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Be careful who you give your midnights to.
- Rohit Kumar Singh
i.
You run into him coming in with the groceries, so you offer to help. Haiji beams at you and you shrug it off, following him into the kitchen. “What are you planning for dinner?” you ask, placing the bags down. Haiji’s already rummaging through them, pulling out leeks and carrots.
“Nabemono.” He brandishes the leek in your direction, and you take it with a sigh.
It's not the first time you're helping Haiji in the kitchen, the both of you moving with the ease of practiced familiarity. You peel and slice the vegetables, eating the carrot ends as you go. He takes the pumpkin, because you hate trying to cut pumpkin and he knows it. You rinse the mushrooms and cut them, carving pretty flower shapes the way your mother taught you to.
“You’re really good at that,” Haiji observes. You shrug, but then you’ve always been good with your hands, and it’s something Haiji has unrepentantly taken advantage of in the last few months.
“I learned from my mother when I was a kid,” you tell him, and he nods. There are certain things both of you agree not to talk about, and your parents are one of those things. “How are your finals going?” you ask, switching subjects.
Haiji grimaces, and you laugh. “C’mon Haiji, it can’t be worse than the National Bar Exam.”
“My professors seem determined to make it that way.” This is punctuated but a sharp crack as Haiji finally manages to halve the pumpkin. You pause in your own prep to lean against the counter and watch him struggle.
“Well, next year’s probably only going to be harder,” you comment cheerfully, and Haiji glares at you.
“Easy for you to say,” he grumbles, but there’s a soft fondness and pride underlying the complaint, the same kind that had filled his voice in the summer past while you swung between anxiety and brash confidence in the quiet of Chikusei-sou, worrying about the results of the bar exam.
“I resent that,” you interject, but you turn back to the vegetables, slicing up the cabbage so it’ll fit in the pot. Haiji knows how hard you’ve worked to be here, if only from all those mornings you woke up with a blanket draped around you and the sliding of the front door as Haiji heads out for his morning run. Similarly, you know he’s waiting for the rest of the rooms in Chikusei-sou to fill, some unspoken desire that depends on the rest of you. You don’t know what he’s planning, but you know enough of Haiji to be wary, even if he looks innocent.
But you don’t think it really matters anyhow, not with at least two of the rooms still empty. It’s changed since you’ve come here, and yet, nothing has as well. The floorboards still creak, Nico-chan Senpai still fills the hallway between your rooms with smoke, you’re still standing next to Haiji in the kitchen while he wrestles a pumpkin into submission and letting yourself be bullied into helping make dinner.
You don’t think there’s anywhere else you want to be.
ii.
“I went for one run, Haiji. One.”
You don't think you've ever been this angry at Haiji before, but then again, Haiji hasn't ever been this out to ruin your life before. Some part of you knows that this is something he wants, has wanted for so long, but right now you're angry at the blatant manipulation and setting up, that he expects you to give up the year you’ve worked so hard for.
You know what the Hakone Ekiden entails. It’s really not that hard to do some research on it, and the information you have is hardly encouraging. You haven’t run in years, and you’ll bet your bar exam results that Nico-chan senpai hasn’t in even longer. Haiji wanting to do this means intensive training for all of you, the kind that people do spend years doing. It’s not something to accomplish in ten months on some lark or whim.
“You can't just—” You cut yourself off with a rude gesture, lacking the words to properly express how you feel right now. But the fight leaves you as suddenly as it comes and you deflate. So you start walking instead, refusing to turn around and look at Haiji. You know he’s following you, even as you scowl and think uncharitable thoughts about him.
“Haiji, you can’t ask this of me.” It’s not fair, you think. You know you sound like a child, but you’re tired of being the adult and responsible. You have the rest of your life to do that, and maybe you’re being selfish, but you’re only asking for this year to be unconcerned and uncaring of anything that might happen. You think you deserve it, after what you’ve done to get here.
“I can.” Your jaw drops at Haiji’s audacity as you wheel around to face him, but his face stops you short. “I can ask, Yuki. But that’s all I can do.” He’s perfectly calm, perfectly serious. In all the years you’ve known Haiji, you don’t think you’ve ever seen him this serious.
