Work Text:
The cure for pain is in the pain.
~Rumi, There’s Nothing Ahead
In the thick of winter, during a lackluster, last-ditch-effort-at-pre-divorce-family-bonding trip to the local zoo, a seven-year-old Suguru took advantage of his parents’ bickering and, unobserved, slipped into the reptile house, for warmth. He parted the heavy strip curtains, sheets of plastic slapping behind him as the place gobbled him up, and gave himself up to that equatorial kingdom bursting with light. In there, at the tail end of a vivaria maze where creatures from warmer parts coiled like ropes of brutal color among bustling greenery, Suguru climbed on tiptoe and found himself eye to eye with—a quick glance at the sign drilled to the wall—a Japanese rat snake (e. climacophora), local, but no less magnificent for that. The animal’s scales flashed green, and green, and blue, now a moonlit forest, now a lake in bloom, now scales again, a lithe armor of dangerous brilliance. From the sign, carefully putting the kanji together, Suguru learned that these blue generals were in the habit of slithering up high, high into the trees, where they’d pluck pre-feather baby birds out of their nests and swallow, bones and all.
From the sign, too, Suguru learned that snakes were ec-to-ther-mic: that their body temperature was variable, entirely dependent on external sources.
In the deserted herpetarium, where strange-skinned beasts fashioned themselves into jewelry precious beyond compare, the unblinking eyes of the snake gave up no secrets and told many a lie.
*
Inside a photo album inside a shoebox inside a drawer inside the house he visits for holidays only, there is a picture of Suguru, before Tetsurou. In that picture Suguru is: composure, shined shoes, suspenders, twelve years old. The photograph—taken in front of Suguru’s new school, cherry blossoms blooming away—marks the end of an era, for, if taken but a second later, it would have documented Suguru receiving a volleyball with his face: his official initiation into all things Tetsurou. From then on, life became a constant struggle not to go off the rails, post-Tetsurou pictures an archive of Suguru with black eyes, skinned knees, a Band-Aided nose, an attitude problem.
At twelve, Tetsurou stumbles into junior high with glitz, dripping some infuriating Suguru ne sait quoi, ostentatious and loud but, at the same time, quietly watchful when you least expect it—watchfully quiet when you’d rather not be seen. Suguru doesn’t like being gawked at, so he takes up staring in retaliation, issuing challenges with his eyes. Tetsurou affects boredom and Suguru, who doesn’t much like being ignored either, sticks out his leg to trip him up.
Tetsurou sees the leg coming but takes the fall, out of spite, fisting Suguru’s collar to drag him down with him.
You’re a poser, says Tetsurou’s condescending, toothy grin as he backs off, walking backward.
“You’re a fake!” Suguru yells after him, once he’s made sure no one’s looking.
But there is something genuine there for both of them, in all that hatred.
*
Once the shock of her skin—colder even than his own—has worn off, Suguru decides to like the fact that Mika is the sort of person who doesn’t startle when her hand accidentally brushes yours, reaching for a dropped pencil sharpener. She smiles—all teeth, no hidden agenda that Suguru can see—introduces herself, and embarks on a friendship that eventually, thanks to Suguru’s efforts, turns into a courtship largely because, at a time when Suguru is sure of very few things, Mika has a knack for telling it like it is. When she asks him about something, it’s because she genuinely wants to know the answer, and when she’s upset, she pouts and scolds instead of clamming up and sulking.
When his mother remarries—when the wedding invitation arrives in the mail—Suguru’s skin thirsts like snowless winter, a barren wasteland of want, and he stumbles towards Mika’s neighborhood with all the lucidity of a sleepwalker. This late at night, she has to smuggle him upstairs, past the ajar living room door where her own mother’s slippered feet are just visible in the otherworldly glow of their ancient TV set. Up in Mika’s bedroom, full of cute little nothings, monuments erected out of textbooks, and fluffed-out pillows, she steers Suguru under the covers. Inside a cocoon of cotton and limbs, he clings to her, trying to leech off her warmth, but, for all the love—and he does love her so—finds the comfort of her excruciatingly lacking.
It is here, with his face nestled in that hidden, private lagoon of her neck, their legs tangled together, that Suguru commits the sin of remembering and lies to her by scooting closer instead of pulling away.
It is here, sixteen and hurting, that he parses the far-flung jigsaw of his thoughts and looks back to the last time he felt warm.
*
It’s nightfall, but the night hovers yet. In a newly minted, suburban wonderland of a playground, a twelve-year-old Suguru, one tooth short and with more chips on his shoulder than he knows what to do with, challenges Kuroo Tetsurou, he of wayward volleyballs, to a duel. A swingset creaks ominously, a fat, domestic cat out past its curfew meows, and Tetsurou turns on his heel to walk away from him.
Blades of dying light cut him to pieces, and still he goes. Elongated shadows clutch at him, and still he goes. In Suguru’s dreams, someone is always taking their leave, backs unforgiving like altars upon which nothing has been sacrificed.
Blades of dying light cut him to pieces but Suguru stumbles after him and says, wait.
