Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The first time they face off against each other after Blue Lock, Kaiser swears that he is going to end Yoichi Isagi. 

Break him, until there is no way he can rise again. Grind him under his foot until he lays on the ground in a pathetic, crumpled heap, the light in his eye gone. 

He moves better than he has ever moved on the pitch. Cuts through teammates and opponents alike because this is his show. The cameras will watch for him. The crowd will cheer for him. He will be the one leaving scorch marks across the grass from the explosive power he’s harnessed oh so carefully, fueled by his rage, and condensed it into something precise, deadly, damning. 

He dukes it out with Isagi with a violence that all but leaves sparks flying. Scores right from under his nose.

And Isagi - 

Isagi stares right at him, eyes blazing sulphur, and grins. 

Long afterwards, much longer than Kaiser cares to admit, the afterimage of that grin lingers in his vision. He’d done everything humanly possible to strike despair as deep into Isagi as he possibly could. Stolen his goals, disrupted his plays, sent his stupid little plans crashing on to the ground. Faster, stronger, sharper than he’s ever been before, so volatile that he could see the apprehension in his own teammates as they fringed him, like they’re dealing with a leashed beast ready to snap. 

It’s appropriate. He’d felt like one too. He’s had to leave Japan humiliated in front of the world, licking his wounds… this is not how he would go down. He did not claw his way out of hell to have his existence wiped away by this brat. 

So they went toe to toe. Kaiser loathes to admit that it was saying something about what Isagi had been up to since he left for Germany, that he was still able to keep up. Kaiser ran, and Isagi gave chase. So close that he nipped at Kaiser’s heels, cut across in front of him. Paid him back for every stolen pass and every fumbled play .Eye for an eye for an eye for an eye.  

Kaiser had pushed. Snapped into a flow state so complete the world collapsed into the breadth of the pitch and the diameter of a soccer ball. And into Japan’s little hero, the one he’d gone all that way to see, not knowing he was about to bait a bigger monster out of its chrysalis. Big enough to eat, big enough to take down and conquer, and oh how he longed to see that fury in Isagi’s eye again, that feral scowl of his as he vowed to kill Kaiser. 

Because that… that’s familiar. The hatred, the bitter loathing, that, Kaiser can handle. He’s stronger now. He can take it and hit back and win and he fights for it, fights to crush even that fury out of Yoichi Isagi. No one, no one, will ever make him feel like trash, ever again. 

But instead, as the match proceeded, and Kaiser put on the performance of his life, Isagi had only looked…

Thrilled. 

Exhilarated, every time they would collide, fighting him back tooth and nail, relentless. So fucking annoyingly relentless , not staying down no matter how much he crushed him. Like a fucking cockroach, impossible to kill, an eyesore. Disgusting. Disgusting. 

(Trash)

Why won’t you die? 

Later, much later, the afterimage of that grin of his sticks in Kaiser’s head. When he’s reviewing the game footage until his eyes blur over and his eyelids are heavy enough to drift shut, that stupid, feral smile, hungry, thrilled, burns an impression of itself into his mind. 

He finds he can’t shake it off. 

It comes to him in the months in between playing each other, with the U-20 cup behind them and the two of them playing for different teams, in different parts of the world. Unbidden, when he’s least expecting it, when it’s the least convenient. 

When Isagi’s name would pop up in the headlines on TV or in the news. 

When he’d see clips of BLTV floating around his socials. 

When he’s by himself, kicking a ball as hard as he can at the nearest wall in the only way he’s learned how to cope, with that feeling of being lost, trapped, suffocated. It takes the abuse he puts it through, it bounces back. 

It always bounces back. 

As this obsession with Isagi continues to fester like a disease he doesn’t want looked at, like acknowledging it will hurt far more than letting it erode him from the inside and feed this bottomless rage of his, Kaiser realises that he doesn’t actually know anything about him. 

His plays, sure. He’s studied that boy like a bug under a magnifying glass, catalogued every movement, every ad-lib, every goal he’s ever scored in his life into his memory. All part of his arsenal to crush him so completely he can never look at a soccer ball again. His magnifying glass angles the sun to burn a hole right through him - Kaiser will watch the smoking carcass until it’s burnt to a crisp, until it’s fucking gone. 

But it’s only as he’s plastering his immaculate PR smile onto his face at a gala dinner that it really occurs to him. Even while stuck in Blue Lock, their interactions were all but completely on the field. All he knows of Isagi is the greedy, monstrous egoist he is with a football, uncouth and vicious, giving back ten times as good as he got, his explosive adaptability on-the-go almost sinister to watch. 

Off the field, apparently, Isagi is a sweetheart.

Kaiser hangs around some of his former teammates at the banquet, trying not to notice. It’s hard, considering Isagi is being practically mobbed close by, and the Japanese players, for all their country’s reputation for decorum, are loud. It’s hard not to notice the red-head sitting close enough to Isagi that he just has to turn his head to whisper in Isagi’s ear, or how Blunt Bob hangs off his back like they’re honeymooners. Even the tall one with the red streaks of hair dye, who’s pretty much tried to kill Isagi in every match he’s seen them play even on the same team, seems to be having a pretty civil conversation with him. Kaiser watches with a strange dissonance as Isagi shoves cake into his mouth and the spikey-head striker appears to yell at him, only to roughly dab at his mouth with a napkin. Isagi, apparently used to it, just laughs, and offers him cake.

He looks animated, happy - he smiles and grins and laughs, and people seem to just orbit around him. 

They go through the whole event without speaking once. 

He’d caught Isagi’s eye across the room, though. 

For just one, fleeting moment. 

He’d seen Isagi’s eyes widen as he registered his presence. 

Kaiser had turned and left before he could see anything else.

The internet - at least the soccer side of it - feeds off the fumes of that event for a week afterwards. It’s probably not that often that that many star players get together for a public gala, and it helps that many of the people there have amassed some kind of celebrity stardom outside of just football thanks to BLTV.

All that to say Kaiser hasn’t been able to go online without having to see Isagi’s stupid fucking face. In selfies with what appears to be everyone from the Neo Egoist League, even that irritating piece of shit Noa. There’s people cooing at pictures where his cheeks are puffed out because he’s been caught in the middle of eating, or at the ones with smiles so huge that his eyes crease shut to make way for them, face squished against his friends’. Bright, sweet smiles as he poses with his mentors, beaming grins with his teammates. There’s one particular picture that looks like the screenshot of a video caught mid–blur and zoomed into with over forty-five thousand likes. Apparently, it’s Isagi with his tie off and hair pushed back off his forehead.  

He snaps about it, exactly once, to Ness, not paying attention to the strange, pinched look the midfielder wears at the mention of his name, or the half a dozen monitors with Isagi’s face he has on beaming blue light into the room, replaying his latest match against the younger Itoshi’s team. 

This serves a purpose though. This is so that not a single millisecond of Isagi’s prowess as a player escapes his notice. He’d underestimated him once and he’d rather bite off his tongue than play the fool again, thinking Isagi would just take anything he dishes out sitting down. 

