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Asako noticed it almost as soon as he did, so Yoshiki didn’t have to waste time letting someone know he had to run to the infirmary while bleeding all over himself and the field. At least there was that. He could get a few drops of blood out of his gym shirt.
The school nurse gave him a couple washcloths but there wasn’t much else she could do to help. He’s had nosebleeds before. He knows the drill.
He takes his time rinsing his hands thoroughly until the water runs clear, save for the spots where the blood drips off the tip of his nose. He’s hunched over so no more of it can run down his mouth. No matter how tight he presses his lips together, there’s no avoiding the copper tang of blood reaching his tongue any time his nose bleeds.
The nurse is back to working at her desk and pays him no mind when he returns from the sink so Yoshiki sits on the end of a bed, pulls the curtain partitioning it shut, and slouches forward. With a sigh, he dutifully pinches his nose and holds a washcloth to it.
The thought that at least he’d get to sit inside instead of having gym class makes the situation slightly less annoying, but the infirmary here is super uncomfortable. He hadn’t spent a lot of time visiting the nurse in junior high, but a couple times last winter he’d had to lay down a spell after he caught Kaoru’s flu. Most of the the time he had gone there on account of Hikaru, ostensibly to make sure he didn’t pass out and injure himself further, but he always suspected that the adults were counting on him to temper any mischief Hikaru might be inclined toward outside of the classroom.
He didn’t add to the mischief, but he was a good lookout when the school nurse happened to be gone for a moment and Hikaru wanted to rifle through cabinets looking for anything interesting. Best he ever found was disposable gloves, which he blew up like balloons and used to harass Yoshiki with.
The adults were dumb to think he was more interested in pleasing them than in getting caught up in one of Hikaru’s schemes. That was the case in junior high anyway. He’s trying to be less compliant.
At least they’re in different clubs. Not that he would have ever joined a sports club even at the height of his deference the last few years. And photography club has been interesting. He’s learning. It doesn’t require much of a commitment.
He hoped high school would be better. Maybe junior high was a false alarm, an anomaly of adolescent confusion and changing hormones in an unnaturally confined space. He thought maybe, upon entering high school, he’d end up sweet on some girl after all. He knew that wasn’t actually gonna happen. It’s like tryna believe in Santa past a certain age.
So far high school has just been a longer bike ride and harder classes and a new guy hanging around their established foursome and an infirmary that’s slightly too chilly to feel comfortable in with cheap scratchy blankets on lumpy hard beds.
It would’ve been better if he’d gotten a nosebleed before gym. At least it wouldn’t be so obvious on the black of his gakuran. And he’d have pants instead of these awful gym shorts riding up his legs. He shifts on the bed in effort to move the legs of his shorts back down, but it doesn’t work and his thighs remain exposed to the abrasive weave of the blanket beneath him.
The infirmary is quiet, at least. No one else is in here right now, so the ticking analogue clock on the wall is the loudest thing in the room. If he focuses, he can hear the sounds of his classmates outside.
Yoshiki moves the towel away from his nose experimentally and dabs at his face to check for bleeding. It seems to have stopped, but if he lingers a little while longer then he might not have to participate in gym at all.
Somewhere outside the privacy curtain around him, a familiar voice calls out a tentative, “Hello? Anyone here?”
“Hikaru?” he calls back, cringing at his nasal voice. He stops pinching his nose and sets the washcloth aside, folded so the bloodied spots aren’t exposed.
“Yeah, I know yer here. I was lookin’ for the nurse.” Hikaru pulls open the curtain along one side of Yoshiki’s bedspace and takes a seat on the empty bed nextdoor, somehow unmaking it almost entirely in the process.
“Didn’t know she left,” Yoshiki says, peering around the corner at the now-empty desk. “What’s wrong?”
It’s unusual for Hikaru to not have a self-explanatory, visible injury.
He flops over onto his side with a theatrical groan. “Someone freakin’ nailed me in the leg with a softball when we wasn’t even supposed to be throwin’ them hard!”
Here, he lifts the hem of his gym shorts to bare the pale skin of his outer thigh. It’s somewhat red from impact, but otherwise unblemished.
Yoshiki can feel his pupils contract and dilate, fine tuning depth and focus as his field of vision narrows to Hikaru’s upper leg. He’s lucky he’s supposed to be staring right now.
“It don’t look like nothin’ right now,” Hikaru concedes, anticipating the need to defend the severity of his alleged injury, “but just feel, it’s a big ol’ goose egg already!”
Hikaru’s hand is hot on his wrist, pulling Yoshiki forward so far that he’s barely able to stay seated at the edge of the bed and guiding his hand to rest against a vague lump beneath his skin. He presses Yoshiki closer to his flesh for good measure.
