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The silver cufflink was shaped like a small, stylized rose, and it had a habit of snagging on Re Al first team captain’s silk. Michael Kaiser, the said first team captain, spent a good three minutes fighting with his left wrist, his breath hitching in a sharp rhythm of annoyance. It was an irksome piece of jewelry, an expensive gift that looked gorgeous but functioned stupidly, much like a player who had all the technique in the world but lacked the instinct to actually score. He stared at his reflection in the mirror, the lighting of the bedroom casting long shadows across the carpet of the room.
He definitely looked like a man who spent the last hour staring at a wall like some kind of crazy voodoo doll with consciousness.
Kaiser stood in silence, staring at his reflection with a long, unblinking gaze. He was thirty now, yet nothing much had changed over the years; he only appeared slightly more mature, as was to be expected. Still, Kaiser continued to stare at himself, already aware that he was no ordinary player. He was an international icon, the captain of Re Al's first team. To anyone who had known him in his younger years, his current stature might have seemed a bit off, yet it had a strange, inevitable logic. He remained confident and arrogant as ever, though the unstable fire of his youth burned with a more controlled intensity. He was less childish now, even if the urge to rip off the heads of those who dared to annoy him still occasionally flickered behind his feline eyes. Yet, somewhere along the way, a special person had guided him in those violent impulses, a positive outcome of his marriage with his husband.
𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟.
His reflection stared back. His skin retained a smooth translucence, untouched by the indignity of manual labor or the dull ache of common fatigue, a fitting canvas for a man who ruled the pitch as the undisputed emperor. How can an emperor like him have any of those pesky ugliness as the common folk anyway?
His magnolia-blond hair was nicely styled, wearing the very same windswept mullet that had defined his silhouette across the years. Two long, deep cerulean-blue rat-tails cascaded down the back of his head, framing a sharp jawline like the deliberate tethers of a marionette. His light-blue eyes blinked slowly, accentuated by sharp crimson tattoos that traced his skin with the precision of fine eyeliner; an iconic signature he guarded with jealous pride, ensuring the ink was never once allowed to fade. These tattoos were a defiance against his father's abuse from the past anyway. They symbolized his victory and endurance against that old bastard of a father he used to have, Kaiser didn't even know if that old prick was even alive at all right now.
𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟, ℎ𝑜𝑝𝑒 ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑏𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 ℎ𝑒𝑙𝑙 𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑤𝑎𝑦.
There, too, was the familiar dark navy rose tattoo upon his neck, a permanent, necrotic blossom bleeding into an intricate, messy tangle of thick, thorny chains. Those dark metallic tattoo links wound their way down his left arm, and coiled around his hand to form the infamous insignia of a royal crown and a solitary keyhole.
A deep silence filled the room; he was entirely alone inside his house right now, the stillness unbroken by the presence of another living soul.
His expression? Indifferent, confident, as usual. But there was a hollowness in his chest that felt like a physical cavity. The silence of the house was heavy, the kind of silence that didn't just exist, but actively pressed against his skin and bones like a curse. The atmosphere within the room remained stagnant for four days following the funeral, which happened on a Tuesday, mere moments before their marriage would have officially had its sixth anniversary. The air in the room felt stagnant, as if the oxygen had been used up by someone who wasn't there anymore, leaving behind only the heavy, suffocating stillness of absence.
Kaiser’s gaze drifted from the mirror to the nightstand nearby, where a single, cream-colored envelope rested against a stack of handwritten notes and a half-empty glass of cold water. The envelope had been there for days, a silent witness to his slow unraveling, even though Kaiser never publicly let his inner turmoil out, at least…not yet. He remembered the first time he had seen his husband’s handwriting on a piece of stationery; not a letter, but a mini scribble of tactical diagrams and spatial coordinates. It was a map of the pitch that only Isagi could perceive, an intricate reflection of his own private world of football inside that little clever head of his. Once, Kaiser had found it amusing to point this out, a playful gesture that invariably provoked Isagi into throwing the paper straight at Kaiser's face with the irritated expression of an angry cat. Back then, the sight of those ink-smudged lines had been an invitation to a duel, a challenge to be surpassed. Now, the envelope looked like a tombstone made of paper.
