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Before he ever knows it, he’s run too far ahead.
It's always the same dream, a light jog, turned into a sprint made with leaping steps. At the crosswalk, the green man trapped in a traffic light box tells him to go, while the one in red, the worst person on earth, says to stop and never roam again. Go on green. Wake on red. Heels skid across the asphalt in halting, sending the rubber off worn shoes. Laces, tied too tight, bind without holding. An ankle turns because all ankles do. Still: you must follow the path ahead.
When Bokuto wakes up at camp with everyone else, he clamors to the doorway to find a hole in his trainers. He does not remember dreams, but he does know of the things that keep him going: running shoes, hearty meals, and courts brimming with people. He thinks about how it starts with the worn-in shoes, and how without them, he won't be able to go on morning jogs, to practice, to the courts; he looks to everyone else’s, still intact, and contemplates staying inside forever.
“What's wrong, Bokuto-san?”
Bokuto lets the voice fly over him in a haze. He stays crouched amongst the shoes in the lobby, and sticks a pinky finger in the hole like a worm emerging from the dirt; he pretends said worm is the one speaking, as his new friend and confidante.
“The last time I had to break in new sneakers,” Bokuto tells the worm, “I had blisters on my ankles for weeks.”
The air hits, quiet, like it does between songs on the radio.
“You could always wear bandaids,” the confidante suggests; his voice, even and just on the verge of quiet, makes sense for morning. “And those are just your running shoes, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“So you still have your volleyball ones.”
“True.”
“And as far as you’re concerned, those have no holes, yes?”
“Right.” Bokuto breathes in. “No holes.”
Bokuto takes one more look at the worm, and the worm dies before achieving greatness. He drops his shoe and finds the footing to stand, wobbly but enough to find height.
“Akaashi,” Bokuto asks without looking back; but when he hears himself say it, it feels as sure as one of his favorite sets.
“Yes, Bokuto-san?”
“Do you know anything about dreams?” Bokuto asks, finally turning.
Akaashi keeps where he is, with trainers caught in the hooks of his fingers. He blinks a few times, before answering, “Well, yes, I suppose I do.”
Bokuto wants to ask how, and why, and when; and why though he knows he's dreamed plenty, enough to fill his head, it’s never enough to remember the next morning.
“You said something about shoes in your sleep,” says Akaashi. “That might be a dream, right? It probably means you really wanted to run this morning. Or you had the foresight, to know about the holes.”
“That sounds pretty amazing,” Bokuto says. “Foresight.” He’s not exactly sure what the word means, but he can certainly imagine it — like someone knowing what the next million miles will look like, straight ahead.
On his way out, Akaashi hands the shoes over to Bokuto, careful not to give him the underside. He goes to put on his own. One trainer slips up Akaashi’s heel in ease, while the other comes up in equal measure.
“Say, Akaashi. Do we wear the same size?”
“We don’t,” Akaashi says, waiting by the door. “But Konoha-san does, and he said he wouldn't mind.”
Bokuto puts the spare trainers on. They fit, much to his surprise, and the two of them run off where no lights, green or red, will tell them of the places they'll end up.
You don't notice a thing, do you? Unless it’s lightning, touching down from the sky.
Bokuto doesn't remember where the words might've come from: a funny great-uncle, or his mother, watching her son watch cartoons on television. It's something that comes to him at various points in his life, in disparaging tones, or jokes that don’t quite land. In truth, Bokuto does notice the little things: not just what was said, but the way it was said, the weather, how shoes go on feet, and the ball against fingertips and then wrecked against palms. He notices in the way cars fly by on the highway — the things noticed become the things passed, en route to the destination.
Sometimes, he makes pit stops. Things stick enough for him to dwell, like missed cross-shots and exhilarating matches watched on other courts. Level ground turns to low roads. Low roads rise back uphill. Sometimes the pit stop is the worst place on earth, with no working petrol pumps, or free wi-fi; other times, it might as well be paradise.
With Akaashi, level grounds return. Bokuto thinks it's nothing like heaven or hell, they are just the city they were born and raised in, the passing trains and cars and people, moving as they should be to the places they are meant to go. On the aftermath of an evening run a few days later, the two of them make their way back to the gymnasium for their last night at camp, endorphins like the usual rush hour.
Bokuto stops to raise his arms to the sky. Akaashi, out of breath, goes forward with a slight gait in his step.
“Hey, Akaashi.” Bokuto crouches down, spotting a sock marked in red. “You're bleeding.”
“Ah.” Akaashi leans down and loosens his right shoe. “So I am.”
“Is it bad?”
“Nothing a few band-aids can't fix.”
“Do you even have any left?” Bokuto asks, rubbing at the back of his own ankles. “I feel like I took all of your supply.”
