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There are some things that are just unnatural – some things that don’t add up, that stick out like a sore, like the moon in the morning, or a muddy blotch on pristine white sheets.
The silence of one Sawamura Eijun is just like that.
This is what Kazuya thinks, as they stand facing each other, and he can’t even hear him breathe. This is what he thinks as silence stretches between them, around them, and it presses in on his eardrums, like he’s climbed into high altitude, wind deafening him, cold biting into his flesh and digging into his bones.
But this is a different kind of cold. The numbness is a different kind of numbness as he watches Sawamura’s face, an open book that spells out in the simplest of words what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling, stare at him, blank.
Unreadable.
And it makes Kazuya panic. It makes him consider his words, words he’s already thrown out there in the open, reflexive, defensive, unthinking, words that’ve wisped into the air and laced into this silence.
Words he can’t take back, but which echo at him from the bare walls of the tiny, cramped apartment that’s been his home for two years.
Then leave.
And then Sawamura closes his eyes, shutters them, and it causes a ripple, like the air around them shudders, the silence shudders, and it makes Kazuya start, take a step back – it makes his gut clench tighter, in anticipation, dread, it makes his skin prickle, his body aware of something about to happen before his brain cottons on.
“Fine.”
And Kazuya doesn’t move – can’t move, is left cemented to the spot as he watches Sawamura pivot, his movements as crisp and certain as they are on the mound, the southpaw pitcher that’s made heads turn by making first-string just halfway into his freshman college year – watches as he strides toward the front-door, watches the pace of a man in a hurry to leave, the sharp staccato steps that dredge distance and space between them howling with emptiness even as Sawamura disappears behind the door, and the click of it shutting behind him is like a full-stop, like the bang of a judge’s gavel, and maybe it’s the finality of that sound, the buzzer-ring of a time-up, that breaks Kazuya.
His knees give, and as his body sags, like it refuses to hold him up any longer, like it’s given up on him. The small living-room that’s only got enough space for one two-seater couch and a mini-koutetsou swims around him, blurs, and Kazuya can’t think, because it’s so quiet, suddenly, so still and silent and empty, that it threatens to unravel his sanity.
***
It’s past midnight. He’s tossed the idea around in his head, choked on guilt for letting his own inability to be honest, his selfishness for not wanting to jeopardise the reputation he’s build for himself as callous and distant and haughty over the years, interfere with ensuring someone else’s wellbeing.
He’d called.
The number you have dialed is either switched off or out of coverage area. Please try again later.
He’d messaged.
Sawamura where are you
Reply when you see this
At least tell me where you are
He’s not proud of the last thing he sends, but he’d been desperate, on the brink of tipping over into a full-fledged panic attack as he prowls his apartment, a caged animal restlessly shifting in the dark.
You left all your things here
He’d reasoned that that’s a trump card in his favour. He’d reasoned that even if Sawamura didn’t want to (I’ve given him no reason to want to) he’d have to return to get his stuff – his sports-bag, with his college team’s uniform, his pitcher’s glove and a worn, frayed baseball that looks toward the end of its tether, a couple of changes of clothes.
Kazuya knows all this, because at the cusp of his anxiety-driven fidgeting, he’d rummaged through the bag, hunting, not really sure for what. It’s something to do, something to allay, even if it’s for a few seconds, the dark, horrible thoughts skirting at the edges of his consciousness, biding their time, feeling around for the chinks in his defenses that they can hammer down when his back is turned.
He holds the baseball jersey bunched in one clammy hand, and lets out a shaky laugh that sounds like nothing, that gets sucked into a vacuum and disappears, at the phantom Sawamura that pops into his head and screams at him for wrinkling his shirt.
He can’t hear the screams though. All he gets is a pantomime, a mocking charade, a shadow of the real thing.
The number you have dialed is either switched off
“Sawamura”
Or out of coverage area
“Where are you”
Please try again later
He’s ashamed, because even now, in the hours between day and night, so akin to purgatory, the place only reserved for dreams and secrets and things hidden from the world, hidden from sight, he can’t bring himself to think, Come back.
***
It’s close to 2 a.m., and Kazuya bites the bullet.
“Miyuki-senpai? Is everything alright?”
Kazuya’s heart sinks, drops out of his rib-cage and rolls across the floor and bumps over the boards into a dusty corner he can’t reach with his vacuum cleaner, because Kominato clearly sounds groggy, clearly sounds like a person just shaken awake from a sound night’s sleep, and he knows the answer he’s going to get before he pushes the words weighing his tongue down out,
“Do you…did Sawamura call you by any chance?”
