Archive of Our Own

The dull thud of the back of his head hitting the floor brought him back to reality. He had rolled out of his futon in his sleep.

Sakura Haruka opened his eyes in alarm, his hands clutching the sheets as if they were the edge of a cliff. He was soaked. Sweat had plastered his shirt to his chest and ran down his temple in a thick trail that disappeared beneath his collar. He took several breaths, but the air never quite reached his lungs—as if something inside him had broken while he slept.

The room was dark. He didn’t remember turning off the light, nor did he remember going to bed. The last thing his memory held was a sky full of stars, the full moon rising on one side while the sun disappeared on the other, all while he made his way home, stripped off his uniform, and threw himself onto his futon. He didn’t know how much time had passed, but it didn’t matter, because everything felt empty. An emptiness that now buzzed in his hands.

It was his palms. They bore the marks of his nails. His dreams had once again turned into nightmares.

He blinked. Still sweaty, still trembling. And then he saw them.

In the dimness of his bare room, the pinky finger of his left hand glowed with a faint radiance. Threads. Delicate threads, almost unreal, a deep red color that seemed to pulse with a life of their own. They sprouted from his pinky like roots and disappeared into the darkness, each one stretching in a different direction.

One, two, three... he couldn’t count them. There were too many.

Sakura swallowed. His throat was as dry as sandpaper.

And then he saw the one that shone the brightest.

Among all those red threads fanning out in every direction, one stood out. It was a deeper crimson, more vivid, as if it weren’t a thread at all but a small vein beating in time with a heart that wasn’t in that room. Sakura felt his own chest tighten as he stared at it.

That thread didn’t vanish into the darkness like the others. It was taut. Someone, somewhere, might have been pulling on it.

"Suo..." he whispered without meaning to, and his own voice sounded so broken that he barely recognized it.

The dream struck him again then, not in images but in sensations: hands slipping apart, a smile fading away, an endless hallway where Suo’s back grew smaller and smaller while Sakura ran without ever moving from where he stood. Being dragged by roots tearing free from his body, each one hurting, each one causing him pain.

He pressed a hand against his chest. His heart was beating too fast, too hard, as if it wanted to escape and follow that crimson thread wherever it led.

He didn’t cry, not because he didn’t want to... but because he didn’t know how.

But for the first time in a long time, Sakura Haruka wished with all his might that he had learned.

He didn’t want to think about the threads anymore.

Sakura let himself fall back onto the futon, turned his face toward the wall, and squeezed his eyes shut.

It was my imagination, he thought. My exhausted mind. I’ve spent weeks sleeping badly, thinking about him, going over the same thing again and again until my head hurts.

Thinking about why he left without saying goodbye.

Why one day he simply stopped showing up.

Why did Nirei have to be the one to tell me instead of him?

“Suo-san said that... that we’re nothing. That we never were anything.”

Coward.

Sakura squeezed his eyelids shut until he saw stars. But the stars couldn’t drown out the memory of those words. We’re nothing. As if the months they spent together, the fights, the laughter, the comfortable silences... none of it had ever existed. As if Sakura had been nothing more than a stone in Suo’s path.

That was what it meant to have your heart eaten away, wasn’t it? That dull ache that wasn’t sharp like a blow, but slow like rust. Day after day, night after night. Wondering what he had done wrong. If he had been too rough, too blind, too much of a Sakura.

The exhaustion weighed heavily in his bones. Sleep called to him like an old debt.
He closed his eyes.

And this time he didn’t see any threads.

Only darkness. Emptiness. A distant echo of Suo’s voice saying his name with that intonation that always made him feel as though he were someone special.

“Sakura-kun, you shouldn’t sell your smile so cheaply. Your smile is something precious.”

Lies, he thought before drifting off. I was never special to him.

He didn’t know how much time had passed.

Maybe an hour, a minute, or an entire lifetime.

