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A crack split the cool April air, and at once twelve first-years snapped their feet into place on their pedals and pushed. Their cries filled Tadokoro’s ears, and he lent his voice to the fray, tearing it from deep down inside his own throat as he threw his bulk into the familiar motions. Hands clenched on handlebars, legs pumping, lungs and heart struggling to keep up with these sudden demands, he plowed ahead, teetered for a minute at the top of the pack, then sank to third. In mere moments, the bespectacled guy and the bowl-cut kid who’d already sworn himself his rival snatched the lead, and by the time anyone who’d have any chance of catching up to them ousted Tadokoro from his precarious position, they were already far ahead.
Sixth place was familiar. It was steady. But it was not comfortable. It was a shoddily-built fort on a battlefield of giants, only just big enough for someone smaller to covet it, and as soon as the new three, four, and five sped on, Tadokoro found himself defending this position of questionable worth.
Someone like the specs guy might say something logical like, The halfway mark is between six and seven! That’s where you separate the winners from the losers! (He might say that if he ever talked, anyway.) And maybe Tadokoro had felt that way for a while, too. But this was high school, and the first years hanging behind him were mostly newbies still getting acquainted with their road racers. The loud-mouthed kid and the awkward kid with the underbite and the weird one with the green hair and the others—sixth place had nothing to do with them. Sixth place was at the back of the more experienced riders.
Warm shame coursed through his frantically pumping blood, spurred on by frantically pedaling legs. He’d spent all of spring break dreading this very thing, that the uneventful few weeks between middle school and high school would somehow prove magical to everyone else, and that the other cyclists with whom he’d stood on more or less equal ground before would leave him in their dust.
Behind him, he heard a shout. There was a pair of riders not far away making a break for his position. Underbite kid and one of the others, leaning so far forward that their teeth were practically clamped around their handlebars. Tadokoro’s heart shuddered within his chest, and he turned to focus on the road ahead with gritted teeth and narrowed eyes. This is a flat, Jin! It’s just a flat! You’re better than this!
He clenched his jaw so hard that he thought he heard something crack, and squinted so much that the line between the road and the sky were all he could see, and his legs burned and his lungs screamed and his heart bellowed, but Tadokoro pulled away from the back half of the cyclists. And there. There, just within his narrowed gaze, was the back tire of Fifth Place.
He gave a cry into the air, pulled this time from the very bottom of his heart, and hefted himself and his bike forward. Moment by moment, the width of the tire in his vision seemed to grow minutely. He locked eyes with it, his gaze clung to it, and he pulled himself forward as if on a tether, dragging his frame along the ground. Turn by turn, rotation by rotation, he heaved forward by inches, staring ahead so intently that he almost didn’t notice when the tire he had been watching grow suddenly vanished.
It took all he had not to instinctively pull up short in surprise. He widened his eyes. Moments later, his heart sank. Stage two of the welcoming race. The mountain, his old nemesis.
In the half a moment Tadokoro Jin existed at the mountain’s base, he stared up its menacing slope and refused to be afraid. He would not let it break his stride. He would not let it break him. He would not slow, would not falter, would not let his momentum from the friendlier flats wane in the shadow of this beleaguering titan’s bulk. The new bout of sweat that broke out along his forehead made little impact on the sheen of moisture already coating every single inch of him, but the way his heart shuddered as his front wheel tilted up made its previous efforts seem calm in comparison. Gravity gleefully tugged at him and his bulk betrayed his resolution, feeding that hungry force with abandon. He kept pumping his legs and gritting his teeth and throttling the handlebars with thick fists, but the slope stole his efforts out from under him, transforming every yard’s worth of speed into mere inches. Tadokoro cried out against the agony burning in his chest, but the second half of his call couldn’t make it out of his throat; the mountain echoed the first half back at him with hollow laughter, then devoured it altogether.
In less than a minute, the two more tenacious rookies overcame him. And when he fell to tenth place, he closed his eyes against the trailing ghosts of the cyclists ahead of him.
Left. Right. Left. Right. Breathing in gasps. Heart racing so fast he felt it could win this race a hundred times over, if he could just free it from the body that was slowing it down.