Tetsurou turns around to face him, takes him in, and—a shift in his eyes, his countenance—rolls up his sleeves with a long-suffering sigh. Around them, a ring of schoolkids, watching. Suguru calms his breathing, coiled, and then strikes, but his punch does not land, knuckles splitting only on air. He wishes someone would hit him—he’s been waiting to hit someone half his life—and then there’s Tetsurou’s own fist, luring galaxies out of Suguru’s blacked-out vision, intoxicating nebulae, cardiac with pain.
Suguru lunges, and Tetsurou lets him take him down, weightless, only to roll them sideways, over, everything knees, skies, and elbows. People are shouting names, betting on them like on horses. For all they swing fists, Suguru soon comes to recognize that the thrill of the fight is in fighting dirty: fingers digging into flanks, kneecaps trying to wiggle between legs, up where it’ll hurt, nails pinching earlobes, and finally teeth, Tetsurou a mouthful of adrenaline as Suguru bites into the meat of his arm. Against him, over him, under him, Tetsurou is fatal but—
Light in bloom, a searing gamma-ray of pain, and Tetsurou’s blood on concrete.
No, not Tetsurou’s. Suguru’s.
—warm. Warm.
*
In the aftermath, as Suguru tastes iron, somebody’s fingertips—almost as warm as the blood—come to rest on the bridge of his nose. Through pain, the sensation is welcome, so much so that Suguru forgets himself and brings up a shaky hand to keep the fingers there. Only at the last possible moment, a hair’s breadth shy of contact, does he have the sense to push Tetsurou’s hand away.
In Tetsurou’s eyes, strange light starts as a tiny fault, a hatchling. Instead of asking if this is what Suguru wanted, he takes advantage of the temporary hush and quietly orders everyone to go home.
“Is my nose broken?” Suguru asks once the onlookers have dispersed, thinking of his father, who will be waiting at home with a cup of instant noodles.
Tetsurou glances over his shoulder and then comes back.
No one’s ever taken a second look at Suguru, and he comes back.
“Well?” snaps Suguru.
Tetsurou scratches the back of his neck and glances over his shoulder again. “We’ve got a first aid kit at home.”
*
Kuroo Tetsurou, twenty-four years old and immaculate, were it not for his overenthusiastic hair, approaches Suguru after Yatsuya’s 3-2 loss, clad in a well-tailored suit. He’s a medium-sized fish in a pond Suguru has never swum in and he must be too busy for the likes of Suguru, but here he is all the same, about to hand Suguru a towel, smile all white-collar like he’s about to talk business, the urgency in his eyes the only clue that whatever this is is personal.
Suguru refuses to accept the towel and walks away, forehead damp with sweat and eyes—
Suguru walks away first, for fucking once.
*
For Suguru’s mother, seasons were ‘little years’, everlasting in their transience. She’d rearrange furniture according to the weather, plant all things seasonal in their garden, and milk the meadows where their neighborhood petered out into semi-wilderness for what they were worth. Nettle was for soup, dandelions were for jam, and wildflowers, after a day spent on stand-by, their stalks bullied through the thin neck of the kitchen table vase, for fabric dye. One summer, his mother turned a plain, white cotton shirt of hers into a ripe-yellow climate wonder, white, tie-dye rings emerging on yellow like a pattern of curious suns. Suguru used to listen for the sound of the shower starting, sneak into his parents’ bedroom, and press the shirt, the fabric still warm from his mother’s skin, to his face, basking in her heat.
She didn’t take the shirt with her. When Suguru found it discarded inside his parents’ closet, dejected-looking without sunlight to set it off and long grown cold to the touch, he understood that his mother hadn’t been happy, despite the meadows, and the seasons, and the hand clutched in hers: his, as he trotted after her in green rainboots, tripping over clumps of what she’d insist were not weeds.
*
Halfway through the winter following their high school graduation, Suguru’s diploma collecting dust in some cupboard or other, in the year of the snake, Suguru bumps into Tetsurou in a hole-in-the-wall Tokyo bar that has just enough character to get away with a certain level of, for lack of a better word, seediness.
Or no, that makes it seem as though Tetsurou, and not Suguru, is the event. So:
Halfway through the winter following their high school graduation, Tetsurou bumps into Suguru.
“Daishou,” Tetsurou says, looking oddly out of place—unorthodox—in the Tyndall effect created by the room’s lighting. “Are you in town for the game?”
Suguru, who will probably go to volleyball games all his life, nods. “How’s life been treating you?” he says, shoving the words out of his mouth syllable by syllable. “Your hair’s as ridiculous as ever.”
Tetsurou grins and, too late, Suguru remembers that the question should have been:
How have you been treating life?
