Work Text:
There have been multiple childhood friends across the thread of Snuffy's lifetime who he’s lost contact with, childhood friends who Snuffy still thinks about till this day, even if the last he saw them was middle school graduation.
Along the thread of Snuffy's lifetime are sections coloured in chalk. A mix of grey and green in his formative years, a combination of gold and royal blue in the gap between formative and pubescent, and an array of black, red, purple and yellow in his pubescent.
His adolescent years were first coloured in purple and blue, but at some point, the thread turned black for a long time, up until the turning corner into adulthood. Now, the thread is simply white, or a dark white, with splotches of colour here and there.
When Snuffy was growing up, he and his sister used to spend all their time outside colouring the entire street and driveway with chalked colours and pictures. His sister used to love drawing faces of animals, meanwhile Snuffy would simply draw lines.
He would draw lines in the form of geometric shapes, clicked together into stages and audiences, shaded in such a way they looked like three dimensional stairs. With a single continuous line, Snuffy would draw fighting poses, ragged and misshapen.
They had put together entire universes with every geometric shape in existence, an entire timeline created on their driveway, a different dimension—a combination of dimensions; first, second, third and forth, and even beyond that. Snuffy found a way to break the very physics which shape the world on their front doorstep.
It feels like he’s drifting through a different plane of existence. Maybe it’s the jet lag overstaying its visit. They landed in Japan weeks ago, almost a month, and Snuffy isn’t one to get homesick, but the feeling is inevitable when he looks through the contents of his memorabilia box.
The chalk dust kisses his skin as he rotates it between his fingers, feeling his scarred hands turn smooth. It’s the darker hours of the morning, and Snuffy can’t sleep, so he’s up and looking at things long gone.
It’s a pink piece of chalk, partially used and specked with sediments and grime, the last one he remembers his sister using. Once his hands feel smooth enough, Snuffy moves on to the crumpled movie tickets and the broken bracelets, the chalk rolling a moment when he puts it down on the desk.
When Snuffy was younger—although the habit hasn’t broken much now—he used to wear every piece of jewellery he ever owned until it broke. He never thought to take the jewellery off in attempts to preserve them, so each piece has been worn thin with athletics and showers and love.
There are two bracelets inside of the box that he and his best friend won in the bowling arcade they used to frequent. They’re made of string, with peace symbols interweaved between their fingers, tethered and run too thin to wear.
Whilst growing up, it was a family tradition to watch a movie every week, which then turned into every fortnight, and then every month, until the tradition died out, as tradition tends to do.
Sometimes they’d stay in and watch a movie on VHS, or they’d go to the local cinemas and see whatever was on. Snuffy first met his best friend when they were watching a movie at the cinemas, their families sat in the same row. They couldn’t stop discussing the movie together while it played, and thus the friendship blossomed.
It wasn’t long after their meeting they find out how connected they are: sharing some family friends, attending the same school, playing the same sports, having the same dream—even almost having the same name. It wasn’t long after meeting that they were inseparable, walking on the same stage, with the same golden light above them.
But as life goes on, so do people.
Snuffy sighs heavy. Shifting through the objects of his box isn’t going to aid him with sleep. It’s only going to worsen the grieving.
The thing about grief, Snuffy grew to learn through the ages, is that it doesn’t ever grow smaller. It’s not a stress ball that changes shape so long as you keep a tight grip on it. It is a ball made of cement, unbreakable and unimpressionable—no matter the pressure applied, the volume remains the same.
Regardless of how tight your grip is on the ball of grief, it remains a ball. That’s the thing about grief. It’s so easy to keep a hold on, to hold it till your knuckles turn white and the skin splits open to a new galaxy. You convince yourself it’s a stress ball; it helps with the nightmares, the haunting, and the grieving. But sometimes you need to let go for the sake of healing wounds; for the sake of closing portals to galaxies of “what if’s” and “but’s”.
The cemented ball of grief doesn’t change shape, but Snuffy has learnt that the grip around the ball does. It is not that grief ever becomes smaller, or that it becomes bigger, but that the grip loosens as life becomes bigger. And sometimes, life too, becomes smaller, and thus gives the illusion the grief has multiplied. In reality, Snuffy’s grief has been the same for decades.
