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One of the earliest memories Ryou has of his little brother goes like this:
They’re sitting in the park. Or maybe it was at a bench just outside an ice cream parlor. Somewhere outdoors—he remembers the shining natural light, the heat of a muggy day that made the ice cream in his hand taste that much sweeter. There is a fence to his left, vivid red with ivy climbing all through its gaps, cracking its splintering form wide. The ice cream is strawberry in a cone, topped with a coat of hardened chocolate, but that’s mostly speculation because his mom insists he had that phase. He certainly doesn’t like the combination anymore.
He takes the first bite. The chocolate hits his loose tooth a bit funny. To his dismay, though, all it does is wiggle more, rooted in place as it’s always been. His annoyance at being the only person in class who hasn’t lost a tooth yet simmers in his gut somewhere behind the immediate, bright joy of eating dessert.
Haruichi is sitting next to him, kicking his heels happily. He, too, has the same ice cream that Ryou has, already the little copycat of a lifetime. He has the same haircut Ryou had at that age and is wearing his old clothes—baggy, yellow shorts and a white t-shirt Ryou had once painted a mild violet after deciding it needed more style.
Unfortunately, despite their many similarities, Haruichi has less emotional control and fewer facts about bees stored in his brain than Ryou—whose proficiencies in both subjects stands at middling and oddly impressive, respectively.
Haruichi, then, doesn’t know to stand still when a bee pops up in front of him. He shrieks and knocks his entire body into Ryou’s arm.
Ryou, of course, is six. His literal, physical grasp on things could use some work, especially in his pre-baseball days.
The ice cream flies through the air. It splooshes at his feet, cone shattering across the sidewalk. Strawberry oozes out from beneath the shards of his broken dreams.
Ryou shouts, “My ice cream!” At least, he presumes he says something to mark the biggest horror of his young life.
Haruichi turns his big eyes up to Ryou, bottom lip trembling. Every inch of his face is pink, sticky sweetness smeared across his cheeks, hair plastered along his forehead, and flushing all around, masquerading as an innocent little cherub who did absolutely nothing wrong.
Except he knocked Ryou’s cone down.
In a fit of pique, Ryou swipes the ice cream out of Haruichi’s hands for himself. Let him be the arbitrator of justice, casting retribution for the sins of a careless three year old. Plus, it’s his duty as an older brother to teach him about consequences.
The triumph of a new(ish) cone for himself is thrilling. And it is so, so satisfying for all of two seconds.
Haruichi bursts into tears.
Ryou panics.
“Take it back!” Ryou probably yells. He tries to force the cone into Haruichi’s hand, prying his tiny fingers open enough to shove it in between, but his little brother will not take it.
Instead, Haruichi shouts, “No!” and shoves it away. His hand catches Ryou’s wrist and sends it hurtling towards his face until the cone smashes over his nose and mouth. The ice cream dribbles down his cheeks and chin and spills onto his brand new trainers.
His face stings, too, something more than the shock of cold to his skin. Haruichi’s baby arm was strong enough to smack his mouth hard. Adding in how shards of frozen chocolate jammed themselves up his nose and into his teeth in the process—
Ah. Ryou carefully runs an inventory with his tongue.
He spits out his tooth.
Haruichi sees it, cupped in his big brother’s palm in a tiny pool of saliva, blood, half-melted chocolate, and soggy cone bits. He cries harder.
After his parents finally notice the commotion and calm the boys down, Haruichi gets another treat. This time, it’s a tiny cup of vanilla. Ryou does not get a replacement. But he keeps his fist clenched tight over his tooth, carefully wrapped in a napkin, until they’re home safe, the other hand clutching his little brother’s.
Haruichi slips into their room as unassumingly as he can—and he’s become very good at that, passing by unnoticed. Has had reason to practice, lately. Still, as the door clicks gently shut behind him, he knows Ryou has noticed, for all that he doesn’t move.
Ryou always notices him.
The bedroom they share is pristine. The floor is clear of everything but the woven blue rug, the shelves dusted and polished, knickknacks all carefully angled on display. Even their laundry hampers are empty and the clothes hung away.
