Chapter Text
The first time the letters had appeared on his arm, Reki had gone to his mom, screaming. He hadn't written anything on his arm, he'd claimed, his little five-year-old arms flailing. Until she'd managed to catch one and zero in on the scrawling script that had appeared—in striking, chilly light blue—just above his wrist. Sideways, big, and very hard to ignore.
"It's just your soulmate, sweetie," she had said, which had only created more questions for Reki. "They've probably just learned to write their name, so they must be about the same age as you."
"What's a soulmate?"
She'd crouched down in front of him, smiling gently. "A soulmate is your other half," she'd explained. "They're who you're meant to spend your life with—they're your person."
Your person. Those words struck Reki, fascination and wonder soon forming in his thoughts. "What's it say?" he'd asked, holding his arm up for closer inspection.
His mother had hummed. "It's… hard to tell." She peered critically at his skin. "I think it's in a different language."
"Oh…"
"You'll still find them someday," she'd assured. "Don't worry."
As it would turn out, most people didn't have soulmarks in languages different from their own native tongue. Some did—it wasn't so rare as to be unheard of—but most souls were born to be close, to be found, to be compatible. Reki would later find that he was only one of two kids in his entire school that had a soulmark in a different language.
"I think it's English," his mother said a year later, when his soulmate's handwriting had gotten neat enough to at least be sort of legible. Soulmarks changed as the handwriting of the specific soulmate changed. Every time they wrote their name, the soulmark would alter to match. "Sorry, sweetie, I can't read it," his mother continued.
Groaning, Reki went straight to the librarian at school and presented his arm. "Can you read this?" he asked.
The librarian—an older, hunched lady with funny glasses—had looked almost affronted by his brazen attitude, but ultimately given in to his question. Pushing her glasses up on her nose, she took hold of his arm and stared at the blue name written there for a few long seconds.
"Hmm, I believe it says… R—Ranga? Lan—Ranga?"
"Ranga?" Reki mimed, the word feeling very strange on his tongue.
"This letter here," she pointed to the first letter in the name, the funny "L" shaped one, "is pronounced as 'Ra,' no, 'Lra,' 'L-La?' It's difficult for Japanese people to distinguish. But if I'm remembering correctly, it's 'La.'"
"Ra," Reki echoed.
"No, 'La.'"
"Ra."
"No, 'La.'"
"That's what I'm saying."
"Don't argue with me." She sent him away shortly after.
In any case, Reki kinda, sorta knew how to at least say his soulmate's name now and muttered it often under his breath for practice, even as he wrote his own name over and over and over again in his notebooks. A common practice among kids, who were all learning about soulmates and who wanted their names to appear as prettily as possible on said soulmate's skin.
"I've added a heart to my name," Reki heard one girl say in third grade.
Reki had stuck out his tongue in disgust. His own soulmate wouldn't want hearts or silly things added to his name, he was certain, and so he kept on with his own practice. He did note, however, that his own soulmark would change from the normal English he'd grown accustomed to into some kind of looping, all-connected version, but only at night when he stayed up later than he was allowed, and only for about an hour.
"Cursive," his English teacher had explained—a foreigner from the US. "Your soulmate is learning cursive. It's a special kind of English writing."
Fancy, Reki thought, admiring the blue loops the next night. He liked his soulmate's normal writing, but the cursive was pretty too.
What color did his name show up as, on his soulmate's arm, he wondered?
In fourth grade, kids started to get self-conscious of their soulmarks. Already, a select few had found their soulmates, which made them considerable braggarts to the rest of their peers. Not wanting to draw attention to their marks and that they'd yet to find their other halves, the girls—mostly—started covering theirs with fashionable sleeves, decorated and bright. The boys started doing something similar in the fifth grade, with dark, tough looking sport's sleeves and such. Reki didn't quite get why, as he and his best friend were two of the few that didn't much care about others seeing their soulmarks. They were far more intent on their new hobby—skateboarding.
"Isn't it depressing for you, though?" the girl who sat in front of Reki said one day, having turned back to talk to him during a break. Looking up from his doodle pad, Reki said "huh?" as he had no idea what she was talking about.
