Chapter Text
i. Portland, OR, at ass o'clock in the morning
Kouichirou’s fiddling with his cellphone when Chris pulls up in his dad’s ‘79 AMC Spirit, a blast from the past coated in dust so thick that it shrouds the underlying paint job.
“Really?” Kouichirou’s mom whispers doubtfully into his ear, hanging on for one more hug. “That car?”
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Chris greets them, bounding up the front steps in two great leaps. “Took a wrong turn into the wrong cul-de-sac, and I--”
He meets Kouichirou’s eyes, blue-and-white shirt collar rucked up from the seatbelt, hair mussed in a way that suggests a day’s travel up the West Coast, and breaks out into a bashful grin.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats, like something private between the two of them, and the clenched fist in Kouichirou’s gut tightens.
“It’s OK, it’s not a problem,” Kouichirou mumbles, a prickly flush crawling up his neck. He conveniently ducks out while his parents reminisce about how young Chris had been when they'd first met, fourteen years old and so well-mannered in his neat baseball uniform. To be fair, Kouichirou remembers it too: the stilted introductions, Chris's palm disappearing into his mitt, Kouichirou's fledgling forkball taking flight.
It’d felt good to have those eyes on him, tracking his movement through the grill of a catcher’s faceguard. And as Kouichirou zips up his rucksack in the living room, he thinks there isn’t much he wouldn’t do to have sixty feet and six inches between them again.
He emerges from the house to Chris dimpling at him and unlocking the trunk with a neat twist of the wrist. “There are lots of rest stops along the way, so we’ll be perfectly safe,” Chris reassures Kouichirou's parents, fielding parental inquiries as well as he once caught Kouichirou's pitches. When he reshuffles his belongings to make room for Kouichirou's bag, Kouichirou can see where Chris's baseball tan is evening out, years and years of effort melting away.
About one block and two minutes later, Chris remarks, “You know, that went over better than I expected.”
Kouichirou covers his face with a hand. “I told you,” he groans, going red and white and then red again, “I told you. They think dating means we’ve mated for life.”
Chris takes the next corner a little too slow for someone with an awful tendency to speed, and Kouichirou opens his mouth to apologize for saying the wrong thing right off the bat. “Well, we could always go long-distance,” Chris offers casually, and the shred of hope in his voice is a lot to digest, too much to digest.
“Chris,” Kouichirou starts, and stops, mentally wired from a restless night of tossing and turning. He loves Chris. Chris loves him. The answer should be easy. “Can we talk about this later?”
Chris concedes with a shrug of the shoulder, but his face is that odd look between neutral and something else, something big. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “Alright. Guess what color this car was when I started driving.”
All too willingly Kouichirou springs for the bait. “Uh, brown.”
“Blue.”
“No.”
Chris throws his head back and laughs. Kouichirou pretends that he can’t hear the thin note of strain. “Maybe the rain’ll wash the dirt off. I didn’t plan on dragging this thing out of storage but Dad dinged the Honda real bad, put it in for repairs the day I left.”
Kouichirou winces, imagining Mr. Takigawa and their only functional car careening into a palm tree or a roadside parking meter. “Well, throwback Thursday's not bad,” he says, and resists the urge to apologize again for his inability to commit, for all the inconveniences he causes Chris, for packing a ball and a glove when he knows the last thing Chris wants to do is check Kouichirou's pitching form.
Chris shoots him a sly look. “When it breaks down, we’re pushing it together.”
“I’m going to fixate on how you said when and not if,” Kouichirou warns, and tentatively shucks off his socks and shoes, bringing one knee up to his chest. Chris reaches out to grab an ankle and Kouichirou knows this game, playfully shakes him off like an inch of skin contact hasn’t got him feeling like freshman year all over again, can I sit at your table, can I hold your hand, can I kiss you please?
“Eyes on the road, driver.”
“But my eyes are on the road,” Chris points out.
Kouichirou puts Chris’s hand back on the wheel and holds it there, trying not to give away too much too soon. He's sure Chris understands, hopes he understands. “So what’s the plan?”
“Anyplace you want to visit before we leave?”
“Nothing’s open at five thirty, unless you wanna grab Starbucks. And I--" Kouichirou hesitates, sliding lower into his seat. “I just kind of want to get going.”
Chris twines his fingers with Kouichirou’s, the bump of knuckle against knuckle familiar and soothing and kind of heartbreaking all at once. “Did something happen?"
“I mean, not really--just the usual, you know.” He doesn’t want to talk about the streets, so foggy that one time too many he mistook them for home; doesn't want to tell Chris how lonely it was, how much he'd missed everyone, moving upcoast two days after high school graduation and having nobody to see, nobody to meet statewide. After a moment, he adds, “All the neighbors know I’ve got an East Coast baseball scholarship.”
“Is that a good or bad thing?”
“Neither? They keep telling me to do what I love like it’s easy, like I understand what that means. Like you need to love something to make it work. I mean--like loving something makes it work. And then if it doesn’t--does that mean you didn’t love it enough?” The dim outside light catches on the rim of Chris’s wristwatch as they round the corner, and Kouichirou eyes the bent iron heads of streetlamps through the window, the hazy silhouettes of trees, the overcast sky. In a few hours it’ll be raining, people streaming onto the streets in hoodies and raincoats. “I dunno. I just want to spend time with you and not think.”
If that comes out in a mumble it’s fine, it doesn’t have to mean anything, it doesn’t have to be important, but the corner of Chris’s mouth is tight in a way that means he’s trying not to smile.
“I don’t actually have plans for until we get to San Francisco,” Chris confesses wryly. “So it’s kind of up to you to decide what we get to do for half of the car ride.”
Kouichirou tries to summon a map of the West Coast in his head and draws a blank. “Uh, I’ve always wanted to see Shasta, Siskiyou… that kind of thing. If it’s not too out of the way.”
“Time to consult Google Maps,” Chris announces, holding out his phone for Kouichirou to peruse. They decide on Klamath, which is not Siskiyou but close enough, with Shasta as a second stop on their southbound route. “Lots of trees,” Chris says in an approving tone, and Kouichirou suddenly and vividly recalls photos of Mr. Takigawa during his hippie days, tie-dyed shirts and dark sunglasses to conceal bloodshot eyes.
By the time they’re cruising down I-5, Kouichirou’s dozing off to The Pillows on Chris’s portable music player. The music’s not slow or sleepy but it’s dear to the heart and hits where it counts, ticks off something good in the back of his head. Kouichirou vaguely remembers to ask Chris about the cost of the trip, feeling appropriately ashamed, but Chris responds with something about family connections, nepotism, and Park Ranger cousins that Kouichirou misses because there’s the slow gray pattern of rain on the windshield, and as he follows one droplet down the line of the rubber window seal he’s out.