blake

In the warm summer night, heat clinging stubbornly to their bodies, they found themselves lying down in the grass, just beside the familiar steps they spent countless hours on, talking about nothing and everything, where their fingers had first tangled shyly together, where confessions had spilled from dry lips, where they’d shared their first kiss and countless others. A place of many beginnings.

The stars were bright, their shoulders pressed against one another. They laughed and laughed until the air in their lungs ran out.

But something felt off. Now, it felt like something was ending.

The laughter died down, their smiles disappeared. Kazuya’s hand that was previously in between them was now sat on his own chest. And he took a deep breath.

“I’m going pro,” Kazuya started, voice quiet yet certain. “After high school.”

He didn’t look at Sawamura right away, didn’t dare to. He simply stared up at the night sky, filled with stars, somehow hoping their future might be foretold in them.

There was a beat of silence, then two, until Sawamura hummed, a soft little sound that was almost too quiet for Sawamura, but still broke through the stillness. “You’ll do great,” he said, and when Kazuya finally glanced over, he found familiar golden eyes to be already on him, his gaze always oh so steady and warm. “Wherever you go.”

And Kazuya let the words sink in for a moment, the corners of his mouth tugging up slightly. “Hmm. I know," Kazuya said, with all the smugness in the world, though, there was a warmth hidden beneath it.

An indignant noise came from Sawamura, and with it came the slight pain of a playful smack to Kazuya’s shoulder, sharp enough to jolt him, but not enough to hurt, simply Sawamura’s way of keeping him grounded, the way he’d always done, the way he knew he would always do. “Don’t get too big for your boots!”

“I’m merely telling the truth,” Kazuya quipped, but the smirk that flickered across his lips didn’t quite reach his eyes, this time. He’d had a lot of time to think — too much, maybe — since their last game at Koshien. The bus ride back from Osaka had been a long one, and while the sound of the engine and the soft snoring of his teammates could have lulled him to sleep, Kazuya hadn’t closed his eyes once.

He’d spent the better part of the trip staring out the window, watching the landscape blur into nothingness, ruminating about all the games they’d played, all the breakfast and dinners they’d shared, all the warm-ups, all the scoldings, all the highs and all the downs, all the blood sweat and tears, the silence from the crowd that came with an injury, and the loudness that came from the pitcher he could call his.

And it had taken him too long to realize that he belonged there. That maybe, just maybe, letting people in wasn’t as terrifying as he’d always thought, that friendship didn’t have to be something fleeting, temporary, something he didn’t dare grow attached too, as it, too, could disappear.

But now that he had it all in the palm of his hands, this life, these friends, this boy beside him, it felt like it was already slipping through his fingers, grain by grain like sand in a hourglass no matter how tightly he held onto them — all of it already over.

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m not dreaming too big.” Kazuya whispered, loud into the dark of the night, looking up at the starry sky. His hand moved restlessly against the grass between them, fingers catching onto strands, plucking some of them.

“This is the most stable I’ve ever been,” he continued, and he could feel Sawamura’s lion gaze on him, those big round eyes of his meticulously tearing apart every tick of Kazuya’s expression, cataloguing the smallest twitch of his mouth, the tightening of his jaw, the subtle furrow in his brows into the library of his mind.

“A boyfriend, and a space that welcomes me and my bad personality.” There was a chuckle beside him, but Sawamura remained quiet still. “Pro teams lining up to sign me.”

And his voice cracked just slightly, almost imperceptibly. But he knew that Sawamura surely knew better. “Took me too long to realize I belonged here,” he admitted, and somehow, it felt like releasing a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, all these months, all these years. “That making friends wasn’t such a bad thing, that I could let people in, and they’d actually stay.”

Kazuya felt the whisper of a finger against his hand, flittering touches against his skin, warm and reassuring in the dark of the night. It explored, took in the minutiae of his hand, every bump and every callus.

“And now that I have it all,” Kazuya continued still, eyes fixed on the sky like it might give him an answer, “it feels like it’s already over.”

He wasn’t sure how, or why, the words kept coming. Maybe it was the dark, the silence, all of it less daunting, somehow. Because Kazuya could talk for hours about baseball, about the kind of meal he’d learned to cook in the so few hours down time they allowed themselves to have, about Sawamura and his pitching prowess and how it made his heart lurch in a hundred different ways.

But this, his feelings, that was different. He didn’t dare let them out, they sat, heavy, like rocks that weighed a ton, in his chest. They were too loud, too fragile, still belonged to the same eight year old boy that had to learn to fend for himself.

And yet, here he was, saying too much, still so afraid, yet grounded by the warmth of the pitcher beside him, by the boy that had turned his world upside down with just one pitch. “I never really had something I could call home. Not really,” he admitted, and the featherlight touches between them turned to a soft cradle.  “But when’ I’m with you… well it feels like maybe I do.”

The hand held onto his tighter.

“Even if we end up hundreds of kilometres apart, even if we’re on different teams, in different leagues—“ Kazuya swallowed, breath hitching slightly, already getting too far ahead of himself. “if I’ve got you that’s enough. That’s home. Home will be a text or phone call away."

Sawamura didn’t say anything right away. He simply scooted closer, until their knees knocked together, until their shoulders were pressed against one another. And then, in the silence of the night, he heard a small smile stretching across Sawamura’s face.

“We’re partners, after all.” Sawamura said, like it was a known fact.

A gentle breeze rustled through their hair, and for a while, neither of them spoke, soft lull in their conversation filled with the distant hum of cicadas and the quiet understanding of it all.

Without thinking much about it, and perhaps to seek even more of that heat he loved so much, he shifted closer, head turning until it found its place against Sawamura’s chest, rising and falling steadily beneath his ear, the quick beat of his heart grounding him in the moment.

He breathed in deep, the scent of grass and rawhide filling his nostrils, along with the familiar scent of the body wash they all shared, that was yet so characteristically Sawamura.

And under him, he felt the soft vibration of Sawamura’s voice. “I think I’ll go to university,” Sawamura said, quietly, as to not shatter the moment. “Keep pitching, maybe figure myself out a little more.”

They hadn’t talked much about what was next, about what the future could hold, too focused on living in the present, on savouring each and every last game they had together, every after practice stats-study session, every second spent in an embrace and every meeting of lips.

Kazuya let his eyes close, let the calming constant of Sawamura’s heart sync with his own. “Yeah?” Kazuya murmured, the word slurred slightly by the way his cheek was squished against Sawamura’s chest.

He felt, more than heard, the soft hum Sawamura gave in response, a low vibrato sound that resonated through his ribcage, and down to Kazuya’s core.

Another beat passed, the city slowly quieting, the distant hum of traffic melting into the background like white noise, carried away by the whisper of the wind.

Then, Kazuya tilted his head just enough to glance up, lazy smirk already plastered on his face. “Didn’t think you could stay quiet for this long.”

A small pause, and a huff above him. “It’s—!” Sawamura started, and Kazuya could feel Sawamura’s body warming up with embarrassment under him. “I knew this was important to you! You never talk this much. Unless…unless it’s about baseball.”

“Touché.”

“But!” Sawamura continued before he rolled them over in one swift, clumsy motion, Kazuya now flat on his back, with a view full of stars, and of Sawamura, hovering just centimeters above him. Their legs tangled together, the weight of Sawamura’s body above him comforting, grounding, just on this side of perfect.

“I’m happy you trusted me with all this,” Sawamura said, mouths so close their lips brushed together in speech.

And Kazuya didn’t answer right away, simply tilted his chin, just barely, enough so that their lips would press together fully this time, gentle and slow, but mostly familiar, wishes on both their tongues.