Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Summertime. Somewhere beyond the edge of the earth.

“That’s where we’re going, right?” Atsumu asks, picking a direction and pointing. “That’s where we’re gonna find the very top of the world?”

Where he points, the sun cracks over the distant mountains, painting their peaks gold and pink like Sakusa’s cheeks in the summer cold. The craggy tops — yellow-green, laid bare by snowmelt — scratch the sky while their bases lay hidden under the ice. An immortal history, never to be known.

His arm doesn’t falter as he holds it up; not from the cold, which he’s grown used to, nor the agony of just barely glimpsing that spot on the horizon towards which they’ve all staked their lives. It looks so impossibly small as he squints, staring out into the wild, untouched land.

Atsumu barely hears the crunch of snow as Sakusa steps behind him, but his heart skips a beat as he feels Sakusa’s feather light touch on his elbow. He makes a minute adjustment, moving him maybe a degree or two over, the difference between a peak and a valley.

“I was close,” Atsumu grumbles.

“The bottom of the globe, Miya.” Sakusa’s words rumble through him with an earthquake’s grace, his voice so deep and so close to his ear. “We’re here for the southern pole, or have you already forgotten? What are we to do with you, hmm?”

This teasing is gentle compared to Sakusa’s usual fare, and Atsumu can’t help but laugh, his shoulder pressed against Sakusa’s chin as he joins him in staring at that miniscule spot on the horizon where all their hopes converge.

“It’s a matter of perspective, don’t you think, Professor?” He feels Sakusa scoff behind him at the nickname. “Some people live their whole lives looking homeward with their compass pointing south, after all.”

Atsumu hasn’t needed a compass in a long while; he navigates with the stars just fine, and when their ship tipped into the southern hemisphere he stopped looking for home. No north star here.

“I suppose you’re right,” Sakusa says, and relief rolls through Atsumu’s body. “It feels like the world has flipped on her axis, down here. Up here.”

“Just here works. Nowhere else to go.” Atsumu tries to shrug, but his voice grows hard — and not from the cold.

They’re alone, together, on the southern continent. An ocean between them and other humans. Seabirds and penguins and fat seals their only company besides each other and the rest of the crew.

All of them have had to shape themselves into this crack in the ice, this lonely dot in the landscape; all of them have staked their reputations on that invisible, critical spot in the distance.

Atsumu’s words are the last to ring out between them for a long time. Sakusa lets his other hand rest against the hem of his sweater, refusing to stop steadying Atsumu’s arm. He knows his way around a rifle better than Sakusa does, but the scientist draws answers from the most finicky machinery with his careful hands.

Maybe that’s Atsumu — a machine, made for this beautiful, wondrous, bleakness.

It’s only under the barely-there pressure of Sakusa’s hand — the phantom heat that he imagines from the touch and the gentle correction — that Atsumu feels his arm faltering.

One Year Earlier. Yokohama Port.

It is with deep excitement and a steady hand that I begin this journal as an account and log of my journey to the Southern Continent. What may lay ahead of me, I do not know — it is impossible to predict — and what lay behind me is best forgotten.

But I am joining this expedition under a sound mind, and with the great hope that the league of men I am staking my lot with — who range from seaman to doctor, scientist to photographer — are as enthused and invigorated by the secrets of the world which will soon lay just within my reach.

The Journal of Sakusa Kiyoomi (1917)

Kiyoomi’s never been on a ship this large or well supplied before.

The Suzaku-maru is getting filled with the last lingering supplies necessary for her journey south tomorrow. They’ll make a few stops in the Southern hemisphere to pick up additional goods and restock on a few provisions, but for the most part the lot they’re packing is what they’ll have until the next time they step foot in Japan.

He’s still not sure how Iizuna managed this fantasy: convincing a hundred different sponsors and companies to fund an expedition to the far reaches of the globe, outfitting a ship with enough supplies for three years of sailing, camping, and pushing at the boundaries of human experience.

It’s not enough to just have maps and graphs and charts — pure data — to justify the expense and the necessity. Very few people are swayed by numbers. If it were, Kiyoomi would be a king by now; between his research, his fieldwork, and a few fringe hobbies, he himself has a whole forest’s worth of charts behind him.

But Iizuna — with his handsome face and calming disposition — could be a king, if he wanted; his lecture tours are exceptionally popular, and he has supporters around the globe.

Luckily for Kiyoomi, his aspirations aren’t quite so lofty.

He has no interest in the air, only the isolated patches of the under-explored and little understood Earth; more importantly, he has the disposition to rally funders, and a crew to follow him there.

“Antarctica, Sakusa. The Southern pole. Doesn’t that sound astounding?” Iizuna told him, after appearing as sudden as a spark at Kiyoomi’s university reading room and dragging him from the accounts of volcanic activity he’d been idly perusing, in favor of a drink.

Kiyoomi doesn’t have a private office — he’s too junior of an academic, and currently searching for a thesis topic — and his rooms are only slightly less suitable for life than whatever corner of the world Iizuna had spent his last few years exploring. They first met when Kiyoomi sent him an introductory letter as a teen, reading about Iizuna’s account of ice climbing in the Alps, and had kept their correspondence ever since.

The last time he heard from Iizuna, the explorer had been attempting to learn how to hold his breath underwater from pearl divers, and trying to connect with engineers to develop better diving equipment.

Compared to the depths of the ocean, the South Pole seemed almost too reasonable.

“Haven’t they already reached it?” Kiyoomi asked, trying to sound flippant even as his heart pounded. “Some European — Amundsen? Explored territory doesn’t seem like your usual field.”

Iizuna leaned forward across the table of the outdoor bar they found, the lamplight making his hair glow a peculiar shade of green-gold.

