Archive of Our Own ^beta

shine for me, darling, and we’ll let the world learn of our light.

.

Basketball is what’s called a team sport.

The court is your world, a map, with veined boundaries like rivers. The ball, a part of your body: an extension to your arm as much as your hand is. The basket—that’s the goal. Lost in the heat of the game, with your eyes solely trained on that goal, it can be hard to recognize that your world isn’t singularly-habitated, that the ball isn’t just yours.

Your teammates are the stars on the map.

And the ball, when passed, connects the members together, a rather lame allusion to a constellation in the sky.

“That’s what basketball’s all about. Connecting stars!” Morisawa-senpai finishes his lengthy speech, and stops the basketball mid-spin. Akehoshi-senpai blinks, then blinks some more. Isara-senpai only nods sagely, as if he had understood every single word without question or comment.

“And again… you don’t make any sense,” Midori sighs, lifting the strap to his bag and slinging it over his shoulder. He’d thought Morisawa-senpai actually had an urgent club meeting planned; never did he expect it to turn into “Basketball 101 for Newbies!!!!!”, nor was he prepared for yet another lecture, and outside of class-time no less. As always, there was no telling just what Morisawa-senpai had in mind. “What a waste of time… well, now that it’s over, there’s nothing else to do, right…? So I’ll be going home now, see you later…”

“Wait a minute!” and Midori feels a hand grip his shoulder. He yelps. “We’re not done here yet, Takamine!”

“It doesn’t concern me, does it…?” Midori turns back around, pries Morisawa-senpai’s fingers off his shoulder one by one as nonchalantly as picking off grapes. “I mean, you’ve already explained to me what basketball is, and all… even though I didn’t understand any of it… so I can go home now, right…”

“Bwahaha! What’s the point of teaching you the rules if you don’t put them to practice!” Morisawa-senpai picks up his basketball, then promptly shoves it to Midori’s chest. “I’d like to see you do a few hoops before you go! Come on, Takamine—you can pair up with me if you want to do some passing, too. Since we’re in the same unit and all, you might be more comfortable playing with me than against me, don’t you think?”

“...who said I was playing with whom…? And Morisawa-senpai, something’s wrong with your logic… why would I want to play with someone I’m already forced to see so much every day…”

Basketball is what you call a team sport.

Silence. Then sound. Heavy breathing, in short huffs; flashing eyes trained on the ball.  Sneaker squeaks.

The court is your world.

The ball feels rough underneath his hands, like sandpaper that could scrape off the skin of his palms if he handled it incorrectly.

The ball is part of your body .

Either the floor is shaking, or maybe, his hands are. He’s not too sure.

“It’s so loud,” he whispers to himself. There’s so many people, so many hands. His limbs have gone rigid, his heart rate is off the charts; he takes a breath and a breath and a breath but nothing clears. The only sound is his own heartbeats and the opposing team’s shouts mushed up into a big mess pounding against a soundproof barricade. It’s suffocating—and he’s tall . His middle-school classmates have often joked, how’s the weather up there? Or Hey, that’s not fair, Takamine-kun can breathe cleaner air than we do, being so tall.

Being tall doesn’t help when you’re afraid to dribble the ball, or pass it— you’re a beginner, what were they thinking when they put you out here?! Ah, that’s right, something to do with “first-hand experience”, something to do with “it’ll be good, Takamine, to develop your skills”— of course Morisawa-senpai would say that, that’s so him to say that, because he sees dreams and the stars whenever he opens his eyes, and spits them right out when he opens his mouth, hoping others could see them too.

Why didn’t I just reject Morisawa-senpai when he asked me to join the club?

Maybe, if I had put in more confidence; maybe... if I said no, just one more time...

Would’ve made everything easier, probably. For him, for the both of them.

“Takamine!” There it is, that obnoxious voice. Midori’s amazed and thoroughly annoyed, and yet not surprised that it penetrated through so easily his seemingly impervious wall that blocked all sound. “Focus on my voice, okay? Pass it to me!”

It could have been the anger, he thinks, when he looks back. Midori didn’t know he possessed that much, but all of it, the summation of it, the total of its parts, broke free (like a supernova exploding) as he thrusts the ball off his own hands like a burden passed off his shoulders to another’s, and—he could breathe again. The air felt lighter, again. Things are quiet again, just how he likes it.

Suddenly, the sound erupts , ripping through—and they are not cheers.

The squeak of shoes, skidding on the black-streaked floor; the grunts of trips and falls. And the shouts. Everything is so loud—panicked, even, it fills the air.

Saying one word.

“ Buchou ?”

And Midori remembers in that moment, just one of the reasons he hates the color red.

.

Chiaki loves the color red.

Red is the color of vitality, of the heart. It is a fiery color of boundless energy, hot and unhesitant. It is the color of warmth.

But red—more specifically, crimson red—is the color of blood. Circulating the veins, keeping you alive, and yet right now Chiaki is nothing close to grateful as he’s hustled onto the bench, dazed and lightheaded, watching the trails of red slip by his eyes like he’s standing behind a waterfall.

The team flocks around him like a cloud of doves, squabbling and waving their hands. Chiaki grimaces in the clamour that only worsened his headache, pressing his hand to his ear, but his free hand, he makes a tiny gesture, as if to say Go. Go and win for us. Win for me.

“Are you alright?” “Your ear—under your ear…!” “Someone call 119!” “Where’s Sagami-sensei?”

“Guys, quiet!” Because Chiaki’s voice is, if anything has been established over the course of the year, always the loudest in the room, even in a room shared by opponents. The team goes silent, but a good amount of surreptitious, low chatter remain. “Thanks for worrying about me, guys! I’m going to be alright,” Chiaki smiles, “this is nothing compared to what I’ve been through before! I’m a stuntman, remember! Besides, scars are a man’s badges, hahaha!”

“Chi-chan-senpai…” Akehoshi starts.

“You should still get that checked out, Buchou ,” Isara says worriedly, if not sternly. The coach nods in approval, jaw set.

“Yeah, yeah, of course. I’ll run by Sagami-sensei’s office in a sec.” The bandage begins to drip; Chiaki adjusts it and applies more pressure with fingers white.

Chiaki blinks then. Really blinks, because for some odd reason if he did so it would feel like a reset of sorts, a way to clear his mind. Two seconds—it took two seconds for him to register the feel of sticky moisture on the side of his face. One second for his eyes to widen as they register the gritty surface of the basketball hurtling towards him.

Everything before was as blurry as a hand mirror smeared one too many times, and Chiaki wouldn’t have minded not knowing what had happened in those three seconds it took for him to breathe, to be still, to fail to dodge, to be hit.

(That was a lie, of course. Perhaps in retrospect he would have preferred not to have known, but heroes face challenges head-on. To not seek out the truth when it was possible to obtain it would be careless.)

Hang on.

He lifts up his eyes, scanning several worried faces. (Each was like a hit to the heart.) In his right-hand vision he catches Isara’s expression change as he does this.

Chiaki stands up. Immediately, the team collapses into him with a flurry of hands, “ Buchou, please don’t stand up so fast after losing blood,” “Don’t stand up so quickly, you’ll get dizzy!”, “Ah, you should rest for a while on the bench!” But even through the wall, there’s gaps where the fingers are, dependent on how exactly the hands move, and for a moment, he locks eyes with someone far down, standing in the court. There are people ushering that person off, but he’s locked into place like his feet were meant to be poles erected there.

Isara dips his head slightly. Akehoshi shifts his place to the left a few inches or so, just to create some more breathing room.

“Takamine!”

Takamine jolts on the spot, a deer caught in the headlights. Though his face appears normal (he’s always looked that way, unconfident, drawn-in, tired, sad) his eyes reflect a fear Chiaki recognizes, because he was once like that, wearing those same eyes.

The crowd around him disperses a little bit. Chiaki tries his best to smile as wide as he can without making the throbbing pain worse.

“Come and join us, alright, Takamine? The team’s all here.”

☆

There are three words Midori, in all his years spent living on this blue-and-green planet Earth, has never fully understood their meaning. The first one, “family”.

The second one, “home”.

Wasn’t home, and family, one and the same? Home, to Midori, has always been the greengrocery, just like how he had always been nothing but the greengrocer’s son. Constants like this, never-changing constants, truths, those kept Midori from overthinking things. He liked it that way. He liked the easy, simple things.

Life was never an easy, simple thing.

Neither was RYUSEITAI , and Chiaki. And the whole onslaught of questions and annoyances that came pouring in after the night he’d...

(He can’t say it.)

Swallow the thought and lock it away.

He sighs. A bit of him wants to cry, or die, or both. The rattling of the bus, comparably prominent where he’s sitting right now, clashes with his turbulent thoughts and eases the ones he wants to forget into the background, just like static. It even goes so far as to induce a mild headache, but Midori tries not to pay it any mind. There’s a specific reason why he’s sitting here instead of his usual spot; all he has to do now is to suck it up, and pray.

If he’d had it any other way, he would have gone to another university, one that was closer to his home. But this one was where almost everyone from Yumenosaki who was pursuing the career of an idol, or a similar career, went. Plus, there was the promise that the three of them made—he had hooked pinky-fingers with Tetora-kun and Shinobu-kun when they had graduated—that they’d stick together. That RYUSEITAI would stick together…

“Takamine!”

Midori snaps out of his thoughts, curling up into the shadows of the bus, but it does nothing to hide his tall frame.

“There you are! Haha, I almost couldn’t find you, because you usually sit at the front, but today you’re al~l the way over here! Well, that’s alright. It’s a good thing to change things up sometimes, live life the way it’s meant to be lived!”

Midori grumbles. “Please quiet down already… you’re scaring the other passengers…”

Chiaki only grins. Standing over him, even Midori’s height is downplayed. He wants to wipe that smile off of Chiaki’s face: it’s annoying to witness something like that at such an early time of day, but there was no legal way to do it. If he closes his eyes, maybe Chiaki would go away.

When he opens his eyes back up again, Chiaki is looking him up and down expectantly, with puppy-like energy.

Midori sighs. “I’m not coming over to your house tomorrow, okay…”

Chiaki plops down beside him— completely ignoring his bag! —and slings his arm on top of his seat. “Haha, what’s that you say? You always come on the weekends!”

