Chapter Text
As Coach predicted, it rained. More specifically, it started raining the instant they left the gym. A cold December rain that soaked through to the bone. Neither had brought an umbrella in the early morning chaos. The only way to reach the school entrance was to cross the covered sidewalks that connected it to the athletic complex. Unfortunately, about half the way was under construction, open to the rain. They couldn’t rush for fear of Akaashi turning Bokuto’s ankle again. So they walked, bags over their heads, hoping their books weren’t ruined.
When they finally arrived outside of Bokuto’s classroom, they were both drenched anywhere their coats hadn’t covered.
“I don’t have any exams today, Bokuto-san.” Bokuto was making Akaashi’s voice sound much too bright, even with chattering teeth. They had arrived in-between classes, and Bokuto’s classmates could clearly hear them. They had no reason not to pay attention to the freezing, dripping idiots in the hallway.
“You’ll be fine,” Bokuto smiled like he wasn’t supposed to. He smacked Akaashi’s back, wincing immediately afterwards.
Served him right.
“Here.”
Before he even stepped fully into the room a sort of generically handsome student waved a towel in front of his face. “Dry yourself off, ace. You should get out of those wet clothes. Change into your volleyball uniform, maybe? Wouldn’t want our star player to lose nationals for us twice in a row, now would we?”
Akaashi did not intend to take the towel. It would be preferable to freeze to death. But considering retaliatory options proved unnecessary because four other students immediately got in the handsome student’s face.
“You’re a dick, Nakihara,” the smallest, a rather adorable girl, spat. She then proceeded to chew him out so loudly and quickly it was impossible to really tell what she was saying.
Don’t talk to Nakihara. Bokuto had muttered with his chin tucked into his neck as he twisted on the swing. He’s a dick. His friends are too.
Well, it wasn’t as though they had nametags.
The tallest of his four saviors ran over to his desk and dug in a sports bag – basketball probably – before rushing back.
“Here you go man,” he sat three towels right on Akaashi’s head with casual physical familiarity. Akaashi was unused to anyone but Bokuto himself getting into his space, though for his part he always kept a respectable distance between them. It was hard not to step away from the stranger on reflex alone.
“Are you alright? Is your ankle okay?” another one asked, a shorter boy with a buzzcut. One of the stars of the soccer team, if Akaashi remembered correctly.
“Yeah!” he gave an exaggerated shrug, which made the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt and jacket chafe against his forearms. Luckily, his uniform had been protected by his coat, otherwise he really would have to change. “Just twisted it. The ice is just in case.” It was more syllables than Bokuto would have used, but he’d given it his best.
The short girl came back and punched him in the arm, growling that he’d better be okay. It was somehow meant to be encouraging. Luckily Akaashi didn’t have to try to guess at their names, because the math teacher had entered the room and everyone was taking their seats.
Bokuto’s seat was in the front of the class, directly in the center. It’s so I pay attention. he had said sheepishly, the words sounding sloppy and cartoonish in his mouth.
Akaashi’s mouth.
This confusion had to stop. Bokuto’s body was Akaashi’s own for the foreseeable future. He would now refer to it as his, and his former body as Bokuto’s because this mental juggling was causing even more strain on his already exhausted mental facilities.
“Did Akaashi like his present?” a voice next to him whispered while the teacher painstaking wrote a series of problems on the board. He turned his head slightly, then all at once like Bokuto would, revealing an eager girl with a crown braid made from hair that was too short and too fine. She was wearing as much jewelry as the school dress code would allow. Perhaps a little more; most of it was hidden in her uniform. It all seemed to involve anime characters on ice skates. He recognized them from a certain gay lifestyle blog that he followed.
“He did,” Akaashi responded, trying to be excited and whisper at the same time, “I knew it would be the best one.”
It really had.
“I told you!” she smiled. “You know him better than anybody else, of course you’re gonna get him the best present.”
“Thanks,” he took a deep breath and tried to relax into what he knew had to come next, “Hoshi-chan!”
