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Migratory birds, or birds of passage, refer to the species of birds that travel to warmer habitats during the winter months. These birds travel thousands of kilometers around the big, wide world without taking a break, flapping their wings and soaring in the wind to get to somewhere other than where they were before, somewhere greater. Migratory birds don’t think about the place they’ve left behind, or if anybody will miss them when they leave, or if there’s anything on the other side waiting for them. Migratory birds don’t text, don’t call, and sure as hell don’t look back.
//
If Rin doesn’t get out of this house right now, he’s going to rupture a vein.
It was bad enough that he had to go home. Not that he hated being in his house, or finally having some peace and quiet all to himself, but living in the Blue Lock facilities for the last couple of months had gotten him used to seeing a familiar face everywhere he went, and he can’t recall a time in the past couple of years where he had somebody to eat dinner with every day of the week. Rin’s never been one to seek out company, and the other Blue Lockers do still piss him off, but the sudden return to normalcy after months of living in a soccer prison facility is jarring, for sure.
He had already prepared himself to come home to an empty house. Or at least to his mother getting ready to leave for the airport; she told him beforehand when she’d be gone for her business trip around the time he’d be back for break, but he had forgotten the exact date. He finds out soon enough—after he jimmies his key into the lock and swings his door open, he’s greeted by the sight of his mother slipping her shoes on at the genkan, her suitcase posted right beside her.
Rin stares at her suitcase. “I’m home.”
She blinks at him, faltering in her step. “Oh–oh, yes, Rin! Welcome back, come inside.”
Rin crosses the threshold, shutting the door behind him with a soft click as his mother hurriedly greets him with a half-hug that Rin tries his best not to shrink away from. It’s pleasantly warm in his house, an improvement from the late winter chill outside, and yet the idea of being awkwardly side-hugged by his mother has him sweating under his jersey. She’s doing her best for a woman who never quite figured out what to do with her kids. He ducks down just to play nice and breathes in the familiar clean scent of their family’s laundry detergent.
“How are you? How is Blue Lock?” she asks. Rin tries not to wince. Thankfully, her question seems to be more rhetorical than anything else, as she nods a head at him to help her get her suitcase down the step. “Like I mentioned before, I’ll be in Singapore for the next two weeks. Call me or your father if there are any emergencies. Or if you think we won’t answer fast enough, call the Minamotos next door, alright?”
It’s the same spiel he always gets. Last time she was in New York, and his father was in Dubai. The Minamotos are always on standby in case some freak accident happens, like if he falls in the shower and cracks his head open or his house gets nuked by an angry foreign military. There will be money left for him on the kitchen table for food and other such things that growing children might need, and if he needs any more all he has to do is give her a ring (which will be sent to voicemail, so it’s more like send her a text).
“Mm,” Rin agrees. He keeps his eyes trained on her suitcase.
Rin’s mother tuts as she notes the already absent look in his eyes. “Listen, I’m serious. Don’t get into any trouble. Double check the stovetops if you decide to cook. I’ve left enough money for the both of you on the table, but just give me a ring if it isn’t enough. Take care, okay?” She punctuates her little speech with an awkward pat to his shoulder.
Hold on.
“‘The both of you?’” He says.
“Didn’t he tell you? I told him to tell you.” His mother heaves a sigh. “You boys, seriously.”
“What do you mean, ‘the both of you?’” Rin presses. He can feel his hackles start to rise, a foreboding feeling settling in his gut that turns his stomach acid into cement. His eyes fall to the floor—there’s another pair of shoes left in the genkan that look more expensive than anything Rin owns. His eyes narrow. “Who else is home?”
She’s already partially out the door when she replies, letting the chill in. It seeps under his clothes and sends goosebumps all over his skin. “What do you mean, who else? I—Rin, I don’t have time for this, I have to go, my taxi’s here. I’ll see you in two weeks, okay?”
Ah, Rin realises. She’s got no idea.
The door shuts behind her. She didn’t stay long enough for him to remind her that his break is only two weeks long. He can hear the slam of a car door outside before it starts to drive away. He breathes alone in silence before the anger starts to seep in. Then it crashes in like a drunk at a steering wheel, leaving his fists clenched hard enough for his fingernails to dig into his palms.
Coming home is usually a little bit lonely, but it's his home, and Sae doesn’t get to just come back and barge in like he didn’t give up on it. Rin finds himself missing Blue Lock in the sense that when he’s there, he’s free to ever-stew in his anger—he’s encouraged to, even, to push his ego until all his limbs go jelly-numb and he can feel his body about to break. Sae belongs somewhere else now, far away and across the ocean where he should never have to see his sorry face ever again. He’s made that loud and clear. How dare he come back now, after telling Rin that he’d never be enough, never amount to what Sae once believed he could be? Especially after the U-20 match, where Rin had beat him—destroyed him, demolished him at what he did best, even if just barely—and Sae had still looked down at him, looked past him, at Isagi Yoichi.
It’s unfair. It’s so unfair. Rin had won. He won, which should mean he was better, and yet—
Rin strains his ears. He hears the sound of the upstairs shower running. His mouth twists, settling into a scowl, and closes his eyes and tries to focus on breathing. In and out. In and out. Then he decides there’s no calming down from this, and turns around to storm right back out the door again. This time, he slams it shut as loudly as he can.
Rin makes it a good few hours before he gives up and goes home. He spends an hour at the local public library looking at the pictures in random books before he gets too bored and leaves. Then he loiters at a fast-food joint for a couple more hours with his headphones on, watching horror lets-plays until his phone dies. He ends up at the beach, stepping over a safety fence to sit and watch the sun dip under the horizon, sky flushed red like the head of a neck squeezed too tight.
How tepid. Rin frowns, ears nearly frostbitten and his ass going numb against cold, hard concrete. The wind is so dry and sharp that it could cut, and the embarrassment of leaving the house so suddenly is starting to catch up to him. His phone’s dead, he’s freezing cold, he’s tired, and he forgot to grab the money his mother had left for him to buy anything from the convenience store. He hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and there’s nothing Rin wants to do more right now than to eat a meal and pass out on his bed. Streetlamps begin to flicker on. He feels like a petulant little kid running away from home because his big brother made fun of him.
Why should he have to be the one to leave? It’s his house. Sae has… another house now, maybe, in Madrid. Maybe he stays at the club accommodation. More likely, he rents his own apartment—Sae’s never liked being in places with dubious hygiene practices, and Rin can’t imagine him sharing a living space with a bunch of guys. Either way, Sae gets paid a salary and has sponsors and fancy new shoes and could definitely afford a couple nights at a hotel, so it shouldn’t be a big deal if Rin kicks him out so he can relax for his two weeks of freedom.
Reluctantly led by the clawing sensation of hunger, Rin trudges home. He takes his time on the way back until it’s dark out, feet scuffing against concrete, and each time he passes a streetlamp he imagines what it would feel like if the lampheads were to fall off and hit his head and knock him out cold.
When he opens the door again, his house is just as warm as before. He regains feeling back in his fingertips like they’re defrosting. He shrugs his duffle off, rolling his shoulders to alleviate the ache as it hits the ground, and toes off his shoes at the genkan.
“--el balón que pasa gooooool!--”
The television in the living room is playing Liga VVBA highlights from last year. Sae sits on the couch, legs crossed, seemingly unnoticing of Rin’s presence in the room.
Rin tries to shake off the uncomfortable feeling, reaching down to swipe the strap of his bag to carry it back to his room. He pauses at the foot of the stairs, hesitating.
His tongue feels heavy in his mouth. He has a thousand things to say, but none of them matter enough to be said. So instead, he settles for this:
“Why are you here?”
Sae slowly turns his head to look over his shoulder. A frown makes its way to Rin’s face in an instant, like it’s his body’s natural response to Sae looking at him.
“I need to renew my passport.” he replies, and turns back around. Rin furrows an eyebrow.
“No, I mean,” this time, when Rin speaks, Sae doesn’t bother turning around. If he wasn’t pissed off before, he sure is now. “Why aren’t you at a hotel or something? Aren’t they paying you over at Re Al?”
