Work Text:
You were the one for skylights. I opposed
Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove
Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,
Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof
Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling,
The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.
Under there, it was all hutch and hatch.
The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.
But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open.
For days I felt like an inhabitant
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.
Tetsuya learns to play the guitar in June because he realizes he’s in love with Kagami in March, and in April Kise takes him to his favorite bar in an attempt to cheer him up four months post-Kagami’s last text message; when the lead singer strums her guitar and lets rip the first thread of sound he thinks he would probably fall in love with her had he not fallen in love with Kagami first. In some versions of this story, it is a pity. In this one, Aomine gives him his old guitar from college and Midorima sends him a link to a useful website that doesn’t load pop-up porn every time he tries to click on a hyperlink. Tetsuya has no idea why he has been implicated in this theatrical re-enactment of high school but Kise tells him it will do him good to learn a new skill over the summer, hasn’t he heard of the aging population problem, and Tetsuya doesn’t want to disappoint him, so he goes along with it. Some time towards the end of the month he cracks open the dusty guitar case with some measure of determination, hunched over its lacquered Godzilla torso. Three minutes later, he gets his phone.
You don’t need a pick dumbass just strum with your fingers, Aomine says over text. I do not want to do that, Tetsuya replies petulantly. His fingernails are too short and it hurts the pads of his fingers to do so. Then use a credit card or something, Aomine says. Does it pain you so much to see me in person? Half an hour later, he buzzes Aomine into his apartment complex.
“What have you been doing since the start of summer, huh?” Aomine leans against his doorway in a style reminiscent of Kagami who has not contacted him since December, only his shirt is slightly more stylish than any that Kagami owns, a side effect of Kise Ryouta. He tosses two scratched-up guitar picks in Tetsuya’s direction. Apparently there had been more but these were all that he managed to salvage. His apartment constantly looks like it has just been hit by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake whilst in the middle of a tornado, so Tetsuya figures this is an accomplishment. He reaches, impulsively, for a cigarette. He does not light it.
“Editing,” he says sorely. Aomine switches shoulders.
Aomine does not tell him how many times he shittily serenaded Kise with the same guitar in college, but he does stay for long enough to get him to figure out how to play a few basic chords. Tetsuya’s touch is faint even though he is holding the guitar pick and pressing down on the fretboard properly. The two of them have to strain their ears to hear the weak reverberation of his E minor. The paper-thin sound does not inspire within him some cathartic desire to write a brand new story about love lost and found again in the bright merry-go-round of the city, but he decides that he likes it. It sounds like teeth. He knows someone who had nice teeth in high school. That someone has not contacted him since December. Aomine, who picked up recreational mind-reading in spring, clinically observes the sour thought as it crawls out of his left ear and stares at him. “Stop thinking about him. He’s not your boyfriend, you know,” he says blithely. He’s not wrong. Another cigarette, then.
//
Tetsuya tries out the sound of Kagami’s given name in his bathroom mirror. It is softer than his family name and makes his mouth twist into shapes he is not used to associating with Kagami, like clock-faces and circles and things without an end. He wonders how his friends in America say it. This is a thought experiment in a series of photographs. Taiga in the snack aisle of a supermarket looking for barbecue chips. Taiga crossing a street lined with palm trees with his headphones on. Taiga on the court like a natural disaster, tearing up the floorboards, ricocheting off the lights threaded through the ceiling. He wonders if Taiga likes him as much as Kagami does, and if the distinction really matters at all.
//
Still Kagami comes back eventually, a few weeks before summer reaches its peak and destroys all their skin cells under the writhing formless mass of the Tokyo sky. Tetsuya has taken a two-week break from the guitar to engage in civil war with his laptop, his coffee mug, and his head. He appears at Tetsuya’s front door at an ungodly hour of the morning, grinning like he’s swallowed a handful of fireflies and can’t wait to show them to him. Tetsuya’s hands twitch on the doorknob. He lets him in.
This is not the first time Kagami has stayed over, but it is the first time he does so with his entire suitcase in tow. “Your apartment,” Tetsuya says, locking the door behind him and staring at his feet as he does so.
