If you must know, Raimon Natsumi is not fond of troublemakers.
fic masterlist <-
pairings: kidou yuuto/reader, raimon natsumi/reader, gouenji shuuya/reader, endou mamoru/reader
chapter warnings: unsurprising: mc is a theater kid, hopefully not an inaccurate depiction of therapy, a story-important oc debuts in this chapter and i hope she is well received :)
word count: 6.8k
a/n: when i wrote this i was still grasping natsumi's character from a writer's perspective here so i rlly hope it wasnt ooc oh dear
A NUMBER of things, Raimon Natsumi deems, are far too unworthy of her time.
A mere theater club’s practice session, for instance, is too much of a distance away from the principal’s office to bother with. Sixth floor of a different building, are you kidding?! She believes she is more suited to watching other stages— passion in other forms ––sure, it’s the performing arts. But even art, in all its glory, is quite useless to a girl backed by a wealth that will last more than a thousand lifespans. Therefore, Natsumi does not bat an eye. Her father might, but her time in particular, of every person on the earth’s? Even money has its limits! In what world can it buy that, anyway?
Every second will count towards the end, wherever that may be, however long it will take. Still, she refuses to waste a drop, can’t afford to see a single moment wither with regret. And still her father asks nicely, and she doesn’t have the heart to tell him no. Pity. There are trivial tasks, tiny matters not meant for her busy mind. He knows this, obviously. He must consider it a rite of passage for a girl like her: watching teenagers pronounce their zeal for the arts when they are most curious– in their colorful, roaring youths. She tells him he’s being sentimental. He tells her she’s never wrong.
So for the time being she does as she’s told, arriving at the sixth floor of a building she wishes the previous chairperson in her lineage didn’t bother to construct, and observes the troupe in a wide, often unoccupied room; a little strange to hear shouts across every corner, see boxes in one and tools scattered in another. Some give orders and some chant songs. In a month’s time it will be on stage. Still a far thing. Still a hassle.
But all is well. Difficulties, whatever they are, appear to be absent. A pen clicks, and here is another check on the list attached to her clipboard. All is well, indeed! When an unassuming actor trips on a stray scissor, all the members pause in their tracks with a fit of laughter and she can muster no more than a sigh. No matter. This is only one of those formalities. But by the mercy of all gods who are alive, this may as well be the worst.
They say they’re doing a production of Annie– whatever that is, she's surprised they can even afford to translate a Japanese rendition with what little time they have in their hands. Most of the people seem to be in high spirits, reading through their lines, occasionally dousing their throats with water in poor fashion. To each their own lifeline, she supposes. Doesn’t stop them from looking stupid.
If there is one thing she has learned today, it is that everyone thrives on hard work, doing what they can in threading themselves through their little worries, mending their dilemmas. Everybody is putting in the effort. Effort! Blanketing the atmosphere is a sheet of enthusiasm, and though it teems with commotion, it is a comfort nonetheless. The less to fix the better. The club is about to do one more practice run in ten minutes. By the middle of it she’ll have been let go in faith of the troupe’s tight-knit patchwork. Give it an hour, and she’d be on her merry way. No tasks. No troubles.
Except a member runs up to her, panicked, and he is breathless when he exclaims, “Our lead– our lead is missing!”
To her surprise, the first response her ears catch is, “Again?”
An older student had said it, projecting his dismay, stirring sighs to emerge loudly all throughout the venue. She notes their usage of their voices– how the room doesn’t do well in sending echoes, yet their words and feelings are able to travel between these walls. Five, six, seven, and eight. It must take some skill.
“I took my eyes off her for two minutes. Two minutes!” One grumbles, rubbing at his temples, eyebrows digging into his skin as though he were older than what he was. “Every practice session, I’m telling you. How does this keep happening?”
“It hasn’t been long since she joined, too. Just because she’s the lead… ugh. That second year thinks she can get away with anything,” another replies. So their Annie is recognized within the club’s circle, though it doesn’t look like she’s respected much. Known for the wrong reasons. For the troublesome things.
“She always does, though,” speaks a member clutching a box to her torso. “Your fault you don’t keep the kid on a leash.”
“Be quiet!” The student berates, gesturing at another side of the room where a circle of actors are standing with their scripts in their hands. “Go memorize your lines, Tachibana!”
“Salty seniors,” the same girl chimes, but she obeys nonetheless, scurrying off in a sprint to set the box aside to do precisely all that is asked of her. Like a good member would.
And what do you know? Everybody is putting in the effort, save for the very lead of the show.
Natsumi holds the thought, uncertain of what to pity first: the club or herself. When has she ever escaped the clutches of trouble? Lately it has been trailing after her shadow, consuming all the convenience in the world. In the arts. In sports. Taking what’s left of her treasured time.
“I’ll handle it,” Natsumi responds. She steps forward and the student gives her his relieved thanks. In her mind her father tells her that duty is duty. At the tenderness of his reminder she complies. It is easy to do even the most menial of things so long as it is out of love.
“Five minutes at most,” she declares. “I’ll find your Annie.”
And on she walks out of the theater club’s practice venue, searching without even asking for a name. She’ll know the slacker when she sees them.
The campus is as easy to navigate as the lines on her palms. Tracing the route within Raimon Academy’s halls comes to her like walking the corridors of her home, because it is. Her movements talk of her familiarity more than her words do. Natsumi grew up here, surrounded by all sorts of useless art and whatnot. In her years she has figured out which areas are best occupied by what cliques. The highest and lowest of them have a certain love of the rooftop, where the air of silence a hundred feet above ground is neither friend nor foe to the afterschool smoke and daydreams of suicide. So that’s where she heads to.
Not even a minute flies, and she’s already found traces of the lead littering the stairs. For every third step, there are remnants of an escapade scattered as the dirt shaken off someone’s shoes. Up Natsumi goes, in as much of a hurry as the runaway lead. The door swings open when it was supposed to be locked. At first she sees nothing special. Nobody is burning what remains of their lungs. Or worse, knocking on the net and pleading for their second life to treat them better. Good. Enough sentimentality for today. The theater club bears plenty of that in its palms.
There’s still someone here, though. Someone who ought to be elsewhere.
Before her, perhaps a few meters beyond, a student lies comfortably on the ground, head cushioned by her jacket as her arms are outstretched to hold a device to the sky. It casts a rectangular shadow to fall on her face. Four years ago her classmates would bring the same device to school, eager in their lunch break bragging and everything else children do to make themselves seem bigger, better. They were ten. Natsumi is fourteen now, dealing with a girl who might do the same. Or not. She reels the thought back in; doesn’t judge yet.
A green ribbon laces her uniform, and that is all she needs to know. Second year. There she is: the slacker.
“You,” she calls. Give them a chance, her father suggests, and she listens like she always does. “You’re going to be late.”
“Look, Tachibana-senpai… I caught a shiny,” the student responds without so much as sparing Natsumi a glance, her focus intent on admiring the glowing screen of her held device. The ground has tousled her hair in all the wrong ways, her body sprawled on concrete, eyes nearly dozing under the setting sun. “Three thousand three hundred and thirty-three resets,” she adds. To Natsumi it only sounds like a lot of wasted time.
Then she looks away from her game, turns to look at whoever has come to intrude. But Natsumi isn’t a friend, and the girl’s surprise is evident in how her body jolts awake before her mind can comprehend the sight.
“Oh. That’s not right. You’re not Tachibana-senpai at all.” She looks more aware of her surroundings now. Sitting upright, she then points at her, more recognition than malice. “You’re— you’re the lady.”
“The what?”
“The lady,” she repeats. Frantic in scrambling her thoughts together. “The girl. The—“
Somehow, she knows what she means, correcting her sternly, “Raimon Natsumi, president of the student council.” If she didn’t know yet. Though there’s no reason for a student of this academy to not know that, of everything. Strange.
“Oh, the president.” She returns to being eerily calm, back to regarding her with half her attention. “No wonder you found me so fast. You’re the stalker lady.”
She places her hands on her hips, peering at her incredulously because she’s uncertain if the slacker means any offense. “Excuse me?”
“That building—” She points somewhere beyond what she can even see, aimlessly. “Fifth floor. Fancy binoculars.” Somehow the tip of her finger faces the general area of where the principal’s office ought to be. The girl makes a gesture with her two hands, akin to a pair of glasses in front of her drowsy, blinking eyes. “I want to see what you see.”
Natsumi glares at the student lying below. “For the record, I am no ‘stalker lady.’ It is my duty,” she begins in a tone as authoritative as her voice can act, “to watch over this academy’s students—“
“I think that’s what the errand dogs say,” the girl comments with a hand to cover her yawn.
“—especially those who are up to no good.”
Again, is what they said. Is this the second? The third? Perhaps the fifth, or worse. She hopes not, but with the air of ease she seems to exude, it is hard to give her the benefit of the doubt.
“I’m catching shinies. That’s a good thing, I think.” The click and clack of the buttons she’s pressing is starting to take a chip at Natsumi’s tolerance. It’s nearly audible, how they steadily fall– the pieces of her patience. Five minutes is what she had promised to the club. Double that now. Five minutes is never enough for nuisances like this one. “You don’t like Rayquaza?”
Her eyes flicker about. No clique is there to accompany the student. She doesn’t try to question the key on the floor, what a Rayquaza or a shiny is, only what responsibility she assumes this girl must bear. “You’re the lead, aren’t you?”
If she weren’t, she wouldn’t have the need to hide herself in here. Or have the key at all, for that matter. Another thing she’ll investigate later. For now, though?
“Oh, fame! Want my autograph? I have a pen right here,” she says excitedly, scrambling beneath the jacket she had been using as a cushion prior. But she pauses, looks at Natsumi with weak suspicion. “Wait. You’re not supposed to know that yet. Who told you?”
“Your president did,” she answered. “What will the student body think of your club when they hear their lead actress is skipping practice?”
“Hear this.” With speed, the girl stood, assuming an abrupt stance that meant business. If not for her schemes she would have looked rather polite. It is a shame she asks, “How about a soda, Raimon? For your silence?”
Natsumi disregards her in an instant. “Do not waste my time. The theater club is wasting theirs waiting for you. Now go.”
Then, Natsumi makes a gesture for the girl to follow her. And what do you know? She complies. The two return to the club venue without exchanging a single glance with the other, and practice resumes once the director is done thanking Natsumi. The slacker, once on stage, is as tame as she can be, eerily placated in the presence of so many eyes. Smiling when she moves as someone else. Actors are so unsettling.
A three minute break is announced. At last, Natsumi is given her cue to leave. Five o’ clock chimes freedom. But before she can turn her heel and call for her butler, their Annie skips towards her, then hands something to her. The key.
Natsumi accepts it with grace, and finally sighs. “...I won’t even ask. You don’t seem to be afraid of receiving a warning.”
She avoids the authority, if she hears it. Most likely not. She starts, “I think you should come by on the real performance.” For a moment she does not look like she has any more to say. A thought then seems to spring up in her head, stemming out in a few rambling words. “Apparently the treasurer pocketed half the club’s funds last year.”
Menial things. Trivialities she already knows. That same student was expelled not too long ago, caught by her own two eyes, no longer treasurer as soon as the year began. Her father regularly laughs at the memory to date, never fails to bring it up on some dinners. She hates to hear of these faults. “Why are you telling me this?”
“So my talents can be funded!” The second-year clasps her hands together, lowering her head; a lethargic plea that could convince almost no one. “Buy a ticket. Or three, please?”
“Hmph.” Natsumi crosses her arms. But she does consider coming. “Work hard and I will.”
Raimon Natsumi does not indulge— barely, if this will count. She tells herself it doesn’t. It will not, because it will only happen once. Just this once. As demeaning as it sounds, perhaps it is time for her to take up a needle, sew in that girl’s thread; to write this cloth reborn, tighten the loop and rid it of all flaws. Flaws, yes. All flawed ends must be tied.
Natsumi observes her leave. A star clumsily hangs onto the slacker’s hair. Golden clip for a grim-looking girl. She walks without a care in the world, the joy in her steps echoing in ones and twos. Trouble, she remembers, comes in threes.
-
Ms. Tsuki. Family friend, a doctor of the mind. Been in the business long before you were even born; long enough to know what she’s doing. Reliable enough, they said. Someone like Ms. Tsuki won’t mind you. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.
“Why are you here?”
Many times you have faced this phrase, and you think by now you’d have a set of answers to give: From a lack of choice, To leave at last, Not for you. Instead, you settle with, “Because I don’t remember.”
“And I take it that your parents didn’t agree with hypnosis?”
Outside the sky will dim soon. The analog clock hung on the wall will sing for your freedom in one hour. You don’t forget to count your days. “My father did, but my mother hates the thought. Wanna try, though?”
“No, thank you— not without their permission. I value consent greatly.” So she’d like to, if she had the means? You wonder. “But we can try something else,” she adds. “Let’s see… are you well, right now? How do you like Inazuma Town so far?”
You ponder on it, as per her command. There is nothing else to do, no other way to bide your time. Let it be, someone told you. The world will spin.
So you cast your mind on Inazuma Town– it is calm compared to the bustle of where you used to reside. The most silent portions of the cities are never really open to anybody living a normal life. Inazuma Town sings, just does it in a way you aren’t used to yet. But it is nice. The clouds form cats, and none of the birds are dying in their midst. You are nowhere near a body of water, and outside your new house the sun actually exists. Calm enough to keep its citizens sane, you’d say.
“Nobody is mean to me, if that’s what you mean.” Save for a few seniors in the theater club, who chirp their praises and overdone acclaims. Their barely concealed jealousy caresses your ego in all the good spots, so it’s a nice thing, too. For now you thank your juniors and wonder which of them you don’t want to see dead.
The woman hums, in thought or to fill the space knit by your lack of response; typical of any teenager, probably. Here come the formalities. Your favorite things. “Was anyone mean to you in a previous setting?”
“Why would they be?” You raise an eyebrow and say it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world: “They loved me.”
Almost immediately, she asks, “Who did?”
When you couldn’t, there were people counting in your stead, hoping for things in your name. Out of care or another thing, it’s all the same to you. Your tone is steady, and you tilt your head as you look at her. “Everybody.”
She nods. It’s likely she’s noticed. In the face of a doctor, your movements will talk in your mouth’s stead. Left hand with a mind of its own, fingers tapping on the wood in stiff beats. Tap once, always skip the second, press your thumb down the desk for the third. Outside the sky will dim soon, in thirty, you presume. Tick and tock. Does she know it yet, your desire to be elsewhere?
“Asuka,” she sews away at the lulling air; with your name, at that. “Breathe.”
“Don’t say that.” Look sullen, don’t smile. A mellow voice won’t make you dislike this any less. “You sound like my old coach.”
“A coach,” she repeats, her tone seamed with contemplation. Intrigue. “For volleyball? Swimming, kendo?”
“Soccer,” you correct. “They said I was good.”
Ms. Tsuki asks, “Who did?”
And you say it again, because all of them ask you for no less than the truth. “Everybody.”
“I see,” she replies, following up with another question. “Did you like playing soccer?”
How do you gauge your love for something only your muscles know? What will be the judge of it now? The heart, the mind, the self you‘re told you cannot rely on, the reason you are here? What miniscule fragments there are of you that belong in the hands of other people?
Did you like playing soccer? Different voices, different names, different people, and each and every one of them still end up asking the same thing. Interviewers, classmates, parents, other players. You wonder how you’d answer had the circumstances been any different. You would love it, you’re sure. But sentimentality brings us nothing but shame, Asuka. So the only thing you come up with is, “I don’t care for it much.”
“Even though you were good at it.” The fountain pen between her fingers does not accuse anything yet. In her notebook, she hasn’t written a single sentence on what to blame. “Why is that?”
You wonder why, but all you are is empty. Nothing but sand in your blood, love for soccer absent from where it should be settled. It’s a simple matter, more menial than what she might imagine. Again you tell her, “Because I don’t remember.” And then you tap to a rhythm you can’t quite name.
Circles. They spot the walls in an interesting choice of minimalistic furnishing you find immensely ugly. Now you’re back to square one. What about two, or three? When will you get there? Months, maybe. A lot of time. That’s alright. You can wait like you always have. See it to the end, and see if you’re worth any less than all the money they’re willing to spend to fix you, however broken you are in their heads.
“Here. Try to write what you remember.” She slides her notebook across the table, less of a nicety, like an offering. “It can be anything. Think of the moments. The little things.”
Anything is too broad a theme. You think of the little things. You try, but he always told you to go farther, be better. There are as many ways to dream as there are to die. The little things are troublesome. If you want to dream, then be sure you will wake up as the winner. Think of the big picture. Discard the details. You honor one name instead of eleven.
Remember, remember. You do, but they’re all wrong, aren’t the little things she asks of you. He said to think of it as this: if not for the victory you bring, you are no one.
For a while you are able to muster nothing, doodling fictional faces rather than jotting the details. In the lines live no words, only careless hatches and rough strokes born of dark lead. You sketch bleeding penguins and lightning bolts and a graphite storm that devours everything on the page, and the woman before you keenly watches, with nothing to add and nothing to tell you. Observing, probably thinking of what to report to your mother and father. Eraser shavings begin to litter the desk, her eyes trailing after your hand when you pat them off the paper.
That aspect of her sticks out— that doctorly patience, honed to fetch no complaints. You try to measure how well she’s able to feign interest in your troubles— if in a week or two she’ll dial your parents and tell them she’s done — a fine layer of it atop what pity she may hold beneath her sharp black gaze, but nevertheless, you look up only to see nothing on her face and declare it doesn’t exist when Ms. Tsuki simply lets you be. She’ll tell them something, and you think they’ll do it in their emails rather than in your face. It almost rips a sigh out of you to know what you might miss out on. Adults are so dull these days.
“What are the little things, Ms. Tsuki?” You ask. You sift through your memories. There should be many, but none come to mind. For now you have your own answer, though it is mindless this time. Not quite yours yet, but you hold on anyway. Trophies and interviews and sand and water and– you stop. You stop there. Breathe in, breathe out. “We had no time for anything small.”
It isn’t right, but it is the only thing you remember.
-
[Name]. Who you are is easy to find.
One folder, one file, the light of a computer and the click of a mouse. In a flash she learns you are Asuka [Name], turning fourteen in a few moons, born under the watchful gaze of the most somber of suns. You are insignificant to the average eye, but Raimon Natsumi sees everything.
Your name opens a gateway where questions come flooding in. Something, something, anything. With each sentence her intrigue hungers. It eats at her efforts to know more, but a few scrolls down and three keywords farther are all she needs to find something. She clicks on reports. The briefest answer what happened, while the longest answer who you are. None of them answer why; the worst of them speak of you as if you died. Search, click, scroll. More victories and unsettling things.
But with them, your history.
Asuka [Name]. Teikoku. Soccer. Accident. It seems you are not known to many people outside of the sports scene; you only ever appear as a player. Light background in the performing arts, quit after three years. Equipped with some degree of talent, enough to land a leading role the moment you got here. The rest are sports and statistics and victories. Nowadays all you are is Teikoku’s. No more, no less— still, she treads what articles and interviews float out there. Usually you are depicted as three things: golden, star, too young.
The mouth of the media really does make it sound like you’re dead, and the only things they mention about your absence are your injuries. When she saw you last, you had none. But you must be hurting somewhere.
The day after, she comes to school, sits in the classroom next to yours, and suddenly she knows more now than she did a week ago. There are only a few more days, a month slowly turning into mere moments left to dwell on. Natsumi is overseeing the theater club’s activities again. Since the show nears, they’ve been granted the auditorium for this portion of the afternoon.
Asuka [Name]. Not too long ago she saw you as nothing but a slacker. But she knows something now, the many things you may be hiding. You might have some use, after all.
Act one of the rehearsal begins, with a few members dressed as children entering the view.
You weave yourself into the story with a care she can recognize. Yet as steady as you are under the spotlight, you are not meant for this. On a different stage, she is sure you will shine. On it you will not play Annie; you will not dance wearing the face of another girl.
You will play, still. Another costume. Another game. She draws a vision in her head as vivid as it can be, painting strokes of your figure on the grass. You run far into the distance where she imagines there are great things. You are blue when you run and light when you jump and red when you kick and— and there, you are no one bound. You will play as nobody but yourself: better, brighter. Death to all who peer into her mind when it says, What a beautiful thought.
In the end the arts may not be useless, after all. The needle in her mind pulses, her fingers dying to set this stubborn thread. She imagines the ink of your name, the pen a witness to how your loyalty is signed by her hands, striking you with the grace of thunder and as easy as that, you are claimed. They crackle at her sides; for some reason, they yearn to see you alive.
An itch appears. Her mind scratches the thought. Clarity comes, and soon she is baffled at how easily the image comes to be, as though it were something that would soon become a memory. Maybe you are more than a trivial thing. Just this once.
You would look good, perhaps, wearing yellow and blue.
-
Shame cradles Gouenji Shuuya, whose life now is birthed by tragedy upon tragedy. They can make light of it, turn him into a joke. But his sister sleeps, and all he can say is sorry. For this, for that, for everything he did and could have done. Children are meant to attend school on Mondays, but he finds himself in the hospital, watching over his sister who can’t. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays and on all the school days there will ever come to be, Gouenji Yuuka will be sleeping instead of studying. Only her breathing tells anyone who watches her that she’s alive– because she isn’t awake. Nobody knows when she will ever be, and in the midst of every thought he allows himself, a spear seizes him, stabs him, tells him it’s his fault as he bleeds.
Behind him the door shuts. He is aimless as he walks the corridors, praying for better things. He thinks of Endou Mamoru and the joy when he talks about his club. Dead, the lot of them, but against all odds they carry on with a blind faith in anyone who believes in them, be it themselves when no one else believes. Raimon is full of courage. How will Gouenji run with a team if he cannot even trust himself to let one person live? All he has ever done is let others down.
Out of nowhere, a girl runs past him. Two bottles of grape soda cling onto her hands for their lives. She stops when she notices there’s another person in the hall. Turns back, stares at him creepily. Sizing him up without saying anything.
She recognizes him.
“Do we go to school together?”
He knows her face. Saw it on the field a long, long time ago. Players often remember eachother for two reasons: if they’ve got grudges, or if they’re strong.
“We’re classmates,” he responds plainly, wondering if he ought to be offended, but he keeps the conversation curt. “I just transferred.”
“Oh,” she replies. “So did I. A little before you, though. Just a bit.”
He doesn’t notice the way his curiosity is evident on his face, and he says nothing about how there’s two bottles instead of one. But the girl speaks anyway, aware of his concerns. Already used to being questioned.
“The vending machine in the lobby. I pressed it twice,” she explains. “Accidents happen, and I lost some yen. But that’s okay. Grape’s pretty light,” spoken with the wisdom of an alcoholic. She looks no older than fourteen.
He doesn’t expect her to, but she still raises the one in her left hand towards him, asking him in a tender volume, “Want one…?”
Gouenji falters quietly, at a loss for words. He’d planned on walking away without replying, then. But it would be good, he thinks, if he was not angry for once. So he doesn’t know what comes over him, just lets it happen.
