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Wakatoshi’s birthdays have come to feel like any other day. It’s comforting, how blissfully normal they are. They’re always hot and humid, the muggy mid-August weather uncannily reliable.
When he’s in town, his mother takes him to dinner at her usual restaurant.
But on his 25th birthday, two noteworthy things happen.
First: as he blows out the candle on his dessert — a new addition to the menu, some kind of sorbet made from yuzu and passionfruit — he finds himself wishing that Tendou were here to taste it, too. He loves delicious little morsels like this. Creative, appropriate, flavors perfectly balanced.
It’s the kind of effort that is wasted on Wakatoshi, but not his best friend.
The second noteworthy thing follows almost immediately. As he opens his eyes, still reeling from the force and fervor of his birthday wish — he hasn’t done that in years — he realizes his mother is holding out a gift to him.
Small, delicate. A ribbon wrapped around a jewelry box.
She told Wakatoshi that he outgrew presents when he graduated middle school.
“Though you will inherit the estate in due time,” she says, “you will receive part of it now. This is passed from head of the family to the future head at this age, and will help you find what it is you need for the next stage of your life.”
She hands him the box.
He frowns as he opens it. “A compass? I do not camp.”
The last time he tried, he walked through a patch of poison ivy and returned home before night even fell.
“No, Wakatoshi,” his mother smiles — not laughs. She never laughs. “This is something far more powerful.”
The compass has a patina’d brass cover, and it tingles with magic when Wakatoshi raises it out of the box.
Powerful indeed.
“Compasses always point north,” he says. “What else could it do?”
“This compass doesn't point north, Wakatoshi,” she corrects. “It points home.”
It takes him a long time to find the courage to open the compass. He doesn’t consciously realize that he’s being a coward, but he spends a few minutes every day rolling the brass compass around in his hand. The smooth metal warms under his ministrations, the patina almost looking like it's dancing or coming to life, and the weight of it is heavy.
Maybe — just maybe — he hopes it’ll open on its own, so he’s not the one who has to take that first step. His bravery only fades when things are uncertain, the future hazy. When he doesn’t know what’s to come or what he should expect.
Magic items like this? Rare. Unusual. An aberration from the norm. Even though it’s part of his family’s legacy and history — though his mother didn’t seem to know how it came into their possession, or how his ancestors even figured out how it worked. Just that the family has always had it, and it has passed from first-born to first-born, helping them find their way home.
Another day comes when he’s preparing to be a coward, the compass in his hand as his thumb rolls over the pattern engraved in the top; a delicate rosette. He’s just barely started toying with it, the ridges in the metal smoothing out under his finger, when his phone rings.
He looks down at his screen. Sees a familiar, bright face; unchanged since someone borrowed his phone a decade ago and put his contact number in.
He picks up the call.
“Wakatoshi-kun!” Tendou’s voice sings through the line, bright even though he must have just worked a whole shift. His stamina has gotten much better since they were younger, and even just that thought quells some of the anxiety swirling in his heart. “I almost missed your birthday! How is it, being twenty five, finally!”
“It is the same as being twenty four,” he replies, honestly. And he might have left it at that. Might have let the conversation move on so Tendou can regale him with the latest story from his neighborhood: telling him about Jean, the cheesemonger who feeds stray cats; Agathe, who wants to train racing pigeons — “No Wakatoshi-kun, messenger pigeons are the ones that are extinct! — when she grows up; the older woman next door who gives him a different name every time they meet but always seems to have the best wine recommendations.
These little slivers of life make him feel like he’s with Tendou; makes his life abroad so much more vivid and interesting than Wakatoshi’s. Tendou’s life is worth hearing about, not his own.
He might have let Tendou do this, if not for the compass suddenly warming in his hand — nearly iron-hot, like all the sunlight converged into the metal — and reminding him that there is something new about being twenty-five.
“Actually,” he says, carefully, squeezing the compass and imagining that it can mold to his touch, like clay, “something has changed.”
“Oh? I’m all ears, Wakatoshi-kun. Tell me everything.
You can always hear the grin in Tendou’s voice; never a smile, always a grin, like everything someone says is the most important thing in the world for him to hear.
It’s easy for Wakatoshi to fall into it. To believe that Tendou wants nothing more than to listen to him, because he knows it’s true. Tendou finds what people — especially Wakatoshi — have to say valuable, because he spent a whole childhood with no one wanting to talk to him.
“My mother gave me a gift.”
“Really?” Fabric rustles over the line, like Tendou’s leaning forward out of curiosity. If they were in the same room, Wakatoshi could probably feel the soft puffs of his breaths, his elbow as Tendou jostles him. “That’s a rarity, isn’t it? When was the last time she got you something? I can’t remember…”
Neither can Wakatoshi. Ever since he was young, his mother hasn’t been in the habit of gift-giving. That was his father's domain.