It’s a twisted form of acknowledgement he doesn’t realise he’s attached to him until it’s too late - until he’s halfway on a flight to Japan for a series of away matches and simply assumes that he’s going to play against Isagi again, because it’s not occurred to him that he would lose before he got to him. 

“Thank you very much, I’ll be taking that,” Isagi cuts through and kicks the ball he’d been about to send gunning straight into the net away, with a needle-thread accuracy. The fury dials up so quickly it nearly snaps and Kaiser thinks he might have thrown both hands around Isagi’s throat if he’d not weaved around him, already chasing the ball. 

“Come on Kaiser, be a proper obstacle in my life,” he taunts over his shoulder, with a grin, and Kaiser is going to end him even if it’s the last thing he does. 

He steals the point back by detonating his Kaiser Impact practically from under Isagi’s own leg, the Magnus shot he’s perfected from impossibility to his reality tearing through and blasting a point home. The crowd’s reaction is deafening. The ringing in his own ears as the physical exertion and the adrenaline catch up to him in a rare moment of stillness is deafening. And he turns to look at where Isagi’d fallen from his tackle and -

The breath wheezes out of him. 

He’s grinning. 

A manic, insane looking thing, that unnerves Kaiser and feels like deja vu because this is hardly the first time Isagi’s stood in front of him like he’s staring down the barrel of a gun and having the time of his life with it. 

“Not bad, shitty Emperor,” Isagi hums as he gets to his feet, smile toothy and sharp and eyes bright, and Kaiser is disarmed for just one second too long to tell apart that it’s appreciative instead of mocking, before Isagi’s already turned and sprinted away, eyes locked forward. 

There’s press afterwards, and there’s a team dinner Kaiser has no plans of joining in on. The questions piling on from journalists who’ve built their careers more on gossip than the actual sport have ticked Kaiser off enough that even his immaculate camera-hogging persona, all glib arrogance and flippant attitude, can’t contain the fury he feels with every question about tying two for two this match with the goals he and Isagi scored each.

And maybe it’s because he’s already feeling like this, the fault lines of his being creaking and threatening to give if he doesn’t kick the shit out of a football until its seams burst, that seeing Isagi on his way out of the more isolated VIP exit feels like a blow to the stomach.

Or maybe it’s the fact that Isagi is standing there, showered and changed into casual clothes, with a man and woman, and Kaiser doesn’t have to even think to realise they’re his parents.

They notice he’s there at the same time he notices them there. 

And then there’s no getting out.

“Oh, Kaiser,” Isagi greets, and Kaiser realises two things at the same time. 

Neither of them are wearing their translator earbuds, which have pretty much become standard fare for international games at this point.  

And Isagi’s voice, when it’s not being fed into his ears by the auto-translation warping his words from one language to the next, is… 

Isagi turns to say something to his parents that’s too quick and low for him to catch, and then he’s waving him over.

“Kaiser, these are my parents,” Isagi starts to introduce, and oh, Kaiser had been vaguely aware that Isagi’s English was a lot better now by virtue of interview snippets, but it still shocks him to hear it spoken out loud and to him. In his voice. His natural voice. His natural voice, that is still almost new to Kaiser. 

It jolts him as abruptly and artlessly as the realisation that Isagi does not exist in isolation in football, locked inside his crosshairs as his maddening moving target. 

Because here he is, chatting with family, who’ve obviously come over to watch him play. Who both turn towards Isagi as he starts to say something in Japanese, out of which Kaiser only manages to catch his own name and Blue Lock, and then Isagi’s mother claps her hands once in a move as though in excited recognition while his dad gives Kaiser a broad, friendly grin. 

And Kaiser, who has gone from sneaking and hiding as second nature to commanding the limelight like it’s meant for him, slips into the role naturally.

“Nice to meet you,” he smiles, going more for the charm he reserves for sponsors than the cocky attitude he brings elsewhere, and Isagi’s dad says something back in Japanese which Isagi translates with a laugh. 

“He’s saying he can’t believe he’s talking to Germany’s ace,” Isagi tells him. Looking like this is just a normal, average conversation. Like they weren’t on opposite sides of a football field snapping at each other’s throats moments ago. 

In fact, Isagi right now looks like he’s not even capable of imagining violence towards others, let alone enacting it. Tokyo is chilly this time of year, and Isagi is bundled up in a bulky coat with a scarf tucked in under his chin, making him look softer in a way that’s incomprehensible, soft in the way the tweets that like to gush about him and call him cute seem to imagine him as. 

But it’s not just the physique he’s built over the years, lean and muscled and strong, that’s buried under the fluff. Isagi is smiling, at him, at his parents, at the situation. Like he doesn’t realise this is the first time since they’ve known each other that they’ve had an interaction that could be called polite, much less friendly.

On autopilot, Kaiser dons his most charismatic smile and does a little bow. Shakes Isagi’s dad’s hand and smiles gamely when he asks in broken English for an autograph. 

To Isagi, he says, “Tell him that it’s my honour to meet the parents of Japan’s ace.” It’s just insincere enough that Isagi narrows his eyes at him. 

But if he was expecting to provoke him into a verbal name-calling, or whatever would be more normal for the two of them than this is , that’s not what he gets.

“Come on, behave,” Isagi tells him almost scoldingly, “They really are excited to see you. You made quite the impression during the NEL.”

This is not news to Kaiser and he almost snorts because not only is he a celebrity here, he’s a celebrity everywhere , with or fucking without the NEL. 

And so, for that matter, is Isagi. 

Ever since he’s landed in Japan and especially in the circuits Kaiser moves in, it’s painfully obvious that the country loves him. In a way, Kaiser thinks his football career falls into two categories these days - before-NEL and after-NEL. Yoichi Isagi had been a nobody, a fledgling Kaiser’d gotten excited to crush the second he budded on to the scene, before he’d arrived in Japan ready to use him as a stepping stone and transfer out of Bastard München. 

In a post-NEL world, though, everyone knows Yoichi Isagi. 

Admires him, reviles him, envies him. Acknowledges him.

But Japan’s newborn ace, the heart of blue lock, the beating pulse of the new generation of Japanese football, and whatever else people have called him, just stands there whining when his dad claps him on the arm after he translates for Kaiser, leaving out the sarcasm judging by how proud he looks, while his mother beams at him. 

And Kaiser - 

Feels - 

There’s an itch under his skin, burning like a poorly-drying wound.

Isagi, completely unaware, says to him in English, “They’re asking if you’d like to come have dinner with us.” 

Kaiser wants to laugh. It rises up his throat tasting of bile.

This is absurd. This is beyond absurd and the fissures that run through him just beneath the surface are straining to keep him together. His hands twitch, his fingers restless for the feel of his tattooed skin under his nails. 

“Thank you for the offer,” Kaiser says. And in spite of himself, the but I’d rather eat shit, gets left unsaid because his eyes move to Isagi’s parents for a split second and the callous disrespect he’s capable of dies away. Suddenly, he just feels tired. 

Hollow.  

