Chapter Text
The smell hits him first — warm oil and something herbed threading under the door from wherever the kitchen is, layered over old stone and someone else's laundry and years of other people's dinners. Señor Ruiz is still talking. He has been talking since the taxi, filling the silence with the particular energy of a man who knows exactly one phrase of Japanese and has decided that enthusiasm is a reasonable substitute for the rest. At the airport he'd produced a laminated card. Welcome. Bathroom. Dinner at eight. Each phrase delivered with the earnest pride of someone who'd prepared for a test. Sae had nodded at all three.
Up the staircase now, past framed photographs and a ceramic Madonna on the landing shelf and three doormats — three, for one landing, each a slightly different shade of terracotta — and Sae takes it all in from behind Señor Ruiz's broad back, cataloguing quietly, because that's what he does with new environments. He maps them. He finds the edges.
The room is the end of the hall. Señor Ruiz pushes the door open with the presentation of someone unveiling something important, and it's — fine. Clean. A single bed against the left wall, narrow but sufficient. A desk beneath the window, which faces not the street but the building directly opposite, close enough that the washing lines strung between the two walls barely sag. Sae notes the window. Notes the alley behind it. Then Señor Ruiz claps him once on the shoulder — heavy, warm, the kind of contact that back home would mean something formal and here apparently means good, yes? — and the door closes, and that's it. That's his room. That's his next four years.
He stands in the middle of it for a moment, alone with his suitcases and the cooking smell and the city noise rising up from somewhere below.
Fine, he thinks again. Fine is something he can work with.
The unpacking is the easiest part of the night.
Training kit in order. Boots at the door, placed not dropped, toes forward. The books he probably won't read go on the shelf above the desk — bringing them had been a kind of optimism he can admit to himself now, privately. In the bathroom he lines up his things along the sink edge with the methodical focus of someone who has understood, somewhere on the twelve-hour flight, that control in this country is going to start very small. The arrangement of a toothbrush. The angle of a shampoo bottle. These are things he can get right.
When he runs out of things to place, the room gets quiet.
Through the wall — not through, really, through the door and down the hall — the Ruiz family's television hums its low steady presence, and someone's footsteps cross the kitchen, and something ceramic meets something wooden. All of it close enough to feel like company and far enough to feel like none. Sae sits on the edge of the bed with his hands in his lap and doesn't fidget, because he doesn't do that, and tries to locate the thing sitting in his chest that is neither quite dread nor quite excitement. Something pressurised. High and still.
Tomorrow afternoon. First session.
He'd known this was coming for months. He'd trained for it — trained differently for it, harder and more specifically, adjusting everything he understood about his own game to account for a stage he hadn't played on yet. He knows the formation the youth coaches prefer. He's watched footage. He's read everything available in Japanese about how ReAL's academy structures its strikers, their movement patterns, the specific spatial language of the system.
Knowing all of that doesn't touch whatever's sitting in his chest right now.
Rin would tell him to sleep, he thinks, and then doesn't think about Rin any further, because that particular direction doesn't have a useful destination tonight.
What he does instead: he remembers what Kei had said, the week before he left. You have to breathe it. The Madrid night air — it's different. Kei had said this with the authority of someone who had been to Europe twice, which in their school made him something approaching legendary. Sae had stored the information the way he stores most things — without sentiment, as data, provisionally useful until proven otherwise.
He crosses to the window.
The frame swings open and the air comes in and — it is different. Denser. Warmer than he expected even at this hour, carrying the city with it the way a body carries its own heat: stone dust and exhaust and some flower he can't name and underneath all of it something almost mineral, something that belongs to the specific latitude of this place and nowhere else. He fills his lungs with it, standing at the frame, and feels — not settled. Not calm. But like the pressure in his chest has somewhere to go, at least. Like the room behind him is slightly less close.
Something moves.
Not movement, exactly — more like a weight shift, a density where there wasn't one before. His eyes drop to the window ledge.
A cat is sitting on it.
Black, entirely and uniformly black, one of those animals that manages to look like negative space in low light. It's watching him. And its eyes — and this is the part that does something sudden and embarrassing to Sae's chest before his brain has time to file an objection — its eyes are a very specific shade. Not quite green, not quite blue. The shade Rin gets when he's been outside in summer and the light hits him at the right angle. The shade Sae has been looking at for his entire life without ever needing to name it, because it was just Rin's, just the colour that meant his brother was nearby.