*
Suguru walks into Tetsurou’s house as though into an earthquake, bracing for impact, cataloging where to crawl, should worse come to worst. Tetsurou presses a finger to his lips as he toes off his shoes in the genkan and motions for Suguru to do the same, then leads him upstairs, on tiptoe, skipping certain steps. Suguru, who suspects that the floorboards would creak if disturbed, carefully follows his lead, hanging onto the banister for dear life as, somewhere downstairs, Tetsurou’s parents’ voices climb and fall, a gentle topography suggesting an exchange of gossip and shared laughter, so different from the Himalayan arguments Suguru’s own parents used to get into in the evenings.
On their way past what may or may not be the door to Tetsurou’s room, Suguru catches stray drops of blood with his t-shirt. On its front, they fall like tears, soiling the face of the cartoon character printed on the cotton.
“Strawberry toothpaste?” Suguru mocks once they’ve reached the bathroom, doing his damnest to come off as brave.
“I don’t think it’s broken,” Tetsurou says, scrutinizing him with a frown.
Suguru, too scared to face his own reflection, reaches for the toothpaste, scanning the front of the tube for something else to pick on.
“Don’t, you moron,” Tetsurou sighs, pinching Suguru’s nose to stop him from snorting the blood in. The pain is blinding and Suguru bites his lip to keep from screaming as his eyes water.
“I’ve never seen you cry,” Tetsurou whispers as he lets go.
You never will, Suguru swears, blinking back the tears.
*
But: after getting hit in the face with it, Tetsurou’s half-assed apology rubbing him all the wrong ways, Suguru trains his eyes on that shabby volleyball, watching it surrender to thicket.
The rest is, as they say, history.
In the school cafeteria, Tetsurou is a focal point, a center of activity surrounded by people. On the court, he takes a step back and becomes the fulcrum on which all of his team’s offense is levered. Suguru starts off watching but ends up playing himself, his fingers slowly developing calluses, the nails mutilated with clippers years before Mika will take one look at them and show him how to use a nail file—years before Mika.
The first time Suguru touches the synthetic leather of a volleyball, a whole world unfolds in front of him like a sphere, opening: a controlled ecosystem of six players moving in a circle, the numbers constant and dependable. He likes the idea of the net, strung between two teams, separating what’s yours from what isn’t, and realizes that he could come to love this game unrestricted by timing, where you play to win and stick around until you have.
“Oi,” Tetsurou calls over his shoulder when he catches Suguru watching him and the others play through the gym window after school. “Wanna join us, Snake Face?”
“No, thanks,” Suguru declines with a pitying smile, feigning nonchalance. “I’ve got better things to do.”
He doesn’t.
In the weeks that follow, Suguru practices alone, in hiding spots so secluded that even the most diligent seekers couldn’t hope to find him there, the ball rebounding off walls as Suguru learns everything there is to learn the hard way, one scraped knee at a time, going from a kid with no skills to speak of to someone with skills that can be honed.
His moment of glory—the very one he’s been preparing for—comes in late May, when a sky sweet with sunlight coaxes the others outside during lunch break. The volleyball soars out of Tetsurou’s hands in a wide arc, past scattered bento boxes emptied of food, and falls right into Suguru’s, snug in his grip and sturdier than the battered one he’s used to in that generous second he allows himself for making its acquaintance. Yards away, Tetsurou opens his mouth, no doubt to demand that Suguru return it, but Suguru beats him to it. “Lost something?” he taunts, spinning the ball on the very tip of his finger, showing off.
“Oh, I didn’t lose it,” Tetsurou insists, something calculating about his gaze.
Suguru adjusts the strap of his bag but doesn’t bother to shrug it off his shoulder before executing a perfect serve, sending the ball back to Tetsurou, where it lands at his feet, all but gift-wrapped, its fall cushioned by grass. Someone whistles, impressed, and Suguru shrugs as though it’s not a big deal, taking the credit, satisfied that Tetsurou’s friends have taken the fruits of his labor for the effortless skill of a born natural, a volley boy wonder too busy to give them the time of the day.
Tetsurou looks, unblinking, and his stare reveals nothing as it follows Suguru across the lawn.
Later, in the bathroom, Suguru rolls up his sleeves to swathe his forearms in soap, the water pleasantly cool on his skin. Feline, Tetsurou slips in unobserved. “Get yourself some elbow pads, moron,” he says, announcing his presence.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Suguru growls, startled, slapping a hand dripping with soap suds over his bruised elbow.
“Tryhard,” Tetsurou mouths. His eyes are on fire.
*
In another old picture, a five-year-old Suguru sleeps curled on his side with a patch of late-morning sunlight for a bed. According to his father, it was his mother’s favorite thing about Suguru: how he’d go hunting for sunlight to nap in, drawing on its force.
According to Suguru, it couldn’t have been his mother’s favorite thing about him, or else she would have waited till the weather turned that fall instead of leaving first thing in September.
Still, he remembers that, on rainy days, she’d always make sure to put something yellow inside his bento box: half a banana, a slice of lemon, a flower.
Today, preschool Suguru would brag to the other kids after clinging to her skirt as she kissed goodbyes all over his forehead, I’m having sunlight for lunch.
*
To Suguru, Kuroo Tetsurou has always been a slow-motion summer, shadow and light playing cat and mouse in the middle of the season that he is, and Suguru, the weather inside him ever-changing, now cold spell, now heatwave, helpless in the face of it.
