Chapter 1: The Confessional Question
The air in the magazine office was thick with the scent of coffee and expensive printer ink. Fairy lights strung along the ceiling beams cast a flickering, honeyed glow over the clutter of props and discarded clothing racks. Somewhere, a speaker played the group’s latest synth-pop track at a volume just low enough to be a persistent, sugary whisper.
Taichi Yagami was sprawled on a plush velvet couch, a notebook open on his knees. His brow was furrowed in concentration, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as he doodled nonsense lyrics next to a sketch of a cartoon dinosaur. His messy brown hair caught the warm light, every strand looking soft and touchable.
“They’re five minutes out,” Sora announced, not looking up from her tablet. She tapped the screen with a blunt, unvarnished nail. “Try to look less like you just rolled out of bed, Taichi. This is Vibe magazine, not your personal diary cam.”
“I look professional,” Taichi protested, grinning up at her. He stretched, his t-shirt riding up to reveal a strip of toned stomach. “I’m channeling ‘approachable idol.’”
“You’re channeling ‘disheveled puppy,’” she corrected, but her green eyes softened. She couldn’t stay mad at him. Nobody could.
Yamato Ishida watched from his perch against the far wall. He was partly shrouded in shadow, the fairy lights glinting off the artful layers of his golden hair. His arms were crossed, his lean frame held with a studied casualness that took years to perfect. He wasn’t looking at Taichi, not directly. He was watching Taichi’s reflection in the large, framed polaroid collage mounted beside the couch. Dozens of captured moments: the two of them drenched in rain after a music video shoot, Taichi asleep on Yamato’s shoulder on a bullet train, making ridiculous faces backstage. Each one a perfect, painful snapshot of a proximity that never quite closed the final, agonizing inch.
“You’re staring,” Sora murmured, appearing beside him with a stealth that was frankly unnerving. She pretended to adjust the cuff of his black leather jacket.
“I’m not,” Yamato said, his voice low. He didn’t move.
“You’re a terrible liar. Your jaw gets tight. Here.” She reached up and pinched his cheek, hard.
“Ow. What the hell, Sora?”
“To loosen you up. You look like you’re about to bite the interviewer. Smolder for the cameras, not for your best friend’s reflection.” Her tone was pragmatic, but her gaze held a familiar, weary sympathy. She knew. She was the only one who knew the weight of the songs he wrote, the meaning behind every “sunlight” and “honey eyes” lyric he whispered into a microphone for millions of screaming fans who thought it was for them.
The door swung open, and the interviewer, a sleek woman in minimalist glasses, entered with a photographer in tow. The atmosphere shifted, the casual warmth ratcheting into professional brightness.
The interview was a predictable dance. Favorite foods? Dream collaborations? Hobbies? Taichi answered with effervescent charm, leaning forward, his hands constantly moving. Yamato offered cooler, shorter replies, his sharp blue eyes occasionally flickering toward Taichi when he told a particularly ridiculous story, a ghost of a smile on his lips.
Then the interviewer leaned forward, a playful glint in her eye. “Okay, fans always want to know this one. Hypothetically, if you had to date another member of Starlight, who would it be and why?”
Taichi threw his head back and laughed, a sound so bright and unselfconscious it made something in Yamato’s chest twist. “Date one of these guys? Seriously? Koushiro would schedule our kisses via spreadsheet. Jyou would give me a health checklist.”
“That’s not an answer, Taichi,” the interviewer prompted, smiling.
“Okay, okay.” Taichi swiveled on the couch, his warm brown eyes landing on Yamato. He grinned, completely, utterly oblivious to the sudden stillness that had taken hold of the man by the wall. “Yamato, I guess? He’s cool, he’s got great taste in music. But he’s way too cool for me, honestly. He’d get bored of my dumb jokes in, like, a day.” And then he did it. He reached out and poked Yamato in the ribs.
The contact was electric. A simple, friendly dig of fingers through a layer of soft cotton and leather. To Taichi, it was nothing. A comma in a sentence. To Yamato, it was a lightning strike. It traveled straight to his core, a jolt of agonizing familiarity and unmet want.
Yamato didn’t flinch. His expression, usually so carefully controlled, didn’t change. But his jaw tightened, just as Sora had said it would. The air left the room. The fairy lights seemed to dim.
He uncrossed his arms slowly, deliberately, and turned his head to meet the interviewer’s gaze. His voice, when it came, was a low, rough velvet that seemed to absorb all other sound in the room. “I’d never date anyone,” he said, each word measured and clear, “who doesn’t see me the way I see them.”
The silence that followed was profound. The synth-pop from the speakers felt obscenely cheerful.
Taichi’s hand dropped back to his own knee. His smile faltered, replaced by a blink of pure, uncomprehending confusion. He replayed the words in his head, his optimistic brain trying to fit them into a friendly context and failing. “Huh?” he said, intelligently.
The interviewer looked intrigued, her pen poised. Sora coughed, turning it into a strangled sound that could have been a laugh or a warning.
Yamato finally looked at Taichi then. Really looked at him. Held his best friend’s bewildered gaze with an intensity that held four years of silent, screaming history. He let the moment hang, let Taichi feel the full, unexplained weight of it. Then, the ghost of his public persona slid back into place. He shrugged one shoulder, a minute, elegant gesture. “It’s a pointless hypothetical,” he said, the edge smoothing from his voice into something more detached, more interview-safe. “We’re a group. We’re brothers. Dating would ruin the dynamic.”
He pushed himself off the wall, the movement fluid and final. “Are we done with the personal questions? We have soundcheck in an hour.”
The interviewer, sensing the cliff edge she’d inadvertently stumbled upon, nodded hastily and moved on to safer topics.
For the rest of the session, Taichi was uncharacteristically quiet. He kept glancing at Yamato, who had retreated back into his observational silence, his profile a clean, sharp line against the whimsical lights. The words the way I see them circled in Taichi’s mind like a strange, captured bird. He didn’t understand its species. He didn’t know what habitat it required.
After the interviewer and photographer packed up and left with a flurry of thanks, the office settled back into its quiet clutter.
“Well, that was subtle,” Sora said, breaking the tension. She started gathering empty coffee cups.
“What did I miss?” Taichi asked, hopping off the couch and shuffling over to Yamato. He bumped their shoulders together, a habitual seeking of contact, of reassurance. “You got all intense for a second there. You mad I said you’d get bored of me?” He was smiling again, trying to reset the world to its normal axis.
Yamato looked down at him. He saw the utter lack of guile in Taichi’s eyes, the sunlit, uncomplicated affection. The love was there, vast and real. It was just the wrong shape. It was a universe-sized friendship, and Yamato was trapped in its gravity, orbiting a sun that would never feel his own desperate, singular heat.
He reached out and ruffled Taichi’s hair, his fingers lingering for a fraction of a second too long in the soft strands. “I could never be bored of you, idiot,” he said, and the truth of it was a physical ache. “Come on. Sora’s right. We’ll be late.”
As they filed out, Taichi still buzzing with a confusion he couldn’t name, Sora fell into step beside Yamato. She didn’t look at him.
“You’re going to have to tell him eventually,” she whispered, her voice barely audible over the sound of their footsteps in the hallway. “Or you’re going to drown in it.”
Yamato said nothing. He just adjusted the strap of his guitar case on his shoulder and watched the back of Taichi’s head, the easy, trusting swing of his steps as he walked ahead, already chatting about what he wanted for dinner. The momentum of the day carried them forward, but the ground beneath Yamato’s feet had irrevocably shifted. He had carved a crack in their perfect, public world, and he had no idea if it would seal itself shut or shatter everything wide open.