Haruichi’s twin bed is pushed into the back left corner. Ryou’s is in the back right. Both are covered in the same plain blue bedding that was carefully picked for them to match the rug. There’s a single window centered on the wall between them, yellow drapes knotted to the side, and a long desk spanning the space as well. Two chairs are tucked under and not a pen is out of place on top.
The only personality the room has is the single poster Ryou tacked up on the ceiling above his bed. It’s one of Ryou’s favorite NPB players, stuck up in defiance of his father’s grumbles about holes in the wall. The concession to put it on the ceiling where it would be unnoticeable was hard won from Ryou, though even if he’s never said anything directly, Haruichi knows from the twist of disgust on his face every time he looks up that he regrets wasting a win on such a frivolous argument.
Not that he’s gonna take it down, after all that.
Ryou finally turns away from the window to stare at Haruichi. He’s sitting at the head of his bed, one knee up on the mattress with his chin resting atop it, other foot skimming the floor.
Haruichi opens his mouth, but before he can apologize, Ryou says, “If you say you’re sorry, I’m gonna throw you out the window.”
He closes his mouth.
Instead of letting Haruichi go to his own bed, where he could stare at Ryou in silent solidarity, Ryou huffs a tiny laugh and pats the spot next to him. Haruichi changes tack diligently and when he perches onto the edge, Ryou pulls an arm around him and hooks him down for a gentle noogie. Haruichi wrinkles his nose at the rough treatment, though he doesn’t struggle too hard to get out.
Ryou lets go, but keeps his shoulder pressed against Haruichi’s. They’re too respectable a family to show each other much affection, so he carefully preserves each moment of it, pinning them delicately like butterfly wings to the corners of his mind.
“Don’t take it all on yourself, okay?” Ryou says with a gentle push into Haruichi.
“But it’s not fair,” Haruichi complains. To you, he doesn’t say out loud.
Ryou grins, gathering his gloominess into a shield and just like that, Haruichi knows he spoke wrong. Even though he’s not a real kid anymore—only one year away from being thirteen!—ask his parents or Ryou and it’s like he’s still learning to tie his shoes.
This time, the shove is a little more forceful, more in line with the way they sneak wrestle over the remote on nights their parents are out. “I’m breaking them in for you. Enjoy the spoils.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” Haruichi’s voice comes out in a high whine. Just hearing it flares up the desperation he has to be older, the frustration of how he’s forever stuck as this baby version of Ryou, weaker, meeker, and dumber besides.
Ryou clicks his tongue and shifts away, maneuvering around Haruichi until he’s laying face up on the bed. Haruichi sees the moment Ryou remembers the poster above him —that grimace— and turns towards the wall, back to his brother. “Be grateful, you little brat. I won’t be a buffer between you and our parents forever.”
“I—I never wanted you to get between us.” The second it rolls off his tongue Haruichi wants to collapse in on himself. It doesn’t mean what Ryou will hear at all. But Haruichi’s relationship with words and speaking has always been contentious at best, nothing like the way Ryou can walk into a group and just know what to say and how to say it. The stammering and mumbling is hard enough to deal with, but he’s never quite been able to translate what he thinks into the right words and the right tone, instead waffling viciously between timid concessions and blunt truths.
All Haruichi had meant was that while Ryou has spent his life noticing Haruichi, he forgets that Haruichi notices back. For every moment Ryou helps him—giving him the last of the sunscreen, chasing off the bullies, asking their parents for anything frivolous—Haruichi sees its twofold effect. The sunburnt skin, the kids avoiding him, the extra chores for discipline. Ryou may be breaking in their parents, but he comes out every conversation with his own widening cracks.
Seeing the application for Seidou on Ryou’s side of the desk, neatly hidden beneath thick test prep books until Haruichi dislodged them while opening the window had just made him so excited! Haruichi only learned the week before there were baseball high schools. And if Ryou is looking at this one, it must be a good school.