He closes his eyes again. Even if Chiaki was physically still there, at least he won’t be able to see him like this. “The greengrocery… is busy,” he slurs, turning towards the window, lit by the orangish hues of the morning sun. “Your house… weekly quota… met…”

“Takamine?” When Midori doesn’t open his eyes, Chiaki shakes the boy’s shoulder. Then, quietly, “Are you feeling alright, Midori?”

Midori yelps at the usage of his first name, and more at the surprise of it all. It makes him sick to the stomach. “Don’t call me that, please…!” he hisses. God, how annoying can one be? “Ugh, especially not on the bus… moreover, shouldn’t you be asking that question yourself?”

“Hmm? Why’s that?” Chiaki must be leaning in, because Midori can feel him breathing down his neck. It is something that is unpleasant, both visually and tactually. Without turning his head, Midori gently nudges Chiaki’s shoulder away, hoping the other would understand the gesture. Out of his peripherals, Chiaki’s eyes seem to flicker for a moment on his face, before shifting himself just a centimeter distance further.

That was… new.

Midori hesitates, then brings his eyes back. The grin is still on Chiaki’s face, as if nothing had changed, as if whatever... caution Midori had sensed was a misperception on his part. “Seriously, Morisawa-senpai… are you okay?”

“Of course I am, hahaha! What, why do you ask?”

Avoiding the bigger question, Midori shoots a glare. Of course someone like Chiaki, who always puts up a front and masks his insecurities seamlessly with a smile, would never say anything else than “I’m fine!” “Since when do you whisper…?”

“Since two seconds ago!” Chiaki announces, loud again, and Midori flinches. “Look, I don’t know what this ‘quota’ thing of yours is, but come by this Saturday, okay? METEORANGERS is having hotpot night before I go! Sengoku and Nagumo are coming, too.”

The simple words before I go drops Midori’s mood by five levels. It’s just a stupid trip to meet some guy who offered the unit a special work assignment. Chiaki would be gone for no more than two or three days. He didn’t have the heart to go to whatever celebration Chiaki is so intent on holding, but… “It’ll be troublesome if I refuse, wouldn’t it… We’ll see then, after I finish up with my greengrocer business, okay?”

Chiaki’s eyes light up at his victory. Literally lights up . Midori hadn’t imagined that possible, but nothing was impossible when it came to Morisawa Chiaki. “Good, good! Ahh, I’m so happy! It’ll be lots of fun, Takamine, I promise!”

Why do I like you, again? “Y-yeah…” It would be kinda nice, to see Shinobu-kun and Tetora-kun, and Kanata-san, all together… “Together…”

“—the five of us, we are—or were— RYUSEITAI, right right!”

“...don’t get me wrong, I’m only coming because Tetora-kun and Shinobu-kun are gonna be there.”

Chiaki only ruffles Midori’s hair, which causes Midori’s annoyance to increase tenfold. Because it feels like home, vaguely, and he’s not sure why.

“Ah! We’re here. C’mon, time to get up.”

Because lately, a lot of things feel like home to him. Like family.

☆

There’s always been a distance.

It’s like Chiaki is the basketball player, and Midori (no, his heart ) is the basket on the other end of the court. Without pause, he is always, always , running towards it, trying to get past all the opponents blocking his way, all the walls Midori had put up before him.

The enemy that are the walls is something he’s never faced before. And the emptiness, the tiredness that is repeated failure after failure after failure—Chiaki may break first before the wall does.

However, heroes don’t give up. They stand up after each failure, and try again, no matter how many times it takes.

The only thing left to do is to play the game.

And so, Chiaki does. And sometimes, the basket is right there, haloing his head, and the ball almost makes it through. The closest it has ever gotten was the night Takamine had pulled on his sleeve, on his arm. Angrily confessed. Asked to stay.

That was a month ago.

And now, the distance was back, and it was farther than ever before, but Chiaki glances at the ball, rolling towards his feet.

Picks it up.

Starts running.

☆

There are three words, three words that no matter how hard he tried, Midori could never begin to understand. Like the question “how deep is the ocean”, and “where does the universe end”, no answer could truly be the answer.

Home.

Family.

Love.

What does it mean to truly love someone? Towards Kanata, that question is easy—it came in bits and pieces, the glimpse of sun twinkling off sea spray, that calm voice that could drown every little worry Midori had running raucously within his mind. How he didn’t have to ask, for space to be given to him, how he didn’t have to ask, for closeness when he needed someone by his side.

The teasing, on both sides. Kanata’s pouts, Midori’s frowns, both their eyes watching the sea tickle at their feet, at the sun making its last moments of the day count, washed-up red-orange-yellow hues that drip off the edges of their faces and their mouths.

And yet. It had taken three steps, one hand grasping furiously at Chiaki’s sleeve, under a blanket of a trillion stars all watching as the unthinkable occurred, that unknown pain that started in Midori’s heart and made its way into his lungs (how does one breathe?) and out into the chill, those words Don’t leave , those selfish words Please let me stay with you, those inexplicable words I think I like you .

Midori hates how it was always after hurting people that he realizes, he loves them. It makes everything so much easier to lose, at that point.

It might have been that basketball game that started it all, because the first eye contact between him and Morisawa-senpai, the third year had caught his eye—and smiled. Grinned like usual, when blood continued to stain the white gauze bandage he’s held so tightly against his skull, as if to say I’m okay, don’t worry.

Don’t lie like that.

The blood’s being absorbed into the bandage, but Midori thinks he can still see it, leaking and dripping onto the floor, turning the court into a sea of red. His vision’s swimming in it. His fingers are covered in it.

With that smile etched into his memory, and his mouth full of never-bloomed flowers of apology, Midori feels the slightest twinge that may have been the beginnings of love.

(A year after that game, he’d become aware of it one day while sitting on the rim of the fountain, the fountain Shinkai-senpai used to love, and he’d feel the delayed guilt crawl down his ribs and up his throat. Out of every possible time to fall in love, and it had to be after making someone bleed.

Could one even call that feeling love ?

Disgusting, he’d think, and hold his head in his hands. That’s... disgusting. )

☆

Chiaki’s house is impressive for an university student who shouldn’t be able to afford it. Then again, it was a joint purchase between him and Kanata, and Kanata wanted it to be close to the sea, so if you think about it, there was some believability to it all.

Midori hasn’t lost count of how many times he’s been here. That alone leaves a sour feeling in his stomach. Why… why did Kanata-san choose here, out of all places?

“Because it’s ‘close’ to the ocean,” Kanata had said. And it was close to the university, which meant Chiaki ushering Midori to his house before Midori had a chance to wait for the bus ride home (“It’s so late, Takamine, and I know you hate going alone in the dark, so why not come over and stay with us instead?”), WHICH ALSO MEANS THAT THERE WAS NO REASON AT ALL FOR MORISAWA-SENPAI TO RIDE THE BUS WITH ME IN THE MORNINGS, IS THERE?

“Hehe~ maybe because Chiaki dislikes early mornings, so he rides the bus with you so he won’t be as ‘lonely’, Midori.”

Midori turns abruptly. “K-Kanata-s-senpai! Hahh, you frightened me, Kanata-san… I was gonna die on the spot…” And he probably was going to die, from embarrassment—he’d said that out loud? How depressing....

Kanata dangles his keys. Midori’s eyes follow the cerulean fish keyring attached to it. “You were ‘staring’ at the house for a long time… What, did he not open the door for you…?”

“...No, it’s just that… I didn’t knock,” Midori confesses.

Kanata presses a gentle finger against Midori’s forehead, smiling as if to say Dummy~ .  “Next time, I will get you a pair of ‘keys’ as well.” Then sticks the key into the keyhole and turns.

“Ah! Midori-kun!” Tetora’s voice rings out. His cheeks are flushed—no, his cheeks are smeared with something red and hints of black grime—Midori’s eyes glue to the red streak, and they don’t let go.

“Are you... is the kitchen okay…”

Tetora pffts, wiping his face with his sleeve. “Midori-kun, my kitchen is perfectly fine! Nothing was burnt at all this time,” he says proudly. He scratches his cheek. “Though it got a bit messy…”

The air clears. “Heh… that’s good, for once… since both of you are bad with fires—”

“Midori-kun!” Shinobu runs in from the kitchen. The two hug. “I thought you weren’t going to come, because you said you were busy at the store, but you know, I was very hopeful, de gozaru.” Shinobu beams. “I’m glad you’re here, Midori-kun!”

“Ahaha… I wasn’t going to come, really, you’re right… but…” Midori looks around the living room, at the people (minus a strangely absent Chiaki), and allows himself the liberty of a small smile. “It’s been a long time since we got together like this, huh…?”

“Yes yes, you’re right!” Shinobu quips, and leans back into the couch. “We haven’t had many unit activities lately, have we.”

Tetora stretches, making himself comfortable. “It’ll be busy again soon though. Midori-kun, you better not slack off, okay?”

“No guarantees…”

Tetora sits up. “Oi, Midori-kun—” he growls, but the hint of a smile shadowing the corners of his mouth gave it away that he really wasn’t serious.

“I’m kidding… I’ll try my best too, don’t worry.”

A familiar voice interrupts the din. “Takamine! You’re here! Why didn’t you say hello!” Chiaki rests an arm on Midori’s shoulder, face too close for comfort.

Midori pushes Chiaki a distance away, as firmly as he could. “You’re so clingy, you know…! And you were probably in the bathroom or something; I didn’t see you at all… anyways, I would’ve asked Tetora-kun to kick you out of whatever room you were hiding in, if you didn’t come out within the next five minutes, so.”

“Oh! So you were worried that I went missing! Aww, you~♪”

No; no I wasn’t...! “Should’ve stayed that way,” Midori grumbles. He didn’t expect that during the span of one month, a person could become that much more bothersome in such a short period of time, but Chiaki brought upon surprises, as always. Chiaki doesn’t act on Midori’s display of displeasure, continuing to smile himself silly.

“Alright!” Chiaki claps his hands together. “Now that Takamine’s here, we can start! RED— ”

“Blue~” Kanata echoes, and sways from side to side.

“Black!” Tetora punches a fist into the air.

“Yellow!” Shinobu pipes up, holding one of his shuriken in his hand.

