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"Why the fuck are you in front of my house?"
Isagi coughs. This is awkward for the both of them. They're more used to spitting daggers at each other, not house calls past midnight for reasons that are still unexplained.
In response, Isagi holds out a tattered soccer ball.
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The creases of the soccer ball; this, this is the mark he has made in the past twelve years of his life.
The boy has nothing to compare it to, but seven years later, even three still seems like an eternity.
Three years from twelve until fifteen, where he is free, free as a bird and engraving thorny vines on his body to pull him back down to earth.
When Kaiser wakes up at night, dreaming of the first fifteen years of his life, he claws at the tattoos on his throat as if he's draining the memories away.
"Remember, always," that man used to say, "That you are the product of subhuman sludge. You are nothing."
Sometimes, Kaiser wishes he could be nothing. Slip out from in between the walls of the shack and become one with the wind and the birds, the clouds and the sky, become weightless enough so that he disappears entirely.
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The blue of the roses is the blue of his hair is the blue of his hands every two weeks, sitting alone in the bathroom.
He's drowning in the blue, blue, an entire ocean of it, but he keeps guzzling the liquid that's hurting more than helping him.
"Too much of anything is bad for you," Ness says, and Kaiser understands what he's implying.
("You can take a break. You don't need to kill yourself trying to train.")
He can't, he wants to tell Ness, because the thorns will pin him where he stands if he stays stagnant, and they will grow into roots that bring him back to his own, leading all the way back to that man, with the doughy hands and the rancid smell of milk emanating from his breath.
Kaiser just nods and sets up, once again, to take a shot.
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That half-moment in which the ball is flying through the air, when his opponents' faces are twisted in despair after realizing that they cannot, in fact, reach it in time to stop the goal.
Every time, Kaiser sees this and feels a sadistic satisfaction in knowing that he caused this, and is a little more human.
The ball, though.
The ball brings him back to his body, to this useless vessel that people insist is beautiful.
He doesn't want to remember the past, but he keeps a memorial of his time there.
When Kaiser carries the ball, holds it like he's a kid again, he can imagine that phantom fingers are being guided by his over the seams.
Skimming the stitches, noting every mark and scratch, he sees his younger self.
I'm beautiful, Kaiser thinks, and what he means is that he looks like someone else.
("Worthless piece of shit, you're not even worth the pot I piss in!")
Call it nostalgia, but Kaiser can see the child as someone worth protecting now.
With wild eyes and dappled in moonlight, and this is not a boy, this is a Fae creature come to life.
A wave of relief, because it would explain away his father and his family (or a lack of), if Kaiser were a changeling, a fairy child that had replaced someone's real child.
(Then, Kaiser thinks, a hole in his chest aching as it hasn't done in years, you would have a family.)
And then dawn arrives, and in the unforgiving light of day, Kaiser is no longer a child of the forest but a broken boy.
The cruelest part of it all, Kaiser sometimes thinks, is that there is no reason for him to be hated. Nothing that he's done to offend his father, or to cause his mother to leave.
So when his father's hands are around his neck, he wonders if he could accept the punishment if it was atonement for a crime he's committed. (The irony is choking, though, when he remembers that the only crimes he's committed were under his father's orders.)
He thinks of all of this, lets himself freeze mid-motion as the images flash through his mind, and then carefully, carefully places the ball down and walks away.
Keep moving, stay aware, stay ready.
He's tense, the kind of tense that renders him both brittle and fragile. If anyone so much as breathes around him, he'll shatter and pierce everyone within a mile's radius.
There is a point to all of this, he tells himself for the nth time, brewing coffee and drinking it scalding hot (even though he knows it will burn, he knows, but it's hard to break old habits.).
There is a point, a meaning to all of this, and he finds it in Isagi Yoichi.
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The point as in the meaning, but also the point as in a knife, the tip of the sword. Razor sharp and cutting to the bone, yes, that is Yoichi.
He knows it like the pattern of his tattoos, deep blue and shockingly vibrant on pale skin, that he is already ruined.
He keeps moving, though, into the Neo Egoist League, taunting and provoking Yoichi. He has so much potential, and Kaiser keeps aiming at weak spots and hoping that the blue, the intangible, impossible blue will spill out and leave him drowning.
