Archive of Our Own ^beta

Five years to the day his best friend passed — because he was still the best even if he was dead — Giyuu ascends Sagiri for his final ride. 

Last one, best one. 

At least, that’s what Sabito always used to say, before snapping on his goggles and taking off down the slopes. Before he’d return to drag Giyuu by hand or pole to the lifts. Before he’d skidded off the mountainside and cracked his head open on the bottom.

Today, the dawn glows pink over freshly fallen snow. Powdery sugar globs atop craggy spruces and evergreens. They blush peach, just like his hair used to be.

It’s a good day for a run. 

Giyuu methodically checks the bite of his skis on his boots, unscrews the tiny bottle of liquid courage Sabito always chugged though he’d never needed it, and downs it all with a frowning wince. He straps on his goggles and tucks the empty shot into his pocket, but ditches the helmet. Tosses it to the side, apologizes to god and rescue workers and ski patrol about the litter, and lets it sink into milky dust.

Whether he makes it to the end of the slope is not his concern. 

All he knows is this is the last time he’ll ever try.

With that thought, he powers off his phone. Urokodaki Sakonji’s seven missed calls are the only notifications on his spider-webbed screen before it goes black, and Giyuu’s throat tightens for a split second at the realization that he hadn’t even texted him back. 

Maybe he should turn it back on and say something. Tell Sakonji how grateful he is for everything, even if he did up and leave at sixteen without a single look back. Or he could convince him not to worry, he’s just skiing for the day, and he has plans for tomorrow even though he never does. Maybe he’d finally stop blowing up his phone. Maybe he’d stop bothering at all. 

Giyuu doesn’t do any of it.

The sunglow is near blinding now, afterimages floating and dancing with every blink. 

Breath mists over bare, snow-stained lips in a sharp exhale. 

And he shoves his poles into the ground to begin his descent. 

“Hey!” 

The voice comes from behind him, unfamiliar and sharp. 

Giyuu skids to a heart-pounding halt. 

Snow jets before him at the sudden stop, as he whips his head over his shoulder. 

Standing beneath the first light is a man clad in green.

He balances gracefully on a battered old snowboard of the same color, hands hanging casually by his hips. Tufts of ivory hair poke out beneath an equally white helmet, a pair of thick goggles obscuring his eyes.

He could almost be an apparition of the elevation.

To Giyuu’s dismay, he isn’t.

He’s picked up the helmet he discarded into the snow.

And he’s beginning to glide over. 

“You,” he shouts the closer he gets, pointing at him with one gloved finger. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Giyuu blinks. 

Beneath his own gloves, he feels his palms slick with sweat.

Right now? Actually?

This really can’t be happening right now. 

Wetting his lips, he manages to croak out just as the snowboarder stops at his side — 

“I’m going down.”

“Down a double black? Without a helmet?” A scoff fogs before the jagged curve of his mouth. “Do you have a death wish?”

They’re close enough now that Giyuu can make out the faintest outlines of scars, rupturing what few slivers of skin are visible beneath layers of scarves and masks. The lacerations ripple along the man’s jaw, as he continually unhinges it to shout at him.

“I watched you throw it away. I don’t give a shit if you think you’re so much better than everyone else here that you don’t need it —”

A hard mass is then unceremoniously shoved into his chest — 

“— but nobody wants to see you brain yourself on these slopes. Put it on or don’t go down at all.” 

Fingers curling around the hollow curve of the damn helmet, Giyuu suddenly feels annoyance scorch its way, Fireball-hot, through his veins. He’d purposely chosen the break of day because nobody else was supposed to be out here. Nobody to talk to or close-call dodge or hallucinate ghostly flickers of rust in.  

Now he has a stranger barking assumptions that are only half-true. His ears are ringing, and it’s not from the altitude —

Though he feels sick enough all the same. 

“You’re not seriously trying to die, are you?” 

Cold laughter creaks through Giyuu’s throat — a single syllable of sound.

“That was not my intention,” he finally spits back, and hopes he sounds as venomous as he feels. “Leave me alone.” 

His second attempt to drop down the piste doesn’t go far.

Because someone is now clenching a hand around one of his poles. 

Giyuu sighs and yanks. Pulls harder when he doesn’t budge.

The man only plops down after his third attempt.

“What are you —”

“Put it,” the snowboarder sounds out, “the fuck on.” 

What a cosmic joke his existence was. It could have almost been funny. 

Giyuu is tempted to throw the helmet at him. 

But the itching need to get the hell out of there wins over childish pettiness.

He shoves the stupid thing over his stupid skull, jerking the strap tight enough to cut white across his chin, and promptly wrenches his pole back into its rightful place. 

“Happy?” he says. 

The stranger pops back upright with a huff. 

Giyuu can’t make out his expression beneath the layers and plastic and foam covering his face — 

But he somehow senses the sarcastic eye-roll anyway.

“Overjoyed,” the man says dryly.

Giyuu stabs his poles into the snow, hefting himself forward with a graceful shove.

“Stay out of my way,” is all he bothers throwing over his shoulder, before he finally, finally, takes off down the summit.

This run is one he knows well. The novelty wore off about five years ago, though he doesn’t bother thinking too hard on the coincidental timing. He knows which curves are the most treacherous and which ones he can afford to shoot down like a star. Which spots freeze roughly in the night and which are softer than clouds. 

Sagiri is as familiar to him as the dip in his elbow and the river of his arteries. He has scaled then sunk her uneven flanks more times than he could ever dream of counting. He’s seen her flushed with spring and he’s seen her losing hair to bitter colds. His lungs have long carved themselves into the shape of her winter’s solstice, grown to expect the biting prickle of ice during the longest nights of the year as he flung himself off boulders and somersaulted through frigid air.

All that time, and Giyuu had never once thought to fear her. Not her backcountry, not her bunny hills. 

Even threatening concussions and broken ribs and snapped wrists, Sagiri was his favorite place in the world, second only to the beating-then-not heart of home. Steeped in peril, dressed in morbidity, cloaked with blizzards, Sagiri has always been beautiful to him — morning, noon, and night. 

Dying on the slopes was always a possibility anywhere, albeit slim. 

Then again, Sabito had gone ahead and done just that.

Illness swims in the vestiges of Giyuu’s vision, sudden enough to buckle his knees. He doesn’t fall, only rights himself on a skid of his skis, catching icicles on his tongue when his lips part in an aborted gasp.

Blood rushes wildly in his ears as he glances over his shoulder. 

He’s made it about halfway down the slope. It’s difficult to discern the top of the peak now, tucked away behind curtains of balding junipers. 

Shakily, he claws in another breath. Clings onto air until his chest burns in protest. Lets it limp out of him like a sick horse someone needs to put down.

In the distance, the sun is rising. 

There’s still a long way to go.

And someone else is dancing down the trails he’s already carved out.

Giyuu watches the nameless snowboarder rip through the terrain like a bullet through ice. Seas of snow part beneath the unforgiving inertia of his body as he waltzes this way and that, never losing control, only ever toying cruelly with the edge of it. 

When the man veers past him, he doesn’t shout or taunt or even look his direction. 

He only sends a second icy spray his way with a soft breath of wind. 

Giyuu’s fingers tighten around his poles.

Tree branches shudder when Sagiri blows, and the weeping willow of his hair trembles in the wake of a stranger’s momentum. 

Soon enough, the lifts will crank their way up the summit with bodies. Tourists who didn’t get their passes for Niseko in time, old-timers who promised they’d stop the next time they tore their knees on a double black, gapers who have yet to figure out how to fit their helmets. 

(Once, there were two kids who rode those same lifts too, shaking gathered snow off their bodies like crows, laughing loud enough to be nuisances, because danger didn’t mean a thing to them just yet.)

((Those children are long gone.

Only one is in the dirt.))

Giyuu’s eyes trail the dangling chairs grinding their way up the ridge. The lone snowboarder shrinks into a viridescent dot the farther ahead he goes. 

He remembers, dazedly, he is supposed to move.

The remainder of the run passes in a nauseating blur. He feels the rush of wind cutting his cheeks. His heart doesn’t pound even as his stomach drops. Sensation quickly reaches its upper limit, which isn’t very high at all.

He blinks —

And he’s coming to a halt at the very bottom. 

Stripping off his gloves, he tosses them to the ground. Does the same for his helmet, then his goggles. 

Immediately, wintry air sizzles around his overheating skin, bare bite of nails digging into palms as Giyuu closes his eyes. He’s dizzy in a way that can only come from adrenaline struggling to find a place to go. Seven missed calls lie heavy in his pocket, and so does the single shooter he brought because he’d only anticipated needing one. He wonders if he could shove his insides around like furniture until the ghosts can make it through the haunted house for just one night without making a fuss of their journey home. He wonders if hauntings made without noise or witness can even be called hauntings at all. 

Sagiri’s pinprick peak glows crimson in the light. Brilliant, like blood spilt on snow. 

The brightest red anyone could ever see. 

He clutches onto the vanishing point like a lifeline in an avalanche.

“You made it, huh.” 

Giyuu hears the familiar cut of snow against fiberglass as a blur of white and green lumbers up to him. His jaw clenches. 

He wants annoyance. He wants the silence of twenty minutes ago. 

He wants to try again. Take two. Fuck it up. 

Break a leg or neck.

He can only summon enough strength to mutter, “I knew I would.” 

Wasn’t that the most disheartening thing of all.

The man, when Giyuu finally swivels his head to look, has shed his gear too. 

Wisps of snow-white hair hide mapline scars, tributaries criss-crossing over his forehead then his brow then his nose. Patches of tan skin flush a ruddy red from exertion and cold. 

Yet, the apples of his cheeks pale beneath the force of his stare: the lilac of skies a minute after blue hour. 

Irises like satellite typhoons glare back at him, and Giyuu can only wonder, faint, if he’s about to get shouted at again. For his poor form or etiquette or safety protocol. For stopping in the middle of the run like an idiot. For coming down second and last even when he left first, the way he always did.

“What’s your name?” is what the man decides to say instead.

The only thing Giyuu can think to fire back is, “So you can curse me out properly?”

A snort, only half derisive.

“Alright. Sanemi.”

“What?”

“Call me Sanemi.” 

Giyuu breathes in again.

Air drips through stalactite lungs.

It condenses on the floor of his ribs. 

Curdles like black mold and grout.

“Giyuu,” he mutters. 

“Giyuu,” Sanemi repeats, rolling his name beneath his tongue. It sharpens into a dagger it has never been before. “Giyuu, ride with me one more time.”

It’s not a request. 

Normal people would have requested. And Giyuu would have refused.

“...What?” he echoes dumbly.

But the snowboarder — Sanemi — is already strapping his helmet back on, lowering his goggles over those storm-dyed eyes. 

“I’m not going easy,” he warns. “Keep up.” 

There is no reason Giyuu should even deign to follow him as he kicks off down the gentle hill, meandering his way back to the whirring lifts. He hasn’t shared slopes with anyone else for half a decade, much less with someone who doesn’t even study his same sport. 

He knows next to nothing about the man, except the ticket of a name he so thoughtlessly gave him, the timbre of his voice when it rises against him, and the fact he snowboards just like Sagiri storms — a dance on the edge of fatal. 

Yet —

“Oi!” Sanemi shouts, gesturing rudely at him from the awaiting chair. “You coming?”

Seven missed calls go unanswered. It was supposed to be his last ride. 

Giyuu stutters in another sigh. 

And for some reason, Sanemi waits. 

And for some reason, he follows.

Nobody has called after him in a long time. Now, his name toes the line of near-extinction, a breathless chant invoked only when Sakonji calls every few months to ensure he hasn’t walked into the nearest highway blind. It’s no longer a gentle whistle to come home, a look over the shoulder to see if he’s close behind, a secret shared like adoration. There is no more sister, no more mother, no more best friend to check that their brother, son, partner was still around. Just a pseudo-father that wasn’t even his father, making sure he hadn’t made a plan just yet, even though he knows damn well Tomioka Giyuu never makes any plans. 

Still, Sagiri whispers echoes of it in the branches they used to crash into. 

And the papercut of his existence chafes his lips, his cheekbones, the valleys between his fingers, when Sanemi ruthlessly summons him into being once more. 

Giyuu doesn’t know, really, why he told Sanemi that name. 

Tsutako had never liked Sabito’s choice of vice. She loved everything else about the boy, even the occasional temper tantrums and dirty playfights in the yard and one-too-many quips about doing things like a proper man. She said he brought her baby brother alive in ways she hadn’t seen since their parents went to forever-rest beneath headstones she’d scrambled to buy, because she was only fifteen then, and fifteen year-olds weren’t supposed to know how to arrange funerals or request cremations or pluck bones from ashes. 

She hated the skiing though.

For years, they’d lived beneath Sagiri’s shadow. Sabito’s home was practically one hopscotch away from theirs, and Giyuu spent just as much time in his bedroom as he did his own. 

One day, he had spotted the bulky pair of skis and boots spilling haphazardly out the overflowing closet, and he’d wondered out loud what exactly that was.

Sabito, missing one tooth at the time, had grinned like he’d been waiting decades for Giyuu to ask. They were only six.

“Try it out with me?” he’d said, boyish and elated. 

The decision was not so much a decision as it was instinct.

If it was Sabito’s favorite thing in the world, then Giyuu would make it his, too.

So he ate snow more times than he could count. His knees trembled as he skirted down cliffsides, shins aching and splitting in the tight claw of boots. He chipped his tooth and cut his chin and sprained his ankle but never broke it.

He was not afraid of heights, but anybody’s stomach would lurch if the only way to reach the bottom of the world was to fall.

But Sabito had always been there, every time. He’d pick him up from the yard sales he tumbled his way into, gathering his scattered skis and gently shoving his foot back into rightful place and wiping away any stray tears before they had the chance to freeze. He’d let him cling onto his pole for a headstart, and when his limbs eventually grew uncoordinated with adolescence, he’d let him hold his hand instead. 

Tsutako wished he wouldn’t. 

It’s too dangerous, she’d scold him, near desperate, each night he returned from the mountains. You’ve already hurt yourself. Sabito will hurt himself too.

Giyuu would counter with the same statistics he had already been told. Accidents were common. Fatal ones were rare. They numbered one in a million.

I just want you to stay safe, Tsutako had relented after the fifth or sixth not-a-fight, scrubbing her knuckles over his head and kissing him hard on the temple. You’re my only brother, you know.

There was another indisputable fact, incontrovertible piece of data, that Giyuu did not tell her. 

Though, he figured, she knew it well enough all the same —

Nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine other times, Urokodaki Sabito would be there to put him, Tsutako’s one and only little brother, right back together. 

Tomioka Tsutako was his only sister too.

Tomioka Tsutako died the night she returned from her graduation party, when a wasted bastard plowed right through her sternum. Twenty years-old.

One in two thousand.  

Sanemi snowboards with an angry undertow that can only have come from years upon years of practice.

He skillfully evades ice patches and hidden stones that would have felled anyone lesser. He coasts his way past ravines and yawning gorges without blinking an eye. He does it all knowingly, like he’s run through the motions a million times before already. 

And when the terrain dips then rises again, he throws himself right off it, seemingly uncaring of whether he’ll land or not. Most times, he does — twisting his body with the grace of an archer, wielding his board like a mere extension of himself — before skidding back over snow. Shot landed. Bullseye. 

It’s not reckless. 

Just scorched-earth steady.

Numbness cloaks Giyuu’s body, down to the tips of his fingers, as he slips off the whining gondola yet again. 

Sanemi takes him to another trail on the opposite end of the peak. It’s just as drop-dead steep as the run they’d survived earlier, only with a few more bumps and boulders. He says nothing to Giyuu the entire ride up, only brushing snow off his knees and swinging his free leg to and fro. 