He approached the nightstand with a slow, absentminded gait, his footsteps muffled by the thick, expensive rug beneath him. As he reached for the letter, his mind flickered back to a memory from three years ago: a chaotic afternoon in their shared home when Isagi had tried to explain his newest concept, which was an improved version of "metavision", using a set of mismatched coasters and puzzle pieces like some kind of nerd. They had ended up in a playful scuffle, a sort of domestic roughhousing that ended with Isagi pinned against the large L-shaped sofa, laughing so hard he couldn't breathe; his endearingly plump metallic blue eyes, which Kaiser had always praised as blue diamonds, were glistening on the brink of tears from laughing too much. In that moment, Isagi’s eyes hadn't been clouded by the desperation that had eventually consumed him; they had been bright, burning with a hunger that Kaiser had once mistaken for an eternal, beautiful flame. He felt like a moth drawn to Isagi's brilliant flame at that moment; yet, tragically, the moth had no fire of its own to offer, and the flame itself was left to flicker into darkness.
Kaiser should have intervened from the very 𝑏𝑒𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔; he should have prevented Isagi from ever attempting to actualize such a concept, rather than foolishly allowing him to have the hope that 𝑓𝑙𝑎𝑤𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑎 would be ever successful.
Kaiser’s long fingers brushed the edge of the thin paper, and for a fleeting second, he felt a surge of genuine irritation. He wanted to be angry at Isagi for this; for the meticulousness of the timing, for the way the envelope was placed exactly where Kaiser would find it during his morning routine. It was such a “striker’s” move, a calculated play designed to maximize the impact of the grand reveal. Even in death, Isagi was controlling the spatial awareness of the room, directing Kaiser’s gaze exactly where he wanted it.
𝑆𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑎 𝑐𝑙𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟, 𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑜𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑏𝑒𝑎𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑓𝑢𝑙 𝑚𝑎𝑛 ℎ𝑖𝑠 ℎ𝑢𝑠𝑏𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑎𝑠.
Kaiser didn't open the envelope immediately. Instead, he sank into the armchair next to the nightstand, the leather creaking under his weight, and stared at the script on the front.
To Mihya.
Just two plain words, written with a slight tremor in the thick ink that hadn't been there in the early days. Kaiser remembered the same handwriting on a celebratory note left on the fridge after Isagi's first hat-trick in the professional league; a mini note that had been bold, arrogant, and brimming with a confidence that had eventually eroded into a quiet, suffocating grief. As he finally slid the letter from the envelope, the scent of the paper was faint, smelling of nothing but dust and old ink. He began to read, and the words didn't come as a scream, but as a soft whisper.
"My dear Mihya," Isagi began, his handwriting sprawling across the thick, cream-colored stationery with a turbulent energy that mirrored the frantic pacing of his mind during those final months. "If you are reading this, then the spatial calculations have finally reached their limit, and I have successfully performed my final off-the-ball run. I know you hate it when I treat our lives like a tactical diagram; you always called me a stupid little nerd when I tried to map out the psychological angles of our arguments using coffee cups and tactical notebooks, but you must indulge me one last time, because for once, the variable I failed to account for was my own breaking point."
Kaiser's eye twitched for a brief second, before continuing to read the letter.