“I have prior engagements,” is what he ends up saying instead, and doesn’t wait for Isagi to relay his words before dipping into another little bow and turning on his feet to leave. 

It’s only when he’s at the far end of the hall and rounding the corner that he allows himself to look back, and sees Isagi and his parents moving towards the exit - Isagi’s arm looped through his mother’s, his dad’s hand coming up once briefly to ruffle at his hair just as they’re about to step outside.

Even at this distance, Kaiser can pick out that same open warmth in their faces that they’d worn as they exchanged introductions with Kaiser. 

It sickens him. 

Picking up the pace, he retraces his steps deeper into the facility, changing his plans of going back to the hotel and reviewing that match beat for beat like he’s playing it all over again.

If he doesn’t physically pummel his rage into something right now he might snap. 

If he slows down enough to let himself think about it, he might realise that his entire drive is zeroed in on taking Isagi down with such single-minded focus that he always forgets how empty it feels afterwards. Whatever the outcome, he walks away from it as though it’s the aftermath of a car crash. Jittering, breath ragged, body cold, dragging himself up and building himself over until the next encounter. 

A lot of things feel empty these days. The giant obnoxious penthouse he’s bought himself in Munich. His luxury cars, the gourmet meals he gets served at any hour of the day with one command. Every material comfort he grew up without that he can now afford ten times over without counting change in small, grimey hands trained to be deft, to snatch and hoard and hide. Even the furious, quiet, private pride, verging close on vengeance, that he’d feel when he’d pay a ludicrous sum of cash up-front for a scrap of fabric he’s going to throw in the back of his closet and never wear, overwriting every second of indignity he’d put himself through in his childhood…even that has dulled. 

If he slows down enough to let himself think, Kaiser will realise he’s scared. 

He’s scared that the friction of his anger is wearing out smooth and one day it’ll have blazed so high it won’t have anything left to burn through. He’s scared because a part of him already knows, or fears, what will remain when it does. That cold, hollow emptiness. Whatever was left behind by the time rough, thick hands that had never touched him with kindness had squeezed out with choking fingers anything else that could make him whole. 

All he has is his fire, his absolute rage, his vindictive appetite, to fill the cracks of his being.

He kicks the ball harder than he’d meant to and it flies towards the wall opposite - ricochets off and sharply angles a wide berth away from him.

As his breath slows, loud and hard in his own ears, he feels the restlessness that’s been prickling beneath his skin start to burn again. This is supposed to help. This is supposed to help. 

Mechanically, he moves towards the ball, where it bounced off the edge of the opposite wall and rolled across the practice pitch until it lost its momentum. He doesn’t bother moving it into a better position - kicks it from right where it is, tuned in even to the barely audible swish of air as it tears through and rebounds hard off the wall and comes shooting back at him. 

Kaiser kills its motion with his foot, stills it underneath his heel. 

And then does it again. 

And again. 

And again. 

Again and again, until he feels stable. 

Yoichi Isagi without the bloodlust he apparently reserves only for the field blindsides Kaiser more than he cares to admit. 

“Oh, hi Kaiser,” the bane of his existence chirps, before popping a piece of choux pastry into his mouth, “Want some? These are really good, but there’s only one left.”

Kaiser, not pointing out that this is probably only the second normal interaction they’ve had since they first met, scoffs instead, “Have you been here this whole time?”

He doesn’t need Isagi to actually answer - he knows. He’d watched him buzz around catching up with people or introducing himself around the venue before drifting over to the dessert table, where he’s been for at least the past fifteen minutes. 

To his credit, Isagi looks sheepish at the call-out. “The good stuff always runs out if you don’t get here fast enough!” he defends, and catches his hand on the way to the remaining piece of choux at the last second. “Are you sure you don’t want that? It’s really good.”

Kaiser can’t help himself. 

“Now why can’t you be like this on the field?” He adds in a sneer for the effect, just to get under Isagi’s skin better.

Except Isagi just rolls his eyes and shrugs him off. “You want me to feed you goals now? What happened to making me eat dirt and saying thank you? ”

Those are the words he’d grit into Isagi’s ear, hot and steaming out from behind his teeth, when Isagi’d stolen a goal from him just two days ago. They feel utterly bizarre said out loud now, without the murder in Isagi’s voice, crumbs of pastry and a smidge of whipped cream clinging to the corner of his mouth. 

Kaiser stares at the cream longer than he intends to before he quips back, “You may as well be eating dirt. How’re you stuffing yourself with this shit and calling yourself an athlete?”

“Am I not kicking your ass in every game regardless?” Isagi asks, sweetly. There’s mischief glittering in those big blue eyes, and the easy humour in them is almost as unnerving as how manic Isagi comes off sometimes, on the field. 

He doesn’t like it. 

He hates it. 

It makes him feel as though every time they’ve clashed, it’s only Kaiser himself that comes away smouldering.

“Big words for someone who lost the last time we played, Yoichi,” his words are low, and sing-song. Sickly sweet. 

Isagi hardly flinches. “That Magnus shot of yours is nuts,” is what he says, and it’s almost appreciative again, and Kaiser doesn’t get him. Doesn’t get why the provocation that works so well on the field just flies over Isagi like it’s harmless here, when Kaiser means every bit of malice he can communicate without crossing a line where he’ll have to be dragged away. 

The prickling starts under his skin, under the layers of his expensive, perfectly tailored suit. His collar chafes against the tattooed roses, and Kaiser pushes, wanting it to dig, wanting it to sour the sweetness that’s still making Isagi smile that stupid content smile of his like he doesn’t have a worry in the world, like he didn’t just lose to Kaiser, like he shouldn’t be self-destructing somewhere instead of standing here with his side-parted hair and neat little bow-tie, tucking happily into dessert. 

“That Magnus shot is going to end your silly little soccer career.”

He stands taller than Isagi, looking down at him - but why does it feel as though he’s the one slipping while Isagi peers at him, unfazed? 

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Isagi tells him with a grin. It’s a far cry from the feral thing that stretches his mouth into a snarl on the field, but it’s close enough with how exhilarated it looks that Kaiser almost founders. “I’ll shut it down before it can ever take off again, shitty emperor.”

And as though to seal the deal on that vow, Isagi scoops the last choux pastry into his mouth. “And since you’re being nasty,” he chews, swallows, and then gives him a look Kaiser can only describe as snooty, “I won’t leave anything for you.” 

Then he’s off. 

And Kaiser doesn’t know what to make of it, watching him get mere feet away before he’s intercepted by yet someone else he knows. It’s Sae Itoshi too, of all people, and Kaiser bites down the irritation he feels as Isagi blooms into a friendly smile, greeting him. 

An irritation that trips into genuine shock when he sees something that almost looks like the shadow of a smile on Itoshi himself, as he points at Isagi’s face. Kaiser continues to stare as Isagi colours and brings a hand up to start wiping away the evidence of his dessert conquests - and baulks when Itoshi’s own hand comes up to help him.  

