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The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument.
~Jared K. Anderson, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest
*
We live by waters breaking out of the heart.
~Anne Carson, Plainwater
Every now and then, when he’s feeling particularly self-indulgent, Tobio gives himself permission to remember and thinks of the good old days when they’d do anything to get the ball up in the air: crash into benches and into tables, run into walls, bump it with their feet. How they’d make it, but only sometimes. How their bones would break, but only almost.
You dropped the ball, they’d think like a chorus, but it hasn’t fallen yet.
When the photo leaks, Tobio breaks a glass, and he can’t tell if it’s by accident or on purpose.
*
They’re a hundred losses old when Shouyou laughs into his mouth and says:
“I don’t need you to pull things off high shelves for me. I can just jump to reach them.”
“I know that, idiot,” Tobio sighs, and that’s that because he doesn’t know how to explain that what he really means is, you’re so easy to please.
*
Tobio is not the one to collect Shouyou from the airport. He’s good at penalizing himself like that. Eventually, he bumps into him anyway because inevitability still has a stronger hold on the two of them than gravity ever had.
The world has aged a little since the last time they saw each other, but Shouyou hasn’t, not a day. No, he’s only changed.
*
Shouyou has the attention span of a mosquito with a few notable exceptions. Volleyball is one, and they still have to iron their school uniforms when Tobio makes the grave mistake of wondering if love is another.
A month later, he makes the even graver mistake of trying to find out.
“I see,” Shouyou says when Tobio pins him to a shelf. The storage room smells of rubber, grease, and possibilities.
This is also when Shouyou becomes Shouyou. Before, he was Hinata, but right now is when it changes. Watch:
“Hi—”
“Shouyou.”
“—nata?”
“My name is Shouyou,” Shouyou grins. “Go on, you can say it. I believe in you.”
“Forget it,” Tobio snaps and tries to move away. He fails because he’s trained his body for everything but not for this. Shouyou is shorter but he always grows one millimeter faster and that’s just about how much space between them Tobio can stand at the moment.
“It even kinda rhymes,” Shouyou giggles. “Shouyou and Tobio.”
‘And’, Tobio realizes, is a toss of a word.
“So I want to be special,” Shouyou shrugs. “So what? It’s not a crime, is it?”
His shirt is pushed up, bunched under his armpits, and this is where Tobio gets to decide if he’ll push it up even higher or pull it back down and walk out on this.
“You’re so easy to please,” he sighs against Shouyou’s temple. “It’s infuriating,” against Shouyou’s ear. “Shouyou,” against Shouyou’s pulse because, in the end, it’s a good compromise between ‘moron’ and ‘love’.
*
Tobio has been Shouyou-less for three months when he musters up the courage to ask Sugawara about oceans. Sugawara is a teacher now and it’s only logical that he should know.
“Sugawara-san,” Tobio says without preamble when Sugawara opens the door to the apartment he shares with Sawamura. “You’re good at geography, right?”
Sugawara sizes him up and then invites him inside. Two obligatory cups of tea and five minutes of small talk later, he starts rooting in the living room closet and produces items such as a clown wig (“please don’t ask”), a hula hoop (“I’ll tell you later”), and, finally, a globe. He sets it on the carpet between them and— it shouldn’t be significant— the carpet is blue.
“I know it’s round, but, despite appearances, it’s not a ball,” Sugawara warns as though he expects Tobio to start bouncing it off walls. “What do you want to know?”
“Well,” Tobio says, feeling stupid. He pushes the globe to get it to spin and when he stops with his finger pressed to the blue of the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Brazil, it’s purely coincidental. “How do oceans work, exactly?”
“Wow,” Sugawara says with a fond smile. “You really are hopeless at everything but volleyball, huh?”
Tobio stares.
Sugawara clears his throat. “Well, there’s water to start with—”
“I mean,” Tobio sighs, “Is it like countries?”
Sugawara blinks at him. “Like countries?”
“Well, you have borders, right?” Tobio struggles. “But it’s not like you get an actual wall between two countries, is it?”