"For years, I believed that love between two strikers had to be an ongoing battleground, a relentless war of attrition where we measured our affection by how hard we could push each other toward our most peak. I thought that if I could just see the game two steps ahead of you, if I could devour your ego and reconstruct it into something even more dangerous, we would become unstoppable. But standing there at the edge of the summit, with Rin’s shadow looming over every single touch of the ball, I realized something: the throne isn't a crown; it's a cage built entirely out of our own insatiable hunger. Every time I looked at you across the breakfast table, my mind wasn't resting, it was constantly scanning your expressions for a weakness, calculating the distance between your ambition and mine, wondering if your love for me was genuine or just another competitive handicap you had learned to manage. Do you remember that rainy evening in Munich three months before the end? You laughed at me because I spent three hours staring at a single highlight reel of Rin, completely paralyzed by the geometry of his positioning. You thought it was just my usual obsession, a cute little quirk of the genius striker trying to solve a stubborn puzzle. But you didn't see the blind spot, Michael. You were so busy playing the role of the magnificent, arrogant emperor that you completely missed the moment my spatial awareness turned inward. I stopped mapping the pitch and started mapping every single fracture in my own psyche, measuring the gap between the player I was expected to be and the thing I had become. No matter how many goals I scored, no matter how many defenders I left behind in the dust, the suffocating void inside my chest just kept expanding, growing wider and colder with every passing match...I tried so hard to love you through the lens of a rival, because I honestly believed that a soft, domestic love was beneath us, beneath our...beneath our greatness; that we were creatures forged in the fire of competition, destined to burn out rather than fade away. But in the quiet hours of the night, when the stadium lights were off and the applause had faded into silence, I didn't want a rival. I just...wanted a home, I wanted you. Because you're the one who made a house a home, Mihya. I wanted to be able to look at you without calculating your next move, without wondering if my failure on the pitch would make you look at me with that suffocating, critical amusement of yours. I wanted to stop running, Michael, but the momentum of my own ambition had become a runaway train, and the only way to finally halt the motion was to step off the tracks entirely. I know you're angry at me. I can practically picture that arrogant-ass smirk twisting into a bitter frown as you hold this letter, cursing me for orchestrating my own end with such precision. You're probably pacing across the bedroom floor, glaring at my old notebooks and photos, and wanting to throw something against the wall just like you used to do when I threw my messy strategy papers straight into that fucked up, handsome face of yours."
Kaiser's breath hitched.
"But please, for once in your life, put down your ego. Ignore the sports pundits calling me a tragic football legend, ignore the headlines crowning Rin as the king of strikers, and look at the things we actually built in the margins of our careers. Remember that little seaside village in Spain where we left our phones off for forty-eight hours and argued over the correct way to eat salted cod? Remember how we collapsed into those fine sands, laughing so hard we couldn't breathe, with the sun warming our skin and the rest of the world locked out? In that moment...we weren't what we usually perceived ourselves as; we were just two human beings who happened to fit together like two puzzle pieces found in the dark. That is the version of me I want you to keep, Mihya. Not the broken ghost who stared at highlight reels until his eyes burned, but the man who loved you with every single heartbeat he took before the end, even when he didn't know how to express it without a challenge. The puzzle on the coffee table isn't finished yet, by the way. I took the liberty of hiding the very last piece inside the fold of this envelope, because I knew your obsessive need for perfection wouldn't allow you to leave a gap in the center of the image. You have to finish it yourself, you clown. You have to place that final piece into the void and realize that even when the structure falls apart, the space we shared still matters. Don't let the silence win. Don't let the empty rooms of this house swallow you the way they swallowed me."
Kaiser's eyes glossed when he read the continuing part.
"Keep playing, keep living, keep being alive for me and our remaining love, and whenever you step out onto that pitch, remember the man who looked at you not as a hurdle to clear, but as the only safe place he ever found in a world full of monsters. I hope that you understand my feelings better now. I'm sorry that I couldn't explain them to you before, I...didn't know how to express myself, but know this: I always admired you. I always loved you. Even when I couldn't really say it aloud. Whenever we talked, other than analyzing only, I always felt an immense sense of happiness. It was because I had found you; a man who perceived my quirks and flaws with understanding, a man who embraced them, and a man who had the sweet vulnerability to share his own traumas with me. To be trusted with the privilege of listening to your background made me feel special. It left me wonderstruck to see the tragic yet beautiful soul that you had. Everything about you felt right to me, and I'm grateful for the memories we had together, for the love we both tried to give one another, and for the kindness of God who made our meeting fated all those years ago. Perhaps, in another life, our souls shall be born again and recognize one another anew, and love each other all over again.”
The rest of the letter detailed the exact moment the shift had happened for him, ignoring the previous romantic tones; not during a specific match, but in the quiet intervals between games. Isagi described the feeling of his new and improved spatial awareness turning inward. He wrote about the weight of being "almost" the best, the precision with which he could see the gap between his current self and the pinnacle of the world, and the realization that no matter how many pieces he devoured, the gap was widening. He had spent years treating his life like a puzzle to be solved, and in the end, he had concluded that the only way to win was to stop playing.