"Your soulmark," she continued, pointing down as his arm where the name "Langa" had started to tilt with a kind of quick grace that reminded Reki of cursive, just without all the confusing loops. "It's in English. That means your soulmate is a foreigner. They'll be a lot harder to find."
"So what?" Reki asked. "I'll still find them someday."
"Some people never do, though," she countered.
Reki frowned. Though he'd never thought too hard about it, he did know that some people never met their soulmates. Despite the assumed idea behind the phenomenon being that you be fated to meet them, the world was just too big and there were too many people. Even in the advent of the internet and globalization, it remained difficult, especially when your soulmate was from an entirely different culture and country than your own.
"I will find them," Reki rebuked stubbornly.
He'd started covering up his soulmark after that.
In year one of middle school, his best (and only) friend had a terrible fall off a skateboarding ramp and ended up in the hospital. He'd cracked his head open and broken his arm, which led to a long recovery. Reki visited him every day, because he tried to be a good friend, and when the doctor said that he'd make a full recovery, they both celebrated.
Soon, they'd be back to normal, skating and having fun!
After the accident, though, his best friend was scared to get on a skateboard again. Reki kind of understood, and figured that—in time—his friend would overcome his fear. He just had to help him be brave.
Unfortunately, his best friend didn't have the same ideas in mind.
"I need to focus more on school," he said, when Reki would bother him about skating. "I can't keep messing around with skateboarding. I want to get into a good university. Don't you?"
Reki just wanted to skate.
"Skateboarding isn't a good thing to be doing," his friend also said. "Only delinquents skate when they get older. I have to stay focused on my grades."
Distance, then, was what came between them. Until they didn't talk at all anymore and everyone forgot they'd even been friends. While his "best friend" went on to become a popular soccer player at their school, Reki stuck to his skating, doodling, and lackluster enthusiasm for his education in general. He didn't have any friends, but he also wasn't "unpopular." People knew of him—knew he was that one red-haired kid in class 2 who was obsessed with skateboarding. Skateboarding, which was sort of a forbidden sport for those who wanted approval, but also kind of cool. From far away, anyway. Thus, Reki remained far away from his peers.
It was… lonely. He found himself more and more focused on his soulmate. Certainly his soulmate would think skating was cool. Certainly they'd want to skate with him and be his friend.
Sometime at the beginning of year two of middle school, he found himself researching what an English keyboard looked like, and downloading the software to his computer in order to use it. And then he was slowly matching each letter of his soulmate's very narrow, swooping handwriting to the letters on the keyboard guide.
L…A…N…G…A, Reki muttered to himself, poking at one key at a time until the name appeared in his browser's search bar.
Apparently, Langa was a township in Cape Town, South Africa. And a village in Estonia. And a village in Greece, and Iran, and India, and a whole bunch of other places. It was also the website for some English tech writer named "Fred," and was a name in Zulu that meant "sun," purportedly for an "independent woman."
Was his soulmate a girl named Langa, then? Hard to tell. The next page of search results got him people whose surnames were Langa, and small businesses called Langa, and, really, nothing useful. But he kept looking and looking. He'd put in different searches, like "people Langa" and "name Langa" and just… browse. Until it became habitual. He'd look up the name for a few minutes every day, either in the general search with new words attached or in the news section or occasionally in pictures.
He didn't think anything of it, really. He did it when he felt lonely, when he had no one to share the latest trick he'd learned with, when the kids at school were laughing about the silly things he doodled in his notebook.
Then, something new happened. Sometime into early March, he typed in "Langa" and went to the "news" section.
"Local, Langa Hasegawa-Wright, takes gold in Snowboarding Junior World Championships." Reki didn't understand all the words, but he knew enough English to sound them out. Pasting the article title into a translator, he soon got the gist.
"Snowboarding," he muttered, clicking on the link to read the rest of the article. It was translated into Japanese automatically, though the software did a rough job of it. He did manage to discover that this "Langa" guy was the same age he was, had gotten a gold medal in the halfpipe event, and that he lived in some town called Edmonton in Canada (the online newspaper was local, therefore they were very proud of this Langa boy's accomplishments).
