still you don't regret a single day, 1/2
Title: still you don't regret a single day
Pairing(s): Aiba/Nino
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~16,600
Summary: AU. Aiba gets thrown out of his apartment and learns that keeping people happy isn't the same as living the life you want to.
Notes: Whooo je_holiday reveals are up, so here's mine! (Original post is here.) This fic exists a) to remind myself that I should not make 'Barely Making Deadlines' an official sport, b) to serve as a kick in the ass for next year's je_hols, and c) for xplodey_di's enjoyment. Di, I hope you liked this! It was definitely a crazy, crazy experience, and one which I will be doing again next year. Immense amounts of love to my beta aeslis, as usual, and especially this time for encouraging me to think outside the box.
Finally, the title of this fic comes from Girl by The Beatles.
Aiba gets it in the morning, right in the middle of cooking breakfast.
It's not exactly the best timing. The landlord could have waited until after ten o'clock to deliver the letters, but when Aiba hears the familiar rattle of the mail slot and looks up only to see two chubby fingers retreating, it almost makes him wince: oh, no, he thinks. The eggs (two--he got lucky and found a couple behind the empty butter dish) are going to burn if he doesn't flip them over in the next few seconds, but Aiba is too busy panicking about the flimsy piece of paper that was just delivered to his apartment.
Maybe if he focuses enough, the thing would just burst into flames.
So he tries it, squinting hard, but the only thing burning in the room are his eggs. What good, then, were those funny magic shows with the telepathy if they didn't even work in real life? Deception, all of it! He'd have to have a talk with Nino about that.
And this--Aiba shuffles over to the door and pokes cautiously at the letter with his toes--will also probably be mentioned. He thinks for a moment about whether or not it's worth the energy to bend over, but then he realizes this might be the last time he ever gets to squat in front of his door to pick up the mail. This might be the last time he'll ever get to smell food burning in this tiny space, and the last time he'll get to turn on the stove, the one you have to kick a few times before it actually starts up.
But all of those things are secondary right now to Aiba's hope that this is the very last time he'll ever have to see the words eviction notice next to his name.
--
Aiba's had run-ins with evictions before, but never like this. The first time he had ever heard the word he was barely seven and the phone had rung at midnight; Aiba was sneaking a glass of milk from the fridge and it had been the scariest thing in the world, hearing the shrill ring of the telephone and then his mother right after asking what in the world he was doing. Behind her, rubbing his face and looking like an old, old man, was Aiba's father. He did not look happy.
"I couldn't sleep," Aiba had sniffled to his mother, who looked more like a demon in a pink nightgown and slippers than she did in those old pictures with the cherry lipstick and the shiny motorcycle.
Had another minute passed before Aiba's dad said, "Evicted? You must be joking," she probably wouldn't have let him stay at the kitchen table with all the milk he could ever want. Aiba would have been sent back to bed with a pinch to his side and a punishment in the morning. But his parents had other things on their minds that night.
Which was a good thing, Aiba thought, as he swung his tiny legs back and forth and licked away late-night milk mustaches that tasted better than any dreamland ever could. It was always nice when his mother looked the other way.
When Aiba's uncle and his pretty girlfriend began to work for the restaurant and started showing up in their house, acting like they lived there, Aiba didn't think much of it. It was a little more crowded, but his uncle's girlfriend smelled like blueberry pie that had just come out of the oven and always said hi to him when he came home from school.
They left in less than three weeks and at the going-away party, Aiba helped his mother write a letter that said may no more evictions come your way.
"What's that?" Aiba asked, trying his hardest not to smear the ink. The last time he did that his mother had not been the nicest person on earth. "That word? E-vic-tion."
"It's when you can't live in your house anymore," his mom had replied, and gently pushed his hand away from the paper. "Because you don't have enough money. Ah-ah, Ma-chan--the ink."
At six, eviction was the biggest word (excluding dinosaur names) that Aiba knew. His mother told him not to throw it around; it was something sensitive and not many people liked getting evicted. In fact, she said after thinking about it, nobody liked getting evicted.
"It's not fun?" Aiba asked. He could only think of sweet scents and extra warmth at the dinner table from everyone so squished together, passing food around and talking. It didn't seem bad to him, this eviction thing. It seemed like it just brought people together.
But his mother insisted. "No," she said, and tucked her son's fingers underneath his thighs. "And if you don't stop touching the ink, you will be evicted from this house."
--
It takes a couple of minutes of Aiba sitting at the kitchen table, brow furrowed over the note and the pungent smell of his burnt eggs, to realize that this is the end. He's being kicked out.
Twelve million things run through his mind at once--what does all of this mean? Will he have to go back to his parents' house in Chiba and help out at the restaurant? He skipped out on that occupation by going to college and choosing to live his own life doing three odd jobs in the wondrous hell of Tokyo. Will he even be able to keep said jobs if the money he received from them wasn't enough to cover his rent? The bakery will probably care the most, unless the principal at the kindergarten finds out before Aiba fixes things. And the construction site won't even bat an eyelash. He can count on that at the very least.
But still, that doesn't solve a thing. He thinks about what he could do--well, Sho would help him out. He works in that really important company downtown, after all, but then again Aiba doesn't want to take any money from Sho even if it showed up on his doorstep and tried to force its way in kicking and screaming. Aiba is perfectly capable of making his own money and getting back on his own two feet without too much of a hassle.
He just doesn't know how. Especially right now.
So he does what he's always done when he needed help of any sort, from not being able to make proper curry to getting lost on the train while trying out a new route. Aiba picks up his phone (the only bill in his house that is always paid on time; Aiba can't afford to lose such a connection) and dials Nino's number.
--
"Funny," Nino says over the phone. "I don't remember your mom being psychic." He pauses for a minute and then says, as if he's reached an epiphany, "But you never could sneak in without getting caught."
"Only because you made me drop things," Aiba retorts. He's sitting on his couch, eyeing the things he'll need to sort into boxes and the things he'll need to sell (or give away). It makes him uneasy to think that soon he'll be sitting on a cardboard box instead of his couch, looking out into an empty living room (and then it'll no longer be one to live in, will it? Aiba will have to start calling it the nothing room), but he squishes down the feeling and tries to bring the bright side in: soon he'll be somewhere else, somewhere better. He'll have a new apartment full of boxes to be unpacked, and a stove that works, and a carton of eggs that will never run out.
"Stop thinking about it," Nino snaps. Aiba is sort of grateful that he doesn't need to tell Nino how he's feeling, but at the same time he dislikes being so transparent even over the phone. But it is Nino, and Nino could spot Aiba blindfolded. "Things will be fine."
Aiba figures that for Nino to say things will be fine really means nothing's looking all too great right now. But he could have guessed that himself.
"When is your lunch break?" Aiba asks, because getting out of his--or, well, the--apartment is his main priority right now. And it's not that he wants to intrude on someone, but he wants comfort outside of digital form and a mug of warm milk that couldn't even be filled in the first place.
Nino snorts. "It was at noon," he says. Aiba knows it's way past that now.
"But Sho-kun is here, so come whenever."
--
Sho is Nino's boss. They seem to have the typical co-worker relationship from what Aiba has seen: Sho saunters into Nino's office with orders and Nino finishes them within the workday with time to spare.
The only thing is, Sho doesn't saunter as much as he walks slowly in, exhausted from too much work the night before and barely two hours of sleep, while Nino takes extremely long lunches and does everything at his own convenience. Not that he's a bad worker--he gets things done the right way, which is why he still has his job--but from what Sho has told Aiba (or said drunkenly in bars at four in the morning) Nino hasn't turned a thing in on time since the day he was hired.
"He's never punctual, but I can't argue with the quality of his work," Sho says into his drink, letting his worries mix with the alcohol. Somehow the two of them always lapse into a round of slurred woes and dreary confessions, and Aiba never fails to order another set or two of drinks when he sees it coming. "He's too valuable to just let go. Definitely a little shit sometimes, but..."
"But it's Nino," Aiba says, and hands another bottle to Sho as if a name and a drink will fix everything.
Surprisingly it does: they clink their glasses to Nino most nights, and then do a round of rock-paper-scissors to decide who's footing the bill. More often than not it's been Aiba, and as he thinks about it now, riding the train into downtown Tokyo, that might be a small part of why the landlord sent him the eviction notice: he simply couldn't pay the rent. With three part-time jobs and a good sense of spending, he might have been able to scrape by, or even have enough money left over for groceries every two weeks instead of every three like it is--or used to be. But Aiba, for all the times he's seen his parents fighting over money, can't seem to remember that the only source of income he has right now is the money that comes along with his own humble sweat.
But it's not much. It never has been, and even though Sho has offered Aiba a position in the company more than once, Aiba knows he would never be able to put on a suit and sit at a computer all day. The world holds too much to do, after all; looking out from inside for eight hours a day has never been his dream. Instead, he chooses to watch kindergartners run around and helps the nurse heal scrapes and cool headaches with hands that the little ones call "magical Nurse Aiba hands." He puts on a reflective suit in the middle of the night to help make new roads or dig up old ones. And sometimes, when he gets called, he helps sell pretty, tiny cakes to girls who are just as petite and cute as the confections themselves.
Before, when his random shifts would end, he would head back to a home that always looked bigger in his head than it really was. If he ever talked about his apartment to people, it was always described as being a better living space than its run-down atmosphere suggested. The ceiling leaked in constellations and practically transformed into Little Dipper-waterfalls during the rainy season; the stove only worked when Aiba turned on the sink--but that wasted water; the floors had more cracks than an old woman did wrinkles. And because of its location right next to the station, it wasn't even cheap.
But it was home nonetheless, so Aiba tried. The money rolled in and out and occasionally he didn't have enough to justify his scissors over Sho's paper at the bar, but he never really considered it a problem. What had happened, then?