Kagami makes a noncommittal sound. “Sold it.” He rolls his suitcase into the living room and stops the wheels just short of trampling the carpet.
“Why?” Tetsuya reemerges from his bedroom and hands him a blanket.
“It was weighing me down more than I liked,” Kagami says, taking it from him, and Tetsuya’s heart thuds dully in his chest. It reminds him that Kagami is more of the ferris wheel type than a merry-go-round. Perhaps Tokyo is weighing him down, too.
“The guest room is where you last left it,” Tetsuya shrugs in the direction of the spare room which has only ever been occupied by Kagami, although he has not shared this fact explicitly with anyone. Aomine understands without being told that his place of right is the sofa. Somewhere between the cushions is a dog-eared gravure magazine which Tetsuya does not actively seek to recover and Aomine returns to like an umbrella in an April shower. Meanwhile Kise has grown into the habit of bringing his own sleeping bag, expensive and well-padded with a foldable pillow attached to one end, and laying it out beside Tetsuya’s bed so he can complain about life’s vicissitudes until he grows tired of his own voice and falls asleep with his hand tucked under his head. In the morning his arm is numb and there is a stain on the pillow. He acts embarrassed about it like a child, like he’s drooled on it, but Tetsuya knows he’s pretending. Kise is a careful sleeper.
Kagami stumbles into his second religion for-rent apartment bedroom and is not seen again until late the next morning, when Tetsuya has long since resumed fighting in his self-initiated civil war with his laptop and his coffee mug and his head. Only there is a new faction now, civil and bright with yearning, which calls itself his conscience. It tells him to come clean to Kagami about why he puts up with him shacking up in his apartment a few times a year even though Kagami is an asshole about keeping in contact when he is not on the same continent and Tetsuya rarely texts first. Surely there are better things for you to spend your free time on, his conscience echoes dryly. Like the guitar? Tetsuya wonders about that.
“Do you have any tea?” Kagami rummages around in his kitchen cabinets like he lives here. The sight of him squatting in front of the plates he stacked up earlier this morning makes Tetsuya’s knee sting.
//
When they were younger, they were immortal. Tetsuya entered high school carrying several years’ worth of trauma in his mouth, under the tongue where all things sacred are preserved. His horrible powerful basketball team had ruined themselves in a desperate bid to stay relevant to the whims of Teikou’s adults, and, having failed to do so, split off in several directions to lick their wounds and do little else. Tetsuya was one of them; Kagami was not. Kagami was either in possession of an electrical fruit blender for a brain, or had hidden his so far down inside of himself that none of them could quite see it from the outside. Walking Seirin through game after game under all those battery-powered flashlights, Tetsuya learned of strange new things like fulfillment, and satisfaction, and triumph. At the end of everything, after Akashi had been ousted from his gameboy throne and the legend of Kagami of Seirin had been burned into the minds of every spectator in the room, Tetsuya looked at Kagami and thought to himself: what I would give to keep him with me. That day he learned what it meant to want something so much it turned into pain.
Naturally he could not keep Kagami with him, for Kagami was to the city what winter is to tropical countries like Singapore: no more than a quarter of a dream, a well-baked pie removed from the oven and then shoved down the trash chute into infinity. He left for the States, and then came back, and then left again, and came back, and each time Tetsuya met him somewhere just five miles shy of the middle. Tetsuya tried to blink as little as possible whenever Kagami was around. He did not want to miss a single second of these mundane moments, for he knew, selfishly, that they would keep his proverbial fire burning long into the summer months. And then fall. And then winter all over again.
//
His editor isn’t happy with his manuscript. He can tell because he spends a decent portion of his life writing stories about people who aren’t really happy with things and try to hide it. All the usual signs are present: the fidgeting, the half-finished sentences, the wistful glances at the dessert counter behind Tetsuya’s left shoulder that she casts out like a telephone advertisement about real estate when she thinks he isn’t looking. Too tired to defend his particular brand of absurdist three a.m. reasoning, he spares them both any further suffering by telling her he’ll look over it again and then get back to her within the week. He finishes his coffee, crumples the creamer, and leaves. She goes for a slice of lemon cake.