“G-Green…!” Midori says, breathlessly. Because the five of them, and this house, and everything within it, felt like home, also. And he doesn’t know what to do with that feeling, the truth of it, at all.

☆

“—and then she gave me these eggplant custard tarts.” Chiaki makes a face. “It was hard to refuse… to this day, I still remember that taste, eugh…”

“You could have refused, you know… it’s not good to force yourself with the things you dislike.”

“Haha! This isn’t the first time you’ve said that, Takamine—ah, that is, Midori.”

Tetora slides the dish he’s prepared, a spicy-looking mapo tofu with loads of ground meat, onto the table, then points to his face. “See, Midori-kun, it was paste, not dried blood!”

“Tofu, huh… Thank goodness it wasn’t blood, then, Tetora-kun, or else I would have been seriously worried…” Besides him, Kanata lies his head on the table, watching the bubbles forming on the surface of the hotpot, murmuring something along the lines of “this is very ‘hot’, I don’t like it much…”

“Kanata, you can just eat it when it’s cooled down! Hm, but I haven’t seen her in a long time, though,” Chiaki continues, having zero sense in how to maintain topic continuity. “I’d really love to visit her again sometime soon. And maybe go back to Yumenosaki to see if anything’s changed along the way.”

“Didn’t you go back to Yumenosaki frequently to see the basketball games?” Tetora points out. Midori wanted to interject, Exactly , but tonight… Tonight, he wasn’t feeling up to it.

“There wasn’t any big changes, were there, Tetora-kun? Well, they extended one of the halls with a new practice room, de gozaru.”

“I would love to go see the ‘fountain’ again~”

Midori, not interested in conversing, stands up and lays down leaves of cabbage and shiitake mushrooms down into the pot.

“Oh! By the way, speaking of going back! Taka— Midori, you did receive that email, right? From Akehoshi!”

The last mushroom enters the mix with a splish . “Huh, email…?” He hasn’t checked his email in a week. “Probably… I’ll check…”

“To tell the truth, I didn’t think Akehoshi would just suddenly think to do something as big as this, but I’m glad! What a guy!” Chiaki laughs. “Though what he said was ‘there’s a lot of guys back when I was captain who wanted to have a match against you’, that’s what he said.”

“It was the same in my year, too… it got kinda annoying after a while. Wait, Morisawa-senp—err… why do you bring that up, Chiaki-san…?” But his question gets an answer before Chiaki has the chance to reply, in the form of the first email he sees in his inbox. His finger freezes mid-scroll.

Chiaki replies, anyways. “It’s a reunion! For the basketball club! Everyone from my year, and Akehoshi’s year, and even your year, seem to be on the list.”

“There’s a lot of guys back when I was captain who wanted to have a match against you”, that’s what he said.

Midori slumps into his seat. Shakedly, he says, “H-heh… but… don’t reunions happen like, “ten years later”, or something…”

“Me and Souma~ And Kaoru, we have already met on many occasions.”

“Kanata-san, that’s different…!” Midori insists, palms on the table. He blinks, then sobers. What am I doing?  “That was a summer trip.”

Kanata opens his mouth, as if to say something important, but only closes it after a minute’s delay, a soft sigh escaping his lips. “The fish, they were very ‘colorful’,” Kanata muses, wandering off track.

“Come on, Midori!” Chiaki’s hand on his shoulder is heavy, and so is his voice. Midori thinks he can see the scar, that slightly discolored scratch, underneath Chiaki’s ear, from his side vision. He swallows something bitter down. “Don’t look so glum~”

Midori’s eyebrows only jut further inwards, a pair of deeply-set creases in the skin. He’s regretting coming here; in fact, he’s regretting a lot of things right now, and they are flashing in his mind as vibrant images. Most of the images contain Chiaki-senpai. He picks up a pair of chopsticks as Chiaki continues, “Don’t you want to see Akehoshi and Isara and all your underclassmen again?”

Shrugging off the heavy hand, Midori sighs. “I would, but… it’s not like I terribly miss them right now, or anything…” The real reason for his hesitation was something Chiaki-san would never understand, not even if Midori spelled it out in big bold letters, blown up so large that Chiaki could see it without contacts or his glasses from a twenty-meter range. There is a clack as he sets down the chopsticks on the edge of the ceramic plate, a high-pitched whine from the chair scraping the kitchen floor as he pushes it back. “S-sorry guys, I’m not really feeling well, so you guys can eat without me…”

The ticks of the clock are deafening in the still. Tetora takes up the chopsticks, picking at a few strips of meat in the hotpot, and asks, “Are you sure, Midori-kun? We’ll leave you some if you feel better later.”

“Midori-kun,” Shinobu says, “is something the matter?” The clips on his hair he’s been recently wearing shows both of his eyes, and there is concern swimming in both of them, so much that Midori almost selfishly wished Shinobu would change back to his original hairstyle, just so Midori couldn’t see the worry reflected in each eye.

Chiaki stands up. A few plates on the table clatter as he does so. “Takamine, are you okay? Talk to me!”

You are… the last person I want to talk to. Midori exaggerates his features to make a pained face. “I’d rather not… I’m sorry, I’m fine, really, just not that hungry.” His gaze flickers to Kanata, who seems relatively unbothered by it all.

Kanata lays a hand gently on Chiaki’s arm. “Let’s give Midori some time by himself, shall we.”

Thank you, Kanata-san. Midori awkwardly bows his head, then silently trudges off into the living room, a complicated tangle budding in his chest.

It is only when he makes it upstairs and sits on the bed does he realize, he’d unconsciously made his way to the bedroom. There was no point in struggling with the fact anymore, now that it has reached all the way to this, so Midori lets his head fall onto the pillow, and lets the stars come into view.

One month. The glow-in-the-dark stars taped onto the ceiling, the seashells hanging above the window, Midori’s own plushies, pinks and greens and purples and yellows, clashing with the reds and blacks and golds of Chiaki’s sentai memorabilia. There are thirteen steps, one flight of stairs, one door past the bathroom, to the room the three of them shared, and Midori has kept all this information in the back of his head. Learned it all in one month.

Even the blankets feel familiar when he clutches at them with a fist. One month. One month since he’d made the mistake of letting Chiaki walk him home. Misinterpreting Chiaki’s unclear message when he’d said “I’ll be going away in a few days” and kept the details vague. Accidentally blurted out something silly, something he did not mean, something that should not have been said—

A knock. “Takamine?”

—something Midori didn’t understand himself, didn’t know was in him at all. “Please go away,” Midori says; it comes out a whisper.

“Ah, thank goodness! For a moment, I was worried there, since you didn’t seem to be making a sound.”

Outside the door, Chiaki’s voice is muffled. Midori likes it that way. He liked things quiet.

Hearing no response, Chiaki continues. “Are you feeling any better? Do you need me to call your parents to pick you up?”

“No!” Midori flinches at his own harshness; tamps it out of him as much as possible. “No… I don’t want that…”

“...Alright. We left you a plate, so come down when you’re feeling up to it, okay?” There are the relieving tap-taps of retreating footsteps. Then, “If you need me, just call me, okay!” Midori hears a continuation echo afterwards, a “Even if you’re halfway across the universe, call for us, and we’ll surely hear your wishes!” trailing behind like the echoes of footsteps down the stairs. He shakes his head; he’s hearing things, for sure.

It’s quiet in the room again. A thin band of moonlight slips in through the crack in the window. Midori almost wants to call Chiaki back, just so the room wouldn’t be so unnervingly silent. Stops himself before he confuses himself more.

An urge to cry blooms within. He needs to get this restless energy out , but. Not like this. Not right now. Everything inside him screams sleep , gives out signals that he is more tired than he feels, but he can’t do that either, not in a house that’s both a stranger to him and somewhere so achingly familiar, it’s almost like a second home.

Instead, his mind wanders back to the words he’d said that night, underneath a sky twinkling with white stars. Entering Yumenosaki’s idol course came a poor second if compared to the mistake that was that night alone.

(Chiaki’s arm had felt so immaterial. Like gossamer, like silk.

“You come crashing back into my life like the nuisance you are… so be it… but now you say you’re leaving again…?”

“Yeah, I am.” A laugh. “Sorry you only found out until now! Though you should check your phone more, you know, Takamine. I recall sending a message out to everyone about it a few days ago.”

Head bowed. Chest pains. Dry mouth. “Don’t… don’t leave.”)

Midori closes his eyes and stuffs his head into the pillow, no longer caring. The pillow muffles the sound of his whimpers, and Midori decides he likes it that way.

One month. It felt like eternity already, and he hates it.

.

Moments, fleeting things, are usually given to you and leave as quickly as they came. Some, however, linger like cigarette smoke on an old jersey. It’s hard to wash out, and after a certain period of time, you stop trying to.

Time stops sometimes, for those moments to develop and grow in the space between, into memories. Nurtured by an urgency of human life and the act of living, they stick to the sides of your ribs and don’t let go.

He remembers those wide eyes, a warm brown; a frozen mouth in a grimace; one eye blinking shut, and the thick, hot red running in rivulets alongside the curvature of the face. He remembers seconds where everything surrounding them was blurred and muted—a world with two people, catched breaths, and the edges of the tension strung between their heartbeats.

The sound doesn’t break through their isolated sphere until a beat later, but the word strangling his breath also does not break through until that beat is over, when every sensory input withheld for those two seconds comes rushing into their small contained world, tsunami-like, and drowns out whatever pitiful, whimpering sound that escaped his mouth that tasted everything like an apology, but wasn’t.

Holding the ball, Midori can see the bloodstains.

...Why didn’t I say ‘sorry’?

☆

Midori likes things quiet.

Behind closed doors, open windows, and on his bed, surrounded by mascot characters and plushies—behind encapsulating walls where the only sound left in the room was of the air conditioner and the faint noise of cicadas chirping. Quietness, solitude, helped him breathe easier, but quietness was also a double-edged sword that made it impossible for him to escape his thoughts.

Loudness, on the other hand, he absolutely hated. It drummed against his ears and made it impossible for him to hear himself think, the irony of it all.

But when Midori looks down upon Chiaki’s face, glistening with sweat, Midori misses the loudness.