“Wow,” Yoshiki says, breathless with appreciation. He didn’t know he was cold until Hikaru touched him.
“Right?” Hikaru agrees, misunderstanding entirely. “It’s gonna bruise up somethin’ fierce in a day or two I bet.”
Yoshiki pulls his hand back slowly, letting his fingertips skim across the breadth of the swollen area..
He can feel the grain of the hairs on Hikaru’s leg, so light and fine they’re nearly invisible. The barest strip of the grey hem of Hikaru’s boxer briefs is visible where his loose blue gym shorts are pooling up toward his groin.
A drop of blood falls onto the pale blue bedsheet beside Hikaru, blooming wider as it wicks through loose cotton weave.
“Oh shit,” Hikaru says, surprised but not alarmed. Maybe even impressed.
Yoshiki pulls back and clamps one hand over his face, the other groping blindly behind himself for the washcloth. He bends further at the waist as if bowing so that any stray drops will fall onto the linoleum. Even so, he tastes hot copper.
Hikaru sends him a photo that night. There’s no context—nothing visible but the too-close blur of the spot where his skin is an angry, injured red—but it’s obviously an update on the status of his gym class wound.
If he’d zoomed out more, or held his phone just a bit further back, what would the fuller picture be? Sleep shorts hiked up to the point where he could get a clear photo, probably. Underwear, perhaps. Nothing at all, before or after bathing, is a possibility. It’s impossible to know.
Yoshiki turns the screen off on his phone and glares at the ceiling.
At least it’s getting easier not to respond to Hikaru immediately. Not that he never took his time with texting in junior high, but… getting older, growing into different people than they were before—whether Yoshiki wanted to or not—had made him insecure. Hikaru had lots of other people who wanted to talk to him. Lots of other people who he might realize were better suited toward being his best friend if he had the opportunity to give it some thought.
Before long he couldn’t deny the reasoning behind his fixation on remaining an important figure in Hikaru’s life.
Now he still feels insecure, but he’s less inclined toward fawning about it. Blaming Hikaru for causing his uncomfortable interest helps sometimes. Resenting him for being unattainable—normal—and blissfully ignorant about it makes it easier to act like he ain’t lovesick.
It’s less suspicious if he pushes back against Hikaru more, or at the very least remains more aloof. There’s already too much about him and his family that draws attention from other people.
With a sigh, he turns his phone back on and texts back, Wow.
Even Yoshiki has to admit that Hikaru’s bruise is worth gawking at the next time they have gym two days later. It’s dark purple, and almost everyone who sees it winces and recoils in sympathy.
In a way it’s probably better for Yoshiki that all of this is happening while they are changing into their gym clothes. Seeing Hikaru in a state of undress is much less distracting when everyone is busy stripping down. Yoshiki has his own body, and the concealing thereof, to worry about.
Still, he spares a moment to join in the gawking as Hikaru plants one foot atop a bench to better display his injury to an audience of his peers.
“Toshi got you real good,” someone says with a low, appreciative whistle. “I’m surprised you ain’t limping.”
“It hurts alright,” Hikaru says, puffing up his chest a little, “but I ain’t even skipped club. Gotta tough it out, y’know?”
“If I was you, I’d be using that to get outta doing as much as I could,” someone else says.
“How? You gonna pull your pants down any time someone asks you to help wash dishes?”
Hikaru laughs at their classmates, his eyes narrowed by the force of his grin, and he steals a glance at Yoshiki to check his reaction. Yoshiki looks away quickly, putting all of his attention into lacing up his gym shoes.
When they’re filing out from their changing room to head into the gymnasium—when Yoshiki finally thinks that the worst of the danger has passed—Hikaru is distracted with talking and lists too close on his injured side and bumps into the door frame. The sound he makes is primal, a wordless wounded animal bleat.
At least, that’s probably how anyone else would describe it. Something in the unguarded vulnerability of that pain-sound is so unnervingly erotic to Yoshiki that he feels instantly too warm, sweating with a pounding pulse before he even starts to exercise.
“Don’tcha think it kinda looks like a galaxy or somethin’?” Hikaru asks. They’re in his bedroom today since things in Yoshiki’s home got a little too heated last night. His folks probably wouldn’t yell with Hikaru around, but he doesn’t want to chance it.
They were supposed to be choosing what game to play, but Hikaru got distracted somewhere along the way to picking up an impromptu stack of cases that had accumulated on the floor and instead he started contorting himself to admire his bruised leg in the mirror.
Yoshiki gives a monotone hum in response, steadfastly not looking.
“Yoshiki,” he whines, dragging out the last syllable, “c’mon, look for real! It’s real cool!”