“Usually not,” Sugawara says slowly, clearly confused. “There might be a mountain chain or a river or—”
“But not, like, a sash,” Tobio interrupts.
“A… sash?”
Tobio stares at him, trying to manifest. Get it, get it, get it.
“I get it,” Sugawara says, as if on cue. “Yes, the borders are artificial.”
“Artificial,” Tobio nods, to show that he’s following.
“We get different oceans and different seas,” Sugawara goes on with a smile, “but mostly, tides just do their own thing, you know? And then there’s the water cycle to consider… So yeah, on the map, the Pacific Ocean is here, and the Atlantic Ocean is there, but, in reality, a single drop of water does more travelling than Nishinoya.”
Sugawara’s smile is a little too knowing for comfort but, truth be told, Tobio didn’t come to him because Sugawara is a teacher. He came to him because he knew that Sugawara, of all people, would know better than to ask what oceans have to do with volleyball.
Later, Tobio mulls it over as he tries to fall asleep to a recording of ocean sounds. He closes his eyes and imagines this endless circling and recycling of bodies of water, wondering if it’s naïve to expect something so infinite to remember. It’s one of those eternal clichés, like wherever you are, we’re looking at the same moon, or wherever you are, it’s the same sun giving us skin cancer.
Poets might call this exchange of waters beautiful, and skeptics might call it gross, but when Tobio walks knee-deep into the Pacific Ocean a few weeks later, he only calls it true.
*
He has two calendars. One is for all the times he forgets himself and tosses the ball to Shouyou even though Shouyou’s not there. The other one is for everything else.
*
The photo leaks and Tsukishima calls him a heartbreaker, my, my, has the shrimp already seen it?
It’s supposed to be mockery, but it falls a little flat. Tsukishima sounds that tiny bit too serious about it and Tobio has the feeling that if they were to play against each other now, he wouldn’t let a single ball through.
But he said goodbye, he doesn’t try to defend himself. But he said, don’t you dare wait for me.
Yachi doesn’t slap him even though Tobio would prefer it if she did.
*
So they bump into each other because they have mutual friends, because they have mutual streets, because they’re over 60% water each and water remembers, take your pick.
It’s not a homecoming and Shouyou hasn’t aged but he has changed. The whole thing is a little more bitter than it is sweet and Tobio feels like an inside-out shirt no one’s washed in weeks. He’s used to taking the process of mapping out changes for granted: when Sugawara and Sawamura furbished their apartment, he was allowed to drag his fingers along the grooves in the second-hand furniture that they’d rescued from the quicksands of the past to populate their future, and when his mother repainted the front door an audacious shade of blue, he could trace the swells of unevenly spread paint as soon as it dried. Now, here, the uncharted territory of this new Shouyou is off-limits even if Tobio knew where to start. There are hard-earned muscles where before there were only the twig-limbs of boyhood, there are razor cuts where before there were only blemishes, and Shouyou’s going to have so many laugh lines when he grows older, but it’s impossible to imagine him ever ageing. The tan is too deep to scrub off and the occasional Portuguese is too fast even though Tobio downloaded an app, bought a dictionary, copied letters in a spiral notebook.
Shouyou is an entire ecosystem of novelties, and Tobio doesn’t know how to navigate him without becoming a pollutant.
If he was braver, he’d say I have a globe, and a pebble, and a fish tank without any fish in it.
Because he’s a coward, he says, “Long time no see, Hinata.”
Up till now, Shouyou has been all valiant grin and ‘long time no see’ himself, but that ‘Hinata’ does it. It happens too fast for Tobio to dodge but that’s all right because he wouldn’t have tried dodging it anyway: Shouyou slaps him and Tobio would thank him if he wasn’t too busy working his mouth through the pain.
Shouyou stares at his hand in surprise. It’s red because that’s physics for you, the law of action and reaction at work, and blood— blood remembers too.
That’s right, Shouyou, Tobio thinks as water rushes in his ears. It’s just like after a good spike.
“You said ‘goodbye’,” Tobio says. He’ll always be taller, but he’s never felt this small. “You said ‘don’t you dare wait for me’.”
