Title: infinite loop
Summary: By chance, Mikado comes across his former best friend online, ten years after they've last spoken. Needless to say, they have a lot to catch up on.
Pairings: Mikado/Masaomi
Notes: Crossposting from ao3. Based on two prompts I came across a while ago, one of which was 'I was looking at my new followers and I think you were my crush that moved away in fourth grade'. The other was 'oh my god, so you're the xkit guy?'

Mikado really shouldn't be up at this hour. It's nearly two in the morning, and he keeps rubbing at his eyes underneath his glasses, yawning before he takes a sip from the glass of water sitting beside his keyboard. It's just that he needs to go through his inbox because it's getting too full; full of questions, suggestions, and even the occasional wish for him to go to hell.

It's mostly just people thanking him, though, for making their lives a bit easier. This particular social networking site has been online for a while, steadily growing while people got invites from their friends or their mothers or their co-workers. Mikado hadn't exactly kept track, but he'd stumbled onto the site one day and decided to sign up on a whim, and started following people who either had interesting things to say about science, or people who took nice photographs of nature.

He'd been bored one afternoon and decided to make a few tweaks in the code, to make the site easier to use for himself; mostly making it easier to sort out the spam, and everything else he didn't want to see. (So, basically everything he wasn't interested in.) He figured some other people might find it useful, put it online as a browser extension, and then forgot about it for three months.

Until people started following him on his own account, sent him messages, and asked when (or even if) he'd update the extension to keep up with the updates the site had gone through. Sure, he'd said. Why not?

The steady trickle of people coming in soon changed into an outright downpour, and his surprise turned into absolute bewilderment.

Nowadays, he replies when he can, privately – it's almost ironic that users still have to use the extension he built to be able to receive messages privately, as that's a thing the site never got around to. He wonders what's worse, that he barely has the time to look at the site like he used to, or that his own page is a weird amalgamation of updates and cat pictures.

(In his defence, they're mostly pictures of the neighbours' cat. It likes to sneak indoors because their balconies are adjoined, and he's found his disgruntled neighbour on his doorstep more than once, asking for the cat.)

He scrolls further down, lifting his glass to take a sip. "Hey man, thanks for the hard work," a new message pops up. "You're a life-saver, haha!"

He's about to move on when the profile picture catches his attention. It's a little too small to identify the person, but… Mikado definitely does a double-take, frowns, and then clicks on 'hotblondsingleinyourarea's profile. (If he said he didn't almost spit out his drink at the name, he'd be lying.)

The user's page is brightly coloured, kept by someone claiming to be a twenty-something college student, and absolutely definitely always in the market to meet up with cute girls.

That's what it says. Right there, underneath their username.

He hesitantly scrolls down the page and—he's in luck, because the first item is a photo, a selfie, of a guy with blond hair wearing an open Hawaiian shirt and pink-rimmed sunglasses while grinning widely. He stares for a moment, then hurriedly scrolls further down, until he finds another selfie tucked between two posts, one a photo of the Tokyo Hand, the other a weird short message about goldfish. It's the same blonde guy, though, this time without the hideous shirt, instead wearing a simple black hoodie.

There's no question about it, though. That's Kida Masaomi. His childhood best friend, who he lost touch with back when he was about… twelve or so. It looks like he's found him again.

He presses the button to send a private message, lifts his hands to the keyboard, and then pauses. What should he say? 'Thank you for following me, also, I think you might be my childhood best friend?' He shrugs, and gets to typing, eventually coming up with a message that doesn't scream 'I looked through your entire page just because I want to see more of your face'.

He ends up with a fairly generic message, mostly because he doesn't want to freak out the guy on the other end of the line, whether it turns out to be Masaomi or not. 'Thanks for your message,' it reads, 'I definitely appreciate being a life-saver. ;) By the way, you kind of remind me of someone I used to know. Is that you, Masaomi?'

Not three minutes later, he gets a reply. 'Holy shit, you nearly gave me a heart-attack. Don't do that to a guy! How do you know my name? Do I need to be worried for my safety? Did that extension give you special mind-read powers?'

Strangely enough, Mikado can just imagine Masaomi's voice saying that, just a little too over-the-top with his reaction. 'I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to scare you,' he starts. 'Definitely don't have mind-reading powers, if that's what you're worried about. We actually went to primary school together. I'm Mikado.'

First he receives: 'OH MY GOD. MIKADO. YOU'RE THE EXTENSION GUY.'

And then: 'fjsijfdosjfopweOAJFEIOJSFSEO;WS!11!'

And then: 'You just blew my mind. Congrats. On both being mind-blowing and being a fancy pants on the internet.'

