Work Text:
When he was sixteen years old, Tsukishima began to have a recurring dream. He had it about once every week for nearly a year. It was exactly the same every time. It went something like this:
He stands in the middle of a long stretch of road with the knowledge that everyone he has ever known is gone and that, wherever they are, they’re not coming back. It doesn’t matter to him at all. He is not afraid. No, instead he is relieved.
Amused by the fact that since everyone is presumably dead, he will not have to pay for anything ever again, he watches himself walk into the record store on 9th and Main of his hometown, the one that closed before he finished elementary school. He selects a pair of headphones from the display on the wall. He doesn’t look at the price. He leaves without even glancing at the register. The thrill is fantastic.
The door snaps shut behind him with a little jingle of the shop bell. The world is covered in a sheet of silence. He’s unsure what to do next. Stuck in place, he fiddles moronically with his new headphones. He puts them on. They squeeze snugly over his ears. Through the tiny speakers a voice sparks and whispers a sound it created just for him, like a crackling benediction.
‘Tsukki. Tsukki.’
Summer heat bounces off the pavement like crinkled cellophane. He hears it on all sides. They’re good headphones. He’s always known a good pair of headphones when he’s seen one. He clicks his tongue at his indecision. He steps forward.
Perhaps he is as warped as people claim, but it is the most peaceful dream he has ever had. Whenever he has it, just before he opens his eyes, he is weightless. He guards this secret closely, speaking of it to no one, including Yamaguchi.
But he’s not a teenager any longer. He’s twenty-four and he wakes up feeling like the morning doesn't like him. He knows he'll be too tired to smile today. It’s still dark outside. He shuts his eyes and tries to go back to sleep.
He is enmeshed in his sheets. He kicks them apart. He turns over. He fluffs his pillow. His feet are cold. He regrets his decision not to wear socks to bed. He considers putting socks on. He turns over again.
All the words he feels he should not know, that doctors threw at him and seem to enjoy switching like they are playing card tricks, thrum up and throw their syllables around: quetiapine fumarate, carbamazepine, lithium carbonate, clonazepam, and so on, et cetera. They won't let him get back to sleep.
‘Kiss off, words!’ he thinks.
They don’t. Instead they croon, ‘I need someone, a person to talk to. Someone to care, to love, could it be you? Could it be you? The situation gets rough and I start to panic. It’s not enough. It’s just a habit. Hey, kid you’re sick! Well darling this is it...’
“Shuddup, Gordon Gano,” he mutters to his empty room, exasperated with himself.
He throws his blankets over his head like they’ll protect him from his own thoughts. They’re as useless at this as they are at keeping his feet warm.
Brian Ritchie crashes in on bass. Victor DeLorenzo backs him up on his drum set. Gano continues wailing:
‘You can all just kiss off into the air! Behind my back I can see them stare. They’ll hurt me bad, but I won’t mind. They’ll hurt me bad. They do it all the time.’
‘Yeah, yeah!’ Ritchie and DeLorenzo agree.
'Yeah, they do it all the time!’ Gano answers.
‘Yeah, yeah!’ Richie and DeLorenzo repeat, with feeling this time.
Words are not his friends today either. Usually, they are. But, sometimes they turn on him. They are as fickle as people. He thinks a rude gesture at their very concept.
He flings out a long arm from under the blankets to snatch his specs from the windowsill where they always rest. He sits up fitfully. Putting his glasses back on feels like putting his face back on, vision. Putting his headphones on feels like putting on a helmet, invincibility.
He plays “Kiss Off,” the second track from the Violent Femmes’ platinum eponymous album, released April 1983 by Slash Records on cassette and vinyl, #21 on Billboard’s top 100 records of the 1980’s, and aborts a sigh of relief when the recording syncs with the song clattering around in his head. He feels the sound of it and it sends a shiver down his spine.
‘I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record. Oh, yeah? Well don’t get so distressed...’
He mutes the music but, doesn’t take the headphones off. He waits breathless moment and listens. Sweet nothing! Gordon Gano has shut the fuck up! Success!
He looks at the time. The sun will start late and clock out early today. It will rise at 07:45, the latest all year, but that isn’t for five more hours, thirty-five more minutes, and counting.
Civil twilight will begin at 07:12. The hour after civil twilight starts and the hour after it ends are his favorite part of the day, both morning and evening. That’s when he likes to wake up. The early morning hours preceding civil twilight, especially the start of astronomical twilight, bewilder him. But he has some time to kill before then.
He scrolls through the texts on his phone.
I hope you got your piece written. - Aki
He hasn’t.
Please call before Sunday. - Aki
He doesn’t feel like it.
Mom wants to hear your voice. - Aki
He knows she does.