“What is this déja-vu…” Midori’s right hand is shaking as he holds up a spoon full of medicine. “Chiaki-san, please stop making this more difficult than it already is… Drink this…”

“Gahh… but I want to do things…!”

Midori’s left hand is growing numb from pinning Chiaki’s arm down. “You already did… what were you thinking, staying up for all-nighters again… and then having too much fun at our gathering…”

“I didn’t drink that much,” Chiaki says weakly, indignance soaking his voice.

Kanata holds up a flat hand. “I will ‘chop’ your forehead if you say that again, Chiaki~” He turns to Midori, on the other side of the bed. “This guy, he doesn’t usually ‘drink’,”

—and he also sleeps weirdly, exposing himself to the chill; and he also does weird things like run into the ocean waters while drunk, like Kanata-san, and, and, and,  “- so you get drunk easily whenever you do, isn’t that right , Chiaki-san. Hahh… how troublesome.” Midori heaves a sigh. This, he already knew. Chiaki’s… “hugging tendencies” while drunk, he also knew. Midori shivers at the recollection.

“Ugh, Kanata…” Chiaki blinks, then blinks some more, trying to wake up from the fog enclosing on his mind but failing miserably. “Aha… haha, Midori, what is this…”

His arms go limp as Chiaki’s eyes finally close, falling asleep. Kanata chuckles. “Night-night~”

Midori inspects the bottle of cold medicine with delayed wonder. “Amazing… how effective this is…”

“Ehehe… from experience, from experience~” Kanata hums.

Midori says nothing more. He knows something Kanata-san didn’t, and that was that he’d seen Chiaki a few times on the balcony, all by himself. Not saying anything. Not doing anything, only staring out into the sea. Summer nights were mercurial at best, and often shifted between heat and chill like it had a temper. So the reason Chiaki had caught a cold, the reason why Midori came today even when Chiaki’s house was the last place he wanted to be at…

He should have called Chiaki in. He knows this.

Kanata stares at Midori, eyes crinkled in a contemplative way. Among the three of them, Kanata may be the most perceptive, the most aware of the situation—at least, more than he’d ever let on. “We should go before we catch his cold,” he says, nudging at Midori’s shoulder.

“Ah… yeah.” He takes one last look at Chiaki’s sleeping form. Get better soon, he thinks. I don’t mind your loud voice… once in a while.

.

(in the absence of all sound, a thought remains.

it tastes like guilt if you close your mouth over it. )

They don’t talk, not for a while.

Or, more accurately, Midori doesn’t talk . It’s not as if Morisawa-senpai ever listened, it’s not like Midori ever dared to come forward with words—

—and so it was, and so it was. Life went on, the sun still set, RYUSEITAI still held their practices, Midori still mumbled good morning, Sengoku-kun; Tetora-kun; Shinkai-senpai; Morisawa-senpai. Nothing phenomenal had changed, despite the awkward silence.

So Midori keeps his mouth shut.

What for?

Midori shakes his head.

why are you running? what are you running from

The answers appear in rapid-fire bursts, like firecrackers, with each tick of a finger.

1. the world
2. fear
3. the truth

☆

There’s something Chiaki both loves, and hates, about Midori Takamine.

Hate, he realizes, was too strong a word to describe what he feels. It is more like a blue-noted, tinged sadness, like realizing your favourite sweater is fraying at the ends. Chiaki himself is used to smiling—he does it when he’s happy, he does it when he’s sad and faking it. He smiles even when everything and everyone in the world would tell him, it made no sense to smile now, but still, he smiled. And when his smiles encouraged others to smile around him, his smile only gets brighter and wider, still.

Midori does not smile.

It is a mouth accustomed to frowning. It is a mouth used to straight lines and trembling and lip-biting, just as his eyes are used to drooping and his eyebrows used to jutting upwards in worry. And being someone who loves seeing others happy and smiling, seeing Midori’s face always under a constant downpour; it hurts, just a bit.

And no matter how much Midori looked like he was in pain, all he did was complain about the surface of that pain, never speaking a word about what lies underneath.

It makes him feel like he’s lost. Chiaki wants to be someone who can make people happy. If he can’t even do something like this, then how can he live with himself?

But, living with Midori—getting used to his presence; the feeling, a brief taste of closeness Chiaki never had the chance to receive from the other back when they were high schoolers, Midori has taught him a few things.

Chiaki lives in a big, bright world full of sound. Midori lived quiet. What Midori had taught him, slowly, subtlety, was to notice .

All the little things, the quiet things, the things gone past like the scurrying of wind until you come across them in your memories, on summer evenings when you couldn’t fall asleep. It’s hard to see the small things through lenses that have only ever seen in full technicolor, his loud world, but slowly,

(One. Because Chiaki was deathly afraid of ghosts, Midori had gone ahead and strung Christmas lights all along the hallway leading up to the kitchen.)

(Two. Sometimes, Chiaki would wake up from a nightmare, sweat and tears dripping down his face, and would go to quietly, discreetly wipe his face with a sleeve, only to find Midori’s hand curled around his. Despite appearing to be sound asleep, Chiaki knew Midori was a light sleeper.)

(Three. The finger-touches during dinner. The gentle shoulder bump or hand squeeze whenever Midori isn’t feeling up to a hug or a kiss. A hint of a half-smile, barely showing, but there, whenever Midori wakes up first, and sees Chiaki’s eyes open.)

Chiaki wants to ask, are you happy with me? Being with me?

But he knows that even if he did, Midori wouldn’t say anything. His answers all lie in the little things, and some of these, maybe Chiaki just hasn’t found yet.

He’s looking forward to finding each and every one of them.

And one by one, finding them gets easier. Even through Midori’s bad days, the depressed days; even through the usual frowns and deep-set eyebrows and tears that Chiaki hated to see so much, he knew that the sadness was inevitable and that it was okay to be that way, sometimes. Midori was Midori, and his sadness did not define him. And there was always more to it. There would be that little thing Chiaki would have never noticed before but now does, that one extra marshmallow in his cup of hot cocoa sitting on the kitchen table when Midori had gone to bed first.

In a world of sadness, every little thing that shone became so much more precious.

So, when Midori bursts out into soft laughter and smiles so hard his cheeks are flushed, Chiaki’s heart melts, a thousand times more.

(because Midori was, if anything, the sunlight after a storm)

☆

“You’re sneezing,” Chiaki points out, heaving blanket after blanket from the closet. “And I’m the reason you caught a cold, right! So it makes sense that you should stay with me and Kanata until you’re all better!”

He says this like it’s a truth. Like it’s a constant, like it has to be— like the stars, in a coalition, had held a celestial meeting, orbited and positioned themselves in just the right angles and just the right places, and made things absolute.

Midori doesn’t argue that the reason he caught a cold wasn’t completely because of him catching it from Chiaki-san. Most of it was his own fault, for staying up too late at night, then not being able to fall asleep, or maybe his bad luck in general—summer colds were as scarce as owls in the daytime, and yet he had caught the worst of it. It could even be because, subconsciously, he’d done it on purpose… wished to catch a cold so he’d have an excuse to miss the reunion...

But Chiaki was right. Midori was in no position to go home as of now. The day was late, Midori doesn’t feel like moving from his spot on the couch, and Chiaki, always doing more than he’s entitled to, had already made calls to Midori’s parents. He’d be deemed unfit for work at the greengrocery (something Midori was hugely thankful for), anyways.

And having a cold had its advantages. When Midori wanted people to leave him alone, they did.

Most of the time.

Maybe going home is a better idea, he reconsiders. He’s never been sick in front of Chiaki-san, but already he’s learning of what it feels like. That guy, he’s the kind that hovers over you and asks you if you need anything every two seconds like a doting parent. Must be because of Kanata-san… always getting into trouble...

Midori opens his mouth to object, to stop Chiaki’s inevitable Plus, I’m your boyfriend!!!!! . As he is now, confused of the very feeling in his chest, hearing that word would only make him more depressed. A sneeze escapes, instead, and he closes his mouth, helpless.

Chiaki hands Midori a tissue. He does not use the boyfriend card, to Midori’s utmost relief. “You’ll like this one,” Chiaki was saying, amidst the beeping of the remote, his back a small thing against the brightness of the TV screen. His voice sounds far away, retreating into the distance. A blur. Carelessly, Midori is reaching for it, his arm extending out before him in a desperate claw. “I watched this one a dozen times when I was little, you know! It’ll fill you with vigor and the blazing heat of justice and you’ll recover in no time!”

His back…

When he was playing basketball. Or when he stepped onto the middle of the stage (Chiaki was always, always, RYUSEITAI’s shining centre, even when he was positioned at the edges), Midori could see his back. It was small, smaller than Midori’s own, but it was broad, meant for a hero’s cape, meant for supporting the five of them, and leading them on.

His back is so far away .

That night, too, it had been so far away. Midori, he can’t, he can’t reach it. Doesn’t dare to reach it.

“T-Takamine?” A strong grip catches his shoulder; Chiaki’s worried face looms over his own. “If you wanted to watch another DVD, we can; just tell me that, okay?”

His hand retreats. Midori mumbles a your face is too close, Chiaki-san . Everything is so hot, and loud. It’s painful.

And your back is so, so far away.

The show starts without either of them consenting. Auto-play, or maybe they’d passed the selection menu already. Chiaki puts a hand to Midori’s forehead; the hand is warm. Midori doesn’t know if he likes it that way.

Don’t talk. Keep the silence. Keep the silence—but everything feels wrong , on the court, on the benches, during unit practice.

Midori raises a faltering hand. Watches Morisawa-senpai’s back, so many times his back that he has become all too familiar with it.

“I’m sorry” breaks down, changes into “Nevermind” halfway through his throat.

Lets the hand fall.

“Takamine.” After that night, Chiaki only uses Midori’s last name out in public—or when he’s scared . Midori wants to cry—there was nothing different about it from back then, back during his first year in RYUSEITAI where Morisawa-senpai came to his house in the mornings and called him by name.

Since when did it become so different?

Midori’s eyes focus and adjust, cutting through the hot blur for an infinitesimal second.  He’s staring up at Chiaki’s face again. His head’s resting on Chiaki’s lap. Since when was he here? “You fell over again, huh. Kanata!”

Kanata pokes his head ‘round the corner. “Yes, Chiaki?”