Making sure to sigh loudly enough that Hikaru can hear, Yoshiki turns around. Hikaru’s standing in front of him now instead of the mirror, cocking his hip so that Yoshiki is eye-level with his bruised thigh.
It’s certainly more colorful now, purple core fading into a mottled dark red plume with a sickly yelllow-green halo.
For just a moment, Yoshiki’s traitorous brain considers the possibility of licking it. He shuts his eyes so tight he sees stars. He doesn’t want to do that. Why can’t he think normal things?
“It’s like somethin’ from outer space, right?” Hikaru asks, pulling him back into the moment.
“Maybe a nebula,” Yoshiki’s suggestion is noncommittal. He’s not especially well-versed in this sort of thing. Space, that is. He is both too well-versed and not well enough when it comes to Hikaru’s body.
At least it will fade soon. Then Hikaru will stop shoving it in Yoshiki’s face, literally and figuratively speaking.
Yoshiki hates the way that his mind has been supplying him with unsolicited suggestions for how he could use Hikaru’s eagerness to show off his bruise to his own advantage. It can’t mean anything good about him, having these thoughts at all, even if he would never consider following through with them.
So no, he will not ask Hikaru for more photos of his bruise hoping that some might reveal more tantalizing details of his body. Nor will he ask how it is looking at all. And he definitely won’t try to touch it, checking how the already discolored skin changes hues with the slightest application of pressure—he won’t find out how much of that pressure it takes to make Hikaru make another vulnerable mewling sound.
The sooner Hikaru heals the better. And he better make damn sure not to get injured anywhere other than his forearms or shins moving forward.
Actually, with the way his mind has been going, those probably won’t be safe to gawk at either.
They get their first warm day of the year that weekend. It’s nothing like the stifling summer heat that will smother them in a couple more months, but it’s the first sign that spring is drawing to a close. Yoshiki hopes that it cools down again at least until they switch uniforms.
Hikaru is, of course, ecstatic. “I’m so ready for summer break,” he says, practically skipping down the path to the creek. It’s not warm enough for shorts, in Yoshiki’s opinion, but clearly Hikaru feels differently.
“We hardly started high school and yer already countin’ down the days to vacation?” Yoshiki smirks a little and tries not to let it color his tone of voice.
“It ain’t that different from before,” Hikaru argues. “School is school, and vacation’s better by a landslide. Hey, is yer family plannin’ on goin’ anywhere during the break?”
“Doubt it,” Yoshiki ducks under a low branch and holds it up until Hikaru’s got a hand on it for himself. “Nothin’ I know about so far, anyway. But Kaoru’s got a friend movin’ soon and she don’t wanna waste any chance to hang out so even if Mom goes outta town I’ll probably stick round to watch her.”
“Oooh, party at Yoshiki’s house,” Hikaru croon. He kicks his shoes off and wads his socks up to stuff inside of them, feet bare in the too-cold dirt nearing the edge of the creek.
He laughs. “Only if ya wanna get yer hair ‘n makeup done by elementary girls.”
“Too dangerous,” Hikaru says seriously. “If I get any cuter they might pull me outta school to be a model or somethin’.”
Yoshiki settles down on the grass and immediately wishes he’d brought a jacket to sit on. Hikaru’s not the only one who dressed too optimistically.
“At least on my part they couldn’t possibly gimme a worse haircut than you.”
Hikaru laughs explosively at the memory. “I swear it weren’t on purpose! Ain’t ya ever gonna forgive me?!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Yoshiki dismisses him, smiling now that his bangs have long since regrown past the point of Hikaru’s butchery having any visible impact.
“Oh yeah, check it out,” Hikaru shifts his weight so that he can hike the leg of his shorts up. “Ain’t that creepy? Makes me look like a zombie or somethin’!”
Sure enough the bruise has dulled down to a mostly green and yellow discoloration, sallow and sickly and less objectively impressive than it has been.
It’ll be a relief when it’s gone entirely. He tells himself so. No more nebula, no more sore spot, no more dangerous casually exposed skin. If Hikaru could just do him a favor and refrain for injuring himself for a couple more years at least then he should be able to endure high school. Probably.
Hikaru is still talking. Somethin’ about summer vacation or soccer or the last zombie movie he couldn’t make it halfway through. Yoshiki makes the appropriate listening noises at more or less the right time as he gazes into the space of the bruise like it could expand outward with the intensity of his focus and engulf him entirely.
“Hello,” Hikaru says, waving his hands. “Earth t’ Yoshiki. What’s up?”
He knows better than to panic. Acting flustered, like he’s got somethin’ to hide, would be the worst possible response. And anyway, it’s Hikaru’s fault for makin’ Yoshiki look at his damn leg so much this week. Or maybe he never shoulda agreed to look in the first place…
Wordlessly, he jams his thumb into the center of it.