He spends the rest of the afternoon hunched over Aomine’s guitar, matching his fingers on the fretboard to the notations on Midorima’s ad-free website. It’s surprising how much everything begins to hurt after a while, but even more so is how he loses track of time while his off-beat guitar chords crest through the air, capturing slivers of silence and then swallowing them. By the time Kagami comes back, the spare keys swinging from his ring finger, the world outside his window has gone dim and Tetsuya hasn’t done a thing about dinner. Guilt strangles his throat briefly; he recalls Kagami telling him he had a busy schedule laid out for the day, and would appreciate it if Tetsuya settled dinner. His jaw creaks open in the shape of an apology.
“Guitar?” Kagami’s got that look on his face again. The one where he’s eaten a hundred fireflies.
Tetsuya wraps his arms protectively around his guitar. “No.”
“Um, yes. Play me something?”
“I know three chords.”
“Then play those.”
“Who’s going to make dinner?”
Kagami grins at him, and for a moment Tetsuya wonders if he really does have an electrical fruit blender for a brain. Then he remembers the conversation they had in his third year of college, about transience and translations and having faith in missing gods, and he takes it back. With Kagami, he takes everything back, and would give it all to him again.
“I’ll cook,” Kagami offers innocently like Tetsuya hasn’t forgotten to fulfill his half of the promise. He still feels bad, but Kagami listens to him play with Herculean uncertainty and doesn’t comment on the way his fingers shake over the strings. In the kitchen he makes an arc with his knife through the white light spilling across his cheeks and cuts potatoes, carrots, tomatoes as red as hearts. Tetsuya doesn’t even tell him that his fingers are hurting, but then again, that has always been Kagami’s style. Straightforward and earnest to the point where it blinds you. There’s nothing much anyone can do in the face of it.
//
When he first found his current apartment listed for rent, the well cared-for oven and extensive array of shiny baking appliances had been one of its main selling points. The landlord had once been a pastry chef. After shuffling from one Michelin starred restaurant to another for most of her twenties, crossing datelines and oceans and also her girlfriend’s parents, who had been expecting someone who could commit more to a relationship than occasional meetings and daily Skype calls, she had finally decided to settle down in Japan again. They were lucky enough that one set of parents was forward-looking or at least pragmatic enough to receive their relationship without forthright criticism, and were planning on moving out of the city by the end of the year. Tetsuya found out about all this over Ceylon tea and cream puffs, the delicate choux pastry crumbling despite the care he took not to crush it between his fingers. She took a liking to him, and disregarding his romantic incompatibility with the oven she handed over both sets of keys with barely a trace of regret. What sadness lingered for a while must have been from the electrical fruit blender she had left in the cupboard, he mused. It was older than everything else in the kitchen, and covered in stickers of 1990s anime which were peeling or torn in most places. He considered calling her up and passing it to her after all, but by then the year had already ended, and he didn’t want to make her come all the way back down to Tokyo for a bit of pointless memorabilia.
Kagami gets the shorter version of this story while he stands over the kitchen counter in a blue Hello Kitty apron, creaming sugar and butter together with a whisk. Apparently the evening spent with Tetsuya’s cooking range had ignited some old flame within him, so he had decided to spend his second Saturday in Tokyo baking cookies with little basketball-faces on them. Tetsuya watches him from the kitchen table, chin propped on the back of the chair while he scrolls through Instagram on his phone.
“She would be happy. This is the first time the oven will be getting any action since I moved in,” he laughs, angling the camera towards Kagami. He had insisted on knotting the apron himself. The butterfly knot is loose enough that Tetsuya could unravel it if he just tugged gently on one end, but he takes a photo of Kagami instead.
“You’re terrible.” Kagami taps the whisk against the rim of the bowl twice.
