kintsukuroi - Chapter 3 - laylayli (2024)

Chapter Text

As Kaiser’s fever breaks and a mortifying sobriety sets in, Kaiser realises this is the closest he’s come to observing a real life family.

“If your not playing soccer, you’re talking about soccer, if you’re not talking about soccer you’re watching soccer -” Isagi’s mother is complaining, but it’s a playful sort of complaint as she passes over little plates of cut-up fruit with picks in them for Kaiser and Isagi to share. Kaiser is frankly a little overwhelmed by how much fruit he’s been handed since he got here. “Your head is going to turn into a soccer ball soon.”

“Oh come on, Mum -” Isagi whines, bringing the fruit back towards the living room seating and picking up the remote to lower the volume of the match he’d just put on. “I’m not that bad, I -”

“Tell me the last non-football related thing you said to someone today,” his mother challenges him, and Isagi is stunned momentarily into silence before he harrumphs, and they start to bicker again.

It’s harmless, and to Kaiser, alien.

Alien in the way looking at an ant farm can be, in the way examining a petri dish of a new strain of bacteria can be. In the way it used to feel in a time he doesn’t often think about, sitting on the ground pretending he isn’t there, watching movie after movie, show after show, templating what a ‘family’ is supposed to look like in his mind. With a face that looks unnervingly like his, in its unattainable, make-believe world.

He watches the Isagis with what he figures to be an almost scientific curiosity.

And in a place disconnected from his spot on this couch in this house, Kaiser thinks, not for the first time, that these are humans.

They’re people. Just people.

Ordinary, everyday people. The traditional, textbook family unit. A mother and a father and a child. In a little house. Where they eat their meals at the same table and talk about their day. Where the roles they play and act out every day don’t change, regardless of the script or the stage.

Kaiser does not belong here.

Kaiser does not belong here, and yet -

“Here you go, dear,” Isagi’s mother hands him a mug of citrusy tea. Kaiser’d realised he kind of liked this warm, fruity drink, the relief it brought to his throat and the pinched headache that forever lived in the bridge of his nose of late. He’d realised much later that Iyo has realised this too, and has taken to stocking it for him.

She lays a hand on top of his head, says lightly, “Ah, it’s really grown long,” as she pinches the ends of his hair, and does not realise that Kaiser has gone deathly still under her palm - leaves the room absent-mindedly, as the washing machine trills a cheery little song to signal that the laundry is done.

Isagi hops down the stairs a while later, a large laundry basket in hand. He’d chased Kaiser downstairs earlier so he could swap the sheets out, and when Kaiser had made a biting comment about him considering switching to housekeeping instead of professional football, he’d tapped the lint roller he had been using on his duvet on Kaiser’s forehead, rubbing it down to his chin before Kaiser could react.

“I’m removing your bad personality,” he’d told him, and then shut the door in his face after yelling to let his mother know that Kaiser was coming downstairs.

The TV hums away in front of him as Kaiser zones out, the distant voices of Isagi and Iyo bickering again because Why do you always bring down your laundry after I’ve run the machine, Yocchan , and feels his outlines much more clearly than he does anywhere else.

Inserted like some invasive species into this ecosystem of a stable, loving, warm home, where the mother and the father and the child live together in harmony. There are photographs around that TV, of this family at Isagi’s middle school graduation, his first day of highschool. As strange and alien as the moving pictures in the box Kaiser used to watch, trying to minimise his presence enough that the hulking, raging beast in front of the TV would not tip into something more violent.

There are other pictures too. Photos from right after the Blue Lock graduation. Photos from the U-20 World Cup. Pictures from places Kaiser has been, where his had been one of the leading roles, where he had influenced the tide of the show. And yet, there’s no space for him in these pictures. His relevance barely scratches the edges of their frames, in these little snapshots preserving those memories for these people.

So what is he doing here?

What is he doing, here?

But also,

Where is he supposed to be?

Where does he want to be?

He doesn’t know who he sees in the mirror these days.

“You should really call home, Kaiser,” Isagi walks in a moment later, muffling a yawn into his sweater sleeve . Yoichi Isagi is an early riser, even when he doesn’t get much sleep. “It doesn’t feel right that no one in Germany even knows where you are right now.”

“I’m going back to the hotel anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

Immediately, Isagi frowns. “Why? You’re not better yet.”

“I can look after myself.” Kaiser feels a deep and infuriating pang of shame as he says it, can hear how unconvincing it is. Iyo has been fussing over his diet, as Kaiser only understood as he got well enough to actually come down the stairs without listing sideways - has built him his own custom menu as she transitioned him slowly out of easy-to-swallow, nutrition-focused soups and porridges to balanced meals with protein and veggies.

And fruit. An endless supply of fruit, cut up into bite size, like she can get him back to full health with vitamin C alone.

“Yes, I can see that,” Isagi deadpans. He drops himself into the couch and picks up a slice of apple from the dishes on the table. “You’re so f*cking stubborn, it’s not going to kill you to let people take care of you. It doesn’t take away your tough guy football cred, I promise.”

“Do not make fun of me.” It’s a threat, but it doesn’t sound like one. It lacks its venom.

“I am not, you idiot,” Isagi bites into his apple with a disapproving crunch, “I literally blacked out in front of you overdoing metavision before, it’s not even the first time either of us have seen the other borderline unconscious. I don’t see you as lesser for that.”

So, so direct. Always saying what he means, giving it away without any conditions, any haggling or bartering. Kaiser hates it. Hates this about him. Hates that there are no layers to peel off that he can grab on to for purchase, has to fight him to yank off, so different from his machinations in matches. Hates how much it disarms him, this open acceptance the more his own layers shed against his will.

Because the thing is, Kaiser knows.

Kaiser knows that Isagi knows.

And if Isagi doesn’t know, he must be able to guess.

The thin, white scars, fading into the pallor of his skin, are only visible up close. And Kaiser has not let very many people - not since he learned to protect this space of his like it is sacred - close. Not enough to see. Maybe not since he’d gotten his tattoos, to strike bright and vivid and lure the eye away, like a trick of the light on stage, always at a distance.

But Isagi, who’d been the one using his strength to shift Kaiser’s deadweight around so he could be upright enough to eat, who steadied himself for the both of them as they staggered their way to the bathroom so Kaiser could use it, who’d sponged off the clammy sweat that he’d woken up sticky with as his fever tore through him, must have seen them.

Where all his cracks are.

And nothing changes.

Nothing in the way Isagi looks at him, nothing in the way he treats him.

Around him, Kaiser has started to feel paper thin.

Like Isagi can just turn his head and see right through that polished lacquer of his practised charm and confidence, the cracked pieces of it by their feet. Right through to the rudimentary, poorly cobbled together approximation of a person he is, a bad imitation of what he thinks humans are. And maybe even deeper, into the unsightly, scathing thing closer to his true nature, forced dormant inside him right now, no matter how much he tries to scratch it awake.

Isagi knows.

And yet, he sits here, next to Kaiser instead of on the other side of the field, peeling an orange and handing him every other slice.

You get what you get because of what you are in front of me, right now.

So what is that?

What is it that Isagi sees when he looks at him, that he thinks he has a place in this surreal tableau they sit within, one he couldn’t have conjured up even in a fever dream two weeks ago?

“Call home,” Isagi tells him after a while again.

Yoichi Isagi nags when you don’t listen to him the first time.

Kaiser feels around one of his cracks, these brittle, broken things, with a fingertip. Feels himself push in, with a morbid curiosity.

“Alexis won’t pick up when I call.”

And Isagi… just looks at him blankly. “Huh?” He frowns, like Kaiser has told him something very strange. “ Ness? Not picking up when you call?!”

There’s something validating about Isagi’s blatant inability to wrap his mind around this. Kaiser had not been able to wrap his mind around it, either. But lately - somewhere between his first week here and the second, between the unanswered messages and phone calls, and with Isagi’s growing insistence that he call home, Kaiser has been forced to confront what home even is.

The penthouse he’s left empty, or

The hovel he grew up in, falling into disrepair the last time he’d driven by, or

The one person bound to him by blood he’d known, clinging to his contempt, whose final act of hatred had been breathing his last without calling his name even once, or

A ball he’s kicked so hard and with so much fury, it splits beyond repair.

“Is he okay?” Isagi asks with genuine concern, and Kaiser doesn’t know what to tell him. “Should I call him?”

“Don’t f*cking do that,” Kaiser hisses out. “If he doesn’t want to pick up, he doesn’t want to pick up.”

Isagi is looking at Kaiser like he’s grown a second head. Somehow this is more of a reaction than when Kaiser’d literally laid in his bed hacking and coughing and telling him that he’s got a criminal record with a history of violent outbursts.

Yoichi Isagi is strange.

“What do… you can’t just… do you know how shocked I was when Ness called saying you’re travelling by yourself? I was as shocked by him calling me as I was by the fact that he was letting you travel by yourself.”

“I don’t need Alexis’ permission -”

“That’s not the point!” Isagi has his phone out, and the little dangling football charm jingles with his restless motions, “He was worried enough to call me to go pick you up!”

“I don’t know if that’s called worry if he proceeded to ghost me afterwards.” Kaiser doesn’t add the part where Ness hadn’t even bothered to tell him that he had called Isagi in the first place.

“Did you get into a fight or something before you left?” Isagi frets.

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Kaiser thinks about an iPad lying on the floor with a cracked screen and the matching crack twisting through a familiar face, the only face that had stayed constant in the shuffling sea of them around him in recent years. Thinks about a ball bursting open and spilling its guts one last time, a roll of tape thinned to nothing lying futilely next to it.

“Kaiser,” Isagi has a deeply disapproving look on his face. “ Call him. ”

“I did, remember?”

“f*ck it, I’ll call him,” Isagi taps to unlock his phone screen and a panic seizes Kaiser as his hand shoots out and cuffs Isagi’s wrist.

Isagi looks at him in surprise, the phone charm chiming out at the sudden motion.

“Drop it, Yoichi.” Kaiser warns. It doesn’t sound like a warning. Sounds like shallow ice, instead, a breath away from breaking.

Isagi doesn’t let it go. Kaiser can tell he won’t from the frown marring his face, but he takes the reprieve when he huffs and drops his phone, and the issue. For now.

For long enough that Kaiser has the time to recognise why this feels so familiar. The lurch of the ground beneath his feet and the feel of everything he’d built for himself tearing through his hands.

The first time Ness had faltered had been that match, hadn’t it. The first time the spell had broken and Ness had looked at him for a split second like he’d woken up, after a long sleep.

Like he had also seen through him.

Had Kaiser simply not realised, or had he chosen not to?

Ness had stayed by his side. Ness had slipped back into his ways. Nothing had changed. Except that’s not true, is it?

His first test subject,

And his first failed experiment.

The closest thing he’s had to a friend in the closest place he’s had to home.

Kaiser is on edge.

Sometimes, it’s like he’s traded in the claustrophobia of the aseptic emptiness of his hotel room or of his apartment in Munich, for a different kind of claustrophobia.

One where, as though in a twisted reversal of the goal he’d given himself to get as close to Isagi as he could to see his faults, he finds himself surrounded in nothing but Isagi instead.

His scent, his voice, his belongings, his mannerisms. His colours and his tastes, his bad habits and his good ones.

If god is real, he has a sick sense of humour he reserves specifically for Kaiser.

Kaiser has not tolerated sharing his space with anyone from the second he was able to afford that luxury for himself.

Kaiser, who notices too late that he’s been sleeping for the better part of his second week in Japan in someone else’s bed, the scent of their shampoo still clinging to the pillows, someone else’s sheets on his skin, and their face the first thing he sees in the morning, laughing at his bed hair.

Isagi has a way of making everything worse without realising he’s doing it.

“You should extend your stay by a couple more days,” he casually brings up, sitting on his futon with his back resting against the side of his bed. He prattles about how long and miserable the 12-plus-hour flight to Munich would be, especially when he’s already sick, how the recycled air and the freezing cold temps and the cramped limbs won’t do him any good, while Kaiser sits on the bed and stares at the corner of one of his Noa posters and thinks this is some kind of especially engineered hell just for him.

He still hasn’t gone back to the hotel.

The days are running out.

“I’m not made of f*cking glass, I’ll survive a plane ride.”

“You are so difficult. Why are you allergic to sense?”

“I don’t want to hear that from someone who tried to tanghulu chicken skewers.”

“ It was delicious!”

It was. Kaiser had genuinely thought Isagi had lost his mind when he went downstairs for water, only to find Isagi making a molten sugar concoction that he then poured over the leftover chicken skewers that Iyo keeps making and sneaking onto Kaiser’s plate when she thinks he isn’t looking.

Isagi’d flinched guiltily hearing footsteps behind him, but his eyes had cleared when he’d noticed Kaiser, and then he had waved him over excitedly to try and tempt him with the abomination he’d been experimenting with like some kind of mad scientist.

It’d been especially annoying, because it had tasted good. The crunch of the sugar made the skewers crispier, and it contrasted with the savoury spiciness of the meat - or so Isagi had been saying, munching happily. Kaiser is a more eat-to-live than live-to-eat person, and has never put this much thought into food textures when food is something that doesn’t exactly last, when he’d not exactly had the luxury of choice and indulgence with it growing up.

But Isagi eats like every meal is something to savour, and Kaiser doesn’t realise when that’s something that adds itself into his database without him realising, even though he doesn’t understand it.

“Hey, do you want to go to the park?” Isagi asks after a while, still tapping away at his phone. “It’s a weekday so it’ll be mostly empty, and I figure you could do with the air.”

Getting outside sounds good.

Good enough that Kaiser doesn’t let himself wonder for too long whether Isagi had cottoned on to his growing restlessness. He’s wasted so much time. Days of practice, lost. Isagi had been to the Blue Lock facilities for a quick training session and come back crackling with energy, talking about how some of the players had quadrupled their stats since the friendlys, laughing that It’s safe to say they were pretty motivated.

Kaiser needs to move. An irrational, paranoid part of him worries that his skills will just atrophy if he doesn’t start running again, soon, soon -

As though football isn’t something wired into his genetic code. Something that he understands on a level more fundamental and intuitive than he even understands himself.

So he thinks about it in relative terms. The physics of it. The law of inertia. A body which, if moving, continues moving in a straight line unless an external force is applied. A body which, if at rest, stays at rest, unless an external force is applied.

Even as they’re driving to the park, where Isagi says he spent a lot of his childhood kicking a ball around, Kaiser gnaws himself up on the inside. Feels around the way he’s come to realise Isagi feels around, for where his boundaries are. Not shoving, not all at once, but tracing the shape and the feel of them, until he knows where they were, and then before Kaiser realises, the boundaries shift as he asks without asking -

As Kaiser lets them.

And he waits, for the fury and the bitterness to boil up and burn through his skin like the

fever he’s been sick with long before the one working its way out of him now.

But it doesn’t.

His fingers twitch uselessly in his lap, and the skin at his throat feels thin and vulnerable, and Kaiser can’t burn anything up any higher and it’s terrifying. Paralysing, in a way he hasn’t felt paralysed in a long, long time.

“Ah, don’t you need to buy souvenirs to take back?” Isagi asks, slowing at a traffic light and dancing his fingers in a quick little fan dance against the steering wheel. He says it like Kaiser is on a tourist trip, and not actively unspooling into something shapeless and beyond recognition beside him. “You can get those gift packs of local snacks for your team!”

“Is food all you think about?” Kaiser snarks - it’s a toss-up between this and asking Isagi to really think for a second if he looks like the type to carry knick knacks for his teammates.

“Food and football,” Isagi tells him seriously, “It’s the meaning of life.”

Kaiser gets a sense for how literally he means this when he pulls up to the park, and after checking that there’s no one around to potentially recognise them, pulls out a football from the back.

“You… do you just carry a football with you at all times?”

“Yes? Don’t you?”

They’re not dressed for football - Isagi is literally wearing flipflops - but that doesn’t stop him from bouncing the ball up and down on his knee with tiny and controlled, precise movements.

“Why are you doing that with your toes out, you heathen?”

Isagi laughs. “They had us actually barefoot at the beginning of the Blue Lock project, you know?”

Kaiser baulks. The more he hears about the project, the more he thinks that Blue Lock could have just doubled as a dubious social experiment with questionable legality - Isagi is living proof, with his abnormal capacity to absorb the most outlandish things he throws at him as though he’s just telling him about the weather. It’s still utterly jarring.

“No wonder you’re all f*cking insane, they raised you in the goddamn zoo.”

“More like a circus,” Isagi answers readily, with a grin. He lets the ball drop into the grass and steadies it with the toe of his flip flop before making a clean pass towards him. Kaiser’s leg moves without any directive from him, stilling it beneath his more sensible, yet not football appropriate, shoes. “With the best clowns in the business.”

With the ball at his feet, the constant vertigo he’d been swaying under steadies.

And his shoes aren’t fit for football but - they hadn’t been when he got his first ever ball either.

Isagi wanders off, saying something about a croquette cart he knows drives around here, and Kaiser calls out something about not being sure how to feel, having deep-fried food derail Isagi’s soccer career before he does. In retaliation, Isagi just sticks his tongue out at Kaiser.

And then it’s Kaiser, and the ball.

It takes him a while to notice when Isagi comes back.

He just catches sight of him sitting with his legs folded on the grass, with paper bags of food in his lap, watching him kick the ball around while tucking into a croquette. When Isagi senses him looking, he holds up the bag. “I got you some too, come try.”

It’s a fine, clear day. Not too hot, with a light breeze that ruffles Isagi’s hair as Kaiser gets closer. The smell of dewy grass and wet earth is fresh against his nose as he nudges the football into a standstill next to Isagi.

“One bite is not going to kill you,” Isagi cajoles. It’s the same insistence with which Iyo has been making him finish his meals, except more graceless, because Isagi shoves a croquette under his nose and Kaiser has to make the split second choice between flinching away and taking a bite. “Good, right?”

It is. The potato is seasoned and warm, and the filling is the same sort of curried meat he’s tried at the Isagis’ home already.

“Got a drink too - this is for you, since you don’t like milk,” Isagi hands him a plastic cup of what looks like fresh mixed fruit juice. And then he pulls out a carton for himself, stabbing through the little foil opening with his straw in a practised move.

He seems unaware of the fact that Kaiser is staring a hole into the side of his head, as though if he kept it up, he could look through and find how Isagi even learned that about him. When.