She giggled and began to quietly babble about the romantic Christmas she had planned for her girlfriend. He tried to follow what she was saying, but it was difficult because she kept referencing prior conversations and the sound of the squeaky chalk on the board reminded him of just where he was. But more than that, he found himself mesmerized by the way the lines scraped across the board.
Hoshi cleared her throat in a way that made him turn to look at her again. She was spinning her necklace. Two ice skaters, one with grey hair and one with black twirled around each other as she gave a sly grin. “You should ask Akaashi to do something with you for Christmas…”
“Excuse me?” he squawked, just as the teacher stopped writing.
The teacher turned, a cruel smile on his face, revealing the problem he’d written, “Excuse you indeed, Bokuto-kun. Since you’ve so happily volunteered, please, calculate the limit as x approaches infinity.”
My math teacher’s a dick too.
“Remember what I said, Kouchan,” Hoshi whispered, anxious but trying to be reassuring. “Just try to focus, you know how to do it! You’re the one who taught me.”
Akaashi did not know even know what a limit was. His exam scores in math thus far had required copious studying. What’s more he was studying trigonometry. This was advanced algebra. He was going to do terribly, but the atmosphere of the room indicated that such an eventuality was expected, anticipated, or dreaded.
He lifted himself out of his chair and accidentally shoved his desk a meter in front of him. Everyone laughed, some much louder than others.
There were three potential reactions in the face of such embarrassment. Bokuto would: A. laugh too and shrug it off, B. protest that it was his ankle for some reason, or C. march in complete humiliation to the board. C was the most unlikely and also the most mortifying for Bokuto, but it was also easiest option for Akaashi to pull off. He was worried that if he got too excited he’d be once again unable to calm down. His responses needed to be as measured as Bokuto could give on his best day.
“I twisted my ankle during practice,” Akaashi said with the same passion he would give to reading a dictionary out loud. Overdoing it, he inadvertently used B to make C essentially a given.
The limp to the board was extraordinarily long and awkward.
He watched the rain as the teacher spent the rest of the class berating his pathetic solution. Akaashi had never had a teacher this bad in his life. Usually they worked with the class to guide a struggling student. But apparently, Ueda-sensei did not care about modern Japanese pedagogy. No wonder Bokuto was so embarrassed about failing his math tests. It was clear he was hardly a model student, but he seemed understand the basic concepts until his teacher inserted himself into the equation.
Akaashi could not be humiliated by such an incompetent asshole, but he was not himself right now. Based on Hoshi’s reaction, as well as the students who had come to his aid at the beginning of class, Bokuto was frequently the object of some kind of ridicule and it got to him often enough. The idea of anyone outside of the team daring to mock their captain angered Akaashi in a way that had nothing to do with his current brain’s capacity to restrain emotion. He tried his best to channel his cold fury into a weight that kept his head resting on his arms. In such a position, he stared at the trails of water that ran down the windows and idly wondered how he could orchestrate a teacher’s forced retirement.
The wildness that had run through his mind that morning had calmed somewhat. The unexpected cold shower had halted the vicious cycle of anxiety over all of Bokuto’s potential futures that he could destroy. Now he felt exhausted, wrung out, though it was easier to think clearly. But still not as easy as it might be. He was now in possession of a brain that ran much faster than his, but wore itself out just as quickly.
That difficulty aside, the range of emotions from the morning far surpassed anything Akaashi had ever experienced or understood. He couldn’t decide if he hated it, or if it was the most sublime experience of his life. The run during practice, something he typically enjoyed very much, had risen to another plane of existence entirely. It was as though he had been physically lifted by his endorphins and carried through the air. But that same energy took his predisposition to organize, manage, and manipulate the world around him and exploded it into a world of anxious possible futures.
There was no question that Bokuto’s experience in his own brain was different. Akaashi was not concerned in the slightest what people thought of him, while Bokuto was desperate for praise. Bokuto rarely worried himself with the future, and yet anxieties over every possible eventuality were spiraling out of control in Akaashi’s mind. It seemed that their most urgent considerations rose to the top and then were impossible to push away despite more practical matters.