"They speak English in Canada, right?" Reki muttered, ignoring how his heart did a little flip in his chest.
Despite knowing that this one person, out of the hundreds—maybe thousands—of people named Langa, probably wasn't his soulmate, Reki copy and pasted the guy's entire name into his search bar.
"Langa… Hasegawa…" He was sounding out the name. "Wait, Hasegawa? That sounds Japanese. Is he part Japanese?" His heart did another titter. "Langa Hasegawa-Wright."
The first link to pop up was a facebook page.
Reki did not have a facebook. He had a twitter, but never been interested in the whole facebook thing. He didn't have anyone to be friends with on facebook, whereas on Twitter, he could at least keep up with the Japanese skater scene.
Still, he clicked on the link, thankful when it appeared to be public.
Langa's cover photo was of some snowy mountains, which wasn't so surprising if he was a snowboarder, and his profile picture was of what Reki assumed to be him, but he was in a scarf, goggles, and beanie, so very little of his face was visible. Maybe he had more pics? Clicking on the profile picture, he was able to scroll back in time to previous ones, but they were all snowboard related—either with him doing a sick trick at a distance or still mostly covered in his gear. Ultimately unhelpful.
Lips pooched in concentration, Reki noted the "photos" option just below his profile picture and clicked away.
Jackpot.
The section titled "Photos of You" gave him a much greater variety. Probably because, he quickly noted, they were posted by other people. The first had been uploaded by a woman named "Nanako Hasegawa" and the caption was something in English. The photo was of her—a thin, pretty woman with long brown hair—standing beside a tall white guy with light blonde hair and very pale skin. While between them, in the foreground of the image, was who Reki assumed was Langa.
He looked younger—Reki's age—and was very clearly of mixed heritage. Pale, with blue-green eyes, shaggy, light-blue hair, and features that were predominantly Japanese, though the euro-centric details were easy to pick up on. He was… handsome. Very handsome, with a sharply shaped face and a small, shy smile.
He looked happy, though, holding his gold halfpipe medal up for the camera, all of them dressed in bulky winter coats.
The picture was dated as having been posted two days prior.
Continuing to browse the available images, Reki quickly learned that snowboarding was a huge deal to this family, specifically to the father (Oliver?) and Langa. "Oliver" posted a lot of pictures of both himself and Langa on the slopes—some selfies, some at a distance. While Nanako posted a lot of family related things and little messages from her vantage point inside different ski lodges, normally with hot cocoa or something similar in the foreground.
Some of the messages she even wrote in Japanese, one of them referring to Langa as her "Talented little bird, Langa Oliver."
"Langa Oliver?" Reki muttered. Langa and Oliver? Or was it really Langa Oliver?
Another image referred to Langa, after he got a medal in some other event, as "Langa Oliver Hasegawa-Wright."
"This guy has a lot of names," Reki decided.
He continued his, er, stalking for a while after, despite the voice in the back of his head whispering that there was "no way this amazing guy" was his soulmate. What he found out was that Langa and his family travelled a lot for competitions, because their photos were tagged not only in different places in Canada, but sometimes in other, snowier locations around the world. He also surmised that Langa didn't have too many friends, as most—if not all—of his photos were of him with his family. But then, if he was constantly travelling around the world to snowboard, friends would be a difficult thing to maintain. There was one girl who popped up in his photos occasionally, however. A "Patrice Wright," who looked incredibly like him in the thinness of her bone structure (she appeared to be full white, however). She had pale, mint-colored hair and eyes the same color as Langa's. His cousin, Reki eventually deduced. There were also a few of him with a couple of older looking white people. Grandparents, maybe?
Langa's posts weren't exactly illuminating, however. He was tagged in some by certain snowboarding organizations and other snowboarders in his "league," but he very rarely posted anything himself. And when he did, it was usually some snowboarding meme or a vague photo of snow or mountains.
Not talkative, but his life was definitely interesting. Exciting, even.
