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Nothing ends, but everything shifts — CHAPTER 1

Summary : About almosts.

About staying.

About the quiet moments before everything shifts and the people you hope will still be there when it does.

Pairing : satosugu, itafushi, shokohime, nobamaki, and more probably

Genre : slice of life, university au!, no curses au!, found family, friends to lovers, strangers to lovers, slow burn, mutual pinning, etc...

Status : In process

Words count : 3.8k

Warnings : the usual one I guess, angst, fluff (yeah its a warning for some people) mention of depression, abusive parents (physically and morally), PTSD, scars, self harm,... satosugu being idiots in love, but if you're here only for them you'll be disappointed.

A/N : Let's go for the first chapter ! Satoru is a sweet dumbass, Suguru is a sweetheart and introduction to my sweetie oc Yuna Hoshino be kind with her ! 💜

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Later, they will say it was the year when everything changed.

But that evening, Suguru wasn't thinking about it. He was just walking through the streets lit by yellow streetlights, looking at the windows of bookstores and cafes. The cool autumn wind prompted him to adjust his scarf, and he found himself noticing how the leaves were already beginning to fall silently. Nothing dramatic. Nothing remarkable. And yet, somewhere in the shadows of habit, something was shifting, imperceptibly, like a wave beneath the surface.

Suguru stopped when he noticed a loud crowd across the road. Looking up, he noticed something who where didn't there before. Something had been painted on the facades of a building. He often walked down this street and knew it hadn't been there the day before.

It wasn't the first time this kind of thing had happened in the neighborhood. Over the past five months, more than four similar works had been painted in just a few hours, attracting the attention of passersby and the authorities. The messages conveyed by these paintings were always political, feminist, or climate-related, like the one in front of him. They always denounced something. A kind of Japanese Banksy, in a way.

Suguru found it rather impressive, not getting caught by the authorities, conveying such strong messages and, above all, remaining anonymous without ever getting caught. He even admired that person somewhat.

He didn't linger too long and continued on his way. The café where he had plans to meet up wasn't very far away, and his friends were probably already waiting for him there.

Or not.

When he arrived, he looked around, searching for a familiar face, but saw only one. A purple head, bent over a book he knew to be about marine biology, a steaming cup of coffee beside her. He simply smiled and walked over, sitting down across from her. He had known Yuna Hoshino for several years now, and over time she had become a close friend.

“What species tonight?” he asked simply, in a soft voice so as not to startle her. She looked up and pushed her glasses back up her nose, her large green eyes surprised to see him. She quickly recovered and closed her book.

“Jellyfish. Did you know they don't have brains? Or lungs, or hearts!”

Suguru nodded, genuinely interested. “Really? How do they live?”

She sat up straight and crossed her arms, taking a sip of her coffee. “They have a network of neurons throughout their bodies that allows them to react to stimuli, swim, and even learn things. Well, it's more complicated than that, but...” She paused and puckered her lips slightly. “Sorry, I'm talking too much again...”

“On the contrary, it's very interesting. Are you alone? Shoko and Satoru aren't here yet?”

From the look on Yuna's face, he realized that they would probably be alone again tonight.

“Shoko is filling in for someone and is on shift at the hospital...” she began, motioning to a waiter so Suguru could order, "as for Satoru... I don't know, did he say anything this morning?"

Suguru also ordered a coffee and turned his attention back to his friend, who was putting away her book. He and Satoru were roommates, just like Shoko and Yuna. And yet sometimes, Suguru and Yuna felt like they were living with ghosts. Shoko and Satoru were the busiest of their group. She was working back-to-back shifts at the hospital, being in her final year, while he spent most of his time in practical work rooms.

“Shoko works too hard, she's going to end up burning out. And I haven't seen Satoru since this morning. I don't think he's at the party, but...”

“The star is in the house!”

