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Akaashi stands outside the hospital. The white of his jacket melts into the flurry of snow, the black lines rivulets of ink. His fingers have flushed red beneath the cast. Bokuto runs down the pathway. His feet crunch in the snow. His breath flies behind him.
“Does it hurt?” he blurts.
“Not yet.”
“Are you tired?”
“Hungry.”
The heater at the fast food restaurant scorches Bokuto’s face and scrapes him raw. Akaashi sits at a booth. Bokuto pushes his last flimsy bill across the counter, wallet emptied. He brings back a small feast of burgers and fries. Akaashi reaches for a burger with his right hand. His cast bumps into the tray. He switches to his left, and bites into the lettuce. Bokuto munches on his burger in giant bites. He rips into the meat, chews, and swallows. He blinks back the dampness in his eyes.
The tip of Akaashi’s nose still flushes red. His long black scarf hangs from his neck, his white jacket zipped to the top. He blurs. Bokuto tastes salt on his mouth, snorts once, and then collapses into his folded arms. He cries in anguished chokes, hands sometimes gripping and tearing at his hair. He can only smell the fries.
“Bokuto-san.” Akaashi sounds bewildered. “Don’t cry.”
Bokuto muffles himself into his arms. He can’t see through his tears. When he tries to speak, a lump in his throat chokes him and he cries again. His cheeks are wet.
“Don’t cry.” Akaashi’s fingers stroke his hair. “I don’t know what to do when you cry.”
This is what Bokuto remembers, years later: the warm touch of Akaashi’s hand, the surprise in his voice, the way he had stood, outside the hospital, alone in the snow.
“Akaashi! I’m-I’m not drunk.” Bokuto wedges himself in the doorway of his apartment. The snowflakes dusting Akaashi’s hair begin melting.
“It’s the afternoon.”
“Which is why! I’m not! Drunk!” Bokuto darts back to his table, where he shoves the cans of beer into a trash bag. They tumble, clinking and clanging, like bells. With his foot, he swipes aside his clothes from his chair. They tangle into a nest on his floor.
“No need for formalities.” Akaashi picks a stray shirt from the back of the chair. With the cast cradled against his stomach, he uses his other hand to fold the shirt into straight lines. He neatens the fold by pinching his fingers together. Laborious and slow, he begins again on the other side.
“No, no need, no need for you to do that.” Bokuto wads up his underwear and shoves them into hiding. Akaashi gazes down at the sloppier folds of the shirt, but Bokuto cannot tell if he is frustrated, angry, or something else.
“My lease is ending.” Akaashi pinches the fold. “Though I can make other arrangements, I was wondering if you would be willing to share your apartment—”
“Yes! Are we going to live together? Yes!” Bokuto flings his arms around Akaashi’s shoulders.
“Please listen.” Akaashi sounds muffled against Bokuto’s arm. “I may not be able to pay my portion of the rent for—”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Bokuto leaps to his table. “I’ll clean up! I’ll clean up for you.” He sweeps more cans into the bag, the stragglers on his shelves.
“I’ll ask you again when you’re sober.” Akaashi’s voice from behind him sharpens like a knife. “This is an important decision.”
“I’ll say yes, a thousand times yes, I want to live with you, Akaashi!” Bokuto rubs his face. “But I didn’t want you to see me drunk, Akaashi, I wanted you to think I was cool.”
“I think you’re cool.”
Bokuto groans at the mocking. He ties off the trash bag. When he turns around, Akaashi is touching his cast like the way he used to touch his hands in thought. Bokuto stumbles to kneel beside him.
“Did the cast get wet in the snow?”
“No.”
“I’ll come with you to get your pins removed.”
“Don’t.” Above him, Akaashi’s voice has a silver glint, sharp, cutting. “You’ll be tired for practice.”
“I’ll come, I’ll come.” Bokuto snickers at the retrospective lewdness of his statement. He has found himself with his head on Akaashi’s lap, warm and comfortable. He hums while he brushes his fingers over Akaashi’s cast, the medical smell faded into something more him. Careful, he must be careful. Hard cast, soft coat fabric, then thin, so thin, lines of the wrist. Akaashi’s wrists weren’t thin, but this wrist was thin, so thin the veins protruded. Cast, coat, wrist. He likes the wrist the best, though, and dips his fingers into the depression of the skin. The heartbeat pulses fast beneath his fingers.