Helpless in the face of Tetsurou.
In a blind alley bar where the tap water looks brackish and the glasses are smudged, Tetsurou buys him a drink. The colorful cocktail stings on his lip, the chill so shocking that Suguru almost reaches for his coat.
Tetsurou, knowing, understands instantly. “At least now it’s obvious which team you were rooting for,” he jokes, his hand landing on Suguru’s shoulder, searing even through multiple layers of clothing, not in temperature but in weight. “I know just what you need.”
Suguru, who doesn’t even know that himself, closes his eyes and pretends that July, that wildflowers, that home.
*
The first time Mika kisses him, he almost bites down to keep her from going.
“You’ve got sharp teeth,” she says, unperturbed, as she slips a finger inside his mouth to test the tip of his canine.
She’s good with the cold, Mika, barefoot in the evenings, half her wardrobe flimsy and off-the-shoulder. She never complains despite the poor circulation, her hands icy first over, and then, with time, under Suguru’s shirts. In winter, overwhelmed by the joy of getting to keep her, mere weeks before he’ll lose her for the first time, Suguru blows on her fingers to warm them after walking her to her front door, and she laughs right in his face, all aren’t you the one who’s freezing, Suguru? She’s not the type to knit or even buy him a scarf, but she always makes sure that there’s a fresh supply of hot chocolate in the kitchen cupboard when he comes over and, ever practical, goes so far as to get him an electric heater for Christmas.
“Don’t cry,” she scolds good-naturedly as she hauls the box inside his house. “Don’t cry or I’ll break up with you.”
They spend the first snowfall of the year together. By the time the white heaps turn to mud-spoiled sludge, they’ve split up, Suguru unsure whether he ought to return the pink sock he discovered under his bed, lonely and without a pair where it’s been forgotten among dust bunnies and pen caps chewed out of shape.
*
Tetsurou, the shittiest nurse Suguru has ever had the displeasure to allow anywhere near him, waits for the bleed to abate, slaps a Band-Aid over the bridge of Suguru’s nose, and calls it a day.
“I’m bleeding from my nose, you idiot,” Suguru says through his teeth, glaring at his Luffy-Band-Aid-donning reflection.
“It can’t hurt,” Tetsurou shrugs.
“I’ll show you hurt,” bites back Suguru, inspecting the side of his nose with narrowed eyes. To give credit to Tetsurou’s judgment, it doesn’t look broken—bleed or not, it has, at least, maintained its shape, and the pain is slowly fading.
“Whatever you say,” Tetsurou laughs, unimpressed. “Uh. Right, then. Want some tea or something?”
Suguru wants to obliterate him. “No sugar,” he says instead.
“No sugar?” Tetsurou repeats with horror. “No wonder you’re so bitter.”
Suguru’s nose throbs. Kuroo Tetsurou should perish but, day after day, he perseveres. According to the weather forecast, they’re in for a cold week, all 30-mph wind and spotty showers, and, one day, Suguru will break Tetsurou’s nose in retaliation, but, for now, tea will do.
*
In the spring of their last year in junior high, Kuroo Tetsurou catches Suguru at his most vulnerable. Spread out on the grass, past a sloping hill where no one bothered to push a lawnmower over the incline, his school bag spilling textbooks and colored pens, discarded at his side, Suguru intends to do no more than rest but ends up nodding off. It’s hard to tell what wakes him, but his money is on the shadow that falls over him as Tetsurou sneaks closer and closer until he’s too close to bear—so close that Suguru comes to, belly up and bare where his shirt has ridden up, drying drool caked on his cheek.
In a different universe, one where Suguru is not the type to hold grudges and Tetsurou doesn’t introduce himself with assassination attempts, Suguru tells him that he sleeps best in full sunlight: that, where others might close their blinds early in the morning or pull the covers over their head to block out the brightness, his sleep is at its deepest in the hours of the snake, 9 to 11 AM, when the sun warms the earth, with molten gold pouring into his room by bucketful.
In this universe, Suguru cracks one eye open and pretends not to mind having allowed Tetsurou to discover him like this, limbs flung every which way, lips slack with sleep, and no telling where his messed-up hair ends and the grass begins. “Next year, we’ll play on the opposite sides of the net,” he promises Tetsurou hoarsely.
At a distance, someone laughs, and then a group of notebook-clutching schoolgirls reaches the apex of the hill. Without sparing them a single glance, Tetsurou extends his foot and uses the very tip of his muddy loafer to drag Suguru’s rucked-up shirt back down until the sliver of bare skin is no longer visible, just in time. He smiles, all teeth, and says, “It’s a promise.”
*
Suguru, shit-talking away, all dramatic hand gestures, and Mika indulging him one affirmative hum at a time, painting each of her toenails a different color.
Suguru, trying to impress her with flowers he picked himself, and Mika, allergic, tossing them in the bin but not before taking a picture and promising to frame it, eyes red from capillaries burst with all the sneezing.
