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He is used to Asahi crying. Not that Asahi is a miserable person, or anything—Asahi cries when he’s sad or happy or stressed or when the dessert is really good at their favorite restaurant. He cries when he feels inadequate, and when he feels loved. He cries after sex, consistently. Asahi will come home from work one day and Noya will be powering his way through a video game on the big flatscreen and Asahi will burst into tears and say, in the most affected voice, “I met a wonderful dog today.”
And so Noya is used to it; he knows to get the tissues and put on the kettle. He likes this about Asahi, likes that he’s a person who feels a lot, because Nishinoya is a person who feels a lot, too, even if he feels different things than Asahi. Mostly Noya feels happy, and angry, and hungry. But he really, really feels those things, so, you know.
Asahi’s feelings are more complicated, and sometimes that’s frustrating, because while Noya likes that Asahi feels a lot, he knows that not all the feelings are good. For example: sometimes Asahi feels anxious and he starts to shake and won’t stop on some dark train of thought, usually about how he’s not good enough at whatever, or isn’t deserving of any of this, or does everyone secretly hate him because he looks so scary? And nothing Noya can say will make him feel any better, and suddenly Noya has to add helpless to his feelings register, which makes him want to tear his hair out. It’s more than fucked up watching someone as perfect-wonderful-innocent as Azumane Asahi tear himself down, it’s morbid, and being so helpless only makes Noya angry again, and there’s no one to be angry at except Asahi. Once he snaps and says, “You’re driving me crazy, Asahi-chan”—that was the wrong word to use, he regrets it even before the tears are welling in his partner’s eyes.
It’s not easy with them, but it never has been. They get through the rough patches. Noya learns to apologize (he calls himself ‘Nishinoya 2.0, now with apologies!’), and Asahi learns just the opposite, because if there’s one thing Noya can do, it’s explain when something really isn’t Asahi’s fault.
There’s one thing, though: Asahi doesn’t cry in his sleep. Or at least Noya doesn’t think he does, and they’ve been together for a few years now, shared a bed long enough to know.
But he wakes up on a cold night in February to the shaking and whimpering of the large figure beside him. Asahi’s hair is loose and clinging to his wet face, and he mutters something, no no no, punctuated by nonsense syllables. It takes Noya a good twenty seconds to shake him into consciousness, and then Asahi is looking up at him. It’s silent for a long moment but for the sound of them both catching their breath. Noya has to swipe some hair out of his eyes.
He manages to ask, “You okay?” In reply Asahi lets out a single sob and wipes his face on his arm. “I’ll make some tea,” Noya decides, and he climbs from the bed.
A few minutes later they sit in the kitchen and Asahi stares at the tea without drinking. It’s four in the morning and Sendai stirs outside the darkened window.
“What was it?” Noya asks. His impatience has always paired well with Asahi’s reluctance. He spurs Asahi into speech or action because he can’t sit around waiting while his boyfriend decides whether or not his contribution is worthwhile. To Noya, there’s no need for value judgments about one’s own thoughts and feelings. They’re all substantive, important. He tries to teach Asahi this, too.
After a long, hollow pause, Asahi replies, “I had a bad dream.”
“You don’t usually wake up crying.”
“No,” he murmurs, “only once before tonight.”
Noya makes a little noise, a hum. “You remember it? The dream.”
Asahi inhales, his wide chest rising shakily. “It was about Ako.”
“Ako. Who’s Ako?” Some relative he’s forgotten about, maybe. He’s only met Asahi’s parents, and not for more than a meal or two, at that. Asahi worries what they think of him living with another man.
“My dog that I had when I was a little boy.” Oh, he does remember this story. Ako—it didn’t end well for Ako. Noya winces.
“Ako died a really long time ago, Asahi-chan.”
“I know,” his voice catches in his throat, “It’s stupid.”
“I didn’t say it was stupid.” It’s hard to scrub any frustration from his voice. Sometimes he thinks Asahi would be better off with someone gentler, who could whisper him sweet nothings all day long and never blow a fuse. But he loves this big bumbling man, has since he was a teenager, and Asahi loves him too, even if it’s not what’s good for him. So if Asahi won’t choose what’s good for him, then Noya has to become good for him, he reminds himself—they’re blessed that he likes a challenge.
Asahi sighs and Noya reaches to take his hand in his own smaller, leaner one.
“Will you go to the doctor tomorrow, Asahi?”
The doctor has long stood as their euphemism for therapist or shrink or whatever, because they wanted a way to be discreet around friends but also because it reminds them both that Asahi is sick. Volleyball fucked up Noya’s knees, and it is just like that. Well, sort of—there are pills for both, at least.
In response to his question he gets a downtrodden look: the bags under Asahi’s eyes are so pronounced, tangles in his hair, slump in his shoulders. Noya slips a free hand around to the small of his back and rubs, reassuring, but encouraging him to sit up. I don’t want to end up dating a hunchback, he’d probably joke, if the time were right. Asahi has this habit of making himself smaller—that’s what this is all about, really. Getting this man, who he loves, to stand up straight.
“If you go with me,” Asahi finally replies. Noya hesitates. He has sat in on a couple therapy sessions before, when Asahi is getting used to a new doctor. Sometimes he gets a one-on-one session himself, helps the doctor “paint a better picture” of Asahi’s mental health or something, but to Noya—who even loves talking—it’s just awkward. He doesn’t feel like anything going on up there is complex enough for him to pay another person to figure it out.