They sit quietly for a while, munching on some of the treats Isagi had brought over. It’s still in a way Kaiser is not used to. The sky is a clear, light blue overhead, the grass taking gentle tumbles as a breeze sweeps through. A liminal space that could exist absolutely anywhere - including in Kaiser’s head, tinged in memory, when the wire meshing enclosing the smallish space reserved for football would loom over his head. He can see over it clearly, now, but.

It’s grounding and familiar in a way a foreign park in a foreign country shouldn’t be.

“Wanna see who can shoot more goals with our hands behind our backs?” Isagi asks as though this is the most normal question anyone could have asked in these circ*mstances.

Kaiser, with the buzz inside his body that begs him to move , agrees.

It’s afterwards, when the sun had started to reach its zenith and Isagi began peering critically at Kaiser’s face like he would wilt unless he hurries them both back into the air conditioning of his car, that Kaiser allows himself to examine this… tightness in his chest that he carries back.

When was the last time he’d just kicked a football around for the sake of it?

Just for… for fun?

Just for himself?

Isagi’s in a good mood, humming to himself something with a melody that sounds automatically old-timey. They’d started off actually trying to keep their hands behind their backs as they stood halfway down the pitch from the goalpost, but it had all gone sideways very quickly when Isagi had jumped in front of Kaiser’s flawless shot to intercept the ball.

After that, the stakes had bumped up from not just shooting with their hands behind their back, but getting in a goal with the other person doing everything possible to get in the way.

And by the end, when Isagi’s phone ringing had snapped him out of trying to yank Kaiser off balance by the back of his shirt with one of Kaiser’s hands shoving at the crown of his head, neither of them could remember how many goals either of them had scored.

“Mum’s going to be so mad when she realises you were running around,” Isagi comments off-hand and Kaiser pretends he does not jerk a little in his seat. “Though she’s going to be madder at me for letting you.”

Kaiser can’t imagine Iyo being mad at Isagi. Kaiser can’t imagine Iyo being mad at all. It takes him a fraction of a second to consider that maybe Isagi, who’d said it so flippantly, did not mean it to be so literal.

“For f*ck’s sake, I’m not some helpless child you have to watch over,” he grumbles, if only to cover for his awkwardness.

“Uh huh,” Isagi intones dryly, while handing him a water bottle he’d kept in the cup holder between their seats. And then, quiet against the hum of the engine waking up, “I think that was the first time I’ve seen you having fun playing football.”

Quiet.

Yet loud.

The car is suddenly too small, and Kaiser’s mind flees back to the park.

An empty, grassy expanse, where he has to contend with no one except himself, where he does not need to think. Where all he needs is a football.

As though Isagi thinks he shouldn’t have said that, he holds his tongue for the rest of the way back to the house.

Iyo does get mad.

Mad being her nagging at Isagi for being out of his mind taking Kaiser out in the sun when he’s still unwell, pushing cool glasses of water into both their hands.

Mad being squinting into Kaiser’s face in a way that’s uncannily similar to how Isagi had, back at the park, before tutting and sending him off to wash up and cool down upstairs.

Mad being the chilled fruit he finds sitting on Isagi’s desk after he comes out of the shower.

The hours don’t stay still, even if he does.

As though in retribution for not listening to him, Isagi takes a detour when he’s supposed to be driving him back to his hotel.

“For souvenirs!” he cheers, jumping out of the car as Kaiser stares at him in abject disbelief.

Isagi scans the gift packs of food - mumbles about flavour profiles that won’t be too unfamiliar to put people off but familiar enough to still be interesting, while Kaiser runs out of patience beside him.

“I should get some for Spain too,” Isagi thinks aloud, considering as he looks at the shopping basket he’s stacked near overflowing, and doesn’t notice Kaiser stiffening behind him.

The hours don’t stay still.

“I’m not dragging all of that back,” Kaiser refuses point-blank. “Why the f*ck do you think I’m interested in taking treats back -”

“I don’t know, maybe to be a decent person for once?” Isagi dodges his attempt to grab at the basket and hops out of his reach. “They’re your teammates, god forbid they get along with you.”

“Just because you and your Blue Lock freaks are all over each other does not mean the rest of us have to be.”

Isagi groans. “You are so annoying. Those Blue Lock freaks are my best friends and my biggest rivals. In fact, I think it’s because they’re my biggest rivals that they’re my best friends.”

“What the f*ck does that even mean?” it’s a scoff, meant to be derisive. Because isn’t that fundamentally a broken idea? A contradiction? “Everyone on the football field is either an enemy to crush or a tool you can use.”

He waits for Isagi to refute him.

Isagi… doesn’t.

“I hate how nasty you make it sound,” is what he does say, eventually. He’s grimacing a thoughtful grimace. “But I don’t exactly disagree. I mean, that’s what it means to be an egoist, right? You’re in a team of eleven but as a striker, you’re fighting for yourself first.”

Isagi picks up a family pack of waffle cookies and gives it a shake. “But isn’t it the most exciting when you know exactly how good everyone else on that field is? Both your rivals, and your teammates. The entire field becomes an opportunity - everyone out there is an option to make a play off of, because everyone has their own approach and their own thought process and sometimes when those two forces meet because the best players are on the field together it can make for plays you can never pull off by yourself. It’s fun. ”

Wild, feral grins.

Electricity, zipping through the field.

A work of ongoing inspiration and continuous reinvention.

Isagi stands shorter than him, but Kaiser, in this quaint little Japanese specialty store, carted around by Isagi and his whims, suddenly feels sickeningly insignificant next to him. Like he’s being left behind, even with the two of them standing right in front of each other.

He hates it.

He hates it.

He hates him .

He’s unbreakable because he isn’t afraid to break.

Kaiser snags the basket out of Isagi’s hand and drops it with a plastic smack to the ground. An angry scowl burns immediately on Isagi’s face at this, even as Kaiser bites out, “I don’t play football for something as frivolous as fun. And I definitely do not play to get along with others.”

“Why do you play, then?” Isagi asks, bluntly. His eyes, inky blue, burn with challenge.

Kaiser lets himself lean into the air around Isagi - feels a jump in his chest, because finally, after all this time, he thinks he can feel that crackle of hostility that’s gone both ways between them for as long as he’s known Isagi. Something that feels like reciprocity. Something that goes both ways.

“To crush people, Yoichi. I play soccer to crush people. Crush others, and win. I don’t know if you have noticed, but you can’t become number #1 if you’re playing nice with the people you’re competing with.”

Isagi looks at him. It’s a steady look, searching in the way Kaiser absolutely despises.

“Fine then,” Isagi says, eventually. He leans over and grabs the discarded basket of goodies, and starts to step towards the checkout area. “You keep your ego, and I keep mine. We’ll see which of us comes out on top in the end.”

That weekend, Kaiser leaves for Munich.

And a month after that, Isagi leaves for Madrid.

Kaiser would have thought, with how tight the silence between them was as Isagi drove Kaiser back to his hotel that evening, that that would be the last they see each other before he goes back. It’s the most… normal they have been, since he arrived. The normal he’s been trying to find for months, an animosity that feels reciprocal enough that he can finally feel balanced again.

But as Kaiser makes his way up to the hotel room he’s hardly used, he does not feel normal. Does not feel settled.

Not that night, as he curls himself up to sleep on a large, immaculately made bed that’s been paid for exorbitantly and hardly used, nor the morning after when he gets a phonecall, Isagi saying his parents are inviting him for lunch before he has to leave. He volunteers to drop him off at the airport, too. Isagi’s tone is light and unreadable on the phone, like after days and days of trying to get under his skin and leave himself there, the one time he managed to get a reaction out of him he shakes off, overnight.

Kaiser looks at himself in the mirror. Tries to search for who he is in there.

He’s already downstairs in the lobby, having checked out, when he realises he hasn’t worn his eyeliner. That he’d just somehow fallen out of the habit somewhere in his last few days here. A part of him winds up tense, to throw open his suitcase and go find the men’s washroom, suddenly naked without his forgotten mask. Even with the familiar sight of Isagi’s car pulling up to the doorman briskly trotting down the steps to get the passenger side open for him.

The rest of him is too f*cking tired of trying to mould himself to some version of himself that’s starting to feel like a caricature. Like a suit he no longer fits.

Stepping back into the entryway at the Isagi house feels like sliding into those house slippers at the entrance left out for him. Sitting at that table, letting Iyo pile more of the feast she’s clearly expended as much effort as that first dinner on to his plate. He can’t find the awkwardness of the first night here, not because he’s any better at handling their easy, open hospitality, but he’s seen it up close enough to have adapted to how bad he is at dealing with it.

When he doesn’t know how the f*ck to read their mundane acts of kindness and scowls in delayed reaction. When he can’t string sentences together in the face of their genuine curiosity. When he takes too long to read a cue and realises it too late, and feels himself brace as though waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Even right up until the moment Iyo and Issei clear the dishes while Isagi proudly introduces him to something called kintsuba, calling it his most favourite food in the world, that shoe doesn’t drop.

To Kaiser’s genuine shock and horror, Iyo gets a little misty-eyed as they crowd in the entryway to see him off. “Ah, I wish you’d stayed a little longer, Michael.” The sound of his name warps in the in-ear bud. “Take care of yourself, eat your fruits! Don’t jump into practice right when you get back, okay?”

It doesn’t feel like it’s been only two weeks, Kaiser thinks, as the distance between the Isagi home and the airport closes up, the scenery rushing past in the car windows like the time has. And Kaiser had thought that would be comforting. To be in motion, to get his forced break over with and get to Munich and back on the pitch, back to the routine he needs to finetune as he looks ahead at the European leagues, at the matches that he will be playing and winning, no matter what.

Because Kaiser… he’s always been clumsy, with the idea of staying still. He’d spent his childhood fantasising about the day he would leave the dump he grew up in, and he’d spent his teens furiously working to outgrow the quarters he shared with those subpar excuses of trainee players, and then to climb higher and faster, to break into the limelight so hard that they would covet him, enough that he could leave Noa’s shadow.

The one time he’d stilled, aware of how high he’s climbed and how much he has to lose now if he missed a step, he’d had to reawaken his ego in a blindingly dizzying crash.

At the airport, before Kaiser goes through Departures, Isagi holds out a bag. It’s a duffel bag, but Isagi zips it a little open and inside is another bag, a yellow one and -

Kaiser recognises it as the one Isagi had carried back from the speciality store.

“There’s stuff for you in there too,” Isagi says, and continues holding it out like it’s either a bomb or an olive branch.

He hates him so much.

“If customs tries to take it, I’m leaving this sh*t behind.”

“Sure.”

“And if I hate what’s inside I’m throwing it out.”

“Cool.”

“I f*cking hate you so much.”

Isagi huffs a laugh. “From you, that’s almost starting to sound affectionate,” he teases.

Kaiser thinks about the years of his life he whittled away under the roof of a man now dead, waiting, waiting, waiting for the chance to leave. Thinks about looking down the rungs of the ladder he was climbing and kicking off those underneath him instead of looking up , losing sight of himself and what fueled the rage with which he played football, his vengeful pride.

Kaiser can’t stay still. Kaiser can’t look back.

As the straps of the bag pass hands, and Isagi looks up at him with those round, wide eyes, like he’s seen him in his entirety and can still hold his gaze better than he can hold his own, Kaiser lets the moment linger.

Just a second.

Just a second longer.

And then he’s through the automatic doors, and Isagi is out of his sight.

Kaiser had decided he would scorn God and wear the irony of his name like a crown, snatched out of His hands.

He did not care to entertain much else beyond this, other than this rebellion he’d lead against heaven, if such a thing even existed. But as he straps himself into his seat on the return flight to Munich, Kaiser finds himself thinking instead about limbo.

An in-between place, the torment of suspension. The torment of forced stillness. Nowhere to run to, to expel his thoughts, nothing to do but face them.

Torn between either what he’s leaving behind or what he’s heading back to.

Or what he’s not heading back to.

In the end, maybe god is real, and laughing at him, for his conceit. For the ways he’d tried to force his fate out of the path it’d been set on by his birth, had inked it into his own skin like that would make it absolute, only to have everything he believed in start to fall apart.

The hold he had over the football field.

The hold he had over his team.

The hold he had over the one person he had by his side in the place they called home.

His faith had been in his abilities, but Kaiser finds himself asking, trapped by inertia, whether his abilities are enough .

When he falls into a fitful sleep somewhere along the fourth hour, he dreams about a familiar back on the other side of a grassy field, disappearing into the distance. Inky blue hair ruffling in a light breeze, wisped out of his reach.

Isagi’s transfer to Re Al happens with grating degrees of fanfare.

The news, especially the Japanese outlets, eat it up with a voracious appetite. One of the ways Kaiser’s obsessive fixation on Isagi’s career had manifested had been the frankly disgusting numbers of Google Alerts he’d set up for the striker’s name - even more so, when he figured out that there was news not even cracking the international media because it was in Japanese.

And it’s through these Japanese alerts and a heavy reliance on auto-translations that Kaiser discovers the country’s newfound adoration for the Japanese power duo. Itoshi, in moves wildly uncharacteristic of him that have Kaiser’s temperament fraying trying to understand, has appeared publicly with Isagi many times. The media exalts how sweet it is, forgetting Itoshi’s open on-record disdain for Japanese football, that the more experienced player is taking Isagi under his wing, showing him around Madrid. They’ve been spotted eating together, going for practice together, on morning jogs together.

It’s as though they’ve never seen people on the same team interact before. It’s as though they’ve never seen Isagi interact with his own teammates before. Kaiser still remembers the multiple reposts of the photos Isagi’s nuisance friends had shared online after they’d stopped by Blue Lock for the 5-v-5 matches. Or the grainy, shaky cam footage of Blunt Bob apparently travelling from Barcelona to Madrid just to welcome Isagi to Spain by jumping on him hard enough to drop all his luggage. That one has circled the earth thrice already, resurrected in one edit or another, slapped with the audio going If I run at Terry, he will most certainly catch me in his arms or in dramatic slow-mo set to a ballad.

Apparently there just happens to be a sizable, loud faction of the fandom that thrives simply on football players, especially anyone who’s ever been on BLTV, so much as breathing near each other.

Apparently, just a completely unremarkable photo of two people walking next to each other to the practice grounds of the team they’re both in is enough to get them going because oh my god, they KNOW each other.

Apparently, somehow, Itoshi and Isagi being spotted together is still more of an event for these chronically online losers than Isagi’s entire posse of weirdos clinging to him.

And here’s the thing.

He wants to pretend, he really does, that it’s just the internet overreacting.

He wants to pretend so badly that he does not let himself think too much about why, exactly, it bothers him so much.

But he also knows that’s not all there is to it.

The chemical reaction of Sae Itoshi’s playstyle meeting Isagi’s is nothing less than a spectacle.

As the Re Al versus Barcha match kicks off on the screen, Itoshi and Isagi sync up with something close to grace - a deadly dance that captivates the field within minutes. Even Kaiser, with how closely he can read the milliseconds off of a match, is afraid to blink should he miss how seamless their back-and-forth is, and it’s almost impossible to tell whether it’s Itoshi feeding Isagi the passes he wants or Isagi reading the passes Itoshi wants to make.

It takes watching more of Re Al facing other teams in Spain as Kaiser restlessly counts down to the Europa League that he concludes it’s neither.

They’re compelling each other to respond to each other’s plays. A battle of egos like the give and take of a tango, ceding yet conquering at the same time, in complete tandem.

Perfect synergy, Kaiser thinks, with his teeth clamped together so tight that he might crack the enamel.

On the screen in front of him, Itoshi executes a flawless pass without looking, threading the ball between two midfielders, both twice his size, and the delayed response of the audience is enough to indicate how sharp the movement was when Isagi just materialises to angle the ball straight through into the corner of the goalpost.

“Wow,” he hears Ness breathe next to him, even though Ness knows not to disrupt Kaiser’s concentration when he’s absorbed like this, as the camera zooms sudden and dizzy into Isagi’s triumphant grin as runs up to Itoshi.

It’s saying something, probably, about that play that Ness forgets himself - or maybe it’s saying something about Ness and the fact that maybe he will no longer physically induce an aneurysm before he acknowledges Isagi.

But then again… Ness hasn’t exactly been predictable lately.

It had been Ness, who’d come to pick Kaiser up at the airport.

Kaiser, who had spent the plane ride back in an even worse fugue state than the one he’d left in, had been so shocked to see him there he had not managed to react.

For a moment, they’d both just stood there, staring at each other like they’re aliens.

“Michael,” Ness had said, eyes huge in his head, “You’re not wearing your eyeliner.”

The car ride had been strained.

Kaiser had automatically opened the passenger side door next to the driver’s, and it’d been Ness’ look of shock that signalled to him that this was not a thing he does here, usually. He sat in the back whenever Ness did drive him, content to let him be his personal chauffeur.

He’d slid into the front passenger seat anyway, too f*cking tired to deal with this sh*t.

And after Ness had pulled them up onto the autobahn, he’d finally asked, “...How was your trip?”

Really?

Is he -

For f*ck’s sake -

“Alexis Ness,” Kaiser’d heard himself say, thinking he’d vibrate out of his own skin between the jetlag and the fresh awakening of every emotion he’d felt when he’d realised the set-up Ness had orchestrated behind his back, all at once, “ What the f*ck do you think you’re doing? ”

After two whole weeks of complete radio silence, he hadn’t expected this to be where he finally came face to face with Ness - but maybe Ness had known what he was doing, running head first into him instead of waiting to be found. Kaiser can’t strangle him while they’re both cruising a little below speed limit on the express highway.

Kaiser didn’t even have it in him to snort. He’d sat in the passenger’s seat rigid, as though one twitch could set off all his limbs like a violent springlock failure.

“I…can explain?” Ness had continued, rigid in his own seat and radiating nervous energy.

“Can you?”

Hands gripped tight around the steering wheel like he’d die if he let go, Ness had taken a deep breath,

And then he’d started to speak without pausing for any more.

“You were right, you know. When you said that my ideas are no use to you. You were right.”

It had effectively quieted anything Kaiser could have done in retaliation down, because he hadn’t known what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t that. And Ness had pushed on,

“Because I could see - for a long time, I could see that you were - I didn’t know how to help you. I didn’t know what I could do to…” Ness had given his head a shake. Ground his teeth, jittered a little. “You were off, for weeks. Months. And I didn’t know what I could do to help you. And I meant what I said before, you know? All I want to do is support what you want.”