Kaiser stopped reading, his glossed eyes trying to not cry, his thumb pressing firmly into the thin paper. He recalled a rainy evening in Munich, just months before the end, when Isagi had sat at the kitchen table for three hours staring at a single highlight reel of Itoshi Rin. He hadn't spoken, but his eyes had been wide. At the time, Kaiser had laughed it off, calling it "adorable obsession" and pulling Isagi into a hug that felt, in retrospect, like trying to hold together a shattering glass vase.
Kaiser was so stupid. He was so stupid to let his husband’s fucked up new metavision destroy his mental health.
“Keep playing, keep living, keep being alive for me…”
The words were stuck to Kaiser’s brain like a hook, as if Isagi had cursed him rather than encouraging him. Kaiser’s eyes blurred, the ink beginning to smear under the pressure of his grip. He folded the letter. He didn't put it back in the envelope; instead, he held it against his chest, particularly onto the place where his heart sat inside his cage of a body, as if the physical pressure of the letter could somehow bridge the gap between the living and the dead. For a long time, he simply sat there, listening to the hum of the refrigerator in the other room and the distant, muffled sound of rain droplets from the windows. The house felt like a museum of things that no longer functioned: the high-end espresso machine that Isagi had loved, the weighted, rich blankets they had shared during rainy nights in Munich while cuddling to warm up, and the countless tactical notebooks that now looked like ancient, useless scripts.
He thought about the younger Itoshi brother. Itoshi Rin. The name felt like a cold stone in Kaiser’s head. For years, the three of them had been locked in a dance of mutual destruction, a trinity of egos fighting for a single, narrow peak. Rin had climbed it successfully, and in doing so, he had inadvertently pushed Isagi into a swallowing abyss. Kaiser had always seen their rivalry as a game of chess, but his Isagi had been playing a game of survival. Slowly, stupidly enough, the realization struck him like a punch at the gut, right now. While Kaiser himself had been fighting for nothing more than victory and fame (His previous goal for being loved having long since been fulfilled by his current relationship of his newly harmonious partnership with Alexis Ness, his husband Isagi, and the latter's parents, whose kindness and appreciation had embraced him ever since their first meeting), Isagi had been fighting for his own existence, believing that if he ceased to be the best, he ceased to be real.
A sudden, sharp memory pierced through his brain. A Thursday morning three years ago, where Isagi had woken up early to watch Kaiser sleep. Kaiser had opened one eye to find Isagi staring at him with an expression that resembled a cute sheep. Funny, sweet, and cute. At the time, Kaiser had rolled over on top of him with a joke. Now, he would have given everything he had to be back in that safe little moment, to tell Isagi that he was enough, and that he didn't need to surpass Rin over and over again after all those years of failure in each world championship they attended.
Kaiser stood up, the movement abrupt, causing the letter to flutter once before he clamped his hand over it. He began to pace the length of the bedroom, his strides unfocused. Every corner of the room was a reminder of a spatial coordinate Isagi had once mapped: the way the light hit the duvet at noon, the exact distance from the door to the bedside table, the same distance Isagi would have covered in a heartbeat during a counter-attack. He stopped in front of a framed photograph on the dresser. A candid shot from their time in the national team’s training camp. Isagi was mid-laugh, his face flushed, looking over his shoulder at something Kaiser had likely said to provoke him. In the photo, Isagi looked light, as if the gravity of the world hadn't yet found its grip on him. Kaiser reached out, his fingertips grazing the glass, tracing the lines of Isagi’s cheeks, which Kaiser had always found as soft as a mochi.
It was a very cruel irony that the man who could see every possible outcome on a pitch had been blind to the one where he survived his own ambition.
The silence of the house was interrupted by the sudden, sharp chime of a notification from his phone. Kaiser didn't want to look at first, but the screen lit up with a news alert from a sports portal: “Itoshi Rin: The Uncontested King. A Look at the Legacy of the World’s Best.” The headline felt like a physical blow, a reminder that the world was continuing to rotate around the very axis that had crushed Isagi. The "King" was still reigning, oblivious or perhaps indifferent to the fact that his ascent had been the reason for a slow-motion collapse of the heart of the emperor of the pitch. There were also unanswered calls from Ness, dating back to last night, to be ignored. Kaiser had not been entirely in the right state of mind at yesterday's practice match honestly, choosing to ignore Ness's calls that night as he was preoccupied with a night visit to Isagi’s grave in the dead of night.
