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At first glance it doesn’t look like it, but when it comes to certain things, me and Aomine are much alike. Very much alike. Take our eyes; mine are pale blue, while Aomine’s are navy blue and a little bit sad, and shaped differently. But how we use them is the same.
Aomine’s whole body is all eyes. He has eyes in the back of his head and on the palms of his hands. Once in October, on a cloudy day, he saw me in the ice-blue hallway and came to say hi. He took my sleeve in his fingers as if he wanted to pinch it.
“Why’d you wear that sweater?”
“Because it’s cold. The radiators won’t be on till November.”
“Yea, but you’ve got the other one. This one’s scratchy.”
He was right indeed. I was wearing my scratchy brown sweater, while my favourite brown sweater was lost somewhere, probably in the laundry. The thing is, these two sweaters really are identical. You have to reach out to tell them apart. I can think of million other situations like that, but I won’t be mentioning them, since this one ilustrates what I’m trying to convey pretty well.
Aomine doesn’t see the similarities between us. He believes we stick together because opposites attract. He thinks I’m clever. That if I want something, I’m gonna get it one way or another, even if it takes ages. I’ll push forward, even with the whole world against me. He considers me the nicest person he’s ever met, too; definitely the nicest person to him. To be honest, I’ve never thought such things about myself. Since we’ve first met five months ago he managed to convince me of some. He must be more convincing than I am.
He also seems to be way more interested in others than in himself. In any case, I’d say he believes we’re so different because of false asumptions he’s made about himself, not me. Sometimes I’m trying to show him the real him. It’s not easy given that neither of us is used to showing things. There are moments like when we’re going down the street and I notice a stranger painting the front of a coffe shop that I grab Aomine’s arm and say:
“Now. Look at that man over there.”
Aomine darts a quick glance, still facing forward. He waits until we pass the shop.
“Yeah, what about him?”
“Nothing”, I say. “He reminded me of you.”
“Huh? Why’s that?”. Now he twists his head, but we’re already around the corner.
Then comes the difficult part, where I try to explain it. But I don’t know how to tell him that the way this man’s back bent, the way his arms were tense reminds me of Aomine. I don’t know how to tell Aomine that this worker’s movements were rough and precise; steady strokes, not a drop of paint spilled. Eyes dark and focused, face firm; even when the tires squealed on the road beside him, only his eyebrow, cut in half, twitched. I don’t know how to explain that those were the eyes of someone who wouldn’t hesitate to chase after a pickpocket, if it so happened that an old lady was robbed in the middle of a street. I don’t even know why am I so sure about this. I just know that I’m right.
If an actual pickpocket robbed an old lady walking in front of us and this guy would run after him, I could point at them and say:
“See, that’s what I mean.”
It’s possible that Aomine would go after the robber first. Then I’d follow him. He’s so much faster. We’d catch the robber and of course give the belongings back to the owner. Still gasping for air, I’d say:
“See, that’s how you are.”
And he’d finally get it. But as long as no one is stealing anything, I just can’t quite explain it.
Rather than with real people, it’s easier with fictional characters. They’ve already been described. Maybe that’s why I like books so much. Between the pages I can find a remedy for this struggle I had had even way back before I met Aomine. Sometimes it feels wrong to use others’ words. On the other hand, when I read through the ocean of letters, I catch myself thinking: There’s no way you’ve come up with this on your own. I imagine Homer had written about Achilles, because he knew someone similar whom he actually wanted to describe, but he didn’t have words. So he reached for another, already existent story (given that The Iliad, even though it’s the first relic of European literature, hadn’t emerged from the cultural void), in which he found a character similar to that person he knew – and he described that character.
So I’m kind of just doing what Homer did. Everything has been already said or done anyway. I open the textbook on my lap as Aomine and I sit at the top of the stairs – a place where nobody comes except for us – dusty streak of light from rooftop window falls on the silky pages. I read out loud.
Achilles is the bravest of Achaean warriors, ready for sacrifices, driven by rage, but capable of forgiveness, too. He’s confident about his strength, proud, virtuous. There’s just one chink in his armor…
“Okay, Tetsu, tell me about the last time I was virtuous”.