“...yes,” he speaks, head hung in what may be shame. Or gratitude, whatever she might see it as, it’s too late to change her mind. “I’d like that.”
Then in seconds, he twists the cap, raises the bottle to his lips, and sips. He tastes regret in his mouth with every word. Soda burns his tongue, and it doesn’t get any better. When he returns here tomorrow Yuuka will remain barely alive and he will barely be free from the guilt.
But Asuka is right. Grape is a light flavor, more or less.
-
She warned them.
It happens today. They are loud when they come, blatant with their needs. Teikoku storms Raimon Acedemy’s grounds at last. But after this, a face tugs at her memories, nudging her in the brain: there is still a show. The slacker asked her to come, done in a manner as mild as a stray can be. And still Natsumi could not bring herself to say no.
The match begins. Endou Mamoru, ever the optimist, makes a grand show of his struggles. And– and to her awe, her binoculars don’t capture much, but somewhere in the audience, Asuka [Name] stands. You are there, posture upright, the golden clip in your hair sticking out, conversing with another student. Natsumi finds it troublesome to believe in what she sees. In the fascinated crowd your expression remains empty. And yet you’re still watching. And nevertheless she believes. You, the new transferee. The theater club’s current lead. The face of Teikoku. Their star.
You are gone the second Gouenji Shuuya scores. The match ends in nobody’s victory. To Raimon it may as well be, though. When Kidou Yuuto and those who trail after him leave, she hurries to Endou Mamoru and his excuse of a club with a glint in her eyes, promises him a good thing at last, saying, “For your efforts, I will send someone your way. I believe she will be of use to you.”
“Wait, for real? That’s…” He pauses, out of breath. It does not show how much he’d suffered. “That’s incredible!” He briefly turns to his teammates, excitedly gesturing at Natsumi. “Guys, do you hear this? On top of her, we’re getting another manager?!”
“No, Endou.” She smiles slyly, ready to correct him. “I’m giving you a player.”
In curt fashion she leaves him astounded after, because she has a musical to attend to. Thoughts stream in her mind throughout the trip. What are you doing on the wrong side? What are you looking for, Asuka? You are more than what you seem to be. The best will be unasked, because for now it is not the time. Yet how will you answer when she eventually asks you, what are you afraid of?
And now, you are Annie. Natsumi sits at the front of the auditorium’s rows, watching you sing for your beloved tomorrow. The two seats adjacent to hers are empty, and everyone is aware it’s on purpose. Three tickets, you asked. Now you are more than a trivial thing.
On this earth with all its meager things, just this once she won’t deny her intrigue. She ought to give the theater club some credit for the show it’s giving for a measly five hundred yen ticket. Loud does not begin to describe it. Does she mean alive?
Then, at the very least, the people of the theater club are alive. More than it. They burst like hazards, their joy infectious, even to Natsumi who is rarely touched by these displays. A stark contrast to how a particular club fares. A sports club, she reminds herself. You’d think them to be the glory of any school. Dashing, throwing, kicking, flying. Nothing brings more prestige than a trophy brought by a team. Of course there are shelves lined with the pictures of winners around these parts. It is the evidence that love for the game is love for the school. But there is one that has not brought home victory, an vacant spot dirtied by dust, the mark of a love wasted by time. Because in Raimon there is a sports club that has long been dead. But starting today, though? Who knows if it will continue to be.
The first hour passes, then the intermission comes. The second hour is over as soon as it begins. She knows when the play nears its last frame. Not long after the cast comes forward and you take your bows. The lights dim, the story dying with them. Red wraps the stage in a final embrace. There it is. A series of claps erupt as cheers roar wildly throughout the auditorium. Well-deserved, she thinks. The end.
You come up to her in a joyful haste, every aspect of Annie leaving your body. You are Asuka [Name] again. You are completely different from who you are on stage.
“See?” You’re panting, having run from behind the curtains as soon as the show came to a close. Still you look smug. “Even slackers can do something right.”
“Yes,” she finds herself agreeing, partly in disbelief. “Well done.”
“Oh.” You blink. Your grin might be lying, but you genuinely do sound confused. “You actually congratulated me.” It dissolves in the pride emerging in your demeanor, with you eyeing the seats that were sold to her alone. “And you actually bought three. So honored.”
“I will be blunt, now. You have piqued my interest.”
You gasp. “Oh, my. I’m wanted by a pretty lady?”
“No, you are not.“ She resists the urge to look at you in disgust. Giving the benefit of the doubt is part of this duty of hers; truly, it is a hard thing to do. She starts, “I simply want to know the business of a Teikoku player– what are you doing in Raimon Academy, of all places to go?”
“Huh.” You blink, back to your state of stupor. “Other than Pokemon, I don’t play anything.”
“You’re denying it. Can I take it as true, then? Especially one of your status as well. Don’t they pride themselves on their aces?”
“How would I know?”
“Because you’re one of them,” she tries. “It’s honestly impressive. You’re a lot more than you let on.”
“But I’m Annie.” You suddenly frown, pointing at yourself, then at the curtained stage. “You even watched.”
“The show is over. Only until two minutes ago were you Annie. Now don’t avoid the question, Asuka [Name].” Natsumi wields your name as a weapon. “Not so long ago, you were a midfielder for Teikoku Academy’s soccer team.”
Now you are in her hands. But you smile, and she realizes this is where you begin slipping away, slowly. “And now I am not.”
“But you still watched the match,” she counters. You were there. When you watched you seemed to not care for anything else in your midst.
“So? Can’t a girl think her school’s goalkeeper looks cute?”
“Soccer, specifically? You don’t show the same care for the other sports teams in our school, even when they practice and hold matches all the time.” And… setting your standards aside, it wasn’t a trick of the mind. You stood amongst that crowd, another witness to what Kidou Yuuto was capable of. “You saw their struggle. You saw them fight against Teikoku with everything they had.”
“Struggle makes us strong,” you say with a shrug. Your desire to leave is tangible in your tone. Not yet. Not now. “Try and they’ll triumph, surely. Why’re you even telling me this, anyway?”
Questions, questions, questions. Too many of them and you are a girl too quick in how you swerve. You fly far, and you fly fast. To you it is possible the questions she presents are all trivialities, little things you already know, irrelevant to your eyes and no better than noise to your ears. Who are you, and what is it that you know that allows you to never listen?
“Why the theater club?” She asks. The count remains, but in a set of four different words she means, “Are you truly satisfied?”
She knows she strikes a hard bargain. It’ll be better for you to keep your ears up, else you’ll end up under her palms. Star hung in a glass. Firefly confined in a jar. That’s how you’ll be. Caught.
First you click your tongue. “I hate impromptu interviews. You could have asked in my emails, like, two days ago. I thought you’d have known something as easy as that, Raimon?”
“My bad, then.” Indeed, it was easy. She remembers it in one of the papers. The name of your email was... She shakes the thought off, repulsed out of respect. Safer for her to forget, lest her sanity be tested. “Well?”
You hum but answer shortly. “Theater is nice. It’s like… you switch to something else, then suddenly, everything you do is no longer everyone’s business.” Is it fame, framing you as a victim? Or is it your ego threading the words that roll away from your tongue? “I don’t like stalkers very much,” you mention. For a moment you pause to shift your gaze to her face. Now you are eye to eye. Equals. If it’s scrutiny, she cannot tell with how sad you seem. All false, of course. It’s easy to forget she’s looking at the face of an actress. “Feels worse when they’re pretty.”
“I don’t stalk,” Natsumi states, feeling the odd need to defend herself. Attempting to be ignorant to how you called her pretty. “I told you. Duty.”
“And I never accused you of anything.” The joy in your eyes screams of danger. Your smile widens and widens, and your lips curl in a way she’d think you were preparing to laugh. You don’t. She wishes you did, spare her of the shame. “See? When you deny it, it must be true. Right?”
“…ugh. Nevermind. It’s for science.” In front of you she will not show her shame. Death to all who dare to know. From your three encounters you have always been a nuisance. You will do with her flaring cheeks what you can: one wrong thought and your mouth will spread the rest. Anything but that. Anything but a death by you. “I think you know what I’m talking about.”
“For science,” you repeat, and the only thing she hears is the voice of the victorious. If anything you are proud. She stays silent, resigns, and you take it as permission to continue. “Sorry. We transfer students don’t know anything about that. I’m still new to Raimon Academy, remember?” You pout as though it is a formality, taking a pen from your pocket and stealing a sticky note off the wall. “I think all my seniors hate me. So, won’t you make me feel welcome?”
Three seconds pass. Then, in the blink of an eye you are nowhere to be seen, and you leave nothing but a piece of paper in her palm.
I care not if you already know:
Three seconds pass. She nearly groans. Mere persistence is not enough for you, it seems. Maybe she should have brought a blunter blade. Trouble has wasted her time. And what do you know? Now she has your number.
You cut the paper, line the photos on your walls with string. Snip, snip. With glue and scissors, you’ll build your life anew. One shot at a time; one moment, one minute, one mile. Piece by broken piece.
Curtain. Scene: a peek into the life of Asuka [Name] restoring her lack thereof.
side story masterlist <- (please read the desc here if you want more context!)
chapter pairings: gouenji shuuya/reader, raimon natsumi/reader (slight. it's centric on gouenji)
chapter warnings: there's a lighthearted death threat from the reader's end. i'm not sure how a death threat could ever be lighthearted but that's just this fic's mc for you...
word count: 1k
a/n: this is chapter 1 of my side story collection. everything takes place in the universe of clear cache, the main fic. each chapter of snippets is a completed one shot so pairings are different per chapter. you dont need to read the main fic to enjoy this, but i hope you are interested to do so after reading ^^
You're late.
No, it's not a cause of concern. This is what always happens: there are meetings daily. Endou emphasizes this. Daily, he says, every weekday, every week, all year round, the whole school year. Raimon has long accepted your penchant for forgetting. Even better, Raimon has long accepted your ignorance.
You aren’t yourself without it. They would know.
They're against some team you likely never even learned the name of. Natsumi should kill you for that. The clipboard's some heavy load; it's not her job to carry it, that's why. Attendance. Endou, present. Kidou, present. Her eyes go lower, to where they've put the ones who always come late. Even they're here, Domon and the other two he's been influencing, somehow. She leaves the box next to your name blank. All your favorites are here. What a shame.
Gouenji, prese--
Wait.
She blinks. Pulls the tip of the pen away from paper and brings the list right in front of her gaze. Gouenji, present.
Except no, he's clearly not. The field is awfully empty today. Emptier than usual when you’re not there in the corner of everyone’s peripheral, slacking off on the side. You’re not here. They can live a day with that.
But so is someone else.
Natsumi looks up. Scans the room. You're absent. That’s not a cause for concern. However:
Gouenji, absent.
The usual is this: you are unseen but present, you are significantly late, or you are absent altogether. The third is not of anyone's concern anymore, not after all the times you've skipped entirely. Natsumi could care less if you don't help them manage the team right now, but today they've got a different problem to deal with.
“You can’t be serious,” she mumbles to herself. There’s only one plausible explanation, a singular reason as to why. Only you could pull this off.
There's a game coming, and Gouenji's gone. But you are, too.
She thinks you've taken him with you.
His hands jump away from the joystick, the buttons, the left and the right. He turns your way, unimpressed. "Do you want this plush or what?"
Is that even a question? You don't even have to look towards the glass horizon, into what swims inside the confines of the clear display. Yes. You want an enormous plush doll, larger than your ego, of that ugly, ugly taiyaki Tamagotchi so bad you would rip this arcade and yourself to shreds. You want it so bad the thought tightens your chest, sewing your heart and its valves shut with thread.
"Do you see its eyes, Gouenji? Do you see what hides beneath those beaded, dark depths?"
"No," he says. "I don’t see anything. Do you want--"
"Ignorance… it must be…" you interrupt. "I will make you see… Gouenji, you must understand the glory of this fish. It must be fate that it has come to allow us in its presence today, and I–"
"No," he starts again, louder now because the machine's music– that upbeat rhythm calling for your coins –is a relentless sound, overriding his volume. "I was asking if you wanted to--"
"WHAT I WANT IS TO..."
Genuinely, for the first time in years, a voice forces Gouenji's body to flinch– yours.
The grip of the claw loosens, releases, dies.
The fish graciously falls down, landing atop a pile of more fish, more of itself multiplied. Thud. The drop is unceremonious and awfully anticlimactic. It was on its way to you the moment before, back in the sea the next. The taiyaki Tamagotchi, you realize, is a truth not yours to hold.
Your eyes’ intent is to kill. "Do you want to die, Gouenji?"
Your vigor is, well, by your standards, wholly returned. Albeit rather stoic. He gestures at the claw machine again. You sense some finality in his words. He’s likely going to drag you out of here, dare you refuse now. "Do you want your plush, Asuka?"
"A proposal!” you exclaim, feigning delight. “First you bettay me by letting go of my fish, and now you ask for my hand? Are you serious? Just tell me you want me to kill you."
"I literally had it until you screamed into my ear."
"This is not good." Again, you ignore him in favor of yourself. You'd be stoked to know: not a living soul loves your audacity. "Not good at all. How am I supposed to not break up with you like this?"
“Okay, we’re not even–” but he cuts his reply clean. He hums in place of an answer. Instead, his hands dig in his pockets, and he allows you to watch, wordless.
A few coins surface from his pockets, coming up and out atop his palms.
One, three, five-- seven hundred yen, your eyes count. There's the sound of silver falling down a metal slot. Clink. He doesn't even ask.
You give up. From behind, you begin by resting your head atop his shoulder like the unwelcome weight you want him to know you as. From afar, you’re no better than a stain over his red jacket. He's silent as he plays, the rare hum here and there. There are staff staring at you. Eyes on the prize, you think.
“This is an attempt to curry my favor,” you question, “isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he hums, his focus unwavering, both the hands and the eyes. He doesn’t even look at you. “And?”
Huh. You pause the spontaneous patterns you’ve begun to trace upon the red cloth over his shoulder. Then you grin. You suppose that there is no place for shame when he willingly associates with you.
Blessed taiyaki-creature-plush-thing. The most niche of all niches! Taiyaki Tamagotchi whose name nobody knows! It will be yours…
Gouenji is going to win for you.
"Okay, then. Nevermind." For you, he will tell you later, even if those won’t be his exact words. The thought is what matters. His actions will say the rest. Thus: nevermind, then. You will be with him for longer. You are too happy to care. "We'll break up later."
Drowning does much to dull your senses, doesn't it? It's the first thing Kidou notices the day he finally sees you again.
fic masterlist <-
pairings: kidou yuuto/reader, raimon natsumi/reader, gouenji shuuya/reader, endou mamoru/reader
chapter warnings: implied loss of memory, mc is hospitalized (briefly. and by brief i mean the whole chapter), mentions of teikoku, hints of past friendships, chapter was lowkey supposed to be a study of kidou but it spiraled so ummm oops, mc is a little strange and it gets worse in the future
word count: 3.2k
a/n: hello all. i've had this uploaded on ao3 and quotev for a bit but im more active here so why not post it here too ... !! and guys i promise this longfic isnt centered on kidou ok. but the burn is very slow i'm afraid </3 sigh
YOU LIKED to count your days. That’s what Kidou did when he lost you.
He'd do it in bits; in little, edible pieces: one accident, two phone calls, three months. The details of it would fly from the hands of journalists serving your name as a meal to the media. His teeth sink into the news, slow. Methodical. At the first taste it’s hard to believe. He chews on your flesh with his eyes and ears. First the titles, the dates, the details– then, in the acidic pits of his body, they become something whole, bound by acid and stuck together by the pain. Swallowing slivers instead of shards will always make it easier to stomach everything.
It’s far from his first grievance, really. A lot has slipped from his grasp. Kidou is a resilient boy.
But today, he will witness it fully: the wholeness of everything– the rotting corpse of a thirteen year-old, or their miracle, as the doctors have hailed you as. He walks in these white halls alone, with trembling hands in spite of his perfect posture. What he breathes in is an atmosphere that reeks hard of sorrow. It’s a little hard when what air that comes in and out must struggle to give the patients life any semblance of life.
To think this is where you have been. It is so unbelievably dull. All of it. The drawling, neat walls stand unmarked by the years and untouched by the lingering grief. Too stiff. Too dead. He will see you and how you don’t belong here, all sparkle and shine, but it isn’t his place to give you his pity. A sorry will work, won’t it? Or would ‘hello’ be better?
As he roams, there is a recognition in Kidou’s eyes when he finds it. Amongst the numbers that hang beside their respective doors, your name has claimed 111. You. You. You. Every article introduces you differently. To some you are golden; to others you are eccentric, but there will always be that word: star. You are still bright, if he hopes hard enough.
Only a few centimeters remain. After the three customary knocks, will the person beyond the white door still be the same? Sweat glides from his wrist as he grips lightly, heart running sixty, then eighty, then a hundred. A moment more is all he needs to reach you.
And when he twists the knob at last, it is a strange sight to behold.
You look the same, still, as you lie in the confines of the white bed, corpse in pristine condition. A tad too cozy in your coffin, actually, with your back rested comfortably against the uncolored pillows behind you. Same and still. Then until now, though a little different when seen without the tint of blue from his goggles. It ran for a long while, yet it was like time didn’t take you with it at all.
You don’t turn to look at whoever entered in favor of the half-empty puzzle board on your lap. The windows are open just a little bit. Perhaps only by an inch. Or three, but the winds still excitedly rush in your room while the curtains elegantly follow. Up, then down with grace. Small crevices appear, allowing light to pass through in between the centimeters. One, three, five. And it all aligns together. The curtains brush against the window, with each stroke of sun painting you aglow. Ingest, consume. Your name rings in his mind, and what he remembers of your face does not reflect the real thing. It never will, because when have you ever looked this fragile?
How beautiful, he thinks. How boring.
Your funeral leaves much to be desired; he hears it all- your idle taps and contemplative hums. A minute runs ahead, splitting into five. Still, nothing happens between the corpse and the grieving. It takes that much time before you place the piece on the board. It’s all wrong, but all on purpose. (Is it still wrong, then?) The door closes, and he’s more than certain the sound of it reaches your ears, but he makes no move, simply watching you for three hundred seconds until you acknowledge his presence at last. With half your mind elsewhere, right hand searching for the next puzzle piece to place incorrectly, you look up to meet his gaze with a tilt of your head.
“How did you find me?”
Kidou’s throat constricts. It’s difficult to place his faith in this fraction of today. Three moons passed, and he has not heard your voice since. Nobody has. Neither ears could’ve heard nor eyes could’ve seen you, save for what you are made out to be in reports. Perhaps your perception has diluted itself in the time you’ve had no need to see. He hopes you don’t notice when he gulps; takes a deep breath.
“Some degree of effort,” he responds rather calmly. “Your parents were quite hard to convince.”
Asuka is a troublesome name. On paper and in person, both parents and child. Your blood doesn’t take to being easy. Took his charm an eternity to bargain with. Not that he had any, is what you’d say.
The expression of serenity on your face immediately sours at the mention of your family, but you revert back to your pleasantries in an instant. “Aw. Did all of that for me?” You speak again. He moves closer to where you lie asleep but alive. Strange, strange things surround his heart, forcing it to run in ones and twos and threes. You know nothing of the way you are real again.
Crossing his arms, he doesn’t appear to have any notable reaction to any of your words. “I am your teammate.” I am your friend. “It’s the least I could do.”
You squint your eyes as your face twists in disgust.
“I think I’m gonna be sick. You’re so cute sometimes, Kidou.”
If his demeanor visibly shifts, you say nothing of it. Kidou, you say. This is how he knows he was not lied to.
Kidou. Kidou. Not Yuuto, not anything. Somehow, he expected this. But it’s not easy to gnaw on his name when it isn’t quite right. Not a single bone in his body is amused, yet he tries anyway, starting with a reflection of your very grin.
He asks, staring straight at you, “Oh? Still know me, Asuka?”
You wouldn’t. It’s no use doubting the doctors. Only one thing happened, but you will never be the same.
“No,” you say without an ounce of your previous enthusiasm. “But how could I not?” Then, you turn your attention to the desk to your side, where scattered letters lay about, front sides facing downward. A number is inked in their corners, and all come in distinct designs. “See these? Let’s count! One…”
One becomes two. Then three. Each envelope, another reminder. Twelve sets of seven in yesterdays. You stack the last one on top of the other three with a proud grin, as if you were presenting to him your most prized possessions. You are scarred, but still, you love freely. The sight of it is nearly endearing, if not for the fact he knew whomever it was who’d thrown hours of their life away to write them.
“Four letters in twelve weeks.” He’d think you were accusing him of a crime. The way your gaze hits is incredulous. Dissective. You had no right to be like this, honestly, but it is only fair. He supposes he did write that many. “Were you in love with me or what?”
“Burn them.” Kidou winces. “Even better, I’ll do it for you.”
Ignorance seasons itself over you as you sheath the letters away from his vicinity. He knows you liked to bask in its effects while the board is ruined even further by your whim. If you wanted to make him uncomfortable, you would. It’s your game. So he doesn’t say anything as he kneels down next to your bed, eyes locked onto one of the hundreds of miniscule, slippery pieces strewn atop your sheets. Two deft fingers lift it up– the small fraction of incomprehensible blue and brown condensed in a horribly printed puzzle –and he counts in puzzle-shaped numbers, eyes scanning as his hand places the piece of cardboard where it rightfully belongs.
Although… from a single glance, any man can recognize the chaos. It is quite out of place. You’ve jumbled the image as a whole into oblivion, into nothing like what it was supposed to be, save for the colors– they’re everywhere in the wrong areas. What even is this? Who allowed you to do this? What looks like various parts of a cat– injured ears, discolored eyes, the fur of a stray –are stitched anew into an unidentifiable, frankensteined body. Another being that is, for certain, not at all what it was intended to be. How everything even fits in a mess so comprehensive that it is in order is, in all honesty, rather… impressive.
However, you don’t enjoy his attempts to reconstruct the “cat,” weakly attempting to swat his hand away. “Stop, stop, stop. You made it worse.”
He doesn’t mind it, picking up some of the already frankensteined parts and continuing to put them in order. There’s some fun in seeing you frown this way.
“I’m never going to understand you,” he mutters. Not in the past, not now, not ever. Is he relieved to know you still count in odd ways? Kidou himself isn’t too sure. It’s something, at the very least. A memento of some sorts.
He turns his attention to your side and reaches for one of the letters, familiarity enveloping his skin. It isn’t as smooth as it had been the night it was made.
“Have you read this?” He says, holding the green envelope, marked number four. You have, if the slight raise of the opening is anything to believe. Creases and crumples dent the sides. One touch and his hand remembers the sweat of its palm, the grip on his pen. More ink than effort, all done in the name of you. He thinks you’re obligated to be grateful— it’s the longest one he’d written. But he wants to hear it from you.
“Seven paragraphs on some tournament.” You’re folding other letters now. Some become cranes while the others become frogs. They’re not his. All white, all plain. But that means someone else was mourning you. “Could’ve cut it by like, half. You didn’t have to make it so detailed.”