It makes so little sense that Kaiser starts to feel unhinged. He’d watched them play against each other, in that fateful match that had been the catalyst to push Isagi into his notice, that’d started it all. He had not gleaned that they knew each other that well, and certainly not that they were close enough for whatever the fuck he just watched happen.

But if the gossip columns and social media were to be believed, this is just who Isagi is. Friendly and sweet, beloved by everyone. Kaiser, who knows exactly how to dial up the charm when he needs to and infuriate and provoke when he needs to, can’t even pretend that this is a show. Jinpachi Ego had pretty much released his horde of Blue Lockers into the world with zero media training, and the headlines have been a circus ever since. Even Kaiser, with his complete disdain for that entire breed, hasn’t been able to spare himself the soundbites of Blunt Bob proclaiming that his ‘monster chose Isagi’ in a piece trying to earnestly decipher if this was some kind of euphemism, or the younger Itoshi’s overly publicised brother complex, or the bizarre things that come of the pink-haired demon’s mouth everytime he speaks. 

So he knows that Isagi’s friendliness is not a farce, it isn’t a show. 

He knows that for every person he proclaims a rival and a friend, he means it.

He knows that when the journalists ask him if he’s upset about losing to Kaiser, and he grins and says what fun would football be if he didn’t have someone to beat, he means it.

Means it, when he tells the press that he’s always excited to play against Kaiser, looks forward to facing off against him again and winning. 

And it makes no sense. 

It’s definitely past midnight, and Kaiser suspects he’s the only soul in the training facility booked for his team while they’re in Barcelona. He’s still in his slacks, suit jacket thrown carelessly somewhere, tie undone, shirt sleeves pushed up. He’d only had enough patience to change out of his dress shoes into cleats, the sharp smack of impact for each ball he kicks a familiar rhythm. 

It’s only like this, when he’s able to throw himself into the fervour of controlling a football with the precision of moving his own limbs, that he can allow himself to think about it. 

About everything that came before Michael Kaiser, Bastard München’s young prodigy. 

He doesn’t remember where he’d heard it, what that self-made French emperor had apparently said, once - that he’d picked the crown out of the gutter, but it was the people who had put it on his head. Kaiser doesn’t know much else about Napoleon Bonaparte, but with their shared flair for the dramatics and Kaiser’s own self-styled identity, he took a shine to it. 

He was the boy abandoned by his mother and abhorred by his father, the boy who had dragged himself out of the gutter. And it was the people that put the crown on his head. 

It’s the people that want him. His talent, his potential, his still-new, still-ballooning wealth. 

From unwanted to wanted, near overnight. 

By PIFA, by rival clubs, by the fans. By brands and businesses who skyrocket their revenue simply attaching his name to themselves. By his own teammates and rivals. 

Kaiser understands the nature of their want very well too, especially the players he shares the field with. He understands that Agi would jump at the chance to put him under a microscope, and that Lorenzo would have him valued like a piece of antique furniture if he could figure out how, just to steal a higher bid than his and a spare set of gold teeth. Even with his starter stats and the leading bid he’d held on to throughout the NEL, he knew that Noa would swap him out the second his plays stopped servicing the logic and efficiency of the team.

But what about Isagi?

What does Isagi want from him? When they clash on the field with the explicit intention of bringing the other down is when Kaiser understands him the most. But what does Isagi want out of it? Out of him? 

Or,

Rather,

Does he want anything at all?

The news blows through professional soccer circles that Yoichi Isagi is officially transferring to Re Al next season.

Kaiser manages to stomach exactly three short clips from an interview where Isagi is beaming and excitedly talking about getting to play with a team he has looked up to for a long time, and especially Itoshi Sae-san, whom I admire a lot, before he throws the tablet away. It smacks against a wall with a crunch that makes Ness flinch, before landing dully on the floor. 

“Alexis,” Kaiser grits through his teeth. His nails are already digging at his tattoo. “Practice. Now.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he can sense Ness hesitating. “What the fuck is it?” he snarls. “Spit it out.”

Alexis winces again, and tries not to cower. Something about the sight pisses Kaiser off even more. “Well?”

“No, I was just, I just wanted to say that,” Ness feels his way around the words carefully, and Kaiser’s rage is a simmering thing, hovering near boiling point, “that you shouldn’t let Yoichi Isagi bother you so much. He’s just a nobody and you’re -”

“Are you saying I’m worse than nobody, Alexis?” Kaiser asks. 

Quiet and cold. Ness freezes immediately. 

Just two weeks ago, Isagi had shut down his Kaiser Impact Magnus. He’d only succeeded once, after failing to stop the two goals preceding it - but he’d stopped it. He’d stopped the impossible. Kaiser can see that triumphant grin on his face after he’d managed it every time he closes his eyes.

He lives on a razor’s edge, like a finger on a trigger.

“No, no, that’s not what I -,” Ness hurries to assure him. Kaiser grinds his teeth. The itch crawls like a fever against his collarbone, around his throat, like a rash burning for relief. The joints in his fingers twitch and lock. He hears Ness take a deep breath in, before he says, “Michael, haven’t you… been fixating on him too much?”

A second becomes two. Two becomes three. Four. Five. 

Kaiser turns slowly to look at him. 

“Excuse me?” he bites out. Low and warning. 

Ness looks like he wants to bite his tongue. But with that feverred, wild light of his own in his eye, he makes himself speak anyway. “Yoichi Isagi is -,” he visibly flounders for a second before forcing his way through. “He is good. He’s getting better everyday. But he is not the best, nowhere near it. You are the one in the New Generation World XI. You’re the star player of the best team in the world. So I don’t know why you… you have to lower yourself to being obsessed with -”

“Ness,” Kaiser silences him. The sound of his surname, in that tone, is enough to stop the midfielder short. “What are you insinuating here exactly?”

“I’m not - I didn’t insinuate anything!” Ness is defensive immediately, and that frantic gleam in his eye flickers to something more nervous as he takes in whatever it is he sees on Kaiser’s face, “I’m just saying that -”

“That I should let Yoichi run around shutting me down and not do anything about it? That I should… what? Rest on my laurels and wait for him to catch up? Have you been paying attention, Alexis?” Kaiser can feel spittle flying from his mouth. His shoulders feel taut with how tense they are, hunched with his rage. His body is a furnace, burning white-hot. “Yoichi Isagi is not the best, but then how is he besting me? Or are you questioning exactly how good the star player of the best team in the world actually is?”

“No, no,” Ness denies sharply. Shakes his head, magenta hair flying with the force of it, hanging into his wide eyes. “No, of course not, I - Michael, you know I’m on your side, right? Whatever you want to do, I -”

“I want to beat Isagi,” Kaiser states, firm and with conviction. It comes easy to him, because it’s the goal that’s been at the forefront of his mind long before he’d met that boy in person. The circumstances have changed, beyond anything he could have anticipated, but the goal itself, at its core, stays the same, even if it’s ballooned to take over everything else, all his other priorities, until he can hardly see past it. “I am going to beat Isagi. Completely. That is what I want to do. Are you on my side for that as well?”

