Cole took a frankly obscene amount of pride in managing to rope Kai into joining the school's choir. Kai 'ew no, that's gay as shit' Smith, now a proud tenor of the Ninjago city High School intermediate choir.
But as proud as he was, small bits of guilt ate away at him from time to time. What if Kai had only joined out of pity, and he'd just wasted a valuable elective slot on his best friend's schedule through unintentional manipulation?
In truth, Cole had little idea whether Kai loved or despised the class. Every time he tried to gauge his opinion, Kai would respond with only a dismissive comment or change the subject. Cole had given up his director's offer to join one of the school's advanced ensembles for the sake of being in class with Kai, though he'd never told him that himself.
Kai would have yelled at him for even considering giving up something like that for his sake, and would have outright refused to let him make such a decision. So the thought that he'd given up something so important to him, only for it to be nothing more than an annoyance for his best friend? It didn't feel good, to say the least.
But damn, was he a perfect fit for the program. To put it lightly, Kai had a nice voice. Beautiful, really, was the only way to describe it. But he could never say that out loud without having the piss taken out of him, so he settled for whatever musical terms he could conjure up.
And he couldn't even tell how Kai felt about that, either. Sometimes he'd get jokingly annoyed and playfully shove him aside, others he'd completely freeze up like a deer in headlights. An adorable, redhead deer.
Because, as it turned out, Cole was doing an awful job at subverting stereotypes. He was, as most music students seemed to be, not straight. And he was, as most not straight people seemed to be, completely head over heels for his (straight) best friend.
Cole shook the thoughts out of his head. He didn't have time to think about this now— he had a physics project due at 7:30am that he hadn't even made an attempt at starting. He could worry about his stupid crush after he made sure he didn't have to retake the class. Which he honestly wouldn't have minded, had he not been certain that Kai would murder him if he did so.
He opened up his chat app to a familiar profile, and typed out an equally familiar message begging Kai to send his work to copy off of. They spoke a little, and Cole totally wasn't grinning like a dumbass the whole time, until Kai agreed to send his project for him to copy use as inspiration.
The video uploaded, and Cole almost closed the app in an effort to procrastinate even further, but the thumbnail caught his eye.
Was Kai holding his guitar? Morbidly curious, Cole pressed play.
"This is for a special someone." Kai smiled at the camera, a light smirk that pierced directly through Cole's heart. He was wearing a plain black t-shirt and pajama pants, his hair leaking out from under his hat more than they normally did. This felt personal, like a glimpse into Kai's life that even Cole didn't get to see often.
He had a suspicion this wasn't his physics project.
Kai gently strummed his guitar, a small yet impossibly sweet smile on his face as he did so. It was difficult to tell through the compressed nature of the video, but it looked like he was using the pick Cole had gifted him as well. To put it lightly, Cole's heart was a puddle on the floor.
He paused the video momentarily to compose himself, completely mortified by just how severely something like this affected him. It was his best friend playing guitar, seriously? Had he really gotten to the level of pining where he couldn't watch Kai do basic activities without his face burning up? After a few deep breaths and some mental self-mockery, Cole resumed the video as a calm, collected man. It was just Kai practicing guitar, he was fine.
