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The thing that Karasu notices even before the blood is the empty voids of Hiori’s eyes. Insensate, pitch-dark pools, such a far cry from their sky-blue, unburdened color when the sun catches in them, glittering brightly.
The second thing is, of course, the blood. It’s running down Hiori’s pale arm in small rivulets, separating over translucent hairs, finding its way together. Pooling in the crook of his elbow. Dripping off and onto the locker room floor. Drip, drip, drip, so loud in the needle-pin silence that Karasu hears it echo even over his own heartbeat rushing in his ears.
“Ah,” slips out of him, for some reason. Incredible reaction there; a wave of shame rolls over him, and then another when he realizes he’s beating himself up for a dumb reaction while Hiori is bleeding.
The locker room is dim like this; it’s why Karasu had been sure everyone was gone already. It hadn’t been his turn to clean up after practice, of course, but he does like to stay behind and make sure everything’s in order. Nothing wrong with playing dependable senpai a little, right?
The locker room is dim like this, every locker closed and abandoned, a thin strip of light falling in from the window behind Hiori, framed by the benches; framing him, in turn. Lighting him from behind until his face really and truly looks like a blank black hole.
That is, until his eyes go wide, wide, wide, until he startles. There’s something falling to the floor, clattering against the tiles, a glint reflecting off it, but before Karasu can even attempt to make out whatever it is, Hiori is slapping his now free hand over the source of the blood. Ouch; Karasu winces.
Keeps standing there, speechless, for a few moments more. Heartbeats that stretch until he’s not sure anymore if it’s been only a handful of seconds or a full minute by now.
“I thought ya were—gone,” says Hiori, eventually; voice an octave higher than it usually is, choking on it in the middle of the sentence. Hiccuping? Eyes wide, almost a little glazed over, body tense with it, like a cornered animal about to bolt.
Karasu’s heart, like it’s only now getting the memo, plummets.
Beyond the initial surprise, the one thing Karasu isn’t, is stupid. It’s his one skill, isn’t it, to be able to look at a whole all zoomed out and still notice all those pesky little details, weaving them together until the picture is complete, faster than anyone else. Finding the weak spot and stabbing right there, x marks the spot.
There’s a glaring weak spot right there, but instead, Karasu’s mouth goes dry. And the sharp thing to stab with has dropped to the floor, anyway.
“Karasu.”
His voice catches on it again. Karasu isn’t sure if it’s a warning or something else, something motivated by animal panic settling into his own bones, too. Like it’s him who’s bleeding, his head spins.
There’s a blade clattered to the floor, blood splattering on the tiles, and Hiori’s hand covering the cut. How juvenile.
(How terrifying.)
“Ya dunce,” slips out of Karasu, and the intensity in his tone manages to surprise himself and make Hiori twitch. “Y’gotta disinfect that.”
Hiori makes a surprised noise, ah, like he’s going to say something to that, but Karasu doesn’t wait for protest or anything else. Moves past Hiori—he tries his best to do so without contact, but the space’s tight between Hiori and the bench, so their shoulders brush—over to his own locker, because while there’s a first aid kit over in the office, it’s probably not a good idea to let Hiori out of his sight right now. Kid might bolt, after all. Can’t have that.
Karasu’s hands are shaking just a little when he unlocks his locker. He grits his teeth against it, opens the door—gently, so it doesn’t clang against the next locker over, so the caducity of this moment doesn’t slip through his fingers—to get his small first aid kit out. It’s better to be over-prepared than to not be prepared at all, after all.
“Karasu—”
“Quiet. Listen to yer senpai for once, will ya?”
Surprisingly enough, Hiori actually falls quiet. Karasu doesn’t manage to make himself look at him.
God, he’s so useless.
Doesn’t matter. There’s blood on the floor and an open cut on Hiori’s arm and Karasu’s self-pity assuredly doesn’t matter, so he pushes it aside.
“C’mere,” he says, holding out his hand to wag his fingers. It’s then that he sees Hiori again: pale in the dim light—and perhaps from blood loss—and slowly but surely, the panic is melting off his face, too.
Bringing with it something worse, perhaps. There’s the blank look again, eyes seemingly unseeing, but he walks over to Karasu, anyway. Karasu plops down on the bench, opens his first aid kit. Holds out his hand. Hiori capitulates; drops his blood-smeared palm from his arm and holds it out to Karasu like an offering. It’s bitter on Karasu’s tongue.
Bitterer, still, now that his eyes have gotten used to the light situation, now that he can tell that this isn’t the only cut. The others are older, more faded, ranging from just a shade paler than Hiori’s skin and lifting up from it like little mountain ranges to various shades of pink. Deceptively vivacious, these colors. The complete opposite from Hiori’s face when Karasu flicks his gaze up to check; it’s like he’s dead.