“It’s because you missed everything on the Football Frontier.”
“Nuh uh,” you deny. “Watched it live and all, you know, while I was comatose. Insane shots, by the way.”
Sarcasm drips from your voice, flavor of your tone neither bitter nor sweet. Like the kind of inexpensive coffee he can’t bring himself to stop buying since his tongue got used to the taste. A few years running on the same field did the trick, unfortunately.
The comment almost makes him laugh. Almost. Then, he digs for something from the pocket of his inner jacket. You watch, stare lazily flitting about in interest. The tips of his fingers find it immediately, and the backside of a picture reveals itself bit by bit, with a few signatures inked and some scribbled in pencil lead.
Somehow, he can feel the movement of your eyes in his hands. Flicker left, right, down. What is he supposed to call it when you feast on things with your curiosity alone? Your gaze always weighs down anything it touches with scrutiny, as though the gods had been eating him whole or digesting his every move, but he knows it is different now. It isn’t divinity. It never was. Not when you bled right in front of him, then.
Star or anything, you remain ordinary. To him, at least. No other pair of eyes were able to witness that fall. No matter the unsettle, he shrugs it off as he always did. Some things never change.
He sighs; hands the photograph to you. Trophy and all.
Indifference paints you as you scan the image in all its glory. The silhouettes of the victorious stand tall together in the picture, Kidou himself among them. In little whispers, you try to put names to their faces. To the goalkeeper, the defenders, the midfielders. When he corrects you on some, you tell him you know what you’re doing. You don’t.
“We won,” he states. If it wasn’t obvious enough.
“We always do,” you reply, tone a tad wistful. He looks at you as you ingrain the image into your head. Genda, Sakuma, Kidou, the rest. You know their names, perhaps not the memories. Is that all they are to you, now: winners?
Kidou breathes. He breathes in the disgustingly dull air of your disgustingly dull room and he takes in you who are– bright –living this disgustingly dull death. Then, he commands himself to act accordingly: to say this, ask that. He has to seek answers, has to look for ways. One, two, and three. It is all he has ever known how to do.
You’re staring at the wall now, mind away, maybe chewing on the sky guarded by glass. The truth is slowly creeping up on him, following his every step. He might mean nothing to you now. The present is cold. You fly far, and you fly fast.
To snap you out of your trance, he tries to ask, “What do you remember?”
Tread it carefully.
You don’t explain anything as you shrug. When you begin to pick the stray skin off your nails, all you say is: “That it was my fault.”
Once, your patience with the world grew thin.
“What?”
It is why you are here in the first place.
You’re back to your puzzle now. That hideous, horrible thing. Piece after the other, you continue building your monstrosity. Your cat worsens and worsens– perhaps no longer a cat. Just the idea of it. Yours, in particular. Skewed, twisted, something new. The photo of Teikoku has long been discarded in favor of your idle pursuits.
“Kageyama thinks I’m useless now, doesn’t he?”
Fragile as you are right now, he can still try.
“He doesn’t,” he lies, voice stern. “Don’t draw conclusions.”
“I love drawing, thank you,” you huff with a raise of an eyebrow. “You aren’t the only one who knows everything.”
You understand it; that, he is aware of. Empty words from a mouth full of shit. Years and years you have gone through it all. Together. Something like this won’t convince you, never. But still, he’s faintly irked. You act like you’re aware when you aren’t. You act like time was on your side. There’s a lot you’ve lost. There’s a lot who’ve lost you. He would know; you aren’t the first person he’s ever mourned.
But you wouldn’t– you wouldn’t grip even a grain of it when you can’t even remember how to let your fingertips graze.
“What makes you say that?” What makes you say that, when all it is you have ever known has lost its grip on you? “You know nothing, the way you are right now.”
And there, he catches it. In that fraction of a moment, that fourth of a second where your eyes soften and your lips curve just the slightest millimeter down.
“...I know,” you mumble, and now you are dull.
There it is, that disinterest in your eyes. When the wrong things reach your ears, they’re all right to you. Regret it, he commands himself. He knows the way you are. Say sorry, say sorry, say sorry. Yet Kidou doesn’t. It’s the truth. For years it’s all you’ve been fed; it’s all you’ve had to swallow.
Water comes in through the window, curtains wet with the world’s tears. They reach you both. You do nothing.
It didn’t have to be this way.
“Soon, you’ll be discharged.” It’s easier to hope if he does it in parts. Think of the little things before you dream big. “And–” he tries to dash away from stuttering his words, “and you can come back to Teikoku.”
Something in him is faltering. Fractures form in parts of his confidence. A whole halving, turning into fourths, into eighths. He can hear it. In a second you’ll agree. While you’re unacquainted with the way he failed you, he can still try.
Try, try, try. Try and he’ll triumph. The two of you can begin anew, together. One more bite. He’s come this far. Something in his body churns. It’s only a little more until there’s nothing left to chew.
But he thinks he’s bitten off more than he could ever handle when you unveil:
“I’m moving.”
They are bitter words for a bitter boy, though it is not a taste his tongue isn’t used to. Far, far, far from it. Syllable per syllable. As they slide, each slice in his throat tickles. The shards of you go down, down, down. You’re going.
On whose decision?
Why?
Have you confirmed it?
Where to?
“What?” you speak up, disregarding the awkward atmosphere. You break through it like it is nothing, tone sliding through all the tension he has brought with a wide show of your teeth. “Gonna miss me, aren’t you, Kidou?”
It’s like this whenever the wrong words fall on deaf ears. Between the both of you, neither like to listen. Reality tethers him alive as an onslaught of questions dare to leave his mouth. And it is wrong to ask about the worst of them all. But Kidou is a resilient boy. He does what he is taught to always do: calm his hunger. To glutton is to sin. To be silent is the right way.
It is the only way.
“Don’t flatter yourself, Asuka,” he scoffs.
The cracks in your crystalline flesh hurt his appetite. First the accident, second the death. He has only counted for three months and he will already have lost you twice. He lets go of the letter, and so he returns your numbers right back to you, because it is better for his gut to bleed from fragments than shards. More is less. One, then two. Kidou counts in bits. Three, then four, whereas you skip the little things and see them as one, big individual everything. One entirety. You will find sentences beyond the words– the embedded love instead of the letters. Who knows?
Maybe you won’t be too different, after all. Now that you’re leaving.
“Say, where does this go?” You look at him to ask, holding a piece between your index and thumb, but not before cheekily adding, “Since you know everything?”
Nowhere. Everywhere. Somewhere wrong, somewhere right. That’s where you will go. Every second, he tells himself. From the ones and twos and threes, it will pass. He ought to believe a little more. Faith can kill the cavity. It will.
“Piece it yourself.”
It's you.
Yes. Do just that. You seem to be full of words, yet in the end nothing forms to leave your lips. You’re smiling more than you talk today. Dull. Dead. When the time comes, you will remember. You’re going to hate him when you do.
Now turn, don’t look. Live as you are, unknowing of your pains. Maybe you’re better off if you simply forget it all. It will make it easier for his stomach to mourn.
Kidou counts, too. This is how he will digest the death of you.
First the sky, second the self. When he is with you, he cannot hide how badly he loves his words. Hear it, ignore it well. A life you want, a life you’ll have to work for.
fic masterlist <-
pairings: kidou yuuto/reader, raimon natsumi/reader, gouenji shuuya/reader, endou mamoru/reader
chapter warnings: first few scenes before mc actually appears are flashbacks!!, gouenji is miserable, kidou is also miserable, one mildly inappropriate joke (teenagers being teenagers man), implied life-threatening Happenings (yup!), it gets kinda corny but who gaf
word count: 16.2k ........
a/n: and the plot finally progresses! Congrats. when this was first uploaded on ao3 there was a Beast of an author's note for u to see if u finished the chapter there. yes i Will elaborate at the end if ur only seeing this for the first time on tumblr dot com cuz the note itself is So funny to me ok enjoy
NATSUMI HAD learned to reserve her time only for what is necessary. The boy was miserable. So when they talked, it was cut; a conversation that’s all business. At least, she thought it was.
“Teikoku is coming tomorrow.” He wasn’t shaken, but his palms were. Sweat ran down his clammy hands. The tremble reminded him of its imminence. “How far are you willing to go to save this…” she stole a glimpse of the character that’s inscribed on the chest of his goalkeeper uniform. It irked her because he was undeserving. “This disgrace?”
His fists weakly clenched at his sides. “Don’t you dare call my club a disgrace! I’ll show you we’re worthy of not disbanding!”
“Oh? You must want to enter the Football Frontier badly.”
“Yeah, I do! I dream of it sometimes– no, not sometimes. A lot, actually,” he corrected. “Guess that makes me want to do it pretty badly, huh?” Aware of himself, she supposed. “Anybody would– even a disgrace like me!”
What a loser, she would’ve snapped. He did not relent, too wishful. Proud to a fault. If it wasn’t genuine, he’d prove it tomorrow. If it isn’t, then he’s done. She’s only doing this for her father’s sake. Then, once the dilemma is over and gone, it’ll be back to a boring life for her.
Although, if the boy is up to bleaching the stain he has spilled on their school’s reputation, exactly how much is this Endou willing to go through?
“Survive your game with Teikoku Academy,” she orders.
One way to find out. One try, and she’ll give it up if he does. Do not spare him. Demand nothing but his all.
“Ha?” He cocked his head to the side, just a loaded gun with a rustic bullet for his brain. “That’s obvious, though. Of course we will!” he proclaimed, voice edged with finality, as sure of it as though it was already set in stone. “Why are you telling me what to do?”
“Survive and I’ll do you a good favor by helping manage your poor excuse of a soccer club.” Then, when his look of skepticism didn’t reveal the slightest bit of interest, she pulled an ace out of her sleeve to change his mind, sharply bringing up, “Next, stop giving our school a bad name by winning whatever game you’ll have after you survive. I might just allow your team to formally participate in the Frontier if you do.”
“Dude,” she saw it’s got him hooked, now; eyes wide, pupils glimmering with a swift desire, his jaw locking into a dramatic drop as he shouted with no control for his intensity: “SERIOUSLY?!”
“You want that to happen?” Natsumi taunted him that day, and later on with the promise of a new player. “Then show me your best.”
Or two. One boy, one girl. Both new students with troublesome pasts; the one she knew nearly everything about, the other nothing at all. The captain saluted, stiff at best, swearing a little effort at most. What a drag.
On the day that followed, the match came as anticipated by all. Out of twenty goals, he tried twenty-one times. What they did not expect, however, is this: in the final, Endou blocks. The ball flew to one of the two she had taken a fading interest in. Gouenji Shuuya.
The next shook everybody, a prelude to what’s to come– Raimon scored. Her binoculars are cast aside. Involvement is now necessary. For his efforts, she remembered, a promise is a promise.
-
The sister, as Endou Mamoru finds, has faded beyond repair.
He holds the thought, however. There is a monitor for the girl who has yet to go, green and glowing with signs of a pulsing heart. It tells him, and most of all promises to the boy he’s with: wait.
There are flowers by her side. He can smell their fragrance from afar, its odor sorrowful. Next to them is a written note meant to be read. A message meant to be known by someone living.
Do not think that, he is reminded, do not say beyond yet.
Hope.
To think beyond is belittling of her brother. She breathes. He watches. A life still resides behind her shut eyelids, inside her still-beating heart. She exists, adrift only somewhere they wouldn’t know. Still someone who can be saved.
Someone Gouenji is still waiting for.
The air is incomprehensible, something his lungs cannot decipher even as it enteres his system. All he knows is that it is mournful– all that is done and said. Everything.
He is not the sick one, yet Endou sees that Gouenji always seems to be stricken, mind ailed and ill, but delicate all the same. Light steps. Lighter, unlaced words. Drifting fingers, careful with what surfaces they touch. His mannerisms speak for him. The boy looks so tender, so serene in the way it is only found in those who yearn to be forgiven.
“You couldn’t have known,” Gouenji whispers, volume lowered in respect, with a hope that if he goes just the slightest note louder, it’ll wake her and bring her back to life. Yet he does not tell Endou it’s okay.
Gouenji Yuuka. The sister. There, bedridden under blankets and near-buried, she lies– the reason.
He hopes Gouenji knows it will be, one day, whenever that will be. He hopes he still has the strength to hold on. For the goal he had given in that game against Teikoku, the goal he himself had unknowingly become for others, and the courage he carries, the captain lends his classmate his gratitude, glances at his sister one more time, then tears his eyes away in deference to the two.
He will leave them alone. He will leave him alone.
“Still,” Endou breathes out and does it in silence, a low sigh as a show of disappointment to nobody but himself, as though it could let his classmate know how badly he wants to show his shame, “I’m sorry.”
If one sorry will suffice.
Endou doesn’t know if it ever will, really, because when he lifts his head from his second bow, Gouenji does what he always does best and doesn’t say anything. You could only ever know how he truly felt if he told you. That’s the kind of person he knows– thinks –Gouenji to be. If he spoke it into existence, only then would it become tangible. Something real.
Yet it doesn’t look like he plans on letting his heart steer him that way.
Doesn’t at all.
-
“We don’t need him,” is Someoka Ryuugo’s stance. His words are solid. An intent set in stone. Then he runs and runs and runs, each step ignited by a drive to do better. Doesn’t matter how much he staggers, if he ever slows down. It’s always towards what strength he wants for himself and what matters most: everyone else.
Amidst these kicks, dashes, and failed goals, do they see it? Do they know how much of yourself you must give in order to soar? Endou admires him for it. Admire isn’t enough, but it’s a part of his respect, too, which Someoka rightfully deserves. Anyone who embraces the need for effort does.
He hopes the others give it to him as well. Maybe even absorb his zeal and become inspired to do as he does.
“You might be right,” Endou says, scratching the back of his scalp. Toothy smile, the kind that’s asking for a friend’s favor. “But we need you, don’t we?”
His friend’s eyes widen by the centimeter, a surprise that Endou doesn’t allow to go unnoticed. It’s sudden, he’s sure. But he wins, because Someoka returns it. Readily so. A prideful yet lighthearted huff at that. “Now we’re talking.”
Though he doubts it, had he not said anything, maybe Someoka would have stopped, gone over to do something else. Lose his drive– that beautiful, raw thing. They are such small things, so little: one sorry, one thank you, one encouraging hand settled on a shoulder.
“Go, Someoka!” Incite that appetite. Help him fly. “I believe in you!”
Then he pushes him forward, and Someoka goes running once more, making a break towards a future where Raimon Academy lives. It can. It will. All Endou has to do is believe enough to try.
One push. One person encouraging you. That’s the only thing it takes to make a difference. That’s how easy it is to appreciate these unrecognized attempts. Learn a lesson or two: let them know, malice or love. Gestures of spite are just as dangerous, but a singular goodluck from the right mouth can get you miles farther than where you began.
Effort–isn’t it such a simple thing?
-
A day. He’s on his way to club practice, and the only notion in his mind is how he’s thought about it, if a day or two counts. Things have been going too fast lately. By far, as he’s heard, the beginning is the best time to bring them to an end.
It’s a good thing he sees Raimon Natsumi today. To finally give it a rest.
“Hey,” he calls, looking at the wave of auburn that rests behind her from a distance. Her silhouette goes still, yet by her movements she is the least bit startled. No response. He calls again, “Hey!”
Still no response, so he sprints. The hallway is dense with an emptiness only the presence of people could fill. His shoes echo when they tread against the floor. He comes up to her front and immediately breaks through the silence. There’s something important that must be said. “Um… the other day, my pal Kazemaru and I talked about it.” He looks around. No soul but theirs. Then right at her as he says, “About him.”
He’s met with Natsumi raising an eyebrow, standing taut yet relaxed. Anyone could tell that she had been expecting him for a while.
It’s almost casual. Almost, because anyone could tell her authority from his.
Him– is Endou that shy? Despite the entirety of the campus being aware of how he trails after him, wags his tail and throws piles of praises for that boy, he can’t even bring himself to call him by his name?
“Do you have something on your mind?” she questions, and almost bitterly with the remnants of a different conversation, “Something worth my time?”
“Yeaaaahhh,” Endou drags out. “Sso! It’s that… I think I’m starting to be fine with not having him on the team.” So there it is. She doesn’t have to hear a name. Not even a description. By the him alone, Natsumi will already know.
You are hopeless, she thinks.
Because he does not hear the way she berates him in her head, he takes her lack of response as his cue to carry on. He keeps his friends in his mind. Holds them close when he says it.
“We’re going to get stronger anyway, Gouenji on the team or not. It’s always been just the few of us, after all.” One became two, and two became more. The same faces who’ve kept trying until now, although it doesn’t exactly… show. If they won’t, well– effort isn’t exactly new to him, now, is it? He can take one for the team. Always has. “Same old people in the same old club, heh… not like anything’s gonna change.”
He can work with that. They’re all he’s ever known, anyway. What difference will it make if Gouenji won’t join and share the flame he has? Hardworkers– they’ve always known how to make their own.
The more he lets it out of his system, the lighter the words are on his tongue. Like it’s easier to allow them to leave his head now that they have been spoken aloud. So,
“I’m okay with that, too.”
There. He’s said it. All that remains is for her to understand.
“Ah. It’s always about him with you.” Accusatory. He isn’t quite certain if that’s a good thing, really. Whatever she means by that. “I admire your honesty.” She begins with a contemplative nod. “I do.”
Yet Raimon Natsumi does not look pleased.
“But are you really, though?” Now she strikes. It’s this again, all over: how often she makes him think, think, think. And even here, even when he won't admit it, she speaks it into being, “Think, Endou.” He would argue there was nothing left to think about, but there Raimon Natsumi goes to stand in his way with her truths.
The ones he can’t deny.
“This is the same Gouenji who’d made it to the Football Frontier once. And the day Teikoku came here, he scored.” She forces him to recall as she shoves it down like it’s a fact he can handle, “Right in front of you.”
That day. Why does it all return to that day? That glorious, fateful day where he’d found the beginning of something to finally look forward to.
Amidst it all, there it lived, whirling in the sky like a gift from the gods themselves. Fire. Rapid, glorious, nothing like anything he’d ever seen before.
With it, light itself in the most brooding boy he’s ever known.
“I know that!” He shakes his head. If it cannot be helped, then that light is something he must be willing to let go of. “But he needs his space.”
Her taut and swift response: “He needs a reason to keep going.”
As steady as it already is, time lags on at a slower pace. He swears by the frigid air he imagines is ghosting his skin and the staggering breaths of a dying hope, somewhere in a different hallway with pale afternoons and grieving days. His mind halts. Reason. Keep going. It’s as though those words spark a signal in the cogwork of his brain.
Why is it that she is so insistent?
“Shit,” he curses under his breath. Covers his mouth right after, now less confident and more aware of her warning glare than anything. No, focus. She knows something like she always does. The embarrassment dies quickly when he opts to find answers. “Do you know about it?”
“I have. For a while now,” she admits, her eyes set on the ground. He knows, then, exactly how she feels. “Gouenji Shuuya, the glory of Kidokawa Seishuu. Left the stadium right before the most important match of his life. His younger sister…” she falls to a silent stop. Sorry. “I acknowledge that it was tragic.”
“Right, right. So you knew all along,” he says in a defeated whisper. “Then… why bother?”
He’s aware his words may come off harsher than he means them to. Not that she’d mind, of all people. “Ahaha… I just, you know, I can’t help but want to back off!” She’d understand, wouldn’t she? She knows. “His– his sister. He said he’d stop for her sake.”
Their faces come back to him. Those two siblings, one wired and immobile in a white room. The other, older, left outside. Waiting.
“You get it, right? A promise is a promise. That’s just… how it works sometimes.”
Sometimes, because sisters receive bouquets and handwritten notes from the right people who have done the wrong things. They don’t know it yet. Never will if they won’t wake up. Sometimes, because their brothers are guilty. That’s just how it works sometimes, because how else will Gouenji find the will to forgive himself after nearly building his own sister’s grave?
“Yes. I know,” she affirms to him. “And I am telling you,” despite it all, she stands her ground and says what he has been afraid of admitting from the start, “You will not want to let him go.”
It should not bother him to this degree, not to the point there are stones in his stomach and he is oddly, unrightfully saddened. Let what go? Let who go? Someone who will not want to join him either way?
“I can,” Endou defies her. Measly, but he tries.
It’s a futile effort.
“Can you?”
Natsumi can tell it is, especially when he loses the strength to add any more. The next moment she takes a glance, and Endou’s face is nothing but downcast.
A hum. “That’s what I thought.”
He can’t. Nobody needs to say that, at the very least. The fact stands behind them, in front of them, within them. Real. It’s difficult to want the best for yourself and for those you will never have. So difficult, when two distinct names flash in his mind, and if he can read them well enough (he can’t), they’re polar opposites, yet the thought doesn’t deter his desire for them to be clad in yellow and blue. Not at all. One just beside him in the classroom and the other drifting away.
How does one bear having to let go of light?
He thinks of the other one. The chronic liar, that one, a classmate he hasn’t known for long, either. The bore of their shared classes becomes nothing when she tells him stories that are worth hearing, shows him minor tricks that are a wonder to watch. The clock ticks faster. That’s just how it is.
Something happened to her, too. He’s not too sure of the specifics, only what Natsumi knows, or whatever she permits him to be aware of. Just that for a few loyal years, [Name] was in Teikoku– which in of itself he cannot ever believe from her demeanor alone –and then she left.
Just like Gouenji.
You couldn’t tell if it had been a good thing or if it ruined her life. Either way, Natsumi has told him of the dangers he’ll have to deal with if the liar does end up in his palms.
He won’t prod. Not unless she’s willing to tell that story. Even if she’ll lie about it, too. He just hopes she won’t have to when they become better friends.
“S-so!” He stumbles but begins, every drop of subtlety he releases into the air, “Since we’re still in a number-of-members-related pinch… How’d the thing with Asuka go?”
She is bright, though. Brilliantly. And completely the opposite of what Gouenji is in his eyes, he has no idea of what feats she is capable of. Who knows if she has a cool hissatsu? If she has crossed paths with the greatest players of their age? If she even plays, for that matter? If she is unreachable, if she is not?
He wants to know. Wants to see. Wants so badly for her and him to know his ears are open, that he is a body who will listen. If he may dare: a friend.
“Oh, please. I have that girl handled.” Natsumi waves it off, like that girl is a matter of yesterday. Done, already dealt with. “Besides, you’ve shown your sincerity to Gouenji. I’ll talk some sense into him just to be safe.”
“No, it’s okay.” Endou’s got to have resigned to it by now. The need for him by his side should have no place in his worries. “You don’t have to.”
But she insists. “I know you’ll regret it if I don’t.”
He will. This is his final verdict. He knows he will; she knows it, also. So badly he will regret it by the time he’s come far along the field, and he has done what he could to deny it. Endou knows she’s right, so he says nothing more.
“His kind takes well to the people who understand them. Believe me,” she reassures. In that hospital, Gouenji was mournful. Peaceful. A lesser someone than what form of perfection Endou thought he was, but someone more than the rageful tail of steam he left in his wake. Someone scarred.
