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Rin starts playing football because when Sae stands on the field, he shines so bright that Rin has to put down his action figures and watch how his big brother easily maneuvers around the other players and sends the ball flying in a beautiful, clean arc. It’s instinct that tells him to dart on the field, to reach Sae’s pass when none of his brother’s teammates can, to kick it into the goal with all his might even if it sends him sprawling to the ground. He gets chastised later, by his parents, by Sae’s team, by the others watching the game; none of this matters when Sae’s response was to call him incredible and ask him to play football together.
Rin keeps playing football because he feels invincible when he plays with Sae, and if becoming the best in the world means this feeling lasts even longer, then he’ll train for hours and hours. He wants nothing more than to stand on the world stage and become the best striker after Sae. When football starts to feel restricting without Sae, he only practices harder to fill in the gap between their abilities and waits for his brother to come back home.
Rin stops playing football because–
It’s snowing. Sae is back and announces he’s discarded their dream in favor of becoming the best midfielder in the world. They play a match, and as Rin fails to even steal the ball back, he thinks the distance between them has widened into an impossible chasm even though Sae stands in front of him.
“If I can’t chase our dream together with you, then I don’t have any reason to play football at all,” Rin says.
His beloved big brother’s face twists into a disgusted scowl. “Then fucking quit,” Sae says, his eyes burning bright with disdain.
Sae says more. Rin thinks he gets called a lukewarm dumbass, but he can’t really remember when his mind goes perfectly blank. It’s a little shocking to have everything he’s known for the past ten years splinter apart in mere seconds, and Rin struggles to collect his thoughts and listen to the last words Sae has for him.
“Get lost Rin. You’re not needed in my life anymore.”
He doesn’t remember collecting all of the footballs littering the field or his walk back home. All he knows is that his parents excitedly tell him Sae’s back and staying in a hotel room rather than their house, and that Rin brushes past them and locks himself in his room so he can shove all of Sae’s trophies off the table in a poor attempt to vent out his anger.
There’s a letter addressed to Rin from the Japanese Football Association in their mailbox the next day. His father eagerly signs the player improvement project waiver and his mother pushes him out the door while gushing over the thought of her second son following in her first son’s footsteps, and Rin mechanically moves one step at a time to the train station.
Ego Jinpachi tells a room of three hundred football players that he’s going to turn one of them into the best striker in the world. He tells them to imagine scoring the winning goal at the World Cup. Rin closes his eyes and all he can picture is the horrifying darkness of a dream he no longer believes in.
Ah, he thinks. I don’t have a reason to play football anymore.
A plain-looking guy with blue eyes leads the charge past the doors behind Ego. Rin runs too, because suddenly the Japan Football Association building feels absolutely suffocating and all he wants to do is to leave. His instincts tell him to run, so he pumps his legs as fast as they can go and fights against the wave of boys rushing to become the future of Japanese football.
It’s only once he’s standing on the platform of the nearest train station that he can breathe again.
Then fucking quit, Sae had told Rin.
So he does.
.
Rin wants to quit immediately. He has no love left for football, and all he wants to do is to find a new dream so he no longer feels like his life has no meaning and that the past ten years of his life have been a complete and utter lie.
His coach screams in his face and his mother cries and his father pleads that Rin go to at least Nationals, and so Rin leads his high school team to victory against a pool of competitors lacking their strongest players. Blue Lock has started with two hundred ninety-nine players, and only its rejects take the field for Nationals. Rin takes vindictive pleasure in crushing Kira’s team to pieces until the spectators are left wondering why they call him the Jewel of Japan.
“Why do you play football?” a reporter asks Rin.
The weight of the MVP award is heavy in his hands. It’s only a paper certificate, but Rin holds it by the corners so it doesn’t leave scorch marks on his skin. He thinks he’d rather have the snow again than the cheerful sun and peaceful blue sky on the day he’s freed from the sport he started playing so he could have a place in someone else’s life.
“I don’t play football anymore,” Rin tells her, ignoring the gasps that ripple through the crowd. “That was my last match. I quit.”