If Kaiser could, he’d have laughed. His life, he had thought, had turned into a f*cking comedy.

“Are you f*cking pitying me, Alexis?” Kaiser had asked, and it had felt familiar, a boiling impatience and anger, without the drugging haze of a cold compress and a grounding touch keeping him anchored to a pillow this time. At the memory, Kaiser’d clenched his fists - willed it away. His fingers had tightened around the straps of the duffel bag he’d not put in the back along with his suitcase.

Immediately, Ness had squeaked. “No, no, of course not, I - Michael, I -” He’d bitten into his lip hard enough to draw blood. “I care about you. I want for you what you want.”

And Kaiser had been opening his mouth, something scathing poised to come out of it because it’s so easy, disgustingly easy, to just slip back into that habit, to take out the tangle of how messed up he’s wired inside on a punching bag, one that staggers under the blows instead of just absorbing them like they’re nothing, when Ness had confessed, “I just don’t understand what you want and -”

Ness had seemed to feel around his mouth for the words before saying them.

“And I don’t think you know what you want either.”

They’d been on the de-restricted section of the autobahn. Speeding at 130 kilometres per hour. Ness had a glassy look in his eye, but his feet had been careful on the brake and accelerator, his hand on the gear shift. Frozen in some kind of grim, terrified determination, like someone with the detonator of a nuclear bomb and a countdown to d-day.

Kaiser had thought about momentum, and forces that continue moving in straight lines unless something else acts upon them, and had thought with a strange sort of clarity that anything he did now could derail them so badly, there would be no coming back.

“So your solution for this… perceived… assessment … of my psychology,” Kaiser had forced himself to grit. Slowly. Slowly like the moment had been a tripwire and he could have sparked the fuse, and he’d not been sure whether that fuse was himself or Ness, “...was to send me to the person I loathe the most in the world?”

“He could have said no.”

It had been quick - but not panicked. Not defensive. A parry.

“What?”

“He could have refused to come pick you up. And you… you could have said no, too. At the airport, you could have refused. But he texted me, you know. Afterwards, saying that you’d arrived safely, and he had dropped you off at the hotel.” There had been a twist at Ness’ mouth, an ugly parody of a smile. “I said thank you. To him .”

And Kaiser had thought about Isagi, bringing up Ness, over and over again. Asking him, over and over again, to call him. To let Isagi call him.

Ness will be worried.

Kaiser had, at some point, started believing that wasn’t true.

But it seemed that he had a track record lately of being wrong about Ness. He’d never understood Ness less than he did sitting right next to him, listening to him like he hadn’t in years.

“And then a couple of days ago, he texted me again, suddenly, asking how I was doing. Out of nowhere. And he told me… he told me… to - to text him, if I needed anything. And I figured that he must have been - you must have been talking.”

Dumbfounded, Kaiser had sat there, and almost marvelled at Yoichi Isagi’s f*cking audacity.

That tight-rope dance he was so good at, learning the curves of his boundaries and pushing without breaking through. With that stupid, incorrigible kindness of his, extending to absolutely f*cking anyone.

Impossibly, that had managed to piss him off even more.

“Why?” is all he’d been able to ask, in the end.

Ness had countered with a question of his own. “Why… why Japan? Why Japan, of all places?”

It had been a belated question. One Kaiser had expected more than a fortnight ago, in the locker rooms.

One he had even less of an answer for now, than before.

“It’s… always him,” Ness had said finally. With something close to bitterness. Something startling and raw. “It’s always, always him. You…something happened in those last few weeks before you went on break. Something had happened, I could tell, but you wouldn’t…let me help. I couldn’t get through. So when you said you were going to Japan, and that you wanted to go alone, I figured… if there’s anyone that can push you in the way I can’t…it’s gotta be him, isn’t it.”

Forty minutes later, when he’d been dropped off at his apartment, stepping into the place like a stranger, Kaiser had managed to handle the silence of the space for four and a half minutes before he’d grabbed the sealed bag he had hauled all the way back from Japan to yank open and upended the contents on to his full-leather sectional couch, stupidly large and sitting there hardly used.

An assortment of snacks in single-portion packages for easy distribution, that he had already recognised.

And,

A box of citrus tea,

A figurine of himself Kaiser had recognised from the Blue Lock merch shop, that Isagi had thought looked just like his shoot form for Kaiser Impact,

A fuzzy football phone charm that jingled a familiar tune Kaiser had gotten used to hearing in another place, now far, far away.

And a box, wrapped up in plain paper, that Kaiser’d turned over to read the words For Ness scrawled in marker.

>> you must have landed by now

>> welcome home !

>> rest !! and make sure you don’t go to bed without eating something

>> also, pls let me know if ness likes his present :)

<< you

<< meddling little

<< piece of sh*t

>> well good morning to you too !

Kaiser’s routine looks a little like this:

He goes for a run in the morning after waking up.

Comes back to his apartment and showers.

Sometimes he hits the gym before heading to the practice grounds.

Skips breakfast -

(Gets texts at random, at the crack of dawn, reminding him not to skip meals)

Picks something up to eat along the way.

He spends almost the whole day on Bastard München grounds, hitting up the practice fields, training grounds, the gym.

The coach looks at him strangely when he asks for the current stats of all the players on the team, not just the regulars.

He picks dinner up on the way to his building, or orders in.

When he gets back, and the apartment feels unseasonably cold, he brews some tea.

The bright scent of oranges makes the place feel warmer, somehow. Brighter.

He goes to bed.

Around five days after his arrival back in Munich, the sight of the bright yellow specialty store bag sticking out against the muted tones of his living room pushes him over the edge.

He grabs it on his way out of the apartment on the way to training.

Shoves it inside his locker along with his gym bag.

Does nothing with it for another two days.

And then, biting the inside of his cheek and daring Ness to say something the entire time, shoves the snack bags and the box labelled with marker at him and tells him to Hand that around or whatever .

Leaves without answering any of Ness’ follow-up questions.

In the car on the way from the airport, Kaiser had told Ness that he did not have any need for a midfielder who acted out - and that too upon half-baked, incomplete ideas and absurd conjecture.

He had told Ness that he would no longer be linking up with him on the field.

Ness seemed to have been expecting it.

Ness - who had spent years agreeing with everything Kaiser ever said and did, who never defied him, who looked ready to bite off his tongue if he so much as displeased Kaiser - had stared him dead in the eye with his own misty and manic but determined.

And told him that he will become someone that Kaiser will need on the field.

He will make sure that he is someone Kaiser will need.

Ness, making his own choices in defiance of Kaiser.

Ness, still choosing him.

Still choosing to graft his own dreams on to Kaiser’s -

Because what he wants is what Kaiser wants?

So what does Kaiser want?

What does he want?

The figurine sits on the coffee table for days before Kaiser puts it away somewhere so it won’t collect as much dust.

Somewhere where he can still see it.

Isagi had picked it up, weeks ago on their visit to the Blue Lock merch store, examining it from every angle, gushing about how accurate it is to his form on the field. The tattoos are so detailed and - they even got the expression right! He’d chirped, delighted, eyes glittering.

Sometimes, when Kaiser doesn’t keep a strong enough leash on his thoughts, they stray to that figurine and he tries to find himself in it.

The countdown to the Europa League ticks away as Kaiser devotes himself to football with a fearsome single-mindedness. He breaks some personal bests during practice matches and qualifiers that have the papers in a tizzy - the PIFA president even deigns to call him with backhanded praise and the advice to keep it up for the big leagues.

Kaiser, monitoring his own plays, sweat running down his exertion-warmed body as he breathes deep, knows he’s at peak performance, does not need the validation from these sh*tbags who look at him and see only headlines and sponsorships that will rake in cash - who will throw him away the second he stops being what they need.

Kaiser keeps moving, keeps moving forward, keeps doing the only thing he knows to do, in defiance. In rebellion.

But as victory after victory rings hollow and fails to spark the curling, blistering satisfaction it used to in his chest, Kaiser can’t help but search, inside of himself, awake in his two-large bed staring at blank, colourless walls, what it is, that he is running for.

The sh*ttiest tabloid Germany has to offer intimates, partway through the first round of Europa League qualifiers, that Sae Itoshi and Yoichi Isagi are maybe more than friends.

Kaiser kicks a ball into the goalpost so hard it leaves a dent.

And then he blocks their platform from all his accounts.

Ness is actually good at ad-libs, Kaiser re-learns, as though they haven’t been playing side by side for years. His ability to intuit the field and calculate plays on the fly are part of the reason that Kaiser had noticed him in the first place but -

It’s as though freed from having to anticipate Kaiser’s will, Ness’ creativity spans more of the field. Kaiser doesn’t know how he’s supposed to feel about that.

And he doesn’t have too much time to get hung up on it. Their qualifier matches breeze through with Kaiser’s personal goals outpacing the collective ones of his team, and a solid third of these are from passes fed by Ness that were improvised on the spot as he appeared to glide out of sight on the field - Kaiser spotting him as he kept his eye out for opportunities and found Ness forcing himself into his view with one.

Pleased when his imagination paid off, frustrated enough to rip his own hair out when it didn’t.

The coach is delighted, Noa gives Ness exactly one approving nod, which by Noa standards is high praise. Ness looks conflicted as to how he feels about it.

Looks at him, expectantly sometimes, in a way Kaiser feels ill-equipped to handle.

Isagi won’t stop texting about the sudden jump in Ness’ performance and how cool it is.

>> i can’t wait to play against you guys 🔥

>> tell ness i said hiii

Meddler. A real f*cking meddler.

All of them.

With half a piece of choux pastry in his mouth, Isagi’s face blooms into a smile the second he spots Kaiser, and it almost trips him out of his stride. “Kaiser, hi! Why don’t you answer my texts, you ass?”

And then, before Kaiser can say anything, Isagi looks over his shoulder. “Hi Ness!”

“Hi Yoichi,” Ness returns, with one of those smiles of his affixed to his face. Kaiser has to try to school the shock out of his expression - he had not realised Ness was right behind him.

But then again, Ness had taken to shadowing him everywhere whether he asked him to or not. Like a dog who wouldn’t leave his side, like a shadow that matched his footsteps. Kaiser supposes he’s more willing to tolerate it, considering Ness has been instrumental in his plays versus Berserk Dortmund, that have had him trending for days now, his net worth skyrocketing with the endorsem*nts coming in.

Kaiser’d gone past the point of trying to scare him off. He may have broken Ness beyond the point of repair, because Ness simply took anything he threw at him like a shock-absorbing airbag, unfazed.

Or, he thinks, looking at Isagi and how genuine his smile is as he greets them both, the first time in months he’s seen him in person, maybe Kaiser’s making the mistake of giving himself too much credit.

Maybe Ness is just another phenomenon that none of his psychology books ever spoke about, of people who are stubborn and strange and choose to care like it’s an act of rebellion instead of an act of polite conformity.

Ness opens his mouth again and Kaiser immediately regrets not checking over his shoulders before he’d approached Isagi when he leads with, “I have been meaning to thank you in person for the gift, it was very thoughtful.”

Isagi, eyes shooting in Kaiser’s direction and reading a thousand things as they do, beams.

“I’m glad!” he says, and Kaiser belatedly, very belatedly wishes he’d just torn into that thing to see what it was that Isagi had gifted Ness. “I -”

“Oh hello,” a fourth voice breaks into their bubble, and Kaiser immediately recognises the pale blue haired boy who used to pair often with Isagi late into the NEL and throughout their U-20 matches. “Long time no see!”

“You guys remember Hiori You,” Isagi makes a motion between Kaiser and Ness and this Hiori with his hand still holding a bit of pastry.

Hiori, with a broad grin on his face and a glint to his eye that looks slightly alarming, holds steady eye contact with Kaiser and asks pleasantly, “How was Japan?”

“ Hiori!”

“Yoichi,” Kaiser hears the venom in his own voice. Sharp and chilly - he turns to look at Isagi, suddenly all quiet and ice cold inside.

Isagi. Isagi’d told? Isagi. After he’d taken all the pains while he was there to -

“Don’t be mad at him, he didn’t say a peep,” Hiori waves both his hands as though just wiping that assumption away along with the tension that came along with it. “I was actually very surprised when I heard about it, given that I was in Tokyo at the time and Isagi didn’t let on, he’s so sneaky. His mum let it slip.”

There’s a tug at Kaiser’s sleeve. Kaiser sees Ness and Hiori both zero in on Isagi’s fingers pulling at his cuff with a frightening laser-point accuracy, and so does Isagi because he backs off immediately. His face stays genuinely apologetic though, as he says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t think Mum would go around telling either -”

“Your mum wouldn’t do that, she’s the best,” Hiori says with conviction, and Kaiser doesn’t have to wonder for long because he seems only too willing to divulge information, “I often stay over at Isagi’s when I need to be around Tokyo so I think she just mentioned offhand that she made the skewers you like to eat or something for dinner.”

Kaiser is keenly aware of Ness boring a hole into his skull with how deeply he’s staring.

Right. He’d not exactly shared any of the details of his stay in Japan - especially not the part where he’d spent a chunk of his last week in Isagi’s house.

That’s partly because it’s none of Ness’ f*cking business - especially this Ness, unpredictable and acting out and sticking to his shoe like gum he can’t scrape off.

It’s also because he just tries not to think about the Isagi home much in the first place. He especially does not like thinking about it when he stands in his own apartment, and thinks about moving to a new place that’s closer to the ground. That feels a little steadier under his feet, where the walls feel a little closer, like they won’t fall through and give on to empty space.

(There’s a container of citrus tea in his cupboard that he has stopped using, even though the leaves will start to go stale if he doesn’t finish it soon, because the alternative is an ending. There is a suitcase full of clothes he’s not been wearing or washing, clinging to the scent of a fabric softener he’d gotten used to smelling all around him. A phone charm. A figurine. An empty yellow bag.)

Isagi is looking at him with cream clinging to his mouth. It’s familiar, searching, like he’s trying to gauge if Kaiser is okay with this conversation. And yet, jarring, that look up close and directed right at him after so long.

Different, too, because now, the images he’d locked up in his head the way he’d locked away a yellow gift bag he couldn’t bring himself to discard no matter how much a part of him wanted to are supplanting Hiori into the picture against his will - Hiori sleeping in Isagi’s bed, Hiori at the dinner table with Isagi’s parents, Hiori going to practise at Blue Lock with Isagi. Hiori under Isagi’s searching, considering eyes.

They’d said that they loved having Isagi’s friends over after all.

Maybe the ease with which they all made a space for Kaiser in their lives was not so unusual, when it was a space that shuffled characters around to fill in when someone else vacated. An endless supply of understudies, a rotating background cast, for the main characters. Maybe -

“Yo, loser.”

It’s the red-haired wannabe villain. His hair is even redder than normal, the streaks more prominent and fiery, and that’s all Kaiser gets to register before he just straight up tries to smash his forehead into Isagi’s.

Isagi plants both his hands with the palms out over his forehead and pushes Shoei Barou’s head back like it’s a volleyball.

“Hi Barou,” Isagi greets, as though the man had not just tried to give him a concussion. “You touched up your hair! It looks good.”

Barou growls something in acknowledgement, overshadowed by Hiori chiming in, with something close to glee, “Isagi likes dyed hair, don’t you, Isagi?”

Kaiser, who’d been about to leave, hardly able to get a word in and reluctant to now because there are only so many Blue Lockers he can handle being around in one go, roots himself to the spot the second Isagi’s wide eyes fly to him for a second before flying back to Hiori. There’s a tiny hint of pink in his ears as he just manages an “Uh -” when a black and yellow blur jumps on his back.

“ Hi Isagi!” Blunt Bob whoops from five feet into the air, balanced only by his hands on Isagi’s shoulders. “Hi guys!”

“Hey Bachira,” Hiori responds, Barou somehow managing to yell in an indoor voice while scolding him about being noisy as Isagi coaxes him off of his back. All of this happens while Kaiser is left to rediscover the fact that Blunt Bob also has dyed hair.

Maybe it makes sense, that Isagi has such an unshakeable threshold of accepting things without flinching, if this is the bunch he’d spent his formative years with.

“You guys having an NEL reunion party here or something?”

Great. f*cking great .

Sae Itoshi.

Kaiser regrets honing in on the dessert table the second he’d walked into the room. He’s used to watching these eyesores gravitate around Isagi from the outside - it’s something else to be in the nucleus of the phenomenon, and having to compete with these buffoons just to speak to him.

“Sae,” Kaiser greets, with the smile he reserves for his contemporaries. He’s going to extract himself from this situation, and he’s going to find a drink and an isolated corner to decompress in.

Itoshi is as inexpressive and deadpan as ever. “Kaiser,” he nods shortly. “Didn’t really expect to see you hanging out with this bunch.”

If there’s anyone that can tick him off without so much as altering the tone of his voice, it’s Sae Itoshi. He’s too blunt and straightforward, saying what he wants to say as a fact rather than as provocation, which pisses Kaiser off even more.

In the background, that Bachira has started to hand-feed Isagi cake, even through Isagi’s good-natured rebukes that he can feed himself.

“Didn’t expect you to want to be around this bunch either,” is what Kaiser says, trying not to focus on Isagi’s chipmunk cheeks as he munches on cake.

Itoshi shrugs, his face permanently stuck in its bored default. “Just making sure they’re not breaking my striker.”

Kaiser stills, at the same time as he catches Hiori saying something to Bachira that makes Bachira look right at him, cup a hand over his mouth close to Isagi’s ear, and ask in an audible whisper-yell, “Hey, hey, Isagi - do you think I should get a tattoo?”

Even with Itoshi standing in his way, Kaiser doesn’t miss Isagi’s eyes dart in his direction again for a split second before he whispers, “Why?”

“I don’t know, don’t you think it’d make me all cool and wild ,” Blunt Bob - Bachira - rises up on his heels and motions his arms in a way that almost knocks over one of the tiered dessert plates.

Isagi catches him and edges him away from the table. He’s laughing as he does. “You don’t need any help to be wild ,” he says, amused, at the same time as Hiori chiming in, “I think Isagi’s actually into tattoos too, no?”

Hiori has a large, toothy grin stretching his face that’s verging on sly, and Isagi is suddenly red in the ears and whispering something sharply at him. Itoshi is saying something about Kaiser’s hat-trick against Berserk Dortmund, Barou is saying something about tattoos being try-hard only to get glared at by Isagi and conceding that a f*cking Batman tattoo might be cool, and Kaiser is genuinely considering splashing the champagne flute he’s gripping with a chokehold around the stem in all their faces so they’d shut up long enough to hear what Isagi is saying .