Ness - meek, obedient Ness, who goes around tripping over his feet to keep Kaiser happy, who throws himself at Kaiser’s opponents to let Kaiser slide into the spotlight as he leaves them in the dust - dithers.

Kaiser’s rage is a fuse and it’s burning low. 

“I don’t hear your answer, Alexis,” Kaiser notes. Nails digging into his palms from how hard his fists are clenched. 

“He’s… I don’t know if he’s good for you, Michael,” Ness finally says. He’s no longer looking at Kaiser, choosing to level his stare at the ground by his feet. “With how focused you are on him and… ever since you met him, you’ve… you’ve not. You’ve not been yourself.”

It rises through him until it howls in his ears. 

Something like fury. Something like disgust. And something worse. Something underneath the surface that feels too raw, too revealing, that Kaiser instinctually recoils from.

“Since when do you get to speak over me like this, Ness?” Kaiser asks, almost sweetly, if it were not for how frigid his tone is.

Ness finally peels his eyes away from the ground to look at Kaiser. 

There’s something almost sad about the look on Ness’ face and for a moment, it rattles him. 

“When we first met,” he starts, and his voice shakes, “You told me that I didn’t have a partner who understood what I was thinking. You told me that you would make my ideas possible. You trusted in me. Since when did that change, Michael?”

A pounding, in his ears. A fog, descending into his brain. A blinding hot fury, breaking loose underneath the seams. Aggression underneath his fingertips and choking up his throat and winding his limbs up with the need to swing it all out. Kick, kick, kick, until it hits the wall. Comes back. Hits the wall. Comes back. Tatters a little. Comes back. Smack. Comes back. Uncomplaining, obedient, bending under his will, and coming back, again, and, again, and, again - 

“I have no need for ideas that are useless,” Kaiser hears himself say, even as he watches the horror blooming on the familiar face of the only person who has stayed by his side in his life, without asking for anything in exchange. “If you are not going to be useful to me and what I want, then I don’t need you.” 

If it’s useless, no one wants it. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s a coach and his star player.

Or a man and his lover.

Or a mother and her newborn baby. 

Or a father and his only son. 

If no one wants it, then it’s - 

“Trash,” he utters and hears it in a voice that isn’t his own, and leaves the room.

That night, Kaiser dreams of his father. It happens less and less these days, fading just enough that he could almost forget. Almost. 

But he lives in his skin. Burrowed into the fractures that’ve mended wrong, into the scars that hurt in phantom ways more than physical. In the nausea that rises in his stomach when he smells that sour stench of milk no matter how fresh and sweet it is, and in the itch in his skin when his anger threatens to overflow, and in the apprehension he’d seen shine in Ness’ eyes, when he’d come quietly to join him in the practice field Kaiser’d spent hours tearing up that evening. 

He wakes up freezing cold, drenched in clammy sweat, hands flying up and feeling for fingers at his throat, for bruises around his ribs. Humid air puffs out of his mouth as he tries to remember how to breathe, his body remembering how that first lungful would be almost as painful as the pressure squeezing down his windpipe. 

As the panicked heat starts to cool, the nightmare itself fleeing from his memory the more he awakes, Kaiser grabs at the water bottle by his bed and chugs it down. His body is still keyed up, halfway into fight or flight mode. 

He would like to say he hasn’t thought about him in a long time. He would like to say that the dreams growing sparser, once every blue moon from the near-frequent events they used to be, carries over into daytime, too. 

But no. That man haunts him the most when he is wide awake. Across the ocean in Japan struggling against the fear of obsoletion or on home turf, in a penthouse apartment overlooking the richest and most luxurious neighbourhood of Munich and wondering if the height he’s climbed is not something temporary, something that could disappear from underneath his feet the second he ceases to be what these people want of him. 

No matter how far Kaiser goes, how high he climbs, he can’t leave that man behind. His shadow trails behind him, like a ghost in the deepest crevices of his being. Inked into his skin and twined into his flesh like vine and thorn.  

But it’s at night, like this, when his grip on his mind is loose and he is defenceless against his baser instincts, that he wonders if his father thinks about him. Whether he’s seen him on TV. Whether he sits on that same, sagging beer-stained couch with its years of dust and nest of bed-bugs and curses him out the way he cursed out his mother, whether he sees that woman in his face even more than when he was a child, in the red of his eyeliner, in his coy smile. 

If he has, then wouldn’t he have tried something? To claim a relationship, to demand money, to do… something? A part of him keeps expecting it, some scandal in the press from a man claiming to be his dad, letters coming in to blackmail him and feed on him like the dirty parasite he is.

But then, he’d never tried that with his mother. 

But then, he had loved his mother. 

Is it ignorance, or indifference, that keeps him away? Which is better? Which is worse?

Kaiser presses his palms into his face until lights start exploding behind his eyelids. Stop it. Leave it. Burn it. 

Burn it higher and higher, keep the flames going. Crank up the fuel, climb, fly, until he’s unreachable, until nothing his father ever does can hurt him, until Kaiser can exorcise himself of him completely. And then, only then, he will go back, and he will look at his pathetic, bloated form, the useless husk of man he became letting himself waste his own ability away all because he was not wanted by someone he wanted, and he will feel nothing but triumph and relief. 

Kaiser is still learning to listen to his own advice when he gets a call from his manager and finds out his father is dead.

“He had a pretty severe case of liver cirrhosis, and he was refusing any kind of treatment,” the manager tells him. “It took the care home a while to get in touch because they couldn’t trace down the next of kin.”

“Okay.”

“Because of resource issues and time constraints, they’ve also already buried him,” the manager continues, “They’re happy to have you if you want to visit the grave -”

“No, that won’t be necessary.”

A pause. “Okay. We’re looking into any paperwork or formalities needed from your side so there won’t be any… issues later. It’s being handled with discretion.”

“Good.”

“Michael… are you… is there anything you need?” 

“No,” Kaiser says, quietly, looking his reflection in the eye. The ghost of his mother stares back at him. “I am fine.”

He means it, too. So the old man croaked. Good. If anything, there’s a grim sense of poetic justice to it, that he managed to drink himself to the grave. That he wasn’t able to last, without someone to leech off of, that maybe in the end it wasn’t Kaiser that was not needed but the other way around. 

Now he won’t have to think about him. He won’t have to worry. He’s gone. He’s gone, he can’t hurt you anymore , he won’t come back. 

He won’t come back. 

Kaiser goes to practice, as usual. He hits the gym, as usual. He reviews match footage, as usual. He goes back to practice again, as usual. Everything continues the same way it always does. Why should it change? What is he supposed to do, mourn? What would he mourn for, what is there for him to grieve over?

He’s fine. He’s okay. 

“Michael,” his manager pulls him aside after a week of this, “I’m concerned about your condition. You are clearly not doing okay.” 

Kaiser bristles, immediately, and obviously enough that the man holds out both hands to appease him. “Look, I just mean… I understand that the circumstances with your father were… difficult, but -”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kaiser interrupts him coldly. “I’m doing fine.”