He rejects all of the scouts that try to talk to him. When his coach tries to approach him again, Rin collects his things from the locker room and returns his uniform while the rest of his team is taking photos with the trophy. This means he won’t be able to take the team’s bus back to Kanagawa with them, but that’s fine. He has enough money in his wallet to afford a train ticket.
His classmates stop talking to him as the news of his betrayal spreads across campus. That’s fine, Rin has never liked talking to them anyways when all they wanted was to get close with the brother of Itoshi Sae. He’s always been a hard worker and good at studying, and now that he doesn’t have to focus all of his efforts on football, his grades start shooting up. They take away his sports scholarship the next year and in return Rin earns an academic scholarship when he places third overall in his year for their final exams.
Physical Education remains his favorite subject, because losing interest in football doesn’t mean he hates exercising or taking care of his body. He still meditates before bed because it helps him center his thoughts and reduce his stress after getting jumpscared yet again from another horror movie. He’s always liked art too, and when his second year of high school starts, Rin sends in an application to the art club.
Football had come easily to him. He was guided by his instincts to where his heart thought Sae would send the ball, and when he played on his own, he used his years of experience to develop an analytical mind.
Art is different: his palm smears another charcoal sketch when he forgets he can’t rest his hand on the paper, the acrylics dry before he can properly blend the colors of his background together, the perspective lines never come out quite right even though he’s drawn them dozens of times now, and his final piece somehow manages to look worse than his original sketch every single time.
It’s frustrating and pain-staking and time-consuming and it’s all his.
His parents beg him not to study art in university. It was never Rin’s intention to, not when he’s in search of something he loves and not a new career. English is the subject he excels at the most after he tried so hard to become fluent in the language, and his appreciation for languages have shifted into learning the languages of coding after he played one particularly awful horror game and was seized with the sudden ambition of creating his own game. There’s certainly nothing disagreeable with wanting to go into engineering even if his new dream is to have early access to the newest horror games.
But for now, he learns to love art. The other students in the club don’t bother him too much, speaking to him only during critiques or to ask him to help carry some of the heavier art supplies. Rin is content as he paints an abyssal monster towering over Madrid.
He studies for his classes, attends cram school for his exams, watches The Shining at least ten different times, plays every new horror game release, experiments with more art mediums, and learns more about computer science. When he graduates high school, he shoves away his unsociability and nods his head at the few friends he made congratulating him on his acceptance to University of Tokyo.
His world changes there. He learns more about coding and what a language is, and while he enters an art club there too, he finds himself attending less and less meetings as he works with some classmates on producing a small horror video game where he helps write code and style the concept art. The project is full of bugs and it ultimately doesn’t seem to get very far, but Rin adds it to his portfolio and returns to the art club’s room and asks if there’s a free seat he can take.
“Is it true that Itoshi Sae was offered a contract worth 450 billion yen with Real Madrid?” a classmate asks him.
Rin shrugs and focuses on debugging his homework. It’s crashed thirty times now and he’d really like to finish this soon so he can get more than four hours of sleep. “I don’t know. Have you fixed the mistake in line thirty yet?”
He doesn’t follow football anymore. He’s seen articles celebrating Japan’s highest placement at the U-20 World Cup after Blue Lock ended and his parents will mention Sae when he returns home, but he no longer follows the foreign leagues or watches the big matches. His English gets more use with playing even more horror games after Rin discovered how many video games exist outside of Japan.
When he graduates from University of Tokyo, his parents have learned to celebrate Rin’s new dreams. He has a degree in computer science and a job lined up at a modestly successful company with a good starting salary. He’ll gain experience here and then hopefully transition into a gaming company later, but it’s fine. He’s older now and a little bit wiser, and he’s learned that dreams are achieved one step at a time.
Which is why Rin is the most surprised of all when his next job is not engineering but rather working as the assistant of a famous artist. The job description emphasized the importance of knowing how to code in order to maintain a website, but it also included administrative tasks. Yet his company is facing layoffs and the fears of a recession are climbing as the tech industry deals with the harshest economic blows, and so Rin emails back the employment contract with his name signed at the bottom.
Looking forward to working with you, Rin writes.
I’m excited to work with you too! is sent in response by Bachira Yuu.