Suguru felt an arm wrap around his shoulder and a chest press against his back. Of course, his heart skipped a beat, which he decided to ignore and blame on the surprise because, of course, Satoru always liked to make dramatic entrances.

“You really think I'd miss this? It's so rare to see Yuna stick her head out of the aquarium!”

The woman frowned. “Hey! I'm never at the aquarium, it's too far from campus...”

“Then why do you always smell like seafood?” Satoru asked innocently, resting his chin on Suguru's shoulder.

“What? That's not true, I...” Yuna lifted the collar of her T-shirt to smell it, a look of panic on her face, then turned to Suguru. “I don't smell like seafood, do I, Suguru?”

Suguru rolled his eyes and nudged Satoru lightly, pushing him to sit next to him. Ignoring his heartbeat again. “Of course not, don't listen to him, he's just messing with you.”

Yuna took advantage of Satoru sitting down to kick him in the shin, before turning her attention back to Suguru. “That's why you're my favorite, Suguru.”

Satoru pouted. “You're hurting me deeply, Yuna. I thought we were friends!”

Yuna and Suguru exchanged glances and started laughing. The waiter brought Suguru his coffee and took Satoru's order, a coffee for him too. They all needed coffee, honestly.

“By the way, have you seen the new painting on the facade of the building a little way from here?,” asked Yuna, taking a sip of her coffee.

Suguru chuckled slightly as he nodded. “About climate change this time. How long does it take to do this kind of thing? Several hours?”

“Not that long if you're good enough at painting,” Satoru replied nonchalantly. Yuna and Suguru exchanged glances, then turned their attention back to Satoru. “Because you've become a pro at street art now?” Yuna questioned. “Satoru, don't tell me...”

“Huh? No, it's not me!” Satoru quickly exclaimed.

Suguru sighed slightly and leaned back in his chair, “Too bad, I'm still curious to know who could do something like that. It's really impressive.”

Satoru looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “What, do you have a crush on this anonymous person or what?” he asked, something imperceptible in his voice.

Suguru turned slightly toward him, not noticing Yuna rolling her eyes and turning her attention to her cell phone. He didn't get why Satoru was saying that. And the tone in his voice... it sounded like he was... jealous? No, it was probably just his imagination. “You're talking nonsense, Satoru. Don't tell me you're not curious to know who's behind all this artwork?”

Satoru raised his eyebrows, turning his head toward the café's large window, seeing the famous street art in the distance. “It's just graffiti on a wall, nothing more. That's not how things are going to change.”

Suguru turned slightly towards Satoru, a small crease forming between his brows. There was something about the way he just said it, just a graffiti on a wall, that didn't sit right with him.

"You really believe that?" he asked calmly while taking a sip on his coffee.

Satoru shrugged, wrapping both hands on his own cup when the waiter brought it. "I just believe that painting something on a wall doesn't make a law change. It doesn't feed anyone. It doesn't fix anyting." He took a sip, unbothered. "It's just… aesthetics. Pretty aesthetics, sure, but aesthetics nonetheless."

Suguru was quiet for a second. Across from them, Yuna already subtly retreated. Her phone was now face down on the table, her coffee cup raised to her lips, her eyes moving between the two of them with the practiced calm of someone who had learned, over time, that the best thing to do in that kind of situation was to stay quiet.

"I disagree," Suguru said simply.

Satoru raised an eyebrow. "Shocking," he repeated, a faint smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. But he didn't look away from the window.

Suguru set his cup down slowly. "Art has always been political. It's always been a way to say things that couldn't be said otherwise. You think Picasso painted Guernica just for the aesthetics ?"

"Picasso painted Guernica, and Wars still happened," Satoru replied, still looking outside, his voice light, almost bored. "Funny how that works."

"That's not the point."

"Then what's the point, Suguru?" He finally turned to look at him, something unreadable behind the blue of his eyes. "That's beautiful? That it makes people feel something for thirty seconds before they keep walkin? Great. Wonderful. The world is saved."

