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Haruka is often defined by the things that he likes, and few will suffer him through what he doesn’t. Mackerel, swimming, baths, low-budget horror movies, to name a few.
Sometimes he gets sick of fish and doesn’t eat it for a few weeks. Sometimes he gets bored of swimming and jogs instead. Sometimes the water in his tub leaves his fingers too wrinkled. And sometimes he’s seen every low-budget horror film he cares to watch too many times.
But no one likes to hear about any of that. Haruka’s not allowed to dislike things, not pursue goals, just exist for the sake of it. He always needs a concept to revolve around, always needs to be reaching for something, always needs a purpose from the second he wakes up until the second he goes to bed, because no one has any clue who he is without his headers. No one wants to read his footnotes.
It’s simply a result of the sort of people he surrounded himself with when he never wanted anyone to read them.
It’s only fitting that Haruka checks out through Kisumi Shigino’s line near the end of the worst day he’s had in recent memory, when he can’t claim to like a single thing around him or give half a damn about tomorrow when he isn’t even sure that he can make it through today. He doesn’t even look up when he throws a box of cold relief medicine and a banana down onto the counter; his eyes are too heavy with congestion and misery to bother.
“Haru?”
He sighs, and it’s loud and burdened. He lifts his aching head to confirm his suspicions of the voice’s owner, and meets Kisumi’s concentrated gaze as he seeks to confirm the same of him.
“How much?” Haruka asks blankly of another thing he doesn’t like today.
Kisumi chews his lip to cut off a frown Haruka doesn’t miss and looks away to the register, then runs the box over the scanner and ten-keys the fruit SKU. “Eight-hundred twenty-two.”
Haruka shoves his hands into his hoodie pocket and sighs again when they meet in the middle with no wallet held between them, only house keys. “Nevermind.”
“Forgot your wallet?”
Haruka glares in response.
“I got it,” Kisumi offers with a smile, reaching to his back pocket.
“No. Forget it.” Haruka leaves it and starts to walk, and the card reader beeps behind him before he gets out of earshot. He stops and asks whoever’s listening what he did to deserve this today on top of everything else before turning back around stiffly.
“Too late.” Kisumi nudges his items towards the edge of the counter and Haruka braces for whatever comes next. A touch he doesn’t want, a guilt trip to stay and talk, a coerceful push for his attention.
He quickly stuffs the items into his sweatshirt pocket. “I’d rathered you didn’t.”
Kisumi shakes his head but doesn’t drop his smile. “You’re welcome, Haru. Feel better.” Then he steps out from behind his register and simply walks away, missing Haruka’s guilty flinch, and likely unconcerned with the fact that Haruka doesn’t even like bananas even on the days that he likes everything else.
-
Kisumi is quiet over the dinner that Haruka still isn’t sure how he got roped into having with him. Haruka’s never known how to work people out of the chasms of silence they fall into, least of all Kisumi who’s always had something to say.
“Why are you back in Iwatobi?” he tries.
“Family,” he exhales on brittle syllables. “Better question is; why are you?”
“I wanted to.” Haruka wracks his memories for anything to follow up on in the five years since they’ve last seen each other, and realizes he doesn’t know anything about him he can ask, and has never learned anything in the past to keep up on. So he grasps at nothing. “Do you still play basketball?”
“Not since middle school,” Kisumi laughs, as if Haruka’s asked him if he still builds houses with wooden blocks. “How was Tokyo? I heard you broke a few records. I watched a few races. Give me some details.”
Haruka wonders if Kisumi’s always been this way. Where he doesn’t answer anything completely before turning the words out and away. He doesn’t lob his questions back expecting them to bounce again. He sends them out on paper sailboats pushed out over a pond that he hopes will float for a moment and slowly disintegrate.
“It was a good experience.”
Kisumi grins, sharp like he remembers, and defensive like he doesn’t. “You’re so cold, Haru.”
Haruka clicks his tongue and sighs, picking at the food on his plate and giving up on trying to force two walls to have a conversation.