Tetsuya tells him about how he freezes milk in popsicle molds in the summer. He likes to eat them while walking around the apartment, and then forgets that he is holding one until it starts dripping down his wrist onto his shorts. Kagami cringes sympathetically at this, and moves on to the eggs. He cracks two.
“So this is what happens when I leave you on your own, huh.” A small pile of flour joins the creamed butter. He picks up the whisk again.
“If you mean to say I destroy myself,” Tetsuya studies Kagami’s grip on the whisk, the way his thumb follows the curve of the handle and he keeps his pinky finger bent at an angle away from it. “You are wrong.” Briefly he wonders what Kagami’s parents are like, if they are forward-facing too, or rigid and distant and clumsily well-meaning like his, like most. Perhaps they are expecting their son to bring home a sweet American girl one day with strawberry blond hair and a bachelor’s degree in mass communication, who will finally tame his riotous nature. He wonders if Kagami will.
“Want a taste?” Kagami has finished combining all the batter and is licking the spoon clean like a wild animal.
“No, thank you,” he says, and then gets up to help Kagami drop batter in clumpy circles onto a fresh sheet of baking paper, which they leave in the oven to bake for fifteen minutes and cool for the rest of the hour. The cookies are not too sweet, slightly underbaked, and gooey. Tetsuya eats one and Kagami has five, and when he goes out onto the balcony later on in the evening to have a smoke, the sleek, bitter aftertaste of nicotine is stronger on his tongue than he’s used to.
//
August doesn’t end as fast as he expects it to. Kagami’s booked to fly back in three days but he’s already spent the first part of his visit parading through the city like a glorified martyr, so Tetsuya wonders if maybe he’s satisfied already. The question of what exactly he came back for remains prevalent even as he slips in and out of roadside ramen shops, middle school gymnasiums, flashing two rows of sharp polished teeth at children who do not yet know what their future should look like. On the first of the last three days, Tetsuya decides he is going to learn a song on Aomine’s shitty old guitar. He feels like a messenger of god, god being Aomine, or perhaps Akashi who has generously sponsored a capo. Maybe he will write a short story about Armageddon when this is all over and Kagami is safely back in America, away from the summery heat and the buzz of cicadas, and Tetsuya.
The thought keeps him up at night for long enough that he gives up on going to sleep altogether, powering up his laptop on the edge of his bed so he can scroll through old documents and pretend he’s left behind a legacy in his twenties that his older self will be proud of. In fall last year, Momoi had spent the night during a prolonged fight with Aida about the nature of truth and human transparency. She had complained about the smoke then. This was not surprising in and of itself, seeing how he was the only member of Seirin who had stayed in Tokyo and picked up an addiction to something so overtly consumerist and destructive. But Momoi has a way of turning a penknife on all of your fragile emotional defenses. She walked into his room at the break of dawn, commenting with swollen eyes that his apartment did not feel like a place that someone else could come home too, and that thought stayed with him. As if she had shone a flashlight into the proverbial well of his best-kept secrets and discovered a stain on the stone, and correctly deduced its origin. He stopped smoking indoors after that.
Around two or three in the morning, there’s a sound outside his door. Tetsuya stops typing. “Yes?”
“Can I come in?”
He looks at the screen of his computer. His half-edited manuscript swims before his eyes like an angelfish moving in and out of sight in a fish tank, radiant behind clumps of neon seaweed.
“Actually,” he says, shutting his laptop. “Please, give me a second. I will come out.”
//
They say you become your parents when you grow up. As a child, this scared him.
His parents never filed for divorce, but growing up with them he was acutely aware that theirs was a family built not out of something as trivial as love, but mere convenience. Whatever proverbial red string of destiny might have once existed had long since blown away with the wind. Meanwhile, they enjoyed benefits such as joint tax returns and subsidized housing. Having a child around was good for posterity; Tetsuya the toddler was brought along to dinners and co-workers’ parties like a dinner gift or a bottle of champagne, dressed up in nice store-bought clothes. Sometimes his father would forget to remove the price tags before helping him change, and they would dig into his skin all evening, rubbing it raw in the places where the sharp plastic tried to insert itself into his soft, childish likeness. He never complained. Even then, Tetsuya knew what power lay in silence: to hold his tongue was to hold expectations at bay. After which, hope was only one stop away.
