts typing something on his phone, then he flashes it at Yamada, who is still exercising his arms.

Yuto’s phone shows: A minute? After Cruel Summer’s bridge, of course.

And Yamada almost stops, because Yuto, goddamn Nakajima Yuto, remembers that Ryosuke has a golden rule when he’s exercising at the gym: no talking during a Taylor Swift’s bridge. 

He wants to cry. 

From the front desk someone calls. “Yamada-san, shoulder check!”

Saved by the bell. Ryosuke stops, pauses the song, stands up and grabs his towel. The weight of Yuto’s eyes following him burns more than his muscles right now. 

*

“Yamada,” he gets closer now, a boundary pressing. Yuto steps inside the practice room, late at night. Ryosuke is alone, getting ready to leave and meet Chinen, who is waiting for him at the parking lot because they are going to a restaurant. Yuto just stands in the brightness like a person who forgot how to be smaller. “I’m— I wanted to say—”

“I’m going now. Another day,” Ryosuke offers, perfectly polite, like he’s declining a flyer on a sidewalk.

“When?” Not sharp. Not begging. Just a question that lands in the chest and it aches.

Ryosuke zips the jacket. His lip wobbles, and his eyes sting again.  

“I don’t know,” he says and it comes as fragile as he feels. 

He doesn’t stay to see Yuto’s devastated look.

*

“Were you running?” Chinen asks Ryosuke, who arrives a little out of breath at the parking lot. 

“Yes—No,” Yamada curses himself. “No.”

Chinen looks unimpressed.

“Shut up.”

*

Of course, the moment Yamada decides to avoid Nakajima like the plague, the agency glues them together. Suddenly they’re booked on every show, side-by-side on every couch, with “RIVALRY!” flashing on the screen like a siren. 

The bosses call it great TV. Yamada calls it torture with an audience.

*

They tape late. The city outside is a blur but inside, the set is calm and bright. The show is called Blue Hour and the set is painted in blue velvet drapes, LED stars, and a band that hits every cue. Backstage, a runner clips a mic pack to Ryosuke and runs the cable under his jacket. Pre-interview is the usual: tour, radio, promo. He’s told he’ll be in between a popular comedian and Nakajima Yuto. He nods, as if his mind isn’t a mess. 

The host opens with a clean joke and a cleaner smile. The comedian comes out first and makes the room laugh with quick and small jokes. The room relaxes.

“And next, representing Hey! Say! JUMP—Yamada Ryosuke!” Ryosuke bows to the host, bows to the comedian, bows to the audience and sits. He warms the crowd fast because he knows the drill by heart. 

“And finally,” the host says, “fresh off a record drama and a new film—Nakajima Yuto!” The band rolls. Yuto walks out in a white shirt, sleeves rolled, black tie and black slacks and hair styled. Yamada feels like he wants to die right there. He shakes the host’s hand with a bow, bows to the comedian, and gives Ryosuke a small, contained nod that Ryosuke reciprocates.

They start with work. Yuto tells a story about how he almost broke his arm in a stunt during his stay in L.A., the comedian jokes about Hollywood, Ryosuke, who is expected to comment too, says I’ve had my share of bruises, too.

Eventually, it all comes to a point both Yuto and Ryosuke knew it was coming.

“Rivalry,” the host states and looks at the both of them. “How does that word make you feel?”

“Nakajima-kun and I have heard that word all of our lives. We were basically raised by it,” Ryosuke says, steady and professional. Natural. Like he hadn’t practiced that line many times in the mirror. “It made us better and along the way, we came to terms and made it our biggest strength.”

“I second that,” Yuto says, looking at the host. “It pushed us to become what we are today. Even if our paths are different now,” a quick glance, bright as a flash, then gone, “there is so much of us inside of ourselves that sometimes I catch myself thinking what would any of the people I admire do in my situation.”

“Understandable,” the host nods. “Let’s look at this clip of the two of you.”

Both Yuto and Ryosuke jump in surprise, because what?

Ryosuke wasn’t warned about this. By the look of Yuto’s face, it seems like he wasn’t either.

They show an old rehearsal from many years ago—two kids dancing next to each other making the room feel electric because of how they look at each other. 

The audience awws.

“Yamada-san, have you always been the center of JUMP?” the hosts asks.

“No,” Ryosuke says, quickly. “Yuto made the camera fall in love first.”

Yuto’s entire body shifts at that. The host opens his mouth and then closes it. The comedian pin pons his eyes back and forth. Someone in the audience gasps. 

The silence makes Ryosuke realize he said the last part aloud and on national TV.

The host clears his voice. “Well, isn’t that wonderful? Two natural gifted centers made JUMP the powerhouse it is today. I am sure Nakajima-san can rely now on Yamada-san to take the group to the next level,” the host turns to Yuto. “Isn’t that right, Nakajima-san?”

Yuto snaps from his thoughts and looks at the call. Nods.

“Yeah, of course,” Yuto says and, of course, his gaze meets Ryosuke's. “He’s always been special.” 

*

“For the record,” Hikaru says. “I already told our manager that whoever chose to pick me to be in this variety show themed as a freaking escape room, of all things possible, is an idiot,” he tells Ryosuke. “This is going to be a disaster.”

“Aren’t you a ray of sunshine, Hikaru,” Daiki deadpans.

“And who the hell chose you two to be my partners?” Hikaru complains. “This is like the constantly-scared-shitless-subunit of JUMP, whose brilliant idea was this?”

They call the game Panic Room DX. Backstage, Ryosuke does the usual mic-pack dance while the host explains the rules of the game.

The mission is not that difficult, actually: two teams, four members each. There is one secret murderer in each group. They have to solve a murder case in Panic Room DX and find a way to escape it. The murderers’ job is to stay quiet until time’s up without getting caught. Simple.

What is not simple is the fact that the agency also chose to send Yuto as a representative of their actors. At least they are in different teams. 

When the game starts and the cameras start rolling, Yamada draws a card from the pile and secretly reads the red letters YOU ARE THE MURDERER. Nice. This means he only needs to be low profile the entire show. 

“Yamada-kun,” the host asks when Yamada joins his team, “how are you with escape rooms?”

Ryosuke can feel the audience waiting for the bit idol vs. fear of the dark. He gives them the polite version of the truth. “I’ll be fine,” he smiles. “Unfortunately, I can’t say the same of the other two JUMP members.”

“You brat!” Hikaru shouts from the opposite team. 

“And you, Nakajima-san?” the host pivots. Ryosuke wants to roll his eyes. It looks like the group leaders are already chosen without anyone asking them first. Typical

“I think I’ll be good. I like this kind of stuff.” Yuto says, easy, and the audience goes soft. Yamada suppresses a smile because he knows that’s true. Yuto is kind of a nerd of mystery cases, which explains how crime dramas and thriller movies love him. 

“Team split!” the host claps. “Red team—Yamada, Tanaka, Amano, and Mizuno. Blue team—Yaotome, Arioka, Nakajima, and Nakamura.”

The game starts like all variety shows: chaos disguised as teamwork. All of them are spread inside a room big enough to be decorated as a mini-village. Amano immediately tries to open a locked safe by yelling at it. Daiki finds a blacklight and flashes it to Nakamura’s face by accident. Hikaru finds a riddle in which he has to read a poem in twelve anime voices while Tanaka pretends to know where the most important clue of the case is.

Ryosuke steps inside the fake noodle shop. Yuto is already there, picking at the sliver of a loose floorboard. The red team gathers and Ryosuke just tries to nod along with whatever theory they have come up with, solving something that looks like overcomplicated sudokus and puzzles that point to different directions. Ryosuke heads to where Tanaka and Mizuno are and pretends to help them, but suddenly gets snatched by the arm. 

“Walk with me,” Yuto says. “I think I have something to help your team win.”

Ryosuke follows, still bewildered to be approached by Yuto. They enter a flower shop, far away from the ears of the other participants.

“What is it?” Ryosuke asks.

“Well,” Yuto says, a grin appearing on his face. “I kind of have been feeding everyone false clues.”

Ryosuke blinks. 

“You are the murderer.”

“Yep. So are you.” Ryosuke opens his mouth to protest but Yuto interrupts him. “Oh please. I know how you get when you are faking an expression. You are such a good actor but a terrible liar sometimes, it still surprises me.”

“Well, then. What do you want?”

“I was hoping you’d be interested in helping me turn the game into our favor,” Yuto grins, playfulness in his eyes.

“Isn’t the entire point to not get caught?”

“The staff told me to do this, though,” Yuto shrugs. “Makes the game a bit more unpredictable. Also, it’s kind of fun to see Hikaru run away like crazy whenever he thinks he got something right,” which comes with perfect timing as they hear Hikaru scream OH MY GOD I FOUND A SECRET TUNNEL! and Daiki's tired response it’s a broom closet.

Ryosuke opens his mouth. Closes it and this time, he doesn’t suppress his smile.

“You evil genius.”

*

“Casual with each other,” the photographer says, framing with her hands. “Forget I’m here. Lean. Laugh. Whatever you feel comfortable with.”

Except, Ryosuke thinks, this is anything but comfortable

The wardrobe team puts a denim jacket over his shoulders. Yuto’s wearing a black turtle neck that should not look that good, what the hell. 

“You’re standing in my light,” Yuto murmurs, teasing.

“We share light,” Ryosuke says. “You hoard it, you goddamn giraffe.”

“Sorry, what? Can’t hear you from up here.”

Flash, flash, flash. The photographer laughs delightedly. “Yes, perfect! Could you fix Yamada-san’s jacket collar, Nakajima-san?”

Yuto’s fingers find denim. It’s just an adjustment until a knuckle grazes Ryosuke’s collarbone and his entire body shivers like someone let the wind inside. 

“Chin down, Yamada-san. Nakajima-san, please look at him like you’re about to ruin his good day.”

“He doesn’t have to try,” Ryosuke murmurs only for Yuto to listen. 

“Always a charmer, Yamada-kun.”

“Stop talking.”

“Yes, sir.”

The camera takes all in until the photographer says. “Maybe smile a bit less, Yamada-san.”

Ryosuke shuts his eyes, mortified. He doesn’t need to open them to see Yuto’s shit eating grin. 

After a while, the photographer instructs, with a mysteriously dangerous smile. “Bump shoulders like you’ve been friends forever and never made headlines.”

Ryosuke hears the cue and feels Yuto’s mouth tilt before he sees it.

“Oddly specific,” Yuto murmurs, eyes on the lens.

They step closer. The bump is easy, warm, the kind that lives in muscle memory because these are two bodies that learned the same songs years ago, gravitated the same space many times and never forgot how to stand next to each other. So Ryosuke guesses it’s inevitable when their eyes meet. He wonders if there is a healthy limit to how much you can lose yourself in someone else’s irises. 

“Don’t look at me,” Yuto says under the shutter. “Don’t look at me like that.”

Ryosuke looks away, cheeks flushed. 

Click, click, click.

The crew makes that involuntary little we got it sound. Yuto doesn’t break the line but one corner of his mouth lifts like he heard it first. Ryosuke holds the afterglow of the bump with an extra heartbeat, steadying where Yuto steadies, and the camera drinks the whole thing like proof.

On break, Ryosuke drifts to the monitor under the pretense of checking his hair and looks through the range of photos: laughing, leaning, eyes on, eyes away—

Oh shit. 

A picture stops him. Yuto is saying something, not looking at Ryosuke but he’s smiling, so Ryosuke guesses he’s saying something to make Ryosuke laugh. Well, Ryosuke thinks, it fucking worked because he can look at himself in the camera, staring at Yuto with the fondest, most I-am-obviously-in-love smile he’s ever seen in his life. Like, you cannot see this picture and not know he’s head over heels for the boy next to him.

Oooh shit. 

Heat climbs his head and utter shame follows. They can’t release this. Everyone will see it—the world, the editor, the manager, the members, Yuto. It’s one thing to carry a match and another very different to be photographed on fire.

“You okay?” an assistant asks, friendly.

“Fine,” he lies, shrugging the jacket back on like armor.

They finish the day. Yuto had to leave earlier because he’s rehearsing for a new play, so Yamada gets to do a solo set of photos. As always, he’s invited to pick personal favorites.

“Choose what you want,” the assistant says. “We’ll send the files tonight.”

Later, alone, an email arrives. Your selects, the subject says, with a copy to Yamada and Yuto. The three images Ryosuke requested load perfectly. Of course, he cannot help but look at Yuto’s pick and his heart does a backflip.

He only chose one photo. 

You can guess which one.

*

Yuto asks again.

It’s after work, the hour when makeup has surrendered and shirts hold the clean, warm scent of lights. He doesn’t cross the threshold of Ryosuke’s dressing room, just stands in the doorway with one hand on the frame, the other nervously turning inside the pocket of his jacket.

“Drinks?” he says. “Um. Wait, no. Let me do this again,” Yuto inhales and exhales. “Would you like to have a drink with me, Yamada-kun?”

Yamada’s first instinct is to say no and throw whatever excuse he comes up with. Early call. Schedules. Another day. Never. It rises in Ryosuke’s throat and then—stumbles. Hesitates. 

Because for weeks it’s been Yuto on every surface, the spare chair on interviews, the other half of a joke on variety sets, the warm edge of a shoulder in a photoshoot. Every elevator ride home has carried the outline of him. Missing someone isn’t only absence. It’s the exact shape of the quiet they leave behind.

“Okay,” Ryosuke hears himself say and hates how right it feels. “Okay.”

Yuto’s shoulders drop by the width of a breath. He nods, shy with relief, and they leave before the muscle memory of avoidance remembers its lines.

It’s ironic how time seems to push them into meaningful places. The bar hasn’t changed at all: wood the color of strong tea, a back room behind a door that still clicks like a secret, a neon crescent doing its best impression of a moon. The light is low and kind. Memory crawls under the table like a loyal dog and lays its head on Ryosuke’s knee. They don’t say it out loud, but being here pulls a thread Ryosuke didn’t know was still attached.

Two beers land with soft thuds. 

“How’s filming?” Ryosuke asks, which is a perfectly decent and polite thing to ask, thank you very much. 

“Busy as hell,” Yuto says. “Yours?”

“Busy, too,” Ryosuke returns. How professional of them. 

They drink like the cold might buy them courage. Small talk comes and goes but it’s definitely not the good kind. Yuto sets his glass down and watches the water draw a circle on the table.

“I get it, you know?” Yuto says at last. “You don’t want to be around me.”

Ryosuke laughs, and it has the edge of broken porcelain. 

“Do you?” he says, tilting his head. Anger suddenly bubbling up hot and slowly up his throat. “Do you really think you know everything?”

The bait is neat, barbed, and familiar. Suddenly, they are almost fifteen years ago in the past. However, this time Yuto doesn’t bite. He places both palms flat on the table, the posture of someone sliding every excuse out of reach.

“I didn’t come here to fight,” he says. “I came to apologize. Even if we’re not walking the same path anymore, I want to mend what I tore. Or at least try. So this is me,” Yuto’s eyes plead. “This is me trying.”

Ryosuke tries to hold his face steady. The room makes honesty easier than restraint. The last thread of anger loosens and then the whole seam gives.

“How dare you,” he starts, low and lethal, and then the quiet can’t carry it. “How dare you leave and leave me like this.” The words come hot and unpresentable. “There was so much of you in me that, when you left, I became almost nothing. I had to—we had to rebuild ourselves over and over, like a set that collapses between takes and you keep pretending it’s part of the plot. And— and I get things to happen for a reason but this,” Yamada gestures to the air. “This is ridiculous.” 

As soon as the words leave Ryosuke’s mouth he knows he’s being unfair. He knows it. Yuto is his own person but he can’t stop this greediness inside him. When it comes to Yuto, there is not a selfless bone inside Ryosuke. 

“Yamada—”

His breath hitches. “Stop calling me that! Just stop! Why did you do it? Weren’t we enough? Was I not enough? Did you want the spotlight again? Is that it?!”

Ryosuke is shaking now, forearms tight, jaw tense, eyes bright because they refuse to behave. 

“You were my pillar,” he says, voice breaking on the truth. “My rock, the person I could lean on when I couldn’t do it alone. You were my support, my strength, the one I trusted when my hands were empty.” His mouth wrenches into a grief-smile that hurts to look at. 

There are tears in Yuto’s eyes but they refuse to fall. “God, Ryo—”

“Don’t call me that either. Don’t—” Ryosuke can’t find the words to describe what he’s feeling right now. “I fucking worshipped the ground you walked on. I—”

He swallows and fails. He presses the heel of his hands to his eyes as if that can give him some clarity. It works, but at what cost.

“I still do, goddammit,” he spits out, and a tear escapes anyway, warm and humiliating. “And I hate it. I hate it, I hate it, I—I fucking hate you.”

He doesn’t. Not even a bit. He’s pathetic.

Yuto drops his gaze. Tears darken the wooden table in front of him. He does not defend himself. He receives it like rain that forgot how to stop, and counts breaths until the weather passes enough to see the road.