“I get them from the infirmary, Bokuto-san.”
“Oh. Well, let's go there, then!”
They make it to the entrance, where Komi and Konoha are already waiting with a first aid kit and a plastic bag filled with convenience store fare. Konoha whips out the bandaids like a full hand of playing cards, while Komi’s already halfway through a chocolate ice cream bar.
Komi takes one good look at Akaashi’s ankle before scoffing. “Wow,” he says. “You know, we were prepared for our ace to come back with blisters, but not you, Akaashi.”
“Yeah,” Konoha follows. “How much did you two even run?”
Bokuto shrugs. “I don't know. The usual, I guess. Maybe even less than that?”
The others turn to Akaashi.
“It was actually five kilometers more than usual, Bokuto-san.”
“No way!” Bokuto takes the band-aids while Akaashi strips off the shoe and his bloodied sock on the floor of the foyer. He cups the blister, as if to shield everyone from looking at it, and winces, just slightly, from the disinfectant spray Konoha’s provided. Then goes the band-aid, all better, while the others look to Bokuto for answers, or perhaps a formal written apology.
“I'm real sorry, Akaashi! I guess I got carried away!”
Akaashi folds the sock between his own held hands. “I don't mind,” he says. “I tracked it, and today we had the best times we've seen all summer.”
“Fun,” Komi remarks.
“So very fun,” Konoha follows.
“Isn't it?” Bokuto asks, beaming straight at Konoha, then Komi, to rest his sights on Akaashi. “Now — what should we do for the rest of the night?”
The game goes as follows. It's one from a message board thread, simply called STARE INTO SOMEONE’S EYES FOR FOUR MINUTES STRAIGHT AND LEARN THE CONTENTS OF THEIR SOUL, which Bokuto likes because the name is as direct as can be. He says something about developing telepathy that'll just make the team all the more invincible, but Konoha promptly tells him it doesn't work that way; in fact, he even says that it's a bastardization of some other experiment conducted by an American psychologist, and that they’re only doomed to fail because none of them are strangers under a controlled environment.
“Besides,” he continues, “no one here is trying to fall in love with each other, right? I feel like that would be a nightmare for everyone involved.”
“Well, I don't know about that.” Komi is now on his third ice cream bar. “Sometimes I read up on acting methods, and apparently it's a good exercise to help with any kind of chemistry. It's no telepathy,” he says, looking pointedly at Bokuto, “but team chemistry is important, isn't it?”
“Yeah! Chemistry!” says Bokuto, while the rest of the team falls into place. They all tell Bokuto, why don't you be at the other end, since you wanted this so badly, and he obliges. They take their turns staring, deeply into Bokuto’s eyes, and it only results in mayhem.
Sarukui goes into it calmly for the first thirty seconds or so. There are no rules against talking through the game, so he says the word, “Daikon” over and over, deadpan like a spirit, eons old and very tired. At the minute and a half mark, he switches over to “Banana,” in English, slow in the syllables like a vibrating gong, and Bokuto can begin to feel his eyes water at the slow pronouncing of “Baaa” then “Naaaaa” then “Naaaaa” again. Bokuto breaks eye contact first. In the end, Sarukui proclaims that he thought this was a loser-laughs-first contest.
Komi does not fare much better. For one, he actually does peel open a banana from the convenience store bag, and insists on staring at Bokuto without blinking. “You can blink, you know,” someone even says, but then Komi mutters something about finding the same intensity as visionary actor Mifune Toshiro. Bokuto follows suit. Soon, they're both trying to be Mifune Toshiro, eyes caught in a smoldering match, until they're both stinging from tears and unable to continue.
Konoha actually goes into it earnestly, and so does Bokuto. It isn't strange at first: in fact, they go a whole two minutes without saying anything, even with Komi’s eating-of-the-banana in the background, and Bokuto wonders if they will be the first to achieve telepathy. But the cracks begin to form when Konoha’s face sours into a frown, and then a full-on scowl — he blinks a few times, like Bokuto’s formed a new mole or seven on his face, and says, “No, this is way too real.”
The experiments end in disaster, and everyone ends up sprawling across their makeshift beds to relax. Phones come out, as do copies of Shounen Jump, when Bokuto looks to Akaashi’s futon: there, he finds Akaashi’s rolled blanket, and a neatly folded jacket, along with a backpack, his phone, and a book, one always carried but never the same.
Akaashi returns not long after, fresh out of the bath with a towel around his neck. He barely settles down on the futon when Bokuto crouches next to him, eyes already set on his next four minutes.
“Hello, Bokuto-san. Did you need something?”
“He’s conducting an experiment,” Konoha says, and Bokuto nods along. “It's called, stare into your ace’s eyes for four minutes straight without combusting into flames. Do you want to partake?”