"And he's probably not my soulmate," Reki said in the end, sighing.
Still, he kept up with "Langa Oliver Hasegawa-Wright." He checked his facebook page at least once a week—just because—and would occasionally type his name into the search bar.
That summer, Reki got his first job. It was at a skate shop called "Dope Sketch" and it was probably the most perfect job he ever could have asked for. The shop not only sold skateboards, but specialized in graphics and design. The manager was a killer artist and after seeing Reki's doodles (and his passion for skating), he'd been happy to bring him into the fold.
Truth be told, that was what Reki had assumed would be the highlight of his year. Until Shokichi, the manager, told him about "S." At first, Reki was skeptical. A secret skateboarding track at an old mine? Where races were held every Friday night? Certainly, he'd have heard of such a thing by then. But Shokichi said it was totally secret and that people had to have special pins to get in. He'd flashed his own for Reki to see, but still…
It wasn't until he'd joined his manager one Friday night, having been granted a guest sticker as an employee for Dope Sketch, that Reki really saw what the magic was all about.
Skaters from all over the city gathered in one place for free style, no holds barred races of insanity through the mine with a finale at the old, dilapidated warehouse. It was like nothing Reki had ever imagined and he went religiously the moment Shokichi got him his own pin. He didn't do any racing himself, but he planned to, someday, and when there weren't races happening, it was the best place to watch and learn from other skaters. He was… somewhat shy—a little afraid to approach anyone directly. But he made more progress that summer with his skating than he ever had before. While Langa, it seemed, did the same with his snowboarding, or so Reki's consistent research on the guy told him.
He was something of a rising star within snowboarding, as it would turn out. Though he wasn't yet old enough, reporters would occasionally mention him as potential Olympic material and anticipated an attempt in the 2022 winter games. His parents were apparently very, very supportive of his athletic aspirations and so put in as much effort as they could to help him succeed. He'd already won a number of notable competitions and was notorious for extreme air off the pipe.
"Did you see that?" one of the Japanese announcers from the X Games coverage was saying, Reki watching intently as Langa finished his halfpipe run. "That was at least six meters off the pipe!"
"This kid is only fifteen years old!" another said.
"He'll be breaking Shaun White's record in a few years," the other added (Reki had then looked up the record, which was apparently seven meters).
"He snowboards for Canada, but I can't hold it against the guy when he's half Japanese," they went on to say, laughing.
Langa finished in third, which had been about all the announcers were talking about, even over the first and second place winners. He was a force to be reckoned with, apparently, and only had good things in his future. At such a young age, his career was very promising and everyone was keeping a keen eye on him.
So keen, in fact, that near the end of his third year in junior high, Reki found himself confused when he did his weekly check of Langa's facebook page. There was a huge influx of messages from people, which never, ever happened. He'd been "stalking" Langa for almost a year and he was lucky if something got posted once a month to his wall.
What were all these people saying?
"RIP?" Was Langa dead?!
Frantically sitting up in bed, Reki did a quick translation on a few of the messages.
"So sorry for your loss, Langa. You father was a great man."
"What a terrible accident. Rest in Peace, Oliver."
"He loved you so much, Langa—I'm so sorry."
Feeling hollow and deflated despite the fact that he didn't even know this boy, Reki took the name "Oliver Wright" and typed it into his search engine.
"Man dies in avalanche," was the first translated article that came up, so Reki clicked in immediately. "Oliver Wright, 36, was buried and killed by an avalanche on Tuesday. He was touring alone on Mt…" His translator couldn't figure out the name of the mountain, "… when he was caught in the debris. Authorities discovered his body three days later. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Wright was vacationing with his family—wife, Nanako, and son, Langa—when the accident occurred. Wright was meant to be touring with his son, who is a 2022 Olympic hopeful, but went alone as a result of his son falling ill with the flu."
Sitting back, Reki listened to himself breathing against the darkness of his bedroom. Despite the terrible news, he found himself relieved—and guilty—that Langa hadn't been with his father. He'd be dead too, had he not been sick.