“Eijun-kun?” Kazuya can hear the shift, can hear the lucidity replacing the slurry drowsiness of a person only half-awake, “No, I don’t think he did…” A beat, then the inevitable, “Did something happen to him, Senpai? Where is he?”
Kazuya laughs. It bubbles out of him, unattached to thought, unattached to any kind of intention, and it’s a macabre sound, grim and warped and shaky and breathless and Kazuya swallows it down abruptly.
“He left,” he says, feels a pang inside the pit of his stomach, that resounds with these two simple syllables, eerie and final, “he was staying over for the break and we…kind of had a fight and he walked out and I don’t know where he went.”
And then there’s the silence again, that damning, terrifying silence, filled with unsaid things, things that are shaped like accusations, weapons gripped in white-knuckled hands straining to hold back from using them, things shaped like truths that are like crickets after the rain, heard but not seen, there but invisible, unspoken.
“I’m going to try to call him,” and then the line goes dead.
There’s that bubble again, the hysteria surging up, pulsing, driving out rationality, driving out composure, driving out everything that’s made him such an effective catcher, such a daunting opponent to face on the mound, and he raises his phone in trembling hands, and dazedly goes through the motions again.
***
“The HELL kind of time do you think you’re calling, bastard?! You better not be drunk off your ass somewhere!”
“Kuramochi…have you heard from Sawamura?”
“…what? What happened? Is he okay?!”
***
“Where is he”
“What time did he leave”
“Didn’t he at least say where he’s going? When he’ll be back?”
The one question they don’t ask, none of them, all urgent and worried and tense, Kazuya can hear loud and clear.
“What did you do?”
***
“If he calls you or something, let me know”
He deliberates a moment, thumbs hovering over the keypad, bluish-white light awash against haggard, ashen features.
He types, “Please”
***
The only thing that’s stopping him from just going out on to the streets and scouring the neighbourhood, if only to work off the restless anxiety sputtering like a string of fireworks that are his nerves, is the flimsy likelihood that Sawamura might come back.
He doesn’t know if he would. He doesn’t want to think about it, because he thinks he knows the answer.
He doesn’t want to think at all.
But here, in this cooped little place he has to work part-time to pay rent for, his thoughts are the only things he has for company.
On the field he has baseball, he has complex plays and the anatomy of players’ psyches, their personalities and motivations and all the different ways he can move a piece on this baseball-diamond-shaped chessboard to get to where he wants, to dull the otherwise hollow silence inside his head. Even when he’s alone, when he’s studying, or working at the sports equipment store down the street from his college campus, smiling charmingly at all the girls that clearly come in for motives other than actually picking up a new set of cleats, that’s all that occupies his head – baseball. Catching. Playing. Winning.
That’s how it’s been for the longest time. That’s how it was when he’d be just like this, at home, moving through empty rooms and sifting between the blank spaces left by his parents, when he thought he’d made the pragmatic choice of learning to be self-sufficient rather than waiting for those gaps to fill over.
When you play a game that involves as much sliding and tumbling and skidding as baseball, you learn early on that some cuts never heal.
And that’s okay. That’s okay.
At least that’s what he’s told himself for the longest time.
Right now, though, here, in this cooped little place he has to work part-time to pay rent for, his thoughts are the only things he has for company.
And none of those thoughts are about baseball.
***
It’s three in the morning, and Kazuya’s downed enough coffee for bitter-gall acid to rise up his throat and stain his mouth in protest, his gut churning. He sits by the window, numb, almost catatonic.
Almost close to coming apart at the seams, a baseball that’s been battered too much by over-zealous hits.
He thinks, absently, about the quiet.
He thinks about how he doesn’t associate it with Sawamura Eijun.
He thinks about how he’d been surprised, intrigued almost, when he’d started noticing those moments where he wouldn’t be screaming his throat out, his volume as reckless as his pitches.
How he’d be serene, but still never completely quiet.
Like when he’s absorbed in a book, or a manga, and the only noises he emits are little mumbles to himself, punctuated by muffled groans or giggles he keeps to himself like secrets.
Like when he’s unwinding after a hard day at practice, and instead of mindlessly pulling a truck-tire round the field he’d sit by himself outside the dorms, nodding to some music you can just slightly make out through his earphones, music he sometimes hums along to.
Like when he’d be on the bus, or standing holding one of those metallic poles in the train, and he’d zone out – how his bright brown eyes, eyes that’s always look ahead, always look above, to that place that he’s so determined to climb no matter how many times he slips and falls, no matter how many times someone – including me, I’m one of them – trips him – how those eyes grow distant and faraway, and you can almost feel his presence, this thing that’s like the force of a magnet, that’s like the pull of the sun holding the earth in its axis, recedes.
