#kidoxfudo

The sun was lighting mercilessly on the small Toon temple. Fortunately for them, the leafy treetops and the wild-growing plants offered in their shadows a refuge from the inclement scorching heat.

They could hear the cicadas singing, some birds chirped melodiously hidden among nature. 

The brunette boy stopped in the middle of the stairs that led up to the temple of his grandmother's hometown, where he had gone to spend the summer holidays inviting his best friend who agreed immediately.

He had already finished his ice cream, stood next to him and looked at him with uncovered red eyes, eyes that made the song of the cicadas and the heat of the sun seem distant pieces of a poorly painted painting.

Just him and his eyes, which pierced his heart with the aim of the best archer in the world. He held his breath for a moment to let it out in a little gasp. 

"If you are tired we can take a break."

The brunette boy sighed, it wasn't the climb that took his breath away, though he dropped onto the cold stone stairs as he finished his strawberry and chocolate ice cream. Squinting towards the lonely path that descended until it was lost among the trees.

He was standing beside him, staring up into the vibrant blue sky, shading himself with one hand, the other falling along his body, relaxed.

The brunette boy's sea green eyes stared at that hand, and with a heartbeat of anticipation he raised his own in a calculated act of madness, holding it nervously. Feeling his skin on his.

His red eyes widened in surprise, then a soft smile appeared on his lips.

What a summer. -------------------- KdFd Week 2020 by @miyabinopenguin

New Chance

-Don’t leave me!

Those words echoed in the crushing silence of the night like a gunshot. A frightened boy sat up suddenly in his bed, his chest ached and he sweated despite a cold breeze coming through the open window making the curtains move. It was his own scream that had woken him up.

He put his hand to his face and discovered that there was a tear in his eyes, wiped it with fury and remained stiff.

His dark brown hair fell on his forehead and his eyes narrowed in a grimace of agony. It had been a while since he had dreamed of him.

His heart took a lot to stop hurting in that rapid throbbing, when he calmed down a little he lay down again, although he could not fall asleep until much later.

When the young man woke up he still felt a strong pain in his chest, the sun was entering the room with wooden floor lighting the dust suspended in the air with some magic. The white and worn over time curtains continued to move at the mercy of the sea breeze.

He got up slowly, trying not to remember the dream, from the window it could be heard the lullaby of the sea and the screams of the seagulls. 

He dressed in a sports outfit: white cotton T-shirt, sweatpants and running shoes. He put on his headphone and left his room, he went down the stairs that creaked at every step and went to the kitchen where the smell of toast and orange juice came from.

"Good morning, Akio” an adult woman smiled, turning with a tray. “I was going to go upstairs with your breakfast.”

The young man shrugged, took the tray and sat down on a wooden table that had lived a long time, for breakfast.

The woman sighed and sat next to him, looking out the window at a blue sky that reflected in her eyes. 

Eyes like the sea, hers were a calm sea and his, a stormy sea.

“Soon you’ll start college again, are you happy to go back to classes, Akio?

He looked up from his breakfast and again just shrugged. 

“Surely you’ll make friends this year.”

The young brunette did not bother to answer that. If he had not made friends in the previous two years he doubted that year was going to be different, but he just didn't have them in class, on the football team it was different.

After breakfast he got up, washed what he had used, kissed his mother's forehead and left without saying anything.

She was left with a sigh and a haze of sadness, watching her son go down to the beach and run away, she knew that it would take him even longer to return from his morning training.

....

The suitcase as black as the thoughts that overwhelmed both of their minds was open in the middle of the room, half done. 

“Do you want me to help you, Akio?”

He shook his head, his mother kept coming in to see if he needed help and that took away the little mood he had to finish packing. The woman had interrupted him again when he observed a peculiar object with which he was ashamed to be found.

“What do you know about him ... about them?”

The boy looked down, forcing himself to show no weakness and simply said nothing. The woman said nothing either, everytime she asked about her son's Japanese friends, she didn't find an answer, like so many things. Since they had left the country her son had barely spoken.

The woman could remember perfectly the times she had heard her son speak more than three words since they had arrived in that Mediterranean country six years ago, that the University where he was studying was in the capital when they lived on the outskirts of a city by the sea didn't help their communication either.

She looked at him sadly dotted with regrets and left the young man's room. That place could have healed her wounds, that place could have been a new opportunity for her, that place could have been the beginning of a life together with a new love full of pink; but there was a dark spot in the bottom of his son's heart she felt guilty about. 

Once again she had proved not to be a good mother by not realizing that the bonds that linked her son with her Inazuma companions were as important as her relationship with her current husband.