He didn't know this boy—he was little more than a fan following his career at that point—but he felt bad. So bad. He couldn't even imagine what it was like to lose a parent, especially when that parent was such a central figure in his life. Yes, Reki loved his father, but they weren't close in the way Langa had been with Oliver. They didn't share the same passions or the same goals.
Langa must be devastated.
Despite knowing there was nothing he could do to help, the incident stayed in Reki's thoughts. Every time he looked at his soulmark, his chest stung and he felt empty. There had to be something he could do, right? Even if Langa wasn't his soulmate, he could, at the very least, send him condolences. Or maybe that would be invasive? He didn't want to intrude.
He was brainstorming his options in class one day, doodling away in his notebook, when he got an idea.
On the page in front of him, he'd drawn his preferred avatar—a red, round blob with big eyes, cat ears, and a little gold halo. It was cutesy, he knew, but was easy and fast to put in the corners or around the edges of his more complicated graphics.
Beside it, he'd drawn the snow creature he'd invented the year before, which he privately related to Langa. It was white and fuzzy with fluffy hair, little hooked horns, sharp, pointy teeth, and rounded paws with claws.
He didn't want to invade Langa's personal bubble, but something like an informal card wouldn't be bad, right?
With this in mind, Reki skated home right after school (rare for him), went to his bedroom, and pulled out his actual sketchbook. Using his school doodles for reference, he created a scene of his little red avatar sitting on its yellow skateboard, rolling down toward the bottom of the page. And beside it, he put his Langa monster on its blue snowboard. He then used his markers to color them in and add a track of cool colors beneath the snow monster and warm colors beneath his own avatar, which came to merge together at the bottom.
He spent four hours coloring it in. Shading and adding other little details—shapes, faces, anything he could think of to fill the page. By the end, he was rather proud of his creation and reached for a thick, red marker with which to sign his name in the corner.
He hesitated, however, the entire idea crashing inside his head.
What was he doing? Was he going to send this to Langa? All the way in Canada? He didn't even know his address. And if he did find it, and send him the picture, would it be wise to sign his name?
Then again, what would it matter? There were probably just as many Rekis as there were Langas in the world and seeing as he and his Langa probably weren't soulmates, his name wouldn't mean anything.
So he signed it. Simply " -レキ," using his "S" spelling for his name as opposed to the kanji spelling.
But… what did he do with it now that it was finished? Was he really going to try sending it? He could always scan it and send it via facebook. He'd have to make his own account, but that was far more direct than sending it in the mail. Yet… Reki wasn't totally comfortable with that. If he sent it through facebook, then that'd connect them almost too directly. What if Langa never looked at it? Or, worse, looked at it and never responded?
No, if he was going to send it, it needed to be in the actual mail. That required an address, however.
Buckling down for a lot of research, Reki actually found himself relatively surprised at how easy it was to find Langa's address. There was a small blurb about his father at the website of a funeral home in Edmonton, with an address directing people if they wished to send their condolences to the family. Supposing that was the best he was going to get, Reki wrote it down in his notebook.
The following day, he folded his picture in half and sealed it in an envelope. He was nearly out the door to the post office when it occurred to him he'd have to write a return address. Did he want Langa to know where he lived? It only seemed fair if the address he had would take him to Langa. But, much like facebook, that felt too direct. Langa was so high above him, was so amazing. Besides, if he put his own address, he'd be caught waiting for a response. Whereas if he put, say…
The address to the "S" warehouse, then he'd never know if Langa didn't respond.
That felt safer.
He sent out his letter later that day, having been told it could take almost two weeks to get there. Which was fine. The longer, the better, or… something. He had no idea. Mostly, he felt foolish. This guy was going to get one of his dumb drawings in the mail and probably throw it away. Which was fine—it was the thought that counted, Reki kept telling himself.
At the most, if Langa did get his drawing, he hoped it brightened his day.
It was that hope, in fact, that had him sketching out another drawing a week later, this one with the same characters, only they were headed down a paved street. Reki's red avatar was skating along fine, whereas the snow monster was sliding precariously on his board. It was comical, Reki hoped, and he added as many bright colors and fun details as he could.