Silence sits down with them and it is everything but empty. A server floats by, takes a quick look at them and decides not to ask about a second round. Somewhere, people laugh, talk, drink. 

When Yuto speaks, his voice has the steadiness of a bridge.

“I don’t regret choosing acting,” he says. “I regret how it happened. I didn’t want it to be announced like that. I asked for time—a proper farewell to the group, to the fans, to you. Time to write ending paragraphs that weren’t cruel.” He shakes his head, small. “By the time I asked, the decision was already printed somewhere. Dramas booked. Contracts done. I was told to pick a box and then pretend it was my idea.”

He wipes his face. “They started erasing me from everything JUMP before I could say ‘wait.’ It felt like being pulled out of my own name. I woke up some mornings and couldn’t find the soul inside myself.” He breathes, calibrates. “There were days I wanted to stop existing. Not because of what I chose. But because of this—this horrible crime scene and them, the company framing me as the only one with the gun.”

Ryosuke’s anger, which had been all teeth, puts its head down and listens. He remembers Yabu’s pleas to see Yuto again because this was so not him to leave like this. Chinen’s furious words at the manager. Daiki’s eyes full of tears. Takaki’s breakdown before A-nation. Inoo buying snacks for a person who wasn’t there anymore. Hikaru demanding Yuto to join him for beers, as if he would disappear in a blink of an eye again.

And Yuto. 

Of course Yuto had been hurting this whole time. Still is. 

“What kept me here,” Yuto goes on, “besides my family, besides those kind comments from fans I didn’t deserve— what kept me afloat was knowing you were out there. Living like the world hadn’t ended.”

Ryosuke looks up. Dark eyes meet dark.

Yuto continues. “I wanted to meet you again. Stand next to you in any form I could get away with. Not as a teammate because I know that door is shut. But—” he thinks and says. “As an equal. As Yuto Nakajima, the person, not the idol. I wanted you to meet him. And I wanted all of you to be proud of me. I’ve always—” his mouth twists, almost smiling at how small that word is for what he means— “I’ve always been so proud of you.”

Ryosuke hates himself because when this earthquake began, deep inside of Ryosuke, he knew Yuto’s soul was still the same. Still is the same. Growing up as idols from such a young age, it’s not rare to believe things like your happiness is my happiness or to give up your dreams to live others’ dreams. Yuto’s charm comes from this but he is also his own person. A human being that, after more than twenty years in the industry, after giving up his entire identity and soul to make other people happy, discovered a different direction. A different meaning, something that came from Yuto. The real true Yuto. It’s not like Yuto wasn't happy or himself as an idol. But you have to be strong enough to always pick out the best version of yourself, and sometimes that version changes. There is an entire lifetime you can discover new things about yourself, new dreams and new paths. Choosing yourself at the end of the day, at any certain point in life, it’s not wrong. It can’t be wrong. 

After a second, Yamada asks the smaller, braver question. 

“Are you happy now?”

Yuto sits with it like a promise not to lie. “Not always,” he says. “I think happiness is not something you need to chase at the end of the day, sometimes happiness just…happens. Even when you don’t know you are feeling it.” He meets Ryosuke’s eyes, and there’s a steadiness there he wasn’t born with. He built it. “Being here with you feels like walking a dark hallway and finally coming home, though.”

Ryosuke nods. The moment is thin ice, beautiful, slick, ready to break if they stomp. 

They don’t.

“Then it was worth it,” he says. “Even if it hurts.”

They don’t sign a treaty, they draft it in gestures. Practical grammar. They learn lessons without turning them into knives. 

Ryosuke is so tired of lessons that feel like knives.

“Come here,” Ryosuke says.

Yuto stares, surprised. Some tears are dry on his cheeks. He stands up and sits next to Ryosuke, the shyest he’s ever seen him. The hug is an inelegant tangle of chair, limbs and apologies, then it finds its true size and refuses to end. They hold each other like a railing in weather—long, long, long—and somewhere in the middle of that length, Ryosuke feels the thing inside his chest that went quiet the day Yuto left. 

It’s a house turning its lights on, room by room.

They separate because air insists and laugh because they are both crying and their noses are red and they are adults who get paid to look composed. Yuto grabs a napkin and offers it like a white flag. Ryosuke takes it like a treaty.

The room loosens. They talk about small plans, small mercies. They settle the bill neither of them reads and put their jackets on. The door clicks the way it always has, the sound of a secret that never stopped waiting for them to return.

Outside, it’s raining. The pavement is a black river and the streetlights look like golden coins. The night smells like wet stone and the clean metal taste of almost-spring. Or maybe that’s just Yuto’s natural scent. They stand in it, not moving, because leaving is hard when the room behind you has proofed your heart.

Yuto looks at him, not the public way but the real way, the one that carries a decision. His eyes are bright, but steadiness holds them in place.

“From now on,” he says, “I won’t ask you to look at me anymore.” A half-smile, quiet and sure. “I will make you look at me.”

The sound Ryosuke makes is a laugh uncaught by any microphone, helpless and clean. 

You really don’t need to, idiot, he thinks as his heart soars. I am always looking at you.

It feels like forgiveness learning to stand. It feels like a beat that has been hovering for years finally finding the bar line and dropping in, solid. And beneath everything—the rivalry translated, the grief aired out, the careful plans—something older sits very still, patient as a lighthouse, doing what it has always done: keeping them oriented even when the weather lies. Ryosuke doesn’t name it. He doesn’t have to. It follows them down the block at shoulder height, steady as if it were something you could lean on.

They walk in different directions that feel, once again, like the same one.

*

“What are you doing?”

Ryosuke stops in the doorway. Yuto is facedown on the common-room couch, one arm over his eyes, the other dangling toward the floor like a melted candle and Ryosuke knows he should be worried but Yuto looks so long and the couch so small, it is kind of funny. The vending machine hums. The clock clicks. The air purifier is fighting for its life under the warm weather.

“Becoming one with nature because I’m fucking dying,” Yuto mumbles into the cushion. His voice sounds like he chewed on sandpaper.

“Don’t you think you got your job wrong? You should be an actor for all the drama you—wait, you already are one,” Ryosuke says. He sets his tote bag on the low table, nudges Yuto’s shoulder with one finger. “Sit up.”

A groan. Movement. Yuto leverages himself vertically with the tragic dignity of an old cat. Up close, he’s a shade too pale. The collar of his shirt is open like it gave up on him first and Yamada wonders if he lost weight. Ryosuke tries to focus his eyes somewhere else. 

“Dizzy?” Ryosuke asks.

“A little,” Yuto rubs his temple. “Heavy rehearsal. Monologues. My brain’s like that one roommate I had in Los Angeles that didn’t pay rent and wouldn’t shut up for a second.”

“Have you eaten?”

Yuto considers the ceiling as if the answer might be written there. “Huh. Huuuuh.”

“So that’s a no.” Ryosuke pulls out stacked bento boxes like a magician with an agenda: rice, garlicky chicken, sesame greens, a neat rolled omelet, some mandarins, and two apple juice boxes. “Sit up properly. You’re not dying on my watch.”

“Your watch?” Yuto echoes, but he obeys, scooting until his back hits the armrest. He watches Ryosuke unclip chopsticks, dividing portions with the calm precision of a person who has his life together. A second lid becomes a plate. Food appears in Yuto’s hands. Yuto blinks at it like it might vanish.

“You cooked,” he’s trying to be casual. It comes out awed.

“I like knowing what’s in my body,” Ryosuke says. “Besides caffeine and regret.”

“You always bring food for the members,” Yuto says. That part is easy, everyone knows it. The next part isn’t. “You’ve never shared it with me before.” 

Ryosuke glances up, quick. Then he nods once, honest. “First time, make a wish” he says, and gives Yuto the omelet piece that’s clearly the best slice.

Yuto eats the rice. Then the omelet. He’s about to annihilate the chicken until Ryosuke kicks his leg. 

“You got to breathe, too, you moron.”

Yuto does what he’s told, because Ryosuke is using that voice, the one that fits a command inside a kindness. Color creeps back into his cheeks. He exhales, less dramatic this time.

“How’s the play coming along?” Ryosuke asks, and it’s not polite noise. He’s actually interested.

“Hard,” Yuto admits. “You’d think none can write many monologues until you meet my director. It’s just me talking at air that’s supposed to be people. The monologues are so long and so heavy, god. After rehearsal I take them home because there’s no way I can learn all of that during the day. Sometimes I can’t sleep. Sometimes I feel sick. Today I stood up too fast and my head told me to go to hell.”

Ryosuke furrows his eyebrows. “This is not the Nakajima Yuto I know. He used to takes care of himself.”

“Trust me, I know,” Yuto deadpans as he shoves an entire mandarin inside his mouth. Yamada laughs.

“I mean—” Ryosuke stabs a piece of chicken, talking mostly to the box. “It’s weird to see you struggle when you are clearly in your field. Kind of refreshing,” Ryosuke jokes.

“Nah, I’ve always been a mess,” Yuto says lightly. “Can I tell you something I should’ve told you ages ago?”

Ryosuke shifts, attention sharpening. “Tell me.”

“Junior days,” Yuto stares at the line where the table becomes a tote bag. “If I missed a step or cracked on a note, my stomach and head would attack me for days. I’d get nausea before rehearsal, migraines after. I thought pain meant I cared enough, so I pushed. I skipped meals because eating felt like admitting I was soft. I ran choreographies until the room tilted, and called it discipline.”

Ryosuke doesn’t interrupt. He sets his chopsticks down like he’s making space on the table for the words.

“It changed,” Yuto says, “when I stopped orbiting alone. When we became us. I watched you all. How you ate before long days—little, often, on purpose. How Kei put doctor’s appointments in his calendar like gigs. How Kota shoved onigiri into my hand and said ‘eat or you’re useless’ in that specific brand of affection. I listened when you told me to drink water like a job. I went to the doctor before things became emergencies. It didn’t make me perfect, but my body stopped feeling like a burden.”

Ryosuke nods slowly. “That… makes so much sense.”

He tilts his head, studying Yuto like a picture he’s seen a hundred times that suddenly has more in the corner. “JUMP taught me everything about being a person,” he admits, softly. “I’m basically built out of you guys’ best habits. Sometimes I catch myself stretching the way Daiki does or saying no the way Hikaru taught me or counting on the exact rhythm you use, and I think—oh. That’s where I got that. I just… didn’t know you were hurting like that. I thought you were—”

“A robot in tasteful sneakers?” Yuto offers.

“Composed,” Ryosuke says. “Which is the PR word for robot in tasteful sneakers.”

“Composed photographs well,” Yuto says wryly. “I’m not great at telling the truth. Should’ve said something sooner. Asked for help before I hit the ‘I might throw up’ threshold.”

“Thank you for telling me now,” Ryosuke says. The thanks lands like a coin dropped into a jar he keeps somewhere behind his ribs. “The making of me is all of you. I just didn’t realize how much you were trying to keep the roof up alone.”

Yuto’s smile crooks. He tries to toss it away with a joke and somehow makes it more honest. “Well, yeah. That’s Nakajima Yuto to you. I guess I’m not very good at expressing my own feelings, after all.”

“Funny,” Ryosuke says, picking up his chopsticks again, “because you’re doing fine.”

They eat a little more. Quiet, but not the brittle kind. The air loosens. The vending machine coughs to itself like an old uncle.

Ryosuke taps his chopsticks against the rim, thinking out loud. “Okay. Be practical: keep a snack in your bag for after rehearsals. Schedule a check-up like it’s a meeting—you’ll go if your calendar orders you to. Pick one song that is only for the walk home so your brain learns it’s the exit sign. And,” he flicks a look at Yuto and holds his breath. It’s now or never, Ryosuke, he tells himself. “Text me if you want to talk.”

“Snack. Doctor. Exit song. Report to the tiny tyrant,” Yuto recites, counting on his fingers. “Got it.” He pauses, then adds, plausibly serious, “You know what would help? Send me reels of cute animals before big rehearsals so I remember I’m a person.”

Ryosuke’s mouth betrays him. He smiles. “Oh, you will regret saying that. I have so many bookmarked I lost count.”

“Yes!”

*

“We have an impostor!” Daiki shouts to the room. 

Yuto arrives at the rehearsal room with an ID card hanging from his neck that says “VIP GUEST” and a careful smile. Hands tap the backs of his shoulders in passing, and the staff makes space for him, as if he is the lost son who hasn’t returned home til now. Once, Ryosuke thought that if Yuto were to come back one day, things would be awkward and never the same again. But the boy has this gift inside him that just makes you at ease and welcome and just right. It’s like a puzzle completing, after cranking up its pieces for a long time. 

By late afternoon the rehearsal room has its own weather—warm air, squeaky-clean mirrors, tape crosses like tiny constellations underfoot. Outside, the wind collides against the windows. Inside, the speakers on the walls pretend to be a small sun.

“From the top,” the choreographer called. “Five, six, seven, eight!”

The first track starts and Ryosuke finds the rhythm in his body. Out by the mirror, Yuto looks at every movement he does.

The new choreography is still a bit loose at the edges, like a draft that is about to become the final piece of art. In the middle of the chorus, a cheer starts from the back and Ryosuke doesn’t have to look back to know who it is, the heat of embarrassment creeping to Ryosuke’s cheeks. Yuto’s hands are above his head, eyes shining in a way that reminds Yamada of a little kid seeing fireworks for the first time. Staff joined in and the noise in the practice room became very loud but uplifting enough to carry JUMP through the choreography without any mistakes.

“Again,” the choreographer said, smiling. “From the hook.”

At the beginning of the bridge, Ryosuke took his chances and looked at his back through the mirror. Yuto is holding a camera in his hands but he’s not filming anything, almost hypnotized. Gaze steady, mouth parted. As if the music had pressed a hand to his chest. Ryosuke lets the music save him from thinking too hard.

Between songs, the room opens into a gentle drift—water, towels, notes. Yuto slips along the wall to where Yabu and Daiki are stretching.

“Oh thank god you are here,” Yabu says to Yuto. “You are literally the king of flexibility, Yuto. Show me again how you used to stretch before dancing because I cannot for the life of me remember how you used to do it.”

Daiki nods. “Yeah, but bare in mind we are closer to forty than you are, so no—arghhh! YUTO YOU GODDAMN ANIMAL!”

Yuto laughs as he helps Daiki reach the tip of his sneakers and pushes him down more than Arioka can take. Then, Yuto does a small demonstration to show how flexible he is, and when he tries to reach his own toes, Chinen has to slap Yamada’s head to make him snap his mouth shut. 

“God definitely has his favorites,” Yabu says.

“I missed this kind of tiredness,” Yuto answers, catching his breath. 

Takaki wanders over with two water bottles and a softness around his eyes. “Can you open it for me, please?” Yuya hands the bottle to Yuto. “How’s the play?”

“Demanding. Big. An absolute chaos,” Yuto answers. “I love it.”

“Good,” Takaki says. “Can’t wait to see it in person.”

Two rehearsals later, Inoo and Chinen drift behind the clothes rail and start to play with the hanging fabrics. Yuto immediately joins and gets beautiful portrayals of Inoo and Chinen’s antics and ugly faces. 

“Yes, Yuto,” Inoo tries to make a sexy pose in between the feathered coats and the shining jackets. Yuto takes several photos, laughing behind the camera “Paint me like one of your French girls.”

“Sure thing, Rose. Get out now, it’s my turn,” Chinen shoves Inoo and starts posing for the camera, too. 

“Oi! Stop messing around and come here, we have to go through Ciatica at least four more times, again!” Hikaru calls. Chinen and Kei both let an nooooooo at the same time.

“Ciatica?” Yuto says, like he can’t help it. “God, I really love that choreography.”

Hikaru raises a perfect eyebrow. “Then come here if you like it so much. Let’s see if the actor of the moment still has some beats left inside of him.”

The staff manage to find the old track, the one with Yuto in it, and the room stills. Holds its breath. 

And it’s like Ryosuke is able to believe in magic again. The moment Yuto’s part starts, everyone knows where to move, where to look. They have rehearsed this song so many times without Yuto. Countless, probably even more than when Yuto was still in the group, trying to make it seem like there wasn’t a missing puzzle. However, they flow with Ryosuke’s and Yuto’s voices in the chorus like no time has passed. 

After a few rounds, the choreographer instructs. “Ballad medley.”

The lights soften. Yuto goes back to watching. The room settles like a held breath. Ryosuke takes his place and feels everything align—the floor under his shoes, the tilt of his chin, the space the harmony needs. By the mirror, Yuto is very still. They sing the bridge. The notes meet in the air and stay. On the last chord the studio doesn’t move, none dares to move a muscle. Then the clapping begins—crew, staff, the lighting tech who rarely claps, and suddenly the eight of them are trapped in one of the tightest group hugs Ryosuke has been in. Yuto’s clear cheer from a corner.

After, during the soft scatter of tomorrow at ten?, and who has the charger?, and beers on me!, Yuto appears beside Ryosuke, handing him a water bottle.