Maybe he’s imagining things, but Rin swears he can hear Sae rolling his eyes. “I can’t stay at my own house now?”
Rin scoffs, turning back around to go up the stairs. Shame on him for expecting a real fucking answer for once from his stupid brother. His stupid, shitty brother and this stupid, shitty house can just fuck off together, then, Rin doesn’t care. Stupid, stupid, stupid—
“Rin,” Sae calls.
Rin pauses in his tracks. “What do you want?”
“There’s dinner in the fridge,” Sae replies. “Eat after you shower.”
No wonder it smelt good in here. Rin flushes. What the fuck is he trying to do? Poison him? Get him to lower his guard so he can smother him with a pillow while he sleeps?
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Rin bites back under his breath, stomping the rest of the way up. “Fuck off and die.”
He makes sure to slam his bedroom door shut behind him to really drive his point home. His body feels hot—this house is too warm, goddammit—and he hurriedly pulls his jersey up and over his head to try and cool himself off. The collar catches on his chin, too tight to shuck off as quickly as he needs to, and he fumbles around like an asshole trying to get it off. The embarrassment is immediate and immense; even in the privacy of his own bedroom, the mere presence of Sae in this house is enough to make him feel like he’s being watched 24/7.
Okay. Relax. That’s not happening. Sae didn’t plant cameras in his room for the sole purpose of making fun of him—he truly doesn’t care enough about him to do that. Also, that’s a fucking crazy thing to even think of doing. Rin swallows a groan, pushing the heels of his palms against his eye sockets until the pressure resets his head right again.
What does he even do when he’s home? Fuck. Okay. Okay. Firstly, he needs to turn the lights on. He blinks as he flicks the overhead lights on, eyes still sensitive as he looks around the room. Everything looks exactly how he left it—bed made, room tidy, his neglected and mostly unopened school textbooks stacked up on his desk with a fine layer of dust settled on their spines and covers. All of Sae’s trophies lined up in a neat row, glinting as antagonistically as they always do.
The room is exactly how he left it. Except it didn’t used to look like this, did it? This room didn’t used to just be Rin’s room, it used to be Sae&Rin’s room. But it’s his now, and Sae can’t come inside, so where is he sleeping? The couch? No way in hell is Sae going to sleep on the couch. Sae has never in his life ever fallen asleep on the couch. Will he kick Rin out of his own room, then? Absolutely not. Rin is not letting that happen.
Owls screech to ward other owls off their territory. The range of a snowy owl’s wintering area varies by season and prey abundance, but Rin’s is only as big as a two storey house. But Sae, Rin has learned over the years, can’t be threatened by him screaming or hissing or pouncing, so to do so would only serve the purpose of making him feel stupid.
Rin chews on the inside of his cheek, worrying the sharp of his canine into soft flesh. His hunger has waned into a dull ache, which will be easy enough to ignore for the few remaining hours of the night that Sae will be awake. He’s seen more of Sae in the last twenty-four hours than he has since Sae had the balls to send him a ticket to that Re Al tour match—and it wasn't like he had to talk to him back then, either. This has been more than enough. Actually, the U-20 match had already been plenty. Rin’s been wanting to cut Sae’s vocal cords out ever since he said the words Isagi Yoichi.
He very narrowly resists the temptation to slam his head against the wall. No Isagi. No Isagi. He doesn’t even want to think about Isagi right now. That shitty fucking—sure, yes, Rin had called him his rival, but Rin doesn’t need that anymore, does he? Sae doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. Isagi’s good, but not as good as him. Isagi can keep up, but only as far as Rin will allow him to. That’s all he’ll ever amount to if Rin can fucking help it.
--
English is hard. It becomes harder when Rin realises he doesn’t actually know how to study—it’s just not something that he’s ever really done, especially since Sae never seemed to do it, either. If Sae didn’t give a fuck about his grades, then why should Rin?
They don’t need things like mathematics or history to play professional football, after all. Sports journalists won’t be asking him things like ‘how do you find the missing base measurement of a trapezoid?’ or ‘who attempted to assassinate Oda Nobunaga?’. They’ll be asking him about football, and how he feels about being the little brother of the best striker in the world, and about how he managed to score a hat trick in three consecutive matches in a row. And he’ll have to answer in English if he wants to become world famous.
He’s slowly getting accustomed to the easier things, like forming basic sentences. After that is vocab and listening comprehension, which Rin gets plenty of practice in by watching Western movies (he learns the word retrograde from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was totally epic). Then there’re the harder parts, like punctuation and reading and spelling, which he also learns at school. The hardest thing about English, though, is the pronunciation.
It’s embarrassing to practice out loud by himself even in the privacy of his own bedroom. His tongue fumbles clumsily around his r’s and l’s and v’s, and he doesn’t want to ask his English/homeroom teacher for feedback lest she mistakenly assume he’s finally started applying himself. He wants to ask his parents, who can both speak English for work, but they’ve started leaving him home alone more often almost as soon as he started middle school.
The only real option, then, is obvious. Rin turns to Sae.
It’s way past midnight in Kamakura when Sae’s match finally ends, but Rin wanted to be awake to watch it live. Good thing it’s the weekend, otherwise he’d be dead on his feet tomorrow. There’s no club tomorrow (later today?) either, which means Rin can go to the pitch to practice on his own schedule. Rin can feel his eyes drooping, and he shakes himself awake every time he can feel himself nodding off—player interviews are starting soon, and he can’t afford to miss him.
Ah! There he is!
What’s amazing about Sae is how much he’s learned English and Spanish since he left home. He did study up a little bit beforehand, of course, but he’s just as bad as Rin is at cracking open his textbooks and even worse at staying awake long enough to read them. He must have worked really hard, then. Rin will have to work harder, too.
An interviewer shoves a microphone in Sae’s face. Rin half-expects Sae to tell them to buzz off, the expression on his face already set in one of annoyance, but Sae simmers down with a light jut to his side from his coach.
“What skills do you feel like you’ve been able to develop the most during your time at the academy?”
“I’ve been working on my dribbling,” Sae replies monotonously, like he’s memorised his replies. He probably has. Interviews are just a part of sports, after all, and media training is just another form of practice. “The only way to score is to get past defenders.”
“Working on my dribbling,” Rin parrots. He tries to pronounce it just like Sae does—less vowel-y, more fluent. Sae’s mouth rounds out more for ‘wor-’, and his ‘-ing’ ends less harshly on the ‘g’ sound. “Working. Working. Working. Dribbling. Defenders.”
“What keeps you motivated to keep training?”
Sae looks pissed off at that. Rin stifles a laugh behind his pillow.
“Isn’t that obvious? I want to play amongst the best players, and then beat them all. These questions suck. I think you should be motivated to write better questions.”
“Sae,” his coach scolds.
“These questions suck,” Rin says. Suck is a verb that you can use when drinking out of a straw, or cleaning with a vacuum. It also means that something is really, really bad in a shitty way. “Write better questions. Ques-questions. Koo-wes-chuns.”
“Final question,” the reporter grits out, looking rightfully ticked off. “How do you measure a successful football season?”
Sae raises an eyebrow.
“By winning. Duh.”
Sae is so cool. He’s the coolest in the entire world, even with that bright red zit forming on his chin. Not like that’s his fault, though; zits are just something that happen to you when you turn fourteen. Rin's not looking forward to having zits in a year and a half, but he does need to hurry and catch up. He’s almost the age that Sae was when he got scouted, and he’s still stuck here in Japan.
“Winning,” Rin echoes out into the dark of his bedroom. Suddenly his chest feels a lot heavier. Sae is cool, but Rin wishes he would at least call him sometimes. But he’s busy becoming a superstar, so Rin understands why he doesn't. “Duh.”
//
Dinner is salted salmon, rice, cabbage stir-fry and miso soup. It’s a lot more nourishing than the convenience store meal Rin was planning to buy. The food at the Blue Lock facilities was, objectively, a lot better. Sae is a mediocre home cook at best with a penchant for oversalting the food—one sip of the miso soup has Rin’s face puckering until he dilutes it with hot water. But this tastes like home, and Rin distracts himself from that fact by taking comfort in imagining Sae at 30 years old with hypertension and kidney stones. Despite the gruelling void in his stomach he makes sure to eat in the dark at one in the morning, long after he knows Sae’s gone to bed, so that he won’t wake up to see Rin shovelling food into his mouth like a starved creature.