“I meant goodbye for now,” Shouyou chokes out, staring at him in disbelief, the cadence of his voice all betrayal. “I meant volleyball.”
Somewhere, an ocean is always crashing into an ocean, but on Tobio’s globe, they’re always artificial, finite, and still.
*
“I don’t need you to pull things off high shelves for me,” Shouyou says, amused. “I can just jump to reach them.”
He’s so easy to please and it’s infuriating because Tobio wants it to be hard, wants to please him despite that. He needs so little to laugh and Tobio wishes he’d need more.
“But I must admit,” Shouyou says after a thoughtful pause, “Occasionally, it is rather nice to have someone do something for you even though it’s not necessary.”
*
When the pain goes away, Tobio slaps himself to keep it stinging.
The photo had been taken at a terrible angle, and it wasn’t significant enough for television, but it did get plastered all over the internet. It wasn’t anything as drastic as a kiss, but the handholding might just have been worse— a cruelly casual, midday, city-center thing.
“I didn’t actually like her,” Tobio said when he accidentally picked up his phone the eighth time Tanaka, of all people, called him. “I was just trying to.”
“Kid,” Tanaka growled. “If I see you, I’ll break your jaw.”
“All right,” Tobio laughed. It was one of the things he’d learned by the time he finished high school, laughing. “I’ll come over tomorrow.”
“Please don’t,” Tanaka said, horrified. “I don’t actually want to break your jaw, you know.”
“Right,” Tobio sighed, disappointed. “Do you think Tsukishima would?”
The next day, Yachi appeared on his doorstep with a pile of blankets, a stack of Korean drama DVDs, and a box of cocoa. She didn’t slap him, but the way she wouldn’t stammer almost made up for it.
“It was supposed to be a secret, you know,” Tobio sighed, not because Shouyou was something to be ashamed of but because he was something Tobio had enjoyed too much to share.
“Well, then you should have taken more care to be secretive about it,” Yachi snapped as she angrily made him cocoa. Some of it sloshed over the rim of the mug and that, too, was a small but tidal event.
*
Shouyou calls him only once, a week after his arrival in Brazil.
“What’s São Paulo like?” Tobio asks. “Are you homesick?”
“I know you know it’s Rio de Janeiro,” Shouyou sighs, and his voice is too loud to be coming from half a world away. “I’m not.”
And because it’s obvious that he is, Tobio stays on the phone for three hours even though it only takes three minutes of silence for their breaths to synchronize. It must cost a fortune and, later, Tobio transfers Shouyou the money for the call.
Shouyou transfers it right back with the eloquent transaction title of ‘fuck you’ but— Tobio decides it’s a win— he transfers only half.
*
They play each other sooner rather than later and it’s exhilarating in a way nothing’s been for years. This time, Tobio has fortified himself against the tide of memories with stockades, drawbridges, and moats, but it all comes for him anyway, working into the nooks and crannies of his defense slowly but surely. Shouyou is on the other side of the net, divided into squares but still an attention-starved whole, and Tobio is floored by the memory of all those old delights, neglected but still transcribed into his muscles: Shouyou and competing with him, Shouyou and competing against him. It’d taken so long but he finally came back with sand in his shoes, salt in his hair, and contradictions in his pockets and now he’s here.
Puberty is a thing of the past, but its conflicting sentiments echo all the way to the present:
I’d rather lose with you than win without you.
Halfway through the game, Tobio forgets himself and catches himself cheering for Shouyou even though he’s on the other side of the net.
I’d rather lose to you than win against someone else.
Shouyou is an ocean and Tobio’s all out of second chances, but he still hopes that he’ll get to sail him.
*
That first time, it’s all too slippery and immediate. Tobio wants Shouyou a little too much— wants him even though he finally has him. It’s tricky like this and they get the tempo all wrong but it’s all right anyway.
Shouyou is 165 centimeters of willpower and Tobio sets out to greet every single one.