“I’m just asking, Yuki. Consider it.”
You scowl at him, but he just keeps staring you down, until you turn around and start walking again. The walk back to Chikusei-sou is quiet and relatively uneventful, but he pauses as he’s locking up and you’re putting your shoes away.
“You know, I really admire how you do what you say you will. So for once, I want to try.” His smile is a little rueful, leaving you staring after him as he disappears into the kitchen.
“That’s not fair, Haiji,” you whisper. But then again, Haiji’s never played fair.
iii.
There are concessions you can make, have made over the years for Haiji. The occasional open door, buying his favourite beer, helping with dinner every now and then, the quiet moments between night and day, secrets unwillingly given after phone calls that feel like minefields. This is just another one, you suppose.
A concession of time, of effort, of energy. Someone else might say this is more than a concession, but then you’ve never been the kind to concede anything easily or lightly, nor once the concession is made, retract it.
You still don’t think it’s likely that you’ll make it to the Hakone Ekiden, but qualifying in itself would be an accomplishment already, given the shape all of you are in. Shindou and Musa are clearly more dedicated to this, whereas King and the twins have been utterly taken in by the presence of Hana. Kakeru is still stubbornly against it even if he deigns to practice with the rest of you, while Prince is on the verge of collapsing at the end of each session.
Frankly, you agree with Kakeru, that none of you are going to make it to be in any kind of shape for Hakone. Even so, you can do this for your health, or so you tell yourself. All that partying and drinking is hardly good for you, and while you’re not dedicated to training for the Hakone Ekiden, a morning run can hardly hurt you. You’ve been meaning to take up some kind of exercise again anyways, now that you have a year for you to do as you please.
But Haiji is certainly testing the limits of what you’re willing to concede, when he announces evening practices. He draws up training regimens, explains them to all of you. You look at yours and know that they’re just slightly more than you’re capable of, achievable targets if you put the energy and effort into it. You don’t doubt everyone else’s is the same.
It frustrates you, because you’ve never been good at letting things go, or not doing things you know you’re capable of. You know exactly what Haiji is doing, but you go along with it anyway. It’s always been hard to say no to Haiji, let alone when he really wants something.
At the end of one practice, he catches up to run with you. “Isn’t it great?” he asks, the look in his eyes more than a little manic, his smile almost delirious. Some part of you wants to push him away, to pretend you don’t know this madman with the crazy look in his eyes. But he only grins wider, repeating his question. “Isn’t this great?”
“Yeah, yeah it is. Are you happy?” you snap at him, and he breaks into a smile, almost as blinding as the setting sun.
You concede, but it doesn’t feel like a concession at all.
iv.
Haiji’s staring at the whiteboard when you go to get yourself a glass of water, his notebook and pencil on the table before him. His eyes flick back and forth, like the answers to improving your times will somehow appear if he stares long enough at the training menu he’s drawn up for all of you.
“Are you alright?” You cast a cursory glance over him, the way he seems to be lost as he stares at the letters and symbols on the board, as if he were rearranging them mentally, calculating the improvement all of you have yet to make against the time you have left to train.
"Yuki, do you know how hard I worked to get here?" Haiji asks. He doesn't look like the ogre that Prince names him to be. He just looks tired now, and you wonder how much the relentless optimism and cheer he puts on for all of you is costing him. And as much as all of you have been struggling this past week, you’re smart enough to know that the scar over Haiji’s knee isn’t a wound. He doesn’t talk about it, and you’ve never asked.
"I want to be there so badly," he says, like it's a confession. And you suppose it is, the same way it had been a confession when you told him you didn't want to rely on your mother or her husband that first year you struggled to balance work and studying at the same time. "I know it's unrealistic, I don't need you and Kakeru to tell me," He looks at you, a faint smile in the corner of his mouth. "But that's what dreams are, aren't they? Unrealistic. Stupid. Unachievable."
Except you know different, when everyone told you passing the National Bar Exam the first time was going to be impossible and unlikely, that you ought to stop dreaming and start being practical. Haiji’s right, after all. Dreams are unrealistic, stupid, foolish, seemingly impossible. Except they’re not impossible, they’re just bloody difficult. They’re so much blood and sweat and tears, hours upon hours of work, determination and perseverance and enough bravado to keep carrying you forward.