But he’d tried—too many things, too many times, over the last year. He ate less for weeks on end, ignoring the smells of bread and pastries that permeated his home and his clothes and his family, ignoring the offers of concerned friends at lunchtime, until he collapsed one day in phys ed. He ate better, but bulk clung to him tenaciously, the needle on the scale more immovable than he. All he succeeded in doing was developing a strong distaste for boiled vegetables and rice crackers. There was no escape from this body. Not for his heart.
Left. Right. Left. Right. Breathing in agony. Breathing in fury. Sweat soaked his closed eyelids and stung his eyes. His legs were on fire. But if he stopped pedaling for even a split second the bottom of the slope would swallow him whole.
The spinning of tires and chains to his right. Eleventh place.
He pried open his eyes because nothing stung worse than the humiliation of this position. Eleventh place. All that remained behind him now was that weird scrawny kid with the green hair. Tadokoro’s chest tightened. Eleventh place. He couldn’t imagine a greater humiliation than to fall any further. If the green-haired kid were still even in the race, Tadokoro couldn’t let him overtake him.
Tenth place was still within his sights, and he too was struggling. Tadokoro begged his knees, his lungs, his heart, anything that would listen. Just let him take this one place back. Just let him make it to the flat on the other side in any place but this.
From behind him, a heavy, thumping bass, as if the mountain had pulled up its feet and was chasing him directly up itself in some maniac, half-hysterical punishment, whumh, whumh, whumh—getting closer, louder, on his heels—whumh, whumh—
A flash of green, and it was past him. Tadokoro’s heart skipped a much-needed beat as the rider leaned down, down, too far to one side, at an absurd angle to the ground. But then he pulled back the other way, weaving up the mountain in deep sways as if he had no sense of balance or direction. The green-haired kid disregarded gravity itself, and less than a half a minute after passing by Tadokoro’s position, he overcame the tenth place rider as well.
Tadokoro’s eyes and mouth stretched helplessly wide behind the green-haired kid as he continued up the slope at a pace he’d never even dreamed of. Twelfth place.
Last place.
He should stop, Tadokoro thought. He should just stop. There was only a quarter or so of the slope left, but the green-haired kid was already in ninth—no, eighth place. He had been in twelfth. How…?!
Thighs shuddering, Tadokoro watched the green-haired rider weave his way between six and seven and disappear over the crest of the hill.
How far back must he have been? He had gained six places in the span of a couple measly minutes! How?!
Tadokoro bit down on a choked sob before it could escape his throat. It didn’t matter how. All that mattered was that he’d done it, that it could be done, and that…
Tadokoro loosed a fist from his handlebars and slammed it against his suffering chest. And that on the other side of this miserable slope, a simple flat stood between him and the finish line. If that green-haired kid could take six places on this mountain, then surely he could win them right back once he reached the top. The distance there was not so much longer. He could do it.
You could do it.
He loosed the thought into his lungs, into his bloodstream. He could. If he just pushed a little harder, breathed a little deeper, ignored the pain. If he just dug somewhere deeper inside himself and found some sort of untapped power…
If that lanky kid could do it…
Momentarily, Tadokoro stopped moving forward, his legs paused between one push and another. In the brief, relieved silence, he took a deep, deep breath and let his chest expand.
The oxygen breezed through him and met with his one hopeful thought, and in abused muscles they mingled together and spread like a salve. Tadokoro heaved against the mountain and against gravity and pushed forward, consuming the remainder of the slope inch by inch as a train eats the distance between points A and B.
When finally the mountain sat heavily in his belly he had no time to celebrate. This first part of the final stage was flat and straight, and Tadokoro could just make out the cyclists the green-haired rider had left behind as they made their way towards a bend in the road. Tadokoro narrowed his gaze again, setting them in his sights like a target. He could catch up. He was exhausted, his legs burning with hardships that still clung to them like muck, but so were they. So were they. And he still had the advantage of experience over them.
Up here gravity couldn’t exert its power over him anymore. For just this one last stretch he could ignore the signals, the warning signs that his body was trying to give him. All that mattered was that the cyclists ahead of him were getting larger, closer, and as he rounded the bend in the road others became visible: eleven and ten and nine and eight and…there, the green-haired kid, already fallen from the spot his weird dancing style had won him. He might have had everyone else beat on the slope, but now that the mountain was gone and the field was level, he couldn’t keep up with the others.