“It is a compass,” he says, the heat of it becoming so unbearable that he drops it onto his mattress.
“But you hate camping.”
“That is true,” Wakatoshi admits, looking down at the compass which has fallen open. There are directions written across it, like normal, but the needle isn’t pointing north.
This points towards home, after all, whatever that means.
Instead, it points east.
It takes him two weeks after his birthday to visit his mother’s rooms, on the opposite side of the Ushijima family compound. The house is big, sprawling across a few different gardens and acres, the kind of complex made for generations of family to share.
Instead, it’s just the two of them, and it is easy for them to go days without seeing each other except in the afterimage of their presence, like footsteps echoing down a hallway in the evening, or the muffled sound of a door sliding open.
The Ushijimas have not been blessed with abundance.
“I was waiting for you to ask about the gift, Wakatoshi,” his mother says, and he frowns.
“I am not in the nature of questioning your actions.” He’s careful with it; she wields a considerable amount of power over him, even now. He also doesn’t want to admit how long it had taken him to actually open the compass. “But I find myself curious as to why it doesn’t point here.”
He had assumed this would be home, but although he walked in circles round the grounds, the arrow still pointed stubbornly, unwaveringly, in the same direction.
She frowns, and it’s the first sign of true sorrow in her heart. “Though I wish you considered this place home, it is clear your own heart points elsewhere. If it helps, there is no exact science to it. Magic is not an explicit art, nor a precise one.”
That is a struggle for him.
“I sense that this is a struggle for you.”
He is silent. It feels like a personal failing, his inability to understand this compass and what it wants from him. Although he isn’t unfamiliar with failure, it still sits uneasily within him.
But there’s a smile — how peculiar, how unfamiliar — on her face as Wakatoshi slowly looks up at her.
“It was a struggle for me, too,” she admits. “It did not point where I expected it to, either. And it took me a long time to find where my heart lay. If I can offer one piece of advice?”
Wakatoshi nods, not wanting to speak.
“Do not tell anyone about this, lest they color your belief on what home may be.”
He can read between the lines, even if he’d rather be illiterate. The compass didn’t point to his father, at least, not for her.
He’s never felt lost, till now.
It's strange, when given a gift meant to find his way, that he's become aware of that sense of being adrift.
It's strange, too, that this has emerged now, when he’s still trying to figure out what team to next join. There are a dozen offers in his inbox and more coming from his agent each week, scattered across the globe. Some teams offer him the moon and stars to join, sight unseen, hoping his power and strength can turn their fortunes. Most attempts ask for a tryout, but on a schedule that suits him; these are the only ones he’s even thinking of entertaining, because more than just being the best on a team, he wants to find the best opportunity to grow. To remake himself. To fly.
Playing on the Adlers has been an honor and a privilege, but it’s time for him to spread his proverbial — and maybe literal — wings.
And with all these opportunities, these chances, available to him, he can’t find a way to narrow the choices down. Poland feels as distant as Germany or Brazil, and all the different teams and stats start to blur together when he tries to figure out which calls to take.
He’s started ignoring messages from his agent, because he doesn’t have anything new to say. They all sound equally good, equally different, but nothing calls to him.
But now, for once, something is; if only it were easier to read, to help Wakatoshi find his way.
“So you’ve got a magic compass that points home, huh, Wakatoshi-kun? What a strange circumstance.” Wakatoshi can imagine Tendou on the other side of the phone, stroking his chin. He’s trying to grow a beard and it isn’t working out. “I’ve never heard of anything quite like it!”
Another day, another phone call. Just before Wakatoshi’s phone rang, he felt the compass warm and pulled it from his pocket, and was looking at it as he answered.
Despite his mother’s warning, he couldn’t help but tell Tendou; to explain it to him. Cutting him off mid-story — Agnes is trying to quit smoking, but he always catches her sneaking onto her balcony and hastily grinding out the butt when he leaves for work in the morning — because the words wanted to escape his throat.
“Really? You are the one person who I thought might know something about this.”
“Why, cause I’m strange?”
Yes.
But also because Tendou has the strongest sense of home within him. He knows where he belongs and how to make a home, even in a whole other country.
Sometimes, the best way to find home is to abandon all you’ve known.
“Well,” Tendou sighs, “I guess, like with all magic, it’s always a little… esoteric, you know? It’s never straightforward.”
“This one is pointing east,” he says. “That is not forward.”
Currently, east is on his right-hand side.
Tendou snorts. “Always so literal, Wakatoshi-kun! Think about who’s in that direction. Draw a line straight east on a globe — oh, but remember that it has to arc! — and you’ll find home just fine!”
