Not Enough Time

Disclaimer: I don't own SD boys, Inoue does. The events that follow are not included in the original plot but enjoy anyway.

One line is owned by the mighty genius Irvine Welsh. So don't sue me.

I also don't own the title. It's from INXS.

A/N: just writing again for the sheer complicated hell of it. No plot in particular. And minimal dialogues. I hate writing dialogues to death.

Summary: From MitKo to MitRu (Yaoi-like but not really). Use of corny flashbacks and a bit of anti-chronological introspection. What the hell. One shot.

OOOOOOOOOO

That morning was like a monster in a children's storybook. He caught himself wishing to buy that bullshit, kept that thought to his head and let it grow by stretch of all imagination he could muster. So that even as his stomach didn't feel right, even as he profoundly hoped that the ache would subside or better yet, come some other time, he hid it beneath notice. Because this wasn't real, because monsters in storybooks couldn't have been real, and what he was now could actually be as phantasmagoric as a dream, as equally fluid and transient.

Alone. The disyllable seemed to stretch to a whole paragraph, like a drop of rain proceeded by a whole storm that crashed on him. How could he get round being alone from now on?

He stashed his practice clothes in his locker; inside, he could see his spare overalls piled in a mess as if the one who put them there did it halfheartedly. Now no longer sandwiched between names such as Kogure and Akagi, the locker stood haughtily labeled with 'Mitsui, Hisashi; Senior'. Being senior would straight away mean being The Boss; being given that epithet among lower year levels would mean Insulation with the big letter 'I', and being staved away from the Congress of Equals. He didn't hope for that, but he hoped to make up for time wasted and time gauged whatever the case, however hard-earned. And what's more, he consented to do just that---as if he could take on this new enterprise, as if this fait accompli could be revoked should he fail, as if he could really do it without Akagi and Kogure, Kogure especially. As if. Consent is elastic, it has to be. It wasn't that he could do anything about being left, being abandoned; but it was that he should do something, even if that something wasn't in the terms of the game. Consent is elastic, right? Pure and simple.

With no conscious effort, he moved to the leak to spray his face, grabbed a towel to dry it, and bent double on the floor until he felt the tiles' temperature drop beneath him. It must've been negative and dropping still. Let the cold eat him for all he cared. Ad interim, he was taking his time, letting the atmosphere ripen around him and the quiet move uncertainly about until—until hell knows what.

Was it retention? Or was it recollection? He thought he just saw the slices of his life as a freshman, here in the very same shower room where Kogure used to pacify the once young Mitsui while he bandied some philippics with another young Akagi. Those stuff he saw and would never see again because he wasn't young anymore, or at least he didn't feel like it. Kogure was gone too, and so were practically the rest. He never doubted that for an instant; the frank reality of it gawked right at him, poked persistently at him. All that was left was him and the random visits of the past. All torn away like a calendar's pages, whose count is measured by time else forgotten.

Alone once again and not knowing how to suspire the next breath, he realized it was retention.

He got up and felt a change in his weight, like he'd just been nobbled. It was psychological, he ruled, but then how real it was—how realistically heavy he felt at that time, how sure he was that his ankles were susceptible to any crack in the next moment or so. It was like coming round to consciousness, feeling the imperfections of the body, its weaknesses that all point out to mortality. What was his name again? Mitsui Hisashi, same as earlier, same as before, same as ever. And what was Mitsui? A loner. Aloner. Alone. Any would do as a watchword, he Jesus Christ swore, as the moment seemed to grow more black and enormous. This was life. This was his.

OOOOOOOOO

'Mitsui's staying for another season.'

He heard Kogure say just within earshot, there just behind the ajar door where he and Akagi stood. Mitsui muttered a low hmmph and abruptly went slipping on his T-shirt.

'And he is fine with that?' Akagi said.

'He said so, but he's a bit under the weather now; he'll do well.' Yes, he always did.