The manager sighs, and looks askance at the team’s coach, sitting silently in one of the meeting room chairs. Kaiser already has an inkling that they’ve colluded before staging this intervention, if not spoken to the rest of his teammates. Ness has cottoned on to something , but ever since the last time he’d tried to speak out with Kaiser, he’s kept himself to a restrained distance. They’ve all been tiptoeing around him, these days. Like a sudden move could set him off. 

It would have, too. Just a few days ago, it would have set him right off, like a lighter flicked into gasoline. 

Nowadays, though, the lighter flicks, and flicks, and nothing happens. If Kaiser wasn’t numb, he might be scared.

“If there’s nothing else,” Kaiser drones, and gets up to go.

“Michael.”

Kaiser clicks his tongue. He really does not need to fucking deal with this right now. 

“I think you need a break,” the coach continues, in a tone that brooks no argument. “You’ve been going non-stop, especially since the NEL and the U-20 cup. It’s off-season anyway. Why don’t you take a holiday? Go somewhere nice, get yourself a girlfriend or something.”

Kaiser snorts. “You benching me, Coach?” 

He’s being mouthy on purpose, but he feels the sneer fade when the coach just eyes him seriously. 

“You’re not in a good headspace right now,” Coach tells him. “It’s got everyone on edge. We’re worried about you, Michael. Just…take the fucking break. Clear your head, come back, and get back on your game.”

Kaiser returns to his flat in a daze.

His calendar is clear.

His manager had given him an awkward clap on his shoulder, and asked him to let him know if he wanted to make any travel arrangements.

He pushes in the code to let himself into the flat.

Walks inside and is greeted by silence. 

Hollow, cold silence. 

His fingers twitch. His skin itches.

His ghosts are still here. 

Impulsively, he pulls out his phone. Hesitates. Doesn’t know what he’s supposed to look for. 

Where is he meant to go? 

Where does he have that he can go to?

He’s grown up in this city, this is all he has known in the name of home. And yet the one person he could have called family is gone.

So where is he meant to go? 

He’s blankly scrolling through the flights he’s taken recently when he lands on a particular destination. 

No. No, no. 

Ness’ fevered face flashes through his eyes, accusing him of an obsession Kaiser will never admit to. He’s not obsessed. He’s not fixating. 

The idea slips through the cracks of his skull and burrows into his brain to germinate there.

A strange look passes over Ness’ face when Kaiser tells him he’s going to Japan for two weeks. 

Kaiser had expected a reaction - had been blunt when sharing where it was he wanted to go as though almost daring Ness to comment on it. But that strange look Ness wears sits a while before it simmers down to something like resignation. Or realisation. 

“What?” he arches an eyebrow, and there’s challenge in it. 

“No, nothing,” Ness shakes his head. He watches as Kaiser empties the last of his things in the practice room lockers into his gym bag, “Just thinking that… I might have an idea you’ll like, this time.”

“Oh?” 

Ness nods, almost as though to himself. There’s a little twist to his mouth, a private thing. A part of Kaiser wants to pry, demand to know what it is Ness has on his mind. But he’s also aware of this film of distance that’s enveloped them since his outburst days ago. 

He’s never had to hold himself back with Ness, who has always taken everything he’s thrown at him without complaint. He’s the only one Kaiser has allowed to see him at his lowest. But lately… lately, it’s different. He’d not even told Ness about his father. A part of it is just because of his own defiance - because what does it matter that he’s dead when it didn’t matter while he was alive, the moment Kaiser broke free of that shithole? Aside from his manager and the coach, no one else knows, and there is no one that he has personally told. It doesn’t matter because he doesn’t matter and now that he’s fucking gone, good riddance, he won’t let him matter.

So he keeps it to himself. And he gets the feeling that Ness is keeping things to himself, too. Usually, he’d have no issue just shaking it out of him - Ness is easy to shake, is a thing he started to learn as they became a set on the field, the emperor and his right hand, growing into those roles as their careers took off. 

But these days he can’t… bring himself to do it. The urge to strongarm his way through what he wants comes with a corresponding claustrophobia Kaiser shoves away to the back of his mind almost instinctively, not letting it breach into his consciousness because - 

(It reeks of alcohol and hot, 

Stomach-churning breath huffing insults, 

The air slowly leaving his body,

A face twisted in hate)

Ness tucks that strange expression away - smooths it out to his usual polite smile. It’s a little unnerving, because those smiles are usually directed at the people Kaiser confronts, and not Kaiser himself. 

“Would you like me to take care of your travel arrangements?” Ness asks sweetly.

Always ready to please. Always looking for his approval. 

He thought that’s what he’d grown to like about Ness. When did that start to grate on his nerves like this instead?

“Sure.”

Kaiser spends most of the twelve–hour flight to Tokyo in a catatonic state. The alternative is having to think, and Kaiser has, for the past several weeks, let his impulses tide him through to avoid just that. He doesn’t have an exact game plan for what he wants to do when he gets to Tokyo. He assumes that he’s going to check into his hotel, order the most expensive things off of the room service menu, wrestle with his non-existent appetite that fails to put away even the first-class airline meal courses, and then figure out where he can go to kick a ball as hard as he possibly can. He has a vague half-plan to stop by the Blue Lock facilities and work out the baseline restlessness in his system against the AI goalies for a few hours. Maybe he’ll make them give over the monitoring room he spent unending hours in, to really get himself back into that devour or be devoured mindset.

Because the truth is, they were right in taking him off the field. It would have killed him to admit it with his feet on the ground, but in that in-between place where he’s tens of thousands of feet in the air and a shoddy in-flight WiFi connection is his only leash to the world he’s leaving behind, it’s somehow easier to admit that his head had not been in the game. 

It’s like the fire that steam-powered him had flickered out. Burned low into embers. 

Empty, he feels so empty and so cold, and it terrifies him. 

And as much as Kaiser’s stoutly avoided thinking about him so far, he thinks it’ll probably help, that he’s going where Isagi is. Not in person, not that Kaiser even knows how to find him there. But every time he’s stepped into Japan he’s seen Isagi everywhere - in commercials, in the news, plastered on billboards. He definitely won’t be able to avoid Blue Lock’s poster child if he’s planning on practising there. 

Maybe that’s exactly what he needs. To jumpstart whatever parts of him that had gone dead since the phone call no matter how much he wants to pretend that nothing has changed at all.

If there’s anyone who has managed to trip-wire him into the absolute, destructive rage that keeps him going, barreling his way uphill, it’s Yoichi Isagi. 

And he’s already scoffing at the pictures of the Blue Lock delegation displayed big and bright in the promotional billboards of the private VIP exit of the airport, eye drawn to the large, boyish smile Isagi sports with Blunt Bob’s arm around his waist and Red-Head resting his chin on his shoulder, when he hears a voice calling his name - 

Turns, to see the man himself a few feet away - baseball cap pushed off his forehead, one hand raised over his head to wave him down while the other pulls his mask to reveal a grin. 

Kaiser, a hand on the handle of his suitcase, thinks he must still be on the plane and in the middle of an especially vivid dream, as the hallucination that looks like Isagi jogs over.

