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I DREAM OF VIOLENCE BUT ALL I FIND IS YOU.
Koushuu dreams of Sawamura, and his hand is outstretched, Sawamura taking it. Koushuu holds on tight, and he wishes to unravel Sawamura— in lisps of his sunflower lips, his hummingbird tongue flickering. And then there’s the smell of undergrowth, of the sunflower fields in Kiyose that grow under their feet but this time it no longer coils around Koushuu’s heart and takes up all the spaces in his body: it’s soft, damp, embraced.
He climbs into Sawamura’s lap, tears rolling down his eyes as he sobs. “Am I not enough for you?”
He cradles Sawamura’s face in his hands, the glimmer of his ice blue irises only made brighter from his tears. Koushuu makes sure to stare at Sawamura hard with his eyes, not wanting him to turn away, a desperate attempt to seduce. “Do you not desire me?”
He wraps his arm tightly around Sawamura, refusing to let go, giving him his best offer, his last plea. “I can and will be everything and anything you want. Please want me, Sawamura senpai.”
In this dream there is no heaviness in his chest, and only light, Sawamura’s light, and Koushuu breathes and lets the fresh air enter his system and there’s nothing but contentment and relief and it feels so right. Sawamura looks right back at him, and moves to press a kiss on his nose— “Okumura. I'll find you. I promise that I'll find you.”
And to that, Koushuu nods violently. Sawamura disappears from under him.
YOU ARE SUNFLOWERS. SUN-FLOWER. REMEMBER THAT.
The Kiyose Sunflower Festival crowd has Koushuu clinging tightly onto his mother’s finger with his small hands. Yellow flowers (that Okumura has learned later, are sunflowers) surround them as they walk through rows and rows of yellow and brightness, and there’s a skip in every of his steps. Joy seeps through from the flowers and into the soil and it infects Koushuu, a gentle stroke of light blooming in his chest. The younger crops face the sun, and Koushuu is curious, and is selfish, and in all of his childlikeness he wants to know what draws the flowers’ attention— but his father shields his eyes, immediately chiding him.
“Koushuu. You can’t directly stare at the sun. It’ll hurt you.”
He pouts, his hand caressing the petals. “Then how will I ever have a sunflower of my own? That only looks at me?”
His parents do not have an answer to that. But they lift him up, drawing him closer to the plant, allowing him to have a feel of the petal. It’s as soft and sweet as melted butter, feeling like the first ray of warmth during the bitterest winter of the decade. The kind of warmth that grows on people, lets them rub their frozen hands together gratefully and maybe even crack a smile.
The wind whistles past and sunlight hits his face, and Koushuu hadn’t known it yet but there was this feeling of what people call addiction, and he’s stroking the petals over and over again, wanting so badly to rip a petal off for him to bring home.
Which he does. But it’s still not a sunflower of his own.
FLOWERS WILT. PETALS DIE. ALL IN MY HANDS.
Koushuu had cried to his parents when he saw that the petal he had plucked became a shriveled up yellow, twisted up, dry, with no signs of its initial brilliance that Koushuu was so attracted to. His mother patted his head, promising him that she would buy a vase and some sunflowers, so that they could properly take care of one.
But Koushuu always has a fierce sense of loyalty. He devotes himself entirely to what he claims is his.
So he told his mother that he didn’t need a new one, and he kept the shrivelled up petal in a small jar. He spent the entire day stroking the glass material, afraid to touch the petal, not wanting it to break in his hand.
The petal crumbles into nothingness by the time he’s 15. But he sees a new sunflower to claim as his own during the fall: donning the Seido uniform, with a number ‘18’ sewn onto the back of the fabric, with a voice so bright like the sun his father has warned him about. But Koushuu has already made up his mind, that he chooses this sunflower who shall bear the number ‘1’, shall be his ace, shall be his.
Koushuu tells his parents he decides to go to Seido instead of Teito.
FUCKING FLOWERS EVERYWHERE.
Koushuu wakes up, and he finds a yellow petal next to him on his pillow, his chest stuffy. He starts coughing, and it doesn’t stop until there are petals every. fucking. where. His bed is all yellow, and the blood in his mouth drips out of his mouth, dribbling down his chin and onto the pile of petals like hushed brushwork against a canvas of yellow. He looks around, realising that he’s alone— Miyuki and Kimura out somewhere. His chest is so tight and he finds himself again at the Kiyose Sunflower Festival, except that he’s falling deep into the soil to grow roots from the bottom of his feet and these roots stretch and expand, coiling so tightly around his heart and lungs and petals start to fill him from within.
His phone vibrates, and Koushuu sees that it’s a text from Sawamura. Okumura! You’re catching for me today!
He starts laughing, hands clutching onto red stained petals tightly as he relishes the burn of his lungs with each laughter he barks out. Tears start to slip out of his eyes, and his forced cackles turn into a sob, his hand letting go of the petals to clutch at his chest— but there’s no difference, his chest is turning into petals too.
“I chose you, Sawamura senpai,” Koushuu weeps, his whole body wracked with longing. And then he lets himself yell out of frustration, of anger, of you’re the only one for me. He falls back onto his bed, trying to calm himself down, his chest too tight and Koushuu too short of everything, his life now a fucking bed of sunflowers.
Cough. And another cough. Petals spew out of his lips the same time he lets slip a desperate prayer.
Sawamura Eijun, choose me too.
JEALOUSY IS A VIOLENT UPROOTAL.