I give him a long stare above the cover.
There’s just one chink in his armor, Achilles’ heel – which is going to be the sore defeat of him, but this passage I omit – nonetheless, it is he who will determine the fate of the war. All the Greeks are counting on him, especially his friends.
“I don’t think this asshole had many of them”, Aomine points out amused.
“That’s true. He had Patroclos, though. Well, I’m not saying you’re 100% similar, were you even listening?”
“You know I listen to you. Got anything about Patroclos in there?”.
I put the textbook aside and reach for an old, stained copy of The Iliad. I really like its harsh cover and the scent of dust on yellow pages. When I was little, I wanted to be a bookbinder. But that’s something both I and Aomine already know; it’s high time we read. With colorful tabs I marked the passages where Achilles behaves as Aomine, if only Aomine was raised in the patriarchal, pro-war Achaean civilization, a vivid study of which Homer presented in The Iliad.
“What’s that about?”.
“Achilles makes up with Agamemnon”.
Aomine wants to know the page and the context. He’s trying to distract me, because he knows I like talking about books. In such moments I really, really want to say: Aomine, this was written 2900 years ago, we can read later, and you are here right now! But I also know that I can tell him more about The Iliad than he can tell me about himself. Scholars have been analyzing The Iliad for hundreds of years, and Aomine’s just fifteen years old and unexplored. And even though it’s hard to believe, I feel like I’m his first-ever explorer.
Well, if it would make him feel down, then I don’t really need to get to know him. After all, I’m intrigued by every person on Earth. I just want him to get to know himself.
There’s a chance I’m just being egoistic. It’s just that before Aomine slowly uncovered how he saw me, I didn’t really have a clear image of myself. Depending on the circumstances, I’d just become whoever people wanted at the moment. Most often it meant being quiet, smart and, as much as I could, helpful. Majority of people are glad to have someone like that around, and the ones difficult to please I can’t please anyway. And so – out of habit, I guess – I did become quiet, smart and ready to help. Precisely speaking, though, I’m just a blend with the highest percentage of those traits.
Ever since I started thinking about it more, it’s making me confused. Because what if it’s not me? What if I don’t actually like standing aside, studying or being nice? I think this is just the kind of person I am, but I basically have no clue how to fact-check it. Sometimes I get a strong desire to scream my lungs out. I have no idea what would happen after. But I can’t even break the silence.
That’s why I admire Aomine. One time before P.E., on our way to the school gym, we bumped into a boy from another class. He started telling us this story about his English teacher. We weren’t sure whether he meant a teacher from our school or his tutor. There were many other things concerning this story about which we weren’t sure either, but we couldn’t really do anything about it, since our interlocutor was the type of person who doesn’t hear any questions as long as their story goes on. Eventually Aomine got impatient and said:
“Cool, bro, we don’t really give a fuck. C’mon, Tetsu, let’s go”.
And he went inside the gym. That was so awesome. Of course I didn’t come with him, but stayed with this boy until the end of his story. I figured out its missing pieces from the context, too; stuff Aomine won’t know, altough I don’t think he cares much. This is exactly what makes it so cool.
If Aomine doesn’t care, he just says so and leaves. He doesn’t feel guilty at all. When I entered the gym, he was already lifting, listening to some catchy songs in the school radio which he repaired himself at the beginning of the school year. He only watned to make sure that I didn’t “get sick from listening to this guy’s bullshit”. He set dumbbells aside and put a hand on my forehead to see if I didn’t have a temperature. But his hand was warm, not suited for this, and my forehead beneath it, cold as ice.
I told him that if anything, it’s him who got sick from the bullshit. See, I said “bullshit”, and even though we were only joking, I feel like he’s more entitled to say it, since he left mid-story, while I stayed and listened. It all comes down to that very thing: I envy him the choice.