“Not particularly,” Akaashi answers. “I have game play to review.”
“But...think of the telepathy,” Bokuto insists.
“For the last time, this won't give you the ability to read minds!” Komi launches a pillow over to where they are, and Akaashi just sighs.
“How about this,” Akaashi says to Bokuto. “Why don't you take a bath first, since it's been a long day, and you can come find me after?”
“You mean that?”
“Yes,” Akaashi says. “Just don't come back too late.”
Bokuto immediately goes to gather his things for said bath, when he forgets that muscles, long worn and worked, can still ache.
On his way past the other futons, the magazines, and food wrappers, he looks back: past all the others, hiding under covers, to the back of Akaashi’s head. He watches for a moment, the way Akaashi dips before rising, always rising, and how he turns, to find Bokuto over a raised shoulder.
Once it's filled to the brim, Bokuto dumps a bucket of water over his head. He thinks this maybe enough to say, yes, I’ve relaxed enough, now I've come here to stare, but the bath calls, much in the way Akaashi had said, “it's been a long day.”
Bokuto gets into the water instead. He breathes out, back against the ledge, and dozes off before he knows it.
By the time Bokuto wakes, the water has run cold, and he's scrambling to get dressed to find Akaashi again. He's not sure why he's rushing — sometimes, in the spur of the moment, he's not sure why he does half the things he does, or feels half the things he feels — but he knows it has something to do with winning those four minutes (and who better to do it with, than his favorite setter)? So he smacks himself clean in the face, forgetting about everything they’ve all said about telepathy and chemistry. The words go forgotten, and he settles on what he knows: a win with Akaashi, even if it's one off the court.
That night, they pitch a valley of futons. Only Akaashi’s stays empty. When a few wrist watches go off for the hour, signaling midnight, Bokuto wonders if Akaashi’s been kidnapped or spirited away by Saitama ghosts. Unable to imagine the horror of it, he goes to Konoha, who's already dead to the world by the way of snoring.
“Konoha,” Bokuto whispers, shaking him awake. “Akaashi’s missing.”
Konoha, partially resurrected, waves him away. “Come on, Tikachu,” he says, still half-asleep. “You know he went to look for Bokuto. Now let me sleep.”
“For me?”
“Not you, Tikachu. Bokuto.”
Konoha goes back to being dead to the world, and Bokuto goes searching on his own. He starts in the hallway, and then another on the next floor up, as if he might find Akaashi at the other end of it.
Out on the street, a vending machine drops a drink, rumbling loud enough for only those who will listen. Sometimes, it is not a sound Bokuto notices — he knows Tokyo after all, and knows that the people who are by-products of a city so large and so grand might only have time for the great things. But he notices, by the way of a window to his right: the sound of coins jangling into a machine for another drink, the back of a certain head, a missing setter at midnight.
He makes a game of it, and the game says, you only have to look over your shoulder, to find him.
You don't always have to look so far ahead.
“Akaashi!” Bokuto shouts out from the windowsill. “I thought you’d been kidnapped!”
From the vending machines, Akaashi collects a second drink, and Bokuto hopes he’ll be the one to share it with.
“I could say the same for you, Bokuto-san,” he says, looking back, and Bokuto relishes in the way they can find each other in the night.
“Four minutes?”
“Four minutes.”
Bokuto knows the rules: that there are no rules when it comes to blinking, or talking, but neither of them dare to begin that way. Sitting outside with nothing but their silence and half-finished drinks, Bokuto counts the seconds by the way of crickets, then not at all when he realizes time, too, can fall away. The crickets quicken with the rise of summer heat, almost enough for Bokuto to ask: is it also hot across your face? Is your heart in your kneecaps?
Is the moon, usually nothing at all, supposed to burn at your back?
But Akaashi stays, and so does the stillness between them. Bokuto lets himself notice again, and again, and again. The crickets, the summer, Akaashi — and not just the back of his head this time, but full on: at dark eyes, the waves of his hair, how the line of his mouth never goes either which way. Shoulders soften before rising again. Akaashi inhales and Bokuto does the same.
(In the flash of memory, an uncle says something about lightning, and a mother marvels at her son’s love of passing color on the TV. If they could see him now, Bokuto would say: look at the things I've found. Look at what I've noticed, when you thought I wasn't paying attention.)
“Say, Akaashi,” Bokuto finally starts. “Remember that one time, when we were at practice and I asked you about that busted play? What was it again?”
Akaashi’s forehead wrinkles, not quite a frown but something on the verge of it. “It was a rebound,” he tells him, a certainty.
“Oh yeah, that’s right.” Bokuto grins. “And you said, BWAH, Bokuto-san, I didn't know you cared about these boring plays! I thought it was all flash with you! The easy stuff, like cross-shots and the way the ball slams!”