“Wah, then I have to get a tattoo!” Bachira cheers, somehow unfazed by the half dozen conversations happening all around him at the same time. “What should I get? What’s a really cool thing I can get? Ice cream?”

“Because I’ve been craving ice cream lately but I can’t have any because of this stupid diet they put me on, and it’s cool, right? Literally! Like a pun.”

“I think maybe go with something you won’t change your mind about later,” Isagi tells him, amused.

“How about a bee?” Hiori suggests.

“Yeah, the bee doodle you do for your autograph would be cute,” Isagi adds. “It’d suit you too.”

“ Ooooh, ” Bachira considers this, seemingly taken with the idea, even as Kaiser’s mental database whirs in automatic overdrive in the background, trying to assimilate this new piece of information.

Isagi likes tattoos. Isagi likes tattoos? On others? On himself?

“But… hmm…,” and seriously does this nuisance never stop moving? Is he a bee? A human bee? He shifts his weight from side to side as he sways on his feet. “It doesn’t feel juuust right, though? I can’t change my mind once I get it,” His face scrunches up at the thought.

“I mean, that’s kind of the point of a tattoo isn’t it? It’s a commitment,” Isagi’s laughing, and it’d be hard to imagine that these two had been going at each other with the ferocity of a knife fight at the last Barcha vs Re Al match if Kaiser hadn’t personally seen it happen. “Give it some more thought, you could get something that you know you’re still going to be into even thirty years later.”

Bachira pauses in thought for exactly a second and says, “A football?”

There are collective groans from all the rest of the Blue Lockers. Ness has somehow lured Itoshi into a conversation about something he’s seen the midfielder do in a recent match that Itoshi seems surprised Ness had caught onto. Their interactions in the past have all been underscored with disdain, Itoshi barely tolerating Ness enough to speak directly to him and Ness only magnifying Kaiser’s dislike for Itoshi, and Kaiser would pay more attention to this bizarre phenomenon playing out next to him but -

“You know, if anyone can make a football tattoo work and not look cheesy it’s going to be you,” Isagi is teasing Bachira lightly, “You little football monster.”

“I mean what else am I going to love until the end of time,” Bachira insists, unbothered by Hiori’s laughter or the judgmental grimace Barou’s wearing, “I’m going to love football until I’m old and grey! I’m gonna spend my last day on earth kicking a ball as far as it’ll go!”

Isagi’s laughter is fond, and the hand he pats on Bachira’s head moves with the ease of familiarity. “Give it a little more thought, okay?”

“What about you, Isagi? Do you want a tattoo?” Bachira gasps again. This brat is apparently stuck in a constant state of excitement. “Do you want to get matching tattoos?”

“Ahhh, I don’t know about getting tattoos myself,” Isagi waves him off quickly, and then when Bachira actually looks disappointed, adds, “...maybe after I’ve thought about it for a while?”

This appeases Bachira, and Kaiser doesn’t think to fix whatever’s going on on his face when he feels Hiori’s focus slide to him again, and Hiori lightly says something about, A key sounds like a nice tattoo idea.

Isagi finds him afterwards, cloistered away from the rest of the party attendees, his patience for socialising burned out faster than it's ever been from overexposure to Blue Lock’s finest clowns up close.

He talks about this and that, unbothered by the fact that Kaiser either doesn’t respond or responds in monosyllables, and then asks if he would mind waiting for him a bit when they get back to the hotel where most of the delegations are staying.

“I’ve been holding on to some of that tea you like, I brought it along in case,” Isagi explains.

Kaiser’s suitcase smells fruity and sweet for days afterwards.

“Don’t lose before I get to you,” Isagi calls out in goodbye when they go their separate ways in the hotel lobby, that open face of his a clear and intentional provocation. Do your best, Kaiser, “I’m gonna beat that hat-trick of yours.”

And Kaiser is amply motivated to crush this boy to a fine dust - is stupidly settled by the fact that he’s been watching him too.

They play against each other in the semi-finals.

Even at this distance, Kaiser can see how small the hand of the child Isagi’s holding in his is as their respective teams file out onto the field, parallel with the kids in matching team colours.

The boy clasping Isagi’s hand is visibly buzzing with excitement, only half a head taller than Isagi’s knee, and his feet barely landing on the ground as he skips in time to Isagi’s larger strides. It draws some audible fondness from the audience sitting closest to the field to notice.

The child doesn’t care - probably because he’s clearly a fan of Isagi’s, beaming like this is the best day of his little life, and probably because Isagi doesn’t care, his attention turned towards the boy, his laughter visible even at this distance even though Kaiser can’t hear it. His eyes squeeze shut with it, tiny fingers completely engulfed in his larger ones, and when the kids have to go, Isagi raises his hand up so the kid has to jump for a high five, which lands with a grin from them both. Isagi sends him off with a head pat and a fondness that lingers in his smile as it simmers down as the kids file out.

Kaiser doesn’t realise he’s just been staring until Isagi looks up - and then straight at him.

And it’s like taking a ball to the chest, the way he watches that smile sharpen the second it lands on him. Turns into something that reads so clearly as a challenge, electric and excited, that Kaiser hears a rush in his ears before he registers Ness say from somewhere beside him -

“...huh.”

“What,” Kaiser snaps, and belatedly realises as his mouth moves that there’d been an answering grin on it.

What.

Ness gives him that doll-like smile of his that Kaiser has started to think of as genuinely unsettling lately.

“Oh, just thinking,” he chimes, stretching his arms in front of him with his hands steepled together, “that it’s going to be a good game.”

Up close, Isagi and Itoshi’s team-up is even more formidable than it looks through a TV screen. They move as though with resonance, a synchronicity that Kaiser did not even see Isagi achieve with You Hiori, with whom he’d practically become the football analysts’ favourite pair of telepathic twins during the U-20 cup.

Itoshi intercepts Ness, shoots upon contact with the ball to an unoccupied corner of the field that’s occupied in the blink of an eye, Isagi slotting himself into the space like it’d been cut out just for him and taking off towards the goal. The crowd is a thundering din around them. Kaiser’s plays get them going, but it’s beyond obvious that so does this. The Itoshi-Isagi duo are bold, decisive, and utterly seamless. The commentators are throwing around the word trust like a hot potato, but Kaiser, teeth bared as he guns straight in front of Isagi to tussle that ball away from him, knows it's true.

They have complete and implicit trust in each other’s ability. Challenging the best out of each other by expecting no less.

Like many things about Isagi, it’s alien and infuriating to him, because Kaiser has only ever trusted himself.

And when he cuts in front of Isagi and Isagi side-steps him like he’d seen him coming two hours ago, even though he’s just the tiniest millisecond too slow to stop him, Kaiser has the epiphany that it’s because Isagi completely trusts in Kaiser’s ability too.

His grin has an edge that could cut, fired up, furious and thrilled as he gives chase after Kaiser, and Kaiser, smoothly eating away the distance to the other side of the field with blood pounding hot in his chest, thinks,

Come at me,

Come at me,

With everything you’ve got,

Keep your eyes on me.

As the match nears half-time, with Re Al in the lead by two goals, both scored by Isagi, Ness sidles up to him.

“Michael,” he says. He’s a little apprehensive, but nowhere near what he would be when Kaiser’d thought him a puppet that danced to his inspiration. “About Yoichi’s link-up with Sae…” he fidgets, and says, “I have an idea.”

And Kaiser, with a buzz under his skin that makes him feel alive, electric and thrumming, an addictive high, tips his head at Ness critically and demands he say what’s on his mind.

Re Al wins by the skin of their teeth and one goal nailed by Luna at the very last minute.

Isagi and Kaiser score hat-tricks each.

And Kaiser should be furious , fuming by the end of the match, a part of him already heaving like a scorned beast as Isagi stomps up to him with daggers in his eyes and then -

“Next time,” Isagi promises, his voice steady and his eyes clear and with lightning crackling off of him. “Next time I will beat you.”

And Kaiser’s nerves sing as he feels a grin curl up the side of his face, manic and unhinged, and purrs, “Come at me.”

Off the field, Isagi continues to be every bit as infuriating as Kaiser remembers him.

Unmoving in the face of Kaiser’s will, both stubborn and sweet. Slipping inside his cracks and staying there long after he’s out of sight.

“Your hair looks nice this long,” he says, out of nowhere when they face off in a series of friendlys in between seasons. Kaiser has to mentally bat away the urge to reach for the recently touched up blue ends he’d bitten the bullet to make a professional appointment for.

Texts when he’s bored out of his mind hanging out in his hotel room and asks if Kaiser wants to go for a walk.

Sends him random facts about Napoleon, like he’s a squirrel that deals exclusively in obscure trivia about a long dead emperor Kaiser had mentioned once .

Offers him unsolicited tidbits like, Dad recently got into golf, or Mum saw you in that shoe commercial recently! She wanted me to tell you that you looked very cool.

Sparks in his vision and disappears like a camera flash while he’s left blinking away the dancing spots in his eyes afterwards.

“Why aren’t you glued to the ice cream bar, they have like twenty different flavours,” Kaiser asks with careful disinterest, after having located Isagi with more difficulty than he’s had at these endless social gatherings that are not as grating as they used to be.

Isagi groans sadly. “I want to go but,” he leans to the side a bit and peeks, and his face falls. “Ugh. Chris Prince has been standing around over there and I don’t want to deal with him.”

Kaiser’s eyebrow hefts up on its own. “Really? Of all the personalities in football, Chris Prince is the one you have beef with?”

“Ugh,” Isagi eloquently huffs again. “He hates me, and I don’t like when he gets all –” Isagi pulls a face, “ - handsy either.”

“They’re my friends! ” Isagi harrumphs. The pout on his face continues to grow bigger and Kaiser’s still looking at his lips when Isagi starts to say, in a slightly beseeching way, “Kaiser…”

“I’m not going to get dessert for you.”

“ Please,” Isagi pleads - actually pleads with him and if that isn’t something Kaiser would have paid big money to see a few years ago. Now it just clenches something tight in his chest like a bloody grip as Isagi stares up at him with imploring eyes, “They have pistachio! I love pistachio, I haven’t had it in ages -”

“Then go get it yourself -”

“But -”

“If you want it enough you’ll survive dealing with Prince for half a minute.”

Isagi continues to pout up at Kaiser, and Kaiser does not realise he’s holding his breath until Isagi deflates. “Fine,” he grumps, and stomps off towards the ice cream bar.

Kaiser watches Prince spot Isagi as he weaves through the crowd, pretending not to see him exerting his presence with all his might in lieu of having a physical spotlight on himself.

Sees him loudly call out Isagi’s name until every head within the vicinity has turned in their direction.

Can tell just from the hunch of Isagi’s shoulders that he’d rather be anywhere else except there, as Prince struts over with his showman’s smile fixed in place, hiding whatever grudge he still holds against him.

Kaiser’s heard plenty of people - privately or publicly - voice hostility towards Isagi. Some of these are the same people he goes bowling with whenever they’re in the same city, judging by all their social media accounts. For the most part, tension just seems to glide off Isagi like he’s a duck happily wading through the football field, unbothered by anything else apart from getting to be there.

But seeing Isagi pull an unconvincing smile on his own face, sitting on it as awkwardly as the tie he’d been wearing earlier that stayed crooked until Shoei Barou intervened while nagging him about appropriate dress sense, has Kaiser restless.

And that restlessness tips over into something else the second Prince grabs at Isagi’s shoulders, clearly about to start patting him down with a third of the room watching.

He’s cut across to them before he knows what he intends to do when he gets there. Grabs Isagi by the shoulders, briefly spares a “Excuse us, I needed a word with Yoichi,” and swiftly wheels him away before the Englishman has a chance to say anything.

“Um, sorry!” Isagi calls back at Prince, because Yoichi Isagi is sweet even to people he finds off-putting . “I’ll catch you later!”

And then, he looks up and whispers, “Kaiser,”

Says, “Thank you,” at the same time as Kaiser makes the mistake of looking down at him.

And there he is. Right there, under his arm, big blue eyes like a midnight sky, shining all the lights in the room back at him like they’re stars. He’s smiling, a tiny little thing, that’s…just for him.

Something shakes loose and falters in his ribcage.

At the ice cream bar, even though Isagi’d looked about as upset about missing out on his pistachio ice cream as he does when Kaiser dunks on Noa, he picks a blueberry and lemon sorbet instead.

“It looks like your hair,” he says happily, and then offers him a bite.

When his curiosity reaches its absolute limits, Kaiser lowers the weights he’d been lifting back on to the gym floor and grunts out a terse, “Alexis.”

Ness, who is perpetually in the periphery of his eye, jumps to attention like a rabbit catching a sudden noise.

“Yes!” he squeaks, as he’s been doing every time Kaiser calls for him these days. Even though these calls have been increasing in frequency, mostly on the field still, and sometimes to ask Ness to hold his water bottle while he ties his shoelaces or spot him while he works out.

Kaiser considers his options and decides he’s just going to go for it straight. It’s not like Ness has been dissuaded by anything else he’s done so far.

“What did Yoichi gift you?”

A gleam steals over Ness’ eyes at the question, and Kaiser has one heartbeat to second-guess his decision before Ness gushes out, “A figurine.”

“A figurine?”

“Of you.”

“Of…me.”

“Yeah, he said he thought I might like it,” Ness says evenly, like he’s commenting on how nice the day is outside to someone he will never see again.

“Huh.”

“It’s a very good figurine. It’s very accurate to life.”

And Kaiser’s still sorting through the absolute static this curveball has reduced his brain to, when something that almost looks a little knowing crosses Ness’ face and disappears before Kaiser can catch it.

“He said he got one for himself too.”

Kaiser uses up the orange-infused tea leaves in his cupboard.

They’re still fresh and sweet and bright by the time he gets through the pack, and whenever he’s at the apartment, sitting down with a cup feels like a break he’s not used to taking. If he allows himself to still just enough, lets the steam cloud up and around and into him just enough, it’s almost as though he’s not here, looking down at the twinkling lights of Munich’s most affluent streets, and instead in a small living room with a two-seater sofa opposite a TV crowded with pictures.

“Here you go,” Isagi tosses him the familiar box as he unpacks his suitcase, propping up the back against the side of the bed. Isagi’d been texting him that the Re Al delegation were arriving soon at the hotel booked for the competing teams in Berlin, and Kaiser, completely coincidentally, had decided that this was a good time for a walk.

Indoors.

Inside the giant lobby.

He imagines he saw Itoshi’s frozen bored face twitch when Isagi had caught sight of him across the hall, brightening as he’d jogged on over to say hello. He’d only hurried back to get his key card, and then returned saying, “Hey, did you want to come up with me? Mum sent me more of the tea and I brought it with!”

“You don’t need to bring this every time,” Kaiser tells Isagi, making himself at home on the bed before Isagi’s even had the chance to sit on it. He knocks aside Isagi’s carry-on bag in the process, on purpose, just to see Isagi glare at him.

“It’s tradition at this point,” Isagi shrugs, and Kaiser ignores the answering bump that sets off in his chest. “Here, let me make some.”

And soon enough, the sweetly citrusy scent of the tea leaves wafts through the room as Isagi mans the complementary kettle and the artsy set of mugs he finds in the little kitchenette. It’s familiar. The kind of familiarity Kaiser’s come to look forward to, whenever he unlocks his apartment door and takes the outside world off of himself. A comfort that exists like the turn of the clock, a reliable rhythm that resets like the time does, turning to the same place and leaving but coming back again, like a cupboard cycling through bags of tea.

“Ahhh,” Isagi sighs, a soft, relaxed exhale as he melts into one of the armchairs his suite is decked out with. He sips tentatively at the steaming tea, sniffing at it appreciatively as he does, like the fatigue of the flight is oozing right out of him, and Kaiser thinks it’s bittersweet.

The charm of stilling in the moment, to savour something all the more because you know it's fleeting. The turn of a clock, and time ticking away.

There’s no stillness in football. Not just on the field, where a half-second’s hesitation could cost someone a match, but in the profession itself. The shelf-life of a pro-player is short; so you start young, making decisions that’ll impact the rest of your life with your brain still a child’s, mushy and incomplete, and keep running, rushing, barrelling through the others rushing with you, to get as much done and climb as high as you can before they close the lid on your career. Jump, higher, higher, stepping on the people on the same side as you and on the side opposite, to scratch the height you reached with some sort of permanence on that ladder that will outlast your time on the field.

Lately, Kaiser’s been thinking about stillness.

The idea of retiring is something he wouldn’t get near with a ten-foot pole, not yet. Not when he’s feeling the most alive he’s felt in years on the field. The rightness that soaks into his core, a sense of belonging that has eluded him for so much of his life. Here, he feels free.

>> i watched your match yesterday !

>> you looked like you were having fun

Well.

He is hardly staying still.

But it’s the stillness that happens as a paradox, that lasts the blink of an eye, that eats at him.

As the months go on, and they inch closer to another World Cup, Kaiser thinks of the sparse moments he and Isagi collide as stillness.

Like marbles, spinning dizzily across space, that split moment of contact before you ricochet in different directions, off-course.

Once, Isagi’d called him randomly, without saying why, and out of blue asked why he no longer wears eyeliner. “I thought it looked cool,” he says, and Kaiser almost works himself up to a psychotic break wondering whether he’d imagined the shyness as he did. Whatever it was gets buried as Kaiser obliges by teasing him obnoxiously about liking his face too much, keeping it going until he frustrates Isagi into hanging up.

The next time they see each other, Kaiser spends forty-five minutes trying out an eyeliner style he’s not used to but that the internet swears would suit his eye shape, the red ink he’d especially purchased sitting in his skincare kit like a smoking gun. Kaiser focuses on getting his hands to cooperate, on getting the angle perfectly symmetrical, not letting himself think about it too much. Not letting him think about who this is for, who it used to be for, or why.

In the last critical look he spares the mirror before leaving for the venue, Kaiser is too preoccupied to realise that he sees his own face there, instead of searching for someone else’s.

Isagi’s expression when he spots him - his longer hair pulled into a sleek ponytail, the neckline he’d chosen generous enough to reveal more of the blue roses against his neck - dissolves all his misgivings to dust.