The winter tournament. The whole place reeked of it. It was sleet and snow outside in the morning and in the after-hours it was blizzard and thin hails. Just another season to make up for the mess, just this season and he was out of the game. Permanently or otherwise. He continued to watch the snowflakes as they pasted themselves on the windowpane and melted into shapelessness, like witless mayflies being lured to the fire and burned there.

'Sure, just one more season, this winter season, and I'm out.' His voice fell like a ball that tumbles on the floor, rolls over it and disappears underneath a closet's bottom.

He meant it, sure. It wasn't a decision on the whole, it was just an instinct to move on, to avoid the zigzags of indecision that ate time in large chunks even before you could say stop. That was what delayed him from coming back after the knee injury nearly 3 years ago and boom, a seedy new phase of his life began, one that would give him the hot seat of the decade.

OOOOOOOOOOOOO

He would be a 'great' contribution to the team. His team mates certified that with that endless string of nice words to thrum while they kept respectful proximity from him. They were 'glad' he decided to stay. It was overmuch 'convenient' to get the show going on the road without resetting the line-up and kudos to Mitsui for making that possible. It was 'fantastic' that he could stick around for one more season. If he didn't, they wouldn't 'know' how else they'd carry on against the larger-than-life teams out there, the star-studded Ryonan, the Jin-led Kainan, the Fujima-less but still promising Shoyo, everyone. 6-foot-nothing and he had been shown more celebrity-treatment than anyone else; he was, if anything, the wrap-up element of the pentad, and that didn't need explaining. They acted as if they owed him whereas it was more like vice-versa, wasn't it? Of course, in a very conventional, very true sense; for indeed, it was they who first let bygones be bygones. He owed them, that was that, and he didn't need to hear anymore sycophantic kind words from them. It half-saddened, half-mottled him and worse, it defeated him. People like his team mates are a painstaking bunch of guilt-conveying, leg-pulling, sweeter-than-anything-on-this-planet fanatics--as if they were just there waiting for a signal to lick his toe.

He was thankful that Sakuragi could still get on mirthfully with him. Hahahaha. Funny. Sakuragi always made him go that way. With him, it subtracted the feeling of isolation, it gave him a chance to counterpoise the others' disillusionment which would most certainly put anyone less than divine to uneasiness. At least there was Sakuragi to neutralize matters.

Miyagi offered little help on the other hand. He was now, self-styled as he was, an apollonian busybody with a team to run. He worked anything to rawness you'd think he had an explosive timer to monitor him. He got on well with Mitsui previously but now, well, they still got on fine only there wasn't a lot of time. Again, time, or lack thereof, got in the way.

For the rest, his glad-to-be-here-still smile would do. What the hell else was there to give anyway?

OOOOOOOOOOO

He had grown insecure over the years, months, days that passed. Exasperatingly insecure. Incrementally insecure. Damn insecure. Even more so when Rukawa came, that 2-years-younger-but-light-years-distant son of a gun. When he came, Mitsui felt that no one could ever make a recommendation letter for him anymore, and that he'd be ignored in the market, left to cool outside the berth. In short, he felt like a walking failure.

He wouldn't know where they manufactured Rukawa's kind—he was the degage, wrong personality-type, from whatever angle you looked at him and yet, his team work never let them down, and didn't he always attract more than his fair share of attention precisely for that? Mitsui just sat silent, relaying in his mind his self-worth over something he did once, a long lifetime ago, and pitting it against Rukawa's so-far accomplishments; if Rukawa's that honest-to-goodness great, he could've proven something even in the junior level. I did. Either he's just overrated or his luck is fucked. He thought and didn't say it aloud because he felt sure that it was too true to put to words and also he didn't know if he had the right to. Come to think of it, it was yet early to make judgments and he was the newest member of the team, technically. He even had the number 14, a symbolic discoloration of the name Mitsui, when he could've had it reduced by 10. Damn, he should've been captain. It could've been the one important thing in his life, just as the coming down of the Berlin Wall to the Germans was, as life-changing and bitterly memorable as that. But the wall came down on its own far, far away from his presence; and Akagi, who had kept a clean sheet on his performance, clinched the stint. When he learned that, a surge of feeling came over him, one that resembled uncannily what he felt when he lost balance and fractured his knee as he landed more than 2 years ago. He was rude enough to himself to use the incident as a rhetorical analogy, but true, it was not a dissimilar situation and that's exactly the way he felt; it was like throwing an already cracked china against a concrete wall, the same shitty thing that convinced him that his life was ruined. Well, he was wrong. In any case, the links with those days were gone now, except in the stretched-away space called memory. The fight wasn't about the past and the itinerant now, perhaps there wasn't any fight to begin with, which rendered it necessary to get over. It was almost impressive for someone who had been living so much more in the past than in the present should efface all those lingering, dusty cobwebs of his personal history, and that made him all the more think how significant it was to keep time in steady revolution and his life/fate/world should be in consonance therewith.