Someone human.
“He’ll come to you, any moment now. But you leave her to me.”
She cares, at least, is the idea he gets out of this. Perhaps it is no more than a show of her pity, yet it would not hurt to appreciate it nonetheless.
“Okay.” He breathes. It’s a long one. Inwards he takes his pride to his lungs. Then out it goes with that girl’s name. “Asuka’s all yours. Got it.”
He doesn’t dare mistake her pointed satisfaction for anything else. Right. He will take it as what it appears to be. Even if it is quite suspicious.
Onto the next. “But, also… um. One more question–promise it’s the last.”
At this point of their discussion, she looks rather impatient with the prospect of needing to explain further. He understands. She does, too, but feigns her irritation anyway, showing how much she has learned from an infamous actress as of late. “Be grateful I’m even giving you my time. What else do you want?”
“What–” he has to clear his throat to rid himself of the way he hesitates, “What do you really see them as?” He has to do it, has to touch this risk if he ever dreams of understanding. “Be honest.” He latches on the truth: she will be.
“Regular people? Good players?”
A gulp. But he speaks it, still.
“...pawns?”
Has to.
“You want honesty,” she ties their gazes together, forcing him to stay on his toes. Eye to eye. From one leader to another. “So I’ll say: all of the above.”
“You will never see anyone play the way they do. Gouenji and Asuka are… abnormalities. Talents that should not exist.” There is no admiration in any of what she says. He’s only receiving what he’s asked for. Blatant and raw, as simple as this: honesty. “Although we’ve never witnessed Asuka [Name]’s playstyle for ourselves– I know she’s avoiding the game, so I’ve chosen to send her to your team as a manager instead. I doubt you’ll believe me if you don’t see it with your own two eyes. Better if we do not force her.” She treats it as the only option. “I do not like dealing with eccentrics. You must understand?”
He blinks owlishly. “Uh-huh. I do.” As if ‘eccentrics’ is even enough to paint a picture with her name.
“Good. If there is one thing you should be aware of, however, it is that from her first year in Teikoku, not a single one of their soccer team’s victories is recorded without her name.”
“Wait. You only told me that it was her old school.” Asuka dislikes the sport he thinks of so dearly. She may ramble about illogical prophecies and hint at a history that contradicts who she is, but Asuka does not play. Does she? He asks, “Not how she played soccer in Teikoku? As in, she was a member of their team…?”
“Yes. Schools often surrendered whenever Kidou Yuuto would show up with her by his side, or so the rumors say. Why do you not know this?” She asks, her face scrunched up in disbelief, “A competent captain should know how to do research, but I guess I can’t fault you, because literally no one else in this school is aware of her history.” For some reason, which Endou catches Natsumi adding at the end, only mumbling to herself. “Does she have no friends or what?”
This is new. Nothing he’d expected to hear about the girl who holds his wrist as she sings to him of their dearest math teacher’s demise. The same classmate who feigns disinterest in anything related to the puzzle Natsumi now tells him she was once a piece of. Huh. Somehow, he finds that it makes sense. Because now he recalls: Asuka is an actress.
Of course it does. It’s you.
“Beyond their abilities on the soccer field, though?” Natsumi mentions. “They are nothing if not normal, which anybody could care less about. Outside of games, they live their own little lives.” Live with themselves. Breathe with others. Take on burdens that he isn’t sure even belongs atop their backs, brittle as they already seem to be. “They’re your classmates, aren’t they?” Yes. They are. He could never miss their heads from that cramped and tiny crowd. “You saw Asuka as a student before you even knew about the possibility of her playing soccer. Gouenji– you saw him play first, but you have to think outside of that. He answers the same tests and listens to the same teachers as you do. Everyone does.”
Everyone does. She asks, “How could you think of them as anything other than people after that?”
How human they are; how senseless he is!
“Look, Endou. It’s gotten to the point that you’ve considered giving up on Gouenji because of his family matters. You understand.”She then explains to him, “That is why you will want to give him a reason to move forward.”
People stagnate the more they are worn and torn in both body and mind. He has seen the look in Gouenji’s eyes. He has seen enough. Make the effort. Make up your mind.
“If he believes he is the reason for how she is now, then give him a way to atone for what he has done.” This is her curt guidance. Exactly as he’d asked for. “You say he promised his sister his dedication to the sport. What is there for him to do to uphold it?”
Oh, Endou says in the back of his mind, Oh! Then he laughs. To think hard was never a necessity. He unburies it straight from his shallow but full heart– the answer. The right one.
One word. That’s how simple it is.
“Win.”
And then it dawns on him. He nods to himself, stumped by how elementary everything is. She’ll be able to do something, anything. His part is a small thing. Place his hopes in her. In Gouenji. In the world. That’s all he needs to do.
“If… if you say so, future manager.” He finds his own hand scratching the back of his head. He does that a lot, doesn’t know why. Natsumi probably does. Okay. That’s right, too. He’ll place his faith in her now, like he hadn’t done it already. “I seriously, seriously trust you.”
“Only now do you think I’m trustworthy?” If anything, she has the right to be the one doubting anyone. He’s sorry, truly, but he smiles regardless as she reprimands him. “You must be stupid.”
“Well. Can’t say I haven’t heard this before.”
Strangely– no, he ought to get used to this –she lets out an exhale, yet it is neither tired nor peeved. She looks at him as though she understands that the both of them are deserving of better days. But she says it anyway, all because it’s what she has to do.
“Bring me a victory, and I’ll handle the rest.”
And then Endou breaks a chuckle, which Natsumi immediately becomes suspicious of. He cares not for her critical glimpses. He can’t help it.
It’s incredible. He might burst into flames. Or stars. Or both? He would like to become both, if possible– to become bright and wonderful things. Vast, vying, adventurous.
“Haha, wait! Wait!” The stretch of his joy widens. There are still people out there who will know no matter what you do; it’s not a good thing. Not at all. But it’s Raimon Natsumi. With that notion alone, he supposes he can be relieved. “That’s… that’s actually really nice of you. To do all this. You really do just want the best for us, don’t you?”
Let them know: malice or love. He swears to repay her for this one day.
“Hm.” She smiles. “We’ll see.”
-
The morning greets the earth earlier. It’s a good day to mourn.
A space rests between his palm and the thin breath of the wind, where another hand is supposed to be. She would at tug him and tear his little miseries away. It does not happen because her hands are static on hospital sheets, glued to her side. His fingers are left by their lonesome, holding onto anything to keep him sane.
He grabs onto soccer. He is guilty.
There is nothing for him to be torn between deciding. It should not have become one or the other when it should have always remained as one. This or that? It’s a decision beyond the simplicity of: to be or not to be? To join or not to join?
What does Gouenji Shuuya want?
He doesn’t know why he can’t express it to life or allow it to reflect in his reality. Why the hell does he hesitate? It’s easy to answer, even easier to say. He wants his sister back. For his wrongs, he wants nothing more than to atone.
Atone. That’s right. It was never one or the other. It has always been the sole course forward. To be forgiven, what is there to be done? What else is there for him to do?
The invite stands, a pledge harder than granite. The hand that extends it to him is unpolished, the person it belongs to being rowdier, rockier, and yet Endou Mamoru is rough in all the right ways. When sunlight hits him, he shines in any angle imaginable. Beaten down by the honest truth to jump back into being a boy whose beaming words can make just about anyone believe in him.
Gouenji paces the bridge. A car painted obsidian slides into his view, settling beside him, too close to where he walks. Invading. He waits warily, watching as the black-tinted window on the passenger’s side glides down, and what do you know?
“I wonder, is this your usual route to school?”
It’s her. “I apologize for my impudence, but it has occurred to me that you must be told.” He’s new here, but he knows who Raimon Natsumi is. He does not know how to feel, however, especially not when she tells him: “I know of your situation, including your sister.”
His face then reflects a hostile glint, but her tone is just as sturdy as his intent to walk away. “Are you truly alright with how you live?!” He has not the need to be reminded of this. “Do not run from it now, Gouenji Shuuya. You walked here, on this path, because you want to join those fools who don’t haven’t the slightest clue on how to surrender!”
“Don’t bother me,” he bites, hating with all of his heart the bitter taste of the truth. Being told through words not his own is wildly different from the scrutiny he faces from himself. When she says it, it’s real.
She snaps back. “Did you think giving up would be retribution for her?”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I may not, but I know I won’t regret telling you that you’re wrong. Listen to me, Gouenji. Who is it who wants you to play soccer the most? It’s not Endou, and it clearly isn’t yourself. So, answer me. Who?”
It was never a matter of this or that. If one thing must be explicitly said, all he wants is for his sister to be happy. A plain wish is a wish regardless.
Still something he wants to come true.
Raimon Natsumi leaves him to his lonesome. The silhouette of her family’s car sets off into the distance, the small puffs of smoke it leaves in its trail the final nail in the coffin alongside the ringing of her words. Now he can name the driving force behind all of Endou’s paltry, useless, and miserable endeavors.
Hope, always. To aspire. To anticipate. To aim. That is the hope that steered the captain to defend the honor of his name with his life. Even if it meant falling down, aching his limbs, making a break to shield his friends. How… odd. How honorable. Diving for another’s sake. Not so vain now, is it?
Would it hurt to try?
Hope– it is the one thing he can offer, now that he has nothing more to lose. Over the horizon stands a warm welcome, something to make him whole again, all of it led by a simple boy clad in a golden orange and glowing green whose heart believes in the world.
How bold, he thinks. How beautiful.
Setting his soles ablaze, he takes his stance, steps once toward the sun, and marches twice forward into the future– Yuuka’s, and if he is forgiven, he may even have a journey to someday call his own.
If a little faith can do anything, perhaps Gouenji will allow himself to hope it will.
-
Run for your life.
Three in the afternoon. Go on. You were told. Asked, even, and Endou did it very nicely. A lowered head he showed, and now it’s your time you owe. The boy is well-practiced in saying ‘please,’ and his bows are presented with precision. Almost a pitiful thing to witness.
You clutch a torn page in one of your hands. Left, right– it doesn’t matter. There’s a message inscribed, a request from just this morning. He doesn’t write notes. You taught him how, which is why his handwriting looks like your own: like shit. Every stroke a bold scribble, written as though it were an unintelligible script of the ancient times.
PRACTICE 3PM AFTER SCHOOL!!! C U THERE
>:D ← btw this is my fav smiley face
:D 2nd best
:) kinda scary??? do u get it coz its threatening me and i dont like that
:3 ← i think this 1 looks like u
Anyways i cant wait!!! ihatechemistrysoboring ok sorry LETZ GO NEW MANAGER yayy
The pen– it really isn’t for him to wield. Better suited to his hands as a toy to play with. In any form, be it chalk or pencil, no. He wants to talk to you. It’s awful. But he’s trying. A three year old could best him with a crayon and some effort. But there he is, attention on his desk rather than on the teacher in front of him, focus aimed at paper and the essay he’s written on his love for his soccer. There he tries.
Note by note. That’s what counts.
That’s enough.
Love your lenience, was it? How much is too much, enough to become an addiction?
Three in the afternoon. You do not forget. You never do. It’s Endou. But you will tell yourself of the goodness of freedom later. Later, strictly.
Because fifteen minutes remain until four.
So you run for your life!
There’s a stark absence of uniform-clad boys running the center pitch in laps. All empty. When you come close to the door of the soccer club shed, you hear the chatter, see the light well. Through the bars you not so discreetly take a peek. There they are. The people. A team.
Barging is a bad thing, so you waltz in (with elegance!) like your own arrival is none of your business. It isn’t, you’d say, more akin to an irrelevant matter.
They stare, blinking and owlish. It’s the disheveled hair, isn’t it? Or the half-removed sweater thrown in a rush and lazily embracing your neck. Whatever it is, you give up the idea of a grand entrance for a mysterious latecomer and ensure your posture saves your dignity.
There are more people than you believed there would be united under Endou Mamoru’s rule. A large blue shirt hangs on the wall. Unused desks and chairs with bent backs litter the room. Boxes, tires, whiteboards. Lockers stand on one side. Not a single word is spoken. Eyes, eyes, eyes. So many different colors, so many different dreams. By now you have taken to the solidity of one crucifying gaze. Ten more will not hurt you.
“Endou, I’m…” you huff in between sparks of short breaths. The trinkets chained to your satchel dangle and chime with you. “I think I’m a little late.”
If forty-five is only a little– not that these busybodies would notice –is it? You would like to believe it is.
To your own surprise, he exclaims with an unexpected relief, “THANK the heavens!”
“Thank me, yeah.” But you do not know what there is for him to be this thankful for. Somehow, Endou is as shocked as you are. “What?” You tease, not certain of what else to do. “Think I’d ditch?”
“Because you’re here!” He answers immediately, his hands gesturing to you in frantic waves, his cheeks held high by the grin of his teeth. Glimmering. He almost shouts it. “You ACTUALLY came!”
You are here of your own whims. You are here and your presence is the bare minimum, a standard meeting the lowest of the bottom bars. Best of all, he’s relieved, even expressing it.
That… isn’t a good thing, is it?
“I did,” you say, though now you’re becoming unsure of yourself. You try to ease the beat of your heart into a steadier rhythm. Crack a joke. That’ll do the trick. “That’s a three hundred yen fee, by the way. For my presence.”
Try not to mind it. Ask another time. You look at your audience, a bunch you wouldn’t have thought you’d ever begin to talk to. Still in their uniforms, all in that ugly blue and yellow. They fit in a way discolored puzzle pieces do, somehow. Some, you recognize from the hallway. Others– you’ve never seen before. They might be younger than you. They’re the people who’ve blended in with the crowd, and starting now they’ll all have their own names. Seems you intruded on a strategic gathering, though it looks to you they’re nowhere near done.
You’ve barged in, so finish what you’ve begun. You’ll at least let them know what they’re dealing with. Regard them, be polite. Smile.
Then, a standard bow, your practiced thirty degrees, followed by a greeting you have told too much in recent times. You are a new person, here with new people in a new place, saying to them: “Hello, all. Thank you for having me.” Don’t forget.
Endou nudges you by the slant of your shoulder with a gloved hand. “Come on, introduce yourself, uh-huh?”
For the new you.
“Okay.” There you are, so take your theatrics with you. “Look up!” Through the gaps of the window you aim the tip of your pointer finger, eager to shoot your heart an introduction for the rest. The sky glows blue, the clouds afloat up where your freedom-loving soul resides.
Fine, then. Claim what will not forsake you. You are the azure of the heavens above, born of its solace and its sacrilege. You sing for the girl you were, tell her you’ll carry her legacy.
“That’s me!”
Say your name.
“Everyone, say hello to Asuka [Name]!” Endou points to you with the awe of an angler bragging about a winning catch.
“Bro,” someone starts, “I thought you meant you were, like, the fucking metal bars.”
There’s a slap to that guy’s head. “Don’t ruin the moment, dumbass.”
“What if it was a metaphor? Some life-is-hard-but-I’m-even-harder shit. Hell yeah.”
Well. Not that it isn’t a mindset you're already equipped with!
“The SKY. She meant the SKY.”
“The girl from the musical!” exclaims a student with ruby frames that dare to fall off her head. You are glad to see it is the only thing you are known for. Nothing else that you don’t know of. She takes your hand in hers with a thrilled shake, radiating enthusiasm when she says her name. “I’m Otonashi Haruna! I’m a manager, too. You’re a second-year, right? I hope we get along, Asuka-senpai!”
Her smile almost feels familiar. Like you’ve seen it on another face with different features, all distinct save for this. Rarer when it’s on him. You can’t put a precise finger to it. You don’t want to.
“Do you know that you have nice hair? Like, model-type hair? Salon poster hair?” You blurt, discard the previous idea, and blink yourself back to your senses. There’s another girl behind Otonashi– Kina Aki, your classmate. Or was it Kino? Either way, you’ve seen her with Endou often, but you have never spoken to her up close. Now you are here, and her beauty is humble. You fail to keep track of your prolonged staring. “She does, too. Wow.”
Awe-filled and awkward, you greet your classmate. “Hi. I had no idea you were a manager here. Endou should have told me sooner.”
“I wish he did. It’s so nice having more girls around.” Kino chuckled softly. “I thought you were in the theater club? I didn’t take you to be the type that’s interested in soccer.”
I’m not, you almost say, but you know even that isn’t true. So, “You watched our show?”
“I wish I did.” Another wish. In an apology, she smiles. “My friend from photography showed me some clips, though. You’re great at singing.”
You freeze, feel your face erupt into fire, but reply with a well mannered “thank you” faster than the inevitability of your mouth muttering an “I know.” It’s different hearing it from someone like her.
The people follow their captain’s lead, offer you some niceties, reflecting your kind regards. Endou continues to show you off as though you’re a jewel pulled straight from the sea. You are not a fish. The water wakes you. He does not know anything. You want to keep it that way.
But! Before you burn with shame from the echoing remnants of your admittedly sappy introduction, you convince yourself to expect a raise of loudened cheers, that they’ll come sooner or later. And you are wrong. They do not. Instead it dies down and emerging from the drought of sound, you hear the same person, haggard in voice yet doll-poised when you see.
Raimon Natsumi, again and again and again, always.
“Where were you?”
One slow turn. Face your death with courage.
“Hey, soulmate.” One slow gulp. “Important business, kinda.”
Needless to say, you are due a grim scolding. “Do not take advantage of Endou’s patience.” She eyes the trinkets on your bag. The newer ones you just won. “The arcade is not important business, Asuka.“
It was unavoidable. You don’t mind it, not at all. Instead you raise your cheeks even higher, smile it wider, let your eyes become little crescent moons just to make her feel the gist of being uncomfortable. “Why do you always know?”
She replies, “Why do you ask too many things?”
Endou jumps in glee as he hears this. “Okay, I see you’re buddies already, but come on, don’t be so mean… Asuka just got here, no?”
“Don’t be mean, indeed,” you over-enunciate as you cast a side glance to the girl you are next to, inclining yourself to her shoulder the way a cat would conquer its owner’s personal space. “Right, buddy?”
In return, a glare is what you receive. “Don’t start.”
You scan your surroundings again. A boy who sits in the corner does not pay you too much mind. You are not worthy of his interest, maybe. But he briefly catches yours; you think nothing of it, only that his knit hat, blue and pink in stripes, looks to have been made nicely, then worn to some degree of tear. He loves it, you note. Enough to see it weaken with use, loves it enough to see it through its end. Not soon, nowhere near his close tomorrows.
Yet some things, as you’ve found, are beyond broken because they are so loved. Was it like that for whoever had led you to this state of decay, no more than this vessel of a different girl? Was love why you have to assure yourself that your name is your own, not something belonging to a higher being, not a set of words spoken only as a warm precedent to a set of cold, grueling commands?
“ALRIGHT!” Endou abruptly starts, and all of a sudden, you are back to counting your numbers. One blink. Two breaths. Three beats. The rumble of the team comes back to you. You owe your thanks to that loud mouth of his and stop before you spiral.
He points at nobody in particular when he says, “Who doubted me when I said I’d get us one more member, huh?!”
That is what you are: one more member. A fraction of a quantity; part of a whole. But your leader is giddy, tells you and his club’s few members, uncaring or not, how happy he is as long as they’ve got the ears. Something you hope to believe is that here you will be one with others through bonds, not statistics.
That you are more than a mere number.
“That was totally Megane,” a member comments. Next there is a raise of hands, all of which have no hesitance. How loved their leader is!
“Peace, everyone— where’s the peace?!”
The student who said that– you think you saw him play as a defender. You’ve caught his name from one of the boys talking to him earlier. His name is Kabeyama. Dismiss the momentary unease that falls in your stomach. It’s Kabeyama. You thought you heard wrong.
“Another manager?” somebody asks.
Your pivot towards the source is crisp, curt, immediate. He didn’t play in the game you watched. Glasses, brown hair, posture of a person who’s afraid. That’s a nasty glare you’ve got. “Another benchwarmer?”
A gasp comes from one side. The atmosphere dims in an instant. All eyes turn to Kageno Jin, a student in your year, if you’re remembering that right. “My ward of evil speaks to me! I sense it! A deep, DARK energy is approaching us all…!”
You make a face, wildly unimpressed. “I think I’m very bright, thanks.”
“Hey, now, don’t complain!” Endou attempts to placate the others. “I said I’d get a player, but it looks like there’s a change of plans. Look on the bright side. Gouenji’s here, and we’re even stronger now with Someoka’s new technique too!”
“Damn right we are,” that same Someoka agrees.
From an outsider’s view, you’d think there’d be a maximum of five members to fill in what space the cramped shed has to offer, but there’s well over enough members to warrant the need for substitutes. Not bad. You sigh as you catch a few names: Kazemaru, Shourin, Kurimatsu, Shishido. Those are only four of the few you’d bothered to note down. Maybe you ought to take up the pen, bring a notebook with you, and make that the proof of your eagerness to learn. They might begin to like you then. If they haven’t already. They really should.
You’ll find out which of them are the least loyal soon enough.
These are who you'll be with. And you’re going to be here for a while. Just hope. Grasp it dearly. Pray to every god when you know each and every one of them hates to hear you speak.
“Hey, Captain.” You nudge the captain in question by his arm. His title sounds about right. Makes you think of pirates, flying fish, and the somberness of water. Ocean. The color blue, the hue of you. All of a sudden, you feel like doing something spontaneous. On the spot and out of the blue, you ask him, in front of everyone with you:
“When do you plan on winning?”
Not one soul is able to brave the front, because nobody in the room can bear to answer. No one daring enough.
But Natsumi’s gaze lands right on Endou’s figure. Waiting.
When you are done, you do not look at anyone for their approval. You’ve got a lot of nerve, but that’s okay. There exists the lone wolf you absolutely love to see, who rests in a corner and thinks he has the right to hog it for himself. Gouenji Shuuya resides in the periphery of your vision, ever the boy who keeps to himself, his shadow stretching far, his striking presence undeniable. Thinks he’s the shit, or whatever. He is. You are, too, so you sit yourself on the ground, less than a centimeter to his side. You wait for the captain to resume his duties. You wait for the announcements, for him to reveal his way of thinking through strategies that make no sense. Above all, he doesn’t have to do anything grand. One word, and they heed him anyway.
Then you crumble. You wonder if you will ever open up to this kind of crowd.
At some point, your ears have registered Endou’s ramblings as noise. You will apologize greatly to him for this. Later, you decide, later, and you look to your left, see one of the three who’d led you here.
“Gouenji,” you call. He turns his notice your way. That’s when you strike your worries for the world to see, “is it always like this?”
The rest are busy amidst their anxieties. You get it. There is a first for everything. The seconds and thirds are never free of the fear, either. They’ll get used to it someday. Gouenji, though, appears collected, confident. Used to this, even though he’s yet to truly belong here.
To him, perhaps this is but the same story. Just that it’s set in a different time and place. That’s all there is to it. You can only hope it’s a better one for him, the way others hope for you this life will be a better one than what you had from a distant yesterday.
Just like you.