“Help me get Midori to bed. He needs sleep.”

No, you can’t possibly know what I need… What I need is answers...

What comes out of his mouth instead is “It’s so hot… everything is so hot… I want to die…”

“No dying yet, Midori,” Kanata commands with a light tap-tap to Midori’s forehead. Kanata is overwhelmingly strong, for his size. While Chiaki was steady. Midori closes his eyes, and lets himself drown in their up-down movements and their voices—one calm, like soothing waters; the other too loud for his ears, and yet it held something as rare, and reassuring, as the last drop of warmth left on Earth cupped in his hands.

He holds those hands to his chest, as if giving it the warmth it needed to melt the coldness of his heart, and breathes in the stifling heat. As long as he breathes, the dream he is living in will keep on, and whatever past memories, whatever dilemma he held in his heart, deluded and urgent, will unravel itself and fade away with each breath. Breathe, Midori. Breathe.

“Midori, hang on! Here, take this pillow!”

“Midori~ Have a sip of water.”

“Shut up and let me sleep…” but he takes the water glass and drinks.

“That’s a good boy~” Kanata praises him, and hands him a stuffed blue whale plushie in exchange for the glass. “See,” Kanata adds, in a triumphant tone, “my ‘boyfriend’ listens to me more than you.”

Kanata uses the boyfriend card. If Chiaki was in any way displeased at losing whatever finicky argument he had with Kanata, he does not show it. Midori’s not sure if he’ll die from his fever or from boyfriend squabbles unbeknownst to him first.

Midori interrupts a playful banter from beginning with a sudden coughing fit. It’s as if something heavy is sitting on his chest. He feels the support of a pillow being slid behind him and a hand rubbing the small of his back. Looks up pointedly with drawn, tired eyes that say Leave. Both of you.

For once, Chiaki seems to understand his need for space. “Drink this after you wake up, okay?” he says, holding up a bottle of juice—Midori’s favourite brand. “Heroes need energy to fight their enemies, you know! So don’t give up yet, okay, Midori?!”

Midori doesn’t need explaining to know Chiaki actually meant don’t die on us.

“Alright then~ Night-night, Midori,” Kanata says, and then places a kiss on his feverish forehead. Midori swallows back a grumble. Only closes his eyes, breathing, dreaming of rivers of stars in a black black sky, and of the North star who has lost its way.

.

but why do you run?

i fear myself.

of what i’ve done

of what i can’t do

of what i don’t understand.

☆

Between them, in a world that rushes and flashes by like lightning, they’ve always taken it slow. Had to take it slow, so both of them could run at the same pace, but Chiaki grew to understand it a bit better, and didn’t mind. Everyone grew at their own pace, and speed was not an issue. Late bloomers were often the most beautiful of flowers, because they had to suffer and succumb through pain in order to get where they were now.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Midori’s eyes are wide with alarm. As quick as lightning, it’s gone, replaced by closed eyes, a shake of a head, an air of petulance. “Talk about what?”

“You look like you have something to say, you know.”

Normally, this would have been a good entry point for teasing. Or, at least, Midori’s signature “No, I don’t wanna talk about it… plus, you never listen, anyways…” So when Midori only tilts his head down, gaze cast to the floor, Chiaki’s at a loss. He isn’t used to dealing with this.

In fact, everything was quite new, between them. One month, and a bit more. It just doesn’t feel that way because something had started way back then, back in their time at Yumenosaki. At least, for Chiaki it did.

“Wait! Come on, let’s go to the balcony,” Chiaki offers. “The ocean’s great tonight, and you know, fresh air is good for the mind and the body!”

“...put on a jacket first, and then I’ll reconsider.”

Chiaki heads to the closet. “I don’t need a jacket, though, haha! My burning heart will keep me warm.”

Midori is silent. Chiaki is, too, as he joins Midori on the balcony.

The sea, dark and roiling, glimmers white under the moonlight. Beside them, the seashell windchime jingles, ringing out a forlorn, soft melody. That, and the distant waves crashing on the shore, and the clicks of Midori’s spoon against the glass become everything that sounds, for the next few seconds.

Please don't be like that , Chiaki thinks. It makes me sad when you ignore me.

Chiaki coughs. “Although I’ve gotten better at reading the mood, Midori, that doesn’t mean I know everything about a situation just by intuition alone. I can’t stand by anymore! I want to help you, so if there’s anything that’s bothering you, tell me.”

“Chiaki-san, we’ve been over this… right now, I don’t need your help. I just… need some space, okay…?”

“Midori, you’re not fighting alone, remember that. You’ve got us, all of RYUSEITAI, of METEORANGERS , me and Kanata, behind you.”

“I know that…! I know that.” Midori stops stirring his cup of drink mix. “Just… not now. That’s not what I need now. I’m going home,” he clips, and that was it, end of conversation. “Goodnight, Chiaki-san. Don’t catch a cold and come in too, alright.”

“Ah… goodnight, Midori.”

The chimes continue their melody, unaware of the tension in their surroundings. Chiaki heaves a sigh, elbows on the railing overlooking the sand, and the ocean, and the summer-sweet chirps of crickets. Maybe he was overdoing it. Maybe he was approaching the problem all wrong; he’s never been great at math problems, anyhow, and it seemed to carry forward to puzzles in life, too. Things never went as well as they did in tokusatsu shows as they did in real life, and that’s what made it ever the more harder to overcome.

“Am... I getting too close?” Had he been trying too hard, to get close again? It was true that Midori has always been this way, a little cold and shut-in at times, but he’d changed during his high school years, you know? And even the month Chiaki had spent with him, he’d been a little different. Now, all it feels like is a relapse. Chiaki half-wonders, if it might have been his fault, but the answer is locked deeply within Midori himself, and Chiaki has no key to access it.

The basket, it seems, is growing ever taller from the ground.

If I shoot…

will you fall?

.

“Left! Pass it here!”

Akehoshi-senpai catches the ball with a firm hold, then dribbles it. One step, and then he springs up; with a stuck-out tongue he finishes the lay-up, and the basketball settles into the hoop.

“Good one, Akehoshi!” Morisawa-senpai claps his hands together. “Who’s next? How about you, Takamine! Come on, get your feet moving and your blood pumping!”

Midori jolts on the bench. “No thank you…”

Morisawa-senpai walks over, hand on hip, basketball tucked in-between. “Just one before we go!”

“Ugh… how depressing...fine…” Midori ties up his shoelaces, and meets Buchou on the court. “What do I do…?”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t been watching Isara and Akehoshi do it! Well, no matter. It’s two against one, Takamine. One of us will be the opponent, and the other two try to score a point. I’ll be playing, of course! Since I’m the captain ☆”

“Nevermind…” Midori shrinks into himself. “I’d rather go home…”

“Takamine.” It’s Isara-senpai. “I’ll do it with you, if you want. Buchou , you’re alright being the opponent again, right?”

“Sure thing! Though I don’t like the idea of it, but even though I’m usually a hero in RYUSEITAI , right now I am the captain of the basketball club, so I’ll happily play my role as the enemy, fuhaha! Isara, Takamine, do your best to take me on!”

“Give me the ball, Takamine.” Isara-senpai takes it, steps onto the court. “Takamine, you can start from over there.”

“G-Got it.” Midori stations himself on the right of Isara-senpai, and bends his knees a little, though they shake like trees in the wind. Isara-senpai moves steadily—not as quickly as Akehoshi-senpai or as fervently as Morisawa-senpai, but he never loses footing, nor sight of the goal. Too fast, Isara-senpai shouts “Takamine! Here,” and Midori, eyes flickering from Isara-senpai to the ball to Morisawa-senpai—

His heart thuds. Senpai, you’re too close , but that was true for almost all sports, wasn’t it? Too late does he wish he could have joined another club. Tea Club sounded less of a chore. Or even Tennis Club; at least you wouldn’t be so close to the other members, at least there’s a net in between you and the opponent that made you feel safer; at least, the ball you were playing with is smaller in size and less heavy—

“Alright there, Takamine?” Isara-senpai’s voice is tiny compared to the loud, elephant-like heartbeats. It’s the only thing in the room besides Morisawa-senpai’s towering figure before him. For once, Morisawa-senpai is taller than Midori, and Midori isn’t even happy about it. All he sees is a bother, an obstruction with no spaces anywhere to escape or maneuver around, and—catching sight of the tape on his fingers, the dirt scuffs on his legs, that fresh cut just slightly below his ear that will likely leave a scar— Midori sees a haunting, grim reminder, and then he sees nothing at all as he closes his eyelids.

The ball in his hands drop to the floor like a heavyweight. “I can’t do it,” he says, swallowing. His hands are sweating too much and he can't focus at all, swathed in all this red.

“Hey, Takamine—”

“Maybe sometime later...” Midori says, picking up his bag. “I’m going home.”

☆

“Your house hasn’t changed since the last time I came here!” Chiaki inspects the peppers, then the tomato section, then shivers when he catches sight of the eggplants. “Hey, T-Takamine… since when did you move the eggplants from over there to here?”

“If you’re not going to buy anything, then please don’t touch the potatoes…”

“Ah, right. Gotcha~”

“Senpai, why are you here again…? And to think I was getting used to you no longer coming over to my house in the mornings…”

“It’s because you sounded reluctant to come to the game, you see. But you absolutely have to come, Midori! Everyone is going, and I bet your underclassmen are also excited to see you again!”

“Regrettably,” Midori says, pushing the cloth of the doorway apart and exiting, “I’m still going, even though I don’t want to…” How depressing. “If I don’t go, I feel like I’ll let down all my underclassmen… Some of them texted me last night, and I’d really suck if I didn’t attend, wouldn’t I.”

“That’s my hero, METEOR GREEN! Keep it up, GREEN ~”

“Aghh, please stop that, thanks… Also, the bus is going to leave if you don’t come out soon,” Midori grumbles.

“Ooh! Don’t worry, I’m coming!”

Midori stuffs his hands into his pants pockets, and sighs.

The bus ride proves to be uneventful. Midori is glad Chiaki isn’t trying to make conversation, or anything that would make him even more nervous than he was already. The only sounds come from Chiaki’s own “Ooh! A cat!” and “I haven’t seen these houses in a long time!” to “I remember that tree… Ahh, I’ve missed this scenery…” and the rattle of the bus as it went over uneven strips of the road.