Sometimes she tried to console herself thinking that Akio never said anything about not wanting to leave Japan; and when that thought reached her, she only felt worse, how could she blame a teenager who had difficulty expressing his emotions that she didn't know him enough because of her own bad decisions? How could she let the weight fall on him when she hadn't been able to get him out of the abyss he had fallen to before playing football and again she couldn't do anything for him? As she descended the stairs to prepare dinner for the family a tear of rage and frustration slipped down her cheek.

He put the object in his suitcase in his suitcase, after six years he still couldn't look at it without being tormented by a surge of intense emotions that shook him like a hurricane; but he could not separate from it yet knowing that that time would not return, even knowing that maintaining it did not allow him to close that chapter of his life, even knowing that he could only get harder.

But how could he do it? That object, that object reminded him that he could not fall back into darkness. That object reminded him that he had to get ahead and be a person that someday someone, perhaps himself, could be proud of.

He leaned back on the open window frame, watching the sun set by the sea, with a delicate thread of pearly thought that simply begged the sky that wherever he was, he would be fine.

........

The rattle of the train had a sedative effect on him, his elbow was leaning against the window, his head resting on his hand and his legs stretched out on the other seat where fortunately no one had appeared. He preferred it that way, he preferred to be alone while watching the landscape change leaving the coast behind, leaving his family behind, leaving the summer behind.

He arrived at the capital late at night and yawned when he left the station, stretching without worrying that he might seem uneducated. He started dragging the suitcase to the exit where he would take a taxi to reach the University Residence where he lived during the school year. The night air of late summer was cold, but instead of bothering him he managed to at least relax the grimace on his face, a frayed memory of years ago had passed through his mind like a cottony cloud through a spring sky. 

The lights of the residence welcomed him from the beginning of the street, he got out of the vehicle tiredly from the long journey from his house and directed his eyes towards the end of the road. He felt at the same time how his heart was comforting and writhing. That bittersweet feeling of familiarity.

He entered the building and the first thing he saw was several young people talking animatedly, with their large suitcases next to them. Yes, the meetings were exciting, but he would not meet who he longed for.

“Akio!”

“Hey!”

“Akio!”

Several voices called him when those boys saw him enter through the glass doors. He shook his head and approached them.

“How was your summer, Akio?”

The boy shrugged and the others laughed, as they continued talking including the newcomer in their conversation, although he barely intervened more than making a gesture.

After a long time they heard an adult voice hurry them to go to dinner, and all the boys ran to their respective rooms to leave their bags before going to the dining room and get together again.

The brunette’s eyes traveled with reassuring monotony the food options presented to them, while his noisiest friends kept talking and laughing for anything.

They were a not very large group, five boys. All of them from the university soccer team, although he knew them before, he knew them from the same time he was trying to leave behind.

But it was difficult, especially when one of them continually revived his past with his mere presence. A bistre-colored boy combed in dreadlocks that fell on his shoulders and gray eyes, a boy who once tried to be a copy of him.

He snorted as he moved the food from side to side noticing that he was really inappetent, it was a problem that had haunted him for a few years. He forced himself to eat, mentally telling himself the reasons why he could not refuse to do so.

.......

That night he could barely sleep, every time his unconscious took over in his mind it presented the image of that boy, that red-eyed boy who grabbed his hand in a desperate attempt to hold him. Why did he have to dream that again and again when in reality that had never happened? Why did he still feel so betrayed because they had let him go without doing anything? Why hadn't he been able to verbalize how much he cared before he disappeared from his life? Why couldn't he close that chapter of his story?

He covered his eyes with his forearm suppressing the tears that flowed from them, while the memory of his farewell shook him like a small boat in the middle of a storm. That day in his sea-colored eyes was hidden the plea that was never made, a plea that perhaps they never managed to decipher. Although when he grew up, he faced the reality that they could never do anything. They were only 15 years old then. 

He took off the blue rubber glasses he always wore, always except on rare and intimate occasions that they shared throughout that year together. The only and last year. The brunette sometimes wondered how it was possible that a person who was so short in his life would have had such a strong impact. He himself responded to tell himself that what they lived together was very intense from the beginning. 

They started hating each other, though perhaps it was more accurate to say that the red eyed boy was the one who hated him, the sea eyed boy had never hated him, never. Not even under the effects of that stone that strengthened the darkness in him, despite not remembering with great accuracy those moments; Or rather, not wanting to remember. He had done a lot of harm to innocent people and still did not forgive him completely, no matter how much his most rational side told him again and again that he was the first to be manipulated and hurt. But even then, all he experienced was a fatal attraction to the boy, a feeling of wanting to show himself better, that he looked at him, that he saw him, that he recognized his place in the World. 

How stupid of him.

