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Thirty-one is a prime number, but Rin is no longer in his prime at thirty-one.
He complains to his doctor, who asks if there’s anything wrong at his annual physical.
“I’m slowing down,” Rin says. “I need to be in top shape for the next World Cup.”
The doctor flashes a smile of pity. “Ah. Not much we can do about that, can we?”
Rin bit down his instinctive urge to fight back, tell the doctor go fuck yourself like he would have if this was a game. But it doesn’t matter. He’s still one of the greatest strikers in the world. Another year won’t change that.
*
Or so Rin thinks, until some twenty-year-old punk from Kanagawa shows up all excited about “meeting my idol, Itoshi Rin!” and outplays him, bests him in every respect physically because even though Rin’s mind is better than it’s ever been, he can’t run as quickly anymore and soccer is a sport where every meter counts. And then he falls in practice when trying to up his training regimen, because he wasn’t going to let the punk get the best of him again. And then the fall turned out to be a rupture in his Achilles’ tendon, needing rest and physical therapy and an entire season away from the grass and the ball and the feeling of scoring a goal. And the first day back on the field, practicing in Spain with some of his stupidly sentimental former teammates who hosted a welcome back party even though Rin didn’t need welcoming back because he was going to defeat them on the field, he tears it again.
And then, it’s over.
Just like that. Ending with a whimper and not a bang, a ripple in a pond and not a tsunami, no final victory but instead an ignominious accident in a practice match that didn’t count for shit.
*
Before he leaves Spain for Tokyo, a bunch of the other Europe-based Blue Lock alums see him off. He barely remembers what happens, everything since the second injury has been a blur of pain and silence. He feels like he’s been submerged and holding his breath underwater. There are tears. He doesn’t remember whose. Maybe Isagi’s. Maybe Mikage’s. Definitely not his. Someone, probably Isagi, who when they were roommates for their entire twenties was unnaturally good at getting into Rin’s space, claps a hand against his chest, and tells him, “You were my best rival.”
Rin wants to slap him. Isagi still can play. He has a match next weekend. But Rin? His schedule is just physical therapy. No training regimen, no matches, not even the hated interviews.
*
The first few months back in Japan are torture. He’s barred from running or soccer. He watches anime. Tries video games, discovers he likes them. He avoids the soccer ones.
His goal had been to make it to thirty-one, because if Itoshi Rin was anything, he was a spiteful piece of shit. He was going to beat Sae, who was forced to retire at thirty because of an injury, just like him.
Rin made it to thirty-three. He won.
*
“What the hell are you doing?”
Sae stands over Rin’s sofa, watching him play this cool shooter game Nagi recommended in the group chat he checked once every three months.
Rin ignores Sae. Sae, the asshole brother that he is, grabs the remote out of his hands, forces Rin to look at him. Sae doesn’t look much older than he did at eighteen, at twenty, not in fact, but there’s a world-weariness in the way he carries himself that didn’t used to be there.
“How did you get in here?” Rin asks.
“Dad gave me your backup key,” Sae says.
Rin groans. Of course. Their parents believed they were buddy-buddy now.
“Figures. Shidou got bored of fucking you, did he? So you came here to bother me.” Rin has never understood Sae’s on-again, off-again thing with his fuckbuddy Shidou, and he doesn’t care to know about his other, more recent, thing with Leonardo Luna, with whom Sae may or may not be still dating but had an open relationship with and Shidou was involved. When Sae retired, Shidou moved to a Japanese soccer club, and he’d heard Luna had been in Tokyo more often than usual. Rin didn’t want to know the details.
“You haven’t been responding to my texts for the past two months,” Sae says. Sae and Rin would never be friends, but they had patched up their relationship some since high school. Which was how Rin heard about the whole Shidou and later the Luna thing. His brother had awful taste in men.
“I’m fine,” Rin says.
“Sure.” Sae turns around to leave. “I’ll leave this here.” He waves a book around and leaves it on the counter. The book is a volume of manga, the original source material of a soccer anime they both liked once upon a time. “Tell Isagi I said hi.”