His limbs were stiff and his heart was exhausted, and the road descended into a serpentine set of twists and turns, but Tadokoro encompassed all the riders ahead of him in his view and refused to let them out of his sight. Turn after turn he stalked them, consuming the space that stretched between himself and eleventh place inch by inch. Turn after turn. Yard after yard. Time was running out, the finish line was just ahead, but he could still do it, he could still end this having beaten just one person. Eleventh place was so close now that Tadokoro could smell the fear coming off the other rider’s risen hackles. He fixated on the incomprehensible designs woven into the back of the rider’s jersey and pressed.
A twisting of fabric. Wide eyes. Clenched hands, a burst of speed that was not his own. A commotion up ahead: excitement, but not for him. His own handlebars. He was falling.
From the middle of a cluster of interested second-years, Makishima looked up just in time to see the bulky rider stumble as he crossed the finish line. A wince split his otherwise neutral expression as the other first-year clung to his handlebars to keep from dragging his knees across the pavement to stop. His large body trembled finely, but he made no voluntary effort otherwise to move.
Makishima remembered him. He was the first rider Makishima had passed on the slope.
“So, Makishima? Are you going to tell us how you made that incredible comeback in the mountains?”
With a small measure of reluctance, Makishima dragged his gaze away from the fallen rider and back to the upperclassmen surrounding him. ”Ah…well…”
“No need to be modest, Makishima! You were in last place for half of the race.”
“And then you got all the way up to fifth, for a while!”
“You might not be all that fast on the flats yet, but you could be a pretty incredible climber! So what do you think?”
Makishima uttered a quiet, tenuous sound, drawing his thin shoulders inward. His face burned with what he thought might be pleasure, and he hoped it wasn’t too evident. ”I…could show you, Tanaka-sempai, if you like.”
“Alright!”
“Awesome!”
“Let’s meet early before practice tomorrow!”
“Yes, sir.”
The pleasurable feeling of elation evaporated as the second-years, appeased, wandered off. Makishima stood still a moment, trying to steady his nerves and muscles whose trembling he wasn’t ready to attribute to simply the race itself. When he looked back briefly at the finish line, he found it empty. Turning, Makishima could just make out the figure of the bulky kid leading his bike unsteadily back in the direction of the school. That was his last image of the other boy that day, but what stuck with him instead, as he rode distractedly home, was the bow to his neck as he crossed the finish line, trailing behind even his own bike.
“Remember what we told you, Makishima!”
“Yeah, if you want help practicing, come let me know, okay?”
“Or me! You fix that dancing style of yours, and you could be a great climber someday!”
“See you at practice!”
The boy raised a thin hand, but the second-years were already off, wheeling their bikes back towards the foot of the rear gate entrance. Frowning, Makishima watched them go until they disappeared beyond the slope of the hill, then turned and wheeled his own bike back towards the club building. There were still ten minutes or so until Captain Kanzaki would be expecting them. Time enough for the second-years to make at least one mad dash up that tall, inviting slope.
Makishima needed to get away from them.
He had always been aware that his method of dancing was somewhat unusual, but that had not prepared him for the rousing amusement with which the upperclassmen had regarded his style. He had hoped…
Well, he was not sure what he had hoped, exactly. Maybe it was too much to ask that they’d consider working with him as he was. Maybe, he thought, gripping his handlebars tightly, they were right, and he’d never be fast, dancing as he did. But he couldn’t fathom trying to ride any other way.
Releasing a heavy breath, Makishima pulled his bike into position against the rack and turned with water bottle in hand toward the hose. Halfway through, something caught his eye and pulled him up short.
That rider from the other day… The one who’d come in last. He was standing outside the club building door, shoulders drawn up squarely, a distinctive envelope clenched tightly in one large hand. What little he could see of the other boy’s face beheld a stern expression that was fooling precisely no one. Makishima was familiar with that feeling. The beginnings of it had been burbling beneath his stomach since he’d taken his first two yards of the rear gate slope for the second-years.
The larger boy remained before the door, either unwilling or unable to move. Makishima, from the opposite end of the compound, felt similarly stuck. If he shifted or made a noise he was sure the big guy would spot him. What he would do then, Makishima could not begin to fathom. So he watched the larger boy stare at the door as if he could see through it, or burn a hole into it. Makishima couldn’t blame him. If he couldn’t ride the way that felt and came naturally to him, and if maybe that meant he was doomed to linger at the back of the pack, he wondered if he wouldn’t end up in this guy’s position, sooner or later.