“You’ve read my papers, then?”

After deciding that the bottom of the sea might not be reachable, at least in his lifetime, Iizuna had returned to ice climbing, reaching mountain peaks the European explorers had written off as impossible, and reporting his exploits in the Geographic Society’s journals.

“Entirely a professional courtesy,” Kiyoomi shrugged, even though he had to constantly fight with his university’s geographers for first crack at the journal. “Is there really anything new to find out there?”

“It isn’t about what’s new or exciting, Sakusa. If mankind gave up on their exploratory endeavors just because every rock has already been trod upon, then we’d be stuck in the mud like the fish we came from. There’s always something new to explore or learn, even for men like me. And besides,” at this, Iizuna demurred, looking from side to side before lowering his voice as if he were letting Kiyoomi join in a conspiracy, even though the proprietress was refusing to pay attention to their conversation and the only other occupants were at least three bottles deep into their sake, “It would be new for you. A whole continent you’ve never seen before. Imagine what you could learn!”

The prospect of discovery was enough for Kiyoomi to sign on; no maps or charts needed.

Maybe that’s also enough to explain the whole phalanx of men on this ship — a mix of sailors, soldiers, scientists, and a few who defied taxonomy.

“A hand, maybe, Sakusa?” asks the lanky redhead walking slowly up the gangway. His pace has caused a jam of disgruntled dockworkers behind him.

He’d marked the box carefully with the words ‘caution’ and ‘chemicals’ and ‘Open at own risk. The risk is explosions’, and a helpful drawing of a fire as far as Kiyoomi could make out. Currently, the box is upside down and slipping from Tendou’s grip, hence his trouble.

“Or two, if you can spare it?”

“I’ll clear a path and open your workshop’s door for you, Tendou,” Kiyoomi replies. He has precious little to do at this point, with all of his supplies already moved onto the ship.

Though he could have spent the whole day before their departure running errands and spending time with his family, he preferred to keep his interactions with them as minimal as they could stand.

Already, it feels a little strange to leave the ship that will be his home for the next few months of their journey to Antarctica.

He’s been part of this expedition for eight months — since Iizuna’s conviction left him unsteady and excited — but already this crowded ship feels more natural than his University’s lecture halls. Kiyoomi has already neatly split his life into two halves, demarcated by joining the expedition; spending more time with his family brought the before into the after, and even the thought of a farewell dinner with them tonight makes him antsy.

Easier to shield himself from the thought if he lends a hand to a fellow sailor.

Tendou’s equipment is being stored in a room that could barely be called a workshop; it feels more like a closet. What it could have been in the ship’s previous life as a whaler is not for the faint of heart to consider — which is why Tendou, of course, asked about it incessantly,

The only thing that matters is that it’s a windowless space large enough to function as a darkroom for the photographer, so that he can develop the photos he intends to take onboard and during the sailing; they’ll set up a new space for him when they make camp in Antarctica.

Although Kiyoomi doesn’t quite understand the point of documenting the journey when the destination is so much more interesting, Iizuna clearly finds it necessary, enough to procure the space for Tendou, as well as have their carpenter Ushijima affix more shelves and hangers to the wall according to his precise specifications.

“I hear you’re abandoning us for the night, Sakusa?” Tendou leers, the box in his arms teetering precariously. “Got someone special you’ll be missing when you’re out at sea? Do you need a photo of her? I could join you and take it, if you needed.”

Tendou’s grating laugh makes Kiyoomi grind his teeth. He needs to focus on recalling the circuitous path to Tendou’s closet.

“There is no one special.” Kiyoomi’s not sure why he feels the need to defend himself. “My family is just insistent on seeing me off.”

“So you don’t think your family is special, huh? You’re an interesting guy, Sakusa.”

Kiyoomi turns to glare at him.

Tendou grins back, that uncanny devil smile etched into his eerie face. It might make him lose his mind before the journey even begins.

Of course, in the narrow aisles inside the ship, any brief moment of distraction could prove disastrous. There’s barely enough space for two men to cross each other, one needing to flatten himself against the wall or duck into a room as the other passes.

Thoroughly vexed by Tendou, Kiyoomi forgets to accommodate for the man stomping aggressively towards them, although Tendou — a traitor and a sneak! — ducks into a bunk room.

Their collision? Inevitable, but also avoidable.

“Hey! Watch where you’re goin’!” The sailor barks, voice hoarse from yelling; his Kansai-ben is tinged with an unfamiliar cadence, like their common language has grown foreign to him while speaking with other tongues.

Kiyoomi vaguely recognizes him from the week he’s spent aboard the ship. They’ve certainly crossed paths — the crew, ultimately, is small in order to optimize the time at the Pole — but nothing about him stands out enough to memorize, unlike Tendou with his wide eyes and bright hair, or Goshiki and the bowlcut he maintains every morning, trimming his bangs into the water.

He can’t place his name; he’d like to remember it before snapping back at him. It’s only the polite thing to do.

But the sailor carries on to fill Kiyoomi’s silence, and his own irritation doubles.

“I see some of us are prone to distraction,” he says, holding tight to the stack of papers clenched between his hands. “I don’t care if that flies in academia, but it ain’t got a place on the ship.”

Well.

Screw propriety, Kiyoomi thinks.

“I can assure you that I understand where the focus of our expedition lies, and I believe that if you know me enough to recognize my background, you can also assume that my expertise will be critical when the time comes to actually do the work.”

The sailor huffs a shallow laugh that lightens his expression; it makes him half-memorable, like an early dawn. With his dark hair, eyes the shaved gray-brown of basalt, and sunburnt skin, he looks every inch a seaman.