Akaashi’s hand sometimes swells. He says this doesn’t hurt, but his breathing eases out in pained pants and he sits near their spluttering heater. Sometimes he starts his homework, but more often he turns to a weathered storybook. The gilded gold cover glints under the cheap light bulbs. When Bokuto returns from practice, he washes his dusty hands and sits beside him.
“Old stories,” Akaashi answers. “Nothing important.” He thumbs through the pages to imprinted wood carvings. Swans and seals and foxes leap from the pages. Akaashi sometimes reads the words out loud, voice hitching and catching when the pain blazes against the hard cast. He closes his eyes. His smooth face lines with anguish.
The book lands open at a wood print of a crane. The pages run like water away from the cracked spine. Bokuto has never heard the story of the crane wife without agony in Akaashi’s voice.
“Why?” Bokuto hunches over the book. “Why does she give away so much? What has the husband done that’s so great? Why does she leave at the end?”
“Nothing is at it appears to be.” Akaashi traces the notched line of the crane with a trembling finger, mouth working through pain. “She’s not human, so she must leave when she’s discovered, that her cloth is created from blood and feathers.”
“But why?”
“I suppose nobody truly wants to be known.”
“Akaashi!” Bokuto bites down on his toothbrush while he rummages through his closet. He’s flung his towel over his neck, hair still slicked back from the shower. When he passes by the sink, he shoves the toothbrush back into the holder and yanks open the cabinet. He rattles through Akaashi’s medicine bottles and only finds a single glove.
“Akaashi, I can’t find my jacket!” He rampages through the kitchen, and finally discovers Akaashi picking through shirts.
“Which jacket?” Akaashi holds out a button-up shirt. Bokuto helps his cast through the sleeve and squeezes the buttons through the holes. Akaashi’s chest is broad and smooth. The shirt strains on the top.
“My favorite jacket! My most favorite jacket in the whole world!”
“The one with the ugly rip?”
“Yeah, but I wanted to wear it one more time.” Bokuto sticks out his tongue for the final button on the bottom. “Then we can tear it apart.”
“I thought it was your favorite.”
“I can’t afford new things, so maybe we can reuse the fabric. It’s like what they did at the hospital, the grafting. I’m smart, huh? Aren’t I smart?”
“I see.” Akaashi pulls on a coat, slow and steady. “Just pick another jacket. You’ll be late to the game.”
“How did you know I had a game?” Bokuto reels backwards, stepping onto the blanket. He’s tried to hide away his schedule in his closet. They each have their own closet, the only non-shared space in the apartment. Akaashi kept his closed and private, but now, upon reflection, Bokuto remembers leaving his closet door wide open when running out the door in the mornings. With a guilty churn of his stomach, he thinks the paper must have been obvious to Akaashi’s keen observations.
“I’ll come if I can catch the bus.”
“I’m sorry!” Bokuto wails and covers his ears, but Akaashi has already sat by the foyer. He hurries while Akaashi lines up his socks and shoes, waiting with a placid face.
“Did you not want me to come?”
“Will it hurt?” Bokuto helps him into his shoes and stays kneeling by his sneakers. Akaashi, too, had once been a setter. With his two hands, he had always brought the ball to Bokuto. Under the high and bright gym lights, Akaashi would serve the ball to the other side and bring up reddened fingers and flat palms into a high block. Bokuto knows the court seems smaller from a spectator seat, with players no bigger than a thumb. But he cannot read Akaashi’s expression, impenetrable even by the hazy light diffusing into their apartment. His cheeks are slabs of stones, his eyes marked downward with the solemnity of a forest.
“You look like you’ll cry.” Akaashi finally smiles, a bright crack in his visage. “Have you learned an ounce of modesty?”
“What do you mean by that?” Bokuto spills over Akaashi’s lap, palms of his hands pressed on either side of Akaashi.
“You used to say, ‘look at me.’” Akaashi’s smile remains calm. “When did that become ‘don’t look’?”
“Well, you know, Akaashi, you know.”
“Of course I’ll watch your match.” Akaashi slid his flexible hand over Bokuto’s shoulder. “Please remember what I once taught you and play well.”