He just wanted to be the person supporting Ryou, for once. But it’s all blown up and Haruichi should have known it’s always better to keep his mouth shut. How hasn’t he learned that by now? He didn’t realize Ryou hadn’t told their parents yet, because if anyone could get them to change their minds, it was him. Of course he would’ve already convinced them to let him go, otherwise he wouldn’t have so brazenly brought evidence of something they’d hate inside the house.
The argument blows up the quiet of the house, even if no one raises a voice. The coldness of the conversation slides into the air on the back of stern, disappointed phrases like, There’s a plan, you know there’s a plan for you and If we knew you’d get this absorbed into some hobby, we would’ve picked you a different one while Ryou patiently grits his teeth, hunched small on the couch.
Worse still, Haruichi’s become a weapon in this, the excuse to lob back and forth because You know how much he looks up to you, if you do this, what’s going to become of his own studies and You’re never living for just yourself as an older brother, be responsible. They play tug-a-war and he’s somehow become the center of it while he’s outside of the room, clutching the doorframe with a single white-knuckled hand, looking on in silence.
Ryou sees him then, too. And once he does, he relaxes his jaw and picks up eyes from the floor and goes to bat.
Now, Ryou looks back over his shoulder with a patronizing smile. “Whether you want it or not, this is what it’s like right now. Once I’m at Seidou, you can spend the rest of your life letting mom and dad do all the thinking for you, and I’ll have a life where I don’t have to worry about my stupid younger brother.” He turns back to the wall and muffles his face with a pillow. “Now get off my bed.”
Haruichi slides off the covers, and hesitates. Ryou’s shoulders are still drawn tight, still but for his shallow breathing. He leaves the room, and just before the door clicks shut again, he hears the hiss of Ryou’s relieved sigh.
“Hey, it’s Mininato! What’re you doing here?” Ryou’s head jolts up from his econ homework, and sure enough, his roommate isn’t just high again. Or if he is, he’s projecting a collective hallucination, because there is absolutely no reason why Haruichi would be standing in the hallway outside his dorm room at 9 p.m. on a Wednesday in December.
Before he wades into mess is about to be dropped at his feet, he takes a moment to mourn, That’s where my fucking Waseda sweatshirt went. It was a present from his parents when he got into the university and he’s been looking for it since his family helped move him in. The way the red of it catches against his pink hair makes him vain. Clearly Haruichi thinks something similar if he stole it without so much as a warning. Then again, Ryou’s currently wearing Haruichi’s special, extra comfortable house slippers, so it’s not something he’ll bring up any time soon.
Haruichi steps forward until he’s hovering just inside the room. His hand is clutching his wrist in a death grip, the same one Ryou has seen over and over again around the corners of their home growing up, heralding Haruichi’s ears and eyes. If he had a bat between that grip, it wouldn’t be a half-bad form.
“I’m here to see my brother,” he says, nodding towards where Ryou is sitting at his desk. Something about his voice is wrong. A beat later, Ryou realizes Haruichi is trying not to cry.
And if this situation wasn’t already alarming enough, what’s worse is that he couldn’t immediately tell.
Ryou slowly slides his headphones off his ears and closes his laptop.
“You mind giving us the room for a bit?” Ryou asks his roommate, who nods enthusiastically, grabbing a snapback and his backpack and smacking Haruichi’s shoulder as he squeezes past.
Haruichi’s standing tall, same spot as when he stepped in, eyes taking in the room as if it’s changed at all in the handful of months since he’d last been here.
“Awfully late for a surprise visit,” Ryou says, opening up the bottom drawer to his desk and pulling out a small bag of Haruichi’s favorite snack. “Were you in the neighborhood?” He shakes the bag at Haruichi, holding it out.
Haruichi bites his cheek and not the sarcastic bait, and shakes his head no to the chips. He deflates with a heavy sigh and paces the room, back and forth across a colorful eyesore of a rug that is the exact opposite of anything the Kominato family would ever let cross the threshold of their home.
Ryou pops open the bag and lets him walk it out. He’s not gonna pull out his phone in front of Haruichi while he’s here in a panic, but it hits him that they probably haven’t texted each other directly in about two weeks. And of the group chats they’re both in, not even the one with just Kuramochi has been used for several days, since he got sick and then overwhelmed with make-up work from his classes.
