Chapter Text
A ball of red hair blocks Rukawa’s view of the passing maple leaves that smear orangely on either side of the bullet train. Rukawa takes very little pleasure in life when things do not pertain to basketball, but he likes to watch the leaves scrape by in autumn, flamingly red upon their death. He sits up from his seat and smacks at Sakuragi’s head, where he has his face pressed flat in the middle of the window, the breath from his nose fogging up the glass.
What a childish monkey of a boy.
“Hey!” Sakuragi barks, hand cupping where Rukawa’s knuckles rapped against his skull. It’s really his own fault that he gets smacked so much. The attitude aside, his head is a big, round, orange globe. Put it in a team of basketball players, and what else does he expect?
Across the aisle, Mitsui and Ryota are slouched together under a yellow blanket from Ayako, who’s sitting in front of them beside Kogure, the both of them reading magazines they picked up in the train station’s bookstore. Akagi’s sitting alone, adjacent from the pair, stretching both legs among the dual seats.
“Stop blocking the view,” Rukawa says shortly.
“Why do you care?”
“I like to look at the trees.”
“How boring!” Sakuragi cries, “Boring, boring, just like you! Just like you! No wonder no one likes you, Rukawa. You’re a bore…” He emphasizes this sentiment with a big, overexaggerated yawn. Then a real one follows, tears springing to his eyes. He rubs them away with a balled-up fist cutely.
“Hmph.”
He stands up abruptly, knocking his head against the roof of the train with the motion. The guy can’t seem to avoid having his head used as a drum, even without agitating his teammates. A small swell is beginning to grow on the back of his head. Rukawa figures that he should give it a break before the guy loses whatever few braincells he has left.
A rush of warmth needles itself into the pit of his stomach, for an unexplainable reason, as his eyes fall on Sakuragi’s arm. It’s long, lanky as his own, and mapped over with veins. He has long fingers, prominent but lean biceps, his forearm blotched with a big, greenish-yellow bruise that he would love nothing more to do than kiss at with an open mouth. He doesn’t know how Sakuragi got it, but given his nature, it’s probably from a fight. Before his thoughts can spiral out of control, Rukawa looks out the window instead of at Sakuragi, so tall and stupid and cute, hunching now as he steps over Rukawa’s thighs. Rukawa tries very hard to focus on the way the thick maple trunks curve together, strong and winding as Sakuragi’s limbs.
Of course, he can’t help himself and sticks his leg out as Sakuragi tries to pass.
“AH—ha! Not falling for that!” Sakuragi says, one leg between Rukawa’s, the other mid-air but not catching on Rukawa’s extended ankle that has him poised to trip. Being intertwined like this only makes Rukawa more flustered, but it never shows on the milk white sheen of his face, all seriousness and plaster. Sakuragi is so blatantly transparent around Haruko. Rukawa has never been so prone to embarrassing himself with a blush, with even the slightest dewiness of his eyes. At least, he doesn’t think he does.
Rukawa scoffs and lets Sakuragi pass, hitting him on the ass with his elbow. Sakuragi wails exaggeratedly and stomps off in the direction of the team’s cooler. Rukawa scoots over to take his spot. The body warmth imbued in the cushion makes him relax back into the chair, taking in Sakuragi’s scent, which is all hot blood and sweat. It’s a cooler October day, the first snow of the year lingering in the overcast sky, but everything red seems to light up the world around him. Sweet azuki bean jam smeared on toast, the rubber basketball bright orange like a clementine, the fragrant leaves wet with rain, Sakuragi’s fuzzy monk head. Rukawa sighs, propping his chin on his palm, wishing he could hold that head on his lap, that he could scratch his fingers upon his scalp, that he could thumb at his cheekbone, his nose. Stupid boy.
When Sakuragi returns, he’s carrying a carton of milk pierced through the side with a straw.
“I couldn’t get the top open.”
Rukawa blinks, and quietly huffs, “Idiot.”
“You took my spot.”
“You were blocking the view,” Rukawa repeats, a bitterness to his words that he doesn’t mean.
Sakuragi chortles out his signature laugh and slouches in Rukawa’s now abandoned seat, putting the straw in his mouth, and slurping obnoxiously loud. A drop of condensation rolls down the side of the carton, over his fingers. The milk is a little frozen, sloshing crunchily as Sakuragi slurps. It makes Rukawa wince. Doesn’t seem to bother Sakuragi, though, who bites down on the frost and lets it melt over his tongue.