“I do not have a globe, Satori.”
“Wakatoshi-kun, with all due respect, your mom definitely has a globe. She’s rich! Go to your library.”
“We do not have a -”
“Just do it!”
He sighs, and rises to his feet. Closes the compass and pockets it, the warmth nearly burning a hole through his sweatpants. As he walks through the halls of his family home, Tendou keeps up an endless stream of familiar chatter. His voice soothing as Wakatoshi enters his mother’s side of the complex.
Apparently, they do have a library.
With a globe.
How did Tendou know?
“I know everything Wakatoshi-kun!” He crows on the other end of the line, delighted from being proven right.
“Can you tell me why Goshiki still gets a bowlcut?”
“Oops, sorry, going through a tunnel! You’re breaking up!”
Wakatoshi chuckles, knowing Tendou is at home, and nowhere near a tunnel.
He draws a lazy line from Sendai, crossing mountains and continents, skirting past Europe, flying past an ocean before —
“Ah,” Wakatoshi says, his finger on California. “I think I may have to entertain a tryout.”
It makes a certain amount of sense.
His father still lives in California. Utsui gladly offers him his spare bedroom; he lives in the same apartment he always has, with thin walls that Wakatoshi can hear him through as he stretches and makes breakfast for the both of them.
It’s a far cry from the family compound, and he says as much.
Utsui laughs. “You’ve always been blunt, haven’t you, Wakatoshi?”
His Japanese is clumsy, like he doesn’t use it as often as he should. Like it’s been bleached in the sun, soaked through with salt-water, smoothed out with sand.
“I suppose,” Wakatoshi replies, feeling awkward. He hasn’t checked the compass yet. In his pocket, it’s cold and inert, even when he walks along the beach with his father, who offers to teach him how to surf if he moves out here, who teases him about his limited English.
“Well, you know as well as I do that I never really fit in there,” Utsui shrugs. “So it makes sense, right? That my home would be the opposite?” He gestures around to his apartment, clean but full of mementos. Little treasures from his travels, his clients, the students that he coaches.
His mother would call it clutter. Utsui calls it comfort.
All of them are blunt, just in different ways. Wakatoshi was carved from both of them, the stone of his mother and the hammer of his dad. Utsui couldn’t help his honesty.
Wakatoshi doesn’t ask him if he knows about the compass. If he knows, he wants to protect him from the memory of it, of not being his ex-wife’s home. If he doesn’t, well… It’s better to not entertain a false hope, in case this tryout goes poorly.
Volleyball isn’t as popular in the US, but the university team is strong, and was surprised that he’d even consider them — that he’d think about going back to school, after so many years playing professionally.
“It was a longshot,” the coach admits, “the offer. Four years is a long time in your career, after all. It’s an honor even to have you play with us.”
The people who could be his teammates are all so young, like he was when he had the weight of Japan on his shoulders for the first time, and failed. They’re talented, but even during the tryout he gets the sense that this was just practice for him.
Not a place where he could build and grow stronger.
“But maybe,” he says, sitting out on the beach later that night as he talks to Tendou on the phone. It’s early in France, and Tendou isn’t ready for stories, yawning as he picks up something sweet at the boulangerie, as he drinks a coffee while pigeons — “Not the racing kind, Wakatoshi-kun!” — fight for food on the cobblestones, but he is ready to listen. “Maybe being home will…”
Will what? Make settling for a weaker team worth it?
“Have you checked your compass yet, Wakatoshi-kun?” Tendou asks. “Maybe that’ll tell ya what to do.”
It’s early enough that Tendou’s tongue stumbles a little over the words, and it strikes Wakatoshi that his Japanese isn’t as clumsy as his fathers is. Even though they’ve both left the country, Utsui fled bad memories while Tendou’s chasing a dream.
And, of course, Tendou talks to him nearly every day, and Wakatoshi doesn’t speak French; it keeps him well practiced in their shared language.
“I have not,” Wakatoshi admits, drawing a circle in the sand. Above him, the stars twinkle, and he smells a faint scent of smoke from a bonfire further down the shore. It’s colder than he expects at night here, and the warmth of the compass — the first time it’s heated up all trip — keeps him warm. He squeezes it tightly, and it pops open. “I was waiting for you,” he murmurs, not knowing why.
He’s not sure what he’s expecting, but what he sees leaves him speechless; he’s so quiet, in fact, that Tendou asks him if he’s alright, if he’s hung up, if he’s gotten abducted by aliens.
Instead of pointing towards Utsui’s house, instead of pointing where he expected it to, the needle has flipped entirely.
It points west. To that place he skirted past on the globe, where lives someone whose very voice warms the compass in his hand.