What he did know was that the sound of the door suddenly swinging open ripped him out of sleep like a punch to the stomach. Sakura didn’t move. He was already used to the door not closing properly—the lock had been broken since he moved in, the landlord didn’t seem to be in any hurry to fix it, and Sakura had no desire to ask for anything right now. Anyone could walk in. And sometimes, they did, like they were doing now.

“Get out,” he growled without opening his eyes, his voice rough and his face still buried in the pillow. “I’m not in the mood for anyone.”

But they didn’t leave.

He heard footsteps. More than one person. Firm steps against the wooden floor accompanied by the rustle of plastic bags. And then, suddenly, cold.

Cold on his back, shoulders, and legs.

Someone had yanked the blanket off him in one swift pull.

“What the...?!”

Sakura rolled over on the futon with a clenched fist and fury ready to explode, prepared to confront the idiot who had dared wake him up like that.

And found himself face-to-face with Sugishita.

The quietest boy in Furin was standing beside his futon, the blanket crumpled in his hands. His expression hadn’t changed in the slightest: his perpetually furrowed brow and a gaze that seemed to judge him without saying a word.

Sakura blinked.

“Sugishita...?!”

He didn’t finish the sentence. Because then he saw Nirei peeking out from behind Sugishita, his arms loaded with bags stuffed with vegetables and packets of noodles. His smile was too bright—rather, too forced, as if he were trying to make up for something with that artificial cheerfulness.

“Good afternoon, Sakura-san!” Nirei sang, though his voice trembled slightly on the last syllable. “We thought you might need some company.”

And then, right behind Nirei, Momijikawa appeared. He was carrying a frying pan in one hand and a spatula in the other, completely out of place in Sakura’s small, messy apartment.

“We’re going to make you something to eat,” Momijikawa announced, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Sakura opened his mouth to protest, to tell them to leave, that he didn’t need them taking care of him, that he wasn’t a child... that he wasn’t anyone.

But the words died in his throat.

Because at that moment, while Nirei set the bags down on the small table and Sugishita remained standing there holding the blanket, looking around, and Momijikawa waved the frying pan around as if he were in his own kitchen, Sakura saw their left pinkies.

They all had threads.

All of them.

Red threads, as fine as strands of hair, wrapped around their pinkies like tiny rings someone had tied there with great care. Sugishita had four. Sakura counted them without meaning to. Four red threads that sprouted from his pinky and floated around him. But when he followed their paths, he saw that all four connected directly to Nirei.

Sakura blinked. He looked at Nirei’s pinky, and he also had four threads. The same four. And not only that: one of them shone brighter than the others, as if that particular thread had been taut longer, alive longer, cherished longer.

He didn’t understand what he was seeing. But he couldn’t stop looking.

His gaze shifted to Momijikawa. The boy had that color on his left pinky as well. But only one. A single red thread, fainter than Sugishita’s and Nirei’s, that disappeared beyond the apartment door, passing straight through the wood. It barely glowed, as if it had only just formed.

A chill ran through Sakura that he couldn’t explain.

And then he dared to look at his own hand.

His left pinky was still there, just as before. But now, after seeing his friends’, his own threads seemed countless. More than a dozen, at least. A dense tangle of red threads sprouting from his skin and scattering toward the open window facing the gray afternoon sky, like the roots of an ancient tree.

But among all of them, one shone brighter.

It wasn’t the thickest. It was simply the most alive. A deep crimson that seemed to beat in time with his heart, tugging at him with urgency, staring at him without having eyes. Sakura didn’t know why that thread was different. He didn’t know why all the others drifted with indifference while this one seemed to be waiting for him.

But he could feel it.

He could feel it in his bones. In his chest. In that part of himself he didn’t know how to name, the part that had been empty ever since Suo left.

Sakura clenched his fist. His pinky trembled, making the threads shake.

Why do I have so many while Momijikawa only has one?

Why do Sugishita and Nirei have four, and all of them connect to each other?

Why does mine shine brighter than the rest?

Where do all these threads lead?