Sae’s not sleeping on the couch. He's got to be sleeping in their parents’ bedroom, then. Rin doesn’t know whether it’s worse to have him downstairs or just down the hall.
The salmon is a tad overcooked from being reheated in the microwave, but it’s still flakey. The cabbage is crunchy and greasy with sesame oil, which pairs nicely with white rice. He washes it all down with hot tea and finishes off the salty broth with a loud slurp.
Dammit. Dammit.
He dumps his dishes in the sink for Sae to deal with later.
//
Rin sequesters himself in his room for the next three days and binge watches slasher movies. He sleeps through the daytime with his curtains drawn shut and his blanket pulled over his face. The only time he does leave his room is to shower, eat and do his daily (nightly?) practice, which he schedules for the middle of the night so there’s no chance of running into Sae. Sae always did love his beauty sleep, after all, and would never wake up before his mandatory eight hours even if the house was burning down.
A little after twelve-thirty, he leaves his room for his ritualistic feeding. The hallway down to the stairs is long and dark, and as he descends the stairs he imagines what he’d do if there was an intruder in his house. He’s confident in his strength, but there’s only so much he can do bare-knuckled against a crazy psycho murderer in his house with a chainsaw. There’s not a lot of makeshift weaponry he could use either, seeing as his parents keep the house as minimalist and empty as possible.
“Oi.”
Rin flinches—oh fuck its the fucking chainsaw murderer holy fuck—before he spins around, nerves on high as his eyes dart around before settling on a bored-looking Sae sitting in the dark at the dining table, scrolling on his phone.
“You need to start doing your dishes,” Sae says. “I’m not your maid.”
Rin’s heart settles, but he doesn’t respond. Instead, he stalks over to the kitchen, flicks the rangehood light on and swings the fridge door open.
“Dinner’s not in the fridge. It’s still on the stove.”
“Don’t talk to me,” Rin snaps. Still, he shuts the fridge and opens the lid of the pot, his mouth watering at the sight and smell of the leftover nabe. He glances at Sae, who hasn’t looked up at him even once. “When are you leaving?”
“What, do I talk to you or not?” Sae rolls his eyes. Whatever’s on his phone has him displeased enough that his eyebrow, for just a moment, visibly furrows. Rin wonders if he’s read the post-match articles coming out about him. “In around two weeks.”
Rin lets the conversation die. He turns on the burner and waits for the soup to reheat. He expects Sae to vacate the premise now that he’s invaded his downstairs sulk time, but he doesn’t, and something about that has Rin’s skin itching.
He doesn’t want to talk to Sae. He doesn’t want to be around Sae, and Sae especially doesn’t want to be around him—he said it to his face, didn’t he? But he’s here. It’s twelve in the morning and Rin’s adjusted his whole daily schedule to make sure they wouldn’t have to suffer each other’s presence, but he’s here. Sae’s existence is stifling. Rin scoops soup into a bowl and brings it up to his lips to take a sip, the heat spreading uncomfortably in his chest and making it ache.
“Sit down when you eat,” Sae says from behind him. “You’ll upset your stomach.”
“Shut up,” Rin retorts.
It’s confusing. Rin’s confused. He’s angry, too, and probably something else—sad, maybe, but a different sad than the one he’s accustomed to feeling. A long time ago he used to know exactly what Sae was feeling and thinking without having to ask, and now he’s confused. And he’s still not used to being so confused, especially not about Sae. Rin’s not good enough for him, but he’s good enough for soup. Rin doesn’t understand, and he can’t tell if he recognises Sae or not, and it’s harder to tell with the lights so dim. Rin wants to ask him why he cooks him dinner, why he washes his dishes, why he believes in Isagi more than he does in him.
But firstly, his stomach growls. He switches the burner off (yes, he double checks) and grabs a pair of chopsticks from the drawer. He follows Sae’s instructions wordlessly—he’s unsure why, maybe the habit’s still engrained in him, which pisses him off—but sits diagonal to him, as far away as he can get. Rin doesn’t really know how to act around him off the pitch. It’s a lot easier to show Sae how angry he is when he can stake his entire life on it. Sae hasn’t been home since last winter. Sae hasn’t seen Rin since he was about five centimetres shorter. There are miles and miles of empty space between the two of them, dead land where nothing grows or flourishes, and Rin imagines it like the tundra: endless plains of white, biting wind that cuts your skin, the sunlight refracting off the snow so brightly it blinds.
What lives in the tundra, Rin thinks as he mindlessly picks at his food. Snowy owls live in the tundra. They migrate there during the summer and build their nests on mounds on the ground. Snowy owls, like every other owl, are carnivores, and eat lemmings and voles and small mammals and sometimes even smaller birds. Right now, Rin’s eating mushrooms, and cabbage, and slices of thinly cut beef, all simmered together in a lightly seasoned broth. He stares at his bowl and stabs at his food with his chopsticks. They’re talons, sharp and nimble like a predator should be, and they snatch his food up quick. Rin sinks his teeth into a thick, meaty shiitake mushroom and imagines he’s a snowy owl, beak-deep into a rabbit.
“Rin,” the sound of Sae’s voice snaps him back to reality. He’s finally looking up from his phone, and Rin notes the tired crease under his eyes. It makes him look older. Sae does a lot of things that make himself look older, it seems—like when he started wearing his bangs up. Rin briefly wonders if that’s something he has to be worrying about. “Start sleeping normally. And don’t come down just for dinner. There’s no point in training if you aren’t eating enough.”
“I don’t care.” Rin averts his gaze quickly, replying through a mouthful of cabbage and beef. Whatever bad thing happened to him, he probably deserved it, so Rin puts in the effort to not care.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Sae half-heartedly scolds. “And you should care. You go back to Blue Lock in two weeks. You need to maintain a proper schedule.”
Rin glares at his food, stabbing his chopsticks through a thick piece of cabbage, and certainly does not pout. Sae’s only nagging because he’s pissed off at whatever’s on his phone, Rin thinks. When owls get pissed off they hiss and snap their beaks as warning. Rin would rather punch Sae in the face. With his fist.
“Just mind your business.”
“Fine, whatever. Do whatever you want, just don’t complain when you start lagging behind because of it.” Sae waves him off. “At this rate, you’ll never catch up to me. How lukewarm.”
Rin almost stabs his chopsticks right through the table. “You can’t call me that! You–” he looks up and Sae is scrolling again. He doesn’t even react to Rin’s little outburst, distracted by something far more interesting than him that has him clicking his sweet lil tongue in disapproval.
Then something happens to Rin that surprises himself; the anger drains from his body. He feels his mood shift so suddenly that it scares him. Yeah, he’s right—Sae can’t call him that, not anymore. And even if he did, it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?
Quick feet, but nothing he’s never seen before. Rin knows all of Sae’s best techniques after watching them his entire life. The ball disappearing behind his dominant leg, ready to be kicked between Rin’s legs—except it didn’t quite make it, did it? Rin stopped it. Rin stopped Sae. The snowy owl swoops down and takes the lemming in its talons. It crushes its neck with a grip strength of 500 PSI and kills it instantly. Hunting is a brutal and ugly and astounding thing to do, and it thrilled Rin more than football has ever thrilled him in the last four years. And now Sae sits here, at his dinner table, no longer unreachable as he believed him to be, but no longer as exciting as he once was either. Sae isn’t—he’s not so far away over the horizon that Rin can’t see him. Sae isn’t some distant future anymore. He’s right here, and he’s almost close enough to touch.
But Rin isn’t done with his anger yet. He can’t be done yet. He just got here, goddammit, and he can’t be done yet. Because Sae is—he’s beaten him now, sure, but he hasn’t crushed him like he promised he would, and he hasn’t proven him wrong.
So what the hell is Rin supposed to do now? Even his anger is half-assed.