Haiji’s dream is just bigger than yours, and has you in it the way your dream never involved anyone but you.
You remember the first time you saw him run, really run. Run like he meant it, run like he was wanted to run, like maybe he’d found the answer that Kakeru keeps demanding of him. It was something to see, even running behind him, trying to keep up with the rest of the runners. You're not sure if you will ever find that answer he's looking for, but you know your own answer to this.
“Unrealistic doesn't mean impossible,” you offer at last. It just means a lot of hard work. You haven't been taking this as seriously as you could, but you know plenty about how much a little support goes a long way. Haiji glances up at you, and you shrug. “It just means difficult. Not impossible.”
And you can see it, that gleam in his eyes that makes you think he's crazy, but the one that says maybe, just maybe, he will pull this off somehow. That he'll manage to get all of you into shape to qualify for the preliminaries, that you'll blaze through it to make it to Hakone.
It's only maybe, but then a little faith never hurt.
v.
This morning—as on more mornings than he’s cared to admit, these past three years—you find Yuki in the kitchen, shaking out a garbage bag for the beer cans.
He doesn’t smile when you roll open the door. He doesn’t wish you a happy new year either. Neither of you have ever been the kind to stand on ceremony, but you’ve both shown up all the same, and that, as far as you’re concerned, is all the greeting you need this morning.
“Let me take that,” you say, one hand already open for the sack. He passes it to you and you move around the table together with the sort of ease that comes of practice—and certainly how the two of you have practiced this, picking up the pieces of a wild night while everyone else snores in the rooms around you.
It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last for a while yet. In a few seconds Yuki will scoff at you for getting sentimental. It’s not like any of you are dying, he might say, and it’s true. No one’s dying; it’s just you, being crazy.
That’s what he’ll say about you, what he’s always said about you: You’re crazy, Haiji. You’re—
“Still asleep?”
The last can clatters down into the bag. Yuki’s elbow knocks against yours as he passes. Having cleared the table, he’s now wiping it down, and you watch those hands—small circles, big circles, then again.
Steady hands. This is not the first time you’ve thought you’d have no qualms about placing anything you valued safely in those hands.
“I’ve always been a bit of a weird sleeper,” you concede. It’s something you could do worse than admit, especially to him.
“And how.” He laughs, but the light from the window shines into his eyes in a strange way, turns them soft. You’ve caught him looking at you like this on and off, more and more since the qualifier, holding a worry he won’t ever voice because he knows too much about you. Who you are, what kind of crazy. What you want and what you fear. How Hakone is so close you can taste the air, and yet— “That makes two of us.”
That certainly does make two of you, and if you can’t fix each other’s fears you can at least keep each other company. You twist your fingers to tie a knot in the neck of the bag at the same time that you lift your head and smile at him, and even as you do these things you can tell what he believes, and what he doesn’t.
“I’ll take this out,” you say. He follows you out the door, even if you don’t ask him to.
Outside the street is quiet, still dozing, still dreaming in the first silvery light of the new year. The wind as it rises feels new, too—new and somehow raw, and at least for this moment you and Yuki are the only living things moving in it, the sack of garbage you carry the only wedge between your hand and his.
vi.
All manner of things can go wrong on a downhill run. You can trip on the slope even on a dry day. You can snap a shoelace. You can lose control of your speed, exhaust yourself, pull a muscle, break something in your legs or hips, break yourself into pieces every which way.
You’re not going to bore Yuki with the details. If anything he’d be insulted you assumed he hadn’t already done his research. Moreover he’d bristle to hear you of all people telling him to be careful, after what you saw Shindou do today, after all the things he knows you’re not telling him about your own troublesome body and the unreasonable demands you make of it.
So instead you only tell him what you told him at the beginning, and expect that to suffice. “Only you can ride down Hakone.”
The sun is down, and you stand with Yuki on the balcony. You can hear Shindou and Kakeru murmuring to one another in the room behind you, soft and indistinct until Jouji pipes up with something that draws a laugh from Shindou, and then a cough. Coach Tazaki’s a gentle rumble, coming in to interpose. Outside, the sky has gotten so dark so fast it’s as if someone’s pulled a curtain over it, and there’s a cold snap to the air when you inhale, the suggestion of a coming storm.