Suguru held his gaze. "You're being deliberately reductive."

"I'm being realistic."

"You're being cynical."

"Same thing, sometimes."

A bried silence settled between them, not uncomfortable exactly, but charged. The kind of silence that had meaning. Yuna watched the exchange over the rim of her cup, saying nothing, her thumb tracing the ceramic handle in slow circles.

Satoru turned away from the window, his fingers drumming ligthly against his cup. "Name one war that stopped because someone painted something pretty."

"That's not how influence works and you know it," Suguru said, his voice even, but with an edge. "It's not direct, it's never direct. You don't paint mural and watch a parliament vote differtently the next morning. But you change minds. You shift something in people. And people…" he pause, "people change things."

"People change things," Satoru echoed, the faint amusement in his voice doing nothing to hide how little he seemed convinced. "Sure. And in the meantime, the paintings stay on the walls and the problems stay in the world."

"Bob Dylan wrote songs about the civil rights movement," Suguru continued, unfazed. "And Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye… The Cranberries with Zombie! You think that had zero impact? That it didn't reach people who had never set foot in a march? That it didn't make something feel possible that didn't before?"

"People still got lynched after Strange Fruit came out," Satoru said, his voice flat, "Segregation lasted another twenty years."

"That's not…"

"And Marvin Gaye didn't stop Vietnam. And Dylan didn't stop anything either, did he? Beautiful songs, really. But the war still happened. The bombs still fell. He tilted his head slightly, "Funny pattern, don't you think?"

Suguru exhaled slowly through his nose. He wasn't angry, not exactly. It was something more like frustration at watching his bestfriend deliberately look away from something obvious. "You're measuring the wrong thing. You're asking whether art stopped the bad thing from happening. That’s not the question."

"Then what is?"

"Whether it changed people. whether it made someone who would have stayed silent decide to speak. Whether it gave language to something someone had been feeling alone with for years." He paused. "Cinema. 12 Years a Slave. Schindler's List, The Voice of Hind Rajab. Documentaries that no one wanted to fund because the subject was uncomfortable, and that ended up in front of millions ofn people who had never once thought about what they were showing. You think that doesn't matter?"

Satoru was quiet for a second, his thumb running along the rim of his cup.

"It matters aesthetically," he finally said. "Emotionally, sure. But emotionally isn't politically. Feeling moved in cinema seat doesn't translate into legislation. It doesn't translate into systems changing."

"It trnaslates into people changing. And people are the ones who change systems."

While they were both arguing, Yuna was on her phone, calm and silent, watching the two men from the corner of her eye.

Shoko.. the lovebirds at it again.

She send the message to her roomate, not expecting her to answer immediatly but surprisingly, she did. She was probably taking a cigarette break.

You're telling me… what's the subject this time ?

Yuna pinched her lips to hold back her laugh.

Art. If art is political.

Sick. Always the good subject when I'm not here. Who's winning ?

The woman felt two gaze on her almost simultaneously and sighed, knowing it was time for her to participate despite herself.

No one at the moment, but I will in a few minutes ~ ♥

She put her phone down, looking at them, expression perfectly composed.

"I know you've been thinking something." Suguru said simply.

"You had your thinking face, still has." Satoru added.

"I don't have a thinking face."

"You absolutely have a thinking face." they said, in unison, with the ease of people who had said too many things in unison before.

Yuna sighed again, taking a sip before setting her cup down with a small, decisive clink. "I think Suguru is right." She held up a hand before Satoru could open his mouth. "Let me finish. Art doesn't change things by itself, you're right about that part. But art carries things across time that nothing else can. Just think about that italian song, Bella Ciao. At first it was a song used in the early 20th century to protest harsh working conditions. It was adapted in 1944 by italian partisans fighting against facism and is still used today. A protest gets disperesed. A law gets overturned. But a song, a painting, it stays. And the people it reaches go on to do things, to encourage them to do something." She tilted her head. "Greta Thunberg, Marsha P. Johnson, Tarana Burke, Audre Lorde, so many others people who lit fires that spread because the gound had already been prepared. By stories, painting, songs, books. That made poeple feel like something was wrong and worth fighting."