.
Bachira Yuu is kind. She’s as gentle as her name suggests, and one minute after Rin arrives at her studio and greets her and her former assistant who had handled the hiring process, she's ushering them out to a nearby café. Rin drinks an espresso as he formally introduces himself.
He calls his new employer shachou and is subjected to a long speech about how she’s just a humble artist who happens to be one of the most recognizable names in art with dozens of awards, magazine features, and several television specials. Rin likes her work and has admired her since he saw her monster collection in a museum exhibit in high school, and it’s a bit surreal to not only work with art once more, but to have her as his boss. But he wants the speech to stop and her old assistant is whispering to just go along with it, so he repeats Bachira-san and lets them all move on to training Rin on their scheduling system.
Bachira Yuu has the most god-awful website he’s ever seen. None of the buttons seem to work, and when he asks them where the information collected in the contact box goes, all he gets are blank stares and a chilling silence. When he looks at the gallery tab, it takes nearly two minutes for a single photo to load.
“Neither of us are that great with technology,” the old assistant explains.
Rin can clearly tell. He bites his tongue to avoid sassing his employer within his first day on the job and starts explaining that he’ll have to overhaul the entire site in order for it to have the functions that Bachira-san wants.
In between working on the website, he reminds Bachira-san of the meetings she needs to attend and of the upcoming interviews that she needs to prepare material for. He gets coffee and picks up lunch and silently nods as she talks about her son who recently moved to Spain for work. He drives her to an appearance on a talk show and somehow ends up helping the television crew with their sound system.
“What do you think of my art?” she asks him when they arrive at her studio.
Rin pauses lifting one of her pieces out of his trunk, taking a moment to contemplate her question before answering. “At first I liked the monster you drew because it reminded me of a horror series that I liked. From a technical standpoint, I like how you use bold colors and various brush strokes to create something incorporeal and fearful. But I also think the ‘monster’ reminds me of myself.”
Bachira-san smiles into her palm. “We all want to believe in something, but sometimes we stop believing when we get older. That’s what I wanted to paint.”
He had once stopped believing in a dream he held for ten years, but he doesn’t think that incident was exactly related to just growing older. Bachira-san’s Monster painting holds something personal within it too: the painting is all wisps and shadows except for a glowing pair of eyes. When Rin found himself in a haze for the weeks following Sae’s barrage of insults, he hadn’t been able to stand seeing his own eyes in the mirror because he only saw his brother’s cold, cold gaze staring back. Rin still goes to a hair salon to get his bangs trimmed eight years later.
Looking at her painting had been like looking into a mirror for the first time since he threw away that old dream of being the second best striker in the world. Her art still holds meaning to him now, but now it reminds him of how he stepped away from football for better or for worse. After eight years, Rin likes to think it was for the better.
It’s only in his third week that the shoe drops.
“My son’s offseason starts next week,” Bachira-san says, the same amount of pride tucked into her voice as usual. “He’ll be coming home from Barcelona, and you might see him when he comes to visit the studio.”
Rin has heard a lot about her son. But as she mentions that his offseason starts soon and that he’s coming back from Barcelona, the puzzle pieces start to click together. After all, Rin’s mother requested that he go home to Kamakura in two weeks when Sae brings his boyfriend to meet their family.
“What exactly does your son do?” Rin asks.
He already knows the answer before his boss says it. That doesn’t stop Bachira-san from confirming his worst fears as she says, “Football! He plays football with FC Barcha!”
Rin slams his laptop shut. It’s a good thing he saved all of the code that he wrote earlier to optimize the loading speed of the website. “I’m taking my lunch break,” he says hurriedly. He’s out the door before his boss can approve his request.
Bachira Meguru has over nearly ten million Google search results. Rin sits in a café and rapidly clicks through the links on the first page and learns that Bachira-san’s son started in Blue Lock, made a name for himself in the Neo Egoist League, got a contract with a team in Porto before later signing with FC Barcha, and now routinely gets named to the Japan national football team alongside Sae. Rin takes a deep break, exhales, and slams his phone down on the table so hard that he cracks the screen.
