All those things that we are not

It begins as a harmless thing: a name. Just a name. A tidy set of printed characters on a letter sized assignment proposal sheet. Four characters. Ink on a page.

Yamada Ryosuke.

"You are kidding me, right?" Nakajima Yuto's agent might not be the person most prone to joking there is (he had to have some equilibrium, after all), but this sounds crazy even for Yuto's crazy life itself.

"It is a big opportunity," Suzuki says, his usual deadpan in place and Yuto's insides tingle. "It is Yamada-kun's first photo book, as you might know. His solo career is at its peak and the photographer who shoots this will have a great deal of exposure. It could be your breakthrough."

"And the Agency okayed this?" Yuto hears his own voice and it's so high pitched with hysteria it sounds foreign. He didn't leave Johnny's and Associates on the best of terms, even if that was ten years and a lifetime ago.

"They actually requested you."

"They as in management or..."

"Management," Suzuki answers, oblivious to Yuto's disappointment. "I do think they are playing a sentimental card to appeal even more to the fans. This is big."

In the following silence, his manager's piercing glance and his own hammering heart break havoc in Yuto's system. It is a great opportunity, even if he is no longer at the stage of his career where he has to struggle to get jobs, and now he is backed up by more than some distant past as idol; Yamada's popularity has been steadily going up since the days he and Yuto used to work together, too, and to be handpicked by the Agency itself...

In the end, he really doesn't care about any of those reasons.

"Okay, I'll do it," Yuto says, and his voice trembles, but Suzuki doesn't breathe a word about it, just nods and types something on his tablet and that's it.

Yuto just closes his eyes and prays he didn't just make the worst decision ever.

***

It is the worst decision ever.

Somehow having coffee to discuss art concepts with Yamada, without their managers or assistants, just the two of them alone seemed like a great idea before, when he settled the appointment via his agent and Yamada's agent and everything happened in third person tenses.

But now Yuto is not so sure, as he watches Yamada approach his table in the little low profile bar their managers agreed to hold the meeting on, steady steps and a balanced elegance that wasn't there when Yuto last saw him, too much time ago.

Yamada grew up a bit, his face is less round, his cheekbones more pronounced and he holds himself differently, with more confidence. He isn't the teenager he once knew and Yuto isn't the person Yamada used to know either. But Yamada's face is so familiar. Yuto was never able to escape properly from it, not even back then. He would have had to flee the country and never log into a Japanese website again to avoid it after all, and he could cope. All these years he was able to cope.

Ten years is one hell of a long time to get over some silly teenage crush, but there are butterflies in Yuto's stomach anyway and he feels as nervous as in his first assignment as lead photograph.

Naturally, he blows it at the beginning.

"Yama-chan..." Yuto greets with a sigh, and he doesn't know where that came from. He feels like facepalming himself, but that would be unprofessional. More.

"Eh?" is all the answer Yuto gets.

In the long, long, silence that follows Yamada just stares at him, an eyebrow lifted and the ghost of a blush on his cheeks, but there is no warmth in his eyes.