There is enough distance between them to fit a third person.

He waits as long as it takes for Giyuu to ready himself, before he takes off in a flurry.

They’re on their fourth run after the first-last one, when he finally bites the bullet. 

“Why are you doing this?”

Sanemi’s somehow extracted a Red Bull from his sleeve while he hadn’t been looking. He cracks it open on the edge of his board and licks the foam bubbling off the top before answering.

“Doing what?” he gurgles on the tail-end of a swallow. 

“Spending time with me.”

The chair creaks and swings in the wind. It used to make Giyuu nauseous, even with the metal bar pressed reassuringly into his stomach. 

Now, he only swallows motion sickness. Chases it with sleeping pills that never work. 

“Well,” Sanemi says dryly, “I was going to ride alone today. But then I saw an idiot try to go down a double black diamond without a helmet. Now I have to make sure he doesn’t accidentally kill himself on my one day off.”

So what if he goddamn does? 

“Why do you care what happens to me?” Giyuu translates. 

He cannot make out the shape or inflection of Sanemi’s hurricane stare behind his heat-map goggles. 

He feels the weight of it like frostnip anyway.

“The rescuers will,” is all Sanemi says, and turns away.

Sagiri passes beneath them, undulating like waves. Tiny bodies streak down her snow-capped peaks, zigzagging between towers and trees, carving snakes into brilliant powder. His lungs have adored threadbare mountain air since he was a child. 

It’s suddenly agony to breathe anyway.

“Oh,” he whispers. 

The first time Sabito taught him how to fly, they were ten. Giyuu’s world had not ended just yet, and home was still the give and take of two beating hearts. There was the one he’d never known life without, and the other that had come hopscotching into his backyard at six.

That day, they were coming down from an afternoon on the slopes. All he had wanted to do was flop into bed and snore the light away, but Sabito had refused. 

His littlest and newest heart had grabbed onto Giyuu’s sleeve and hauled him back in line as the last lifts of the day were about to close. 

“Just one more ride,” he’d cajoled. “Last one, best one, okay?”

It was a filthy lie. 

“You’re joking,” Giyuu could only stammer out as he eyed the rolling hills jutting out the mountainside and the skiers launching themselves off half-moon pipes. 

“I swear, it’s like riding a bike.” 

“Filthy liar.” 

Sabito grinned, all braces and acne and half-moon dimples. 

Still, his hand was steady in Giyuu’s. 

Even with the thick fabric barricading them, he could feel the reassuring squeeze of his fingers around his. 

“Giyuu,” he said. “You’ve followed me all this way, yeah?”

Unfortunately, Giyuu wanted to shoot back, even if that would make him a filthy, dirty, stupid liar too. 

Sabito began gently pulling him down the slopes, toward the imposing divots in the ground. Giyuu could feel himself beginning to shake again, in a way he hadn’t shaken since the first time he’d seen the end of the lift coming without knowing a damn thing about how to get off it. 

But before Sabito could throw him off the deep end, literally, he paused. 

Confessed, near shyly, like he’d done something wrong —

“I want to go to the Olympics one day.”

“Oh.” 

For some reason, Giyuu wasn’t surprised. It seemed inevitable. Sunlight glowed pink on snow. Sagiri was beautiful every time of the year. 

And Sabito was always destined for greater things than this cowardly corner of Hokkaido. 

“You could,” Giyuu stumbled to say, when the boy just stared back at him. “You could do it.” 

“Giyuu,” he said again, exasperated, yet the warmest thing around. “I’m asking if you’ll follow me, just a little bit more.” 

Don’t you know yet? Giyuu would fling himself right off the face of Sagiri if Sabito was already halfway down. Maybe he would complain, and maybe he would be terrified. 

But what was a little ramp?

His fingers still quivered, and his heart still thundered. It stormed even harder as Sabito’s thumb traced over his own, as Giyuu squeezed his hand right back and said, pinky-promise, hopscotch-love —

“Show me how.”

(“Skiing,” Sabito told him once, when he ran out of statistics to share, “is just controlled falling.” 

Upon hearing that, Giyuu had only laughed. It was ridiculous. Even more amusing than the fact that Sabito had taken it upon himself to drag him kicking and screaming to the Olympics behind him. Of course it was, and of course this was the sport he’d chosen.

Because Sabito could shred through air like he was made of hollow bones. 

And Giyuu had already been plummeting, hopeless and certainly helmet-less, long before he’d ever fallen for Sagiri.)

Gone is the pink lemonade flush of dawn, and in its place are skies as blue as the Pacific.

The hills dew with sun crust and momentary thaw. They glisten bright like spilt glitter and SOS signals in the corner of his vision. 

Giyuu finds himself sitting at the base of a great evergreen tree, occasionally catching flecks of snow that drift off the branches every time another snowboarder or skier rumbles by. One run beneath him, amateurs and professionals leap off rolling ramps and pipes — 

The very same valleys they used to ride too. 

He can’t help but stare. Can’t help but think of gold medals and glory days that never came. All the dreams he’d crammed into moving boxes as childhood departed him without second chance. 

There’s an ache pulsing in the small of his back. Soreness blooms between his shoulderblades. It’s expected for any unpracticing athlete — he’d spent weeks lulling in the rancid thick of his own doldrums, after all, before finally dragging his skis out the closet, packing them into his shitty old car, and driving out to Sagiri’s slopes. 

Perhaps throwing himself down all those black diamonds, skirting the abyssal calls just inches beyond the edge of his ski without even a warm-up, took its toll on him.

(Or maybe, just maybe, he was tired of hefting around all those old hand-me-down aspirations.)

Giyuu reaches up and unclasps his helmet. Pressing it beside his knee, he musses a hand through his hair. It must look a mess — undeniably sweat-stained, flattened to his skull from his own humidity. 

Tangled strands stick to his forehead as he closes his eyes and presses his face into his knees. 

He doesn’t know what he’s doing here. 

It had snowed all night on the drive over. Dandelion tufts of white filled the roads, melted on his crusty windshield, scraped against the hood of the car. Giyuu should have been elated. He thought, pow days were the best days to ride. He thought, five years ago he would’ve been. 

Then, he thought —

It’s been five years. 

So he’d thrown his car right into park, took nothing but the bare minimum, and clawed his way up to the highest point he knew, hours before the sun ever rose.

Giyuu had come without a plan. Sakonji would argue he had hopes anyway. Sakonji would tell him, gruff, that the two were one and the same. Tsutako would have agreed. It has been eight years since she was around. Eight is much closer to a decade than five. Children go through entire schools within eight years. People round up to ten from eight. He forgets things from even eight days ago. 

(The sound of her imagined nagging comes only in the shape of Giyuu’s own voice now.)

He had no plan.

So now he pays the price.

Hours must have passed by now. Even if he doesn’t turn his phone back on to check, he can tell that much by the waning length of the shadows, ticking like blue clock hands across scattered pearl. 

In the distance, a kid tumbles her day down a ramp. Someone hollers out a laugh — a begrudging parent, or an instructor proven right. 

Giyuu briefly contemplates just sitting there until dark, before crawling his way back down the mountain. He could walk-of-shame his way back to his janky, past-its-prime Subaru and drive halfway back to the city before breaking down on the side of the road, because he hadn’t checked his gas tank before leaving, and he doesn’t remember fetching gas for a long time. 

(Maybe he could call Sakonji to come get him.)

((Giyuu thinks he would rather really, truly, actually die.))

Before he can veer too far down the slope of that thought —

Shhhhhk.

He hears the telltale hiss of shredding snow.

Peeking one eye open, Giyuu glances above the crook of his elbow just in time for a jade blur to douse him in a cloud of cold and white.

Heaven help me, is the only thing he can think as he cranes his neck —

Only to be greeted with the sight of one Sanemi glaring back down at him. 

“How long are you gonna sit there?” he demands.  

Giyuu blinks powder out his eyes, brushing a single knuckle through the icicles crusting his lashes shut.

“Was that necessary?” he asks in lieu of answering.

Huffing through his nose, Sanemi fiddles with his gloves. He stuffs them into his pocket, revealing thick, knobbly fingers that shove down his mask then rip off his goggles.

“’ve passed you twice now. Don’t think you’ve noticed a thing.”

It’s hard to miss Sanemi whenever he bullets his way down the slopes. It’s near impossible, really. 

He commands all sight and sound.

Giyuu doesn’t voice this opinion.

He watches instead as the snowboarder squats then crouches down with a grunt. 

He watches, and wishes he could shove that alpine anguish back into the creaky pipes of his heart from which it leaked.

“You don’t have to stay with me all day,” is all he says instead. “I’m fine now.” 

Sanemi just makes another near-disgruntled noise in response. 

“It’s your day off,” Giyuu continues quietly.

“No need to keep reminding me.” 

“So you should go.” 

“You have to go down sometime.” 

“You don’t know me,” Giyuu frowns.

Sanemi’s chewing at his lip. When beads of crimson well up from tooth marks and cracks, he deftly sucks them away.

“I know,” he says, uncareful, “that you’re a stubborn asshole. I know you’re practically foaming at the mouth to do something stupid.”

Ah, there it is again, that flicker of annoyance. It warms him up, stomach to soul, far more than the Fireball ever did.

Giyuu clings onto it like a moth to flame. 

“You shouldn’t —”

“And,” Sanemi tramples right through his protest, “I know you’re pretty damn good at this.” 

He shuts his mouth.

“Got you covered, don’t I?” 

The snowboarder idly scratches at his forehead, nail ghosting over the criss-cross intersection of two deep scars. Sunlight drips with perspiration down his temples, slipping over his cheeks. It ignites the mahogany of long-healed wounds. Turns the evidence that hurt had come but left its keys on the table into poppy fields. 

(They do that, scars: glow like light under water when the sun strikes right.)

((His had always danced the same too.))

Something sour curdles in his throat, acrid like aftertaste vomit. 

Giyuu tears his gaze away, but Sanemi doesn’t gloat over the win.

He just sits back on his hands, bare palms to ice, and makes no move to get up.

“I bet you haven’t eaten anything yet,” he guesses out loud. “We’re close to the lodge. We should go.”

Clouds roll over the sun, for just a moment. 

They blot out the stained glass window of Sanemi’s unbroken-broken face.

Giyuu closes his eyes again. A snowdrop he’d missed in his haste to wipe his eyes drips its way into the corner of his mouth. 

It tastes like salt and sea.

“One more minute,” he murmurs. 

It’s not a test, but Sanemi doesn’t have to adhere anyhow. He could up and leave, ditch him with another shot to the face, kick Giyuu right off the mountain, and he would understand.

He waits, still.

Coughing up clouds of tempura-tinged smoke through a red brick chimney, the lodge is a cabin no bigger than his own palm. It could go from cozy to cramped to claustrophobic in a blink of an eye. But back when Giyuu was still small enough to fit into his first pair of skis, sneaking hot chocolate out the kitchen because he only ever indulged in sweets on the slopes, it had felt as wide as the rest of the world.

Sanemi navigates the unforgiving labyrinth of misplaced chairs and skewed tables with ease, dodging then elbowing his way up to the front. When he gets there, he orders enough to seemingly feed a small village, wrestling Giyuu’s arm away when he tries to pay.

“Fuck off and make sure nobody’s stolen our stuff,” Sanemi says with a teeth-clenched glare, smacking Giyuu’s flaking wallet back into his pocket, to the chagrin of the weary cashier. 

So Giyuu is banished to their corner. He pours himself back into the chair with a sigh, shedding his coat and pressing his temple to the ice-cool window. 

Their vantage point overlooks the easy-sloping hills. Families of two or five or ten struggle their way up the T-bars, tripping then flailing in a scatter of limbs and laughter. Snowboarders as tall as his hip wobble their way down the littlest divots, and he watches as a toddler, practically a baby, waddles into a pair of skis the length of his arm. 

Giyuu is absently massaging a twinge out his own knee, fingers digging too hard into muscle and wasted atrophy, when he hears the clomp of Sanemi’s boots echoing through the food hall. 

A tray full of plates and bowls clatters to the table before them, nearly eclipsing its entire surface. There are stacks upon stacks of tempura, curry udon, fried rice and egg. Two black coffees steam out the mouth, surrounded by however many sugars could fit into one of Sanemi’s pockets.

The man dumps a single packet into his own mug before swigging it down. Giyuu feels his eye twitch when he remembers how Sanemi had crushed a Red Bull only a few hours before.

He must be exhausted, silently thuds the thought. He’d gotten up at the ass-crack of dawn to hit the slopes, as anyone sane and snow-loving would, and now he’s spent twice the money he ever needed to spend —

On someone like Giyuu, no less.

The age-old instinct to atone for something, anything — this blunder of an existence, this rudeness of being — gnaws at his stomach like hunger. 

But Giyuu is all empty. Skipped breakfast and religion. Threw up last night’s dinner and all the defenses he had left. Hopscotched right over all the proper, repentant things to do. 

He cannot offer anything except his own willing absence. 

He can only track the bend of Sanemi’s back as he slouches his way into the chair, the blue shadows beneath caffeine-caked eyes as he burns his mouth on his coffee. 

Without the armor of an ivory-white helmet guarding his view, it’s much easier to track the wing of his lashes. How they cast flimsy shadows, thin and long, over his cheeks. How those cheeks remain boyishly round, despite the fact they must be the same age. 

How they puff up with frustration and half-chewed noodles when he reaches out to shove a plate of tempura Giyuu’s way.

“You just gonna stare all day?” he grumbles. “I got one of everything. There’s bound to be something here you like.”

Giyuu takes just the coffee, holding it up to his lips. Bitterness coats his mouth, sliding like bile and sludge down his throat. 

His nose twitches in instinctive repulsion, but he swishes it around his teeth before swallowing anyway. 

Lunch crowds fill the lodge with white noise. The smell of fried foods and tired bodies and fresh snow wafts in from outside. The baby on the skis has given up and now clings to her father’s shoulders to wail in frustration.

Rooted right at the edge of the hubbub, they eat in silence. 

Well, Sanemi eats. Giyuu nibbles. 

He hasn’t been very hungry since the day before, or the day before that, but Sanemi doesn’t need to know.

As unpracticed as he is with skiing now — more well-acquainted with his bed in the dark than blue bird days — Giyuu is even clumsier with words. He hasn’t had to relearn this, this speaking-and-making-nice thing, since childhood. He found one good thing and convinced himself he would have it forever. Incidents numbering one in thousands and millions never happened to anyone, except the one, and he would never be the one.

(He wasn’t. That much was true.)

((It was always, always someone else.))

So he doesn’t know where to start anymore. Perhaps the logical conclusion would be the one commonality they share, Sagiri. He could ask Sanemi why he didn’t go for the tourist traps or the bigger resorts. Could ask him why he’d settled on this one corner of Hokkaido, where the snow came the latest and the winters bit the worst. Could ask him what he does for work that has him twisting his face in barely disguised disdain when he references his one day off. 

Could ask him whether he runs hot or cold. If he’s broken any bones. Why he snowboards like he’s trying to outrun something.

Could ask him to ignore the fact that he’s even here. Sorry you had to see me like this, do you mind forgetting all about it? 

Could tell him, I don’t know what I was doing. 

Could convince himself, I wasn’t going to do anything.

(Could swear, cross his heart, hope to die —

I think I came here to do something.)

Giyuu opens his mouth. He’ll make up his mind. He’ll just say something. Anything. As long as it’s not incriminating or idiotic or insane. 

His fingers tighten around the mug until the burn seeps into his bones. 

Alright. Come on. He skis black diamonds, for fuck’s sake. He’ll just spit it out. 

He inhales sharply, air on the tip of his tongue —

Riiiiing.