Akehoshi-senpai is the one that greets them outside the gym. “Takamin, Chi-chan-senpai, over here!” When Chiaki goes in for an embrace, Subaru, wholly accepting his fate, only makes a “guess I can't help it” face at Midori, who is standing at a distance.

“Akehoshi, did you grow taller? You've grown, haven't you!”

“Chi-chan-senpai, you literally saw me last week in the halls…”

“Haha! It feels like ages though! And it's been a long time since we've played basketball together.”

Subaru has a glint, an edge, to his expression. “Doesn't mean I’ll lose to you, Buchou !”

“Oh, a challenge! I accept your request with open arms, Akehoshi! Fuhaha!”

“You guys better hurry inside,” Mao calls, standing just outside the doorway. “If we don’t start playing, I don’t think we’ll have enough time to get through everyone.”

Chiaki is the first one to take off, while Subaru and Midori lag behind. Akehoshi-senpai takes one look at Midori before nodding, as if concluding something. He grins. “Takamin, join my team, OK?”

Midori isn’t listening. His gaze is drawn towards the clamor, through the doorway, of Chiaki greeting everyone, high-fiving and hugging each and every person who wanted to have a match with him. Midori recognizes some of his own underclassmen in the throng of people, smiling and chattering away. You’re… really good at making people happy… aren’t you…? Morisawa-senpai. “Morisawa-senpai… sure is popular, isn’t he.”

“Ahaha, he is; it kinda makes me jealous! Oh, but Takamin, there’s people from my grade and even Chi-chan-senpai’s grade that want to have a match with you, too.”

“Ehh~ They don’t even know me…”

Akehoshi-senpai smiles knowingly, as if he knew something Midori didn’t. “You’re way more well-known than you think! You should see yourself when you play, Takamin… It’s hard not to get distracted by you when you—”

“Stray ball!” and suddenly, there’s a ball in front of them.

(It’s larger than Midori thought it would be.

“Don’t worry about it! It could’ve been a concussion, but luckily it didn’t hit the right place to knock myself silly. You can call it a stroke of good luck, haha!”

His heart is dropping to his stomach; his legs are screaming at him to move , but like a moth drawn to a flame he’s mesmerized, and like prey to predator he’s frozen stiff.

One, two seconds, and it—)

“Takamine!”

The ball bounces once on the parquet. Midori’s hands, as if apart from his body, reaches forward to catch the stray ball. “Sorry, Subaru, Takamine!” Isara-senpai calls, running towards them. “Is everyone okay?”

The ball is rough, like sandpaper.

“Geez, Sari, be more careful next time!” Subaru dusts himself off. Midori is shaking next to the door, leaning on the frame for support. “Look, you scared Takamin half to death.”

“I really… could have died…” Midori huffs, and leans in harder. Is this what he saw when I…?

Midori knew he had been clumsy back in first year, movements never matching up with his hands, and his strength had been unknown to him. But that wasn’t everything: everything is rushing back all at once, things he’d thought had gone deep into the unconscious resurfacing— all the times he’s done nothing but complain, Tetora-kun’s validated anger as he laid out truth by truth by truth, the time he almost broke Buchou ’s nose, when he had stepped on Morisawa-senpai’s foot, whenever he snapped at his seniors. Morisawa-senpai’s face in the morning as he came over to pick Midori up from his house, his kindness, the ball the ball the ball hurtling like a meteor blazing up towards Earth—

“...can walk, right? You can still stand up, right? Don’t give up yet, hero!” Chiaki’s voice is loud. Too loud. Midori blinks, and it turns out, it’s because he’s right there beside his ear, his shoulder underneath Midori’s arm, walking him over to the bench.

“Am I…” Midori doesn’t finish the sentence.

Chiaki inspects him like he was inspecting the peppers earlier. There are a few other spectators, most of them Midori’s own underclassmen, concerned about their club captain as much as Chiaki is to his kouhai. “You don’t look hurt, thank goodness!” He doesn’t reach forward to hug him, much to Midori’s surprise. “You hit your head on the doorframe when the ball came towards you,” he tells Midori, while his hand brushes back Midori’s hair, looking for bruises or any signs of bleeding. “Your face is rather pale, though. Are you sure you’ve recovered from your cold?”

Your face is close though , Midori wants to say, and so is your mouth… All of a sudden, he’s uncomfortable in his own thoughts, and he keeps his eyes glued to the floor, ball kept in his hands through fingertip strength alone. Morisawa-senpai seems to notice this, because he retreats a little, too. “Y-yes… I’m alright now. I was just surprised. Go play your game.”

“Mm... Okay then!” Chiaki seems hesitant to leave, contradicting his own words, and yet, there is a rift between them as if a force field has been put up around where Midori is sitting.

“There’s a lot of people waiting for you,” Midori says. “Oh… right,” he says hastily, tracing Chiaki’s line of vision, “here, the ball.” His arms start the motion of passing the ball, but suddenly, his muscles clench, tension-strung. I…

As I thought, he thinks, as he looks up to Morisawa-senpai’s face, feels the ball’s leather scraping at his skin. I just can’t do this.

Chiaki doesn’t seem to notice as he plucks the ball from Midori’s hands, touching nothing but the ball itself. Just like that. “Thanks, Takamine!”

There are eyes all trained on him, burning holes into his flesh. Midori can’t read minds, but he’s sure of it, that everyone is wondering why their buchou can’t even pass the ball. He wants to put his face in his hands. “I’ll… meet you all on the court when I’m ready,” he mumbles, but it’s not a promise, not really.

Reassured, Morisawa-senpai nods and springs off the heel of his foot, landing back into court, into action. Midori slides off the bench and lays his head on the wall of the bleachers. The crowd around him also disperses, gives him a few waves, as if to say We’ll wait for you when you’re ready, Buchou.

The game… isn’t terribly exciting to watch. Save for a few shots from some of the players and Akehoshi-senpai’s flashy moves, it was just like a normal basketball club activity day. But everywhere, there was laughter, and like a star in the middle of a solar system, Morisawa-senpai is shining. RYUSEITAI’s shining centre, as always. A firecracker.

Midori strains to hear what they’re saying, among all the noise. He squints. Is… Is that guy really cheering on for the other team?

For Midori, he’s used to Morisawa-senpai’s kindness, so it became something commonplace, but he’s reminded now, as one of his underclassmen gets a clap on the back for doing something commendable, that not everyone has had the experience. Morisawa-senpai was kind to everyone, but even now, he’s turning around to flash a grin at Midori on the bench. Checking up on him.

Midori tilts his head to the side as a return gesture of acknowledgement. Shakes his head and mouths, I’m not ready yet. He’s been taking Morisawa-senpai away from everyone else as it is already. It would be inexcusable to cause even more damage, so it was only right to stay on the sidelines. Besides, he’s sure that even if he joins the game as he is now, in his overthinking state there was no way for him to be able to stay focused on the game.

Morisawa-senpai is smiling, and so is everyone else. Everyone is so happy… because of you. Something in his heart flutters.

And yet another thing pushes that feeling down. With a start, a sinking of the heart, Midori realizes that what he’s suspected must be the truth. The reason why he had reached out and grabbed Morisawa-senpai’s arm that night, told him to wait. Even if I spent my whole life trying, I don’t think I could ever fully return the favor. He’d said that once, during their Repayment Festival, and it was true even now.

Pretending that what he felt was love when it was just guilt in disguise, asking Morisawa-senpai to stay with him out of guilt of not doing enough for the other, so he could somehow make it up to Chiaki, all of that was just another way to run away from the truth. And he’d still hurt everyone in the process, rather unherolike for someone who took upon that image and assumed the title of RYUSEI Green. I’m still a fake, aren’t I. A fake idol, a fake shell of a person with fake, half-assed feelings.

When Midori finally gets up to play, he doesn’t play for, or against Chiaki, at all.

☆

Nonetheless, Midori found himself standing in the middle of the hallway—Morisawa-senpai’s hallway—with an ice pack pressed against his left cheek. Although the ball had harmlessly made its way through the gap between where Midori was standing and Akehoshi-senpai, it did so not before giving Midori a slight bruise along its trajectory. Perhaps he was just worried, or maybe even with that dense mind of his he’s sensed the awkward distance stretching in between them like the wires of telephone poles, but Morisawa-senpai had taken them back to his house after the reunion. Maybe he was even angry at Midori for not paying attention and wanted to lecture him… Morisawa-senpai’s anger took a different shape and form than most people’s. It almost always came out of pure concern and worry, and never crescendoed into fury, which only made it ten times worse.

“Takamine,” Morisawa-senpai was saying, standing two large crates’ distance away from him. It really did sound like a lecture. And then he says, “Midori,” which only added onto the confusion, and anxiety.

“Morisawa-senpai,” Midori answers. Because it’s the only thing that fit.

“Have you been pushing me away?”

It didn’t start with “What were you thinking?” or “You should be more careful next time”; it didn’t even start with “Apologize to me,” worst-case scenario. You... were worried about this?

“Why… do you ask that… all of a sudden.”

Morisawa-senpai puts a hand to his forehead. “...Nothing. Nothing really. But you haven’t been responding to me as much lately, so I wonder. Ahaha, I know I’m not good at reading things! So don’t worry about it. But… If I’m troubling you, please let me know, Takamine.”

Is that the reason for the caution Midori had sensed? Was the reason why Midori is finding Morisawa-senpai all the more annoying a product of time and of getting to know the other better, or because all this time, Morisawa-senpai was trying to get Midori’s attention, to get a response?

“I’m sorry… I didn’t know that you were thinking of all this...” Why was saying this sorry that much easier? “In fact, there is something troubling me right now…”

“What is it? Please tell me! I’ll accept what it is, no matter what.”

“No matter what, huh… How can you be so sure?”

Morisawa-senpai only smiles. “It might be a blind leap of faith, Midori, but I’m willing to place my trust in both of us. After all, the bond in RYUSEITAI that we’ve forged is stronger than anything! It’s not going to break so easily, that’s what I think. I’d like it,” he says, “for you to be honest with me.” He says like as if he were saying need .