He has always lived like this. Once upon a time, basketball. Once upon some other time, Kagami had left to chase his own proverbial destiny into the next continent, and Tetsuya had not said anything other than thank you because he had not been able to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. It had decided to stay there forever. His body reflected the fear which his heart had done its best to asphyxiate.
Once upon a time, he had wanted with a ferocity that would send sleep tremors through the wild boars that everyone said lived in the mountains, but that was a while ago. He sits on the floor of his balcony and stares at his unlit cigarette.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
“No,” Kagami thumbs at his chin absently. There is stubble there he has not shaved. It would be an inconvenience if he had a sweet strawberry blond girlfriend from America; less so if it were Tetsuya, who is forgiving by nature and in the habit of making compromises for others’ sakes. “I came out to get water. Then I noticed the light in your room was on.”
Tetsuya flicks his lighter. A tiny, sleepy flame emerges into the darkness and illuminates half of Kagami’s face, throwing it into sharp relief. It makes him look like a surrealist painting of longing. “I was trying to become god.”
“What the fuck,” Kagami says.
“Have you seen that advertisement,” Tetsuya murmurs, toying with the idea of lighting his cigarette or throwing it over the parapet. It would land in the trash collection area downstairs if he did so, and if he remembered to then he would surely pick it up in the morning.
“Mm.”
“The one they made for the elections this year, to encourage the youth to vote. With all the old people in it, making fun of young adults for not having faith in themselves or the world.” He lights his cigarette. Standing up is too much effort after all. “I like it.”
Kagami laughs. It is the kind of laugh that seeps into your skin and makes your arteries contract with greed or pain or something in between the two. “Are you sleepy or high?”
“I am your best friend.” Tetsuya takes a drag. Their shoulders are touching. He has noticed this only now. What a young, feeble night they have wandered into.
//
If given the chance he would shove Kagami up against a wall and kiss him until they were both sick. Kagami would be wearing skinny jeans, the pair he always packs for Tokyo with the metal chain threaded through the belt loop, and Tetsuya would tug on that belt loop with two fingers while he leaned up into the warmth of his body, dizzy with wanting. He would get carried away by Kagami’s awful cologne and forget not to use his teeth. Then it would sting, and Kagami would hiss at the blood on his lips but laugh at his clumsiness, hands anchored like sails at his hips, and if asked to Tetsuya would throw away all the cigarettes in the world in exchange for that single, seamless painting of salvation: Kagami’s glassy eyes, his wind-blown smile, the golden patina of his skin. There would be no talking, just sound. And fire, and their mouths cracking each other open in the quiet seething dark.
//
On his second last day in Tokyo Kagami goes out drinking with Aomine, who has asshole stories to tell about his asshole exploits in the city, and Kise, who has been traipsing around in the aviation industry horrifying his mentors and colleagues alike. Neither of them is working towards any particular goal in life at the moment, but they seem happy enough to exist in the present, pushing the boundaries of society and each other’s sanity alike. Kagami conveys this to Tetsuya upon breaking down his front door at three in the morning, and then throws up all over him.
“Asshole,” Tetsuya tells him at four, fresh out of the shower with a towel slung around his shoulders. He is holding a mop and a bucket he had dug out of the storage room. He has no recollection of having ever owned such an item. The world is full of surprises.
“Fuck,” Kagami answers eloquently. He is stretched out on the sofa behind, a hand resting on his forehead like a damsel in distress from a Barbie movie.
He shifts. “I’m going back to the States in two days. That’s what the fuck was directed at. Not you.”
“You wouldn’t fuck me?”
“No that’s not what I. God. You don’t even fucking text me.”
“Neither do you.”
“You know, I think my head’s actually going to explode.”