“You were—” Yuto begins and Yamada thinks that if he keeps blushing like this every time Yuto is next to him, his cheeks will be permanently pink. Yuto takes a breath and tries again, not reaching for big words, only true ones. “You are always so breathtaking. Marvelous. Outstanding. Grandiose.”

Not reaching for big words. Haha.

“What? No, shut up,” Ryosuke’s fingers close around the bottle. The plastic is cool, the pulse in his wrist is not. “Thank you,” he says, because he’s a moron who apparently doesn’t know how to respond to compliments.

“I mean it,” Yuto replies and Ryosuke believes him.

Across the studio, Daiki lifts Yuto’s camera. “If you upload a photo in which I look like a potato, I am leaving the worst review ever to your play.”

“Then how will people know you were at rehearsals at all?” Inoo laughs. Yabu chokes on his water.

“Come on, Yutti,” Chinen appears and tries to climb up Yuto’s back. Yuto holds him with zero effort. “Let’s get some meat into our systems!” 

“And come tomorrow, if you can,” Yabu adds. Everyone agrees and it makes Yuto smile like a fool.

“If I can,” Yuto says, almost shy.

*

They step out of the restaurant into air that smells like rain and grill smoke. Warm light spills over the sidewalk, the sign of the place hums. They’ve just come from practice and Yuto from play rehearsals, hungry enough to split extra gyoza and steal from each other’s bowls without asking. Yuto laughs at something the owner shouts after them. Ryosuke watches the smile hang around a second longer than the sound.

“I’m heading west,” Ryosuke says, tipping his head toward the curb. “Want a ride?”

“Okay,” he says. “Thanks.”

They cross to the car. Inside, the cabin is warm and the world goes quieter.

“You can put on the music,” Ryosuke says as he fastens his belt. 

Yuto connects his phone and lets the music flow. It’s different from the Japanese alternative rock he used to listen to and Ryosuke wonders if he picked it up from his trip to LA. 

He doesn’t know who the band is or what they’re called. He only knows that Yuto turns the volume up and suddenly the car fills with a luminous calm. A woman’s voice threads in, taut and soft, guitars breathing at mid-tempo, strings that don’t push so much, and a restrained drumline that feels more like a heartbeat than a beat. The city slides past the window as if someone slowed down the speed: traffic lights turn into blurred shooting stars, the glow becomes salt on dark glass. It isn’t music to lift your spirits after a long and hard day, Ryosuke thinks. It’s music for going,for lingering a little longer in that in-between that exists when nobody speaks. Sometimes a nearly spoken voice appears, wry and warm, and the song opens like a window that lets in air both cold and warm at once, other times a chorus rises slowly and leaves him with the sense that something is about to be understood without being said. And then the inside of the car feels bigger, closer. The engine noise turns into a blanket, the quiet between them goes domestic, and the space between their hands—just a few centimeters—seems like the exact center of the universe.

By the second play, Ryosuke already knows a little more of the words, enough to catch on before the chorus arrives, enough to feel the shape of the song fitting against his chest. He asks Yuto, almost shyly, to put it on again. Yuto blinks, surprised, then nods and taps the screen. By the end of the third repeat, Yuto restarts it without being asked. Ryosuke laughs, because it’s like Yuto can read his mind.

On the fourth, they’re softly humming, barely above the engine. On the fifth, the words find them at the same time and they’re singing, not loudly, but together, like the melody has given them permission. On the sixth, Yuto lowers the window and the cool air slips in, his longer onyx hair lifts and streams back, and the moonlight kisses his skin until it looks almost silver. They lean into the song, they “na-na-na-na,” harmonizing without having to negotiate who takes which line. For a moment the car is not a car but a small moving stage, a quiet room, a place with good acoustics and no audience.

When the song ends, they’re already outside Yuto’s apartment complex. The silence that follows stretches like a warm cup of tea. Ryosuke’s hand rests on the console. Yuto’s own hand lands near it, close enough that the heat passes between them. Their shoulders angle in, a few degrees at a time. Yuto inhales like he’s about to speak, then lets it out and doesn’t. They look at each other and it’s all there anyway: the question, the answer, the yes that neither of them say. The air feels private, claimed. The nearness turns the cabin into a small, bright world that belongs only to them, and it opens, the way it always does, when their eyes meet.

Ryosuke’s voice arrives small and honest in that glow. 

“Thank you for staying close to JUMP,” he says, and leaves the “to me” folded inside the words, warm as a secret kept in the mouth.

Yuto tips his head back, eyes following some invisible path along the roof, the moon, the dark beyond. 

“I’m tired of being kept from coming home,” he says, steady and low. “Tired of pretending my life has to be black and white. I can have the whole goddamn rainbow if I want.”.

Ryosuke closes his eyes and counts, because counting has always calmed him. Because music is made of measures and this moment needs one. One—Yabu and the way he steadies the room. Two—Hikaru’s spark, laughter thrown like confetti. Three—Takaki’s quiet patience and gentle eyes. Four—Inoo’s lovely orbit, ideas like comets. Five—Arioka’s open hands, the generosity that never asks back. Six—Chinen’s precision, the blade that still bows. Seven—his own stubborn flame, the thing that won’t go out. Eight—Yuto. He arrives at eight like arriving at a final chord, and the feeling swells so full inside his ribs he almost has to exhale just to make space for it.

“I need to tell you something,” Yuto says, and their hands drift toward the console as if guided by the same faint current. The backs of their fingers hover, heat trading places, a breath’s width of nothing that feels louder than any chorus. Ryosuke’s heart climbs against his sternum, clumsy and earnest, as if it, too, wants to speak first.

Yuto’s phone starts ringing.

The world splits. He glances down: Raiya. Yuto’s mouth softens even before he answers. 

“Hey. Mm. Really? That sounds—yeah, of course. What? No, of course not. You can come anytime you want. Mm. Okay, then,” his voice is warmth held in two fingers. “I’ll be up in a sec.”

He hangs up.

“Raiya is upstairs,” Yuto explains. “Apparently he had a fight with his girlfriend and decided to crash at my place because he says, and I quote: you have all the streaming platforms and I need to watch Whispers of the Heart until my eyeballs bleed,” they laugh quietly. Yuto looks at Ryosuke again and smiles with an apology in his eyes. “I’ll tell you another day. I promise. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Ryosuke says, and the smile that finds him is ridiculous, helpless.

Yuto reaches for the door handle. Night air folds in, cool and awake. His hair lifts, and the moon lays silver along his cheekbone. He steps out—

—and then he’s back, a quick lean that happens faster than the speed of light. Lips brush Ryosuke’s cheek, warm and sure, a single bright note struck clean. By the time sensation blooms into meaning, Yuto is already moving across the wash of the entrance light, shoulders squared against the evening.

Ryosuke sits very still, palm pressed to the place where the kiss landed. In the quiet, the car seems to keep their voices like a room keeps heat, the last ghost of a “na-na-na-na” threads the air. He looks at the empty passenger seat and feels that private world lingering in the air.

*

The theater is pure velvet darkness, a low murmur under the lights, the small rustle of programs smoothed by nervous hands. An usher led them down a side aisle, past the chandeliers and the curious glances, towards seats with the placards that read RESERVED. They see everything and, blessedly, almost no one can see them. 

The house lights fall and the murmur dies. Ryosuke’s fingers find the edge of his program as if a paper square can steady the flutter of his heart. Yuto’s name is printed in bold. Seeing it there does something very quiet and very loud to him at the same time.

The play opens like a match: a single yellow light, a space that looks more like a thought than a room, and Yuto walking into it as if he has just been born there. No overture, no clutter. The air changes around him. He doesn’t so much speak as lay words down like stepping stones on black water, exact and steady and, somehow, full of risk. The monologues come in long, careful arcs that demand you to come closer to hear their center because silence does as much work as sound. Ryosuke forgets he is holding his breath. He forgets other people exist—except he can sense his members at his flanks, each of them pulled to the same point as if by gravity.

Midway through the first act, Yuto stands alone at the lip of the stage and says nothing for what feels like a full minute. It isn’t empty. It is a weather pattern forming. By the time he speaks again, Daiki has his fist pressed to his mouth. Ryosuke swears Hikaru isn’t even breathing.

The play leans harder in the second half, growing heavier in the places where it could choose to be easy. Yuto lets the words bruise him, bares something raw without begging for pity. He carries the audience by the back of the neck—gently, but with intent. Ryosuke’s chest aches at the discipline of it. At the courage. At the way Yuto can be alone and make it feel like communion. Suddenly, every time Yuto looked like he was tired out of his mind it makes sense now. 

At the final blackout, the applause rises up like a tide. Inoo claps hard, so hard Ryosuke winces for the bones of those long hands. Yabu and Chinen are grinning so widely their cheeks are impossibly high. Takaki’s “WOOOOOH!” cuts clean through the house like a bright knife. Daiki cries. Hikaru cries. Ryosuke smiles, claps until his palms sting, and feels his eyes sting, too. He lets them because every minute of this play deserves every one of these reactions.

They move as one when the bows finish and the house lights begin to lift, down the side aisle, through a door marked STAFF ONLY, past a stagehand who barely glances at their passes. A narrow corridor. The smell of paint and old dust and something floral from a dressing room farther down. They spill into a small backstage lounge with mismatched chairs and a sofa that has probably survived many different productions.

They hide in plain sight and it’s so funny seeing Inoo put Chinen in front of him, as if he could hide behind him. They honestly look and feel like a bunch of children at a surprise party, badly contained. Yabu adjusts the paper on the bouquet he holds, so big Hikaru, who is carrying his own too, has to help him carry it. Takaki has fumbled the ribbon on his own to a perfect knot without even trying. Chinen holds a neat, dark arrangement and looks like the exact image of composure. Daiki’s flowers are a riot of color. Ryosuke’s bouquet is simple: cloud-white blooms and eucalyptus, a low veil of rainbow gypsophila underneath. Clean and steady. He holds it like a secret. 

Footsteps. The soft scrape of soles, the whisper-groan of a door eased open. Yuto appears in the doorway, a towel slung around his neck, his sweat-dark hair pushed back. He is still half inside the character—eyes too bright, shoulders squared like a weight is still there. He turns toward the corner of the room like he senses there is something (or someone) there and six voices fail at whispering his name all at once.

“Surprise?” Yabu laughs, and everyone joins delighted at the ridiculousness of the statement.

Yuto stares for one stunned second, and then whatever scaffolding he has been leaning on gives way, making the seven of them reach out to him in a heartbeat, like a mother who sees his son breaking down. Yuto just cries at the center of them, soundless at first, then with one small sound like breath breaking. Daiki reaches him first, then Hikaru, then everyone, crashing into a group hug that is less tidy than any move they’ve ever choreographed and infinitely better. Flowers get squished and no one cares. Yuto’s hands find shoulders, backs, and the fabric of a sleeve. He holds on like the ground is moving and they are the only still things.

“It was—,” Daiki tries and completely fails. “You—,” he laughs, the kind of laugh that comes with tears. “Holy cow, I’m a mess.”

“Don’t worry, I’m his translator: kiddo, you were incredible,” Hikaru says into Yuto’s shoulder. “Like, criminally. What the hell.”

Inoo is still somehow clapping with the hand that isn’t fistful of flowers and says, “I would sue you for emotional damages and then buy front-row tickets for tomorrow.”

“Wooooh!” Takaki adds again but more heartfelt and it makes Yuto laugh wetly when he recognizes that voice from the crowd before.

“We’re proud of you,” Chinen says, eyes curved to crescents. It isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be.

Yabu says nothing for a beat, pressing a palm to the back of Yuto’s head the way you do for people you love.

“Congratulations,” Yabu finally says, even and warm.

They peel back. Inoo presents his bouquet with a theatrical bow and, of course, Yuto bows back, ruined and radiant. Takaki kisses the top of Yuto’s head. Hikaru wipes under his own eyes in the least subtle way possible and says shut up, I’m fine to no one.

Ryosuke waits. Not because he wants to. Because it feels like he should. He wanted to go first and couldn’t, but somehow, going last feels right. When it is finally just them at the edge of the noise, he steps forward and the room tightens to a single, clear point.

“Congratulations,” he says. His voice comes out low and steady. “You were… you really are a star.”

Yuto takes the words like they contain a hidden treasure and holds them with both hands. A breath shivers through him.

“Coming from you,” he says, not performing his gratitude, just letting it exist, “It means the world to me.”

They lean in at the same time, then stop—a millimeter of space and a pressure that makes that space feel like an ocean. A hug suddenly doesn’t seem like the right size for what is happening. They both feel it. Neither names it. The air does the math on their behalf and holds.

“Let’s celebrate! Drinks on Yabu!” Daiki calls over Yabu’s shoulder, already fishing his phone out to map a late-night place. However, 

Yuto shakes his head, apology already in his lips. “Thank you so much but I’m dead. Absolutely devastated both physically and emotionally," he says with honesty. “Tomorrow, please.”

“Tomorrow,” Yabu confirms.

 “Wanna grab a drink, prince?” Hikaru asks Ryosuke.

“I have a shooting at dawn,” he says, grimacing, and they groan in sympathy because they know that means getting up at an unholy hour. 

Logistics unfurl. People peel away in twos and threes with promises. The room slowly returns to props and tape marks and ordinary light. Yuto stands next to Ryosuke with his flowers cradled in the crook of one arm the way you’d carry a good book.

“I’ll drive you home,” Yuto says quietly.

“You’re exhausted,” Ryosuke protests, reflexive and weak.

Yuto’s smile is small and anchored. “I’d like to.”

Their steps fall into a rhythm they do not arrange. Outside, the night has the soft shine of a city that has decided not to sleep but to pretend, for a few hours. In the lot, Yuto’s car blinks awake. They fold themselves into a familiar kind of quiet, doors, seatbelts, breathing.

Music plays from somewhere—one of Yuto’s unoffending playlists, guitar and soft bass—but neither of them pay it any attention. However, the air in the cabin is a live wire. It isn’t nostalgia because nostalgia has edges softened by time. This has teeth. It isn’t grief because grief is heavy and slow. This is a set of wings beating hard against their ribcages.

Ryosuke watches the streetlights climb and fall on Yuto’s knuckles where they curve the wheel. Yuto, in the reflection of the window, watches the way Ryosuke’s jaw flexes when he swallows. They are busy not getting caught watching. They fail a little each time.

At a long light, Yuto’s hand leaves the wheel and finds the center console, palm up, unassuming. Ryosuke’s fingers are already there like there is no other possibility for them to be anywhere else. Yuto’s hand slides under his, warm. Neither of them speaks. Yuto traces the ridge of Yamada’s knuckle with his thumb, slowly, as if learning something by touch you can’t learn any other way. Ryosuke feels his breath go somewhere deeper, his shoulders drop a fraction they haven’t allowed in hours. Years.

The light turns green. Yuto drives one-handed for a few blocks and the lights reflect on his firm grip. Ryosuke can’t, for the life of him, stop looking. 

The rest of the way is not quiet so much as charged, like a storm deciding where to break. They do not up the volume. They do not lower it. The city unspools around them, lights listing on wet asphalt, the kind of night that invites you to think you are the only two people inside it.

Of course, Ryosuke notices with his pulse up in the sky, they are not going to Ryosuke’s apartment.

“I know you have an early morning but… do you want to come up?” Yuto asks, as if he already doesn’t know the answer because the night has been screaming it. It isn’t a trap or a test. It is a door, open and unadorned. “I can take you home if you want, of course. It’s okay..”

“Weren’t you tired?,” Ryosuke teases, just to mess with him.

Yuto laughs, deep and steady, like he’s been finally caught. “I know,” Yuto says. His hands are firm on the wheel. “Still. I’d like you to.”

So, in defense of both of their sanities, Ryosuke’s “yes” arrives before reasons can line up to argue with it. 

They don’t rush. They also don’t linger in the way that means no. They move. The elevator is mercifully empty. Their reflections stand in steel—two men with too many words and very few they can afford right now. The numbers climb. A floor bell chimes, polite, at each stop. Ryosuke watches Yuto’s hand hover an inch from his own where it hangs at his side, not touching, so close it changes the temperature of the space between. He remembers when he was ten, looking down a hallway and thinking, without language for it, that this was what a star looked like: not brightness for its own sake, but a thing that makes other things visible. He can feel that thought now—older, more complicated. 

Unchanged.

The hallway light blinks awake as Yuto unlocks the door, and the first thing to reach them isn’t the room. 

It is a tumble of gold fur and bright eyes.

“Oh my god,” Ryosuke breathes, already crouching. The kitten—oversized paws, star-bright eyes—pads straight to him and rises against his knee. Warm. Silky. Recklessly friendly. Ryosuke’s laugh comes up from somewhere unguarded as she bats at his sleeve. “Who is this angel?”

“My personal menace,” Yuto says, locking the door behind them with his shoulder. Then, softer, “Sora.” He drops his keys in a bowl and toes off his shoes. “She’s still learning what ‘no’ means. Mostly she chooses ‘play,’ though.”

