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Ennoshita Chikara takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and plunges head first into the parade.
Tokyo Pride. A swirling vortex of colour, music and people; rivers unfurling down the streets of Chikara’s city, infiltrating roads like rainbow snakes. People flood by in swishes of cloaks and clattering placards, frills flouncing, blinding smiles hitched on painted cheeks. Chikara’s never seen such flamboyance: in his favourite hoodie and battered jeans, he feels almost underdressed. Overlooked, unnoticed. In this unapologetically extravagant parade, he’s one of thousands, and he knows he is outshone by each and every one of them.
Still, he’s here. He picks up his pace, a grin creeping its way over his features. His hands itch for a camera, wishing to capture this moment on film, keep it forever. I’m marching in Tokyo Pride. A disbelieving laugh bursts from his lips, and he rocks his head back to catch the sun. Sudden bliss clouds his thoughts. I’m marching in Tokyo Pride. I’m marching in Tokyo Pride, and nobody can stop me.
As the parade spills down the street, Chikara accepts a tiny flag from the girl marching next to him and runs his hands through his hair. It’s grown long recently, creeping past his ears, and it hangs in his eyes if he doesn’t have time for the gel on his bathroom sink. I should probably get it cut, he muses briefly, enjoying the breeze pushing past his face. I don’t really want to, though. Besides, it frames my cheekbones. It’s small freedoms like this which make him glad he left Miyagi, and deep down, he doesn’t think he’ll cut it short again. He doesn’t want to part with anything that separates him from the boy he used to be.
Wow, he thinks drily. I sound like an angsty anime character.
(…Hey, but what if I was?
Shut up Chikara, you’re walking in Pride, now really isn’t the time...)
However, he’s a lost cause. Without regrets or Chikara’s permission, his brain starts ticking, and before he can help himself, he’s off in a filmmaker’s dream. What could the anime be about? School? Volleyball? What would his character look like? Lines, plots, and artists spring into his head as he navigates the street, lost amid flapping flags and banners. Brain whirring like a well-oiled machine, he conjures characters and sifts through designs, perusing hypothetical storylines and points of view.
He’s at the point of selecting voice actors when he stumbles on the kerb and reality bursts in uninvited. No. He’s not a filmmaker; he’s in law school now. He’s not going to waste time on a profession he won’t follow, or ideas that will never spring to life.
Angry at himself for getting distracted, Chikara leaves his thoughts of filmmaking at the end of the street. However, as he passes a cinema, he bites his lip and looks away.
He’s always been like this. Quiet, passable, easy to overlook; with sleepy eyes and a plain face, Chikara has never been the centre of attention, and never really intended to be. The limelight at his old high school was always taken up by those who competed for it, those who commanded attention – loud, flashy Tanaka with his shirt whirling above his head, Noya with his lightening reflexes, the freak duo with their impeccable quick and impossible endurance.
Chikara never minded sinking into the background, letting the others have their time to shine. It allowed him to notice all the tiny details that no one else would. Little things, like the crease in Kageyama’s forehead when he concentrated, and the peculiar way Narita sat while studying, and the way Kinoshita sang when he thought nobody was listening. Tsukishima genuinely smiling, eyes lighting up when he got carried away talking about some science fact or the obscure band he listens to, and the eyes-scrunched-up dimpled grin that appeared on Hinata’s face whenever Kenma called. Tiny things. Just enough to have a better understanding of the team, or make someone’s day a little better; Chikara reveled in it.
Perhaps that’s why he was drawn to filmmaking, all those years ago when he first picked up a camera in grade school. Finding a way to let the world see all the details, a subtle way; sharing his little gift. Maybe it was the all-encompassing sensation of capturing a moment in megapixels, storing time in a memory card. Or perhaps it was the allure of scripting, acting as if he could control a little piece of the world at a time, always knowing what was coming next. Real life is never like that, Chikara reflects. One minute you’re behind the scenes with a camera in your hand, controlling it. The next, you’re having your decisions made for you, caught up in a plot that you didn’t write.
Filmmaking. Law school.
Chikara’s not sure when he became a character, but this film doesn’t seem to have a happy ending.