She took a deep breath and shrugged. "Without all those people, women wouldn't be able to go to college, vote and so many other things I'm too lazy to list."

She glanced between them, calm and precise. Satoru looked at her for moment. "So your position is the same as Suguru's."

"My position," Yuna said, picking her cup back up, "is the same as Suguru's yes. With one small amendment."

She took a sip.

"Picasso is a terrible example."

Suguru frowned slightly. "Why? He…"

Yuna gave him a look, flat and unimpressed, making him go quiet. "He was a deeply, profoundly, terrible person, and it's an euphemism. And if the anonymous painter out there is a feminist, which, reading all those walls, seems fairly likely, they would probably not love being compared to him."

A beat.

Suguru nodded with a faint smile. "Fair point."

"Of course it is."

Satoru was looking at her with something that might, on someone else, have been called respect.

"I take back what I said about the seafood," he said finally.

Yuna kicked him under the table again, but she was smiling. Satoru snorted. It was small, almost involuntary, but it was there. The tension been coiling quietly between the two men for the past few minutes loosened.

"So now, if you're both done with your weird flirting things…"

"We are not flirting!" they both said at the same, glancing at each other with something they both couldn't really name.

Seeing this, Yuna tilted her head, shaking her head with a sigh. "Anyway. I have an appointment for a piercing next week, would someone be willing to accompany me?"

°°°

The bill was split three ways, as always, despite Satoru's half-hearted attempt to pay for everyone that both Yuna and Suguru shut down before he'd even finished the sentence.

Outside, the air had gotten colder. Suguru pulled his scarf a little tighter and watched Yuna button her coat, her purple hair catching the yellow light of the streetlamps.

"So," Satoru said, hands in his pockets, rocking slightly on his heels. "The piercing."

Yuna loked up. "Next Saturday at three."

"Where?"

She tilted her head and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, revealing the neat row of small silver rings already there. "Upper ear, the flat part." She touched it briefly. "I've wanted it for a while."

Satoru made a vague gesture. "I'll come"

Suguru glanced at him. He said earlier that he had to work on a paper due to the next Monday and really needed to lock in.

"You sure?" Yuna asked, with the kind of tone that meant she was already expecting him to canel.

"I said I'll come." He finally looked at her. "I'm not going to let you go alone to let someone stab a needle through your cartilage."

"That's essentially what a piercing is, yes."

"Horrifying. I'll be there."

Yuna chuckled, then nodded, not saying now that she planned to get tattoed too very soon. She turned to Suguru and hugged, warm, brief, the kind of hug tht had become a reflex over the years. He hugged her back.

"I will send you the adress Satoru!" she exclaimed as she was already turning to walk away, "Don't fight on the way home!"

They couldn't answer as she was always far enought to not hear them. They watched her disappear around the corner. When the night swallowed her up entirely, it was just the two of them.

They walked in silence for a while, which wasn't unusual. Silence with Satoru had never been uncomfortable, it had always been the kind that existed between the two people who didn't need to fill every gap. Suguru had always appreciated that about him, even if he would never say it out loud.

The streets were quieter now. Most of the cafés were closing, chairs being stacked behind fogged-up windows. Their footsteps were almost synchronized without either of them trying, a habit built over years of walking the same routes.

"She knows a lot," Satoru said, eventually. "Yuna."

Suguru looked at him for the side. "She usually does."

"About art, I mean." A pause. "Bella Ciao, Marsha P. Johnson,…" he said the names with a kind of absent precision, like he was cataloguing something. "The way she talked about it, it wasn't like she'd just read something somewhere. Isn't she in art club or something?"