“Maybe not in those exact words,” Akaashi says. “But yes.”
“And what did I tell you after that?” Bokuto asks, a bit of a test.
Akaashi shifts in place. Maybe he doesn't remember, because people are always bound to forget, but he merely finds that steady gaze once more, to meet Bokuto on level ground again.
“It's not about what's easy, but what's fun,” Akaashi repeats. “Isn't that what you said?”
Bokuto feels his face widen in a smile, never one to control its spread. “Yeah,” he says, though the voice that follows is smaller than he expects. “That's exactly what I said.”
“What about it?”
“I'm just remembering what someone said to me once,” Bokuto says. “I can't even remember who it was at this point. You never seem to notice anything, they told me. It’s just nice to prove them wrong, even if they were kidding.”
“You do notice,” Akaashi says, unmoving. “Not all the time, but you do.”
A laugh finds its way out out of Bokuto’s mouth, a hum more than anything, a nervous, stupid something in the face of a light head. “You know, you really are something, Akaashi,” he says. “You never leave me wondering where I stand.”
“Then can I ask you something, Bokuto-san?”
“Yeah.”
“On the spectrum of easy to fun,” Akaashi asks, “what would you call this?”
“Well, I wouldn't say this was easy. Would you?”
Akaashi shakes his head; when his head dips, ever so slightly, Bokuto leans forward with hands up, ready to prop, to say — no, no, we're not done yet. But Akaashi comes back, as he always does, with his head held high, no holding back.
“Then is this fun for you, Bokuto-san?”
“Fun?”
“Fun,” Akaashi repeats, like the word is Bokuto’s to define.
The crickets race again to nowhere, faster than before. Knees end up knocking. The moon comes in full blast. Somewhere, across millions of crosswalks, lights will go from green to red to green again.
“No,” Bokuto says, inching forward. “I wouldn't call it fun either.”
“Then, what would you call it?” Akaashi asks, so close there’s wind in the things he’s saying.
Bokuto doesn’t answer. Color crowds his vision, but ahead they go, knees kneading into knees, eyes on eyes, and hands over hands. Bokuto feels his way across stiff fingers, ones made by a thousand very-Akaashi thoughts; thoughts he knows, because he's seen them in the silence, when no one else will notice them. He keeps his hands there, because just as there aren't rules about talking, or blinking, there aren't any against touching — and what are rules, but things to break?
He leans in closer, and Akaashi meets him, in equal distance.
Again, and Akaashi goes to match him.
Again and again and again —
Noses almost touching and —
The timer goes off, their four minutes won, and Bokuto stays past any time they tell him to follow. Akaashi breaks first. His hands hide as fists before finding each other to hold. Knees fold up, close to the chest. Eyes shut, then open again to find a spot on the ground, done with games meant for strangers.
“That was four minutes,” Akaashi says, abiding by the rules. “You can look away if you want to, Bokuto-san.”
Bokuto keeps on ahead. Always ahead.
“Bokuto-san.”
At the sound of a name, always called to bring him back, Bokuto breaks. He grins, if not some disbelieving thing. He lets his eyes water, a body pent up, as if moving might mean death and forward, a fatality.
Over a communal sink the next morning, Bokuto splashes his face with cold water for the third time, dazed from a lack of sleep and the heat across his cheeks.
“Are you sick?” Konoha asks, while he's brushing his teeth. “You’ve been muttering the words, hot hot hot hot for the past thirty seconds or so.”
“Have I?” Bokuto asks.
“Yes,” Konoha says. “Is it a fever? You should rest when you get home, if that's the case.”
“No, it's — actually, I don't even know what it is.” Bokuto goes to wash his face again, in case he really is overheating, but doesn't say anything about the new shiver he's got from shoulder to shoulder, too.
“I think the game we played did weird things to everyone,” Konoha says, checking his own temperature. “Tikachu came to me in a dream, and Sarukui claims it opened his third eye.”
“Weird things?”
“Yeah. Anything happen to you?”
By now, it's already a blur: falling asleep in the bath and the long hallways and vending machines. But Akaashi stays in clear view, dark eyes in the night. Stiff hands stay under his, and withdraw when a timer runs out, an alarm to remind them of the minutes they were given.
“I think so,” Bokuto says. He turns the faucet off, forgetting he'd let it run in the first place. “Nothing like dreams, or that fifth eye stuff. But did you know that four minutes can feel like nothing at all? Like you could have double that, and it still wouldn't be enough?”
Konoha gives up a grin. He goes to his own faucet, letting the water pool in the cup of his hands. He splashes himself clean, too, as if a heatwave has hit them all at once.
“What?” he asks. “Have you gone and fallen in love with someone here? Like the experiment intended?”