Through the opposite window Aiba catches a glimpse of the business district with all its giant silver buildings poking like noses into the sky. He's two stops away from walking into one of those skyscrapers in jeans and a sweatshirt among thousands of black-suited businessmen, and even though he knows his friends are part of that mob it's hard for him to imagine Nino or Sho in suits. To him, Nino is a small boy in an oversized t-shirt and dirty boxer shorts sitting on his couch with a video game cartridge in hand. He has an uncanny knack to ignore work when he doesn't want to see it, even if a report is being waved in front of his face by Sho, whose off-duty uniform is an unbuttoned oxford shirt and, if he remembers, pants (that are probably stained with coffee).
Aiba is like that all the time. He's not suited for a nine-to-five job, no matter how much money it brings him: if he doesn't like it, he's not going to do it. And even if right now he has no idea what the hell he's going to do, Aiba trusts himself. He trusts his friends.
He'll be okay.
--
At least, Aiba thinks as he sits under the fluorescent lights in Sho's office, he'll be okay in some sense of the word.
"Aiba-chan," Sho says. He doesn't sound too thrilled, and it's the last thing Aiba needs right now. He just wants people to smile at him, to tell him that things will be all right. "What are you going to do?"
But leave it to Sho to look on the practical side of things. Aiba has always wondered where Sho learned how to be so ridiculous one minute and straighten up into his serious side the next, like it's some kind of trick. It's been like this since college, when too-late nights would make them all a little loopy, and Sho would be the gracious butt of all the jokes for thirty minutes until a switch somewhere inside of him turned on to say, work time. And he'd be the only one with his fifteen-page paper finished before class.
"Find a new place to live," Aiba says lamely. The atmosphere of the workplace is getting to him, in the next room he can hear Nino on the phone, speaking in the flattest voice ever. "Work on, um, getting paid."
Sho's face shows genuine worry and it makes Aiba's insides hurt. What was he thinking, coming here with all of his problems laid out on a plate like they could be immediately fixed? Aiba's smart, he could have figured something out for himself. He knows numbers and he knows accounting things. He took classes in college that would prepare him for a life alone with his own salary to manage. And there's always been a place he could stay for awhile if he ever needed to--his parents would never turn him away and his brother owns an apartment somewhere south of the city.
"Okay, but," Sho says, and his sigh is a weight on Aiba's chest, "you're getting kicked out, you know."
He is, and what a drastic change from just twelve hours ago, when Aiba was lying in bed wishing hard for another pillow to hug or someone to tangle with for warmth and a four-in-the-morning conversation about absolutely nothing. Last night that had been the extent of his thoughts, and now his brain is filled with a jumble of whys and wheres and hows.
"The paper said I have twenty-four hours," he says, trying to keep his voice even, "before I have to be gone. And I have to bring all of my stuff to--to wherever I'm going."
"And where is that?" Sho asks, even though Aiba knows neither of them has a clue.
Aiba smiles, though a little sadly. It's the least he can do right now.
"Somewhere," he says, laughing softly, "over the rainbow."
--
'Somewhere over the rainbow' happens to be an apartment complex. It's a ten-story building surrounded by worn-looking houses and cliques of stray cats, and Nino has a place there. Sho lives a couple of minutes down the road in a slightly nicer-looking flat, but the difference isn't large enough to notice: the kittens still roam around the front door looking for a couple of scraps, and sometimes Aiba wonders if the building is meant to be a shade that is not smog-pink.
When Nino gets off work and Aiba is around, they go home together. It's been like this since Aiba can remember, and even though it's been so long since it's happened it still feels the same, with the rush hour crowd pushing against them and Nino folding, somehow perfectly, into some slim space between Aiba and another person.
"Don't lose me," Nino scowls as they watch the train attendants rush to shut the doors. It's been awhile since Aiba has been on during rush hour and the excitement is bubbling within him already, but Nino's voice makes him quiet. "I will be killed."
"By who?" Aiba whispers loudly. The woman next to him glares, and he bows in apology as much as he can in such limited space.
"By everyone," Nino says, and stumbles when the train lurches forward. "Sho-chan, Jun-kun, even Ohno. You know they'll have my head if I come home and go, 'Oh hey guys, I lost Aiba on the train! Where do you want to have dinner tonight?'"
Aiba's laughter is too loud and he ducks his head when several people turn in their direction. Nino's close enough for Aiba to feel his little quakes of laughter travel from the tips of his toes (Aiba knows exactly where; they've been friends long enough for him to notice) to his stomach and finally to his mouth. When Nino bites his lips to stop from giggling, Aiba goes cross-eyed at him.
"Stop," Nino mouths, nudging Aiba in the knee with his briefcase. "People are going to kill us."
"No, I'll be killed," Aiba whispers back, this time controlling his tone a little. "You're in a suit; you're necessary to the economy. I'm the bum in a dirty sweatshirt and old jeans."
Nino leans in, sniffs, and then makes a face. "Yeah, and you smell like it, too."
The train empties out in quick bursts of people at every stop, and eventually the two of them, who both look too young to be offered a seat, end up getting shuffled near the back of the car. It's a little tight but not as bad as before, and Aiba can still hear Nino counting the number of stops left to go under his breath.
"When's the last time you were over?" Nino asks all of a sudden.
Aiba blinks as if coming out of a dream. He'd been thinking hard about there being two stops left and how he didn't remember that, which, he thought, wasn't a good thing. "It's been awhile," he says quietly, hand shifting on the handle above him to keep his balance. "A month."
"More than that," Nino says, and Aiba wants to ask if he's been counting. He waits for it--Nino will say something like that, even if he's joking--but nothing comes.
So Aiba tries his luck. "Have you been counting?" he says, grinning.
Nino looks at him sideways. There's a second-long flash in his eyes and Aiba wonders if that means yes, Nino has been counting; Nino misses the way they used to be, when they were together all the time and only had to run down the hallway to see each other and took the train home together every single day of the week, even on the weekend. His heart does a little skip.
But all Aiba gets is a smirk.
"You wish," Nino says, and shoves his briefcase into Aiba's arms just as the train begins to slow down. "Get off, this is our stop."
--
Nino makes Aiba carry his briefcase all the way to the door. It's not a long walk, but the bag is stuffed with papers and, Aiba suspects, office supplies that Nino did not ask permission to take with him.
The elevator announces that it's out of order through a poorly written sign taped to its doors ("Day six," Nino says, and eyes the stairwell ominously). The apartment is on the third floor and not too much of a stretch, but Aiba lags behind anyway. It's been at least a month since he's seen anybody besides Sho and Nino and he's torn between babbling away at a rate of sixteen-hundred words per minute or hanging in the doorway and waving shyly.
But when Nino kicks in the door of his flat and Aiba smells hot food and fresh laundry and the scent of cheap candles, Aiba feels like he's just slipped back in time.
"Oh, God," Nino groans as Aiba pushes his way into the room. "Can somebody please explain to me why the hell my house smells like a bed of roses?"
"Stop complaining," a faraway voice replies. "Your sister gave you these candles two months ago and you haven't even used one yet."
The voice hits Aiba quickly and he's suddenly out of breath for no reason as he tries hard to remember where Nino's kitchen is. Somewhere along the way he drops the briefcase on the floor, not caring that someone might step on it or that whatever's in it might break. "Jun?" he says, turning his head every which way. "MatsuJun, where are you? It's me!"
"Me who?" Jun calls, and Aiba busts through a door to find Jun standing in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with a spoon in one hand and a magazine in the other.
They look at each other for a couple of seconds. Aiba's mouth opens and closes a few times; he's not sure what to say or if he should say anything--the last time he saw Jun was in the fall, when they had gone grocery shopping and walked under the trees in the park because Aiba had begged to see the changing leaves. It's winter outside now, but warm inside where there's dinner and blankets and beds, lights and carpet and friends. If time has passed between then and now, Aiba has already forgotten.
"Hi, MatsuJun," he finally says, and Jun puts everything he's holding down without looking where. "How--how have you been?"
"The same," Jun says, and then they're hugging so tightly that Aiba didn't even see it coming. His hands scramble for some sweater to hold onto and of course, of course Jun would be wearing a cashmere one. "Where did you come from? No, don't answer that." Jun exhales hard into Aiba's hair, and he can tell that Jun is stressed and overworked, but none of this is new. "Where have you been?"
Aiba shrugs. "Getting evicted," he says, voice muffled. He can smell Jun's shampoo and it's the expensive kind, full of exotic flowers and sweet things. Aiba hasn't forgotten that scent--it's tucked somewhere in his memories of meeting Jun through Nino years and years ago in a cheap cafe by their college. He had been Nino's sister's boyfriend, then, and while that relationship had ended soon after it didn't change much, only that Jun stopped going to Nino's house and started showing up more in his and Aiba's dormitory, cold from the journey but bright with excitement.
When Jun pulls back his cheeks are flushed and his eyes are wider than Aiba has ever remembered seeing them, wider than the full moons, even, that they howled at on nights where they were all too drunk to know their own names. He wants to tell Jun that it's okay, he'll manage, but Jun's mouth is already set in the same thin line that has always made Aiba a little ashamed of himself, even when he didn't know why.
"I heard," Jun says a tad stiffly. "Nino told me."
"Tattletale!" Nino calls from the other side of the apartment. "We had an agreement."
"Shut up, Nino," Jun yells back, and Aiba smiles before he forgets he's not supposed to right now. Instead, he scratches his head and looks at the ceiling.
"Uh-huh," he says, looking elsewhere. "I'm supposed to be out with all of my stuff by tomorrow."