Thankfully, these sour thoughts don’t last long. A chant leaks through the crowd, catching Chikara up and bearing him down the road in a flurry of excitement. It brings him back to volleyball (doesn’t everything?) and the chants that filled the court, the meagre cheering team that Yachi pulled together. Though it’s been barely a year, it may as well have been a lifetime ago. He recalls the squeaking trainers on the court, the electric air and frenzied shouts in the gymnasium, the energy that crackled in every teammate’s eyes. Perhaps he wasn’t as intense as Daichi, or as understanding as he knows Yamaguchi will have been. He hadn’t natural talent like Hinata and Kageyama (he ponders briefly if they got together in the end. He’s pretty sure he’s still got a thousand yen riding on it), or a blocking powerhouse like Tsukishima turned out to be. The university team rejected him, on the grounds of ‘you’re a good player, but we’ve got too many like you’, an accusation that stung at first but then made sense. He was never an exceptional player, and he knows it. However, any captain that could deal with a freak duo’s fights, an overenthusiastic vice, various nightmare first-years and still take the team to nationals, in Chikara’s opinion, deserves an award other than ‘you’re generic’.
But so be it. He did his damn best for the team, and he’s sure their eventual loss at the Battle of the Garbage Dump (he can still hear Kageyama cursing Kenma’s team of alley cats) was down to chance. His memories of volleyball camps (complete with Tanaka’s desperate attempts to hit on Fukurodani’s managers) and his mess of a team remain intact and precious, and he wants to keep them that way. In a few years’ time, he’ll be occupying a very different kind of court; however, he knows the first one will always be his favourite.
He doesn’t know how he would have put up with high school if he hadn’t returned to the volleyball club. Though some of the best times of his life were spent snarking over lunch with Narita and Kinoshita and trying to keep his mess of a team together, the suffocating closeness of Karasuno had pressed in on him like a vice. He scans the parade, rainbows flashing behind his eyelids, and thinks about the Ennoshita Chikara of last year, third year of Karasuno High. As exam stress and caffeine ran through classmates’ veins, Chikara had scraped along, cramming any spaces in his overflowing timetable full of English verbs and politics, camera gathering dust in a drawer. His mother threatened him with horror stories of those who failed exams, didn’t get into university, ruined their whole lives, and Chikara worked harder, tutoring teammates and managing volleyball and sanity around his ridiculous schedule. Dreams of film school were long forgotten, replaced by thoughts of seminars and ideal courses, and Oh look, Chikara, a law course! Let’s go for that one!
As the acceptance letter dropped on his desk one dismal Monday morning, something inside Chikara had died. Model student he may have been, but as he looked at the sheaf of paper in his hands, he was seized by the urge to do something crazy. Rip it up. Bunk off school. Shave his hair off. Do something, anything, to let him break out of the box that was Ennoshita Chikara.
Kiss a teammate.
No, kiss a very particular teammate.
For that was all that ran through Chikara’s head as he studied subjects without his interest and chose a course he did not want to go to. The niggling thought in the back of his mind every practice, the black cloud over his head every time he went out with a girlfriend. Guilt shoots through his mind at the thought of it, as he knows will happen for a long time hence. The broken eyes every time he let them down, the knot of guilt in his stomach with every date, the panic stoppering his throat when he looked at boys and felt things stir in his stomach, emotions he’d never felt before. He’s no stranger to the hipbones under his hands and lips on his, but just as familiar is cold hard guilt leaking down his spine, the resolute refusal of his heart to thump harder. That was all he ever thought about as his overbearing, overly religious mother crowed about her beautiful boy, her model student, her ladies’ man. What if you knew, mom. What if you knew.
Because halfway through second year, Chikara had walked into practice looking at Tanaka Ryuunosuke in a different way, and that was all it had taken to ruin him.
It wasn’t easy to pinpoint what had made Chikara fall; no aspect of Tanaka had ever been easy to define. He was a character Chikara could never write – unpredictable, spontaneous, loud and carefree, polar opposite of the meticulous boxes Chikara drew himself into; the boxes other people had always set out for him. Tanaka erased lines, spilling out of any box Chikara tried to build around him, any labels he tried to attach. It wasn’t possible to write him, and Chikara couldn’t understand. He couldn’t capture the midnight conversations, the intensive training and secret smiles in words; Tanaka was the best kind of character, the one you could pick away at and still never understand the workings of their mind, and maybe that was part of the appeal.
Tanaka Ryuunosuke didn’t live by scripts, but he shone so brightly he made Chikara feel like a side character in his own film. Most other characters did that; his mother, who dictated the boxes he existed in, the prodigies oozing natural talent in the volleyball team, his older brothers, successful lawyers before him.