He rolls out of bed, pretending that giving up on sleep is volitional. He pads into the kitchen and meditates the abyss of his refrigerator. A nasty box of fuzzy strawberries stares back at him. It quietly leaks clear, pink juice onto the bottom shelf, as if to spite him. He gives them his most vitriolic stink-eye. How dare they! He takes vindictive satisfaction in tumbling them into the garbage then throwing the carton into the recycling bin, even though he knows that’s not where it belongs. Ha! Take that, moldy strawberries!
He pads into the living room, throws his laptop open, and balances it on his knees. He is disappointed to find that the document he was failing to make progress on is still blank. The cursor blinks impatiently at him. He tips his gaze up at the ceiling for inspiration. The landlord fixed the spreading spider crack that Yamaguchi stared at near the end at instead of staring back at him. He looks away from the ceiling. He snaps his laptop shut.
He’s bored. No, he just wishes he was bored. He’s wound up tight. He decides he needs a hobby. Maybe he’ll take up the xylophone, just to piss the neighbors off. That’ll teach them to run an underground banshee breeding program out of their two bedroom apartment, or whatever they think they’re doing, raising children or something. The nerve of some people, honestly!
He doesn’t have a xylophone. He’ll settle for a walk. That’s close enough for government work. He knows he’s not using that phrase right. He doesn’t care. He takes great pleasure in bundling up warm then takes the stairs two at a time.
As soon as he opens the front door he gets a face-full of ominous weather. He likes it. It’s exhilarating.
For the first few weeks after the breakup exactly as his feet hit the sidewalk he thought unhinged thoughts like: ‘What is this street’s problem? Why isn’t it taking me where I want to go? All streets should lead to Tadashi. They do not. They are wrong. I fucking hate streets. Get stuffed, streets! Stupid streets...’
He’s glad he’s not thinking that thought anymore, just thinking about thinking it. It’s the small things in life, really. He curses away the cold, and nestles into his jacket like a bird fluffing its feathers. It looks like it’s going to snow. It is snowing, actually. But the flakes are so small he can only see them glittering in the light of the streetlamps.
The twisting motion of every airborne particle, lazy like they have no place in particular to be, is audible at the base of his skull. They hiss in his ear the murmur of waves played on a compact disk that is skipping, skipping, skipping. He’s not sure how long he stands entranced by this. He makes a sound of disgust at the sound of the snowflakes. He looks away. He turns his headphones back on, and sets it to shuffle. The sound stops.
He walks until he notices that the light from a diner across the way looks like something out of an Edward Hopper painting. He appreciates that for a moment then crosses the street. He’s not hungry but he goes inside anyway. The shop bell chimes.
He settles himself in a booth. He rests his feet on the seat across from him so it doesn’t feel empty. The waitress comes over and presses a menu onto the table and tries to walk away. He calls after her:
“I just want two scrambled eggs, please.”
He is sorry to hear her utter the five single stupidest words the wait staff in a restaurant can ever have the misfortune of being required to tell him, “We aren’t serving breakfast yet.”
“Do you have eggs?” he asks impatiently, like he does every time this happens.
She stops chewing her gum long enough to say, “Yeah.”
“Do you have a frying pan?” he continues, more impatiently, because really put two and two together.
“Yeah,” she responds in the exact same voice, like he’s talking to a recording or something.
“Then I’d appreciate it if you would get me my eggs, thank you. And bring some maple syrup on the side, please.”
He holds his menu out to her. She snaps her gum at him, takes the menu from his hand, and saunters away. Just like that he’s alone with his thoughts again. He wonders if Yamaguchi is at work. He doesn’t understand how he worked the night shift for over a year without losing his mind.
Life always kicked the everliving shit out of Yamaguchi. But, for all his worrying, bloodied and bruised, he always got right back up ready to take it again. He even had the balls to feel thankful. Tsukishima respected him for that. Sometimes he even feared him a bit for it, the tough little bastard. Nothing ever stopped Yamaguchi from trying, well, almost nothing. He wondered how he did it sometimes. It never failed to astonish him.
Like once in their second year of high school, it was just awful, Yamaguchi came into school half-way through the day looking like he’d dressed in the dark, and when Tsukishima asked what his problem was he replied:
‘Pops woke up dead today.’
And then he laughed.
Tsukishima thought he had lost his mind, dutifully coming in to school like that, and his heart twisted for him.
Seemingly out of nowhere he thought, ‘Oh, shit… I’m in love.’
His immediate thought following this was, ‘Really? This has to be the moment I realize I’m in love for the first time? Good timing. What's my problem?’