He had not anticipated he'd be dropping it in the mail, the same as the other one. Nor had he predicted that he'd do it a third time, this drawing centered on a snowy landscape where the monster was leading the way and Reki's avatar had the wheels of his skateboard stuck in the snow.
He never got anything back—how could he? But he even went ahead and sent out a forth drawing, and then a fifth, and a sixth. Until it became a weekly routine. He needed the practice as far as creating awesome graphics anyway, and so he used that as an excuse to keep going. All the drawings included his red avatar and the snow monster he'd assigned to Langa. Sometimes, they were simply hanging out, doing their respective sports on a fun, colorful background, and other times, Reki told stupid, dumb stories. Like his red avatar dragging the snow monster across town to the "S" track, or the snow monster coming to visit his avatar at Dope Sketch. It was never anything overly detailed, but he hoped that if Langa was getting these drawings at all, they were maybe something to look forward to.
He kept up on his stalking as well, keeping an eye on Langa's facebook page and any news of him. Nothing much changed after the death of his father—no one was saying much of anything and his social media was even more inactive than it had been prior. So Reki kept drawing and kept sending every week, all in the small hope that he was offering even the slightest bit of relief to this boy he didn't know and would probably never meet.
He was determined to keep it up now. Even during weeks when he didn't have the time to create a fully colored drawing, he cleaned up one of his sketches and sent that instead. If Langa was receiving his letters, then he might be looking forward to getting one every week, right?
Probably not, but Reki could dream. And in his dream, Langa couldn't wait for his letters, so he had to make sure to get them out consistently and without fail.
Six months after Oliver's death, Reki came across an article that had likely started in the rumor mill. Something about how Langa Wright wouldn't be participating in any upcoming snowboarding events due to the death of his father. It was a statement that had a few in the sport questioning its validity, thus it was shortly dismissed. But after another month, a more official statement was released that verified its accuracy— "Langa Hasegawa-Wright, rising-star snowboarder and 2022 Olympic hopeful, has decided to end his athletic career before it even had the chance to begin. Citing his father's death, the sixteen-year-old is hanging up his board, quoted as saying that he 'can't find any joy in snowboarding anymore.' A sad loss for the community as a whole and a devastating clue as to how young Langa is fairing after the tragic accident that killed his father and fellow snowboarder, Oliver Wright."
Reki wished, more than ever, that his idiotic efforts were doing something. In his next drawing, he removed the snow monster's snowboard and instead had his own avatar offering up a replacement skateboard. He didn't want to rub salt in the wound, but if Langa wanted, he could share in Reki's passion for skating. If he wanted to. If he was getting these letters at all (and if he didn't think they were lame or annoying or immature).
He sent it out, and the next one, and the one after that. On and on, sometimes feeling stupid, but knowing it was long too late to stop now. On the slim chance that Langa was enjoying his letters, he couldn't let up.
An entire year went by. Fifty-two drawings Reki sent out, always different, and always with only his given name signed at the bottom. It became normal, habitual. He stopped even thinking about it. His art skills improved tremendously, much to his manager's approval, and he was even allowed to start offering up designs for the shop. He'd also taken that year to start learning how to build his own boards. Cleaning out the garage beside his house that no one used, he'd slowly but surely created his own workspace, where he labored at creating the perfect boards with the craziest graphics. Life was good. No, he wasn't a stellar student and he didn't have much in the way of friends, but he got to go to "S" every Friday night and he had an awesome job and his skating was getting better every day. He figured everything would keep on going as it always had, that he had nothing to worry about but climbing up, up, up.
Until, one afternoon, his mom said that a call had come from the post office. Some letter he'd sent out had come back, but the return address wasn't valid. They'd looked up their name in order to find him.
Heart sinking like a stone, Reki went to the post office directly, where the clerk handed him his letter. It had the words "RETURN TO SENDER" stamped on it in English and a similar message in Japanese.
He'd never felt so disappointed in his life.
