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i.
There’s a kid on the ground, and he can’t breathe.
A dim flicker of recognition at the back of Kei’s mind tells him they must be in the same grade—possibly a year apart at most, but kid is still what he thinks, in spite of that. Maybe it’s the freckles, or the fearful, put-upon look on his face, that are making the boy in front of him look smaller than he is. And young, impossibly young.
There are three other boys standing between Freckles and Kei. They’re bigger, noisier. One of them has a stick in his hand. Another throws his backpack in Freckles’ face, and even with his view obstructed by porky thighs and flailing arms Kei can see the welt flaring red and angry on his cheek where it’s hit his head and bounced off, the tears standing in his eyes as he presses a hand against his chest and tries to suck in a shaky breath.
Why are you so scrawny, Tadashi, they chant, jeering. Carry our bags, Tadashi. Put some meat on your bones.
“How lame,” Kei says, raising his voice just enough to be heard. And then, because he’s no hero, he turns his back.
He can still hear how it ends as he walks away, though, the bullies scattering in a cacophony of clicked tongues and halfhearted shouts of Four-eyes! and sneakered feet on the pavement. He imagines he can hear the kid on the ground (Freckles? Tadashi?) and the noises his breath makes as he fights it back into his body—a sniffle here, a wheeze there, a sob.
ii.
They’re at the public gym for a summer volleyball clinic, and Freckles is walking up to him and bowing and saying Thank you for what you did um the other day at the um park in a too-loud voice. Of course Kei knows exactly what he’s talking about, but he pretends not to.
Freckles’ real name is Yamaguchi Tadashi, and Kei can’t decide if it’s funny or annoying that he’s exactly like he imagined he’d be, just from those few minutes at the park. He’s pale and knobby-kneed and seems always to be looking for ways to make himself smaller, always hunching his shoulders up close to his ears and stuttering his way around his words. The only not-small thing about him is probably his smile, which breaks across his face like the sun without warning, at the stupidest things—Kei’s hand-me-down sneakers, his stories about his brother, the realization that none of the playground bullies have followed them to volleyball.
He says he’s hoping that playing a sport will make him stronger, and Kei bites his tongue against the temptation to ask, But aren’t you sick? It’s none of his business, really.
Yet, still, Kei watches, even if he doesn’t really know why. He’s watching close when, right before the coach tells them to drop their things by the benches and get warmed up, Yamaguchi unzips the left front pocket of his bag, pulls out an inhaler and puts it to his mouth. He’s watching the watered down, sheepish version of Yamaguchi’s sunshine-smile when he says, “Sorry, I just gotta—so I can breathe, you know?”
“It’s fine,” Kei says, and files that left front pocket away in his memory.
iii.
His lungs get tired easily. That’s how it appears to Kei, what happens to Yamaguchi whenever he pushes his body too hard, or when the air’s too dry—how he has to stop whatever he’s doing and sit for a while, one hand pressing down hard over his heart. After a while Kei knows Yamaguchi’s breathing inside-out, can trace the way it changes down to its smallest sounds.
It’s a pattern, and Kei’s good with patterns. This doesn’t have much to do with Yamaguchi at all, for all the times that Kei’s pulled at the zipper on the left front pocket of his backpack and shoved the inhaler into his hand like a protective talisman.
“Not so fast,” Kei warns, hissing under his breath, whenever they’re in the line to do diving drills. Everyone hates diving drills, he knows, but Yamaguchi’s the only one who doesn’t seem to have the nerve to say so, not even in whispers, so only Kei can hear. He just throws himself down face-first, wincing whenever his chest hits the floor and the momentum sends his body skidding.
“Don’t run,” he calls, sharply, on the special days that Akiteru picks them up from practice with popsicles in his hands. Akiteru likes Yamaguchi—this is plain from the way he’s always ruffling his hair and calling him “Little Tadashi”—but he seems to like their friendship even more, if the goofy-looking grins he’s always shooting Kei over Yamaguchi’s head are any indication.