Sanemi startles in his chair, swearing softly under his breath as he roots around his jacket. 

Giyuu stares helplessly as he pops out his phone, squinting into the screen and holding it too close to his face.

“Hey,” he answers. 

A warbled voice, pulled apart by crappy mountainside service, blasts from the speakers. 

“Sanemi-i-i! You busy?”

“I answered you, didn’t I?”

For as long as Giyuu has known Sanemi existed, he has always sounded gruff. There was no moment in the six-hour stretch they’d known the other where he didn’t sound gruff. 

But between one staticky breath and the next, his shoulders slump. 

Tension unravels itself from the tangled cords of his body, slipping to the floor beneath them like a too-heavy coat. The cross scrunch between his brows smooths, the vexed storm above his head fizzles right out, and —

A smile stumbles its way back to his mouth. 

It arrives home late, but flicks on the lights anyway. 

And Sanemi is a window, tangerine shine in the blue.

“I’m getting lunch right now,” he tells the person on his phone. “You wanna see?”

They hum, “D’you get the curry? You know I like the curry.”

“Of course.” 

Then, Sanemi jerks up, like he’s just remembered something. Violet eyes glance his way, and Giyuu promptly freezes.

“Listen, sorry. I can’t talk too long today,” the snowboarder says, staring at him. “But you need anything?”

“Oh? Not really. I’m all good. Just figured you’d be eating by now.” A pause. “You with someone?”

It’s the cue Sanemi takes to flash his screen at Giyuu. 

He’s met with the spitting, chubby-faced image of Sanemi, if he had three fewer scars, darker brows, and a mane of midnight-black hair.

“Genya, this is Giyuu. Giyuu, Genya,” white-haired, four-scarred Sanemi says. “My brother.”

“Hi, Giyuu,” Genya chirps.

“Hello,” Giyuu mutters in return, though Sanemi’s already snatching his phone back before he can even summon the word.

“Giyuu skis,” he explains curtly.

“Sanemi,” his brother says.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I’m just surprised! You never like riding with people. You said they just trip you up! Even I had to —” 

“You’re on speaker,” Sanemi reminds him loudly.

“What? Really?”

“You Facetimed me.”

“Oh —”

“Anyway, Giyuu’s — fine.” There’s a strange flush to his cheeks now, which Giyuu passes off for the lodge’s warmth. It is getting stuffy. “He can do all the same runs as me.”

That’s when Giyuu takes his leave of the conversation, the easy back-and-forth ribbing and teasing that never breaks skin. 

He never likes when people speak of him in front of him. They had done the same thing at the funerals, in the news reports, at the hospital morgue. Eulogized his life like a museum exhibit when he was still there in the crowd: how statistically rare is sole survivorship, shoot a pitying glance his way, there’s your answer. 

Rare enough. 

The raspy drone of Sanemi’s voice fades into a hum so constant and cosmic he imagines only a telescope aimed point-blank at his heart would be able to parse out. 

Left with nothing else to do, he finds himself fumbling around with his own phone.

He traces a nail over the meshed cracks, years and years of documented clumsiness. It’s a miracle the old thing still works at that point.

When he powers it on, the screen flickers alive to a low battery warning and three new missed calls.

That makes ten. 

Stomach sinking, Giyuu shuts it back down.

Jamming his chin into his wrist, he stares back out at the slopes. The snow glistening beneath the steadily aging light, melting then freezing then melting again. 

Eventually, the clamor inside thins only slightly, as a rowdy group of teens pushes their way back into the cold. Sanemi glances at the clock on the wall and bids his brother goodbye with a promise to do a perfect run in his name, not that that was ever a question, before tossing his phone back on the table.

“Sorry about that,” he mutters, digging back into the curry.

Giyuu chews his lip. 

His tempura has gone cold and untouched. 

“Your brother,” he makes himself say, stilted and stitched together. “Older?”

Sanemi nearly chokes on a piece of rice.

“God, no,” he coughs out. “Younger.”

“Oh.”

With that failure of a question, Giyuu goes back to plugging his mouth with bitter, shitty coffee.

But presented with an open line, Sanemi snatches onto it, nearly greedily. 

“How long’ve you been skiing? I meant it. You’re good.” 

Perhaps his conversation with his little brother had put him in a better mood than before. That’s understandable. God knows what one measly minute with Tsutako would do for — 

Giyuu crumples up that thought quickly. 

His heart is extra leaky today, he thinks near hysterically, as he downs the rest of the mug — dregs and all. 

“I was six,” he answers belatedly. 

“Seven,” Sanemi supplies. 

“Sagiri?” 

“Yeah. The whole time.” 

Giyuu pushes his empty cup aside, scratching at the bend of his wrist. 

So he wasn’t hallucinating it: Sanemi is nearly as familiar with this mountain as he is. What coincidence. What chance. He wonders if they ever passed one another on a bunny hill or crashed into the other on the way down. If they were parallel lines on opposite sides of the peak, front then back, light years apart even if they were only one chairlift separated. 

Sagiri is big, but not all that big. 

He wonders if he would have remembered someone like Sanemi, should they have met before.

He likes to think he would have.

“I live in Sapporo,” Sanemi says suddenly. “I substitute teach for high schoolers.” 

It’s a merciful opening, is what it is. Tossed at him like bait, a little pitifully. It should be embarrassing.

Giyuu takes it for what it is.

Hooks ice-slick fingers around it until he bleeds.

“What do you teach?” he asks.

“Math.”

“Oh. Do you like math?”

Sanemi’s mouth twitches. 

“Would I teach math,” he retorts, “if I hated it?”

Another failure. Maybe it’s the Fireball fumbling. 

Giyuu knows it isn’t.

“I don’t know,” he mutters. “People usually hate their jobs, so I thought you hated yours.”

“When did I ever say that?”

“You sounded like it earlier.”

“Kids can get annoying, sometimes. High schoolers, especially,” Sanemi concedes. “Doesn’t mean I hate it.” 

Giyuu picks up a floppy shrimp tempura just to have something to do with himself. The twitch comes back in Sanemi’s face. It might be all that caffeine he drank.

“What do you do, then?” the snowboarder prods.

Rubbery meat sticks to the crevices of his molars as Giyuu chews through an answer. Teaching requires extensive schooling, or so he’s heard. Sanemi must have known for years he’d wanted to teach, even if it was only substituting. There was that time Giyuu tried his hand at retail, only to be dishonorably dismissed when his manager quickly found out he had zero knack for talking or smiling at, well, anybody. He had a just-as-brief stint trying to get some drawings into art shows, but all his best work had still turned out an irredeemable mess. He had thought about joining the mountain patrol, even though the pay wasn’t great, and he’d once been told that the moment he grew old enough he could — but things happened, so he didn’t. Since he’d sucked at drawing and was far too young to be trusted handling neither recovery nor rescue, he’d turned to writing like all failed twenty-somethings ended up doing, though every book he comes up with returns to him with the same tired complaint, time and time again — the ending is just too sad to sell. 

Mostly, though, he thinks about skiing. 

When he details this to Sanemi — because he asked, and because he paid for the food, and because he somehow is still sitting there, bathing in his lackluster light that could never start any fires, much less even warm — 

The man just twitches again. 

“Are you seriously alright?” Giyuu finally asks, but he doesn’t need to.

Because, he finds out, it isn’t a glitch of his muscle or a symptom of overdose. 

It’s just the way Sanemi smiles. 

“Fucking hell, Giyuu.” 

The tail end of the shrimp plops to the empty plate with a tiny clink. 

“You asked,” Giyuu points out, and part of him does wish he had another coffee, or water, or even a shooter would do, because his throat aches something fierce — and he thinks that’s the most he’s remembered he could say to anybody in a long, long time. 

Sanemi smothers a laughing snort behind a fist, shaking his head. 

“Genya would love you, alright,” is all he mutters, before tossing another piece of tempura his way. Sweet potato, this time. 

Giyuu picks it up, hummingbird heart in throat, and bites.

Slowly, the picture of Sanemi begins to come together. The calculus he teaches, the meals he likes to cook, the bars he frequents after a particularly irritating high schooler has hopped on his last nerve. Missing are the pieces of his heart, all those precious shards hidden beneath sun crust and scar. But Giyuu can pinpoint the spots of him that he’d broken on Sagiri’s boulders now, the places on his body his clearly beloved brother had bruised in playflights then cataclysmic arguments. He could almost even measure the angle of his smile when he talks about the people he loves, of which Giyuu currently only knows one. 

Sanemi tells him the story of the time Genya tried to eat their pet rhinoceros beetle, and there comes that half-moon grin, lifted just slightly higher on one side than the other. 

Giyuu’s plate empties as steadily as it refills. 

He slowly slots another piece into place. 

“Well, Giyuu,” Sanemi declares when every last one of the dishes has been picked clean and stacked, sweeping his board right off its perch by the windowsill. “Shall we?” 

In the fall line of the sun, he glows like daylight off snow. Giyuu wonders when, somewhere between the blue hours of the morning and the glaring afternoon brightness, it became that way. We should go. We should eat. We should run. We, us, our. 

Giyuu, Giyuu, Giyuu. 

(Papercuts sting. Solitude scabs deep.)

((But someone else knows his name.))

Sanemi is already halfway out the door, propping it open with one foot. 

Wordlessly, Giyuu picks up his skis and trails him out. 

He regrets it when Sanemi bodily hauls him up the dreadful T-bar for a slowly rolling blue.

They’ve got all day, and the black diamonds aren’t going anywhere. 

That, at least, is the excuse the snowboarder throws out before smoothly straddling the bar and letting it lug him up. Giyuu thinks he just wants to see him flail.

“Bet you think you’re too good for this, huh?” 

He definitely wants to see him flail. 

Still, Sanemi shoots the occasional look over his shoulder anyway, as if to check Giyuu hasn’t tumbled off somewhere along the ride.

He doesn’t know what to make of that, so he doesn’t.

It’s the busiest hour of the day, the hillside dotted with beginners berating the so-called friends that ditched them there to figure it out. They sidestep them to take the scenic route, a winding course overlooking the distant white-capped waves of the Japanese Alps. 

Sundrops streak through rupturing cloud cover, bannering them in indigo and ivory as they meander their way down.

Sanemi doesn’t rush this time, only glides wordless rivers by his side. Their pathways intertwine, radio wave rhythm. Where Sanemi carves, Giyuu intersects in parallel. 

X marks the spot of their crossings, helixes and infinities dancing their way down Sagiri’s face.

The mind-lulling motions only stop when they cruise their way right into a tangled heap of bodies, lying in the center of the course.

It’s a trio of snowboarders, in various states of shouting to crying. A boy with blue-frost tips, for some reason dressed in only a shirt and shorts, is yelling something about Gonpachiro’s fault, while the Gonpachiro in question just groans from where he’s half-buried in his green-checkered puffer. His legs are splayed over the prone body of his other wailing friend, whose blonde-dyed hair is covered in snow and scruff. 

Giyuu slows, puncturing one pole into the ground as Sanemi begins to chuckle under his breath.

“What are you brats doing,” he looms over them, much to their startlement, “blocking the pathway of everybody else?”

“Blame Kanzaburo —”

“Don’t mind Inosuke!” Gonpachiro-Kanzaburo flails his arms. “I’m so sorry! We’ve been falling for ten minutes!” 

“What’s your name, kid?” 

“Tanjiro! It’s Tanjiro, Inosuke! I’m — ahh, I’m so sorry, Zenitsu! Are you okay?!” 

Zenitsu yelps when Tanjiro tries to flip off his back, only to ram his head into Inosuke’s skull. It elicits another wave of rage from the rowdy young boy. 

“Sanemi,” the snowboarder says, loud enough to cut over the chaos. He jabs a thumb over his shoulder. “That guy over there’s Giyuu. He skis, so don’t mind him. Think you can crawl over to me for a second?” 

Granted permission to essentially stare, Giyuu sticks his other pole into the ground and sheds his gloves. He pops each knuckle, slowly flexing sore fingers, as Tanjiro shouts, grinning brightly even while wincing in pain — 

“I’ll try my best, Sanemi-san! Nice to meet you, Giyuu-san!” 

Sanemi fluidly backs a few paces down as Tanjiro painstakingly tries to wiggle his way out the pile.

“Use your knees, kid,” he says, bemused. 

“Shoot. Sorry.” The edge of his board whops Zenitsu in the head again. “Agh! Sorry!”

Eventually, Sanemi takes pity on the trio and reaches down to pull them up by hand. Inosuke insists he can pop up by himself, yelling something about duking it out with Sasuke as soon as they get to the bottom — “Sanemi, Inosuke, and don’t fight him!” hisses Tanjiro.

“Alright, stand like you normally would.” Sanemi brushes past Inosuke’s petulant grumbling. “Let me see something.” 

His head tilts in pursed-lip scrutiny as the kids line up before him, shoulders scrunched inward as if awaiting detention. He eventually skirts his way around them in a slow circle, nudging Tanjiro by the elbow. 

“Did you feel like you were moving too fast? You couldn’t control your speed?” They nod glumly. “It’s ‘cause you’re too heel-heavy. You’re using the entire bottom of the board. You’ve gotta get on the toe side. See how I’m doing it?” 

Propping his chin over his pole handles, Giyuu watches as Sanemi uncrosses his arms and bends his knees to demonstrate. 

“‘M scared I’m gonna fall,” Zenitsu mumbles. 

“That’s the reason you already fell, brat,” Sanemi shoots back. “Who even taught you?”

The sun inches its way forward, dipping into jagged horizons. Cobwebs of light scintillate the same way trees rustle in the summertime. If he listens closely enough, he can almost hear it — full heads of leaves swaying in the wind, gentle but never mocking laughter that followed whenever he wobbled his way down ant and bunny hills alike. 

Skiing is just controlled falling, a voice soft like Sagiri’s springmelts, cracking at the edges with adolescence, would remind him. Falling is par for the course.

It had never meant much when Giyuu was listening through another begrudging earful of snow.

Still, the hand had always been there to haul him to his feet. Had always brushed hair out his eyes and wounded pride off his back. 

Sanemi does the same now. Holds out his palm, ungloved and bare, to the kids who see-saw after him like a trail of ducklings. 

He’s in his element — not the snow or the freezing air, but instruction. He calls the children names and chides them for their idiocy, but he is never mean-spirited. He leads them down the slope, back turned toward the bottom, eyes only focused on the young boys before him. 

Giyuu isn’t the one moving. 

He feels his heart twinge with elevation drop anyhow.

“That’s it, you’re doing it,” Sanemi encourages, as teetering turns to trembling turns to ease. “Remember, alternate your edges. Perpendicular to brake.”

Inosuke breaks free from the group first, darting downhill in a storm of snow. Zenitsu is a little slower, a little more frightened still, as he follows after his friend, grumbling he’d just wanted a nice day at the hot springs. The complaint is drowned out by the noise of Inosuke’s jubilant yawping.

Tanjiro is the last to leave, struggling to swivel around and wave his arms wildly at them.

“Thank you for everything, Sanemi-san! I will work hard!” 

Sanemi shoos him off. “Go on, kid!” 

“Giyuu-san! I think it’s actually really cool that you ski! My sister skis too! She just started learning! Maybe you can help her if you see her, she’s got long brown hair, pink hat, super nice —”

Tanjiro’s yelling fades the farther downhill he gets, though he just cups both hands around his mouth to keep going. 

“— I hope I can meet you again! I’ll buy you a meal! An eating contest! Let’s do an eating contest! Thank you, Sanemi-san! Bye, Giyuu-san!”

“Watch where you’re going!” 