He doesn't move for a moment. Neither does the cat.
Then it opens its mouth and makes a sound — not pleading, nothing so vulnerable as that. More like a correction. Something between you're in my spot and I was expecting this sooner. And then it settles its paws more squarely and looks at him with the flat patience of something that has decided the outcome of this encounter was never really in question.
Sae leans closer.
"You shouldn't be here," he tells it, in Japanese, quietly enough that it doesn't carry, which the cat doesn't care about anyway. He extends a hand and the cat performs the customs check — methodical, nose to knuckle — and then makes its decision: head pressed firmly against his palm, full and deliberate. A statement. The purring that starts is enormous for the size of the animal, like the volume setting was calibrated for something bigger.
His mouth does something he doesn't intend, at one corner. He starts scratching behind the cat's ear.
He doesn't know how long he stays like that. Long enough for the purring to become ambient, long enough for the city noise below to become something he's no longer actively registering. Long enough that when the sense of being observed arrives — not from the cat, from somewhere further out — it takes him a second to locate its source.
His gaze goes up.
Across the narrow alley, at the window in the facing building's wall — already open, already occupied, which means she was there before him, which means she watched him lean in and start talking Japanese at a stranger's cat on a window ledge — a girl is leaning out with one arm extended toward the cat, the reaching posture of someone who has done this particular move a hundred times, and she has gone very still. Her expression has that quality of a word half-said: she'd had a plan, and the plan involved the cat, and the cat has a person attached to it that she hadn't accounted for.
For a breath they're both just — looking.
Then she really sees him, and her whole face reorganises. Wide and immediate, the kind of smile that doesn't wait for the person to decide on it, like her face had an opinion before she did. She straightens at the window frame.
Waves. Big. Like they've been waiting on each other.
"¡Hola!"
And then she just — keeps going. A full unbroken pour, no visible seams, no pause long enough for him to find even a single foothold. "¡No sabía que alguien se había mudado! El señor Ruiz me dijo que tendría un chico aquí — pensé que sería un estudiante universitario, ¿eres universitario? No lo pareces, te ves muy joven, aunque no sé, los japoneses parecen jóvenes por más tiempo. ¡Perdona por Rizo, siempre se mete en ventanas ajenas, es horrible para mis nervios! ¿Te ha arañado?"
Sae stares at her.
Hola. He has that word. He has that word and eight others, rehearsed from a phrasebook on the plane with the grim preparedness of someone packing for a trip they know will go wrong if underpacked — and whatever she just said consumed all eight and then kept going for another thirty seconds he has absolutely nothing for. She speaks the way the city sounds from the street below. Warm and layered and completely certain the world will keep up.
He digs up the word most relevant to this situation.
"Hola," he says.
She beams like he's scored.
"¡Claro! Perfecto. Entonces, ¿eres tú el que se ha mudado con los Ruiz? ¿Eres japonés, verdad? Vi llegar el taxi, tenías una maleta enorme, ¿qué hay dentro? ¿Cosas de deporte? Pareces deportista. Las piernas. Bueno, no estaba mirando las piernas de un desconocido, eso sería raro, pero —"
She stops.
Something has landed on her face — she's looking at him, really looking, at whatever expression is currently sitting there, which he can only imagine is the careful neutral blankness of someone at the bottom of a very tall wall with no handholds. Her eyebrows draw together. Not annoyed. More like a chess player who's just identified the actual shape of the problem and is already somewhere else thinking about it.
Both hands come up to either side of her head. Index fingers pointing straight up.
Cat ears.
She holds this. With complete seriousness. Then she rounds her mouth and says, slow and deliberate: "Miau."
Points to herself.
Points to the cat.
Sae looks at the cat. Looks at her. The cat is purring against his hand with its eyes at half-mast, entirely indifferent.
He understands. She's the owner. The washing line — the rope strung between their two windows, the obvious transit route — explains the rest. He nods once.
She points to the cat and says it twice, slower the second time: "Rizo."
Ri. The start of it. He turns the sound over and puts it somewhere, and doesn't examine why it wants to go next to something else.
He picks the cat up.