“What makes you say that?”
The water goes off, and Komi swings through the door, proclaiming the official end of summer training camp. Konoha follows, towel to his face like he wants to hide behind it.
Before leaving, he finds Bokuto again by the way of a glance over the shoulder.
“Here you are, trying to stretch four minutes into forever,” he says, and Bokuto can only go to wash his face for the millionth time that morning.
(Four minutes: the length of a song sung at graduation; or the time it takes to soft-boil an egg after you boil the water; the length for a warm-up drill at the MSBY Jackals trial workout; the cooking instructions for instant ramen, forgotten until the noodle cake has already turned to mush in hot water.)
(Four minutes: remembered, by the moon, and dark eyes, and stiff hands.)
(Four minutes: remembered, even when no one ever expects it.)
Across six years, there are 788,400 four minutes. This is a concept Bokuto explains to Konoha over the phone one night, in ignorance of his instant ramen, midnight, and a responsible sleep schedule.
“What now?” Konoha asks.
“You know,” Bokuto says, waving his pocket calculator like Konoha can see it from his end of the line. “Four minutes. From that time at summer training camp.”
“Right.” Konoha laughs. “Maybe that experiment back then really opened your third eye, too.”
Minutes go into days into weeks into months into something beyond. Time slides on, hardly noticed with the oncoming of things, like new teams and new uniforms and new apartments overlooking the city. The apartment Bokuto has found himself in tonight is not his own, but Akaashi’s, because he’s here in Tokyo for a game and a fan event. He would stay at the hotel like all the other Jackals, but in truth, he doesn't like the arrangements; Miya Atsumu sleeps with his eyes open, somehow, and Bokuto would rather avoid new nightmares.
When Bokuto eats the mushy ramen he’s made in said apartment, he remembers other haunted affairs: how he thought Akaashi had been spirited away that night at camp, and how Konoha called him Tikachu in his sleep. “I can’t believe how long ago that was,” he says, when he remembers that time, too, has a path.
“Six years, to be exact,” Konoha says. “You said it yourself: 788,400 four minutes. You never see it coming, until it hits you.”
It hits Bokuto all at once, then not at all. Time, he thinks, is meant to be spent, even when it's a whir and he could have sworn it was seven PM, not eleven forty-five.
“Well,” Konoha says, “I won't keep you. You're a starter now, and starters should sleep.”
“I can’t sleep when I’m still hungry.”
“Go eat something, then. High protein.”
“I'm thinking eggs,” Bokuto confirms.
“Poor Akaashi.”
“Why poor Akaashi?”
“You're always stealing his eggs.”
Konoha hangs up, back to karaoke or drinking beer or whatever he's up to that night. Bokuto turns to the kitchen, where he always remembers where Akaashi keeps the pots, but never the pot lids. He runs into several kinds of sauces. Spices. Matching bowls and plates and smaller plates for god-knows-what. All the novelty mugs he'd brought back to Akaashi from Yomiuri Land, Tokyo Disneyland, and Argentina. But no pot lids. He determines this is the worst part of adulthood, the missing pot lids, and mourns the day he might have to get his own set, complete with pots he’ll have to learn to stack in too-small cupboards.
He looks up at the mascot on the Tokyo Disneyland mug, one Mister Mackey Mouse, for guidance.
“What's wrong, Bokuto-san?”
“I can't find the pot lids,” Bokuto says, looking into Mackey’s eyes. “Do you know where they are?”
A pot appropriate for boiled eggs comes onto the counter, complete with its lid. Then the eggs. Akaashi reaches over to turn the burner on high, then another for his kettle.
“Akaashi!”
“Bokuto-san,” Akaashi says, reaching for the Mackey Mouse mug for tea.
“Was I making too much noise?”
“No, it was just that by the time I looked up at the clock, it was almost midnight.”
“Which means?”
Akaashi sighs. “Do I have to say it?”
“Egg time!” Bokuto finishes for him. “But really, I could've handled myself in here. I know you have a deadline.”
“I was just finishing up my readings, so it's fine,” Akaashi says, letting the steam from the stove hit his glasses. Bokuto laughs, still not used to the sight of Akaashi in them; but he thinks they're awfully cool anyway, as if worse eyesight just means a new way to see altogether.
“What were you reading?”
“What was I reading?” Akaashi repeats, almost as if he doesn't understand the question. “You never ask me what I’m reading.”
“It’s good to know about this stuff. I've been thinking about reading more anyway.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. So, tell me about it.”
“Well, I was reading these sample pages for a project we're not taking on just yet. The art’s crisp, and the world building is fine, just...” Akaashi stops himself, to drop the eggs into the water, one for Bokuto, and one for him, just like usual. “Sorry. I’m going on.”