Sae must think Rin’s given up on arguing. It was a thing he used to do, back when Sae would always insist on having the last word just to feel like he was right all the time, because little brothers can’t talk back. He gets up with a squeak of his chair.
“If you’re going out running, don’t forget to lock the door when you get home.”
Rin scrunches his nose. “Of course I’m going to lock the door. I’m not stupid.”
Unlocked doors are how crazy psycho chainsaw murderers get in, after all. Rin knows well enough to never make that mistake. The Minamotos won’t pick up fast enough to stop his body from getting cut into pieces. They’re elderly.
“Hey, wait.”
Sae pauses by the staircase. He turns to Rin expectantly.
“What?”
“Why are you…” Rin trails off. “Whyareyoudoingthis.”
Sae quirks an eyebrow. “What did you just say?”
Rin’s mouth twists, face suddenly hot. He pokes at his food with his chopsticks, holding a mushroom underneath the broth until it’s drowned. He lets up and it bobs back up to the surface. “Why are you mrghngh…”
“Speak up,” Sae tuts. “I can’t hear you.”
Rin clears his throat. “Why are you doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Cooking. For me.”
“Hah?” Sae tilts his head like Rin just said the stupidest thing he’s ever heard, hand posted on his hip. “Did you want me to let you starve?”
It isn’t really an answer that leaves Rin satisfied. Actually, Rin doesn’t know what answer he’s looking for, but he knows that Sae isn’t nice enough to do anything like this for anybody he doesn’t give a shit about. Does this mean he gives a shit about Rin again, then? Does this mean that, in some capacity, Rin has done something to earn a modicum of Sae’s care?
“Ah.” Sae’s eyes dart to the corner of the room as some form of contemplation. Maybe he’s caught on to what Rin’s really asking. “Just eat. I’m going to bed.”
Rin stuffs a piece of cabbage in his mouth.
“And wash your dishes,” Sae says as he walks up the steps. “Only idiots don’t wash their dishes.”
Sae’s footsteps fade out the further he gets away. There’s a barely-audible sound of a door shutting upstairs that leaves Rin feeling rather numb.
He finishes his food. The soup is so salty he can still feel it on his tongue even after his tastebuds dull out, more from the sensation rather than the taste. He walks his dishes to the sink and sets them down for Sae to deal with in the morning. Huffing, he turns away from the sink. Then he turns back. Because Rin isn’t an idiot, he does his dishes.
Afterwards, he gets ready for his run. He shrugs on a jacket and ties his laces up once, twice, then reties both shoes again. His head is still fuzzy and muddled in his confusion, so he squeezes it between his hands and imagines popping it between his palms and spraying blood and brains all over the entryway. Then, after a deep breath, he opens his eyes and Rin settles back in his skin. In real life, in Rin’s house, there is no battlefield, there is no tundra, and he is nothing but a human boy.
//
Rin’s never thought about offing himself, per se, but what he has thought about—
Is what if there was some sort of freak accident—like a car crash, or a robber with a knife, or sudden onset stage three terminal cancer, or if the Japanese government were to send missiles and copters and tanks right at him to stop him from rampaging across the city—
That would take him away, that would force Sae to come crawling back to him, to be the one to unzip his body bag and regret everything he’s ever said and done to hurt him—
Make him realise that he was wrong, that he did need Rin, that he was a stupid, stupid failure of a big brother for pushing him away and trampling on everything he knew—
All so that Rin, up in heaven (unlikely) or down in hell (more likely) or right beside Sae as a ghastly apparition can look at Sae’s miserable, crumpled face and laugh—
I told you, I told you, nii-chan, that’s what you get for not listening to me—
Being the one to deny Sae, this time, of any chance of reconciliation, of taking back his words, changing his mind, and achieving their together-dream. But Rin doesn’t take comfort in the simple thought of dying anymore. He thinks he might be cursed to follow Sae around in every lifetime. How awful is that?
He wakes up from another dream like this. He doesn’t remember the details, only how it feels, and it feels awful. It surely has to be because his mind, no matter how hard he tries to ignore it, is instinctively aware of Sae haunting him from their parents’ bedroom down the hallway. It jolts him awake, eyes snapping open to the black of his ceiling, and he stares and stares at empty space until his mind makes up shapes out of nothing. His hands come up to his face—his cheeks aren’t wet, Itoshis aren’t born with tepid things like tear glands—it’s sweat, he’s sweating all over, overheating under his blankets. He throws them off, standing to pace around his room with a sudden burst of energy, buzzing under his skin and setting him on fire.
It’s too warm in this house. It’s boiling him alive under his skin and cooking his organs. It’s going to turn him into a solid block of blood sausage and kill him, and the doctors will have to slice through him with a serrated knife to do his autopsy report. Sae keeps the heat up too high even throughout the night. When he’s alone by himself he doesn’t even bother to turn it on because turning it off is such a hassle. And now it’s too warm in the house.
His feet move before he can even process it, down the hallway and down the stairs and past the living room. If he doesn’t get out in time he will be cooked alive, and the flesh and fluid around his joints will coagulate until he can’t move anymore. There is something in every shadowy corner waiting to jump out and grab him by the ankles and kill him, and he dares every single one to. None of them do, obviously, since he’s still alive when he wrangles the key into the door to step out into his front stoop, bare feet flush against freezing cold concrete.
Circumpolar means to be around or in either the north or south pole; in the case of snowy owls, they migrate around regions in the Arctic circle. That’s right, that’s right—snowy owls are migratory, too, and nomadic, and solitary. So it doesn’t matter where Rin goes from here, does it? It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know what to do with himself now, just as long as he gets somewhere. It doesn’t matter that he has nobody to tell. He used to have a best friend, and now he doesn’t. He used to have a big brother, too, and now he doesn’t know anymore. If he couldn’t be Sae’s brother, maybe he could instead be his reaper. He should be angrier, shouldn’t he? He was a lot angrier before. It doesn’t matter. All Rin knows how to do is kill himself and others. Maybe he should buy a chainsaw. He touches his face and rubs it all over his palms and rubs his sweaty palms off on his pants. It doesn’t matter now. Sae ruined it. Sae should have been better.
Rin stands there and shivers, skin goosebumped and rough to the touch. He breathes in a lungful of crisp air and waits for his body to cool down and for his teeth to start to chatter. He waits and waits until toes get so cold they almost lose sensation, and then his fingers, and then his ears. Rin doesn’t know how long he stands there for, but when he stumbles back inside on numb feet he remembers to lock the door behind him with numb fingers. Just in case.
--
Rin’s teammates don’t really like him.
Sae was allowed to be weird because everybody called him a genius, and geniuses are allowed to be weird. Everybody just thinks Rin’s a freak. This isn’t new or unusual or anything, since people have always found Rin to be more than a little strange, but it’s getting harder to cope with it without Sae by his side.
Kamakura Youth is an elite team because Sae made them elite. That means that, no matter how weird Rin was, everybody had to suck it up and deal with it because he was the only one capable of helping Sae’s vision come to life. Rin scored goals, which means Rin helped Sae win games. That means everybody had to deal with Rin’s peculiarities—their teammates, their coach, even other club parents.
The worst part is, it isn’t even Rin’s fault. All his teammates just suck in comparison to Sae. How's that his problem?
Well. It’s because he’s not scoring anymore. Is the thing.
“Hey, Itoshi,” his teammate confronts him in the locker room, arms crossed over his chest to try and make himself look bigger. Sae told him a long time ago that this was called posturing, and that only insecure losers did it. Rin kind of understands it to be the same thing that birds do when they feel threatened. “You kept fucking up the attack formation today. The hell was up with that?”
Swearing, Rin has learned, is another thing that boys do to try and scare each other. It’s like everybody started middle school and all collectively decided to start swearing. He rolls his eyes and ignores him, folding his towel neatly before packing it in his duffel.
“I’m talking to you,” his teammate—Nakamura? Nakai? Rin doesn’t really recall—shoves at his shoulder. “You’re the reason why we lost, you know? You’re supposed to be our ace, and you can’t even run to the right place to get the fucking ball.”