“Sorry, Tsukki!” Yamaguchi always says. It’s “Sorry, Tsukki!” every time without fail. He apologizes for so many things—for his asthma attacks, for having to take water breaks more frequently than anybody else, for dropping to the back of the line when they run laps—Kei’s convinced sometimes that the only thing he wants to be in this life is an inconvenience. The truth is that in all these instances the only inconvenient thing is the way the breath catches in Kei’s chest at the “Thanks, though” that follows each apology, and the sunshine-smile.
“I think he’s good for you,” Akiteru tells him one night, out of the blue, while they’re brushing their teeth in the hallway bathroom. The water’s running in the sink and there’s toothpaste foam on both their chins, and Kei’s making a big show of avoiding his brother’s eyes in the mirror because this is a stupid place to be trying to have a conversation about anything, let alone something like this. “I was worried you’d never make a friend.”
He’s not my friend, Kei almost says, but his throat feels thick all of a sudden. He spits into the sink instead.
iv.
It’s full dark by the time Yamaguchi finds him at the park, and Kei’s mood has soured so much that he’s scowling at everything. He’s scowling at the swings that have been too small for him for years—he must look like an idiot sitting on one now, with his legs bent up so much his knees are nearly level with his face and his butt’s practically on the ground—and at the sick-looking yellow light filtering down to him from the nearest lamppost. He’s scowling at the stars and at the dust on his shoes and at Yamaguchi, bent nearly double over the swing next to him.
“You said…” Yamaguchi stops, coughs, his knuckles bloodless on the swing’s chain. “You said… going home…?”
“I will,” Kei says, annoyed. The subtext, of course, is I’m not a liar, like him. “Later.”
“Your mom, she—worried. Akiteru-kun too.” Kei doesn’t like the raggedy, rattling noises Yamaguchi’s making, and briefly contemplates clocking him upside the head so he’ll stop talking until he gets his breath back. It’s almost funny, but also it isn’t.
(He finds the sound of his brother’s name’s put a bad taste in his mouth besides, rancid on the tip of his tongue.)
“You ran.” It’s not a question. “You didn’t even bring your inhaler.”
“Had to find you. Had to.”
Kei wants to ask how Yamaguchi knew he’d be here—coincidentally the place they met, though that doesn’t really mean anything—but he doesn’t. Kei wants to tell him he’s an idiot—how many times has he had to tell him not to run?—but he doesn’t. Instead he stands and takes a couple of steps forward, and somehow Yamaguchi knows that just this once it’s okay to lean a little—head pushed down against Kei’s shoulder, fingers uncurling from around the chain to clench in the fabric of his jacket instead.
Kei doesn’t hold him—he wouldn’t know where to put his hands—only makes a wall with his body and stands there, and it’s enough for the two of them to be quiet like that until Yamaguchi’s chest stops heaving and his shoulders come down.
“Go home,” Yamaguchi tells him. For emphasis he beats his fist against Kei’s chest once, softly, and Kei sighs.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, fine.”
v.
Kei knows he’s impossible all throughout their last year of middle school. He knows he’s all stone walls and razor blades now, armed to the teeth as he is with a withering stare and enough cutting comebacks for days, but for some reason Yamaguchi sticks around anyway. They still walk home together every day, though sometimes Kei’s patience runs thin and makes him pull ahead briskly, hands jammed into his pockets and headphones snapped protectively over his ears. Yamaguchi still pulls his chair up to Kei’s desk at lunch hour, pushes an onigiri across the table, insisting that his mom’s given him one too many yet again.
Kei always wonders if he completely misses the stares, if he doesn’t notice their classmates murmuring to one another about Yamaguchi-kun’s possible death-wish, or if he’s just gotten good at the ignoring game. He never actually asks, though; if it’s the latter, he’ll have to admit to being impressed. They’re too old now for tussles in the playground, for sticks and stones, but there’s still a softness about Yamaguchi that he has yet to outgrow, and Kei’s spent so much time teaching himself to be unkind he’s confident he could smell it on someone else from the other side of a mountain.