You’re so easy to please and it drives me insane because it shouldn’t be easy— you deserve someone trying their best and failing anyway, you deserve someone trying over and over again until they get it right.
You’re so easy to please but I want it to be hard.
With Shouyou, everything is for the first time. He loves the same way he plays volleyball. He’s greedy but he has so much to give. He’s selfish, yes, but also selfless.
*
Apparently, it’s possible to predict the path of debris based on the location of its source. Back in 2011, after the tsunami hit, computer simulations were used to do just that because, if you take every factor into account, you can determine where a toy soldier or a fridge will wash up.
Trying to think of something Tobio wouldn’t sacrifice to try and send it to Shouyou across oceans quickly becomes Tobio’s go-to mental exercise.
*
They all go out after that match that Tobio can’t quite bring himself to regret losing. They both have new teammates now, but this is for old times’ sake and it’s almost too much to bear: Shouyou boasting, Sugawara crying, Sawamura trying not to, and Ennoshita pretending he isn’t.
“You’re awfully quiet, King,” Tsukishima says halfway through the meal. “I see you’re a sore loser as always.”
Tobio doesn’t attack him with his chopsticks only because he knows exactly what Tsukishima means by losing and, just this once, the taunt is well-deserved.
Across the table, Shouyou is trying to sell beach volleyball to them. He’s fluent in so many languages now: Japanese, yes, Portuguese, yes, but also wind, ocean, sand. When he talks about it with flying hands it has the charm of an initiation, everyone leaning in to listen. When a wave pushes you over, that’s a greeting, he explains. When it crashes against rocks, that’s applause. As for sand, it gets stuck in your teeth, sure, but that’s just love, you know? Tobio imagines it all: blistered feet and scraped knees and the beach gathering in the wrinkles of Shouyou’s sheets, a slow but stubborn siege.
Shouyou grins so wide that, if he let you, with a little patience, you could count all the individual grains of sand he brought with him from Rio tooth by tooth, but he probably wouldn’t let Tobio.
“Does he think they don’t notice it when he steals food off their plates?” Ukai laughs an hour into the meal, leaning back on his arms. Across the table, Shouyou is swallowing faster than he can chew and if Tobio could change anything about this evening, it’d be this: he’d sit closer to Shouyou to have the pleasure of contributing to keeping him full.
“He took that thing you’d always tell us to heart,” Tobio sighs.
“That reminds me!” Ukai grins. “He phoned me a few months ago, completely out of the blue. It was 2 a. m. here, but the kid calls me all Coach, this is a matter of life and death.’”
“Everything always is with him,” Tobio sighs. He’s going for exasperated, but he miscalculates and ends up sounding fond instead.
“Truer words have never been spoken,” Ukai nods gravely. “Anyway, he sounds all choked up, and I ask him, what’s wrong, who’s dying, are you dying, and he goes, can you remind me what I should eat to repair my muscles?, all hiccupy.”
Water sweeps stockades, rushes over drawbridges, and fills moats. It’s nothing personal.
“I’ve pulled one quite badly and if I don’t do something fast, it’ll die on me, he says,” Ukai goes on with the carelessness of someone who has the privilege of not knowing what he’s talking about. “Says, I need this muscle in tip-top shape, but I can’t remember my food groups! What do I eat? Eggs? Beans? Rice? All of the above? And I tell him, all of that is good but make sure to breathe first, and he goes, is it okay if it’s a little too salty? And I go, well, why would it be too salty?, and he goes, it’s just going to have to be, for a while. So then I go, what the hell, and then he goes, I can’t help the salt, but only for a while, and I go, well, if it’s only for a while, and he sounds all choked up again and so I say, what muscle is it you pulled again?, and he says, the big one, and hangs up on me, the little— Yeah. He scared the crap out of me and he wouldn’t pick up the phone after that, but he’s playing better than ever, so I guess it must have turned out all right in the end.”
It’s nothing personal because there’s just no fortifying oneself against an ocean.
“Coach,” Tobio says because it’s still ‘coach’ and always will be. “When was this?”