A removable splint replaces Akaashi’s cast. While Bokuto cooks breakfast and washes last night’s dishes, Akaashi stretches his hand. His shoulders stiffen when he pulls back the fingers. The murky morning has an uneasy air, any light swathed in continents of leaden clouds. In front of the dreary landscape, Akaashi stands beside the window. Stretches, three times a day. PT appointments, three times a week.
Akaashi’s hand is small. When the bulky cast had been cut away, his hand had emerged like a wet caterpillar from a cocoon, confused and trembling. His wrist has starved into a lean boniness. His fingers resemble sticks wrapped in skin. The surgical scar has not yet faded. When the doctor had asked him to extend his finger, Akaashi’s hand twitched and fell flat. Bokuto knocked over a muscular mannequin at the corner of the doctor’s office and asked what that meant, but Akaashi said it was expected.
The shape is different. Parts protrude, the knuckle has become lumpy. Bokuto cannot identify the precise divergence, but Akaashi’s hand falls limper when he rests against a table. His fingers have become affixed in different curls. Akaashi sometimes tucks his splinted hand beneath his long sleeve. He does this casually, still focused on spooning his dinner into his mouth. Bokuto digs his own spoon into his rice.
“Do you not want me to look, Akaashi?”
“‘Don’t look,’” Akaashi quotes. “’While I weave, please don’t ever look behind the door.’” Sometimes he hides his hand, and other times he folds back his sleeve. Bokuto touches the fiberglass and the elastic of the splint. Akaashi watches. His face is unperturbed.
Bokuto grabs handfuls of pamphlets from the doctor. Outpatient care, healthy eating, help lines. Over a pamphlet for postnatal depression, Bokuto ogles at Akaashi for a week until Akaashi sweeps the lot of pamphlets into the trash. Bokuto fishes back out the pamphlet about expected hospital costs, but he supposes the other ones have finally found a better home than loitering on the shabby dining table.
In the morning, Akaashi stretches his shoulder, too. By the end of his routine, the sunlight would have finally begun to stream over the apartment buildings, slicing over the rooftops. Akaashi holds out the entirety of his limp arm like a heavy wing. The light catches in the webs of his hand. His fingers are feathers, raised for the eternity of a second before falling back into their crooked, natural place.
The crane’s return of a favor:
Once, on a snowy day, a man rescued a crane from a hunter’s trap. That night, a beautiful woman appeared on his doorstep. They married the next day. They lived happily in each other’s company, but their household was poor and lean on food.
One day, the woman said, If you would bring me a loom, I will weave fabrics to sell at the market. The man brought her a loom, which she hid behind a closed door.
Don’t look, she said. While I weave, please don’t ever look behind the door.
Three nights later, she brought him a roll of the most beautiful fabric he had ever seen.
Bokuto washes Akaashi’s hair. He sometimes sings while he rubs the shampoo into the strands, humming something like ‘I get to wash Akaashi’s hair,’ which Akaashi later rewards him by squirting the bath water into his face. But after a long day of practice, Bokuto enjoys sitting in the cramped bathroom on the plastic stools. The bumps of Akaashi’s spines protrude from his back when he leans over. Bokuto presses his knees against Akaashi’s thighs and delivers dollops of shampoo into his hair.
When he had first come home with the cast, Akaashi had brought up having difficulty washing his hair. He had spoken in a soft, halting tone, though Bokuto didn’t know how Akaashi’s sentence would have ended. In the following second, Bokuto had swept his napkin and plate off the table in his haste to tell him that he could help, he really could, he had qualifications, he’d washed his own hair before, let him do it, please please please. Akaashi had looked surprised, but nodded in a small twitch. Bokuto snickered in victory the entire time in the bathroom, though his smirk had grown subdued when the suds slipped into Akaashi’s eyes.
Bokuto had grown better at washing his hair. Akaashi still closes his eyes while Bokuto parts his hair. His strands curl after the rinse. He has fine hairs at the nape of his neck. Bokuto scrubs the last of the shampoo from the scalp, his hands buried deep into Akaashi’s heavy wet hair. He touches his neck, his ears, his forehead, and the feel of Akaashi’s bare back against his chest excites him too much. He uneasily rocks back on the stool and covers his lap with a thicker towel.