Finally, the larger boy took a deep, deep breath, clutched his envelope a bit tighter, and rapped on the door with wide knuckles. He entered a moment later, and it closed decisively shut behind him.
Makishima released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Well…that was that, then.
Ah. But the other boy probably wouldn’t spend too much time meeting with Captain Kanzaki. Makishima momentarily fumbled the water bottle in his hands, then pressed his lips into an empty whistle and headed decisively for the hose. By the time he returned, the other boy was long gone.
The crumpled envelope in the bin outside the club building didn’t entirely make sense until the bulky first-year showed up for practice the next day. His expression hadn’t changed much, Makishima noticed, since the previous afternoon. It was still deeply ashamed and deeply hurt, and still glossed desperately over with grim determination, but Makishima thought there must have been some sort of difference, for him to have come back at all.
What had done it? he wondered vaguely, pulling his bike into position. Had Captain Kanzaki refused to accept his resignation? Had he offered some valuable advice on how to make the bigger kid a faster rider?
Makishima attempted to focus on the instructions for that day’s practice, but he kept trying to catch the two making eye contact, trying to determine what had passed between them. They never did.
On their warm-up leg, Captain Kanzaki set the pace, and a blockade of upperclassmen kept Tadokoro and the other first-years in their place. Before practice began in earnest, Tadokoro took this moment to look around and accept the team he had now barred himself from abandoning. Two of the other first-years had dropped out, for reasons he could not begin to guess at, but whose resignations Captain Kanzaki had apparently accepted without complaint. Yet he was still here.
If you don’t want to be a winner, you can quit.
Tadokoro narrowed his eyes on the backs of the first-years in front of him, pinning his attention squarely in the present. If he let his mind drift now, he would become lost in those feelings from two days ago, letting that hopelessness hang off his ankles like dead weight. If there were anything he didn’t need more of, it was dead weight.
So he cleared his mind and stared straight ahead, at all the first-years who had pulled ahead of him on the slope during the welcoming race. Four-eyes and bowl-cut, underbite and loud-mouth and green-hair and the rest, all obediently, impatiently, keeping their positions until they had left the town far behind them. If they’d been on horses, they’d be nipping hungrily at each other’s heels for the first opportunity to pass. Tadokoro was no exception. He felt his bike’s hunger like his own, desperate to prove that his thoughts of quitting yesterday were no more than panicked, foolish responses to failure. Panicked, foolish, and temporary.
The pack dissolved the moment they hit the city limits, like a block of salt in water. Tadokoro heaved along with the others, feeling the shame of his performance in the welcoming race, feeling the shame of wanting to quit propel him, and like that first day he flung himself to the front of the first-years’ pack, neck and neck with four-eyes and bowl-cut. And then, with the ease of a shifting wind, he fell once more to third; with the predictability of an even, unchanging pattern, he landed again in sixth.
Sixth, which was no longer in the top half, but still far, far better than last.
Like a pack of juvenile delinquent sheepdogs, the second-years descended, giving up their enviable positions with ease to obediently observe these unruly underclassmen. The feeling of being watched, wrangled, and penned rankled through Tadokoro’s spine, but he could not let that disgrace reach the frame of his bike. He gripped his handlebars and his resolve harder and forced his legs to pump faster, move faster. There were four first-years behind him and he would not let a single one of them overtake him on this flat. This flat was his domain. His. Fifth and fourth place were just ahead. Just a little further, a little faster, and he could take back what they’d stolen from him…
“Tadokoro-kun!”
He felt the skin on his back prickle, though whether out of annoyance or fear he could not tell for sure. The speaker was a second-year, pedaling with ease beside his desperate pace.
“Kitayama-sempai.” The syllables tore reluctantly out of his throat, which was busy enough being used to breathe, to keep him moving, so how was it this second-year could keep talking even at this pace?
The second-year grinned. His voice was steady and smooth where Tadokoro’s shook and rasped, his face clean where Tadokoro’s was already dripping with sweat. ”Didn’t see you at practice yesterday. You had somewhere else to be?”