“Fuck,” he curses, as the heat becomes unbearable, and he hangs up as he drops the compass.
He needs to call his agent immediately.
He’ll apologize to Tendou later.
France.
It’s the only other place he could think of. Maybe it should have been his first guess, because the compass always warmed when he thought of Tendou, because his first impulse was to tell Tendou.
But only one of them was a guess monster; Wakatoshi’s another kind of creature entirely.
Tendou, of course, carries a home within him.
His agent is quick to arrange a tryout. There’s no team in France sending offers — a cruelty of fate — but Poland is close enough, and good enough that he’d not sacrifice anything. Through it all, he barely has time to talk to anyone — doesn’t tell his mother, doesn’t tell his dad, just apologizes to Tendou for hanging up and promising to talk soon.
The tryout goes well, his agent coming along with him and vibrating with excitement and happiness that this era of uncertainty is finally coming to an end.
He signs his contract in a concrete office at 10:37 AM, shakes hands with the coach and manager for Orzeł, and offers to delay his celebratory dinner for when he returns to apartment hunt in Warsaw.
They don’t take him up on it; plying him with heavy food that he’ll come to appreciate the taste of, and liquor that sits sweetly on his tongue. He wakes up the next morning and is on the first flight out to Paris that day, less than 24 hours after deciding where to uproot his life.
He doesn’t check the compass; he’s not home, yet.
The thing about north is that sailors and explorers merely used it to find their way home. If you follow a compass — or the north star, however you want to find your way — all the way north, you’ll end up at the pole. An inhospitable place. No life to speak of.
Wakatoshi had been trying to follow his compass, as if, at the end of the line, he’d find out exactly where he needed to be. Instead, he should have been treating it as a reference point.
Unlike the Earth’s north, his true north can change. It’s not immutable, nor infallible, but as long as he knows where his compass leads, as long as he knows where home is, he’ll no longer feel lost.
He doesn’t tell Tendou he’s coming. When he lands in Paris, he pockets his phone and holds the compass open, following the needle through the city. He hits dead ends and private courtyards, bridges and scary alleyways, takes wrong turns and doubles back a dozen times; but the journey is all part of the fun.
He knows that, eventually, he’ll end up where he needs to be: in front of Lionceau, Tendou’s shop.
There’s a long line, but Wakatoshi is patient.
The compass’ warmth is, for once, pleasant. Comforting. Like a warm, milky coffee in the morning, or hot chocolate at night.
He watches people smile and laugh as they leave Lionceau, their delicate little chocolates wrapped up in the rich maroon and gold of Tendou’s packaging. They must have been charmed by him, too.
Here, people understand Tendou’s magic. It had gone unappreciated back in Japan, Wakatoshi thinks. For all that Wakatoshi’s the one with the compass, Tendou’s the one who’s found his way.
It’s so busy that Tendou doesn’t even notice him until he’s finally at the counter, and he speaks to him in French like he’s on autopilot before his eyes go wide.
“What’ll ya have — oh, Wakatoshi-kun, what are ya doin’ here?” Tendou blinks, mouth agape. “Do you want a truffle? I’ve got the curry ones you like!”
Wakatoshi does like the curry-flavored truffles, even though he knows they’re not a best-seller by any means at Lionceau, but he’s here for something sweeter.
“I want you,” Wakatoshi says, making Tendou’s mouth round into an O, his cheeks reddening to match the decorations around Lionceau. Behind him, he can hear quiet murmurs from the others in line. In the air, there’s a crackle of magic, electric on his tongue. “I miss you. You’re my home.”
“I’m your… what?” Tendou leans over the counter, dropping his voice to a whisper. “What are you saying, Wakatoshi-kun? You’re too blunt, sometimes!”
“It runs in the family,” Wakatoshi says, before holding up the compass, touching Tendou’s cheek to make him look down at it.
To make him see that the needle is pointing firmly, insistently, at Tendou.
To compel him to wrap his long, clever fingers around Wakatoshi’s hand, as the compass settles into a delighted rattle of heat.
Maybe Wakatoshi needed this compass to help him realize he had a home in Tendou; maybe he needed the compass to help him realize he needed a home after all, that he couldn’t live a driftless life, that he needed this, a point in the storm.
Maybe the Ushijima family, for all they lack in abundance, need a home that grants them that.
Around him, the sounds of Lionceau bustle back into life, one of Tendou’s staff taking over the next customer, row after row of chocolate glistening like stars in the elegant glass case.
The air smells like sticky chocolate, like sugar and spices and nougat and all the sweetest things in the world.
“You are my home,” Wakatoshi repeats, closing the lid of the compass because he doesn’t need it anymore, and leans forward to kiss the sugar off of Tendou’s lips