They both acted weird all summer. Well, Yamaguchi acted weirder than usual because he was in mourning. Yamaguchi was essentially raised by his grandfather. He was a good guy. He was one of the only adults Tsukishima liked as a teenager.
'I'm sort of happy for him, you know?' Yamaguchi rambled. 'He went in his sleep, right here in the house where he was born. Healthy 'til the day he kicked it. None of us are getting out of this alive. That's the way to do it. I hope I'm like him. Not like I want to die. Just, like, I hope I'll be half as cool as he was. I'd be happy with that. You know?'
Tsukishima felt small when he thought about how selflessly Yamaguchi was capable of loving another human being. Yamaguchi was the only person in the world capable of making him feel like a huge jackass without even intending that. He sort of liked it. He sort of liked it a lot.
Yamaguchi loved his mother, too. But she was only around when it was convenient for her. In Tsukishima’s esteemed opinion, she was garbage if only for the regime of benign neglect she had the audacity to allow Yamaguchi to believe could be called a childhood. Yamaguchi’s mother hated Tsukishima, passionately. In her defense, he never was very good at keeping his opinions to himself.
Tsukishima acted weird too, that summer, because he was aware he was in love. Suddenly it was very important to tell Yamaguchi he had feelings for him. What the was he supposed to say? And, for God’s sake, when? It was sort of funny, looking back on his endless rumination.
At the funeral Yamaguchi insisted on brewing several pots of coffee that nobody except Tsukishima drank because he knew that if Yamaguchi didn’t have something to do with his hands he might lose it. He hated coffee. He still hates coffee. It never grew on him. He remembers thinking that he should have said:
‘I’m sorry for your loss. I think I’ve had a crush on you since we were children. And stop it with the fucking coffee already. I’m on my fifth cup. My bladder can’t handle this shit.’
He did say that last part, about the coffee.
He waited another year before he royally embarrassed himself.
He doesn’t notice the waitress is back over him until she throws his plate down in front of him. He startles. Really, if she threw the plate down on the table any harder she would probably have cracked it. She saunters away again. He snorts a laugh at himself.
‘Oops,’ he thinks.
He bathes the eggs in maple syrup but not before checking under them to make sure his waitress didn’t hock a loogie on his plate. He clicks his headphones off, finally.
Immediately Gano is back to his wailing, ‘Make a joke. Grasp and reach for a leg of hope. Words to memorize. Words hypnotize. Words make my mouth exercise. Words all fail the magic prize. Mo-mo-mo-my-mother! I would love to love you lover. City's restless. It's ready to pounce. Go with you in your bedroom, ounce for ounce. Mo-mo-mo-my-mother!’
Tsukishima stares blankly down at his eggs and tries to wait Gano out.
Gano doesn't give a shit. Gano keeps it right up. He keeps it right the fuck up, 'Day after day, I get angry. And I will say that the day is in my sight when I take a bow and say goodnight! I know you've had problems. You're not the only one. When your sugar left, he left you on the run. Mo-mo-mo-my-mum!'
Ritchie and DeLorenzo scramble back in on bass and drums, and boisterously back him up on vocals, 'Add it up! Add it up! Add it up!'
‘Dammit!’ he thinks, and placates them by playing "Add It Up" from the exact same album as before. 'Again with this shit. Get outta my head.'
He turns his attention back to his food. He’s still not hungry. With no one there to encourage him to eat he takes his time pushing the eggs around in circles until they have disintegrated, and are inedible.
Neutrally he thinks, ‘Wow. That’s gross.’
He doesn’t bother getting the check. He leaves $20 on the table because she deserves a really, really big tip for the shit he gave her, and the fact that she didn’t spit in his food.
The shop bell jingles as he leaves. He doesn’t know what he thinks he’s doing. There’s a 24-hour grocery down the way. Maybe he’ll go there. Yeah, that’s the ticket. He’s always loved grocery stores. They amuse him.
The snow looks like it is considering coming down in earnest now. It sticks to his glasses and melts. The streetlights crystallize into dozens of yellow-orange bursts. He watches his breath come out in little cloud-like puffs, and stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets.
He gets satisfaction out of the way the automatic doors open for him when he steps in front of them. He likes the smell of this grocery store, fresh vegetables and cardboard, not like the other one around the corner that smells like putrefying meat. He avoids that one, obviously.
He circles the produce. It never ceases to astound him that he lives in an age where he can have whatever he wants, whenever he wants. It never ceases to disappoint him that this doesn’t seem to occur to other people. A strawberry, in mid-winter? Fine! Don’t even give it a second thought! All you need is a piece of plastic and the ability to scribble.