He had no answers.

But his eyes were already following that crimson thread toward the window, toward the outside. Toward an unknown place.

When Nirei, Sugishita, and Momijikawa left—after washing the dishes, leaving food in the refrigerator, and promising to come back the next day—Sakura was alone in his apartment once again.

He got up from the futon and walked over to the window.

The threads were still there. All of them. A vast red web stretching beyond the houses, beyond Makochi, beyond everything he knew. They swayed gently in a wind he couldn’t feel, as if they were alive. As if they were waiting.

Sakura didn’t feel afraid.

He felt sadness, but he felt something else too.

Determination.

That night, when the moon had already begun to rise and the streets had fallen empty, Sakura put on his shoes. He took nothing but his jacket, his phone, and the weight of weeks of silence.

He opened the door.

And followed the threads.

The threads led him beyond the outskirts of Makochi.

Sakura didn’t think twice. He spotted the last train of the night with its doors open, its worn blue fabric seats, and the fluorescent lights flickering above the heads of the few passengers still traveling at that hour. He boarded, quickly feeding a ticket through the gate, never taking his eyes off his threads.

The train lurched forward with the screech of metal against metal, and Sakura dropped into a seat by the window. He rested his forehead against the cold glass. The vibrations of the train traveled through his bones like a second heartbeat.

During the ride, he watched.

Through the glass fogged by his own breath, he saw more threads. They floated outside like seaweed carried by an invisible current. Red. All of them red. But not connected to anyone. They slipped through the windows of trains rushing in the opposite direction, vanished among the streetlights, and tangled themselves in electrical wires like trapped birds.

Ownerless threads, Sakura thought, but then the image of the threads connecting Nirei and Sugishita came to mind, and he thought, while his cheeks took on a faint blush for reasons he couldn’t understand, Or owners who simply haven’t found each other yet.

Then he looked at his own hand. His left pinky remained the center of that crimson tangle. But unlike other people’s threads—which scattered at random, without direction, without purpose—his followed the train’s route.

They moved with him. Pulled him forward. As if they knew something he had yet to discover.

The train emptied station after station. Passengers got off, passengers got on. Sakura didn’t look at their faces. He looked at their pinkies. They all had threads. Some only a few, others many. An elderly woman had only one, so faint it was almost invisible. A young man had at least five, all of them bright, all of them stretched taut in the same direction.

Where are they going? Sakura wondered. Are they searching for someone too?

He got no answers. The train continued on its way.

After what felt like two hours—the back of his neck ached from resting against the glass and his eyelids felt as heavy as small stones—one of the threads changed.

It wasn’t the crimson one. It was another. Smaller, more discreet, one that until then had traveled alongside the others without drawing attention. Suddenly, it curved. It pulled away from the window and turned in the opposite direction of the tracks, like a river refusing to follow the current.

The train doors opened with a pneumatic hiss.

Sakura was outside before the conductor could announce the station’s name.

Reading the signs wasn’t necessary.

The air was different here. Denser and colder, saturated with cigarette smoke, unfamiliar perfumes, and something else Sakura couldn’t identify but that made the hairs on his skin stand on end. Streetlamps lined up one after another, forming a corridor of orange light. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all shining with that fierce intensity unique to the night.

Bankoku-gai.

The place Endo had told him about. The place where Suo was.

Sakura clenched his fists, and his fingers cracked.

He took one step. Then another, until he began walking without stopping to look around the new place that seemed somehow wonderful because of how varied it was. It was like gathering movies from all over the world into a single location.

There was no other way to describe it, at least not for Sakura with his limited knowledge of the world’s different cultures, but he could make out several languages as he passed through the crowds. Likewise, he spotted clothes he had only ever seen on television and fast-food stalls lining the sidewalks.

Everything was new, interesting, but he didn’t let himself get distracted. He had a mission, and that was to find out where the threads tied to his pinky would lead him.

He wandered through the streets, following the threads.