“If my one day of attendance counts. I think you’re a little late, though. So.” He nods, says yes despite that, and he is straightforward as he states the future, plain and obvious.
“You’ll fit right in.”
Delighted to no end, you grimace. There’s a surfacing yawn you have to swallow, so under the bite of your sharpest fang, your tongue begins to bleed. Tastes awful. It’s all to keep you awake amidst this mess. Then, the moment’s lethargy nearly forces your ego to speak in your stead.
“Will they love me?” you ask. Only because you can’t help it. There’s always their love you need to gauge. Even when you don’t understand the need. More of an instinct than anything. Habit of the dead girl.
But that– he does not yet give you what you want to hear. Very Gouenji, if you’ve the right to judge, of him to do. It’s on purpose, most especially when he decides on this:
“See for yourself.”
He, too, will be with you for a while, you decide today. For how far gone the look in his eye always seems, you think he’ll stick around longer than most of them will. Warm flames keep people as placid as they can be. You’ve never seen anyone whose heart is this far from the sea.
Who are you to deny that sympathy?
“Thanks, Gouenji.” Minimal applause for the one who will be the least of your worries. “You’re the best.” It’s true. Your voice is devoid of anything. So vague, so helpful. So you slump into the corner next to where his shadow is firm, and attempt, albeit sadly, to do your best in remaining the humble being that you are eons from embodying. “Die.”
“Sure.” He lets out a low hum, not a single breath neither paying you any more of his attention nor implying an intent to reflect your useless malice. Raimon Natsumi and Endou Mamoru note you in tandem, yet say no word on whatever is going on between you and the boy you’re beside. Occult this, Occult that. Somewhere beyond the line of tomorrow lies the first of their enemies.
When are you ever wrong? Go on, see. Count with your broken fingers and fractured sight, let them tell you if you’re lying. This is the one thing you want to believe. The lot of them seem nice enough.
It’s going to be alright.
-
When the boys are out of sight, off to another round of practice, you take their absence as the chance to finally simmer in the rustic silence, gazing into nothing as you lie down on the sturdy floor, taking in the essence of today before it consumes you. From now on, what are you going to do with yourself? There is nobody who wants to answer for you, save for Ms. Tsuki and her support, though you have yet to take a liking to her and her blooming myriad of questions.
Your parents have been nudging you to visit her once more. You like to believe you are fine as you are, that you’ve no need to be fixed. Here you settle, blinking thrice at a time in an attempt to combat the sudden heaviness of keeping yourself conscious. One and two and three. There’s a stray, sleepy tear beneath your left eye. Only the left.
Though the door opening is an intrusion your ears cannot miss. “You must have nothing to do if you’re still here,” a voice comments. That elegant lilt of hers is something you’ve gotten accustomed to. Not that you mind. “Get back to work.”
“Hi, Raimon,” you greet, though you do not make any move to acknowledge her any more than that. You lie on the ground, glued to the great promise of quietude within the shack’s run down walls. “Sorry for being late.”
“That’s new.” When she’s sarcastic, to you, it sounds oddly sweet. And as per usual, accusatory. “Are you really?”
A yawn flies past your lips, so both of your hands jump to cover the lower half of your face as you tell her, albeit rising in pitch and quite muffled, “Nnho.”
She’s about to lean on the wall, but she catches herself when her back is but a millimeter off from the touch of the worn wood and immediately jolts away. It’s a strenuous sort of disgust, for sure, despite the fatigue you assume to have pushed her back. You appreciate the effort. It isn’t everyday you meet someone this petty.
Then arrives a sound you don’t seize by choice.
“Is Asuka-senpai in there?”
You catch on, infatuated by nothing less than hearing your own name. Still.
“I’m really not,” you say to Natsumi. “Tell her I died or something.”
She lowers herself to your level. Her hair could frame your face if it falls any further below. You do not make any effort to move a muscle. At each other, you gaze blankly. She turns her head to the direction of the door.
“She’s here, Otonashi!” Natsumi announces. Says it rather loudly, proudly, with all the intent to notify the former. She’s good at projecting. A girl like her would be better suited to standing on a stage.
Otonashi, too, because you can hear the cheer in her “Okay!” eons away. These are people who know how to be heard. They make good use of their voices from the small snippets you’ve witnessed within the designated club time. You’re a bit jealous. It took you years on end to even think of raising yours. You wonder how that ended, but here you are. No need to.
Steps rush in against the wooden floor. As you are persistent in your position, the reverberations tickle you with each one of your junior’s approaching steps.
Entering in a hurry, she calls out, “Asuka-senpai, I– huh?! What’re you doing?!”
Natsumi’s hands latch onto her own hips. “As you can see, your Asuka-senpai is a lazy bum. It’s a miracle we even got her to attend.”
Flatly, you gaze into nothing, and with a frown you say, “Your Raimon-senpai is so mean to me.”
“We need to, um, get you off the floor. Please don’t lie down there. It’s–” she looks at Natsumi and (presumably) tries to protect her words through an attempt at whispering, but it doesn’t work since her voice still reaches you, “–help?? What am I supposed to say?!”
“You say this,” the latter assumes a battle stance of crossed arms, raising her volume further when she talks. She clears her throat, on the offense. “Did you know the Beatmania IIDX machines in the nearest arcade are going to be discounted soon?”
“Of course I do!” Your legs propel you to rise from the ground, wide-eyed and reborn. You point at Natsumi with the most cynical stare you can manage. “What do YOU know about Bemani?!”
Otonashi jumps back from where you now stand, a confused smile growing on her lips. “That actually worked…?”
The disappointment on Natsumi grows. “It seems so.”
“Oh, right.” You forget you are being watched. Before you are killed by three sneezes, you pat the dust away from your clothes. Then you regard your junior, speaking with an absent mind. “Need something from me?” You begin to imagine your wallet being at peace with the glory of spending less for a stupid song clear. “‘Cause Asuka-senpai has important business to attend to.”
You think Natsumi desires your death with the way she looks at you, half-expecting her to chide the most pitiful aspects of your mannerisms. She does not, but you perceive the repulsion anyway, because the arcade is not important business, Asuka.
“Er…” Otonashi nervously begins. “Actually, Kino-senpai told me to get you ‘cause she wanted to show you the basics. Or something like that. Have you done this sort of stuff before?”
With a shake of your head, you tell her, “Only in games. Does that count?”
The student body president says dryly, “No. Why don’t you do some work in real life instead?”
That’s right. You are a manager. Your task is to manage all the meager things. You also forget you are duty-bound now.
-
With the most pious intent to pacify your rapidly souring mood, Otonashi beams, towels in hand, saying, “It’s okay, Senpai, I’m new to this too!”
Towels and bottles. Writing and whatnot. It was only a little work. It is only a little work, by the standards of most students. It should be only a little work. As it turns out to the surprise of no living soul, you find that you are not cut out for a little work.
In other words: you are incapable of fulfilling the bare minimum.
“Kino?”
“Yes?”
“You’re so cool.” If it has yet to be said, you must let the it echo to extend itself to the farthest corners of this stretched city: you hate work, you hate boys, and you would rather kill yourself than do such… strenous work for boys! “Since you’re so cool, you can tell me if Endou or any one of his cronies is holding you captive.”
“O-oh. Um. Don’t worry about me. I’m not being held hostage or anything!” So bewildered by your mannerisms, all she can do is hold eye contact with a shy chuckle with a denying wave of her hands.“I’ve actually been doing this for a while now.”
Prying as you are, your innate interest, which you cannot seem to quell as of late, reveals its winning question for you.
“Long enough to enjoy it?”
Kino’s glance flutters faraway. Curiously, as it might be worth following, you are met with the life you want to believe she has chosen for herself. You have realized well enough that it was not by force, by coercion, or the image of Endou pointing a pistol to her head. You decide Kino Aki, whose patience radiates from her like a glow, is deserving of much, much more than your feeble respect can offer, because:
One word from one content girl.
“Unfortunately.”
An unmistakable endearment in how her eyes take them in like gentle lights. You look away out of respect for her fortitude. You do not harbor the same love Kino holds for them, or the love they carry for the game.
One day, though. How will you fare on a day like this a winding distance ahead? Will it still be a day like this, where you are unknowing of anything but the love these people have for their world? Will you feel as they do; will you be a friend, then?
Kino leads you and Otonashi away from the sidelines of the team’s practice to perform another set of mundane tasks once more. When you refill their water bottles you don’t even bother to look at the liquid rising, gauging it by ear. It’s a successful tactic for the most part until you get bored of listening.
A thought hits. You were a slip from dropping the flask and all of its contents on the soil.
“I don’t think I’ve asked.” Because, you know, you were late by forty minutes on your first day. You digress. Tardiness matters not in the absence of context. “Who are we up against, anyway?”
“Occult Junior High!” Otonashi exclaims, eager to explain. “They’re like, super eccentric and weird. I think they threatened our school to play against them!”
Too eager for such grim words, if anything. “I can give you the club binder containing a whole load of general info.” Kino adds, “But if it’s the long-term you’re asking for, I think it’s Teikoku they want to ultimately win against. Endou even wrote a brief summary of how badly they crushed us last week.”
The mention startles you enough to loosen your grip. The bottle would have fallen had you not caught it within the lenience of a split second. The two you are with are too involved in their own work. Nobody takes notice of it.
“I wouldn’t say crushed,” Otonashi says. “Sure, it was a bunch of lost points, but holding them off for that long’s a crazy feat.”
“You’re right.” Kino sighs. “Teikoku was super tough, so everyone’s counting it as a small victory.”
Teikoku. Even when you think of it, all you are met with are blank files. Lost save slots. You can only mumble in a low, wistful tone: “So ambitious.”
Is it, though, if you can envision it to be true? If the leader’s patience and efforts might just guide his world to spread that far?
“I know,” your classmate agrees. Yet her voice is resolute– resigned to the chance of winning, all because of one boy’s whims. “But when has anything stopped Endou, anyway?”
You return to where the members are, tireless in their tries, dashing in soaked jerseys as they relish in their shining dreams. Try and they’ll triumph.
They really want to take Teikoku down. It’s a lot to believe. You don’t want to give it too much thought. You’ll begin to care when you need to. Maybe. Endou’s team is going towards whatever it is they’re looking for, starting small with these little steps. Occult Junior High is one of them? So be it. All you have to do is go with the flow. Let them take you wherever.
Remember, don’t strive too far this time. The sun is not what it seems.
-
Hours have come beyond the final bell. Today– yes. That’s right. Endou can deem it fruitful enough. Today, they are resilient, too. A few more until their first true victory. He’s certain of it. Expecting, even. Just wait, wait, and wait.
He finds that he runs towards Natsumi who lies in wait all the same.
His head turns in multiple directions like a spinning globe as he asks under a quiet breath, “Has she left?”
Her eyes scout their surroundings. When she’s done and satisfied enough, she replies with an audible caution, “The managers dragged her by the arm. Why must you sound so secretive? Also, I dislike this setting. It makes us look like we’re gossiping.”
“I mean, aren’t we?”
“We are not!”
Endou squashes a swelling chuckle and runs his mouth on a tangent before Natsumi can stop him.
“I still can’t believe she actually came,” he starts with unabashed wonder. “Not too long ago it was Gouenji– Gouenji! Since him joining as a forward sorta cancels it out, I don’t even care that you were kiiiinda wrong about bringing her in as a new player, but…” he trails off. “She used to play, didn’t she?” It should be clear to her now that he’s aiming for something. “Isn't it weird that she doesn’t… uh, want to play?”
He needs to find out. “I agree that it’s strange.” However, she doesn’t seem too keen on letting him. “But I told you. Don’t pry.”
“But isn’t that what you’re doing…?”
“It’s called research, Endou.” She clears her throat. “Onto the more important matters, you’ve gotten what you wanted, but you are aware that Teikoku has its eyes on you, right?”
“Uh. Right. Sure, they do.” The word “Teikoku" seems to pummel him back into a descent from the clouds. The thought of you does not cease clawing at his mind, and the fact you were once a member of the school he desperately wants to dethrone keeps gnawing at him. But, “So what? Are they already scared of a boy who blocked just one shot?”
“One is always the beginning,” she states. “Since Occult is your next target, it’s just one win, isn’t it?”
Counting is easy. Zero becomes one. One push turns it into two. Two is an effort. More of it and three will turn into a hundred, a thousand, a million reasons to move forward. In no time zero will have taken the shape of a realized dream, shifting into an ambition he’ll have achieved. He can’t wait.
“Mhm! We’re just getting started!” Then, he recalls he’s here for another purpose. “Oh, and thanks a lot for last time, by the way. He came to us on his own.”
“For your greed, you owe me.” Natsumi sighs. “Wanting two aces from not one, but two different teams?”
“And I have them now, thanks to you!”
“I doubt you would have wanted it any other way.”
“Yeah.” Endou nods, quieter now, pondering aloud. “There’s something wrong with them, I swear. Like, deeply wrong kind of wrong.” He can’t pinpoint it with precision, but it is there. “Don’t know what it is.”
“That’s your reason for choosing them, isn’t it?”
A triumphant glee. “Pretty much.”
“Then I’ve done you a good favor, Endou,” Natsumi huffs. “Don’t forget your promise.”
“Well, duh! I want you to be on my team for real, too!”
What… greed!
“I hope you know what you’re getting into, now that Asuka [Name] is on your team. Kageyama Reiji is a dangerous man. Put all of your focus into winning your next game, but be careful.”
“I know.”
“You don’t.”
“Okay, I get it!”
She doesn’t even look back, but the boy still waves goodbye. It’s the little things you’re willing to do for your friends. She gave him her word, so he’ll give her a victory. Friends, he thinks, will mean more than the world soon.
For now, he’ll wait. A good leader embodies what his team will be. He can hunger all he wants, but he’ll bite later.
Patience is a virtue.
-
In fairness to what your parents say, it has been a while.
“Ms. Tsuki!” The door flies leftward, moving to half-open as your head peeks through in greeting. You’d knocked seven times prior, just in case. “I haven’t seen you in like, a chapter and a half!”
Seated behind her desk, Ms. Tsuki’s back straightens slightly when you enter the room. The door returns to a close with a slow creak. She must think you’re doing it on purpose.
“I don’t think,” she starts with a questioning raise of a brow, “you’ve ever been this happy to be here.” The more you see her, the milder she gets. Something solemn about the darkened bags beneath the pupils carrying your blurred reflection. Sad, actually. “Are you doing well, Asuka?”
“No.” Sitting down, you prepare to perish. She’s chosen a new pillow to place atop the seat, but no amount of changing will fix how tacky the room is in your eyes. It is quite comfortable, though. “Just a bit more impulsive.”
Click. A sheet of paper settles under your restless fingers. Ms. Tsuki asks you, “Is that a good thing?”
“Never.”
“I see.” She does, for sure, by the look of resignation she always seems to own whenever you’re around. “Can you provide me with an example of something you recently did– an action you’d consider impulsive? Big, small, anything you can name.”
Anything you can name. Right in the middle of your recent memories, you could say you have one gleaming example.
“I…” But your words fade on your tongue before the notion can fall out of your head. You did something you never thought you’d do again. You knew you did it once, not how it came to happen. Not the experiences, neither the misery nor the mirth. You knew of the title you held, if only by a boy’s written words. Sentiment is unreliable, more so if it’s on paper, but sometimes the sentiment of a student who had seen the worst of you inside out before everything is all that you have. There are photographs in your home. In none of them did you ever lose. You were adored because of the existence of soccer. All you remember of it is the bed it buried you in for months on end. You don’t remember how you left it, only the way it left you.
You want to ask Ms. Tsuki why it is that you are always so wanted for the wrong things.
Yet you accept the existence of it. This is the most honesty she’ll ever get from you. “I joined a different club,” you mention. Confess, even “Kind of a big jump, isn’t it? From theater to sport– not that I’m complaining.”
Art to another art is all it is, you tell yourself. A jump of worlds. Nothing of the grueling sort.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t your academic year begin not too long ago?” Click of a pen. Leather thuds against the desk, low enough so as to not capture either of you from the growing conversation. A learned consideration, certainly from her years, that even moments this dull– she treats them as fragile. The ink hovers above the paper, and Ms. Tsuki slowly readies her hand to write in a notebook of her own. “Sports. You mentioned having a history with it. What made you come back? Were you unsatisfied during your time at the school’s theater club, then?”
It’s shameless– soccer –holding the audacity to come back to you, refusing to waver, relentless, adamant, as though it was a life you’d denied. Perhaps you did. When it presents itself back into the mundanity of your life, it’s almost as though it wants to deny you the belief that you are meaningful whether or not it is with you. Whether or not it is a part of you.
You are tied; you have tried. You thought it’d do you good to believe in the works of the wooden stage, but there are some strings you just… cannot let go of. They won’t let you.
Was it simply a matter of impulse? Maybe a matter of an issue she’d want to unveil, you know, to have even a word or two to let your parents know about your severed mind? Thirty seconds. She waits thirty seconds, forty, ‘til sixty as you remain unspeaking, but in truth, you are only feigning a lack of awareness. You know exactly what you’ve done.
“Asuka?” She asks. It doesn’t feel like a reminder, yet you’ll treat it like it is. Twice, you blink, followed by a drastic change of expression to show her you’re back to your senses. She observes.
“Not at all.” You have an answer. And you’re here, all smily. “I just think brown-haired goalkeepers are really cute.”
You could rake through the dead air that follows with your bare fingers, slash at it with your uncut nails, loosen it to its thinning.
“Well, I suppose it is typical for people in the early stages of their adolescence to do such things for… those reasons,” she resumes, yet you catch the drift in her speed– that slow-down of surprise. “You are a teenager, I suppose.” She might have expected a statement more profound. Your time is at stake, but now that you are here, you’d be glad to never make this easy for her. “But.”
You just don’t expect the return, either. “This may be a strange question, but do you have any memories or ideas of there being a brown-haired goalkeeper in your previous school, too? Somebody amongst your peers that you would have been in contact with.”
It’s a good question, since the vague portrait of a brown-haired boy in a different yellow blurs your vision. A goal is before you, the keeper someone taller but still within your reach. Tangible. A teammate. You scramble for a name but cannot give him one, the syllables on the tip of your tongue. His name is in there, somewhere in the cache of your brain. The hue of his hair mattered little to you in comparison to what marks outlined his rounder cheeks. He was pretty– this, for a reason you do not know, is a fact that remains with you. You focused further on the face you were against rather than the ball beneath your feet. You were younger here. Oblivious.
It was not a serious game, yet he defends with a gait of slight impatience and an itch to catch whatever you are willing to throw at him. You strike with grace and conviction because the keeper tells you to. Contrasts birth coordination. Obey what you are told. This was when you were meeker, smaller, still unsure.
You don’t want to remember.
“There was one.”
“What did you think of him? Do you remember having a positive or negative relationship?”
There are flashes of this same teammate running to you with a rough call of your name, its abruptness having been trained for that purpose alone. To cooperate. To win. You could not blame the glove for being worn to defend a dastardly hand. The string on his neck was sinister, but the boy was sturdy just the same.
Kidou hinted at it in one of his many messages; the second, to be precise: you desired to have that person’s tenacity as your own at some point. Not his presence, not the peculiar markings on his face, but the solidity he held in his senses. Even if they were not fully his.
“He was… firm with his beliefs,” you conclude. “I don’t know how. My–” Though you nearly make the mistake of blurting friend. No. Kidou Yuuto is not that kind of person, the last time you saw him. Much of the fondness he had in his letters stayed hidden beneath colored envelopes. You think he was grieving the girl he lost, then. Friend– he was, only to who you were, not who you are. “–er, someone,” you correct yourself, “told me I got into a fight with that goalkeeper once. Or twice? Said I forgot to stand up for myself both times.”
Click. “Forgot?”
What you thought back then is exactly what you say today: “Because he was too pretty to fight with.”
“What I’m taking out of this anecdote is that you have a subconscious attraction, platonic or whatnot, to brown-haired boys, but perhaps twice is simply mere coincidence. It may be too vague to draw a conclusion.” A hand presses against her chin. She seems to be deep in thought. You did not think she would take you this seriously. “If it’s alright, I’ll assume there are people of a similar description in your current school. Do they reflect similar characteristics such as a security in what they stand for?”
He had five letters in his name, too; Endou is different, though.
Warmer.
“Wait,” you deliberately announce out loud. You have to cut this short before she delves any deeper into uncovering experiences you doubt you can wholly claim to have seen, heard, lived through. “I just remembered…”
Ms. Tsuki’s eyes visibly begin to shine. Even now, she still holds hopes for you. You’d feel bad if not for the fact she’s getting paid.
Straightening your sitting posture, you bite back the coming yawn to save yourself from looking stupid and stretch your arms as far as you can manage. “I have responsibilities now!” You do not. You barely do anything in the soccer club, so you suppose you can at least be honest about it. “Like, I’m only going to stand there and be cute for motivation, but even that needs some kind of practice, okay?”
“Practice… how, exactly?”
“Alone.”
For the disgusting amounts of money your parents send her for these sessions, you’re giving her fewer tasks than what she originally had to do. You know the pain of labor now. Worse if it involves dealing with you, so you save her from the trouble and stand up from your seat. She ought to thank you.
“Don’t snitch.”
-
When they come, they are unrealistically brooding and awfully ritualistic.
Occult Junior High is exactly as they’re known for, topped by the dark atmosphere that dampens the field. So alike to what their name insinuates, it’s almost ridiculous.
So ridiculous you almost want to feel sorry.
You turn to one of the managers, mild animosity evident on your look. In a volume barely concealed that it seems you’d meant for almost anyone to catch your words, you lean into her ear and say, “Who let these losers take their Dungeons and Dragons campaign outside of their houses?”
“Asuka!” She exclaims, startled. You wonder if it’s by the abruptness of your proximity or the lack of shame in your voice. Perhaps both. She has to grip her notebook to avoid its fall on the ground. “Er… that’s not too nice. Please refrain from saying such inappropriate things.”
Someone visibly perks up at the mention of the board game. One scan of your peripheral. You think you remember his name. Megane, was it? Of course, you think, with a brief yet sneering grin which you force back into a frown. Of course. You will mend your bad impression of him later. But you dismiss his presence for now.
“Only weirdos can judge weirdos.” This bold exclamation is not aimed at any particular individual. You repeat. It is not. “I’m allowed to judge, okay?”
“I don’t think you’re a weirdo.”
“You’re funny, Kina.”
“...it’s Kino.”
…
It tickles your skin when you, in a great haste, scribble the kanji of her name down on your palm. It won’t happen again. You’ll say it right next time. To deny the existence of your embarrassment, you turn your tail around with a rushed elegance and place your target on the next best option: the one and only.
“Hey, Captain.” Striding to Endou next, you settle a kind hand on his shoulder, offering a much kinder word. “I don’t want your team to lose to that.”
You don’t know that the rate of his heart spikes. Beating and beating. Ready to win.
“Believe in me, okay?” Your hands are in his, but you notice the way he turns his head by the slightest degree to catch a glimpse of the rest. Now you are pleased to know that he is but a humble boy who will always look back to where he came from. “In us.”