“The work happens on the ship, too, Sakusa,” he drawls out the name. It’s like he’s making fun of the way Kiyoomi can’t remember his, and it rankles him; so does the way he looks Kiyoomi up and down, slowly, committing him to memory. “Even rookies come to know that before long. I’ll see ya when you’re needed, and not a moment too soon — so I guess I’ll be meeting ya at the Pole, huh?”

Before Kiyoomi can say another word — in his defense, or as an attack, he doesn’t know — he shoulders past him to continue down the hall before turning right, towards the captain’s quarters.

“You’re already making friends, Sakusa? That’s good for morale,” Tendou jokes, “but maybe you could find a few more enemies while you’re at it?”

“Be quiet. Let’s just get to your rooms.”

He still has to meet with his family and say his goodbyes; a parting they insisted on, though Kiyoomi can’t fathom why. If there are any enemies of his — if to call someone your nemesis means that they oppose your worldview — they’ll be found at dinner tonight.

They won’t be found on the ship, in the body of a vexing sailor.

Of course, upon arrival in Tendou’s erstwhile office, he tips over his box — the warnings apparently were only for some outside observer and not for Tendou — to reveal only photographic paper and pieces of chocolate.

Luckily, Kiyoomi doesn’t have to say a word. Just the unimpressed look on his face is enough for Tendou to hand him a piece.

Later That Evening. A Hotel in Yokohama.

Dear Cousin!

I know that you are in possession of an allergy to sentiment — though not sediment — so I will not burden you with illness as you begin your journey south.

But it is in my nature to solicit — by any means necessary — the last word, so I hope you will forgive me this missive I slipped into your pocket before we parted ways. Do you remember our childhood games of pickpocket, Kiyoomi? I was always better than you, wasn’t I?

My time is brief and I fear you may be about to sneeze, so all I will leave you with is this: I wish you all the luck I have, and maybe then some, that you find what you need on your expedition, Kiyoomi.

Not what you’re seeking, but what you need.

Your Landlocked Cousin,

Komori Motoya

There are a hundred other places Kiyoomi would rather be, and yet he’s stuck sitting around the low table of a hotel’s private room with his family.

(That’s a lie. At this point, there’s only one other place he wishes to be: on the Suzaku-maru, with his comrades and a rude sailor who hasn’t wedged himself from his mind. It’s irritating when Kiyoomi can’t have the last word,)

Dinner is a somber affair, despite the mirth and laughter leaking into the room from the windows and paper doors. He’s sweating through his shirt and can barely choke down the delicate goodbye meal, but the rest of his family seems unaffected.

“Are you sure this is meant to be a congratulatory dinner?” Kiyoomi mutters under his breath to Komori, who took a regrettably early train south to meet Kiyoomi and his family in Yokohama and share in his suffering. “Because the tone is more akin to a funeral.”

Komori — full of humor, as always — lets out a small, nervous laugh as he leans closer to Kiyoomi, under the guise of pouring him more sake.

“You’ve never been to a funeral, Kiyo, how would you know?”

Unfortunately, there’s no other explanation for the particular malaise which has settled over them.

Across from him are his mother and father, casting a watchful eye upon him that he hasn’t felt since he was a small child, stumbling as he ran ahead of them. On one side of them is his brother — shorter than him and built like a brawler, always dressed to the nines to obscure his muscle — and his sister, who keeps her curly hair carefully braided back and pinned in place to combat humidity.

Altogether, they’re as impassive and still as statues, while Kiyoomi nearly shivers under their patronizing gazes, despite the summer heat. Upon stepping into the room — uncharacteristically late, still rattled by his encounter with the sailor — he sat closest to Komori, his sole ally in the family. Both are young — Kiyoomi the youngest in his family by many years, Komori the beloved only son of his bastard uncle — and their friendship is a natural result of their common age rather than any shared interest.

“Do you have something you’d like to share with the rest of us, Kiyoomi?” His mother asks, between sips from her sake cup.

So his utterances had been noticed, then.

“Nothing,” he says, and it’s the truth.

Silence is not uncommon to him, especially at family dinners, which are much more rare.

They’ve always been stiff. His brother — Sakusa Seigi — is a lawyer who studied at Tokyo Imperial University before opening his own practice, and has his eyes on the government seat currently occupied by their grandfather, though there are several cousins he has to fight first. If it came down to a physical battle he could win handily; alas, he must rely on his acumen, which is luckily of hearty supply in their branch.

Sakusa Miu — the first born — is closest to understanding Kiyoomi. She studied medicine overseas when Kiyoomi was young, so his first memories of her were as a full-fledged adult who told him stories of the ship that carried her far away and back home. Missing her awkward gangly years made her untouchable, seeming more of an authority in his mind. She spends most of her time between a Tokyo hospital and her own clinic, seeing patients and writing papers on novel illnesses, and had once spent a whole afternoon stretching and observing his wrists before sending him back home with a letter describing all the exercises he should be working on to refrain from straining them.

The Sakusas set goals and work towards them; they might be lofty, but they’re concrete and understandable.

Kiyoomi’s feel less concrete, and more like a calling. He isn’t in search of a professorship, or a lifetime rotting in academia. Instead, he seeks knowledge, plain and simple. There are still so many stones in the world to uncover. Although he’ll die before they are all turned, he wants to at least see how many he can flip to observe the underbelly; see what secrets he can draw out of the Earth that the rest of them take for granted.

(His siblings also have a fifteen year head start on their plans. If one reads between the lines, it’s clear that Kiyoomi wasn’t conceived with a concrete and well-formed goal in mind.)

He didn’t come here expecting a raucous parting meal. He didn’t expect much at all from this dinner, really, except that the atmosphere would be less funerary.