Retreats to the background.
And in this moment, mentally exhausted, emotionally frayed, Kazuya thinks about how uneasy these moments make him.
How disconcerted.
How ominously like he’s being left behind.
Maybe that’s why he’d said yes. Maybe that’s why he’d complied, when a stuttering, awkward, bashful Sawamura seemingly on the brink of passing out from embarrassment had meekly confessed his feelings for him, on his very last day in high-school.
Maybe his subconscience had been just as uneasy, just as disconcerted, by the idea of the Sawamura Eijun-less silence his future otherwise held.
Kazuya lifts his nth cup to his mouth in a hand that trembles, and he doesn’t know whether it’s from fatigue or from emotion, doesn’t think about it, but when the caffeine-tinged ceramic touches his lip and he inhales the now sickening stench of stale coffee and his stomach roils, lurches with revulsion, he can’t help the little sound that leaves his mouth.
Broken. Helpless.
***
He would drink, but he wants to be sober for when he sees Sawamura again.
***
His brain adamantly refuses to think the word “if”
***
In that weird place between sleep and wakefulness, where you hang on to the real world with the flimsiest of grips, the last words that normally cheery, carefree voice that’d made left its mark on Seido’s grounds (and in him) had spoken whisper back at him and snatch away that respite of just turning everything off.
Miyuki…just tell me
Be honest
He can still see him, branded into the backs of his drooping eyelids, fidgeting hands, nervous eyes, a face that always wears smiles like second skin working to keep how distraught he is hidden and failing – can hear the words that’ve damned him to this hell.
If you don’t l-…
If you don’t feel about me
The same way I feel about you
He’d known. He’d known long before it happened that this moment would come. He’d known that he wouldn’t be able to just drift along with this, a pebble in a stream that just rides the current with no mind of beginnings and endings, when they’d started this thing.
He’d known that there would come a point where he would have to stop and confront himself, and figure out the answers to the questions one impossible southpaw, who could somehow be so afraid and so intrepid all at once, was asking of him.
Because if you don’t
But how can Kazuya answer? How can Kazuya know? How can Miyuki Kazuya, the boy that’d spent so many years of his childhood with half the man that his father used to be, decide if he could trade half of himself away too?
Then I can’t do this anymore.
***
Then leave
***
Fine
***
Silence.
***
“Hes at my place”
“and hes staying the night”
Kazuya’s already scrambling for his jacket, stumbling round in the darkness and too frenzied to remember to turn the lights back on, when another ding signals a new message.
“give him space”
One hand holding a sneaker, the other holding his phone, Kazuya regards the text with genuine bafflement, like his brain is incapable of processing that concept, for a couple of seconds – stuck. Stunned.
Tired and scared and relieved and contrite and wanting.
Needing.
The sharpness of his laughter strikes against his eardrums a second later, discordant, and it makes him flinch but he can’t get himself to stop. It’s a horrible sound, bent and distorted, but he belts it all out until there are stitches in his sides and his lungs are heaving with the effort of drawing in enough oxygen.
When he’s done, he’s shaking, and there’s dampness streaked down his face that he makes a savage swipe at with his sleeve, and a renegade drop seeps into the corner of his mouth and its bitter and salty and befitting.
He bangs the door on his way out, uncaring that he might be troubling the neighbours, so loud that his ears ring.
***
“I told you he needs space.”
“…I know.”
“…you look like shit.”
“I know.”
Kuramochi Youichi regards him with slightly bloodshot eyes, puffy bags making his glare look marginally more deadly than usual. He pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, body language tense and reverberating with a tightly coiled tension – Kazuya suspects that it’s the barely leashed temptation to bodily remove him from his flat, a couple of train-stops over from where Kazuya lives.
“Give me one good reason,” Seido’s ex-shortstop and current formidable college-baseball star nicknamed “Cheetah” grits between clenched teeth, “not to kick you out of my place right now.”
Kazuya inhales. Exhales. Repeats.
It’s so ragged it doesn’t make a difference.
What he finally says are words that are so honest, he’s taken aback that they’re coming out of his mouth.
“I’ve got nothing.”
Silence. Cursed, horrible, daunting silence. Silence that he’d thought he was accustomed to, partial to, even.
But when it becomes a reminder of what is missing…when it’s like the jumbled static of a radio, messy scribbles by a toddler across a clear sheet of paper…when it stands in the room with you like a stranger, alien and incomprehensible, it becomes terrifying. It becomes something you have to acknowledge, something you have to see, something that follows you around, a part of yourself lost in the vast nothingness of the sky, and Kazuya can’t run any longer.