Jun's mouth opens and Aiba just knows that there's a string of concerns on the other side, complete with the question he's been asked too many times to count: so what now?
"Well," Jun begins, "you can always--."
Before he can continue, though, the door behind them opens creakily. Aiba hears laughter and the sound of paper bags rustling against each other.
Then--
"Aiba-chan!"
Leave it to Ohno, Aiba thinks, to be the last one to show up. He's shuffling in behind Sho and not even completely in the room yet before Aiba is crushing him in a hug, crinkling the paper bag between them and stealing all of the cold away from Ohno's small body.
"Aiba-chan," Ohno says again, this time into Aiba's shoulder. "Long time no see."
His arms come around Aiba like they know exactly where they're going, like Aiba's shoulders aren't sagging with the weight of an eviction and too many worries. Ohno's laughing like this is easy, like they're still riding on the euphoria of landing jobs and getting paychecks and living in apartments, and all Aiba can do is squeeze him harder.
Out of them all Ohno is the one Aiba sees the least, even though he wishes it was the other way around sometimes. Ohno, Aiba is convinced, is good for the heart. Oftentimes Aiba finds himself wondering how they met and when it was--not too long ago, and it might have been through some odd job he had back then--but the details don't matter. There's a certain aura Ohno has that makes Aiba want to sit down anywhere and talk for hours without the fear that someone will make him stop.
They'll do that tonight, Aiba knows. Being here makes him think he has all the time in the universe--he has no plans, no concerns, no stigmas attached to his name. The five of them used to have dinner together often, before Sho became the big boss and Ohno quit the company to work at a studio on the other side of the city. Back then Aiba only had two jobs, and he was here almost every night to help Jun cook (as much as he could, anyway; Jun only let him do so much) and talk to Ohno, who said nothing back but the right things, and then after dinner he and Sho would pore through Nino's bare alcohol cabinet and whine about how there was never anything in there, save for a half-empty bottle of rum.
"Even the dust mites are looking for a drink," Aiba would always say, and Sho would swipe his finger across the bottom of the cupboard for proof.
Now Nino is standing next to Jun at the kitchen counter, poking through a mound of pasta and vegetables and mourning about how he'll have to clean up after everyone. This never would have happened, Nino is saying, if Aiba had never been evicted.
"Hey!" Aiba says, loosening himself from Ohno. "You're excited, Nino. Don't lie."
"Yeah, excited to take care of your drunk asses," Nino shoots back, but Aiba sees him smile. "Just like the old days, right?"
The old days would end in nights that spiraled into a familiar darkness lit only by the dim lamps in Nino's living room. They'd all be a little tipsy, and Aiba would be eating the leftovers from just hours before while Jun giggled over something vaguely profound Ohno had said. Sho would be blinking heavily, bottle in hand, and Nino would have his head in someone's lap, murmuring about how this was his house and they were all making it a mess.
He's doing the same thing now while pulling dishes out of the cabinet and examining which ones are clean enough for this dinner party occasion. "The last time we did this I had plastic utensils," he says, passing along ceramic plates and glasses to Ohno. "Now I'll have to wash them all by hand, and scrub the carpet, and rearrange my living room to hide stains--."
"Nino," Sho shouts from the couch. "As your boss, I'm telling you to stop being such a housewife."
"Easy for you to say," Nino snaps, placing a bunch of forks on top of Ohno's stack of china, "but who's going to be here tomorrow morning to help me?"
In the short silence that follows, Aiba thinks about it. He's the only one without a stable job and a house, and right now he needs the latter to ever think about getting the former. In his heart he knows that he has always wanted to live with Nino, if only to keep his old memories alive by seeing his best friend every single morning, weak with sleep and still dreaming about being Mario saving the princess from doom and gloom. College was like that--even high school was like that, when they would meet in the early hours to catch the train together.
Growing up may have separated them, but that isn't stopping Aiba from wanting to coming back.
"I will," Aiba says, and Nino turns around sharply, mouth halfway open. "Let me stay, I'll help you out."
--
That night after dinner the five of them (all sober for the task ahead, though Ohno had tried to sneak a swig straight from the bottle) pile into Sho's car to help Aiba pack and move into Nino's apartment. Aiba's not sure how he woke up this morning with an eviction notice sitting on his welcome mat to finding a temporary place to stay barely twelve hours later, but he refuses to think about his good luck or how Nino is now grumbling in the backseat.
"Why me?" he says exasperatedly. "Can't you move in with somebody else?"
But they are all perfectly aware of their respective living situations: Jun lives three doors down from Nino, but he has a girlfriend that moved into his apartment two months ago; her name is Mina and Aiba likes her a lot but he doesn't want to intrude on their personal space if he can help it. Ohno lives too far away, in the tiniest studio flat Aiba has never seen--it's hard to fit three people in there without Ohno having to put half of his belongings in the miniscule closet. And the only thing with Sho is that his sister often goes to his apartment when she doesn't feel like going home. It's been so frequent lately, Sho says, that she's moved half of her stuff into his house.
That leaves Nino and his nearly empty, sizeable apartment. The process of elimination, Aiba thinks, has never been more in his favor, even if Nino seems to feel differently.
"It'll only be for a little bit," Ohno says, and Nino groans, kicking the seat in front of him. Sho almost has a heart attack and attempts to go into a lecture about safety on the road before Aiba cuts him off.
"But it will be just a little bit!" Aiba promises. He turns around in the front seat and grins wide at Nino. "I'll help out, I promise. I'll cook and clean and make your bed and..."
"And find a new place to live," Nino adds. Aiba can feel his fingers curling over the edge of the headrest, and his nails are cold and sharp against the back of Aiba's neck like a tiny bite. "Soon."
As the car cruises over the highway Jun begins listing off a number of things in Aiba's apartment that he'll need while simultaneously keeping another list of objects he should throw out and forget about completely. As it turns out--but Aiba would expect nothing less of Jun, whose apartment is wide and spacious and yet is still full with everything he needs--the first list is much shorter than the second, and also sounds more like what Aiba would need to pack for camp rather than his moving into a new house. According to Jun, all Aiba needs to survive until he can find his own apartment are some clothes, a toothbrush, and two pairs of shoes.
"And Nino has a spare futon, don't you, Nino?" Jun prods.
"Yeah," Nino says after a long pause. Aiba can just imagine him slouched down in the backseat with his arms crossed. "Well, it's not spare anymore, I guess."
But I'll put it to good use, Aiba wants to say. He knows Nino is just being bitter about having to share his coveted space and in a couple of days it won't be so bad, but Aiba is starting to feel more like a leech than someone who just wants to move in with a good friend of his until his life gets sorted out again. He doesn't know how to tell Nino this, though, without getting smacked upside the head with a retort from Nino that would go something along the lines of, "Seriously, how corny can you be? Don't you care about my mental health?"
He's still thinking about it by the time they've all piled into Aiba's ex-home armed with cardboard boxes and masking tape ("Don't ask," Ohno says as he hands out a few flattened boxes to each of them. "I got lucky at the studio, is all"). Jun immediately tackles the kitchen because, he says, he doesn't trust any of them with knives, and Sho and Ohno move somewhere into the bathroom to shove a bunch of half-used shampoos and soaps into a giant trash bag. Aiba is sad to see all of his free samples go, but half of them made his skin itch and the other half smelled too much like perfume for his taste.
That leaves Aiba and Nino to sort the living room out. Even before they start, Aiba tells Nino that soon this will be a nothing room.
"Because it'll be empty," Aiba says sadly. In reply, Nino just biffs him over the head with a throw pillow.
"It doesn't matter what it'll be when we're finished," Nino says, and begins to assemble one of the cardboard boxes. "It's not even your house anymore."
Aiba nods, but he doesn't exactly feel that way. Even if he's no longer a resident of this building and even if this place wasn't the best one on earth, Aiba will still miss coming back to it at weird hours of the day, sweaty and tired. The next place he'll move into won't have the same fridge that Aiba could stick his head into during the hot rush of August, nor will it have the windows that shook during typhoons. Even if there are better things ahead, seeing all of his stuff getting thrown out or packed away just makes Aiba feel like a part of his life is ending.
"Hey," Nino says, nudging Aiba in the shoulder. "It's okay. You're coming home with me."
When Aiba looks up all he can think of are bar nights with Sho, when they'd clink their glasses to Nino and down a drink or two in his name. Sarcastic little brat or not, since they were fourteen Aiba has always counted on Nino to be there for him to make things that much better.
"Yeah," Aiba says, nodding. There's a thank you on the tip of his tongue, but he knows that Nino's heard it already.
--
When they were in college, Aiba and Nino lived on opposite ends of a hallway.
It was nice, then, for Aiba to see Nino all the time even though they weren't constantly in each other's faces. They'd both agreed that being roommates would have been too much, so Aiba found himself staying with a fellow science major, which was good for his schoolwork, and Nino had the good fortune of getting a roommate who came back a total of three times per semester, so there was always extra space. Still, all they had to do if they wanted to see each other was take a quick walk down the hall. There was a comfortable distance between them at school and on breaks they went home and came back together.
But living with Nino, Aiba has quickly discovered, is a whole different experience.
After he moved in with a couple of cardboard boxes and one duffel bag full of clothes, Nino pulled out the spare futon, laid it on the living room floor and told Aiba to restrain his sleep-kicking enough so that Nino wouldn't have to wake up to find all of his things on the floor in disarray (and by 'things' Nino meant his carefully put-together game consoles that occupied more space in the living room than they were supposed to).
He then said, in his most matter-of-fact voice, that Aiba had three weeks to find a new place.
"Just three?" Aiba had said. He didn't even try to hide his disappointment.
And maybe Nino had noticed, but that didn't change anything. "Three," Nino repeated. "That's enough time, since you took leave off work and everything."