For the majority of humanity’s existence not even a king could have a strawberry out of season. You want a strawberry in October, Mr. Emperor? Too damn bad! Enjoy your big, stupid palace. Nothing you can do is going to make it any less devoid of perfect, delicious strawberries, sucker!
He stops in front of an absurd pile of carrots that all have their tops cut off. Most of them are cracked down the middle like something convinced them to keep growing when they knew they really shouldn’t have. They offend him.
'Look at all these fucking carrots!' he thinks, drying his glasses and squinting at them. 'Why are they so goddamn big? Whose idea was this? Cure cancer? Nah! World peace? Fuck that! Let’s allocate our resources to genetically modifying carrots to be the size of baseball bats! That’s right! Project Big-Ass Carrot. You could kill man with a carrot like that! ...and then you could feed it to a goat, multiple goats. No evidence. It’s the perfect murder weapon.'
He is inordinately proud of himself for conceiving of this. He pulls out his phone to inform Hinata that his end is near. Then he realizes he’s probably asleep, and it wouldn’t be any fun if he didn’t get a series of confounded messages back for his efforts so he puts his phone away.
He paces up and down the aisles pretending to read nutritional labels. He thinks again about the year Yamaguchi’s grandfather died, all the ways he tried to tell him he loved him, and did not know how.
For example, he cleaned out Yamaguchi’s grandfather’s closet for him, because his mom was off doing God knows what. Yamaguchi took one long look at the shoes, all lined up in neat rows, and left the room hyperventilating. Tsukishima thought maybe the right choice of words upon his return would have been:
‘I’m back from driving all your dead Pop’s clothes to GoodWill! Don’t worry, you’ll never see them again. What a joyous occasion. To celebrate, I’m going to shove my tongue down your throat because I’m a twisted fuck and I’ve wanted to lick your tonsils ever since I held you while you wept at the funeral. That’s called dacryphilia. I self-diagnosed using Wikipedia. Now, if you don’t mind, let’s please make out already.’
Yamaguchi didn’t look ready to hear that then, slash ever maybe. So, he kept it to himself.
He wanders over to the dairy section and contemplates the eggs.
The size of eggs is determined by weight, not dimension. Smaller eggs tend to have thicker shells than larger eggs and are less likely to become contaminated by bacteria. So they are preferable. Choosing eggs also depends on what you’re doing with them. If they are being hard-boiled older eggs are better because the older they are the easier they are to peal.
He could go on forever about eggs. He could go on forever about a lot of things. But, he doesn’t.
Once when he was a kid he got six double yolk eggs in a row while helping his parents cook breakfast one Sunday morning. Only one in every 1,000 eggs is double-yolked, so the chances against getting six in a row is 1,000 to the power of six - or one quintillion. He knew this. But, he didn't tell anyone. He scrambled them immediately so no one would see and make a big deal out of it. To this day he is not sure why he felt compelled to hide that.
One quintillion. That number feels strange, like he is inordinately big and inordinately small at the same time. It makes his skin crawl. He turns up the volume on his headphones to chase one quintillion away.
He huffs at the idea of numbers. It wasn’t until he was in middle school that he realized other people don’t hear motion, and see bursts of color at sounds, and feel numbers on a spatial plane the way he does. He guesses that means he had a rather lonely childhood. While trying to explain their math homework he snipped at Yamaguchi, ‘The equation says you should take seven five steps forward, then eight steps back, then expand it by three, then fold it in half by two. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you feel them? Do you have no proprioception?’
He wonders how many double yolk eggs are hiding in the case in front of him. They’re stacked six high, nine deep, and twelve across. A dozen eggs to a carton, that’s 7,776 eggs. Divide by 1,000, and that means this store has seven or maybe eight double yolk eggs for sale.
When they used to go grocery shopping together he always--
No.
He stops to stop thinking of him. He is doing this too often for his liking. In order to accomplish the banishment of a thought he mostly constantly calculates all the seconds left in the minutes, hours left in the day, days in the year. Otherwise he names albums alphabetically, by year, autobiographically. He used to name dinosaurs. But, he’s not a child anymore.
He chases his unwanted thoughts away with albums chronologically by date of release: ‘January 12, 1969 Led Zeppelin, EP. January 13, 1969 The Beatles, Yellow Submarine. January 17, 1969, Iron Butterfly Ball. January 30, 1960 Credence Clearwater Revival, Bayou Country.’
He selects the most suitable eggs. He checks out. He idols idiotically in the parking lot with his eggs. The snow really starts to come down, but hasn’t coated the pavement. He kicks a shopping cart and watches it roll away. He’s not ready to go home yet.
He arranges some grocery carts into the shape of the tip of an arrow. Then he takes one and walks it to the other side of the lot. He looks at the carts he arranged. He looks at the cart he’s holding. He looks to see if anyone is watching. He’s alone. He breaks into a full sprint, and jumps on the cart.