“It’ll be alright,” Karasu murmurs, helpless. If there’s one other thing he’s good at it’s looking like he’s keeping his composure, at least, however. “I seen worse.”
It’s not exactly a lie; there’s some gnarly things that can happen on the football field. There’s a lot of bone that sits right under the skin, without much of anything in the way of flesh and fat providing some buffer. Shit happens.
Nothing has made his stomach twist like this does, though.
Hiori, for his part, relaxes a little. Doesn’t hiss any when Karasu dabs at the blood with a tissue, trying to identify where exactly the source is. Down, down, down the wrist. Right there. Hiori does hiss now, at the contact.
His eyes are empty doll-eyes that Karasu feels weirdly exposed under, but he’s cleaned out wounds plenty of times—no football without scrapes—so it’s muscle memory to do this, as much as he bristles against the context. Even like this, in the half-dark, he manages to dab at the blood until only the dried bits are left; reaches behind himself to grab his water bottle to wet the tissue and get that, too. It’s something at least, he thinks, that he’s apt with this. What if someone else had found Hiori like this?
He bristles at this, too.
The cut, at the end of it all, once it’s mostly stopped bleeding, is a simple, straight line. Deep, he thinks, but not too deep. Pink and fresh and repulsive, all the same. Makes him ache.
Makes him swallow, too. He brushes his thumb along old, bellicose cuts, criss-crossed in some places. Makes sense that Hiori mostly wears long sleeves, he supposes.
(With his beguiling blue eyes and the polite smile. With how he tried to follow Karasu home that one time. It aches, aches, aches.)
Disinfectant. Carefully, Karasu angles Hiori’s arm, sprays. Hiori, with his dead eyes, twitches. He sprays another time for good measure, and this time Hiori hisses again, sibilant, scratching over Karasu’s skin.
How juvenile.
With the wrapping of the bandage around Hiori’s arm, it’s complete. Karasu drops it, watches it swing down, back and forth for a moment, like a pendulum, until it stills. Like this, the white bandage hardly stands out against his skin.
“I’ll clean up the blood,” he says to the sight of Hiori’s placid, uncurled hand. “Y’should probably sit down. Drink some water.”
Hiori doesn’t move. Reluctantly, Karasu drags his gaze up the arm of Hiori’s Bambi Osaka practice jacket, over where it’s bunched up at Hiori’s elbow, until he arrives at his face. Black-hole eyes and a closed mouth. Half-lidded and all-empty. Karasu swallows. Cocks a brow.
“What?”
“Aren’t ya gonna ask why?”
Ah.
He should probably ask why. Wants to ask why, just a little bit; though he’s got working eyes and a brain and can paint a pretty good picture himself, especially from that cryptic thing Hiori’s told him when Karasu approached him for the first time.
“Ain’t my business,” he says, shrugging. Hiori’s expression doesn’t shift. Doesn’t change whatsoever, as if set in stone. Staring, staring, staring. And it is, of course, not Karasu’s business.
For one stupid moment, Karasu wonders what exactly it is Hiori is seeing.
It doesn’t matter, in the end. Karasu thinks like this, Hiori looks so painfully lonely; like he’s suspended in some kind of void that nobody else can enter. His arms are slack by his sides, and Karasu wonders, for one stupid moment, if there’s an impulse itching in them like there is in his own.
It doesn’t matter, of course, in the end.
“C’mon, sit down,” he murmurs. “I’ll walk ya home after, ‘kay?”
Finally, Hiori does move. Moves to slump into the bench next to Karasu, a thigh’s width apart. Karasu lingers for a beat, or two, but Hiori doesn’t say anything.
“Right,” Karasu says, more to himself than anything. Alright. Cleaning blood from off the tile. Shouldn’t be that hard.
(Taking care of a hopeless, isolated sheep and bringing him home and trying to shield him from further harm? Might just be a whole lot harder.)
Later, when Karasu is on his hands and knees on the locker room-tiles, scrubbing with a rag he found in the cleaning supplies closet, he finds himself saying: “Y’shouldn’t be doin’ that, Hiori.” And: “It’s dangerous, yanno? Infections and shit.” And: “Plus, someone could see.”
He doesn’t know why he says those things. He means them, of course—means them in the helpless, sincere way of fumbling his way through attempting comfort—but they’re so utterly useless, so utterly small and irrelevant floating in the air like this. But Hiori doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything, his eyes still empty and fixed somewhere around his feet, his hand shielding the bandage where the cut is.
But Karasu has no idea what to do with any of this.
He buys Hiori a drink from the konbini on their way home. Hiori knocks his shoulder to his as a way of goodbye.