The younger boy’s grip tightened, streaking his knuckles with white. His chest heaved, his lips moved, but all his breath had to be reserved for keeping up his pace. Every ounce of oxygen flowing with all haste to his muscles, to his blood. He could only nod, and it tore at something deep within him when the second-year cut a wider grin.
“If you ever want to be any good, you’d better make this the best place you could ever be. Got that, first-year?”
Tadokoro gasped. Any explanation he could make would take too long, require too much energy. Ahead of him, the flats, these blessed flats, were ending, and he was going to need all the strength he had not to allow himself to fall behind any further. For a split second, he cursed the second-year for distracting him from his goal; ahead of him, number five had already begun his ascent up the slope.
But the same way he couldn’t waste time or energy trying to explain away his absence, he couldn’t allow himself to place the blame solely on Kitayama, though the second-year was obviously goading him. If he wanted to win, he couldn’t quit, and he couldn’t make excuses.
So Tadokoro merely nodded again, and as that slope rose up insurmountable before him, he allowed his thoughts of excuses to retreat with Kitayama as he fell back to harass someone else.
The meters of the gap he closed between himself and the end of the flat shrank along with his vision, until his eyes narrowed on that dreaded moment when his tires would tilt and his bike would give in to his oldest and worst enemy. Momentum carried him only so far up the slope before his legs began to lose their battle with gravity, and his heart sank as it always did when his efforts lost their value, his speed diminished by the lay of the road.
A quarter of the way up the slope he fell to eighth, first-years and their second-year sheepdogs whipping past with either desperation or amusement. By the time ninth place overcame him just moments later, his legs were protesting every motion, every turn of his pedals. And that old familiar shame had set in, twin funeral pyres burning in his cheeks. He had known, logically, that just wanting to be better, to be stronger—faster—would not make him so. But that did not stop the disappointment from tearing at his insides, as he asked the universe with a final gasp how much he would have to work and suffer and sacrifice before this type of pain was behind him, and the universe had no response.
Tadokoro slowed to a stop, panting. He was not quitting. Just stopping. Temporarily. Just for a moment. Just until the fire in his legs and his lungs and his face burnt out. He would begin again in a moment, just before…
From the foot of the slope, a glint of green hair peaked out from beneath a helmet. Last place. Panic shot through Tadokoro, taking over for oxygen in powering his lungs, his muscles, his heart. His feet slid back into position on the pedals, and then he pumped his legs with all he had, cursing himself for having thought for a moment that he could slow down, that he could stop, even for a second. Any stop was giving up. Any stop was quitting.
The green-haired kid remained a respectable distance behind him, but Tadokoro did not allow himself to revel in his lead. That kid and his gangly limbs weren’t his only opponents, after all; there was still so much more ground to make up.
The climb was, it seemed, agonizing for the both of them; they remained apart, but their ascents seemed to last an eternity, earning the interest of a pair of second-years. They hung back to shout encouragement to the green-haired kid who’d needed no such thing on the slope only two days ago.
Only when the second-years dashed back ahead with a whoop and a chuckle did Tadokoro realized how clear their voices were and how quietly the kid behind him rode. With the upperclassmen out of sight again, he risked looking over his shoulder.
The spindly legs and arms jutting off his bike’s frame seemed utterly awkward in comparison to how weirdly graceful they had been during the welcoming race, and that terror-inducing whumh, whumh, whumh had been silenced. He was riding normally—yet even on this slope he could not manage to catch up. He could not manage to catch up to Tadokoro Jin, of all people.
His lungs protested, but he called out anyway, “Makishima…Yuusuke… Right?”
Below him, the green-haired kid raised his pale face from the slope and stared at him with troubled eyes. His expression startled Tadokoro with a familiarity he did not quite understand.
A moment later his eyes dipped back to watching the road, mouth still set in a deep, thin frown. ”…Yeah,” he muttered. “And you’re…”
“Tadokoro Jin.” He watched over his shoulder a moment longer, while Makishima huffed and struggled behind him, and finally slowed down to match his pace—not because he was giving up.
Just the opposite.
“Why…are you riding…like that…?”
Makishima’s expression tightened. ”Riding like what.”
“Like that!” At this pace, Tadokoro actually found that speaking wasn’t so impossible after all. ”Just two days ago you whipped up this slope like it was nothing!”