Rizo accepts this with the dignified resignation of an animal that has been transported before and considers it beneath him but tolerates as a fact of life. Sae closes the window.
The last thing he sees, before the glass cuts off her view, is her expression shifting — half confused, half something else, something that's on its way to a laugh and hasn't quite arrived yet.
The alley is barely wide enough for two people walking side by side. Dark concrete, the washing lines overhead, Madrid sky in a thin strip above. Sae carries Rizo around and finds the facing building's door, and it's already opening before he reaches it.
She came down fast. Her hair is slightly disordered from leaning out the window and she's in the mismatched clothes of someone whose evening had not been planned around visitors — and she stops on the step and takes in the sight of him, of the cat tucked in his arm, and something moves through her expression quickly, involuntary, too fast to identify before it settles back into bright.
Both hands go to her cheeks.
"¡Ay, madre —" Quietly. To herself. Then she looks up at him properly, and the smile is back but different now — less front-facing, more true. "Gracias, gracias, gracias," she says, already reaching, and Rizo goes to her with the seamless loyalty of someone returning to their first allegiance after a brief diplomatic incident.
She cradles him and looks at Sae and begins immediately.
"¡Pensé que te lo ibas a quedar! O sea, que lo habías robado. Bueno, Rizo no se deja robar por cualquiera, pero igualmente — ¿Cómo lo recogiste tan fácilmente? Normalmente tarda un buen rato en dejarse agarrar por alguien que no conoce. ¿Tienes gatos en casa? ¿Eres de Japón? Claro que eres de Japón, qué pregunta —"
Sae watches her more than he listens, because listening is not yet available to him. She is — a lot, in a way that resists easy categorisation. Her hands are in every sentence, her face entirely invested, occasionally redirecting mid-thought to address Rizo directly, as if the cat has stake in this. When she laughs at something she's said it happens before she decides to, openly and without checking herself first. She is, he thinks, very Spanish, in the specific way he's been watching Spanish people be Spanish since the taxi from the airport — loose in the way of people who haven't decided yet that the world requires armour.
She catches him looking.
Goes still mid-sentence. Raises an eyebrow at him.
Points to herself. Says her name, clear and deliberate.
He keeps it.
Points to him, brows lifted.
"Sae. Itoshi Sae."
She tries the family name once, loses it on the consonants, and abandons it without ceremony — goes straight to Sae like that was always the plan, the vowel slightly more open in her mouth, the word given a little more room than it gets at home. Nods once, settled, like she's decided it fits.
Then she says something — gestures up at the windows above them — and the last word sounds like mañana. Tomorrow. He knows that one. He doesn't know what he's agreed to. She takes his silence as an answer regardless, which is, he suspects, how she handles most things.
"¡Buenas noches, Sae!" she calls over her shoulder, already back through the door, already gone.
Buenas noches. Good night. Phrasebook, page four.
He stands in the alley for a moment after the door closes, the washing lines overhead, the strip of sky, the city noise framing either end of the gap like parentheses around something he doesn't have words for yet.
He goes back inside.
First session: exactly what it needs to be.
Three hours, and the Real Madrid youth coaches have no buffer between you did this wrong and the telling of it. Four errors in the first hour and he hears about each one at volume, in Spanish he can't follow beyond its tone, which is sufficient. Tone carries most of what matters. By the end the exhaustion in his legs is the clean deep kind, the kind that means the body has been used correctly, and his mind — finally, mercifully — has somewhere to put itself besides tomorrow.
The bus back. Dinner with the Ruiz family's patient slow Spanish, a quarter of which resolves into meaning. The walk down the hall to his room.
At his desk he opens a fresh page and writes palabras across the top — words, from the phrasebook on the plane — and lists beneath it everything he's certain of. Hola. Adiós. Sí. No. Gracias. Por favor. Mañana. Bien. Fútbol. Nine words. Miau doesn't make the list.
He's reviewing the page when Rizo appears on the outside sill.
The window is closed. He'd shut it deliberately, having watched the cat's operations on the washing line this morning long enough to understand the logistics. Closed windows are, apparently, a position Rizo considers negotiable. He's installed on the other side of the glass with the inexhaustible patience of something that has never doubted a door would eventually open.
Sae looks at him for a long moment.
Opens the window.