'Fancy pants?' he finally replies.

'It's 2 am, shut up.'

Mikado had been intending to go to bed earlier – he still has class in the morning, although at least not at 9 am – but instead he ends up chatting to Masaomi all night instead, where they tell each other about their endeavours. Masaomi turns out to be in the middle of writing his thesis, and whines for about two paragraphs about how much he hates making a works cited list.

In turn, Mikado takes a picture of some of the math problems he has to solve this week. 'It's too early for math,' Masaomi complains. 'But then again, it's always too early for math. I chose language for a reason, ninety percent of those reasons being there are (usually) no numbers involved.'

He finally shuts his computer down when it's almost five in the morning, and while he'll probably keep yawning through the day's lectures, he definitely won't regret this. He and Masaomi exchanged e-mail addresses earlier, and, more importantly, agreed they should meet up some time in the near future. He falls asleep with the biggest grin on his face.

Two weeks later, Mikado's phone is nearly bursting at the seams with messages from Masaomi, pictures of his shoes, pictures of his face, and pictures of the inevitable disasters he calls his dinner. In return, Mikado sends him pictures of the cat that isn't really his cat, his homework, the book he's currently reading, and, occasionally, some of his own face.

The first time he did, he received a '!' as response. 'You look just as I remember! Well, maybe a little older.'

'So do you,' Mikado had replied, 'except a little blonder.'

Even his classmates notice how much he's glued to his phone – more so than usual, anyway. It's a shame Masaomi and him are not going to the same university, but at least they're in the same city. That makes it a lot easier to meet up.

His heart beats a little faster just when he thinks about it, even he's not entirely sure yet why. It's been years since he last saw Masaomi, when they were still kids in their small middle-of-nowhere town. Mikado had been awkward, uncertain, and perhaps the slightest bit unsociable, while Masaomi had been everything he hadn't been. Outgoing, never alone, friendly with everyone, always convincing Mikado to go out and dragging him onto adventures in the forest just out of town. Considering that Mikado was usually the kid that stayed home from school trips, Masaomi did his fair share in pulling him out of his shell.

And then he'd left. Not entirely unexpectedly, but it had made Mikado realise how large the gap between him and the rest of the world would be once he left. They'd promised each other to keep in touch, and they had. For the first few months, anyhow. He supposes now that neither of them were to blame; Masaomi was swept up in Tokyo life, while Mikado dug himself even further into his house.

Eventually, he'd grown into a lanky (albeit still awkward) teenager, went to middle school, went to high school, and then applied to university. It would be the first time he'd live on his own, and the thought of being all alone in a big city like Tokyo had scared him at first, but… He'd grown used to it. He had a nice enough place to live, enough money for groceries, friendly neighbours. He could've ended up in a worse place.

(Had he come to stay in Tokyo just a few years earlier, he might have witnessed the Dollars blossoming, growing, until eventually the site would be taken down. The only thing still available is the log-in, through the Wayback Machine.)

He and Masaomi agree on a date – Sunday – and a time – two in the afternoon. It's weird, but he can barely wait. His life has mostly revolved around going to school these last few years, and the few friends he's managed to make there. He can't quite explain it, but his life still feels like it's missing something, occasionally. When he rubs his thumb along the edge of his phone, sitting in his pocket, he thinks this might be it. This might be what he's been waiting for.

He can't help but feel nervous though, by the time he arrives at their meeting place – way too early, because he didn't want to sit around the house and do nothing. And he knew he's be too nervous to do a thing, anyway. He orders a coffee, and then another when he's finished the first, listlessly stirring in too much sugar; one of his legs is doing jittery jumps underneath the table, but it keeps moving even after he puts his hand on his knee to steady it.

"Yo, Mikado," a familiar voice says close to his ear, and he jumps almost fully this time, legs bumping against the table, his coffee falling over. Luckily his cup was only half full, but it's still spilling over the edge of the table by the time Masaomi comes rushing back with hands full of napkins. "Shouldn't have scared you like that, huh?" he easily says, throwing the damp tissues in the bin when he's done and wiping his hands on his jeans. "Let me make it up to you. I'll get you another!" He dashes off once more before Mikado can even tell him that he's already had one, that it's really not necessary.

It takes a few more minutes for the order to go through, but Masaomi is sitting across from him now, pushing another cup of coffee in his direction, along with some sugar packs. "Thank you," Mikado mumbles.

"No prob," Masaomi says. "It's been at least ten years since we last saw each other, but I still recognised the back of your head. It's definitely Mikado-shaped."

"Mikado-shaped?" he blurts, because what on Earth does that even mean. Masaomi laughs in return, and he still doesn't hold back. His joy is infectious.