Sora’s tail flicks, pleased. Ryosuke sinks to the rug and offers his hand, palm down. The kitten sniffs, then headbutts, pressing her whole face into his fingers as a small purr starts up.

“You drink wine, right?” Yuto says.

“Only if it is the late harvest from California you were bragging about the other day,” Ryosuke says with a playful eyebrow raised.

“Deal.”

The apartment has the soft edges of a place people actually live in: low lamps, a stack of scripts spine-down on the coffee table, a plant that looks healthy, unlike Yamada’s cacti back home. There are photos along the shelf—nothing ostentatious, little rectangles that catch friends mid-laugh, a city corner in winter light, a blurred backstage corridor. Sora puts herself beneath Ryosuke’s hand, then rolls onto her side for a belly rub that Ryosuke complies.

Yuto returns with two glasses, pauses at the doorway at the sight of Ryosuke on the floor, and sighs like a man theatrically injured. 

“I’m going to get jealous,” he announces, exaggeratedly wounded. “Why are you giving her more attention than me?”

Ryosuke looks up, unable to hide the smile curving his mouth. “She’s a baby.”

“I am, too” Yuto says, straight-faced.

“You are ridiculous,” Ryosuke counters, taking the glass Yuto offers. Their fingers brush. Heat travels up his arm like a warning he has no intention of heeding. “Thank you.”

They sit on the couch, Sora settles with a contented sigh by Ryosuke’s foot, a living, breathing foot warmer. The wine is like melted gold and gentle. It slides easy and sweet down his throat. They let the room catch up around them, breath, glass on glass, the small domestic sound of a dog dreaming.

Small talk isn’t needed because their conversation flows easily—light talk about the play (“I almost tripped at the beginning of the second act,” and “are you serious?,” and “You really didn’t notice?” and “Honestly, I was a bit busy crying my eyes out to your monologue”), Takaki’s legendary post-show holler, about how Yuto could easily open a flower shop right now with the amount of flowers he has received after his shows. Laughter comes naturally, small and sincere.

Ryosuke should have known it wasn’t going to last.

“And the film. Hollywood,” Ryosuke says, as casually as possible. “How are you feeling now that… you went through that experience?”

Yuto tips his glass, watching the golden catch the lamp light. “It was a job,” he says. “A big one. A strange one. Wonderful one, too,” he tries to smile and it comes out uneven. “The cast were brilliant, of course.”

“Oh, come on. You are amazing too!” Ryosuke stares at him, incredulous. “No one downplays Yuto Nakajima’s talent on my watch,” he says, not joking. “Not even you.”

A breath leaves Yuto like a door quietly opening. He looks over, the avoidance easing out of his eyes. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

And he tells him. Not the press version but the real version: landing in Los Angeles at an hour that felt imaginary and watching the city sprawl like a lit circuit board. The first table read where his mouth went dry on page three and his co-star actress, legendary and precise, nudged his knee under the table once and said breathe, without moving her lips. The director, famous for building hard truths out of light and silence, speaking to him in verbs: wait, crack, yield, swallow, bloom. Running lines in a kitchen that was all cold stone and a roommate that could have been better at living companion. A wardrobe fitting where the costume designer said to him that the suit works when you decide it belongs to you. A night shoot that tasted like rain and electricity. Yuto’s voice shifts while he talks, like the memory of it is a light source inside his chest—steady, not showy. He names co-stars in surprise, like he can’t believe the nouns belong to his sentences. Ryosuke asks questions the way he learns a choreography he loves—attentive, specific, hungry for the right angles.

“Wait,” Ryosuke says at some point, when the details have made a small galaxy on the table between them. “When is it coming out?”

“September. The premiere is, huh,” Yuto answers, hesitating, and Ryosuke feels the hairs along his arms prickle. “This month.”

It takes Ryosuke a beat to translate this month into now. His fingers tighten on the stem of his glass.

“Where,” Yamada doesn’t intend it to sound harsh but it comes out like that anyways.

Yuto looks down at his hands. “Los Angeles.”

“So you’re leaving again,” he says, before he can help it. The words come out too fast, too flat. “How long is this time? A month? Six? A year?” His voice pushes farther than he means. “Forever?”

Yuto blinks, opens his mouth. “Ryosuke—”

“Don’t,” Ryosuke says, all the gentle burns out of the word. He puts the glass down too carefully, as if force would break more than crystal. He stands because his body has run out of ways to hold still. He paces once, twice, Sora lifting her head, confused at the weather change. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Nakajima.” 

The last name comes out sharp. It cuts both of them.

“No, wait a minute, Ryosuke,” Yuto stands up too. “I am not leaving forever, so don’t put words in my mouth.”

Ryosuke sees red.

“Oh, sorry Mr. Don’t Put Words In My Mouth, but weren’t you the one who told me—when we were juniors—you said “I am here,” and then left me behind and called it a day? You told me once to look at you, to always look at you,” his laugh sounds cruel even to him. “Well, guess what? I am the fucking joke here, because I always have. Always will,” and of course, tears start blooming in his eyes when he asks. “But have you ever looked my way once? Just once? Do you even care, Yuto?”

Silence, the loud kind. Yuto, who was rooted to the floor, starts moving slowly, as if sudden moves might spook a dangerous animal. The animal being Ryosuke’s horrible trauma of being left behind again. Ryosuke feels ridiculous, ashamed, angry at himself and horribly scared. He doesn’t care about careers anymore, or who is the best actor, or who is more successful, or the ratings or the agency or the public eye. 

He just wants Yuto.

Why can’t he have him? Is it really too much to ask?

Yuto’s mouth opens, closes. When his voice arrives, it’s with devastating honesty and rawness.

“From day one,” he says, and the words steady as he finds them, “when we were trainees, when we didn’t get along, when we were rivals, when we made peace, when I left and even now—” he presses his palm against his chest, like he needs his own body to feel it. “I’ve tried to pay attention to my surroundings. At the lights, at the amazing people I have met here and outside the country. At all the distractions that life presented me on a silver plate. But that’s exactly what they were, Ryosuke. Distractions.” Yuto’s eyes are glistening under the dimness of the room. “I,” he emphasizes, raw and true, “have always looked at you. I have never been able to look anywhere else but you. You. Whether you are in the room or even when you’re not,” Yuto breathes as if he had been containing the air. 

Ryosuke takes a shaky inhale and tries. “I—”

“No, it’s my turn now, you absolutely wonderful idiot. And I am going to say this as many times as you need it because—because I know I broke something in you the day I left and no matter what I do, that is not going to change. So, I will say this many times—forever if it’s necessary. I don’t care, because I know it’s worth it. You are worth it,” Yuto grips at his chest. “You’re part of me. Just as much as I know I’m part of you.” He swallows. “But I also thought I was not worthy. I was not… complete, Ryosuke. I was so lost. I have been trying to find myself again and I think—I finally do. And God—” His voice cracks, not with tears, but with relief breaking through fear. “Back then, I couldn't have given you anything. Now… now I can give you the fucking world if I want. I can—” the tears finally start rolling down. “I can give you so much more now.”

Ryosuke feels the fight in him stutter and re-form into something quieter. The room narrows down to breath and the space between their heartbeats. He hasn’t realized they’ve walked toward each other until there is only a hand’s width left. Sora, perceptive in the way animals are, sighs and resettles her head on her soft paws.

“Next week,” Yuto adds, careful. “I’m leaving for LA next week. Four days. But I am coming back,” he promises, emphasizing each word. “I’m not leaving you,” Yuto’s voice is as gentle as the love in his eyes. “I’m coming back.”

Ryosuke lifts his eyes to Yuto’s and sees exactly what he is carrying there: fear, yes, but also the steadiness that happens when fear is named and set down. The apology and the not-apology. The want, finally not hiding.

A beat holds them. The air between their mouths feels shared.

The hell with it.

Ryosuke moves first.

His hand curls in the front of Yuto’s white shirt and he pulls, hard enough to erase hesitation, not hard enough to hurt. Their mouths meet like they have been falling toward this point in slow motion for years and have finally run out of air. It isn’t careful. It isn’t neat. It’s sweet because of the wine, devastating because it is Yuto. It is raw, a soundless yes, yes, yes that starts in Ryosuke’s chest and finds its answer in Yuto’s hands, one at the back of his neck, warm, sure. The other at his waist, pulling him closer with a need that isn’t going to apologize for existing anymore.

The kiss breaks for a breath and comes back like it has learned something. Ryosuke’s knees soften. Yuto’s arm tightens and holds him. There is nothing performative about it. No audience, no angle, no line reading. Just mouths and heat and the knowledge of a body you’ve never had but somehow already trust. Ryosuke makes a small noise he’ll be embarrassed to identify later and Yuto swallows it like a promise.

When they finally pull apart, it is only to hover—foreheads nearly touching, breath charting the same short distance, both of them looking like people who are the only ones living and breathing on the planet.  

“I’m still upset you are leaving,” Ryosuke says, honest, voice low. Yuto laughs quietly

“I know,” Yuto says. His thumb strokes once at Ryosuke’s jaw, a gesture with no ambition beyond contact. Then, his eyes darken and he looks serious, like he’s giving the answer to many questions between them. “Stay with me tonight.”

Time. What the hell is time? Ryosuke doesn’t know it. Ryosuke doesn’t look at the clock. He doesn’t list reasons. He lets the yes rise again and doesn’t trap it. 

“Okay,” he says, and feels the word on his knees.

They find each other again with the easy inevitability of tide on a familiar shore. Ryosuke kisses like he’s never getting the chance to kiss Yuto again and closes his teeth very gently in Yuto’s lower lip. Yuto’s hands slide under Ryosuke’s shirt and learn the heat of him, wide palms mapping his shoulder, spine, the small area at the back of his neck. Ryosuke answers by hooking fingers in the hem of Yuto’s long hoodie and tugging him close enough that the air between goes warm.

“Ryosuke—” Yuto murmurs against his mouth, breathless. “W-wait, listen. How far do you want to—?”

“Don’t stop” Ryosuke says, and means it all the way down. “Don’t you dare to stop.”

Yuto’s mouth parts, like he can’t believe this is reality. Then, his eyes go dark.

The couch is the nearest soft thing and they fall into it with a bounce that makes them both laugh. Laughing becomes kissing again, deeper now. Ryosuke tilts Yuto’s chin with two fingers and kisses down, a line along his jaw, then lower. Yuto’s breath misfires, his hands steady on Ryosuke’s hips. Yamada noses beneath the edge of fabric and mouths at skin, slow and claiming. Yuto arches into it without thinking, a quiet sound breaking loose that Ryosuke absorbs with his mouth like it was meant for him alone. Hands open buttons without hurry and their shirts end up somewhere toward the armrest. 

Soon, the kisses, the touches, the sharp bites aren’t enough. Ryosuke slowly starts to roll his hips, creating a maddening fiction that has Yuto grabbing his hips to intensify the movement. Ryosuke’s head falls back, a moan ripping through his throat that Yuto catches with his lips. They are so hard it aches but it’s agony and pleasure and the world losing the edges of reality and falling into the fog of a dream. The room smells like rain lifted from the street and the citrus scent of Yuto’s laundry detergent intertwined with Ryosuke’s peach sweet scent.

They forget the rest of the apartment exists until Sora pads up and hops onto the cushion with blunt confidence, reminding them who is the queen of the apartment. She wedges herself between them, pupils wide as two coins. Ryosuke has a mouth on Yuto’s throat when a soft paw taps his cheek.

“Hey, excuse me,” Yuto says, laughing into Ryosuke’s hair.

“She is adorable,” Ryosuke tells Sora. Sora chirps at the attention.

“She thinks we’re playing,” Yuto says, and Sora, pleased to be understood, bats at Yuto’s jeans with decisiveness.

They dissolve into helpless laughter, foreheads pressed together, the kind of laugh that shakes something loose inside your ribs and makes room for more oxygen—and more wanting. Yuto scoops Sora with an apology and deposits her on the blanket-laden chair, where she kneads once, twice, and glares like a supervisor.

“Bedroom?” Yuto asks, voice sweet and slightly wicked.

Ryosuke’s eyes darken. 

“Yes,” he says, already reaching for Yuto’s hand.

They hurry down the short hall, tripping over their own urgency and the rug edge once, laughing again because of their eagerness. Yuto shoulders the door, and the bedroom opens to them, dimmed lamplight, a soft king size bed, the quiet click of the world outside turning away.

Ryosuke backs Yuto to the edge of the mattress and pushes, gentle but certain. Yuto sits, knees spreading like an instinct. Ryosuke steps between them, thumbs at Yuto’s cheekbones, kissing him like an oath. He kisses the little smile lines that only appear when Yuto is this happy, the scar in his upper lip, goes up to kiss every beauty mark on his face, then the hollow beneath his ear, then a measured path down the column of his throat. Yuto’s hands go light and reverent over Ryosuke’s small waist, then tighten when Ryosuke sinks to his knees between them in a heartbeat and looks up through his lashes, asking without words. Yuto seems to find coherence enough, the fog in his dark eyes clearing for a moment to nod his consent. 

Ryosuke wastes no time, getting his face closer to Yuto’s clothed hardness. He unzips everything and gets jeans and underwear down. Loving hands rest on Yuto’s hips, rubbing circles into his hip bones with thumbs, pushing hard into the skin and then gently as a feather. Yuto looks at him, dazed and waiting. Ryosuke wants to laugh a bit because he’s sure Yuto thinks he can handle this. That he can handle him. Satisfaction runs hot in his veins when he kisses the tip of Yuto’s hard cock with feather touches, just to, in one single movement, trail with his tongue from the base of his shaft to the very tip. Yuto moans loudly when Ryosuke starts swallowing around him, no warnings whatsoever. 

Both of Yuto’s hands thread into Ryosuke’s hair with so much love it makes Ryosuke’s eye water. He helps him guide Yamada up and down his cock, paying rapt attention to how his length slips in and out from Ryosuke’s pink lips. 

“God, yeah, baby,” Yuto barely manages to breathe out. “Yes, yes, yes, just like that. Ah—” Yuto cries out when Ryosuke hollows his cheeks out, sucking hard as tries to take him even deeper than he previously had. Ryosuke moans around him, and the vibrations seem to send liquid electricity through Yuto’s spine. “Ah—fuck. Fuck.”

What happens next is heat and closeness, it’s the sound Yuto makes when Ryosuke drags his lips up and down and the way his hand trembles in Ryosuke’s hair before he steadies it. It’s Yuto buckling and catching himself, breath breaking, saying Ryosuke’s name like a prayer. Yamada dips his head lower, taking one of Yuto’s balls into his mouth at the same time that he wraps a hand tightly around his cock. Ryosuke takes advantage of the wetness of Yuto’s length, dragging the skin up and down while circling his tongue around the sensitive skin. Yuto falls to the mattress, gasping for air, eyes full of tears. 

 “You’re—god—” Yuto’s voice cracks when Ryosuke works his cock in just the right way. So fucking right he has to stop Ryosuke because—”Ry—Ryosuke, wait. Babe, wait. Don’t wanna come like this.”

Ryosuke sucks hard for one last time and pops off Yuto’s cock, lips glistening with spit under the lamplight, eyes wide and blown, tears pooling at the corner of his eyes. He doesn’t give Yuto the chance to say anything else because he’s climbing him on the bed, lips already searching for him to anchor the chaos of pleasure inside his head. 

“Need you,” Ryosuke says in between open mouthed kisses, Yuto tasting himself with obsession. “I need you inside me. Yuto, Yuto—”

Desire trips from careful to can’t-hold. They undress each other like unwrapping a present you already know is perfect, slow enough to savor, fast enough to confess how much you’ve wanted this. Yuto kisses his way down, reverent, and Ryosuke opens under him, trusting, a hand in Yuto’s hair guiding, asking for more with the smallest pull. The bed answers each shift with a soft creak that turns into part of the song they’re making.

Time loosens. They move through shapes that feel like a conversation. Ryosuke braced on elbows, Yuto’s mouth writing patient praise along the inside of his thigh. Ryosuke turned toward the headboard, back arching, breath breaking into agonizing pleasure, Yuto’s name hanging like the gardens of Babylon. Ryosuke feels Yuto’s hunger in the way he savors and bites and sucks at the tender flesh of his cheeks, tongue flicking masterfully his rim like he wants Ryosuke’s insides to remember the shape of Yuto’s mouth. His vocabulary collapses to smalls yes, please, there. 

They draw close to the edge and find each other again, foreheads pressed, both of them shaking with how much they want. Yuto steadies Ryosuke with one hand and reaches blind for the bedside drawer with the other, the practiced hush of it saying I’ve thought about this. There’s a slick sound, the precise kind of care that is a love language by itself, and Ryosuke’s gaze catches Yuto’s like a hook.

“Look at me,” Ryosuke whispers, and Yuto does, pupils blown wide, reverent with pure honey devotion.