It’s a gesture you’d like to gnaw on with your jagged teeth. All your might, too. That’s how sweet it is.
“Captain, you’re so corny. It’s just a practice match.” The boy with the well-loved and well-worn knitted hat interrupts. Matsuno. Max for short, if you got that right. Some others lag right behind him. You scan the checklist you’ve written in your head and attach names to each of their faces, grinning only a bit when you get it right. You’ve memorized at least seven. It’s a start, you suppose.
“Come here,” a member whines into the air like a child awaiting its mother. “We need your pep talk, please!”
And so, Endou rushes to their aid. Typical. “ALRIIIIGHT! Everybody, LISTEN UP!!!”
They do. Gladly.
Now that’s a team.
-
The recent rain has come to fade. Above, the clouds caress the afternoon gently, but soon enough they make way for the shine. Raimon’s game with Occult opens with a bang. In the outlying areas of the sizable audience stand two individuals who have no place here, royals among the rest. No one is aware of their presence.
All it takes is a singular eye’s keen flitting for them to be made aware of yours.
“Hey, Kidou,” one of the two nudges his friend, his celadon locks falling down his shoulder in his shock-induced hurry, “isn’t that…?”
Kidou does not know if he regrets allowing his eyes to follow; does not know how they did not see it sooner.
It must be a wraith conjured by the months he wishes you could have lived to see. Must be the seconds he contemplates on sewing a new you, must be the crying urge to listen to the only sane mind he’d ever known taking its revenge on him. He’d buried you so many yesterdays ago just so he could stomach the sour life he was about to lead.
They were here for Gouenji. Not this; not you.
It can’t be, yet you are there in the distance, sitting in the sidelines, sound asleep on some bench, recognized by Sakuma only because no one else in this school could ever dream to be as shameless as you are.
Asuka, always. Today you walk with someone new.
He sees you again. Hand heavy, you still hold what is left of him, having taken it with you the day your name disappeared from all the troubles he’d ventured with you.
“Don’t,” Kidou hisses, left hand rising on its own to clutch onto the bone of Sakuma’s wrist. He does not hold it with malice, just hard enough to stop his friend, who challenges him with a look of suspicion. “This is none of our business.”
He shakes his wrist out of Kidou’s grasp. “[Name] was one of us.” This is the first time in months that he hears it from a mouth not his own. [Name], Sakuma says. You ran by their side until your name was ripped from their roster. Your name is wrong in the voice of someone who did not understand. “Tell me how it can’t possibly be.”
Here it is, sewn to a different uniform. Here you are, tending to troubles in place of causing them. Reversed, unrecognizable, a person put back together in all the wrong ways.
“When?” he starts because he wants to put this to an end, “When did you decide that she was worth worrying for?”
A tongue clicks, its person glancing at him, peeved. “You weren’t her only friend, you know.”
How strange. He resigns to a silence, but his ruder forms of thoughts relent. It always felt like he was.
It was why you’d even done it.
To the shock of the world, Raimon lives. So do you. Such are few of the many miracles as of late. Once, you had asked which among the two of you was more loved by the gods. To you they wanted you dead. To him they did not exist. Then both of you answered neither. Now the world has proven you wrong, because only the two of you traitors know they’re real: your rebirth a betrayal to the old, his ties to Teikoku his trial.
“Asuka’s in Raimon, Kidou,” Sakuma sucks his teeth in frustration and points to the figure in the distance in disbelief. “Raimon!” There’s no mistaking it. The apathy in her gaze and the clip that crowns her can only mean one thing. “She can’t be just an ordinary student, ‘cause look! That’s their captain talking to her!”
Half-time began not too long ago. The boy’s name, as he found out a while back without much effort, is Endou Mamoru. A protector of sorts is what it entails, what it was written to mean. What Kidou couldn’t be for you.
It’s clear the boy has yet to understand, gently grasping onto his dreams instead. Fool. Someone with his story should be hungry. His team lags behind, but he sees them and how they’ve tried. Inch by inch he crawls, trailing after something Kidou thinks he can give a name to. He doesn’t; only if Endou dares.
Though Kidou can see it in him– what he himself used to be, what he himself could have been. Only that the boy is waiting. The day he gives chase won’t be far.
But he knows it well, enough to ignore what he sees. That you are yet to be new, still half-sewn and partially threaded. Because two is a tether. The sky and the shadow. Solely; still together, alive as one sinner.
You’re supposed to. Only now, you do not know your own story.
How many days to know who you have become without him?
“This is the first time anyone has seen her in months– this is the first time I’ve seen her at all. The last time I heard anything about her, it wasn’t even from Coach or– or anyone.”
Because, “It was from the news!”
Drowning girl. Teenager presumably dead. Body salvaged from ocean. Rising star sunken. Accident, accident, accident.
“Stop it,” Kidou warns, but he’s not too sure who it is between the two of them that he’s warning. “Being sentimental won’t help anyone.”
It’s wrong, but he has to ruin your legacy, never let anyone else get hurt enough to empathize. It just hurts to tell a friend to abandon what another one had to die for.
Sakuma’s voice is strained, telling of much he has tried to suppress, and the betraying smile he wears is a tired, pointed mockery of what he asks:
“Did you know?”
Order, command, do for you as he tells himself to: keep counting. Don’t stop. Never, never, if you do not want her dead.
The ordinance of it all has yet to truly settle in him. It’s laughable, yet day by day, your ink in their lives fades. Every mention of your name sinks its teeth into his chest, if there’s remnants of a heart anyway, thrashing, thrashing, thrashing against his caging ribs. You are there, tracing, tracing, tracing away at the segments of your own self, unknowing of how much you are overwritten by time. He had no other options. For your sake and his.
“No,” he confesses. If he were braver he would ask him why he couldn’t have shown this same level of concern for you, how you are, and where you are in the past; only if. Sakuma should see now that you are but the walking slivers of someone else. Kidou is an old tie that’s yet to cut itself apart from where it was thinly, unnoticeably seamed into your skin. For all the nights you have made them weary, not once would you ever know. “I never thought I would.”
He got used to it, somehow.
“Then you aren’t really friends now, are you?”
He did; it’s you.
-
As done by any other sound institute, Occult’s expectations for Raimon are obvious. They don’t believe they’ll win. Console them all you want. You’d be lying if you say you weren’t thinking the same.
You are half-awake, mind drifting to form disjointed kaleidoscopes of what you see when a foreign object settles atop your nose, forcing you to react and pinch whatever it is with your nails, catching and forming painful crescents in your skin in the process. You quickly realize it’s a mosquito when you find that blood stains the edges of your two fingers, but none of that is even relevant in the moment where yells of awe resonate as you catch sight of a Raimon player who spins with a flash of fire. The ghost of an azure maw soars behind him, the efforts of another teammate incarnate. His trajectory is up, rising impossibly, his passion concretized by the whirls of a forming blaze.
You do not want to miss this.
Number 11– no, Someoka –sends a thunderous shot roaring into the sky, alive in the high altitude. Number 10 does not wait for anyone’s signal when he begins. You abruptly stand, then, and when you do, he’s taken flight above his newly found friends, kicking with a newly found confidence. Gouenji is flying.
Then, he’s back on the ground. The whistle sings, as do the people, but the chorus of cheers is not for Occult Junior High.
Good for Endou and the rest, you suppose, breathing out a sigh of a relief you’d unconsciously restrained. Good enough.
You’d swell the same way, but there’s just one idea that prods at your consciousness. You regret the bothering run of your thoughts, really, as you would allow it to accompany you inside your open grave than admit to anyone how you’d told yourself at least once: Occult would have surrendered to you in your sleep.
You neither think this, nor do you assume. This is because you know.
-
Many have left, flocking away from their sudden fascination with a passing game between two teams. A half had left with their chins raised as the other fled the campus with tilted heads and wagging tails. The winning club went back to their timeless shed. You told Kino a fever would kill you if you do not reach your home in three, two, one. Now you idly tread the road that slumbers in wait with no flock of shoes to support and no cars driving down. It lies alone.
You don’t believe you are, though.
Hope for better things. Hope drops right down in your gut, the gulp you’ve swallowed dissolving into a feeling that everything is only going to get worse from here. As soon as you walk the roads, you see someone you’ve wanted to erase from the sky. You still see him sometimes, in the vacancy of your dreams and delusions. Just not in person. You left him and his beliefs, last time.
Your heart sinks. A feeling, you said. For better or worse, you are never wrong.
Malice meets you from above. His hair falls lower. Months have passed. You expected that it would be unavoidable, not that it would come to you this soon.
“You don’t look too thrilled to see me.”
You do not matter to him; he does not matter to you. It would not make sense, but your gut retaliates. The question arises up your throat like bile, forcing itself out of your body. “Are you here on his behalf?”
“Partially,” responds the man, his demeanor untelling, eerily calm. “Even he wonders why you lend yourself to the lowly.”
Twice has Kageyama Reiji formed the wrong words, a recurring feat alongside the self-rightenousness he does not bother to veil in your presence.
“Does he?” springs your question. His willingness to speak in his stead makes your stomach churn. Your instinct tells you to declare it as a wrong thing. You do not know if Kidou Yuuto would wonder it or not, if this man is confident in knowing Kidou more than you do now. Inside-out, including the inner workings of his mind. You do not know him at all, yet something tells you to deny any who dare decide his being for him. “Would he dare?”
Does he even know where you have gone?
“An ambitious one, that boy.” When you first awoke from your slumber, your sense of humility had diluted, but the figure you are against remains a shadow of no shame. “Without you he is better.”
He is exactly the person the boy he mentions has told you about. You have never met anyone who is not rectified by reality. Whose assumptions of another could not be any farther from the truth.
“I’m sure,” is your reply. His teeth glint in a vicious grin, shielding the doer of sin from your sight. You dislike that his voice reeks of a restful vigor, but you remember: to sever a tongue is simple. Scissors, knife, saw. One, two, three ways to win. “Without you I am better, too.”
With the thumping bud of contempt grows steadily, fed towards an astounding fullness the longer you hold yourself together as your conversation with him flows.
“Oh, you mistake my intentions. I’ve always taught you to be generous, haven’t I? But this–” he gestures to the building behind the gate of your school where its very emblem is boldly embedded, “You do not want this for yourself.” He talks to you as if he equates you to a child whose way home is overcast by fog. In those unclouded eyes of his, where he certainly sees a better trail for your wandering feet to trudge, you are seen as the lost being. Lesser. The familiarity of this encounter slithers around your limbs. You hate that he is so sure of what you would not want for yourself, or as he says, “For anyone.”
You do, because you will embody the generosity you were given. You’ve come to terms with it. You have died once, let the crashing waves remind you of your faults which you can no longer recall. Your failures.
Most of all, your future.
How real it is; how it exists. How beyond everything, there still exists a sky to gaze upon, look into, and live in.
You are free now, alive again. Again, you cannot believe, but you breathe in the air of a new day nonetheless. You’ve sunken, seen the worst of your days. The perils in your past– they are the proof of your existence. That despite all the bad that you cannot remember but can feel scraped into your bones, you are still here. You do not know how you died, but you know what it means to have died, be treated as though there is so much you have lost when you yourself don’t have the slightest idea of what any of it is. It is better you do not know. You have gone through it all; you have known the flight once, know it less than you know life after the fall. But you live. Now the sunrise is yours to reap.
So what is there to stop you?
Again. One more chance. The world won’t take no for an answer. What else is there to do other than to do it; what’s there to lose now that you’ve known what it means to die?
So sentence yourself to another life.
Malice or love. Face him straight, hold yourself high, fight him head on.
“Let Kidou know: I will be happy here.”
His lips twist into a sneer. Condescending. Something tells you that although you are standing taller, he will still refuse to take you seriously. To him, you’ve no doubt any longer that you are small. Soundless. Afraid.
“If that is what you have chosen to believe,” he starts, the lie in his whimsy a pierce to your throat when he finishes, “Then be free to live your lesser life.”
Devour the blade. Grip your grievances. If a game is all that you are, then you hear him, ignore his words well. Truths are the few things you can’t handle– bliss, you can, though.
Reality has denied you once— caught you alive and declared it a wrong thing. Thus, a truth-teller is something you cannot be. Eye for an eye, they say. You’re only going by the world’s laws this time.
“Do not forget, child, I know it will do you well to receive yet another word of advice.” Child. How sick you are. Thus comes your second sentence. When will he rid you of that name? Child, curious, chosen. Like you are something to raise up to the savage sky, both the star and the sacrifice. “Take this as a reminder.” Again, he promises, bladepoint to your iris. One push is all it takes. You’re beginning to believe you are never free from this. Always, in his presence, you are bound to bleed.
“I am always with you.”
You are tethered to him in that way. With him. Like him. Part of him, as he could be a part of you. What if he was the water, the very flow invading your life’s stream, diluting it with the dullness you are so disgusted by? If he is your breath’s thief; all the world’s strife and envy made flesh in one body, your killer?
Then, you think, you’d have no greater desire now than to someday see him dead. But breathe now; you are not submerged. You step on stone instead of sand. Save your prayers for something to look forward to– a good thing, and by the grace of the name you are granted the possession of once more, do not let your hope rot to waste.
Do not kill it in spite of him.
First the sky, second the self. When he is with you, he cannot hide how badly he loves his words. Hear it, ignore it well. A life you want, a life you’ll have to work for. You do not remember, but you do not forget. Never. Asuka [Name] is what you’ll respond to. Nothing else. Not child. Nothing less. You have one name and one name alone.
Live; sing of your own volition.
Head to toe, tooth and nail, Kageyama embodies the sole thing he taught you to be.
Your truth this time: you say as you denounce him, “Liar.”
We all have our addictions.
a/n: hello. Inhale Exhale. congrats for finishing this 16k chapter ... as your reward here is the Beast of an end note from the ao3 version because Again. it is So funny to me
Inazuma is quite the nosy town. The people in it do sing, some knowing things they shouldn't. Persistence, here, is rampant like a disease. You learn this the hard way.
fic masterlist <-
chapter warnings: flashbacks, endou is silly, the texting scenes are formatted awfully on tumblr i suggest reading this on ao3
word count: 8.6k (and it gets longer from here... Apologies)
a/n: formatting issues aside. pretty much everybody gets screentime yaay
Star,
Don’t reply, and forgive my handwriting.
I do not address you by name. Star? Is that what he always calls you? I know you hate it. Sorry. But I think if I use your name he will catch a glimpse and every word I write will be thrown into a fire, and you will never learn what has been happening lately. Don’t tell me I’m paranoid. I know I am. If only you had a phone, though even then, I think he’d find a way.
I thought you were dead. You don’t know the extent of how thankful I am that you aren’t. There are words that are forming in my head— because you like it when I get sentimental —and currently I’m trying to pick out the ones you would want to read, so: I hope you are well, wherever you are. If you are at home or in a hospital, he doesn’t know, either. He hasn’t come to see you yet, has he? It’d be best if he didn’t. For three days I’d been hoping to visit; They——————- I’ve asked, but both Mr. and Mrs. Asuka are dead set on keeping you to themselves. I don’t blame them for it, but I will still try.
At first the homeroom teacher didn’t like writing your name on the absentees’ list on the daily, but she stopped talking when two weeks had passed. Are you aware of the homework you’ve missed? When it began to pile on your desk she gave it all to me. Now they sit in the corner of my room because I can’t give them to you if I don’t know where you’re being kept. Are you at home? At a hospital? Somewhere else? Do you know how much time has passed? Nevermind. I think I ask a lot. I’m sorry.
I think I’m the only one who wonders when you will return. When I write this down it sounds surreal that we have become used to it. We were all worried. I still am. Like always, the club continues to have meetings. We practice, run, strategize. Genda tells me it’s better to keep moving. He and Sakuma are the same. Even Domon has stopped asking, despite his jokes on being your twin. Everybody acts as if all is well and normal. Is it? I don’t know if He’s telling them to be quiet or if h———————. I’m sorry. I think he’s still waiting for you, though, so I might not be alone in that regard.
Wrong? Is that how it all feels? I understand that the world will spin. That much is obvious to anybody. Yet in the days I did not hear about you some part of me thought it was the end.
(Sorry. Ignore the errors. It is dark and I’m rushing and I’ll write more cleanly in the next.)
Kidou
-
UNTIL THE second he stopped Kidou Yuuto’s shot, Endou Mamoru was a nobody. No one had seen his name as a good thing until then. You know who he is, think him a tad too ambitious, putting up posters and pleading to anybody who didn’t necessarily have the capacity to listen yet had the ears. They called his efforts useless. But you were there to see the ball fly from afar, there to see it falter in his hands. He caught something that could kill. It wasn’t something that trivial people– that nobodies can do. With your own eyes you were a witness. To see is to believe.
“He’s stupid.” Raimon Natsumi once said, in her meager attempt to make you understand. “Even worse, he loves soccer.”
You have no idea why she’s so keen on putting you in their signature yellow jersey. You find the blue tacky for your tastes. You think you understand– she’s got a list of what you’ve done, the scores you used to bring. Yet you’re appalled at how she got to the point she was willing to speak on Endou Mamoru’s behalf, that outcast full of endeavors. She argued for him, yet that did nothing to improve the image of a deranged boy in your head. Then again, he didn’t exist, not at all.
Until you realized he sat in the seat next to yours.
“I love soccer, too,” you declare out of the blue, the so-called love more blatant than anything. You make sure to sound enthusiastic. Very excited about the word soccer. Act and act. He’s a goalie– you don’t forget that. It isn’t often you come across someone so stubborn. You wonder how he will stand for its sake. Why he thinks it’s worth fighting for.
You turn to see him only to notice how the lone star clipped to your hair is not the only one his eyes reflect when your gazes meet. There are many, many more, among his every hope and dream. The boy lays himself and his wishes bare to the world. Something like that takes much courage.
“Sweet!” He nearly jumps out of his seat. “You do?”
There are many in there, you realize. Far too many to count, far too hopeful. Here the gods give you somebody to deceive. You’re thirteen, no better than your peers. Of course you make fun of him.
“No, I don’t.”
He deflates visibly. “You don’t?”
“I do,” you say.
“That makes no sense!” he exclaims. And this must be the end of it, since by then you assumed he’d be done talking to you, go on his merry way. He doesn’t. “But it does!”
“How so?”
“I think I get it. Sometimes you hate it, sometimes you love it, isn’t that right? That’s what you mean? Sorry, I’m no good with riddles. That’s a nice way to put it, though, since the same can go with pretty much everything else in life.”
Tough talks. Not what you’d expected from Endou. He is quite in touch with the real world, after all. As ambitious as he is.
“…sure,” you find yourself agreeing. At a loss for words yourself, you can do nothing but nod with reluctance. One slow nod, to make sure his attention’s still on you. “Real nice way.”
“So how do you feel about it, right now? Love it? Hate it? Depending on your answer I might ask you to join!”
How does one misinterpret you to this degree? Is he delusional?
“I don’t care about it,” you state. “But I do think you’re cute.”
“HUH?” He exclaims it, loud, garnering the attention of the few students littered around the classroom in their cliques. You two aren’t the only people in the world. He forgets that.
“I said,” you start again, “I do think you’re cool.”
“Oh. Oh,” he stammers on what he says, but he attempts to play it off. “Um, okay. I heard wrong.” He heard it perfectly, yet he still puts his trust in what nonsense you say. “That’s cool, too. So, if you do play soccer, can you maybe…?”
You mess with him and he says sorry. How it hurts your feeble conscience.
“You should think I’m lying.”
“But she said you watched the match,” he mentions with misplaced confidence, “That’s all it takes for me to believe you.”
You stop. Raimon Natsumi told him. So he does know who you are.
It goes on for a number of days too many for a sane mind, all within a week. He barrages you with his morning greetings, bothers you during class, and as intrigued as you are you think him a nuisance. But you answer anyway. The teachers likely want him in a ditch. You too, for allowing them to listen to his barely lowered whispers during class. Every now and then your tongue twists to forge another tale, all done to entertain him. What stumps you is how he never bothers to ask, “Really?” after. That he has no suspicious bone under his thick skin.
There are stories on dark alleyway fights and serene beach errands, each told in great detail. Some on soccer, but you don’t elaborate after eleven words. Sometimes they get too vivid. Too real. For all you know, they could be true. So you shut up about the sport and try to craft something you’re certain never happened.
People have sworn on their fingers they’re telling the truth when they speak of a tall boy who appears in town, swearing himself you’ve got the same name. Contrary to popular belief, you do not have a brother. Nowadays it’s as though everyone knows everything about you. But Endou Mamoru doesn’t— he’s the type of boy who thinks you aren’t an only child. That’s exactly what makes him so fun to bother. In between your every lie all he does is ask you for more.
“I want you on my team,” he blurts out in one of those days. “Please! You HAVE to hear me out. You can have any number you like.” After you curiously eye him, he feels compelled to add, “Even if it’s sixty-nine.”
“Don’t tempt me.” You lean your head into your own palm, your elbow propped up on the desk.
When you tell him, “It will rain,” Endou doesn’t question you. That kind of blind faith will kill him one of these days. A little dose of it never hurts, though, if all he cares for is what lies on the bright side.
“Say, what do you know?” You ask, just to see the gist. It’s about yourself. Maybe he’ll take the hint and tell you what he’s heard.
Endou scratches his head. You are not getting anything out of this.
“Erm… About soccer? What, do you mean hissatsus? I’ve got God Hand, among many things!”
God Hand. Yes. Soccer contains much sacrilege. You don’t care, really, but you keep talking, if only to continue the conversation. That’s what you’re convinced you’re doing. “Among what things?”
“Many things! Um, there’s… okay, there’s nothing.” A frown emerges. That way you know he is honest, how someone as simple as he is can’t bear to do even that. “I lied,” he quickly admits. “I’m sorry. Please join, though.”
He’s nice, this boy; that’s why you spare him with a truth, as real as it gets: “I don’t play soccer.”
It’s the right thing to say, because it is the one thing you are certain of your present self. You hope.
“Aw, man.” It’s an immaculate grimace settled on his features, curved downward to show the great extent of his misery. Pity might swell in your gut, only if it weren’t so funny. He looks at you with hurt, clenching his fist to where his heart lay, then at the clear skies outside the closed windows. “Damn! I was lied to, then?”
You are being lied to right now, you think. Raimon Natsumi was right. He is, without a doubt, stupid.
“Ms. President is dangerous, I’d know,” you murmur. You think of the lady, her nose high and her sights set higher. She thought she could stalk you and get away with it just because she watched you sing. Better yet, you let her. “Never trust the pretty faces.”
“What? So I shouldn’t trust you?”
A pause. Something in your brain buffers, a split-second glitch in the cogwork of your mind.
Your hand lifts to still before your face. You make sure to do it with elegance. Behind the back of your hand, your palm faces a barely hidden, but surely growing grin. “What’s the saying? Flattery won’t get you far?” That’s not true. Nothing you ever hear really is. Your favor flows anywhere, swayed in every direction by almost anything that pleases you. This is one of them. You like being told you are pretty. You are only a girl, after all. Then your eyes crinkle as you muse, “On second thought, it might. What’s your name again?”