Rin stands up at his full height. His growth spurt over the summer has put him amongst the tallest of their club’s team players even though he’s only a middle school junior, and his teammate shrinks back, intimidated. This doesn’t count as posturing, Rin thinks. This is simply Rin establishing the food chain.
His teammate grits his teeth. “You only got bumped up to key player because of your brother, you know. Without him, you’re useless.”
The other teammates around them start to stare. Rin recognises these kinds of gazes—it’s agreement. It’s always agreement. Like all it takes is for one person to speak up for all of them to go, phew, at least somebody finally said it.
What about you, then? Rin wants to spit back. He doesn’t even remember seeing this guy on the field. A benchwarmer, then. Is he mad at Rin for ‘stealing’ a spot in the main lineup? Does he dream at night about terrible things happening to Rin so he can finally take the place he deserves? Of Rin being disfigured, unable to play football anymore? Rin scoffs. This guy can’t even get on the damn field. He’s a side character in his own damn life, and needs to take his frustrations out on Rin to make himself feel better.
Still, Rin bites his tongue. Nobody on this team understands what he needs. He can try and convince himself that his level of thinking is just too high, too far above even the most elite of standards for a youth club—but without results, isn’t that just the same as doing nothing at all?
Kamakura Youth tied 1-1. A tie isn’t a win, and they would have won with Sae here. Sae could have won the match by himself, one against eleven. Sae is a prodigy, and doesn’t need people to get him. Rin could barely even get the ball.
“...Hey,” a senior speaks up from off to the side, palms out to try and diffuse the situation. “Let’s try not to be sore losers, yeah? Even tying is a learning experience. It just means we all need to work harder to win. As a team.”
He’s on Nakamura-Nakai-something-or-other’s side. The message is clear, and pointed directly to Rin: you’re not Sae. You can’t win by yourself. Fall in line, or die trying.
Rin’s face goes hot.
“...Nakamura,” Rin starts.
Nakamura bristles. “My name is Nagumo!”
“You’re a fucking joke,” Rin bites. The words are bitter on his tongue. He’s never really spoken to somebody like that before.
Rin pushes past him easily—he’s gotten a lot stronger since puberty started, too—and stalks out of the locker room, ignoring the cries of indignation behind him as people clamour to hold Nakamura back.
His face burns all the way home. Rin’s never been this embarrassed in his entire life. He wants to see Sae, but he doesn’t want Sae to see him—not all red-faced and unable to win local club matches while Sae’s already repping Re Al Youth. Rin’s already thirteen and he’s still right where Sae left him. Sae had gotten scouted at this age. What the fuck is Rin even doing?
Something twists in his chest, in his belly, his gut. Yeah, sure, he doesn’t want Sae to see him right now as a football player, but can’t Rin still miss him as a brother?
Sometimes Rin wishes he had wings. Then he wouldn’t need to have money to buy a plane ticket to Madrid. He could just fly straight there and see Sae whenever he wanted to. But it’s a hard thing to make Sae do things that he doesn’t want to, so Rin supposes that it must be intentional that Sae hasn’t tried to contact him at all. That just means Rin needs to learn how to get over things like this all by himself.
Ah, Rin thinks as he shoves his key into the front door. It swings open. He’s greeted by a dark entryway. The only slippers laid out in the genkan are his own, and he’s starting to outgrow them. It’s lonely.
//
After not seeing Sae for days, he suddenly starts to see him all the time. He’s downstairs every time Rin leaves his room, always on the couch and always watching reruns of the current season of the Liga VVBA. There’s a newcomer on Barcha that Rin doesn’t remember seeing in the season’s first El Clásico; a tall, white haired guy with IGLESIAS 19 plastered across his back that isn’t half bad. Sae huffs in disapproval every time he’s shown on screen that lets Rin know that he dislikes him more than personally, which has him mentally egging Iglesias on for more assists.
Rin begins to wake up during normal daytime hours. Not because Sae told him to, or anything, it’s just—he’s allowed to exist in his own house, isn’t he? He goes downstairs and eats breakfast, not quite with Sae but at the same time, just sitting in different places. Sae’s fully taken over the couch, which so isn’t fair because Rin wanted the couch, but fine, whatever. He hunches over at the dining table and shovels scrambled egg and cherry tomatoes and rice into his mouth until his cheeks are bulging, and slowly eats through the contents of his cheeks bit by bit as he watches Youtube on his phone.
He moves through his day with his usual routine. Breakfast before he brushes his teeth. A warm up with yoga and basic bodyweight training before he jogs to the pitch to run some drills (the frost outside makes the pavement slippery, and Rin spent his entire run to the field thinking about whether he’d slip and fall and crack his head open). He comes home and cools down with more yoga before he takes a scalding hot shower, and by the time he’s wrapped up it’s around lunch.
The general malaise of Sae’s presence in the house has become less uncomfortable as time drags on, until it’s seemingly inconsequential and achingly familiar. The only reason the familiarity still aches is because they used to do everything together, and now they don’t, and they never will again. But that’s just a part of growing up, isn’t it? It was always going to happen someday. Rin just wasn’t expecting it to happen until Sae was six feet in the ground.
Sae’s downstairs on the phone when Rin’s done with his shower. He speaks in short, direct Spanish that Rin can’t understand, because the only Spanish words that Rin knows are balón and golazo and gracias.
And trivela. Wait, no, that’s Portuguese. Três velas. In Brazil, três dedos. Tridactyl birds only have three toes, like emus and sanderlings and plovers. Ptarmigans have four toes, but their tracks make them appear to be tridactyl due to the hind toe not often making contact with the snow.
Sae pays Rin no mind so Rin does the same, walking past to peer into the pantry.
Except it’s empty. Rin huffs in frustration. Of course it’s empty—he hasn’t been to the convenience store all week so he hasn’t had the chance to stock up on food, the money his mother gave him sitting untouched in his wallet. Snowy owls sometimes eat ptarmigans. Rin wouldn’t mind one right now if it meant having something to eat. He wonders if it would feel more like chicken or duck in his mouth. He hasn’t eaten any other birds to compare it to.
“We’re out of food,” Sae calls out to him, and Rin turns to see him covering the mic of his phone with his palm. No shit they’re out of food. Rin just checked. “You’re coming with me to the grocery store later.”
Sae turns away, cutting off Rin’s chances of protest as he switches back to Spanish. Oh hell no. No way in hell is Rin going to be stuck doing chores with Sae. He escapes back into his room, slamming it behind him in lieu of a verbal response and settling cross-legged on the middle of his bed to watch an episode of something gory on Netflix.
Sae comes up ten minutes later and doesn’t knock. This room used to be his as well, after all. But it isn’t anymore, which means he should knock before he opens the door.
“Can you knock?” Rin spits out very kindly, just to inform him.
“Why aren’t you ready? I told you we were going out.” Sae grimaces as his eyes flicker down to Rin’s iPad just in time to watch a man’s organs spill out of his body through his mouth, which manifests on his face as the slightest crinkle of his nose. “That’s disgusting.”
Rin turns the volume up. “Go by yourself.”
“You’re the one who ate all of the food.” Sae stands at the doorway, arms crossed over his chest in disapproval. Maybe Rin should buy a talisman to make sure he stays out. He’ll get it made custom: no evil spirits may pass beyond this threshold. “You eat like a damn bear. Stop being lazy and come with me.”
Rin rolls his eyes. “That’s why you’re shorter than me—hey, what the fuck!?”
It only takes two long strides for Sae to cross the room and flick Rin on the forehead. Pain flares through his temple—Rin’s hand shoots up to smack him off, and Sae flicks him again.
“Fucking—stop it!”
“Don’t swear,” Sae says. “Who the hell raised you?”
Rin’s eye twitches. He wants to scream at Sae to fuck off and get the hell out, but Sae’s fingers are bony and strong, and he can still feel his forehead throbbing. Instead he turns his volume up some more and shoves the bottom half of his face into the pillow on his lap.
Sae is still there even after Rin turns around, waiting. He can feel his presence looming over his shoulder and his gaze pointedly fixing itself on Rin as to not look at whatever’s on Rin’s screen, and he has to make a conscious effort to not squirm or let his shoulders bunch up at his ears self-consciously.