Ryosuke lies back, spreading his legs to make room for Yuto, inviting. Yuto fits himself close, the first careful press of his finger stealing both their breaths, one after the other. It’s slow at first, dragging, deliberate, a pleasure that stretches and stretches until Ryosuke can feel the whole world shake along his nerve endings. It’s discovery, too, Ryosuke teaching Yuto all the ways he likes to be touched, destroyed and revived. He murmurs nonsense that means more, more, yes, right there, honey and Yuto answers in the language of his hands and the placement of his mouth and the steady, anchored cadence of his body against Ryosuke’s.

When Ryosuke feels Yuto’s cock press at his entrance and pass the tightness of his rim, he starts to seriously lose it. His breath comes out irregularly as he tries to get used to the feeling of being absolutely full, and he wails when Yuto doesn’t stop until he’s seated firmly inside him, pressed flush up against Ryosuke’s skin. Yuto places his hands on either side of Ryosuke’s head and leans forward until they are chest to chest, heart to heart. 

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Yuto kisses like fairy touches on the corner of Ryosuke’s pleading mouth. “I’ve got you, I promise. I’ve got you.”

Ryosuke nods and takes deep breaths in a vain attempt to calm his heart down. They move. Yuto keeps the pace slow and agonizing but it makes Ryosuke feel to his very core every inch of skin, every drag, every roll of hips meeting halfway, every part of their body that is touching and pressing like they want to become one. It’s controlled, sensual, absolutely perfect because Ryosuke truly believes he is never going to love like this ever again in his lifetime. There is a sense of being whole, worshipped and loved beyond understanding with an intensity he is sure he can match, too. 

It’s everything. It’s too much. Ryosuke doesn’t notice when tears start falling down his face until Yuto wipes them away with his thumb. Yuto fucks him gently, pulling out slowly and thrusting back. Yamada feels it like a punch to his lungs each time he buries himself fully inside and melts away when Yuto searches for his mouth, cradling his face in his hands and kissing his forehead, his cheeks, his lips. 

At some point the balance shifts and Ryosuke decides he wants to watch Yuto fall apart. Wants to make him fall apart, so he pulls Yuto down into the mattress and climbs over him, palms spread on Yuto’s chest, hair falling in his eyes as he lines himself with Yuto’s cock and sinks. He finds a rhythm that carves heat up his spine, he circles slowly, then rocks forward until Yuto gasps, then backward just to hear the sound again. Yuto’s grip finds Ryosuke’s hips, not to control but to meet him, until his eyes shine too bright and he has to blink hard to keep them open.

“Fuck. Look at you,” Yuto says, voice hanging by a thread. “Look at you.”

Ryosuke laughs helplessly, delighted, and kisses the corner of Yuto’s eye. The mattress complains against the wall in steady punctuation and it occurs to Ryosuke distantly that neighbors exist, which only makes him bite back another laugh and bury it in Yuto’s shoulder. Yuto’s hands are shaking. Ryosuke is heat and pulse and the pull of gravity. He is nothing but the pure concept of being present and feeling alive. 

When it gets too close to the edge, Yuto manhandles him, rolling them and pressing Ryosuke to the mattress again, bracing himself over Ryosuke, finding a faster rhythm that is nothing like before. He starts fucking Ryosuke, hard, raw, with an urgency that Ryosuke had recognized before in his controlled hands. Now it is completely forgotten. Ryosuke opens his throat on a sound that might be Yuto’s name and might be an I love you and might be both. 

It doesn’t take much more until Ryosuke starts feeling his walls clenching around Yuto, the ball of heat and pleasure centered in his lower stomach trying not to burst but failing each time Yuto snaps his hips and meet’s Yamada’s skin with a sound that should be unholy to hear. The almost violent rhythm of his thrusts, the way the bed creaks under them over and over again, Yuto’s hands framing his face, his eyes meeting like magnets that can’t be separated, Ryosuke’s name at the tip of Yuto’s tongue. All comes together in an overwhelming whip to his heart and Ryosuke’s back snaps off the bed as he shudders through his orgasm, sobbing Yuto’s name. The cock inside of him twitches and Yuto fucks him through his orgasm mercilessly, until warm wetness fills him and it seems like Yuto’s orgasm goes on and on endlessly, hips stuttering and rocking back and forth, his chest heaving as he catches his breath. 

They feel the moment side by side, untouched by anything but each other, and the room fills with the kind of silence that’s really a chord easing into resonance. Yuto is murmuring at Ryosuke’s ear, something soft that sounds like I love you, I love you, and Ryosuke says his name back like it’s the perfect answer. 

After, they stay in bed, legs tangled because the thought of separating themselves is unthinkable now. Breathing steadies. Sweat cools. Yuto laughs once, shakily, the exhausted kind of laugh that means happy, and kisses the hollow below Ryosuke’s ear as if to seal it.

They clean up with the conspiratorial tenderness of people who have decided to treat each other like their own personal religions. Back under the blankets, Yuto stretches out and tucks Ryosuke under his arm. Outside, the city softens. Inside, the world is small and perfect. Their breath syncs, Ryosuke puts his hands over Yuto’s chest and almost cries when the beat of his heart feels so strong and steady and his.

*

Life without Yuto sucks. 

It sucks so fucking much.

“This suuuuucks,” Yamada whines at his empty apartment. 

Two days without Yuto and suddenly every place crowded feels like an empty room. The routine keeps its shape, but sound carries differently. Too loud, too annoying—mug to saucer, page turning, the faint hiss when the rice cooker clicks to warm. Ryosuke fills the hours with things that have nothing to do with waiting: morning gym, a photoshoot wrapped in polite light, blocking rehearsal where counts replace thought, a vocal run-through that asks his lungs to be practical. He cooks enough for two and packs one portion away without thinking, then eats at the counter and tries to look like someone who is not incredibly missing his other half. 

He doesn’t say the word miss out loud. He makes a practice of putting his phone face down when he laces his shoes, when he finishes a rehearsal, when he starts eating, when he has nothing to do. Hope—he knows—can be architecture or avalanche. He rebuilt himself once. He isn’t sure he can survive rebuilding again.

The first morning, his phone buzzes at 7:03 a.m. while he is stretching his neck next to the kitchen counter. He doesn’t look. He lets the timer pass three cycles, pours water over coffee, watches the steam lift and vanish. When he finally says fuck it and checks, there’s a stack of messages that read like someone opening a window on the other side of the world.

You > loml (lunatic of my life <3)

Yuto: just landed! but as soon as I stepped into the airport i wanted to go back 

Yuto: it’s so hot here omg, you would love it. You are basically made of sunshine

Yuto: sunshine

Yuto: ok i now, that was terrible

Yuto: got to the hotel safely! i think i am about to pass out from jet lag

Yuto: the director just called me to check if i arrived without complications lol

Yuto: i guess i can’t complain to him about the oven this city is. 

Yuto: (photo attached) the sunset from the balcony is to die for, tho. it almost makes me want to leave the curtains open

Yuto: (photo attached) keyword: almost. if i don’t sleep on a proper mattress i might kill someone

Yuto: ok i’m done ranting. have a wonderful dayyyyy

Yuto: and 

Yuto: i miss you already

Yuto: like, you have no idea

The picture is a breathtaking sky colored by all the warm colors ever possible, palm trees framing it like a postal. A second image follows: a paper coffee cup with his name YUTO NAKAJIMA spelled correctly. Ryosuke finds himself smiling so much his face starts to hurt. 

By noon there is a group chat again labeled as ‘Yabu Kota and his sons’, which includes the seven of them plus Yuto. Inoo writes that time zones are a social construct and if Yuto doesn’t update every second of the premier he’s calling the FBI. Daiki sends a voice memo that is just him trying to speak in English and spectacularly failing at it. Yuto responds with a sticker of a monkey laughing its ass off. Takaki sends every coffee shop recommendation in LA through Instagram reels and asks Yuto to rate them from 1 to 5 stars. Chinen responds with a (very long, very expensive) list of souvenirs Yuto must bring to be allowed in the agency again. Yabu writes reminders to Yuto about drinking water, putting on sunscreen, and not talking to strangers unless they look like George Clooney. 

Yuto answers all of them, and Ryosuke can almost imagine how happiness radiates from him every time a member writes to him. It makes Ryosuke ache sometimes, thinking that Yuto must have felt so lonely when no one was talking with each other. Fortunately, that’s not the case anymore. 

Yuto: (photo attached) what do you think? 

Ryosuke looks at the photo and then slams the phone down, eyes wide and mouth parted in shock. Fuck. Fuuuck.

Ryosuke turns it again to see the photo and hopefully this time, engraves it in his mind. It’s a mirror selfie. Yuto is wearing what Yamada believes is his suit for the premier and the thing fits him like a second skin. It’s dark blue with some golden details, black shirt, black tie and polished dress shoes. Ryosuke laughs—quiet, involuntary, hysterical—and immediately puts the phone down like it has teeth. He lasts eight minutes. He picks it back up. 

You: nakajima yuto, you need to hurry the fuck up and be here by yesterday.

Yuto: oh

Yuto: haha

Yuto: that good, then?

As if he doesn’t already know.

Evenings bring more. City corners and a blur of faces Ryosuke recognizes from movie posters. A street sign glinting at blue hour. Yuto’s speech script with handwritten annotations. In the mornings, Yuto writes between calls and at night, he writes in the time space when LA is shining and Tokyo is already inside tomorrow. Ryosuke answers from his kitchen, his shower while the steam fogs the mirror, the warmth inside his car, the security of his bed.

On the third night (technically morning) the video call comes at 3:47 AM. The screen jumps to life and reveals Ryosuke’s worst version back at him: hair refusing to choose a direction, oversized T-shirt, sleep at the edges of his eyes. He accepts it anyway.

Yuto’s face blooms on the screen, bright and handsome. He is outside, city hum behind him, a light jacket slung over his shoulders. 

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Ryosuke mumbles. “What time is it?” and it comes out fond, not scolding.

“If I tell you, you'll probably hang up,” Yuto says. “And miss the surprise I have for you.”

He angles the phone, frame opening like a stage reveal. Another face enters from the side—familiar, extraordinary, the kind of familiar that makes your brain misfire before it understands its own eyes because on Yamada’s screen fucking Leonardo DiCaprio appears.

“Hello, there,” Leonardo says, easy as if they are all kitchen-level friends. “You must be Ryosuke. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

W H A T .

Ryosuke forgets language because something in his brain just—disconnects. But he gives himself a mental slap and  then finds all of it at once and trips. 

“I—hello. I mean, hi. I—sir—huge fan, since—forever. Your work—sorry, I’m in pajamas—”

Leonardo’s mouth tips, amused and kind. “Best outfit for a midnight call,” he says. “This guy,” he points at Yuto, “talks about you nonstop. We should meet if you find yourself in town.”

Ryosuke’s mouth remembers how to make sense. “That would be… an honor. Thank you. And—please take care of him.”

“We will,” Leonardo says, and gives an acknowledging little salute like a person who understands being trusted with fragile things. He slips out of frame with a goodnight that sounds like he means it.

Yuto fills the screen again. He looks both pleased with himself and strangely shy. 

“Don’t kill me,” he says, laughing. “I didn’t want you to be nervous. Also—” He takes in the T-shirt, the hair. “You look cute.”

Ryosuke covers his face with one hand and groans loudly. 

“What the hell—What the hell, Yuto?! Warn me next time, oh my god. I totally made a fool of myself in front of Leonardo DiCaprio. How is this even real? I’m literally—” he gestures at the chaos of himself, “—this!”

“That,” Yuto says, eyes softening in a visible way, “is perfect.”

The wave hits then, loneliness and wanting and the sharp edge of being proud from far away. It rises too fast to manage. He stays very still and says the only thing that lets him keep breathing. 

“I miss you,” Ryosuke whispers.

Of course, Yuto catches it. 

“I miss you, too,” he says. No ornament, nothing to prove. “I’ll call after the rehearsal dinner. And before you go to work.”

“It’s okay if you can’t,” Ryosuke says.

“I can,” Yuto says, steady. “And if I can’t, I’ll tell you. But I want to.”

Something unclenches in Ryosuke’s chest, painfully. He nods.

“Show me you,” Ryosuke says suddenly. “Turn the camera. Let me see where you are.”

They talk about ordinary things for a few more minutes. Ryosuke shows him a video of Sora and Yuto coos at it. Yuto tells him about some Hollywood gossip he heard from very reliable sources, making Ryosuke gasp in scandal. Eventually though, Ryosuke’s eyes start blinking too many times and his eyelids begin to drop, slowly. Yuto tells him to go sleep but Ryosuke grips his phone harder and refuses.

“Can you stay until I fall asleep?” Ryosuke asks. “Please.”

Yuto’s smile is lovely.

“Of course, love.”

The next day, he wakes at the first light and reaches for his phone before he reaches for the day, already knowing what he hopes to find.

Yuto: good morning, sleepyhead

Yuto: have a wonderful day, love 

Ryosuke smiles into the pillow, and for once the word hope doesn’t feel like an edge. It feels like a path lit just enough for the next step. He takes it.

*

He finds Daiki the way he often does: without looking for him. The studio’s fire stairs have a view of a sliver of street. The concrete stays sun-warmed even at night because buildings like these store heat the way people store feelings. Daiki sits two steps down, hood up, a can of lemon soda sweating in his palm, sneaker heel hooking and unhooking the railing. He doesn’t look surprised when Ryosuke shoulders the door open.

“Want some?” Daiki asks, lifting the can.

Ryosuke drops beside him with a small groan and takes it. The fizz hits the back of his throat and makes his eyes water. Down on the street, a taxi noses around the corner and forgets them immediately. The building hums behind their backs.

“How are you? Rehearsals were a bitch today,” Daiki asks, because he can feel the pain in his muscles, too. 

“I can’t feel my feet,” Ryosuke says. He turns the ring pull with his thumb. “But I think I can do the whole concert in my sleep now. So that’s good.”

They let that sit. Daiki is surprisingly good at silences. Surprisingly for people who don't know him well, though. Ryosuke knows he can find peace at his side just when he needs it the most.

“You look like yourself again,” Daiki suddenly says. Ryosuke looks at him.

“What do you mean?”

Daiki thinks his response through. “You smile a lot with your eyes. Sing in the showers, not very good I must add, though,” Ryosuke kicks him without force, but Daiki continues. “You are eating full meals now. You laugh at my horrible jokes. Sometimes you even make this cute little jump when you are walking through the hallways,” Daiki smiles. “You don’t look like you lost your entire world in a blink of an eye anymore.”

Ryosuke scrapes a thumb along the can’s seam. “That obvious?”

“It’s not a bad thing,” Daiki says. He tips his chin toward the dark slice of street. “But JUMP’s anniversary is in two days.”

“I know.”

“And he can’t be here. Even if he is in the country.”

“I know that, too.”

Daiki doesn’t push. He leaves the door open and waits. The stair light hums.

“But sometimes—sometimes I feel like I am holding weights in each hand,” Ryosuke says at last. “Fear in one hand, relief in the other. I’m happy he’s back in our lives but I just—I am just so scared of him vanishing again. Like everything was a dream and I just woke up late,” he admits. 

“I think those two things are not mutually exclusive, Ryosuke. They can coexist together,” Daiki says. “If the person is worth every single one of those feelings, then it’s okay. Don’t you think so?”

Ryosuke half-smiles despite himself. “Arioka, that is actually really good advice. What a Yabu thing to say.”

“What can I say? I am a kaleidoscope of all of you guys mixed together,” Daiki laughs. “Also, marriage made me more thoughtful. A true love guru.”

“I take it back, you are still a child.”

They laugh freely. A beat passes and then, Daiki bumps his knee

“What do you need from him, Ryosuke?” Daiki asks. “Really.”

Ryosuke exhales. “I don’t want to feel like I depend on him to be emotionally stable but—I still need reminders he’s here and this is not my mind making everything up. I want to feel like he’s next to me again, and it’s not necessarily something physical. Although of course I want that, too. I want him by my side. Not on stage. Not as rivals. Not as—I just,” Ryosuke breathes, a bit shaky. “I just want him.”

Daiki nods. “And what do you give to him in return?”

“The same,” Ryosuke says, immediately. “I can’t put it into words.”

“You have to,” Daiki says. “Love is all rainbows and pink skies but communication is as important as the feeling. Actions, too.”

Wind lifts the edge of his hood. Inside the building, someone lands a turn clean and whoops once.

Ryosuke smiles. “How are you the one who cries at convenience-store commercials and still the most functional among us?”

“Hydration and snacks. Skin care. Unlimited emotional intelligence,” Daiki says, saintly. “Also therapy. You should consider it. You don’t need to go when things are bad, you can go when things make sense, too.”

They stand and both of their knees make a cracking sound that has them groaning in pain and then laughing like children. At the door, Daiki’s hand lands on Ryosuke’s shoulder and stays one heartbeat longer than casual.