“Karasu-kun,” he says, suddenly polite, “thank you.”
Don’t thank me, Karasu thinks. I ain’t done shit. What he actually does is flick Hiori’s forehead, what he actually does is say: “Yer such an idiot.”
Hiori doesn’t smile. He rubs his forehead, blinks too-big eyes, glances at Karasu. Sways where he’s standing, lingering, before finally turning and skipping away after a stupid little bow in Karasu’s direction; one that makes him feel like he’s being made fun of.
Karasu watches until Hiori disappears into the house where he lives, then he turns around, too, to catch his train home.
.
The crisp air and the bright sunshine heralds spring; Karasu can tell that much even when they’re still stuck in the airport. It explodes all over him once they step outside, and he takes a deep, deep breath, sighs it out with relish. Hiori next to him laughs.
“Home sweet home?” he teases.
“Ya don’t know the half of it,” Karasu replies, knocking his shoulder to Hiori’s. Almost succeeding in knocking Hiori over, it seems: he fumbles with his suitcase, laughs again, hair wild, scent just a little sour from sweating on the plane. Karasu can’t presume to smell any better.
“It is very nice,” says Hiori, and he’s smiling when Karasu glances at him askance. A small one, a real one, one of those that twinkles in his eyes with something that tastes like mischief, with something that prickles down Karasu’s spine every time.
With you, Hiori doesn’t say, but it’s likely there, anyway. Karasu’s palms sweat with it, but maybe that’s just the way it’s getting warmer every day, even here in Japan.
“Race ya there?” Hiori asks, the cheeky bastard, and Karasu knocks his shoulder into Hiori a second time. This time, the laughter turns shrill; turns heads, too, but who cares about that.
“Ha-ha,” Karasu says, caustic. “Take back yer second suitcase first, then we’re talkin’.”
It’s buzzing under Karasu’s skin, everywhere. Home sweet home, Hiori’d said, and it’s something like that, of course—though he’s spent too many years by now flitting around to really call any one place home, he supposes the place one grew up in never really disappears from their DNA, for better or for worse—but more than that, it’s this excitement in the air. They make their way over to the taxi without racing, and Hiori holds Karasu’s door open for him. Karasu rolls his eyes, feels his ears burn; catches Hiori’s grin from the corner of his eyes.
“Ain’t exactly just my suitcase,” Hiori insists when he slips into the car, too. Karasu already told the driver where they’re going; but by the way the guy’s eyes went wide at the sight of him, that much must’ve been obvious.
Home sweet home indeed. But what that’s really about, for Karasu, of course, is playing for Japan again. What that’s really about, for Karasu, is doing it alongside Hiori; Hiori with that calculating grin of his, Hiori with his twinkling eyes, Hiori with the coltish way he peels himself under Karasu’s skin and stays, stays, stays. Y’can run, he’d said one time in the half-dark, with his hands under Karasu’s shirt, but not forever. I’ll getcha yet.
Karasu doesn’t quite know how to say ya’ve already got me without it being embarrassing. He doesn’t know so many things. His phone buzzes; likely something asinine from Otoya who got here a day early and saw paparazzi photos of Karasu and Hiori online. Tabito and Yo, sittin’ in a tree…
“Lemme see,” says Hiori, reaching past him and into his pocket, and a strangled noise of protest slips out of Karasu, but that doesn’t matter, of course; Hiori is always going to chase him, Hiori is always going to catch up to him, and what Hiori is doing, too, apparently, is reading Karasu’s goddamn texts, too. What are they, fucking married and he’s cheating?
“Look,” Hiori continues, “this one’s so romantic.”
It is a picture of them both, it turns out: of Hiori with his eyes wide and his smile wider, nearly losing his balance, of Karasu staring at him, staring, staring, staring.
Karasu snatches his phone back. “Yer a fuckin’ idiot.”
Hiori snickers. Like this, with his arm stretched out, his sleeve rides up just enough for the criss-crossing white, faded gossamer of scars to peek out, and it stumbles in Karasu’s chest, just a little bit. Hiori catches him staring. Narrows his eyes with a smile Karasu thinks he’ll never understand.
Skips ahead of him once they’ve arrived at the hotel that got completely booked out for all of Japan’s players, one arm spread wide like bird’s wings, the other once again very much attached to his suitcase. Of which Karasu is dragging two behind himself. Just saying.
“Come catch up ta me if ya can!” Hiori says over his shoulder, a challenge in his eyes; always a challenge in his eyes, these days. Karasu thinks, for a moment, about the apathetic doll-boy with the empty eyes, and finds that he likes this much better.
He runs, of course. Hiori shrieks, then laughs. Didn’t expect that, did he?