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“Macchan.” There’s a soft shift of the light in his eyes that is somewhat akin to melancholy, and she hates it. Despises it fiercely, even.
Because the last time he’d had this look in his eyes, it meant one thing:
You’re leaving me again, aren’t you?
Before they could witness something within Matsuri twist, crumple (and almost die), she turns to Ria with a grin. The closest she could, anyway. A baring of teeth: nothing more that makes it an honest-to-God smile.
“Hey, sorry to ask this of you so suddenly, but,” she starts, and she tries to will it away—suffocate the weaker, cowardly part of herself beneath her fingertips, “is it alright if you could walk home by yourself tonight?”
They part their lips as if to ask something but decide against it. Instead, they nod without a word.
Matsuri smiles again, but this time, it reaches her eyes a little higher. She pats their head.
Thank you.
“See you tomorrow, Macchan,” they say, and their doe eyes move to Haruhisa, “and Kuribayashi-san.”
“I’ll lock the doors to the gym, don’t worry,” Matsuri assures, key and keychain dangling between her thumb and index finger. She wiggles it in front of her friend and teammate for good measure: nonchalance, her form of retreat.
Haruhisa gives them a wave. “Good night, Ria.”
Ria takes off. Their strides are longer yet, in some ways, uncertain.
She knows they’re hurting, too.
Vulnerability is something they are reluctant to acknowledge. And now reticence has become avoidance, and avoidance will only lead to solitude. It had hurt when the familiar flash of cherry blossom pink in the school hallways was often the only indication they’d been there at all.
To see them—Matsuri was within inches of that desire came late afternoon, when duty called—but they had already gone somewhere beyond her reach.
Absently, she thinks it was a mistake allowing them to walk alone. To be burdened by all the painful truths they’ve chosen to keep close to their chest.
It’s only once their lithe shadow has receded from the far side of the walking path, right after rounding the corner, that Matsuri allows herself to break apart.
A crack in the cistern. The trickle of weariness seeping past broken resolve. Slow, inevitable.
It’s staggering how much has changed within a day.
Matsuri swallows a lump in her throat, eyes darkening with premonition.
One step at a time. Lay to rest all thoughts of Ria for now, let them slide off like rain off a wing.
It’s just you and Haru now.
They stay there, on the small stairs leading up to the gym. He would always be on the second to last step. It’s a sight she’d seen time and time again that it had etched itself on her memories, that when she woke in the early dawn, and all the daybreaks besides—
There was only him.
An image so ordinary it should have been entirely beneath notice, except this… doesn’t really happen anymore.
“How—” she starts, fumbling with the key as she tries to insert it into the keyhole.
Why—
Oh. Her hands are trembling.
“How have you been?” It’s lame. She’s a fucking fool. Of all the things to say—
The gentle, patient smile on his sharper features halts her thoughts.
Pursing her lips, in her heart a lick of flame, Matsuri faces him head-on. Somehow emboldened.
From her place on the highest step, she sees the heaven-sent stars twinkling in his gaze.
He’s a star in his own right, no?
But stars have always been alone. They could never hope to meet and collide with another. Fate or coincidence, by divine intervention or the coming-into-existence of all past and current matter in one breath, it doesn’t matter to them. They’re content with this dictum of existence, irrespective of who or what breathed life into their celestial bodies.
But you, she wants to say yet finds no breath to speak, you get lonely, too, don’t you?
The human heart, however, gravitates towards that sort of cosmic catastrophe: from high-fives and hugs and entwining of pinkies, to flesh raising with a fleeting touch, bruises in the shape of fingertips—
Tell me you’re lonely, too. You’re human, after all.
God, he has such beautiful eyes.
This sight should’ve been comforting.
And yet, in stillness and familiarity, came an overwhelming sense of foreboding.
Her courage is quickly unravelling, it’s pathetic.
Suddenly, Haruhisa crouches to sit on the steps, and because his legs are too long, he lets them unfurl and stretch before him. He then looks up at her with the same smile and beckons her over to take the empty space to his left.
“Let’s talk?” he asks. A request.
And perhaps there are vestiges of her heart that yearns and aches, still, for a boy who can never be hers. So she obliges.