Then they met in the nomination for the national team, after that time the boy kept hating him, and he, even without the stone that altered his behavior, felt that fatality. They went from hatred to distrust, to cooperation in the game, to personal confidence, to friendship. And then the brunette took the last step, discovering that at some point during that long process he had fallen in love.

He kept that feeling to himself, a bomb in his heart that he had, without him knowing, the countdown activated. It exploded that same day that her mother gave him the news that they were going to live in Italy, since she was going to marry an Italian man she had met years before and with whom she had been dating without the brunette knowing until shortly before that announcement. 

The rain fell on him while he wanted to drown when that boy found him. He noticed that an umbrella protected him from the inclement rattling of the drops and raised his eyes as wet as the ground around him. He lowered his glasses and opened his mouth to ask, but he was speechless when he hugged him crying loudly, desperate. The same despair that led him to put his lips together, the same despair that made him run after putting his lips together, the same despair that consumed his soul from that moment. 

The other boy never said anything about that kiss, said nothing when he followed him to his house holding him by the hand just in time and preventing him from being hit by a car without ever knowing if it would have been an accident or not, he said nothing when all the friends from the football gave him a farewell party, said nothing when he went to say goodbye to the airport with tears in his eyes with the other three boys closest to him. He said nothing, nor would he, since those two boys did not cross their paths again. 

The brunette received many goodbye gifts; but none as shocking as those glasses of dark googles at the airport, like a forget-me-not flower, like a petition that was still bleeding, like a painful memory of what it could have been but never was.

Sometimes the brunette regretted having lost touch with the Japanese boys, should he have resisted the fate that separated them? Should he have sent that letter he wrote so many times but never sealed? Should he have made an account on a social network and looked for someone he knew?

And then he wondered, for what? What would have helped to see how they continued their lives without him? What would have helped to see him grow and become a young adult? What would have helped him to cry bitterly to see that he was no longer part of them? Of him.

The presentation of the course was the next day, and that boy with wild brown hair and eyes like the sea came with the relief of knowing that he was returning to a routine that removed the most turbulent thoughts from his mind.

Although it was not until a week afterwards he began the activity he liked most, the activity that somehow embraced his suffered being with invisible hands of calm. 

.....

“This year do you have the dorsal number fourteen again, Akio?”

The boy raised his eyes to the person speaking to him, a boy with dark skin and black eyes who shared nationality with him and raised his eyebrows.

“Yes.”

It was one of those rare occasions when the boy spoke outside the matches, and the other, Hidetoshi Nakata smiled.

“Have you heard the rumors, guys?”

All the young men who tried on their new uniforms turned their heads towards the person speaking. A boy with pale skin, light hair and freckled who was eating a candy. 

“What rumors?”

“My father told me that a player who is going to play in the Professional League will enter the team too.”

There was a fuss, Luca's father was the team coach so they could ensure that the information was right.

“It is not as if we did not have level to play in a Professional League.”

The brunette grunted surprising everyone, he had not said something so long for a long while.

"But Akio is right," said a short boy with blond hair and an androgynous appearance. “Especially Fidio, Demonio, Hide and Akio. Surely you will end up entering a Professional League.”

They shrugged, the one with the most interest in that was the black-eyed Japanese.

"We're going to fill ourselves with Japanese in the Italian team," Luca murmured suddenly.

“What do you mean?” asked the one called Demonio Strada.

“The new one is also Japanese, and although my father has not told me who he is, he has said that he was Akio's teammate.”

The boy narrowed his eyes, feeling his heart soar with panic, while the other companions wondered who that boy would be.

“I hope it's Mamoru!” exclaimed the captain, that blue-eyed boy.

The others seconded it.

"We haven't heard from Mamoru for a long time," a boy with blue eyes, though lighter and dark brown hair, murmured.

"I think he is in a professional team but in Japan, Gian," said another boy with burgundy hair and olive green eyes.

"But I'm already a good goalkeeper," protested a large boy with long brown hair.

Demonio turned to the brunette Japanese to ask him something, but discovered that the boy was gone. They did not see him again until several days later.

.....

He realized how much he was disturbed and the immense discomfort generated by thinking that someone from his past would return to his life. He couldn't stand it, the news burned him inside, not letting him sleep. His short sleep time was splashed more than ever by memories he rejected. If only he had sent that letter. 

That day he went for a walk in the Historic Center of the city, full of tourists with cameras and sandals with socks up to mid-leg. He sat on a bench watching the traffic of people. Who would it be? Who among them would be crazy enough to go to Italy to play football? Maybe it was Endou. He lowered his head, what if it was him? He shook his head as a poison spread from his stomach.

His eyes widened, was that the reason? He looked up and saw a couple kissing with the Colosseum in the background. He ruffled his hair and laughed bitterly. The reason he was tortured so much by the possibility that the new team member was one of his old friends was because he wanted it to be him? He wiped the tears that flowed down his cheeks and rose.