Even though Snuffy has learnt plenty about grief, there are also plenty of things he never learns, even when he has encountered the formula time and time again. No matter the repetition, Snuffy does what’s worse for him every time the impulse to reminisce arises.
Pushing the movie tickets and broken bracelets aside, Snuffy’s eyes land on the 2005 Ford GT model car he and his best friend each bought a copy of, and under its wheels lies a photograph of the both of them, the model held far above their heads as if holding a thousand suns.
It was their dream car as kids, and in the corner of Snuffy’s garage back home, there is a life-sized, real model; untouched; unrevved. It hasn’t quite learnt to talk yet, just as Snuffy hasn’t quite learnt to stay away from memory lane.
Memory lane is a lane full of bustling, busy traffic. If you aren't careful while walking it, you might get hit by a pickup truck, or a Rolls-Royce, or something as embarrassing as a Smart ForTwo.
Or maybe it’s more accurately an intersection, one you somehow always find yourself right in the middle of, like the bullseye of a target—a circle bright red to be hit.
It feels like Snuffy is being hit with a 2005 Ford GT as he stares and stares and stares at the childhood picture before him, so much so it feels like his small eyes and small face and small hands are staring back at him. So much so it feels like his best friend is still alive, stuck in a picture forever young. So much so he can hear the engines roaring.
Snuffy can feel the bumps on the Ford’s head caressing his sides as they collide, can feel the bumper kissing his lips. He can feel its body roaming his body like hands carding through rows of wheat, turning him into something edible; something grainy, just like the old photograph between his fingers. He can hear the noise surrounding that photographed moment as if it happened today.
Technically, it was today, because today is a product of yesterday, and yesterday is a product of the day before—so on, and so forth.
Time weaves, intertwines like stems of a flower crown, the hands Snuffy has touched throughout the decades clasped together like eclipsed celestial bodies in the form of clocks; in the form of the chalk coloured thread of life.
Even when you have died, you live on, your hands clasped with other clasped hands, intertwined with the very essence of time and space and memory and crashing cars and scattered bodies.
Snuffy does not put the photograph down when he hears the office door slide open. Lorenzo must have marred another nightmare, a regularity these days. It must be because of the concrete walls, so similar to concrete sidewalks and concrete streets, a concrete past of presents and futures.
"Marc." A voice speaks, accented with hometowns and markets, diacritics and umlauts. The name feels like an arrow through the tongue, whether spoken or thought—it's quite fitting.
The name in question turns around, forest meeting gemstone, the Frioul archipelago meeting France.
“Marc.” Noel repeats, as if he completely missed the turning of Snuffy’s head towards his direction in acknowledgment of his existence in this time bubble they’ve both found themselves in, and therefore acknowledged he had heard him.
"Is there something wrong?" Snuffy asks, his mind wondering if Noel is here to tell him Lorenzo had a nightmare instead of Lorenzo himself, Snuffy’s hippocampus reeling like a film strip with memories outside of the one currently clasped between his fingers like the string of a balloon.
It has been a while since Snuffy has gone to a fair. He believes the last time he went to one was with Noel. The last time he had ever gone to a fair was with Noel, which was the last time they had ever gone anywhere together. Snuffy has been too busy having a meeting with Time, who is made of hands, wrinkled or otherwise smooth; scarred or otherwise bruised.
“There is nothing wrong.” Noel answers, tens of thousands of days’ worth of time wrapped around his tongue and his words and the soft wrinkles running traffic wherever there is an edge on his face, like a mountain decorated in hairpin turns. “I wanted to check in.”
Snuffy smiles, a laugh escaping through his nose, “So there’s something wrong with me, then?”
It’s a joke, but Noel has spent too many years in Germany to appreciate jokes, or to even acknowledge them. It’s a blindness that entertains.
“I wanted to check in.” Noel repeats, as he repeated Snuffy’s name earlier, as he tends to repeat words and lectures and trailing fingers through strands of hair. Noel has a habit of repeating. Snuffy wonders if he bothers to repeat himself in the presence of other people.