“Hey,” Isagi greets, in English, his energy somehow so bright that Kaiser’s sleep-less eyes, dry from half a day in the air, squint, “I came to pick you up!”

Isagi explains that his dad drove them here so Isagi could come inside and fetch him. 

“We have to be quick though before people recognise you and start with the mobbing,” Isagi adds, and loops his hand into Kaiser’s elbow to guide him the right way out. 

Kaiser has tripped out of the air and into some kind of fever dream. 

“How was the flight?” Isagi asks conversationally, as they zoom through the exit hallways. It goes by a lot faster than it would if Kaiser were by himself, since Isagi seems more familiar with the place and navigates them without needing any translations for the signage. 

“What are you doing here?” Kaiser asks, bluntly.

“I’m - picking you up?” Isagi repeats himself, though this time phrased as a question as he turns to frown at Kaiser. His mask is pulled over his mouth again, and Kaiser is winded by the powerful compulsion to pull it off. His grip tightens around his suitcase handle.

“No, what are you - doing here?” Kaiser asks again, and his own mask muffles the bite in the question. “How did you know I was coming, why are you -”

Isagi is fully frowning now. Their brisk pace slows in the wake of his obvious confusion. “Didn’t you know I was going to be here?” Isagi asks, and then says something that nearly sends Kaiser back on to a return flight just so he can hunt a certain teammate down, “Ness called ahead saying you’d be needing a ride to the hotel.”

Ness isn’t picking up his calls, which is unheard of, or responding to any of his texts, even though he can see the Read receipts, and if Kaiser wasn’t in the back of a car with Isagi’s father - Issei Isagi, he’d introduced himself as - making friendly conversation from the driver’s seat, he would have blown a fuse. Or several, atomic bomb fuses. 

Is this payback? Is Ness rebelling? Is this his way of getting back at Kaiser while Kaiser is too far away to do anything to him? Does he think Kaiser is above taking a flight back tonight itself just to break Ness’ door down demanding to know what the fuck he was thinking? 

“You must come to have dinner with us once you’re settled,” Issei is saying from the driver’s seat, shooting a smile in Kaiser’s direction through the rearview mirror. Isagi is settled in the seat next to him, munching on something, after having handed Kaiser a pair of the translator buds he’d brought along to match the ones he and his father are now wearing. Distantly, Kaiser thinks that he’s watched him eat enough times firsthand to confirm that he does look like a chipmunk when he’s snacking, like the tweets say he does, and is horrified by this knowledge now existing in his mind. “We love having Yoichi’s friend’s over.”

Maybe this isn’t Ness’ fault. Maybe Kaiser’s mania blast past humanly containable levels and now he’s just gone completely insane.  

He’s still reeling from the absurdity of it when they pull up to the hotel that Ness had booked for him, in the heart of Tokyo but apparently not that far by car from Saitama, and Isagi’s father hops out of the driver’s seat to get Kaiser’s luggage out of the trunk. 

He claps Kaiser on the shoulder and with a toothy grin that Kaiser is starting to see the resemblance of Isagi’s in, tells him, “You rest up now, that was a long flight. Let us know once you’ve slept off the jetlag, okay? Yoichi can come pick you up whenever you’re ready.”

And then they’re off, Kaiser with both their numbers on his phone, and even after he’s checked in and rolled his suitcase into his penthouse suite, he can’t wrap his mind around what the fuck just happened. 

His call to Ness doesn’t go through and he considers leaving an angry voicemail but realises just as he opens his mouth that he physically can’t muster it. 

He is tired. He is so, so tired. 

Instead, he kicks his shoes off, forces himself to decipher the unnecessarily complex shower system because he’s made it a personal, unbroken rule to never go to bed dirty, and is out like a light the second his body hits the mattress.

“Why do your parents think we’re friends?” Kaiser mutters sideways at Isagi. They’re sitting on the same side of a small dining table, while Iyo Isagi bustles around in the kitchen. Issei’s gone out to grab some sake , after greeting Kaiser with that easy, warm smile of his that keeps throwing Kaiser off and starts an uneasy burning in the pit of his stomach.

Isagi snorts. “My parents think everyone from the NEL is my friend,” he whispers back. “They even think Master Noa is my friend.”

“You’ve got a picture with him hanging in your front hall,” Kaiser points out. If having Isagi actually show up at his hotel, because apparently even a seven-star resort chain will bend to the will of a star striker of celebrity status and give away his room number, wasn’t surreal enough, walking into his tiny family home only to run face first into an impression of Noa’d been enough for Kaiser to want to check himself into the psych ward. He’s going insane. There’s no other explanation for it. He’s going totally insane. 

Maybe that’s why he’s just letting himself go with the plot-less flow of whatever the fuck is happening right now, instead of causing a scene and getting deported back to Germany.

“Well!” Isagi squeaks, and that’s one of the new things among the slew of little new things Kaiser has learned about Isagi in the short time since he’s been here. His voice goes high-pitched when he’s embarrassed, like when Iyo had been saying hello to Kaiser with her own translator buds and led with Yocchan has told us so much about you! “He’s been my hero since childhood! Wouldn’t you want a picture with your childhood hero hanging in your house?”

Would he? Kaiser’s never had a childhood hero. He’s never chased after football because of the players he admired - football was his lifebuoy, the thing he clung onto to save himself from drowning. Unlike many of his teammates, unlike so many of the useless little upstarts whose ambition in football is as simple as wanting to be like Noa, he hadn’t had the luxury to dream to become a star. He had to become one, or like a star, he would die out without anyone knowing.

Normally, he wouldn’t let himself reflect this honestly. He certainly wouldn’t while in front of Isagi. But Kaiser has been knocked off-kilter since he landed in Japan. No - since even before then. He’s not unused to being a fish out of water, and he’s not unused to camouflaging himself perfectly like he’s a lifeform meant to be there. After all, you’re only effective as a thief if no one notices you flitting in and out. And you’re only effective as a star if people believe that the leading role under the brightest spotlight was written for you, all along. 

But this set piece is unfamiliar. Sitting at a dining table in a small family home - not fancy and certainly not reflecting the net worth of the player sitting beside him in a plain, comfortable hoodie and sweatpants. It’s neat, though, and well looked after, small but warm and clean, and lived in, in a way Kaiser doesn’t think he understands, between the clutter and grime he remembers from his childhood and the sterile impersonality of his current apartment. There are pictures on the walls, and the place mats are fringed in blue and green and match the tableware, and Isagi had fetched a knife and fork for him alongside the chopsticks he had placed around the rest of the table. 

Kaiser has house slippers on his feet that were set aside specifically for him, and he’s nursing a glass of chilled barley tea Iyo had pressed into his hand while asking kindly, “Have you ever tried this before? It’s very refreshing, especially in this heat.” When Isagi had gone to get himself a refill, he’d grabbed Kaiser’s glass unprompted to get him one too.

He doesn’t know what to do with himself.

