Chapter Text
‘Almost’ is such a cruel word, and Chigiri has gone through many, many ‘almost’s ever since he came back.
Almost the same height, which means he’s gotten taller. Broader, too. Almost the same hair, only longer, more unruly, just as brightly orange but peppered with patches of silver grey that weren’t there before; that’s the sight that makes Chigiri’s heart skip a beat when he catches a glimpse of it in the hallway. The face that turned to him when he called, almost familiar. Almost the same amber eyes, only dull and lifeless, as if someone had turned the light behind them off. Almost the same voice but coarser when he told Chigiri to piss off and leave him alone. The understanding sank into his chest before he could register the pain and pinned him in place helplessly, preventing him from crossing the distance as he would have liked to do.
Proficient at cataloguing his losses due to his injury, Chigiri’s used to looking at ugly things straight in the eye and calling them by their proper name, unflinching, determined to go on and fill the gap they leave later, and that’s exactly what he’s trying to do. He is being very deliberate and precise about it, in fact.
What remains: a rival with a formidable presence on the field. Someone who occupies the same shared spaces and breathes the same recycled Blue Lock air, technically still Kunigami Rensuke in name and bone structure and ginger hair (or the most hurtful word: almost.) What he’s lacking: absolutely, devastatingly everything else –the warmth, the easy-going laugh, the unhurried attentiveness with which he treated everyone, firm in his belief that fairness was something worth making room for even in such a competitive, ruthless place. All that small and towering evidence that he chose, every day, actively, to care. All of it, gone. At least it’s the only thing that doesn’t have an ‘almost’ before it.
So Chigiri puts an ‘s’ before the wallowing and pushes the sorrow down his throat time and time again for all those ‘almost’s and then some; wills himself into playing beside the stranger wearing his almost-friend’s skin (he doesn’t dare to even think of the other word; way too far for an ‘almost’-anything-of-the-sort) and doesn't reach for anything that clearly isn't there. Every now and then, he believes to have seen a spark of recognition in the dull amber and the ghost of his almost-whatever threatens to resurface, and he does what he does best: keeps moving to outrun his grief. And spares him a smile, regardless of his better judgement, just in case.
It's fine. Chigiri is more than used to calibrating his expectations to what his body and mind are actually capable of; he just hadn't expected to have to do it for someone else's.
º . ˚ . · ˚ º .
The drill is simple: forty metres, full sprint, three dribbling repetitions against one of the holograms, two minutes recovery, back to square one again. Kunigami’s legs move in motions that have been precisely planned out by his conscious brain, leaving nothing to chance, not even the tightening or relaxing of the tiniest muscle in his body. Every variable is accounted for, analysed and optimised; his lungs report, his heart rate climbs to the projected ceiling and holds there obediently.
Blue Lock hums with its usual entropy around him. Someone's stray shot clangs off the crossbar, accenting the general percussive chaos of balls hitting nets and dummies alike, the huffing and muttering. None of that registers as more than background noise to be ignored as he goes back to the beginning of the track. Something catches across his peripheral reason: a flash of red hair shining under the harsh fluorescent lights, but since it doesn’t move towards him, he promptly files it away. Chigiri must have given up on the idea of seeking him out, which is a convenient, unspoken arrangement Kunigami wishes they’d reached sooner. Others still try every now and then: Isagi, mainly, with his particular brand of earnest insistence, which Kunigami has learned to meet with sufficient coldness to discourage repetition. He still hasn’t quit, though, probably because they’re supposed to play for the same team. An absurd notion: the Bastards are nothing but a stepping stone in his path to become the world’s number one and every player in it knows it, deep down. Beside’s, there’s no such thing as a team Kunigami can ever be a part of. Hasn’t been since–
Third repetition. His chest tightens slightly toward the end, which he attributes to a slight drop in the air conditioning’s temperature compared to yesterday. He hops in place a couple of times to warm up and adjusts his breathing pattern accordingly until the slight discomfort passes. The figure with the pinkish red hair moves towards the exit without a word to anyone and leaves the training area. Without any attempts at friendly banter or a teasing jab; the last time was a whole week ago. But of course. Kunigami shouldn’t be taking notes of his not-doing so regularly, so he shakes his head and pulls his headphones out to drown out the noise.
Later that night he has a short fit of dry cough. Shallow and irritating, the kind one gets when the air recyclers are kept running the whole day, parching the air of any and all humidity for hygiene concerns’ sake. He drinks water until his throat doesn’t feel like sandpaper and gets a hot tea from one of the vending machines, just in case.
º o . ˚ . · O ˚ º .
Monday. The cough persists, although still minor and decidedly irrelevant. It has no impact on his performance on the field –he’s measured it– but nonetheless he has increased his water intake and sleeps with the window cracked despite the days getting colder, in an attempt to fight Blue Lock’s tightly controlled, dry environment. In the afternoon session, Chigiri runs a drill twenty metres to his left and Kunigami observes his form with the automatic, impartial attention he applies to every other player on the field: his explosive departure, his impressive stamina keeping his speed constant and the perfected landing of his feet, calculated to absorb their own momentum and allow for a sharp cut when he needs it. He is, objectively, one of the most efficient movers in Blue Lock, and there’s no fault in noticing. Studying his opponents is fundamental if he is to surpass them.