Then he took a large envelope from his briefcase and handed it to Aiba.
"This is from Sho-chan and Jun-kun," was all the explanation he gave before he went off in search of sheets and a pillow.
The envelope turned out to be a huge stack of housing magazines with a couple of ads for part-time jobs thrown into the mix. Several pages in the magazines were bookmarked with bright-red tape from when Sho was looking for his apartment, and some of the ads had Jun's handwriting in the margins that said things like good times available and quick commute.
And, on the cover: YOU CAN DO IT, AIBA-CHAN. The letters looked suspiciously Ohno-like, but the 'Aiba-chan' was written in Nino's signature style--a quick yet decipherable scribble.
Since then Aiba has been determined to make himself useful. Every morning he's gotten up to make breakfast for himself and Nino (usually something easy like toast and coffee, but he's still trying to make scrambled eggs that are not burnt to a crisp) and, after Nino is out the door cursing about his lateness around a piece of toast, he sits at the table with the envelope and a thick green marker.
He's made a bit of progress--certainly nothing to brag about, but it's only been four days. In between the early morning hours and lunchtime Aiba circles promising-looking apartments in green and, when that gets boring, tours Nino's house with the television on in the background. It's exactly how it was when Nino first bought the apartment: one bedroom, one bathroom, a living room and a tiny, tiny kitchen. But there are details that Aiba hasn't seen before, like the generic, mass-produced paintings hanging on the walls and photographs in thick, black frames sitting on the coffee table (both trinkets that Ninomiya-mama probably forced her son to put up for the sake of his aesthetically boring apartment).
By the sixth day Aiba's come to memorize all of the faces that look up at him from inside the frames. As he sits on the couch, circling away (and sometimes doodling green flowers or stick figures in the margins of the magazines), he glances up sometimes to find all of the still-life figures smiling at him expectantly, as if they're waiting for an explanation of why he's there and Nino is not. But Aiba doesn't feel like he should have to explain this to the frozen pictures of Sho and Jun and Ohno that sit on the table in various degrees of dress: graduation suits, New Year's Day kimonos, swim trousers. Their real-life counterparts know the story, after all.
But there's a girl in the last picture that Aiba doesn't know.
Aiba knows that by staying here he's sort of intruding in on Nino's new life and that maybe there are certain things he shouldn't know or care about, but even so he's not sure how to feel about this. The girl in the photo seems familiar to Aiba in that she looks like every other girl he sees on the street: fairly pretty, but nothing special to set her apart from the rest. She's got one hand resting on Nino's arm and the other is raised in a peace sign to whoever is taking the picture.
And Nino, Nino looks happy. This is what strikes Aiba the most--not that he's looking at a photograph with Nino and a girl, because girls like Nino and he's used to acquaintances and classmates asking for pictures to show off to their other friends--but that still-Nino looks genuinely pleased. His expression is frozen in mid-laughter and his arm is casually slung around the girl's shoulders. They look comfortable, like they've known each other for years.
The fact that he doesn't know who the girl is annoys Aiba just a little bit. He's tried not to stare at her too much and has attempted, over the past six days of being Nino's pseudo-roommate, to focus on finding a new, affordable home and not breaking anything in the house. So far, he's done a good job of not bringing her up in conversation, but lately when Nino comes home he's so tired that all Aiba can say to him are quiet words about dinner and nothing more. According to Sho, the company is trying to form an alliance with a big-shot company that's taking up all of their energy and resources, and Nino is being forced to buckle down and do things on time.
"I even cut down his lunch to one hour," Sho says, shaking his head, and Aiba understands completely.
So he tries to be helpful. He does the laundry a couple of times, and it only turned out really bad once ("The last time I checked," Nino had said, holding a horribly shrunken sweater away at arm's length, "I couldn't fit into children's sizes"). He's called Jun to ask for really easy recipes to cook for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and even though Jun had been kind of wary at first, he'd finally relented. Now instead of boring old coffee and toast in the morning, Aiba rolls off his futon excited about stuffing a fried egg into a frame of bread and tossing a piece to Nino as he walks out of his room, bleary-eyed and hair uncombed.
Aiba is starting to realize that domesticity might be calling his name. Then he thinks of all the laundry he'd have to fold and all the potential children he'd have to cook three meals a day for, and after coming to the conclusion that being a house-husband would start to become a chore, he scraps the idea.
But right now, doing all of this for Nino is enough to keep Aiba satisfied.
"Why do you do this for me?" Nino asks sleepily at the end of the first week. He'd walked into the kitchen five minutes earlier than usual, which gave him time for breakfast on an actual plate and a couple of words before he was out the door. "You don't cook, and I don't do anything for you."
Aiba just laughs. He pours more coffee for the both of them and stares at the steam that spirals from the mug to envelop Nino's pale, small face in dainty fog. They never used to drink coffee; bucketfuls of green tea were all they needed in college to stay awake for term papers and last-minute conversations. But Aiba thinks he likes this better, for a number of reasons.
"I just want to," Aiba says cheerfully, and his eyes flick for a second to the photographs on the table. Who is she, Aiba imagines saying, and has she ever made you breakfast, coffee; does she ever do your laundry?
Do I do it better?
Nino shrugs and pokes the last bit of egg and toast into his mouth with the tip of his index finger. "Don't break my stuff," he says, and picks up his briefcase with the air of someone who would rather sleep in for the next five days than go to work.
If he could, Aiba would let him stay. He'd peel the coat off Nino's arms and undo his tie and lead him back to a still-rumpled bed.
But all he does is smile and nod, smile and nod.
"And," Nino says before he steps out the door, "thanks."
--
On the first Saturday that Aiba and Nino have together, Aiba gets up at seven o'clock on the dot. Lying next to him is a sheet that he made the night before of apartments for rent, and he'd hoped that today would be full of adventuring round the city, looking for the perfect place for Aiba to call home for the second--or, he supposes, third or fourth--time.
For several minutes he stares at the ceiling, blinking himself into consciousness and thinking, it's Saturday--Saturday! The weekend! There might be businessmen walking the streets right now and getting paid for overtime, but not even Nino would do that. Right now he's probably curled up in a ball on his bed, blanket twisted somewhere near his feet and fingers unknowingly reaching for the sunlight creeping slowly into his room.
So Aiba gets off the spare futon and tiptoes, as quietly as possible, down the hallway.
Nino's door opens with the softest click and Aiba exhales, making sure not to make any loud noises. The bedroom is already glowing with the sunrise, and Nino's white sheets are awash in dandelion-color. It takes Aiba minute of standing still and silent by the door to find Nino, but his eyes finally catch the faint wriggling of toes by the end of the bed. Aiba follows the lines under the blankets up to Nino's lifted t-shirt and parted mouth, and Aiba feels, inexplicably and suddenly, that this is an image he could get used to waking up to.
Or next to, Aiba thinks, and makes his way over to the bed. If he got in--if he rolled into bed with Nino, closed his eyes, and dreamed the next four hours away--what would happen? Experience has taught him nothing. The last time the two of them were ever together in the same bed they both had some sickness that needed to be quarantined, and the nurse at school ordered them to stay together, far away from human civilization, until they got better.
In that room the two of them played an endless amount of video games and talked an endless amount about girls and their mysterious ways. They were nineteen, but it didn't matter--nobody could hear them. They sneezed a lot and coughed up a storm and took too many prescribed pills so that in the end Nino swears that they both went a little loopy, but Aiba prefers to think that's just because they had been locked up in isolation for a week.
The beds they were meant to occupy were soon pushed together to create one bed ("We're sick," Nino had grumbled, "so it doesn't really matter how close we are. I probably got this from you, anyway"). At night they tumbled around, tossing pillows and throwing around sheets, trying to get comfortable until Aiba realized that whoever invented spooning was a genius. And Nino didn't seem to mind it, either.
The fact that it's been too long since that moment isn't stopping Aiba from crawling into bed with Nino now. They're both reasonably healthy and no longer nineteen years old, but Aiba has never stopped missing Nino's body heat in the middle of the winter. In Nino's apartment the heating blasts all day long, but Aiba's felt colder nights in his life than he ever wanted to and all he did to get through them was rub his feet together and think, if only, if only.
Nino stirs when Aiba shifts onto the bed, but Aiba only finds himself whispering sssh. He's gone this far and there's no going back.
Of course something in Aiba should have seen this coming, but these days he hardly ever sees the signs: having three part-time jobs instead of one that paid well didn't signal any warnings to him, and so the eviction was like a slap in the face. And moving in with Nino, well, that should have triggered something in Aiba's head that told him to stop, to not go through with this, to just hold it in and look the other way.
But Aiba loves Nino. Aiba loves Sho and Jun and Ohno, too, but there's an extra-special part of his heart reserved for the boy he's trekked through the rain with underneath a single, half-broken umbrella. They took their college entrance exams at the same time and have memorized most of the train routes going in and out of Tokyo together simply because of the amount of times they've ridden past the same buildings and fields and skies sitting side-by-side. They've survived two graduations, Jun's random fits of anger, moving house and an eviction.
Now all Aiba has to do is survive these three weeks in Nino's house without letting anything happen. He doesn't know what his living under this roof will entail, and his future plans only include circling more ads in green marker, doing more laundry the right way, and trying not to think about who that girl in the picture is. It might not be a big deal, anyway--she could be just a friend--and it doesn't matter if Aiba's the one lying next to Nino in bed right now. This is all it could ever be, though. Nothing more.
He rests the edge of his chin carefully on Nino's shoulder and closes his eyes. Nino smells like work, like printing ink and snapped ballpoint pens and starched shirts.
Aiba breathes in and out. He forgets, gradually, about lists and independent living, paychecks and loneliness.