“Go away,” Rin snaps.
Sae makes a soft noise of disgust. “How do you watch this stuff?”
With my eyes, Rin thinks sourly. But he doesn’t want to talk to Sae, so instead he scowls into his pillow.
“Oi, Rin.”
Rin keeps his mouth clamped shut.
“Do you want ice cream?” Sae asks.
The woman on his screen rips a man’s teeth out with pliers.
“Okay, fine.” Sae sighs exaggeratedly. “I’ll go by myself, then.”
He makes a show out of turning around pronouncing his footsteps as he trails out the door. Rin tries to not turn around, but he is craving something sweet, and Sae is going to pay…
“Wait,” Rin grits out, fists balled as he pauses his movie and swings his legs off the bed. “Fuck you. I want ice cream.”
Sae lifts a smug eyebrow that has the exact same effect as laughing right in Rin’s face. Stupid fucking brother, stupid fucking passport—Rin’s gonna plant a bomb in his suitcase when he goes back to Spain. Let's see how far his football career goes when he’s been put on an international terrorist watchlist.
Rin splutters as Sae flicks his forehead again.
“Stop doing that!”
Sae is already halfway out the door as he shrugs. “I told you not to swear.”
Walking around outside with Sae again is awkward, so Rin keeps a couple paces behind. They walk down streets they’ve known their entire lives with shared familiarity, taking a shortcut around the back streets to get to the supermarket. One of their neighbours has a fat orange tabby that likes to lay just outside their house with its belly up that Sae always huffs amusedly at. Rin lets him walk ahead to lean down and give its belly a scritch while Sae isn’t looking. It purrs almost immediately and wriggles around on its back to playfully swipe at Rin’s hand as he pulls it back.
A longwinded jingle chimes as they breach through the automatic doors. It’s almost colder inside than it is outside, and Rin shoves his hands into his pockets and rubs his fingers together to try and keep warm. Beside him, Sae picks up a shopping basket by the entrance and immediately makes for the produce section. Rin walks into a random aisle in the opposite direction.
Laundry detergent. Fabric softener. Laundry…soap? What’s the difference? Don’t they all achieve the same purpose of cleaning your clothes? Rin squints at random products as he shuffles by. Laundry detergent for women. Laundry detergent for men. Oh my god, does it really fucking matter?
He takes a lap, gazing boredly at random labels around the store. He runs into Sae staring at packages of filleted fish on refrigerated shelves, and Sae beckons him over with a minute jerk of the head.
“What do you want,” Rin says more than asks.
“Pick one.” Sae nods his head towards the fish.
Rin turns to stare at the shelves and his mouth waters at the sight of it, the flesh plump and glossy underneath the plastic wrap. Mackerel is good for breakfast, and salmon is good for dinner. If they got bream sashimi, they could have ochazuke, which is good for any meal at any time, especially with this weather. Or Sae could simmer some cod in something mild and slightly sweet and gingery, and Rin could spoon the broth over his rice.
“Hurry up,” Sae snaps.
“Get bream. And salmon. And cod.”
“I said pick one,” Sae replies.
Rin shrugs. “Just put the rest in the freezer. You can cook it later.”
Sae rolls his eyes. “What am I, your maid?” Then, after a beat, “Just pick already. I won’t have time to cook all that.”
Rin rolls his eyes right back. Harder, even. He can roll his eyes way better than Sae can. “Bream.”
“Go get the bream from the sashimi section,” Sae orders. Rin rolls his eyes. Typical.
Right as Rin’s about to turn around, he spots Sae placing a tray of salmon into the basket. He almost looks caught as Rin stares right at him, frozen in place. He’s quick to defrost, though, raising an eyebrow like he dares Rin to question him.
“What?” Sae says.
Rin looks down at the tray, then back up at him. Maybe they could marinate it, or grill it, or even make salmon ochazuke. After all, the only thing better than eating ochazuke once is eating it twice. “Get one more tray. That won’t be enough.”
“You eat too much,” Sae quips. Still, he grabs another tray and tosses it in the basket.
Rin rips his popsicle open almost right after they step outside of the grocery store. He’s been craving something sweet all morning, even though it’s so chilly today that he’s shivering even under multiple layers. Soda flavour is the best. It’s the type of sweet that isn’t overly offensive like grape or orange, and it’s nice and refreshing. Sae lifts an amused eyebrow. “Couldn’t you have waited until we got home? It’s freezing.”
“You asked me if I wanted ice cream. I’m going to eat my ice cream. Don’t complain later if yours ends up melting.”
“It’s two degrees. I highly doubt my popsicle is going to melt.”
“Whatever.” Rin rolls his eyes.
Sae heaves a sigh. He fishes his popsicle out of the plastic bag and tears the package open.
“There,” he says. “Are you happy now?”
Yes. A little bit. “I legitimately could not care less about whether or not you are eating a popsicle at any given moment.”
“I haven’t had one of these in ages,” Sae says. He bites straight into icy blue and immediately makes a displeased noise, mouth hanging open as he tries to chew. “Shit, that’s cold.”
What the hell did you expect? It’s a popsicle, Rin almost retorts. Instead, his brows furrow together and he says: “Don’t swear.”
“I’m allowed to swear.” Sae, seemingly incapable of learning basic Pavlovian concepts despite all his genius, takes another bite of his popsicle and suffers a similar reaction.
Rin glares. “How’s that fair?”
“I’m the big brother. Little brothers aren’t allowed to swear,” Sae quips. “It’s against the rules.”
Rin balks. “You just made that up.”
“Yeah, I did.”
Sae sticks his tongue out. It’s blue. Artificial soda pop flavouring blue. Rin sticks his tongue out right back at him. His tongue has to be equally as blue, surely.
Sae, again, ends up walking in front. They take the back streets again even though the long way would give them a nice ocean view, though Rin doesn’t know if he could handle that. Rin trails behind him and, embarrassingly, reminisces. He remembers when Sae had to hold his hand to make sure he didn't run away or throw himself into oncoming traffic, fingers sticky with sweat and melted popsicle juice. Rin remembers staring up at Sae’s back, how it used to be big enough to carry both himself and Rin. But Rin's older now, and so is Sae, and he hasn’t been shorter than Sae in a very long time. Though Sae's bigger, broader than he used to be—still a bit broader than Rin, even, from years of professional football—he’s never looked smaller.
In front of him now stands the only person in the world who has ever unconditionally loved him. That’s really where the hurt comes from, doesn’t it? That Rin still wants to love Sae. Sae wasn’t supposed to change, never to the point where he was unrecognisable. If he did, Rin thought it would only ever be for the better of their dream—like a superhero evolving, where he got stronger and faster and his kicks sent the ball farther and farther until he could send an unstoppable meteorite across the field straight into the other team’s goalpost. But anything else would be—was unfair, unacceptable. Sae was the anchor and the beacon and the grounding pillar that kept Rin’s entire world stable. He wasn’t supposed to break or bend or pull away, because that’s just not what he did.
How embarrassing it is now to be confronted with how small his entire world was. How disgusted you must feel to realise you have somebody else's life in your hands. Rin lingers in his own shame and tries to dampen it with sweetness on his tongue. Maybe Sae is right after all, and Rin is indeed as tepid as he says he is—even in Rin’s wildest dreams he couldn’t allow himself to be the best.
Rin goes back to Blue Lock in four days, and he’s still not anywhere closer to figuring himself out. What happened during the match against the U-20 team was both familiar and jarring. The state he entered—if he can do that all the time, he’d be unstoppable, wouldn’t he? He felt unstoppable. He’s improved at football, that’s for sure, but being good isn’t enough anymore. Maybe being the best won’t be enough, either. His eyes stay on his feet as he steps around cracks in the pavement. Rin wants to be better, he thinks. Better than everybody. Is that the same as being the best? No, there’s a difference somewhere in there. Rin’s already the best. His eyes flick up to look at Sae’s back. None of that is enough anymore. That kind of lukewarm bullshit isn’t enough anymore. What he wants is to be better than—better than—
Rin tears his eyes away. Shit, he really still doesn’t get it. It’s pissing him off.