Chikara likes things to be scripted. He likes funny little jokes woven into speech, different sentence lengths and comedic pauses, not uncalculated conversations and awkward silences and the spontaneity of everyday interaction.
However, with Tanaka, he could never bring himself to care.
Despite his intriguing existence, there had always been one box that Tanaka confined himself to. To Chikara’s utter dismay, Tanaka was just about the straightest man on the team – although holding that title had never been hard. Sexual tension had haunted Karasuno Volleyball Club like a ghost, giving cause for Kuroo’s nickname of ‘the gayest volleyball team in Japan’ (not like he was one to talk, Chikara thinks, recalling the blocker’s crush on his childhood friend - about as inconspicuous as a two-ton elephant) and a prefecture-wide homo reputation. Although many group chats, inexplicably christened with such eloquent names as ‘Narita’s hair looks like an egg’ and ‘Shut up Noya’, had entailed elaborate plans of shutting Hinata and Kageyama in a cupboard and throwing away the key, nothing fruitful had come from the speculation and the third-years had graduated without any successful matchmaking attempts. Though Tanaka and Noya’s incessant badgering of the managers had been reduced to easygoing friendship in their third year, Chikara had never caught a glimpse of anything other than fierce heterosexuality emanating from the wing spiker. And anyway, even if Tanaka had been the most blatantly gay man on the team, Chikara probably wouldn’t have done anything about it anyway. The risk of his mother finding out would be too high, and the last thing his teenage sexuality crisis needed was a disapproving parent in the mix.
Still, Chikara sighs, it would have been nice. Spending the whole of his third year in such close proximity to Tanaka – despite his lacking grades, the wing spiker had been the obvious choice for vice captain – had been challenging, not only for his eardrums but for Chikara’s self-control. The vice’s tendency to whip off his shirt was both a blessing and a curse, and the various study sessions organized to drag both he and Noya through exams had been nothing short of painful. The cheesy pick-up lines he tested incessantly on everyone – everyone but Chikara – seemed invented solely to tease him, to push him past the brink of sanity.
(As if dealing with Hinata and Kageyama hadn’t done that already)
Taunting thoughts of let me push him against a wall and kiss him or everyone is looking at him it doesn’t matter if you do too were forced into exile by bitten lips, heads in hands and threats to punch that stupid smile off Narita’s face if he doesn’t stop smirking Right. Now. Despite his best efforts to conceal the pining, Chikara was too far gone, and it was painfully obvious that everyone knew. Apart from Tanaka, and his mother. And he knew he would confess to the former a million times if it meant never ever letting the latter know.
Teenage angst with a twist, Chikara thinks grimly as he passes another cinema. What a storyline, eh?
But along with acceptance letters, graduation had arrived in a flurry of packing and goodbyes. Tanaka and Noya were taking a gap year, Chikara had learned as he pored over team stats and his vice captain surveyed the court. His eyes had lit up as he described the countries they were going to visit, the beaches they would surf on and the ‘hot babes’ who they were destined to meet. Chikara managed to refrain from snorting, instead trying to imprint Tanaka’s expressions into his brain. If he couldn’t film every single moment like this, then at least he could attempt to remember them all.
Something he tried his best not to remember was the knot in his stomach as they’d rocked up to his house at five am on their way to the airport, blasting music loud enough to wake the dead. “Hasta la vista, baby,” Tanaka had yelled, whirling a flower necklace out the sunroof of the rental car. Brakes had squealed like rabid animals. Chikara had yelled ‘Shut up and go!’ from the upstairs window, teeth gritted in a grin that stuck on his face like superglue, watching as opportunities slipped through his fingers and Noya attempted not to crash the car.
After a final quip of ‘Sure you don’t need a booster seat?’ and laughing at the furious reply, Chikara had shut the window and sunk into bed, stomach furled tight. As the sounds of the engine faded into the distance, nausea swamped his body. What had he to look forward to now? More revision? College courses? While Tanaka and Noya travelled the world, learnt languages and met new people, Chikara would be holed up in an apartment, existing on cup ramen and searching for any way out. He curled into the covers, regrets overflowing his head. As the person he wanted nothing more than to spend his future with sped away, Chikara was looking forward to being alone, with the acceptance of no one to put his mind at ease.