“I’ve always admired that the most about you,” he continues, and Haruka looks up without moving his head, hoping his confusion is evident in the draw of his mouth. “That you’ve never liked me at all.”
-
Kisumi rarely uses the phone number that Haruka still isn’t sure how he got roped into giving him. When he does for the first time, he only asks if Haruka would like to go for a walk.
Others don’t know how to approach Haruka now that he’s reached for the stars and had the audacity to release them with disinterest. He lives simply, and he lives happily, and no one knows what to say about it, how to tell him to look for new dreams when his sleep is quiet and restful without them.
He works and he goes home, and he often takes his time between destinations in lieu of rushing for a finish line he doesn’t see. So Haruka asks him where they’ll be walking, and Kisumi responds with nowhere in particular, and that’s exactly where he wants to be.
Hayato is sick, Kisumi reveals without prompting, but it’s nothing bad, and Kisumi only wants to be nearby for support while he’s in high school. If one thing is clear about Kisumi, it’s that he would do anything for his brother, but Haruka wonders what he had to give up to come back.
“Not much,” he answers dismissively. “Not as much as you did.”
“You can answer me, you know,” Haruka sighs. “The world won’t end.”
Kisumi hums and looks out at the sun as it sets. “Is it unbelievable that I left behind nothing I would miss?”
He could almost laugh, but settles on a small smile. “No, actually, I understand.”
“It sounds like we have something in common after all,” Kisumi says in such a way that suggests he wished Haruka had noticed it sooner. Haruka wishes he did too. But it isn’t as if there’s a time limit on these things, and that also seems to be something Kisumi realized long before he did.
Haruka doesn’t ask him if he has a finish line either, or if he dreams at night of distant ideas. Kisumi only seems to keep pace with the cycle of the sun, the only star that ever really feels within a comfortable reach, the only one that’s close enough to give off any warmth or light no matter where Haruka is when it’s above his head.
Haruka finds he doesn’t have to reach out very far to touch the sun that braids into his hair, and their solitary unexceptional kiss is only one fleeting part of an aimless walk that takes them long into a starless night.
-
Kisumi never keeps to his side of the bed that Haruka still isn’t sure how he got roped into sharing with him. Haruka gives in on this fight early on, the white sheet around them both his flag of surrender to start their days.
Sometimes their days are filled with work, sometimes their days are swim meets for Hayato, and sometimes their days are confined within the walls of Haruka’s house at the top of the steps. At some point their days without finish lines come full circle, and the lack of a finish line becomes the goal, and there’s nothing else to do but to laugh about that.
Slowly Kisumi starts to answer Haruka’s questions, and Haruka rewards him with the details he seeks, until they can claim to know a few things about each other for the first time long after Kisumi stops leaving at night. It’s an oddly secondary development, a progression in reverse, an Escher sketch for all of its utter lack of direction.
Haruka never looks over his life and asks why anymore, not since coming back home with a shrug and a why not and if someone’s going to go ahead and define him by the things that he likes, he can tell them that he likes that Kisumi doesn’t bother asking either. So he doesn’t question why he’s only recently discovered that Kisumi’s favorite food is tofu, or how anyone’s favorite food could ever be tofu with no clarification over whether or not it’s the tofu by itself or the flavors it becomes.
He’s learned the world’s a sphere and not a line on a graph. He can step whatever way he wants to go and it’s no less nonsensical to do so than walking backwards when there’s always a way back to where he started if he needs to take it. Nothing needs to be in order this way.
“I was rude to you back then,” Haruka says on a day they keep inside his house, and hopes apologies have no time limits either. “I’m sorry.”
And Kisumi could ask him why he’s saying that now, after so much time. He could drill him on exactly which incident Haruka is referring to, but he only shrugs and pauses to pick a small wisp of lint from the tip of Haruka’s nose. “You were sick.”
“It was more than that.”
Kisumi’s eyes flash with a surge of the constant undercurrent of excitement and wonderment he keeps just below the surface of his skin and pairs it with a soft smile that breaks to a laugh in response to a joke that Haruka isn’t privy to. “It sure is.”