Kaiser didn't bother checking the comments on his phone screen regarding either the Rin headlines or the Sae headlines. The articles concerning Sae centered primarily upon his situation with Vivian Hugo; specifically debating which of the two reigned as the best midfielder in the world, given that their respective statistics had fluctuated over the years. Not that Kaiser cared in the slightest about such trivial discourse, of course, seeing as he was not even a midfielder himself. He didn’t want to see the analysis of Rin’s "amazing" positioning or the way the pundits described Isagi as a "tragic legend" of the current era of the football world. With a sharp, sudden motion, he tossed the expensive phone across the room; it landed with a dull thud on the carpet, the screen still glowing. The silence rushed back in, filling the space where the notification had momentarily punctured the air. He felt a sudden need to move, to scrub the stagnation of the house off his skin, but his limbs felt heavy, as if he were wading through heavy water.
He walked toward the door, but stopped at the threshold of the hallway, his eyes catching on a pair of worn cleats resting by the entryway. They were Isagi’s, the ones Isagi had used for training in the rain, now dry and left alone. For a moment, Kaiser imagined Isagi standing there, leaning against the wall with that familiar, annoying spark of irritation in his eyes, asking Kaiser if he’d finally mastered the trajectory of a curved shot. The hallucination was so vivid that Kaiser 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 stepped forward, his hand reaching out to touch the leather, before the cold reality of the room snapped him back. The cleats were just objects. Just cold, lifeless things. Not Isagi’s warmth. He retreated back into the bedroom and sat back down on the edge of the opulent bed, the letter still clutched in his palm, the creases of the paper digging into his skin. He found himself thinking about the peculiar way Isagi used to breathe when he was deep in thought: a shallow, concentrated rhythm that signaled he was mentally simulating a thousand different scenarios. It was a sound that had once signaled the dawn of a goal, a warning to every defender on the pitch that he had found the gap. Now, that sound was a haunting echo in the vacuum of the bedroom.
He looked at the clock; it was nearly noon, but the house remained shrouded in a dim, artificial twilight. For weeks, he had functioned on a loop of avoidance, treating his grief like a tactical error he could simply correct by ignoring it. He had spent hours in the gym, pushing his body to the point of failure, trying to sweat out the memory of first time feeling Isagi’s cold, lifeless body in his arms. Only twenty-four hours prior to Isagi’s death day, they had indulged in a shared day-off from practice, spending their day off together. Their morning had a nice, big breakfast, followed by a face time call with Isagi’s parents. Later, Kaiser had privately reserved an exclusive VIP restaurant for the entirety of the lunch time to have privacy during their romantic lunch. Later, they went to the beach, bathing in the warmth of an afternoon by the ocean and a marathon of who swam better (Isagi won), before returning home and take a long, hot bath within the custom-built walk-in rainfall shower equipped with aromatherapy diffusers in Kaiser’s house. In the evening, they had a comforting dinner, softly curled together on the living room sofa to watch an anime Isagi nagged the fuck outta Kaiser’s brains to watch together, drifting into sleep wrapped in each other's arms cozily.
Kaiser should have never let Isagi step away to use the bathroom prior to settling in for that final anime time on the TV. Unbeknownst to him, Isagi had secretly swallowed an overdose of pills before joining Kaiser on the couch, where they had shared those final hours. Before sleeping, in response to Kaiser’s quiet murmur of a goodnight, Isagi’s last words had been a soft “𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢” breathed against Kaiser's chest. When Kaiser awoke the next morning, it was to the realization of Isagi’s stiff, cold body in his arms. Though he had frantically gathered a team of elite doctors, their interventions were futile; Isagi had already crossed the threshold of death long before anyone could so much as touch his lifeless body.
But the gym was just another pitch where Isagi wasn't present, and the silence there was even louder than the silence here. The physical exertion had been a lie, a way to avoid the realization that no amount of muscle or speed could outrun a memory.