“I wanna hear it,” Bokuto says, grinning against the counter, because he likes it when Akaashi goes on: while other people drop their formalities by the way of honorifics, the removed -san’s, Akaashi does by talking more than anyone would expect. So Akaashi does, about things like line-art and panels. Characters come to life, because he says them.
One, loud, and a little single-minded, aims for the day he’ll be the best warrior in the city, while the rival, the quieter of the two, casts magic when no one is looking. They're foils for one another, Akaashi explains, a word Bokuto doesn't quite know, but guesses at, when he thinks of cartoons he's watched, and manga he's read. “Different, but the same,” Akaashi explains.
“And what's the problem with that?” Bokuto asks. “Sometimes, that's all those stories are. All kinds of people, fighting it out forever.”
“Yes, but that's it. None of the other editors agree with me, but the characters feel more compelling, when they're working together. Not fighting one another.”
Bokuto grins. “Who said anything about fighting one another?”
This shuts Akaashi up for a good few seconds, until the timer on his phone goes off and proclaims that four minutes have passed. Akaashi doesn't switch the burner off. Eggs go from soft-boiled to just-boiled, and the steam rises from a heat on high.
“And even if they end up god-knows-where, doing god-knows-what,” Bokuto continues, “what does it matter, when they've got each other in the end?”
At this, Akaashi smiles, brighter than midnight.
“You should ask me what I'm reading more often, Bokuto-san.”
Meanwhile, a phone timer, way past four minutes, begs for the sweet release of death.
On a bus back to Osaka, Bokuto proposes a game to the rest of his teammates. Not just a game, but the game, one he proudly proclaims as the only effective way to open your third eye, your fifth, and all the ones that exist beyond that. Hinata, who usually goes along with all the games he suggests, says something excitedly about telepathy, while Atsumu mutters how he’d rather nap on the way back.
Bokuto explains it anyway. By now, he knows the rules by heart: like yes, you can blink, and yes, you can talk, just remember to keep staring ahead, like you know nothing else.
Atsumu looks up the game on his phone and lets a tch escape through his teeth. “Stare into someone’s eyes for four minutes straight and learn the contents of their soul,” he reads. “What is this? Are you trying to get someone to fall in love with you here?”
“It's not for that,” Bokuto says. “I mean, not all of the time.”
“Not all of the time,” Hinata says, with eyes wide. “But some of the time?” He gasps. “Bokuto-san, have you made someone fall in love with you?”
Bokuto-san. Bokuto flinches, not because that's what Akaashi calls him, but the difference in how it's said. In fact, he's sure plenty of people have called him Bokuto-san over the years, and that he's let most of them slip by, like air, or drinking water. Hinata’s Bokuto-san, though noticed, isn't Akaashi’s Bokuto-san; no, Akaashi’s Bokuto-san is another name in itself, a reminder. Of those four minutes. Of returning after rushing ahead, or hiding under desks. Akaashi’s Bokuto-san reminds him to open the window and let in the air, even when air feels like a memory.
“Huh,” Atsumu remarks. “I think you broke him, Shouyou-kun.”
“Ah, what? Bokuto-san, no, I didn't mean it!”
Bokuto-san, Bokuto-san, Bokuto-san.
“It’s all good,” Bokuto says. “Really.” He goes to yank open a window in reminder. Hand out the gap, he lets the wind rush past his fingers, the cool air, and presses it to a face, familiar with its heat.
“Hey, Akaashi, what are you reading right now?”
Over on his end in Tokyo, Akaashi hums, barely loud enough for the speaker to pick up. They've taken to calls like this now, those eternal minutes of silence, because they're doing other things like watering houseplants or half-watching the baseball game on television. It's a quiet Bokuto is still not used to, but one he's beginning to understand: that much in the way Akaashi speaks, more when he wants to, Bokuto can give back in the way of quiet. He listens about a lot of things, like Akaashi’s struggle with a new vacuum cleaner, or noisy neighbors. Bokuto learns of new books, instant classics crowned every other day.
“I’m reading this translation of this old book from 1949,” Akaashi says. “A book on myth-making.”
“Oh, so like kami?”
“Not quite as old as kami.”
“What's the book called?” Bokuto asks.
“The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” There’s another beat of quiet and the whistle of a kettle, and Bokuto wonders if Akaashi will be using the Mackey Mouse mug again. “It was written by this professor who studied myths,” Akaashi explains. “He came up with something called the hero’s journey, after he saw that these myths began to share similar structures.”
“I’ve never heard of this.”
“We didn't study it in school or anything,” Akaashi tells him. “It's all through a western lens, but you might have seen similar stories in say, Star Wars. Things like that.”
“Ah, like Luke Skywalker,” Bokuto says, like remembering an old friend.