He had always on some level known that Bokuto’s behavior came from a deeper place than just being the bratty youngest child. In fact, Bokuto had told him as much last year when he awkwardly explained his first visit to a psychiatrist. But there was a difference between knowing and experiencing.
A very large one.
“Now,” Hoshi said in a voice that was certainly intended to cheer him up, “we are going to talk about Akaashi whether you like it or not.”
Try not to talk to Hoshi too much. She’s really cool but she has crazy ideas sometimes. Really crazy, I mean, Akaashi, you would not believe the stuff she says!
Akaashi grunted, barely audible over the chatter of others in the class. It was thundering outside, enough of a rarity for the English teacher, an older woman from America, to give them time for “conversation practice” while she listened to the sounds of the thunder wistfully.
“Look, you can’t play dumb with me. I know you like boys just as much as girls. Plus, you can’t talk about someone that much and not have some kind of feelings, best friend or not.”
Best friend?
That’s what Bokuto called him?
“See!” Hoshi leaned over across her desk, “You’re blushing! You like him, just admit it! I don’t even get why you’re scared. Look, I know, you’ve never been confessed to, but that’s only because people are dumb. If you were a girl I’d be all over you, you know. I like my ladies muscular.”
Bokuto would probably preen at a statement like that, so Akaashi tried, but the current situation made it challenging.
Was Bokuto his best friend? He could count the number of friends he had on one hand, but he never even counted Bokuto within that number. Bokuto was… well, he was a teammate of course. And teammates were not necessarily friends. They were simultaneously more and less. But even among his teammates, Bokuto seemed to be something else. Whatever that something was, it was a position that only he held.
Akaashi had always assumed that the obnoxious middle blocker from Nekoma was the person Bokuto considered his best friend. Actually, if Akaashi hadn’t overheard the two of them earnestly discussing Kuroo’s romantic woes in regards to his setter, he would have just assumed that Bokuto was madly in love with the utter pain in the ass. He certainly talked about him enough. This proved, then, that talking frequently about someone could not be an indicator of romantic interest in Bokuto’s case. Hoshi was confused.
“What makes you think I like him so much?” the question was a gravely whine and Akaashi had no idea how it had escaped out of his mouth.
Hoshi rolled her eyes. They were a beautiful obsidian and he assumed her girlfriend probably loved to gaze into them. The thought struck that he had stared into his own eyes that morning. They weren’t really as cold as everyone implied, but Bokuto had been the one behind them.
“I’ve told you like twenty times. We talked about what you wanted to get him for like, four weeks before his birthday. Every morning after practice you can’t go without mentioning his name every other minute. You talk about him constantly.”
“I talk about Kuroo too!” he objected with reasonable hope.
“Kuroo agrees with me!”
Akaashi accidentally shoved his desk across the room.
The teacher, Miller-sensei, smiled at him. “Don’t get too excited, Bokuto-kun,” she said.
“Sorry, Miller-sensei! I forgot my own strength,” Akaashi replied, unsure how to sound sheepish but trying his best.
The woman’s eyes opened wide, and half the class gasped.
Oh. That had been in English.
Bokuto was terrible at English. Akaashi, on the other hand, was fluent, having spent the first eight years of his life moving around the UK as his parents went from job to job. He didn’t even have to take the class. In fact when it came to writing, he felt his English was stronger than his Japanese.
“Have you been practicing with that setter of yours?” Miller-sensei beamed, her accented Japanese more challenging to understand. “I know Akaashi-kun is a proficient speaker but I had no idea he was such a talented tutor as well!”
Akaashi was perhaps the most incompetent tutor in existence.
“I’ve been watching a lot of American tv too,” he attempted to defend himself. Well, his other self. Actually it was less of a defense and more of an insistence on actual reality.
“I am happy to hear it,” she switched back to English.
He nodded, grinning so much that it hurt. He was probably wincing in actuality.
“See, this is what I’m talking about,” Hoshi tipped her head smugly. He taught you English.
“Pardon me but I need to use the restroom.”
That was not what Bokuto would have said.