This is all he needs for now.
Part two
Pairing(s): Aiba/Nino
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~16,600
Summary: AU. Aiba gets thrown out of his apartment and learns that keeping people happy isn't the same as living the life you want to.
Notes: Whooo je_holiday reveals are up, so here's mine! (Original post is here.) This fic exists a) to remind myself that I should not make 'Barely Making Deadlines' an official sport, b) to serve as a kick in the ass for next year's je_hols, and c) for xplodey_di's enjoyment. Di, I hope you liked this! It was definitely a crazy, crazy experience, and one which I will be doing again next year. Immense amounts of love to my beta aeslis, as usual, and especially this time for encouraging me to think outside the box.
Finally, the title of this fic comes from Girl by The Beatles.
Aiba gets it in the morning, right in the middle of cooking breakfast.
It's not exactly the best timing. The landlord could have waited until after ten o'clock to deliver the letters, but when Aiba hears the familiar rattle of the mail slot and looks up only to see two chubby fingers retreating, it almost makes him wince: oh, no, he thinks. The eggs (two--he got lucky and found a couple behind the empty butter dish) are going to burn if he doesn't flip them over in the next few seconds, but Aiba is too busy panicking about the flimsy piece of paper that was just delivered to his apartment.
Maybe if he focuses enough, the thing would just burst into flames.
So he tries it, squinting hard, but the only thing burning in the room are his eggs. What good, then, were those funny magic shows with the telepathy if they didn't even work in real life? Deception, all of it! He'd have to have a talk with Nino about that.
And this--Aiba shuffles over to the door and pokes cautiously at the letter with his toes--will also probably be mentioned. He thinks for a moment about whether or not it's worth the energy to bend over, but then he realizes this might be the last time he ever gets to squat in front of his door to pick up the mail. This might be the last time he'll ever get to smell food burning in this tiny space, and the last time he'll get to turn on the stove, the one you have to kick a few times before it actually starts up.
But all of those things are secondary right now to Aiba's hope that this is the very last time he'll ever have to see the words eviction notice next to his name.
--
Aiba's had run-ins with evictions before, but never like this. The first time he had ever heard the word he was barely seven and the phone had rung at midnight; Aiba was sneaking a glass of milk from the fridge and it had been the scariest thing in the world, hearing the shrill ring of the telephone and then his mother right after asking what in the world he was doing. Behind her, rubbing his face and looking like an old, old man, was Aiba's father. He did not look happy.
"I couldn't sleep," Aiba had sniffled to his mother, who looked more like a demon in a pink nightgown and slippers than she did in those old pictures with the cherry lipstick and the shiny motorcycle.
Had another minute passed before Aiba's dad said, "Evicted? You must be joking," she probably wouldn't have let him stay at the kitchen table with all the milk he could ever want. Aiba would have been sent back to bed with a pinch to his side and a punishment in the morning. But his parents had other things on their minds that night.
Which was a good thing, Aiba thought, as he swung his tiny legs back and forth and licked away late-night milk mustaches that tasted better than any dreamland ever could. It was always nice when his mother looked the other way.
When Aiba's uncle and his pretty girlfriend began to work for the restaurant and started showing up in their house, acting like they lived there, Aiba didn't think much of it. It was a little more crowded, but his uncle's girlfriend smelled like blueberry pie that had just come out of the oven and always said hi to him when he came home from school.
They left in less than three weeks and at the going-away party, Aiba helped his mother write a letter that said may no more evictions come your way.
"What's that?" Aiba asked, trying his hardest not to smear the ink. The last time he did that his mother had not been the nicest person on earth. "That word? E-vic-tion."
"It's when you can't live in your house anymore," his mom had replied, and gently pushed his hand away from the paper. "Because you don't have enough money. Ah-ah, Ma-chan--the ink."
At six, eviction was the biggest word (excluding dinosaur names) that Aiba knew. His mother told him not to throw it around; it was something sensitive and not many people liked getting evicted. In fact, she said after thinking about it, nobody liked getting evicted.
"It's not fun?" Aiba asked. He could only think of sweet scents and extra warmth at the dinner table from everyone so squished together, passing food around and talking. It didn't seem bad to him, this eviction thing. It seemed like it just brought people together.
But his mother insisted. "No," she said, and tucked her son's fingers underneath his thighs. "And if you don't stop touching the ink, you will be evicted from this house."
--
It takes a couple of minutes of Aiba sitting at the kitchen table, brow furrowed over the note and the pungent smell of his burnt eggs, to realize that this is the end. He's being kicked out.
Twelve million things run through his mind at once--what does all of this mean? Will he have to go back to his parents' house in Chiba and help out at the restaurant? He skipped out on that occupation by going to college and choosing to live his own life doing three odd jobs in the wondrous hell of Tokyo. Will he even be able to keep said jobs if the money he received from them wasn't enough to cover his rent? The bakery will probably care the most, unless the principal at the kindergarten finds out before Aiba fixes things. And the construction site won't even bat an eyelash. He can count on that at the very least.
But still, that doesn't solve a thing. He thinks about what he could do--well, Sho would help him out. He works in that really important company downtown, after all, but then again Aiba doesn't want to take any money from Sho even if it showed up on his doorstep and tried to force its way in kicking and screaming. Aiba is perfectly capable of making his own money and getting back on his own two feet without too much of a hassle.
He just doesn't know how. Especially right now.
So he does what he's always done when he needed help of any sort, from not being able to make proper curry to getting lost on the train while trying out a new route. Aiba picks up his phone (the only bill in his house that is always paid on time; Aiba can't afford to lose such a connection) and dials Nino's number.
--
"Funny," Nino says over the phone. "I don't remember your mom being psychic." He pauses for a minute and then says, as if he's reached an epiphany, "But you never could sneak in without getting caught."
"Only because you made me drop things," Aiba retorts. He's sitting on his couch, eyeing the things he'll need to sort into boxes and the things he'll need to sell (or give away). It makes him uneasy to think that soon he'll be sitting on a cardboard box instead of his couch, looking out into an empty living room (and then it'll no longer be one to live in, will it? Aiba will have to start calling it the nothing room), but he squishes down the feeling and tries to bring the bright side in: soon he'll be somewhere else, somewhere better. He'll have a new apartment full of boxes to be unpacked, and a stove that works, and a carton of eggs that will never run out.
"Stop thinking about it," Nino snaps. Aiba is sort of grateful that he doesn't need to tell Nino how he's feeling, but at the same time he dislikes being so transparent even over the phone. But it is Nino, and Nino could spot Aiba blindfolded. "Things will be fine."
Aiba figures that for Nino to say things will be fine really means nothing's looking all too great right now. But he could have guessed that himself.
"When is your lunch break?" Aiba asks, because getting out of his--or, well, the--apartment is his main priority right now. And it's not that he wants to intrude on someone, but he wants comfort outside of digital form and a mug of warm milk that couldn't even be filled in the first place.
Nino snorts. "It was at noon," he says. Aiba knows it's way past that now.
"But Sho-kun is here, so come whenever."
--
Sho is Nino's boss. They seem to have the typical co-worker relationship from what Aiba has seen: Sho saunters into Nino's office with orders and Nino finishes them within the workday with time to spare.
The only thing is, Sho doesn't saunter as much as he walks slowly in, exhausted from too much work the night before and barely two hours of sleep, while Nino takes extremely long lunches and does everything at his own convenience. Not that he's a bad worker--he gets things done the right way, which is why he still has his job--but from what Sho has told Aiba (or said drunkenly in bars at four in the morning) Nino hasn't turned a thing in on time since the day he was hired.
"He's never punctual, but I can't argue with the quality of his work," Sho says into his drink, letting his worries mix with the alcohol. Somehow the two of them always lapse into a round of slurred woes and dreary confessions, and Aiba never fails to order another set or two of drinks when he sees it coming. "He's too valuable to just let go. Definitely a little shit sometimes, but..."
"But it's Nino," Aiba says, and hands another bottle to Sho as if a name and a drink will fix everything.
Surprisingly it does: they clink their glasses to Nino most nights, and then do a round of rock-paper-scissors to decide who's footing the bill. More often than not it's been Aiba, and as he thinks about it now, riding the train into downtown Tokyo, that might be a small part of why the landlord sent him the eviction notice: he simply couldn't pay the rent. With three part-time jobs and a good sense of spending, he might have been able to scrape by, or even have enough money left over for groceries every two weeks instead of every three like it is--or used to be. But Aiba, for all the times he's seen his parents fighting over money, can't seem to remember that the only source of income he has right now is the money that comes along with his own humble sweat.
But it's not much. It never has been, and even though Sho has offered Aiba a position in the company more than once, Aiba knows he would never be able to put on a suit and sit at a computer all day. The world holds too much to do, after all; looking out from inside for eight hours a day has never been his dream. Instead, he chooses to watch kindergartners run around and helps the nurse heal scrapes and cool headaches with hands that the little ones call "magical Nurse Aiba hands." He puts on a reflective suit in the middle of the night to help make new roads or dig up old ones. And sometimes, when he gets called, he helps sell pretty, tiny cakes to girls who are just as petite and cute as the confections themselves.
Before, when his random shifts would end, he would head back to a home that always looked bigger in his head than it really was. If he ever talked about his apartment to people, it was always described as being a better living space than its run-down atmosphere suggested. The ceiling leaked in constellations and practically transformed into Little Dipper-waterfalls during the rainy season; the stove only worked when Aiba turned on the sink--but that wasted water; the floors had more cracks than an old woman did wrinkles. And because of its location right next to the station, it wasn't even cheap.
But it was home nonetheless, so Aiba tried. The money rolled in and out and occasionally he didn't have enough to justify his scissors over Sho's paper at the bar, but he never really considered it a problem. What had happened, then?