He finishes off the last of his popsicle. ‘Winner!’ the stupid stick says. He crinkles his nose, tossing the stick into a mound of hard rubbish furniture out the front of somebody’s house to dispose of the evidence. When he looks back up, Sae’s a couple paces farther than he was before and about to round the corner.
“Can you at least wait for me?” Rin snarks, speeding up into a jog to catch up to Sae.
Sae looks over his shoulder, his brow arched. Maybe Rin’s seeing things, but he swears that the corner of his lip twitches upwards for just a moment, and he mentally notes to himself to be ready to contact emergency services in case Sae’s having a stroke.
“What the heck, Rin?” Sae’s hand reaches up tentatively. It hovers between them at first, hesitant, before it drops back down. Rin tries to not let himself feel any certain way about that. “You aren’t a kid anymore. Keep up.”
Rin swallows. All that lingers is the taste of artificial flavouring.
That night, they end up having ochazuke. With sea bream, just how Rin likes it the most, and it’s hard for Sae to fuck up the broth with salt when it’s just green tea. The food is warm and comforting and heats him up from the inside, the warmth spreading from his stomach throughout his entire nervous system. Rin even put Sae’s paycheck to work and picked out the most expensive tray of sea bream that was available. He can feel the difference, too. The sea bream is sweet and fatty and bouncy in his mouth even after a few hours in the fridge. The tea, too, is mild and slightly bitter from Sae’s oversteeping, but that’s okay. Ochazuke is the best.
They don’t really talk while they eat. They still sit on opposite corners of the dinner table. The television’s still playing Spanish league reruns, but this time of a youth match from late last year that Sae was in, the narcissist. Sae eats his bowl with a side of kyurizuke, which makes Rin’s nose crinkle and his mouth salivate unpleasantly at imagining the tanginess on his tongue.
As soon as Sae finishes his food, he stands up and takes his dishes into the kitchen to wash them. He’s always eaten faster than Rin has and never quite as much. Rin keeps his focus on the game on the TV and definitely does not marvel at Sae’s sense of spacial awareness on the field.
“Ah.” Rin smugly points his chopsticks at the screen as an Atlético player nabs the ball from Sae’s feet. “You should’ve passed there. You held onto the ball for too long.”
Sae retaliates with a sharp click of his tongue. “Shut the hell up. I don’t want to hear that from you.”
Rin whips his head around. “What the hell do you mean, from me? Who else would you rather hear it from—”
His mouth snaps shut in puzzlement. There, on the kitchen island, Sae’s got the salmon from this morning out—both packs, the plastic film sliced open, alongside an assortment of vegetables, a packet of soft tofu and a tub of miso.
Rin swallows down the last bite of his food before he speaks so that he doesn’t choke. “What are you doing?”
Sae hums. He doesn’t look up from his work in the kitchen, hands keeping themselves busy as he grabs a kitchen knife and begins chopping through a half-head of cabbage. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“No, seriously.” Rin sets his bowl down. “We just ate. What are you doing.”
Sae doesn’t answer for a solid minute. The sound of the knife against the chopping board is almost loud enough to drown out the dynamic ramblings of the Spanish commentator.
Rin’s about to snap when Sae finally answers, “I’m cooking.” “I can see that.” Christ, Sae’s difficult. Rin wonders how he ever put up with him. “I’m asking you why you’re doing that.” “You didn’t ask why, actually. You asked what I’m doing. That’s an entirely different question.” Rin lets out an impatient growl. “Okay, fine! Why are you cooking!” “To make you food for tomorrow,” Sae replies. “Obviously.” “...Okay?” Rin raises an eyebrow. “So do it tomorrow.” “I’m not here tomorrow.” “What?” Rin’s brows furrow. “Where are you going?” “To Madrid, obviously.” Sae rolls his eyes like Rin’s slow on the uptake. He starts salting the salmon. “My passport got expedited. I’m leaving in the morning.”
Oh, is Rin’s first thought. A fleeting emotion passes by, just for a moment—disappointment, perhaps, but not how he’s gotten used to feeling it. He tries not to let it linger. It isn’t the right emotion to feel about Sae.
Rin’s second thought is, that’s way too much salt.
Rin swallows around the lump forming in the throat. “When the hell did you find that out?”
Sae shrugs. “A few days ago.”
You fucking bastard, Rin wants to scream. He wants to flip the table, too. He wants to mess everything up so he can ruin this little moment between them, so he can never look back at this fondly and think, at least he’s preparing me dinner. He doesn’t do any of those things.
“She should’ve told you herself, but mother texted me to tell you that she isn’t going to make it back before you return to Blue Lock,” Sae says. “So you’ll be home alone for a few days. Make sure you lock the door behind you when you go out to train. And bring your house key with you.”
Rin pops a vein. “I know that.”
“Don’t just eat shitty takeout either,” Sae continues. “At least look up how to cook eggs or something. Buy actual vegetables and not just bullshit. And you need to wash rice before you cook it.”
“Stop it. I’m not stupid,” Rin snaps. Actually, that he didn’t know. Does he mean to wash it with soap, or like…?
“The Minamotos are old and decrepit. I saw them the other day and they’re practically on death’s doorstep. Don’t bother calling them for anything or you might kill them. If anything happens or you need something…”
Sae pauses to chop-chop-chop up some mushroom stalks. Rin waits with his breath stuck in his chest. He keeps his eyes fixed on the TV. Sae, for whatever reason, doesn’t have Youtube Premium, so he’s stuck watching an ad with two stupid dancing bears twirling around and singing about throat lozenges.
“Don’t text me,” Sae finishes. “I’m very busy. I probably won’t see it.”
“Fuck you,” Rin retorts. “I’ll be busy, too.”
“Yeah, sure. Just focus on that, then. Don’t even think about contacting me.”
“Wasn’t even considering it,” Rin lies.
There will be ways to pass the time until Rin can catch up to him. After dinner he will let himself digest, and then train until his legs burn. In a few days he will go back to Blue Lock and sort some shit out to better crush everybody there. From there, it’s only a matter of time until Rin’s getting pro club offers of his own.
The ad plays through, and the next video auto-plays. It’s back to Liga. Leonardo Luna’s face shows up on the screen, and Rin scrunches his face in disapproval.
“Ugh.” Sae’s tone drips with disgust. “Skip that part of the video. I don’t want to see that.”
Finally, something they can agree on. Rin grabs the remote.
//
Rin has a dream where Sae is a bird.
A seagull—which is pretty on the nose, isn’t it? Sae stood among a flock of identical seagulls standing on the shore. Don't ask Rin how he had known Sae was now a bird, or how easily he accepted it, or how he knew which bird was his brother. It was a dream, okay? He just knew.
Anyway. Sae the Seagull stood on the sea shore. Rin stood there too, but farther away, out of the flock. Their eyes made contact. Rin knew what the gaze of his brother felt like, even in the form of beady little bird eyes with tiny little bird underlashes, and he wanted to flip him off and scream what the fuck are you looking at?!, but even in his dream he knew it was quite a ridiculous thing to get so pissed off at a bird. Even his own dreams won’t allow him the peace of looking at the face of the first person in the world to ever break his heart.
He can't beg Sae the seagull to love him—again, it would be ridiculous, because he is a bird—and he can't beg him to stay, either, for the same obvious reasons. And he's sure that if birds follow the rules of sentience, they have their own thoughts and dreams and rules that Rin will never know because he is not a bird. The idea of him not understanding makes his stomach churn—not for the first time, no, but Rin doesn’t typically care about whether he gets other people or not.
They stand there with their eyes locked. The waves lap at his feet, foam tickling his ankles as it pulls back. The sea sprays at him as it moves slowly, rocking back and forth like how Rin used to when he’d sit right in front of the television and imagine himself a cheetah, an owl, Godzilla.
There's a cold front threatening to roll in soon, out from over the horizon. The gulls around saw squawk and flutter, antsy and restless. They have to go soon; they’re waiting for Sae’s signal. Sae himself stays still, stays staring—he’s never been one to be moved so easily by a crowd, after all. Ever the individual, that one, always a cut above the rest of them. Though Rin supposes he is, too.