Suguru, waiting for her to head back home before treating himself to a brief cry over the electric heater and Mika, who must have known anyway.
When she leaves for the second time, she tells him that she can’t guess what it is he needs so badly. “I don’t think it’s me, but I’m much better at being wanted, either way,” she explains, apologetic, squeezing his fingers with hers, the grip cold but sure, almost warm in its familiarity. “It’s never sat well with me, you see, being necessary.”
*
They say that snakes never forget any good or bad thing done to them.
Suguru, true to himself, never forgets the time Tetsurou hurt him the worst.
*
According to Kozume, Tetsurou used to be a quiet kid—even shy.
“He regresses in age by five years whenever he sees you,” he sighs when he and Suguru bump into each other at the local arcade, Suguru desperately pretending that he hasn’t wasted all his pocket money trying to best one of the claw machines. “And he acts childish enough as is.”
“Finally, something we agree on!”
Kozume blinks, catlike. “Just so you know, he’s not the kind to get into fights, either,” he says slowly, eyeing Suguru up and down. “Not the physical sort, anyway.”
Suguru mulls it over and, frustrated, realizes that Kozume is right. Kuroo Tetsurou is not the fighting kind, and yet Suguru, who has fought him.
*
Lost in a poorly-lit, convoluted neighborhood in the dead of night, they look and look, but what few places are still open are not the sort to have hot drinks on offer.
Tetsurou, undeterred, suggests that they ‘go back to his’.
“How forward of you,” Suguru mocks, feeling numb.
But there has always been something backward about them, so he lets Tetsurou hail a taxi and drag him inside. Hell, he even lets the guy buckle him up.
*
After an away game—their last of the season, given the score—in their final year of junior high, Suguru sits perched on the curb, refusing to commiserate with his teammates, who are waiting for their minibus to start in a dejected huddle. Chilled to his marrow, he tries to rub warmth into his fingers, an endeavor doomed to failure. In moments like this, cold nipping at his extremities, he can’t help but think that there’s not enough blood to go around inside him—that to force its flow in one direction is to back it into a corner and deprive the rest of his body, a plant with a consistently insufficient output, of what little warmth it has generated.
Suguru is about to slip his fingers inside his mouth to warm them even though he knows it will only make things worse in the long run, when something smacks him in the side of his face and plops in his lap.
“So they don’t fall off,” Tetsurou explains as Suguru picks up his weapon of choice—a small, plastic packet—and tries to figure out what it is he’s holding. “We might need them yet.”
Suguru stares at him, uncomprehending.
“Your hands, idiot,” Tetsurou elaborates with an eye roll. “You’ve been rubbing them since we left the stadium.”
Hand warmers baffle Suguru, the science behind them difficult to comprehend, and being on the receiving end of Kuroo Tetsurou’s generosity is no less of a conundrum, but, even being one to notoriously look a gift horse in the mouth, Suguru is too cold to proceed with caution and greedily rips the packet open, eager for what little heat it might offer. Exposed to air, the hand warmer, so like a teabag in appearance, warms quickly, bringing sweet relief to Suguru’s stinging fingertips.
“The referee liked us better,” Tetsurou shrugs.
“No thanks to you,” Suguru snorts, remembering Tetsurou, the tireless instigator, trying to pick fights across the net.
“No,” Tetsurou laughs. “That was all you, wasn’t it?”
High above them, the last of the sun spends itself on the sky cold with distance, and Suguru presses the handwarmer to his cheek, where it pulses heat like the last ray of light before sunset.
“Easy with the knee,” Tetsurou says when Suguru gets to his feet.
Surprised, Suguru almost drops the hand warmer. Tetsurou’s smile is a scale, catching and refracting light differently depending on the angle.
“I won’t miss this,” Suguru says evenly. “Playing with you.”
Tetsurou’s smile is indulgent. So is his stretch as he arches his spine, arms raised high above his head. Later, on the bus, he’s a wall of heat next to Suguru but Suguru leans away instead of risking to rest against him and shoves the handwarmer into the crook of his neck, where he needs it most.
*
In the week preceding the start of the summer holidays, a thirteen-year-old Suguru finds a pair of Cardcaptor Sakura elbow pads in his school bag.
It’s a testament to his patience that he does not burn them on sight.
*
In his mousehole of a student apartment, hardly wider than the doorway, Kuroo Tetsurou makes him an abomination of a tea that tastes like sewage but warms Suguru to his core, never mind that half of the drink goes over the brim and splashes on the rickety fold-out table for how badly his hands are shaking.
“Jesus, Daishou,” Tetsurou sighs as he kneels next to him and pulls on Suguru’s laces to help him out of his shoes.
Tetsurou’s bedroom is hardly big enough to stand in, more cavity than space, the bent-out-of-shape mattress that sprouts rusty springs where the fabric tore squished between a plywood closet and a tiny excuse for a desk. The heating is off, the wall paint is peeling, and the light of the flickering bulb dangling from a safety hazard tangle of a wire blinks the miserable yellow of old urine, but still: a signed volleyball poster hangs on the wall, a Jenga tower of odd manga volumes takes up precious floor space, and a pair of fluffy slippers lies discarded by the door, the room hardly domestic and yet domesticated.