“Sorry,” he mumbles when Akaashi turns at the loss of heat. “Sorry, I was just thinking about—about other stuff, like pomegranates, and stuff.”
“I can think of no fruit more sexually charged.” Akaashi runs his hand up Bokuto’s thigh and slips beneath the damp towel. Akaashi’s hand feels good, wrapped wet around his erection. Akaashi always did have dexterous fingers, which drag hot beneath the sensitive underside and rub against the head. His eyes glint with interest. Bokuto had not invited guests over after Akaashi began living with him, so the heat inside him rushes downward with alarming speed, throbbing and desperate. But Akaashi’s hand has little grip. When Bokuto brings down his own hand, Akaashi’s shoulders tighten.
“Oh.” Bokuto withdraws. “Sorry.”
“Sit on the bathtub.”
“Akaashi, you don’t have to.” He clutches onto Akaashi’s shoulders. “It’s hard to get me off, just ask anyone, I’m a real plug, knotted hose, stuff like that, also, don’t push yourself, I think it said that in the pamphlet.”
“Sit.”
After a while, Akaashi’s mouth and hand finally bring him over the edge. Akaashi wipes the come from his face. Bokuto breathes through his mouth and curls his toes against his faded tiled floor.
“Did that feel good?” Akaashi has no characteristic smirk, but he searches Bokuto’s face with a placid face that nevertheless radiates a stubborn triumph.
“Really good. Really really good, but so does this.” Bokuto kneels down and presses his hand under Akaashi’s sharp chin. He envelops his mouth into a kiss. When Akaashi kisses back, he has a fierceness to his touch.
The bath salts turn the water into a muddy, milky white. Akaashi hangs his hand outside the rim. Bokuto massages his shoulder, the memory of his earlier practice and gym session haunting his muscles. He drifts in and out of sleep, awakened only by Akaashi’s cold foot jammed into his shin.
“Akaashi.” He pushes back his hair. “Will it be all right?”
“It’s promising.” Akaashi sits with his shoulders and knees emerged from the water. “The scar tissue was worse than expected, but I can still regain mobility. It won’t be the same. But perhaps it will be enough.”
“Will you be okay?” Bokuto studies him. Akaashi blinks. The steam rises in swollen heaves. Bokuto pulls closer to Akaashi, kissing his shoulder and running his hands down his sides. His skin is wet and warm. The water splashes over the sides.
Akaashi murmurs, “The pain medication, I can’t,” and Bokuto says, “I know, I know, but can I still touch you,” and Akaashi folds one arm over Bokuto’s shoulders at a sharp angle.
“Kuroo! Hey, it’s me, your best friend, Bokuto!” Bokuto waits for his spotter outside the gym, wedging himself against a tree. “You’re free this weekend, right? I heard from Kenma.”
“When have you been my best friend?” The voice over the phone chuckles. In the background, Bokuto can hear the sizzling of a pan. “But yeah, I’m free. What’s up?”
“Wanna come play with me and Akaashi? Let’s go to the park!”
“Sure, why not.”
“Okay! Oh, but I have something to do, so it’ll just be you and Akaashi.”
“I told you before that you gotta wait longer to pull that excuse. But, yeah, sure. I’ll hang out with Akaashi. You worried about him or something?”
“He’s been studying really hard for his tests, he needs a break. I’ve never studied that long!”
“Yeah, I’m not surprised.” More sizzling, the sound of a pan lifting from a stove. “Hey, while you’re on the line. You coming to the training camp? I got an invite, I figured even an annoying owl like you would get an invite. Old AVC Champs are going to be there, too. Sounds interesting.”
“I wanna go! But I can’t afford it.” Bokuto rubs his forehead. “I was gonna tell them that, but I can’t find their letter anymore. I’m losing everything! Yesterday, I had a yam in my hand, and the next second, it was gone.”
“You probably ate it.” Kuroo’s voice lowered into something full and sympathetic. “And you have a lot on your mind. Forgetting one or two things isn’t that bad.”
“I have a lot on my mind?”