Rizo enters and conducts his inspection — the boots, the desk chair leg, the centre of the bed — and then folds down in a patch of light near the pillow and begins washing his face with the settled air of something reviewing a long-term arrangement it finds acceptable.
Across the alley the window opposite is lit. The edge of a desk. A poster. The corner of a shelf. He can't see her directly.
He turns back to his notebook and writes one more word at the bottom of the list: mañana. Below it, in Japanese, its translation — not because he'll forget, but because committing things to the page makes them feel fixed. Mapped. Like territory he's started to learn the edges of.
He closes the notebook. Turns the desk lamp off.
By the time he's settled on the bed Rizo has migrated from the patch of light to the pillow beside him, and the purring fills the room in the dark, and Madrid goes on outside being loudly and entirely itself. Sae shifts over. Makes room. Closes his eyes.
Tomorrow, he thinks, the word in two languages at once, and then — for the first time since the gate at the airport, since Rin's face on the other side of it, since the long specific sound of that moment closing — doesn't think about anything else.
The paper aeroplane comes through the window the next morning while he's at his desk.
Orange, torn from a spiral notebook, reasonably well-folded. It bumps against his notebook and settles on the desk. Rizo, in his patch of sun on the bed, tracks it with one eye and elects not to act.
Inside, in handwriting that runs forward like it's late:
¡Buenos días, vecino misterioso! Estoy muy feliz que hayas traido a Rizo aunque fuera de una manera muy rara (¿por qué cerraste la ventana con él dentro?). Escribo porque cuando hablo no me entiendes, eso ya lo he visto. ¿Hablas algo de español? ¿Algo de algo? Escríbeme aunque sea en japonés, qué más da.
Buenos días. Good morning. Rizo — obvious. Español — Spanish, he can parse the shape of it. Japonés — his own language seen from the outside, recognisable. Misterioso sits in the middle of a phrase he can't crack, the syllables strange and vaguely suspicious. The rest is a closed room.
He flips the plane over, finds the back of one wing, picks up his pen and writes in Japanese: I can't read this. Sits with the problem this response presents for a moment. Refolds the plane.
She's at her window. It's already open, because of course it is, and she's leaning on the sill with her chin in one hand and the expression of someone who has been there long enough to have an opinion about how this is going. He aims. The plane clips the washing line, drops. She catches it off the descent, reads it, looks up.
A series of things happens on her face quickly: something like obviously, something that's a laugh beginning, something that's actual thought. She disappears. Returns with a fresh notebook and holds it toward him — big letters, a language that is neither Japanese nor Spanish. The letters he's seen on signs and newspapers since he landed, that third language everywhere in this country, the world behind a door he doesn't yet have a key for.
He looks at it. Looks at her.
She watches his face. Tips the notebook forward like proximity will help. Then flips to a new page: ¿español?
He shakes his head.
Another page, slower: Do you know English?
Same shapes, same closed room. He shakes his head again.
She sets the notebook down.
Studies him across the gap with the look of someone locating the real shape of a problem — not frustrated, actually interested, the way a person gets when a puzzle turns out to be more interesting than expected. Then one finger up: wait.
She disappears and comes back with two things: an older battered notebook and, held up for him to see, a Spanish-Japanese phrasebook with a worn cover. She flips through it — quickly, someone who knows roughly where things live — and holds up a page, pointing to a line near the top.
From across the alley, the Japanese characters are readable:
Can I teach you Spanish?
He reads it twice.
She looks very pleased about this, in the way she seems to look very pleased about most things — with her whole face committed, nothing withheld. "I will—" she makes a motion, two hands moving toward each other "— enseñarte. Teach you."
He considers this.
Learning Spanish in a classroom, with a textbook and a patient teacher speaking in the slow, enunciated register reserved for foreigners — that is one option. It is the option the club has arranged, a language tutor once a week, which he has looked at the schedule of and already categorised as insufficient. One hour per week is not enough. One hour per week will get him through introductions and menus in approximately three years.
The option in front of him speaks at native speed to someone who cannot yet keep up with her. That is, arguably, a more efficient system. Immersion by force.
He also has no one else to talk to, which is a secondary consideration he does not intend to examine too closely.
"Fine," he says.