His exclamation was met with a deepened scowl, and Tadokoro had to veer off to the right a little to avoid a sharp elbow when Makishima attempted to adjust his grip. ”Yeah. Well.” Focusing intently on the road before him, Makishima failed to notice the increasingly bemused expression coming his way. ”Hope you didn’t get used to that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what I said…!”
Makishima grimaced down at the road that inched by below their tires. Silence lingered between them in the spaces between their gasping breaths, between the screams of their muscles. But that Tadokoro was still watching him.
“I’m not riding like that anymore.”
“What! Why?”
“Oi,” said Makishima, narrowing his eyes and his frown on the visible bumps and imperfections in the road before him. “Shouldn’t you be focusing on riding?”
Tadokoro laughed—and it hurt. His lungs had to heave and his chest had to expand more than he was used to, but he laughed, and it was possible. At this pace, he could laugh. ”I’m in last place.” With his hands still gripping his handlebars, the larger rider gave a dramatic shrug. “What does it matter?”
From beside him, Makishima gave a frustrated grunt. ”You’ve given up just like that.”
“I haven’t given up,” Tadokoro said, his fists clenching tighter.
“You could beat me, easy, and a bunch of the others, too, once you hit the top of the hill. But you’re just going to give up now. Wh—why are you laughing?!”
“Listening to you talk about me giving up! That’s hilarious.” Tadokoro gave him a hard grin, narrowed eyes beneath furrowed brows sweeping over Makishima’s struggling form. ”Aren’t you the one who’s given up?”
“Me!”
“Riding like that.”
“This is not giving up.” Finally, Makishima turned from the path to fix the other boy with a gaze abounding with a surprising amount of pain. The green-haired kid’s face had twisted so much in glaring at the road that Tadokoro thought his features might take this opportunity to swap places with each other. ”I’m trying to ride properly!”
“Properly? Hah!” Tadokoro stared at the other rider a moment longer than he had to, before fixing his gaze back on the road. ”There’s nothing proper about being back here. Not when you could be riding like you did in the welcoming race.”
Irritation exploded from Makishima’s throat in a sudden, frustrated sound, and he slapped a palm on one of his handlebars, nearly upsetting his own balance. ”This is proper! They told me to ride like this! I’m trying.”
“Who told you to ride like this?”
“The second-years!”
“Bullshit.”
“Yesterday! They said—”
“No, I mean it’s bullshit. Riding like this.” Tadokoro would’ve folded his arms over his chest if he thought he’d be able to balance like that. He had to hope his words alone would be able to have the same effect. ”Riding like this when you could be riding faster. There’s nothing proper about that.”
Out of the corner of his eye he could sense Makishima staring at him, and let his grin widen slowly.
“It’s stupid. Do the one thing you can do, and do it well. And the rest will follow.”
Silence followed this little pearl of wisdom, and Tadokoro sat back a little in his seat, feeling a strange, warm feeling come over him. He had understood what Captain Kanzaki had said to him the day before, but only now, in relating that one seemingly simple idea to someone else, did he really feel the weight of its meaning, how valuable and precious it was, forming the center of his barely understood concept of what it meant to be a cyclist.
“Is that what Captain Kanzaki told you yesterday? When you went to see him to resign?”
Tadokoro’s grin faltered. There’d been something…off…in the way Makishima had said that. Something slimy. Glancing to the side again, he found the other rider’s eyes pinned on him from beneath long, thin eyelashes, his mouth twisted into something Tadokoro thought resembled a snide grin. Something in his heart rankled.
But he tightened his grip even more on his handlebars, and he refused to give into it.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is.” Even with Makishima staring at him with that judgmental smile bruising his face, Tadokoro retained his bearing, regained his hard grin, and felt something in his chest expand a little and settle as if into a new, better position. ”So, what? That’s what I’m gonna do. I finished that race in last because I’m slow on slopes, and because I wasn’t fast enough on flats to make up for it. Someday I’ll be good enough to work on that first part. But right now I’m gonna work on being the best damn sprinter Sohoku’s ever seen. So you just watch!” Tadokoro exclaimed, reinforcing himself against Makishima’s constricted stare. “You just wait! Me, giving up? That’s all behind me now! And you’d better put it behind you, too!”