“You don’t have to keep hanging around me, you know,” he says one day. He knows it’s the closest he’ll ever come to broaching the subject outright. “You could go find some decent friends, or something.”
Beside him, Yamaguchi tenses. The shoulders go up, his hand tugs at the collar of his shirt, and in spite of all his earlier bravado Kei thinks, You fucking idiot, Tsukishima. Of their own accord his eyes snap to the backpack slung over Yamaguchi’s shoulder, zooming in on the left front pocket.
Kei doesn’t expect him to bounce back as fast as he does. He doesn’t expect Yamaguchi to shake himself a little, take a breath, lift his head so they can see eye-to-eye. He’s got the sunshine-smile on and everything, and it takes all of Kei’s willpower not to look away.
“But I like you, Tsukki,” he says, and it sounds so strangely simple, so self-evident, that Kei doesn’t even think to ask why. Or what the hell that’s supposed to mean. Or anything, really.
vi.
“I—I think I’m gonna have to call it a night.” They’re sitting up late together in Kei’s room, studying for the high school entrance exams. Kei’s head is bent down toward the pages of his algebra book, but he’s watching Yamaguchi out of the corner of his eye, following the arc his arms make through the air as he stretches. There’s something brittle about his smile tonight. “Brain’s shutting down.”
“So go to sleep,” Kei tells him. He turns a page. Soon Yamaguchi’s elbows come to rest on the low table, and his hands cover his face. Kei thinks, in between flipping pages to keep up the pretense of interest in all the different ways to solve for x, that he looks even smaller like this, more easily broken than Kei’s ever seen him.
The first sob sounds like glass shards in his throat. It sounds as though it’s been struck from him, slipping out with a force that seems to shake his whole body, for all that he’s pressing the heels of his palms to his mouth to silence it. He’s crying in earnest now; a few drops slip through, shatter on the varnished surface of the table.
“Yamaguchi.” If this goes on Kei knows he’s going to work himself into another attack. Yamaguchi’s bag—inhaler in the left front pocket—isn’t far away, just a few feet behind them by the door, but with Kei’s fingers around his wrists and the wet whistle of his breathing filling up the room it may as well be miles.
No answer. Kei comes up on his knees, leans forward, closer. “Yamaguchi, come on.”
“S-sorry, Tsukki.” His elbows won’t unbend—the tension seems to have locked them into place—but his hands come down a little when Kei pulls a few more times at his wrists, insistent. “I’m trying, I j-just—” He gasps in another breath. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Kei says. There’s no bite in it, for once, as he leans forward a little farther. “You can.”
“I can’t.”
“I said you can.”
“But what if I—” Yamaguchi starts, but the rest of the sentence evaporates when Kei’s forehead makes contact with his own, and then Kei’s lips are against his and Kei’s all but exhaling straight into his mouth, and both their faces are wet now from Yamaguchi’s veritable waterfalls of tears.
At this point Kei’s at least a thousand percent sure neither of them has any idea how to breathe and kiss at the same time—a process he imagines has been made infinitely more complicated by the fact that one of them is a recovering asthmatic and the other hadn’t had a single serious thought about kissing in his life until maybe two seconds ago—but, when Yamaguchi’s hands curl like steel clamps in the front of his shirt, gripping so tightly Kei worries for a second that he’ll tear the fabric, he’s at least equally certain that neither of them cares. Their noses keep bumping together and Kei’s glasses have slipped sideways off his face—to say nothing of the bruises they’ll probably come away with from all this clumsy business of teeth-lips-tongue—but Kei knows the mass of knots in Yamaguchi’s chest is loosening, he can feel it in the way he breathes.
It’s only when he stops shaking that Kei pulls away, sitting back on his heels. He wants to drop his eyes to the floor, paw at his mouth with the back of his hand, but he doesn’t.
