Chapter Text
The sky is cloudless and blue like an endless ocean, the day he meets a strange boy in the local park.
“I’m Katou Haru! What’s your name?”
Hardly any other kids his age come to this place. All the other kids in the neighborhood are either too old—busy with exams and clubs and always treating him like he’s dumb just because he’s younger than them—or too young, and no fun to play with at all.
Under Haru’s excited gaze the new kid opens his mouth as if to say something, and then his blue eyes flicker to the big guys in suits milling around the park perimeter. The new kid’s mouth clicks shut with an audible click, and he makes a face like he’s smelling feet and someone planted a raincloud firmly over his parade all rolled in one. It’s a pretty weird face to be honest.
“I. . . can’t tell you my name.” The new kid says, staring sullenly at his shoes. It’s kind of fascinating to watch the way his forehead scrunches up some more as he knits his eyebrows harder. Apparently the frowning is contagious, because Haru can feel himself frowning too.
“Of course you can! My dad says it’s rude to not introduce yourself properly when you meet someone for the first time.”
“I can’t!”
“Why can’t you!?” He can’t help the way he punctuates his statement with a foot stamp. He knows it’s childish, because whenever he does it all the grownups around him get that look on their face, and start treating him like a dumb little kid again. But sometimes he really can’t help it, like when he meets some weird kid in the park who won’t tell him their name even though it’s basic manners!
“My mom said I couldn’t!”
All of Haru’s anger drains out at that. “Oh, okay. Then I guess that’s alright.” He scuffs his sneakers awkwardly against the sandy ground underfoot. ‘Moms’ words are law’ that what his dad and his mom said, so he figures it doesn’t get much more concrete than that.
It seems pretty rude to just call the new kid ‘you’ all the time though, and his dad had told him that manners make the man or something like that. He stares at the unnamed new kid and racks his brain for a solution. The answer strikes him in a brilliant moment of enlightenment, partially inspired by the drama his dad watched last week where the hero had stumbled across a downtrodden, abandoned kid without a name. And then after a touching sequence of scenes where they gradually went from strangers to family, had at last given the no-longer-abandoned-child a name, thus solidifying their lifelong bonds of camaraderie.
He strikes his best hero pose, planting his hands on his hips and straightening his spine until he stands tall and imposing, regarding the new kid in a long assessing moment. As he makes up his mind, he reaches out a hand in an offer of lifelong companionship and declares the result of all the creativity and pride a ten year old can muster with tremendous gravitas:
“Aoi!”
In the movie there had been manly tears involved in this moment, and also a great deal of the sun making bright spots across the screen as the camera panned out until only the silhouettes of the new family could be seen. He doesn’t think real life quite has that kind of dramatic camera work, nor does the newly dubbed Aoi look very touched. The smelling socks expression has made a prompt return, impressively mixed with what is probably confusion.
"What? Why? What does that mean? "
"Blue!" He proclaims with all the same gravitas as his earlier proclamation. He had, with utmost ingenuity, selected Aoi's name based on the fact that his eyes are blue. The other leading option had been Kuro, after Aoi's hair, but that had felt a little too much like naming a pet.
Aoi wrinkles his nose, which kind of scrunches up his whole face. Actually most of Aoi’s expressions seem to involve contorting his face like a pile of laundry left out unfolded for too long.
“You couldn't have picked a cooler name?”
“Well I could pick a cooler one like your real name, if you would just tell me your real name!” He says it mostly on principle, since he knows Aoi can’t. But he might also be a little, teensy bit miffed Aoi doesn’t like the name Haru’s picked for him.
“Anyways, I'm gonna call you Aoi then.”
Aoi huffs and folds his arms, but he doesn’t complain anymore so Haru’s going to consider the matter settled. Anyways, he doesn’t think he can legally adopt Aoi, and he definitely doesn’t have enough money to get them both giant ice cream parfaits; so maybe it’s only proportional Aoi is grudgingly accepting of his new name instead of tearfully grateful.
They migrate to the swings after the name issue is resolved, and Haru learns something about Aoi that horrifies him to his very core:
“What do you mean you don’t know how to jump off the swings in midair??? How am I supposed to have a swing jump competition with someone who doesn’t know how!?”
“I’ve never done it before! I- I don’t think I’m allowed to.”
Haru rolls his eyes, “It’s easy!”
He kicks his feet in rhythm, raising higher and higher and feeling the wind rush against his face until he’s pretty sure he can’t possibly go up anymore. Then at the height of his last upward swing, he arcs off the seat, leaving the swing seat to collapse back down behind him in a cascade of tinkling chains.