“Where do you keep your legs when you sleep?” Suguru asks.
Tetsurou laughs and ushers him inside. “I make do,” he shrugs, unbothered. “After all, this is temporary.”
With how quickly skin cells die, it’s a given that Suguru has already shed the skin he wore the last time he and Kuroo Tetsurou touched.
He needs to remember it now, carefully. He needs to remind himself of this with care.
Suguru, who will probably go to volleyball games all his life, admits, “I’m not in town for the game.”
“Oh,” Tetsurou says, the sound soft and rounded, a jewel on the cushion of the night.
“You see,” Suguru goes on, “I came here to see my mother.”
*
Once, after a drawn-out match, Tetsurou tells him that watching Suguru play volleyball makes him remember that zodiac tale of the snake catching a ride on the horse’s hoof and, through deception, beating it to the finish line.
“Even when you lose, it’s like you’re biding your time,” Mika will say to him years later. “You’re a sore loser, Suguru, but that’s only because you’re not a loser at all.”
*
It happens in between Mikas and, at least partly, on her account.
In the weeks following their first break-up, Tetsurou brings her up after Nohebi loses to Nekoma, his words punctuated by the clink of change inside a vending machine. Before Suguru knows it, he’s got a handful of Tetsurou’s shirt in each fist, and Suguru, who deals in flattery and mind games, doesn’t get into fights either.
Before Suguru knows it, he’s got Tetsurou pinned to the wall, and that hair of his, that smirk of his, that heat of his—Suguru just can’t, can’t stand it.
“Oh,” Tetsurou says as his eyes widen. “She actually broke your heart, then.”
“No,” Suguru insists, trembling. “No.”
“Are you dying?”
“I’m cold.”
Tetsurou’s shirt is soaked with sweat, slipping out of Suguru’s grip. His neck is not between Suguru’s hands, which Suguru would gladly put there, if only to warm them.
No. Only to warm them.
“What else is new?” Tetsurou snorts, his smile an act of violence.
Suguru means to spit in Tetsurou’s face but gets lost on the way there, synapses misfiring. There is a storage room near—isn’t there always?—and the rest, like a crime, they commit instead of doing.
*
In a Tokyo apartment facing East, Suguru toed off his shoes even though to keep them on would have been a well-justified safety precaution. His mother had prepared a casserole and greeted him with a kiss, whatever sunlight roosted in the wrinkles of her clothes just out of reach.
It was Suguru’s first time in the apartment. In the years preceding the visit, it was always her visiting—her coming and going.
Mostly going, and Suguru should know: he’d been keeping score.
He came underprepared and flunked the test no one had forced him to take. The reading glasses forgotten on the kitchen table, folded on top of the sort of magazine his mother would never subscribe to, the coloring books scattered all over the living room floor, crayons forming a breadcrumb trail around the apartment, and finally her smile, its prism shattering everything he’d known, leaving it on crutches: he’d set himself up for failure, plain and simple.
In the bedroom, he wanted to crawl under the covers and smell her, but he found more than just her hair on the pillowcase. Later, faking a smile, chopsticks in hand, he realized that he’d always intended to face her there, on her turf, and let it kill him.
To me, he almost told her as he wrestled with his shoes, in a hurry to leave, struggling to put them back on, you were the longest of all days, my own private summer solstice.
Elsewhere in Tokyo, Mika would have welcomed him with open arms, but Suguru was not for company, so he made himself scarce and let the city carry him like tide only for Tetsurou to stumble upon the beached debris hours later, and it would be him, of all people.
Now, in Tetsurou’s cramped bathroom, faint morning light slacking as it spills inside in a trickle, Suguru clutches the disposable razor Tetsurou handed him in a shaky hand.
Tetsurou, dressed in a t-shirt that appears to be more hole than cotton, chooses that very moment to poke his rooster’s head inside and ask Suguru how he likes his eggs.
Suguru drops the razor. When he crouches to pick it up, his hands are shaking so badly that his fingers fail to close around the metal.
“For fuck’s sake,” Tetsurou says, slipping inside and slamming the door shut.
“The eggs,” Suguru reminds him.
“I asked because it’s the polite thing to do,” Tetsurou says with a shrug as he picks up the razor, resting his hand on Suguru’s to spare him further shame. “I’ve already burnt everything I had in the fridge.”
*
Deceitful to the last, in one respect, Suguru is honest to a fault.
Left behind, he has never lied. When the time came, everything he wanted to keep, he knew to let go of.
*
In a dark storage room in a stadium that Suguru will soon leave for the last time, Suguru finds Tetsurou by smell, by touch, by the lack of space forcing them together. By temperature. The inside of Tetsurou’s mouth welcomes him home, in from the cold, and Suguru ventures a finger there, slips his tongue in alongside it. Tetsurou’s hands scramble, blunt nails dragging over Suguru’s back, and fresh sweat beads in all the wrong places.