“Who says I’ll see Isagi?” Rin asks, but Sae’s gone already.
*
Isagi has left him a voicemail every day. Rin hasn’t bothered to keep his phone on most of the time, so all his calls go to voicemail. He turns on his phone to find a hundred ten notifications. He hits play on the latest.
Hey, Rin? It’s Isagi Yoichi. You’re probably sick of hearing from me by now. This is gonna be my last message. I’ll be in Tokyo in May to visit my parents. Maybe we could meet then? And hang out. Or something. Anyway, I’ll drop by your place during Golden Week. If you don’t want to see me, it’s cool.
Rin doesn’t delete the message. He replays the message when folding paper planes and launching them into the air from his balcony. Isagi’s voice isn’t the worst soundtrack in the world.
*
What happens in the in-between of March is this. Sae forces him to go on a weekend roadtrip together with Leonardo Luna, who retired at the same time as Sae. Rin doesn’t ask what they are. They drive to Hakone. Hakone is cold. There are icicles hanging from the windows in his room. Rin is underdressed. Sae has to buy him a coat. Sae doesn’t make a fuss about paying for the coat. They drive back. More correctly, Sae and Luna drive back. They don’t let Rin touch the steering wheel. Guest of honor or some bullshit.
“The kanji for Rin’s name means ‘cold,’” Sae explains to Luna, deadpan.
“Your parents were dead-on,” Leonardo says.
“The kanji for Sae’s name is ‘bright,’” Rin retorts. “Does he seem bright to you?”
“Wow, where did your respect for your big brother go?”
It left the day you came back from Spain when I was a teenager, Rin thinks, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Hasn’t mattered for a long time. He had been so full of anger in his teens at Sae—if not for Sae pissing him off, he might not have become one of the great strikers in history. He should thank his brother, really.
“Rin, I hear you’re coaching?” Leonardo asks.
“A college team,” Rin says. “I start in April. They’ve sent me game footage already. The strikers are complete shit.” They didn’t have half the drive of anyone he knew from Blue Lock.
“Well, good thing they have you,” Sae mutters.
*
Some days are worse. Some days Rin wakes up and he looks for his soccer shoes until he realizes he doesn’t have soccer shoes because he threw them out when he returned to Japan in a fit of rage. Some days are better. Some days he knows that his playing days are over. The first Monday in April is his first time on a soccer field since he played, although this time on the sidelines. He manages to get through the whole day without vomiting.
On April 5th, Rin has work. The kids on his new team are terrified of him. His reputation as a standoffish asshole has traveled far and wide. None of them cry on the first day, which he counts as a success.
On April 6, Rin thinks he can do this. He reinvented himself from Sae’s little brother to one of the two greatest strikers in the world, World Cup Champion. He can whip this subpar, lukewarm bunch of strikers into something warmer, get a couple degrees to the boiling point.
*
“Itoshi Rin, I know you’re home,” an annoying voice says from outside the door.
Whoever is outside rings the doorbell four times in rapid succession. Rin puts down the electric kettle he was using to make tea, closing the gap between himself and the door.
The door opens. Isagi Yoichi has finally come to collect on his promise.
Isagi has come a long way from the mediocre striker fueled by sheer willpower he was when they first started in Blue Lock. Isagi is like water in his ability to meld to his surroundings and change, becoming anything in between a calm lake to a downpour to a storm cloud waiting for the right moment to strike. Isagi has that grin he always has when he sees Rin, even when they didn’t get along. He’s handsome in a boyish way, the magazines say, popular with women whose advances he’s always turned down.
“I have to take care of Rin,” he would say, back when they were in their twenties and lived together and Rin would see girls ask him out all the time, “that’s my roommate. He’s a jerk sometimes. But he’s cool.”
Rin doesn’t read the magazines. Their former Blue Lock teammates text him screenshots of articles where Isagi talks about him as ‘his greatest rival’ with winky face emojis.