Yeah, that’s good. Just like this, he’ll roll right through his year, drift right through his months, slide right through his days. It’s fine. He’s fine. Everything is fine. The cart he’s riding crashes into the other carts and they scatter.
He re-arranges them, and decides to leave them there because whoever has to clean them up will probably get a kick out of wrecking them first, like he just did. If not, well, too bad for them. They hate fun.
He leaves the parking lot, almost in a hurry, by way of an alleyway that’s full of dumpsters, and probably rats and stray cats, too.
He remembers surveying the bags of garbage the Karasuno Volleyball Club hauled out of Yamaguchi’s grandfather’s home, which covered the entire driveway and a good part of the lawn.
‘Take what you want. Throw the rest out. Just throw everything out except the furniture and the stuff in my mother’s old bedroom,’ Yamaguchi assured them. Everyone looked at each other like he’d lost his mind, but did it anyway.
His teenage self thought maybe he should have put his arm around Yamaguchi’s shoulder and told him:
'It is just astounding how much worthless detritus people accumulate in their lifetimes. Isn’t it? I know! Let’s collect useless shit together until our bodies cease to sustain metabolic function. I love you.’
'B-52s, Beach Boys, Beatles, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Blur, Bowie (David), Buzzcocks, Byrds,’ he thinks angrily at himself.
He doesn’t know where he’s thinks he’s going. He’ll just walk until he finds something that will help him to write his piece. He promises himself he’ll only walk that far. He’s not sure how long he walks without any place in particular to go. He walks until he’s spooked by the sound of a crack, and a streetlamp flickers out above him.
'You can wish on the pop of a light bulb,’ Yamaguchi used to say every single time a light bulb gave up the ghost, to which Tsukishima always responded by rolling his eyes.
Still probably says, he corrects himself. It’s not like he’s dead.
He tries it. He's never made a wish before, not as an adult. He’s not sure he remembers how. He closes his eyes, pictures the popped filament of the lightbulb in his mind and thinks really hard.
He thinks, ‘Oh great and beneficent cracked lightbulb, I don’t believe in God, though I’ve always respected Him(?) as a brilliant concept and/or scam that would probably might make the universe, which is essentially devoid of reason, conveniently comprehensible if I was stupid. Anyway, do me a favor and grant me my wish in His(?) stead. We’re not going to talk about the message I want you to deliver because if you’re actually omniscient you should already know. I’d appreciate it if you would do it in a timely manner, so I can relax. Go on now. Get to it. I’m not asking twice.’
“Amen,” he mumbles after, and feels like a moron.
‘Wishes don't do dishes,’ his father used to say but, they never really got along. Aki always said it was because they were too alike for their own good. Aki is a turd sometimes, even when he thinks he’s being nice. He keeps walking.
He remembers that summer between second and third year of high school again. He remembers loitering outside in the street at midnight listening to the cicadas buzz because Yamaguchi said he needed to say goodbye to the home his grandfather lived in before his mother settled on the sale of it the next morning. His sixteen year old self thought he should have yelled up to the window of the room he saw Yamaguchi’s shadow puttering around in:
‘I know you’re in a bad place emotionally. But I’m a self-absorbed prick so I’m going to have to ask you, this instant, to make a decision which may jeopardize the friendship you’re depending on to get you through this. Will you be my boyfriend?’
He didn’t. He waited, and he waited, and he waited for that boy to be ready. It was the best decision he ever made. Given the chance he would do it again. He would wait, and wait, and wait, and wait for that man. He would wait even if he was only promised more waiting.
‘Songs, alphabetical!’ Tsukishima thinks, and keeps walking. ‘Any Way You Want It - Journey; Baby I Need Your Lovin' - Four Tops; Come Sail Away - Styx; Dancing in the Dark - Springsteen; Eight Miles High - Byrds; Foxy Lady - Jimi Hendrix; Girls Just Want To Have Fun - Cyndi Lauper, Hotel California - The Eagles; In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida - Iron Butterfly; Kentucky Woman - Deep Purple--’
He is stopped only by the sight of a car turning the corner. The driving snow is silhouetted by its headlights. They blind him. Their approach sounds like the ring of silence has somehow picked up by a microphone and the pitch is being gradually dialed up by some degenerate sadist higher, higher, impossibly high. It’s a sound it isn’t even possible for him to hear anymore in a natural sense because he killed those cells in his inner ear off a long time ago. He doesn’t know why he cannot look away. He’s frozen in place.