“Yes, him. There's this idea that the hero must go through a journey, beginning in the ordinary world. He then goes out into the unknown, when he gets some call to adventure. He faces challenges, and in defeating said challenges, he receives a reward. He then returns to the ordinary world, better for going on that adventure.”
From his balcony in Osaka, Bokuto spots the vending machines on the street, like bystanders, a world theirs all around them, no matter the city or place. He remembers the jangle of coins, and the rumble, and two bottles tucked under arms. Akaashi, seventeen again, finds him by the light of constant boxes; Bokuto, eighteen, finds him right back.
“Sorry,” the Akaashi of now says over the phone. “Did I go on again?”
“No,” Bokuto tells him. “I was just thinking.”
“Of?”
“How real life can feel like all that at the same time. An adventure. Ordinary. Who says it has to be one or the other?”
Bokuto thinks of the words again: adventure, and ordinary, and how they can mean anything he wants them to.
Ordinary, like how someone is just an ace.
How adventure is talking to someone on the phone, cities and cities and cities away.
“Hey, Akaashi.”
“Yes, Bokuto-san?”
“Do you remember, when you asked me, if this was all easy, or fun?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, what would you call us now, Akaashi?”
Akaashi goes quiet, like sleeping in itself, before waking to answer.
“Anything we want to be, Bokuto-san.”
Bokuto’s twenty-fifth birthday starts out with a dream: never-remembered, crosswalks, lights changing color. On green, he takes his time to tie loose shoes. On red, he takes the time to catch his breath.
On his twenty-fifth birthday, Bokuto wakes up feeling like he’d like to climb a mountain. So he does: by the way of a volleyball net in Osaka, a million feet up in the air, with hands at the peak to say, I wasn't the first one to climb Everest, but I'm here today. At the summit, he welcomes the crowd to come with him, and they follow by the way of trumpets and flags and drums. They're not just here for him, never just for him, but he allows himself the chants — BOKUTO BEAM, they call it, and he BOKUTO BEAMS right back.
After the game, Hinata runs into the locker room with a birthday cake and drops it, upside down, into Atsumu’s open duffel bag.
It's a giant mess, and Bokuto allows himself the gift of a white lie. He proclaims, “ah, time to get a snack,” and lets the rest of the locker room devolve without him.
Bokuto does better than a snack, and lets a nearby river watch him eat a store-bought birthday cake.
He waves at waves he didn't know rivers couldn't make.
In turn, the waves wave back.
(Four minutes: the time it takes to devour half of said birthday cake.)
Bokuto texts Akaashi not long after, full of things he doesn't know the names for.
Did you know that if you don't try to find the mouth of a river, it looks like an ocean from the side?
I didn't know that, but now I do.
Happy birthday, Bokuto-san.
Konoha comes to Osaka on business, and finishes his dealings in time for beer and skewered meat. Bokuto only has one, citing the nutritionists’ pleas, but Konoha has four, all before pounding his chest once and proclaiming, “you know, I think I used to be in love with you.”
Bokuto lets the beef slide off a wooden stick. He blinks a few times, mouth wide enough to mimic what he wants to say next: “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
Konoha laughs at this, before loosening his tie and ordering more meat for the table. “You never noticed,” he says, more a statement than a question, “but that's fine.”
Between them, the meat burns on a grill. The beers go flat in revelation. Bokuto opens his mouth to speak, before Konoha stops him short of any I’m sorry or I didn't know and I’m sorry, again.
“You don't have to say anything,” Konoha insists, “because this isn't a confession. Not anymore, at least. It's just a statement of the facts.”
The moments are hazy, but Bokuto remembers its vague outlines: two third years, standing next to each other at the sink, and a first aid kit, waiting in Konoha’s hands. Borrowed shoes, used for a full day’s run, because they were the same size.
“No thinking,” Konoha says, flicking a burnt end of pork onto Bokuto’s plate. “I can hear it. Stop that.”
“But.”
“But what?” Konoha asks.
“When?”
“The same as everyone else.”
“Everyone else?”
Konoha sighs. “It was always just a little of an inside joke between some of us, a bit at your expense. Do you remember that day, even?”
“There have been a lot of days,” Bokuto tells him, unable to find any other answer.
“Well, we were rookies, and you decided to fly up like you were already on the Olympic team. Komi and I thought, the gall of this guy, and Sarukui said he saw spots in his vision. Maybe his third eye opened then? So we joked that we all fell in love a little bit, with the ridiculousness of the situation.”
“But then joking became something I couldn't laugh at,” says Konoha, “and I saw that that ridiculous person was, in fact, a ridiculous person. All those moods. The way he’d hide. And I thought, well, someone’s gotta make sure he keeps going. He has to, with all the nerve he's got to rile up the crowd like that.”