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Yoichi is leering over him, sneering down at Kaiser, and his eyes are even bluer than before.
For a second, he stares at the impossible made flesh.
Then, he breaks into a smile, looking more like a grimace, and says that Yoichi is a monster.
Yoichi is leering over him, sneering down at Kaiser, and his eyes are even bluer than before - feverish, even.
For a second, he stares at the impossible made flesh.
“My ultimate clown.” So Kaiser’s a clown, then? He doesn’t care as much as he thought he would. That what he has been fighting for the entire NEL was to be washed down the drain.
He just wishes that he had known that he would fail, so that he could do so with grace.
In a different life, perhaps, he could’ve killed Yoichi with kindness. He could have. He could have been the shark boy, receiving hair pats and affectionate nudges; or the cyan-haired one, jumping onto Yoichi's back after a goal.
It's too late, and the blue is receding, pulling away like the tide. Isagi, now, is a stranger to him. Even before Kaiser had walked out of the facility, he could already sense those eyes were no longer trained on him.
And yet, impossibly, Isagi is here, standing in front of his door with hope in his eyes like Kaiser's about to reward him for the valiant deed of bringing back his ball.
It doesn't matter anymore.
Isagi is gone, now. Or the opposite, because Kaiser's left Blue Lock, but Isagi's left him in the dust long before Kaiser had even stepped out of the facility.
Kill them through kindness, Kaiser thinks, and he could have. He could have been the shark boy, receiving hair pats and affectionate nudges; or the cyan-haired one, jumping onto Yoichi's back after a goal.
It's too late, and the blue is receding, pulling away like the tide.
And yet, impossibly, Isagi is here, standing in front of his door with hope in his eyes like Kaiser's about to reward him for the valiant deed of bringing back his ball.
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Kaiser is about to slam the door in Yoichi's face, and then he sees the ball.
"Where did you get that."
Isagi is confused, and Kaiser wants to smack him upside the head, say "Yeah, I'm confused too," wants to pull him in by the collar and kiss him stupid to satiate the hunger in his chest.
Instead, Isagi cocks his head. "Is this ball that important to you?"
Well. If Kaiser nods, just nods, will he be allowed by social norms to walk away as if this conversation never occurred?
On the other hand, this is a weakness. Kaiser doesn't know how it'll be used mid-game, but surely Yoichi will come up with something more devastating than "I got your ball!"
Actually, that would be characteristically diabolical of him. Scratch that, Kaiser is going to take the ball and close the door on Yoichi.
He makes a move to grab it, but Yoichi is fast now with the training from Noa. Fast enough to evade Kaiser's lunge and sidestep around him to take a step inside the house.
For a moment, Kaiser thinks he’s flying - a second in which he has beat gravity itself - before he braces himself to stop the fall.
"Your style is, ah," Isagi looks like he's searching for a word that doesn't directly insult Kaiser's taste, "Minimalistic?"
"Stop snooping in my house."
"You're strangely monosyllabic today, Kaiser. Or, this night? It's still daytime in Japan."
Isagi laughs sheepishly. He'd only meant to drop off the ball, but it's tempting to learn more about his rival when Kaiser only reveals so much of himself on the field.
Yoichi keeps craning his neck past Kaiser's doorway like he's worried that he'll miss Noa and the entirety of Bastard popping out of the closet as soon as he looks away.
Kaiser clears his throat, trying to speak around the lump that has formed all of a minute ago; to spare himself a moment before speaking. "Noa isn't here."
"I know."
"...Neither are any of the New Gen players."
Isagi quirks an eyebrow at Kaiser, like he's the crazy one here. "I know.Sae texted me a selfie of him and Rin in Spain together."
"You have his number?"
"Why do you care?"
He doesn't. He shouldn't care, because he doesn't own Yoichi. Kaiser saw the France game, saw how Hugo was practically clinging onto Yoichi in the name of "converting him to the second-best" philosophy, even when the crow mastered it and scored a goal.
"Why do you have my ball?"
Isagi sighs, because it is a quintessentially Kaiser thing to do. Deflect a question with another, mix provocations and flirting until Isagi's stammering from anger or embarrassment (he can't tell which), the rose that always approaches with thorns outstretched like claws.