It’s loud. It hurts. He detests the car. He despises its painful headlights. The sound of it, mixed with whatever tune he has playing on his headphones, he doesn’t even know anymore, is overstimulating, sickening. It feels like the shine of the headlights is being injected directly into his eyeballs, directly through his fucking pupils. He wants to be ill.
Right when he thinks he can’t take it anymore the sound abruptly terminates. The car passes, far closer than he anticipated. He stumbles back. There’s a big gust of air as it goes by. The noise of the driver honking angrily at him and the tires spinning over the snow coated road stretches off into the distance.
He studies the carton of eggs that he is, for some reason beyond his comprehension, still holding. He wants to throw them at the car but it is already long gone. He chucks them unceremoniously into the nearest street corner garbage can instead. He keeps walking.
He pulls out his phone and recalibrates the time. He calculates his age: twenty-four years, three months, one week, two days, twelve hours, forty-six minutes. Doing subtraction while he’s walking feels like walking backwards while he’s walking forward. It’s dizzying. He doesn’t stop walking.
He’s cold. The wind picks up, and cuts through his layers of clothing. He still doesn’t stop walking.
It feels like a thought is creeping up on him. It’s the same feeling he gets when he knows someone’s eyes are on him. He turns up the volume on his headphones. He walks just a little bit faster, the way he does when he knows he’s caused trouble but doesn’t want to get caught by someone noticing his nervousness while he's making his escape.
He lists frantically, ‘Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Compsognathus, Diplodocus, Eoraptor, Fabrosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Heterodontosaurus, Iguanodon, Janenschia, Kentrosaurus, Lambeosaurus, Maiasaura, Nodosaurus, Oviraptor, Parasaurolophus, Quaesitosaurus, Riojasaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Unenlagia, Velociraptor, Wannanosaurus, Xiaosaurus, Yangchuanosaurus, Zuniceratops.’
When he’s done he isn’t even sure where he is anymore. There’s a park, and a church. The city is under a sheet of silence, and unmarked snow. He feels quiet now too. He just wants to hide.
A church, that’s perfect. He’ll hide in there. He heard once that a church’s doors are always open. He trots up the steps and pulls on the ornate, iron handle of the big, red door. It doesn’t give. So, churches aren’t always open. He feels lied to, which is a shitty thing to do to someone who’s been wandering around freezing his tits off as long as he has. His disappointment is vast.
It dawns on him all at once that he is very tired. His eyelids are pulled down as though lead weights are attached to each lash. He leans back against the church and lets himself slide down, down, down until he’s crouched in a gangly ball. Before his asscheeks can even pancake out on the wet concrete his phone is in his hand again.
'36 seconds left in the minute, 24 minutes left in the hour, 19 hours left in the day, 16 days left in the month, 11 months left in the year,’ he rattles off mentally so he still feels like he’s walking away.
But, it doesn’t work this time.
His chance to say something seemed so brief but it wasn't. Now he knows he had plenty of time. It feels like a sound he didn’t notice until it stopped has left him there wishing he had listened more closely.
He takes down his headphones. He bites off his gloves. He dials without looking at the keypad. Then he stares at it while it rings.
His heart clatters. Shards of adrenaline shiver, electric right to his numb fingertips. It occurs to him that perhaps he is making a terrible mistake. But, really, what does he have to lose?
"Tsukishima?" the phone says to him in a miniaturized version of Yamaguchi’s voice.
Suddenly, he’s lost his words. Why? Why can't he draw right up what he wants to say? Yamaguchi always has always done this to him. With everyone else it is easy to be blunt. With Yamaguchi, he is a moron.
"Can I tell you something I've never told anyone else?" he says putting the phone up to his face suddenly, impulsively.
"Wha’ da’ fresh hell?” Yamaguchi groans in complaint.
His speech is a little slurred. So, he’s not working the night shift anymore. He always did slur when he just woke up, and Tsukishima always thought that was sort of cute. He doesn’t sound angry. He just sounds confused. Tsukishima is relieved he hasn’t hung up yet.
“Da’ you have any idea what time it is?"
"No," Tsukishima lies.
He knows exactly what time it is. He always knows what god damn time it is, to the minute. He’s a walking atomic clock and always has been. It is seven months, two weeks, three days, twenty hours and twenty-six minutes and counting since they last spoke.
"Do you want to hear it?” Tsukishima asks. “Or should I hang up and pretend this never happened?"
"Are you okay?" Yamaguchi responds, sounding a little more awake, and very much more concerned.
"Probably not,” Tsukishima admits, but that’s not the point. “Do you remember how things were always tense between my father and I? I was always at his throat. Right? The dinner table was a war zone.”
“What’s that howling? Is that the wind? Are you outside? It’s ten below!” Yamaguchi nags, fully awake now. "It's blizzarding!"