He walked for a long time.

The streets of Bankoku-gai were a living maze. In the center, bars spilled different kinds of music from their half-open doors, and groups of people passed by laughing too loudly, shoving one another carelessly. Sakura avoided them without looking. He only looked at the red threads. Some glowed brightly, while others were barely visible in the dimness of the alleyways.

But the deeper he ventured into the darker streets, the more the noise faded away. The streetlamps grew farther apart, and the asphalt became rougher, older, lonelier.

Sakura looked up.

The moon was high. Round. White as polished bone. He didn’t need a clock to know the time: the moon told him from high above that midnight had long since passed. Maybe one o’clock. Maybe two.

He yawned. Fatigue weighed heavily on his eyelids. He had been walking for hours. Hours spent following threads that might lead nowhere and building a hope that could collapse at any moment.

I’m being an idiot, he thought. I came all the way here just because I saw some threads no one else can see. I’m tired, and I’m cold...

He was about to turn around. One foot had already pivoted, and his weight was already shifting in the opposite direction, toward the station with its variety of benches in the waiting area. He could sleep there until the first train of the morning arrived.

But then his threads tightened.

Not like before, when they merely tugged at him gently. Now they pulled hard. As if someone had grabbed the other end and was yanking on them in desperation.

Sakura spun around in every direction. His neck cracked, and his mismatched eyes swept over every alley, every shadow, every flickering streetlamp.

He saw no one.

But he heard a voice.

A voice that, by this point, he didn’t know whether to hate or be relieved to know so well. A sound etched into his memory like a fight he couldn’t forget, no matter how hard he tried. A voice he had cursed silently for entire nights while tossing and turning on his futon, unable to sleep.

Suo Hayato’s voice.

The boy who had abandoned him more than three weeks ago.

The one who had disappeared without saying goodbye.

The one who had left behind nothing but a we’re nothing.

The one who, according to his best friend Nirei, hadn’t even bothered to say his name.

A shiver ran through Sakura that had nothing to do with the night air. His feet moved on their own, drawn toward that voice like iron filings to a magnet. This time, he didn’t need to follow the threads.

He crossed an empty street. Then another. He stopped near what looked like a large Chinese temple—red roof tiles, stone dragons carved into the columns, paper lanterns swaying in the night breeze—and there, in the middle of asphalt damp with the usual autumn dew, he saw Suo’s back disappearing into the distance.

It was him.

There was no way he could be mistaken. That way of walking—unhurried, confident, as if the entire world belonged to him—was unmistakable. That long coat that reached his calves. That chestnut hair, almost reddish, shifting slightly with every step.

Sakura wanted to shout his name. He wanted to run to him.

But he couldn’t.

Because at that moment, when the light from a streetlamp illuminated Suo’s hands—the hands he always kept clasped behind his back—Sakura watched all of his own threads connect to Suo’s pinky.

Not one. Not two. All of them.

Sakura’s threads—the ones he had been following for hours, the ones that had traveled with him from Makochi, the ones that had crossed cities and streets—wrapped themselves around Suo’s left pinky like flower buds finally finding their home. Some circled it three times before merging into his skin. Others only once. But every single one ended there.

And the crimson thread—the one that shone brighter than any other, the one that had pulled him the hardest, the one Sakura had felt beating this afternoon as though it were a second heart—was wrapped four times around Suo’s pinky.

Sakura felt as if the ground had opened beneath his feet.

He didn’t know why he could see these threads that seemed to connect people.

Nor why everyone had different numbers of them.

And even less what they actually meant.

But there was one thing he did know.

He had only realized it recently. During the endless hours of loneliness that followed Suo’s departure and the sleepless nights spent staring at the ceiling of his room, wondering what he had overlooked for things to end this way.

In the dreams that had started out sweet—Suo smiling, Suo calling his name, Suo brushing against his hand by accident—and that had eventually turned into nightmares where Suo walked away without ever looking back.

Suo was important to him.