What is the character he’s supposed to play here? Who is he supposed to be, in this little play? 

Isagi breaks him out of his inward spiral. “...take a picture with?”

“What?” 

Beside him, Isagi sits with his elbow resting against the tabletop, looking at him. Without the electric edge that they wear on the field, his eyes are wide and blue, catching every light in the room and gleaming with them, posture relaxed. It’s such a difference from the monster he saw on the field killing his killshot into the ground mere weeks ago that Kaiser is struggling right now to think of the two as the same person. 

“I said, if you were going to take a picture of someone to hang in your front hall, who would it be?”

My mum, Kaiser doesn’t say. 

Why the fuck are we engaging in shitty small talk, he doesn’t say. 

What the fuck am I doing here? he doesn’t say.

“Napoleon Bonaparte,” is what he says, and watches Isagi blink those eyes at him in surprise and what bafflingly looks like real curiosity. 

“Okay, I wasn’t expecting that,” Isagi concedes, “How come?”

Kaiser is saved from having to answer by Iyo calling Isagi over to help and bring the dishes over to the table. Is Kaiser supposed to help too? He doesn’t fucking know. He’s never been over to a friend’s house for a meal before. His ‘friends’ when he was younger weren’t exactly the type to have stable home lives. And after all that, well… he had Ness, and Ness didn’t exactly get along with his family. That’s been another point of familiarity, between them, bonding them into better partners. 

His first friend. 

His only friend. 

Ness has not been picking up his calls. 

Ness doesn’t know that his dad’s dead.

What the fuck was he thinking? What was his big idea here? 

And when did Kaiser stop being able to read them?

Issei comes back not long after, and Kaiser slips a little more comfortably into the flow of polite conversation. It helps that both Isagi’s parents are so welcoming. They weave around any odd lulls in conversation or any of Kaiser’s missteps trying to figure out what the fuck the next line in the script should be with an easy sweetness, taking turns putting meat and stir-fried vegatables and dumplings on his plate. Iyo beams in delight when Kaiser compliments the food, and he doesn’t know what to do with that either, because has he ever had anyone cook for him - specifically for him, as an act of unprovoked kindness, before? 

Kaiser has done casual dinners before. He’s sat with sponsors and endured friendly ‘meals’ that double as business meetings and the unspoken barter of career advantages in exchange for dates with the daughters and sons of powerful people. He’s good at this, he knows who he has to be because he knows who the people sitting on the opposite side of the table want him to be. 

It becomes quickly obvious that Issei and Iyo Isagi don’t exactly understand the football world much. They love their son, and their son loves football, and so they are happy to support them. 

It’s so simple that it’s stupid and Kaiser wants to feel mad about it, furious , but can’t work himself up to it when he sits under the warm smiles and open hospitality of two people who are not seeing Michael Kaiser, the brand, but Michael Kaiser, the person. 

And even Kaiser doesn’t know who that person is supposed to be. 

He’d been freshening up in the guest bathroom downstairs when Isagi approaches him outside the door. 

“Hey,” he seems to hesitate for a second, and tips his head a little to look at him, and Kaiser feels almost transparent as he does. “Is everything… are you okay?”

He feels his own face shutter at the question, and his jaw tighten, and it’s clear that Isagi notices it all too, because he’s quick to say, 

“No, it’s just - I know my parents can be overwhelming sometimes, and they really do think that I’m close to everyone I tend to talk about, so they’re maybe being a little too familiar… if you’re uncomfortable, I could tell them to dial it down. They won’t mind!”

Kaiser decides to latch on to the only part of these words that he can latch on to without feeling like he’s on the verge of falling. 

“Oh? You talk about me that often?” 

Isagi rolls his eyes. “You’re a consistent pain in the ass,” he tells him, and Kaiser really doesn’t know how he’s supposed to reconcile the familiar sentiment with this unfamiliar openness, that fringes enough on friendliness that Kaiser just feels lost. “How’m I supposed to not talk about you?”

He confesses it so easily. Like it doesn’t cost him a thing. Like he doesn’t have to hide it at all, the way Kaiser hides his obsession. 

Because it’s an obsession. It is an obsession. There’s only so far that Kaiser can go without admitting it, and it’s a growing impossibility when he is in his house, standing in front of him, wearing fucking house slippers . There’s only so far he can push his own denial before he has to ask himself why he’s allowing any of this to happen when he could have put a stop to it whenever he wanted. Lived up to his reputation as the sometimes-controversial, sometimes-difficult, headstrong football star who lives and plays by his own rules and won’t hesitate to bulldoze anyone, including an unassuming, unnervingly sweet Japanese family, to do it.

It is an obsession, and Kaiser doesn’t let himself think when Isagi asks him if he wants a tour around the house before agreeing. 

“It’s nothing special,” Isagi says as he guides him up the stairs, “But I grew up here, so I like coming back whenever I can.”

It really is nothing special. It’s not glitzy or glamorous, not luxurious or extraordinary. A well-kept home, made quietly alive with personal touches. Photographs lining the walls, telegraphing the passing of time, a growing boy and his parents, smiling in almost all of them. Magnets on fridge doors from trips taken together, and trophies from childhood tournaments sharing shelves with newer, shinier, more important looking awards. Shoes lined in neat rows in the entryway, umbrellas that speak of the personalities of their owners hanging by the front door.

Kaiser’s slept in the dumps, on cold prison floors, in dorms, in luxury apartments, and in the finest of hotel room suites.

And yet it’s this calm, unassuming space, so laughably ordinary, so mundane in its thought to comfort and practicality, carefully looked after with the grooves of its occupants worn into it, that have Kaiser on edge and uneasy in his own skin as he follows Isagi through what is, most certainly, a home . 

The Noa figures and posters in Isagi’s room make him physically recoil in a way that makes Isagi laugh. 

He’s seen his laughing face many times - in pictures and in video clips. On the field too, with teammates, and at events as he mingles with other guests. He’s still not used to it. 

“I need to update this collection,” Isagi observes, eyeing the floating shelves over his bed. Kaiser looks at the desk he probably did his homework at, a little humidifier keeping the air all nice and clean, the accents of blue and green he’s noticed throughout the home. 

“Start by throwing all this shit out.”

“Never,” Isagi swears, mock offended, and goes over to straighten one of the figurines, even though it looks like he’s barely moved it after he’s done. Kaiser only realises he’s hesitating because he’s been watching him so closely – watching the slow movement of his arm as he pulls it back, and takes a second too long to turn back around. 

“Kaiser,” he starts to say, “I’m sorry if I’m overstepping, but are you really okay?”

And he’s not sure, even afterwards, what it is that makes this his breaking point. 

Whether it’s the fact that he’s so far away from home, feeling like he’s unmoored himself from reality in this surreal, unfamiliar place, or whether he’s just so tired, so defenceless without the fire burning through him and its fumes obscuring the things he does not want to handle. 

He’s not sure, if it’s because Isagi is the farthest thing from a friend or the closest thing he has to familiarity right now, but he hears himself say, “My father died,” out loud, for the first time since he got the news.