His words are caught like a frog’s made a home in his throat, a physical lump that chokes him up; he’s been wanting to ask Sae this for the last week and a half but never could. They’re words that are so genuinely pathetic that physically manifesting them in the real world would ruin his entire life. But this beach—even though it’s familiar, it isn’t real. It should be okay here, then, right?
“What do I do, nii-chan?” Rin asks. “I'm not ready to be done being angry yet.”
Sae squawks and ruffles his feathers. Rin knows exactly what it means.
I don’t care. Do what you want.
Ugh. That sucks. It sucks just as much as it always has, even when it’s coming from a fucking bird. Rin squeezes his eyes shut so tightly that it hurts. With the backs of his hands he wipes the wetness from his face, his neck. He wipes it on his pants and it’s seaspray now.
The birds are really starting to act up. Black-tailed gulls make sounds like meowing cats in a basket. That’s why they’re called uminekos, Sae had told him. Rin used to chase off flocks of them from the shore when he was a kid, arms spread and flapping as he meowed right back at them. Ah, the clouds. The clouds are coming. They’re dark and angry and Rin thinks, thank god they’re still dark and angry. Either way, it means they need to go.
So he just waves goodbye, but the flock doesn't fly away. So he breaks into a sprint to run right through them and shoo them off the shore. They’re stubborn things, these gulls, so he ends up having to kick up the sand to scare them off. There are some stragglers, including Sae, so he sucks in a heaping of salty ocean air until his lungs are burning and he screams.
“Aagh! Go away!” he yells. Yeah, okay, this is just as ridiculous as he thought it’d feel. A bit too late for him to start caring about looking crazy, though. So what? He’s been crazy all his life. “Get out of here!”
Sae’s eyes bore into him. Really? they ask. Is that really what you want me to do?
Rin’s throat is raw. He comes to a stop right in front of his brother. His shoulders heave with exertion, even though he’s more than accustomed to running around a field nonstop for forty-five minutes at a time. The beach is so beautiful. It’s so beautiful, and they will never be here together again. Not in any future that Rin can imagine, at least. Not even in his dreams.
Rin nods. He wets his lips and they taste like salt. “You’re damn right it is.”
Is it? He isn’t even sure. He just knows something has to change. Rin knows that it has to be him.
“I don’t need you!” It hurts to swallow. There’s seaglass stuck in his throat. “Fuck off! Fuck off, or I’ll kill you!”
Sae tilts his head, the same way that birds often do, like he’s sizing Rin up, and it takes Rin everything in him to not wither under the scrutinization of a fucking seagull. Then, after a beat, he shakes himself out from top to tail, spreads his wings, and catches up with the rest of the flock.
Black-tailed gulls have wingspans that range between 120 to 130 centimetres on average. That seems pretty wide for such a small bird, but it's because seagulls have to glide on the wind for miles and miles at a time. A nonstop flight from Tokyo to Madrid takes fifteen hours and thirty-five minutes by plane, and Sae has been running forward nonstop since he was thirteen years old. Rin takes his bottom lip into his mouth and chews it until it’s stinging.
From down here, he can’t even tell which one Sae is. That really, really sucks. But the world doesn’t end, not even in his dreams, not even when Sae flies so far away that Rin has to squint to spot the flock, and further still until Rin can’t even see him anymore. The waves keep crashing. His heart keeps beating. That’s the most important part, he thinks. His heart—it keeps on beating.
A beating heart means that you’re still alive. As long as your blood keeps pumping, your world can keep turning. The rules of human society can’t be forced onto a bird. Rin will find something else to live for.
//
This time, when Rin wakes up in the middle of the night, there’s no sudden jolt, no sweat. He’s still tired as hell. He wants to go back to sleep but ends up tossing and turning in his bed, restless.
Rin huffs, swinging his legs over the side of his bed to force himself up. He trudges out of his room and down the stairs, grabbing a glass from the cabinet and a pitcher from the fridge to pour himself some cold water. He downs the glass eagerly, his body soaking the water up like a sponge, and makes his way back up the stairs.
When he gets back to the upstairs hallway, he pauses.
His feet lead him like he’s on autopilot. That’s what he tells himself, anyway, when he passes his bedroom and stops in front of his parents’ bedroom door—that he’s moving on instinct, that he isn’t in control. It’s the middle of the night. Sae is surely asleep. He also surely would not appreciate being woken up when he’s got a flight in the morning. Still, it’s like something has possessed Rin to grip the doorknob in his hand and twist it open. Maybe his house really is haunted.
He tiptoes inside, careful to try and not wake Sae. The sound of his breathing when he’s sleeping is a familiar comfort that Rin almost forgot about. That sounds creepy, and kind of is, but Rin’s been a light sleeper ever since he was a child. He would wake up frequently throughout the night by even the slightest of noises, and what always helped him get back to sleep was the gentle white noise of Sae’s breathing. It was proof that he was still alive. Rin doesn’t know what he’d do if he ever ended up outliving Sae.
Rin crawls in next to him, slinking under the covers. Not close enough to touch, just to—to be there, back against the mattress, staring at the dark space where the ceiling would be. They used to do this, too, back when Sae was still his bestest friend in the whole wide world. Nowadays they’re both a lot bigger and Rin has to squeeze his limbs together to keep them to himself. There is no evidence of their bodies in the dark that Rin can see, so Rin doesn’t have to feel ashamed of himself even if Sae’s bed is warm and comfortable. Rin will get up before Sae does and he can tell himself that this never happened.
Sae doesn’t belong here. Maybe Rin doesn't belong here, either. But what other place does he have to go? Rin wants to be understood. Humans are social creatures. Rin doesn't want to need anybody, but he’s only human, and he wants to be understood. Sae used to understand him. Something in Rin wants to understand Sae, too.
In a few short hours, Sae will be on a plane. The distance between Kamakura and Madrid is almost fifteen thousand kilometres. He’ll be flying over oceans and across continents to a land where Rin won’t be able to reach him again for a while. That’s fine. He’s used to it. Rin isn’t a kid anymore. He’ll live. More than that, he’ll surpass every one of Sae’s expectations. More than that, he’ll surpass his own.
Sae grumbles, turning over. Rin stills.
“Nii-chan,” Rin whispers. He turns his head to the side, staring at the dark space where Sae would be. “Are you awake?”
Sae doesn’t respond.
“I left the front door unlocked overnight once,” Rin begins to confess, “when I was fourteen. I was home alone and I wanted to see if anything bad would actually happen to me.” He pauses. “Nothing did, obviously. But I still lock the door now.”
“...Rin, what the fuck?” Sae replies, his voice groggy from being woken up. “Go to sleep.”
Rin goes to sleep.
//
Sae is gone by the time Rin wakes up. There’s no goodbye. Rin looks around his parents’ bedroom for a single trace of him and falls short on it, leaving him to wonder if he’d really gone crazy this time and hallucinated Sae for a week and a half straight.
The emotion he’s feeling is the hardest he’s ever tried to describe, and Rin doesn’t even think he knows enough words to try. Instead, he goes through his typical morning routine: stretching out the sleep from his limbs, opening up his window for some fresh air, his daily mantra of kill Sae die die die kill die. He goes downstairs to fuel up before training and squints at something on the kitchen counter—-three peeled hardboiled eggs on a plate, cling-filmed over.
Rin’s face heats up. He huffs at nobody in particular.
“I know how to boil eggs, you dick.”
Still, he swipes the plate over to himself and eats. Breakfast is breakfast. There are only three days left until he goes back to Blue Lock, and he doesn’t have time to fall into bad habits.
Another thing about snowy owls, Rin muses as he steps outside into the morning chill. Shit, it’s cold! His breath fogs the air in front of him. He jumps on the spot to warm his body up, jogs in place, stretches out his hamstrings. Anyway, the other thing about snowy owls—snowy owls are low fliers, for hunting. They can accelerate to speeds up to 80 kilometres per hour, and their wide wingspans range from 130 to 150 centimetres on average to help them cover long distances. A plane flies overhead. Rin knows he isn’t on it, but he can pretend.
Rin bends down, touches his talons to the ground, and soars.