Even his parents’ expressions have barely shifted all night. His father’s hair has gotten more gray since the last time he’d seen them, and his mother hasn’t changed at all except for a minute twitch in her left eye that Kiyoomi only notices because he’s in the business of pointing out aberrations.

It’s so similar to the quiet that had settled on them after he announced his decision to pursue a degree in the sciences instead of law or medicine.

“If we’re talking about death, have you ever given much thought to your last meal?” Seigi asks, unwilling to allow Kiyoomi his peace.

He’ll need to get better at whispering if he wants to survive the long journey ahead with his secrets intact; he’s seen his bunkrooms, and to call them cramped would make them seem palatial.

Seigi barrels on, even as Kiyoomi picks at the food on his plate.

“There can’t be much opportunity for your favorite foods when you’re out at sea, I believe? Your whole adventure in the Arctic is a veritable death wish so I would hope you prepared some pickled plums, just in case.”

“It’s the Antarctic, dearest brother. I’m making my way to the Southern pole. Given that I’ve only been preparing for it for nearly a year, and I have seen you memorize briefs in minutes, I would expect you to have retained at least some knowledge of where I am bound.”

He doesn’t mean to react so sharply, but his brother’s blithe words set his spirit alight.

(Blithe words and ignorance — of course pickled plums are packed for their journey. They’re pickled. That’s the point.)

Months he’s been preparing for this departure, taking a break from his studies to exercise and climb mountains and get used to horrible rations, and now, on the eve of his great sail, for it to be treated so lightly? Preposterous, but expected; Kiyoomi’s temper isn’t normally so easily sparked but his family has had a lifetime to get under his skin.

“Is there any difference?” Seigi waves his hand as if to encompass the whole of the globe in the slight gesture, which speaks more to the folly of man to underestimate the world than his own intelligence, “they’re both cold.”

“Only in one location do I risk being eaten by bears.”

There are a hundred — no, a thousand — other risks, and perhaps an uncountable quantity hidden with how little known the region was. In Tokyo, Kiyoomi can sit comfortably with his handful of known risks, the things he’d grown accustomed to in city life. The chances of stumbling over something new is rare, nearly astronomically so, and he leaves that field of study in the hands of his colleagues who spend hours at night staring at the distant heavens like they can make something of the stars.

“I bet you’d like that though, wouldn’t you?” Seigi grins, sharklike, sensing the excitement that thrums under Kiyoomi’s skin like blood in water. “You always were an odd one, brother.”

“Seigi,” Miu hisses, to chastise him. Of their family, she’s known for being reticent; when she examined Kiyoomi’s wrists, only a few words had passed between them, mostly demands to move or adjust his position. Even now, her only contribution to the dinner had been to deconstruct their fish with surgical precision, like she’d rather be in an operating room miles away.

“Please do not cause a scene the night before our youngest is meant to leave,” his mother tuts. “But I do worry about these bears — are you sure you must still go? I believe our cousin could offer you a professorship in Miyagi if you wish to go further with your studies.”

Beside him, Komori startles, like he forgot he’s connected to all of them in turn. Komori’s father is an academic and his mother a researcher, while Komori himself had stumbled into contract law. Fate has borne them into the wrong families, although Komori’s parents support his endeavors.

“For the last time, there are no bears in where I’m going.”

There’s a small part of him that desperately wants them to get something right about his journey. For them to pretend — for even a moment — that they understand his work, or care about it. Enough to know a little bit about what he knows.

Sure, his parents were proud of him when he received his doctorate, but when pressed they couldn’t describe what he had studied. They champion Seigi’s legal wins, but refuse to understand the cases he argued. And there is a framed picture of all of them outside of Miu’s clinic, her refuge outside of the hospital, but of the disease she had spent years investigating? Not a word, not even its name, has passed his parents lips.

His siblings don’t seem to mind, so caught up in their own worlds and families and lives, but Kiyoomi has precious little to cling to but his studies.

Knowledge is power to Kiyoomi, and his family is blind to it.

He looks between all of them. His parents a lost cause, his father silent because Kiyoomi had already informed them that there was no professorship waiting for him at the end of this journey, and certainly no job, either. Seigi useless, because he had gotten most of the muscle in their family but least of their brains.

Miu is his last hope, and he looks to her plaintively, nearly desperate.

Please understand, he thinks. Please tell me you know something. Anything. Begging that a small part of him sticks to his family so that — if the worst were to happen — they’d have something to cling to in memory of him.

So that he knows there’s something waiting for him back in Japan.

But Miu refuses to meet his eyes. “I don’t know anything about bears,” she says, before turning back to her food.

His plate clatters and his sake cup tips over when he rises and leaves dinner, without a goodbye or any care at propriety, because at least his rudeness will leave an impression.

He’s so close to making a habit of this.

As he slides the paper doors closed behind him, he doesn’t hear a sound; no protest, upset.

Just his family, quiet as they’ve always been, with or without him.

He knows Komori’s been following close behind him after he stormed out of dinner to head back to the pier where the Suzaku-maru sits, but he doesn’t turn back around.

His cousin is a patient pest.

Kiyoomi needs time and space to think.

The moonlight pours over them; the heat, too. In the humid haze of midsummer, Kiyoomi’s thoughts are muddled, so he walks in circles to clear his head, drawing curious stares from onlookers. Luckily, Yokohama Port is still bustling, even this late. In the distance, a steamship has only just come in, with dock workers unloading another ship on the edge of the pier. All around the hotel Kiyoomi’s family chose to stay at are other visitors, mostly foreign, who are also explorers of a sort.

In the dark of the night, on the curve of the sea, he can just make out the sails of the boat that will be his home for the journey south. Even though she isn't as big as the other ships, he feels her presence acutely.

