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There is a ghost leading Haru around Nagasaki.
Not that he's felt very corporeal himself, recently. Before his injury, he at least had football as a vague distraction; now, he spends most afternoons staring into nothing, either at Raimon’s practice grounds or in his bedroom, drifting between the two the only thing he ever does. Social media is flooded with rumours of his fall into nothingness; school isn’t much better. Being able to walk without crutches now doesn’t change much—maybe lessens the stares of his peers in the hallways. He wanders around the school like a stray puppy, only occasionally coming to rest at the club's training grounds, where they politely ignore him as they work harder than he ever did with them. He's lost, and it only occurs to him to search when Ren suggests it.
So Nagasaki it is, to meet someone, a version of the person he’s reaching for that doesn’t only live in his head, and he finds him at Nagumohara Junior High.
He addresses him wrong, at first, but a gentle correction is enough to make him stop; hearing just Haru with no honorific in a soft-spoken voice sparks something in him, something longing, something wistful. He scrambles for it, the feeling slipping through his fingers, something new to combat the ache in his gut, but it fades in his palm. What if I really can’t play again? his mind whispers as he explains the situation to the only person who will understand, and the knowledge that there are things to focus on other than football isn’t as comforting as when he heard it from the mouth of someone else.
The hand offered to him is cold. Haru shivers when he takes it, feeling as though he shouldn’t be touching it—the skin should be intangible, like passing his hand through a cloud. Yet it’s solid beneath his fingers, friendly and forgiving, and Haru finds himself chasing that same spark from before like it’s an addiction he can’t shake.
He’s led through tramlines and across bridges, quiet conversation about cats and ramen shop drama and moving to this part of town filling the air between them even as Haru struggles to keep up. They stand on Megane Bridge, the soft-spoken voice continuing on with stories about floods and castella shops in the area, and Haru spots a turtle in the river and races off the bridge and down the stairs to get a better look. He’s joined a minute later, his friend having walked instead of ran, and Haru hops across the stepping stones to blink curiously at two turtles stacked on top of each other. There’s koi here, sometimes, too, says the voice behind him, and a vague memory of sitting next to the pond in the Odaiba Football Gardens, allowed in by their parents and set loose on the park, makes Haru swallow and turn to give his companion a hand to the stone next to him.
If he doesn’t look that close, if he turns his eyes to the terrapins, he can pretend the presence next to him—hesitantly taking his hand to carefully step onto the stone—is the person he’s truly looking for. Fuzzy and just slightly off, but he can gloss over the imperfections in his vision if he tries.
They tour Nagasaki, going places he would have never thought of: ice cream and a bus to the penguin aquarium and champon. He's laughed at, and laughed with, and stilted conversation starts to flow more naturally, until Haru looks up and the sky is starting to turn orange; they realise the next tram is arriving sooner than they thought, and Haru moves to start sprinting for it, injury be damned. But a hand grabs his wrist. Wait, he says, I can’t run that far, quiet and embarrassed. And Haru almost instinctively offers to carry him there, give him a ride on his back, he can carry his crutches if he wants. He doesn’t—he’s sensible enough to know that’s a step too far into this fantasy, just. The trams come often enough that they just get the next one.
The hand that finds his, occasionally, on this tour, is gentle and soft and icy to the touch each time. Was it this cold back then, too, when he helped him with steps, with doors, with anything he asked for? He voices the observation, once, and there’s a medical explanation, as it turns out—along with a tiny mutter of your hand is warmer than normal, too, which Haru laughs at. It’s cold due to blood circulation issues, he says, and Haru can imagine how hard it must be when your heart has stopped beating.
The idea of a best friend leads him to a slope car and a sunset view of the river through the city. Mt. Inasa, he’s told on the way up, is over three-hundred metres above sea level. A must-see, he says, and Haru asks if he’s been up here before, and gets a flustered non-answer that he can tell is a no. He’s not sure why, though, considering the view really is incredible—they make a game out of who can figure out where Nagumohara Junior High is first, and though he loses, Haru is the first one to see the ship passing through, so they call it even. The mountain breeze carries their hair on the wind, gentle and sweet, and if Haru really concentrates, he can mix the glow of the sunset into teal and pretend it’s pink.