Because, contrary to how some might see it, Aomine doesn’t have trouble with self-control. If that was the case, he’d lose his temper more often. When we hang out, I see it on his body and I hear it in his voice. Often he wants to snap, but not always he does. For exemple, no one riles him up as much as Kise, but Aomine never leaves during one of Kise’s stories – and with these even I can’t keep up – because he likes Kise. I was worrying about this stuff first weeks after we met. Back then, trying to maintain a good atmosphere in our group was taking a lot of my attention, and Aomine was the biggest threat to a good atmosphere. Yes at the same time, I mostly wanted him to feel good.
I tried to uncover his formula for anger, understand which steps he goes through until he’s infuriated, so that I could say the right thing in the right moment. I figured he liked being stimulated, because when he was getting annoyed, he’d start to kick something with the point of his shoe, rip strips of paper from his textbooks, untie other’s shoelaces or squash whatever he had in his hand. Adressing him directly was also helpful, seeing that if someone in the group were talking for too long about something in which he wasn’t involved nor interested, he’d leave. And if we were sitting outside the classroom, he'd put on headphones or start working on his homework. As his anger grew, he'd interrupt others more often, curse more often, and sometimes his eyes would darken and narrow.
All of that I noted and tried to make sense out of it. But I couldn’t. Some days Aomine would shoot daggers at someone the whole lunchtime, but he’d be cool with just scratching his name on the table with razor blade taken out of a sharpener. The other days barely thirty seconds would pass and he’d went: “That’s fucking boring, can we change the subject now?”. If the answer was no, he either kept sitting quiet or stand up and leave. Didn’t matter if it was early in the morning or in the afternoon, whether he had a stressful day or not or who was speaking at the moment. I couldn’t figure out the pattern. I just wanted to help him.
It came clear to me that I can’t four months ago. Paradoxically, my failure felt much like a success. There came a moment, similar to like when the sky lights up during a storm, when I saw clearly Aomine’s rage building up in him. Without thinking much, I put my hand on his arm. He turned to me and I gave him a flower. We were sitting, all six of us, in the school yard, beneath the tree. Aomine weeded out most of the flowers from the grass around him. Those were daisies, I think. He was tearing off their petals while Murasakibara, Akashi and Kise were quarreling.
“Oh… thanks”, Aomine said, taking the flower from me. Just as I hoped, this, combined with the grip of my hand on his shoulder, cleared the storm; his eyes were sky-blue again. His face softened and he even smiled a little. He twisted his body and reached for his backpack, arms now untensed.
“For fuck’s sake, don’t you ever get bored?”, he asked as he twisted back. Everybody went quiet, surprised by the abrupt reaction. I, the one expecting it, was surprised the most. “Can’t you for once just chill and not fight over some stupid bullshit? Jesus fucking Christ. I’m out of here”. He stood up and looked me in the eyes, and his eyes seemed light again. “Bye, Tetsu. See you in English”.
He walked away towards the school, backpack loosely hanging from one arm, playing with the flower I gave him.
I spent the rest of the day thinking about it. Why didn’t he use my flower? And then it hit me.
“He didn’t need it”, I told Kise as we were heading back home after school. Sometimes I share with him glimpses of my thoughts.
“Huh?”.
Aomine didn’t need my flower, neither he needed me. I couldn’t remember the last time something made me feel so light the way revelation that I failed did. Finally, after weeks of analyzing it, it came clear to me that it’s Aomine who chooses.
“I think Aomine should be glad he’s gotten anything from you”, Kise said at the branch of the road, where we were splitting.
From this day, when Aomine is getting mad, I look at him and imagine the conversation he’s having with himself in his head. It must sound something like this: "Hmm, here I am, listening to what my Zodiac sign says about me once again. I’ve heard it so many times it’s gotten pretty boring, no, really boring. I kind of feel like getting mad now. I need to finish my sandwich, though, so maybe I’ll get mad in five. Yeah, five more minutes seem about right”. Actually, knowing Aomine, it probably sounds more like this: "Jesus I fucking can’t". I need to fill the whole time, though, hence the extended, less realistic version.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that it all comes down to a choice. And some people are like ducks. When a duck notices something interesting in the pond, it thinks: I can either waddle or fly there, or I can swim up there. Me, I just waddle.