“Right.” Snuffy swivels his chair around, the photograph left face up on the desk, the blue light flickering behind Snuffy with analytics and numbers and more analytics, casting his back in light and his front in shadow, as if he’s walking backwards into fiery hell. “Do you have a set of questions to ask? Or is coming in without knocking enough of a check in?”
“I just wanted to check in.” Noel repeats, adding a new word to spice up the repetition a bit, like only using three fingers in your last push up set instead of five.
Snuffy inhales, and then heavily sighs. “You are some concerned man, Noa.”
Noel walks forward, the door sliding shut behind him automatically once the path is no longer blocked.
He took a single step forward, so not much of a walk, but it may as well be considering the small space they were offered for their offices—so much for an alleged “Master Striker”, but it will do. Snuffy works best in small spaces anyway. After all, he was developed inside of one.
“What do you think of Isagi Yoichi?” Noel asks, his posture straight as a giant sequoia, his hands tucked into the pockets of his sweats and his elbows straight, somehow.
The question makes Snuffy raise an eyebrow, “You want my opinion on Blue Lock’s it-boy?”
“That is the question I asked.”
Snuffy raises a brow again, except it isn’t questioning or confused, “Well… I don’t have one. Do you?” Snuffy dodges the question, because Noel is in front of him, and he’s much more focused on him than some rising boy.
Jupiter has multiple moons, as does the professional league. A moon in the process of rising isn’t anything new to Snuffy. He has witnessed plenty amid their ascension, and was there to watch them fall all the same.
“He’s on the right track.”
Well, that was outside of Snuffy’s calculations. He imagined Noel’s response would be something like: “I don’t have one either, which is why I asked you.” Or “He’s just a child.”
“Oh?” Snuffy blinks at the blaring lights of the 1999 Toyota Corolla in front of him, the sudden movement of his eyelids causing visual snow to flicker like Christmas around the edges of his vision. “That’s unexpected.”
“It is.” Noel agrees, his legs moving again as he takes another step forward, closer to Snuffy, closer to the ticking pendulum of the grandfather clock Snuffy has climbed into and Noel followed.
The small room falls quiet, the sound of electronics buzzing in Snuffy’s ears and the blue light hurting his eyes, even though his back is to the screens. He should have been asleep six hours ago.
Noel’s posture remains straight, his hands still tucked and his elbows still unbent, the whole of him too undeviating to be broken. Snuffy wonders if he ever cries.
“Well,” Snuffy purses his lips until they squeak once, twice, and then thrice. “Are you satisfied with your check in?”
It’s a question meant to be answered, so that Snuffy can return to getting run over by every kind of car from each direction on the compass, but Noel has a tendency to randomly go nonverbal.
But Snuffy can’t quite remember him having a tendency to get so close.
The atmosphere is still, and silent, and too sparky for Snuffy’s liking. There’s a heavy weight on him, heavy enough to send the chair travelling the few centimetres between it and the desk, the back of it making a light thud sound at the gentle impact.
One moment Noel is standing one-eighty degrees, and then the next he is sitting ninety.
There are exclamations spinning pirouette around Snuffy’s head as Noel makes himself comfortable, his legs stretched out to the side as he stares at the very appealing concrete wall, whilst Snuffy’s eyes are on him. It’s quite a sum up of their dynamic.
“Noel,” Snuffy says, his voice low and quiet as if the man currently sitting on his lap would run away otherwise. As if Snuffy does not want that to happen. “What are you doing?”
“Sitting on you.” Noel answers simply, his eyes still on the concrete wall and his hands still tucked in, elbows unmoved. Snuffy wonders if it were Michelangelo or Donatello who sculpted Noel Noa into an unbending, right angle statue.
“Right.” Snuffy bites his lower lip to remain quiet and unmoving, the vehicular accidents forgotten. “I can feel that.”
If his hands weren’t dusted in chalk, Snuffy might bother to put a single finger on Noel, just to see if he’s as hard as the concrete ball Snuffy has been carrying in his stomach and chest and head for lifetimes.