His heart thunders while he rockets up with his leftover momentum, and then gravity drags him back down to earth and he tucks into a messy roll as he lands. When he comes out back onto his feet at the end, he’s breathless. “Just like that!” He grins at Aoi, his heart still beating a wild rush.
Aoi stares at him with knit brows for a moment, and then Haru can see his determination in the way his shoulders set and his jaw tightens. Aoi starts swinging his legs.
“Yeah! You can do it!”
He watches as Aoi inches upwards in fragments, until he definitely has to be higher than Haru was swinging. Aoi’s knuckles go pale, and then white with the strain of his grip on the chains, but at the very peak of a forward arc he lets go and soars.
Haru feels immeasurably proud for a second—like watching a weird, facially stunted baby bird taking the first flaps of its wings. And then he realizes that Aoi’s eyes are screwed tight and he’s curled up in an awkward ball as gravity starts taking its toll.
There’s no way he’ll land on his feet like that, Haru realizes in mounting horror. Aoi’s gonna land in an awkward jumble of limbs and scrape something and then there’ll be blood and maybe even tears and Aoi will never do a swing jump again and they’ll never manage to have a competition!
Haru darts forward, arms outstretched, hoping to at least slow Aoi’s descent enough that no blood is spilled—and is promptly bowled over by the entirety of the momentum behind one whole child catapulted from the swingset at Haru’s behest. When he manages to pry his eyes open, he stares at the cheery blue sky as he wheezes out breaths from mildly crushed lungs and wonders if this is what karma feels like.
“Are you,” he gasps, “okay?”
Aoi stands up and brushes off his shorts, unperturbed that his human crash pad is contemplating the concept of heavenly retribution while his lungs reinflate on the sandy ground. Aoi glances at his palms and holds them out for consideration. They’re red, and probably stinging, but they don’t seem scraped up badly and no blood is spilled. Haru considers this a job well done, or at least good enough.
He manages to get to his feet and brushes the clinging sand off as well. He’s probably a little bruised, but nothing his mom would fuss over. He glances up at Aoi ready to ask if that was fun or if that was fun, but his words die in his throat when he sees Aoi’s shoulders are up around his ears. Aoi looks thunderous.
Haru follows Aoi’s glare to the suited men who had been hovering around the outskirts of the park, now rapidly moving their way. He had seen them before, hadn’t thought much of them, but now that they’ve stuck around this whole time and are even coming closer, Haru doesn’t like them very much.
“Young master!” One of them calls. Which seems absurd—who the heck calls a kid ‘young master’ anymore? There had to be better pretenses than that. Aoi’s face scrunches up even more in response, which doesn’t seem to be a good sign. Now that he's paying attention to the men in suits, he quickly realizes that they’re all tall and more than that—they’re big, broad. He’s seen enough brawling in detective shows to know that size can make an incredible amount of difference in a fight.
Dangerous. “We need to- do you want to get away from them?” He stutters out, the dread in the pit of his stomach mounting with each step the men take their way.
Aoi snorts and rolls his eyes, “Yeah, of course. But-” Glad to hear they’re on the same page.
He seizes Aoi’s wrist and books it.
The back end of the park leads to a few walking trails that wind through dense thickets of trees. They’re pretty easy to navigate, as long as you stick to the trails. But Haru isn’t planning to do that—they’re trying to lose pursuers after all.
He dashes towards a clump of bowing shrubs, the gaps between them just enough for a small kid to fit through. As he slips through the first few he feels resistance in his hand and turns to Aoi, trying to figure out why he’s not coming along. Aoi is staring, wide eyed, at the men who were quickly closing in. If they didn’t go now they might not have a chance of losing the men in suits.
“Hurry!” He hisses at Aoi, shoving aside a few branches so they can make their way through the next layer of greenery. He used to be able to fit through all of these bushes without trouble, maybe he really was growing taller like all the cooing neighborhood moms said he was.
“You hurry up!” Aoi retorts, finally focused on actually getting away instead of staring helplessly behind them. They end up having to crawl on all fours through the last bit of underbrush, which really needs pruning or something, considering even reasonably small kids can barely get through. But it’s to their advantage this time. There’s no way a grown man could come through the path they did without raising a ruckus, and all the low lying shrubbery hides their tracks.
Haru stands and assesses the little glade in front of them. Only a few of the walking trails lead to this place but it’s still fairly accessible from the park; they need to go deeper. “Come on,” he checks that Aoi’s still following behind him and starts making his way to the path winding out on the far side of the clearing.
Once upon a time, it had been an uninterrupted dirt road to a pleasant little babbling brook. Last rainy season, a miniature rock slide had cut the path off, so now it just looked like a dead end. But he’s played in this park for ages and knows its secrets like the back of his hand.