Yuki shifts where he stands next to you, arms folded, making a soft impatient sound—tch! through his teeth like something has bitten him in a tender place. You’ve seen him get like this before, become this silent, intense person, all the restlessness barely held under his skin.
“Yuki.”
“Looks like snow,” he says at last.
You nod, your eyes still on the sky. “A battlefield that suits you.”
And that’s the thing: for all the things that Yuki accuses you of when he’s angry, the cajoling and the threatening and the subtle jockeying him into a position to do what you want him to do, you’ve never lied to him, and you never will. You’re only telling him what you know, having lived with him so long, and having watched him just as closely as you watch anything that catches your attention.
Yuki is the only person you’d trust to run down one of the steepest slopes in the world, because he knows what it means to throw himself headfirst at a mountain, dangers or no dangers, ready to do what needs must. Yuki does everything he says he’ll do, no matter how impossible it seems to other people. You’ve known this about him since you learned he was the sort of person to go dancing all night to blow off steam, and still wake up the next morning for a nine AM class. Yuki will wash the blankets you leave around his shoulders when he falls asleep on his books, will cut your mushrooms into flowers, will get up and leave the room when he sees your phone ring and your father’s name flash across the screen, without a care for any of the details.
That is how you know that tomorrow he will make it to Odawara where Nico will be waiting, even if he’s bleeding into his shoes when he arrives. He doesn’t even need to tell you he will.
“I hear Kakeru,” Yuki says. “You’d better get going.”
“Yes, see you,” you tell him. And you will, before too long. None of this is blind faith, because Yuki is a person you chose.
vii.
In the days after Hakone, you are never alone.
It’s doctor’s orders, in a way, delivered with equal parts fondness and frustration: You all had better take care of this crazy boy. Don’t leave him alone while he’s recovering. Now it’s like you can’t take a step without a friend appearing at your elbow, King or Prince or Nico-chan Senpai with their hands out to take your books or your crutches or your jacket as they shepherd you from class to class. Musa and Shindou have commandeered the kitchen, the twins Nira’s feeding and walking schedules. Kakeru comes to sit with you on the floor of your room every evening—to study together, to help you stretch your knee, sometimes for no purpose but the reassurance of still seeing you nearby, healing slowly around all your weaknesses.
It’s easy for you to tell which is which. Kakeru has never been hard to read; he’s too honest for that, too good to you. They all are. You know this, of course—but, typically, the knowing is one thing, and the accepting quite another.
Yuki is the only one these days who doesn’t try to take care of you. Yuki doesn’t come to see you until well into the night, after everyone else has retired to their rooms.
Tonight he’s stretched out on the tatami mats by your futon, one arm behind his head, the other at rest by his side, fingers idly tapping out the rhythm of a song you can’t hear. His skin is still flushed from the bath—still warm, you can tell just with your eyes—and you can smell the citrus-scented soap in the air when you breathe in, faintly.
Oranges, you think. Like a warm day in the summer.
This is and isn’t a habit, and this time is both like and unlike all the other times you’ve done this over the past three years, one of you stealing away to the other’s room sometime in the quiet hours between midnight and morning, quick and furtive and laughing under your breath even as you covered each other’s mouths to keep everything quiet, quiet. You remember laughing so much, in the earliest days, speaking in whispers about things that didn’t really mean anything—before the bar, before the Ekiden, before all the things each of you saw and decided to want, no matter how crazy.
“Hey.” He catches your eye sidelong and holds it. “Penny for your thoughts?”
You turn onto your side and gaze steadily back, unhesitating, but you take your time with your answer. You know Yuki will give you those few seconds of his time—will always give you what you ask for, if you but ask. As ever, you take advantage.
You can only hope that the answer, when it comes, is honest enough to be worth his while. “I think I’ve been a little selfish.”
It feels like an understatement. These are the shadows that creep up on you in the what-comes-after. You don’t tell Yuki that sometimes they speak to you in his voice. Are you happy? Are you happy now? Which is to say, was it worth it in the end, this thing you made the mistake of wanting?
