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The first time Isagi nearly trips over Bachira, they haven’t even officially met. Bachira is just a strange creature curled up on the concrete floor of the Team Z locker room, saved from a foot to the back of the head by Kunigami’s warning.
“Watch out.”
And Isagi does. He watches the boy come to life with fire in his eyes, mischief in his smile, and danger coiled up in every muscle of his body. He watches and he can’t look away.
.
By the next time, Bachira is no longer a stranger, but he’s still an enigma, someone that Isagi could listen to all day and never quite understand, always pushing the boundaries of how he thinks, how he plays, how he feels. He can’t define him. Not quite a teammate, or a rival, or a friend.
Morning comes the day after their defeat against Team X. Isagi is a mess of nerves and exhaustion, but he gets up obediently at the morning bell to stumble towards the locker room. He doesn’t realize that the pile of blankets on the futon next to him are still wrapped around a body until he lands across it.
“That’s not a very polite way to wake someone,” Bachira mutters and it makes Isagi smile.
.
The third time it happens, Isagi has managed to lose something important and in its absence, found the strength to live without it. Then Rin hands it back to him like a gift and Bachira tells him that he doesn’t need him anymore either, but that wanting him is still on the table. The words play though his head in Japanese, and then in English.
少し時間が必要です。 I need some time.
もっと知りたいです。 I want to know more.
He leaves his notebook behind in the study room and goes back to fetch it. He opens the doors, steps inside, and his foot catches against Bachira’s back, sending him to his knees as he desperately tries not to step on outstretched arms and hands.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” Bachira says, getting up and pulling Isagi up with him. “If you hurt yourself, we won’t be able to play together anymore.”
Isagi nods. “I won’t let that happen.”
.
They win against the national U-20 team. He’s more confident and determined than he has ever been in his life and his dreams are looking more and more like a possibility. Somewhere along the line, he’s learned to believe in his own ability to change and grow and adapt to each situation that is thrown his way. He doesn’t need a cheerleader anymore. But sometimes he could still use a reminder.
“Trust your instincts,” falls out of a mouth made only for possibilities, never regrets.
And he does. Isagi charges forward past every obstacle Blue Lock can throw in his way. There are some things he will never have, a shot as fast as lightning, legs that reach for days, the physical strength to knock down gods. But his own gifts open up a different avenue into a different world. He never looks back. But on occasion, when he walks into a quiet room, he catches himself glancing down.
.
Blue Lock ends not with a bang, but a whistle. They don’t win the 2019 U20 World Cup. They don’t launch Japan football into the international spotlight. They don’t walk away from the pitch as heroes. But that doesn’t mean nothing has changed.
Isagi has learned how to burn with a fire hot enough to smelt precious metal from worthless ore. He does it again and again, leaving behind bronzes and silvers in his wake, always searching for and just barely missing elusive gold.
.
“I never understood,” his father tells him, “why you want to win so bad.”
Isagi tries to explain it to him. He tells him about how much he loves soccer and in those brief moments, when the ball hits the back of the net, when the scoreboard reads 1-0, when his feet kiss the top of the podium, it feels like soccer loves him back.
His mother gives him a strange look. “A thing can’t love you back, Yocchan. Only people.”
Her words follow him like specters. He thinks about the people he loves, people just like him, who live and eat and breathe this sport, whose love rotates around the axis of a spinning ball, and wonders what it would take to differentiate between loving and winning.
.
The 2022 World Cup slips between his legs and the loss weighs on him like a stone around his neck. It drags him to his knees and rips through his throat. They’ll leave Qatar with nothing. Not even silver or bronze. It takes him minutes, maybe hours, to feel the hand on his back. When he looks up, Bachira’s yellow eyes glint in the sun. They’re the color of butter, something soft and warm and comforting, but for a moment, he thinks he sees something glitter before he looks away.
“I really wanted to make it all the way to the end,” Bachira says with a deep sigh. “Now we won’t get to play together again for a whole ‘nother year.”
It’s ridiculous enough to tear a laugh from Isagi’s raw and aching lungs.
When Bachira turns his way again, smiling, Isagi realizes what it was that caught his attention before. In Bachira’s eyes, there are traces of gold.
.
Alcohol has never been Isagi’s friend, but tonight it offers him something that no one else can. It offers him a chance to forget. And he has good company as his teammates seem to once again share a single goal with him, drinking themselves into oblivion. Rage and disappointment and loss disappear around one in the morning in the middle of the hotel bar.
Isagi wakes up who knows how long later on a soft bed back in his room with no memory of how he got there. It’s a mystery that will have to wait as his bladder gives him more pressing concerns. As he gets up to stumble to the bathroom, his foot connects against something warm and solid curled up on his hotel room floor.
This time, there’s nobody to warn him. This time, as he watches bleary yellow eyes blink open at him from a few feet away, he lets himself fall.