Although he knew — from the moment he walked in the door, no; the moment he received the invitation — that his last dinner with his family would be odd, he didn’t expect to feel so humiliated.

Maybe he’s just grown unused to it. Spending the last few years entrenched in research, splitting his time between Tokyo and fieldwork, he’s forgotten how to act around people who don’t crave adventure. Conversations in the field revolved around survival first and research second; complaints about the weather, queries about the plants, strictly educational curiosity about treacherous paths their guides refused to show them. But his family — wealthy, and distantly honorable — preferred a more stoic kind of communication.

And worse still —

Obvious from their refusal to listen to anything he’s said or written them about —

They don’t believe in him.

Because he won’t come back from the ship with a better title or even a faculty appointment — difficult to manage when there’s no guarantee he’ll return at all, no matter what Iizuna told him of his past experience in the Antarctic — it meant nothing to them. Rising to a higher position, accolades and ribbons, all of those are currency in the Sakusa family, but what drives his heart is a quest for knowledge.

Ever since he was young, he felt like he needed to know everything about the world. As if the only way to survive was to grip at the unwound threads of the universe and tug; to understand the make of the fabric around them.

That is what drives him forward.

If he returns from this expedition knowing one thing no other man on the planet understand, then it will have been worth it

“It was nice of you to entertain them, Kiyoomi.” Komori says, finally tired of watching Kiyoomi’s quiet panic. He steps beside him now that his hands have stopped shaking where they grip the bollards that keep drunkards from accidentally stumbling off the quay. “I know your family can be a bit unaccommodating.”

Kiyoomi snorts. “I never knew you to be so fond of an understatement.”

It sparks a laugh from Komori, which lightens him too. The levity allows him to stretch and stand at his full height, instead of hunched over, watching waves break across the stone. In the shallow water is a young boy on a small boat, struggling to catch fish.

For some reason, it hurts to watch.

“Well, I can’t say I envy your position with them,” Komori says, and it brings Kiyoomi back down to earth. His cousin’s hand finds its way to his shoulder, as if to console him, gripping him tight. “They’ve never really understood what it is you do, Kiyoomi, but I know you believe in the path you’ve set out to take, and that’s what will keep you going forward.”

“It isn’t belief that keeps me going.” Kiyoomi shakes his head. Nothing so finicky as belief, the mere acceptance of truth. He needed to see it — to observe — and that’s what drives him. “I am dedicating my life to the expansion of human knowledge. To live, we must understand our world, and to understand our world, we must take risks.” His hand tightens to a fist as a spark flares inside of him.

Next to him, Komori grins. “Passion, then; there’s no more honest calling. That’s what sent you into the field in the first place, right Kiyo? All those stories you told me about the desert?”

“They weren’t interesting stories,” Kiyoomi admits. He’d talked Komori’s ear off about his last expedition, to the Gobi for a month, upon his return home, and it was only when he started gathering his notes into a proper report of his research did he realize that all of the stories were functionally the same.

Wake up. Walk. Draw cross-section of a rift. Argue over provisions. Lose at cards to a travel mate. Sleep on hard ground.

Boring.

“They were interesting to you,” Komori insists. “They were important to you. And you unearthed the story of the land, didn’t you? Just from looking at the rocks?”

He received a commendation from two governments for his geographical history of a mountain range and the mineral deposits located therein. His parents had been proud of the recognition but couldn’t name the mountains he’d studied, and when they pressed him on what he meant to do with his new awards, he’d quailed.

Explaining as much to Komori draws another sigh.

“Don’t let your family get you down,” Komori says, finally, while moonlight paints silver the shallows. “Those of us with sense will be looking out for your stories and research alike when you return. People like us, we know the value of your work at least.”

“People like us?” Kiyoomi looks sideways at his cousin. Beyond their families, they have little in common, Kiyoomi dark to Komori’s bright, sharp to his soft, reticent to his talkative nature. “Whatever could you mean by that?”

“The young!” Komori insists, grinning widely. More subdued, he adds: “Listen, Kiyo; you’ll do well on this expedition. I have faith in you. More people than you think have faith.”

The ocean seems to tap endlessly at the water break, and Kiyoomi hears his future in the waves.

“I don’t need faith, Motoya; I need data.” Out in the distance, the lights of the Suzaku-maru blink and gleam, sparkling with what’s likely a much more joyous celebration inside. Tendou had also pulled a few bottles of something strong out of his box earlier.

“Well, if you ever find yourself in need of the former, it’s right here.” Komori removes his hand from Kiyoomi’s shoulder, and places it over his own heart, bowing far too deep until he provokes a small laugh from Kiyoomi. “Seriously, you aren’t alone in your journey. You have the crew, and I’ll be with you in spirit. Just… observing, from a safer and much warmer distance.”

Kiyoomi jostles him with an elbow. “I’ll be sure to send a bear after you.”

“I thought there weren’t any bears in Antarctica!”

“We-ell,” Kiyoomi drags out the vowel, opening his eyes wide while he looks at Komori, faking naivety. “I’ve never been, so how would I know for sure? “

Motoya laughs again, and they stand there for another few moments, watching the waves. Even though this wasn’t the first time Kiyoomi had traveled far for the sake of knowledge, it would be the longest time they’ve been apart. As cousins of the same age, they’d gone to school together for years, and were rarely in different cities afterwards, with the obvious exception of Kiyoomi’s field expeditions.

This trip is scheduled to last, at minimum, two years, with a hearty chance that Kiyoomi might stay for a third. And despite the lack of predators, Iizuna warned him that any number of calamities could occur. Safe return doubtful, he’d said. The sea is a harsh mistress, and an unwelcoming one; the Antarctic, to Kiyoomi, is an unknown entity. The most he knows of cold was a winter spent partially in Aomori, unable to travel back home because of the snow.