He returns a similar smile, to your surprise, one that strikes you with just as much elation, flashing you with the face of someone who knows he’s won. So he knew what that would do, said it anyway. Or he gambled on how easy you are to sway. Either way, he didn’t even hesitate. Part of you commends it. The sly never fail to go far.
“Endou,” he answers, the spike of zeal in his voice evident. Two syllables pronounced so slowly, intricately and full of pride, enough for you to figure he must love his name, where he comes from, the role he was given from birth. “Endou Mamoru.”
Once, as somebody had told you: the brave are the best people. He wouldn’t know it– for each of his daring words, he was too anxious to act on any of them– but Endou Mamoru might. You saw what Kidou was capable of outside his letters at last, and after that you were also a witness to what Endou could do in response. It was only a brief exchange, though winners recognize fellow winners, and Kidou left that day without reducing Raimon Academy into rubble.
What was that, if not an act of acknowledgment?
With the theatrics of a member from your club, he points at himself, declares, “That’s me! You better remember, because—”
Again your thoughts whisper once more, as though to digest who he is. Endou Mamoru. It fits. A simple name for a simple boy with a simple duty: to protect the end.
You puzzle his words together in his stead. “Because you’re going to win the Football Frontier.”
He pauses. Takes in what you’ve said. In a flash the legs of his chair follow as he leans himself forward, takes your hands, and you’re a bit startled yet you do nothing to stop him from shaking them in his sudden burst of excitement. How could you? In that moment he was so bright. Endou presses your palms against his own. They are rough, you feel, iron hands marred with more errors than trials. Scratches and scars.
He has known a lot of pain.
“Do you mean that?” he asks. This is where the world promises you this boy– Endou Mamoru –is full of dreams.
“If you can stop an Emperor Penguin, sure,” you mention without much thought. Mindlessly, whether or not it’s knowledge you hold dear. “There will be lots of variants.” You aren’t sure why you sigh, don’t know if what comes out of your mouth is nonsense or not. To keep yourself awake you say it anyway. “I think the first was the worst.”
You’ve no idea if there’s a second, if it will even come to exist. You don’t know what an Emperor Penguin is, either. All you know is you hold no authority over the words that fly away from you. That they aren’t yours, but they are.
“Ohhh…” He nods like he understands, a new vigor to win in his voice. “Alright, noted! So like, what do I have to do to– hold on. Hold on. What?” Endou blinks, stopping in his tracks to meet you in the eye. When it dawns on him, he raises a brow, newly skeptical. He looks at you incredulously. Everyone does that a lot these days. “I thought you didn’t play?”
“Ah.” You face him now, blank in expression and thought. So deeply you want to look as if you were mild, less visible than the vapor in the air and miles better than a mere fraud. But alas: you tell the truth or you don’t.
A tilt of your head, sheepish this time. And nevertheless, you are not ashamed. “Slip of the tongue?”
Despite your tedious lies and meaningless ramblings, he looks like he’s dying to ask a hundred things, but the homeroom teacher enters the classroom before he’s allowed to make a single sound. It’s only a little, but it doesn’t stop you from feeling bad. He doesn’t know any better, yet you know to yourself a truth the world itself is certain of: neither do you.
Science class begins not long after the hunched teacher leaves, and soon your head is emptied further by the dragging talks of carbon. Endou’s gaze is heavy upon your skin, the earlier press of his fingers on your own more tangible than the weight of the passing time; you pay him no mind. You try your best. The cat-shaped clouds darken, and tears do fall from the sky. It’s strange to be living on lucky guesses— these well-timed coincidences, when you’re aware they might never happen again. Guesses don’t change anything.
Unless they’re right.
Your drifting mind halts at a face you last saw in a white room, where the walls were dull and the air a murdering dead. Is he training right now? Is he in class, is his city under an awkward rain as well?
A minute withers into the passing hour. Everything has gone so quickly, and you’re curious if he’s keeping up. Minute per minute. You wonder what Kidou Yuuto is up to.
-
Somebody grips you on the shoulder where you expect it most to happen: in a secluded area, darkened by the concerning lack of proper light bulbs; where you are free from the eye of the student body, where screams are shut and bruises are born.
That’s a lie. The faulty wiring isn’t all too unbearable. Nobody gets beaten up in Raimon Academy. Especially not when you’ve got Raimon Natsumi openly spying on you and your every move.
Before you even look behind, you already know who it is.
You place your own palm atop her hand, clasping it gently. You make no move to pry it off your shoulder.
An amused groan. “Do you do this often?”
“Only with special cases,” Raimon Natsumi responds, might be to cater to your ever-present ego that everybody loves using against you. Her hand retracts back to her side, as though elegantly reclaiming it from your grasp, like it was never there to begin with. “Have you talked to him?”
Him, of course, him– that boy, your seatmate. Tousled brown hair underneath that obnoxiously orange headband. The goalkeeper, the dreamer. The one and only.
“Yes,” you answer. “And you’re right. He’s stupid.”
“He may be,” she begins, “but he’s brave. Now do you see what I’ve been trying to tell you?”
“I do. I do!” You say it twice with a nod for emphasis. You see exactly that, and you are sure of two things; first, it’s painfully obvious how the boy is a person of great interest, and the second being: “You think too highly of me.”
“How humble.” She smirks. “Then again, at least you know what you’re worth.”
A little laugh leaves you as the corners of your lips turn up. You have never had anybody confront you this way. You are broken, perhaps. You are unwilling; these she nudges to you like knives, only centimeters off from drawing blood. You come closer. It isn’t a threat, though she might as well think it to be when your presence looms over her with as much effort as it takes you to breathe. Your voice is gentle enough. It is.
If you want to lure her away, you might as well. “Think you can do better, Raimon?”
As expected, her composure is nowhere near to faltering. Not even close. Coolly, as if to shut you up, she retorts immediately, “I already am.”
“How?” you provoke. There’s only one thing stingy student council presidents do if their chosen weapon’s the pen. “By signing papers?”
“By giving them an opportunity.” You do not mistake the smile on Natsumi’s face as forgiveness. “Who do you think allowed that match with Teikoku to even occur? Who arranged it, who continues to do so?” You are acutely aware of the scheming glint you see. “How? By helping them grow, Asuka. You can do that, too.”
Do what? Signing papers? Is what you’d ask, but you sense the finality in her conviction. Her deeds need no questioning. You can do more than sitting idly. She knows it, too. You know exactly what she asks for.
“I haven’t run in a long while.” A few months is long enough to lose your edge. If you try, the growing rust smudged on you will be evident. Every crack and tear. All the wrong threads. All the wrong things. There is no good in anyone seeing how vulnerable a girl could be. Thirteen weeks– of course you remember. The hospital would know it best. “I’d rather not.”
“What does it matter if you haven’t in five months? Have you seen those freaks?” You have, actually. She adds, “Some of them have had two years on that excuse of a team, and half of them can’t even kick a ball for their lives!”
Two years. What could you do in two years? What were you doing two years ago? There was soccer, yes, yet the rest of that you have no idea. You’re sure you could catch an entire shiny Pokedex within the span of two years, though. Or three shiny Pokedexes. The thought excites you.
“Sounds like a lot of wasted time,” you say, knowing well you’d waste the same amount willingly. You fly adrift in a landscape of pink Magcargos and Slugmas coated in mercury.
You forget you are conversing with a schoolmate of high authority. Her jagged voice brings you back down.
“I know, right?” Unexpectedly, it is soft, hopeful, and for once she’s agreeing with you. Worn out by the heaviness of her work, and you wonder how present it is in the heavings breathed out across the campus in a rush. “Do you get it now? You are capable of many things. Many things more than being a flop for two years. Would it really kill you to give it a shot?”
She should give the club some credit, in all honesty. They stood their ground on failure after failure, loss atop another loss. Now that you think about it, how hardworking they are! Were it you in their shoes, you’d be found in tears!
Pressing your knuckles together, they crack. You are pleased at the sound of several pops. Natsumi watches intently. You might have to get used to this: being observed behind a wall of glass. Acting in her favor.
She already has Endou. And Gouenji, you suppose. How will you be of use to any of her plans? The two of them are forces on their own. All that she needs is right there. The spirit of revolt resides in them, and you have seen them house it well within their minds and bodies. One point. To Raimon Academy it may mean everything.
Things are expected of you. By the theater club, by Raimon Natsumi. Maybe by Endou Mamoru. Maybe not.
“I don’t think I can give you what you’re looking for.” Unless soccer is what’ll tell the right story, you say: not right now, anyways. Not while you’ve a life you’ve left to know, the body of a dead girl with your name to understand.
But you are not even a body in her midst. Oddly, her vision lies straight ahead, set farther than where you are. Higher. Like she sees right through you. Unyielding, she insists, “Someone hurt you. Is that why?”
The people are rather perceptive in Inazuma Town, you note. Was it someone? Something, maybe?
“Believe me.” You finally sigh, slouching in resignation. “Even I wouldn’t know.”
She gives you a face that tells you she isn’t satisfied. You know you’ve done something wrong. But you do not need to be forgiven. Next, you remind yourself before guilt sits heavy in your gut, you are not obligated to give her any part of you. You have such a scattered self that you don’t even know where to begin if you want to look.
“Let us discuss this later.” It almost sounds like a command. You almost obey, if not for all these reasons. “Come to me when you’re ready.”
Whenever that will be.
-
The Steel Tower Plaza is not as pleasant as you hoped it would be. On the bent arm of a tree, a black tire hangs by the tail of a rope. You look down and search the ground in hopes of better sights. Then you see the blood. Behind it all is a sunset ruined by this: everywhere else there are remnants of a reckless fool. Already you know who it belongs to. You set your sights up, again, where he should be, though you are met face to face with a darker gaze belonging to a different boy.
Endou Mamoru is not here. But Gouenji Shuuya is.
“Hi, classmate,” you greet with a small, casual wave. He’s leaning against the railing, both feet planted on the pavement, ears perking up before you even speak, the moment he hears you arrive. Probably due to the rustling of the keychains stuck to your bag. You do your best to disregard the tell-tales of his brooding stance. In school you’re roughly a few seats apart, but you never fail to feel his presence. Though at the moment, he’s eyeing you only, as if waiting for you to state your business. Silent, as always. Perhaps it’s as docile as he’ll ever be.
“I saw the game against Teikoku,” you start. You realize you mention this rather late. “I didn’t know you played soccer.”
In your humble defense, you are not lying. You didn’t know. Really didn’t. Of course, you heard Endou bother him on the daily before the fateful game, and you dread that now you are next. It looks like it, too. You ought to do something before that happens. In Gouenji’s case the only thing that worked in shutting Endou up was to join.
Maybe this was a sign. Who knows.
Gouenji hums in query, as though he were perplexed by what you’d said, that he’d heard it come from you. He doesn’t prod further. Only responds with: “For a while, I didn’t.”
“As did I,” you admit. You don’t know why you do; to him, of everybody you’ve met thus far. “I still don’t.”
The question arrives so fast. “Why don’t you?”
You don’t believe that he asks. He never seemed too keen on keeping conversation, to say more than two syllables at a time. Not even right now. You mull it over. Ponder it again and again. It’s almost everyday that you are asked this. Just didn’t expect it to be Gouenji, of everyone.
Why don’t you? Only nothing you know. Only everything. But you don’t tell him that, he does not need to hear it. You are not friends, you don’t know if you will ever be. Though you are intrigued, enough for you to try to take up this portion of his day’s time.
He says, “It… It would not hurt. To try, I mean.”
This will decide something, you think. You apologize within your head that he has to be the one to unknowingly bear all of this. You can only hope he chooses his words carefully.
“Why?” In other words: tell me the truth you follow.
He does. You don’t expect anything less. It is Gouenji, after all. Far more things to expect of him than there are with his new leader. The one he chose.
“There is… joy to be found in soccer.” Now he looks so solemn, like he knows it is something he can believe. “Endou was trying to tell me that, I think.”
Joy? What kind of joy will it be in his case? Who is telling him what? Who is he listening to?
“Endou,” you repeat the name of the same boy who plans to etch it above the clouds. Endou, again. Endou, as always. It always comes back to him. And like always, your curiosity demands itself sated with something real.
So, you ask Gouenji: “Was he wrong?”
“If I’m being honest, I don’t know yet.” That is his answer. You are led to believe that’s it. He doesn’t know more than you do, there is nothing left to be said, and you fall into a calm absence of any sounds as the clouds watch and the leaves are rustled by the soft wind.
But he follows it up soon after: “Though is that not the point of trying to find out?”
The breeze touches you both. You are clad in your uniforms, in this second looking like students who are not kept behind barriers and are not more than that. Just students. Just kids.
He seeks answers, the way you do. So that’s it. He is as simple as you thought he would be. You wonder why you are relieved. “Maybe.”
Perhaps he is right.
“I’m as new as you are, and I don’t know much, but I do know they’re going to play,” he says. Though he hears the they, catches himself, and repeats it again. Now, this time, with the right words: “We are.”
Because he is one of them now. You can be, too.
Gouenji doesn’t appear to be as foolish as Endou makes himself to be. Colder, farther, within him more shadows than stars, or so it seems. Yet before you is the first time you hear him speak as much. Under the setting sun, he stands beneath the deceptively red sky as no more than another one of those drawn in by Endou Mamoru’s shine.
One second is what you’re given. You catch it then, the hint of happiness, that rapid flash of glee– then, as you look at him again, it is gone in as fleeting as a blink. Solemn again. Your eyes were dry then, but you know what you saw. Against your vision’s tendency to lie in recent times, to see is to believe. There it is– the gentle spark to a raging flame.
Was that a smile?
-
It happens, you knew it would. The world always follows your whims.
For three days a cold precipitation befell Inazuma Town. By the afternoon’s arrival the light drizzle is dearly missed by no one. Especially not by Endou Mamoru who immediately sets for the field, his impatience hauling him to where his growing club stands.
The second the bell rings, he dashes from the classroom, and you watch him go from where he was as close as next to you, until he becomes a numbered jersey on the field far off. Behind Endou is Gouenji Shuuya who follows, posture high, the boy whose vision is bound to reach somewhere higher. Similar to a different pair of eyes that you know– the ones that watch.
You were folding a paper plane when you heard them talk of an upcoming game, then the topic shifted into something about a new manager who’s good at talking or stalking. Or both? You wonder who that could possibly be; if it’s Raimon Natsumi or somebody else.
Right. They have a game soon. Another one, right after Teikoku. That’s good. Part of you is relieved to know their club has a future.
You’re waiting in your classroom, sitting down and steady. You recall the meeting you’ll have in roughly twenty minutes. Since the end of Annie, a member is designated to come and collect you for as long as you’re in the theater club. You’d like them to know you can play better roles than a leashed dog, but your seniors don’t listen and drag you by the tail nonetheless whenever classes come to a close. The only time anyone is ever given any kind of special treatment is when they’re deemed to be nuisances. There’s an abundance of surveillance to be done when you are the worst one they’ve ever had.
A hand grabs you by the back of your uniform, drags you up and out of your seat. You hastily gather yourself alongside your paper plane, standing on legs numbed by the hours. You lean on the windowed wall for balance, saddened by your origami getting crumpled, and only then do you see who the culprit is.
It’s Tachibana who fetches you today. Your loveliest, most carefree senior who does not give a single damn if you slack for the sake of shinies. Winners recognize winners. That’s why you fail to have other friends.
But you’ve given it as much thought as you could possibly have, which will exceed no good expectations, but is still worth something, at the very least: you want to know why Raimon Natsumi insists, why Endou Mamoru struggles, why Gouenji Shuuya returns. How in spite of every little thing there is to stand in their way, they are able to cast their troubles aside or even take those with them in their lives, mocking those troubles when they watch as they succeed in what it is they want to do. How they take those things, turn them into pieces of their bodies, complete themselves with their failures and flaws.
Because you are so scattered, never really an entirety, you cannot help but desire to know why you loved soccer so, before you have become everything you are today: fragmented, a body incomplete of a heart. How you stood, who you ran with, what you fought for.
Why you fell, why you flew.
Your chest is a gaping pit where in it resides a sorry for what you are now; the rotting corpse you live as. There are so many things to be understood if you want to become whole again.
Many, many things. So you decide for yourself now, simply because you can.
“I think I’ll switch clubs.”
“Seriously?” comes the word you’ve been expecting. You are not so oblivious that you do not know of your sins. “After everything we’ve been through?”
You are happy to hear it, though; to know you are capable of doing as much bad as you do good.
Everything you have been through has only lasted three months. And although she’s exaggerating, you digress, instead pointing out, “You’re complaining.” Then your teeth threaten to show. Good things begin to flutter in your gut, your voice giddy to pair. “You’re complaining!”
“I am!” Tachibana raises a gesturing palm, looks at you and your imperfect airplane of notebook paper like you’re not normal. “Don’t sound so excited?”
“Sorry,” you follow up, though you don’t say sorry for enjoying how you will be missed. “Um. Yes. That’s all I had to say. Can I go home now?”
“No way in hell. So?” she asks, and you recognize she’s expectant of a good reason. Sweat falls off your palms. You don’t have one, really. It’s as bad as it can get. “At least tell me what it's gonna be? Wait, don’t tell me, actually. You can join anything, just don’t go to a sports club.”
Maybe you do have half the conscience to rescind your words, to never let them be spoken. She will hate you for this, but alas. You die with dignity, and pick your deliberate death:
“Soccer, I think.”
She chokes on her water. Almost spits it out. Her turn towards you is slow. Scrutinizing.
“You’re kidding.”
You keep silent. Guilty. To her it is enough.
“What did I just tell you about joining sports clubs?!” With her jaw dropped, Tachibana continues, “So you choose that…” she trails off, quickly pointing at the soccer clubroom far away, “… run-down shed of— of sweat and testosterone? Over the stage? We have air conditioning, you know!”
“Don’t blame me.” You say, your shoulders resting into a slump. You think of Raimon Natsumi, of Gouenji Shuuya, of Endou Mamoru. Troubles and tragedies and terrible fits of passion. You don’t know who they are, what they want, what they’re striving for, but you want to watch their stories unfold. Nothing more. You are fond of unpredictable things, and even better, in the future they will all be true enough for you to tell. “Something interesting happened.”
“I wasn’t planning on telling you– course I wouldn’t ‘cause of your bloated head –but even if he thinks you’re kind of annoying, the club president actually thought you’d be really useful for the rest of the year.”
“Why wouldn’t I be? My face brings money.”
“Haaah.” She lets out an exasperated breath. “See? So full of yourself, Asuka. Has anybody told you that yet?”
Throwing the paper airplane out the open window, you plainly state what you know. “You and everyone else.”
“So honest today. And humble! Now I wish you’d stick around.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yeah.” A light slap hits you on the back. You feel the impact of her disappointment shake you awake. “I really don’t. Now they’ll grill ME for being late.”
The two of you watch the plane fade into the ground. It ends its life distanced from where it’s meant to be: above. She glances down to where it crumples under an unknowing boy’s feet. Several others wear the same uniform, pushing past comrades acting as foes. They appear to be practicing for what’s to come, after whatever the hell it was that the kid with a big glove and the kid with a scorched foot were able to pull off. Neither of those were flukes, the same way you made half your seniors in the club hate you with how you’d snatched Annie from everyone’s grasps. All’s the same in theater, really. In soccer, your name’s just going to be known for a different thing. If it isn’t already. Love for the sport is still love for the school.
That’s your decision.
You disappear then, like you always do.
If you stay for the rest of the year, for certain she and the rest may kiss their roles goodbye. So she does not know if they will sigh out of self-pity or relief, but in the coming meeting, Tachibana will tell the theater club you’re leaving.
Official papers, they’ll demand. All you’ve ever needed were your words.
-
RAIMON NATSUMI
(! 1 missed message !)
RAIMON NATSUMI:
Asuka, I await your response regarding the matter we previously discussed. Do reply. I will discuss further once you agree.
2 days ago
JUST NOW: You set the nickname for RAIMON NATSUMI to ms. president!
YOU:
this phone thing is sooo cool
Can you like
not lock the soccer gossip bfhind a paywall
Do you realize no8 everyone is 7privilegdd…………..
Raimon what if im Poor
ms. president!:
Asuka.
What took you so long to respond?
Do you realize how much of a luxury time is?
There is no gossip. And this is not a paywall. Joining the club is free.
Are you aware?
YOU:
do i car
ms. president!:
Nevermind. I doubt you do.
YOU:
you know me so6 well
Good thing U put aaAll that Stalking to Good Use!
ms. president!:
Tell me once you are willing to divulge only the necessary information.
I dislike wasting my time.
YOU:
I know thats why its funny
Seen
YOU:
Ok sorry
about Soccer
H 8hought about it
ms. president!:
Did you, now?
YOU:
Yes! I did.
Can we just meetup i
hate typing on this
stupid BLOCK
ms. president!:
No. I’m busy.
YOU:
Ok
ms. president!:
Have you decided?
I’m in the middle of something.
It would be best to tell me now.
YOU:
Ddont know what U put in endou Mamoru’s soup or so6methi4ng
his friend too i guess
The fire tornado
Very charming
ms. president!:
Do you mean Gouenji?
It’s good you’re fond of them.
Alright. I’m going to take this as a ‘yes’
YOU:
No
asuka [name] cant soccer
Ok?
ms. president!:
Is that so?
YOU:
very Injured. very bad
At playing
ms. president!:
Right. I hope you are being honest with me.
Seeing that you are by no means physically impaired?
YOU:
U dont know that
What if im bleeding internally
hrts so bad!!!
ms. president!:
By the way, I saw your stats from your previous school.
That is truly a shame.
YOU:
but!
manager = cand o
do yo receive my MESSAGE
Sorry
Message
ms. president!:
You want to be a manager?
Fine. That will do for now.
YOU:
What do you
mea
For now?
ms. president!:
I’ll sort all the club transfer papers. We will talk tomorrow.
Goodbye.
YOU:
Ok.
Be grateful ………………..
You hold half the hope in the chance she responds. She doesn’t. It takes you a minute before you place your flip phone inside your school satchel as you struggle to turn it off. There. You think about what you have done, and what you’re going to do to yourself. Raimon Natsumi should thank you for your time.
Then you realize: you are doing this of your own volition. The autonomy lies nowhere except in your hands. Not your parents, not him.
It is only you.
This time, you choose. There is no man to follow, whose orders are absolute when you are told to go on field. Play, play, play, he bid back then, but here he does not exist. You are far from where you came from; far from who you used to be. Endou Mamoru does not seem to demand as much. Does not seem to need you as much, despite his pleading– you have seen what the boy can do when he runs with his own efforts, rebelling against all odds as he shoulders the tiny club he deems as his own world. Maybe this is precisely what drew Raimon Natsumi in, what kept Gouenji Shuuya going. Now you understand.
So far the sport is beautiful from the distance you keep. It looks nice. You hope it will be.