“You’re allowed to be happy,” he says. “Not the stage kind, but—the Yamada Ryosuke kind.”

Ryosuke answers with a shy smile

“Perfect,” Daiki answers. “I charge a thousand yen the hour if you want to talk things out aga—ow, ouch! Ryosuke stop hitting me, oh my god. See if I listen to you again—ouch!” 

Later, the stillness of Yuto’s apartment welcomes him. He pets Sora for a good time and then puts on a T-shirt that is not his and sits on the edge of Yuto’s bed with the kitten, making herself space in Yuto’s bed too. He lays down, brings up the blankets to his nose, sinks into the pillows and breathes. 

Yuto’s faint scent lulls him enough to rest.

*

Yokohama is gorgeous in winter colors: neon blurs into the glass like watercolor rinsed too quickly. In the back seat of the van—cap low, mask up, turtleneck high—Ryosuke refreshes showtimes on the webpage of the cinema on his phone. Almost every screen in the city is playing the new Villeneuve movie, and almost every block reads FULL. Miraculously, he finds a spot. Theater 4, Screen 7, 18:20. Available, it reads

He buys it before it changes to Occupied.

At the cinema he shows the QR and the scanner chirps. The attendant barely looks up. The lobby is a soft riot of butter and sugar and popcorn scent. Posters hum in their glass frames like fish behind clean glass. Ryosuke keeps his head down, takes the ticket, and lets the current carry him inside the  dark room. 

Back row, aisle seat. The room is packed to the seams. 

Lights die down. Movie trailers pass. Studio powerhouses show on screen. And then, finally, the movie title appears.

BLACK WATERS

The movie opens on a gray sea and a metal shutter lifting. Yuto is Arai Kento—no hero posture, just a son unlocking his deceased mother’s bathhouse and listening to old pipes cough themselves awake. The first fill runs the color of rust. Steam ghosts up like a memory that refuses to be forgotten.

Ryosuke feels a tug he can’t blame on the story alone. He sees, instantly, why Yuto said yes to the role. Not because the film is “Hollywood” but because it asks an actor to carry meaning with almost nothing: hands, breath, how to stand in a room. It’s a part about upkeep and patience, about staying when leaving would be easier. That’s Yuto’s language.

People arrive and speak like humans, not plot devices. The older brother, Cam, arrives in town full of anger, sorrow and resentment. He arrives with his son, Kento’s nephew, with his hair damp and with a fear of swimming in open waters. The camera keeps finding hands: scrubbing tile, wringing a cloth, turning a ledger where their mother’s neat handwriting stops midweek. Loneliness isn’t treated as a hole here. It’s a room you clean even when no one else is coming. Ryosuke’s chest aches quietly.

The palette begins in iron and ash. Yuto barely talks. He listens to boilers and tapes labeled in his mother’s voice. Ryosuke thinks this is exactly the kind of silence Yuto trusts. The kind that isn’t empty, only waiting. Every small task—bleeding a valve, folding a towel—lands like a sentence with its verb hidden. The film lets you sit inside.

In the steam room, the brothers argue without gentleness, short, square lines that end with both men staring at tiles. Ryosuke feels his own shoulders loosen at how little the movie demands from the moment. No apology monologue, no crescendo. Just air cooling after two people finally say the unglamorous truth.

The twist arrives when Yuto’s character finds a cassette at the bottom of the box without any label whatsoever. Kento clicks it in. Their mother speaks to the grandson first—gentle, precise—releasing him from blame for the way she left. Then to her sons. No swelling score. Just the soft click of the tape turning over and Kento shows himself as a little boy trying not to break in front of the woman who loved him the most in the world. Ryosuke’s throat burns. Grief, in this film, is not loud and demanding. It’s like an old friend sitting besides you, comforting you.

Something changes that you can feel without the movie pointing at it. The light warms. Rust lifts. Towels look whiter. Even the steam goes from bluish to a kind of gold. Ryosuke notices the color quietly returning and realizes the story has been moving from grayscale to warmth the whole time, like a bruise letting go.

On the last night, they opened the bath for free. Old men arrive with soap in net bags. Two kids run and laughter becomes the main soundtrack. Cam sits, and Kento—slowly, without ceremony—washes his brother’s back the way their father used to. I wasn’t here, Cam says. I know, Kento answers. The line lands on Ryosuke like a hand steadying his spine. The film suggests that sometimes forgiveness is not a speech. It’s a task you do with warm waters. 

The final image appears, steam rolling soft as breath. Kento folds his mother’s towel once, twice, sets it on the rail, and steps in. The water is clear. He exhales like someone returning to his own body. Ryosuke feels the hope of that action more than any line.

When the credits rise, he notices the damp edge of his mask and smiles at himself for missing when, exactly, he started crying. He sits through the crawl and thinks about what the film does with loneliness. It doesn't cure it, it gives it a job. It sets out buckets, it schedules Sundays, it teaches a boy to float in shallow water so he remembers being held. It treats silence like furniture, not emptiness—something you arrange until the space feels human again.

He understands, suddenly and completely, why Yuto took this role. Because it’s a story that makes staying brave. Because it trusts the audience to hear with their eyes. Because it moves from iron gray to warm steam without ever raising its voice. Because it leaves you wanting to try, really try, for better days. To show up, to keep one day for the town, to wash a brother’s back, to let water carry what words can’t.

He waits with the crowd and then, someone stands up in the audience and starts clapping and it creates a domino effect that Ryosuke joins. He quickly sends a video to Yuto from the cinema. Later, his phone buzzes with ordinary life: call time, warm-ups, Yabu sending a photo of Hikaru asleep on a yoga mat. Inoo sending a sleeping cat sticker. Hikaru answering with a scared emoji. His manager’s reminder of tomorrow’s schedule.

Yuto’s answer to his video comes later:

Yuto: woah! 

Yuto: i’m kinda embarrassed lol 

Yuto: that’s nice though, thanks for sending it to me (:

Yuto: did you like it?

I love you, Ryosuke types and then stops. Erases it because every moment has its own pace. 

*

They push the news into a corner together, as gently as they can.

Yuto’s stay in LA is extended.

“After Christmas, just before New Year’s eve,” Yuto says on a late call, the blue dawn of Tokyo cooling Ryosuke’s cheek. Netflix saw their opportunity and handed a script to Yuto’s manager with another lead role. Not the sort of offer a person refuses, not the sort of distance that doesn’t sting. 

Ryosuke feels the ache land and settle, polite and heavy. 

But he doesn’t say don’t go. He says go. Be brilliant. Then he sets his phone face down, cries himself to sleep and the next day he works his body until his thoughts are too tired to climb back up.

It helps that he barely touches Tokyo either. The tour lifts him and carries him east and west—Fukuoka to Sendai to Nagoya—hotel hallways that all smell the same, stages that change size but not atmosphere, dressing rooms with mirrors he learns by their chips and scratches. He learns how to miss someone in transit but he also learns how to be missed from a different continent.

They make it work like people building a bridge from each end. Morning check-ins before the dome lights wake. Voice notes at airports, Ryosuke’s a compressed whisper by a gate, Yuto’s a bright message with palm trees waving in the background. They trade photos like talismans, the curve of a stadium bowl from the stage, neat stacks of setlists, a bruised knuckle from fight choreography Yuto swears looks worse than it feels, the spark of Yamada’s new outfits. Sometimes their calls line up. Sometimes they miss. When they miss, the words still arrive, honest and small.

Eat. Sleep. Proud of you. Miss you, too.

Two months draw themselves across the calendar. In a blink of an eye, Osaka, the last stop of the tour, catches them like a net.

They close the last concert date breathing hard and blessed, glitter in their shoes, towels draped like medals, the sound of the crowd still in their bones. After, they crowd into the elevator up to Takaki’s place, his Osaka apartment looking out over a river of headlights. Shoes pile by the door. Someone dumps convenience store ice into a bowl. Beers hiss open. Takeout arrives in obscene amounts, the table a rowdy map of okonomiyaki boxes, yakitori skewers, takoyaki steaming like small planets. Hikaru and Chinen hold court, the birthday kings in hand-made paper crowns Inoo has “found somewhere” and definitely did not make during breaks, don’t be ridiculous. Yabu counts heads and lets the chaos unfold. Daiki declares he will fight anyone who tries to leave before midnight.

Ryosuke laughs when the terrible jokes arrive, tosses cushions back, steals a fried shrimp off Chinen’s plate and pays for it with a stern look that lasts exactly one minute and fifteen seconds. He keeps his phone face down near the drinks even as his fingertips memorize its weight. The noise is a comfort, but underneath it, something is pacing.

Halfway through a terrible group rendition of “Happy Birthday” in four different keys (“why can’t we sing this one song like normal people instead of sounding like heathens?” Takaki asks. Chinen's response is to the tune of Come On A My House), his phone buzzes. Then again. Then the small, persistent cadence of a video call request. He catches the screen: Yuto.

“Be right back,” he says to nobody who asks, and slips down the short hall.

The empty room at the end opens like a secret, floor-to-ceiling glass and the city thrown wide beyond it: bridges lit like jewelry, a river of cars, snow clouds stacking themselves at the horizon. He accepts the call, breath already calmer.

Yuto’s face fills the screen, too close and perfect, city light pooling behind him somewhere else. 

“Hey,” he says, and the room adjusts around the sound. “How’s Osaka?”

“Loud,” Ryosuke says, his mouth taking the shape of a smile without permission. “But we finished the tour without any incidents, thankfully. We are at Takaki’s apartment in Osaka, do you remember it? We came here two years ago, too. When you broke the couch.”

Yuto’s laugh comes easy. “Tell the truth, whose fault was it really?”

“You didn’t want to stand up and make room for me. Naturally, I had to sit on your lap” Ryosuke says.

“Naturally,” Yuto agrees. 

“How’s filming?”

“Quite different from the last time I filmed here,” Yuto admits, then brightens. “It was good, though. Everyone is super kind to me. The director kept me on my toes the whole time, though.”

“You can do it. Just remember to rest too, okay?” Ryosuke says. “Heading to sleep?”

“Eh,” Yuto hesitates, breath fogging into the shot and disappearing. The camera jostles, revealing a slice of dark coat, night sky and city sidewalk. “Not yet.”

“Where are you going?”

Yuto’s smile blooms like spring in the middle of the winter night.

“To see someone special,” he answers, like it’s obvious.

Ryosuke isn’t a jealous person. But curiosity rises anyway, feline and abrupt. 

“Oh?” he asks with his best neutral voice. “Lucky person, then.”

“Very,” Yuto's smile widens, like he can read Yamada’s resentment clear as day. He angles the phone down for a step, then back up. There is the strangest sound, a hollowness that belongs to open space, not a street, and then Yuto goes still. 

His eyes lift above the camera, not into it. “Woah,” Yuto says, after a second. “You look gorgeous tonight,” he says, a little awed.

Ryosuke blinks. “How do you—”

“Look down, babe,” Yuto says softly.

Ryosuke’s eyes have never followed an instruction so fast in his life. His heart gets impossibly bigger inside his chest.

Down, seven floors below in the open and empty parking lot, in a long dark coat and a blue scarf, Yuto stands under the security light. Snow is just beginning to fall, not fat flakes yet, just the fine glitter that makes the air look enchanted. He lifts a hand, the phone in his other, and the gesture is so familiar it feels scripted by fate. He looks like a dream Ryosuke once had and then told himself not to have again.

His heart trips over itself, then finds a sprint. He can’t talk, can’t breathe. His mouth tries to come up with a single word and fails. 

“Hi,” Yuto says through the phone and Yamada watches his mouth coincide with the screen of his phone, that easy, devastating smile breaking wide. “Aren’t you going to come down, Ryosuke?”

Ryosuke doesn’t stop to think about elevators, or coats, or shoes, or the way the cold will climb his sleeves. He leaves the phone somewhere, barely remembering to end the call, and bolts for the door. He passes the living room in a blur, heads turn mid-laugh as chairs scrape. 

“Where are you—” Yabu starts. 

Inoo hisses. “Do not die on the stairs!”. 

Takaki shouts. “Go get your man, Yamada!”

Ryosuke takes the stairs two at a time because he is an idiot in love. The concrete turns at each landing, his breath doing knife work in his chest, a ridiculous grin pulling him forward by the ribs. He should have taken the elevator, he knows but honestly? He can’t stand still to wait. He needs to move.

The door to the parking level pushes open with a complaint and then all at once there he is. 

Oh my god, Ryosuke thinks. This is real.

Yuto, very real, breath hanging in white loops, snow catching in his hair, his coat dusted like sugar. He looks up from the glow of his phone and meets Ryosuke’s eyes with that same stunned fondness that ruined him when they were young and the world was too big to fit in their little hands.

Yuto opens his arms and says, like a promise snapped into place. 

“I’m home!”

Thank you, Ryosuke minds supplies. To no one, to everyone. 

Ryosuke manages two careful steps, as if checking the floor will hold, and then he runs.

The hug is not elegant. It doesn’t need to be. It is a collision of relief and months and this exact body fitting against his own. Yuto’s arms close around him like puzzle pieces. Ryosuke closes his eyes and inhales, the faintest echo of a citrusy scent and something uniquely Yuto he doesn’t have a word for because he’s never needed one until now.

Still, in the back of Ryosuke’s mind, a tiny whisper nags about how he should be worried about cameras.

Fuck that.

Ryosuke pulls back just enough to find his mouth.

The kiss blows the circuits of Ryosuke’s mind and then teaches them how to hum again. It isn’t careful, it isn’t apologetic. It’s the kind of kiss that knows it has a right to exist. Yuto makes a small sound like gratitude unspooling. Ryosuke feels snow land on the back of his neck and melt with a shock that only pushes him closer. They break to breathe and immediately lean in again, less frantic, more anchored, the love of it expanding instead of exploding. In between kisses, Yuto notices Ryosuke came down with nothing but a white sweater, so he gently covers him inside his coat, big enough to fit the two of them.

Suddenly, from above, a balcony door slides open with the subtlety of a carnival. Someone curses. Another person curses the person that curses. 

But then, the whoop that drops from seven floors up is unmistakable.

“WHOOOOOOO!” Takaki screams.

“Don’t get too close to the edge, you idiot!” Inoo scolds Yuya, grabbing at his sleeve. 

“About time!” Yabu adds, equally delighted.

“Get married!” Hikaru shouts. “Ten out of ten, would recommend.”

Daiki doesn’t shout. He smiles brightly, loudly. Knowingly. Chinen pats his back and makes a thumbs up at them.

Yuto rests his forehead on Ryosuke's and laughs, breath frosting the inch of air between them. 

“We have an audience.”

“Let them watch,” Ryosuke says. His voice goes low, the kind of low that belongs to no cameras. He brushes snow out of Yuto’s hair. “How did you—?”

“Wrapped the last scene early,” Yuto says, words tumbling now that they’re allowed to be near. “They wanted me to stay for meetings, but I mean, it’s freaking 2026. Zoom meetings exist for a reason. So, I got into the first flight to Japan I could find and prayed to make it before you guys left Osaka. I didn’t tell you because—” He shrugs, almost shy. “I didn’t want to jinx it.”

Ryosuke keeps the scolding for later. Right now, he is busy putting both hands on Yuto’s jaw and memorizing the exact resistance of bone under the skin. 

“Stay tonight,” he says, which, given the circumstances, is the only thing he can come up with right now.

Yuto laughs. “I would like to see you try and make me leave.” 

Snow chooses that moment to clarify its intentions, fat flakes now, lazy and sure. The parking lot turns into a slow, glittering confetti cannon.

They stand there too long for the weather and not long enough for anything else. The balcony chorus trickles back inside. Takaki shouts a last triumphant “whooooo!” and slams the door before anyone freezes. Down on the ground, Ryosuke slides one hand into Yuto’s and Yuto takes both hands inside the warmth of his coat pocket.

“Come on,” he says. “There’s bad beer and too much food and adults who don’t know how to behave like normal people upstairs.”

They take the elevator back up, because love is dramatic but not stupid. In the mirrored box, they catch sight of themselves: the coats dusted white, the hair damp with melted snow, the linked hands, the redness of their noses, their cheeks, a look that makes them look younger and older in the same breath. Ryosuke meets his own eyes and doesn’t look away. Neither does Yuto.

At the apartment door, the noise meets them like a tide. Ryosuke doesn’t give a speech. Yuto doesn’t either. They don’t need to. Later, when the crowd’s volume ebbs too comfortably and the city’s snow turns the window’s black to something softer, Yuto leans close enough that his words don’t have to cross distance. “Merry almost Christmas,” he says, a joke, a promise, a fact.

Ryosuke presses their shoulders together and lets the night settle around them like proof. “You’re late,” he murmurs, smiling. “But you’re here.”

“I am here,” Yuto agrees, and this time the word doesn’t ache. It rings, a clear note hung in a room that has been waiting to vibrate. Outside, Osaka keeps snowing like the city decides to keep a secret. Inside, they don’t have to.