On Wednesday, his chest feels tighter, and earlier in the session this time, which is a variable he logs without particular concern. He’s not getting ill, he can’t afford to. He gets some cough syrup from the infirmary, after swearing on his life that he’ll take no more than is strictly necessary. It helps marginally and he allows for the possibility of mild bronchial irritation he simply has to put up with until it’s resolved and considers the matter closed. That day, Chigiri looks at him across the length of the lunch hall and Kunigamim, by virtue of his location, has no choice but to meet his gaze –for no more than a fraction of a second, that is. Enough for Chigiri to curve his lips, so slightly, and look away first, a combination of gestures that Kunigami decides not to try to interpret. What an absolute loser, the redhead, still holding out hope for someone who made his peace with necessary losses long ago. Warmth, loyalty, the exhausting weight of caring about people who can't always carry their own: a set of ideals so antithetical to what the Neo Egoist League demands of its players that no one insisting on keeping them can move forward. In order to advance, unencumbered, Kunigami had to strip his former self from everything that couldn’t be made into a weapon; chose to cut all the dead weight.
It’s not like he didn’t grieve it, for a while, but this new individual he’s become knows better than to waste his time with petty sentimentality. That’s the sort of thing that made him lose in the past and he won’t allow such weakness to drag him down again. He wonders, briefly, if Chigiri has grieved the Kunigami he knew as well, and his chest gets uncomfortably tight again, the same dull pressure he felt during training. He breathes through it with practiced evenness. It doesn't matter.
That night the cough wakes him at 2 a.m., sharp and insistent, and he sits on the edge of the bed in the dark for a long moment after it passes, his chest aching with something he chalks up, automatically, to muscular strain. He lies back down thanking the heavens for not sharing a room with anyone else. The ceiling is very white and very still.
Thursday and he finds Chigiri standing in front of one the vending machines that’s further removed from the commons and that Kunigami always goes to because it’s usually fully-stocked and less crowded. He acknowledges him with a curt nod (it would have been more awkward not to) and Chigiri hums a ‘hi’ and shakes his head in return, in a way that makes his bright red hair sway lightly around his graceful neck. The machine takes a moment to process Kunigami's selection. Chigiri glances at the screen and says, absent-mindedly:
"Try pressing it twice, this one sticks."
Practical, unremarkable and exceptional in its ordinariness. It’s hard to tell why he still acts friendly towards someone who’s been nothing but an asshole to him ever since his return.
They stand in silence for about fifteen seconds until Kunigami’s given a proper excuse to avert his gaze when the soda can he’s ordered drops with a deafening clank, and Chigiri jolts, and scoffs –the reflex of someone who finds the anticlimactic noise faintly amusing. Whose usual guardedness still has an opening that’s shaped exactly like Kunigami, carved by sheer force of habit after those months they spent living in the same room, laughing at absolute nonsense way past lights-out. Whatever. It’s a meaningless encounter that Kunigami spends the rest of the evening not thinking about on purpose. The cough syrup is definitely not working as advertised.
It’s Friday evening and the training hall is almost empty by the time Kunigami comes back for his phone, left abandoned on a bench without him realizing. His sleeping schedule has been wrecked by fits of coughing that no amount of room-humidifying or water-drinking will break off.
A red-haired silhouette is on one of the mats near the far wall, earphones in, moving through a cooldown routine with the unhurried ease of someone who believes he's alone. He’s going through a hip flexor stretch –he’s learned not to skip those the hard way– with practiced attention and, at the same time, mouthing the lyrics of whatever song he’s listening to. Then he shifts, extends his right leg, and begins working around his knee. Kunigami stops in the doorway.
He knows those moves, could reproduce them with his eyes closed: the very specific way in which Chigiri shifts his foot when the exercise begins to hurt, the point in the stretch where his breath catches and he has to decide whether to push through or ease back. Kunigami knows because he’s knelt there beside him countless times, steadying the joint through several degrees of flexion and wrapping athletic tape around it so it would endure that first Blue Lock winter when Chigiri still flinched at the wrong angles and was reluctant to let anyone witness his vulnerability. He feels the phantom weight of it in his palms with a clarity that someone like him, who has excised every piece of non-essential information from his memory, has absolutely no business retaining, and it’s Chigiri’s unawareness at being watched that clamps around Kunigami’s throat like an iron claw.
He does not say anything, which is the right call (what would he tell him anyway? There’s nothing in Kunigami’s head worth saying out loud, hasn’t been for months), takes his phone and leaves just like he arrived, invisible like a ghost.
It’s three a.m. when, again, he wakes up and coughs violently into his hands, until he feels something wet and with a certain weight to it come out of his throat and past his lips. When he opens his closed fist, expecting a blood clot –has he overexerted himself that much? he thinks, not without some bitter self-reproach–, he’s taken aback.
Sitting in the center of his palm, tiny and unassuming, is what appears to be a blue flower petal, drenched in spit. Offensively delicate and innocent looking, in stark contrast with the utter dread that creeps up Kunigami’s neck when he recognises it as such.
“What the hell…?”
Could he have swallowed it at some point during the day? The Blue Lock building has restricted access to its exterior areas and he hasn’t been in one in weeks. Could it have passed through the air filtering system and gotten in his room? In his food? He takes the horrid thing to the bathroom and examines it under the harsh white light above the sink, in case his sleep-deprived eyes and brain are pulling his leg. Upon closer inspection, it turns out to be exactly what he thought at first; a tiny, perfect, bright blue petal with a hint of white on its innermost, sharper part. He drops it in the toilet and flushes it without ceremony.
Kunigami looks into the mirror for a while, hands braced on the edge of the sink, and goes back to bed soon since his reflection has nothing to offer besides a familiar tired gaze. The ceiling is just as white and still as always, and it takes him a good while to fall asleep.
º . o ˚ ✿ . · o ˚ º .