And for a moment - just that moment - Kaiser’s mind is quiet and he thinks he learns contentment.

He lets himself have it, knowing that tomorrow, he and Isagi are both going to be boarding planes bound for different destinations, and this is all he’ll get to have until the clock’s hands turn enough to meet each other again. A reliable rhythm, a continuous countdown. A parting that begins as soon as they meet.

Until when will this be enough?

“What would you do on your last day on earth?” Isagi’d asked him, a long time ago. At Isagi’s debut Europa League as a Re Al forward.

“Crush you one last time,” Kaiser’d replied automatically - tonelessly, swirling the drink he’s holding around in its glass.

Re Al had lost at the finals, but Isagi had a four-goal streak in that final match.

Kaiser ought to have flown into a murderous rage simply breathing the same air as him then. Instead, he’d listened to Isagi’s quiet laughter, and the two of them had sat side by side in that secluded enclosure of the venue grounds overlooking the small garden where Isagi’d found Kaiser.

He’d watched that whole match, hardly blinking. His entire being straining to be on the field instead of the outskirts of it.

“Aw, Kaiser,” Isagi’d teased, “You want to spend your last day on earth with me?”

Kaiser never allows himself to think that far ahead.

About what comes after.

What’ll stay behind once he finally stops running, has to. When he’s forced to slow and still and look around at what remains once the applause dies down and the curtains fall one last time. When he can’t outrun the want that’s started to chase him, an impossible want that only grows hungrier the more time passes and the more these split second collisions happen, each one leaving behind a deeper dent than the one before.

A far more dreadful want than the greed with which he’d seized and snatched fame and glory and wealth for himself so he would never have to beg or steal or lower himself to the mercy of another, ever again.

Sometimes, in the comedown after an intense match, a match where his performance amps up to the extremities of his own ability until it comes off as superhuman, and Kaiser feels the frenzy and the fulfilment of it fade in the clinical cold of whatever hotel room he’s staying in, he thinks about a grassy field where time starts and stops with a football he kicks around without the need for a goal pushing his feet.

Thinks about the background hum of a TV and the cheerful song of a washing machine and the jingle of a phone charm that stays inside a drawer in his apartment’s kitchen like a piece of glass his skin has mended over.

He’s met Isagi’s parents a couple of times since his solo trip to Japan. When they fly to wherever Isagi is playing, a luxury Isagi clearly loves to spoil them with. Or when they’re playing in Japan. Once, when they’d had time for more than quick hellos, Iyo had insisted they take a photo, since they didn’t get to do that while Kaiser was staying over.

They always, always invite him back, saying he is welcome anytime.

And it scares Kaiser, gets under his skin. Hides in wait like a rash waiting to break out because the next morning he’ll still be waking up somewhere and Isagi will be somewhere else and they’ll keep moving like orbits that just occasionally intersect and Kaiser grows afraid of wanting more and what will happen when he snatches and grabs at empty air and falls.

Sae Itoshi and Yoichi Isagi continue to bounce off of each other’s explosive plays, evolving in tandem, pushing each other as the team around them evolves too to keep up and challenge them both for their share of the field and their opponents evolve to outwit them. Isagi gets crowned as the season’s best playmaker multiple times by multiple outlets, and Kaiser isn’t blind, he can see why. Isagi’s easily the most intriguing player on the field to him, and it takes him time, a lot of time, to admit that Ness was right and that perhaps even with his psychology background it was Ness who’d been able to read Kaiser better than the other way around, because -

It’s always Isagi, who pushes him the most.

As Isagi’s unpredictability on the field grows, as his scope of the field magnifies and the people on it fall into his radius of influence, whether in attraction or repulsion, and the arsenal of options Isagi has at his disposal to mix, match, and improvise triples in size, Kaiser pushes himself to the same limits to keep up, to surpass him.

To understand not just the field, but the people in it.

The people in Kaisar’s radar, all the possibilities he can make happen with them.

The people in Isagi’s radar, and all the possibilities there, too.

All these people, who are Isagi’s teammates and rivals on the field,

And who are dear to him off the field, with that same acceptance and open warmth that Kaiser himself has felt, and is starting to grow terrified of even underneath the thrill of playing the sport that is synonymous to life itself for him, because -

It isn’t,

Enough.

He isn’t enough, not enough to keep it all to himself.

And in every moment of stillness, Kaiser is left wanting for more.

Kaiser doesn’t think of his father as often as he used to. Or at least, not in the ways he used to, like he was a sickness fermenting under his skin. Like a hulking ghost whose mass would suck all the air out of his room as it ballooned into his mind and squeezed rationality out of him. The nightmares sneak up on him still, once in a while. But as he throws himself into football with a vigour that has Noa pull him aside to commend him in a way that makes Kaiser throw up in his mouth a little, they are rarer. They flee him faster as he opens his eyes and feels the present settle a bit more soundly onto his bones.

Instead, he thinks of his father in question marks. Thinks about who he used to be, before Kaiser was even born. Someone he had to have been for Kaiser to exist in the first place, someone he never met. Someone who must have loved fierce and all-consuming, who must have been possessed by it utterly, if the hate it tipped into ruined him so completely. Until nothing was left except a physical wasteland of the worst parts of him. All his talent, all his ability, everything else that he was, rotting away underneath a ghastly shell barely resembling a human, stuck in perpetual limbo in front of a TV. The only window into her life.

The only way he could maintain a connection with her, aside from the rose he kept preserved like a wound he wouldn’t let heal.

And aside from him, with his mother’s face, the last living proof of something he had once and lost completely.

Kaiser wonders what would have happened if she ever threw him a crumb.

Wrote once in a while, called in. Tried to stay on friendly terms. Not even for him, her own child, left with just a name that he grew into like a curse.

Would he have been any better, if he had those crumbs? Would it have been kindness or cruelty, to lead a starving man on like that?

They’re at a fundraiser for something or the other, and Isagi hastily hands him the plate of fruit tarts he’d been enjoying like he would literally be doing nothing else in the world and rushes out, “Oh my gosh, Master Noa! You didn’t say he was coming too!”

Kaiser rolls his eyes. He’d edged Isagi away from the catering so that he doesn’t stand there attracting flies like a magnet, but now seems to be functioning as furniture himself as he holds Isagi’s plate and watches him wipe at crumbs clinging to his mouth. “Why do you act like that every time like you don’t have a picture with him hanging in your house? Like you haven’t actually played on the same field as him multiple times.”

“He’s my favourite player,” Isagi insists, like he does every time. “I grew up wanting to be like him, that’s not going to go away just because I’m pro too now.”

And Kaiser - he shouldn’t but -

His cracks sit closer these days, fitted together better with how well he knows the shape of them, but sometimes, sometimes he can’t resist tucking his nails in and scratching.

“If you love him so much how come you didn’t transfer to Germany instead? Then you could have just been on the same field as him all the time.”

Isagi gives him a look like he should know better. “Because I want to beat him, obviously. You’re the one that keeps going on about how there can only be one #1 and that’s him.”

He says it so simply. Not like it’s an inevitability that he will beat him, but that it is goal to do so. A clean and pure ego, that Kaiser would have found laughable a long time ago. Finds something else now.

“ As if Master Noa would retire just because of that,” Isagi scoffs, while still managing to utter Noa’s name with that reverence he reserves just for him. “He’d be even scarier to play against if he’s trying to get #1 back, right?”

He buzzes with that tangible excitement as he envisions that future, like the possibility of it alone is enough to have him levitate. His eyes are glazed with whatever he’s imagining, and even though he’s right in front of him, Kaiser feels him already slipping away.

“I can’t tell if you’re a sad*st or a masoch*st.”

“I’m an egoist, duh.” Isagi tips his face up at Kaiser and goes, “Hey, does my face look okay? I want to go ask Noa for a picture.”

Kaiser knows this face by heart now. The tiny nose, the apple cheeks, the pout that grows the longer Kaiser drags out his appraisal, the forehead Isagi’s stylists thankfully have the sense to keep exposed, at the cost of a hundred thousand other people getting to appreciate it too. Those big, midnight blue eyes.

“You missed a bit,” Kaiser hums, and before Isagi can move his hand towards his mouth, Kaiser thumbs at an imaginary crumb, just to watch the bloom of colour bright on Isagi’s cheeks when he pretends to lick it off the pad of his finger.

But he can’t keep it.

Can’t hold on to that corresponding warmth, can’t make it last, because by the time Isagi returns from his photo-op with Noa, he’s still red, still with gleaming eyes, and collecting his plate back from Kaiser babbling a mile a minute about how cool Master Noa is and how he praised Isagi’s form this season and all Kaiser can do is think about what will happen, when he can no longer be on the field,

The only place where he can make Isagi look at him, and him alone.

“Hey, let’s take a picture too,” Isagi suggests, when one of his idiot friends starts a commotion partway across the conference hall about a photowall.

Kaiser has those photos. Isagi’d texted them to him. Hates looking at them and cannot resist looking either. At how he sticks out like a sore thumb, his European features, his smile a far cry from the ones oozing with effortless charm for the press cameras.

Hates how he’d rather stand out than blend in with the dozens of pictures Isagi will walk away with at the end of tonight with dozens of other people.

>> did you know napoleon wrote a self-insert novel once ?

>> a romance novella

>> that’s insane

Isagi probably doesn’t even remember sending him those texts, months and months ago. But Kaiser remembers. Kaiser’d looked it up, and read all about the doomed romance between Clisson, Napoleon’s fictitious stand-in, and his lover Eugénie, tempted away by another man as Clisson plotted his own demise on the battlefield.

It doesn’t happen all at once, not like the crashes and collisions he’s used to. It builds up, and up, and up, over time, and then his fault lines just give way.

“Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation,” Kaiser grunts into the phone, and pretends he’d not needed to take a deep breath before answering.

Off season has rolled by again, and Kaiser has nowhere to run from his thoughts.

He stays clear of social media, where it’s impossible to avoid Isagi holidaying across Europe with Meguru Bachira. He ends up seeing the pictures anyway, because Isagi texts them to him. And Kaiser, for his own sanity, should just stop looking, but it’s hard to dissuade yourself when your life alternates between empty practice fields and empty apartments and the emptiness inside of him that hasn’t rung so hollow in a while. His phone screen is like a window in a prison, his only connection to Isagi’s life, happening by itself without him.

He’d been staring at it still, the last few things Isagi had sent him - mostly snaps of all the food he’s eating, but also a dog he met and befriended, a blurry snapshot of the beach where he can see a yellow and black blur presumably kicking a football around, a video of two pigeons committing sandwich theft somewhere in Paris that Isagi’s captioned, The Itoshis .

A selfie of Isagi’s face squished cheek to cheek with Bachira and the ice cream they’re apparently sharing and they look happy, their giddy grins pushing their eyes closed, and Kaiser -

Had jerked in shock when his phone had started ringing, the noise sharp in the quiet of the penthouse.

Isagi’s voice is dry and sardonic.

“Hello to you too, why yes, I am doing fine, and you?”

It’s not the first time Isagi’s just called him like this without warning. Kaiser’s imagination has had plenty of exercise trying to picture his expressions as he listens to him over the phone.

And for a while, that had been enough.

But Kaiser doesn’t think he can take any more crumbs. Kaiser’s not even been able to replay the football matches he’d brought home to study as distraction. Somewhere between the act of connecting his iPad to the giant wall-mounted TV he barely uses and realising he’d only bothered getting Isagi’s game footage, he had had an epiphany.

Recognised the horrible, damning echo of a long dead past in the picture he’d be making. Stuck in front of a TV, watching someone far away. Unreachable.

“ - aiser. Hey. Michael Kaiser.”

“What,” he makes himself say. Forces his brain not to linger on that split second utterance of his first name. Forces away the twinge that begins at the fact that it had to be like this, while he was distracted, without even being able to see him.

“I was saying, I had a question for you.”

Kaiser doesn’t say anything.

“Um so… when you got your tattoos, did they hurt a lot?”

The answer squeezes at his chest worse than his dignity can stand. “Um, maybe…? It’s been months and Bachira’s still going on and on about it so…”

“Getting a tattoo because someone else is pressuring you is lame.” Kaiser, hearing himself say the words, knows he’s the lamest of all.

“I’m not getting pressured, it’s - I mean it’s kind of sweet that he wants to get matching tattoos with me.”

“You said you’re not into tattoos for yourself.”

“A little one probably won’t be too bad… um, again, do they hurt a lot…?”

“Yes,” Kaiser says bluntly. It’s not like he’s being dishonest - the roses and the crown had hurt like a bitch, but then again Kaiser hadn’t been a stranger to pain when he’d gotten them done. Had stalked into the sort of seedy joint that would agree to ink an underage kid without something as f*cking laughable as parental consent and grit his teeth against the needle, pain cancelling out his pain, overwriting it. Kaiser traces the vines curling up his arm now, tipped in thorns, and thinks he’s not felt as vicious as this for a while as he continues, “You wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

An indignant sound from the other end. “I’m a professional football player, I think I can tolerate pain just fine.”

“Your mum said you used to cry taking medicine because the pills hurt going down your throat.”

“Hey!” Against himself, Kaiser pictures what his face looks like now - the angry pout, the red cheeks. The sparks coming out of that frown. If he closes his eyes, he could almost -

“If anything, out of the two of us, Bachira’s more likely to cry. He’s a total crybaby, cried when the dog I sent you a picture of earlier licked his ha -”

“I don’t f*cking care whether Blunt Bob is a crybaby or not,” Kaiser interrupts. It’s harsh enough to his own ears, harsher than any tone he’s used on Isagi in a long time, that it continues to ring in the silence that follows.

“...Hey,” he hears Isagi say again, though it’s a different sound now. As though he’s confused. Shocked. “ There’s no need to be mean, he’s my best –”

“Your best f*cking friend, yes, I get it.”

“What’s wrong with you today?” There’s an edge to Isagi’s voice. If he was here, he would be looking at Kaiser in that way of his, as though he could read the answer to that question right out of his head, better than even he can.

But Isagi isn’t here, and Kaiser doesn’t understand, or doesn’t want to, at the precipice and afraid. Of how much he craves to let the pull take him, all of him, eat him whole, even though there might be nothing to catch him down there.

“I have better things to do than give tattoo advice to a pair of honeymooners who -”

“Stop it,” Isagi scolds, and he sounds upset and Kaiser feels ill in a way he hasn’t in a long time. Like he wants to gag around it, has to fist his hand into the couch to keep it still. “Where did that even come from? It’s just… it’s just a harmless tattoo! Bachira’s been by my side since the beginning, the first real friend I made in Blue Lock and -”

“That’s a stupid f*cking reason to -”

“He’s important to me!” Kaiser feels something cave inside his chest, something pathetic and paper-thin. It’s not like he doesn’t know. It’s not like he hasn’t known since even before he and Isagi became…whatever they are now. Would Isagi be able to talk about them, in these same, definite terms? Would that be enough? “Bachira, he - he acknowledged my potential before even I did! Stood beside me through everything, even when we fought against each other, and he -”

“So now you’re what? Indebted to him?” Kaiser has his fingertips wedged into the cracks. Tucked in, digging. Visualises kicking a ball as hard as he can. Visualises it coming back. “Doing things you don’t even like -”

“God, why are you - relationships aren’t transactional like that! You can just… like people and do things for them because you like them!”

He sounds frustrated, and Kaiser doesn’t know if he imagines it, the way his voice wavers. Sounds a little wet.

He wants to look at him. Wants to see him.

Wants, wants, so much that he can feel it breathing down his neck, a thin, thin line between craving and something darker, something with fangs. Something to covet, something to hoard selfishly to himself that he wouldn’t let anything else touch, something to sink his claws into and own, held together with tape.

But Isagi isn’t even here.

And abruptly, his strings cut loose. He feels tired. Feels the fight leave him, feels the shame setting over him, that old emptiness and the cold that lives in it creeping back in. Along with something else. The ticking of a clock, eating away time.

“Neck and the back of the hand hurt most,” he says, toneless, and cuts the call.

There’s an untouched bag of tea left in his cupboard, the last one he has left, losing its freshness. Kaiser knows that if he doesn’t use it up, it would go to waste, but he can’t bring himself to do it - can’t bring himself to admit that it might end.

So it sits, and sours.

>> why the f*ck did you hang up like that ??

>> you asshole pick up your phone

>> kaiser

>> is everything okay ?

>> answer my calls f*cker

>> kaiser please

>> i just want to know if you’re alright

>> please michael

Kaiser is in a semi-comatose state when he distantly hears an electronic beeping at his front door, and wonders in that drowsy half-drowning place whether he’s losing it enough to imagine a home invasion when he distinctly hears that door open.

And then a voice that might as well belong in a dream too.

“Kaiser? Kaiser, are you - oh.”

Isagi.

Isagi?

A baseball cap comes off and the tuft of hair sticking out is messy but immediately recognisable, and as the face mask and the layer of a jacket sheds next, Kaiser has to gather his wits around him enough to decide whether he’s far enough gone to be hallucinating or if Yoichi Isagi, who to his knowledge should be somewhere in Malta right now, is in his Munich apartment, dumping bags and coats haphazardly in the entryway as he comes hurrying inside.

“How -”

“Ness gave me the address,” Isagi cuts him off, and that wasn’t even the question Kaiser was trying to ask - doesn’t know what it was going to be, with Isagi materialising much more solid and real in his eyes than even his living room is. It wakes him up, a shot of adrenaline to his gut, gets him on his feet from where he’d sunk into a stupor on his dumb, excessively extravagant, too-large couch. “And the passcode.”

Kaiser frowns as Isagi frowns back harder, the closer he gets to him. Studying him, Kaiser realises - taking all of him in, his unkempt hair and his eyebags and he’s got that blatant f*cking concern of his wedged between his eyebrows and has it just been two days since the last time they spoke to each other?

“How the f*ck does Ness know my passcode?”

“Because he cares about you,” Isagi blazes at him, and ah, there’s a dancing fire in his eye, sulphur blue. If anything snaps Kaiser to the present, into the moment, that makes it real, it’s that - Isagi’s fury, as he comes barreling into him, until Kaiser has to start looking down instead of right ahead, because he’s right under his nose now. “It’s a bit creepy that he just had that readily available off the top of his head but you know what? Maybe that’s reasonable considering it’s you.”