*

“That’s it,” Yuto croons. “Fuck yourself like you mean it, babe.”

The party blurred at the edges once Yuto’s hand found his hand under the table. Not a secret anymore—everyone saw. Someone shoved a plate at Yuto, someone else a beer at Ryosuke. Laughter went up like steam but like a silent agreement between two people who have missed each other to the bone, soon enough they were already choosing the door to have some privacy in the hotel Yuto was staying in.

Now, Ryosuke is already moving, straddling Yuto in the hotel’s wide bed, breath stuttering, skin lit by the restless city lights. He sets the rhythm like a song he knows in his bones, slow to tease, then quick to take, then slow again until Yuto’s eyes go unfocused and hungry, Yamada’s walls clenching around his length in a tortuous rhythm that they are growing more and more obsessive with. Ryosuke likes putting on a show for him, rolling his hips to chase that one bright point inside where the world goes starry at the edges, then does it again just to hear the helpless sound it pulls from Yuto’s throat.

Yuto looks spellbound. The city paints him in blue and rose, turning his expression otherworldly, cheekbones cut in shadow, pupils blown, mouth parted as if the air itself is too thick with wanting. 

“Gorgeous,” Yuto manages, voice rough, and then, softer, like he can’t help himself. “You’re so—look at you.”

Ryosuke’s laugh breaks into a gasp. Sweat beads at his temple. A curl of hair sticks to his cheek. He braces his hands on Yuto’s chest and changes tempo again, back and forth, a drag that borders on cruel and a mercy that arrives right on time. This is not their first round of sex and their bodies are already feeling the ache of dragging themselves through the edge. The room smells like skin and heat and the salt of hours already spent. Their bodies are slick where they meet, the sheets gone to ruins under their knees.

Ryosuke tips his head back as Yuto’s hands slide to his hips, fingertips firm enough to be remembered in the morning or even longer. The pressure knocks something loose in him and his eyes blur. He likes the idea of waking covered in fingertip constellations along his waist, a crescent on his thigh where Yuto’s mouth had bruised, the kind of tenderness that looks like proof.

“God,” Yuto breathes, the word sounding like awe. “If you could see—Ryosuke, if you could see what I’m seeing.”

“Yuto—honey. Tell me,” Ryosuke whispers, chasing his release point again and again, the bed dipping loudly with them in every movement.

“Babe, you are, ah, ah—” Yuto says, undone. “You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

The window throws a glimpse of Osaka onto their bodies, streetlights, red beacons that land across Ryosuke’s ribs, down Yuto’s forearms. Ryosuke rides the pulse of it until he’s half-sobbing, until Yuto’s hands bruise the moment into permanence and Ryosuke breaks on a sound he doesn’t recognize as his own. Yuto’s mouth finds Ryosuke’s shoulder and Ryosuke’s palm catches the headboard to steady the beautiful chaos running through him. Yuto takes him, re-angles him until Ryosuke is pinned to the bed, back hitting the mattress in an unexpected movement. The world narrows to breath, to trust, to the drumbeat at Ryosuke’s throat. The pace turns earnest, urgent, inevitable. Yuto’s focus sharpens to a single purpose: keep him right there, where every nerve sings for them. Ryosuke can’t make words for a while because his body is screaming for him, mouth open, gasping for air, Yuto’s name broken into syllables like prayer beads.

“You are—fuck, oh, fuck—how are you so good. My god,” Yuto rasps, forehead to the hinge of Ryosuke’s jaw. “It’s like you are made for my cock, baby.”

Ryosuke nods so hard his hair shakes, his tears fall again like rain of tiny diamonds. “Yes, yes, yes. Yuto, oh, oh—” he breathes. “Inside me, honey. I need it inside me.”

Another roll, another reassembly, Yuto drawing him down, Ryosuke yielding and inviting, the two of them finding the angle that turns the air electric. It’s a study in contrasts: Yuto’s control fraying at the edges even as his hands stay careful versus Ryosuke’s impatience gentled by how worshipped he feels. The bed taps the wall in a steady, shameless metronome.

They climax together this time, too. The sound in the room widening and then thinning to a held note, then silence. Yuto’s eyes flutter shut, Ryosuke shivers and clutches at him, both of them knocked soft by the force of it. For a long minute, all that exists is the slow unwind, lungs catching up, heartbeat stepping down, the lick of cool air over overheated skin. Yuto tries to pull out gently but Ryosuke traps him firmly with his legs.

“Don’t—” Ryosuke holds him tight. “Stay here,” Ryosuke clenches his walls making Yuto hiss and chase his mouth again, keeping them connected in every way possible.

They stay in each other’s arms, their lungs trying to find a normal pattern again. Osaka at 3 AM is a quiet creature outside the hotel. Yuto traces shapes on Ryosuke’s back, small circles, then a star, then a messy heart. Ryosuke catches his wrist and kisses the inside of it. 

“I can’t feel my thighs,” Ryosuke asks, smiling into the air. “How many times have we—?”

Yuto gives him a side smile. “Too many for the neighbors, not enough for me.”

Ryosuke huffs a laugh that bumps his shoulders. 

“You’re going to get us a complaint.”

“Oh, suddenly I am the one to blame here?”

“Naturally.”

“Well, fuck it. It’s worth it,” Yuto says, and then, quieter, closer, love in the form of a whisper.  “I missed you.”

Something eases in Ryosuke’s ribs. 

“I missed you more” he says, because it’s childish and true and he wants to win even at this.

Yuto nuzzles into the hinge of his jaw. “Nah.”

“You are so not winning this battle, Mr. Nakajima,” Ryosuke corrects, and turns his face to steal a kiss.

“Hey. I really did miss you,” Yuto whispers, as if the word were fragile glass. He kisses the corner of Ryosuke’s mouth, then his cheek, then the hinge of his jaw, a gentle inventory of what he gets to keep.

They talk about nothing and everything until words die and gravity pulls them together again. Ryosuke has no idea who kisses who first, but he doesn’t care. They grow steady, heavy and their breathing gets labored and everything starts feeling like pure electricity in his veins. Yuto gets hard again inside Ryosuke just with this. Just with Ryosuke kissing him over and over again. 

“Again?” Yuto asks, breathing hard. Ryosuke answers with his mouth before his voice, a soft kiss that deepens into a second, longer one, hips already rolling against to meet his thrusts. 

This time, they don’t hurry. Ryosuke cups Yuto’s jaw and pulls him in again, and the kiss makes their bodies boil with hunger. Yuto breathes him in with a sound that makes Ryosuke’s ribs ache. Fingers slide over his shoulder, his arm, his chest, his waist. Memorizing, checking, praying, claiming. The kind of touch that says I know where you live now: under my hands, under my tongue, inside my soul.

“Babe, love. I missed you,” Yuto says, hips snapping and colliding until Ryosuke eyes roll back with pleasure, close enough that the words land on Ryosuke’s mouth. “I missed you so much it felt like my heart was gone.”

“Here,” he whispers, pressing Yuto’s hand in his chest. “It’s here. Yuto, it’s always been here.”

Heat returns not like a strike but like a tide, a cautious rise that becomes the whole horizon before either of them can control it. They keep whispering to each other because talking keeps them human while the rest of them catch fire, little lights of assurance, like Yuto’s whispering yeah? right there? and Ryosuke answering in a wreck like that, just like that guiding themselves with a shift of knee, an angle of hip.

The sensation stacks, sweet on sweet, pressure on heat, until Ryosuke makes a sound he didn’t mean to make and immediately doesn’t care. 

“I—” he tries, and loses his sentence when Yuto’s hands settle more firmly, fucks him earnestly, fingers painting new constellations along his waist. It tips toward too much in the best way, white crowding his edges until they blur. “I—I can’t, I can’t—”

“Ryosuke,” Yuto anchors him until Ryosuke's irises find Yuto’s again.

The sight knocks like a punch. Yuto flushed and wide-eyed in the city’s late light, mouth parted, completely undone by the privilege of witnessing him this close. They say that sex is good, but sex with the love of your life is a life-changing experience. Ruins you forever. For Ryosuke, it feels like that every time.

“Honey,” Ryosuke says, reverent as a secret. “I love you.”

Ryosuke’s hand finds Yuto’s and brings it to his chest. Yuto lays his palm there, feeling the gallop under skin, and steadies it with a thumb pressed. Yuto looks at him and Ryosuke just knows Yuto loves him back just as violent and strong and pure. The world narrows to pulse and breath and the gentle, inevitable way their bodies answer to each other. The air takes on that charged quality of storm about to break.

They reach the edge together, again—no push, no hurry, just a shared, shivering yes that finds them at the exact same time and makes the ceiling swim. The silence after is bigger than the room. It hums through their bones. Ryosuke laughs once, shaking with relief. Yuto presses his forehead to Ryosuke’s and breathes like he’s been returned to himself.

Neither of them moves away. They lie there in the warm mess they’ve made, Yuto’s thumb drawing patient circles on Ryosuke’s ribs. Outside, Osaka turns one shade darker toward morning. Inside, two heartbeats slow and sync. The neon winks through the curtains, and where there might have been distance, there is still only warmth.

*

Christmas slips past like it’s on skates—staff in reindeer headbands, a glittery star Daiki insists on pinning to Ryosuke’s hoodie. He texts Yuto a photo and gets one back of a script bristling with tabs: Christmas dinner with thirty pages of monologue. Romantic, right? He grins into the dressing-room mirror and tells the mirror to behave.

JUMParty at New Year is a snow globe that somebody keeps shaking. Tokyo Dome hums like a living thing. They count down with thousands and the year turns with a pressure change in his chest—something that whispers, keep going. After, when the stage exhales and the seats look like sleeping scales, he stands in the wing and lets the quiet after soak into him. Somewhere in the dark, he imagines Yuto looking at a different ceiling, lines running under his tongue like prayer.

Yuto’s new play is with a Japanese actor Yuto has admired since he was a kid. The rehearsals eat his days and the photoshoots peck at whatever hours remain. Ryosuke learns train timetables to the theater by heart and the alleyway shortcut to the stage door where the lamplight always stutters. He attends as many nights as the tour lets him. On the nights the curtain drops and neither of them owes the public anything more, they end up in one apartment or the other, soup steaming in Yuto’s kitchen, socks on tile, low music from an old playlist.

They talk. Finally, they talk. On his couch, under a blanket the color clouds. At Yuto’s window while the city hum sets their glasses trembling. At Ryosuke’s tiny dining table. They talk about what they are and what they want and how those hands fit inside the public eye without tearing them. STARTO is a wall neither of them can pretend isn’t there. They hate it. They negotiate with it anyway, because in between the lines of their contracts there’s a clause that feels like a huge miracle: it is not a requirement to reveal who they are dating. Privacy is a right if you hold it tight enough. Disclosure is only mandatory when the status changes to—

“Marriage?” Ryosuke blurts.

They’re on the highway, the rest of the world reduced to white lane lines and the dark suggestion of trees. Yuto is driving, but he rolls his eyes so hard Ryosuke can feel the dramatic arc of it. He reaches across the console and finds Ryosuke’s hand, squeezing it once.

“Don’t freak out, Romeo,” he says, dry and fond. “I’m not proposing, if that’s what you’re worried about.” A heartbeat passes. “Yet.”

Ryosuke turns his head so fast his neck pops. “Yet?”

“I feel like there are several steps we’re missing before we even begin to fathom the idea of getting married, so calm down, tiger.” Yuto’s mouth tilts. His thumb is warm against Ryosuke’s knuckles. 

“Wait a minute,” Yamada says, “who says you are the one proposing? Why can’t it be me?”

“You are terrible at hiding things, babe.”

“So no true. I’ll propose the living daylights out of you. Just wait, Nakajima.”

Yuto splutters, half-scandalized, half-delighted. “Oh my god. Only you would turn our hypothetical proposal into a competition.”

The highway light draws and redraws his profile like a moving portrait. “We’ve known each other most of our lives. We’re only just figuring out that we’re—” He pauses, the word still too bright to look at head-on. “—that we’re us. And, by the way, we’re currently heading to dinner with my parents, at my childhood home, where you have been approximately a thousand times. So maybe let’s not game-plan proposals in the slow lane.”

“That’s very a me thing to do, I guess” Ryosuke murmurs, mortified and somehow glowing.

“That’s very a us thing to do,” Yuto corrects, and squeezes his hand again, like punctuation.

The houses get lower, the streetlights more patient. The Nakajima household hasn’t changed at all, the camellia bush is still stubborn near the gate, the welcome mat still frays at the corners like a book you reread too many times.

Ryosuke’s heart kicks. He tells himself not to be ridiculous. He fails at once.

“Why are you nervous?” Yuto asks, killing the engine. The sudden quiet fills the cabin. “You know they adore you. They adore you more than they adore me. Which, frankly, is rude.”

“This is different.” Ryosuke hears his own voice and wants to reach out and smooth it down. “I’m not here like a team member or best friend. I’m here as—”

“As my partner. Boyfriend. Love of my entire life,” Yuto says and laughs at Ryosuke’s red cheeks.

Inside, Mama Nakajima hugs Ryosuke like he has come home from three wars. She smells like oranges and home. 

“Ryo-chan,” she sighs into his shoulder, and he laughs helplessly because now the thought of even being nervous looks ridiculous in his mind. 

Papa Nakajima claps him on the back with a thump that rearranges his ribs.

“It was about time, don’t you think?” Papa Nakajima says. “We always knew you two would end up—”

“Oi,” Mama interrupts and swats the back of his head with loving precision. Yuto and Ryosuke are already red to the ears when Raiya appears from the hallway just to witness it and starts laughing.

Raiya teases them like it’s his paid job. He morphs the salt shaker into a microphone to “interview” them between dishes. 

“So, Mr. Yamada, on a scale from one to ten, how tolerable is my brother’s cooking?” he asks, while Mama Nakajima puts out platters that taste like childhood and holidays. “And, Mr. Nakajima, when did you realize you were dating a national treasure?”

“Zero,” Ryosuke says to the first question, without missing a beat. “And he realized it late,” he adds to the second, and Yuto’s foot nudges him under the table.

Dinner blooms easily—stories, refills, chopsticks tapping bowls like applause. Ryosuke watches Yuto watch his parents and feels something in him rest. If last year’s Ryosuke could see him now—laughing so hard his stomach hurts, warmed all the way to the bones, Yuto’s knee pressed to his under the table—he would shake his head and ask if he’d fallen on it. He would not believe how simple happiness can look when it finally arrives: a family table, a hand you don’t have to hide, the room where your name is said like a blessing.

Upstairs, the Yuto’s childhood bedroom has been tidied for guests but not rewritten. The posters are still on the walls, RHCP, Nirvana, Metallica. Diplomas and sports medals wink from walls where the paint has faded around their edges. On a shelf a vinyl collection from bands Yuto used to talk about until dawn, cases scuffed with years. Photos crowd a corkboard, old friends, backstage chaos, a shot of JUMP mid-laugh, one of him and Yuto grinning at the camera. When they turn out the light, the ceiling sparks because glow-in-the-dark stars are scattered across the ceiling like their own private galaxy.

Mama Nakajima has laid out a futon wide enough for two. They shower, complain half-heartedly about who used the last of the hot water (Raiya, obviously) and forget about sleep the way you forget you left tea steeping in another room. 

They don’t mean to make out. It just happens in that simple, inevitable way, an arm across a waist, a hand finding the back of a neck, a mouth meeting a sigh. Lazy, unhurried. Yuto rolls onto an elbow and looks at him the way you look at something you’ve wanted too long to risk blinking. 

“If teenage me knew I’d be making out with my archnemesis in this exact bed,” he says, eyes bright, “he would combust.”

“I was never your archnemesis,” Ryosuke says, pretending to be offended and failing. “You were just annoying and tall.”

“Mean,” Yuto says, delighted. He kisses him again, gentler.

“When did you realize?” Ryosuke asks into his mouth, barely separating the words from the warmth. “That you liked me.”

Yuto goes quiet in that way that means he isn’t looking for a clever answer. He’s looking for the truth. 

“Honestly, I don’t know when it started,” he says. “There isn’t a clean start to it. But I know when I started pretending it wasn’t there,” he meets Ryosuke’s eyes. “After we made peace, in 2013. That night with the beers and too much honesty. It feels like something inside me broke and it was—freeing. Like I’ve been holding a door shut against a storm and suddenly realize the storm is a summer day and the house won’t flood.” He huffs a laugh at himself. “From there it kind of snowballed pretty fast. I made jokes and looked at you first to see if you had laughed. I took photos of you when I had no right to look that long. I’m greedy. I want your eyes on me and only me all the time.”

Ryosuke lies there, undone by the gentleness of being seen and the audacity of being wanted. He tucks a hand at Yuto’s hip like he can keep the words from falling on the floor and breaking. 

“You’re—” he starts, and doesn’t finish, because the rest of the sentence is in his face and his throat.

Yuto feels it, smiles that small relieved smile, and turns the question. “When did you know?”