His phone screen has been replaced by the time he meets Bachira-san’s son. Their resemblance really shines when they stand next to each other, and Rin can already feel a headache starting to form as he’s told to distinguish between the two of them by calling his boss’s son by his first name.
“We can’t both be Bachira-san,” the annoying football player says smugly. “And I really don’t mind if you use my first name, I’m used to that since I spend most of the year in Spain!”
“Only when I’m with the both of you,” Rin says. He intends to never see Bachira-san’s son again so he’ll never have to say his name out loud.
Rin is using the studio’s desktop today for work. If he’s typing louder than usual today, he’s going to blame it on the mechanical keyboard.
Unfortunately, being Bachira-san’s assistant means he’s stuck playing as her son’s assistant too. Bachira-san is taking a break from art this week, and while she doesn’t have much experience with technology, she did earn a business degree before she became an artist, and Rin can’t help her as she plans out the details of her collaboration with a designer bag company.
“You can take a break today and go around with Meguru,” his boss tells him the next day. She seals her words with a wink. Rin can’t decide if she’s trying to be kind or if she secretly knows that being stuck with someone as annoyingly loud as her son is a form of torture.
“Don’t worry, you’ll still be paid,” she rushes to assure him. She must be misinterpreting Rin’s grimace, but he doesn’t want to anger his boss before he can secure another job. Rin sighs, points at Bachira, and motions for him to head downstairs to his car.
“Your hand gesture looked like you were trying to slice my neck and kill me,” Bachira laughs when they leave the studio.
“Get in the car,” Rin says. He doesn’t deny it.
Rin is stuck driving Bachira to Shibuya where he’s meeting friends at karaoke. Bachira spends the drive flipping through radio channels and putting on a simple face mask as a disguise even though his most obvious feature is his partially-bleached hair. When Rin attempts to drop him off in the parking lot, Bachira only tells him to find a spot to park.
There’s a hat in the backseat of his car. He left it there after a short visit to the beach the past weekend. Rin places one hand on Bachira’s seat to stabilize himself before twisting his torso and grabbing the hat. Bachira is silent for the first time all day as Rin jams the baseball cap over his head.
“I do not want to deal with someone finding out you're famous just because my boss told me to drive her son around,” Rin mutters. He leans over to twist the bleached parts of his hair under the cap and mumbles an apology under his breath. When he pulls away, Bachira’s cheeks are dusted with red.
Rin narrows his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re sick after you didn’t wear a mask inside my car until the end.”
“I’m not sick!” Bachira says in his defense. It sounds like he’s squealing and when his cheeks flush even more, Rin isn’t convinced.
“Are you nervous to meet your friends again?” Rin asks. It’s not exactly his place to ask, but if he’s going to be spending the rest of the day with them, he’ll try a little bit to not insult them.
“Definitely that,” Bachira says. “Definitely that.”
Before Rin can dig into his words and excavate their true meaning, he’s getting out of his car and heading into a karaoke box. He trails after Bachira and tries to remember when the last time he came to a karaoke box was before realizing that he’s spending a long time trying to recall the memory because it doesn’t exist. He’s never been to one before, and now his first time here will be with a handful of professional football players.
“It’ll be me, Isagi, Kunigami, Chigiri, and Nagi!” Bachira whispers loudly as they look for room sixteen. “Isagi has blue eyes, Kunigami has orange hair, Chigiri looks like a princess, and Nagi’s probably going to be on his phone the whole time alternating between video games and texting Reo.”
He has no clue who any of those people are. He’s spent the past eight years trying to avoid any mention of football so he wouldn’t have to think of Sae. That eight year streak only ended when he had to search up who Bachira Meguru was.
But there’s nothing Rin can do except walk into the karaoke room, wave, and immediately plop himself in the corner and stare at the wall in silence. If anyone is concerned by his presence, no one says it, and Rin gets an early start on his meditation exercises as the men fill the room with chatter and awful singing.
“What’s your name?” Kunigami asks after an hour of Rin sitting there in the corner in silence. Chigiri had tried to pass him the tambourine earlier, though he quickly took it back after Rin scowled at him.