“Hmm, let me think,” Ukai says. “A few months before he came back to Japan. Three, give or take.”
Right about when that damned photo leaked.
Shouyou, so easy to please, and so hard to disappoint, but look: Tobio managed anyway.
*
“This is where you end,” Tobio says when they’re maybe we’ll get to keep this forever old as he drags the tip of his finger over Shouyou’s chest. He stops right where his heart is kicking up a riot, pumping rivers of blood to all the places Tobio likes best, which would have to be all of them. “This is where I begin,” he adds, tapping his own heart.
“Oh yeah?” Shouyou says, always new, always in the (re)making, always on the brink of another beginning. He turns everything upside-down until he’s straddling Tobio, and the world might be old, and stranger things might have happened, but Tobio feels like they’re the inventors of love anyway. “Well, consider this,” Shouyou whispers as he drags his own finger in a circle where Tobio’s heart refuses to lose the race. “This is where I end,” he says, and then, as he points at his own heart, “this is where you begin.”
They’ll be graduating soon but Tobio has decided to keep him.
I played before you, he thinks as Shouyou hooks a finger on the waistband of Tobio’s underwear. I will play after you.
“Hello,” he says when Shouyou’s mouth greets his.
I did not love before you.
*
A month after the match, Shouyou calls him.
There is no world in which Tobio wouldn’t answer.
“Okay, enough,” is what Shouyou says instead of a greeting. “We’re not divorced, and we don’t have to divide up our friends.”
“Um.”
“I mean, stop it with the self-fla— self-fella—self-fg— self-la-la-la-whatever.”
“Self-flagellation?”
“Yeah,” Shouyou snaps. “That.”
“I.”
“You can hang out with people!” Shouyou says, exasperated. “It’s okay! You don’t really have enough friends to be able to afford to neglect the ones you do have!”
“Ouch.”
“Shut up,” Shouyou snorts. “I need you to understand something, all right?”
I don’t need you to pull things off high shelves for me, but, I must admit, occasionally, it is rather nice.
Maybe there is a universe out there where the ocean helped them communicate and kept Tobio from fucking it all up. Maybe there is a universe out there where, when they go grocery shopping, they share a cart because they share an apartment, and where Shouyou doesn’t jump for his favorite brand of cereal because he has Tobio there, aching to get it for him.
“I’m listening,” Tobio says, and thank God he remembered to mute the ocean sounds recording before picking up the phone.
You’re so easy to please and, because of that, it’d be a crime to ever stop pleasing you.
“Okay,” Shouyou says after a deep breath. “Okay. You broke my heart, okay. You broke my heart, but don’t you forget that I let you.”
And then he hangs up, and that’d be it, only there is something Tobio hasn’t had the heart to throw away.
*
Sakusa Kiyoomi calls him only once.
“Technically, if you make him ill again, that’s on him,” he says neutrally. “But don’t make him ill again.”
Tobio leaves the calendar on Shouyou’s doorstep and tries not to think of the humiliating, double-digit number of Xs inside.
*
Shouyou has changed but Tobio remembers him so well that he opens the door a second before Shouyou can pound on it, and he would have pounded on it, too, because he never knocks.
Tobio remembers him well, but he wants to memorize him from scratch anyway. He did not love before him, and he hasn’t loved after him because there is no after Shouyou.
“Fuck, you’re good,” Shouyou sighs, holding up the calendar. “I wanted to be strong, so I stopped calling.”
“I wanted to be necessary, so I stopped waiting,” Tobio says because it’s probably a little better than a half-baked, reheated ‘I’m sorry’. “Now, I struggle to imagine anything better than just being there.”
Shouyou’s eyes soften but the rest of him is vibrating. A wave is about to crest, and a tide is about to surge, but it’s all right. Shouyou is an ocean, but Tobio will sail him. He’s a storm, but Tobio has weathered him.
This is when he learns whether the universe where he gets to pull Shouyou’s favorite brand of cereal off the shelf for him is this one:
“You dropped my heart,” Shouyou says with an apocalypse of a smile. “But Tobio, it hasn’t fallen yet.”