The other rider’s shoulders drew inward, his tangled expression retreating from Tadokoro’s triumphant conclusion. He huffed a quiet noise and stared down at the road on which his bike had been nibbling daintily all this time.
“Go on, Makishima.”
The voice came from just behind him, in an excited whisper. ”This way of riding isn’t going to get you anywhere. You know you can make a comeback if you ride the way you want.”
“…But…”
“Hey. Don’t worry about me.” Tadokoro had a blunt thumb jabbed at his own chest. ”Once we hit those flats I’ll catch up. Until then, I want to see you climbing the way you’re supposed to. You hear me?”
“…Yeah. Yeah, I hear you.”
Makishima turned briefly. His discomfort met a confidence that had yet to settle properly within Tadokoro’s round features, but there was something in it that spurred him on nonetheless. His lips formed another twisted smile, which now seemed to Tadokoro kinder than he had initially realized. ”Fine. But I’m holding you to that.”
“To what?”
“That you’ll catch up.” Carefully, as if testing waters which only yesterday had been swarming with sharks, Makishima rose from his seat.
“I’ll catch up,” said Tadokoro, raising his hand in a fist. “That’s a promise.”
His view of the smile that dripped onto Makishima’s face was brief, before the other rider leaned hard on his right side. His handlebars dipped, then straightened, then fell to the other side, and in only two rotations of his pedals, Makishima had left him behind. But that one brief glimpse was enough.
Makishima’s breathless gasps steadied into little more than a sigh of relief, and then his breathing seemed to vanish altogether as his lips set in a satisfied smile. The air itself seemed to make way for him, and as he swayed from side to side, the road disappearing by yards at a time beneath his tires, he was finally able to lift his head and look forward again.
It really was best, riding like this. The way he was supposed to.
It was not long before the top of the slope became visible, and Makishima approached it both eagerly and with dread. Up there was where he could, maybe, use the momentum of this climb to help him overcome one or two of the other first-years before the end of practice. But up there, also, awaited the second- and third-years, those enemies of his dancing. It was easy to let his bike go at full-tilt while they were gone, but the moment they were watching, Makishima felt sure he would falter. How could he get them to understand what Tadokoro had seen in the span of only two races? How could he get them to let him ride freely?
Makishima threw his balance side to side ever harder, tilting his bike’s frame to sharper and sharper degrees, and the road beneath him retreated into his wake. He would just have to practice, and practice, and practice, without them around, so he could prove to them without a fraction of a doubt that his way of riding would not only work, but succeed. He would learn—a toothy grin invaded his thoughts for the briefest of moments, and with a faint smile he let it, before shaking it out with a turn of his head and a shift of his bike—he would learn, how to do this one thing perfectly, and use it as a springboard for everything that was to follow.
And better yet, he thought, narrowing his eyes as he finally crested the slope, he would hone it, hone his climbing into a powerful weapon that no one could laugh at—not his fellow first-years, not the upperclassmen, not other riders on rival teams. It was, after all, the one thing he could do well. And he owed it to more than just himself not to give up.
Those present at breakfast that morning were a fascinating cross-section of the Sohoku cycling team. Captain Kanzaki sat at a table surrounded by his five fellow third-years, bright and strong and unrivaled, their yellow InterHigh jerseys shining like gold in the morning sun filtering in through the food hall’s windows. A small group of second-years who had either nothing or everything to prove sat mingled with most of the first-years, their chatter and energy from the day before lost between layers of sandwiches and piles of vegetables and sunny little mounds of eggs. Of the twelve first-years who had initially joined the team, six remained.
Makishima watched them quietly from the next table, his mouth bothering little with food, and even less so with talk. Of those second-years seated near him, there were several who’d tried to work with him—to correct him—on his form, with various levels of sincerity, and zero success. As Makishima proved himself too stubborn to accept their advice and continued to practice on his own, one by one they’d given up and drifted off, seeking out other, more pliant underclassmen to take under their discarded wings, with varying levels of success. Those first-years who didn’t seem to mind the extra attention were thus popular targets and often surrounded by this impenetrable upperclassmen wall, so even had Makishima cared to engage in conversation with them, he would not have been able.