A sudden, impulsive memory surfaced: a small, handwritten list Isagi had left on the kitchen counter months ago. It hadn't been a tactical diagram or a mini grocery list, but a series of "future goals" for after they both retired.
1. A house near a coast with a beautiful view to the sea. 2. Learning to cook something other than kintsuba (Isagi was terrible at cooking so they either ordered out or Kaiser spoke his chef abilities in the kitchen). 3. Watching the World Cup from the stands, not the pitch. Kaiser had laughed at the time, teasing Isagi for being too sentimental like a baby, for imagining a world where they weren't defined by the scoreline. He realized, stupidly, now that those goals were Isagi’s attempt to build a lifeboat, a way to imagine a version of himself that existed outside the narrow, suffocating corridor of being the "best."
Kaiser’s hand trembled slightly as he smoothed the letter out on the duvet, the paper now softened by the moisture of his grip. He found himself staring at the empty space where Isagi’s signature should have been; not a formal sign-off, but a small, hurriedly drawn with a mini heart, skewed and imperfect but nonetheless cute and genuine. It was such a clumsy gesture for a man who had spent his career calculating the exact angle of a strike to the millimeter. That imperfection was perhaps one of the only things that felt honest in a world that had demanded they both be magnificent tools on the pitch. He stood up and walked to the window nearby, pulling back the heavy velvet black curtains to let the cold, gloomy cluster of dark clouds and rainfall scenery reflect the room. The gloominess was unforgiving, dimming the dust motes dancing in the air and the faint, lingering scent of Isagi’s favorite cologne on a discarded sweater draped over a brand-chair. For the first time in days, Kaiser didn't feel the urge to shut the world out. He felt a strange need to acknowledge the wreckage. He looked out at the garden, where the grass was overgrown and the hedges were losing their shape, reflecting the slow decay of the sanctuary they had built together.
He thought of the "blind spot" Isagi had mentioned once. For years, Kaiser had prided himself on having the most expansive vision in the game, the ability to see the entire pitch as a living, breathing map. But as he stared at the quiet house, he realized his own spatial awareness had been actually flawed compared to Isagi’s crazy visions. He had seen the rival, the husband, and the partner, but he had completely missed the man who was drowning in plain sight. He had been so focused on their shared ascent that he hadn't noticed Isagi was slipping through the cracks of the very peak they were climbing.
Kaiser stepped out of the bedroom and into the hallway, the sudden transition to the bright living room making him squint a bit. On the coffee table sat a half-finished puzzle of a cityscape: Tokyo, perhaps, that Isagi had started weeks before the end. It was a thousand pieces of interlocking chaos, most of them still scattered across the mahogany surface. Isagi had approached the puzzle with the same surgical intensity he used for a match, categorizing edges and colors, but as the weeks had passed, the progress had slowed. Now, a large gap remained in the center, a missing piece of the skyline that mirrored the void in the whole house.
He reached out and touched a stray piece of cardboard, the blue of a skyscraper beneath his fingertip. He remembered the evening Isagi had nearly finished, leaning back with a triumphant sigh and that endearing look of genuine peace that Kaiser always was fond of. For a few hours, the "world's best" had been a puzzle, and the only victory required was simply fitting one piece into another. Kaiser had watched him from the doorway, amused by the domesticity of it, never imagining that the tranquility was a fragile mask for a man who felt his own identity eroding with every passing day.
A sudden, sharp movement in the garden caught his eye.
A neighborhood cat, a stray, poofy, orange tabby that Isagi had secretly been feeding for months. 𝐼𝑠𝑎𝑔𝑖 ℎ𝑎𝑑 𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑑, 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑎𝑠𝑡, ℎ𝑜𝑤 𝑐𝑢𝑡𝑒 𝑖𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑠. The cat was sitting on the porch, staring at the glass door with a patient, expectant gaze. The animal didn't know about the World Cup, the weight of Itoshi Rin's legacy, or the silence that had swallowed the house. It only knew that the man who provided the treats was gone. Kaiser felt a lump form in his throat, a physical thing that made it difficult to swallow. He realized that the world was continuing to operate on a series of simple, biological needs, while he was trapped in a complex, psychological wreckage. Kaiser slid the glass door open, the sudden rush of cold, rainy air hitting him like a physical weight. The orange tabby didn't hesitate at all; it trotted toward him with a confident, rhythmic purr that was sweet to stare at, weaving between his ankles with a persistence that felt almost accusatory. Kaiser looked down at the cat and felt kinship. Both of them were waiting for a man who would never come back to them, both of them lingering in the memory of a life that had once been full of warmth.
