Chapter Text
Nitori is bent at the waist, towelling his hair off in the locker room when he feels the presence behind him - bare feet on the slippery tiles, even steps, in no hurry at all. Most of the team have long since cleared out by now. He must be the last of them still getting changed, but the facility is so huge and the locker rooms and showers so numerous that there's no way to tell.
Another damp towel hits him square in the middle of the back, and Nitori doesn't have to turn around to know who has come looking for him.
Rin clears his throat before addressing him, as though to get his attention. "Good race," he says. It's the same way he speaks to the team after practice, when they're all lined up at the side of the pool. The most generic of his praises, but Nitori doesn't mind at all.
"Thank you!" he replies, straightening up and hoping that Rin won't somehow notice that he hasn't gotten around to putting anything beneath the lilac towel that's only loosely tied around his waist. His words don't echo anywhere near so much as Rin's did in the enclosed space. "But-- I'll do better next time!"
Rin makes a noise of acknowledgement, like he already knew that without Nitori having to tell him. At least, that's how he chooses to take it.
"He wants your number," Rin says, and Nitori does turn around then, just for the opportunity to see Rin standing there, leaning with his shoulder against a row of lockers, tracksuit on, his hair tied back but still dripping onto waterproof fabric. "Just so you know."
Nitori blinks at him. "Hazuki-kun?"
He nods. "Nagisa."
Nagisa - the one who had winked at him before the relay, and there Nitori had been relieved to have an opponent who wouldn't have the advantage of height and longer limbs, because what were the odds?
Nagisa from Iwatobi, who, like seemingly everyone else from Iwatobi, Rin has been friends with since the beginning of time but never wants to talk about. These are the people that Rin doesn't want to share, and one of them is reaching out.
Nitori manages to shimmy into his tracksuit bottoms without an accidental flashing - no underwear, but Rin isn't exactly giving him the opportunity for privacy. "Did you give it to him?"
"I didn't think I should. Not without asking you first." Rin stares at the adjacent wall with at least some degree of nonchalance, like it's fooling anyone. "I mean, I wasn't sure if he meant... you do know about Nagisa, right?"
Nitori has a sudden, vivid mental image of picking his way through a minefield.
"I think so," he says, carefully. He doesn't know anything of the sort, but he can parse Rin's meaning anyway. The sound of zipping up his bag cuts through the impending silence; like he's expected to say more, but at the same time, he isn't supposed to.
Rin nods, very slowly, at the blank wall as it though it had answered his question. "So you understand there's a chance he's...?"
Nitori wants to narrow his eyes, but doesn't. Instead, he just slings his bag over his shoulder and tries to become the picture of uncomprehending innocence as he tosses Rin's towel back to him.
Rin catches it easily, and then sighs. "...Asking for your number that way. You know." He puts his towel over his shoulder and his hands in his pockets as they head, together, for the door. "I had to warn you. He's an okay guy, but he isn't exactly subtle."
"He's not going to eat me, Captain, it's okay. You should give it to him." Nitori grins - can't possibly help but grin at the way Rin looks at him like he's just stepped over the edge of a cliff or sold his soul to the devil. "Tell him I said good race."
oOo
Nitori mostly knows about Hazuki Nagisa due to the fact that Facebook has been suggesting him as a mutual friend for months now. He's watched Nagisa cycle through a different profile picture every two days or so, and he had beaten Nitori to the punch when it came to leaving happy birthday messages for both Kou and Rin this year - but he's never had the courage to do anything about it, and neither, apparently, has the oh-so-unsubtle blond making peace signs at the camera in the little icon beside his name.
On some level, he understands. Rin mentions him like he mentions the others, vague asides about Nagisa said or Makoto thinks without elaborating much on who they actually are. And there are enough Nagisa saids that Nitori comes to the conclusion that Nagisa actually says an awful lot.
Which is why it's so surprising when Nagisa texts Nitori with his own number, his message dinging in while Nitori is on the bus home that weekend, and then not at all.
Nitori comes to the swift conclusion that Rin forgot to tell him good race.
Not that it was the greatest conversation starter of all time, but at least it was something.
So, after three days of radio silence, Nitori takes the plunge and sends Nagisa a friend request, along with the rest of the Iwatobi team.
They come back four accepteds and an emoticon-laden IM asking when he's in town next and if he wants to go for a run sometime, like that something people just ask.
oOo
For the first time in a while, Nitori's phone stops being almost purely decorative.
It's not that he doesn't get texts (he does) or that he doesn't have friends (he has the team and classmates and people from middle school who ended up at different academies) - it's just that it's always been kind of a functional thing. A where r u, meet me by the vending machines, what the hell is the homework thing. He's found that he doesn't have much to say on a platform where he actually has to read his words back to himself beforehand. He's also found that, maybe because of this, he isn't the person people text when they're trying to combat the crushing boredom of waiting in a dentist's office or procrastinating on school-work. And he's adjusted to that. It's a lifestyle.
A lifestyle that comes crashing down hard.