He’s breathing right in his face as he fumes at him. So close, that he’s stealing Kaiser’s share of the oxygen - he’s winded, reeling at space folding over so suddenly that Isagi, who was just a voice on the phone two days ago, becomes Isagi standing right in front of him, eyeing him close and with worry, like he’s surveying for the places where he’s breaking.

“You’re…okay, right?” he says, a lot quieter than he has been since he’d bulldozed his way in. And it’s familiar, the deja vu he brings with him. Kaiser doesn’t even have the mercy of a fever about to numb him through to miss it, how bitterly familiar it feels to strain against his stitches in front of these clear, steady eyes and know with a sense of doom about the crash that is coming, that he can’t avoid. “I just -”

“You’re -” Kaiser grabs his phone off the couch, double checks the date, “Supposed to be in Malta. Leaving for Croatia.”

There’s something unusual on Isagi’s face, something he isn’t used to seeing.

Uncertainty , Kaiser realises, just as Isagi takes a breath and says, or -

“Yeah, I - I took a detour.”

“And where’s your… best friend?”

Isagi pulls a face at the tone that comes out in, but responds anyway, “He went ahead. I’ll meet him later.”

Ah.

“Well. Is there a reason you’ve taken all this trouble to break into my house?”

And Isagi… Isagi is still looking up at him, still looking steadily into his eyes but there’s something there that he hasn’t seen before. Underscoring that clear concern, his obvious frustration at Kaiser and his waspish, distant attitude.

Something vulnerable, as he stares up at him and hushes a quiet, “I was worried about you.”

And for one frightening, lurching moment, Kaiser wonders if this is what his father used to see when he looked at him, this face of someone long gone left on his to taunt him.

Someone you love so much that you hate them.

It comes in a violent splash and leaves just as quickly, does nothing except make his gut churn and leave his body cold and covered in gooseflesh. But for just that one second, that one split, awful second, Kaiser feels paralysed the way he would when he was much, much younger, much smaller - frozen in place even when he knew a blow was coming.

“Well, as you can see -,” Kaiser spreads both his arms out. “I’m fine.”

There’s a ringing in his ears, and a desperate fluttering in his ribs. He recognises it as hunger. A dancing, greedy hunger, that wants to gorge itself on the fact that Isagi is here, that Isagi’s done this again, for him, not just a car ride over but a plane ride over. That Isagi’s made a choice and the choice has been him and his body strains with the need of it, wanting, wanting, wanting -

But he can’t.

He can’t,

He can’t have this -

Because he can’t keep it.

And he knows he’ll want to.

He knows that every tiny crumb will only sharpen his appetite and his greed and he knows that he will, inevitably, be left starving.

“Kaiser,” Isagi says, whisper-soft - and oh, there’s something imploring in it. In his eyes. Isagi’s looked at him in many ways throughout the years, Kaiser has made Isagi look at him in so many ways throughout the years, but this is the first time he’s seen him look so unsure. “Are you… I mean over the phone you sounded…”

He hesitates, and Kaiser wishes he could keep him and wishes he could push him away and wishes he wasn’t his father’s son because he wants , Wants so terribly that he knows that he can’t sustain himself on these brief moments of Isagi’s attention, of his stubborn, earnest kindness anymore, of being the only thing he sees. Wants so terribly that he knows it will take so little to push him from infatuation to something worse, something darker. Something that demands and takes, something that is greedy and obsessive, something that yearns to sink itself deep and stay, like a scar.

Like a tattoo.

He doesn’t know any other way to love.

In front of him, Isagi takes a steadying breath. Wide-eyed, shadows underneath like he hasn’t been sleeping properly. One of his buttons is pushed through the wrong hole, as though he’d been too much in a hurry to dress himself properly. And nervous like he never is, asking, “Is it… did I do something wrong?”

Yes. No. Leave. Stay. “It doesn’t matter.”

“What - no, of course it matters! What did I - have I made you upset? What did I do?”

Why do you care? Except no, Kaiser’s had to accept that Isagi doesn’t need a reason to care, that his capacity for it exceeds logic and rationale. Extends to everyone. Generous, and giving, and so dangerous for Kaiser because he wants it all, he wants it all for himself and he can’t ask for it. Even when it’s so hard to pull himself free of his gravity when his entire being wants to do anything but.

But he has to.

Because Isagi’s here right now, and tomorrow he won’t be.

And maybe he’ll jet off to see another friend who is having a hard time.

And maybe he’ll visit home and someone else will sit in the seat beside his at the dining table and his car.

And maybe he’ll clench his teeth around the pain of a needle feeding ink into his skin for the sake of someone else.

Kaiser can’t stand the idea of being someone else in his life. Not when, if he lets go, for even a second, his want will yawn open and Yoichi Isagi will become everything .

And he won’t be able to make it last.

Kick.

As hard as you can.

As far as you can.

“You’re overreacting, Yoichi.”

“But -!”

“Like I said, it doesn’t matter.”

“Kaiser - I just… you don’t look…did something happen? To upset you?”

Like an actor stepping into the performance of his life, Kaiser sheds himself to step into someone he used to be.

“No,” Kaiser he monotones. “I just got tired of playing this game.”

“What -”

“What, did you think, Yoichi? That we were friends?” Kaiser tilts his head. Makes as though he’s appraising Isagi, sees the words register behind wide eyes and a slack jaw and pushes on. The words bite at the insides of his mouth as they leave. “I told you, didn’t I? That I came to Japan to figure out how to beat you.”

“Kaiser, I don’t know what the f*ck you’re going on about right now,” Isagi starts, and his frown’s shifted just a little from concern to vexation, “Why are we going over this again when -”

“When what? I never stopped, Yoichi. I figured you’d be easier to observe from up close.” It’s almost like Kaiser’s mouth doesn’t belong to him anymore.

Kick the ball.

“Oh, shut up,” Isagi retorts immediately, shakes his head, and there’s fury in his eyes and something else, too, “Are you telling me that, what? We’ve been hanging out for months, talking for months, just because you wanted to beat me? That you’ve been acting this entire time?”

It comes back.

“That is what I’m telling you, yes,” is what Kaiser affirms. Lines fed through his mouth, a script wired just for his one-man audience. “Did you know that my mother was an actress? Famous, in theatre circles here. You could say I got it from her.”

Isagi stares at him, stares and stares, confounded, and a part of Kaiser, against his will, wants to be seen. Wants to be seen right through, wants to be known, wants Isagi to understand and listen to him and keep him anyway.

But he’s just -

He’s just worthless -

Trash -

“Kaiser,” Isagi takes a step towards him almost as though he heard the word ring out in his head. It’s an alarmed thing, and he’s always so honest, always displaying everything going through his head on that face of his that haunts Kaiser when he isn’t there. Clear water in a stream that you can look right through, where Kaiser is mud and grime and choked, dead things. “Listen, I - I don’t know what’s going on, but we can talk -”

“There’s nothing to talk about. As I told you, I’m done with this experiment.”

“Ex - experiment? ”

“I studied psychology, you know? So that I could learn how to break people better, without raising a single finger,” the confession slides off his mouth like it’s not even his. Like it belongs to some character called Michael Kaiser, and he’s just a skinsuit, a conduit for the words coming out. “In fact, Alexis was my first experiment - he’s the first person I got close to, to make him dance to my will.”

There. Something close to shock, something tasting like horror, soaking through that face. The feedback loop between his performance and his audience’s reaction.

Kick the ball.

“But I got tired of it. It wasn’t really working out,” Kaiser shrugs his shoulders. “And now,” he holds Isagi’s eyes. Stares into them, and sees the words register on his face like a slap when he says, “and now I’m tired of you, too.”

He’s said worse things to Isagi before. Far worse.

But his voice wears something cruel in it as it speaks and he can tell they both hear it, and when Isagi recoils, it occurs to him that ah . He got in.

The tip of his scalpel, long disused, tucked under an edge.

Oh, the irony.

He’d finally gotten close enough to see him break.

It’s rare. To see Isagi struck dumb. Isagi, who always has retorts that shuts down teammate or rival, who never lets himself be pushed around. Isagi, who has not let a single one of Kaiser’s insults or idiosyncrasies get to him, who has seen Kaiser at his lowest lows and not wavered as he held his gaze. That Isagi stares at him in pure shock, like he’s been blindsided.

“You don’t mean that,” he whispers, a haunted sounding thing. And Kaiser knows. Even as he growls the worst things he can dredge up from the worst parts of himself, they ring so openly false in his ears he thinks Isagi would know he doesn’t mean any of them. Isagi would know. Isagi’s seen through him like no one else has. And right now, his expression is wide open and begging for Kaiser to read it back. To understand, to agree, to admit. “You…why are you…why are you trying to push me away like this?”

It’s like a sudden, unexpected touch against a fresh bruise. A broken glass bottle to the thing he holds dear and has hurt the most. A defence mechanism. And it’s so familiar he flies into violence, his very special brand, almost on autopilot.

Raises his voice, balls his fists until his veins stick out dangerously against the back of his hands, feels his face contort with the twisting emotion he’s let take him over, and plays the role with theatrical precision.

“Let me set this straight for you, since you don’t seem to get it. You’re the one that said we’ll let our egos decide who comes out on top, right? To me, you are an obstacle - a big one, I will give you that. Once I beat you for good, though… that’s all you will be to me.”

There.

His delivery rings through the room, echoes in its corners and in his ears. In front of him, on Isagi’s face, he sees an entire kaleidoscope of emotion flash past - his captive audience, synced into their twisted little feedback loop. He waits for it to settle on rage. Waits to see that sweet little face distort with something, something with friction, something he can hold on to. Waits for him to yell and scream and call him names. To swear and curse and demean him. To call him a liar, to stand his ground and resist him, to come back towards him no matter how hard he kicks away -

Isagi doesn’t do any of those things.

There’s something unreadable on his face when he finally hushes, in a tone restrained and far removed from the clear, unmarred sound Kaiser’s more used to hearing now than the feedback of the translator buds, “You’re lying.”

He says it with so much conviction it tears into Kaiser inside. Bleeding warm and horrible, the relief and the tragedy of being known for exactly what he is and being reached for anyway. Kaiser wants to keep him here. In this stupid open wound gashed deep.

But he can’t.

He can’t.

He can’t.

Nothing lasts forever and no one stays.

Football stars and absent mothers and dead fathers.

A blue rose, impossible, beautiful, and only meant to be kept at a distance, admired from within its case of glass.

The thorns winding around his arms bleed black through him and twist inside as he makes himself sneer, bitter. Kick the ball. “What? Just because I entertained you a couple of times you think we’re buddies?” Kick it harder. A bark of laughter, an alien, sharp sound. Cruel. He sees it wedge deeper into Isagi and feels none of the joy he’d once expected he would, from finally, finally getting through. Feels the glass embed into his own psyche as he pushes, “Are you that desperate for attention? I’m over it, Yoichi. You have all your other friends to play the soccer world’s sweetheart with. Now if the cameras were running, the PR would be nice -”

“Shut up !”

He’d been waiting for it. Had been winding Isagi up, watching, searching, digging and twisting at the sore spot now that he’s found it.

Because who knows better than him that you don’t need physical blows to hurt?

Bruises can heal, but words can slip inside the cracks and stay there like splinters and keep you bleeding long after skin and flesh and bone mend.

The way Isagi’s voice cracks at the end of that roar almost slaps his mask off his face.

Isagi isn’t even looking at him anymore. His eyes are lowered until that fringe of dark hair hides his eyes. Kaiser can see the tight, downturned mouth - the hands rolled into fists so hard they’re quivering. Maybe he can work Isagi up to blows. Maybe he can anger him enough that he’ll want to hurt him and -

“Is that how you really feel?”

There’s an almost audible click in the way his jaw unhinges from its tight, tense set.

And suddenly, it’s so quiet.

Isagi’s voice has no inflection.

It’s so quiet that it’s deafening and Kaiser, head blank, can’t think of a nasty enough retort.

“Yes,” is all he says.

Isagi is still just two feet away from him, but for the first time since the final match of the Neo Egoist League, the empty space feels like a rift. He takes a deep, slow breath, and the noise in Kaiser’s head has cooled enough that he can hear how it shakes a little at the end.

“Okay,” he breathes, and looks up, and Kaiser watches the curtains drop.

“I am sorry for imposing,” Isagi continues, and it’s so wrong, how even his tone is, without the little lilt of emotion that gives away whatever he’s feeling as easily as his expressions do.

Not today, though. As Isagi gives him a tiny bow, and collects his jacket from where he’d dropped it at the entrance as he’d walked in here earlier.

Calling for him, worried, shuffling international flight itineraries around with a two-day notice just to make sure he’s okay.

As Kaiser stands there, watching him go, he can’t read a single thing off his face. It’s smooth as it slips past, with nothing to hold on to.

The click of the door politely shutting closed behind Isagi cuts through the quiet like the bang of a gunshot.

And when Kaiser, breathing shallow, chest tight, wipes a suddenly cold, shaking hand over his face, he doesn’t realise the red he sees wet against his palm is just his eyeliner, at first.

Kick it and it’ll still come back.

Hurt it and it’ll still come back.

Empty all your aggression into it, all your resentment, all your hate. All your love and your passion, the depths of your devotion. All your hunger, your desire, your greed.

Concentrate it, with needle-point accuracy, and it’ll hit the wall. It’ll come back.

Kaiser stares at the door, unseeing. Stares and stares at it.

He doesn’t come back.

An hour passes. Two hours pass. Three.

No messages come through on Kaiser’s phone from a number he knows he should block. Force a clean break. Hope it mends properly.

But he can’t. Can’t help himself. He’s never been able to.

He’d grown up streaking eyeliner on to see his mother looking back at him in the mirror.

He’d inked his skin with roses and thorns so they will last forever and he’d keep them, against even their wills.

He’d learned to breathe violence to carve himself into others in a way they’ll keep him , even when they leave. Like a scar from a broken glass bottle to the forehead.

He doesn’t block Yoichi Isagi’s number.

Even though he has the thought he should, every time it pings with a message and Kaiser can’t choke down the part of him that sits up imagining it’ll be from him.

Four hours. Is Isagi even still in Munich? He may have already left for Zaghreb, to someone waiting. To someone that belongs in his life like a neat, clean little puzzle piece, someone he comes back to.

And after that -

After that…

Kaiser can’t visualise it. He tries. He sits on his couch dead-eyed, head silent. But it’s just so quiet everywhere else, that Kaiser picks up even the whispers. And he doesn’t know what comes next.

Surely, they will play against each other soon. Surely, they will. And when they do, he -

He will -

Isagi will -

His brain supplies him with that sharp image it’d snapped of Isagi as he’d left.

Face shuttered. Emotionless.

So removed from what he is, what he’s like, what Kaiser knows he’s like, has learned so intimately that the lines of notes in his mental database blur into pictures - expressive. Straightforward. Thoughtful in the way that gets under Kaiser’s skin because there’s no pretence to it. No ulterior motive. Quick to anger when provoked, but quick to forgive.

A sweet boy, warm and loving, an extension of that home that Kaiser hasn’t stepped foot in again in…is it close to two years now?

It leaves him cold. So, so cold. Cold in a way he can’t chase. In his warm king sized bed or his extravagant shower or any of his disgustingly luxurious wool robes. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Whether it’s here or on hotel room carpet or grimy floorboards he’d fall asleep on hugging a football. The cold stays.

Somewhere around the fifth hour, Kaiser sits up so quickly his vision swims when the muted clicks of the keypad lock reach him. He’s about to jump to his feet, heart thundering and head a mess, just as the door swings open and -

It’s Ness.

“Michael,” in a second, he’s scurried over in a magenta blur until he’s next to Kaiser, looping his hands into Kaiser’s arm to help him to his feet. “What are you -”

Kaiser wrenches his arm away. It only works because Ness’ grip was light and he releases Kaiser the moment he senses resistance. “What the f*ck are you doing in my house?”

Ness considers him for a second, and that’s the second time today that Kaiser has had someone look at him with such open worry. Perhaps also the only other person who has seen him at his ugliest, at the receiving end of his worst.

“Yoichi called,” Ness says finally. Watches him, with his unbroken stare as Kaiser sits back down on the ground with his information. Kaiser is looking up at Ness from this angle - an unusual sight, for him. “He said… he said you shouldn’t be alone.”

And then, before the chinks of Kaiser’s makeshift glued together pieces can fall completely apart one last time, Ness continues, “He’s checked into a hotel for now.”

Oh.

Isagi’s still -

“It must have been very expensive,” Ness continues to say, almost with the polite detachment of a newscaster. “The flight, I mean, since he randomly flew out like this, last minute. The hotel too, he hadn’t booked it first. He sounded very distressed when he called me today, after he arrived.”

It’s not new information. Kaiser can guess. Ness knows he can guess.

“He… sounded distressed afterwards too.”

And Kaiser…

Can’t help himself. Has never been able to.

“What -,” he has to clear his throat, work out his closed-up vocal chords. “What did he say?”

Beside him, Ness sits down with his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped around his legs. “Just that… that he’d just come from seeing you and that. He thinks you needed a friend.”

The breath Kaiser takes pulls no air into him. There might be none left here.

That meddler. That awful, wonderful, maddening, beautiful meddler. Ruining him even without being here.

“He did that when you came back from Japan too,” Ness confesses quietly. “Texted me all cryptically, asking if you’d given me something. And then saying that I should keep an eye on you, because you got sick while you were there and he was worried.”

Ah. Ness’ incessant puppy dog tendencies immediately afterwards, perpetually a call away from him, look a little different too with that context.

Like the way he does his eyeliner has started to look.

Like the way his football has started to look.

f*ck.

f*ck.

“Why are you here, Alexis?”

“Yoichi asked.”

“And you listened. Since when do you listen to Yoichi?”

“Well,” Ness exhales slowly, stretches his legs out in front of him as he does and lays the flats of his palms on the ground behind him. Tipping his head up at the ceiling, he sighs out, “We discovered we have some important things in common. He’s… He really cares about you, Michael.”

Kaiser knows.

He knows, and that’s why it hurts, doesn’t it?

Because Kaiser cares that he cares. He cares so much it winds tight around his lungs and keeps him from breathing and he just chips away. Like bits of falling plaster, like a broken mask.

He says it out loud almost as though he’s sinning, an answer to a riddle Ness had posed in a car speeding down an expressway a long time ago. “I want him.”

From beside him, Ness hardly reacts. “I know.”

“I can’t have him.”

“Why not?” Ness asks, as though he’s not talking about the impossible, and then, “He wants you too.”