Some men have been lost to the continent entirely, and the fear — however illogical, however brief, that Kiyoomi might be one of them too — flitters between them like a lightning bug.

Eventually, the thought blinks itself away, and the darkness returns, somehow more comforting.

“One last thing before you go, Kiyoomi. I know you’re not a fan of belief,” Komori says, fiddling with his pockets, “or the spirits, or anything like that. But I am, and I assumed you wouldn’t bring anything of a spiritual nature with you.”

He assumed correctly.

“Please tell me you’re not dabbling in spiritualism.”

One of his former colleagues had returned recently from a stint in America, and kept trying to convince them to reach out to the ghosts, who he claimed took more to the grave than they left behind on earth.

Komori snorts. “Nothing of that nature.”

He hands Kiyoomi something he draws from his pocket. It’s a small bag, dark green with delicate gold embroidery, and long green cords to affix it to something.

“Don’t open it!” Komori cries, when Kiyoomi tries. “Thrice damned scientific curiosity. That’s an omamori I had blessed for you specifically. It’s meant to ward off unknown evils. I thought about getting you one for travel, but I thought, well, your most obvious enemy when clawing at the edges of the known world might not be known to you yet, right?”

It’s a thoughtful gift, if a little frivolous, and Kiyoomi sighs. “I promise not to open it, Motoya,” he says, and his cousin accepts it with a strange glee.

“Keep it close to your heart!” he insists. “Or tie it around your neck! Whatever you do, don’t lose it! And definitely don’t let those sailors make you bet it on a game.”

As he walks down the quayside and to the pier where the Suzaku-maru rests, he holds the charm tightly in his hand, the cord wound loosely around his wrist.

After saying his goodbyes to Komori – and accepting that his family would see him at some point in the future — he takes step after careful step, dodging the crowds of visitors and workers.

With each footstep — each heartbeat — he walks deeper into the unknown.

And, summer heat bearing down on him, salt in his nose, as he holds the omamori, a little bit of Komori’s faith — blind and foolish — bubbles up inside of him.

Chapter Text

A Summer’s Evening on the Eve of Adventure. Yokohama Port.

I have requisitioned quite a fine ship to bring us to the Pole, Kita! A whaler in the northern waters, though we’ll strip and outfit her for our needs. I am not sorry for making the decision without your input, though I did my best to mimic your logic and reason, and I had Ojiro beside me to keep me honest. We’ll be sailing her down to Yokohama tomorrow. I wanted to sail her out today, but he insisted on waiting; there’s a sailor here he knows, who he thinks he can convince to join us. He said you might know him — Miya?

Anyway, worry not about her past life; I have given her a new name, befitting her future.

Do you know the story of the Vermillion Bird?

(Excerpt from a letter to Kita Shinsuke from Iizuna Tsukasa)

The Suzaku-maru is alive.

As Kiyoomi approaches the ship under a starlit sky, despite the lateness of the hour, music is pouring off of the deck. He knew Iizuna had convinced a sponsor to supply a gramophone, for the sake of their “general sanity and culture” while in the hut, and that there were a few musicians in their crew, but this sounds mechanical.

It’s loud enough that some of the dockworkers bob their heads in time with it; the ones carting cargo back to shore, that is, but not the steadfast machine of the tengutori, the women filling waiting steamships with coal.

He hasn’t quite gotten his sea legs yet, so he walks gingerly up the gangway and onto the ship. The last time he sailed, he’d been seasick for the first two days of the journey, long enough that the expedition leader worried incessantly about his hydration, a concern which sprawled the length of their travels through the desert.

In preparation for this trip, he spent hours spinning over and over in circles in his lab, to make sure he can keep his wits about him even when vertigo flares. His brain is his most valuable asset; he needs to make sure he’s prepared for anything the ocean and the Antarctic can throw at him.

Kiyoomi follows the sound of the music — a little too loud now that he’s actually on board — to what must be a party.

“This certainly wasn’t on the agenda,” he mutters, as he slips past the propped open door into their mess hall, and the smell of the crowd, of food picked up from some of the stalls on shore and the sweet scent of sake wafts over him.

“Some things are better than an agenda, Sakusa,” Tendou says, already at the door and holding a small cup of sake out for Kiyoomi. “And we’re not getting too wild. We do have a ship to sail, you know?”

Squinting dubiously at the overflowing cup, alcohol dripping down Tendou’s wrist, he doesn’t take it so much as Tendou shoves it in his hand, and stares at him with his big eyes until he gulps it down, choking.

It’s nothing like the smooth junmai his family was drinking over dinner, from a brewery run by an old friend since 1880.

“You don’t have a ship to sail, Tendou, but most of the rest of us do.” Goshiki — young, bowl-cut still pristine — says, throwing an arm around the photographer and tugging him in. “And stop blocking the door! Let him join in with us, come on!”

And once Tendou is safely embedded deeper into the room, falling onto the laps of Ushijima and Hoshiumi, Goshiki — egregiously misreading Kiyoomi’s own comfort — grabs his wrist and pulls him further into the room, and bodily shoving him down onto a seat at the end of one of the long benches, his shoulder hitting the hard and firm body of another man.

“Ah, the rock scientist.” This voice, at least, is familiar. Its owner is clearly unimpressed. He grunts in discontent which rumbles through Kiyoomi as he rights himself, sitting upright instead of slouched against a relative stranger.. There’s limited space — almost negative space — so he can’t separate himself from the other man entirely, their shoulders still pressed to each other, thighs too. “You’re still gettin’ in the way, I see.”