He stepped onto the porch, the weathered wood groaning under his weight. His gaze swept across the garden, and he noticed a small, forgotten soccer ball nestled in the overgrown clover, half-hidden by a stray hydrangea bush. It was a cheap, synthetic thing, not the professional grade leather they usually played with. He remembered Isagi bringing it home after a trip to his parents' house since he missed Japan, laughing about how it felt "clunky" and "weird." They had spent an entire afternoon kicking it back and forth in the grass, not for training, not for tactical dominance, but to see who could keep the ball in the air the longest. Like children. A stupid but warm memory.
Kaiser walked over to the ball, ignoring the rain, and picked it up, the surface gritty with dirt and mud. As he held it, the memory of Isagi’s laughter, not the triumphant roar of a striker, but the soft chuckling of a man who was genuinely happy, echoed in the back of his mind. It was a sound that didn't fit into the narrative of the "tragic genius." It was a sound that belonged to the man in the letter, the one who had hoped Michael to live. Kaiser didn't put the ball back down. Instead, he gripped it tight, the synthetic texture scratching his palm, and walked back toward the house slowly. He stopped at the glass door and looked back at the orange tabby, which had finally stopped circling his ankles to sit and groom its paw with indifference. The cat’s presence was a reminder that there were things in the world that existed outside the orbit of professional football and the weight of ego.
He entered the living room and stopped before the half-finished puzzle of Tokyo. For a moment, he considered sweeping the tiny pieces onto the floor, a sudden surge of frustration boiling up at the sight of that missing center. It was a physical manifestation of Isagi’s incompleteness, a map of a city that could never be finished because the architect had walked away from the drafting table. But then, he remembered the handwriting on the letter. Isagi hadn't wanted a perfect legacy; he had implied that he wanted to be seen as a human being, flaws and all, and that he hoped to see Kaiser in maybe in another life one day.
With a sigh that felt like it was pulling a heavy curtain across his chest, Kaiser sat on the cold floor. He didn't know how to solve a puzzle, and he certainly didn't have the patience for it, but he reached out and picked up a stray piece of the skyline. He spent the next hour in a focused, silent focus, his long fingers hovering over the mahogany surface as he tried to find the pieces that fit. It was an exercise in a different kind of spatial awareness. Not the scan of a pitch, but a slow, meditative search for connection. He found that the act of fitting the cardboard edges together felt like a conversation, a way of tracing Isagi's final thoughts.
As the afternoon passed and the rain stopped, casting long, dark stripes of night across the living room floor, Kaiser found a piece that felt right. It was a small fragment of a gray building, barely distinguishable from a dozen others, but as it clicked into place, a section of the city began to emerge. He felt a strange sensation in his chest, an echo of the satisfaction Isagi must have felt.
For a few hours, the world stopped being a series of deficits and rankings; it was simply a matter of finding where one thing belonged in relation to another. He paused, his hand resting on the table, and looked at the gap remaining in the center. It was a void, a missing square of the cityscape. He searched the surrounding area, scanning the mahogany surface and the carpet beneath the table, but the piece was nowhere to be found. The realization hit him: the piece wasn't missing because it had been lost; it was missing because Isagi had never put it there.
Kaiser stood up and walked back to the bedroom, his movements feeling less focused than they had been that morning. He returned to the nightstand, picking up the cream-colored envelope. He turned it over, feeling the weight of the paper, and noticed a slight thickness to the bottom fold. With a careful flick of his thumb, a small, rectangular slip of cardboard slid out from the crease.
It was the final 𝑝𝑖𝑒𝑐𝑒 of the puzzle.