The train is smooth along the tracks, and before long, Kogure and Ayako have closed their magazines and are tilting their heads back, their eyes closed.
Mitsui has begun snoring lightly, and Akagi seems to be out of it up ahead, too, his arms crossed and his chin resting on his chest. The lulling silence of the train on the tracks, interrupted only by the announcer dinging lightly over the intercom, indicating their arrival time, eventually gets to Rukawa, too. It’s honestly surprising it took him this long to fall asleep.
He supposes he thought that the braying laugh and sheer irritation he feels in Sakuragi’s presence would keep him awake, but even that can’t stop him from falling victim to his own strange form of narcolepsy.
Besides, Sakuragi’s being strangely quiet, save for the slurping of his milk.
Rukawa lets himself relax, his vision blurring, morphing the trees into an amorphous fire-red, as he falls asleep.
*
Then it’s all cherry blossoms. The trees flower into blooms that are blush-colored, light, and fragrant with a new spring rather than rainfall. And Sakuragi’s lips look like they taste of sticky mochi, skewered on the end of a stick. Rukawa’s laying flat on a hill side, his arms spread, eyes skyward on an expanse of blue dotted with thin, wispy clouds that take on heavenly streaks of gold from behind a setting sun. He feels bored, imagining the skyline of San Francisco, Houston, Brooklyn. Imagining the shiny uniforms of each city where he will inevitably be traded to, after all of this. Chicago, L.A., Seattle.
Then the smell of matcha and milk, and he turns his head. The grass on the hill is soft, like cotton, when it passes across his cheekbones. It coddles his long limbs, cradling him in their dewless warmth. Sakuragi’s kneeling beside him.
A petal falls on his head, and Rukawa reaches up to pluck it off that monkish hair.
His limbs move slow, like he’s wading through syrup.
And then Sakuragi’s leaning down, his brows knitted in concentration, his eyes squeezed shut tight, shyly, anticipatorily, like a child who can’t swim leaping into a body of water for the first time. Rukawa catches the sharp jawline between his thumb and forefinger and leads him down.
No snarky laugh, no yelled accusations, no huffing through his nose when they kiss.
Something is wrong.
Rukawa can’t figure it out, but the kiss is featherlight and almost belongs to a girl. It’s plain, clinical. The rubbery texture of—of a sheet mask, the outside of a bottle… Cool. It smells of matcha, of milk…
*
“Ehehehe…”
Rukawa’s vision swims into focus, and he watches as Sakuragi comes into his line of sight, very close to him indeed. He can count the bottom lashes beneath his pink waterline. For a moment, his head sticks on the conception that they really have kissed, that Sakuragi leaned in in his sleep.
Rukawa’s eyes fly open when he comes to this conclusion. His heart begins to jackrabbit in his chest, and he jumps back, hitting his head against the window with a clanging, hollow sound. His scalp throbs and his hand flies to nurse the back of his skull. Well, he thinks, serves me right for hitting Sakuragi’s head and taking his window seat.
Against his lips is the cold milk carton.
“You were smacking your lips in your sleep, Rukawa. What were you thinking about, eating noodles?”
Sakuragi puts a palm on his stomach and hums with closed eyes at the thought. Rukawa can hear it growl, but he can’t focus on his hunger, on anything but the fact Sakuragi’s breath is warm against his face, that his lips are so close to his, that the carton—the straw that’s been in Sakuragi’s mouth—is pressed to his own lips. It’s almost like an indirect kiss of sorts.
“We’re here, anyway. So wake your lazy ass up. Typical. Do nothing for the team, laze around…”
Rukawa juts his forearm into Sakuragi’s throat on instinct. Sakuragi gags and falls back out of the seat, a bit melodramatically. Ryota, who’s standing now, pulling his jacket on, carefully steps over him with great effort, given Sakuragi’s breadth of limbs and Ryota’s unfortunate lack thereof.
“Careful,” he says to Rukawa, “It’s raining idiots.”
“YOU TRIED TO CHOKE ME!”
“And?” Rukawa says.
“I’m calling my lawyer! I’m suing you! I’ll sue the skin off your ass! I’ll send you to jail! No bail! Life in prison! Where you belong! Rot there, Rukawa! ROT!”
Rukawa rolls his eyes and follows Ryota out of the bus, leaving Sakuragi squawking his threats as Kogure desperately tries to calm him down. He hides his smile behind a feigned yawn.