This close, he can feel the rise and fall of his chest, hear his carefully measured breaths. There’s a hint of alcohol on his breath, but not much; the sailor from earlier, who — as Goshiki keeps asserting, with the confidence of the very drunk — has a ship to sail in the morning.

“Maybe you’re in my way,” Kiyoomi spits back. He needs water, definitely, to wash the taste out of his throat before he gags.

But as he turns to scan the table, he feels the sailor lean in.

And sniff him.

The utter cheek.

“What are you-”

“And you smell like booze. Gettin’ drunk and useless the night before our big send-off, huh? I guess that’s what all you fancy little researchers are doing tonight, and leaving the hard work to the rest of us.”

The sailor — Miya, Kiyoomi recalls, finally, the one with a rangy look on his face during their roll call earlier that week, staring towards the sea instead of Iizuna and Kita as they made their announcements — leans back, grinning smugly, with his arms stretched behind him over the back of the bench. Ojiro is on his other side, and doesn’t seem to care about his movements or touch.

Makes sense; he vaguely recalls that they were shipmates, once upon a time. You get close with men you trust with your life; a little brush here and there, a hand on the small of the back, bodies pressed together, all the proximity is part and parcel of a life like this. With reliance comes comfort.

There’s no way that Kiyoomi will ever feel comfortable with Miya’s touch; not even if they were the last two men at the end of the world.

The thought makes him spin, though, and he touches his forehead; the drink Tendou forced onto him was a bit stronger than what he’s used to, and he didn’t eat much of anything at dinner.

“Trust me, this sake was thrust upon me; if I had my choice between this and seawater, I’d jump overboard myself.”

Miya snorts. “Figured you’d have a palate too refined for our base provisions. Only the finest for a rich boy like you, huh? What’ll you do when we’re out at sea and the only food left is hardtack and sawdust? Will you really drink seawater, then?”

Maybe he’s still reeling from his lackluster goodbyes with his family, and maybe it’s the touch of alcohol lining a nervous stomach, but Miya’s insult hits him harder than it should.

“I’ll be sure to eat you first if it comes to it,” Kiyoomi says, letting his shark smile grin widen, as Miya’s eyes shoot open, “so let’s hope the day never comes, for the sake of your constitution. I’m sure you’ll be well fed enough for the both of us.”

He casts a smug look at Miya’s arms; they're bulky and large, although his shoulders aren’t as broad as Kiyoomi’s own. He’s sturdy, carved from stone, and would make a filling meal if tragedy strikes —

Which it will not, Kiyoomi thinks, knocking on the wood bench suddenly.

Miya looks down at his hand, a little confused.

Although Kiyoomi’s clothes — and the Sakusa sigil ring he wears out of habit on his hand, which he’d meant to leave behind in Tokyo — definitely mark him as wealthy, and he’s never quite been able to shed the peculiar mix of manners and stunted professionalism that he’d grown up internalizing, he doesn’t appreciate the fact that Miya would have the cheek to assume he was incapable of shouldering the ugly side of exploration.

It’s not like he’s never known labor, before, even if he’s only been a passenger on a ship. Geology is physical work, between hiking and mountain climbing, let alone wrenching samples of solid rock from the earth. Not to mention the number of times Fukunaga has dragged him into fossil hunting expeditions, taking a quick look at his build — thick waist, strong legs — and decided he’d be handy in the field, with a shovel as his weapon.

Maybe it’s not honest work, and maybe it’s not consistent, but it’s his, dammit.

Meanwhile, Miya’s found his way back to being snide. “Already planning to eat the lower classes, Sakusa? How shockingly literal of you.”

“Well, ‘from each according to his ability,’” Kiyoomi bites out. “And you’re certainly able enough to provide for a meal or a dozen.”

“And ‘to each accordin’ to his needs’, and I’d reckon you’re scrawny enough to need it – huh.” Miya pokes Kiyoomi’s stomach, clearly expecting the skinny and useless build that might suit some of the boys in chemistry, the weakness that comes when your daily work requires only lifting a beaker or filtering a titration.

He stops himself when he realizes there is bulk underneath Kiyoomi’s button-down, coughing to hide his shock while his arms retreat onto his lap. “Maybe I’ll eat you first, then,” he mutters. “See if you can sail yourself back to shore.”

“Some of us are capable of swimming,” Kiyoomi replies, and Miya has nothing more to say to him.

Kiyoomi wishes that Miya wasn’t wrong, though. Some of the scientists and researchers, the auxiliary crew — not including Kiyoomi — are taking the opportunity to let a little too loose.

Tendou must have downed an entire bottle on an empty stomach while Kiyoomi’s been watching, sipping on tea and ignoring the warm body by his side as Miya turns to talk calmly with Aran about predicted sea conditions, nothing Kiyoomi can weigh in on.

Who knows what else went inside of Tendou before he arrived, but his disposition hasn’t changed much from the man Kiyoomi has come to know by daylight. Perhaps his eyes are a bit glassy, and maybe he turns a drunken stumble into a dance steep as he tries to get Ushijima to rise to his feet.

Since choosing to rest, he keeps listing sideways into Goshiki, who sits with the firm and stick straight posture of a recently commissioned officer, or someone trying to hide how drunk they actually are.

Maybe both.

(Goshiki’s not strictly one of the researchers, but as the nightswatch he still has nearly a full twenty four hours until he’ll prove useful.)

In direct opposition to Goshiki’s insistence on maintaining decorum, Yaku — an explorer and a biologist with a fieldsman’s understanding of surgery — and Kuroo — a geographer or cartographer, depending on who he’s trying to impress — have been making a proper fool of themselves, playing some version of hanafuda with a devilish Hoshiumi that Kiyoomi doesn’t recognize and seems to require yelling and throwing up their arms.