More important than he had ever imagined.

And it didn’t matter that he had left like that. It didn’t matter that we’re nothing. It didn’t matter what Suo had said or left unsaid.

Because now that he was close—now that Sakura could see the curve of his shoulders, the shine of his hair beneath the lantern light, the red threads binding them together like a promise neither of them had ever spoken aloud—he wasn’t going to let him get away.

He would demand an explanation.

He would shout every single thing he had kept bottled up all this time.

He would ask him why, all while refusing to let go.

But his thoughts were slower than his actions.

Because while all of that was happening in his mind—while he processed the meaning of the threads, Suo’s presence, the certainty that he didn’t want to let him go—his legs had already begun to move. He was running.

Running toward Suo.

The sound of his footsteps echoed through the empty street.

Hearing the hurried steps, the brown-haired man turned instinctively.

His body shifted into a defensive stance—shoulders slightly squared, one foot drawn back, his right hand half-clenched—before his brain even processed what was happening. It was a reflex. A reflex Sakura knew well, because he had it too.

But when Suo recognized who was approaching, the shock was so great that he didn’t react in time.

His body went rigid as his one visible eye widened. His lips parted around a syllable that never became a word.

And then Sakura tackled him.

Suo’s body hit the ground with a dull thud. The air escaped his lungs in a sharp huff. Sakura ended up on top of him, one knee on either side of his waist, his hands planted beside his head, caging him in with his body.

“Sakura-kun…?” Suo’s voice came out thick with disbelief. Crimson, gold, and gray meeting again after what felt like an eternity. His eye shone too brightly. As if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “ How…? What…?”

“Tell me!” Sakura demanded, cutting him off.

It wasn’t a plea. It was an order. A challenge. A desperate request dressed as a threat. He sat astride Suo’s torso, and he could feel the brown-haired boy’s heart beating just as fast as his own.

He tried to hold back the tears, but he couldn’t, not when he finally had him in front of him. He squeezed his eyes shut. But his heart could no longer contain so many feelings. It had been full for weeks—anger, sadness, doubt, and a feeling he didn’t know how to name—and now all of it overflowed.

One after another, tears began to fall. Once again, Suo had taken another one of his firsts.

Sakura’s tears fell like a gentle rain onto Suo’s astonished face.

“Tell me why you left!” his voice cracked, but he didn’t care. “Why did you walk away without saying goodbye?! Without giving me a reason! Without telling me why you left me behind!”

His throat tightened like a fist. The words stumbled over one another, trampling and shoving each other aside in their rush to escape before he could stop them.

“Did you really never… always…?!” He paused to swallow, trying to get rid of the knot forming in his throat. His lips trembled.

But even then, with his voice broken and his eyes fixed on Suo’s crimson one—that eye that always looked at him as if it knew something Sakura didn’t—he whispered between hiccupping breaths:

“D-Do I mean nothing to you?”

The silence that followed was heavier than any blow Sakura had ever taken in a fight.

Suo didn’t answer. He only stared at him.

He looked at him as if Sakura were an illusion. A mirage in the middle of the desert that was Bankoku-gai. Something too good to be true and therefore bound to disappear at any moment.

That look ignited something inside Sakura.

“ANSWER ME, DAMMIT!” he shouted.

His voice echoed through the empty alleys.

Somewhere, on a second floor, someone switched on a light and turned it off again a second later. Sakura didn’t notice. He only saw Suo. He only felt the frustration of days—of sleepless nights and tears he refused to shed—rising through his chest like a black tide.

“I was worried about you!” every word burned on its way out. “It was eating me alive, thinking I was nothing but a toy to you, that we were nothing!”

His voice trembled. But he continued.

“I started hating you when I started dreaming about you, dream after dream until they became nightmares where I watched you walk away from me, mocking what you did to me… and… and realizing one day that you never cared about me the way I stupidly came to care about you!”

Not only were his tears falling faster. His face no longer knew whether it was flushed from everything he was saying or from crying nonstop. Probably both. Probably everything at once.