"Yeah, well," he starts, stops, and laughs again. "I don't know. I just knew it was you right away."

Mikado quickly takes a sip from his coffee to hide his blush, and then coughs and grimaces because he forgot to put in any sugar. Of course Masaomi starts to laugh again, sliding more sugar across the table. "I feel like I'm making a terrible impression," Mikado says when's finally over his coughing fit. First the coffee falling over, and now this.

"Worse than mine? I'm the guy that made you spill your coffee after all."

"Well, if you put it that way…"

"I am," Masaomi cheerfully says. "Knowing my luck, it could've ended up on you instead of the floor. Let's just thank the gods that it hasn't. But I really hope you weren't as nervous as I was about this whole thing, though. I think my roommate was willing to pay me to get out of the house."

"You have a roommate?" Mikado asks, if only to steer the conversation away from how nervous he had been in the first place. He totally hadn't dropped his toothpaste covered toothbrush on the floor three times this morning.

"Yep. Nice guy, though a little closed-off. Studies marine biology, I think? But at least he doesn't complain about me singing in the shower or forgetting to do the dishes. Do you have any roommates?"

Mikado shakes his head. "I do have a weird neighbour, though."

"Oh, you mean the one with the cat?"

He nods. "Yeah. I think there's two of them. Neighbours, I mean, not cats. But one of them wears a helmet and she… never takes it off?"

"That is weird," Masaomi says after a pause.

Talking to Masaomi is as easy as it used to be, Mikado thinks, somewhat relieved. He'd definitely hoped that would be the case after the multitude of messages they'd sent each other the last few weeks, but he couldn't know how much Masaomi – how much he himself – had changed. It seems their friendship has survived the test of time, and he's glad about it.

They take to the outdoors after finishing their coffee, occasionally bumping their shoulders into each other as they weave through the crowd. Mikado is suddenly glad he's no longer a teenager. Maybe he'll always be a bit shy around people, but he's a lot more certain about himself now than he used to be in high school.

This city might have swallowed him whole if he'd lived here back then.

"And, you know how I said my roommate doesn't complain about my dirty dishes? That's mostly because we seem to have this unspoken agreement that if he doesn't mention those, I won't tell his mother he pays someone else to do his laundry. Not that she comes over often," he says after a pause. "Though, when she does, the house is always spotless after she leaves."

"I don't see my parents very often," Mikado chimes in, "they think it's too much of a hassle, and the city is too busy, things like that. Not that they've actually told me that."

Masaomi hums in agreement, and then says, "I haven't seen my parents in almost six years."

"Six—six years?" For a moment he thinks he's heard him wrong, but Masaomi looks solemn, and at least a little withdrawn.

He shrugs in return. "Their life, their choice. I hope they're not expecting to get an invitation if I ever get married, though, because they're definitely not invited."

"I'm sorry," Mikado says, not knowing what else to say.

"Don't be. It's not your fault. You know, when that happened, I actually though about moving back to Saitama for a while. I'm a little disappointed in myself that I didn't."

"Well, you didn't miss all that much," Mikado admits. "Literally nothing happened. Well, except that one time when some kids accidentally burned down someone's tool-shed, but that's about it."

"I kind of missed that whole 'this town is so boring nothing ever happens' thing we had going on, though. This place moves quickly, far too quickly to really keep up. Being able to slow down a little would've been nice."

"We should've swapped places sometime," Mikado suggests, and they finally find an empty bench to sit down on, scaring away the few birds that had been picking away at crumbs underneath it.

"Ha, maybe we should've, if it had been possible. You missed out on most of the excitement, being holed up in Saitama, in that… did you live in that same house the whole time?" Mikado nods. "Well, being cooped in your house, probably in your room."

"You saying it like that makes it sound like I'm a hermit."

"Maybe you are, when you only come out of your cave once every ten years to catch-up with your best friend," Masaomi jokes. "Seriously, though, you moved here to start university, right?" He continues when Mikado nods, again. "In other words, no urban legends for you, young man."

"I don't—Kida-kun, what are you talking about?"

Masaomi tsk's at him. "It's Masaomi, not 'Kida-kun'." He pulls out his phone, and then quickly finds a video, tilting it towards Mikado so he can see. "Back when I moved here for the first time, people talked about this a lot." It's a short video, maybe twenty seconds long, of what seems to be a woman on a motorcycle without any lights on it. She's also wearing a weirdly shaped helmet. "They call her the black rider, because of the whole riding around in the darkness thing."

"Masaomi," Mikado says (and he sees his friend beam at the use of his first name), "I think that's my neighbour."

"That's your—of course it is. I should've known the moment you said she never took off her helmet. Who does that indoors?"