Through the opposite window Aiba catches a glimpse of the business district with all its giant silver buildings poking like noses into the sky. He's two stops away from walking into one of those skyscrapers in jeans and a sweatshirt among thousands of black-suited businessmen, and even though he knows his friends are part of that mob it's hard for him to imagine Nino or Sho in suits. To him, Nino is a small boy in an oversized t-shirt and dirty boxer shorts sitting on his couch with a video game cartridge in hand. He has an uncanny knack to ignore work when he doesn't want to see it, even if a report is being waved in front of his face by Sho, whose off-duty uniform is an unbuttoned oxford shirt and, if he remembers, pants (that are probably stained with coffee).
Aiba is like that all the time. He's not suited for a nine-to-five job, no matter how much money it brings him: if he doesn't like it, he's not going to do it. And even if right now he has no idea what the hell he's going to do, Aiba trusts himself. He trusts his friends.
He'll be okay.
--
At least, Aiba thinks as he sits under the fluorescent lights in Sho's office, he'll be okay in some sense of the word.
"Aiba-chan," Sho says. He doesn't sound too thrilled, and it's the last thing Aiba needs right now. He just wants people to smile at him, to tell him that things will be all right. "What are you going to do?"
But leave it to Sho to look on the practical side of things. Aiba has always wondered where Sho learned how to be so ridiculous one minute and straighten up into his serious side the next, like it's some kind of trick. It's been like this since college, when too-late nights would make them all a little loopy, and Sho would be the gracious butt of all the jokes for thirty minutes until a switch somewhere inside of him turned on to say, work time. And he'd be the only one with his fifteen-page paper finished before class.
"Find a new place to live," Aiba says lamely. The atmosphere of the workplace is getting to him, in the next room he can hear Nino on the phone, speaking in the flattest voice ever. "Work on, um, getting paid."
Sho's face shows genuine worry and it makes Aiba's insides hurt. What was he thinking, coming here with all of his problems laid out on a plate like they could be immediately fixed? Aiba's smart, he could have figured something out for himself. He knows numbers and he knows accounting things. He took classes in college that would prepare him for a life alone with his own salary to manage. And there's always been a place he could stay for awhile if he ever needed to--his parents would never turn him away and his brother owns an apartment somewhere south of the city.
"Okay, but," Sho says, and his sigh is a weight on Aiba's chest, "you're getting kicked out, you know."
He is, and what a drastic change from just twelve hours ago, when Aiba was lying in bed wishing hard for another pillow to hug or someone to tangle with for warmth and a four-in-the-morning conversation about absolutely nothing. Last night that had been the extent of his thoughts, and now his brain is filled with a jumble of whys and wheres and hows.
"The paper said I have twenty-four hours," he says, trying to keep his voice even, "before I have to be gone. And I have to bring all of my stuff to--to wherever I'm going."
"And where is that?" Sho asks, even though Aiba knows neither of them has a clue.
Aiba smiles, though a little sadly. It's the least he can do right now.
"Somewhere," he says, laughing softly, "over the rainbow."
--
'Somewhere over the rainbow' happens to be an apartment complex. It's a ten-story building surrounded by worn-looking houses and cliques of stray cats, and Nino has a place there. Sho lives a couple of minutes down the road in a slightly nicer-looking flat, but the difference isn't large enough to notice: the kittens still roam around the front door looking for a couple of scraps, and sometimes Aiba wonders if the building is meant to be a shade that is not smog-pink.
When Nino gets off work and Aiba is around, they go home together. It's been like this since Aiba can remember, and even though it's been so long since it's happened it still feels the same, with the rush hour crowd pushing against them and Nino folding, somehow perfectly, into some slim space between Aiba and another person.
"Don't lose me," Nino scowls as they watch the train attendants rush to shut the doors. It's been awhile since Aiba has been on during rush hour and the excitement is bubbling within him already, but Nino's voice makes him quiet. "I will be killed."
"By who?" Aiba whispers loudly. The woman next to him glares, and he bows in apology as much as he can in such limited space.
"By everyone," Nino says, and stumbles when the train lurches forward. "Sho-chan, Jun-kun, even Ohno. You know they'll have my head if I come home and go, 'Oh hey guys, I lost Aiba on the train! Where do you want to have dinner tonight?'"
Aiba's laughter is too loud and he ducks his head when several people turn in their direction. Nino's close enough for Aiba to feel his little quakes of laughter travel from the tips of his toes (Aiba knows exactly where; they've been friends long enough for him to notice) to his stomach and finally to his mouth. When Nino bites his lips to stop from giggling, Aiba goes cross-eyed at him.
"Stop," Nino mouths, nudging Aiba in the knee with his briefcase. "People are going to kill us."
"No, I'll be killed," Aiba whispers back, this time controlling his tone a little. "You're in a suit; you're necessary to the economy. I'm the bum in a dirty sweatshirt and old jeans."
Nino leans in, sniffs, and then makes a face. "Yeah, and you smell like it, too."
The train empties out in quick bursts of people at every stop, and eventually the two of them, who both look too young to be offered a seat, end up getting shuffled near the back of the car. It's a little tight but not as bad as before, and Aiba can still hear Nino counting the number of stops left to go under his breath.
"When's the last time you were over?" Nino asks all of a sudden.
Aiba blinks as if coming out of a dream. He'd been thinking hard about there being two stops left and how he didn't remember that, which, he thought, wasn't a good thing. "It's been awhile," he says quietly, hand shifting on the handle above him to keep his balance. "A month."
"More than that," Nino says, and Aiba wants to ask if he's been counting. He waits for it--Nino will say something like that, even if he's joking--but nothing comes.
So Aiba tries his luck. "Have you been counting?" he says, grinning.
Nino looks at him sideways. There's a second-long flash in his eyes and Aiba wonders if that means yes, Nino has been counting; Nino misses the way they used to be, when they were together all the time and only had to run down the hallway to see each other and took the train home together every single day of the week, even on the weekend. His heart does a little skip.
But all Aiba gets is a smirk.
"You wish," Nino says, and shoves his briefcase into Aiba's arms just as the train begins to slow down. "Get off, this is our stop."
--
Nino makes Aiba carry his briefcase all the way to the door. It's not a long walk, but the bag is stuffed with papers and, Aiba suspects, office supplies that Nino did not ask permission to take with him.
The elevator announces that it's out of order through a poorly written sign taped to its doors ("Day six," Nino says, and eyes the stairwell ominously). The apartment is on the third floor and not too much of a stretch, but Aiba lags behind anyway. It's been at least a month since he's seen anybody besides Sho and Nino and he's torn between babbling away at a rate of sixteen-hundred words per minute or hanging in the doorway and waving shyly.
But when Nino kicks in the door of his flat and Aiba smells hot food and fresh laundry and the scent of cheap candles, Aiba feels like he's just slipped back in time.
"Oh, God," Nino groans as Aiba pushes his way into the room. "Can somebody please explain to me why the hell my house smells like a bed of roses?"
"Stop complaining," a faraway voice replies. "Your sister gave you these candles two months ago and you haven't even used one yet."
The voice hits Aiba quickly and he's suddenly out of breath for no reason as he tries hard to remember where Nino's kitchen is. Somewhere along the way he drops the briefcase on the floor, not caring that someone might step on it or that whatever's in it might break. "Jun?" he says, turning his head every which way. "MatsuJun, where are you? It's me!"
"Me who?" Jun calls, and Aiba busts through a door to find Jun standing in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with a spoon in one hand and a magazine in the other.
They look at each other for a couple of seconds. Aiba's mouth opens and closes a few times; he's not sure what to say or if he should say anything--the last time he saw Jun was in the fall, when they had gone grocery shopping and walked under the trees in the park because Aiba had begged to see the changing leaves. It's winter outside now, but warm inside where there's dinner and blankets and beds, lights and carpet and friends. If time has passed between then and now, Aiba has already forgotten.
"Hi, MatsuJun," he finally says, and Jun puts everything he's holding down without looking where. "How--how have you been?"
"The same," Jun says, and then they're hugging so tightly that Aiba didn't even see it coming. His hands scramble for some sweater to hold onto and of course, of course Jun would be wearing a cashmere one. "Where did you come from? No, don't answer that." Jun exhales hard into Aiba's hair, and he can tell that Jun is stressed and overworked, but none of this is new. "Where have you been?"
Aiba shrugs. "Getting evicted," he says, voice muffled. He can smell Jun's shampoo and it's the expensive kind, full of exotic flowers and sweet things. Aiba hasn't forgotten that scent--it's tucked somewhere in his memories of meeting Jun through Nino years and years ago in a cheap cafe by their college. He had been Nino's sister's boyfriend, then, and while that relationship had ended soon after it didn't change much, only that Jun stopped going to Nino's house and started showing up more in his and Aiba's dormitory, cold from the journey but bright with excitement.
When Jun pulls back his cheeks are flushed and his eyes are wider than Aiba has ever remembered seeing them, wider than the full moons, even, that they howled at on nights where they were all too drunk to know their own names. He wants to tell Jun that it's okay, he'll manage, but Jun's mouth is already set in the same thin line that has always made Aiba a little ashamed of himself, even when he didn't know why.
"I heard," Jun says a tad stiffly. "Nino told me."
"Tattletale!" Nino calls from the other side of the apartment. "We had an agreement."
"Shut up, Nino," Jun yells back, and Aiba smiles before he forgets he's not supposed to right now. Instead, he scratches his head and looks at the ceiling.
"Uh-huh," he says, looking elsewhere. "I'm supposed to be out with all of my stuff by tomorrow."
Jun's mouth opens and Aiba just knows that there's a string of concerns on the other side, complete with the question he's been asked too many times to count: so what now?
