Work Text:
i. age 20, motorbike
No such thing as red lights or stop signs, baby, tonight Youichi is on the prowl, the piston heart of his sleek metallic wondermachine pumping combustible blood through its veins. This is true speed, this is liquid luck in mechanics: the whiplash blur of electronic billboards and skyscrapers, the outer skin of inertia peeling away to reveal the underneath, the below-the-flesh, the seed of the pit. It sits a huge swollen thing in Youichi’s chest, a little soft and sore, like the breath leaving his lungs or the inside pressure of joy pushing its way out.
We call this love, someone said to him once, and the memory tastes like cherries and the acrid sting of the road in his nose.
Love, Youichi thinks, breaking past bustling Tokyo crowds and bubbles of conversation. He keeps finding it everywhere, in tire burn on asphalt and the hard-learned lingo of the fast lane, in snatches of voices and the carapace of his motorbike. Love, adrenaline bliss, an indestructible chemical rapture filling the empty ache where laughter longs to be, and Youichi grins, shouts into the night, letting his voice carry him farther, thinking he’ll reach someone else there.
ii. age 8, scooter
Mom calls eight the age of enchantment, the best of the single digits, except enchantment is ghosts in the mirror and the scooter is red-paint real, convincing and in the present-tense. The grip tape’s starting to wear off, fading into this scuffed-boot color where Youichi puts too much pressure on his heels, and it looks awesome until Youichi remembers that he doesn’t know how to change it or where to buy it.
The five o’clock traffic clumps in Youichi’s peripheral vision, a multi-colored caterpillar that he beats down the block and back. This week he’s gained a number of cuts on his knees, topped off with a spectacular bruise in the shape of a chicken, and each wound’s a lesson in how to not put on a bandage, how much antibiotic to apply, how to get up after falling down.
It’s a matter of doing the same thing once, twice, fifty million times, whatever, no big deal. The hardest part is being brave when he’s pinging on nobody’s radar, but Youichi can take care of himself, tie his own shoelaces. He’s got surprise on his side, the final ingredient in victory: scoring at home plate before shortstop can throw to catcher, the grainy voice of the announcer drowning out the roars of the audience, is he going for it, is he gonna make it, no, yes, he slides, he scores!
iii. age 1, the beginning
For his birthday Mom and Gramps buy him a baby walker, red and blue with soft squeaky buttons. Youichi is ecstatic, pushing forward on his unsteady legs, already walking away from them.
iv. age 12, bike
He plays baseball. He kills giants. It annoys him when the new coach acts surprised, like the old coach didn’t update him like he should’ve, and his friends think it’s funny that Youichi’s so up in arms about it, tease him about getting cocky. He doesn’t know how to say it, that he hates having to prove himself over and over again, that he can carry his own weight when he’s been living with it his whole life, so he keeps his trap shut except to laugh and make fun of people who aren’t him.
The weekend after they lose to some rich-ass Tokyo school, Youichi spends all of Saturday cleaning out his bike gears, checking up on its tires. Mom leans in the doorway and laughs, one infatuation to the next, huh, and Youichi knows she doesn’t mean anything by it, that he’s not a shadow of his dad, an all-over-the-place kind of guy, one great love to the next without a second glance. It’s not like Youichi’s searching for another headrush, a better and more satisfying skin-your-knees quick-- he’s chasing what he’s always been chasing, just packaged differently each time, that’s all.
But he doesn’t know how to say that either, how to make it ring true, and he holds his tongue, hoping that time will tell.
v. age 18, car
He’d saved for months to get this car, this beat-up scrap-pile junk piece of shit, and there’s heat in his arm and heat in his chest and then pain, the kind that’s half physical and half not, half some internal urge that says Youichi, Youichi, you can cry, you can. Except the tears aren’t coming, only an anger that’s not even a real anger, a cousin twice-removed at best. He’s tired, that’s the right word for it, tired of the incredible hurt stored in his body, agents talking to him like he hadn’t produced results, good results, come home with numbers stacked so high it was like looking at the Empire State, Tokyo Tower.
Think of college, say the advisors, your future, say Mom and Gramps, Koushien, does not say the team, and Youichi climbs in his car and slams his foot down, down on the gas, the windows punched-out open and pain peeling off of him in strips and time lifting off of the clock and then the soothing openness of night, the lights sinking into him. He’s not as numb as he wants to be, an unpeeled scab drifting aimlessly over a tar-black dreamland, floating fairy lights, phantom Ryousuke whispering in his ear, traffic signals are casual suggestions. The taste of cherries, someone too distant to touch.
vi. age 14, longboard
So he’s never gonna give up this feeling, no, he's never gonna leave, never gonna let go of these streets flying beneath his wheels, alternating lengths of gray and black. His heart's buried under the concrete teeth of pavement and it's pounding triple-time to the bump of wheels over uneven turf, the sudden and almost painful awareness that he is here, he is here in this world, he has always been here.
There’s the noise of wind in his ears and enough hot blood in his body to make this next stunt either a really good or really bad idea, nothing in between, and his cheeks are sore with grinning, mouth as full of knives as a shark’s. A kid his age shouts when he winds around them, the smell of cheap cologne, an awful aftertaste, but Youichi can't bring himself to care, giddy on each new discovery, oh, so I could move like that.
When he kicks off the ground he has no idea where he’ll end up, if he’ll faceplant on the sidewalk or soar over the bar with a new trick under his sleeve, but his goal’s to tear it down in one try, knock it outta the water with his feet and his board and a yell, a resounding whoop of joy, earth and gravity yielding to what seems like an indomitable happiness.