Chapter Text
Kurona has only ever been good at two things in his life. One of which is football.
Football makes sense. Every position is perfectly optimised towards a single goal. All roles Kurona can play. All roles Kurona has played. The orbit to Isagi's sun, a wing on Ego's Icarus, the soul of his high school team. Back and forth, up and down. Anything that was needed, everything that was needed. Whatever it took to place victory in his hands.
When Blue Lock ended he felt it in him like a wound. There's a gaping hole in his heart where Blue Lock was. The friends he made, the skills he fostered, the home he found, all gone with one decision from a man he'd never met. In the end, it had lasted just under a year. A year of pure bliss, even when it was crumbling apart. A year where it didn't matter if he was slow, or quiet. Where no one cared about his quirks if he could set up a good play. A year where he didn't retreat to his magic once. A year that sucked everything out of him and made something beautiful, leaving only an empty shell behind.
Most of them followed their sport out of the country, too passionate and too prideful to let the JFU end their careers so early. Kurona didn't, Kurona couldn't. Territorial treaties between covens are delicate things, oft forged with countless caveats that become something of a way of life. In normal circumstances, this is fine. It is not often a witch will leave her homeland for long, when her magic was built around the very soils she was raised on. The magic that birthed a witch will be the one to kill her, after all. One must return to her home to die.
Uprooting one's life and restarting abroad, however, will take more… discussion. Editing treaties forged when their coven was greater than a pod of four, at the very least. Ranze wouldn't force his Grandmother to do it, especially when he's not even sure football is what he wants anymore, not sure if he wants anything anymore.
His father, ever soft hearted and kind, cried when Ranze had told him that. That, more than anything, is something he's come to regret.
So, he's home. Waiting it out until he's allowed to go to school again. This, he assumes, is what everyone who stayed is doing. Not that he'd know, the only ex-teammate he's spoken to in weeks is Yukimiya, who's less quitting and more on non-consensual indefinite medical leave. Yukimiya who has plans for the future beyond graduating high school; Yukimiya who's nothing like Kurona paying five months of boredom as a price for the best year of his life.
Except it wasn't the best year of his life, was it? It can never be, when half of it was watching it fall apart in sobering clarity. If he is being honest with himself, everything went wrong when Hiori got eliminated. It's odd. He likes Hiori, sure, but not like that. Not in a way that his elimination should spell the end of his life, yet it had.
They'd seen it coming. With the way he'd frozen up, lost them the match, it was almost inevitable. Hiori had taken it well, better than Kurona took it. He'd seemed calm, talked them down, even promised to keep in touch. Which he did, for a time. Ranze doesn't blame him for pulling away. Not when he knows intimately how it feels to stare at your phone knowing that you're nothing, that you'll never be anything again, yet are expected to be normal around people who have so much more they can be. Nowadays, the days Kurona can't bring himself to do it are more common than the ones he can.
The other thing Kurona is good with, is the Hive.
The Kuronas deal in time. In everything, really, for there is nothing but Time. She is all, She is everything, each object is a part of her endless writhing coils. Extension through her encompasses all of existence, She predates all and She will exist after all. As much as before and after exist beyond her.
There are many types of magicians. Ones who brew, who break, who call upon Them who live inside Her. The Kuronas simply go to the source. Time magicks, as they call it, is not what one would assume. They do not freeze the passage of time, nor do they speed it up or slow it down. They cannot even dream of such things; there is no stopping something as stationary as Her, after all. You see, everything that ever has and ever will exist are Her many limbs. To change them, one must bargain with Her. So, time magicks is the art of object manipulation, not just on the surface, but down to its very core.
This, is the family speciality.
Ranze is particularly good with the Hive — the part of Her humans can conceive. Good at navigating Her, dealing with Her, fine tuning Her. So good that his grandmother jokes that She's fond of him, as fond as the entirety of existence can be of a single boy. Which is good, he supposes, since Ranze is rather fond of Her. There's something so freeing in being with Her. Beyond matter, beyond pressure, expectations, the passage of time itself. Alone with something far too big to comprehend; alone with the one thing far too old to judge him.
He spent a lot of his childhood with Her, out of continuity and beyond persistence. Any moment alone, any moment he was too tired to pick up a ball, he spent wobbling down the gradient between consciousness and Her grasp. It's where he feels his safest.
He's done that a lot, these last couple months. Float just beyond consciousness, in the place where he can see the trailing works that make everything that Is, and thinking. He can map out their downfall from beginning to end. From Nagi's crash to the lines it drew in the sand between those who had faith in Blue Lock's ideology and those inclined to pragmatism. Lines between the egoists, the pragmatists and Nagi and Reo. From the damage that meant that, no matter what they tried, they could never work like they once could. To the grave of the trust between them, which died more and more with every moment Ego decided to prioritise Nagi's highs over his awful, damaging lows.
It's so easy, in hindsight, to trail his finger down the path of time and point out exactly what went wrong. Where the fights started, where their faith failed, where the powerhouse known as Blue Lock ceased to function. Where things could've changed, if he could relive it.
