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He’s not surprised to hear the creak of the rooftop door being pushed open, nor did he need to turn to know that it was Minato who had found him. He’s had a decade of being enveloped in that warmth, after all, making it all too easy to recognise that familiar presence even before Minato shuffled over to settle down next to him.
“Hey,” Ryoji greeted, glancing over to throw what he now knew to be a charming smile, but if Minato was charmed it didn’t show, “how was class?”
“You would know if you attended it,” Minato said, sounding slightly mournful when he spoke, and it was a sound that made Ryoji laugh, “it was fine. The usual.”
Ryoji hummed in acknowledgement under his breath, letting the silence pass over them as he waited, attention returning to the planters before him. Patience, too, was something that he’s well-acquainted with, and he counted the veiny lines on the leaves of the golden tomato plant in front of him. He got to two-fifty-nine before Minato spoke again.
“Why did you skip out after lunch?”
“Did you miss me?” Ryoji returned readily, beaming brightly at Minato and receiving only the briefest ghost of an eye-roll for his efforts.
“It was your turn on classroom duty today,” Minato said, huffing lightly in a way that made his hair bounce, seemingly glowing in the late afternoon light, “it’s rude to answer a question with a question, by the way.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
The heat of the sun rested pleasantly on his skin, and Ryoji leaned back, putting pressure on the palms of his hands to press them into the ground instead of surrendering to the impulse of reaching over to brush Minato’s hair. The rough concrete beneath him was hot too, its chaffing texture digging into him, “you haven’t answered mine, though.”
“I did.”
“No you didn’t,” Ryoji laughed, even as Minato remained seemingly unfazed, “it was a deflection. Toriumi-sensei was just talking about it last week, remember? Ah, unless you’ve been skipping out — that’s rather naughty.”
“I remember, and I don’t want to hear that from you,” Minato huffed again, but this time, Ryoji could identify the faintest of smiles tugging on the corner of his lips, “but since I asked first, you should be the one to answer first.”
“Another one of your human customs?” Ryoji remarked, and Minato’s deadpan expression only made him laugh harder, “oh, fine. I suppose… I wanted a moment to think, and it was quiet up here.”
A gentle breeze picked up, and the plants swayed lightly in front of them. As they did, Ryoji noticed a tiny green bulb nestled behind a messy vine of leaves, and he recalled the textbooks splayed out in front of him during biology class, adorned with vivid illustrations about the lifecycle of a plant. The appearance of fruit was a marker of spring approaching its end, of the passing seasons and the advent of summer. It wasn’t something Ryoji frequently thought about, but now that he was here it’s impossible to pull away from it. Summer, too, would give way to autumn, and before long it would be a year since Ryoji’s arrival at Gekkoukan High School last November, until it was once again spring, inching its way into summer and bringing with it another graduation ceremony. His graduation ceremony, as he had been told. The patience of immortality was incongruent with this acknowledgement about the passage of time, and the neatly folded career plans form from this morning remained in his pocket. The average lifespan of a human being was eighty-four-point-two-nine years, and if Ryoji was seventeen like he had said he was and human like he had presumed, then he had another sixty-seven years ahead of him. Ryoji knew about birth and death, about green sprouts and withered vines fated for eventual decay — what he didn’t know was everything else in between, of what it meant to put one foot before the other and what each slice of time, pulled away from the long thread of fate, ought to resemble.
“Is summer nice?” Ryoji asked after a beat, and it made Minato blink at him. Ryoji wondered if his question had been too abrupt, but Minato seemed to consider it anyway, brow furrowing in consideration.
“It depends,” Minato said eventually, slowly, and Ryoji hung on to each syllable with care, “on whether you like it warm.”
As opposed to the cold, Ryoji thought was implied in those words, but knowledge like that was only apparent once he also became acquainted with the warmth. He’d existed for millennia where it had been the only state he’d known, and it’s only through Minato that he could now put a label to it, that he had a base point of comparison about whether he liked it or not. Ryoji thought about it for a little while; he thought about Minato’s secretive smiles during that school trip in Kyoto and the heat of his hands around Ryoji’s own on that evening in late December, and he thought about how it felt like a balm for a loneliness that Ryoji never even knew was lodged inside him, a sun that Ryoji sought to chase.
“I do.” Ryoji smiled, and he was glad when Minato seemed to like that answer.
“Me too.” Minato said, reaching over to catch the bushy fronds of the tomato plant between lightly calloused fingers. Ryoji wondered what the plant felt like under bare skin — he’d been staring at them for four hours and he still didn’t know, hadn’t been bold enough to try it for himself. There’s a tenderness in Minato’s action, and the serrated leaves looked as at home in those hands as did a sharpened katana, raised in defiance against a god.
“Because it’s good for the tomatoes?” Ryoji teased, and Minato regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, his eyes bright with amusement or the reflected light of the sun or both, Ryoji couldn’t say.
“I grow very good produce.” Minato answered, leaning in close enough that Ryoji could make out the warmest shades of blue behind his gaze.
“I don’t doubt that,” Ryoji remembered how much the others in the dorm raved about dinners cooked with the results of Minato’s hard work, “you like growing them, don’t you?”
Minato nodded, and when he looked away Ryoji found he missed that attention, “it’s something to look forward to. A promise for later.”
“I can appreciate that.” Ryoji acknowledged. Here, too, was another gap in Ryoji’s knowledge — he knew Minato had planted these tomatoes on the 30th of January. He knew Minato had refused to pull them up, even after they had born fruit once in March during a surprise heatwave, but he didn’t know why. Instead, their planters seemed to receive a place of honour amongst the other dozens of planters scattered around this corner of the rooftop, and as Ryoji watched the expression on Minato’s face, he felt he understood what Iori meant when he told Ryoji that these plants were special to Minato.