Honest? Since when have I been honest about myself? “...I guess it’s time to be honest, isn’t it.” He thinks of everything he needs to say. There was no way to back out of this now that the culmination of events has reached the pinnacle. And if he ran away now, it would only prove that Midori hadn’t changed a bit since his high school years.

It would only add to the unfairness. At least, if Midori told the truth and left, then Morisawa-senpai would have one less thing to worry about. He’d have to tell the truth to Shinkai-senpai afterwards, too, but that can wait. Right now, he’s as ready as he’ll ever be, and he needs to take the chance before his fear overcomes him again and pushes logic outside the window.

To be honest now would be the last thing, the only thing Midori could give to Morisawa-senpai now. It pales in comparison to all the kindness he’d gotten back, and that plain fact feels disgusting.

“Chiaki-san.” He’ll call him that, one last time. “Remember when I… that night, when I confessed…”

Morisawa-senpai is quiet. Midori finds, suddenly, that he hates it.

Forcing each word out of his mouth was a Herculean task. “It was a mistake,” Midori says, in the most convincing voice he can pull off. His confidence, or faked confidence, (just like his fake self, he supposes)—whatever it was, it came out more convincing than he’d expected. “I didn’t mean it… I’m sorry.”

Morisawa-senpai is nodding, but nothing about the way he did it felt like acceptance . Rather, it feels sad. Pained. “I’m really happy for your honesty, Takamine. Thank you. And thank you, for these two months, too. I’m glad to have been a part of it, you know.”

Midori swallows. “Me… too…” he says, because it’s the only response he could come up with that wouldn’t shatter Chiaki’s heart more than what his words just did, right now.

Morisawa-senpai smiles, as if nothing was wrong. His gaze drifts off to the kitchen clock. “Would you look at the time! It’s getting dark out there, so let me take you back to your house, then!”

“No thanks… I don’t want to bother you anymore. I’ll walk home myself.” Even as he says this, Midori’s legs feel on the brink of collapsing. He knew, with no doubt in his mind, that he wouldn’t be able to last the entire way back without breaking down along the way.

“No, I’m happy to help you out. I know you don’t like walking home at night alone, you know.” It almost sounds like a plea, like At least, let me do this for you one last time.

“ You don’t like the dark, either,” Midori points out, stressed.

“That’s right, certainly I don’t! However, it’s easier with someone there walking with me, right?” Chiaki doesn’t give Midori any room to argue as he gets up and heads towards the door. His back is terrifyingly small against the small rectangle of light streaming through the door window.

So, it ends like this…?

Midori realizes, with a sickening thump, that the word end tasted bitter on his tongue.

There’s blood, leaking and dripping onto the floor. Turning the court red. His vision’s swimming in it. His fingers are covered in it.

Morisawa-senpai smiles, all wobbly, one hand holding the side of his face as it continued to bleed. Smiling even though he’s hurt, even though Midori had hurt him, to help ease the guilt. As if, naively, if he smiled, then Midori would catch the contagiousness of that smile and smile, too. “Come and join us, alright, Takamine? The team’s all here.”

A great ache is opening up in his chest cavity, wide as the maw of a giant prehistoric sea creature—as if he’d never… loved Morisawa Chiaki more , than what he felt right this moment, the force of it slamming into his chest.

No, I—

The next breaths that come out of his mouth are quick, tattered, raw.

“Chiaki-san...!”

And, just like that night, Chiaki stops, and turns back to face him.

☆

He hates how it was always after hurting people that he realizes, he loves them. It makes everything so much easier to lose, at that point. Hates how Tetora-kun had held back words against him for the entire first year until the point that it was unbearable and yet waited for Midori to come back, before Midori had realized, just how important RYUSEITAI was to him.

Hates how this wasn’t the first time he’s hurt Morisawa-senpai, some without an apology.

Since when did it become so different— since when did he start to feel this way towards him —he understands now. It came out of every time Chiaki pulled Midori by the cuff of his shirt and dragged him to practice despite Midori’s plaintitive protests. It came out of every time Chiaki sang on stage for an audience ten times the size of Yumenosaki Academy, and remain unshakable. It came out of Chiaki’s kindness, his forgiveness—how he could make everyone around him feel important, how he could smile at the basketball club’s members, at total strangers, and make them smile back. It came out of the afterglow, the sparks off Chiaki’s fire that would catch on Midori’s stiff heart that was so used to darkness that even a drop of something warm could kindle it, make it yearn for more.

It came out each and every time the word sorry dies on his tongue and he’s forced to see Chiaki’s back, not because of his guilt but the other way around—Midori feels sorry because he should, towards someone he must have hurt, but also because that someone is important to him; because he’s been, little by little, falling in love with—

“What’s wrong, Takamine?” Chiaki abandons his directive and comes rushing back, at the motionless Midori standing pitifully in the middle of the empty kitchen. “Did you forget something important?”

What’s wrong?: It’s always been you, Chiaki-san.

Did you forget something important?: Always been you.

“You…” Midori mumbles, shaking. “You…”

Chiaki points to the living room. “Why don’t we sit down and talk it out together?” He says it as if it’s a suggestion, not a command, but Midori knows both of them knew, that distinction didn’t matter anymore. Not when this is where the two of them were now.

“It’s not like you’ll listen… or rather, it’s like you miss all the little details and only sees the big picture… but...”

“I’ll listen.” Chiaki sounds so sure, so direct. “I promise I’ll listen—if I don’t get it, you can correct me. But I won’t know what you want to say if you never say it.”

Midori nods. They make their way to the couch, Chiaki on one side, Midori on the other, so that there’s a seat left open in the middle. “It’ll be unfair if you’re the only one trying, I guess, so… I’ll do my best, too. To talk.”

“Go on. I’ll take on whatever! Even if you want to take out your frustrations on me, I wouldn’t mind—”

“That’s it ,” Midori snatches Chiaki’s arm mid-air, grabs it tightly. “You… why… why are you like this?!”

“Takamine… I don’t think I understand.”

“I just told you, that I never meant those words I said… and yet, you pretended you were okay with all that… you just smiled, as if nothing was wrong. You know,” Midori doesn’t stop himself. He’s tired of running away. “You… even you can afford to be a little selfish sometimes, too…”

Chiaki’s face is a blur. Belatedly, Midori notices the moisture dripping down his face; he hastily wipes them away with a brusque sleeve.

“It’s not like that, Takamine.”

Midori blinks.

“Of course I was sad,” Chiaki starts. His fingers twist into a mesmerizing tangle in his lap. “But… I guess you could say that I was relieved. You seemed uncomfortable with me, you know… So if I was causing your pain, Takamine, if you weren't happy with me… then I’m more than happy to let you go.”

Midori opens his mouth, but what comes out isn’t choked-up tears. It’s a strange sort of strangled whisper-laugh, as if even his voice had no idea what to do. “That should be your line, being stuck with such a useless guy like me… I don't understand it. Morisawa-senpai, and Shinkai-senpai, too; just what do you see in me?”

“There’s a lot of things I like about you, though!” He says this as if it were a constant, an universal truth.

“Actually, please don’t answer that question, it’ll only make me feel worse…”

“It’s the truth, though!”

“Even if it is to you, I still haven’t lived up to it.” It would be too much to ask, for him to ask Chiaki-san to wait for him until he caught up to everyone else. So he doesn’t, and instead, continues. “I’m not finished, so… please, hear me out until then...?”

Chiaki exhales. The room is quiet again. “I’ll do the best I can.” It sounds genuine.

“I guess you could say I was pushing you away… I needed some space to think things out, because I was confused about a lot of things, but I got lost along the way, and ended up coming to the wrong conclusion. But I think... I’ve got it now.

“I felt guilty… of a lot of things, Senpai, and I let it mess up a lot of things, so I don’t know… I didn’t know how to feel about you, towards you, anymore...” He looks up. “Does that make sense?”

“Give me a moment to process that… er… no, could you explain it again?”

“It’s no use, is it, Morisawa-senpai… fine, that’s okay. I’ll show you,” not with words, but with actions .

Midori shifts closer. Reaches to touch that small scratch underneath Chiaki’s ear, gingerly. “This… This. I realize… this might be too late for me… I’ve always been slower than everyone else, but…” It’s hard to look at the other in the eyes; he drops his gaze to the couch. “Sorry,” and it hurts, so much that his mouth closes around the word as an automatic, protective response, but the hurt is nothing compared to the pain of keeping it in, so Midori forces it open each time it closes. “For hurting you, I’m sorry…”

“Is this what you meant by feeling guilty, Takamine? For hurting me?”

“Yeah… and for not saying sorry back then, because I was scared of how you’d react… And I couldn’t look at you without feeling guilty of something, so… I wasn’t sure if what I felt was lo...”

Chiaki lifts Midori’s chin up so they are face to face. “Look at me.”

“I don’t want to,” but he does, anyways. Chiaki’s eyes are warm, and bright.

“Thank you,” Chiaki sighs, then smiles. “You know, heroes don’t ever ask for anything in return, but you’ve given me a lot, you see.”

“No…”

“Takamine.” This is said with a softer tone than usual. There are still so many things Midori didn’t know about Morisawa Chiaki, he realizes. So many things. “I’ve told you before, that by living, we inevitably hurt others accidentally in the process. But that’s why! That’s why, Midori, we have families, and friends, and lovers, and even unit-mates—that’s why we find people we can support, and be supported by—it’s so we can learn from each other and grow , as people.

“So, have faith in the people you love and don’t be afraid to be honest! Apologize when you must, but at the end of the day, people who truly love you and who you love back, trust in them to forgive you.” Chiaki brushes the edges of Midori’s eyes with his sleeve. “So… is it selfish for me to ask you to smile…?”

“That’s… impossible for me…” Midori lifts his hand to meet Chiaki’s wrist, but doesn’t push it away. “...but no, not really… And if you were going to say ‘No such thing as impossible!’—”

“Ahaha! That was just what I was about to say! How did you know?”

“I had a hunch.”

“Am I really that easy to tell? Or… don’t tell me you have ESP?!”

“ESP… seriously…”

“Hey, don’t laugh! Kanata told me it was a real thing! Didn’t everyone in Yumenosaki suspect Kanata’s hair was actually an antenna that could receive mysterious messages?”

“Heh… did you really believe that, Chiaki-senpai?”