She blinks. Then she laughs — it comes out suddenly, bright and uncalculated, with her head tilting back slightly — and says something in Spanish that he doesn't catch but which sounds uncomplimentary about his enthusiasm.
"¡Bien!" she says, and the notebook comes up again, a fresh page already filled. Lección 1 at the top, and below it a long list he can't read. She taps the first entry and looks at him and says it:
"Oye."
Points to him. Points to herself. Mimes tapping a shoulder.
Rizo has arrived on the sill. He's sitting squarely between the two windows now, regarding both of them with the specific condescension of a creature that operates above language and wants this known.
"Oye," Sae says, a beat behind.
She points at him like he's scored a point.
She flips the page. His name at the top — Sae — and below it a long phrase filling most of the page, a small star drawn in the margin beside one section. She tilts it toward him like the extra few centimetres will help, then gives up and just says it instead.
Long. Many syllables. She says it at her normal speed, chin lifted slightly, one hand extended in a small gesture that suggests she has rehearsed this or invented it just now — with her the distinction feels academic. It starts with mi and goes somewhere elaborate from there, brillante somewhere in the middle and more beyond that, the whole thing taking up far more space in a sentence than any name should reasonably require.
She waits.
He spreads his hands: I have nothing.
She grins — wide, like this is the exact response she wanted.
Writes it out in the notebook, big enough that he can copy it across the gap, which he does: character by character, into his own notebook, to look up later. The phrasebook won't have this. He is already certain the phrasebook won't be adequate for most of what she's going to put him through. He doesn't know yet whether that's a problem.
She says it once more, tracing each word with her finger, watching his face.
He nods. Once. Files it under: unknown, pending.
Three words below it now, held up:
Tu turno.
She mimes writing. Points to him. Points to the page.
His turn. He picks up his pen and is briefly aware of the precise situation: at a desk in Madrid, thirteen years old, conducting a vocabulary exchange with a girl he met yesterday across two metres of Spanish alleyway, while her cat sits between them looking superior. He writes in Japanese that she won't be able to read any better than he can read hers.
He writes his brother's name. Beside it, what it means in Japanese: something like cold, bright, like the sound of something clean. He holds it up.
She looks at it. Really looks — head tilted, the careful attention of someone actually trying to decode an unfamiliar system. After a moment she shakes her head. Palms up.
He points to the characters for Rin. Points to his own chest. Then out and away, toward somewhere imagined.
She reads his face instead of the page. Something in her expression adjusts, something small and quiet. Then she picks up the notebook and writes, slow and clear: ¿Tu hermano?
Hermano. Page twelve of the phrasebook. Brother.
He looks at her across the gap between the buildings — Rizo between them, the washing line above, the Madrid morning warm on both their windows.
He nods.
She says the name quietly to herself, tasting it. Then she looks at the cat.
"Rizo y Rin," she says.
He has thought this himself. He did not intend to show it on his face. Apparently he has shown it anyway, because she is watching him with an expression that has gone softer than her usual, the bright surface of it settling into something more careful.
"Se parece a él?" Does he look like him?
He thinks about Rin — the same eyes, the same hair, the way he is always about six seconds away from either laughing or furious, the way he had grabbed the hem of Sae's jacket at the gate and then let go very quickly like he had not meant to. "Los ojos," Sae says. The eyes.
She nods, slowly, and looks at Rizo, who is watching the washing line again with his teal-eyed attention, plotting his return journey.
"Then he has very beautiful eyes," she says, simply, and does not make anything more of it.
He looks at the notebook.
There is something inside the simplicity of this that he doesn't quite have the language for yet — in either language. He catalogues it as one of the things that does not fit into a category, which is an uncomfortable position for something to be in. He prefers things in categories.
"Gracias," he says, quietly, and the word comes out with more Japanese cadence than Spanish, rough at the edges, but it is the right word in the right moment, and she hears it that way.
"De nada," she says, and goes back to the notebook.
She doesn't push further, doesn't make it anything. Just opens a new page and writes the next word at the top, large and underlined, and holds the notebook up toward him — a small bright flag between two apartment blocks, the city going on enormous and indifferent below, entirely in a language he doesn't yet speak.
He leans forward.
Picks up his pen.
Starts.
That night, Rizo is on his pillow when he gets into bed.
Sae moves over without turning the light back on. Gives him the room.