Opening the letter when he got home, he found that it was one of the drawings he'd sent out only a month ago. Which made sense—it'd take it two weeks to get to Canada and then two weeks to make it back. Did that mean all his letters has been getting lost and this was the only one to have made it back to him, simply because the post office had bothered to look into it? Had all his efforts been wasted this entire time?
Paranoid and sad, he'd left a notice with the post office that if any more came back for him, they could call him on his cell.
A week later—before he was going to send out his own letter, as usual (in the hopes that perhaps the one that had been returned to him was a fluke), he got another call. Another letter had come all the way back to Japan with the same "RETURN TO SENDER" stamps all over it.
Despite how he'd warned himself, despite how he'd reasoned that Langa probably wasn't even getting the letters anyway, Reki was heartbroken.
He didn't bother sending out any more of his own letters, though he did seal them up in envelopes and date them appropriately. He had three lined up that he'd planned to use for three upcoming weeks, so now what was he supposed to do with them? File them away, he supposed. Seal them up and pretend like he was going to send them, all while his own letters kept coming back, week after week. Until, finally, two months' worth of his letters had come home again, a few of them dented and crinkled, but whole. After opening the first one, he didn't bother with the rest. He just stored them away and tried not to be too depressed.
The worst of it all was that he couldn't stop himself from drawing more pictures for Langa. He was so used to doing it now, and he thought so often of the ex-snowboarder, that it didn't feel right quitting. It felt thoughtless, and cold, and so he kept drawing and folding them up and tucking them away in envelopes, dating each one with whatever day he'd have sent them off in the mail.
The idiot romantic in him kept whispering that if Langa had appreciated the other drawings and if Langa was his soulmate (he definitely wasn't), then keeping up the habit was good. Someday, when they met, he could give Langa all the drawings and they'd have a good laugh about it. Maybe.
Who was he kidding? The letters probably hadn't even gotten to Langa in the first place.
Pathetic.
Yet, he did it. Every week, without fail. Even when it hurt.
Then, something amazing, and terrifying, happened.
He was in his second year of high school and, as usual, none of his classmates much cared about what he was up to. He sat in the very back corner of class, by the windows, and doodled his newest ideas in his notebook. A few of his peers had come to investigate his arm injury from the race he'd recently lost against Shadow, another "S" participant, but as he wasn't allowed to talk about "S" outside the track, he'd simply refuted their wrong assumptions about what had happened and kept doodling.
His teacher was saying something about a transfer student. He wasn't paying attention. That was, until his pencil lead broke, messing up one of his drawings. Sighing to himself, he reached back and scratched at his hair, eyes skirting up enough to catch sight of the new, foreign student all the girls were whispering about.
Tall, blue hair, pale skin. Sharp blue-green eyes and a rather unimpressed expression. Beside him, on the chalkboard, his name was written for all to see.
Reki nearly choked.
Their teacher cleared his throat and glanced over at the new student. "Introduce yourself," he ordered gruffly.
The new student looked at their teacher only quickly, then turned back to the class. He was wearing a suit jacket, tie, and dress pants—he hadn't gotten his school uniforms yet.
"Uh…" he started, not sounding shy, but still somewhat uncertain. "I'm Hasegawa Langa."
Reki choked again, despite knowing exactly who it was standing at the front of the class. Hearing his name, though…
Was this really happening?
"Is that all?" their teacher asked, after a long, painfully awkward pause.
Langa looked at their teacher again, saying "huh?" and then was turning back to the class. "Well… I came here from Canada."
Shit, it really was him. Reki was going to have a stroke.
"Is… that all?" their teacher asked again.
"Have I done badly?" Langa asked.
"No, not badly, per se…" their teacher muttered, before clearing his throat once more. "There are a few seats in the back, if you'd like…"
Langa didn't even say thank you, or bow, or anything. He just headed straight to the back of the room, everyone staring after him. He faltered between two desks—between the one beside Reki and one further away.
Their eyes met for half a second and Reki turned quickly toward the window, making sure to cover up as much of his notebook as he could.
Langa sat in the seat further away.
Inside his chest, Reki's heart beat like a jackhammer.