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Sasanami Unmei hates football.
It’s a fact he’s known for a while. He doesn’t think about why; he doesn’t think about blurry memories in a hospital bed, voices of adults urgently rushing around him, the beeping, the sterile white of the ceiling above him and the black behind his eyelids. He doesn’t think about the bruises on his arms and hands where needles had punctured the skin, nor the oxygen mask that had rested on his face. He doesn’t think about sitting in a room and listening to a doctor punch a hole through his future, doesn’t think about how he had stood up and screamed his denial in a way he would never do now.
There are holes in his brain where two years should be; books too complicated for a nine year old, folders of evidence deep enough for an undergraduate paper, knowledge that he retains even if he doesn’t know where it comes from, surrounding him in his room with context he can only barely grasp. Two years of sitting in his room searching, studying, trying to find something that could spell salvation, and when he failed to find it, his mind switched it off. He can’t read all the scans that his doctor takes, he’s not that advanced, but he can broadly tell when the numbers are good and when the numbers are bad, and even that’s strange when he can't remember learning it—he keeps all his scans in the pointless, horrible hope that maybe one day it’ll look better, that one day he’ll be able to point to one from a year ago and say, look, look how much it changed, I’m at normal levels. He never is; sometimes the numbers look better than the last, making him think maybe, in a cruel game of cat and mouse, and then the next they’re back down.
So he’s left with knowledge he can’t return and, worse yet, a life still to live despite his protests.
He manages the days by procedure, creating a schedule: he goes to school, avoids Soramiya, comes home, does his homework, reads too advanced books and, when all else fails, whiles away on the internet, falling into rabbit holes of research that he can’t really do anything with: hours of scouring articles, finding archived pages, images almost lost to time had he not unearthed them. When something—a craft, a science, a person—catches his eye, he spends hours tearing it apart piece by piece until he has a collection of strange facts and social media posts from ten years ago that wouldn’t hold up if they were posted today; he learns how to access areas of the internet spoken about in news articles as dangerous, through different browsers and VPNs and safeguards, and scours under the surface for whispers of activity until he’s satisfied.
None of these fits of fixation end up long-term. He does nothing with the information he gathers, simply packs it into organised folders and leaves it to gather dust until he maybe picks it back up again, months or years later. He searches for something like he’s applying pressure to a wound, something to alleviate the ache in his gut and the nauseous lump in his throat, but nothing quite works.
(He knows what would work, if he tried; every time the thought pushes itself to the front of his mind, he swallows it back like acid in his throat.)
He’s researched every junior high school in the area before anyone even suggests they should start looking at choices. Finger on the pulse, one specific school catches his eye—one blemish on their reputation, and it caused a ban he can’t look over. They live just a little too far away, on the wrong side of Nagasaki, but when he keeps eying it, his mother starts looking into finding a new place to live; they won’t get there in time for the start of the year, but he can transfer easily enough. He doesn’t thank her for it until months later.
The obvious choice for his schooling in the area they move to is Nishinomiya, focusing on academics over anything else; Unmei ignores it entirely and obsesses over maps of Nagumohara. By the time he actually transfers there, he knows the place inside and out, and only spends a few minutes walking around to confirm what he already knows: pretentious students, prestigious achievements, clean grounds. He goes to class, meets a stalker, gets rid of the stalker on his way out of school, and resigns himself to going home and stalking him for intimidation. It’ll be an interesting use of an afternoon, before his teachers stop taking pity on his new move and start assigning catch-up homework.
But he meets Sakurazaki in the alleyway and suddenly all of his plans are shot as the constant roaring in his ears gets loud.
He can see it, see the lines he takes, and he just knows. The trajectory of his kicks, the speed, the power; it’s something special, something he hasn’t seen for years, the sight rushing for him and etching its way into his brain, bright energy clashing with his lethargy. The steps he takes towards it are almost unintentional, automatic, needing—he has to see it closer, he has to understand it, he has to trace the lines and figure out exactly how he can use it.
It’s only after he wakes up in a hospital bed with his head pounding like—well, like someone hit him with a steel pipe—that he thinks through his actions and feels his stomach churn. But it’s nausea and something else, something deep, something craving; something stirring, as though waking up.
Sasanami Unmei hates football for all the things it has done to him. For every moment wasted, for every moment lost.
But underneath the surface, buried in the tightness in his chest and the acid in his stomach, is a clawing, desperate longing to go back to that world he was in; to take his delicate future into his hands and forcibly mould it into a shape he likes, to fill the dusty hole that was left with something familiar. He had felt it, for just a moment, watching Sakurazaki take control of that street fight like all he was ever meant to do was kick—could see comforting green and white, could taste sweat in the air and crushed grass in his kit.
It manifests into something nauseatingly consuming, the haze in his mind making his vision swim if he dares to think about it for a second. A bit in front of him and all he has to do is put it between his teeth and bite down, take control, fight back; drooling like a dog with a bone just out of reach, all he feels as he stares at the ocean at the park near the hospital is empty, hungry, miserable.
Sakurazaki was told, once, to give up football. Once, and he crumbled into nothing but a fake delinquent. Unmei has been told every check-up, every appointment, every heart-related article he’s ever read since he was seven, and only that had ever stopped him.
The feeling swirls in his gut, something violent, something stormy. An angry cry; a how dare he. Hissing and spitting every time he looks at him, deep and primal and shoved down to his gut. But he can’t act on it, can’t speak up, because doing so would acknowledge the wolfish desire in his throat, the desperation that would come through in his tone.
One day, maybe soon, he knows, something has to give; the bubble he’s surrounded himself in will pop, the safety pin will come loose. And when it happens, he wonders what his fate will end up being.