"Why do you - " Isagi starts, and he means to say something cutting in return, but Kaiser looks vulnerable right now and it's throwing him off-balance. Messy blonde hair, smudged eyeliner, and there's a ferocity in his eyes that is making Isagi want to run away with his tail in between his legs or fight.
He never turns down a challenge.
"Why do you care about this ball so much?"
Kaiser opens his mouth, about to respond with a quip ("You came all the way here to ask me that? And here I thought it was a booty call."), but he cannot find the energy to push away Yoichi, stubborn, idiotic Yoichi who came to Kaiser's house at three in the morning to return his soccer ball.
Instead. Instead, he traces the air, draws the pentagon pattern of the ball, and there's a flash of recognition in Yoichi's eyes. Only a monster like him would recognize the shape.
Kaiser wishes he knew how to speak like a "normal person" about his childhood. With a dash of self-deprecation and the kind of language that you learn in therapy to approach it from a distance without reopening the wound every time.
He thinks back to his younger self, glowing in the light of the stars, and tells Yoichi a story.
Kaiser recreates his house in all of its details, from the stains on the rug that had glued it to the floor; the television that was half-cracked after that man decided he didn't like the face of one of the newscasters very much, and it was better to disfigure the left side of the screen than turn it off at that time every day.
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There is a man, with greed and loathing in his heart, and a woman who Kaiser only remembers as gold. There were shining lights, and carpets that are the color of Hollywood exclusivity that Kaiser has memorized as the shade of blood, freshly spilled.
This story is not about them, (although it is, in some ways) but it is about the boy who lives in the house with them. The boy is a creature in the night (later, he will discover books, and think of himself as one of the Wild Things), and he is barely more than a whisper away from crumbling apart completely.
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"What do you think so far?" Kaiser asks him, and it's hard to think words right now when he can't stop imagining what - who Kaiser might've been. Isagi does not know what to respond, so he just leans his head on the blonde's shoulder.
It shocks both of them, this show of tenderness without an ulterior motive, so Kaiser keeps speaking and waiting for the moment that Yoichi will start to think of him as a piece of shit.
(He doesn't hate you for this, yet.
And Kaiser should stop while Yoichi still has sympathy for the boy born of glitz and glamour, but he needs to know, now, whether his childhood is why he is...this.)
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The woman left, and it's as if she took the man with her. The good part, Kaiser assumes, but he cannot remember a time when the man was in love and therefore, able to be loved.
The man is yelling, always yelling about the cost of gas (he never drives anywhere) or the boy's living expenses (the boy steals more than he eats), or the milk.
(The boy understands that the man is his father. The boy does not understand why his father hates him, but there is nothing to be done except absorb the anger like a sponge.)
The boy learns where milk comes from, and drinks a gallon of it in one sitting to understand why the man needs it. He does not understand, and neither does his father, apparently, because the boy sleeps on his side and under the stars that night.
It's too hot for snow, and the boy can't ice the bruises that scatter his back. If he squints, almost closes his eyes, they look like constellations, and he can believe that even if people don't want him, the stars, at least, are on his side.
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Kaiser imagines that he is beautiful in the moonlight, and describes the visions he has of himself to Yoichi, of changelings and a family waiting for him to come home.
Isagi wonders what he would have done if he were separated from his family, and he cannot. (Why would someone with a full heart want to imagine a hole in it?)
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The boy is desperate, and so the boy is a thief.
The boy is five, six, seven, twelve, now, and he grows accustomed to weaving in between stalls for "the essentials": food, milk, magazines, and powdered coffee because "We're not fucking rich, get that in your tiny little brain, brat."
The boy soon realizes that he can get away with stashing watches and wallets in his shoes and selling them at the pawn shop.
He buys a safe, as the shopkeeper advises, but he hides it outside, by the well. His father never leaves the house, just stares at the blue rose.
On one of his quieter days, the man speaks. Softly, almost contemplatively, and looking back, he thinks that this is what his father must've sounded like before she left.
He speaks of queens and kings, of the rot that worms its way inside of people's hearts and forces them to leave, or worse, be the one who is left behind. "The rot," he says, "is what you are," and the boy already knows this.
"Do you see this?" At first, the boy is confused. Obviously, he's seen the blue rose that his father keeps.