And now a year on, Chikara thinks, I’m marching in Tokyo Pride. One year of cramming legal jargon into his head, fighting the urge to drop out and live in a box somewhere, wishing he hadn’t left his camera in the drawer back home. Kinoshita and Narita had gone to university elsewhere; contact was rare, simply due to busyness and conflicting class times and distance. Chikara was on good terms with those in his classes and had gone out several times with his roommates, but university lacked the easy companionship provided by high school and he frequently finds himself longing for the raucous squabbling of his teammates, the inane laughter that answered his snarky jokes.
As he spills down the street in a whirlpool of voices and music, he realizes he misses Tanaka more than ever; the knot still hasn’t dissipated, instead become accentuated with time. He misses all the damned details that he couldn’t help but notice and he misses filmmaking and sealing moments into eternity. He misses Tanaka snoring on the bus after a big game, unwarranted yelling after a spike and bristly hair he longed to run his hands through; trying to tutor English while laughing at vulgar jokes, rolling his eyes at awful pick-up lines and trying to spot the soft smile Tanaka kept for when nobody seems to be looking.
Chikara misses him. He misses him so much, and he’s this close to breaking down in the street, because the parade is reminding him of all the things he couldn’t be when it mattered; confident and brave and able to break boxes, and he knows he’ll end up graduating law school and getting a boring job and leading a boring life when if he’d just had the courage to become someone new he wouldn’t have to do that, and he could have confessed to Tanaka or gone with them on their gap year or graduated film school and done what he really wants to live for, but no, he’s still safe within his stupid boxes and he’s never going to see the one person he wants to spend his life with again -
The lamppost, apparently, has other plans.
Chikara doesn’t realise that he’s walked into it until he feels the white-hot explosion in his nose and hears the laughter round about him.
Even then, he doesn’t register the pain.
He’s too busy searching for the source of that one laugh, the one he recognizes from three years of bleeding eardrums, and the voice that’s shrieking “It’s Ennoshita! Hey, Ryuu, it’s Ennoshita!”
Something hits his middle like a bullet, and through hazy vision he sees tan lines and spiky hair. He’s so startled that he tumbles to the ground, and then he’s lying on his back with a bleeding nose in the middle of a Tokyo street, the pride parade coming to a halt around him. Looking up, at Nishinoya Yuu standing triumphant over his prone body – the only time he’ll ever be taller than me – and Tanaka Ryuunosuke emerging from the crowd with guffaws shaking his broad shoulders. Tanaka offers a hand and pulls him up into a rough embrace, and Chikara’s mind goes blank (with maybe some fireworks here and there) and tears threaten to spill down his cheeks and mix with the blood from his god damn nosebleed from the lamppost he just walked into and the situation is just so ridiculous and outside the box that he rocks his head back and laughs to the sky, the boy he loves laughing with him.
-----
“So,” Tanaka asks him over the top of a beer, eyes full of mirth. “Has it stopped bleeding yet?”
Chikara glares at him from behind the bloody clump of tissues. As his nose continues to bleed, he’s been drinking every single tiny detail of Tanaka Ryuunosuke; enough for the year, or the lifetime he’s missed. The bead bracelets adorning the tan lines on his wrists, the shoulders that have grown even broader in their year apart; the scar on his lip from the time he bit through it after taking a serve to the face. The blue-pink-purple warpaint slashing his and Noya’s cheeks (“For ‘bisexual,’” they announced proudly on the way to the bar, and Chikara tried not to internally combust), the confident grin, the ever-bristly haircut that Chikara thinks maybe, just maybe he’ll get to run his fingers through this time.
Noya has left the scene, disappearing earlier with the promise of drinks, but instead sneaking out of the bar with a not-so-subtle wink at Tanaka (go get em’, Ryuu) that Chikara pretended not to see. Just like he pretended not to see the disappointment flickering on Tanaka’s face as he spluttered over all the past ‘no homos’ and the way Tanaka was scrutinizing everything about him, just like he was doing now. The hair, which he doesn’t intend to cut because it frames his cheekbones nicely. The sleepy eyes, the ones that notice everything. And quite possibly the blinding grin on his face, because somehow, this new film has a happy ending.
…but still. This happy ending has been teasing him, and he’s not going to let that slide.
“Fuck you.”
Tanaka’s smile lights up the world as he signals for the bartender, and suddenly, inexplicably, Ennoshita Chikara knows what’s coming next.
(Almost as if it had been scripted)
“Only if you get the bill.”