Kuramochi studies him for a long, long time, and Kazuya is too shattered to try and put up a front, to try and keep how distraught he is, how scared and damaged and unstable, from leaking out of the cracks and showing under the artificial glare of the light-fixture right above their heads, in the tiny hall cluttered with shoes leading into Kuramochi’s functional flat.
“He’s in the shower,” is what Kuramochi says, and the inflection in his voice makes his reluctance obvious, if the scowl against his face left Kazuya in any doubt, even as he turns round and begins to walk.
And Kazuya takes the silent permission, not caring about the hostile aura Kuramochi’s emanating in droves, not caring about the fact that he’s probably been reduced to being pitied, because when a man is desperate, they’ll pick at crumbs, and Kazuya has never been more desperate in his life.
***
He’s sitting in a straight-backed chair in Kuramochi’s living-room-come-kitchen, too keyed up to relax, a kink forming in his shoulders, when Sawamura shuffles out of the bathroom.
Kuramochi’d given him one last, long, scathing look of pure menace before announcing gruffly that he’s had enough disturbance for the night and doesn’t plan on wasting his weekend because of him, and slammed his bedroom shut without a backward glance – but not without leaving him with one last warning:
“If you make him cry again, I will personally make sure you never get anywhere near him.”
Kazuya believes him.
But now’s not the time to think about retribution Kuramochi’d clearly been busy devising in his head as he’d dragged unwilling feet to a different room to give them some privacy, because here he is, finally, after nearly six hours, and he’s got a towel round his neck, damp hair sticking to his nape and forehead, borrowed T-shirt a little too big on him, hanging loose and low, wide eyes tired and surprised and dim and –
“What are you doing here?”
He says it like he’s not really bothered about the answer – says it so wearily that the aftershocks make Kazuya’s already unbalanced nerves falter.
Sawamura doesn’t look at him – his face is slanted to the side just a little, his stare on something near Kazuya’s shoulder, and oh, those huge lifeless eyes and that dip of strong shoulders borne down, defeated, and yes, I did this to him, it was me, and Kazuya feels the hot sting of what he knows are tears prick the corners of his eyes because his body just can’t contain it anymore.
“I…” he croaks, hoarse. Clears his throat, swallows, winces at the pain, tries again. “I…”
He mouths, helpless, because he has nothing. Nothing to give, nothing to offer, nothing to hold this boy to him, to keep him in the space he’s cleared for himself in Kazuya’s life when he’d not been looking, the space he’d vacated, but not before marking every nook and cranny with himself – not before entangling himself so close and so tight that the knots can’t be untied anymore.
And those distant eyes aren’t looking at him, not the defiant upturn of chin he gets when he picks on him, teasing and harmless, but something different, something faraway and cold and silent, and Kazuya is here with him again, just a metre away, so close that he can see the steam of the shower rising off his skin, but he’s never felt farther away.
And it scares the shit out of him, frightens him like he’s a little animal about to get consumed, ripped apart, and he just moves, deprived of thought, deprived of anything except pure impulse and animal instinct and he does the only thing he can to remove that space between them altogether and when their mouths meet it’s rough and clumsy and hurts a little, teeth bumping and cutting into flesh, but Kazuya refuses to break that contact, winds frantic-fumbling hands into damp tendrils of hair and holds and pulls and tastes, like he’s trying to inhale him, like he’s trying to fuse them together –
Because all Kazuya’s fears, all his insecurities about giving a part of himself away to someone else, are futile now.
Because he’d given it away anyway, and he doesn’t even know when, but it’s too late now and it doesn’t matter anymore.
When Sawamura wrenches himself away, shoves at him, hard, Kazuya almost whimpers.
“Don’t,” hushed and tremulous, pained, “don’t do this to me, Miyuki. It’s hard enough as it is – “
“It doesn’t have to be – “
“It does. Because if you don’t lo…because I can’t, I can’t give up all of myself if you’re not going to do the same, I can’t do it, I – ”
Kazuya sucks in a breath that hurts, that slits at his windpipe on its way down, spasms with how that makes it feel –
With how it should be frightening, but it’s not.
“Sawamura – “ Kazuya says, slowly, and he can barely hear himself because there’s so much happening – the unsteady rhythm of Sawamura’s breathing, the rush of blood behind his ears – that thumping he can make out, the crescendo of a heartbeat gone haywire, and it’s all so confusing, so deafening, so perfect and Kazuya decides he can’t live without this, doesn’t want to, “I love you.”