Sawamura smiles so brilliantly that Koushuu starts to see sunflower fields, starts to breathe the air of Kiyose, starts to have flowers blooming in his chest and it’s so painful that he might think it’s just necrosis from his heart pumping flowers more than blood through his body. Koushuu’s feet sink even further in the ground. The roots are so painfully tight and yet here is Sawamura looking at Miyuki with a light that brightens up the sky with everything he’s got and here is Koushuu, with nothing else left to hold onto: his own sunflower being plucked, pull and tug, an uprootal.
Koushuu wonders if that was why his parents had scolded him for plucking that one petal.
His chest bleeds of brown and murky green: soil, the remnants of stems and leaves. And Sawamura is so cruel to him, by being the kind of yellow paint that goes perfectly with the dirtiest shade of green and brown, and petals fill up his chest even more— to complement, to give his wounds some kind of twisted beauty. It’s so so cruel, how more petals are only left behind in the wake of Koushuu’s love despite having been uprooted so violently.
DENY ME AND I’M DOOMED.
If Sawamura is a colour, he would be a yellow explosion— the kind that Koushuu dreams of behind tightly closed eyelids, and Sawamura gently illuminates even vacuum spaces with every touch. But for Koushuu, Sawamura is also bursts of energy with a deadline, so brilliantly fleeting and yet fatal. Sawamura is tugging on his wrist, excitedly dragging him to the indoor practice area so they can play catch.
Whenever Sawamura touches him, Koushuu always thinks of leaning down gently, to kiss a sunflower, to kiss Sawamura. This time his chest feels lighter, less constricted and there’s a very temporal sense of liberation. He doesn’t want Sawamura to let go, and so he asks for him to help him put on his guards. With every touch of Sawamura’s hand that ghosts across his back and calves, it’s as if the dead leaves and stems within him has been clipped off, and he’s finally able to breathe and it’s not the air of Kiyose but it’s the smell of sweat-soaked rawhide and dirt from the practice field.
And because he’s finally able to breathe, he reaches out for Sawamura’s hand. “Sawamura senpai,” Koushuu whispers, and his grip gets tighter, willing himself to not caress, to not make it intimate. “I’m always here for you.”
Sawamura beams at him. Koushuu wishes his father’s hand was shielding his eyes. “I knew it! That you actually like me and my pitches! We will make very good works of art together!!” And then Sawamura’s hand is slipping out of his grasp to give him a thumbs up sign. A jolt of ache shoots through Koushuu’s chest.
Sawamura Eijun. Blood on sunflower canvas. Koushuu wonders if that’s also a good work of art.
Koushuu catches Sawamura’s fastballs that night. He tries to ask if he would want to practice the numbers, and Koushuu near keels over from the tightness of his chest, and he can feel it , feel those flowers sucking the life out of him as Sawamura says ‘no, I usually practice the numbers with cap only!’.
Later that night in the bathroom Koushuu cried as if the world was ending. He’ll never let someone come close again. All he did was allow judicious cuts to encourage new growth: he has started coughing up whole sunflowers.
Seto finds him in the toilet, so much blood on the white of the toilet seat, on Koushuu’s mouth, on everywhere. “Koushuu,” Seto whispers, rubbing his back as Koushuu continues to cough, each flower too big and caught in his throat and having to force it out. His airway feels so raw, hanging on a thin line as if one more flower Koushuu coughs will break him.
“Koushuu,” Seto softly calls out again, and asks gently— he isn’t prying, or imposing, or being unnecessarily nosy, but it’s a genuine curiosity, one that tells Koushuu he just wants to help too. Koushuu coughs again as images of Sawamura flashes through his mind. Thankfully only petals come out this time. “It’s Sawamura senpai,” Koushuu hoarsely croaks out, his voice no longer able to come out.
Seto sighs. “Your condition seems really bad, Koushuu. I’ll walk you back to your room first, and we can talk tomorrow when your throat is better.” He grabs some toilet paper, helping Koushuu wipe the blood off his chin and neck, before flushing it down with all the sunflowers to he has vomited out; it’s not even a cough anymore, with the flowers being forced out of his body with so much violence that he shakes with agony as he writhes from the pain in his chest.
“Surgery,” is all Koushuu can mutter when Seto sets him on his bed, before black starts to seep into his vision and he slips into slumber. He can’t find Sawamura Eijun anymore.
SAWAMURA EIJUN. BLOOD ON SUNFLOWER CANVAS.
He wakes with a yellow petal on his pillow. It looks like the one he kept when he was younger. The moment he tries to touch it with his finger, it dries up, disintegrates, disappears. His room door bursts open, and Sawamura runs in, panting heavily as he immediately drops to his knees beside Koushuu’s bed.
Sawamura tries to breathe and he’s taking in gulps of oxygen before he manages to say what he had wanted to say. “I've been having dreams about you, Okumura.”
Koushuu’s chest still hurts. It beats so fast and with each beat he can feel the roots being stretched out, tightening further around his heart before snapping back to its original size. And Koushuu wants to recoil, wants Sawamura out. He thinks of surgery. He thinks of Blood on Sunflower Canvas and that’s the only work of art he can give to Sawamura.
A calloused finger traces Koushuu’s jaw and it isn’t as smooth as the petal he first touched when he was six years old but Sawamura pulls his chin towards him, leaving a soft kiss on his lips. And finally, it’s as soft as melted butter.
“I've finally found you.”
A kiss on his right eyelid.
“You’re everything to me.”
A kiss against his Adam’s apple. Koushuu’s throat feels weirdly clear.
“I desire you.”
Then he holds Koushuu’s hands.
YOU’RE ALL I EVER DREAMT OF.