But he couldn't relive it.
Or, more accurately, he shouldn't try.
Perhaps, if Kurona had reached out to someone, things would not be the way they are. That may have been better. Unfortunately, he didn't. So at 11:48 on December 16th 2019 Kurona Ranze had the worst idea of his life, and by 13:00 it became all he could think about.
It started as a distraction, something to keep his mind occupied and off the emptiness in the pit of his stomach. It was impossible, after all, banned merely as a formality between covens, not something a witch could actually do. Past, present and future coexist at once, if anyone were even able to travel backwards in their chain, they would be forced to relive their life exactly as they had lived it. If they didn't collapse onto themselves. Second chances don't exist beyond speculation, and in speculation they stayed.
In speculation they should have stayed.
Except, Ranze is good at this, better than any Kurona has been in lifetimes, and he has nothing but time.
He rolls a pen along his fingers idly as he thinks. It's a little clunky between his cold fingers, but the rhythmic movement is soothing. That's why he's here, to soothe his heavy heart. It's a choice of exclusion; a change of pace. Somewhere to clear his head far enough from home to escape his father's guilty eyes but close enough that he could sprint home if needed. Somewhere familiar enough he doesn't feel out of place but not so familiar that he gets bogged down in nostalgia. One of various places he can sneak away to clear his head.
That's all he can do these days. He's close, he can feel it on the tip of his tongue whenever he looks at his notes, in the thrum of his magic and that of the earth's. Kurona Ranze could break oh so many rules with only a night's work. It's enticing, as any forbidden fruit is, to have the taste of victory on his tongue for the first time in months. Yet, Kurona knows himself. Knows that if he knew that he could, then he would, and he can't. So he must never know.
So he's out, has been out most days of the last couple of weeks. Anywhere and everywhere far away from reminders that he has access to knowledge that is in anyway magical or that he has ever been within the immediate vicinity of a football. Which is going great—
"Kurona?"
The voice makes him jump, forcing the pen out of his stuttering, stiff fingers and onto the pavement beneath him. It rolls to the feet of the intruder, who picks it up and tosses it into Kurona's lap with an all too familiar laugh.
"You've gotten clumsy." Despite the teasing, the young man settles in Kurona's space like it's home, playfully nudging him when he doesn't immediately reply. Ranze looks up, if only to tell the other to leave him alone with the scraps of courtesy his jittery mind allows, but then his gaze catches big, warm eyes and he can't. Not when those eyes make him feel like only a second has passed since he was a bright-eyed sixteen year old with the opportunity of a lifetime in his hands. "I haven't seen you in a while, how long have you been back?"
"November, November," he answers, a little ashamed to admit how long it's been in the face of his new company: Fukuda Kaito.
They're… friends, if anyone from before considers him that anymore. He had loved him, once, in the delicate kind of way a boy loves his first. Probably still does, somewhere deep in the grief writhing within him, for Fukuda is oh so easy to love. A man full of kindness, patient and all too soft for someone almost thirty centimetres taller than him. Fukuda has always been what Ranze couldn't: a bright, personable academic; soft in all the places Ranze is harsh; sharp in all the places Ranze is dull. Perfect.
"How's settling back in?"
Bad, or not at all. Whichever is worse. "Where are you studying?"
Ranze doesn't like the look his misdirection earns him. A frown somewhere in the weird spot between pity and inquisitive, as if the other wants to peel him apart to inspect his core — to find out where everything went wrong, what this shell of a human being did with Kurona Ranze — but knows better than to try.
Fortunately for both of them, Fukuda doesn't push, "Hokudai. I couldn't bring myself to stray that far from home."
This, of all things, is what shatters the illusion of normalcy because Ranze should've known that. He probably did know that. Staying in Sapporo is the most in character thing the elder could've done, If Kurona was even half the friend he used to be — half the friend he should be — he should've been able to guess that. Let alone that this can not the first time he's been told this. He left in November, and came back in February, April and June. Yet he cannot remember his friend's painfully predictable university choice. Instinct says he should apologise, to prove that he does care, but all he can conjure is a pitiful, "Cool, cool."
"You should come by some time, I can show you around."
"Sneaking people into campus? Scandalous, scandalous."
Fukuda snorts and, with a smile that melts hearts, hums, "Only my favourites."
Kurona turns away.
"Sap, sap."
A warm body shifts closer to his. As he is, Ranze cannot tell whether his friend has leant towards him or relaxed onto the wall behind them, only that "I watched all your matches, you know?" is breathed into the air between them, like it's a secret, "We all did."
He doesn't react. Why would he? At times it feels like half the world watched their fall in perfect clarity.
"You did a great thing out there. You've got many great things to come. You don't have to pretend it doesn't hurt."
He flinches, because that's what he's been doing, pretending. Anything and everything but admitting that he misses Blue Lock, that it hurt to watch it fall apart before it's time. That it had hurt to be part of that corpse and pretend not to see the writing on the wall. That, more than anything else, it hurt to know that people he had grown to love had given so much up just to be humiliated before the final step.