A knot of uneasiness tightens in his gut. He'd gotten was a cryptic text from his mother a month ago: Tell me if you hear from Haruichi. No one explained, Haruichi dodged his questions, and the mystery got lost as his classes amped up. Their mutual friends were clueless, too, or unwilling to tell Ryou directly if they did know. Distance is unraveling what he has with his little brother. The first tear between was probably his fault, a casualty of how desperately he wanted space from that apartment. But now that he’s gotten it, he wants to stitch it back closed.
Ryou kicks his legs out far enough to get into Haruichi’s way. “As much as I’d love to spend my immeasurable free time watching you make gloomy faces at my floor, you’re worrying me here.”
“What’s new,” he responds without thinking, and then blushes bright, eyes widening.
It’s a bit bold in the shy way only Haruichi can manage, and Ryou laughs at the surprise and familiarity rolled into two words. Haruichi finally settles onto the edge of the ratty futon his roommate had insisted on keeping despite how much space it took up. Ryou sits next to him, folding a leg onto the seat so he can face Haruichi directly.
Haruichi’s next words are spoken softly, but hit hard. “Why did you quit baseball?”
The directness is another surprise. No hedging, no stammering, no backtracking. Cuts to the chase, and he doesn’t look away. Haruichi’s never been shy when asked about others, but for anything personal, and especially anything hinting at the constant call and chase of their relationship—it’s momentous. Objectively, Ryou is proud, but as it stands, Ryou doesn’t enjoy having to answer the question. From the look in Haruichi’s eye, Ryou is not getting out of it.
“Don’t make that face,” Haruichi says, exasperated.
“I’m not making a face.” In fact, it’s a point of pride that people find him inscrutable. All the energy of a resting bitch face masked in pleasant neutrality. He’s earned it. There is no face he is making but the face he has.
“You are, brother.”
Ryou grumpily crunches into a chip and holds the bag at an angle that Haruichi could grab some if he wanted. When he reaches for one, Ryou is smug that at least he’s still got that.
“For the record,” Ryou says, “I’m still playing college ball.”
“But you won’t try for the NBP, right? I don’t understand why. You could. You wanted to before.” He wishes he didn’t understand what Haruichi means, but they’re in the same boat with how their parents have spent their whole lives driving in a sense of excellence, exceptionalism, reputation. It was meant to launch them into picture-perfect careers and families, but their parents never foresaw the way baseball snuck in as the leading love of their children’s lives, and the way their obsessive refrain of goal setting intersected with the sport.
Ryou has had to come to terms with the idea of doing something for the joy and not the results in a way that Haruichi has not. With giving up, in a sense he can’t shake.
“Not anymore,” Ryou says. “Weighing my potential risk for more injuries with my skill—it’s not worth it to me. Now will you tell me what’s going on?”
Haruichi’s jaw unclenches, and when he looks up, there is fire in his eyes. “I’m not going to university.”
For all the hints smacking him in the face this entire conversation—or really, the past few years since they both went to Seidou—it’s only then that Ryou realizes how much his brother’s grown without him.
It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying. He’s going to have to spend a long while wrestling with that knowledge. But that’s not what Haruichi needs right here, right now.
“Okay,” Ryou says evenly, but who knows? Maybe he’s making a face again. “Are you planning on the draft? Who’s been scouting you? There have been scouts, right? Kuramochi told me Miyuki told him that Sawamura said—”
“I don’t want logic right now, Ryou. Even if none of that were true, I think I’d need to try anyway.” The sigh Haruichi lets out is shaky, but there’s a yearning to it that’s palpable. “I just want to play baseball, as much of it as I can, as far as I can make it.”
His parents’ adages of being prepared and realistic bubble up Ryou’s throat, but he tamps them down. Hard. “You’re kind of being an idiot, but whatever you need, I’ve got you.”
Haruichi covers his face with his hands and mumbles into them, “Sorry in advance for all the calls mom’s going to give you about this.”