They’ve booked this karaoke room for an awfully long time. Rin studies the four faces staring at him with burning curiosity. The last guy, the man with unruly white hair who should be given a hairbrush, does indeed have his face inches from his phone screen. Rin mentally marks him as Nagi before speaking.
“Itoshi. Itoshi Rin.”
Isagi studies his eyes and by the time he opens his mouth, Rin can guess what he’s about to say. “We know an Itoshi. He’s our teammate on the national team actually. You kind of look like him, do you know–”
“If you finish that sentence, I will kill you,” Rin says calmly. Isagi shuts his mouth.
Chigiri claps his hands to diffuse the tension. “So! How do you and Bachira know each other?”
“I just met Bachira yesterday.”
Chigiri forges on, undeterred by the venom in his voice. “And he brought you here to meet us? Wow are you his–”
“My mom’s employee!” Bachira squeaks. When everyone’s gaze shifts from Rin to him, he clears his throat and starts to speak again. “He works for my mom. He’s her assistant and she was pretty busy today and getting a ride would be a lot better than taking the train when I’m still working towards my license. He’s just driving me around today.”
Kunigami and Isagi nod in understanding even though Rin can see the confusion still lingering on their faces. He doesn’t quite understand how driving Bachira around translates into joining them for karaoke either, but it’s too late to back out now that he’s spent the last hour sitting with them. Chigiri looks less convinced, but he places his chin in his hands and thinks.
“Do you watch football?” Isagi asks in an attempt to break the heavy silence that settled over the room after Bachira’s answer.
It might be worse to lie than to tell the truth. Rin hasn’t touched a football since the end of his first year of high school, but they already know he’s related to Sae and Rin has a small set of achievements that they could find if they search up his name.
“I used to play football in high school,” Rin shares.
“Maybe we played against each other!” Kunigami tries. When no one answers, his shoulders sink. “Okay maybe not since Blue Lock was more memorable than playing football in high school.”
“We heard your name before,” Chigiri says. His brows are furrowed, and as he leans forward with a serious glint in his eyes, Rin thinks it might have been better if he kept his mouth shut. “Ego mentioned your name during Blue Lock. You were the only one who chose to not participate.”
Now that he’s shared this nugget of information and successfully ruined the rest of day for Rin, the rest of the men start chiming in. Even Nagi puts his phone down so he can study Rin.
“Didn’t he bring up Rin when we formed our U-20 team around Shidou?” Isagi asks.
Kunigami scowls, his eyes darkening despite the harsh fluorescent lights of the karaoke room. “I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there.”
“Ego said you’re why we couldn’t play a more rational style of football,” Nagi adds. “Not that I care. We would have lost against the U-20 team anyways considering none of us could beat Itoshi Sae then.”
It’s the first time Rin’s heard him speak, and knowing that he made the sleepy member of the group put down his phone to discuss his reputation makes him consider quitting his job so he can abandon Bachira here.
“You guys lost to the U-20 team?” Rin asks. He knows better than anyone just how strong Sae is at football, but he also knows that Blue Lock later made a television series because it felt like he was the only one in the world who wasn’t paying five hundred yen a month to watch football. It doesn’t make sense as to why there would have been a second season of Blue Lock if they lost their all-or-nothing game.
Bachira sighs. The wound must continue to sting if all of them, even Nagi, look glum. “We tied with the U-20 team. Not much of a loss, but the only one who won that day was Shidou who found his future boyfriend, even if he was on the opposite team.”
Rin doesn’t know the name of his brother’s boyfriend that he must love enough to bring to Kamakura to meet their family. He’s kept in touch with his parents after moving to Chiba, and he’s constantly forced to listen to his mother complain that Sae never stays for longer than an hour when he visits home. Shidou must be special to Sae if he has the power to visit his home and stay for a night.
“What’s Shidou like?”
For a moment, Rin hopes that they’ll sing Shidou’s praises and that when he sees Sae again in a week, he’ll be able to have a nice, peaceful dinner. Instead, the five men share uneasy glances with each other.
“He’s uh…nice before he starts getting violent?” Isagi tries.