Some fucked up part of her thinks, wants to believe, beyond all doubt:
Maybe this time, it will be different.
But that’s never the case, was it? Never with him.
“What did you… want to talk about?”
“Coach Guaruja has finally asked me to sign a pro contract for the senior team,” he announces.
Her heart stops.
She’d felt it happening towards the end of their first year, but she’d held onto the bridge that brought him to her like her efforts ought to have any bearing on whether he stayed or not.
By the beginning of their second year, with the sun seeping through the gaps between the cherry blossom flowers to speckle them with light, he’d made his intentions clear.
“I would like to focus on my dream. I’m sorry.”
Strange, then, to realise that whatever they had has a similar lifespan to these things.
And that he’s unattainable, no matter how much she tried.
In hindsight, all the clues were already there. Haruhisa’s voice has always been somewhat distant, even when they were no more than five feet tall. His gaze even more so. Taira had described it best:
His mind, body and soul are perpetually tethered to the pitch.
He’s already up there playing with the stars.
The bridge had burned with immeasurable space between them. There was nothing left to salvage.
The fleeting thought of Ria—with their round face, and cherry blossom hair, and a smile that feels like morning alpenglow—leaving her, too, shakes her momentarily.
Matsuri clenches the fists on her lap.
It’s infuriating; it’s maddening. He has no idea how much she’d like to throw anger over the wound like a shield, kick and punch him, call him names—
But he’s him: nearer a god than human, living and walking among mortals. Yet so, so kind, all the same.
“I felt the need to share the news with you first,” he confesses.
You didn’t have to—
"The contract will remain effective until I turn eighteen.”
You’ve cut me off from your life, remember—
“And then I’ll be flying to Spain. Get into La Liga. ”
You’re not obligated to—
“I will become peerless like I’d promised from all those years ago.”
You never were—
“Now I’m one step closer to it.”
There was never an ‘us’.
She’s looking down at her hands: calloused, marred with pale scars, fresh blisters. The toll of practice, every ache a testament to her devotion to the sport.
“Meet me on the world stage, yeah?” And he smiles: the paragon of sincerity.
I can never compare to you, Haru.
A drop of water lands onto the palm of her hand.
Please don’t go where you’re out of reach.
“... Macchan?”
“Huh?” Matsuri swipes at the curve of her cheek and is surprised to see her skin glisten with moisture.
She attempts to stop the tears, rubbing the flesh of her face raw with rough, careless strikes of her palms.
Shameful enough to never amount to anything, and now this: candour without dressings, soul and all its ugliest vices laid bare before one of the strongest people this world has ever wrought.
“Don’t,” Haruhisa pleads, taking her hands in a delicate draw. “You’re hurting yourself.”
An errant heartbeat later, he cradles the soft lines of her jaw and gently wipes away the tears.
She feels so little, so insignificant under his stare; she knows of the world only the circumference of her chain, and he burns fiercer than life.
But she terribly misses him, leaning into his warmth with her smaller hand curled around his, and so her anger—at herself or him, the line blurs—fades into shadow.
“S-sorry,” she hiccups, giving him a watery smile, “I’m just h-happy for you.”
His eyes widen. For a second, something flickers within his gaze before it gentles further, his sharpness eroding down into what might be mourning.
“… Yeah,” he says, his own smile belying a truth she cannot divine nor he chooses to tell. “Yeah.”
He lets her go—and she aches at the finality of it—before standing up.
“Let’s walk home? It’s getting late.” His body tilts as he peers past the roof of the walkway, illuminated by the slivered crescent of the moon from above.
His hands have already retreated into the pockets of his grey trousers, yet her skin burns.
Matsuri shakes her head as she rises to her feet. “It’s okay, I’ll have to return the key to the teachers’ office, anyway.”
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”
“I see,” he says simply. Had she not been so attentive of him, she would have failed to notice the quiet resignation in the pinching of his brow.
She will not think of it any further, Matsuri decides, because it gets tiring: seeking hope from whom she knows is willing to offer none.
Before going their separate ways on the walkway, the corners of his mouth quirk up into another smile.
“Take care, Macchan.” I love you.
She pitches to her knees.