Sanemi manages to squeeze in a shout, before the trio is disappearing around the corner with one last cheer. The echoes of their joy linger even after they’re gone, high and bright like the clouds.

Only when the sounds vanish entirely does the snowboarder turn back toward Giyuu, flushed. He’s shaking his head, pressing a thumb to his temple. 

“Loud dumbasses,” he mutters, even with a smile snagged fond between his canines.

It returns to him slowly: the necessity of looking over his shoulder to check someone is following, the presence of a second shadow hovering just out the corner of his eye. The receding dream which was once memory, of what it was like to wander mountains with company. 

The rest of the blue run should go without any other incident. No more fledgling riders to train and no more edges to catch.

But Sanemi glides into an accidental standstill on a flat clearing looping around the valley, swearing softly under his breath and preparing to unstrap himself.

Giyuu automatically extends his pole behind him before he can.

He doesn’t need to look back to confirm Sanemi has latched on. He feels the weight of his fingers curling around the base, that same tight belligerence with which he’d yanked Giyuu off their first double black — snappish insults and all. 

He glances over anyway.

The shape of his own reflection swims and warps in Sanemi’s goggles.

“This usually doesn’t happen,” the snowboarder grumbles, holding tight to the end of Giyuu’s pole. “It’s ‘cause I’m sticking around you.”

Giyuu pulls him along anyway.

When Sanemi grows bored of the blues, which is rather quickly, he suggests the backcountry. Perhaps out of a need to nurse bruised pride that had no reason to be bruised. Giyuu doesn’t try to figure it out.

Sagiri off the piste is formidable even during the summers, all roaring cascades and foaming rapids. 

But when the waters freeze and snowbanks cake abandoned foxholes and keelback dens — 

That’s when she becomes deadly. 

Giyuu holds his breath as he swoops downhill and arcs over buried tree roots. Sanemi is right beside him, and then he isn’t, and then he is again, darting his way between shriveling trunks and ripe evergreens. Few other people etch figure eights and diamonds into the cliff face. Their twin tracks are the only ones on this side of the mountain. 

Occasionally Sanemi lets out a cackling laugh whenever he skids on an exceptionally close call, the breathless thrill of near-fatality stuttering through his veins like a whisky shot. 

The sound reaches Giyuu where he follows, six feet behind and not under. Cards through his hair like an exhale of relief. 

He holds it up, North Star in the rough, and chases. 

It’s strange, Giyuu thinks, even though he shouldn’t be thinking, he should be focusing on not dying here. It’s strange, how simple Sanemi makes it. Simple to click back into his skis even when his body protests, simple to pick up the poles even when he knows it’d be easier to let them rust. Simple to feel, again, be it annoyance, adrenaline, awkwardness —

Anything that is not bedfellow sorrow, sour in his sheets, deadweight in his heart.

He feels it, something that isn’t the acrid tang of last night’s dinner or the last years’ regrets, when Sanemi reaches out and loops two gloved fingers into the strap of Giyuu’s helmet to test the give.

He feels it, something that isn’t the rude blemish of unhappiness and missingness, when Sanemi slaps him upside the head and shoves the poles back into his hand. 

He feels it, something that, for just a second, isn’t awful, when Sanemi flips up his goggles, just so Giyuu can know he’s seeing him, and says —

“See you on the other side.”

But Sanemi leaves first. 

He traces constellations through withering forests as Giyuu lingers at the top of the ravine. 

And when Sanemi is gone, so too goes the feeling. Saliva pools in his mouth, sticky between his teeth. In the turbulent wake of someone else’s velocity, he’s left staring down everything he should have already buried. 

Giyuu stands at the edge of the world with poles in one hand, gravedigger shovel in the other. 

Because he remembers what it meant to ride with someone else —

But he remembers why he’d kept riding at all. 

(It was never meant to incite joy.)

((It was only funeral procession.))

Wind whispers in his ear, stirring the baby hairs curling behind his neck. 

Someone breathes against the slope of his cheek and darts past him in a blur of snow.

Giyuu looks over his shoulder to check, but no one else is there.

Just the sunlight settling in the trees, yellowing like aging photographs, like overripe peaches. Like the edges of an oil-spill bruise —

Spreading and spreading and spreading, until it becomes his entirety.

There are only so many roads leading to Sagiri, and only so many trails coming down. The backcountry, the black diamonds, the blues. 

And the one that weighs like the black-tie suit in the back of Giyuu’s closet, untouched since eight then five years ago.

He’s learned, over the years, the trick to curb the nausea of the heights wasn’t to chew foul-tasting gum or whale on pressure points until they stung. Nor was it to glare down at the skiers and snowboarders below them and laugh whenever one of them ate it, especially if they were the latter.

No, it was to look out at the horizon: the sand dunes of the Alps jutting out the earth, the distant ginger-yellow lights of Niseko, all the cities and white-block roads meandering up the northern mountainside.

Today, Giyuu does not look for the snowscape.

Sagiri’s lifts summit even her highest peak. The sun nestles like a phoenix over thick power lines and gangly cables.

And he cannot take his eyes off Sanemi.

Metal nails grind on chalkboard clouds, and the oncoming dusk sets the sky alight with strokes of tangerine and mauve and indigo. Yet, Sanemi’s hair is the only thing which shines dandelion-bright, like the moon has come out early too.

In the clementine glow, his features soften then dissolve altogether. Light sticks like sweat to the curve of his cheeks and the slightly bent ridge of his nose. His lavender irises more closely resemble the furious blush of Sagiri’s craggy stones, and in the setting sun, his scars are kintsugi gold, knitting the chipped porcelain of his face back together.

Steel grumbles coldly beneath their thighs as they sit together on the lift, close enough that the fiberglass of Sanemi’s board and Giyuu’s skis occasionally collides. What began as a third absence is now a mere sliver of space, so thin that should an errant gale blow into them, their knees might just brush.

He wonders if Sanemi knows any tricks to best the altitude too. If heights make his stomach swoop, no matter how many times he drops off them. He sure doesn’t act like it.

(Giyuu had thought he’d be frightened forever, after all.

Then the time had passed.)

((His pockets are all heavy again.

Filled with the lint of all the hours and days and months and years he had borrowed, then stolen.))

“Ah. Shit.”

The sound of Sanemi clicking his tongue jolts Giyuu out of his reverie.

“Think someone’s fallen in the front again,” he continues, craning his neck.

As if on cue, the chairs shudder to a halt.

Somewhere in the distance, a chorus of disgruntled groans sounds. One of the skiers in front of them flops their disappointed head over the back of the chair, banging helmet against metal.

As for them, they’re halfway through the steely claws of another tower. 

“We might be here a while,” Sanemi says with a sigh.

Left to dangle in the wind, the rocking motions are gentle. Nearly a lullaby.  

Beside him, an elbow suddenly knocks into his own.

Giyuu traces the movement — 

Only for his eyes to twitch when they land on the silver glint of another Red Bull can.

“Where do you keep getting those from?” he can’t help but ask as Sanemi leans forward, cracking it open on the edge of his board.

Foam bubbles furiously out the open mouth, no doubt exacerbated by the elevation.

“Deep pockets,” Sanemi grunts, licking it clean off —

Before he holds it out in a silent offer.

Giyuu doesn’t know why.

He takes it.

The tips of their gloves touch as he presses his lips where Sanemi had just brushed his tongue, tastes mountain-chilled aluminum and something vaguely like smoke on the edges of his teeth.

Overwhelming artificial sweetness fills his mouth when he takes a swig, sticking grossly in the crags of his canines.

Giyuu can’t help but shudder as if he’s just downed another Fireball, wrinkling his nose and handing it back.

A slow tilt teases at Sanemi’s mouth as he accepts it and drinks.

In their newfound stagnance, it’s easy to track the lilac contours of their shadows, etched into pink lemonade. The curve of Sanemi’s helmet and the bulky folds of his pants. The oblong shape of his board slicing into the twin lines of Giyuu’s legs.

A flash of green darts through rose, as somebody leaps off the hill right below them. 

They land in a cloud of coral, before zipping far away.

Giyuu watches, and he can’t help but think of that kid from the afternoon, the checkered puffer and the burn in his forehead hidden away by that clunky helmet. He thinks of how Sanemi had paused in the middle of the run just to pick them back up and teach them how to stand again. 

Then, he thinks of the person who had taught him in much the same way. 

The unwavering kindness of both.

Separated only by timing.

“Sanemi,” he finds himself muttering.

“What?”

“Why did you never teach snowboarding?” Giyuu clicks his skis together and watches the snow drift off. They fall like sundrops, sparkling with refracted light. “Those kids earlier today — you were a natural, handling them.”

For a long moment, he’s silent.

Winry torrents blow through Sanemi’s hair, sweeping alabaster bangs into eyes watering with the cold. There is the smallest cleft in his chin, Giyuu realizes. A purple shadow smudging the curve of his jaw where it comes to a point, twitching as he picks the question out from between his teeth.

He takes long enough to answer that Giyuu almost wonders if he’s somehow killed the conversation again before it even began.

But then Sanemi just pushes his tongue into his cheek, sucking in a breath.

He shrugs one shoulder and slumps back.

“I tried teaching my brother, once,” he says.

“Oh,” Giyuu replies slowly. “Genya?”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t he come today?”

“Genya doesn’t snowboard. He can’t,” Sanemi says, almost bitter, chasing the words with another gulp of battery acid. “He tore his ACL one season in.”

“Oh.”

Giyuu’s poles chime against the gondola as he wrings his hands.

It’s another piece of him that Giyuu can fit into place — one inch closer to the live, beating thing in his chest. Sanemi loves his brother. Sanemi taught his brother snowboarding.

Sanemi’s brother could not snowboard anymore.

There’s a cold weight to his admission. Like it angers him to even think about it.

Giyuu doesn’t know how he can take it away.

Doesn’t know why he wants to. 

He can only repeat words others had spoken to him, twice too many times in his life. Words that sicken him to his core, because no matter how many times he regurgitated or recycled them, they would never grow any gentler or less true.

“Accidents happen.”

(It’s not nearly enough.)

“It wasn’t your fault.”

((If it was, they would only be accidents. 

Not casualties.))

Sanemi stares at him with a frown twisted up in his face. But there’s no escape, save dropping all the way down. 

They’re still stuck in the same place they were, minutes and years ago.

“He likes you very much. You seem very close,” Giyuu murmurs, just to fill the growing space.

To that, Sanemi just barks out a half-hearted laugh.

“It wasn’t always like that,” he mutters.

Another piece snowfalls into place. 

“Besides, it was pure luck that I managed to start anyway,” he says. “I was never gonna go anywhere else with it.”

Stern teacher. Beloved brother. Last name unknown.

The slivers of Sanemi unfurl like fortunes. 

Giyuu quietly wonders which parts of him were hand-me-down too. 

“If you ever changed, I think you would do well.” The words come clumsy, stumbling too-big and too-heavy off his tongue. But they’re no less honest. “The kids would be lucky to have you anywhere.”

Sanemi says nothing for a long moment.

He leans his temple against the icy bars caging them in, lashes fluttering against the wind. Giyuu doesn’t count the seconds, just watches the clouds of their shadows merge and part and waver. For a second, they’re twin birds perched upon radio towers. Then, they’re pairs of nocturnal monsters tucked beneath the bed. Two mismatched puzzle pieces making one picture anyway.

By the time they become uncannily stretched rabbits, darting through the snow — 

Sanemi finally speaks.

“Thanks,” is all he says, curt, and pushes the Red Bull back at him.

Giyuu holds it just to take it away from Sanemi. Presses it to his chin to feel the cold, a hissing fizzle trapped behind flimsy aluminum.

“Will you even be able to sleep tonight?” he asks.

Sanemi shrugs again. 

“No need to worry about me.”

Giyuu looks down at the incomplete picture he’s made of Sanemi.

Teacher. Brother. Guilty.

Just one more piece he picks out from between his nails —

Hypocrite.

He doesn’t say it to start an argument.

He really doesn’t.

“Yet you’re concerned, about me. That’s why you’re still here.”

Something flashes in Sanemi’s eyes. 

It might be hurt, flattening his lips and dimpling his chin.

It’s more likely irritation, moseying its way back home. 

“That’s way different,” he snaps, “and you know that.”

“I just don’t understand,” Giyuu says.

“Understand what? What is there you have to understand? Okay, make me understand first,” he retorts. “What were you really planning on doing today?”

Clouds shift. Suns set. 

Their shadows resemble dancers then skaters then podium-makers.

Sanemi demands, again, “If I hadn’t been there, would you have gone down anyway?”

(But, really, it’s all a figment of the imagination. Dirty trick of the light. They aren’t skaters or rabbits or powerline birds.)

((They are just Olympians and dreamers who never came to be.))

“Nothing would have happened,” Giyuu mutters.

“Then tell me, Giyuu,” Sanemi pushes. “Do you have a place to stay? Do you have a car? Do you have anywhere to go at the end of the day?”

He did once, at an address whose page he’s torn out of his memories. And he does, a beat-up old machine with just enough gas for a one-way trip. 

“Home,” Giyuu says weakly, and even he doesn’t believe it. “I’d go home.”

“And where, pray tell,” Sanemi says, “is that?”

The sun ignites his scars in golden-white, pools his hair in fields of rye. His breath puffs out before him in brazen admissions of life, and something tumbles off the shelf of Giyuu’s sternum to shatter on the floor of his ribs, because it finally hits him —

It’s not anger or ache or vexation which steers Sanemi’s unblinking irises his way.

It’s understanding.

Sanemi looks at Giyuu like he thinks he knows him.

Like they are messes cut from the same horrible cloth.

But — 

Something horrible is swelling in his chest, leaking through moaning pipes, stumbling inebriated through molding halls. Hauntings cut corners and slam into tables and make an utter din of his heart. Announcements that they’ve come home, that they’ve already rearranged his nooks and crannies and organs into the shape of absence, just the way they liked.

Snaemi looks at Giyuu like he knows him.

But he can’t.

He can’t know the numbers that ricochet through Giyuu’s head on the nights he can’t sleep and on the days he can’t bear living, mockeries of statistics and data and one-in-a-million chances that just so happened to happen to him.

He can’t know how long he had waited and waited and waited, on the edge of the slope and in the mountain-cold morgue, for the news that they had finally pulled him out the wreckage of his own body.

He can’t know how patiently Sagiri has waited too, all these years, for the day Giyuu finally righted his incurable wrongs.

Because —

Because he can’t possibly know —

It was just a broken helmet.

A strap that couldn’t buckle. 

(Here, don’t cry. Just take mine, yeah? Mine works fine. Don’t worry about me, you know I’ve got great balance! 

Sabito had traded it without hesitation. Tucked Giyuu beneath his own watchful kitsune eyes while he donned Giyuu’s useless piece-of-shit excuse of protection instead. 

Eyes on the slope, Giyuu. I’ll be right behind you.)

((It was a day as beautiful as this one had been. Blue birds and blue skies.

Red-white snow.

Red-peach hair.))

(((Vacant-lilac eyes.)))

So, no.

Sanemi cannot understand him.

Because Sanemi is good. Giyuu knows this because he has seen it, witnessed the kindness that patches Sanemi together despite the horrific asymmetry of those scars and tales of hurt. He spends his free time coaching strangers into standing again, just as he spends his dawns pulling survivors out the rubble of their own making. Giyuu might only know the most select pieces of his soul, the parts he deemed long ago were the safest to share, but he knows goodness, and he knows kindness —

Because Last-name-unknown Sanemi is good, just like Urokodaki Sabito was good.

Sorrow comes suddenly, crushing the air right out his lungs. Giyuu’s breath hitches on its way out, and he knows he will never be getting it back. It doesn’t matter if he’s at sea level, in the heavens, or lying in the bottom of the abyss. He has relearned how to stand, how to fall, how to walk. 