Bachira presses his fingers to his temples as he tries extra hard to find a compliment. “He’s a good guy, at least until he starts swearing.”
“I can’t say I like him that much,” Kunigami frowns.
Chigiri places a hand on Kunigami’s arm and pats him twice before he gives his answer. “He’s very…unique. A great football player though.”
“You’ll hate him,” Nagi offers. He picks up his phone again, and this time Rin notes that he’s texting someone instead of playing the battle game from earlier. “And he’ll hate you.”
Rin didn’t want to go back to Kamakura before this, and he certainly doesn’t want to go back now. When Bachira wordlessly hands him the karaoke microphone, Rin accepts it and asks Isagi to queue up a King Gnu song.
.
He sees Bachira a few more times after that. Bachira-san asks him to take Bachira to a team meeting, and Rin feels light headed when he realizes it’s the same Japan Football Association building where he realized he wanted to quit football.
He has to disguise Bachira with the hat from before so they can go eat ramen, and this time, Bachira gives him a wobbly smile as Rin tucks in the incriminating parts of his hair. He forgets this once Bachira asks how dinner with Sae and Shidou went. He has no intention of remembering how the night culminated in him tackling Shidou into the couch because he cheated in Mario Kart.
He forgets this memory too, because Bachira accidentally flings a bamboo shoot into his hair and Rin quickly gets over his status as his employer’s son as he curses Bachira out. Bachira must not mind this either, because he laughs and laughs and uses his greasy napkin to pull it out.
“You look cute with it, you should keep it in your hair,” Bachira suggests. He wiggles his eyebrows and fans his face as the warmth of the restaurant makes his cheeks turn pink.
“And I think you’d look cute with my chopsticks up your nose,” Rin promises. “Turn towards me so I can try.”
Bachira leans away from Rin’s chopsticks with a pout, chugs his glass of water, and continues the previous conversation of what exactly happened in Blue Lock.
He drives both Bachira-san and Bachira to the airport when Bachira has to return to Barcelona. Bachira waves at him with just as much enthusiasm as he showed his mother; Rin returns the wave hesitantly.
He continues revamping Bachira-san’s website. They’ve already agreed that Rin will stay as her assistant and web developer for a year, because while he enjoys his current work, it isn’t as fulfilling as what he still dreams of doing. He watched one particularly amazing horror movie recently, and it’s only renewed his interest in working on a horror game.
The contact field actually works now. The image gallery loads in much faster now, and Rin has added a tab where site visitors can purchase prints of her work. There are more features to be added while Rin is still working here, but anything seems more manageable than the very bad week where someone tried to hack their website.
Two months before Rin leaves Bachira-san’s studio, he flies with her to northern Spain. Her work is featured in a special exhibit in a contemporary art museum in Bilbao, and as the only employee on her payroll, Rin gets taken along. Bachira meets them there for the first day of the exhibit, and when Bachira-san is done entertaining reporters, she tells the two of them to explore the museum together.
“I don’t really get modern art,” Bachira says as he squints at an art piece consisting of different rings of painted circles layered over each other. “I like my mom’s art, but I don’t always understand what art means.”
“Art doesn’t have to have a meaning,” Rin says as he moves on to the next piece in the gallery. “You can just enjoy what it looks like.”
Bachira jogs after him, one hand pressed to the same baseball cap as always to make sure it doesn’t budge an inch and reveal the bleached parts of his hair. He somehow forgot to pack a disguise and Rin only has the cap he brought to Spain in case it was too sunny.
“Rin-chan, you’re so wise.” Bachira elbows his arm alongside the compliment, and Rin reaches out to slap away his hand.
“That’s what happens when I have a university degree and you finished high school through a virtual program because of Blue Lock.”
Rin walks a little faster to ignore Bachira whining and calling him mean.
It’s Bachira-san who tells her son that Rin won’t be her assistant anymore in two months. They’ve started to prepare the listing for more employees for her, and Rin has been preparing his documents so he can apply for open positions at gaming companies. Bachira takes the news as well as he can, which is to mourn the loss of a chauffeur when he’s in Japan.
“We never even got to play football together,” Bachira says dejectedly.