"Well," Jun begins, "you can always--."
Before he can continue, though, the door behind them opens creakily. Aiba hears laughter and the sound of paper bags rustling against each other.
Then--
"Aiba-chan!"
Leave it to Ohno, Aiba thinks, to be the last one to show up. He's shuffling in behind Sho and not even completely in the room yet before Aiba is crushing him in a hug, crinkling the paper bag between them and stealing all of the cold away from Ohno's small body.
"Aiba-chan," Ohno says again, this time into Aiba's shoulder. "Long time no see."
His arms come around Aiba like they know exactly where they're going, like Aiba's shoulders aren't sagging with the weight of an eviction and too many worries. Ohno's laughing like this is easy, like they're still riding on the euphoria of landing jobs and getting paychecks and living in apartments, and all Aiba can do is squeeze him harder.
Out of them all Ohno is the one Aiba sees the least, even though he wishes it was the other way around sometimes. Ohno, Aiba is convinced, is good for the heart. Oftentimes Aiba finds himself wondering how they met and when it was--not too long ago, and it might have been through some odd job he had back then--but the details don't matter. There's a certain aura Ohno has that makes Aiba want to sit down anywhere and talk for hours without the fear that someone will make him stop.
They'll do that tonight, Aiba knows. Being here makes him think he has all the time in the universe--he has no plans, no concerns, no stigmas attached to his name. The five of them used to have dinner together often, before Sho became the big boss and Ohno quit the company to work at a studio on the other side of the city. Back then Aiba only had two jobs, and he was here almost every night to help Jun cook (as much as he could, anyway; Jun only let him do so much) and talk to Ohno, who said nothing back but the right things, and then after dinner he and Sho would pore through Nino's bare alcohol cabinet and whine about how there was never anything in there, save for a half-empty bottle of rum.
"Even the dust mites are looking for a drink," Aiba would always say, and Sho would swipe his finger across the bottom of the cupboard for proof.
Now Nino is standing next to Jun at the kitchen counter, poking through a mound of pasta and vegetables and mourning about how he'll have to clean up after everyone. This never would have happened, Nino is saying, if Aiba had never been evicted.
"Hey!" Aiba says, loosening himself from Ohno. "You're excited, Nino. Don't lie."
"Yeah, excited to take care of your drunk asses," Nino shoots back, but Aiba sees him smile. "Just like the old days, right?"
The old days would end in nights that spiraled into a familiar darkness lit only by the dim lamps in Nino's living room. They'd all be a little tipsy, and Aiba would be eating the leftovers from just hours before while Jun giggled over something vaguely profound Ohno had said. Sho would be blinking heavily, bottle in hand, and Nino would have his head in someone's lap, murmuring about how this was his house and they were all making it a mess.
He's doing the same thing now while pulling dishes out of the cabinet and examining which ones are clean enough for this dinner party occasion. "The last time we did this I had plastic utensils," he says, passing along ceramic plates and glasses to Ohno. "Now I'll have to wash them all by hand, and scrub the carpet, and rearrange my living room to hide stains--."
"Nino," Sho shouts from the couch. "As your boss, I'm telling you to stop being such a housewife."
"Easy for you to say," Nino snaps, placing a bunch of forks on top of Ohno's stack of china, "but who's going to be here tomorrow morning to help me?"
In the short silence that follows, Aiba thinks about it. He's the only one without a stable job and a house, and right now he needs the latter to ever think about getting the former. In his heart he knows that he has always wanted to live with Nino, if only to keep his old memories alive by seeing his best friend every single morning, weak with sleep and still dreaming about being Mario saving the princess from doom and gloom. College was like that--even high school was like that, when they would meet in the early hours to catch the train together.
Growing up may have separated them, but that isn't stopping Aiba from wanting to coming back.
"I will," Aiba says, and Nino turns around sharply, mouth halfway open. "Let me stay, I'll help you out."
--
That night after dinner the five of them (all sober for the task ahead, though Ohno had tried to sneak a swig straight from the bottle) pile into Sho's car to help Aiba pack and move into Nino's apartment. Aiba's not sure how he woke up this morning with an eviction notice sitting on his welcome mat to finding a temporary place to stay barely twelve hours later, but he refuses to think about his good luck or how Nino is now grumbling in the backseat.
"Why me?" he says exasperatedly. "Can't you move in with somebody else?"
But they are all perfectly aware of their respective living situations: Jun lives three doors down from Nino, but he has a girlfriend that moved into his apartment two months ago; her name is Mina and Aiba likes her a lot but he doesn't want to intrude on their personal space if he can help it. Ohno lives too far away, in the tiniest studio flat Aiba has never seen--it's hard to fit three people in there without Ohno having to put half of his belongings in the miniscule closet. And the only thing with Sho is that his sister often goes to his apartment when she doesn't feel like going home. It's been so frequent lately, Sho says, that she's moved half of her stuff into his house.
That leaves Nino and his nearly empty, sizeable apartment. The process of elimination, Aiba thinks, has never been more in his favor, even if Nino seems to feel differently.
"It'll only be for a little bit," Ohno says, and Nino groans, kicking the seat in front of him. Sho almost has a heart attack and attempts to go into a lecture about safety on the road before Aiba cuts him off.
"But it will be just a little bit!" Aiba promises. He turns around in the front seat and grins wide at Nino. "I'll help out, I promise. I'll cook and clean and make your bed and..."
"And find a new place to live," Nino adds. Aiba can feel his fingers curling over the edge of the headrest, and his nails are cold and sharp against the back of Aiba's neck like a tiny bite. "Soon."
As the car cruises over the highway Jun begins listing off a number of things in Aiba's apartment that he'll need while simultaneously keeping another list of objects he should throw out and forget about completely. As it turns out--but Aiba would expect nothing less of Jun, whose apartment is wide and spacious and yet is still full with everything he needs--the first list is much shorter than the second, and also sounds more like what Aiba would need to pack for camp rather than his moving into a new house. According to Jun, all Aiba needs to survive until he can find his own apartment are some clothes, a toothbrush, and two pairs of shoes.
"And Nino has a spare futon, don't you, Nino?" Jun prods.
"Yeah," Nino says after a long pause. Aiba can just imagine him slouched down in the backseat with his arms crossed. "Well, it's not spare anymore, I guess."
But I'll put it to good use, Aiba wants to say. He knows Nino is just being bitter about having to share his coveted space and in a couple of days it won't be so bad, but Aiba is starting to feel more like a leech than someone who just wants to move in with a good friend of his until his life gets sorted out again. He doesn't know how to tell Nino this, though, without getting smacked upside the head with a retort from Nino that would go something along the lines of, "Seriously, how corny can you be? Don't you care about my mental health?"
He's still thinking about it by the time they've all piled into Aiba's ex-home armed with cardboard boxes and masking tape ("Don't ask," Ohno says as he hands out a few flattened boxes to each of them. "I got lucky at the studio, is all"). Jun immediately tackles the kitchen because, he says, he doesn't trust any of them with knives, and Sho and Ohno move somewhere into the bathroom to shove a bunch of half-used shampoos and soaps into a giant trash bag. Aiba is sad to see all of his free samples go, but half of them made his skin itch and the other half smelled too much like perfume for his taste.
That leaves Aiba and Nino to sort the living room out. Even before they start, Aiba tells Nino that soon this will be a nothing room.
"Because it'll be empty," Aiba says sadly. In reply, Nino just biffs him over the head with a throw pillow.
"It doesn't matter what it'll be when we're finished," Nino says, and begins to assemble one of the cardboard boxes. "It's not even your house anymore."
Aiba nods, but he doesn't exactly feel that way. Even if he's no longer a resident of this building and even if this place wasn't the best one on earth, Aiba will still miss coming back to it at weird hours of the day, sweaty and tired. The next place he'll move into won't have the same fridge that Aiba could stick his head into during the hot rush of August, nor will it have the windows that shook during typhoons. Even if there are better things ahead, seeing all of his stuff getting thrown out or packed away just makes Aiba feel like a part of his life is ending.
"Hey," Nino says, nudging Aiba in the shoulder. "It's okay. You're coming home with me."
When Aiba looks up all he can think of are bar nights with Sho, when they'd clink their glasses to Nino and down a drink or two in his name. Sarcastic little brat or not, since they were fourteen Aiba has always counted on Nino to be there for him to make things that much better.
"Yeah," Aiba says, nodding. There's a thank you on the tip of his tongue, but he knows that Nino's heard it already.
--
When they were in college, Aiba and Nino lived on opposite ends of a hallway.
It was nice, then, for Aiba to see Nino all the time even though they weren't constantly in each other's faces. They'd both agreed that being roommates would have been too much, so Aiba found himself staying with a fellow science major, which was good for his schoolwork, and Nino had the good fortune of getting a roommate who came back a total of three times per semester, so there was always extra space. Still, all they had to do if they wanted to see each other was take a quick walk down the hall. There was a comfortable distance between them at school and on breaks they went home and came back together.
But living with Nino, Aiba has quickly discovered, is a whole different experience.
After he moved in with a couple of cardboard boxes and one duffel bag full of clothes, Nino pulled out the spare futon, laid it on the living room floor and told Aiba to restrain his sleep-kicking enough so that Nino wouldn't have to wake up to find all of his things on the floor in disarray (and by 'things' Nino meant his carefully put-together game consoles that occupied more space in the living room than they were supposed to).
He then said, in his most matter-of-fact voice, that Aiba had three weeks to find a new place.
"Just three?" Aiba had said. He didn't even try to hide his disappointment.
And maybe Nino had noticed, but that didn't change anything. "Three," Nino repeated. "That's enough time, since you took leave off work and everything."