He heaves himself onto the heap of crumbly stone and takes a wobbly step forwards, trying to find stable footing. It’s not a very wide rock slide, so it’s only a few steps across but, “Are you sure you’re gonna be okay?” He asks, eyeing Aoi’s weirdly shiny leather shoes. They’re not as polished as they had been, covered now with a fine layer of sand and dirt, but they look like the pair he was forced to wear when his aunt got married, and those had been the worst.
Aoi’s hackles go up immediately, his face doing a wrinkly thing that probably means he’s been offended and definitely going to prove Haru wrong. It kind of reminds Haru of the crotchety stray cat he also met in this park. It’ll let Haru feed it, but if he tries to touch it at all Haru usually goes home bleeding.
Aoi scrambles up the rocks with only a minor struggle, pointedly stomps across, and drops down to the other side. “Where to next?” Aoi demands, arms crossed. Haru snorts and clambers down behind him.
“Just a little bit more. We can wait around at the stream and then come back and check if the strange men are gone.”
It’s a pretty short walk to the brook after the rock slide. But when he stops at the creek bank and glances back, Aoi’s still hanging around the rock slide, a weirder expression on his face then normal.
“Aoi?”
“They’re not strange men.”
“. . .what? They were running after some kids they don’t know, of course they’re strange.”
“I do know them.”
He blinks. Processes that.
“You. . . know them?”
Aoi looks down, so Haru can’t really see what new variety of impressive facial contortion Aoi’s pulling off, but he does grit out as if it physically pains him to say, “They’re, my bodyguards.”
“You have a protection detail!?” Bodyguards!? Like for real, ‘Get down Prime Minister!’ bodyguards? Did that mean the ‘young master’ was real!? Wasn’t Aoi actually someone pretty important then? Aoi couldn’t tell Haru his real name either, so maybe his identity was a classified top secret! Maybe Aoi was the son of an international secret agent, and he was being raised for a life of espionage and spy craft! He’s about to tell Aoi Haru can definitely be trusted with his secret, and maybe ask about how to join a super secret spy organization.
However when he looks up, Aoi doesn’t really seem to be in the mood for being asked for favors. Aoi’s hands are fisted so tightly his knuckles are white again.
“I don’t need protecting!” Aoi snarls, fury like shards of glass in his words.
Haru snorts, and every line of Aoi’s body tenses at that, a bowstring drawn too tight. Aoi’s words really didn’t make sense at all.
“Yeah, you clearly do need protection. Those guys were there to protect you right? But you didn’t tell me about it and now we’re out here without them, so now I have to protect you.”
Haru’s been told he has a strong sense of personal responsibility, which is a very mature trait, his teacher has said. Aoi’s smaller than him, and didn’t even know how to play on the swings properly until Haru taught him earlier, so it’s only natural that since Haru dragged them away from Aoi’s bodyguards he should pick up the slack.
Aoi squares his shoulders and pins Haru with a livid glare in a single motion. A sense of foreboding curls in Haru’s stomach, icy, and he sees as if in slow motion the way Aoi gears up, plants his feet like the fighting stance Haru’s learned in judo, and rears back to put all his body weight into it. Haru narrows his eyes, and Aoi charges and shoves . Haru goes flying back — a surprising amount of power put into the shoulder check considering Aoi is definitely smaller than him — and lands in the creek behind them, soaking the seat of his pants with cold, mucky water.
Haru lunges forwards with his own snarl, lashing out and snagging Aoi’s ankle to drag him down from his dumb victorious pose so he can wipe Aoi’s annoying smug look off his face. He goes down with a screech like a declaration of war and they tussle down the stream in a tangle of thrashing limbs, spitting their best invectives the whole time.
“DUMB DUMB!”
“YOUR FACE IS DUMB! IT LOOKS LIKE AN UNFOLDED TOWEL!”
Somewhere after Haru working himself free and sprinting away from the tiny madman intent on fighting like a feral creature in a strategic withdrawal, and between Aoi’s knobby knee catching Haru in his ribs in a brutal tackle that sends them both rolling and shoves the breath from his lungs again, and Haru futilely trying to maneuver Aoi into various joints locks — except Aoi is definitely the son of super spy with super spy training because he keeps worming out of them —their anger starts fizzing out.
Haru makes it back onto the riverbank wheezing, with a few new sets of bruises. But he definitely gave as good as he got, so he doubts Aoi’s any better off than he is. “Draw?” He manages to huff out. “I definitely won,” Aoi retorts, but he accepts the hand Haru offers to help him up and Haru managed to get back on his feet first, so Haru doesn’t quite believe that.
