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He thinks he is alone.
He’s still sulking in one of the Teikoku locker room toilet stalls, feet propped against the door. He’s been scrolling through his messages on his phone for a good hour now, waiting for everyone to leave. He’d lazily slipped away for his own sanity after their crushing defeat, crushing because they’d been so close to Raimon, but in the end one goal slipped through Genda’s fingers. Just that two seconds, that centimetre between Genda’s glove and the ball, and it’d all been over.
Fudou takes his feet off the door and swings them down onto the floor, flicks the lock open in one neat swipe and pushes it open.
He is not alone.
Sakuma is there, at the mirror in front of one of the sinks, still in his uniform with the Captain’s band a garish red stripe across his arm. His hands are shaking, fingers struggling to hold a tiny dropper bottle above his eye. There’s a fat drop of liquid forming at the tip. Sakuma struggles to hold open his lower lid. His hands are shaking, shaking. It falls. Hits the top of his cheek, just under his lower lid.
“Shit!”
He hisses it, kicks the pipes under the sink, slams his open palms against the cold white porcelain. He looks up, into the mirror. There’s no way for him to not notice Fudou, standing just to the side and behind him. Fudou tries not to gawk, tries not to look anything but his usual expression of half-unimpressed and half-amused, but he fails. Sakuma stares at him, his shaking hands the only part of him that’s moving.
Sakuma looks at him with two eyes.
It’s not like anything he’s seen before. It’s not like Sakuma’s other eye, the one that cuts him down to the bone with a sharp glare so frequently when he runs his mouth. This one has a deep blackness to the sclera unlike anything he’s ever seen. The discolouration runs down to the skin underneath, the colour of clouds before a storm, greyness with darker points to it, like a strange pattern of freckles. It’s trembling, and at first he thinks it’s the shaking of Sakuma’s body, but then he realizes the eye is quickly twitching back and forth, to the right and back, even as Sakuma blinks down.
He opens his mouth but Sakuma’s hand is already up.
“Don’t—“ he says. “Just don’t.”
Fudou steps out from the stall doorway. “Wasn’t gonna.” He holds up a hand and makes a gesture for the bottle. “Gimme.”
“No.”
“C’mon. Give it here.”
“Why can’t you just—“
“I’ll help you with ‘em.”
“I—“ Sakuma cuts off, looks down and away. Fudou gestures for the bottle again, and finally feels it being pressed into his outstretched palm. “Don’t stare.”
“It’s kinda hard not to.”
“Well try.”
Sakuma stretches his neck up, bares his throat as he leans his head back and locks his eyes on the ceiling. He’s about the same height, just a bit too tall to get any proper leverage. It’s not going to work like this, even standing on his toes. He grabs Sakuma’s hand and tugs him around the corner and over to the bench in front of the lockers, sits him down. The bench is thin, and he nudges Sakuma’s knee with his own so Sakuma turns, straddles it. Fudou kneels in front of him, intent on staying kneeling with Sakuma sitting in front of him, but it’s hard to steady his hand.
He leans forward.
His hand connects with Sakuma’s chest. He expects resistance, but Sakuma gives and slides back as he eases him down, knee resting between Sakuma’s thighs and he steadies his elbows gently on Sakuma’s chest, bottle in one hand, his other steadying Sakuma’s ever-twitching eye under the lid. Sakuma exhales a breath he’s been holding too long. Fudou feels it against his cheek. He’s never been this near before with Sakuma so serene, so still Fudou has the means to count every single eyelash resting against the tops of his cheeks.
It looks so much different now that he’s this close. A deep copper coin in a pool of ink. The sclera is so deeply black the only color and light in the socket comes from the iris, the deep bronze-brown of it only barely contrasting. He gently places his thumb under the lower lid, rests it against the orbital bone and the whole time he feels it, even when he’s not glancing over at it. Sakuma’s other eye fixed on him, watching. Waiting.
Like he’s waiting for something to go wrong.
“Can I…ask what it is?” he says finally, as he brushes a hair out of the way and gently squeezes the small bottom of the bottle.
“Nevus of Ota,” Sakuma says, softly. “It’s like a birthmark, but on the eye.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No. The movement is from nystagmus. Muscle twitch. It’s annoying.”
Fudou snorts. “Can you spell it?”
“Nope.” Sakuma blinks and hisses as the drop hits the inside pocket of his lower lid.
He squeezes it shut, goes to wipe the excess that drips from between his lashes but Fudou gets there with his thumb. Once he wipes it he realizes how gentle and intimate it felt in that split second, how much of a reflex it was. A mistake. His finger lingers on the edge of the grey coloration where it splays out against the orbital bone and ends at the top of Sakuma’s cheek.