"The love your mother and I had is impossible. This is impossible."
Then, the man gets on his knees and cries, and the boy is disgusted by this pathetic, cowering man.
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("Do you hate me?" Kaiser wants to ask, but realizes that he doesn't want to hear the answer.)
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There is the ball, and then there is the boy, and together, they are two pieces of shit.
(The time spans endlessly long in Kaiser's mind, but he knows that the next three years are near-identical. Save the money. Lock it away. Kick the ball, throw it, then cling to it like it's the only tether to his reality on the bad days.)
Even so, he describes his routine to Yoichi, and is comforted by the steady weight of the other on his shoulder.
Then, that day. The day of freedom, of release and the way that Ray Dark looked at the boy like he was worth something, and it was all because of the ball. Hours, days, years of studying humans (to analyze them, Kaiser says, but he means to analyze his father.) and every way they tick.
Exploiting Ness and his love for magic, the moment he realizes that his father loved him through malice, and Kaiser can wield it like a weapon and a tool to become one of them. The people he sees on the street, and later, the dorms at the training camp, who feel and speak as if they've never learned how to tiptoe around the house.
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And then, he tells Yoichi, he realizes that they haven't. Hadn't needed to learn the cadence of footsteps to know when to run, to hide, to curl their body into the fetal position to protect their most vulnerable parts.
He stops, and senses that Yoichi is no longer breathing. They sit, still, on the porch in the moonlight.
"Do you hate me?" Kaiser wants to ask, but Yoichi speaks a second before him.
"I still think you're pretty."
It catches Kaiser off-guard, stoppers the question in his throat.
"It makes sense," Yoichi continues. "Your mom's an actress. You're pretty."
"That was what you got from the story?"
"I mean," Yoichi says, and lifts his head to stare at Kaiser. "I get why you're fucked up."
That was the best he could've hoped for, right?
(No, he'd hoped that Yoichi would comfort him. Would pat Kaiser's hair like he'd done hundreds of times to the shark boy, would pull him close and tell him that it was fine for him to be broken.)
"You're not inhuman, though." Kaiser snaps to attention when he hears that. "You just want love, right? That's human."
"I'm clearly bad at it. No one seems to like me very much."
Yoichi starts giggling, giggling, then full-on laughing and wiping tears from the sides of his eyes.
"Kaiser, that's because you act like a dickhead."
Kaiser's starting to feel annoyed, because this is the first time he's opened up and Yoichi is laughing at him like he's a clown.
"Give me back the ball, then, and go stalk Sae or the little Itoshi."
"No!" Isagi cries, as Kaiser lunges for the ball and comes away victorious. "It's my ball," Kaiser points out. "You came here to give it to
me, so you can leave now."
"What I meant to say," Isagi tries, "is that you're not good at expressing your love."
Kaiser frowns at that. "You want me to act like the bee boy and hang onto you every game?"
"What? Bachira - Bachira is a special case. Just try being nicer."
Kaiser frowns even more deeply at that, the lines etched in his face.
"Try with me."
That sounds dangerous, Kaiser thinks, because it's one thing to think that your rival is objectively attractive and another to talk about your feelings towards him to the rival himself.
But. But, Kaiser's been wrong before, and Yoichi is reaching out a hand to him.
He takes it.
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Later, three hours into their "feelings practice," Isagi calls it, pleased to be better than Kaiser at something, an elderly couple is walking around town because of a brief New Year's resolution to wake up at six am and take a stroll.
They see two boys, one tall and blonde, the other smaller and blue-haired.
The shorter boy is half-asleep, head on the blonde's shoulder, and he is playing with the blue strands on the boy's head. The old man feels a sudden surge of affection for his husband, and places his head in the crook of the other's neck.
"Why'd you do that?"
His husband shushes him; points out the two boys on the porch, whispers, "They're having a romantic moment, hush."
"Young love, huh?"
"Perhaps."
They go along their merry way.
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What they don't know:
That Isagi will wake up in an hour, and he'll realize that he's missed his early flight. That he'll try to get up and realize that there's a blond head on his chest, and Isagi will think he's going crazy because that's Kaiser, and blue-blond hair on his shirt.