And it's not until it's one in the morning on a Tuesday -- when Rin grunts out, "Ai," from the bottom bunk, "would you put your damn phone off," and Nitori looks at the screen with bleary eyes and sees, as though for the first time, bubble after bubble of asinine chatter about TV dramas and music and swimming and just about everything else under the sun -- that he realises what's happening.
He says goodnight, shuts his phone off, and falls asleep smiling into his pillow.
oOo
"It's this thing Gou-kun is making us do," Nagisa explains, two weeks later and like she isn't standing about two feet away from him on the pavement. He pulls his calf behind himself, stretching it off laboriously, even though they haven't done anything yet. "A brutal workout to build our stamina and blah blah blah running is boring without fun people around, and you seem like a fun person to me, Ai-chan."
He shoots Nitori a sunny, toothy grin. The three of them are out in their sweats, loitering by a road that spans the coast, giving all the view of the sea without the added effort of running through the actual sand. Nitori still isn't sure why he packed his running shoes and came to Iwatobi for the day, but when Nagisa says it, it seems like the simplest thing in the world. It's not like he has anywhere else to be.
He does find it hard to believe that after two weeks of occasional text messaging and Nagisa has somehow, bless his soul, come to the conclusion that he is fun.
Nitori can only smile hesitantly back at him.
"I'm fun too," Kou protests, her ponytail swinging with the force of the way her head snaps around to look at Nagisa in the most accusing way. "I'm a good manager and I'm fun."
"Gou-kun." Nagisa shakes his head and rests one hand solemnly on her shoulder. "You try. But you'll never surpass Ai-chan here. You don't text me about anything except protein and regimes."
Just like her brother, Nitori doesn't say, because it's not even strictly true. Rin did text him about a cafeteria menu change once. Even if it was a mass text, so what? Those count.
"I think you're fun," Nitori offers, and truthfully. He's only met Kou in passing a handful of times, but he's always liked her. And she, at least, is forthright with her social media.
A car goes by, and the relative brightness of the headlights reminds them all that time is ticking on. It's drawing closer to sunset, though not at any real speed. It's too late in the spring for the nights to sneak up on them, but too early for the weather to be any real deterrent to be outside - it's perfectly mild. Half the Samezuka team have been out every morning this week, at approximately the crack of dawn.
Admittedly, Nitori thinks running is boring too, but he's never admitted it, and he can't fault Kou for her training.
"Thank you," Kou says, more to Nagisa than anyone. She rolls back the sleeve of her hoodie to check her watch, and while her head is bowed, Nitori watches Nagisa stick his tongue out at her.
They manage one long lap that feels like it goes around the entire town, and by the time Nitori gets back to the train station, his thighs are burning and his throat aches from trying to keep up with the demanding pace of conversation.
It was hard and gruelling and bizarre, but not boring, not even for a moment.
"Let us know when you get home safe," Kou tells him as his train pulls up, and Nagisa nods enthusiastically from behind her. Nitori has a feeling they'd exchange hugs if they weren't all so gross and damp.
"I will," he says, and when he gets back to the dorm and promptly forgets, the two phone calls he receives catch him off guard more than he could have anticipated.
oOo
"I'm not actually fun."
Nitori's confession comes a week later, when it's Nagisa's turn to deal with the train journey for a day out at the arcade. Nagisa being a beast at DDR isn't surprising, really, and after being beaten twice, Nitori finds himself content to watch, resting his forearms on the red bar of the empty station while Nagisa works through his fourth song without even breaking a sweat.
"Yes you are," Nagisa says without taking his eyes off the screen. "I think you're great."
Nitori doesn't know what to say to that, so he says, "We hardly know each other, though."
"Well, I'm like that. Sometimes I just take a shine to people, I can't help it." A group of middle-school girls come to a halt nearby, watching Nagisa dance, but they don't break his focus with their awed whispering. "Especially not when they're as super-fun as you are? It's like they're a magnet and I'm - well, I'm another magnet, maybe, and we just have to be friends."
The thumping music doesn't screech to a halt, but from the way that statement gives Nitori pause, it should. It's in the way Nagisa says it like it's mined straight from the core of his brain, unfiltered. Unashamed and unembarrassed. His feet still tapping out a harsh rhythm as though he hasn't said anything out of the ordinary at all.
"You want to be friends? With me?" Nitori has to double-check - he has to. He pulls his phone from his pocket to fiddle with the charm, just for something to do with his hands. His phone full of back-and-forth with Nagisa for weeks, contained in little bubbles. He almost never has to text first.
"We are friends," Nagisa tells him, and for a moment there's no room for argument. The sky is blue and the Earth is round and the soles of Nitori's feet ache from their modest sightseeing and they're friends. But then Nagisa says, "Aren't we?" in a way that implies nothing of second-guessing himself and everything of checking for some kind of consent.
Consent that he shouldn't even need. Nagisa wouldn't come all this way to see someone who wasn't a friend. Nitori doesn't know why it took him so long to realise that himself.
"Sure. Yes." he nods, hopes Nagisa can't see the way he's blushing, flustered in the dim neon of the arcade. "We're friends."