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Megumi had been counting tiles for a while before he understood that he was on the floor.
They were small and square and pale blue, the kind every public pool in the country had, and a black lane line ran through them about a hand's width from his face. He'd gotten to sixty-something. He started over twice because he kept losing his place, and it was the losing his place that finally told him something was wrong, since he didn't usually.
The pool had been drained for years. Somebody had closed the building and never come back for it, and the deep end had filled up with whatever blew in through the broken skylights. Leaves, a shopping bag, one child's sandal with a cartoon frog on the strap. Megumi was lying in the middle of all that, on his side. He could feel grit against his cheek. He could not feel much of his left leg, which he decided not to look at.
The curse was dead. He was fairly sure of that. He remembered the dog going into its throat and the sound it made coming apart, and then he remembered the wall of the pool arriving very fast. After that, tiles.
It had been 6 years since the accident.
―――
The report had said grade two. The report was written by a man in an office who had never been inside the building, and Megumi had read it on the train out to Saitama and thought, fine, home by nine. He'd even bought dinner already. It was in a plastic bag in a station locker, a bento and two cans of coffee, one black and one of the sweet milky ones he didn't drink.
He still bought the second can. He'd stopped trying to explain that to himself around the third year. He'd leave it on the shelf above the sink until it had been there long enough to be embarrassing, and then he'd give it to Kugisaki, who took it every time without saying a word, which was the kindest thing she knew how to do.
So. Not grade two. He'd figured that out about four seconds in.
His phone was in his jacket. His jacket was somewhere up by the diving blocks, where the thing had taken it off him. He tried his shadow instead. It spread out under him the way it always did, and then it just lay there like a shadow. Nothing came up out of it. He didn't have enough left to give anything a shape.
"Okay," he said, to the tiles. It didn't sound like much.
He thought he would rest for one minute and then start on the ladder.
―――
"You look like crap, Fushiguro."
Megumi opened his eyes. He hadn't noticed closing them.
The pool sloped. He was down in the deep end and the floor ran up and away from him, lane lines and all, to where the water would have been knee height on a kid. Yuji was lying up there in the shallow end. On his back, one arm flung out, head turned so he was looking down the slope at Megumi.
He was wearing the red hoodie. The front of it was dark and wet from the collar to the pocket, and his breathing was doing something Megumi could hear from most of a pool length away, a hitch at the top of every inhale like a drawer sticking.
He was grinning, though. Of course he was.
"Don't," Megumi said. His tongue felt thick. "Don't move. Stay there."
"I'm fine. It looks worse than it is."
Megumi knew that sentence. He turned it over slowly in his head, the way you turn a coin over to see which side it is, and then he let go of it, because Yuji had coughed and something came up with the cough and none of the rest mattered.
He got his right elbow under him and started to crawl.
―――
Six years ago in November it had been a parking garage in Kawasaki, four levels, and they'd split up to clear it faster. That was Megumi's call. He was the one who said it out loud. You take three, I'll take two, shout if you need me.
Yuji shouted. Megumi heard it through the concrete, his own name, just the once. He ran. He went back afterward and measured it, the ramp and the length of the level, because he was the kind of person who would. Forty meters from where he'd been standing to where Yuji was. A little under six seconds at the speed he'd run it.
Yuji was sitting against a pillar with both hands pressed to his stomach and his head tipped back. He looked up when Megumi's shoes hit the level. He smiled. He said, I'm fine, it looks worse than it is. Megumi was still four or five steps away when Yuji's hands slid down into his lap.
That was all of it. There wasn't a speech. Megumi got there and knelt and put his own hands where Yuji's had been, and kept them there a long time after there was any reason to.
Four or five steps. He'd done the math on that too. About a second.
―――
The slope was harder than it looked. The tiles were slick with old leaf rot and his left leg dragged behind him doing nothing, and every time he pulled forward his vision went white at the edges and took its time coming back. He counted lane markings now. They were bigger than tiles. He could keep hold of them.
"You should eat something," Yuji said, from up ahead.
"Shut up. Save your breath."
"Seriously, when did you last eat? You get so mean."
Megumi laughed, or his chest did something. He'd heard that one in the kitchen at school, he was almost sure. Yuji at the stove with his back turned, shaking a pan. He pulled himself another body length. The frog sandal went by on his left.
"I'm coming," he said. "I'm nearly there. Just keep talking."
"Your eyes are gonna fall out, reading like that."
"Itadori."
"You're gonna set your hair on fire."
Megumi stopped.
He lay with his forehead on the cold tile and breathed. Up ahead Yuji was breathing too, that awful hitch, in and catch and out. It was a real sound. He would have sworn to it in front of anyone.
"Say something else," Megumi said.
Yuji smiled at him down the length of the pool.
"Something new. Anything." His voice cracked and he hated it. "Tell me what you had for lunch. Tell me I'm an idiot. Say one thing I haven't heard before."
"I'm fine," Yuji said, gently. "It looks worse than it is."
―――
He knew, then. He'd probably known from the hoodie. It had been in a box at the back of his closet for six years, folded, with the hood tucked in, and nobody was wearing it.
There was a part of his head that stayed clear and dry no matter what the rest of him was doing. It was the part that wrote his reports. It said, blood loss, concussion, you are alone at the bottom of a swimming pool. It said, he only has the lines you gave him. It said all this without any cruelty at all, which was worse.
Megumi listened to it. He was a careful person. He weighed things.
Then he got his elbow under him again and kept going.
Because the thing was, Yuji was right there. He was closer than forty meters. He was still breathing and his hands hadn't dropped, and Megumi was moving, he was covering ground, and nobody had ever offered him that second back before. He didn't care who was offering. He'd have taken it from anyone.
Ten meters. His elbow had skinned through and was leaving marks on the tile. Five. He could see the scar at the corner of Yuji's mouth. He could see that Yuji's eyelashes were wet, and he couldn't remember ever noticing that before, and for one second, just the one, the clear part of his head went quiet.
Somewhere above him a door banged. Someone was shouting his name through the building, a woman's voice, furious, getting closer. He didn't answer it. He'd answer it in a minute.
"Hey," he said. "Hey. I got here. Look at me, I made it, I'm here."
Yuji's arm lay across the tile with the palm turned up. The fingers were curled a little. There was a callus at the base of each one. Megumi knew that hand better than he knew most people.
"I made it in time," he said, and reached out and took it.
His hand closed around nothing.