Konoha pauses for a moment. Hands circle around a glass without reaching for another drink.
“I guess that care I took made another turn.”
Three days into twenty-five, Bokuto still knows nothing about confessions: when they're coming, before they're about to arrive, or the shape they take in their making. He just knows to sit straight. And breathe, because he's allowed to, even when he knows he has no good answers to give.
“You're doing it again,” Konoha chides. “Come on now. I'm not giving you a chance to say yes or no. What did I say?”
“Statement of the facts.”
“Good.” Konoha sits up straight. “Now, stop looking so sad.”
He makes a fist on the table, and Bokuto remembers those same knuckles across his back. Konoha, eighteen, finds the ridiculous boy and says, don’t quit now. The fist, never to be pitied, remembers itself across his spine. It tells Bokuto of 110 percent, the people at his side.
“Now,” Konoha says with zero force, like he's just talked to Bokuto about pharmaceuticals. “How about we get another round? You look like you could use another drink. Maybe we can get more at karaoke.”
And Bokuto agrees — “but please, don't tell Akane-san.”
“Who’s that?”
“My nutritionist.”
“Before, you said something about everyone else.”
“That was a joke,” Konoha says, straight into a karaoke mic, instead of the song at hand.
“Was it?”
Konoha goes back to facing the screen.
“I feel like you know the answer to that.”
(Four minutes: enough for the kind of love you’ll never notice. The time it takes for me, to watch you and him fall in love amongst the crickets. I pretend to see nothing, then. But I know where you are now.)
Even now, Bokuto still calls it, “The Autumn of the Sixteen Volleyballs.” He's five when it happens. A birthday party turns into a ball pit when relatives and friends come over, all with the idea for the same gift, because a boy who loves that much will do with a ball against his hands.
His mother laughs it off, but she also takes the sixteen volleyballs in stride; an aunt explains that it seemed like the right gift in the moment, because, “well, doesn’t Koutarou-kun seem to love nothing else?”
In a city hours from the one he was born and raised in, Bokuto finds a package with a Tokyo address, neatly written in case of return. Akaashi. A neighbor's note stuck to the package proclaims that they'd taken it by accident, and that he'd kept forgetting to return it to the recipient.
Inside, Bokuto opens the package to find a book inside, along with another note stuck to the cover, not from the neighbor this time. In Akaashi’s handwriting, it says —
Bokuto-san,
For your birthday, I’ve reunited you with someone you may know named Mr. Skywalker. We’ve talked about this book before. This is a commemorative Star Wars version from 1977, so it’s also not quite as old as kami.
Birthday. A week into twenty-five, it occurs to Bokuto that the neighbor has gone and held Akaashi’s present from him for seven whole days. He thinks of the texts and phone calls he's shared with Akaashi since then, about things like rivers and pictures of stray cats. Nothing about presents. No. Bad. In truth, Bokuto knows nothing about manners, not in the way Akaashi does, but he knows how rude it is to not say thank you for presents, whether this means sixteen volleyballs, or “A Hero With A Thousand Faces.”
Bokuto calls. Akaashi answers on the third ring, which means he was reading.
“Bokuto-san, hello.”
“Akaashi!” Bokuto says. “My neighbor is a kidnapper!”
“Ah.”
“Ask me what he took!”
“Bokuto-san, what did he take?”
Bokuto pauses for a moment, before recollecting and finding the rest of Akaashi’s note, covered by his own hand.
But after reading the book, I thought about things. We aren’t the same heroes you read about in myths. Our paths don't make straight lines.
“Bokuto-san?”
They never end.
“The book you gave me,” Bokuto answers, finally. “But I got it back.”
Akaashi is the one to go quiet on his end. More familiar with silence, Bokuto knows it’s the still kind, marked by two people in fullest attention. This goes on forever — four minutes, and four minutes after that. A million of them, like the passing of years without set answers.
“The next time I'm in Tokyo,” says Bokuto, “I'd like to buy you eggs, because Konoha says I always steal yours, and it's only fair, that I meet you with more.”
A hero with a thousand faces. Two meet, across the crowds of cities new and old. They both find they are constant things, like vending machines, and myths, and the unfolding of time itself.
“But no more timers,” Bokuto insists, “because even if we overcook them, aren't we past the point of that?”
(Four minutes: what comes before infinity.)
At grand speeches, Akaashi laughs.
On his way to Akaashi’s apartment in Tokyo, Bokuto finds him at the crosswalk. A light goes green to red, and dreamers see nothing but some time to breathe easy.
See — this is what they don’t tell people about living in the city. For all the great and towering things, all made with expectation, what you’ve had all along is what to live for.
Bokuto reaches out, hand to hold, and Akaashi meets him right back.