Drawstrings and sleeves and knee pads. Here and now and yet. And yet. Suguru cries out and Tetsurou folds his hand over his mouth, only for Suguru to lap at the sweat, taste the salt.
It’s the worst Suguru has ever hurt. It’s the best he has ever ached.
“Say my name?” Tetsurou asks, out of breath.
And Suguru, who never spoke it before but who has known it forever, says, “Tetsurou.”
*
Half past three in the morning, on a mattress too small to accommodate two, Suguru curls up on his side and Tetsurou rests on his back, legs up and propped on the closet wall.
“I would roll you a cigarette, but I don’t smoke,” Tetsurou says.
Suguru, who doesn’t smoke either, says, “Paradoxical undressing.”
“Come again?”
“People in the final stages of hypothermia often undress before death. Mental confusion and the dilation of constricted blood vessels causes the body to feel uncontrollably hot. This—the paradoxical undressing, the terminal burrowing behavior—is the point of no return: loss of consciousness and organ failure are quick to follow.”
After a pause, Tetsurou whistles. “I have been trying to save money on energy bills, I admit, but it can’t be that cold in here.”
“Never mind,” Suguru huffs, rolling away from him.
“I’d offer you my blanket, but I spilled curry on it the other day.”
“Shut up already,” Suguru begs.
“I mean, we could always cuddle for warmth like a snowed-in couple,” Tetsurou goes on, undeterred. “You take off yours, I’ll take off mine?” he jests, pulling on the back of Suguru’s shirt.
Suguru rolls over again, with every intention of smacking Tetsurou in the face, but Tetsurou, eyes sharp and knowing, catches his wrist before Suguru’s half-fist can make contact. “I know,” he says, his breath a sample of spring on Suguru’s pulse. “I know, but one of these crappy jokes will make you laugh if it kills me.”
“You’re the joke,” Suguru says shakily.
“If it kills me,” Tetsurou promises, the pad of his thumb meeting Suguru’s blood halfway.
*
Seventeen, shorts off and shirt on, Tetsurou says, are you sure?
Seventeen, shirt off and shorts on, Suguru smuggles a bite under his collar.
Kuroo, who has been Tetsurou in the privacy of Suguru’s head for as long as Suguru has known him, first out of audacity, and then because of something entirely else.
Across the net, Tetsurou is not his. In here, where they don’t belong to each other, either, Suguru kisses Tetsurou’s eyes closed to dull the sense already crippled by darkness and not be the only one committing the rest—the smell, the feel, the heat of it—to memory.
*
“You better not nick me anywhere, or I swear to God—”
“I’d never ‘nick’ you,” Tetsurou assures with a smile. “I’d go straight for the jugular.”
Suguru glares.
Tetsurou grins. “Go big or go home.”
Under Suguru’s chin, Tetsurou’s fingers rest easy, index and middle fingers framing Suguru’s Adam’s apple and his thumb tilting his face up, into the light, confident on Suguru’s jawbone. In his other hand, the razor hovers and then skirts Suguru’s cheek, Tetsurou maintaining eye contact instead of watching what it is he’s fucking doing.
Still: he neither tells Suguru to stop shaking nor draws blood.
“You sure about this?” Tetsurou says with a squint. “I think you’d look hot with a beard.”
Suguru, perched on the edge of Tetsurou’s bathtub, tilts his head back and pretends to squint. “I can see your boogers from here.”
The razor dances, low, low, skirting Suguru’s jawline and then tucking under it. When Suguru gulps, the blade moves with it.
“Oh, shut it,” Tetsurou huffs, the pad of his thumb sliding up, up, where it rests just south of Suguru’s lip. “Like I’d ever be that careless with you.”
They’ve been nothing but careless with each other all their lives. Suguru has scars to show and bruises to remember for it.
How cruel of Tetsurou, to understand him so well. How painful, this baseless insight.
Suguru hooks his trembling finger on the elastic of Tetsurou’s shorts, just for a second, just once.
“No,” Tetsurou confirms with a sad smile. “I’m not going anywhere, am I?”
But here’s the catch: in order to come back, you have to leave first.
Tetsurou’s fingers, ballet on Suguru’s throat. Tetsurou’s fingers, little bonfires in the night of his skin. He’s been going, and going, but, by some stroke of bad fortune, he has not left in years.
*
At twelve, Suguru desperately needed someone to take care of him, not do it well.
One nosebleed ago, Tetsurou never offered ice and gave him oily tea out of a bag, but he couldn’t have done more for Suguru if he’d tried.
*
After a night spent failing to hide angry tears from Tetsurou, Tetsurou sends Suguru on his way with a freshly shaved face, a bento box, and a catch you later wink.
Later won’t be for months but, inside the box, next to cremated eggs, Suguru finds a yellow fridge magnet in the shape of a banana.
“Very funny,” Suguru snorts when he sees it, mindful not to fall apart over it.
*
At twenty-four, Suguru has known Tetsurou for half a lifetime.