But never how to breathe in absence.

So, it’s with asphyxiation burning in his throat, that he says, strained and warped —

The most truthful thing to ever foam at his mouth —

“I was supposed to compete.”

Sanemi’s eyes widen, and the world beneath them gives one rude jerk.

With a roaring grumble, the lift begins to turn again.

They lurch forward, but they don’t slip. 

“I had a friend,” he continues. “We wanted to compete together. We were going to go to the Olympics.” 

The end of the ride is approaching. The black-tie suit, the funerary arrangements, the piss-poor safety netting strung too-late up the ravine.

Giyuu’s fingers threaten to crumple the aluminum can, as he readies his skies to jump. 

“I’ll show you,” he murmurs.

Between the two of them, though he’d steadfastly denied it, Sabito had always been the better one. Sabito, after all, was the one who could catch air like fireflies, who could spin and spin and spin his way into futures and golds and dreams, just to land his own two feet. Giyuu could never compare. Could never gather enough speed. Could never jump with enough strength. He nearly gutted himself on bars and hit the ground not running, but tumbling.

But Sabito believed in him. It was sanctity, and it was salvation. 

It was enough for Giyuu to cling onto it like a worshipper, even if he’d never tried any faiths on for size.

Even if he had never thought he would land anything.

He darted down the hill once more, coasting on the tail-end of Sabito’s unwavering and perhaps unfounded conviction. His stomach clenched with mouth-watering anticipation, and the ending of the ramp grew closer and bigger with every blink. Before he knew it, it had arrived.

Giyuu twisted his body just as the edge scampered past his feet. Air whistled in his ears as he launched himself into the sky, gripping onto one ski for dear life. He spun, counted each orbit, one, two, three, last one, best one — 

And he thought, as the world melted away into one long stream of color, that he saw a flash of peach somewhere in the midst, a silver curve of a crescent-moon smile —

Before he lost count, and he’s falling, falling, falling —

— and wind is rattling through his eardrums, whipping the hollow of his bones. Deafening gales billow beneath layers of clothing to ride upon bare skin —

As Giyuu somersaults through the stratosphere once more.

For a moment, all gravity peels away. Lets him go. 

In its wake, he’s freefloating. The world is beneath him, around him, but never above him. 

It’s addicting. 

It’s enlivening.

Maybe he really hadn’t been fibbing. Maybe it really was like riding a bike. The downhill shot, the launch, the landing. He hasn’t done this in so long. He’s forgotten how wonderful it felt. The stomach-dropping thrill, the wild beat of his heart, the dizzying sensation of oxygen lost to wind and brain. 

Giyuu leaves contrails in the sky, an arrow nocked and bullet fired. 

Up here, he is not heavier than the world.

He wants to stay like this forever.

Then —

He plummets.

The ground greets him heartfirst, high-speed collision.

Giyuu crashes into snow and rock, a rude tangle of limbs and poles skidding through earth. Pain lances in a white-hot flash through his head when he smacks it against the mountain. Agony scatters down his back in solar flares, lightning ricocheting through every nerve down to his fingertips.

He rolls and bounces and nosedives until he finally comes to a screeching stop, halfway down.

Silence rings like tinnitus static.

Muffled like someone’s covered his ears.  

The first gasp that tears its way through winded lungs threatens to gouge him open. 

Air trickles bloodily back down his throat, shuddering and earthquaking through every fiber of his being. He coughs wetly with the effort. Metal coats his tongue. Maybe he’d bitten through it in the fall. It’s not the first time he’s done that.

Oh, this has gone sideways. Very sideways. Giyuu is sideways. 

No, correction. He’s on his back.

He’s lying on his back, and he is not dead. 

He is not dead, and he has nowhere else to look but up at the sky.

The sun has gone somewhere beyond the peaks now, laid to rest between the alps and their valleys. But its light clings stubbornly to papery airplanes and cotton candy clouds. The roof of the atmosphere is as pink as the inside of a seashell, as sunlight through skin. 

And it’s beautiful. 

It’s that bewitching hour again, when Sagiri softens and bends to the winds, lets them carve away her ribcage forests and arterial rivers. She looks just as enchanting as she had been the day Giyuu first laid sore eyes upon her — six and tiny, too small for all the equipment he needed, too naive to believe that time could be limited at all. 

Childhood lays in eternal hibernation all around, never awakening even when icicles drip off cypress-black rock. 

Nearly six feet tall but still too small, Giyuu lies among all its robbed graves now. A house to nothing but memory, memory, always fucking memory. 

He should be cataloging his injuries. He’s run this routine countless times before. He can predict where his body will plum and bruise, which rib will hurt the most where he’d botched the landing. His skis have not ejected, he still feels their familiar bite weighing down his boots, but his poles are somewhere far away. His heart is beating like it might gallop right out that cavity he calls his chest, and one ankle twinges painfully where it lays awkwardly to the side.

Ice is beginning to melt beneath his heat into comet-trails of bare, exposed skin. Winter air kisses his cheeks blood-red in apology for the trouble.

Nothing too bad. 

Nothing that will kill him, at least.  

So he should get up. Get back on his feet. Skiing was just controlled falling, after all, and he’s been losing control for five years, sending it off black diamonds and ninety-degree falls when he knows he’s never once stuck the landing, not like he ever could, and —

He should get up.

He should get help.

But Giyuu can only stare up at that beautiful sunset, that ethereal dusk. That promise of twilight.

And that’s when he sees it —

Serein snow. 

Drifting like dandelions blown mid-wish. 

The first flake pools gently on the sloping hill of his cheek.

The next disappears in a wounding sear upon the tip of his nose.

White confetti swirls and falls around him, dusting the palms of his gloves, burying his heaving chest. It closes his eyelids and melts upon his face, and it should be impossible, there are hardly any clouds in the sky at all, such a beautiful, pink lemonade sky, blue bird day, yellow pearl moon —

Giyuu’s breath tears above him in a ragged pant.

Something is coming up from deep inside, bubbling like puke and blood through his throat. 

He wonders, briefly, if he should turn onto his side, lest he choke on it.

But he just begins to laugh.

Everything but amusement ricochets through him, adrenaline-drenched, wheezy and wrong. 

What’s the joke? He is twenty-one, he is older than his oldest sister, and he has outlived every person he’s ever loved. 

Yet somehow, here he is. Yard sale of Tomioka Giyuu’s life. 

The only relic out of anybody. 

It’s anguish that cradles, collides, crashes into him. Sprained ankle. Broken rib. Rotten molar. One prod of his tongue, one move too fast, and it all comes rushing back. 

Because somewhere out there, the sky is still blue. Somewhere out there, the conditions are always perfect for aerials. It’s somewhere that does not exist, because they were all wrong. Because heaven is not a place on earth.

It’s Giyuu who is stuck here on this singular plane he knows, stuck here and stuck behind. All he ever does is catch hopeless edges on the body of his own grief. Trips and tumbles and falls over it when he digs too deep, but never breaks his neck on the landing.

But he wants the broken neck. 

He wants the pink lemonade skies. 

He wants five years ago. 

(He wants him back.)

((He wants to go home.))

 “Shit!”

Someone shouts in the distance, garbled as if speaking through a broken radio.  

“Giyuu!” they yell, and there’s a face hovering over the blurring edges of his vision, lilac eyes wide and doubled and tripled. 

Sanemi, Giyuu remembers. No last name. Just Sanemi.

“Giyuu,” Sanemi says again, too loud and too close. “Are you hurt?”

He rips his gloves off with his teeth, tossing them aside. Suddenly, bare hands are cupping his face. Fingers, callused with years of work doing god-knows-what, cradle his chin. They unbuckle his helmet, feel the back of his neck and up his skull. They’re so searingly warm, nearly more painful than the aches blooming in his spine and the rotten noise erupting from his chest. 

Giyuu knows what Sanemi is checking: that his pupils are even, that red doesn’t coat his palms, that his brains haven’t bloomed through the back of his broken-china head. He should cooperate. Should unhinge his already unhinged mouth and tell him he’s fine, he’s the most alive he’s been in ages —

But he just can’t stop laughing.

Sanemi stares at him, lips parted on words Giyuu cannot hear. Maybe something about fucked and in the head, and he would be right, he’s so right. 

Because there’s salt coating his tongue now. 

Because he’s crying so hard he can only giggle like a child. 

Because —

“Sanemi,” Giyuu says in a choked whisper. “Sanemi. My best friend is dead.”

They left the memorial up for a year.

There were no photos. No messages for a safe passage or sorry’s that it had happened. There were only black and silver ribbons, wrapped round the trunk of the tree closest to the site. 

Every now and then, they would flicker gently in the wake of passing winds and bodies, though it was hard for either to reach them, so far down. 

Before the ribbons, it was caution tape.

Giyuu no longer remembers the minutiae of the immediate aftermath. He only recalls taking whatever money his parents and Tsutako had entrusted to him in their wills — as much as they could have amassed, in such a blip of a lifetime — and running. Left the keys on Sakonji’s table with a single-sentence note about how sorry he was for everything and everyone. Kept the helmet with painted kitsune eyes that neither protected nor warded off misfortune behind the air mattress like a talisman. Chucked his dreams in the bin with the cardboard boxes and address book nobody lived in anymore.

The first time he returned to that run, he was fine. 

Until he wasn’t. 

He stopped breathing, then started breathing too much, then lurched into the netting to throw up off the side of the cliff.

Afterwards, he could hardly stand or even talk. He’d been hauled downslope in the back of a toboggan, and he didn’t even have it in him to be embarrassed. 

Because he had to do it. Had to go down those slopes, year after year, season after season, on and then off and then on again. 

Because he could not let it scab. Could not let it fall off. 

Could not afford to misplace it somewhere in his life like loose change or keys which no longer opened anything. 

Childhood was left everywhere on Sagiri — in her rookie streams and her angriest falls, in the summer’s weeping willows and tallest snowy spruces. Pockets of memory hung like ribbons from branches, in every cardinal direction, in memoriam — but none of it mattered, really.

He needed to rip it open. He needed the crimson spray on snow. Because that was all he had left. 

Because the memorial was gone. 

Because Sabito laid with the foxes now. 

Took their dreams to the dirt right with him.

All that remained was a single black ribbon, too high up for anybody to notice, waving to nothing, rotting more and more with each season of snow.

The month after Tsutako passed, spring still came. Cherry blossoms tapped against the window panes, and butterflies dashed to and fro in the yard. 

Spring still came, and it was harder than anything to drag Giyuu out of bed.

He would sludge and sleet in Sabito’s sheets, because he had no one left to live with but Sabito and Sakonji. He would not brush his hair, his teeth, or her headstone where the rest of his family now laid. He only wasted away like disease.

Sabito had said something, once. Something like if you don’t eat in the next hour I’ll kick you out of my house.

Something like, when has Tsutako-san ever wanted anything like you dying in her stead?

Something like —

Say that again, and I’m not going to be your friend anymore.

Sabito had not cried when he found out. 

When Giyuu burst into his bedroom, unable to do anything except fall apart and weep and scream, all he’d done was silently gather him back up, matter-of-fact, to piece him back together. Nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times.

Occasionally, Giyuu wonders if he would have reacted the same way to his own news. Sabito, you passed away in a skiing accident in February of 2014, two weeks and three days after I turned sixteen. 

Maybe he would have tilted his head to the side, incredulous. Shit, really? he’d wince with a scrunched-up nose. I better not have ruined your birthday. 

Maybe he would have shrugged, pointed high up above the clouds, and grinned, look at that, that’s where I’m riding now.

Or maybe he would have just stayed silent and stoic, like the first time. He might have reached out to hold Giyuu’s face. He might have picked up the yard sale of his shattering soul. Here’s your heart, here’s your head, here’s the only place you’ll be able to keep me from now on.

But Sabito is not here anymore.

That is what Giyuu knows. 

Now, that is what Sanemi knows too.

And Sanemi —

Sanemi, somehow, somehow —

Unknowing, unplanned —

He reacts just as he had.

With only a twitch in his face.

Not a smile-twitch, just a twitch. 

He stares at Giyuu for one painful moment, unreadable even in the slightest downturn of his mouth, the softest divot between his brows —

Before he picks him up by the hands. 

He pulls him up halfway, pausing to brush off the snow clinging like burrs to his clothes. He clasps his chin with those warm, callused fingers, turns his head this way and that until his eyes rattle in his skull. The same hands move to his elbows and squeeze, then make their way to the caps of his knees. 

Sanemi’s palms ghost over the curves of his ankles last, cradling the metal straps of his boots. 

He picks up whatever shards of equipment and heart Giyuu had let scatter into the snow, and puts it all in a neat pile on his lap. 

“You with me again?” he asks lowly.

Laughter skids off the slopes and cracks its neck on the rocks. 

In the newfound silence, Giyuu can only nod, numb.

“Okay.” 

Sanemi turns to gather his poles last, which he’d lost in the tumble. Presses them insistently into Giyuu’s hands until he remembers they’re his.

“Come on,” he says gruffly. “Let’s get you down now.” 

The snow is blowing harder. The sky has gone anoxic.

Bare fingers curl around frozen gloves, as Sanemi takes him by hand, not pole, back down the piste. Giyuu finds he can’t look away from the shape of his eyes or the expanse of his face. Shock response, desperate vision. A single vanishing point to remind him he has not gone under, has not ordered a casket, has not fallen six feet into his own death trap. 

All the while, Sanemi never puts his goggles back on. Only squints against the oncoming frost.

He glances over every now and then to check that Giyuu’s still there. He is the glowing iris of a lighthouse, a sweeping signal for his sodden soul, a blink of you’re still here, morse code promise, I’m seeing you —

And he never lets go once.

The procession goes like this:

One foot in front of the other.

Eyes on the ground not to trip again.

Twitch each finger, thumb to pinky, just to check they’re still attached.

Sanemi painstakingly maneuvers him into a seat by the fireplace, where almost instantly, a blanket of heat drapes over freezing shoulders.

Bent knee, crooked arms, interlocked fingers.

He carefully folds the origami of Giyuu’s stiff joints into something resembling a sitting human — albeit one sitting like rigor mortis has already run free.

When he’s finally satisfied with his work, he leaves him with a single pat on the knee.

Giyuu is alone to stare at the empty seat before him. His hands have been placed in his lap. He feels the weight of his knuckles pressed into muscle, while his poles and skis are propped against the stone hearth a few inches away. His helmet sits unattached to a head on the tiny coffee table, though his head doesn’t feel very attached to anything else at all.

Every now and then, his foot knocks into the wooden corner.

It sends a numb jolt up his leg, but the sensation always ends just below his knee.

When he took his tumble, pain had strung him together like tendons and ligaments. But it had only been temporary, shock glancing off his body.

Now, he’s all empty.

Just negative space the wind blows right through.

Around him, the lodge empties and refills. Tables flood with the dinner rush as chairs get pulled this way and that. Doors open and close, bodies filter in and out —

And Sanemi is nowhere to be seen.

Maybe he dropped him off here to become somebody else’s problem. He isn’t the type to do that, but maybe Giyuu has pushed his luck and blown right through his last straw. Maybe he’ll come back in ten minutes with ski patrol at his back, point to him and say, this one’s crazy, get him off the mountain.

It would hurt, but Giyuu wouldn’t resent him for it.

The door bursts ajar again. A group of teenagers piles inside, clearly high off the rush of their first black diamond. Did you see that move? That was insane! Their faces glow with rowdy blush as they shake freshly fallen snow off their helmets.

That kid, Tanjiro, is not among them.

He must have gone home by now.

“Hey.”

Someone knocks into him with deliberate slowness.