Aoi primly brushes off his clothes, as if that’ll do anything to get the river muck out of them, and Haru surveys their surroundings to try to get back to the rock slide. Except. . . as he looks around some more, he realizes they’ve managed to make their way to a part of the forest he doesn’t really recognize.
“We should get back to your bodyguards,” Haru says. But Aoi must catch the hesitation in his words, or they way Haru's eyes are darting around, because his eyes abruptly narrow. “You don’t know where we are.”
“I do!” Haru takes another glance around, “. . . well, maybe I don’t really know. But I’ll be able to figure it out soon!”
Aoi snorts, the aggravatingly smug expression blossoming over his face again, which kind of makes Haru want to shove him back into the river again. “So much for protecting me,” he says, which definitely makes Haru want to shove him into the river again. But Aoi takes a look around, decides on a direction, and starts walking.
Haru hurries to follow him, trying to figure out how Aoi decided this was the correct way to go. He quickly gives in and just asks.
“The water current is stronger and the stream is wider behind us. We came from a little creek, so it can’t be that way.”
That seems to make enough sense, so Haru bites his tongue and keeps walking alongside Aoi. They walk for longer than Haru expected they would.
The sun has been setting earlier and earlier as the seasons changed, and the temperature drops as the sun starts making way down. It takes him a while to notice that Aoi’s cold, because Aoi’s forcing himself not to shiver by progressively tensing every muscle in his body so it doesn’t show. Aoi’s halfway to walking like a toy soldier when Haru realizes, but he should have known sooner, since Aoi is wearing a no longer starched and pristine white dress shirt and dress shorts rather than anything sensible. He really is a young master.
Haru shrugs off his jacket, reasonably dried off by now, and shoves it over Aoi’s head, then speeds up until he’s ahead and out of range of Aoi’s bony knees or elbows.
“I’m not weak! I don’t need protec-”
“It’s not weak to be cold, you weirdo. Anyways, that jacket is my favorite, so you better give it back to me in one piece! Alright?”
When he glances back, Aoi’s put the jacket on properly and shoved his hands in the pockets. Aoi snorts and shoves his nose in the air, “Unlike some people, I don’t like crawling around or fighting in creeks. I’m sure I’ll keep it much safer.”
Aoi was the one who shoved him into the creek! And the only reason they crawled through bushes was because someone hadn’t thought to tell him that the squad of giant suited guys on their tail were their bodyguards. Haru sputters indignantly, wordless at how Aoi’s twisted the situation, and by the time he’s done Aoi has walked past, still with his nose still stuck obnoxiously in the air.
Haru huffs and catches up.
Slowly, the scenery becomes more familiar, and when they slow to a stop the familiar hill of the rockslide looms a short distance away. They really did manage to make their way back!
They scramble over the rock pile again, and stick to the trails this time, to avoid getting lost again. As they get closer to the park, long beams of light start shining through the bushes. When they finally get back to the park, the number of suited men has doubled or tripled, all of them methodically sweeping every inch of the place wielding flashlights.
The second one of them spots Aoi, they raise alarm, and all suited men turn to pin them with stares in unison. It kind of reminds Haru of those funny animals he learned about at the zoo, meerkats? A collective sigh of relief sweeps the whole park.
They make a beeline towards Aoi, and he irritably brushes off the mother henning of his bodyguards a few times before he manages to break free so he can address Haru.
“I’ll see you again.” Aoi demands more than says, his forehead mildly scrunched in a minor frown.
“Sure,” Haru responds, trying not to seem too excited, “you still have my jacket after all.”
Aoi glances down at the hands, half swallowed by the slightly too long sleeves and grins at Haru. It’s kind of a weird grin, all poky at the edges like Aoi’s face is more used to making meaner expressions, but Haru’s pretty inured to Aoi’s weird faces at this point. Aoi nods once, firmly, and then walks away, his figure rapidly obscured by the herd of bodyguards falling into line behind him.
On the walk back home Haru can’t help thinking about it: How annoyed Aoi had been, having to break through a line of bodyguards just to say goodbye to another kid; how Aoi couldn’t even tell Haru his real name; and most of all, how Aoi had never been learned to do a jump swing. Maybe, being the kid of an international super spy was more trouble than it was worth.
He makes it home in time for dinner, and his Mom sighs in exasperation when she sees his ruined clothes and muddy face but fusses more about his lost jacket than anything.
“Are you sure you’re not upset Haru? You wear it everyday! I thought you liked that jacket the best?”
“Mmn, it’s okay. I’ll get it back, definitely!”
She frowns at him like she doesn’t believe him, but he’s pretty confident. He’s gonna get that jacket back.
(He’s gonna see Aoi again.)