With one exception. Over a halfhearted bite of apple, Makishima glanced down to the other end of the short table, populated with at least three cyclists’ meals and only one rider. Watching Tadokoro Jin eat was like watching the destruction of a building via wrecking ball: large chunks of food disappeared at a time into his large mouth, were pondered only briefly by his grinning, grinding teeth, and finally cast off down his gullet, only to be followed swiftly by yet more food.
Makishima’s own mouth stopped working on the apple in his hand as he watched, mesmerized, his eyes glazing over. How could someone eat so much? And more to the point, how could someone eat so fast, without gagging or choking? He ought to be grossed out—and was, admittedly; if he were any closer to the other end of the table he might have worried that the other rider’s indiscriminate maw might mistake perhaps Makishima’s own finger or hand for food. But then…
As Makishima watched, he noted how carefully Tadokoro ate—with large gestures, but with greater efficiency. Every bite made its purposeful way into his mouth, every chew deliberate and clean, his thick hands commanding surprising dexterity. Not one morsel escaped him. A weird sense of admiration filled Makishima as he watched, and he corrected his earlier thought: Tadokoro did not eat like a wrecking ball at all.
A quiet growl rumbled from the other end of the table. It wiped away the dull filter from Makishima’s eyes, and he blinked rapidly, wondering if he’d imagined it.
“Oi!”
Makishima left his apple where it was and hoped it was large enough to cover the way his mouth had been gaping. Probably not.
“You got a problem, Makishima?”
Tadokoro had swallowed his last bite; little of his large breakfast remained in front of him, and he didn’t bother to pause in finishing it even as his shoulders raised defensively. ”Eating is also a road racer’s responsibility,” he said, giving Makishima’s paltry meal a pointed look. “If you damage your digestive system on a long course, you’re finished. And I’m not ready to be finished. I’ve got three more days left to go.”
“Th-that’s fine.” Makishima raised his hands in surrender.
“So why were you staring, eh?!”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were!”
“I just—”
“Well?!”
Makishima coughed and looked over his shoulder, at the empty wall behind him rather than at the table packed with first- and second-years. ”Nothing. I was just thinking that…”
“What?”
“That you kind of look like…a bear…” Makishima muttered, “when you eat.”
Silence stretched long after this admittance, so long that if he were to close his eyes, Makishima might have believed that he had sunk into the ground and disappeared. As Tadokoro remained quiet, he began to wish that he had. When his gaze darted back to Tadokoro, the larger boy had actually paused, with the half-eaten sandwich in his hand lowered back onto his plate, and was watching Makishima with a strained expression, as if the heat Makishima felt spread across his cheeks had formed itself into a particularly difficult riddle.
“Gah!” he exclaimed, emphatically enough to nearly knock himself out of his own seat. He took a healthy grip on his green locks and tugged at them in frustration. “That was a joke! I was trying to make a joke! Geez, Yuusuke, this is why you shouldn’t try to talk to people…!”
From the other end of the table came a sound like the rev of an engine, and before Makishima could open his mouth to properly apologize, Tadokoro’s hearty laughter hit him like a warm summer shower, and the heat in his face fizzled out.
“You really are terrible at conversation!” Tadokoro exclaimed, and with his features bubbling over in amusement, Makishima could not find in him even a mere ounce of unkindness.
“Tadokoro—”
“It’s fine,” the larger boy laughed, slapping a hand on a clear part of the table. “It’s fine! We’ll work on that.”
Makishima’s jaw dropped a little lower, but all he could manage to get out was a quiet, unconvinced, “‘We’?”
“Sure! We’re friends, aren’t we?” Tadokoro raised the rest of his sandwich again, as if their eating at the same table together was proof enough.
“A…are we…?”
Tadokoro chuckled again at the smaller boy’s skeptical face and pushed an untouched sandwich towards him. ”Better eat more than that, Makishima. I’m not letting a friend of mine drop out of this race because he didn’t prepare properly beforehand.”
Makishima glanced down at the plate in front of him with gritted teeth. By his normal standards, it alone was more than two meals’ worth of food—but, he supposed, the other boy had a point. He was going to need more than an apple to get him up today’s slopes.
He sighed, but his lips stretched into a smirk that was supposed to be a smile.
“…Sure, Tadokorocchi,” he said, replacing the paltry meal in his hand with the sandwich offered him. “Thanks.”