"But you said she's an urban legend?" Mikado asks. Masaomi looks a little put out that he can't even introduce Mikado to this facet of living in this particular area of Tokyo, but in all honesty he's missed out on a lot. Masaomi probably knows a lot more about living in Tokyo than he does, even after having lived here for several years himself.

"Well, she doesn't appear as often these days," Masaomi muses out loud. "But she was definitely Ikebukuro's number one urban legend for a while. People were making videos, writing blog posts, or just gossiping on the internet about her identity. No one knows, by the way. There was a popular theory about her being headless, but, come on. How realistic is that?"

"Not very," Mikado says with a laugh. Helmet or not, he really can't imagine his neighbour having no head.

"Oh, and then there's this other guy, Heiwajima Shizuo."

"I've heard of him," Mikado says, peering over Masaomi's shoulder as he finds another video. They both watch in awe as a blond man lifts a large trash can above his head effortlessly, throwing it in a direction the filmmaker doesn't follow. He probably doesn't want to be noticed, Mikado notes, as the camera is shaking the whole time, and at one point they start filming in portrait mode. Like the video with the headless rider, it's over before it can even start, and Masaomi puts his phone back into his pocket. "He doesn't live in this area anymore, right?"

"I honestly have no idea," Masaomi admits. "I haven't seen him in a while now, so, probably?"

It's amazing how long they can talk about the weirdest subjects; they share stories from their childhood, catch each other up on their lives, and Masaomi tells Mikado (in the deepest of confidences, he assures him) that he used to be a gang leader, back in junior high.

"Really?" Mikado asks, a little surprised.

"Yep, really," Masaomi says. "But it's been years, and I no longer really see anyone from that crowd anymore. It feels like that was another life, to be honest."

"Maybe it was," Mikado pragmatically says, and Masaomi smiles brightly at him.

"Gangs were kind of a big deal back then," he admits. "There was us, and another few basing their names off of colours. Although, admittedly, at the time I was just way into Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Don't tell anyone I said that, though. And then," he continues when Mikado nods, "there were the Dollars. But I don't think anyone really understood what they wanted, or even who they were, and they just disappeared overnight one day, so…" He shrugs, and then gives Mikado a weird look when he starts to laugh. "What?"

"Maybe our lives were more intertwined than we realised," Mikado says, still far more amused by this situation than he maybe has right to. "You weren't the only one who created a gang, Masaomi. I created the Dollars years ago."

Masaomi's eyes are wide. "All this time, and that was you? What happened? Why'd you stop?"

Mikado shrugs. "I got bored."

"You got bored. Right. Of course you did. I guess it saved us a lot of trouble in the long run." Mikado hums in agreement, thinks of all the ways his life could have gone. He likes it the way it is now, though, with both his and Masaomi's hands so close to each other their pinkies nearly touch.

Masaomi takes him out for dinner later, and his friend keeps stealing his sushi off his plate – Mikado catches him once, just after he's looked out the window to see what Masaomi is pointing at excitedly, and realises it was just a ruse to steal his food.

Feeling bold, he does the exact same thing, right under Masaomi's nose, who squawks indignantly. Mikado has to keep himself from laughing out loud, because if he does all the rice might come spilling out of his mouth.

"I haven't had fun like this in a long time," he admits later, when Masaomi is walking him home (he insisted, and Mikado is really bad at saying no).

"Same here. We should do it again sometime!"

They walk in amiable silence, until Mikado says, "This is my building. Thank you for walking me, Masaomi."

"No problem," he says. "Hey, promise you'll let me know if you ever find out whether your neighbour has a head or not?"

Mikado smiles. "Yeah, I promi-"

He's cut off by Masaomi, who leaned forward while he was talking, his hands in his pockets, and gives Mikado a short but soft kiss.

"I've been wanting to do that the whole day," he admits when he steps back, and he's blushing a little, Mikado thinks, feather-light pink on his cheeks. But then Mikado's probably blushing too, so it doesn't really matter.

He steps into Masaomi's personal space, their faces close together, and their noses brush against each other before their mouths meet again like old friends.

He really can't tell how long they stand there, but it feels far longer than only briefly, far longer than any other kiss he's had before this one.

It's still over too soon. They look at each other, and they're standing so close he can hear Masaomi breathe. "Let's do that again sometime," Mikado says, rather breathlessly, and then his brain catches up with his mouth and he almost hurries inside the door of his building, just catching Masaomi waving at him through the glass when he steps inside the elevator.

(Not two minutes later, he receives a picture of Masaomi's face, looking absolutely ecstatic. In return, he sends a picture of the cat lounging on his couch.)