“I will get you water once I have finished cleaning up your mess.” Somewhere around four thirty, he does get him his water. Then Kagami falls asleep right there on the couch with his too-long legs sticking out over the armrest, giving Tetsuya flashbacks to being fifteen and watching a beautiful horrible boy walk into his life and then send it spiraling down to the bottom of the sea. He mumbles to himself. Basketball jargon and nature documentary observations, the occasional bit of English that cuts through the smooth dilating rhythm of Japanese. Tetsuya listens for a while, and then goes back to his room and turns out the light.
//
August doesn’t end as fast as he’d expected it to. Or maybe he had secretly been hoping for it to end before he could begin the mourning process, as if by default Tetsuya would never be able to hold on to anything that caught his eye and would inevitably have to suffer the phantom-limb of its loss. Like the little mermaid, except he’s never felt like he belonged to either the land or the sea. Maybe he has always been standing somewhere in between the shore and the edge of the sand, where the sea glass is the softest. Here it does not storm nor simmer, and the sky is a closed loop of revolving photographs from the beginning of childhood.
//
“There’s a song I found recently. Do you want to hear it?”
When they were younger, they were immortal. Now they are twenty-seven and getting softer with every passing moment, and he suspects their child-selves would not be able to recognize them at all on the street if they were ever to chance upon such an iteration of the past. Tetsuya is not the basketball player his middle school self had once envisioned, clad in gold and glory and bruises like battle armor, each chain-link a trophy of accidental cruelty. In the end he did not go on to graduate school or attain the Master’s degree his parents had wanted him to bring back home. These days, he thinks he can live with this. He cuts off the price tags on new clothes before throwing them into the wash, and when he visits, he brings news of publishing contracts and seasonal snacks from Tokyo station.
Kagami presses his shoulder into the wall. “Yes.”
“The lyrics go like this.”
“Are you going to read out all the lyrics. Right here. In front of me.”
“No.” Tetsuya tilts his head to one side quietly, and smiles. “I will play it for you.”
//
He does play it for him. He does not do it very well. The last few weeks have been spent staring black holes into Google documents and thinking about what he did right in high school (Kagami) and what he did not (Kagami) and sending the occasional text to Momoi, who had a few things to say on the subject of truth and human transparency, having become exceptionally well-versed in all philosophical arguments pertaining to it by now. She had reminded him that he is not a bad person. But he is very opaque, and this makes it hard for others to reach him, especially if they have bad eyesight. Then Aomine, who had recently picked up recreational mind-reading and was putting it to good use all over the place in new and almost-invasive ways, had called in his usual brash way during the lunch hour when Tetsuya liked to take a smoking break and read the news on his phone, and demanded to hear updates on the guitar situation. Then Tetsuya had developed a blister from playing too much, and discovered the best way to deal with a blister is to let it go away by itself. But he does not play the guitar very well, still.
Nonetheless it makes Kagami’s expression morph into something profound and unrecognizable, reminiscent of small children who have been penned up at the mall lost and found and are finally picked up by their parents after three hours. His face cracks open like a watermelon at a summer festival, and Tetsuya is horribly, horribly glad he let Kise talk him into singing after all. His voice is not the most pleasant, he knows. It is, like the rest of him, too quiet to make much of an impact, breathy and dry and scratchy like old cotton. It does not linger, and in his line of work he has never needed it to. It is a good thing Kagami has learned how to listen.
When they are younger they are immortal. Now that they are older they are ordinary and washed out like clothing bleached white by the sun, no longer propelled through the hallways of history by the shallow flooding waters of fear and validation. Suddenly half of them believe in heaven, while the other half adopts atheism like it is a majestic bronze shield that will protect them from the heavy hands of hell. Suddenly some of them are lonely again. Or maybe they have always been lonely, and only recently decided to trade their residual guilt for honesty.
//
“Hey, Kuroko.”
//
Tetsuya hooks two fingers into the belt-loop of Kagami’s day-old skinny jeans and pulls him in with teeth, not tenderness, and twelve years of sadness climbs out of the sacred place under his tongue to meet him. Summer goes on, irregardless of where they're headed.