But Rukawa? What was he? So far he'd been the three N's to his archrivals: nemesis, nuisance, nobody; or he could be this first-class jerk and narcoleptic twat and pea-brained fox all rolled into one as Sakuragi claimed. He could be anyone, anyone to Mitsui. He could be that one person who'd crush his dreams 7 times a fucking week, if he already hadn't. But Mitsui wouldn't permit himself to think that horridly. Perhaps Rukawa was just another Mr. Nobody. Just like…

OOOOOOOOOO

He lingered for a while in the locker room. It was 15 minutes past practice dismissal—too much for one single session of remembering what he didn't want to---and he had fifteen minutes to go before classes picked up again. Too assuredly alone in that four cornered asylum, Mitsui stood rock-steady. Time ran past him, plucking each millisecond pieces of his life, owning every square inch of him yet again. Just like before. He had been the too-willing victim of belatedness and now, it was too late to be embarrassed; to apologize to Kogure would be about as of usefulness of feeding a dead cow its hay. Kogure was hung to dry but come to think of it, Kogure hung him to dry in this life-sentence of a winter-season without him. Mitsui felt paranoid, would Kogure give him up this time as a retaliation? Would he just forget him like that, like curtains that are so old nobody even bothers with them? But he didn't want to chase the thought further; he was too tired, too mentally fatigued to allow such filthy suspicion.

That's when Rukawa appeared in his school uniform (wearing it in a fashion that would only look good on a seven-year-old) and with nothing less than the out-of-place spontaneity of his very presence. He had dressed up to tow fifteen minutes ago as the rest had been. That's what Mitsui knew and he hadn't the remotest clue why the freshman was still here. Or was he here all the while, formerly painted with vanishing ink and sticking his ear to Mitsui's head so he could read his thoughts? Mitsui didn't want to think that was so and he'd be more comfortable to dismiss Rukawa as a pointless, un-exorcizable ghost haunting him at 2:15 in the afternoon. Naturally, that didn't make sense either.

'You left something, Rukawa?'

'No.'

'What now?' Mitsui asked; 'no' was not the requisite reply to the question. Rukawa would have to do better than that after barging in to Mitsui's solitary thespian contemplation.

'What are you doing here?'

'If there's someone I don't like to meet it's someone who asks back after being asked.' Mitsui said.

'…'

'Alright. I wouldn't say anything then.' Mitsui snapped and that frustrated him; the failure of good humor on Rukawa's part just when he needed it and of course, Rukawa, who didn't know the first thing about anything else besides basketball, wasn't about to give him the satisfaction of talking back.

There was silence. A minute, another one, and another…Mitsui lost count; they just stood there.

'You know Rukawa, if you start speaking perhaps you can buy us some time and I wouldn't be here sitting on the egg, waiting for you to say something---'

'Get over, sempai.'

'Excuse me?' Mitsui's eyes widened, as if the question mark put him off-guard. In fact, it did.

'Forget him.' Of course, Rukawa meant Kogure; it was glaringly obvious, wasn't it? But who was he to tell this to Mitsui anyway? People don't stop doing what they do just because somebody told them to, right? And more to the point, what had he to do with them? For someone like Rukawa, who would have about the same link with Mitsui as a shark has with an ant, these words—forget him—were certainly a big number.

'Forget who?'