Ryou rolls his eyes, shoving the rest of the chips into Haruichi’s lap. “If it wasn’t one thing, it would be another. And don’t think I’m doing this for free. I’ll be collecting someday.”
“Of course,” Haruichi says, munching again now that the worry has passed. “Thank you, Ryou.”
“Yeah, well, if you were really grateful you’d give me back my sweatshirt, wouldn’t you?”
“Haruichi, do you remember that time you punched my tooth out?”
“Dad, you didn’t!” his daughter gasps.
“It wasn’t like that, and I was four.” He shoots Ryou a dry look of Really? and gets an unrepentant smirk for all his trouble. Ryou mouths three from across the room, as if Haruichi remembers the incident instead of absorbing the memory from his family’s retellings.
“Dad, that’s bad,” she says, tugging at Haruichi’s shirt, aghast. “Don’t punch other people! You’ll get in trouble that way.”
With the way Ryou is laughing silently behind her, visible only to Haruichi, he knows that reasoning is 100% Ryou’s fault. Classic jerk.
Haruichi’s kid takes after both of the brothers a lot. She has the same haircut they both did at five, and even if the clothes are all new, he sees echoes of their own old wardrobe in every outfit Ryou ships over in a surprise Amazon package to his doorstep. And Ryou’s frequent calls with her have only heightened the similarities in personality. Haruichi can’t keep track anymore of how much they talk, or what about these days. Time zones don’t seem to matter to them. Only Ryou’s haphazard meetings and kindergarten get in their way. The one sure video call Haruichi sets up is for every Sunday morning, Haruichi’s family crowding around the iPad with Uncle Ryou and their parents in Japan, when it’s Sunday night for them.
He brushes her hair down with a gentle hand and kisses the top of her head. “I’ll try very hard not to punch anyone in the future, accident or not.”
She nods her head decisively and wanders away, distracted by a pile of rocks she brought into the house yesterday and forgot about until now.
Ryou slips further into his armchair, savoring the rare moment his niece isn’t hanging all over him. “Get me a glass of water, would you?” he said, kicking his feet up onto the coffee table as if he owns the place and isn’t just visiting the US for the first time in over a year.
So far, all the frustrations that come with an older brother physically in the same space as him again have resurfaced. Mainly, it’s a constant undercurrent of a patronizing, proprietary sense of superiority. But more than that, there’s a relief and wonder that they made it here and feel this close and free with each other.
Certainly there’s an odd detente they’re at, these days. He doesn’t know all the big waves of Ryou’s life right as they come, can’t ferret his nose into the things he keeps hidden away on habit because he’s an ocean away. Ryou will complain at length about an awful sandwich he ate but duck around every request for an update about his boyfriend or work. Haruichi cannot watch and speculate, a shade of solidarity built from living in the same room and thus knowing each other’s secrets, siblings out of forced proximity and minor blackmail instead of genuine affection.
But these days Ryou will send him articles dragging Haruichi’s baseball skill, commentary literally written into the margins thanks to the tablet stylus Haruichi bought him for his birthday. Haruichi sends back funny animal videos and 10-hour loops of his favorite new music. Ryou responds back to those with TikToks of sea shanties, lately, and sometimes he’ll shake it up with one he’ll record himself, bullying Kuramochi into dueting with him. Texts start with Do you remember when and Look what dad posted. There are memories and traumas and obscure ways of living no one else in the world will ever understand but the two of them growing up under the same roof. An act of witnessing no one else can share in.
Haruichi doesn’t have to savor the rare moments he loves his brother without a single worry undercutting them when they are so abundant now. Even when he comes home to a broken TV because his angelic daughter convinced Ryou to play extreme indoors scooter-basebasketball over FaceTime again. That worry has nothing to do with the uncertainty he used to feel at the way Ryou was always two steps ahead and ready to leave him behind. The foundation between them may have cracked from growing pains, but together, they’ve taken the time to fill them up and smooth them down over the years. No one is going anywhere.
Both metaphorically, and literally, right now.
“No,” Haruichi says with a smile. “If you want water, you can get it yourself.”
Ryou raises an eyebrow. “How bold you’ve gotten.”
“Blame yourself, brother.”