“When the heck did you get so strong?” he asks.
Yamaguchi eyes the wrinkles mapped down the front of Kei’s shirt, scrubbing at his face like he can’t believe what he sees. “Did I really do that?”
vii.
Most of the time Kei’s sure nothing’s changed. Sometimes he’s not so sure. Sometimes on the long walk home they’ll pause outside Yamaguchi’s gate, and he’ll stop in the middle of fishing his keys out of his backpack and say “Tsukki—” in an odd, fractured little voice. As if he’s waiting for whatever should come after, getting ready to say something more, but neither of them knows what that is.
Usually it ends up being a see you tomorrow, lilting upward a bit at the end so it becomes a question. See you tomorrow? Sometimes, on a brave day, I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?
It’s a bluff—they both know it’s a bluff, but Kei figures he’ll take it anyway, because he doesn’t know what he can do, supposing Yamaguchi ever does tell him the truth. “Tomorrow,” he always says, and figures that’s the closest to a promise he’ll ever get. Yamaguchi seems to find the repetition comforting, though—Kei’s heard him locking his gate and walking up the driveway into his house mumbling “tomorrow, tomorrow” under his breath—so maybe that’s all right for now.
(They haven’t kissed again, obviously, since that one time. Kei’s hardly an expert on the matter, but he’s willing to bet it’s not something friends do all that often. Not even best friends—and, mind, he’s not at all certain that he’d go so far as to call Yamaguchi his best friend. Come to that, he’s not certain what Yamaguchi is—what they are, only that thinking about it sends his chest into knots and makes all these white spots mushroom at the edges of his vision.)
The day the entrance exam results come out, though, it’s a different question: “Where are you going?”
Home, duh, Kei wants to say, because it’s safe and smartassy and won’t put either of them on the spot. Instead, just because it’s an important day, he tells the truth, even if it’s muttered into his collar and accompanied by an offhand shrug.
“Karasuno, I guess. Dunno. Wherever. You?”
“I wanna go where you go,” Yamaguchi says, and Kei feels the back of his neck go warm.
viii.
There’s a kid on the floor, and he can’t breathe.
They’re not on the court together much during training. Most days Kei will already be halfway through his stretches by the time Yamaguchi starts running laps with the other second-stringers. He’s not the fastest or most enduring of runners, but it’s weird all the same for Kei to watch and find him already so different from the boneless, floundering boy from the summer clinic, a hundred years ago now in his memory. His strides are longer, his steps surer, and there’s an uncanny rhythm to the movement of his chest and shoulders that Kei thinks he wouldn’t even have been able to imagine before today. Rising and falling, rising and falling steadily as he moves, in perfect time to his feet pounding in their beaten-up sneakers against the gym floor.
“Not so fast,” Kei calls, sharply. The words are out of him before he remembers that he hasn’t seen the inhaler come out of the left front pocket in—months, maybe. He doesn’t remember Yamaguchi taking it out for the entrance exam results, or for finals. He didn’t even have it the day of their junior high graduation, for all that he wouldn’t stop fretting about tripping on his way up the stage, falling off the stage and dying, receiving his diploma with the wrong hand.
When the heck did you get so strong?
Maybe Yamaguchi’s forgotten, too, for a bit. Or maybe it’s just a habit—one of the many patterns they’ve fallen into with the years, almost without knowing—that he slows to a jog at the sound of Kei’s voice, lets Ennoshita-san and Sugawara-san pass him, until he’s trailing at the end of the line.
“Sorry, Tsukki!” he yells over his shoulder. He’s laughing, open-mouthed—Kei can see his teeth flash, the slip of pink tongue—and the sound is full and warm as the late afternoon light. The little knot of muscle that’s been tied tight in the center of Kei’s chest goes even tighter just then, as he bends to touch his toes.
In these moments he can’t help wondering if asthma is catching.