He wonders if—and he knows he isn’t—Noel Noa is breakable and impressionable. If Noel Noa isn’t yet hardened and can still be scarred. If Noel Noa is a new sidewalk still in the process of setting, barren with names. If Snuffy just dragged his finger along the smoothness of Noel’s body with the lines of his name, he wonders if he could live on forever, immortal.
It reminds Snuffy of those stalks of bamboo with decades-old names and identities carved into their bodies. All those streets that once embodied multiple childhoods marked with the names of youth. All those railings embraced by the locks of relationships long broken and people who have long forgotten themselves.
Humans are so scared of death, Snuffy thinks.
They’re so scared of death that they carve their names into nature and memories and create stories about the people they loved, an attempt to live on forever, to be remembered. They write for help on bathroom stalls and graffiti their grandmother’s name who they’re named after under bridges. They tattoo birthdates onto their skin and write out messages only to delete them.
Snuffy wishes his best friend carved his name into his brain and heart and very being in a less grotesque way; with some sense of mercy. Even though he knows his suicide wasn’t an act of remembrance, Snuffy wishes he could’ve stayed long enough for them to build their own neighbourhood, one with sidewalks covered in their names and achievements.
Fuck the chalk. Snuffy wraps his arms around Noel’s middle, pressing one ear against his bicep to mute some of the electric bouncing in the air. The fabric of Noel’s sweatshirt is clenched between his fingers, dyeing pink; an act of remembrance.
While Noel stares at one concrete wall, Snuffy stares at the other. He imagines names carved into it: his sister’s, his mother’s, his father’s, and every person’s he has ever met, all surrounding his own. Noel’s is there, too.
“Do you remember when we—” Snuffy stops, and then restarts in correction. “Do you remember when I wrote my name under the seats in the coach? You would just look at me and say nothing.” It’s a whisper, the sentence signing off with the click of a lock.
Noel hums in affirmation, the names Snuffy is imagining on the wall sparkling with embedded sequins. Noel’s is pink, probably because Snuffy is colouring him so, his hands clamming and rubbing chalk against his clothes.
“I also wrote my name.”
Snuffy sits up to stare at Noel, who has now turned his attention from the concrete to Snuffy.
“You did?”
“I did.” Noel answers, his gaze and stature unwavering. “With your best friend, since he encouraged.”
The pink ocean recedes as Snuffy retreats his arms from wound Noel’s waist, their gazes locked. What a human thing time is; how small the world is.
Over the ages, Snuffy has grown conscious of the transparent interconnections that shape community, the awareness growing after Chris met his childhood best friend an ocean over.
It’s just like how he met his best friend at a cinema, only to find out they attended the same school, and would’ve inevitably met on the big stage either way.
The amount of intertwined hands holding time together—holding Snuffy’s existence together—is incomprehensible to him. There are so many, and none of them let go, even when you’ve only touched them for the shortest moment.
It’s quiet for a moment, Snuffy’s vision filled with Noel, until it decreases to a slit, only his chin and chest visible. Snuffy doesn’t hold back from moving this time, because he knows Noel won’t run away, because he is made of cement; of neighbourhoods and houses lived in.
“What are you laughing about?” Noel questions, his head tilting, or so it feels like with the slight movement of his body on Snuffy’s lap.
The electric in the room dissipates as Snuffy squeaks out laugh after laugh, like wet surfaces against dry, a laugh he has developed from people combined—his grandmother and first ever friend in kindergarten, and many strangers whose name he does not know.
“About time.” Snuffy answers, squeaking hinges sounding between his words. Noel remains unmoved on Snuffy’s lap. “It’s late and I haven’t slept.”
“That is what I was checking in on.”
Snuffy squeaks a bit more, his hand lightly pressed against the small of Noel’s back, instinctive. There’s the smell of cheese in the air. His own laugh tends to remind him of the one time he visited a cheese factory with his father, a trio of siblings laughing like unoiled simple machines throughout the tour.
“If I was sleeping?”