Rin tightens his grip on his glass of water. “And we never will.”
“Don’t be a hater, Rin-chan.”
At the end of the trip, Bachira sees them off at the airport before he leaves for Barcelona himself. Bachira-san smiles as she sees the two of them arguing over the worth of Rin’s LINE profile, and when they start attracting stares as two grown men nearly start fighting, Rin yanks Bachira’s phone out of his hands and adds his contact.
“Don’t message me,” Rin orders as he returns the phone.
There are sixteen messages on LINE, all sent by one new contact, when Rin’s flight lands at Narita International Airport.
.
He gets an offer from a gaming company that has produced many of his favorite horror series. He’s spent the past two weeks onboarding the new hires that he and Bachira-san recruited, and after a weeklong break for himself, he’ll be working at his new company. Bachira-san wishes him well and offers him a space in her studio if he’d ever like to return to art. Rin thinks of the thrill of finding a hobby for himself all those years ago and tells her he’ll send a message when he wants to drop by.
It’s different to be part of the team that develops a video game rather than being the consumer. There are many new tasks that Rin must learn, but his affinity for languages and working hard hasn’t faded at all. The first time Rin plays their product as part of the debugging process, he takes a longer break than usual so he can dab the tears of both joy and frustration out of his eyes.
Bachira continues to text him. Rin doesn’t usually respond, but he gets dragged to another hangout with Isagi, Chigiri, Kunigami, and Nagi. This time, the elusive Mikage Reo is there, and as Rin shakes his hand, he wonders if Mikage knows that Bachira once sent fifty-seven messages in a row detailing the complicated relationship between him and Nagi. Rin is summoned because Rin-chan I need a car please send help and his first meeting with Mikage is soured by Rin headbutting Bachira for sabotaging him in Mario Party.
“I don’t think Reo likes you,” Bachira says during their drive back to Chiba. They’re having dinner with Bachira-san that night, and Rin reminds himself that he cannot show up to his old employer’s house with the news that he got them into an accident because Bachira wouldn’t stop running his mouth.
“If you don’t shut up, I will make you shut up.”
“Please do,” Bachira says. He flutters his eyelashes and puckers his lips, and this only makes Rin even more sure that he’s not in the wrong when he grabs the steering wheel with one hand and slaps Bachira’s shoulder.
They’re late to dinner. Bachira-san smiles as they blame each other for the delay and welcomes them into her home.
He visits Bachira-san once a month. It’s nice to throw himself into art again: he wears his old football jacket and a pair of ratty sweats and leaves with paint smeared everywhere. Bachira once had to help him remove acrylic paint from his hair before it dried, and Bachira-san had filmed the whole exchange of the two of them screeching at each other. There’s a small stack of his work in her studio now, and when he runs into her current assistants, they treat him with reverence.
“Why do you let me use your studio?” Rin asks.
Bachira-san takes advantage of him sitting on the floor to ruffle his hair. “You’re almost like family.”
There’s some deeper meaning hidden in her words, but Rin doesn’t have enough time to figure it out before she peers down at his painting. There’s a looming shadow underneath the feet of a young boy, and while something crawls out of the shadow, the boy clutches onto a bundle of ruby red anthuriums.
“Why did you choose anthuriums?”
Suddenly Rin forgets all rationale behind choosing that flower. He discards that painting soon after and starts a new version where this time, the boy holds a single sunflower. He sends a photo of that piece to Bachira when he’s done, and when Bachira asks if it’s a Mob Psycho 100 reference, Rin wonders if he should have kept the anthuriums after all.
The horror game Rin helped work on finishes its development stage. Rin accepts the invitation to go out for drinks that night, and when the producer delivers an emotional speech, Rin isn’t the only one crying. When the game hits the market later, Rin laughs at Bachira who made the mistake of playing it before bed. Bachira promises revenge, and when he’s back in Japan once more, he makes Rin accompany him to an informal dinner with the Japan national football team.
“They told us to bring a friend, but none of us have friends that aren’t on the team. I only know you and that’s because I met you through my mom,” Bachira grumbles.