Giyuu is pushed back into his own body, blinking when his vision zeroes in on that shade of green, that ivory hair.

Sanemi sidles around him to plunk a mug down on the table.

A few steaming ebony droplets spill onto his thumb, which he instinctively sucks away with a hiss and grumble.

Then, as if it’s the most inevitable and natural thing in the world —

The snowboarder settles into the chair before him.

He crosses one leg gracefully over the other to sip at a cup of hot chocolate.

Giyuu can’t help but stare, incredulous.

Sanemi has taken off his helmet, hair flattened but no less scruffy as it falls in sunrise-shaded waves over his forehead. Bathed in the warm glow of the fire, of sparks that fly close enough to threaten stinging, he is brilliant and alive. Amber light dances like rainwater off the dips and curves of his face, and —

Oh.

Maybe he’s waiting.

Waiting on Giyuu to make the first move. To excuse his behavior, explain his conniptions, offer to see himself right out.

No matter what, Giyuu needs to say something.

Well, of course.

It’s the least he could do.

Perhaps the most decent, too.

He just doesn’t know what would be sufficient.

(Lunch, then dinner, then life.)

((He’s got to pay it all back somehow.))

“I’m sorry,” is all he can come up with. “For saying that.”

Sanemi raises an eyebrow at him, slow.

Shame runs uncut nails down the chalkboard of his spine.

“You didn’t need to know that,” Giyuu finishes, slumping over.

The aftertaste of vomit-laughter lingers, gunk in his molars, as he picks up his own hot chocolate and awaits his verdict.

He can’t believe he did that, really. He should’ve gotten yelled at for it. Sanemi had shouted at him so instinctively when they first met, but now he hasn’t said a word beyond the occasional question to check that he still exists.

Giyuu crashes down from anguish like adrenaline. Like aerials gone wrong. Now, it’s disgust which slicks him like sweat and syrup, an incontrovertible anger at himself.

What he needs, really, is to go back. Restart this entire day. Head up Sagiri at the crack of dawn to do it properly —

Stitch himself back up, shove it down deep. Put it all away before his heart begins leaking. Before he leaves behind a trail of red, dragged like dead horses and bodies through the snow.

(He is in the business of breaking himself for recreation and remembrance. 

But he never meant to get it on anybody.)

((Certainly not Sanemi.))

“You’re right.”

The second it takes for Sanemi’s words to register is filled with the hum of other conversations and eavesdroppers.

But when it finally does, Giyuu wants a hole to open up and swallow him whole.

He opens his mouth, closes it.

Opens it again, to offer just that, let’s dig a grave and toss me right in —

But Sanemi beats him to it.

“I’m the oldest brother,” he tells him. “But Genya wasn’t the youngest.”

The mug settles in his lap.

His knee begins to bounce.

“It was me, Genya, Shuya, Hiroshi, Koto, Teiko, and Sumi. My old man was a piece of shit, so he was never in the picture. It was just me and my ma taking care of them,” he says.

“We had a house north of Sapporo where it snowed all winter. Except for Genya, they were too young to snowboard with me. So I played with them in the yard instead,” he says.

“It always snowed. Even when the house caught on fire one night, it still snowed. I was twelve,” he says.

Oh.

God, no. 

Slowly, then all at once, Giyuu feels his heart plummet.

“I got Genya out in time,” Sanemi says, “but Ma went back in for the others.”

Shadowy flames flicker over his face, but he doesn’t seem to see them anymore. Somewhere deep in his irises, they’ve glazed over with distance. As if he’s only rewatching a movie scene, reading the end of a book, ready to send it back with that age-old comment, too tacky and tragic to sell —

“I never saw them again.”

The sky outside is dark now, as the snowstorm rolls in, a brief tempest as short-lived as childhoods can be. Falls come faster and faster, knocking against the window, billowing over stopped lifts.

A gaggle of children bursts inside, followed by their harried parents, looking like they just lost a brutal war with powdered sugar.

Giyuu watches the way Sanemi’s body instinctively inclines toward the family — one whole, big, complete family. The way his hand twitches with the aborted instinct to reach out to siblings that used to exist —

Mouth parting on names he no longer speaks.

“I never wanted to talk about it with anyone,” he says, rough, staring as laughter sounds and mothers scold. “But Genya did. Hell, it was all that kid ever wanted to bring up. It drove me fucking crazy.”

Then his face twists, and it’s all Giyuu can do not to drop the mug and reach out to press away those pained creases. To check not for brain bleeds, but leaks in the heart.

He should tell him, it’s okay. You don’t need to tell me. These are old pieces of Sanemi, but the blood on them is years away from drying. 

Don’t waste them on someone like me.

But —

The moment passes.

Sanemi quickly rearranges his face into something resembling normalcy, sighs, and nudges his snowboard with his foot.

“So I never spoke with him. Just fed him, clothed him, sent him to school. Threw myself into this,” he accentuates it with another jab at his board, “until one day, he followed me all the way here and begged me to teach him again.”

Fury, clenched like an injured bird in his fist, lifts its broken wings to fly.

For a moment, heartbreak cracks into a wistful excuse of joy.

“It was the longest conversation we had that wasn’t about our dead family,” he scoffs.

Their hot chocolates have both gone cold.

The crackling fire fades into a slow, eerie ring.

“That’s all this ever was for me,” Sanemi says. “Not talking about it.”

Across the room and world and mountain peaks, their eyes meet.

And he mouths, not mockingly, just earnest —

“But you didn’t need to know that either, right?”

So.

There is the picture of Sanemi.

Firelight, typhonic, lionhearted Sanemi.

Sanemi, who snowboarded not to speak and who had a last name seven fewer people possessed and who was once-upon-a-time not an only brother. Who had ragged nails not from the nervous habits of his teeth but from the sheer exertion it took to claw back into life, after it had so unequivocally tried to repulse him out of it.

Sanemi, who understood the tragedy from which Giyuu was made, even if he’d never said so —

Only because he’d recognized, in an instant, the petrichor-stink grief that clung to bodies like theirs.

Giyuu takes the pieces of Sanemi that he’d, for some reason, decided to honor him with. He lays them out on the table like a deck of wet, bloodied cards.

Wishes upon shooting stars and birthday candles and eleven minutes into eleven o’clock are useless. Just empty words spoken into emptier air with no receivers.

But still, he wishes. He wishes.

He wishes Sanemi had been dealt a kinder hand anyway.

It blows across the tiny coffee table like a stray eyelash, lands like a penny in a fountain.

Sanemi doesn’t call heads or tails.

Only promises —

“I can talk about it now.”

The whole time, he hasn’t squinted or looked away once.

“I’m saying,” he says, “you can too.”

Giyuu feels his chin begin to quiver. Warmth seeps into his side like stormwater and sleet. Years of childhood, which had slipped between the cracks, begin to worm and writhe.

And grief returns to him in car wreck lungs, in unfeeling numbers, in the museum exhibit of his life where he keeps talisman-helmets and skis that never outgrew their wearer and hooks for medals that can only hang scarves now.

“I don’t know what to do,” he confesses sickly, nails digging into his palms. “I’ve too many memories.”

Sanemi’s jaw tenses. His own fingers twitch, agitated.

But he only says — shredding-black-diamonds simple, winning-Olympic-golds simple, carry-on-living simple —

All those feats so far beyond simple they had nearly died even trying —

“Leave some with me.”

Don’t say that.

The half-hearted plea thuds through him like a blizzard pounding down the door. Only hours ago, Giyuu had wanted the shouting. The annoyance. The anger. He’d clung to its insipid warmth as the only sign of life his body could muster. But even after Sanemi’s yelling turned to jabbing to twitching, even after Sanemi’s hand on his pole had turned to fingers between his —

His heart had just kept right on beating.

The pathetic truth is, Giyuu doesn’t actually want Sanemi to call the cops on him. Doesn’t want him to cart him away. Doesn’t want the brashness or the negligence or the abandonment.

He doesn’t want him to see the full picture, all his ugliness and rawness, then up and leave.

“What do we do after that?” Giyuu asks, barely louder than a breath. After he cuts the ropes of rescue he’d tied around his waist, after Sanemi’s strange obligation to him finally falls away, where will he run free?

Don’t say that, he begs, and what he really means is, please don’t say that and leave.

Please don’t go away.

Sanemi just shrugs.

“We can shred some more. We can just sit here. We can shut the fuck up.”

Oh.

Oh.

That —

That’s such a Sanemi-esque answer, that —

Giyuu can’t help it.

He snorts on a broken-hearted laugh.

It jumps out of him like a cough, lasting only about as long as it takes for fireflies to blink. It’s nothing like the putrid rot that had tumbled out his rupturing body before. Nor is it the unfeeling, single-syllable articulation of disdain he’d thrown at Sanemi the very first minute they’d met.

It’s something he, for every possible reason, well and truly means.

Giyuu reaches up to cover his mouth, tucking the fledgling noise between his palms.

But it’s too late.

Sanemi’s lips are already twitching again, a fraction of a smile hung on his face like a piece of the moon.

He throws this lifeline across the table, across seven choppy seas.

And this time, Giyuu doesn’t cut his fingers on it.

This time, he just loops it around his pinky in a promise.

(His name was Urokodaki Sabito. 

He was six when they met and sixteen when he died. For the ten years in between, he skied like he was dancing on water. He had peach-colored hair but swore vehemently he’d never touched dye once. He wanted to win an Olympic gold or two. He taught Giyuu everything he knew.

He saved Giyuu’s life, two weeks and three days after his birthday.

He was his first friend.)

They decide to shred.

Every night, after the sun sets on Sagiri, her slopes light up in gold. Incandescent streams flow downhill as, one by one, lantern posts flicker to life. They ignite the mountainside like city streets, rivers so bright that even satellites might pick them up from space.

Sanemi takes off first.

His coat, partially unzipped, billows over his shoulders as he tips forward to skim one hand over snow. Powder swells between the canyons of his fingers, fizzling out like sea spray and contrails in his disturbance.

With one graceful kick, he edges back onto the tip of his board and sends it.

Gravity surrenders to his vicious speed in an instant. Sanemi is every deadly windstorm ever named and classified, all shoved into a pair of broad shoulders and round cheeks. Cyclone on the slopes, hurricane on land.

He meets the earth again on the flat of his board, sending a typhoon of snow jetting into the atmosphere.

Embellishes it with a mocking twirl and bow to no audience.

Giyuu follows next.

He races down the hill, so fast he can hardly register the steady slap of air skipping over his ears.

At the last second, he twists around entirely. Stares over his shoulder at the vanishing point of landing, and jumps.

One rotation.

Two.

Three.

That’s all the time he gets before he feels the telltale lurch of fast-approaching ground.

Giyuu feels himself bracing for impact, another bone-rattling, muscle-tearing collision to cap off the night —

But his skis only skim over freshly carved tracks with the softest sigh.

His heart pounds up a racket in his throat as he whirls around. An exhilarated gasp rips through him.

I did it, he thinks wildly. I did it!

He whips to the left to share the news.

But the only other adrenaline junkie on this side of the mountain is already staring right back at him.

Remnants of snow drift in fragmented tatters all around him, framing the golden tufts of Sanemi’s mountain-ridge hair. His lips, pinked yet chapped like tundras, part on the remnant of an incomplete breath.

Giyuu doesn’t hesitate before skiing over, spraying some snow up at him on a stop.

“Again?” he asks, breathless.

Sanemi doesn’t even blink before he’s packing up his things and going.

So they do go. Again and again and again.

Ghosts fall silent, and fatigue loses its grip. Giyuu loses himself in the endless cycle of falling, rising, falling. He catches air like snowflakes in his mouth: backflips, corks, buicks. Thousand-degree spins into a future nobody’s around to keep count.

They race down the slope, twin shooting stars. Night air cools the sweat beading his temples as Giyuu floats in three-sixties. Sanemi leaps only seconds after him, just close enough that when he lands, Giyuu can catch the last spin he makes before he, too, finishes in a gust.

It’s beautiful, Giyuu thinks. 

Beautiful, his latent ire, his jumping poetics. 

His furrowed concentration which lines his brow and dews the tip of his nose, his —

The tip of his ski catches the edge of Sanemi’s board.

Lilac eyes widen with the realization just as soon as it hits Giyuu.

Then, they’re tumbling.

A flailing hand smacks Giyuu in the back of his helmet, as his knee collides right into Sanemi’s thigh. Their bodies skip and skid like stones down the piste, etching deep gouges into the snow as they roll and bruise and ache.

By the time gravity grows tired of its playthings, one ski has ejected, and Sanemi has lost a glove to the tussle.

Giyuu stares mournfully across the slope at his orphaned ski, as Sanemi spits snow and half his ponytail out his mouth.

“Ow,” Giyuu says flatly, suddenly too aware of the heavy line of Sanemi’s leg blanketing his hip.

“That was on you,” the snowboarder groans, as he struggles to rearrange his limbs at his side.

“You were too close,” Giyuu retaliates.

“No. Brat. Idiot. Dumbass,” Sanemi sounds out. “All you.”

It’s a hopeless argument.

So seems to be getting up.

Giyuu resigns himself to laying back with a sigh, blinking up at the stars.

It’s a lucky night. The squall which had come earlier has already left, leaving behind only occasional snowy stragglers and a clear, cloudless atmosphere.

Sagiri is far enough away from the humdrum metropolis that light pollution lingers only in select pockets of the horizon. Not even the lanterns igniting the frozen slopes and walkways could blind him to the stretch of constellations, both named and nameless, stretching vast and endless above their bodies. Swans glide over the river of the night, rams chase little foxes over wispy stardust, and crows surf the backs of great blue whales. Orion tucks on his belt, Andromeda splays her arm toward her mother, and Cassiopeia edges toward the brightest darling in the sky.

The North Star glows proudly, perched beneath the moon like a stray firefly.

Giyuu clasps his hands close to his chest, feels as the rapid flutter of his heart begins to settle.

The satellites roaming above snap their photos. Somewhere among them, he believes he and Sanemi will show up, too. Two particles of dust blurring a single camera lens, floating untethered in the sea of Sagiri’s light.

(He’s skied Niseko and all the other peaks jutting out of Hokkaido.)

((He has always found Sagiri’s stars to be the brightest.))

Without the adrenaline rush of what goes up must come down occupying his attention, exhaustion begins to roll back over him. His limbs grow heavy, as lethargy steadily swells from drizzle to monsoon.

Giyuu can’t fight off the yawn that takes him over, wide enough to make his eyes water.

Rubbing the remnants of the tears out his eyes, he tips his head over to meet Sanemi’s instead. Meets lavender irises, which are already wide open and drinking him in.

Gold cradles the side of his face with one gentle hand, softening the crescent of scarred cheeks, blots of carmine blush piercing monochrome blue. 

Varnished in an entirely kind light, Sanemi is wholly relaxed — loose-limbed, candid, and ardent.

“Giyuu,” he says. “Stay over tonight.”

The question hardly registers, as Giyuu’s bleary eyes drift upon the open-and-close movement of his lips.

“What?” he murmurs belatedly.

Maybe that’s the wrong question, again.

Suddenly, Sanemi is looking away again. Too tight and too stiff. 

The divot in his chin trembles as he snaps, “I have a room. You don’t. Unless you’re planning on driving back right fucking now, in the middle of the night —”

“Okay,” Giyuu interrupts softly. “I’d like that.”

Sanemi instantly falls silent.

“Okay,” he grumbles back, after a long minute.

But nobody moves.

They just lay on their backs, catching their breaths, snow melting into the outlines of their bodies. The stars are out, there are skis and gloves to gather, and Sanemi’s elbow is still jutting painfully into a bruise on Giyuu’s hip. It might be the one part of his body he’s forgotten to disentangle from his own —

And Giyuu finds he doesn’t plan on doing a thing about it.