'Kogure sempai. You know that.' Cut the crap was what Rukawa meant, but his tone belonged to a more matter-of-fact circumstance, not this; this was too serious.

Nonetheless Mitsui knew that just fine; it wouldn't take a scientist to know that. His vexation had just been confirmed by someone 2 years younger than him; all this time he'd been waiting for someone to say that just to make sure, but he never expected it to come from some bland and brush-daft freshman who'd never endure a speaking role unless all he had to say was 'eff off' with no expression, overtone whatsoever. Mitsui tried to comport himself and do something with that dippy slap-faced shock but forcing an awkward smile was all he could do. Still, the words stuck on his ear like ear wax and Rukawa looked at him, then to the door and started to move out. Mitsui had an inkling that Rukawa was dreading to speak as if every word was going to cost him. Mitsui followed him with no discernable purpose.

'You have no classes today, Rukawa?' Mitsui said once they'd gone a distance, hoping to prolong their one minute old conversation in the locker room.

'I have.'

'Then where the hell are you going?'

'Up.' He must mean the rooftop.

'Up? What's up there?'

'Nothing.' Then Rukawa continued to his march.

They reached the top in a few seconds. Rukawa was perfectly right; there was nothing up there aside from the sunlight. Yes, the sun was glowing beautifully, dividing like raindrops and reforming upon contact with them. Mitsui watched Rukawa stretch down to bask on the warm floor, turn to his side and put his arm over his head. He had gone there to sleep, no question, to doodle like most people wouldn't because they weren't cloyed with the kind of guts Rukawa had; Mitsui used to do that (and only the very mean or the very tough did that) in the past years, he remembered well, and the resembling sight almost made him want to retrieve the squally habit.

This was a bum's business and he was certainly done with that; but here was also Rukawa in this limbo of time where anything else was nothing. And Rukawa could be a nobody to him, whose every pulse, every point and rebound, and every moment mattered not. Not to him. Just as Kogure didn't matter to him during the getting-to-know-each-other stage of their rapport, just as he started to put Kogure on the count later on and you might say valued him that no working scale could estimate his worth to Mitsui then, remember? He looked at Rukawa as he showed himself brighter and brighter by the minute; no, something like him can't be a nobody for eternity. Not at all.

'You were right; nothing is here.' Mitsui said just as Rukawa turned to him. He hadn't been asleep after all.

'Yeah. No rainstorm. No dark clouds. No gloom. You were wrong.' Rukawa replied. If he meant to inform Mitsui, he didn't do any better than demystifying the whole thing; it sounded too mellow, too uncharacteristic of him, if it was being said at all.

'Wrong? And why is that?' Mitsui said.

'You always act as if there were.'

And Rukawa was right again though to provoke a nice reply was clearly not his plan. But ah, his words, they were like hands that massaged the senior's pain, inside, outside, and he was right; Rukawa was right. Mitsui grieved in the underground beyond how long was necessary, come to assess his performance. It didn't make sense. He blinked at Rukawa in the very gesture of embarrassment. His throat too tight to give a truth-telling, Mitsui just nodded. At that second, he asked himself why he was thinking about forever when he should be thinking about the beginning, never the ending. Some other time he meant to tell Rukawa this, to say to him that he was somebody to Mitsui, for saying that. Or was he already a somebody to and for Mitsui from the start? Perhaps that was the beginning Mitsui so wanted to think about. Who knows?

Mitsui felt himself smile at that and it was silent all over again.

END

A/N: Told yah there's no plot. Anyway, notes on the story: it's not arranged chronologically as I have already said. OOOOOO signifies the differences in the time when each happened. I used flashback and a flopped attempt at stream of consciousness which makes it hard to follow. But that's only because SOC is really like that. I'm open to criticisms, if ever.

Also, I want to differentiate retention from recollection. The former is the unintended invocation of the past and alongside this is usually bitterness, meaning, not wanting to remember an event. However, recollection is always intended; a kind of endeavor to bring back happy memories when one is lonely or nostalgic. In some respects, we can consider retention as destructive while recollection a cure. Something like that. Almost.