When it comes to love, Rin’s first and greatest love is soccer. Everyone knows that. Nobody could compare. He was too famous, regardless. He had locked that part of himself away while he was playing, because the only thing he wanted to be recognized for was his soccer. To be gay and a famous athlete was to invite attention in a way he didn’t want. Isagi thought the same.
But now, Rin’s just yesterday’s news. He can be anyone. Rin isn’t dumb. He knows what Isagi has returned for.
“You asshole,” Isagi says. “You only replied to my voicemails with one word.”
“But you still showed up,” Rin says.
“Yeah. I did, because it’s you,” Isagi says.
“You’re such a fool.”
*
One small mercy Isagi allows Rin when they grab lunch from the family restaurant at the end of the road is not bringing up Rin’s retirement. Instead, Isagi catches him up with everyone’s accomplishments. Bachira is retiring soon, apparently, as are a few others. Rin wasn’t the only one whose time had come. When they walk to the park, they fall into step, one-two, one-two. Like the old days, when they’d play soccer and know exactly where the other was.
“It isn’t fun without you,” Isagi says, when they stop in front of a park with a soccer field.
Rin grabs the chain links of the fence, knuckles white with force. A group of kids chase a soccer ball. He wants to join them. But he can’t run more than a hundred or meters or so before his ankle starts to hurt, so he stays inside. Some days, he wants to run so much that he folds paper airplanes made from newspaper scraps and throws them from his balcony, willing them to run as far as they can because he can’t.
“What have you been doing since retiring?” Isagi asks. “Picked up any new hobbies?”
“Folding paper planes,” Rin says. A parent calls, and the kids leave the park. Rin motions towards Isagi, who takes a brand-new soccer ball out of his backpack.
Without speaking, they end up in front of the goal. Isagi places the ball down, tilts his head expectantly.
“Here you go,” he says, getting out of the way so that Rin can kick it in.
Of course Rin hits it home.
That feeling he gets when hitting a goal, the one that makes him feel like he can fly, is still there. Not with the same intensity as it used to, and for this he is thankful, because there is a season for everything and his season as one of the best strikers in the world is over. A new kid, someone with as much ego and sheer drive as Rin and Isagi and everyone else from Blue Lock had when they were kids, would take up that mantle instead.
Isagi whistles, reaches his hand out.
Rin takes it, grabs onto his fingers.
Isagi’s eyes are deep blue like the ocean, and Isagi is as grounding as listening to the ocean at the beach. Rin lets himself move before he can think both on and off the field, always, forever, and caresses Isagi’s cheek.
Isagi doesn’t move.
They’ve both been waiting a long time. He’s seen the way Isagi has looked at him, the venom with which Isagi glared at the nameless hookups after games that Rin would go with, and when they were roommates, Rin nearly punched some of Isagi’s hookups, all sharing the same slender but muscular build with delicate features.
“I’m moving back to Japan after this season,” Isagi says.
“Are you?” Rin asks.
“Yeah,” Isagi says. “I’m taking a coaching job at Meiji starting the fall term. It isn’t the same without you. Nobody’s as challenging. And I’m slowing down—I can’t keep up with the kids anymore.”
I’m moving back for you, is what Isagi’s saying.
“What day?” Rin asks. “What day are you coming back?”
“I’ll send you a message—or would a paper plane from Europe be better?”
Rin scoffs, squeezes Isagi’s hand tighter.
“Stay with me while you’re in Tokyo,” Rin says. “I’ll teach you how to fold the best damn paper planes out there.”
Isagi meets his eyes. Laughs. Kisses Rin on the cheek, something playful and filled with promise, of new beginnings, of soccer and paper planes and blue eyes like water, like the sky above the Mediterranean, like the color of their Blue Lock jerseys.
“Of course,” he says. “I’ll fold even better planes than you, and that’s a promise. Now take me home, Itoshi Rin.”
“You’re on, Isagi Yoichi. You’re on.”