Then he took a large envelope from his briefcase and handed it to Aiba.
"This is from Sho-chan and Jun-kun," was all the explanation he gave before he went off in search of sheets and a pillow.
The envelope turned out to be a huge stack of housing magazines with a couple of ads for part-time jobs thrown into the mix. Several pages in the magazines were bookmarked with bright-red tape from when Sho was looking for his apartment, and some of the ads had Jun's handwriting in the margins that said things like good times available and quick commute.
And, on the cover: YOU CAN DO IT, AIBA-CHAN. The letters looked suspiciously Ohno-like, but the 'Aiba-chan' was written in Nino's signature style--a quick yet decipherable scribble.
Since then Aiba has been determined to make himself useful. Every morning he's gotten up to make breakfast for himself and Nino (usually something easy like toast and coffee, but he's still trying to make scrambled eggs that are not burnt to a crisp) and, after Nino is out the door cursing about his lateness around a piece of toast, he sits at the table with the envelope and a thick green marker.
He's made a bit of progress--certainly nothing to brag about, but it's only been four days. In between the early morning hours and lunchtime Aiba circles promising-looking apartments in green and, when that gets boring, tours Nino's house with the television on in the background. It's exactly how it was when Nino first bought the apartment: one bedroom, one bathroom, a living room and a tiny, tiny kitchen. But there are details that Aiba hasn't seen before, like the generic, mass-produced paintings hanging on the walls and photographs in thick, black frames sitting on the coffee table (both trinkets that Ninomiya-mama probably forced her son to put up for the sake of his aesthetically boring apartment).
By the sixth day Aiba's come to memorize all of the faces that look up at him from inside the frames. As he sits on the couch, circling away (and sometimes doodling green flowers or stick figures in the margins of the magazines), he glances up sometimes to find all of the still-life figures smiling at him expectantly, as if they're waiting for an explanation of why he's there and Nino is not. But Aiba doesn't feel like he should have to explain this to the frozen pictures of Sho and Jun and Ohno that sit on the table in various degrees of dress: graduation suits, New Year's Day kimonos, swim trousers. Their real-life counterparts know the story, after all.
But there's a girl in the last picture that Aiba doesn't know.
Aiba knows that by staying here he's sort of intruding in on Nino's new life and that maybe there are certain things he shouldn't know or care about, but even so he's not sure how to feel about this. The girl in the photo seems familiar to Aiba in that she looks like every other girl he sees on the street: fairly pretty, but nothing special to set her apart from the rest. She's got one hand resting on Nino's arm and the other is raised in a peace sign to whoever is taking the picture.
And Nino, Nino looks happy. This is what strikes Aiba the most--not that he's looking at a photograph with Nino and a girl, because girls like Nino and he's used to acquaintances and classmates asking for pictures to show off to their other friends--but that still-Nino looks genuinely pleased. His expression is frozen in mid-laughter and his arm is casually slung around the girl's shoulders. They look comfortable, like they've known each other for years.
The fact that he doesn't know who the girl is annoys Aiba just a little bit. He's tried not to stare at her too much and has attempted, over the past six days of being Nino's pseudo-roommate, to focus on finding a new, affordable home and not breaking anything in the house. So far, he's done a good job of not bringing her up in conversation, but lately when Nino comes home he's so tired that all Aiba can say to him are quiet words about dinner and nothing more. According to Sho, the company is trying to form an alliance with a big-shot company that's taking up all of their energy and resources, and Nino is being forced to buckle down and do things on time.
"I even cut down his lunch to one hour," Sho says, shaking his head, and Aiba understands completely.
So he tries to be helpful. He does the laundry a couple of times, and it only turned out really bad once ("The last time I checked," Nino had said, holding a horribly shrunken sweater away at arm's length, "I couldn't fit into children's sizes"). He's called Jun to ask for really easy recipes to cook for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and even though Jun had been kind of wary at first, he'd finally relented. Now instead of boring old coffee and toast in the morning, Aiba rolls off his futon excited about stuffing a fried egg into a frame of bread and tossing a piece to Nino as he walks out of his room, bleary-eyed and hair uncombed.
Aiba is starting to realize that domesticity might be calling his name. Then he thinks of all the laundry he'd have to fold and all the potential children he'd have to cook three meals a day for, and after coming to the conclusion that being a house-husband would start to become a chore, he scraps the idea.
But right now, doing all of this for Nino is enough to keep Aiba satisfied.
"Why do you do this for me?" Nino asks sleepily at the end of the first week. He'd walked into the kitchen five minutes earlier than usual, which gave him time for breakfast on an actual plate and a couple of words before he was out the door. "You don't cook, and I don't do anything for you."
Aiba just laughs. He pours more coffee for the both of them and stares at the steam that spirals from the mug to envelop Nino's pale, small face in dainty fog. They never used to drink coffee; bucketfuls of green tea were all they needed in college to stay awake for term papers and last-minute conversations. But Aiba thinks he likes this better, for a number of reasons.
"I just want to," Aiba says cheerfully, and his eyes flick for a second to the photographs on the table. Who is she, Aiba imagines saying, and has she ever made you breakfast, coffee; does she ever do your laundry?
Do I do it better?
Nino shrugs and pokes the last bit of egg and toast into his mouth with the tip of his index finger. "Don't break my stuff," he says, and picks up his briefcase with the air of someone who would rather sleep in for the next five days than go to work.
If he could, Aiba would let him stay. He'd peel the coat off Nino's arms and undo his tie and lead him back to a still-rumpled bed.
But all he does is smile and nod, smile and nod.
"And," Nino says before he steps out the door, "thanks."
--
On the first Saturday that Aiba and Nino have together, Aiba gets up at seven o'clock on the dot. Lying next to him is a sheet that he made the night before of apartments for rent, and he'd hoped that today would be full of adventuring round the city, looking for the perfect place for Aiba to call home for the second--or, he supposes, third or fourth--time.
For several minutes he stares at the ceiling, blinking himself into consciousness and thinking, it's Saturday--Saturday! The weekend! There might be businessmen walking the streets right now and getting paid for overtime, but not even Nino would do that. Right now he's probably curled up in a ball on his bed, blanket twisted somewhere near his feet and fingers unknowingly reaching for the sunlight creeping slowly into his room.
So Aiba gets off the spare futon and tiptoes, as quietly as possible, down the hallway.
Nino's door opens with the softest click and Aiba exhales, making sure not to make any loud noises. The bedroom is already glowing with the sunrise, and Nino's white sheets are awash in dandelion-color. It takes Aiba minute of standing still and silent by the door to find Nino, but his eyes finally catch the faint wriggling of toes by the end of the bed. Aiba follows the lines under the blankets up to Nino's lifted t-shirt and parted mouth, and Aiba feels, inexplicably and suddenly, that this is an image he could get used to waking up to.
Or next to, Aiba thinks, and makes his way over to the bed. If he got in--if he rolled into bed with Nino, closed his eyes, and dreamed the next four hours away--what would happen? Experience has taught him nothing. The last time the two of them were ever together in the same bed they both had some sickness that needed to be quarantined, and the nurse at school ordered them to stay together, far away from human civilization, until they got better.
In that room the two of them played an endless amount of video games and talked an endless amount about girls and their mysterious ways. They were nineteen, but it didn't matter--nobody could hear them. They sneezed a lot and coughed up a storm and took too many prescribed pills so that in the end Nino swears that they both went a little loopy, but Aiba prefers to think that's just because they had been locked up in isolation for a week.
The beds they were meant to occupy were soon pushed together to create one bed ("We're sick," Nino had grumbled, "so it doesn't really matter how close we are. I probably got this from you, anyway"). At night they tumbled around, tossing pillows and throwing around sheets, trying to get comfortable until Aiba realized that whoever invented spooning was a genius. And Nino didn't seem to mind it, either.
The fact that it's been too long since that moment isn't stopping Aiba from crawling into bed with Nino now. They're both reasonably healthy and no longer nineteen years old, but Aiba has never stopped missing Nino's body heat in the middle of the winter. In Nino's apartment the heating blasts all day long, but Aiba's felt colder nights in his life than he ever wanted to and all he did to get through them was rub his feet together and think, if only, if only.
Nino stirs when Aiba shifts onto the bed, but Aiba only finds himself whispering sssh. He's gone this far and there's no going back.
Of course something in Aiba should have seen this coming, but these days he hardly ever sees the signs: having three part-time jobs instead of one that paid well didn't signal any warnings to him, and so the eviction was like a slap in the face. And moving in with Nino, well, that should have triggered something in Aiba's head that told him to stop, to not go through with this, to just hold it in and look the other way.
But Aiba loves Nino. Aiba loves Sho and Jun and Ohno, too, but there's an extra-special part of his heart reserved for the boy he's trekked through the rain with underneath a single, half-broken umbrella. They took their college entrance exams at the same time and have memorized most of the train routes going in and out of Tokyo together simply because of the amount of times they've ridden past the same buildings and fields and skies sitting side-by-side. They've survived two graduations, Jun's random fits of anger, moving house and an eviction.
Now all Aiba has to do is survive these three weeks in Nino's house without letting anything happen. He doesn't know what his living under this roof will entail, and his future plans only include circling more ads in green marker, doing more laundry the right way, and trying not to think about who that girl in the picture is. It might not be a big deal, anyway--she could be just a friend--and it doesn't matter if Aiba's the one lying next to Nino in bed right now. This is all it could ever be, though. Nothing more.
He rests the edge of his chin carefully on Nino's shoulder and closes his eyes. Nino smells like work, like printing ink and snapped ballpoint pens and starched shirts.
Aiba breathes in and out. He forgets, gradually, about lists and independent living, paychecks and loneliness.
This is all he needs for now.
Part two