And that’s just -

Such an absurd, such a laughable concept that he can’t even -

“How do you -” There’s that awful f*cking pulsing heat in his chest again. Thrumming through, bleeding in the corners of his eyes. “Did he say -”

“He doesn’t need to,” Ness keeps looking at the ceiling. “It’s so obvious. He used to look at you so differently back at Blue Lock, but now it’s like…”

Kaiser wants to hear. Kaiser doesn’t want to hear. Kaiser doesn’t know what he wants, but Ness makes the decision for him. The way he plays these days, opening windows for him on the field, telling him, Look here. Look at me, and letting Kaiser turn his ideas into reality.

“Now it’s like he can’t take his eyes off of you. Doesn’t want to.”

“That’s - only for -”

“It’s not just for soccer,” Ness refutes. How did he know that was what Kaiser was going to say? Had Ness simply gotten this good at anticipating Kaiser’s needs or is Kaiser just this haplessly, helplessly exposed right now? “On the field, yeah, but off the field… in the crowd, he looks for you. Goes to find you, right? Wherever you are.”

A stuttering, ragged breath. A closed door and a ball he’d kicked beyond saving. “Not anymore,” Kaiser hears himself say, “He won’t anymore. He -”

“Michael, Yoichi didn’t even book a return flight because he didn’t know how he was going to find you when he got here,” Ness cuts him off, “he forgot to think about getting a place to stay. He forgot that he could have told me before doing any of that and I’d have come here anyway if I knew there was something wrong.”

In between wanting every word of what Ness is saying and resisting even hearing it, Kaiser grinds his teeth together and feels the moisture at the corners of his eyes sting and stick there. “He’s… like that. He’d do that for anyone.”

“You’re not anyone.” Ness says immediately, and that stupid stinging in the corners of his eyes burn. “And definitely not to him. He didn’t tell me what happened but… he… he sounded really upset, and angry. He sounded so mad at you, and he still wanted to make sure you were okay.”

But that’s just who Isagi is. Isagi who had been texting Ness without telling him during his time in Japan because he wanted to check on him. Who’d made him carry a present back for Ness on faith alone that it would make him approach Ness.

He hadn’t needed to, because Ness had approached him. They seem to alternate between being the most rebellious, stubborn, unpredictable people in his life, with how they force themselves into his stratosphere, unbothered by its chaos and its hostility.

“Why?” he husks it out, quiet.

“Why…what?”

“Why does he care? Why do you? Don’t you think I’m - ” Trash. “Are you both… f*cking masoch*sts or something? Why are you two just… why won’t you just leave?”

Ness is silent for a beat.

“Do you want us to?”

“Don’t f*cking answer my question with more questions, Alexis.” It’s like that car ride all over again. “You saw, right? During the NEL. Before I went to Japan. I’m not the f*cking hero, the f*cking emperor in whatever fairytale you thought you were living. I’m f*cking -”

“Human,” Ness says, softly.

“...What?”

“You’re human,” Ness repeats. “People are not… infallible. Even the people you admire the most. That’s what I saw during the NEL, and after. That even the most amazing people you’ve ever met are just people at the end of the day. I think it made you more… human to me.”

Whatever it is that he sees on Kaiser’s face makes him add, “It’s not a bad thing.”

And then, with something that looks like a smile - an actual smile, not one of those frozen unreadable things he fixes on his face all the time, “It actually made me feel as though I…got to know you better. Better than I thought I did.”

A part of Kaiser, from long-nurtured habit, wants to scoff at the face of such an assessment. To take insult in the implication that he’s less than flawless in Ness’ eyes, to be offended that Ness is talking about him like they’re equals as though he didn’t intentionally break this boy and shape him into something else to submit to him.

But Ness had broken free.

Ness had seen right through him. Is seeing right through him, right now.

And Ness still chooses him.

It’s far from healthy. Far, far from healthy.

And yet the Ness that sits next to him and looks Kaiser in the eye, unafraid, settled in a way he wasn’t behind a steering wheel he was holding on to like a lifeline, is steady like Kaiser didn’t realise he needed until it walked through his door and fell into place by his side.

“f*ck,” the back of his head hits the wall with a thump and Kaiser smacks a little harder because it doesn’t jolt his brain back into place enough, “f*ck. ”

“Don’t give yourself a concussion,” Ness says mildly. “... you should… do you want to call him?”

There are many things Kaiser wants to do, and he doesn’t trust himself with any of them.

“You should,” Ness presses. “He’s… well. On the phone he sounded… upset. Really…yeah. Really upset.”

Kaiser, eyes closed as he taps the back of his head against the wall, thinks back to how blank Isagi’s face had been, as he’d left.

“What the f*ck would I even say?”

You were right.

I lied.

(Stay)

“I mean, you could start with ‘thank you’ I guess,” Ness says, and Kaiser has no idea what he’s talking about, the dubious tone in Ness’ own voice making him open his eyes to look at him and see Ness holding out a bag for him.

“It was by your entryway,” he explains, “I grabbed it while coming in but I’m pretty sure Yoichi must have brought it for you.”

The scent hits him before Kaiser’s even pulled the top of the bag open. Tangerine-sweet, a bright, happy scent. Ness makes a curious noise as Kaiser pulls the familiar package out and the fragrance and familiarity of it nearly rips the ground out from underneath him. Tips him all the way back, to a cosy couch, a TV surrounded with pictures of smiling faces, and a feeling more than a place that Kaiser thinks might mean what it is to be at home .

“What’s that?”

“Tea. My… favourite tea. He brings some with him when we’re playing in the same cities.”

“Why would he have this on him on vacation?”

“He…,” Kaiser realises it for himself just as he starts to answer Ness’ question, “He must have been planning on coming here at some point, anyway.”

The shock on Isagi’s face is evident the second he opens the door and sees Kaiser on the other side of it.

Kaiser has simulated many ways this can go - a part of him is expecting to have to shove his foot inside because nearly all of the scenarios he’s thought up involve having the door shut in his face. Ness had continued to stress the fact that Isagi had sounded mad, on the phone.

Instead, Isagi just goes completely still, like he’s barely breathing.

“Hi,” Kaiser says, and has to force himself not to wince at how lame that sounded to his own ears.

“Kaiser,” Isagi says, quietly. Kaiser lets himself stand there as Isagi scans him once, quickly, catching a millisecond longer on the bag Kaiser is holding, and then his eyes dart down the empty hotel hallway. “What are you doing here?”

Kaiser licks his lips, mouth dry. “Can we talk inside?”

Cool air drifts out the open door from the powerful hotel room air conditioning as they stand on either side of a threshold. Kaiser is conscious of how reversed things feel right now - it’s Isagi, usually, on this side. Breaking his way in.

The car ride over had felt the same way. Ness had volunteered - insisted - that he drive him, and the journey over had almost churned Kaiser’s insides into mush because it’s true, what Ness had said - that Isagi comes looking for him. Seeks him out, with a purpose that Kaiser thinks he doesn’t exhibit himself, forcing his way in.

“Michael,” Ness had said to him as though he’d been speaking Greek as he vocalised some of this, “... you took an almost 15-hour flight to Japan without even realising you were going for him . Putting aside the fact that you asked to go for the NEL after seeing Yoichi play. You’re literally as bad as each other, Yoichi is just more honest about it than you.”

Well.

Somehow, with Ness sitting beside him and occasionally giving him sideways looks like he half expects him to try and barrel roll out of the car, his head had felt a lot clearer than it had at the apartment.

And he’d thought, then, gripping on to the straps of a bag they’d made a detour to pick up, sitting still and yet moving, that the visualisation he’d been doing had been all wrong in the first place. Kicking the ball and waiting for it to come back. As though Yoichi Isagi would ever be anything as passive as an object responding to his will.

As though he isn’t a creature of his own momentum, who may just have been pushing at him to force him out of his own inertia, all this time.

And well, he’s moving now. He’s here. And Isagi’s face gives nothing away as he quietly considers him, standing on the wrong side of the door, before taking a step backwards. A silent invitation inside.

The short hallway gives onto the room Isagi’s staying in - Kaiser doesn’t get far enough inside to see anything but the edge of the bed, but it’s far smaller than the rooms Kaiser has stayed in in the past, the kind Isagi stays in too. A suitcase lies propped open on the ground at the foot of the bed, its insides in chaos, as though packed in a hurry.

Kaiser is trying to figure out how to work up to the conversation he wants to be having here when Isagi cuts to the chase.

“Did Ness tell you I was here?”

Fair enough. Kaiser admits to it.

“Yes.”

Past his initial shock, Isagi has schooled his features down to something neutral. It’s almost a relief watching it twitch before a frown takes over and he grumbles with a scowl. “I shouldn’t have told him.”

Kaiser forces himself not to let that push him back out the door.

“He drove me here.”

The scowl deepens. Isagi isn’t meeting his eyes.

Kaiser’s mouth is dry, but he searches for something to say - remembers Ness’ suggestion and starts with, “Thank you for the tea.”

As though the mention of it reminds him of the last time they’d been face to face with each other, mere hours ago that feel like individual lifetimes, Isagi’s face closes off.

“I was starting to run out,” Kaiser confesses.

“Hm,” is all Isagi says, and raises his arms to hug himself a little.

He’s not used to the single syllable answers. Is maybe realising only now how much of their conversations Isagi carries by himself, without making Kaiser feel left out, when the monosyllables tend to come from him. “Please tell your mum thank you for always sending them over.”

“Sure,” he agrees, quietly. He’s looking at the ground, still, subdued. Kaiser hasn’t seen Isagi this upset before, outside of the field, loud in the subtleties of it. His stillness, his posture held tight, the way he won’t look at him in the eyes. Kaiser remembers too clearly the hurt he’d seen slashed into those eyes just earlier that day. The hurt that he’d put there. He can’t see that deep midnight blue right now, but he can see him blinking rapidly, and it takes him back to another time when he’d stood in Isagi’s room, losing his grip on himself because he couldn’t leave a scratch on him.

A feisty, fiery Isagi pushing back against him, he’s used to. An impassive Isagi, unnerving.

But an Isagi fighting back tears makes Kaiser want to claw off his own skin.

It’s almost reassuring, in a way.

“I brought you something.” He holds out the bag. He doesn’t even let the genuine shock with which Isagi’s head snaps up to look at him get to him - apart from paper napkin autographs, when has he been the one to get Isagi things?

Warily, Isagi hesitates a second before reaching for it, and as his fingers loop around the straps and Kaiser lets go, he realises the weight of it.

“What is -,” he asks, frowning, using his free hand to pull open the sides of the bag and look at -

The stacks and stacks of boxes inside.

“I… didn’t know what you would like so I got some of everything,” Kaiser admits, even as every cell in his body screams and rebels against him. Without his careful mask over him to hide his intentions, Kaiser almost feels naked. And there’s that irony again - one of the earliest promises Isagi’d ever made to him was that he’d reduce him to a naked emperor.

And so here he is, putting everything in the hands of this boy in the form of all the German sweets he could purchase at the store he’d made Ness drive them to.

“I know this shop,” Isagi says slowly.

“I know you do.”

“It’s like… a designer dessert bar.”

“Yeah.”

Isagi is looking at him like he’s a strange sea creature that has beached up at his door. “It’s the designer dessert bar that I told you I want to try, if I ever came here . ”

Ears warm, Kaiser nods again. “Yes.”

All he can do is stand there and try not to fidget as Isagi looks at him. Finally looks at him.

“I didn’t think you’d remember something like that.”

Kaiser scoffs lightly more as a reflex than any attempt at being casual. “Well…I remember everything you’ve ever said to me, so…”

There’s that whirlwind play-by-play of emotion flashing by on Isagi’s face again, and somehow that’s enough of a reprieve to be seeing it at all even if Kaiser doesn’t know what is going through his head. When it lands on an intense frown, Kaiser almost braces for the boxes to come flying at his face.

“You…,” Isagi starts to say, voice tight with a trembling kind of tension, “Why can’t you just say sorry, you idiot?”

Trust Isagi to get directly to the point like that. Kaiser lets out a startled bark of laughter, even though there’s no humour in the situation. Because what is he supposed to tell him? His pride got in the way? His ego won’t let him? These still feel like better answers than the truth.

Because saying sorry does f*ck all.

He’d learned that very, very early in life. Saying sorry changes nothing. Begging and grovelling changes nothing. If the hands around your throat are mad enough, it can even make it worse. So he’d simply unlearned it. He didn’t protest the abuse, he didn’t protest getting clapped in handcuffs, he didn’t protest when the money he’d foraged away like a starving animal instinctually preparing for a harsh winter got taken away. It was pointless, anyway.

It was pointless, it was all pointless, there was no use, and yet, even then -

Pushed to a certain limit, it seems that Kaiser will always break.

“Sorry,” he hears himself say, and knows he means it, for the first time in years.

Isagi looks like he’s going to cry. There’s a version of him, younger, warped with his arrogance and over-compensating sense of superiority and burning with vengeance, who would have thrilled at the sight. Had daydreamed and conspired and hungered for it.

Now, it just makes Kaiser husk out another shaky, “Sorry,” almost in spite of himself.

“You asshole,” Isagi grinds out. He drops the bag on top of the little bar space next to the closet, and starts to fidget with the lids of one of the boxes. “I am so mad at you.”

“Sorry.”

Isagi gets the lid open, picks up a piece of pastry and pops it into his mouth. He chews for a second, his entire face twisted up like he’s being force fed poison, and Kaiser can only vaguely think about his forethought in bringing variety in case Isagi doesn’t like everything, when Isagi growls, “It’s good,” like it actually hurts him to say it.

And Kaiser hadn’t come here expecting absolution. Had not dared to hope for it, but the relief that cuts through him is near enough to send him to his knees.

“I knew you didn’t mean it,” Isagi continues, huge blue eyes a little hazy with the sheen he’s trying to hide from Kaiser, angrily stuffing another pastry into his mouth and growling with his mouth full. “That’s what made it worse. Saying all those things even though you didn’t… I’m so mad at you, I wanted to punch your lights out so badly.”

It’s hard to take threats of bodily harm seriously when the person doling them out has his cheeks puffed full of pastry and is trying to talk around it without crying. A strange, helpless warmth courses through Kaiser at the sight, loosening out his muscles and making his limbs tingle with an urge he doesn’t know how to act out.

“You should have,” Kaiser says frankly, because if nothing else, at least that was a language he did understand.

Isagi levels a watery glare at him. He sniffs, carefully puts the container down next to the bag. There’s whipped cream stuck to the corner of his mouth and Kaiser locks in on it like a laser beam. “I really wanted to. You were being so… so cruel, so cruel on purpose ,” he glares at him. “But you already looked like you were in pain.”

And -

Oh.

The air whistles out of Kaiser’s lungs.

And then, Isagi, glowering so intensely he still looks like he’s considering throwing a punch or a few at him anyway, snaps, “What are you waiting for, you moron? You’re supposed to hold me now!”

Kaiser’s not sure which of them moves first, or if he even gets his brain back online to be able to move at all - all he knows is that between one moment and the next, Isagi’d gone from standing just out of reach to tucked right against him. His breath is warm as it tickles past his tattooed nape.

And then he’s holding him, and being held, and Kaiser can’t tell if he’s tipped right side up or spun straight out of equilibrium.

“I hate you so much,” Isagi swears at him, arms tight around his neck and squeezing him hard. Kaiser is well aware that he’s strong, an athlete whose physical prowess has only evolved as his football career has. Knows firsthand that he can hold his ground in a physical battle of attrition in a match, and that he can hold Kaiser up all by himself. Kaiser doesn’t know if he could extract himself from his grip right now if he tried.

“You’re the worst. The f*cking worst . I hate you.” The hand curled tight into the fabric of his shirt and balled up against his back screams the opposite of the insults mumbled into his skin.

Held so firm and so unrelenting, Kaiser, to his own utter shock, takes a rattling breath in and starts to break himself.

“Sorry,” he mumbles again, uselessly, because apparently that’s the only word he’s got left in him. He’d feel pathetic, the warmth he’d held in the nooks of his eyes leaking through, if it weren’t for Isagi squeezing him in response, holding all his pieces together hard enough and warm enough that they might even start to meld back together. Kaiser’s melting into it, going boneless and brainless and then flinching when Isagi butts his head into his collarbone hard enough to hurt just a little before he tucks his forehead into his nape. His own arms have wound themselves around Isagi’s waist and he just… holds him. Holds him just as hard, as though he can steal him into himself, like ink. Like a living, breathing blue rose, bloomed with care.

“If you ever pull that sh*t on me again I promise you I will shave off your eyebrows in your sleep,” Isagi threatens into his skin, and Kaiser can’t help it - he starts to laugh.

It starts with a watery little bubble, the shaken sweetness of a soda can swimming to the top. And then fizzes over, until he’s shaking with it, or maybe that’s Isagi, catching the hysteria from him and starting to laugh as well.

Kaiser hasn’t seen that laugh on his face once since he arrived here, not anywhere that isn’t behind a screen, so he starts to pull back, body going slack almost at the way Isagi holds him tighter for a second before loosening his grip just enough to let him pull back but not enough to let go and he’s unsteady, with that euphoric headrush he associates with winning , and -

He takes one look at Isagi’s face,

At the whipped cream at the corner of his mouth,

And the momentum just carries him as he leans in and licks it off.

The sweetness is still melting on his tongue as the rest of his body tries to catch up to what the f*ck he just did.

But as he often seems to do, Isagi beats him to it.

Grabs him by the collar of his shirt and yanks him in, and their lips catch in the middle in a car crash of a kiss.

And it’s stillness.

It’s bliss.

Cold. That’s the first thing Kaiser registers as the dream breaks.

He curls into himself for warmth, foggily straining his ears for the distant sounds of the TV. He can’t hear anything, which might mean the old man has passed out, or that he’s lurking. His teeth grind together as his brows furrow, body tense and curling around his soccer ball. It’s not like pretending to sleep will help if he’s in the mood to unload his rage on him, but it’s not like Kaiser can run away, either.

He lies there. Body clenched, braced for impact, ears sifting through unnatural quiet and waiting to hear something. The TV, the heavy fall of feet dragging on the ground, the fridge door opening, cupboards slamming shut. He holds his breath until he can’t anymore, and breathes in quick -

And smells sweet shampoo and clean laundry. Familiar scents, as though he’s in -

His eyes fly open.