“I’m just guessing. But, hey, if you need a little money…”
“It’s okay. The V.League doesn’t pay that bad, it’s just a little tight. And besides, I’m already leaving Akaashi all the time for the games and stuff. He can’t move around that much because the best bone doctor’s in Tokyo. Maybe I should look into other jobs, local jobs.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, it’s just looking.” Bokuto watches a stream of people leave the gym, other league players with large bags and sipping from brand water bottles. “Isn’t it great? It’s something I really want to do.”
“If it’s good for you, then I’m happy for you.” Scraping, a spatula against a pan. Bokuto can imagine Kuroo standing at the kitchen counter, wearing his usual thin top and red shorts, phone wedged between shoulder and cheek. A lanky figure, slouching with a quiet ripple of tension. He talked like he kissed, mellow and deep, though that was a long time ago. His intellect would be good company for Akaashi.
“I think I see my spotter.” Bokuto rises from the bench. “I’m looking forward to not seeing you this weekend!”
“Same here, best buddy.” A clink of spoon against plate, comforting in its distance.
The man sold the bolt of fabric for a handsome parcel of gold. He asked his wife for more and more fabric and grew wealthy from the market. However, with every fabric, the woman grew sicker and sicker.
One day, unable to bear his curiosity, the man looked into the room. There, to his shock, he saw a crane tearing out her feathers to weave into the beautiful cloth. Her wing had been torn to tatters, her beak wet with blood. At the sight, the man fainted.
“… and here comes Bokuto Koutarou! His spikes are in top form today, that’s the fourth time this game.” “An admirable effort there by the two man block, but you’ll need to have three blockers against that kind of form.” “Absolutely, you’re absolutely right. The other team will need all their players to try and stop that kind of power…”
“Why are you watching that?” Bokuto flings down his gym bag and grabs the remote. The television powers the only light in the room, pulsating rays of gleaming courts and wide nets. Akaashi sits with his homework in his lap. His dominant hand cannot grip the pen, which rests on his limp fingers. Akaashi has admitted the pain overwhelms him when he tries to grasp anything firmly in his hand.
“It’s your game.” Still, Akaashi’s hand strains to grab the pen. Akaashi fixes his jaw into a deep grit, and takes the pen with his other hand.
“I don’t want you to watch it.”
“‘Don’t look.’” Akaashi writes at a sluggish pace, lettering a frightened shiver. “‘Please don’t ever look.’”
“Stop quoting that. I don’t like that story. That story makes me scared.”
“Scared?”
“That you’ll leave me.” Bokuto folds in front of Akaashi. He has turned on the apartment lights, and can see new bandages on Akaashi’s fingers. They wrap around the smooth parts of his fingers, like he once did with athletic tape. Both hands have been wrapped, and Bokuto touches his wrist like a safety.
“I have nowhere to go.” Akaashi holds out his hand, allowing Bokuto to stroke the veins of his wrist. “You buy the groceries, do the laundry. I stay without paying rent and you spend every spare minute with me.”
“Are you saying I bug you? I can be less that, Akaashi. I promise.”
“Bokuto-san.” Akaashi strokes his cheek with the back of his hand. “I’m saying, between the two of us, I have never thought of myself as the crane.”
“You won’t leave me?”
“I won’t be the one leaving.” Akaashi’s face lifts into a small smile. “Are you frightened of such a small tale?”
“Don’t laugh, Akaashi!” Bokuto buries himself into Akaashi’s shoulder. Akaashi strokes his back, distant through the layers of jackets.
They somehow move to the bed, where Akaashi can prop up his hand. Bokuto likes to kiss down Akaashi’s chest, pushing away his sweatshirt. Akaashi has bought a box of condoms, and guides him inside with a neat and powerless flick of his wrist. He’s thinner, cleaner, the smell of a fresh shower wafting from him. His muscles have thinned into a wary leanness. He sweats after a minute and tires after five, though he rolls down his hips in stubborn effort. Akaashi has weaned off the severe pain medication, so Bokuto tries to move with a cautious force. When Akaashi finishes, he falls back to the pillow and his eyes close with a soft vulnerability that Bokuto had never seen.
Akaashi says he will begin looking for a job. Bandages still wrap around his hands. Akaashi sprouts a harsh bruise on his thigh. A hard bump, he explains, at a restaurant where he was applying. Must be the new pain medicine, he says. The bruise swims with reds and greens. Akaashi takes to wearing longer track pants, and only pulls them down when they kiss in the dark.