He can’t look at Sakuma’s other eye, the one he knows is on him, he can’t.
He’s about to get up, but Sakuma points to his other eye. “Next,” he says. “They’re just for dryness. Too long in the game, gets to be a bit straining.”
This one is harder. It’s strange, the eye he sees every day is so much harder to look at. Sakuma said not to stare but this is the one he finds himself staring at, that bright copper-brown coloration that shimmers and the pupil, constricted from the fluorescent lights of the locker room, but focused on him. He can see his reflection as he closes in, bends nearer.
His thumb lingers against Sakuma’s cheek as he moves it up to pull down the lower lid again. He can see all the slick red capillaries against the warm pink of Sakuma’s membranes. He’s seeing inside. It’s as pink and wet as Sakuma’s guts might be. A shiver goes down his back as he thinks about that, thinks about how hot it must be inside Sakuma’s body, what it’d be like to feel that. The drop hits. Sakuma squeezes his eye shut again. This time, Fudou tells himself to wait, not to wipe the leaking, but his hand still moves.
Then it stays.
He wipes the drop with his thumb but his hand lingers there, against Sakuma’s cheek.
Sakuma is beautiful.
He’s always beautiful, on the field, in class, after practice. It burns. It burns a hole in him.
Both of Sakuma’s eyes are focused on him and trembling. The one is still dark and twitching, but he can see where it’s trying to go, right to his face. Sakuma licks his lips, Fudou watches the movement of his throat as he swallows, feels the gentle rise and fall of Sakuma’s chest under his elbows. The warmth that radiates from Sakuma’s cheek is under his hand, against the full splay of his open palm.
He doesn’t know which one of them leans close first but there’s an exchange between them, something unsaid. Fudou’s knee moves up and he leans in. Sakuma’s lips meet him, clumsily, but hot and soft. It’s a kiss, they’re kissing, Sakuma kissing him back. Sakuma tastes like honey lemon slices from halftime and chapstick. His hand moves up through Sakuma’s hair, rubs against his scalp. He can smell the faint scent of Sakuma’s shampoo from the day before, Sakuma’s sweat, everything that radiates from Sakuma’s skin.
The warmth of their bodies pressed flush together is so different from all the times they’ve fallen against each other on the field. On the field it’s crashing, tangling, bruises and full force of the weight. Now he’s holding back, he’s taking the full weight of his own body in his thighs and biceps to keep it from crushing Sakuma. A gentleness he didn’t know he had in him but he does, unconsciously.
There’s a stirring against his knee, the slow beginning of Sakuma’s arousal.
He parts his lips for his tongue, laps at the parting of Sakuma’s lips. He weaves it in, gently pries Sakuma’s lips apart, like the opening petals of a flower. It curls against the inside of Sakuma’s upper lip, he waits as Sakuma gently starts to part his teeth and he slips his tongue past them, against Sakuma’s open tongue, presses their bodies closer together, harder, nothing feels like enough. He curls his tongue deeper into Sakuma’s mouth, deeper, deeper, against the soft palate, rubs Sakuma’s tongue with his own.
The hand against his chest comes like a flash bang grenade.
He’s tumbling off the bench and hits the cold tile with his palms and knees. Sakuma is sitting up, both eyes wide, breathing heavy. He doesn’t say anything. His jaw is set in a line, but he looks more startled than angry, and Fudou knows both those expressions of Sakuma’s well. Sakuma swings his legs off the bench, runs a hand through his mussed hair, and quietly heads back towards the bathroom sink, eyes fixated neatly on Fudou until he turns the corner.
There’s the sound of running water from the back, probably the sink.
He peels himself off the tile, throws his uniform and street clothes into his duffle bag from his locker. His palm hits the door to the outside with a recklessness. He touches two fingers to his lips. Swollen. Red. They ache, just slightly. It makes something stir within his stomach.
The clock on his phone says it’s only been ten minutes since he last checked it, but it feels like he’s been somewhere else entirely for hours. Time has swallowed up that moment into the void, left him with nothing but a vague feeling of thrill, but also emptiness.
His heart flutters in his chest.
He can still feel the ghost of Sakuma’s hot skin against his cool open palm. There’s still one of Sakuma’s thin, translucent strands of hair stuck between his fingers, and he shakes it out onto the floor. Just like that, he’s both had and lost Sakuma. From the time his tongue slipped between Sakuma’s teeth to the back of his throat, barely a fraction of a second. Just enough time for Sakuma to blink before coming to his senses, planting his palm in the centre of Fudou’s chest. In only took that small push to lose him. A fraction of a second.
The heat gathers in his cheeks and the wind whips through his hair as he heads back to the dorm to shower and change.
He really understands how Genda must’ve felt when that goal slipped past his gloves.