Sanemi’s borrowed room is cramped yet strangely tidy. He’s got a single duffel bag sitting on a patterned armchair, a rickety television stand overflowing with old rental movies, and a bed with the sheets neatly done and tucked. A tiny bathroom juts out the corner, more of a cardboard box than anything designed to fit a human, though an even tinier balcony sticks out the side to overlook the woods.

Hands clenched around his equipment, Giyuu finds himself hovering in the doorway. 

Sanemi, meanwhile, putters about without a care — sheds his jacket in one swoop, folds it up and sets it on the nightstand. 

Muscled arms stretch above his head to strip his thermal wear, revealing a sliver of meaty hip and scar. Scrubbing one hand through his hair, eyes scrunching with a forceful yawn of his own, he leans his snowboard carefully against the chair.

“You got any change of clothes?” Sanemi asks while digging through his duffel. “Actually, don’t know why I bothered asking. This might be too big on you, but I’ve got a spare.”

He throws it all at Giyuu, a black blur of a shirt and sandpaper kindness. 

He fumbles to catch it before it smacks him in the face, dropping his poles in the process. 

The clatter of metal against wood seems to finally alert Sanemi to his position.

He pauses his cleaning and grumbling tirade to shoot him an unamused glare.

“You just gonna stand there all night?” he demands.

So Giyuu takes the cue to loiter in the middle of the room instead.

Sanemi stares at him for a moment longer. 

It seems to be all the time he needs to deem him an official lost cause, before he grunts that he’s going to shower.

“Make yourself at home,” he says pointedly, before shutting the bathroom door behind him.

The faucet starts with a sharp hiss, then soda-pop fizzle.

Left to his own devices, Giyuu glances around. At the place they’ve propped up their things, then the spots he’s unwittingly tracked snow, then the tacky Christmas wreath hanging above the bed which the staff had clearly forgotten to remove.

He decides to shed his boots first, sighing as the buckles snap off one by one. His shins sing with relief as he lines them up neatly at the foot of his skis, before wriggling out his jacket. He’s a little hesitant about dressing down to his boxers, so he keeps the pants on but peels off his shirt. 

Sanemi’s clothes smell faintly like pine woods and fresh snow days. First rides and breaths taken on the frontside. 

It does hang a little loose on him, stretching too wide around the shoulders —

But Giyuu burrows into it anyway.

Tucking his knees to his chest, he rests his chin against the bone. Closes his eyes, but doesn’t drift off. Just languidly blinks and breathes, swathed in the uncomfortable warmth of thermostats turned too high.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there at the foot of the bed, listening to the winds and water whistle beyond the walls.

But eventually, the sound of running pipes ceases with a creak.

Giyuu wiggles his socked heels against the carpet, watches the fibers bend beneath his weight, as the door slides back open.

Sanemi strolls out with water dripping off the ends of his hair, alabaster strands already curling in the humidity. He’s dressed in a pair of gray sweatpants, hung low enough that Giyuu can make out the beginnings of a Calvin Klein hugging his hips, and —

Nothing else.

For the first time, the entirety of his body is discernible, no longer hidden away beneath layers and insulation. 

Thick scars criss-cross Sanemi’s very broad, very bare chest, rippling down the bunny hills of his abdomen and the slope of his lovehandles. His skin glistens with shower dew that he’d neglected to dry, droplets beading and sliding down the valley of his sternum to his navel.

Maybe the heat really is too high.

Giyuu carefully averts his eyes, presses the back of his hand to his cheek, and reminds himself to turn it down before they sleep.

“Where’s your shirt?” he finds himself asking thin air.

Sanemi clears his throat roughly.

“You’re wearing it,” he grunts.

Giyuu frowns.

“You said you had a spare.”

“Well. I lied.”

Fingering the hem of Sanemi’s shirt where it drapes over his thighs, Giyuu offers, “I can give it back —”

“Just shut the fuck up and take it,” Sanemi snaps too quickly, before dropping the towel from around his neck and pointing. “Why are you on the floor?”

Giyuu just shrugs.

The look Sanemi shoots him is somehow long-suffering at best. A beat passes, and he only toys with the ends of his towel, shoulders tensing as if bracing himself for another bout of Giyuu’s stupidity. Giyuu readies himself for another blistering jab. 

But Sanemi only sighs.

He ambles over and settles down on the ground beside him, stretching out his legs and tilting his head back. 

Giyuu leans his cheek back into his wrist. 

Watches the bulb of his Adam’s apple bob on a dry swallow. 

“Sanemi,” he speaks up after a minute or two have passed. “Can I borrow your phone?”

“What for?” 

“I need to do something, and mine is dead.” 

“You need a charge?” 

“If you have one.” 

“If I have one,” Sanemi mutters under his breath, even though he reaches around the corner to dig through his duffel anyway. He holds out a palm for Giyuu’s phone, fingers quirking. 

When Giyuu relinquishes it, he raises one brow at the sorry state of it.

“What the hell did you do to crack it this much?” he grumbles as he plugs the charger into the wall.

Giyuu stares at him blankly.

“I ski.” 

Another twitch.

A huff of scoffing laughter. 

“Alright, fuck you,” Sanemi says without heat, and tosses Giyuu his own phone. 

The screen shines bright with a blurry, clearly hand-taken photo. Giyuu takes the liberty to swipe away some stray news notifications and texts from names he doesn’t recognize. 

Extraneous words and emails disappear, revealing the smiling face of Sanemi’s younger but not youngest brother. 

They must be on Sagiri. Giyuu recognizes those powerline lifts and the bright shade of blue that cannot be found anywhere else — even if they do all share the same skies. 

Refracted light washes out the tan of their faces. Sanemi isn’t smiling as he glares into the camera, though the effect is hopelessly loosened by the fact that Genya’s cheek is smooshed right into his. There is an airiness to the tilt of his shoulders where they left up his phone, a twinkle in his eye that cannot come from reflection alone.

Something in his chest thuds once, then twice. Enough that his breath sticks like phlegm to his throat.

Across the room, Sanemi asks, “What’d you need to do?” 

Giyuu pushes himself to his feet, wobbling only slightly when overexertion buzzes in his back.

“I’ll be back,” he tosses over his shoulder, before slipping out onto the balcony.

The moment the door slides shut behind him, goosebumps bloom over his bare arms. Immediately, Giyuu begins to shiver, breath stuttering before him in white plumes. 

He can feel Sanemi’s incredulous stare on the center of his back, probably wondering if he needs to intervene or just watch the car wreck play out.

Giyuu sucks in a sharp breath, fumbling to power on the phone once more.

Bright blue light illuminates his face, a single flash of white among pitch black. Unsteadily, he presses in the familiar string of numbers he’s always run through but never called himself. The digits blare up at him, searing into the backs of his retinas. 

When his thumb quakes over the green call button, he isn’t sure that the cold alone is entirely to blame. 

Ten missed calls.

Probably more, since the last time he checked.

He knows he has to do this. He’d be cruel if he doesn’t. 

(He has already been cruel.)

((He has sent him running to voicemails and circles for far too long.))

In the end, it takes only six rings.

Then, it’s open air.

“Hello?” An apprehensive voice crackles through the speaker. “Who is this?”

The aching sameness of it has Giyuu tilting his head back with a short gasp. Sagiri stares back down at him, standing guard over her corner of the island like a black radio tower. He stares through emptied branches into her swath of stars. 

All those constellations he only knows because Sabito had been the one to teach him —

And because Sakonji had been the one who taught Sabito. 

“Urokodaki-san,” he murmurs, fingers clenching white around Sanemi’s phone. “It’s me.”

The breath that rips through Sakonji is so powerful Giyuu swears he feels it. Late February gales, combing through his own hair, even one hundred miles and cell towers apart.

“Giyuu?” 

Suddenly, his throat screws tight and shut. 

He chews through his lip, dips his head down low. 

Sakonji always had a kind face, one that did no favors for his sternness whenever he chewed his boys out for doing something stupid on the slopes or making Tsutako needlessly worry. It must have worn down over the years, a placid mask whittled into gaunt cheekbones and sweet oak eyes. Giyuu wouldn’t know.

Because when he’d packed his life up into suitcases — he couldn’t afford the moving truck — the memories had come pouring right out anyway. They could never be contained within cardboard or luggage, would only spill out of duct tape and zippers like doll fluff. Those ghostly recollections remained in that house, the building only one hopscotch away from his sold childhood home. 

In his dormancy and despair, Giyuu had never volunteered himself to return to steward the rest. 

So he’d left Sakonji with the broken pipes and still water. Left him to drown all alone in the sludge of his own grief —

Because even if Sabito was his best friend, Sabito was his son first. 

Yet, Sakonji had dutifully kept his distance after Giyuu fled. Because that’s what it was: fleeing. He’d known that chasing after him would not bring him back, would only drive him farther out to sea. It didn’t matter if it was for his detriment or for the better — when Giyuu set his mind on something, it would take all the world’s brute force and more to pry him off it. He’d known that fact, ever since the day he drove his six year-old boy and his newly annointed best friend up to Mount Sagiri for the first snow of the season.

So he limited himself to the real big occasions. Calls on New Year’s, birthdays, two weeks and three days after the birthdays. Sometimes he tried him in the days between, because Giyuu had gone silent for too long, and he’d begun convincing himself the next unknown number to call would be someone asking him to come identify a body. 

But that was all. 

Giyuu hasn’t seen him in a long time. 

Five years.

No — 

That wasn’t entirely right.

He glances down at the time, then up at the moon, eclipsed behind rock and snow. Midnight passed a while ago.

Five years and one day, since.

Does he still live at that same address? Does he still have that old Toyota? Does he still keep Sabito’s bedroom door locked?

Does he still look at the same stars Giyuu’s staring at now?

He doesn’t know anymore. He just doesn’t know. 

“Urokodaki-san,” he whispers, and his next inhale hitches on something dangerously close to a sob. “I’m sorry I never called. I’m sorry for being so immature.” 

“No. No. Don’t do that,” Sakonji cuts him off sternly. “Giyuu, where are you?”

“Sagiri,” Giyuu says, wiping at his nose. 

“What did you do today?”

“I skied. I skied all day.” 

“Do you need me to come get you?”

Giyuu slumps against the ice-cold railing. Condensation and evening frost slick his elbows.

“No. I’m okay,” he says. 

“Are you, Giyuu?” Sakonji asks. “Are you okay?”

Just this morning, he would have lied. Had he actually answered that seventh call before it looped right back into his voicemails, he would have said anything to get Sakonji off his back.

But, he blinks, and —

He thinks of the man whose phone he is using to call his not-father but still the only one he’s got left. The man who had lent him his only shirt under the guise of it being a spare, because he’d somehow guessed Giyuu would fluster once he knew the truth. The man who is currently lounging on the floor, leaving one spot loyally open for him, despite the perfectly empty and available bed just behind. 

He then thinks of the hand tugging his pole and the fingers laced in his. Those strong hands which yanked him off the edge and guided him down the mountain.

He thinks of a clementine face and a kintsugi heart. 

A mouth that twitched to smile —

But never flinched at his rancid sorrow.

“I think,” Giyuu whispers, as his eyes meet the unblinking gaze of that North Star, as Sakonji breathes so steadily they might as well be in the same room again, “I can be.”

When he slinks back inside and slides the balcony door shut with his foot, Sanemi is still on the floor, waiting.

In his absence, he’s somehow broken out a bottle of sake. Maybe he keeps it in his bag along with the rest of his unhealthy Red Bull supply. 

Clenching it in his fist, he eyes Giyuu where he stands, shivering in the doorway.

“Bad call?” he asks.

Giyuu shakes his head.

“It was good,” he says softly. 

“Alright.” Sanemi lifts up the bottle. “We’ll drink to celebrate, then.”

Static buzzes as the half-dead DVD jumps around in the player. Tinny speakers blast with some horror movie they’d plucked off the shelf blind. 

Giyuu pays it little mind even when shrill screams sound, only drifting back to his designated spot at Sanemi’s left.

He cracks open the sake, pouring it into the cap of his thermos. He passes it to Giyuu first, who takes a long sip.

Alcoholic warmth, sweet and fruity, blankets his weary bones again, chasing out the lingering nip of the cold. It sloshes all the way to the back of his skull, fuzzy-soft. Settles heavy and drowsy in the pit of his stomach.

Giyuu lets Sanemi pry the cap out his hand to take his turn. Lips curling around the spot his own had touched just moments before, he licks up the portions he did not finish, tongue darting out to chase liquor dewdrops and spit.

He tips his head all the way back, doesn’t make a single face as it goes down. 

The hills of his cheeks flush like apple orchards in season —

And it’s tempting — so tempting — to get in close.

So Giyuu does.

He finds himself scooting farther and farther in, stopped only by the insistence of flesh against flesh. 

Balmy heat sticks like velcro to his elbow as Sanemi’s bare arm presses to his own. They’re so close together Giyuu is sure he’d bleed and blister, should he ever try to peel himself away.

But Sanemi doesn’t comment on the deadly lines he toes before flipping head-over-heels off the piste.

He just leans over and slides the balcony door open a crack.

Winter air tumbles inside, curling like a stray cat between their near-intertwined legs.

With his free hand, Sanemi reaches into his pocket to shake out a pack of cigarettes.

Marlboro Reds, Giyuu recognizes, as he plucks one out between his teeth.

Clementine sparks fly but don’t burn as Sanemi lights up. Chemicals plume in dragon-breaths between his teeth, the mountain of his throat bobbing tectonically on each swallow and sigh.

He chases every capful of liquor with equal parts water and smoke, the liquid glistening like sweat on the corners of his lips before he licks it away. 

In his fascination, Giyuu finds himself fiddling with the last of the sake.

“Why do you do that?” he wonders out loud, swiping a tongue over the bottle mouth. It’s near-empty now, so he errs to drink right out the glass.

Another jumpscare rattles the shitty screen. Flashes of gore slash through staticky pixels.

Red ripples off the lines of Sanemi’s shoulders and back, as he taps crumbling ash into the makeshift tray he’d made out of the bottle cap.

“It’s familiar,” is all he says.

Giyuu hums, soft.

At the sound, Sanemi glances over at him.

Something unreadable twists his expression. It isn’t knotted up in tension or anger, but neither is it the same open slope out beneath the stars.

Giyuu’s vision swims, a trick of the light — 

As Sanemi suddenly holds out two fingers in his direction.

“Wanna try?” he offers.

Liquid courage, liquid stupidity.

Giyuu thinks they’re one and the same as he finds himself reaching out on unsteady palms, index and middle fingers splayed for Sanemi to slip the smoke between his joints.

“You’ll need to breathe it in deeper than you think,” he instructs, watching intently as Giyuu in turn eyes the split in Sanemi’s right cheek.

The directions are a little vague and hard to follow, but he tries anyway. He brings the end of the cigarette up to his lips, closes his eyes, and breathes.

Suffocation rushes through the narrow corridor of his throat in an instant, knocking its way right into the back alleys of his lungs.

Giyuu coughs hard, sputtering up embers and wasted nicotine. 

Sanemi’s face twitches in quiet mirth.

“Too deep,” he comments.

Hacking into the crook of his elbow, Giyuu shakes his head and dumps the whole thing down the bottle.

What few droplets of liquor he hadn’t managed to get onto his tongue snuff out the tiny flame.

“You just wasted a perfectly good cig,” Sanemi drawls.

Let him think that. Let him think he’s petty, he’s insecure. Let him think he’s so embarrassed he fucked up his first drag that he put it out in vengeance.

But Giyuu isn’t stupid.