So, just this once, he lets himself admit the obvious, "I'm quitting."
It feels stupid the second he says it. Of course he's quitting, he's here, in Sapporo, where he can't play, not Munich where they offered millions just to have him. Yet he's never said it aloud before. He's never needed to, not answering is as good a denial as any. Somehow, though, this feels final. Not 'Kurona Ranze can't leave Japan', or 'Kurona Ranze doesn't know what he wants anymore' or even 'Kurona Ranze can't look at a football without thinking about everything that went wrong'. Just 'Kurona Ranze is quitting football'. It feels a little like dying.
It's a little freeing.
For a moment, it hangs between them, poisoning the already tense air between them. Then the elder sighs, and when Kurona turns it's Fukuda who's looking away, gaze fixed to the sky and arms above his head, "I'm probably not the first person to tell you this, but you play football like a satellite," he holds one hand still and mimes a circle around it with the other. "A moon is a better example, I guess. You whizz around, always ready, always moving, always changing. You do a lot of things like that," he drops the central hand to the floor and mimes the other flying off aimlessly, "And now you've lost your planet, there's no more tides to change, and you feel homeless, right? You don't have to. You don't have to be someone's orbit. You're…" the hand stills, "You're a great guy. I want you to know that's enough. You can be the star," the hand is lowered for two soft knocks against Kurona's chest, "Let the centre of the universe be you, for once."
In the next two moments — both an eternity long and over far too soon — Kurona's gaze bores into here his friend's hand lies on him, then his brain stutters off. What the fuck? What the fuck??? Fukuda can probably feel Kurona's heart hammering in his chest — thump, thump, thump against his knuckles — as he futilely tries to collect his thoughts. Perhaps that is why, as if suddenly recognising his actions, his friend flinches away.
"Sorry." Awkwardly, he clears his throat and turns his entire body away from Kurona, "I planned to be more gentle about it."
"Planned?"
"I've wanted to catch up from the second I found out what happened."
"Why now, now?"
Fukuda tilts his head backwards, "Your grandmother is a force to be reckoned with, and you haven't exactly been on your phone," he twitches and adds in a quick attempt to reassure Ranze that he holds no grudge over their distance, "This is a conversation to have in person," and, finally, that uncomfortable expression breaks into a crooked smile, "Is your quitting the reason your dad has been skulking around like a kicked puppy?"
Ranze presses his palms into his eyes with a groan.
After that, things feel 'normal' again. A good normal, that doesn't make him miss a long gone past or dwell in the mistakes that changed it. Just normal. They chatter for a little longer, Kaito catching Ranze up on gossip and Ranze offering little tidbits of his life in Tokyo in return. It's nice, comforting in a way that leaves him at peace and when he promises to keep in touch, he doesn't feel like he's lying.
His good mood lasts for most of his walk home. That is until he lets his mind wander to what Fukuda had said to him.
The centre of the universe, huh?
Him, a singularity, bending space time about him? No, that's not him at all. Kurona is made to move, to skitter around endlessly and never run out of uses. Not to sit idle and let the world orbit him and certainly not to bend it to his—
He stops abruptly. A singularity, that could work. With pressure, lots of it, he could force time to collapse in on a single moment. On him. If he chose his moments carefully he could send them back. Not reversing time, deleting it.
It would work.
It could kill him.
He could tear a hole through time and he might die with it.
He will die with it so that the team will succeed. To fulfil his ego. Not just the way he approaches football, but the way he approaches life. Become that thing that ensured victory, that machine that creates goals. If that's disgusting so be it. Kurona Ranze will die disgusting to ensure Blue Lock lives, die useful.
Except there's a chance it wouldn't be useful, isn't there? Sure, he could focus the impact on himself and a few other objects but all he was doing was setting the stage and hoping She would work in his favour. There was no guarantee the All That Ever Was And Ever Will would do what he wanted, nor that She wouldn't retaliate. It would do something, turn time on it's head and force it to change, but he could never be certain on the odds that it would work in his favour. It's a gamble, one he shouldn't be willing to make.
…He needs out. Somewhere away from his family, their traditions, their magic, maybe even somewhere where his spell casting is limited. Just for a while, until he can get his head on straight. But where? It would need to be somewhere he could afford to stay indefinitely. A friend, since he has no family he can trust not to send him straight back home. Someone who cares about him enough to take him in if he asked, but preferably someone who he can lie to if needed.
Fukuda isn't far enough, Isagi is in no head space to take anyone in, Shidou and Reo have left Japan, Raichi lives on the other side of Japan, he has no idea how to contact Gagamaru, he stopped speaking to Igaguri long before Blue Lock ended, Hiori is a no-go, and Yukimiya can smell a lie on him before he can even think it. Isagi's friends aren't really his friends, nor are Shidou's. Hiori's friends are Yukimiya's friends. So… Karasu or Otoya.
Given that, the choice is obvious.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟
"Otoya?" he picks up on the first ring. Of course he does. Why wouldn't he? He doesn't have much going on, none of them do.
"Yeah, bro? You good?"
.
..
…
"I need a favour, favour."