And still, he didn’t stop.

“I can’t stop thinking about you, I’m even imagining things, I’m going crazy because of these threads I started seeing… but they brought me to you, so…!”

His voice broke again. But this time it wasn’t from sadness.

It was from indignation.

Because Suo was smiling.

“W-Why are you laughing, you damn idiot!?”

He punched Suo in the side with a clenched fist. It wasn’t a hard hit, more the strike of someone who doesn’t know how to say I need you, and so he hits because hitting is the only thing he ever learned to do well.

Then Suo started laughing.

A low laugh at first, shaky. Then clearer, easy to recognize, as if for a moment everything could go back to the way it was before. But then the seconds passed, and that laugh began to crack—not all at once, but slowly, like a branch bending before it breaks—until it became something that was no longer laughter, but the sound of someone who had been holding their breath for weeks and was finally drowning.

Sakura raised his fist to hit him again, but stopped.

Because Suo’s laughter had broken apart, turning into small hiccups.

And then he saw a thin trail of tears slipping from Suo’s left eye. Crimson. That crimson eye that always looked at him with infuriating calm, that never showed weakness, that always seemed to know more than it said…That eye was crying now.

Even more, because they were so close, Sakura could see tiny tears seeping out from beneath the eyepatch covering the other eye. They slid slowly down Suo’s pale skin. Some reached his neck and disappeared beneath his traditional Chinese shirt.

“Suo…?” Sakura asked. His voice was no longer a shout, but a whisper. As if speaking any louder might break something that wasn’t completely broken yet.

“Sun Fei” Suo corrected.

The words left his mouth like a secret he had kept for far too long. A couple of fresh tears fell from his lashes and rolled down his temples.

Suo—Sun Fei—raised a trembling hand. His fingers brushed Sakura’s flushed cheek, still damp from recent tears. He wiped away a trail of tears with his thumb, but another one replaced it a second later.

He smiled.

It was a smile both gentle and sad. Like someone returning home after a very, very long time and discovering the door was still open.

“I like how it sounds in Chinese better.”

Sakura blinked.

His tears stopped instantly. As if a faucet had been shut off. He stared at Suo—at Sun Fei—with his mouth slightly open and a deep frown on his face.

Did he lie about his name too? Who the hell is…?

His thoughts must have been written all over his face, because Sun Fei cupped Sakura’s cheeks with both hands—the hands that were always behind his back, the ones that never touched anyone without permission—and focused his gaze on the heterochromatic eyes staring back at him.

“Sakura-kun… why are you so stubborn, hm?” He sighed. His thumbs swept away the remaining tears from Sakura’s face with a gentleness that contrasted everything that had just happened. He shook his head. “You stepped into a place you can no longer leave…” His voice was low, almost a secret. “Tell me, Sakura-kun: what am I supposed to do with you now?”

Forgetting, for a moment, the entire issue of names and pronunciations, Sakura answered with a pout:

“Answer me.”

He raised one hand to Sun Fei’s face. His fingers brushed damp skin. And just as Sun Fei had been wiping away his tears, Sakura began running his thumb over the other’s cheeks, removing every trace of crying.

Because the name didn’t matter, nor the revelations that would follow. The only thing that mattered was that the boy his heart held so deeply was finally in his arms. Could he get into trouble for being here? Yes, but it didn’t matter.

Not now. Not while Sun Fei was beside him.

He didn’t look away from that solitary eye. Not even when his fingers trembled, nor when he felt his heart threatening to leap from his mouth as he asked:

“What am I to you?”

Sun Fei sighed at the question.

He looked at him for several long seconds. His crimson eye darkened until the black pupil nearly swallowed all the red. It was an intense gaze, as though he were memorizing every pore on Sakura’s skin, every mole, every dried tear.

“What are you to me?” He let out a huff. It wasn’t ironic, more the reaction of someone who had just been asked a question with an answer so obvious. He shook his head slightly. “You’re my weakness.”