(For a moment, on the ride down, he mentions the bench where they met again, and hears a different person’s voice respond, blunt and carrying, and he admits that he hasn’t tried to enjoy football for years, not since he left him, and...)
They say goodbye at the train station, and Haru pretends it’s not forever. It’s a casual farewell; he tells him that he’ll see him later, and wants to believe it’s true. But he can feel that spark escaping again, and knows it’s the last time he’ll feel it, elusive and fleeting as it has been. He can’t see a future ahead of him, and so he figures there mustn’t be one—that the next step he takes will be into nothingness. So he says goodbye, and he leaves him in Nagasaki, ghostly and haunting, and the see you again is a promise he knows he’ll be unable to keep even as it leaves his mouth, tasting like dust even as he smiles.
He’s alone again as he stands on the escalator to his platform, somehow colder than before, going through the motions as he mindlessly walks to the train and considers why the yellow line is there. He takes a final breath of Nagasaki air, stale in his lungs, and steps forward.
“Haru!”
Clear as the sun slicing through the clouds, a voice behind him cuts through the fog in his brain almost effortlessly. He finds himself with one foot raised to step onto the train back to Tokyo, feeling as though he’s teetering over the edge of a cliff. He takes a step back from the threshold, and turns...
And it’s Sasanami Unmei standing there, breathing heavy.
Staring at him catching his breath, Haru feels a lump in his throat he hadn’t realised was there. There’s no trace of brown hair or freckles; no wispy laughter he’s almost forgotten the sound of. It’s Unmei, real and solid, a strangely determined expression on his face, sharp eyes seeming to pierce Haru’s defenses in a way he’s never felt. Everything seems to form real edges around them, the train station sharpening with Unmei as its centre, spark roaring into a flame.
“Unmei?” Haru says, quietly in awe, like he’s on the precipice of something. “What’re you doing?”
“I...” Unmei stutters, and Haru feels a spike of worry—he ran here, he realises, he ran here for Haru—but he straightens up and looks him in the eye and it’s like he’s being seen. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
And standing here, staring at him, Haru can’t see anyone else anymore. He wonders how he ever did, when the passion and grit in Unmei’s eyes is so foreign to him, when he’s faced with someone so fierce under the surface. Sasanami Unmei is dangerous, he realises, in a way he’d never considered before. “What?” he asks, and he almost feels like crying again.
Unmei takes a breath, and almost shouts, “You can’t give up!” with such conviction that Haru feels sick. “I...” he trails off, swallowing, considering his words. “The path ahead of me seemed so dark, but I kept going.” And there’s a tiny smile on his face now, a genuine one, Haru can tell.
A train runs past behind Unmei, and his hair gets picked up by the wind it carries. Haru can feel it on his own face, blowing past, Unmei’s soft, confident smile carrying his senses to something real. “I mean!” Unmei shouts over the train, more emotion flitting across his face than Haru’s seen from him all afternoon, as though convincing Haru of his point is the most important thing he’s ever done. “Meeting everyone—it... it made me feel...” the smile returns, wider this time, “It made me feel like it was worth it to keep going.”
He straightens, eyes crinkling at the edges. “If you keep going, you will see the path, too.” And then, with more faith than Haru’s ever felt, exploding out of him, “I know it!”
There is no one else in front of Haru, no one else whispering in the back of his mind. It’s him, and Unmei, and a train track that he suddenly glimpses past the darkness; just there, if he reaches for it, that spark can carry him through, even if he can’t quite see all of it yet. He swallows, feeling as though he’s just barely surfaced from the depths of the ocean, just for a second, and caught a tiny sliver of sunlight before he starts sinking again.
He wants to see where the path Unmei is talking about leads. He wants to walk down it, hand in hand.
(He needs to keep a promise.)