There’s an unspoken question of if Rin will be okay seeing Sae. But Rin has grown older and achieved the dream he carved out with his own two hands. He paints his heart out twice a month now, and he left his most recent therapy session feeling like he could play football again sometime.
“I don’t mind seeing Sae,” Rin says softly. Bachira beams at him as he accepts the baseball cap that’s become his over the years. There might not be much of a need for a disguise tonight, but it’s become a tradition for them, and it’s strangely become something he treasures.
“I want to see Shidou again though, because that fucker gave me the shitty Joy-Con with drifting issues the last time we played Mario Kart–”
Rin meets Isagi, Chigiri, Kunigami, Nagi, and Mikage again. He likes talking to Aryu and Tokimitsu the most, and when he meets a friend that Karasu invited, he learns that he and Hiori took a course together at University of Tokyo at one point. When he runs into Shidou, Rin thinks he’s been thrown into a parallel universe because there’s no other way to explain Sae tugging at Shidou’s ear until he apologizes for the shitty Joy-Con and promises to defeat him on Rainbow Road fair and square next time.
“That wasn’t so bad was it?” Bachira asks at the end of the night.
Rin got to eat the best steak in his life and didn’t even have to pay for it. “It was fine,” he decides.
He stretches his hand across Bachira’s seat so he can have a better view of the parking lot as he pulls out of his space. Bachira’s cheeks are tinged with pink as they leave the parking lot, and after he submits the parking ticket with proof of verification, Rin flicks on the air conditioning to help him cool down.
His team starts a new project at work. Rin gets to help out with some of the concept art this time even though he’s an engineer, and he’s excited to develop another horror game. Only a few select members of the project know that Bachira Yuu, an artist who only gained more recognition after that exhibit in Spain, is in talks to create the cover image. Until the project reaches that stage, Rin keeps his lips zipped shut.
He still paints twice a month at Bachira-san’s studio. He would have plans to go this weekend as well, but it’s still Bachira’s offseason and Rin suggested that they go play football. Bachira had jumped on the chance immediately, and today Rin wakes up on a Saturday at seven in the morning and laughs when he realizes he no longer owns shin guards or cleats.
He shows up to the field in the clothes he wears to the gym and a pair of running shoes. Bachira used his connections to reserve his junior high’s football field on the condition that he help coach the student team next week.
Rin started playing football for Sae and kept playing for Sae, but there had been moments where football had been special to Rin. This becomes one of them. He steals the ball from Bachira and barrels towards the goal while Bachira shrieks that it’s unfair he’s still in shape and retains his game sense. Rin thinks he’ll learn to see football as a friend one day.
They sit in Rin’s car even as he’s parked outside Bachira’s house. The two of them are still exhausted from playing football for hours, and the drive back home only worsened it. He needs a break before he heads to his apartment complex.
Bachira’s cheeks are always pink in his car, and he’s starting to wonder if his heating is broken and he just can’t feel the difference. Today is no exception. His voice trembles as he lays his heart out and speaks.
“Y’know, you see my mom more often than I do since I mainly live abroad. You’re over at my house more than me too. You might as well join our family officially and take my last name.”
Rin sees the determination shining in Bachira’s eyes. It’s a bold confession even if he’d been so nervous that his face turned ruddy and his words came out unevenly. Rin has always been rather intelligent, and he feels a little silly now as everything starts clicking into place. There’s never been anything wrong with his car’s heating.
Rin reaches over and flicks Bachira’s forehead. “You’re skipping a few steps there. You need to ask me out first before you can propose, Meguru.”
“That’s the first time you called me by my first name even though I’ve asked you to use it for years,” Bachira groans lightheartedly.
“Get used to hearing it,” Rin tells him.
“You can’t just say that!” Bachira protests. His face only flushes even more until they resemble the red anthuriums Rin once painted.
But Rin can. And he does as he brushes his boyfriend's bangs behind his ear without using a baseball cap as an excuse, and he does it again as he tells Bachira good night and that he’ll see him tomorrow.
There is a dream he used to carry until it broke and a dream that he made for himself until he finally achieved it. Rin thinks of how he’s looking forward to tomorrow and knows there’s a new dream of his blooming to life.