He was never going to be able to close that chapter.

.........

The day, the important day, he woke up discouraged, that day the new player was finally going to enter the team and they would finally know his identity. The coach kept it a secret and the Professional League had not announced his name since it was scheduled to start at the beginning of the following month.

The classes that day were especially dense, his mind was not where it should, to his disgust. Memories surfaced without compassion. One time and another. One time and another. His eyes, his lips, his hair, his neck, his smile, his teasing. One time and another. One time and another. 

He walked to the training camp with steps of melancholy and despair. With mind in black and the eyes absorbed. When he arrived and saw his hand on the door handle to enter he felt his guts twist. The next thing he was aware of was that he had run away. Looking up, he found himself in one of his favorite places in the city, a tree-lined hill from which there was a beautiful view of the ruins that in another era had been majestic pride buildings of his Empire.

The cold air blowing in that place eased the burning that consumed his head, dropped on a bench and buried his face in his hands. His heart ached.

Suddenly he felt a strange nervousness in the stomach, the wind had brought him a smell as peculiar as painful. He felt his emotions overflowing like blood from a wound he had not managed to close.

-Fudou ... Akio ...

The boy's fingers twitched and he felt his own nails dig into his face. A hand landed on his shoulder and he fell apart.

Tired of running away, tired of resisting, tired of getting up every day, tired of people saying him to smile,  tired of living.

He was not able to move, he was not able to say anything. The hand was still on his shoulder, burning. The wind shook his hair, grown since they had last seen each other, so many years ago. He felt the tears slip between his fingers, losing themselves in his body. He noticed his red eyes glaring at him. He felt a strong pain in his heart.

The boy sat next to him while the brunette lowered his hands slowly and left them with his fist clenched above his knees. He was not yet able to look at him, but something in his desperate expression implied that he could run again, because he was not able to cope with that turn of destiny.

And he noticed, that boy with red eyes reddened by tears trying to surface, noticed. His hands closed around the brunette, with force, with pain, with regret and he buried his head in the chest of him. His heart ached so badly that it seemed like it was going to break, and somehow when he heard the beating of the sea-eyed boy, he knew that his was also struggling not to go out.

-Kidou ... Yuuto ... -kun ...

Saying that name was strange, hearing the name in his own voice was strange. He never thought to hear it again. He never thought to see him again. He never thought that perhaps his life could regain a meaning.

Until that moment, that moment in which he hugged him and with his head sunk in his cinnamon hair in dreadlocks came the same citrus smell of the shampoo that he remembered with the clearness of the stars on a dark night in which going hand in hand dreamed a future that for years they believed stolen.

And then their eyes met, finally Fudou Akio had the courage to look at his red eyes, his body shuddered with a feeling of agony and at the same time peace flooded his soul. They were dark eyes, in which time had left traces of bitterness and loneliness. The boy's whitish hands held that face, while his eyes still connected. Kidou Yuuto barely breathed lost in those eyes like the sea, filled with such a long time of helplessness and resentment, as a swirling wave brought to the surface a new glow of hope.

His hands, of a more vivid color, grabbed his face at the same time, thus remaining indifferent to the passage of people, indifferent of the time swirling like autumn leaves around them.

The brunette’s lips moved trying a gesture that had not been seen on his face for so many years that it only became a try; but for Kidou it was enough. The small gesture of those lips made the boy's tired face shine.

Kidou moved forward, towards Fudou. His face anxious over his, his eyes still in that unperturbed connection. 

Kidou lowered his eyebrows in anticipation of apology and then to the surprise of the brunette he finally responded to that request that the boy had made years ago.

His lips felt warm, rough and remembered the taste of a "cappuccino". And his, softer and finer, of the salty tears that had traveled his cheeks for so many years. 

When they separated and despite the fact that both had closed their eyes, immortalizing that moment in their memories, Fudou's eyes were wide open. Showing in them a profound impact.

That made Kidou burst out laughing, a laugh of relief, a laugh of engagement.

“I think we have to talk about many things, Fudou.”

The boy felt a slight blush on his cheeks, looked at him. His face reminded him of when he was planning a mischief as a teenager. A mocking smile, a roguish glow, colored cheeks. Kidou contemplated that expression with absolute enthusiasm, feared for a long time being late to see it again.

“My residence is not far. My room is a quiet place.”

Their eyes met again and they laughed. Stretching among the trees that waved their branches to the sound of a wind of change.

Their hands entwined on the way to that place. There they cried about the grey like ashes years that were reaching their end and held really close the other with fear of fading. With a blooming of light  in their hearts. With a new story full of love. They could finally close that bitter chapter of their lives.