The thought made him a little envious — of what, Ryoji wasn’t sure about. They stayed there in pleasant, companionable silence for a few moments more, and Ryoji was content to watch Minato smile at those plants until he remembered what Minato had been looking for him for.
“I’m sorry, by the way,” Ryoji started, and it felt like a sentiment intended to bear so much more than Ryoji was willing to reveal in that instance, so he moved on quickly, “that I forgot about classroom duty. I’ll take over one of yours in exchange - when are you next scheduled?”
Minato regarded him for a long while before he eventually shook his head, “I don’t mind. You can make it up to me in other ways.”
Ryoji raised an eyebrow curiously, “oh?”
But Minato was already digging around in his bag without further elaboration, and when he eventually pulled out a carefully wrapped paper envelope, Ryoji felt his eyebrows rise even higher, “help me plant these?”
It’s a small envelope, no bigger than the size of Minato’s hand and in a nondescript manila brown. The text written on it in blank ink - pomegranates, Ryoji read - stood out sharply, and if it wasn’t for the absurdity of the request, Ryoji would have laughed at how Minato seemed to carry plant seeds around in his book bag, at how entirely fitting it was.
“A charming choice, I’m sure,” Ryoji said after he swallowed a giggle, “I’ve heard from Iori about how you’ve roped him and the others for help with these plants, but I’m not sure asking me would be a good idea.”
“Why?”
It’s an odd question; Minato ought to know Ryoji was more familiar with atrophy, that he was the herald of the end, not new beginnings. He didn’t think Minato had asked him with malice in mind, though, as grating as the thought was, as painful as it was to articulate it into existence.
“It seems cruel” Ryoji eventually settled on saying, and he hoped his kindness wouldn’t be misconstrued for coldness, “when they deserve a fair start for this world, not one tainted by the touch of death.”
The expression on Minato’s face twisted unhappily, but it was brief, gone almost as quickly as it came. Ryoji kept his own calm, steady, the only consolation he could offer. It’s an unpleasant truth to hear, but the truth nonetheless, regardless how much neither of them wanted to hear it, even though voicing it felt like a sentence against himself. A reminder about the implications of Ryoji’s company, not just for Minato but one for him as well.
To his surprise, Minato drew in closer instead, shifting until his shoulders brushed against Ryoji’s with careless ease as he tugged at Ryoji’s arms, and before Ryoji could pull away Minato had thrust the packet of seeds onto Ryoji’s still open palms, firm fingers holding them together. The contours of Minato’s hands feel a little different today compared to last season, shaped these days by the grip of a pen and a gardening spade rather than that of a weapon. But they weren’t any less warm as they pressed into Ryoji’s own; if anything, today, they felt even warmer to the touch.
Another kind of reminder, then. That nothing, really, could hope to eclipse the brightness of Minato’s sun.
“You’re not -” Minato started, visibly frustrated. Ryoji knew he was only occasionally eloquent, preferring to let his actions speak in place of words, so when Minato’s fingers closed themselves around Ryoji’s he felt like he understood something else here, at least a little, “you’ve saved my life before.”
Ryoji knows the memory that Minato was talking about, the one which they were sitting only five feet away from. The electric heat that burned through him that night was new, and the foreignness of that emotion had not diminished the vengeful rage latent in it, to slaughter and obliterate the threat before them - before Minato. It didn’t make sense before; death was meant to be a cold, rational calculus, a balancing scale of life. Instead, it had warped into something unrecognisable, and Ryoji still didn’t know if it was a good thing, and whether it mattered at all.
Death, tempered by stoicism or ignited by passion, was still death.
“I doubt these pomegranates need protection from wandering shadows,” Ryoji remarked lightly, “if that’s what you’re asking of me, that seems like a disproportionate trade for you.”
“That’s not it,” Minato said, exasperated, his grip tightening around Ryoji’s with insistence, “you - you haven’t forgotten, have you? It wasn’t just that night. It’s your annoying persistence in November, your wish for me to be happy, your gift of friendship. Didn’t you play me a song on the piano with these fingers, given me a promise in a music box? These hands of yours, Mochizuki Ryoji, have offered so much. They’re not just that of the Appraiser, and if so - so what? Doesn’t the death arcana represent regeneration and change?”
“And you believe that?” Ryoji asked softly, the wind grazing his cheeks, and it might as well have been the intent in Minato’s breath, brushing him with the same tenderness as it with the leaves of the tomato plant.
“I know you’ve changed my life,” Minato declared, “I believe it to be for the better. These seeds - they’re a promise for us.”
Minato was different like this. Assertive and bold, a facade that Ryoji was rarely witness to as an outsider. He’d always known it to be true, however; Minato was, after all, the boy that led the charge for SEES against Nyx, the reason for Ryoji’s affection for humanity. Ryoji stared at him, at that quiet undercurrent belied by boundless depths of unwavering bravery, and he felt a little braver himself.
He squeezed Minato’s hand in return, cautious at first, until Minato slipped their fingers together, intertwining them. Ryoji marvelled at that, at how much that singular act grounded him.
“You never did answer my question, you know,” Ryoji said after a while, “did you miss me?”
This time, Minato didn’t wait a single beat.
“Yes,” he answered, “every single day that you were gone.”
Minato’s smile was soft as his eyes sparkled with vivid blues, and it’s all the promise Ryoji would ever need.