Ryosuke makes a face. “No.”

“Yes,” Yuto states.

“It’s embarrassing.”

“The more reason to tell me.”

Ryosuke attempts a theatrical pivot. “We should sleep. It’s pretty late—”

Yuto slides a hand under the covers to Ryosuke’s side with childish menace. 

“Well, then…” he warns, tapping at Ryosuke’s ribs. “I will resort to violence!”

Ryosuke yelps, tries to wriggle away, fails. “Yuto—stop—oh my god—”

“Confess!” Yuto says, mercilessly, tickling with the authority of someone who has known these angles since trainee days.

The door opens with the same force of an explosion. 

Yuto’s mom barrels through first, hair wild, clutching a laptop like it’s the most important evidence in a crime drama. Yuto’s dad and Raiya stack up behind her like a startled chorus line.

“Dear God, Yuto, do you see the news—?!” She starts, and then, mid-stride, takes in the bed, the shared futon and the very obvious closeness. “OH MY GOD.” She gasps, whirls, and tries to shield three sets of eyes at once—her own, her husband’s, and Raiya’s—with a single flailing hand. “Close your eyes! Everyone close your eyes!”

“Mom—no—nothing is happening!” Yuto blurts, voice jumping an octave.

“Definitely nothing!” Ryosuke echoes, mortified and somehow laughing, dragging the blanket higher even though they’re both fully decent.

From behind her, Yuto’s dad says in a reasonable voice, “Even if something were happening, none of us would hear a thing over Raiya’s snoring.”

“I do not—!” Raiya starts, affronted, and then stops, reconsiders. “Okay, yeah. You are right.”

“Everyone stop talking nonsense!” Yuto’s mom yelps, marching forward and practically shoving the laptop into their faces. The screen lights the room like a lightning strike, Ryosuke winces as his pupils try to catch up. “Nakajima Yuto, what is this? What’s the meaning of this? Is this true? Oh my God, oh my God—”

The brightness settles. The headline sharpens.

Ryosuke’s breath leaves him in a small, stunned sound.

On the homepage of a major news site, beneath a photo of Yuto he recognizes from the Los Angeles press kit, the text is impossibly, perfectly clear:

ACADEMY AWARDS: BEST ACTOR NOMINEES ANNOUNCED — YUTO NAKAJIMA AMONG THIS YEAR’S FIVE WITH BLACK WATERS

For a beat, the room falls into the kind of silence that doesn’t exist in normal houses. It’s the backstage silence before a curtain lifts. It’s the stillness in a rehearsal room when a count reaches eight and becomes something else.

Beside Ryosuke, Yuto goes very, very still. His eyes track the headline like he’s trying to find the trick in it. He shakes his head once, then again—small, disbelieving no’s, as if he can physically refuse it and the letters will rearrange into a joke.

But then, Yuto’s phone on the low dresser starts vibrating so hard it buzzes itself crooked. Messages stack in a waterfall—manager, publicist, friends, co-stars—notifications blooming faster than the screen can list them. 

An incoming call takes over the chaos. It’s Yuto’s manager. 

Yuto stares at the phone as if it’s a new species.

Ryosuke reaches for his hand under the blanket and squeezes, hard enough to anchor. Yuto looks over—really looks—and whatever is wild in his eyes finds ground.

Ryosuke is already smiling, tears at the edges, like sunlight hitting water. 

“Answer it!” he says, voice wrecked with joy.

Yuto makes a helpless sound that might be a laugh. He fumbles the phone to his ear. 

“Hello—” He doesn’t get farther. Even at arm’s length, Ryosuke would be able to hear pure chaos on the other end, shouted congratulations, a schedule avalanching into existence, someone insisting on media windows, the words “YOU DID IT!” firing off like confetti.

Yuto’s mom presses a hand to her mouth, eyes glossy, the laptop screen now a ridiculous and perfect nightlight. Yuto’s dad stands there very upright, the kind of pride that makes his neck straighten. Raiya, who comes in to tease and stays to witness, leans in the doorframe with his arms crossed with a grin.

“Okay,” Yuto keeps saying into the phone, dazed and obedient. “Okay. Okay.” He looks at Ryosuke between okays, the look a thousand things at once—shock, gratitude, the white-hot edge of wonder, the kid who first walks into a practice room and falls in love with mirrors and sound and the impossible job of becoming himself.

Ryosuke slides their joined hands up, kisses Yuto’s knuckles, tastes salt he can’t swear isn’t his. Yuto’s mom finally remembers how to move and launches herself at the bed in a wobbly, glorious hug that takes in both of them. Yuto’s dad arrives a heartbeat later with a back-pat that shakes them both. Raiya piles on top with zero grace and all intention.

Somewhere in the middle of the mayhem, Yuto says into the phone, breathless and laughing, “I’m with my family,” and the word lands in the room with perfect weight.

The call ends only when someone on the other side insists he hang up and watch the announcement replay on television. The phone goes quiet for a quarter second, then resumes buzzing like a trapped bee. Yuto puts it face down, like he can pause time by flipping it over.

He turns to Ryosuke, hair crushed on one side from the hug, eyes bright to the point of danger. “Is…is this—?”

“Yes! Yes, it’s real!” Ryosuke claims, answering the part of the question that doesn’t have a mark at the end. “It’s happening!”

Yuto’s laugh comes up raw and beautiful. He frames Ryosuke’s face with both hands, and for a moment it’s just them again—no laptop glow, no buzzing phone, no chorus behind them—only the breath they share and history trembling in his fingers.

“Okay,” Yuto whispers, like he’s promising something. “Okay.”

Down the hall, the house exhales—the clatter of someone hunting for bowls, popcorn, the murmur of a TV waking, the ordinary music of a family in shock and joy. The glow-stars above them do their cheap, faithful impression of a sky. For a ridiculous second, it feels like the ceiling has rearranged its constellations to make room for one more.

*

Japan loses its freaking mind.

Yuto’s name is suddenly everywhere: headlines jockeying for space, panel shows tripping over each other to book him, magazines racing to stamp his face on covers they haven’t even designed yet. Casting directors start saying his name as if it is a key that unlocks international money. The news hits overseas and ricochets back. American morning shows learn to pronounce Nakajima with careful mouths, blogs writing breathless think pieces about “Japan’s hidden ace.”

The popularity wave rolls through JUMP, too. People who’ve never heard the name are suddenly pressing play on fifteen years of catalog, falling down rabbit holes of concerts and behind-the-scenes clips. The numbers climb. The comments fill. The members laugh about it in their group chat, half-dizzy, half-dazed. Collateral popularity, Inoo writes, adding an emoji of a meteor smashing into a heart.

A few days later, Ryosuke walks through Shibuya because sometimes it’s important to look straight at the thing that used to scare you. Neon climbs the buildings like vines. Screens loop Yuto’s interview clips until even the air seems to say his name. Once upon a time these lights felt like knives aimed at his ribs. Once, they made his chest a battlefield of loneliness and loss. Now he stops in the middle of the crossing, scarf up against the cold, and lets a five-story Yuto grin spill onto him like the weather. They don’t haunt him anymore. They don’t mock him. He smiles back, helpless and proud.

That’s my person, he thinks. Not as a possession—never that—but as a fact: the love of his life lights up a city and the city looks better for it.

He takes a photo and sends it to the group: 

You > Yabu and his sons

You: (photo attached) @yuto you’re blocking traffic again. 

Takaki replies with seventeen camera emojis. Chinen sends a single star.

At the agency, JUMP’s “Congratulations!” is a chorus at a volume that probably violates safety codes and the cake they bring to the celebration is shaped like an Oscar holding a drumstick. 

Yabu claps Yuto on the shoulder with the gravity of a man blessing a ship.

“When you get on stage,” he intones, “remember to say you learned everything from me.”

Yuto folds himself in half laughing. “Of course, Sensei.”

Inoo arrives late on purpose to maximize impact, peeling off his coat to reveal a T-shirt that reads I KNEW YUTO NAKAJIMA FIRST in big block letters. He turns in a circle like a model on a bad runway.

“Limited edition,” he announces.

Takaki is already ten minutes into a documentary he has not been asked to direct, snapping photos of everything—the cake crumb on Yabu’s hoodie, Daiki’s tears in close-up, the way Yuto’s hand keeps finding the back of Ryosuke’s coat without thinking.

Hikaru corners Yuto by the paper cups and delivers a thorough lecture titled How To Not Die In America. 

“Hydrate,” he says, ticking off points on his fingers. “Moisturize. Do not accept invitations from hosts that dares you to eat hot chicken wings. If a talk show plays a prank, you’re allowed to scream. Learn to say ‘I don’t think so’ in a way that sounds both charming and threatening. Never trust a cupcake with glitter. Or a cat.”

Chinen waits his turn, then unfolds a meticulous souvenir list that begins with “weird cereal flavors” and ends with “a life-sized labubu.”

Ryosuke mostly watches and lets the room love Yuto in the loud way people do when they’re proud and a little overwhelmed. Every time Yuto meets his eyes, the volume in Ryosuke’s chest turns down just enough to breathe.

Months telescope. Popularity rises like a tide and learns where to sit. Yuto lives in fittings and flights, makeup chairs and microphones, a new play that eats his nights and feeds his bones. He is everywhere and somehow still texts from airport lounges like a person refusing to float away. Ryosuke works, learns new stages, sleeps. They compare calendars like puzzle pieces.

“Come with me,” Yuto asks one night over late dinner at Ryosuke’s place, both of them in their summer pajamas, the city pressed warm against the windows. “To the Oscars.”

“Hah?” Ryosuke says, practical and fierce. “What?”

“Ryosuke,” Yuto laughs, then sobers. “Win or not, I’m not going unless you’re beside me.”

“Is that a threat?” Ryosuke asks.

“It’s reality. I can’t do this without you,” Yuto says. “I need you”

In this sense, STARTO has rules. But STARTO also has a new golden boy. Yuto doesn’t ask so much as informs, politely, in complete sentences and with his manager on speaker. Permission arrives through email, stamped and sealed. The irony tastes strange.

“Because it’s funny,” Chinen says later, sprawled across a green room couch with heart-shaped party sunglasses from some photoshoot. “They tried to erase you from our story once. Now they’re eating out of your hand.”

Yuto looks a bit uncomfortable with that fact but the group is kind and honest.

“Head up, Japan’s ace,” Hikaru tells him. “You’ve earned every single thing of what’s happening. This moment is yours.”

Yuto nods and learns to carry that pride without an apology.

*

Los Angeles takes them in like a warm, slightly ridiculous dream.

They make a game of dawns: whoever wakes first drags the other to coffee. Some mornings it is a quiet café in Silver Lake where the barista draws leaves in their foam. Other days they stand at a walk-up window near the beach with paper cups too hot to hold, watching runners dodge pelicans. They buy a disposable camera and then use every shot, Yuto squinting under a mural, Ryosuke mid-laugh with a street taco tilted dangerously, the two of them kissing at a very bad angle. 

They hike up toward the ridge above the Hollywood sign, stopping every few switchbacks because Ryosuke insists that the city looks different from one bend to the next. At Griffith Park, they press their foreheads to the cold rail and let the wind comb their hair. At the Broad Museum they fall quiet in front of a room that looks like an infinity of art history and new perspectives. They do the tourist things without apology, Santa Monica pier with its loud joy, a bike ride to Venice beach where the pavement glitters with skateboard dust, the canal bridges that make Ryosuke feel like he’s stepped into someone else’s postcard. They find Little Tokyo and buy too many snacks, then find Koreatown and sing until their throats are wrecked in a private karaoke room that makes them miss and love Japan at the same time.

They wander the aisles at a record store so big it feels like a cathedral, arguing playfully about which vinyl earns suitcase space (although Yuto runs through the place like a kid in a candy store). They eat fruits that taste like sunshine from the farmers market, burn their tongues on late-night ramen, and learn which taco truck’s salsa means business. They sit in a tiny revival theater where the seats squeak and the projector hiccups, and Yuto squeezes Ryosuke’s knee when the lead actor cries like a thunderhead. Back in the hotel, the city hushes through double glass while they trip over each other and into each other with the relief of people who are allowed to want what they want. Sometimes, they don’t leave the bed for hours. 

They keep JUMP in the loop because love multiplies when it is shared: selfies at the pier, Yuto’s terrible attempt at surfing and Takaki’s thirty crying-laugh emojis, a panoramic from the hike and Chinen demands their next vacation to be LA. Inoo demands photos of every “weird American snack”. Yabu sends practical questions about weather and schedule, and Hikaru asks Yuto photos of all the bass guitars he finds cool enough to show him. One afternoon in the Arts District, they literally bump into freaking Pedro Pascal coming out of a gallery. He is kind in the way that makes time feel slower. When Yuto shyly explains the group chat, Pedro grins into Ryosuke’s phone and records a short video.

“Hey, Hey! Say! JUMP. Sending love from LA!” 

It’s a short video but enough to make Daiki send a full-minute-voice-memo of incoherent joy. Inoo writes that he’s keeping the video like a family treasure, Hikaru types in caps I LOVE YOU PEDRITO, Yabu sends a decent audio greeting Pedro like he’s the only one who knows how to behave, and Takaki demands Yuto and Ryosuke to tell him every single detail of Pedro’s outfit to replicate it. 

But time is greedy when you’re happy. The week runs itself and suddenly it is The Day.

The suit makes Yuto into some amplified version of himself, clean lines, quiet power, the kind of handsomeness that isn’t loud because it doesn’t need to be. In the mirrored door of the hotel wardrobe, Ryosuke catches sight of them both and has to look away before he forgets how to breathe. He wants to keep Yuto in his pocket, selfish as a child with a sparkly marble. He also wants to show him off for the entire world to see how wonderful he is.

The limousine’s interior feels unreal: soft leather, bottled water lined like soldiers, a small dish of mints they don’t dare to touch. Outside, the city stacks itself into barricades and bleachers. The car creeps into the queue of arrivals and somewhere ahead, cameras flicker like a swarm of electric bees. 

Ryosuke sees it then—how the nerves have crept in under Yuto’s jacket. The still hands, the measured breath. He slides his palm into Yuto’s and threads their fingers, the gesture small and private in a space designed to be neither.

“Remember when you asked me when did I realize I fell in love with you?” Ryosuke says, casually on purpose.

Yuto blinks, surprise loosening his mouth. “You didn’t answer.”

“Ask me again.”

“When did you know?” Yuto turns on the seat to face him more fully. 

Ryosuke tips his head, letting the car’s slow motion rock him back through the years. 

“When I was ten years old, I went to an audition," he says. “I wandered a hallway I was not supposed to and looked through a little window into a rehearsal room. There was a boy too young to be practicing with the older ones. He moved like the music was inside his bones. I watched him and I—I just knew what I wanted to be. Not famous. Not special. Just like him.” He swallows. The memory still tastes like electricity. “I didn’t know the word for it then. But I do now,” Ryosuke brings Yuto’s knuckles to his mouth and kisses them softly. “I fell in love with the star I saw more than twenty years ago. And he’s still the brightest one in any room.”

For a beat, the world narrows to the soft roll of tires and Yuto’s eyes—wet, shining, unashamed. He slides closer on the slick seat until their knees press.

“You know I love you, right?” Yuto says, voice careful like he is holding something breakable. “You know I will love you forever—you know that, right?” Ryosuke opens his mouth to say something reasonable about the future and how things could be different and how no one knows what’s going to come, but Yuto shakes his head, urgency gentle and absolute. “No—no, no, listen,” Yuto says. “You’re not understanding me. You are it for me, Ryosuke. It’s you, or no one. I don’t mean it like—” he huffs a small nervous laugh. “I mean as in I will never love anyone like I love you. Like I’m loving you now,” the grip in their joined hands tightens. “And yeah, everyone keeps saying I’ll win, but even if I don’t, this—” he lifts their joined hands, the knot of them suddenly the only holy thing that matters. “This is the part that makes me whole. This is the part that makes the world make sense.”

Ryosuke kisses him. How could he not? He has kissed Yuto a thousand times in hallways and kitchens and hotels rooms and rooms with silly star stickers, but he tries to lay this one down like a foundation stone—weight-bearing, weatherproof, something you can build a life on. 

Yuto answers like he’s been waiting for this exact moment. 

The car eases to a stop. The small intercom clicks. 

“Mr. Nakajima, Mr. Yamada,” the driver says, courteous and steady. “You’re up.”

Through the tinted glass, the world is a smear of color and flash. Ryosuke squeezes Yuto’s hand once more and leans in, breathing the words into the small space between them.

“Look at me. Just look at me,” Ryosuke says, right here and right now. “I’m here.”

Yuto meets his eyes and nods, an anchor dropping. They settle back into the choreography of the moment. The door opens, the night rushes in. Lights go from faraway stars to blinding days. A hundred voices rise and try to pull them apart into sound bites and angles and headlines.

They step out together anyway.

Leave it to us,

We are the challengers of the unknown.

(Challengers, The New Pornographers)

FIN