Kaiser stared at the small piece of cardboard in his palm, a tiny sliver of a Tokyo skyscraper that had been tucked away like a secret play. Isagi kept it. He had systematically dismantled the center of the image, holding the key to the completion of the whole thing, and then he had entrusted that key to the only person he knew would be obsessive enough to eventually look for it. It was a final, lingering exercise in spatial awareness, a trail of breadcrumbs leading Kaiser from the grief of the letter to the physical act of restoration. He walked back into the living room, the orange tabby still watching him from the porch, its silhouette an orange blur against the moonlight. He knelt by the table and carefully slotted the piece into the void. There was a soft click as the cardboard locked into place. For the first time in years, the image was complete. The city of Tokyo sprawled across the mahogany, finally whole.
Kaiser didn't move for a few moments. He remained on his knees, staring at the completed puzzle, the silence of the room no longer feeling like a weight, but like a breath held in anticipation. The city was finished, but the house was still empty. He felt a sense of irony; Isagi had spent his final days calculating the exact coordinates of his departure, and yet he had left behind this one, small task for his husband to finish.
It was a way of saying “look at what we had”, rather than “look at what I lost”.
He stood up slowly, his joints popping in the quiet. He felt a strange, fluttering energy in his chest, a flicker of something that wasn't quite grief and wasn't quite peace. It was the ghost of a challenge. Isagi had always played with him, pushing his buttons, manipulating his expectations, and even now, his dead husband had managed to orchestrate a moment of connection between them, despite the fact that they were separated. Kaiser looked at the puzzle and then at the door, the orange tabby still watching him.
Without thinking, Kaiser walked to the kitchen and opened a cupboard he rarely used, finding a small tin of treats that Isagi used to feed the little orange bundle of a cat, before his death. He softly grabbed it and opened it. He stepped back onto the porch and placed the treats in a neat row on the weathered wood. The cat quickly lunged forward, purring quietly in happiness that seemed to cut through the loneliness of the night. Kaiser watched the little cat eat, his own breathing beginning to synchronize with the slow, rhythmic movement of the cat's tail. He realized that he had spent the last four days treating the house like a crime scene, as if the evidence of Isagi’s despair was something that needed to be cataloged and analyzed. He stepped back inside and closed the glass door, the click of the lock echoing through the hallway.
For the first time since the funeral, Kaiser didn't feel the immediate urge to retreat into his bedroom. He looked at the completed puzzle on the coffee table; a tiny, cardboard city, and felt a desire to break the silence of the house with something other than his own mourning. He walked to the record player in the corner, a vintage piece of a little equipment they had bought together during a rainy weekend in London before a match. He didn't remember the last time he had actually played a disc; for months, the only soundtrack to their lives had been the aggressive hum of tactical analysis videos and the muted roar of stadium crowds on a loop. He flipped through the collection, his fingers brushing past the soundtracks Isagi used to blast to get himself "in the zone." He stopped at a particularly worn record, eyes blinking slowly now, something soft and atmospheric that Isagi had insisted was "the only way to properly wind down after a long, brain-melting match." As the needle dropped and the first low, smooth and romantic notes of a song filled the opulent living room, the atmosphere shifted immediately with it. The music didn't erase the suffocating void the house had, but it occupied the space, pushing back the oppressive stillness that had settled. Kaiser leaned against the wall, closing his light-blue eyes slowly, and let the melody wash over him, imagining Isagi leaning against the opposite wall, probably critiquing the tempo with that annoying, endearing focus of his.
The music brought back a memory of a night in Madrid, after a particularly big loss. They had sat in a hotel room in full darkness, the only light coming from the city skyline through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Isagi had been silent for an hour, his mind likely simulating the ten different ways he could have shifted his weight to change the outcome of the game. Kaiser had reached out and grabbed Isagi’s hand, not to comfort him, but to ground him, to stop him from floating away into the thoughts of the pitch. Isagi had squeezed back, his grip desperate and tight, and for a few minutes, they had simply existed as two husbands in a room, stripped of their titles, their goals, and their egos.
Lost within the labyrinth of that specific memory, Kaiser let himself quietly shed down those suppressed tears inside his eyes, his eyes remaining tightly shut while his wandering mind drifted to dreams that could never be achieved in this life.
"I hope to see you in another life as well, Yoichi." Kaiser mumbled softly as the long night slowly slipped away, his thumb gently toying with the ring upon his finger, a ring he had intentionally chosen to wear as his own wedding ring since they had been married.