He will remember the hours they spent just talking, drunk on the other's company, spilling secrets that they wouldn't share in any other situation.
Isagi can't stand loud noises, and Kaiser flipped over a table because someone offered him milk.
Isagi's fear that he won't be good enough for the prodigies, and Kaiser laughs at that.
"They won't be good enough for you," he says, and instead of pulling back, he boops Isagi on the nose.
"Hey!" They have a nonsensical competition that consists of trying to boop each other on the nose as many times as possible, a contest that Isagi insists he's won, and Kaiser allows him to revel in the glory of being "the best booper".
This is only for tonight, Kaiser promises himself, and that is why he allows himself to be weak.
He tells Isagi about the crippling anxiety of being at the top and yet still under Noa's thumb. He thinks, for a moment, that Yoichi is going to start extolling the man, and then Yoichi snorts.
"You realize that he used me to give you a power-up, right? I can admire his skill while admitting that he's an asshole."
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When Kaiser wakes up, Yoichi is playing with his hair, this time, their positions reversed, and he blinks to separate dream from reality.
"You're awake." And it isn't disappointment, a silent acknowledgement that they will never do this again, but a joy underlying the words.
Kaiser will finally let Yoichi into his house, and will endure the endless jabs at his hair products ("You do this every day?"), his cola ("Why do you have fifteen cola cans stuffed in your closet like they're inappropriate reading material?"), and he expects the most insults for the dartboard that he made with Yoichi's face on it. Before he met the face behind the reputation, and after, he not only kept the board but added more photos onto it - clips from the NEL where Yoichi's looking at him. Anger, or fear, but especially the ones with admiration.
"I like it," Yoichi says, instead, and takes out a photo of Kaiser he has tucked in his wallet, pinning it onto the board.
"..."
"You're my rival," Yoichi says. "I have to stay motivated to defeat you, obviously."
"Obviously," Kaiser agrees, and there is no mention of taking down the board or any of the pictures on it.
Yoichi goes back to Spain, where Rin and the rest of the Blue Lock team are awaiting him. In a rare display of "kindness", Ego took all twenty-five of them to Spain to watch the games there.
"Because you were horrible in the last game," Ego insists, and they pretend to believe him.
Isagi is in a restaurant, and he's thinking about Kaiser stealing "only the essentials". He's in the game, sees the ball soar in a perfect arc, and thinks of Kaiser hugging the ball to his chest and staring out the window at the moon.
Isagi can't stop thinking about Kaiser, and he goes to Germany again to tell him so.
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"Why are you here?"
Here, once again, Kaiser says, and this time without the excuse of bringing back his ball.
Isagi sighs, a long, exasperated sound. "I can't stop thinking about you."
"Your words are romantic, but you seem mad at me."
"No - " Isagi waves his hands, and Kaiser squints to see if he's drawing pentagons. "I want to be with you."
"Again," Kaiser says, barely restraining a smile, "Your speech doesn't fit your tone. Try again."
(Try again, and say what I wish you had earlier.)
"I like being around you. I don't know, this seemed like something that I could say when I was reciting it on the plane, but it's too late now to back out."
"You're rambling - "
"You're receiving a confession, and this is my first one, so maybe shut up for now, okay?" Isagi's cheeks are a bright pink, and he looks more agitated than during the match versus PxG.
It's satisfying, Kaiser realizes, to be the listener as well as the storyteller for people he's interested in.
"What I meant to say was that I like you. I don't know if we're boyfriends, after that night - if you even want to be," and Kaiser can't tell if he's imagining the unspoken "but I wouldn't mind."
"But you're not so insufferable all the time. It's irritating when you're actually a good person, and I can't focus on the match of the year because I'll be thinking about you. I'll be folding my clothing, or on the pitch, or drinking milk - " Kaiser winces at that, "And I'll be thinking about you."
Kaiser is cursing himself for the words he's about to say. "If I'm what's causing you pain, why do you think I can fix it?"
That is...a surprisingly cogent argument, Isagi has to admit.
"I don't know."
(Did I cause you to leave again?)
"I don't think it can hurt to try."
Just like that, Kaiser realizes, as he pulls in Yoichi by the collar, kisses him stupid against the doorframe like he'd wanted to on that night.
I'm drowning.