All you will do is watch. Sit down, see their stories from the sidelines. That’s… okay, too. The ache says you are not yet ready to tread your return. You can wait. You always have. This time, it is your decision: you’re going to be alright, you think. It does not need to be grand, royal. It never had to be. You no longer know what it means to live that way.
Alright is enough for you.
-
Summer is the burning of skin, the setting of the air ablaze. Supposedly. But it’s June, and Kidou lives in Japan. The wind decides what’s different here.
Yesterday, you drew in a torn sheet from your notebook an elaborately inked depiction of vapor rising, becoming something more, yielding a scribbled storm on the paper. There was nothing wrong with it, save for the top left corner, where one word boldly rests: tomorrow.
You claim to be a psychic. He thinks you are no more than stupid. Slowly, he is beginning to believe in the defects of your birth. Your being is… strange. It should not disturb him this much, with how Kageyama is so fond of his strays. He would know. He’s one of them– after all, he’s friends with you. Tomorrow is what you’d guessed yesterday.
And it rains today.
“You sure know a lot of things.” Kidou clicks his tongue, unbelieving of the few stray drops of water that touch his skin as he walks. Left and right. Or one and two, as you’d say. Your written tomorrow was only a passing comment— a lucky guess. Yesterday you were a fool. “How come?”
But since you are right today, you continue to nudge him by the side, proud of the weary sky. He’d rather not look to his left where he knows you are waiting to show him the picture of your grin. Already he can hear the smile. Braces himself in three.
You point at yourself like the narcissist you are, and you do it proudly. “Because I know everything.”
The gloom of the air saves him, as much as a nuisance the moisture on his goggles is. Saves you from seeing him roll his eyes, the whole three-sixty degrees, wholly unimpressed. “Be real.”
“Wisdom rewards anyone who deserves it,” you remark merrily, and with that you’re doing no better than equating yourself to a god. The only thing he is sure of is how in the near future you will be lovingly smited by one of them. Or four. “Anyone. And you know what? It’s a generous thing, isn’t a prick, shares its gifts with me. Unlike you.”
Then, you don’t relent, trailing after Kidou Yuuto’s lying shadow with a silent step. Both of you are twelve years old, running under a burdensome rain that was not supposed to happen. His footsteps are heavy against the ground, though the sheer weight of the downpour is heavier, as he tries to stay selfish. Under the cover of his umbrella he is dry, and all things outside remain dreary.
You, on the other hand— anyone could mistake you for a dying dog. Or a cat seized by a storm. Whatever mystifying creature it is you want to be perceived as. Either way, you don’t fail to look the part of being pathetic, really.
“Are you stupid?” An answer acknowledged by the universe is this: you are, and it’s what he always scolds you for. “Did you see Domon’s umbrella? I’m sure that thing could fit seven people underneath. You should have gone with him.”
“Oh.” There is a change in your tone when you speak. Something terrible, something bitter. “The other Asuka. I don’t share with name thieves.”
“[Name],” he breathes out, easing into a steadier pace, slow enough for you to catch up to him. Enough for his umbrella to save you as you duck your head under its wings. Had you asked, all he’d do is defend himself, then call it concern for his teammates’ wellbeings. Liar, you’d insist. He knows he is. “You really think you’re so special.”
“I really am,” you agree with delight. He can’t tell what it is, the way Kageyama knows it in an instant, but he knows you are about to do something. “Who else could have predicted this?”
“Don’t think you’re a god just because you got lucky,” he reprimands. “Professional weather institutes could have. They always do.”
Glossed with rain, your hair glistens just the right amount. The weather should not be in your favor, but in the moment he couldn’t help but think: you look more alive than ever. Aren’t girls particular with their hair? Haruna was. He remembers it well– how many children he’d fought to keep leaves and twigs out of hers. Do you let the water do anything to you, allow it to dampen anything it touches, or do you simply care not for anything the world does to you?
“Sure. But the thing is, Yuuto, they didn’t. And guess what?”
The joke you like most is how you say his name, the authority you think you have when you do. Something akin to a bragging right. That’s what Yuuto is, why everyone believes you’re closer than you actually are.
He knows what is to come, yet in the present you have gone through many things. In the bygone days, from eight and beyond you were a nuisance, but now he is your friend. And begrudgingly, with his eyes on the pavement, he asks regardless of his sound mind, “What?”
“I did,” you are smug when you whisper, and all of a sudden the handle of his umbrella slips from his grasp, is no longer his to hold; now you call the shots, have the right to determine which of you will stay dry. For a second he believes you’ll shove him away and run your little heist, leaving him and his shoes soaked to hell. You don’t. Instead you walk side by side, together, with some of the rainfall coming down to resume grazing your arms.
Mud stains your shoes; as a show of good graces his father bought his a week ago, and you told him not too long ago your own were also good as new. But you stay dry nonetheless, the two of you. Head to toe. Together.
“We’re sharing.” You move forward, and though your shoulders clash, your feet are in sync. On the field you win because of this, how your minds are in tune. Left and left, right and right. One and one, two and two. “Be thankful.”
He asks it like a reminder: “Whose umbrella is this?”
You don’t even bother. “Anything that’s yours is mine.”
“Right, of course.” By now, perhaps he is already conscious of how late it is of a realization, but he has long given himself to your whims. From eight and beyond, maybe until the end. “And if you get sick?”
“I’ll tell my parents you’re my best friend.” He knows the Asukas hate him; your father wants you hidden, your mother wants the same. But they never stopped you from choosing to be here, with him. That’s how he knows they do. “They raised me to, you know, have a best friend who can never do any wrong. And as my best friend, you’re off the hook.”
“In short, you’re blaming me. Good plan. This is why nobody allows you to take command in our games,” he replies, all without refuting any idea that comes out of your mouth. Bizarrely. Barely.
You nearly steal a smile out of him then. How little faith he has in you.
Asuka [Name], how the girl is never still. Never free, yet never frozen. Somehow you flow as both water and sky. It’s your fourth summer on the same side, yet somehow he can’t bring himself to believe. How are the fish your friends, all the while your home stands amongst the clouds? How is it that you can accept the gloom of water, let it fall on you with grace? Wearied as you are, there is wonder in the world you live in: the one you hide from Kageyama, whose mantra is how dreaming would do anybody no good; who holds you both by the neck, whose fingers wring you both for all your blood, sweat, and tears. But Kidou hopes to hold your vision, hopes to someday see. And you are twelve, the two of you. Already he knows it will not be true.
And yet.
Tell them, he thinks, and as much as he denies it, his heart swells to know you in days that belong to nobody else. Not to Kageyama, not to the Asukas, not to the world that wants you to fall as much as it wishes you to fly. You belong to nothing but today. And no matter what it is, he is never entirely alone. He is here, and with him, you sing simply. You are twelve and you are stupid, but you are wonderful all the same.
You are here.
Who would be brave enough to keep it from him— the joy of being together? Who?
He is Kidou Yuuto, and you are Asuka [Name]. In the coming years Teikoku will lead both of you to reign. Right now Kageyama celebrates you in how you will be monsters— the world will watch the star parading wickedly, the shadow guiding her by the tip of his finger; and in the end the two bring one victory to one name. In the end nothing will win against you. Kidou knows you will not remember this in the coming mornings, so his heart speaks again with the freedom that comes with you forgetting, and decides to hope in its young silence:
Tell them.
You are happy now. Tomorrow you will be, too. He can only hope.
But in the end, nobody wins. Because you will be thirteen when it happens: twelve sets of seven in yesterdays, and one of you nearly dead.
You do not know if you want to be afraid of him now, or worse, if you want to know you trusted him once. Did you? And what does he know of shame to speak your name with such pity?
fic masterlist <-
pairings: kidou yuuto/reader, raimon natsumi/reader, gouenji shuuya/reader, endou mamoru/reader
chapter warnings: family reveal, mentions of drowning, implied accident, kageyama reiji should honestly be his own warning
word count: 3.4k
a/n: the action starts next chapter sorry gang
AS YOU stand on its grounds for the last time, Teikoku does not bid you farewell.
Then again, you suppose you’re here for no more than a process of niceties. Your parents bring their papers and you bring the accompanying words. Beside you stands the man whose hand makes a dent on your shoulder, boasting of the power held by the name he gave, held down farther than a mere hundred years’ time.
Your head wanders farther than that, though, as you walk behind the figures of a husband and his wife. Parents. Papers. Following the shadows cast by opposing statures, you stop by the office, uncaring of what surrounds you at first. “Watch,” he says, removing his hand before entering. Always the show-off to his audience of two. You listen from a lack of choice. It feels familiar.
It unfolds the way an animated story would, from the top of a scroll unwinding to the end, in a motion as smooth as sixty frames. His signature on its own is etched as his price, the swipe of his card no more than an accessory– a deal, and it is done. Teikoku, in spite of its extravagance, is a surprisingly easy school. There is no need for your mother to bargain. Why would she, when your father can buy their silence in seconds?
Albeit slightly, a smile creeps upon you, your lips hesitating to show teeth. You can’t help it. What a delight it is to watch your father thrive in what he does best. The staff offer their prying stares, a few in a hurry to pass the message with documents in their hands. Signing, scurrying, stamping more papers.
You care not for the awe on their faces. What interests you more is the fear. To your father, it’s all trivial. Formal or not, there is no denying the evil. Or it’s true: you’re no different, if the dormant narcissism in your blood flows faster; if it’s risen alive at the sight of it. Nothing you find much fault in, really. After all, there’s only those two to blame.
Once you’re out of sight, away from those teachers, you don’t hesitate. “And I thought you were a little more honest than that,” you jab, adding a sigh to emphasize. “Some kind of example you set.”
Your mother hums, nudging her husband, smiling at his ear as though speaking of a scandalous thing. “What a wretched man you are. Even your own daughter thinks so.”
“She has the best of us both,” are the only words he lets loose, sounding more like some awful joke. Neither you nor your mother react too well, if the lack of delight in your gazes don’t lie to him. For different reasons, maybe— for you it’s more of a nuisance, for her it is less of a nice thing —though better off without his words nonetheless. When it comes from his mouth, it is undeniable. Because the wretched see the wretched alike. And you wouldn’t see it if it weren’t for her eyes being your own, too.
She taps you on the shoulder, any weight absent from her hand. Motherly. “Don’t listen to him. He’s in a sad state of mind.”
He continues to grin, subtle, as though she hadn’t insulted him, partly in jest. Only looks at her with the wonder of an honest man, beholding her in a way fonder than anything you’ve ever seen.
“Be delusional, dear. It suits you nicely,” he coos.
You’d be a fool if you didn’t catch the pink afloat in his eyes, the little colors of your mother sculpting into bigger shapes of love. The image fills your head with nausea, a rush of disgust rapidly surging your skull. For others, it may be love. You understand. You do. But as their daughter, you think you’re going to throw up first.
You hear the clack of her heels, the heavy steps of his leather-made boots, and by some miracle, follow with a pair of slippers under your feet. Wear whatever you’d like, is what they had told you at home. What does it matter if Teikoku was founded by grace? By the end of the day, you will no longer belong here. The rhythm of each step tangles with one another, clashing timbres reverberating around six pairs. Unpleasant to the eye; without a doubt a mess to most ears. You don’t dare to name it music. There’s something else you can use to name the sort of thing you hear. Something better for the eyes, or something worse: family, they call it.
You find that the latter rings true. Because despite your differences, you are without a doubt bound.
This is the fugue of a daughter who rose from the dead.
A week’s gone to waste since your discharge from the hospital. The doctors are gone, leaving just the two of them to deal with what’s left of you. They still hold your hand, sometimes— the fragments or pieces of it, anyway —beckoning you to look back. You know you can’t, but they still remind you. You are this, you are that. You are bloodied and you are fragile, you are bruised and you are blind. They will try to sew you anew, and they will try together.
On some days the thought of it pricked at the pores of your head. Digging into skin, burying itself deep, settling dead in the depths of your veins: that it was your fault. That it was theirs as much as it was yours; that you can be molded into who they are, as long as you remain unaware.
Perhaps with the flick of a finger, maybe with a stinging word. It’s only a fraction of the price for what you’re told you did before this. You hope it’s a fair one; not that you’d own up to this debt any less. There is no one else to believe.
But on some days you like to believe you thought nothing of it back then, as you see their faces reflected instead of yours on shut windows and koi ponds.
You liked to believe. It’s good for the gaps.
So right now, you hold the pen your mother brought for your father to sign his deeds, and feel nothing for it. Nothing much. A prick or sting shouldn’t faze you when your skin’s good as new. Not that you’d know, now, anyway. Try not to think of it either. And for a second, you freeze, because something in your gut stirs. Like it remembers.
One. Not that you’d know, now. Two. Try not to think of it either.
Three. Would Kidou have told you that?
You halt your steps where it is dark, both left heel and mind above turning south.
“…you two can go back to the car,” you say out of the blue, legs shifting around. Itching to run. A place comes into mind, the path appearing second: first dash forward, second turn to the nearest left, then run right. It’s a route you still know, you tell yourself. In your memory there’s fading bridges and steel rooms, and above are hundreds of seats for the peering eyes. You were a student here until today. If anything, the way towards it is the least of your worries. “I need to see something.”
Someone. He won’t be here. But you can always try. Try, try, try, and you’ll triumph.
(Do you really want to see who taught you that, though?)
You don’t know what came over you, then, but the dull hallways and dead air of the academy do nothing to slow you down. The walk to the field is a waltz your feet have yet to forget, and with every step you go faster until you ease into a broken sprint. Between deep pants and short pauses, it takes you no more than a minute to stride to the grounds where you were born and killed.
You don’t know who told you this.
Beneath the steel bridges lie a vast hollow. Step once, step twice, and go. Right in the middle of the field, you halt with bated breath, unused to your body’s actions. Now you stand where the sound of your feet meets grass instead of metal, only you are here with the wrong shoes.
With an undisturbed silence and a sky that extends to the void, Teikoku remains as it is with its stretch of artificial pastures. Frozen in the back of your mind, retained cold, to be remembered: this is where people are meant to run for their lives. You don’t hold the idea close. It is not dear to you. At least, you think it isn’t. The green of this stadium has endured much hardship, scraping envy in hundreds of knees. What a shame, that whether or not yours were one of them doesn’t rise up from your thoughts to demand its place in how you feel. Shrunken soft, small and weak— gone.
How… strange. When you realize you feel nothing for it, there must be something wrong. You’re supposed to. You came here expecting to, yet you stand straight, head up, staring at the far ceiling. Down, at everything. What to make of it, you don’t know. Each move you make, you hear the exact moments your organs go against your caging bones, body emptied by a gap shaped with the parts of yourself you can’t ever fathom again.
How beautiful, you think. How boring.
And you hear it: the wrong voice bound by the dark, its bass soft. You are distanced enough for it to barely reach you. It does not echo, yet it is enough for you to know you are not alone.
“Oh, how curious,” the voice spoke. Firmly. Glad. “My star lives.”
You aren’t too sure why your body goes still, but you know who it is.
“…Kageyama,” you speak.
Perhaps that’s why.
He glides towards you easily. When he does, it makes you wonder why you stiffen as he nears, looking pleasantly surprised to see you, aware that none of it at all is done with a grain of honesty. For all his formal evils, you don’t compare the sight to the grand image of your father, no. Kageyama looks distraught, nearly. As if he wants to deceive.
“And here I was, thinking you would never set foot on this field again.” He pauses in his tracks, neither too near nor too far. Still out of reach. Still peering over. “What unfinished business is it that brings you here?”
The years are what distances you from one another, his height marked up by the years. That’s alright. It shouldn’t stop you. You tilt your head up to look him straight in the eye, meeting him beyond his darkened lenses. “Not you.”
“Oh?”
Swallow the discomfort, be silent. The habit sinks in again, but you try to stop it from telling you what to do. You’ve forgotten how to listen, and you will be rid of this fear anytime soon. If you can even call it that. “You aren’t the one I’m here for.”
“Ah, for Kidou, then. But even I allow the team to rest on weekends.” He looks around. On instinct, your curiosity follows, taking in how void of life the stadium is. Not a soul fills the room, thrilled chatter absent from the air. “You knew he wouldn’t be here, yet you came anyway.”
“I saw him not too long ago,” you say, treading the scene slowly. Your left foot falls into little taps, the shake in your knee telling you not to falter. Not here, not now. You can come out unharmed if he doesn’t see the dismantling of your being.
“So that boy did visit in the end. He was pondering it for quite a long time, did you know?” He begins with mentioning the boy and his indecisiveness, moving on to a tangent about him. You learn more about yourself than you do about Kidou who he treats like a prize, but you’re quick to catch onto the creeping animosity in how he speaks.
He doesn’t hide anything, eyeing the star clipped onto your hair, wrongly placed in the morning sky. “I’d always thought the two of you were too tied to the other. Too much for your own good.”
His scrutiny tries at you, though you don’t eat any of his implications, not sure if you’re ready to stomach it. Might tell your throat to spit it down on these sacred grounds. Kidou Yuuto. You pair his name with yours: Kidou Yuuto and Asuka [Name], days together a blur, and you’re unsure if the moments in between even belonged to the times with him. Did they?
Think, do it harder. You picture his letters, his feelings abundant in his words; the tiny endeavors, precise with his numbers. A kind of thoughtfulness you cannot describe. He was counting with you.
Pretend, pretend. You try to be nice. “Whatever do you mean, Coach?”
“Sentimentality brings us nothing but shame, Asuka.”
When you listen, you think your name in his mouth is a wrong thing. One of the many.
Having spent twelve weeks in silence, the dead air that comes after means nothing. Kidou Yuuto broke that streak, waltzing in with more questions than answers, but you don’t remember him being as loud with what he was to you. You wonder; that day, was he sparing you? Maybe you ought to be mad. Insulted, at the very least. If he truly knew it all, he would have known he had no need to.
If you even were friends. In his letters, he couldn’t decide too well. Teammates. How often are they supposed to say sorry? Apologize for their allegedly committed sins?
“Maybe he and I were close,” you start, but even you can’t begin to fathom it. You imagine your hands welding together— a truce of two… victims? Did you see yourselves as such? —but it’s no use scrambling for lost things. When you try, the thought won’t materialize. You’re not familiar with the sweat of his palm. Don’t know if you envied him, once, on this very field. His name is all you know of him nowadays. “But I thought you were more attentive to the news. Since you’re so curious, Coach. I don’t know him anymore. My little… accident, yeah. It did a lot.”
There’s a stray ball in your vicinity that someone likely forgot to put away. A lapse in judgement; you want to know whose it was, if he was your friend. It’s static on the grass, taunting you to put it in its place, where you’ll see it touch a white net and hear the buzz of a point rumble throughout the stadium. Kageyama looks at you in mild interest, aware you’re about to do something. Observing before you even tell him you are.
“Watch.” You approach it to make a quick show of yourself, power absent from your kick. Just to prove your point. It doesn’t make it in, and you turn to Kageyama with a sigh, as false as it can get. You’re only here for the niceties. “See? Can’t even score a goal.”
“So, I wouldn’t worry if I were you, considering how poor an old man’s health is.” After, you pretend to think. “How old are you again?”
“You don’t show up for months and this is how you are. How… disappointing.” He makes no move to show his dismay. You don’t need to see it when you can hear. “But then again, at your young age, you don’t know what it means to be humbled by the world, do you?”
Humble is weak. A word that isn’t enough. You liked to believe he knows what happened, how bruised your body had been— though you don’t think he knew of how badly the onslaught of water washed your memory. The moon pulled at the ocean’s strings, waves and waves and waves digging a grave of sand for it to settle in. In the dead of night, there are moments where you drink salt in your dreams.
He does not know of the extent. But to you, it is enough that he knows the reason why.
“I wouldn’t know.” You shrug. “I’m just a kid.”
At that, Kageyama does not bother. You think it is for the best.
He is fond of what you say; you couldn’t possibly miss it. He hums with a smile too pleased for the face of a guilty man. “And that, you are.”
(Do you want to rely on what he tells you, though? Who is he to claim to know everything about what you are?)
“Yet, to think you’ll leave our team,” he begins, most likely in an attempt to inject some remorse in your veins. “Or worse, even lend your talents to the unworthy?”
“So you know where I’m going?” You ask, more akin to an accusation, your blood unmoving, skin immune to the puncture he tries. It has been a while, so long that it feels like nothing when you recall the silent nurses, holding you close and their weapons closer. Worse.
“Not quite,” he replies. “Only that it disheartens us, coach and players alike.”
“Oh.” You like that he makes it sound like you are loved. You place a finger to your bottom lip and stretch one corner up to form a lopsided smile. The bass of his empty flattery kicks at your patience. “Is that a threat?”
“Take it as you will,” he says, and he doesn’t delay himself when he pricks, “like you always do.”
It’s eerily reminiscent of how you try to sting others. You stop, giving into wondering how much of yourself is made up of him. If the way you think is a piece not yours. That doesn’t comfort you, either.
“Though since you are leaving, at the very least, remember this.” Then, what your ears receive is the embrace of a thread. It coils around your wrists, coming for your neck, tickling all the attention you don’t want to lend. It is a warmth that seeps, peels at the thin layers atop your salt-soaked body. You’re touched by a warning that wants to tangle itself between all the grains of sand in your blood.
A word of love.
He promises to you and you alone, “The sky will never forsake you.”
At that, you’re unable to stop the shiver that drifts across your skin. Such bold, white lies. He speaks so much of shame with a filthy, self-righteous tongue. But his conviction made it sound like he truly did believe in them. Your intrigue wants to tear at him, to see where it hurts. Reminiscent of the boy you could call his son, he acts as if he knows everything, but he does so without sparing you. That’s why you don’t hold back, coming closer, your slippers clashing against the grass as you let your laughter run freely.
“Who are you?” You laugh, mirror his ridicule, because in not a single word does he sound sorry. “Who are you to tell me what to believe?”
“What do you mean, who?” Kageyama leans lower, bringing himself down to where you will meet as equals. In his close presence, you are reminded that infinitely, irrevocably— you are smaller, younger, unknowing of anything. Only his student. Only a kid. He does not lay a single finger on your shoulders, no hand or any tight grasp to follow, but all that he sings presses a heavy burden all the same. “I am the one who taught you how to believe. When you listened, you were bright, Asuka. You were so, so bright— before you ruined it for yourself.”
But you resist as best as you possibly can, no matter if it is for your ego’s sake. The world must deem him wrong. No soul will know you any better. Not the sand, not the water, not the sky. What right do they have? You’re still bright. Bruised, diluted, but bright. Perhaps fainter than what they know, but you are alive.
You tell him to take his shades off, that they do no good for his dwindling sense of sight. And after, you tell him, “I think I am not ruined.”
“Yet you leave where you are most loved.”
The volume of his fictions begins to weaken, lower, soften. In Teikoku, you always go down.
“They don’t trust you.” You clasp your hands together the way a little girl would, smile politely, and you decide you are done. “That’s all it is.”
“Let time run its course, my star.” He watches, the way a mentor would, as fond as a noose’s caress can get. Like a love bound to the reddest, most disgusting slivers of your flesh. “You will know where you belong.”