“You mean like… sit there while you talk to the lady?” Even at his tone, Asahi shrinks, and Noya quickly shakes his head. “I’ll go, yeah, sure.”
“No,” he mutters, “You don’t want to. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll go, Asahi!”
“No, I’m sorry.” Asahi thunks forward, head on the table, which leaves Noya rubbing his temples. He’s gotten himself into another one of those binds where he wasn’t patient enough when he needed to be, and now he has no clue what to do next.
“I’ve got to go with you now, Asahi-chan, I made it worse,” he jokes, and Asahi lets out a sob-laugh that’s muffled by the table.
“Okay,” he concedes, lifting his head. It’s remarkable how small his voice can get sometimes, as though it were ignorant of his body’s size.
Noya loops an arm around his shoulders, and presses his cheek to the nape of his neck. He’s warm and his skin is soft, this big comfy person, and Noya thinks of one way he could cheer Asahi up—except he got coached out of that one within the first few months of the relationship (“I don’t want our sex to be a crutch, Yuu” and so on)—it’s just, he still thinks of it sometimes. He spends as much time thinking about fucking Asahi as he does actually in bed with him. Or in the shower with him—he has to squash the urge to ask Asahi if he wants to get clean and happy. He settles on, “You wanna go back to bed?” Meaning sleep, unfortunately.
His companion peers out at the lights of the city against the dark of the night. “No. I’m awake.”
“Me too,” says Noya, and he feels Asahi snug against him; he grins. “Tell me more about Ako, Asahi-chan.”
Noya has to run errands for work after they leave the therapist, so they split up and Asahi rides the subway home by himself. He feels better—calmer, not like there’s an invisible weight pressing on his sternum—but exhausted from talking so much.
He gets back to the apartment and reads for an hour and then cooks. By the time he’s done, he hopes Noya will be back. He used to make enough for a family of four, but now that neither of them works out five or more hours a day (not for lack of trying on Noya’s end, but it’s easier when you work at a gym) their caloric intake has decreased accordingly. Which makes him feel sort of old and weird and fat, though he is twenty-six and runs a 10k twice weekly.
He’s setting out the food when he hears the lock click in the front door—perfect timing.
“Come eat,” he calls to the scuffling sound from the front hall.
“Ah, no, Asahi-chan, come here.”
“But I cooked,” he tells a bowl of rice sadly.
“It’s important!”
Hanging his head, Asahi unties his apron and shuffles toward the entrance, not knowing what to expect but anticipating a scolding of some kind. As an adult man he receives very few scoldings nowadays, but he is always prepared for one should it arise.
When he turns the corner, however, he’s met not with a reproving glare but with—fur. A lot of fluffy, white fur, and a tiny face with black button nose and eyes, almost entirely obscuring his petite boyfriend.
Noya is holding a puppy, he realizes. A big puppy.
“He’s a Great Pyrenees, Asahi-chan!”
“Where did you get that dog, Nishinoya!”
“The dog store.”
“There are no dog stores,” he gasps, and his head clouds with images of Noya snatching up puppies in the park, or sprinting away from a dog show with his arms full of canine.
“Fine, I got him from a shelter—so he might not be completely a Pyrenees, but I called this morning and asked for the biggest, fluffiest puppy they had.”
“Oh,” Asahi mumbles, and the puppy leaps from Noya’s arms to bound toward him. “He’s going to be big,” he notes, as one of the dog’s paws lands on his thigh.
“Huge,” says Noya gleefully, “Just the right size for you, Asahi-chan.”
“For me?”
“For you.”
The puppy is trying to climb up into Asahi’s arms—he might do a better job holding him than Noya did, because it’s true, they’re a size match. “You adopted a dog for me?” He feels a lovely tickle in his belly at the thought of Noya going out with the expressed intent of finding a dog for him, and he drops into a crouch so he can meet the soft white creature face-to-face—earning a lick on the eye. He thinks of Ako (she was smaller, a lot smaller, he was seven and he found her sniffing around the curbside on his walk home from school, and she’d followed him all the way to the house, which in retrospect reminds him a lot of Nishinoya), and the lovely tickle in his belly hurts a little, too. But maybe it’s the right kind of pain, the timely kind that comes with moving on.
“Yeah.” There’s new uncertainty in Noya’s voice, like maybe now he feels he was presumptuous in making this decision for the two of them, what with the responsibility and history involved—and maybe he was, Asahi doesn’t know, he isn’t stubborn enough to pretend he doesn’t love having a big puppy in his arms. “I dunno,” Noya adds, with an unconvincing shrug, “I just thought maybe it would be good for you to have a new dog, to make some happy memories with. So I don’t get woken up in the middle of night anymore.”
Asahi looks up at him, beaming. “You have to get up in the night to housetrain a puppy.”
“I knew that,” Noya grunts. A moment passes in which the puppy tugs on Asahi’s shirtsleeve and he wrestles it away, and then Noya mutters, “I love you, Asahi.”
The puppy jumps and knocks Asahi back, so he’s sitting on the floor, a big grin splitting his face. “I love you too—but what are we going to name him?” The day is poised to end much better than it started.