He pulled off the plastic wrap and the bag full of cold water then threw the whole mess in the trash before unrolling his pant leg. It was wrinkled and sloppy, with damp spots from the melted ice. Perfect for the part he was playing.
Thankfully no one came in the bathroom during the long period where he stood in front of the urinal. Because although he’d certainly chosen an opportune time to leave the classroom, the reasons hadn’t been contrived. He had to piss. That wasn’t a big deal. He’d already had a long look at Bokuto’s penis in the shower. If he were the sort of person to feel jealous over such things, he’d have certainly been envious or perhaps even impressed, but since he was not, he wasn’t. Not at all.
But there was a difference between looking and what had to take place.
“Like ripping of a bandage, Keiji,” he muttered, pulling down his fly, trying to find a distracting thought.
It was not difficult.
Once the immediate weirdness was over (really just a difference in timing) the flurry of overwhelmed, outraged, humiliated, and bewildered feelings from the morning began to clamor for attention. He was proud of himself for holding them back for so long. It was hard to understand how Bokuto did it, because certain ones were piling up instead of clearing themselves away. Sorting through such chaos was a painstaking process. Some concepts were loud and demanded attention, and the only way to ground himself was to focus on physical reality. Which, he’d prefer play out on its own.
He put his free wrist against the cold tile and tried to think about that.
Out of everything Hoshi, Miller-sensei, even that Nekoma bastard had said, nearly all of it was speculation. The way Hoshi had addressed the subject clearly indicated that it was something she regularly pushed, not something that Bokuto had ever said himself. So Akaashi was going to give him the benefit of the doubt, if he could calm himself down enough to do it.
But Bokuto had unquestionably told her that Akaashi was his best friend.
A shake and a zip and it was done. Not as bad as he’d expected, though something he’d rather not get used to either. He briefly imagined Bokuto in the same position, then let out an unexpected bark of laughter as he went to wash his hands.
“Bokuto says I’m his best friend,” he said to the mirror, as though the Bokuto reflecting back at him could add his own commentary.
What was a best friend, anyway? Until Fukurodani, he hadn’t stayed in one place for more than three years at a time. His parents worked for a scientific foundation, not a university. They went where they were sent and stayed for as long as it took. There had been a few birthdays together in the middle of nowhere. Birthdays apart more often than not.
There was another flash of light, followed by a clap of thunder that rattled the windows. He hadn’t heard a storm this loud since the summer he’d spent in Cambodia. This degree of thunder and lightning were a rarity in Tokyo. Especially in the winter. It had to be climate change.
This wasn’t what he was supposed to be thinking about. Gold eyes blinked back at him, atypically judgmental. Not a good look on Bokuto’s guileless face.
He’d always assumed a best friend was someone you knew for more than a schoolyear or two. Someone with whom you shared everything: secrets, deep feelings, dark worries. But those had always been things that Akaashi never shared with anyone, certainly not Bokuto.
And yet, there wasn’t a word for what Bokuto was to him. He was certainly the only person Akaashi felt even remotely comfortable switching bodies with, which was ridiculous considering Bokuto was Bokuto. He wasn’t really a friend, at least not in the casual way Akaashi preferred. He was more than a teammate, certainly. He was someone who needed taken care of, and then abruptly took care of everyone. Someone… bizarrely interesting… energizing… unexpectedly gentle…
Bokuto’s face wasn’t as soft with Akaashi behind it. He missed that softness. He hadn’t even realized it existed before… no, that was a lie. It had been creeping up, again and again, both in Bokuto’s behavior and his own heart. There was a place in his mind where he locked away Bokuto’s admirable, no, attractive qualities and his own reactions to them. Instances that he insisted were nothing but freak occurrences. December thunderstorms.
But this brain did not have locks.
What would it be like, to have a best friend? It was a nebulous title, if Bokuto could give it without Akaashi’s knowledge. Was it something that Akaashi even wanted? And if it was, if he told Bokuto that they were, in fact, best friends, would anything change about their current dynamic? Would the soft ache that was slowly growing into a low rumble of both terror and excitement go away?
Bokuto’s eyes glowed with the next flash of lightning.
Did he want it to?