At twenty-four, he has not known himself at all. On the eve of Mother’s Day, May euphoric with blossoms, he gets up early and picks a handful of yellow wildflowers, the rainboots he bought just for this occasion wet with dew. Behind him, the sun takes leave of the horizon and hikes the sky slowly, without hurry, on its way to warm the earth.
Suguru shakes wet soil off the stalks. Somewhere in a Tokyo apartment full of coloring books, there is a vase that can’t wait for a handful of flowers.
*
The crust of summer is well-baked when Suguru orders two lemonades and settles at a table for two, sun in full swing. Twenty-five but seventeen in spirit, Mika slides into the seat opposite with grace, her dress puffing and then settling, a meadow in bloom.
“Long time no coffee,” she says with a grin. There’s something stuck between her teeth, but Suguru doesn’t tell, since it’s only endearing and not embarrassing on her.
“I want to apologize,” Suguru confesses, mutilating his paper straw from nerves. “It’s long overdue.”
She cocks her head, puzzled. He explains, and she smiles, pitying but as affectionate as ever. “Suguru, you must be the silliest boy I’ve ever known,” she says, tapping his shoe with hers under the table.
He sighs and returns the smile. Her hand is cold under his. They’ve been friends for as long as he can remember.
How easy, to want her in his life now that she needn’t be necessary. How beautiful, this willingness to have it work.
*
Once exposed to air, the iron in disposable hand warmers oxidizes, releasing heat.
In December of his twenty-fifth winter, after a well-played game the highlights of which Suguru will remember long after forgetting the score, it doesn’t take him long to find Kuroo Tetsurou outside, despite how poorly the parking lot is lit. Tetsurou, warm beyond compare, always leaves heat in his wake, the paths he takes, no matter how stealthily, strewn with summer, and Suguru’s always had a knack for finding him, for all Tetsurou likes being the one to find him first.
“Here,” Suguru says, fresh snow crunching under his shoes.
Tetsurou, the only person on Earth who would have heard Suguru approach, catches the hand warmer before it can hit him in the face. “Don’t you need it more than I do?”
Suguru stuffs his hands deep inside his pockets and shrugs.
“Good game,” Tetsurou allows, scuffing his shoe. “How’s the knee?”
Suguru pulls up his scarf and hides his pathetic smile in the wool. He’d never admit it out loud, not even under torture, but Kuroo Tetsurou calling him a tryhard over a decade ago now is, to this day, the kindest thing anyone has ever said to him.
“The knee’s fine,” Suguru sighs. “Don’t go thinking I don’t know you get cold, too.”
Tetsurou side-eyes him with surprise, and then tucks into the hand warmer, ripping the packet open. “You could return my calls sometime, you know,” he says carefully after a pause. “Or pick up in the first place.”
“You never text me back, either.”
“You delete the messages before I can read them,” Tetsurou points out.
“You read them before I can delete them,” insists Suguru.
“Let’s agree to disagree,” Tetsurou says with a sigh.
Let’s disagree forever, Suguru does not ask. Not just yet.
“Why are you here, then?” Tetsurou says, glancing at him with poorly concealed suspicion, cradling the hand warmer.
Suguru, tired of relying on disproportionately good karma to throw them together, sighs and takes a step closer, narrowing the distance between them to three, two feet.
“Well?” whispers Tetsurou, who does not step away.
Inside a photo album inside a shoebox inside a drawer inside the house Suguru has been visiting more and more, on a bed of tie-dye shirt, there is half a lifetime of Tetsurou: a shabby One Piece Band-Aid, a used handwarmer inside which all of the iron has long reacted, a well-loved Cardcaptor Sakura elbow pad covered in mud stains, and a worse-for-wear banana fridge magnet. Two weekends ago, after a meal shared with his father, Suguru unearthed the box and, sorting through the keepsakes stored inside, imagined a life where, instead of doing things for him and disappearing, Tetsurou would stick around to do things alongside him.
“Let’s agree to never hit each other again,” Suguru says with a shrug that must do precious little to hide all that he’s feeling.
Above them, the splendid snake of the Milky Way shines despite pollution, defiant and brilliant with its own heat. Tetsurou’s smile catches Suguru off guard but it’s his words that finish him right off. “Shall we shake on it?” Tetsurou offers, extending his hand.
Suguru, never one to be one-upped, gently circles Tetsurou’s wrist with his fingers and guides his hand close, close enough to press his mouth to the center of Tetsurou’s palm.
Tetsurou gasps as skin meets skin. Suguru, ready to bicker his life away, gives him an apologetic smile and rearranges their fingers until he’s cradling Tetsurou’s shaking hand in his. There is no telling who is the hearth and who the chilled traveler, but, in the dead of winter, they’ve got a midsummer’s worth of warmth between them. Suguru’s eyes are wet now, but he makes an effort to let it show.
Tetsurou exhales shakily. Suguru smiles, a frail thing shakier still.
Now that it’s cold, heat. Now that Suguru no longer needs Tetsurou, all that’s left to do is want him.