There’s no Noa poster in front of him.

Instead, his vision is full of a head of indigo hair, so dark in the early morning kept at bay behind the curtains that it’s almost black.

Somehow, this feels more like a dream than that distant nightmare of a buried, dead childhood.

Probably sensing his agitation in that uncanny way of his, Isagi stirs. Kaiser’s sluggish brain takes slow and careful and wondrous notice of all the places they’re touching, seeping warmth into him as they huddle together under a thick duvet after fighting the air conditioning that they can’t turn down. Isagi in his arms, Kaiser’s leg tucked between his knees. Cradling him against his chest.

But more wondrous still… Isagi holding him back.

Kaiser thinks he hasn’t let go once ever since he collided right into him for a hug. A collision that stuck .

“What time’s it,” Isagi croaks, groggily, and that content little haze vanishes. Kaiser twists to look at the digital clock on the side-table as a miserable knot bursts into form in his stomach, climbing up towards his windpipe.

It’s four am. Isagi’s flight - the one he’d booked for Croatia the day before - leaves at nine.

Every good thing comes to an end.

They lay there in silence for a while, still even though time isn’t.

Kaiser’s hands twitch restlessly where he has them looped around Isagi, but he’s not present enough to notice. It’s hard to, when inside, that momentary joy, this all-encompassing warmth, is already starting to look like a distant memory that is going to flee his fingertips the tighter he tries to hold on.

It takes him a while to get past the slow weight crushing him inside to realise Isagi’s trying to get his attention. He’s about to get up now, Kaiser thinks, dully.

He’s about to get up and leave.

Every good thing comes to an end.

“... would it cost?”

“Huh?” Kaiser grunts, suddenly feeling so tired that speaking seems like a chore. They’d stayed up late, reluctant to drift off, clinging in one way or another, Isagi shifting till they touch even as they tucked into their room service dinner like he’s anxious Kaiser might leave if he didn’t keep him close. It’s wonderful and horrible and in the palm of his hand slipping away like sand already and a part of him just wants to lay here. In complete stillness, in pointless rebellion, and -

“I said, if… if I changed my flight, how much do you think it would cost?”

Even in the relative dark of the room, Kaiser sees the blush high and warm against Isagi’s cheeks. Would it be hot to the touch? It’s not the first time he’s had a thought like this, but it almost knocks him sideways, the realisation that that thought can translate into action here.

As though in a trance, one of his hands unsticks from Isagi’s skin to curve around his jaw.

He feels warmth against his palm, and feels a hummingbird pulse against his jaw, and even still, this feels like a dream.

“Probably a lot,” he says honestly.

Isagi, face doing something complicated, nods once, shortly. His eyes are huge and fixed on Kaiser’s as though asking him for something. Demanding something from him.

“You could afford it though,” Kaiser adds, and maybe the hummingbird pulse actually belongs to him, and not Isagi. Maybe it belongs to them both, syncing together like they have done long before they’ve known how to exist side by side without fighting for the same ground.

“I could,” Isagi agrees, “Or… or Bachira could just come here…”

“You were planning to come to Munich anyway,” Kaiser whispers to Isagi. Not a question.

“Yeah,” Isagi hushes. Over his shoulder, Kaiser watches the red digits of the clock eat up time, greedy and relentless in the way he’d fashioned himself to be.

Greedy and relentless like this impossibility in his arms, staring straight into his eyes and pushing him like he always pushes him, giving as much as he takes. Reciprocal in a way nothing else has ever been in his life.

“Stay,” Kaiser whispers, under the cover of night, vulnerable like he never is, never allowed himself to be. Was never allowed to be. Distantly, he thinks how strange it is, to feel so unafraid, in these budding hours of morning, all the cracks that cobble together to approximate him smashed open. “Stay.”

The smile Isagi gives him is a delicate thing.

“Okay,” he promises, like it’s the easiest ask, and pushes his forehead against Kaiser’s chest.

And he stays.

Later, after Isagi gets off the phone, blushing furiously until the tips of his ears look almost painful with how red they are, he informs Kaiser that Bachira will be arriving in Munich the next day. He thinks about just extending his hotel booking so Bachira can bunk here, because they’ve been room-sharing anyway while travelling, but Kaiser, in disbelief and delight, finds it pretty easy to persuade him to come back to his apartment instead.

As soon as his eyes land on Isagi at the airport, Bachira loudly proclaims, “I can’t believe you left me for the white boy, you cheater!”

Thankfully, it’s in Japanese, and Kaiser only understands because he has his translator buds in, and Blunt Bob is laughing too hard for it to be anything other than blatant teasing anyway. Besides, it’s hard to mind anything while Isagi is next to him, his fingers locked into Kaiser’s and trying not to melt through the ground and take him along as he goes.

It appeases, a little, that awful, selfish part of him that resents the idea of having to share Isagi’s attention in the first place. Because now, there’s also this sobering, stabilising part of him that recognises that Isagi is guilty about abandoning his friend and throwing the rest of their European holiday itinerary into the dumpster but is doing it anyway. Just for him. That his friend is okay going along with it, too.

“He knows,” Isagi’s confessed to Kaiser with his face shoved into his chest and the tips of ears so hot that Kaiser’d been unpacking the strange urge to feel that heat in his mouth . The two lay stealing minutes out of the morning before Ness would arrive to take them to the airport. “They all… I mean most of my friends all know. They were so obvious about it, Hiori especially, that I was always worried they’d piss you off.”

Isagi’s friends do piss Kaiser off. All the time. That isn’t going to change even as his general feelings towards Blunt Bob shift from baseline aggravation and hostility to neutral to maybe even positive as he dedicates the car ride to openly teasing Isagi about his crush now that he can in front of Kaiser.

But that might just be because of the scale of the revelation it is - to have this obsessive, irrational hunger of his reciprocated, let alone to the extent Blunt Bob cheerfully sings about until Isagi is too curled up in embarrassment to leave the car.

Still. They’re all loud and annoying and all over Isagi all the time with no sense of boundary or space and yet somehow Blunt Bob is bounding around in his apartment where he’s never had more than two people at a time and yelling for Isagi to come over and look at the view.

“Woah,” Isagi intones in wonder, shoulder to shoulder with Bachira as they peer out his floor to ceiling windows. “This view is amazing!”

And Kaiser bites down on his tongue to avoid saying something horrendous, as he watches Isagi explore his space, curious, taking everything in as the apartment takes him in - the idea, materialised, of him here, carving out its emptiness to make room for himself in ways he’d started long before he’d physically stepped through the door.

Bachira, to his credit, deigns to give them their space, mostly if they want to sleep in or retire early, but also steals Isagi away with constant reminders of “You are the one that interrupted my honeymoon with my Yocchan, so now you owe me!” They get their tattoos done in Munich, too - puzzle pieces, tiny ones just below the wrist, which interlock when they hold their arms side by side. Blunt Bob gets a tiny bumblebee etched into his and Isagi gets a small cartoon lobster, and Kaiser would find plenty of ways to object to all of this were it not for the fact that Isagi holds onto his hand tight throughout the process. Tucks his face into his arm at one point, during the delicate linework of his lobster.

Afterwards, he tells Kaiser, I don’t know how you got all of those, and then, with gentle, cautious fingers tracing the crown on the back of his hand, asks Do they… what do they mean?

And Kaiser had held his tongue between his teeth for a moment, contemplating - they were in his bed, one that’s never felt smaller than it does with Isagi sharing it with him, and Kaiser is already dreading the emptiness that spells for him when he eventually has to leave.

I’ll tell you someday, Kaiser ends up saying, and thinks it sounds like a promise, maybe the first, genuine one he’s made to another person, and reminds himself that it’s okay. They have time. To savour right now, and to think of for the future.

And what a surreal concept that is.

He holds on to it hard, especially as the vacation time Isagi has off runs out and they have to leave.

Holds on to it all the way, holds on to him all the way. Soaking him up as much as he can before he can go, nose behind his ear, drinking in the fragrance of his skin and his hair, and the sight of him, in clothes Isagi takes to stealing out of his closet. Kaiser only realises he’d taken some back when he starts to get selfies of Isagi in them after he’s left and he holds on to those, too, even though they feel like an affront to his sanity in ways that could make him hop on a flight to Spain.

Holds on, as he finds a plushie lobster in a duty free store at an airport on the way back from a match and buys it without a second thought. Ness waits for him with a pleasant smile at the counter and Kaiser doesn’t have to tell him anything for him to know.

He can make the connections all he wants - it’s Kaiser who had been the one Isagi’d gifted time to, saying he could explain his tattoos to him whenever he wanted and never, if he wanted. Who’d traced the lines of the new one he’d gotten himself, red still, because Yoichi Isagi has sensitive skin , and volunteered what the puzzle piece means to him - the potential for growth and connection, for constant reconfiguration. The slots along the side an idea he likes, he says, because of all the possibilities. It’s a pair with Bachira’s as a testament to their friendship, and also its own thing, because he and Bachira both are constantly evolving and reinventing themselves and forming new chemical reactions. Constancy in change, the paradox Isagi enjoys.

And the lobster?

Oh, um - I just like its form? Hehe.

The lobster plushie’s first home is Kaiser’s closet, preserved in its plastic cover, and its second home is Isagi’s bed.

Not the one in Madrid though.

Iyo claps both her hands over her mouth in surprise and open delight when Kaiser shows up at their doorstep unannounced and pulls him into a hug before he has the chance to be awkward about the surprise.

“Does Yocchan know?!” she’d asked, eyes glittering with excitement and mischief as she ushered him up the stairs to go surprise him and Kaiser’d rediscovered just how like his mother Isagi is, so openly expressive and so dizzyingly warm, as welcoming as a loving home.

Kaiser very much does surprise Isagi - he swings the door open just as Isagi comes out of the shower, with just a towel around his hips that he drops in shock seeing Kaiser there, and the first thing Kaiser manages to say, holding a lobster plushie he’d spent an entire plane ride overthinking about the best way of presenting and in the presence of a naked Yoichi Isagi in his bedroom while his mother is somewhere downstairs, is Are those figurines of me?

Ness comes by too, to visit while Kaiser and Isagi are there. He adapts to the Isagis' friendliness like he’s known them all his life and Kaiser can’t even really tell if he’s that good at blending in or that good at pretending.

It’s not pretend, he concludes, when at some point Iyo pats him on the cheek and tells him he’s a sweet boy for helping in the kitchen and Ness glows all the way out the front door as Isagi puts on his shoes to drive him back to his hotel.

That’s another unlikely thing that somehow happens. Isagi and Ness bonding. Kaiser already knows they talk behind his back - it’s not really behind his back when he’s occasionally beside Ness while it happens - but it’s still bizarre. Especially after Ness starts talking about something called Sailor Moon all the time, and the two of them plan a full day trip to Tokyo Disney without even consulting Kaiser. You Hiori comes with, and spends the whole trip taking pictures of Isagi and Kaiser whenever they’re near each other because This’ll make me famous on kaisagi twitter.

It’s okay though. Kaiser can deal with it and even, to his genuine chagrin, admit that he has fun, when Isagi quietly asks him as he leans his head into his shoulder tiredly and nibbles on the corner of a Mickey Mouse shaped castella like he would not be anywhere else in the world right now.

Neither would Kaiser.

It’s moments like these that make the long, long stretches of time apart bearable. These moments that he learns, from Isagi himself, to savour, so that they can last. So that the taste of powdered sugar or the fading scent of fabric softener or a newly opened bag of orange tea can take him back somewhere special, can help him feel stable on those days when he can’t shake off the cold no matter how much he tries and his apartment with the view Isagi likes feels too big and too high up and too empty.

At least now, he can hear Isagi’s voice almost always on demand, because Isagi is sweet and thoughtful and will pick up even if he can’t speak and will appease him with promises to call back that he always keeps and whisper an I love you right at the end just for him to hear, no matter who it is that the headlines and football commentators are insisting on pairing him off with that day.

Even when he’s verging on the worst of his spirals, that voice and those words help him pull back together - just enough, just enough to get through another day, just enough to be able to recognise the worry raw in Isagi’s voice over the phone and sober up from whatever rage-tinged sadness he’d tripped into. Just enough to grit his teeth and look into appointments with professionals, someone whose second name is client confidentiality, because he’s… happy. And it’s such a frightening and wonderful thing, and now that he has it, he’s scared to lose it. Knows that sometimes, on nights that are especially cold and quiet and a long dead voice speaks to him through the hollows that haven’t fully mended over to try to tell him that everything he’s slowing stitching himself together to be is a sham, knows then that this is not who he has to be. That he can ask for better. That he should be better, because he has a life he wants to keep and the only person who can take this away from him is himself.

It helps that there are people who believe in him, when he can’t believe in himself.

And it gets better, two steps forward and one back some days, but slowly, carefully mending. Isagi, devoted in ways that match Kaiser’s impossible greed, and Ness minutes away if he ever calls when he can’t stand the silence and just needs the stability of someone who would never let him fall beside him.

Kaiser is content.

And Kaiser is greedy.

It’s strangely freeing to lean into his contractions, especially when he knows that they will be met with acceptance. It grounds him even as his teeth catch at the thin skin where Isagi’s jaw meets his neck and he tugs, feeling the gasp Isagi lets out in his bones before grunting, “When the f*ck are you transferring to Bastard?”

Isagi, who’s been trying to twist himself free, backs off to give him a startled look. “Huh?”

“You want to have this discussion now?!” Isagi starts to say, voice lifted in outrage but shuddering out in a way that tingles at the base of Kaiser’s spine, when he seals his mouth over his bites and soothes in the way he knows makes Isagi start to melt. He’s already listing backwards, towards the wall, as he stutters out, “ Here? Like this when we - ”

“Did you know that Noa’s planning to start coaching Bastard once he retires?” Kaiser says it almost conversationally - manages to affect it as much as he can when there’s so much heat building up inside him that he could start to singe through his clothes if he doesn’t get through Isagi’s fast enough. When Isagi bats at the hand untucking his shirt from his pants, Kaiser jams it against the wall too with one of his.

“What are you -”

“Wouldn’t that be a dream come true for you? Getting coached by that old freak.” Kaiser continues. He’s thought his spiel through carefully - the hardest part had honestly been to find the right time to launch into it. With Isagi trapped against his body, stolen away from the main party with his skin flushed and ears so red Kaiser wants to touch them just to feel the heat against his fingertips the way he’s memorised and yet can’t get enough of, well - it’s not ideal. But he’s managed to get him alone, and they seem to only have these sorts of conversations while breathing fire in each other’s faces. It seems about as good a time as any.

Isagi writhes around trying to free himself, Kaiser crowded in too close to give him much room. “He can’t retire yet! I haven’t beaten him.”

Kaiser snorts. It’s so stupidly earnest and there would have been a time, there was a time, when this sort of grand ambition would only make him salivate for the pleasure of tearing it apart with his teeth and spitting it out.

Now, though -

“Well, you better get a move on,” Kaiser shifts closer, swallows the air up between them until their foreheads touch. God, that hazy look in those eyes - he knows he can make them foggier, until the black has swallowed up all the midnight blue, and he feels himself strain for it - but in a minute. In a second, this is important. “He’s been planning out his retirement with that f*cking disturbing precision of his, and if you want to be part of that, you might want to start thinking about that transfer.”

Isagi stares at him, pink mouth, dewy from where Kaiser’s had gotten to him earlier, gasping - they’re close enough that Kaiser feels their chests bumping every time Isagi’s heaves. It takes all his restraint not to dive back in and reduce Isagi’s protests about them, this, a couple of doors away from some of the most decorated players in the sport, to dust. He knows how, exactly how, and he will , but first, he just needs to incentivise Isagi properly so that he -

“Michael,” Isagi says, breathless but somehow still serious. Kaiser doesn’t think he will ever get used to hearing him say his first name - like it was meant to be sounded out by him like this, all along. In every way he ever speaks it, in amusem*nt and anger and reverence, with affection and heat and promise. Like this was the key, for the lock he’d tattooed to the back of his hand, giving the name he’d never been called by substance.

It feels realer still like this. From someone like family. Someone like home.

Kaiser’s thinking he’ll work on persuading Isagi about the key tattoo eventually, once he’s made some headway here, when Isagi’s free hand comes up to grab at the fabric at his shoulder, and fist into the lapel there to shake him, as much as he can with how little leverage he has. “You don’t need to bribe me with Master Noa. If I move to Germany, I’m moving for you . ”

And.

Oh.

Isagi realises what he’d said at the same moment that Kaiser realises what he’d said, and the instant fluster that explodes into Isagi’s face saves Kaiser from thinking too much about a similar explosion happening inside him. It rises through him, tingling and a little delirious, and he can feel it stretch against his mouth in a way that feels sharp and feral.

“Well,” he purrs, unbothered as Isagi yelps and tries to yank him off by the fabric at his shoulder when he pushes his lips into Isagi’s ear, “Since that’s setted, I guess I could take you to see Bastard’s training facilities tomorrow -”

“If, Kaiser, I said if - ”

“You’ve never been there, right,” Kaiser leaves a noisy, wet kiss against his ear, and doesn’t let up as he gets a whiff of the cologne Isagi must have dabbed on behind it - the chemical undertones of it against his tongue is a small price to pay for the bitten down groan Isagi lets out when Kaiser licks at hot skin. “They say it’s the best training facility in Europe -” Better than Re Al’s, he doesn’t say, because he doesn’t need to be any more obvious, he does have some dignity left, thank you, “You might even fix your shoddy workout regimen finally when you start training -”

“I said if! If I move -”

“You’ll move for me. I heard you sweetheart,” and Kaiser thrills to hear himself say it as much as he thrills at the shiver he can feel running through Isagi from all the places they’re pushed together, and Kaiser wants to gather him up and hold him even closer. Wants to hide him away, wants to keep this feeling of having something that is all his own to himself, where no one else can get at him.

It’s not a new feeling, no, Kaiser recognises it well - but it feels a lot less lonely than it did as a child.

Because even though Isagi makes him let go eventually, wrestles out of his hold and darts into a nearby bathroom to straighten all the parts of himself that Kaiser’s unravelled, he does it with a rose-gold glow in his skin and a strange shyness that’s rare to see in his smile as he leaves while warning Kaiser to stay put and behave.

And then,

And then he comes back for him.

Takes Kaiser’s hand, and pulls him back to the party.

He comes back.

He always comes back.

And eventually, he stays.