“Yes.” Noel moves in Snuffy’s lap a little, which causes Snuffy to clench the back of his sweatshirt between his fingers, until he realises that Noel isn’t going anywhere. He is just getting comfortable. “You sleep terribly sometimes, so I check in.”
Snuffy’s face crinkles into a smile, “You check in on my sleeping?” He teases.
“No.” Noel says defiantly, as if he didn’t just confess a scene ago. Then he adds, “Maybe.”
“You’re so...” Snuffy licks his lips, rubbing out the word he was about to utter. “Thank you.”
Noel looks at him, his hands now clasped together and on his knee, holding it in place as if his heart would fall out otherwise. “What for?”
“For everything.” Snuffy whispers, the words like a gust of migrating wind, almost inaudible. If it weren’t for the smallness of the room and their closeness, Noel would’ve carried on through the wind, unhearing.
A hum serenades the air, rising deep from within Noel like a purr, the sound vibrating against Snuffy’s arm that has since wrapped around Noel, the pink chalk rubbing onto his own sleeve. Never mind it. It is but a hand among many.
When Snuffy was first rising as a player, he had a habit of writing his name with sharpie underneath the seats of their team’s coach, until every wall bore his name and every bottom of a seat had something to read.
Whilst he was in the Bundesliga with Noel, he’d write under the seats and on the cornice connecting the overhead storage with the ceiling, barely legible due to the darkness. The latter would simply watch, at most raise a brow, and say nothing—neither to Snuffy, nor their coach.
“How did he encourage you?”
The comfortable silence is broken with a question. Well, no, actually—the comfortable silence is still there, imbued within the many lines that draw Noel, just like all those chalked images on concrete.
Noel moves his shoulders the slightest bit, his personalized gesture of a shrug. Every gesture Noel performs is small, like travelling ripples after a pebble skip. Even on the field, Noel’s movements are small; smooth and striking.
“He asked, so I wrote.”
Is all Noel says, the answer making Snuffy think back to all the times he wrote his name inconspicuously in front of Noel, but never bothered to ask if he wanted to join in. He was a pretty exclusive person back then, but his best friend had always been inclusive. Two sides of the same coin.
“Sounds like him.” Snuffy smiles around the words, his thumb brushing against the roll in Noel’s sweatshirt like its the back of a hand, Noel’s body unmoving.
They’re so close. Snuffy could drag a knife against Noel and cut a perfect line. He’s convinced it would close up, like disturbed water which inevitably calms, the clay that shapes Noel unbreakable and unimpressionable.
Noel Noa is a walking, talking, breathing sculptor of modernism. His walls are straight and flat white, detracting attention just as fast as he attracts.
You see Noel on the field and keep your eye on his goals, but the rest of him goes dismissed. There isn’t much appealing in flipping through a magazine of modern architecture. If Le Corbusier were still alive, he would deem Noel Noa the most striking art of modernism.
But he isn’t alive, and Noel Noa is not on a stage being ignored by tens of thousands of eyes that only open when he’s in the penalty box. Noel Noa is sitting in Snuffy’s lap, painted pink and turned fauvist. Snuffy sees him, and he can feel Noel’s name written into his own skin.
Noel opens his mouth, “Would you like me to show you?” And then closes it.
Snuffy raises his brows, his thumb softly pressing into Noel’s hip. The flesh does not dent. “Show me...?”
“Where I wrote my name.” Noel clarifies, rising from his seat on Snuffy, his body the colour of a rosemary sunset. Snuffy lets him go. “In the Blue Lock facility.”
A pocket of silence. There’s a smile licking at Snuffy’s lips and threatening to split open. He keeps his eyes on Noel, who is looking at him expectantly, his hands tucked back into his pockets and his elbows bent.
Snuffy smiles closed, his eyes crinkling into the shape of crooked lines spelling out names. “Let me sleep first, OK?”
For but a moment, the concrete ball of grief is forgotten as Snuffy puts it down, his hands heavy with a different weight for the morning. It’s a more tolerable weight, one smelling of sage, and one that teaches Snuffy to finally sleep.