He tucked a white strand behind Sakura’s ear. His fingers lingered there for an extra second, caressing.

“You’re my weakest point, my tether to the real world… my moon, the one who lights my darkest path during my hardest moments,” he confessed and smiled when he heard Sakura holding his breath. He could hear his heart pounding. He stroked him again, this time letting his fingertips trace the curve of his neck. “You’re the person I want to protect,” he continued, and his voice trembled slightly on the last syllable. “But…”

He squeezed Sakura’s ear a little. Just to know he was real, to confirm he wasn’t dreaming.

“You’re here.” his voice broke. “Why didn’t you let me go?”

Sakura went blank.

Sun Fei’s words spun through his head like leaves carried by the wind. Moon. Tether. Weakness.

All of that was him.

He was all of that to Suo.

And then, without thinking—because if he thought about it, his embarrassment would surely stop him, his fear of rejection would silence him forever—he blurted out:

“Being away from you feels like someone is tearing a piece of me away.”

Sun Fei’s eyes stung. Sakura could see his lashes growing wet again, his chest rising with a shaky breath, and his lips pressing together to stop himself from pouting.

And then Sun Fei gave up. A couple more tears escaped. And he smiled.

“Is that so?”

Sakura nodded. His cheeks burned. His whole body burned. But he didn’t look away.

“I want to know you,” he said. His voice came out firm, much firmer than he felt. But the words were true. They had been waiting inside him for months, maybe since the very first day Suo approached him at the start of the school year and smiled while joking about everything. He gently squeezed the damp cheek beneath his hand. “I want to know why you hate natto, why you adore tea, your darkest and most embarrassing secrets… I want everything. I want to know everything about… about Sun Fei.”

Ever since he left Makochi—since he made the decision to tear the flowers out by the roots, since he walked away without looking back, since he left everyone behind, including the boy now sitting on top of him asking to know his true self…—since that last time he saw him, Suo Hayato’s eyes, Sun Fei’s eyes, shone again.

It wasn’t the same shine as before. The old one had been polite, distant, a mask he put on every morning in front of the mirror. This was different. This was real. The shine of someone who had been found after getting lost on purpose.

“I’ll give you everything,” Sun Fei whispered. He was hypnotized. By Sakura’s confessions. Unable to get the image of the boy above him out of his head, turning into a boiled tomato with every passing second. By the tears still dampening his cheeks, mixing with his own. “Just… don’t hate me when you discover what lies beneath.”

He hadn’t even finished the sentence before Sakura was already shaking his head.

“Impossible. I’m not letting you go now that I have you back.”

This time Sun Fei laughed with genuine amusement. A clean laugh, free of the earlier tremor. The kind of laugh that came from the deepest part of his chest.

He nodded. He agreed. After all, it seemed he wasn’t the only one confessing to the moon.

There had also been another boy doing the same thing from a lonely apartment in Makochi, without knowing the moon could hear him too.

And above all, he wasn’t the only one who could see the threads.

Those red threads that connect people destined to meet. Those threads that can stretch, tangle, loosen, but never break.

Sun Fei would never forget the number of times he had found this white-haired boy with heterochromatic eyes. He didn’t count them in numbers—he couldn’t, there were too many—but he felt them in every thread tied around his little finger. Some shone brighter than others. Some were thicker, older, but they were all there. All of them were real.

Sakura doesn’t know it. He only sees the threads and doesn’t understand why he has so many. Why Suo’s crimson shines brighter than all the others. He doesn’t understand why, when he’s near him, it feels as though he has been waiting for this moment for much longer than three weeks.

But he feels it.

And that is enough.

Because Sakura will always go after him.

No matter where he is. Even if the road is full of hardships. Even if they end up in different places. Even if three weeks pass, or three years, or three lifetimes.

Sakura will always come back for Suo.

And Suo will always return to Sakura.

Because after all, they are destined.