Akaashi eats less, vomits more. Bokuto catches him resting on the table, forehead plastered against his hand. Akaashi refuses to return to the doctor to request new medication, even when Bokuto resorts to pleading and begging.
The winter rushes into town again. Bokuto pastes mistletoe pictures across the ceiling and kisses Akaashi under each pixilated printing. Akaashi, though wary against the tape on the plaster, accepts the kisses with a slight curve of his mouth.
The season brings his volleyball team to a series of away practice matches. He crams himself into the hotel bathroom to call Akaashi during lunch breaks, shoving his pithy sandwich into his mouth while insisting Akaashi dresses warmly for bed. Before bed, he crawls out the balcony to call Kuroo.
“You’re in town, right? Go visit Akaashi! And me, except I won’t be there.”
“I’ll try, but he seems to be busy lately. No time for his old friend, Kuroo. You worried about him still?”
“It’s not worried, it’s just. Do you think the nose of a train knows it’s a nose?”
“Depends. Are we talking about the Shinkansen?”
“Yeah. The Shinkansen. Except not really, because we’re talking about Akaashi. He’s a good guy, Kuroo. He’s the best kind of guy. He’s my kind of guy.”
“So we’re talking about the JR Group.”
“Right, yeah. Except nah. Akaashi’s a guy who takes care of other people. Looks out for them. And people like that, sometimes, they’re not so great at taking care of themselves.”
“I’ll be more persistent in my requests to him.” Kuroo’s voice washes out slow and easy.
“Yeah. Yeah, do that. He might be able to handle everything on his own, but he shouldn’t have to do that. He should know that. There are lots that he should know.” Bokuto folds his knees underneath his chin. Behind him, three of his teammates snore and knock against each other’s legs, blankets wrapped around their knees. Outside, Bokuto shivers on the cool metal. Quiet and alone, he stares at the moon above.
He arrives back at his apartment earlier than scheduled, haste driving him to dart up the stairs and throw open the door.
“Akaashi! I’m home early! Congratulate me!” He throws his bag onto their mangled chair, rolls his suitcase against the chipped table. The soft rush of the shower runs in their bathroom, though this does not surprise him. Akaashi has been taking repeated baths lately, perhaps relishing in his independence. Bokuto turns to their bedroom.
Akaashi’s closet has been left open. They each have their own closet, the only non-shared space in the apartment. Akaashi has lined up his shirts in straight rows on the hangers. On the bottom of his closet, he has an open metal box full of cash.
The wads of bills have been tagged with rubber bands. A spreadsheet has been taped to the top of the box. Training camp, one column reads. A folded letter has also been affixed to the handle, which Bokuto unfolds. Acknowledgment that one Bokuto Koutarou had responded, via letter, in acceptance to attend the camp. Rent for another column, groceries, caretaking. The numbers have been inflated to near bursting, but a small green checkmark has still been jotted beside the training camp label.
A manila folder has been filled with newspaper clippings and print-outs of online articles. Only the predictions have been high-lighted. Bokuto Koutarou has a promising future, and the coaches hope to continue traveling abroad for game experience. Bokuto Koutarou has a practical guarantee to continue his overseas training, which he had halted abruptly in the last year. Bokuto Koutarou has been rumored to have been invited to an elite pro team, located far from his hometown of Tokyo. Bokuto reads until his fingers have turned dusty from clenching tight against the newspaper dust.
The last, Bokuto finds strange. His favorite jacket has been folded into the corner of the closet. When he holds the jacket to the light, he spots the clumsy stitching across the rip. The shades of the thread vary, sometimes even stitch to stitch. The top has wide, yet tight pulls. The stitching grows jagged and loose, hurt and fumbling. A few blotches around the rip have been cleaned, like someone with a painful hand had tried, night after night, to sew together an incomprehensible wound, though his hand had not yet mended, though his entire body must have racked with pain, though the small needle must have slipped from his fingers and pierced through his skin and tore out something beautiful inside him.
When the man awoke, the crane had flown away, never to appear by his side again. She left behind the most beautiful bolt of fabric, and a note pinned to the top. Only one sentence had been written on the lonely paper:
Thank you for your favor on that snowy day.