"Not officially but she goes there regularly; I think she's made a friend there. Oh, and Marsha P. Johnson is well known in the queer community, she has been a true pillar of strength in this cause. But for Bella ciao yeah, I didn't know either."

"I just thought it just was a song made for Money Heist…" Satoru snorted and shrugged nonchalently.

Suguru chuckled but considered what he said about their friend. He had noticed it too, in a way you sometimes noticed things about people you'd know for years, a detail that had always been there, only now catching the light differently. Yuna knew things about art specificity that didn't match the perso who also spent her evenings reading about whales and jellyfish nervous system. The references she made were never random. They were always exact.

"It's a bit strange isn't it? She studies marine biology. She reads books about it at ten in the evening. And then she drops something like earlier like it's nothing." Satoru voice was thoughtful, not critical. Almost curious. "How long have we known her?"

"When she moved with Shoko… Four years almost."

"Four years." He said it like he was doing the arithmetic. "And I still feel like we know barely anything about her."

Suguru considered that. It was an accurate way to put it, actually. Yuna had always been like that. Present for her friends and yet somehow always keeping something back. Not in a cold way, more like someone who had learned to offer what was needed and keep the rest quietly for herself.

"That's just her way," he said finally. "She will told us when she'll be ready, and if she want to."

Satoru made a small sound that might have been agreement.

The crowd from earlier when they passed by the painting wall were gone. The streetlights made everything look a little warmer than it was, and the wind had picked up, pulling leaved off the trees in small, spiraling falls. Suguru pulled his scarf higher without thinking about it.

"For what it's worth," Satoru said eventually, and his voice was different, slightly lower, stripped of the easy boredom he wore like a second coat, "I don't think it's nothing."

Both had they their hands in their pockets. Suguru's shoulder was close enought to Satoru. They were almost touching, the way they always walked, proximity so habitual it had stopped registering. Or should it have stopped registered.

Suguru noticed it anyway. He said nothing about it.

"Bella ciao was a good ewample." Satoru broke the silence.

Suguru glanced at him. "Better than Guernica?"

Satoru made a sound that was not quite a concession and not quite a dismissal. "Different. Guernica is a painting. People have to go somewhere to see it, and seeing it on a screen don't it the same. A song travels differently." He paused again. "I'm not saying you were right."

"I know."

"I'm saying the song example is better than the painting one."

"Noted."

"Don't look so pleased."

"I'm not looking anything."

"You have a face."

"Everyone has a face, Satoru."

Satoru exhaled, something between a laugh and a breath of cold air, and looked ahead. They turned onto their street. The building was visible at the end of it, familiar and a little ugly in the way of student housing, with it's uneven gutters and the light on the third floor that had been flickering for two weeks.

The pavement narrowed slightly as they walked closer, the way it always did near the old wall on the left, and without either of them adjusting their pace or stepping aside, they ended up closer. Their arms brushed first, the outer seam of Satoru's jacket against Suguru's coat, which was nothing, which happened constantly.

Suguru's hand came out of his pocket, reaching for nothing in particular, just the restless movement of someone who had been walking in the cold for more than ten minutes. And Satoru did the same, at the same moment, for no reason either of them could have named.

Their knuckles brushed.

A second, less than a second, a minute or an hour. He didn't knew.

Neither of them stopped walking. Neither of them said anything. The contact was so bried it could have been accidental, the kind of thing that happened between two people who had been walking side by side for years and had simply run out of space between them.

Suguru looked straight ahead. He was aware, with a precision that had no business being that precise, of the exact point of his hand where Satoru's skin had been. The cold air made it worse, somehow, made the warmth of it more distinct than it had any right to be.

It was nothing.

The same nothing as yesterday in the kitchen, that had been happening in small increments for long enough that he had run out of new ways to file it away. A hand on his shoulder, a chin resting against his shoulder, a knuckle against a knuckle in the cold.

It was nothing.

He had been telling himself that a lot lately. He was getting quite good at it.

The same nothing as earlier. The same nothing as always.

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