"Blizzarding" is not a word. Tsukishima doesn't say that.
Tsukishima can picture him barefoot in his pajamas, pulling back his curtain to check the thermometer he always keeps nailed outside his bedroom window, the luddie. Why couldn’t he just check online like everybody else? His hair is probably more of a disaster than usual. He’s probably scrunching up his goofy, lovable, freckled face against the assault the light he’s just clicked on is committing against his eyes.
“Yeah, it’s cold. I can’t feel my toes. ‘Think it’s frostbite. Think I could still play volleyball without toes?” Tsukishima responds with a blithe smile he is sure Yamaguchi can hear over the phone. “Anyway, I did everything I thought I was supposed to do. Right? I got straight A’s. I did well in my extracurriculars. I did all my chores without being asked. I mean I didn’t do it for him. I just did it because that’s what you do. Right? But I didn’t understand why he was so upset with me all the time. He just looked at me like he was disappointed and I hated him for it. Aki always said it’s because we’re really alike. Which is true, but a little off the mark.”
He shouldn’t have made that comment about his toes. It really gets Yamaguchi going.
“Are you on drugs? What are you ranting about? For God’s sake, get inside. Go home. How long have you been out there?”
“Unfortunately, I am completely sober, and a few hours, maybe,” he shrugs, annoyed that Yamaguchi doesn’t seem to be following what he’s saying. “Are you listening to me? This is important. One day I was sitting at home with him after practice and I was railing on some kid from our class, just ripping him a new one. I don’t even remember what I was saying but it must’ve been vile. When I tired myself out he sat silently for what seemed like a very long time but couldn’t really have been more than a few seconds then he said, ‘What’s happening with you, Kei? You were such a happy child.’ And I said, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ And he said, ‘It’s hard for a parent to watch their child struggle, you know.’”
“This isn’t funny." Yamaguchi’s anger pleads in an uncertain key. Tsukishima knows he’s about to be scolded. "You’re going to make yourself sick. Go inside or I’m hanging up.”
Tsukishima is well aware that this is not a joke. He also thinks that if he keeps on talking that Yamaguchi will not hang up, because he learned young most people will go along with whatever he says if he sounds calm and self-assured enough, Yamaguchi included.
“I knew he was onto something. Like how parents know things about their kids before anyone else does. I didn’t say that, though. I just went upstairs and shut myself in my room. I didn’t come down until it was time to get ready for school the next morning. We never talked about it again. But, I know he always, always, always worried about me.”
“You’re right, you never told me that,” Yamaguchi concedes, finally, distantly.
Tsukishima knows he’s touching a nerve. Now he is sure he’s about to hear a click followed by silence. He rolls some powdery snow between his fingers. The crystalline structure of each individual flake is visible. It’s coming down so hard they are beginning to gather all around him in a soft outline, like a shadow. His hands are pink and numb. He shivers.
“Dad croaked on Tuesday,” he says dryly.
It’s almost funny when he puts it like that. Irreverence is his panacea. He laughs humorlessly and his hatred and affection for the man, so goddamn similar to himself, march in the same line. He remembers when Yamaguchi said almost the same thing to him, in much the same manner.
To fill Yamaguchi’s shocked silence, and because he really doesn’t want to hear another ‘I’m so sorry for your loss’ again in his life, and because Yamaguchi makes him feel stupid, and desperate, and brave all at the same time, he continues:
“I didn’t get there on time to tell him I’m sorry I did that to him for all those years. You know, that he doesn’t have to worry, ‘cause I’m okay now. I’m getting help. And I think it’s working. I mean I’m not sure because who fucking knows. But, I thought maybe he would have wanted to hear I’m at least trying, and that it wasn’t anything he did wrong.”
There, fine, he’s confessed. He doesn’t know why he thought it would make him feel better, because it doesn’t. He hopes writing his father’s eulogy will be easier now. He doubts it. He does not want to wrap his mind around why his family is asking him, of all people, to do it.
He knows it is because his father loved him very, very much.
When he was little, in kindergarten and grade school, he would set his own alarm and get up early every single morning before school so they could have breakfast together, just the two of them. Sometimes, as a treat, they would get up extra early and go to the diner in town. Every time, he’d get scrambled eggs with maple syrup. With encouragement, he’d eat about half of it. Mostly, he just took pleasure in picking them apart.
All week he would look forward to Sunday. They ran errands before his mother and Aki got up. He loved being pushed around in the shopping cart in the parking lot, and walking beside his father through the aisles of the grocery store. Boy, oh boy, did he ever think he was mature for helping out. What a clever boy he was, selecting the best carton of eggs. He always loved his stupid eggs.