Or at least, sometimes, he thinks so.

It’s familiar, Sanemi had said, and nowhere is your greatest anguish closer to you than in your chosen vice. They make hours-long journeys to Sagiri every year, after all, to not talk about it. Giyuu tears across slopes with his helmet on the side of too loose, and Sanemi crawled out of fire just to suck soot into his lungs years later.

Grief was never going to save him.

It was just leftovers. Love which dusted the shelves, confetti-thick. Adoration which cobwebbed the ceiling corners he could never quite reach. Devotion which flaked off like dead skin cells and laundry machine lint and hair clogging the drain.

It gathered up, accumulated like leaf litter and rot, until it grew too thick to swallow — cigarette smoke, yellowing the walls.

Still, Giyuu has spent nearly an entire decade of his life and squandered youth, just breathing it in. Calling asbestos his absolution. Wondering what he’d do with the black hole absence in his chest once he finally hopscotched past the event horizon for good.

It was never going to save anybody. 

Of course, everyone learns that eventually.

(But drowning people will cling onto any lifelines. Even the ones attached to deadweight.)

((He cannot watch Sanemi capsize too.))

So, Giyuu tells him, in the only way he knows how, and he hopes against all hope that he will understand —

“You don’t need to do that.”

Sanemi just stares back at him, incredulous. Disbelieving. Slow, yet steady in his retaliation.

Maybe he’ll just call Giyuu a hypocrite too.

Say he’d already stenciled his lungs for things far worse than the chance of disease.

Statistics, statistics. What’s the data for this one? It’s not such a rare thing. It’s not looking too good.

They’d better get to stopping soon.

Giyuu crawls toward Sanemi’s slumped-over form, feeling a little like a child just learning how to walk. 

Milky under all the influence, unsteady even on all four, he joins him by the window, where the big ceiling light shines like alien spaceships through the glass.

“Sometimes,” he confesses, because his tongue is loose tonight, and there are both good and bad ghosts waiting for him in the unlived room he calls his heart, “I think it should have been me who died on the mountain that day.”

“That’s fucking stupid,” is Sanemi’s immediate response.

“Why?”

“Because then I’d have to talk your friend out of doing something dumb too.” He frowns angrily at the hypothetical. “And I think he’d annoy me even more than you already do.”

Giyuu can’t help but snort on a choked laugh. He should probably defend Sabito’s honor. A proper friend would.

“What makes you think that?” is all he says.

“First of all,” Sanemi says, “because he’s friends with you.”

Another hiccupped giggle. A voice he’s patched together out of memory and fiction retorts, you know what, little buddy? I fucking guess!

“I think he’d’ve liked you,” he says. “You would’ve gotten along.”

“Don’t believe you.”

“Sabito wouldn’t do something like that,” Giyuu whispers. “Sabito would’ve moved on by now.”

Sanemi stares down at him steadily. His breath smells like wasted Marlboros and peach-sweet liquor.

Giyuu blinks sleepily every time an exhale ghosts warm over his eyelids.

“I don’t believe you,” Sanemi says again. “You’ll never know for sure.”

That’s just the thing, though, he wants to argue. Giyuu does know that.

Because Sabito had.

He was an only child and orphan, but he had loved Tsutako like his own big sister. When she died, it was like it hadn’t even fazed him. He’d kept right on living, skiing, breathing. Nudging Giyuu out the carcinogenic ash of his own sorrows, without even donning a mask. He’d told him with something like fury in his eyes and aborted sobs dimpling his chin to stop, drop, and roll, to get out of that burning house, to get himself together, because he wasn’t the one crushed in the car that night.

He’d moved on.

Hadn’t he?

So maybe —

Giyuu thinks he has his answer.

Maybe, just maybe —

This is how he would have reacted. 

He would have looked him in the eye when he heard the news: his body no longer lived in his childhood home, but a teenager-sized grave. He would have sighed and rolled his eyes when he read the fine print: he couldn’t be buried on Sagiri, his favorite place in the world, because it’d be offputting to the tourists.

Then, maybe disappointment would have creased his peach brows — which he swore up and down he’d never touched up in his life. Maybe he would have smiled sadly, scar rippling like memorial ribbons on his face, because he’d survived that accident, just not this one, why couldn’t you just live past this one.

And maybe, when all that was said and done, only then would he reach out to Giyuu. 

He would have cupped his face in his hands, stared him down, only child and only orphan and only last of his kind —

And he would have told him —

“You didn’t choose to be here,” Sanemi says. “He decided for you.”

Giyuu blinks, and he is much closer than he had been before. Their shoulders no longer toy with contact. They are fully enmeshed together.

“Nothing you can do about it now but live,” Sanemi tells him, final.

What do I do with you, Sanemi? Giyuu wonders. What can I tell you that you don’t already know?

Sanemi, last-name-unknown Sanemi. Brother, teacher, unbroken Sanemi.

Against all odds, Sanemi.

Not a sole survivor.

Not alone.

Just wholly alive.

Does anybody know how rare that really is?

“Sanemi,” Giyuu repeats.

“Giyuu,” he answers.

In this room and moment, his name is not a dagger.

Sanemi invokes him like things that should be impossible — like snow falling from serein skies, like alien ships lighting up nighttime slopes, like death days and pow days and good days.  

Things, like Giyuu standing tall again. Giyuu, putting his helmet on again.

Giyuu, living again.

A friend to someone other than the unidentified dead.

“Sanemi,” he intones, implores, insists. “It really wasn’t your fault, Sanemi.”

His breath hitches.

Without a cigarette to tide him over, Sanemi’s jaw ticks, like he’s biting right through his tongue.

Lavender eyes stare at him wordless. Too shiny. 

Too wet. 

“You were a child,” Giyuu continues, soft. “You did all your best.”

On the staticky TV screen, someone is crawling out of their grave. Or, maybe it’s a deep stone well. Skeletal hands stick high up in the air, black hair dragging across the forest floor.

The bleached flash ignites the side of Sanemi’s face, the slope of his nose, how deep his scars run —

And Giyuu’s getting sleepier now. Doesn’t know when or how he’s become such a lightweight. He should be used to it by now, the addling liver, the burning lungs.

But for some reason, it’s Sanemi who keeps changing him. All these things he’d tried to bury with the foxes come anew, tearing right over him. He is the wind which wrecks entire forests. The breeze who carries dandelion seeds home.

So Giyuu needs to say this. He doesn’t just think it, he knows it. He is supposed to tell him.

That he really didn’t know where he would’ve ended up today. Maybe back in his apartment with the shitty old furnace. Maybe six feet in the ground. Part of him had hoped it would be the latter. Hoping was not a plan. It was just hope. It’s not so easy to rewrite hope, or unmade plans, or lungs that have long been carved into the shape of winter solstice and sorrow.

But still, he breathes.

And still, the sky is blue.

Today, the air doesn’t stink of rotting bodies.

It smells like pine woods and pow days and some mix of sake and smoke and Sanemi.

Sanemi, who needs to know this.

Sanemi, who —

“I’m glad you survived,” Giyuu whispers, slumping deep into the bend of his side. “I’m glad you didn’t survive alone. I’m glad you got to be here.”

Tension trembles in Sanemi’s joints, keeps him strung up like the end of a noose.

But he does not shove Giyuu off.

He just tilts his head toward the alien-ship ceiling, hands digging into the carpet beneath them.

“You’re drunk,” Sanemi diagnoses hoarsely. “And you barely know me.”

Giyuu shakes his head, smears his cheek into another’s skin.

“I know that much,” he promises.

The girl from the well has crawled inside the house. Giyuu feels more than hears Sanemi sigh.

And one eon later, the hand on the carpet reaches up to cup the back of his head.

His fingers move methodically, cradling the curve of his skull, summiting the slope of his neck. 

They linger at the shell of his ear, nails tangling with loosened hair. 

As if checking for bumps or blood or bluff once more.

“What’re you doing tomorrow?” Sanemi asks him.

“Don’t know,” Giyuu murmurs back.

“That’s fine,” Sanemi whispers, just as soft. “I think I’ll do one more ride.”

“Okay.”

Fingers card through his hair, press to his temple. He doesn’t squeeze nearly hard enough to hurt, but part of him hopes he’ll leave a contusion anyway. Violet of the promise to heal and mend someday. Just not today.

Today, they give themselves permission to bleed.

“What is it they say?” Sanemi presses the words gentle to the top of his head. “Last one, best one, or something like that?”

And Giyuu can’t help but smile. 

A tear sits cradled on the edge of his eye, like a boy perched peacefully upon the end of a crescent moon. Legs dangling off the lunar chairlift —

Riding those same clouds that bring snow upon them, far below.

“Yeah,” he says, tender and bruised, smothering a broken grin into Sanemi’s skin. “They do say that.”

The horror goes unwatched.

The TV is turned off midway.

Sanemi attempts to take the chair, and when Giyuu complains, he hangs halfway off the bed. To which he just grumbles something forlorn about don’t bite, you know. To which Sanemi just huffs out loud, mumbling that it wasn’t that.

Giyuu’s a little too far gone to understand what that means. He just smooshes his face into the nearest pillow it can find, spitting wet hair out his mouth because he just took a very drunk, very slippery shower. He’s so tired. So achey. He fell a lot today.

“Go to sleep,” Sanemi’s voice rumbles beneath him. “I’ll wake you before sunrise.”

“Okay,” Giyuu whispers back, and finally, lets his eyes flutter shut.

It’s a fresh powder day. Blue skies and alabaster snow. Eighty percent chance of storms overnight.

A snowboarder clad in forest-green and white tears down the slopes. He is a falling star, come to nestle among the thin crowd waiting at the bottom. They wave wildly at him, beckoning. What’s taken you so long?

Giyuu knows he is in a dream.

Because everyone he loves is there.

He shoves his boots into his skis anyway. Toes first, then heels down. Two clicks, and he’s in.

He jumps. Doesn’t care if he lands.

It’s a good dream.

He’s sure he will.

True to his promise, Sanemi woke him up an hour before sunrise. He’d shaken his shoulders then ruffled his hair then hollered in his ear until Giyuu groaned and slapped his hand aside.

When he finally crawled off the too-stiff mattress, they sleepily bundled up again. Wrapped themselves in scarves and balacavas and the same jackets from yesterday. Sanemi left his keys on the check-out counter and tossed his duffel into his car, before they trudged up to make the first lift.

And now, they’re here. 

Standing on the cliff’s edge of the same slope where they met only twenty-four hours ago.

Giyuu swears a lifetime passed while he hadn’t been paying attention.

Beyond the horizon, the sun is rising again. It’s the same charming view Sagiri always offers, no matter the occasion. It rose the day before, and it rose all the days before that too.

But something is different today.

It’s a little brighter. A touch pinker. Heavy-handed with the color.

Sagiri glows brilliant beneath breaking light, not a sliver of white to be seen. Just the luster of ripened guavas and five-years-and-one-day ago and the tentative promise of tomorrow. Tree branches bristle with peach frost as the early morning shines red through ebony fingers — 

So vivid, so dazzling, it could make his eyes water and burst.

The world is awful and trying and still, so beautiful. How has Giyuu never stopped to take in the view? He’s always staring downslope, right at his feet, bracing for the impact that never comes.

Up above, it’s enchanting. 

Their lilac field shadows, the cotton candy snow.

It’s everything.

He turns and meets Sanemi at his side. The man shines, alpenglow-soft. Tangible apricity and pink lemonade glow. The warmest winter sun, dancing off the tidal waves of his cuts.

No dawn is ever the same. It takes nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine chances just to get something that might look similar enough. One in a million, to have ridden these slopes for a decade.

One in a million, to have never met until their own desire paths crashed —

For one singularity of a lifespan.

Giyuu wants to tell Sanemi he is thankful. That would be the proper word. He is thankful for the irritation and the hot chocolate and the one puff of a cigarette they’d shared then squandered. For the glimpses and the picture pieces and the surviving.

For the coincidence that they had both set alarms for the same time, same lift, same run.

Same day, two weeks and three days after he was born, twenty-one long odd years ago.

Gloved fingers brush beneath his jaw before he gets the chance, tilting his chin up.

Giyuu’s breath snags treacherously in his throat as Sanemi loops his index and middle into the strap of his helmet, giving it one good tug. 

The motion jerks Giyuu’s head forward, just an inch closer. Close enough that Sanemi’s sigh frosts like condensation over his nose.

“Sanemi,” he garbles out, a little strangled.

“Yeah,” he answers steadily.

Thank you for snowboarding. Thank you for taking my memories. Thank you for meeting me, here.

Thank you for everything.

Giyuu works the words around his tongue, wants them out. Wants to skip them like stones across the lake of snow lying inches beyond their feet.

It’s not nearly enough.

It’ll only sink. 

“I had fun yesterday,” is all he can bear to confess. 

Still, the hand on his helmet doesn’t let go. 

Sanemi only reaches up and knocks their heads together, a bump teetering near gentle, shoving Giyuu back into the wayward frame of his body anyway. Aftershocks rattle the dusty sorrow that had settled in his absence.

For once, he doesn’t choke on it.

“Sanemi,” he says again, as the motes only dance. “Will I ever see you again?”

At that, he just chuckles. It’s a bit smoke-stained, but it’s real. Giyuu needs to believe it was real.

“You sure you want to?” he retorts. “I’m not sorry I derailed your snow day.”

“Yes.” Giyuu takes Sanemi’s halfhearted joke and flings it out as far as he can. “I am.”

Lilac eyes widen, stunned silent.

In the ensuing quiet, Giyuu dares to push himself forward, just a smidge more.

His skis meet the end of Sanemi’s board with a soft clack.

“Tomioka,” he says. “Tomioka Giyuu. That’s my full name.”

Sanemi raises one pale eyebrow.

“Don’t you think we did this whole thing backwards?” he asks.

“Perhaps,” Giyuu agrees.

At that, he just huffs out a laugh again.

He leans down to strap himself in, hands hanging at his hips. Adjusts his stance, wiggles a bit to get used to the powdery give. Reaches deep into his pocket to crack open another damn Red Bull. Swipes the foam clean off with his tongue.

Meets Giyuu’s eyes in the middle.

Jaw set in decision, as he offers in return —

“Shinazugawa.”

The last piece slots into place, for now.

He still has questions. Missing corners and centers. There are stories lined all over Sanemi’s flesh he hasn’t yet shared. He thinks that someday, he might even ask.

But today —

Just for today —

Shinazugawa Sanemi will do just fine.

“Sanemi,” Giyuu says, sliding his goggles onto his face. “I think my car is out of gas.”

He rolls his eyes.

“If you need a ride,” he says without heat, “just spit it out.”

“I think I need a ride.”

“You want a damn meal while we’re at it too?”

“Lunch,” Giyuu says, “would be nice.”

Sanemi stares at him for one moment longer. Sun glitter in his eyes, mirth warm in his breath.

Then, he tugs his goggles down his helmet too. He pulls up his balacava until all that remains is the reddened tip of his nose.

Still, Giyuu can make out that twitching tilt of his mouth, the timbre of that clarion voice, as he declares —

“Alright, Tomioka Giyuu. It’s a plan, then.”

Shinazugawa Sanemi takes off in a flurry, oceanic gales blowing atop the mountain, even a hundred miles out from sea.

In the wake of his clement breeze, Giyuu’s hair blows in the gentlest waves across his face.

He gazes up at the silvery pearl hanging high in the clouds, cradled between the palms of a blooming dawn. One-in-a-million chances. Dying on the slopes. Meeting at the summit.

Sun and moon and star, sharing the same sky.

It’s a plan.

His first breath in tastes only of snow.

And Giyuu doesn’t hesitate any longer, before he chases Sanemi’s fall line all the way down.