the first sky is inside you

the miya house is always warm, like a fireplace full of kindling, and it's nothing like the frigid air that settles, thick and suffocating, into every corner of your house.

you tell osamu this offhandedly, sometime in middle school. you remember the way the moonlight caught in his eyes, you remember thinking that he makes it feel warm, literary tropes be damned. osamu looks at you with the steady warmth of a heater in winter, and tells you that home is where your heart is.

(you don't tell him that your heart is where it hurts the most.)

»»------------- ------------- ------------- ¤ ------------- ------------- -------------«« 

the thing about being warm is that it lends itself to forgetting.

so when your mother appears before you, a ghastly apparition in the middle of the street, dull grey and freezing under the summer sky, your mind goes white with the remembered presence of memory. her hair is neat the way it never is within the house, and her clothes are as pristine as the first blanket of snow every winter.

the thing about the cold is that it just needs a crack under a door, a moment of weakness, to seep through skin and wrap itself around bone.

your mother says something. you don't hear it, you don't hear anything at all.

vaguely, you register that osamu is casting you a worried glance, but you're too far away to respond. there is a blizzard brewing in your mother's mouth, and you are frostbitten.

then atsumu puts a hand on your elbow, and you bloom into warmth. he's smiling easily, with that same flashpoint grin as he says, "y/n's just bringing us to get assessment books, ain't that such an honours student thing to do?"

he stares the blizzard in the eye and lights a bonfire, and the blizzard leaves. sensation returns to your body from the light grip atsumu has on your elbow, slowly, then all at once. the sky is blue, the streets are bright, and atsumu's eyes are matchstick-brown.

"why are ya cryin'?" atsumu, eight years-old and entirely grown, scoffs. "yer always cryin'."

"am not!" you try to wipe your tears with your hands, but your palms are strawberry-red and hurting. everything hurts — every beat of your heart sends your blood flooding everywhere and you are so tired of hurting—

"stop that," slightly less-small hands are prying yours away from your face by your wrists. atsumu wipes your tears away with his fingers and nearly stabs his thumb into your right eye. your vision's all watery, but there's a deep furrow in atsumu's brow. like he's upset.

(near-blindness aside, his hands are so gentle.

you didn't know that atsumu could be so gentle.)

"stop cryin'," he says again, and you can't help the annoyance that wells up in your chest, past all the pain.

"then go away!" you glare at him as best as you can. "nobody said you had to be here."

atsumu stops. the hurt comes back, all at once. it starts from the middle of your chest, nearly splitting you right down the middle, and you want atsumu to go away so you can tear the hurt right out. you know it won't be pretty.

"don't like it when ya cry," he says, scuffing his foot in the dirt. "'s noisy."

tears rise again, unbidden, and you hate it. everything hurts, and you hate everything—

"what can i give ya so ya won't cry anymore?"

you hate everything. everything is unfair and you hurt everywhere and you want to leave and go somewhere and you want to go everywhere because anywhere would do—

"the world." you hate everything, and so you want everything, so that you can have anything. "i want the world," you tell your best friend, and the resolution settles over you, almost triumphant, like a bucket of water over a roaring house fire.

you can't give it, you think viciously, you can't.

"what's the world to ya?" atsumu asks instead, after a brief deliberation. he kneels, places his hands on the chains of the swing on either side of you.

like this, he's looking up at you.

you've never really noticed the way it looks like there's gold flecks in his irises when the lighting's just right. like twin little wishing wells of five-yen coins.

atsumu stares at you, utterly serious, and all the hatred in you settles into a dull ache. "i haven't decided," you admit, "but i want it."

atsumu mulls over this. you watch the head tilt, the gold coin-flash.

(you've never been to a gambling hall before, but your father loves to. and you're not a gambler, but if you were ever asked to, you'd bet on atsumu.

something about atsumu makes you want to bet on him, even if you know he will lose.

maybe it's because he's yet to lose at anything that truly matters.)