When he was even smaller, a tiny thing, he would wait at the door in the evenings for his father to get home, and flail with joy when he saw his headlights round the corner of the driveway. He had to be reminded to settle down so his glasses wouldn’t fall off. Aki called it “Kei’s Zoomy Dance, capitalization necessary.” He doesn’t remember this. He was told.
The story is a perennial favorite at family gatherings. Aki does impressions of the Zoomy Dance to this day. Tsukishima thinks they are wildly exaggerated. His father found the impressions hilarious, every damn time. Tsukishima thinks humor is genetic. Tsukishima also doubts he will see Aki’s impressions anymore.
The two hours of the day after the start and end of civil twilight, when he was small, and not yet jaded, and untouched by illness, that’s where his father lived for him.
“Oh, Tsukki,” Yamaguchi murmurs into the phone, sounding like he’s been knocked right on his ass, and it strikes him that the sadness in Yamaguchi’s voice is much more apparent than in his own.
“I didn’t mean to--”
‘Grow up, Kei. Own it,’ he tells himself. ‘Say it.’
And he’s so exhausted he isn’t sure who he really thinks he’s talking to anymore.
“I inflicted myself on you. That couldn’t have been easy.”
“No, it wasn’t easy,” Yamaguchi agrees.
It sounds like he’s trying to hide the plain fact that he is in pain, like he always has. Tsukishima is deeply ashamed. He picks at the pilling wool of his gloves. He uses them to brush bare a section of pavement. He doesn’t know why he did that. They will be damp when he puts them back on now.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes, uselessly.
He feels like such a loser. He promises himself he will never be this sorry again in his life. Still he feels kind of selfish saying it. He wishes Yamaguchi could say congratulations, just for that, he’s forgiven. His meanness has been redacted. He knows it doesn’t work that way so he doesn’t give Yamaguchi any time to feel compelled to tell him it’s okay. He doesn’t want to hear it because he knows it’s not.
"What I'm really trying to say-- I mean what I'm asking is... I know we haven’t talked in a while but, could you come get me?"
The pause feels like an extra year of high school.
"Where are you, Tsukki?” Yamaguchi finally asks.
He doesn’t answer, just because he wants to hear him say his name again.
“Tsukki. Tsukki?”
Yamaguchi’s voice is clear. He can see it as summer heat bouncing off pavement in waves like crinkled cellophane. Tsukishima tips his head back at the sound of it. He looks into the lamp that’s circling him with a crescent, yellow pool of light. The vision stops. This feels juvenile. He snorts a laugh at himself.
"I don't know. There's a church with a big red door, and a park, and a lot of snow. I am covered in snow. Is that helpful?" he finishes by asking, knowing it most certainly is not.
He’s greedy now that he’s heard Yamaguchi’s voice. He wants to make him laugh too, even though he knows he probably can’t do that anymore. It always comforted him to make Yamaguchi laugh, to make him double over and hold his sides, and beg for him to stop kidding around. He never understood the mechanics behind that. How derisive whispers about retards, and crashes, and queers can soothe the soul like daily prayers is an ineffable mystery.
“Is it St. Luke’s?”
Yamaguchi sounds certain.
He looks toward the gaudy neon cross hanging from the corner of the building. ‘Jesus Saves,’ it blazes and dyes snowflakes pink as the wind whips them, swirling past it. Below that is a smaller sign, whose peeling gold paint reads, ‘St. Luke’s: A Community of Faith.’ So it is. God must have terrible dress sense, if this is what his house looks like.
"Yeah," Tsukishima nods, even though Yamaguchi can’t see him.
“The one where we used sit on the steps, and people watch?" Yamaguchi continues, softly now, like he’s talking to frightened child.
For once this doesn’t bother Tsukishima because he has to admit he sort of is. In fact, it’s the nicest thing he’s heard in a long, long time.
“Mmhm,” he affirms, and the memory sparks so vivid it hurts.
He makes a terribly undignified, wet snivel and curses his body for suddenly deciding sneak up on him with that. It’s just the cold. He always has that reaction to the cold, he tells himself. He should have thought to bring tissues. Tears are freezing beneath his eyes, under his glasses. It’s just the cold he tells himself again, and knows he’s full of shit. You can't bullshit a bullshiter, and he’s the best bullshitter he knows. He hiccups sloppily. He holds his breath in attempt to make his diaphragm stop spamming, and waits for Yamaguchi to say something.
"I'll be right there. Don't move."
Truly, he is a fool whose only redemption is his best friend. Whatever he's done and whatever is about to happen next, he is thankful. He gets to hear that sound Tadashi created just for him.
‘Tsukki. Tsukki.’