“Hey, come on.” He doesn’t speak above a murmur but you catch it anyway, the note of warning in his voice ringing like a gunshot in the quiet. Warning, or challenge: Let’s not go there, Haiji. Are we really going there?
“It’s true, though, isn’t it?” you ask him—lightly, lightly. “You can say it, I don’t mind. This year was supposed to be yours.”
“Come on,” he says again. “Have you ever seen anyone make me do anything? You’re really making this about me?”
You can turn this inside out into a question he hasn’t asked, has been making it a point not to ask: This isn’t about us, is it? The truth is you are starting to wonder what he would say if you told him what’s been on your mind—it can be about us, if you want—but if the days since Hakone have taught you anything it’s that you’re still weak about so many things, so you don’t, not yet.
“You’re right,” you say. Now and again you fold, and give him what he asks for instead.
viii.
The months pass. Your leg heals a third time around, albeit crookedly, in a way that never quite lets you forget. By the time you graduate with Yuki and King, it’s spring again, and the trees that line the streets are starting to bloom.
As a reward, or perhaps a punishment, Yuki takes you dancing the night after the ceremony. In gratitude, or perhaps in retaliation, you break his glasses under a streetlamp, two corners down from Aotake.
Or maybe that’s not quite right. Maybe it’s an accident. All you know is that the two of you are walking home from the club, arm in arm, tipsy and silly as you haven’t been in ages now. It’s hard to say what happens; at some point he leans a little too close, or maybe you do. Call it an accident, call it clumsiness. Whatever it is, your foreheads knock together, and then you’ve knocked his glasses off his face, and then one of you puts a foot wrong. Whenever anyone puts a foot wrong, something breaks, inevitably.
“Shit! Haiji, you idiot, you totally shattered them!”
You bend, even if it makes your head spin, and pick up the broken frames by the one intact leg. You lift them to your face and peer at him, grinning. “I didn’t, I didn’t. Look, the lenses are still okay. I’ll fix them for you in the morning, don’t worry.”
“And what if you can’t?” Yuki’s image is a little blurred, a little warped through the glass, but you can see all the most important parts—the hair mussed and slightly sweaty, the wrinkled shirt collar, the glare. The white light overhead cuts down across the planes of his face, making shadows. He looks like something out of one of your most impossible dreams, and as soon as the thought is in your head it makes you laugh and laugh.
“Then if I can’t, I’ll go with you to the op—the opto—” Your tongue stumbles around the word, clumsy and numb as the rest of your face feels, but you don’t care. “The eye doctor. And we’ll get you new ones, get ‘em made for you right there in the glasses store. I won’t leave you until they’re done. Then you’ll be seeing like new, you’ll see.” All told it must be the best plan you’ve ever come up with. “Trust me, Yuki.”
Unfortunately, this is Yuki. Drunk or sober, he’s never thought much of your plans. “I should trust you about as far as I can throw you, by now.”
“You’re so mean.” You shove the remains of the glasses in your jacket pocket, freeing your hands. You pull one of his arms around your shoulders, a little too forcefully—the extra weight makes your body pitch slightly to one side, but you don’t stumble, and he doesn’t shove you away. “Don’t forget there’s only one pair of seeing eyes between us and we’re still not home.”
“Don’t forget whose fault that is.”
“Oh, never.”
You’ve started walking down the street again, moving out from under one circle of silvery light, shambling toward the next one where it glimmers just a few steps ahead. He’s leaning on you, head turned into the crook of your neck, trusting your one pair of seeing eyes to lead the way in the dark, and you almost stop again. It’s tempting, suddenly, to linger here—lean the weight of your two bodies against the next lamppost and not move, forever.
You love this neighborhood as much as you’ve ever loved anything, with its little shops and its streetlights and the quiet that settles over it late at night as you and Yuki walk slowly home. You wish it would stay just like this forever, but you know it won’t—but even if you already feel the thought starting to make you ache a little, maybe that’s all right too, when all is said and done.
“Haiji,” Yuki grumbles, pushing against your back. “Keep going.”
All dreams end, one way or another. But some things, impossible as they might seem—some things are still there when you wake up.
“I’ve got you,” you answer, smiling.
And you do.