“Well…”

Midori couldn’t help it; before he knew it there were telltale pricks of newly-formed tears at the corners of his eyes. Because talking like this feels natural . It feels, inexplicably, like home, and the warmth budding in his chest is no longer possible to ignore. There’s still so many things he needs to say, but.

He can trust Chiaki to wait for him, right…? He wants to be able to face Chiaki with as much honesty as he can, starting now… so some things will have to wait, until Midori can make sure, it’s exactly what he wants to say.

Right now, there’s one thing he’s sure of.

Home, family, love— he didn't understand any of it, but now, looking at Chiaki it’s like he’s found his answer. Because Chiaki was all three. “Before, during Repayment Festival, I told you that I wouldn't be able to pay you back even if it took my entire lifetime. But… I still want to try, even if it's selfish of me… I’ll be honest with you right now, and from now on. In fact, I should have, a long time ago, but… I guess I was scared, and all, and I’m sorry I lied to you earlier, and hurt you again…” Midori sucks in a breath. “What I mean, is...”

Midori closes his eyes. Takes another deep breath. His heart has never been as honest, as unwavering, as right this moment, he thinks. Maybe it was an indicator of change. “I think… I might be in love with you. No… I’m sure of it.”

Constants like this, never-changing constants, truths, those kept Midori from overthinking things. He liked them, constants. This one he’d let out, maybe it was a constant, too—maybe it had been a constant, a truth, to begin with. He just hadn’t been ready to face it yet.

“Is… is that right.” Maybe Chiaki wasn’t ready for it, either.

“I’m not going to lie to you… well, at least, not in a time like this; I know I was lying to you before, about not meaning the things I said that night… I was, just confused?... probably… so… I’m sorry… that it took so long for me—ahh?!”

“Ah, sorry,” Chiaki releases Midori from the hug, but his eyes remain teary-eyed. He takes off his glasses, and sets them off to the side. “I should apologize too, for not giving you space when you needed it the most. Mm! I’ll try my best to recognize it from now on. But, I really couldn’t help myself just now; I was really happy, you see...”

Me too, Midori wants to say. Me too. Instead, he says, “So, even after everything… if you’re okay with me staying by your side, even though I’m selfish, and unpleasant sometimes, and runs away from things often…” The corners of his mouth quirk sideways. “I guess I’ll be okay with you too, being loud and clingy and obnoxious and whatnot—”

Chiaki frowns.

“I’m kidding… there’s, a lot of good things about you too, okay…” Because I fell in love with those good things.

“Of course,” Chiaki says, “of course I’m okay with it… Didn’t I tell you before that ‘I love you no matter what’?” He laughs, then grows somber and uncharacteristically serious. “Besides… I’d like to stay with you too.”

Midori ignores the feeling of extreme embarrassment growing in his chest, along with something else—something he can confidently label as “love”, he thinks. “Then, I guess it’s settled… seems like you’re stuck with me for a li~ttle while longer… Chiaki-san.”

“Haha! I don’t mind that at all; I love you you know!”

“You’re kinda embarrassing sometimes, you know…”

“Ehh?! What part of me is embarrassing?”

“Should I bring up a list?” Midori shakes his head. “Honestly… sometimes I wonder, huh. People like us, just how did this even happen?” But he says it as if it’s a good thing.

Chiaki smiles, because it’s a good thing to him, too.

“Ugh…”

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong, Takamine?”

“No, nothing… It’s just, your face is a bit too close, so it makes me kinda want to k-ki…” Midori is glad the room is dark and the summer night’s cool, because his cheeks feel like live coals and must look the same way, too.

“Ki—? Ki—ll?”

“Forget about it,” Midori turns away, sighing. I kinda do want to kill you right now...

Chiaki pulls back his face, but arches an eyebrow and looks at Midori pointedly. “Ngh… you were going to say “kill you”, weren’t you, you little~”

“No… I mean, I know I say that a lot, but I didn’t mean...”

Chiaki laughs a little, changing in the middle from a light laugh to something more… sheepish. “Hey, ...Midori... what you said about being selfish earlier. I’m feeling a bit selfish right now, so... can I...?”

Midori lets himself smile at long last, and it feels good. “Good thing then, because I’m kinda selfish, too…♪”

The warmth is overwhelming.

That’s what he used to say.

But he realizes now, as Midori leans forward and closes the distance between their mouths, that it isn’t so much overwhelming as how much he misses the warmth whenever it was gone. The shock of it returning, of it even existing in his life, that was what make it surprising, but it was also what made the hugs, and the kisses, like home.

Chiaki’s hand makes it to the nape of Midori’s neck.  Midori lets him pull them closer. And vaguely, it’s as if both of them are saying, we’ll be fine, the two of us, you and me.

.

Basketball is what’s called a team sport.

The court is your world,

( Midori’s heart is pumping hard, but it is a constant.)

the ball a part of your body, an extension to your arm as much as your hand is.

( Though his legs are shaking, his hands and arms and eyes are following the ball. )

The basket—that’s the goal.

Lost in the heat of the game, with your eyes focused on that goal, it can be hard to recognize that your world isn’t singularly-habitated, that the ball isn’t just yours. But your world is your team, and the ball connects the members, a rather thoughtful allusion to a constellation in the sky.

During the game, few things matter. Your hands and feet, where to place them. The ball, like love you can have, but can never keep, passed from person to person to person. The basket, where you throw your hopes and dreams towards, and hope they come true.

The people— the audience the opponents your comrades .

And again the court, the court is where you belong. Right this now, right this moment. It is a blanket of space, a star map mapping out the sky; it is home.

“Nakayama!” Midori shouts, and only when their eyes meet does he pass the ball, a swift receive from the other end. Passing—connecting stars. But when Midori reaches the end of the court, he’s surprised to find that the ball has made it back into his hands.

He’s scored, once, in first year. Held the ball in the air for the amount of time needed to take a breath in and shoved it through the basket. It was his only one success out of all the games he’d played in his first year at Yumenosaki, but like any first successes, it was celebrated with pompous occasion, with hugs and fist bumps and laughter.

He’s scored, many more times, in second year and third year. They were met with the same enthusiasm, the same energy. And yet, this time, it’s different, because it’s the last game he’ll ever play and Midori hates how he can spot him in a crowd, but then again,

maybe it was just the natural progression of things.

The crowd lapses into cheering, and laughing, and yelling, among other displays of untamed emotion, but Midori puts the commotion behind him; tries to focus on the sudden quiet immersing the entire court like underneath a softly undulating sea. It takes everything for Chiaki not to run over; the hesitation is written everywhere from his lips to the way his eyes flicker and the slight twitching like he’s in the midst of a game of Daruma-san ga koronda.

Thirty minutes later, and Chiaki is almost all that’s left in the dispersing gym crowd. His back is turned; he’s picking up his bag to get ready to leave.

And that’s when Midori walks over. (He’s slow, but steady.)

Your back.

“I’ve got you now,” Midori murmurs, under his breath.

Chiaki, who never hesitates, who always plows forward without a thought, pulls Midori into a hug while laughing. “Takamine! That was amazing, you know! See, you got it in you—I always believed that you would be able to—”

He can smell the sweat and feel the steady heartbeats, the burning warmth that can only be from one person and one person only; taste a thousand words unsaid between them like the tang of copper coin metal and hear the sound of hustled breathing from both of them but for once, Midori doesn’t care who this is he’s hugging. Feels the solidity of Chiaki’s frame against his, and all Midori does is pull him tighter.

( “I didn’t want you to come” is replaced with “I thought you wouldn’t come” is replaced with “ I’m… sorry” but there’s something else he wants to say. Right this moment. Right now.)

“Welcome back,” Midori says, coming out a whisper (and it really feels like welcome home, ) a hidden, wobbly smile hovering near the other’s neck, right underneath the scar. And for once, Chiaki is quiet.

☆

He’s not sure why he fell in love, anyway, he tells himself sometimes. Chiaki is loud, over-the-top, annoying, clingy—he is everything Midori isn’t.

But he is everything Midori isn’t—he is confident, friendly with just about everyone, and made everything brighter simply by existing. Chiaki is the sun, and the sun is a star, and its gravitational pull was heady and unheeding—but maybe Midori wanted that. Maybe Midori needed that, needed a sun to teach the moon how to shine before becoming something else that could shine with its own light.

And when Chiaki opens his mouth, sometimes, sometimes , Midori can see it too. The stars Chiaki dreams of at night, sees through his eyes during the day—the brightness of life that is a hero. They’re shining with all their might against a bleak black world, and they’re winning.

Chiaki was still annoyingly loud. With how passionate he got, how surprisingly loud his voice could reach, so loud and full of emotion that sometimes his words made no sense (Midori eventually did learn to understand the takeaways from Chiaki’s speeches. Usually, they were rather plain messages, hidden underneath a thick coat of noise.)

But they make it work, somehow. It took some time, and Midori’s not sure if they could ever fully understand each other (or Kanata, for the matter). He’s sure though, that as long as they tried hard enough to learn about each other, to work with each other’s needs, then they could continue to make whatever this was—this beautiful mess, just like RYUSEITAI —work. Even through tough times. Even through the times Chiaki doubted himself, didn’t know if what he was doing was the right thing. Even through all of Midori’s sad days, his unsure days, his insecure days.

(because Chiaki was, if anything, the rainbow after the rain)

And when Chiaki falls asleep inadvertently after watching his favourite tokusatsu show and forgetting the time, Midori would cover his exposed body with a blanket, and sit next to him on the couch. Slowly reach over and slip his hand in the other’s, so that if Chiaki were to wake up and be met with sudden darkness, he’d take comfort to know that he wasn’t alone in the dark that both of them hated so much.

“...hey, Morisawa-senpai…”

The TV, though muted, is left on for the meantime, illuminating the room in sparse flashes of light whenever the scene changed. These flashes would dapple onto the couch, making Chiaki rather colorful.  Midori imagines he catches a glimpse of the villain sprawling in defeat, the hero striking a triumphant pose with his comrades.

Chiaki’s hand is warm. Midori thinks he likes it that way, probably.

The TV shows one last scene of the heroes patting each other’s backs before fading into black. “Goodnight, Chiaki-san.”

Midori smiles.

He’s quiet.