It’s only when Yaku starts standing up on one of the tables and Hoshiumi points an accusatory finger at him that Kiyoomi sees fit to intervene.

“I think you can grab him, Bokuto,” he mutters, to the wild-haired athlete who had been conspicuously sober all night, “aren’t you sharing a room with him?”

He certainly wasn’t going to touch Yaku, who’s been babbling in another language for at least a quarter of an hour. Before that, though, he had been angrily arguing with Kuroo about techniques for fighting bears, and Kiyoomi doesn’t want to get involved in another argument about them tonight.

Instead, he’ll deal with Kuroo.

He rises with a sigh — Miya twitches as he does, even though they hadn’t spoken in an hour, and had turned away from each other while Kiyoomi watched the clock and counted down the minutes until he could make an elegant exit.

(It’s something he’s perfected to a science — the art of staying in a room until the earliest possible moment he could leave without causing offense. Make an impression without embarrassing himself, and, most importantly, without getting a headache from the noise in the room.)

Despite his best efforts, one is definitely forming now.

“C’mon, up you go you brute,” Kiyoomi groans as he tugs Kuroo’s arm over his shoulder, as he tries and fails to sing in Kiyoomi’s ear. “Why are you such a lunk? What do you even do with that compass? Navigate to a food hall?”

Over the course of the ship’s journey, they’ll be sharing a bunk along with Akaashi — their doctor — and Tendou, who will probably be using Goshiki as a bed tonight. He’d gotten enough of an introduction to Kuroo before leaving for his family dinner to know that the man is intent on grating on his very nerves, and that he’s excited to map the path to the Southern pole, and will not stop talking about map projections if you get him started.

The sailors — men recruited specifically for the work of running the ship, like their navigator Kageyama or Sawamura, their chef — share a separate bunk together, and it highlights the fact that Kiyoomi and the rest of the scientific corps, with the exception of Akaashi and occasionally Yaku, are mostly useless when it comes to the running of such a vessel.

With Kuroo on his feet, he nods to the room at large — which has mostly calmed down, now that Yaku has gone — and thinks for a moment about apologizing on behalf of his fellow men of science.

“‘M not a brute,” Kuroo slurs out, into the half-silence “but I could navigate you to my bed, if you know what I mean.”

He winks at him.

Kiyoomi is horrified.

Miya — of all people to act as his savior — lets out a bark of a laugh, before drawing the rest of the crew into a new conversation.

Kuroo can apologize on his own behalf for being a nuisance in the morning. For now, Kiyoomi tugs him down the hall to their shared quarters.

The room is small, with lower and upper bunks pressed against the walls on either side, their rucksacks under the lower bunk and some additional equipment that will come in handy on the ship stored there as well. They have larger trunks for any additional items in the cargo hold, and Kiyoomi keeps much of his equipment and samples in them.

He throws Kuroo down on the bottom bunk. The man lands with a thud and a groan, like he’s moved past the hazy delight of drunkenness and dived right into the bitter headache of regret.

When they were first shown their quarters, Kuroo offered to wrestle for the opportunity to claim the lower bunk, and it seemed as though Tendou would take him up on the offer. It would have been amusing to watch, Kiyoomi can admit, but then Akaashi stepped in to establish himself as a voice of —

Well, not quite reason.

“If you break something and make me set a bone before the ship sets sail, I’ll throw you overboard myself.” His tone was flat and he sounded bored, but his gaze as he stared Kuroo down was sharp. Tendou stood to the side, already claiming the bunk on the upper left to himself.

At least someone on this journey knew the benefits of a tactical retreat.

“Oh yeah?” Kuroo leaned into Akaashi. The doctor, to his credit, didn’t move a muscle. “So does that mean breaking a bone is fair game if it happens when we’re on open water?”

Akaashi tilted his head to the side. “Of course not. It just means you have further to swim to shore.”

With that, he swanned into the room and claimed the bunk below Tendou.

Kuroo, still looking a little shellstruck, turned to Kiyoomi to try his luck again, but Kiyoomi saved him the trouble and picked the top.

He’s learned the hard way that he prefers even the illusion of solitude that looking up at a ceiling rather than another man’s bunk provides, and he climbs up there now, exhausted from the day, unable to even worry about what’s to come in the morning.

Akaashi is already in his bed, eyes closed; he’s either asleep or pretending to, and for Tendou’s sake when he sees fit to grace the bunk with his presence it better be the latter. Disturbing Akaashi in his sleep while he clambers up onto his bunk sounds like the kind of nightmare only the most intrepid daredevils among them are willing to face.

On second thought, maybe it’s best for Tendou if Akaashi is asleep; he’d be the only one of them to survive accidentally stepping on his chest in sleep.

As he twists and turns in an attempt to find a good position to sleep in — the mattresses are practically a piece of thick cloth, but he’ll have to get used to this kind of treatment again after a year of his thick futon — something falls out of his pocket.

The omamori his cousin got him, the fabric bright, stitching neat.

With a sigh, he slips it over his neck to keep from losing it in his sleep. He’s doing it for Komori’s sake rather than his own, knowing his cousin would be displeased if he lost it so soon on the journey.

If the gods are willing, he’ll make his way back home with the peculiar magic inside worn out, with a stack of research and sunburnt skin, a million stories, and a body that’s gone as far south as anyone in this world can manage.

He won’t return with his family’s respect. And the odds are low that he’ll accomplish everything he set out to do.

But he can’t go into this hoping for less than the bare minimum; he can’t begin this journey abandoning his lion’s heart and the spirit of discovery that drives every man on this expedition.

He will accomplish all of his goals; push at the boundaries of knowledge, discover new frontiers and answer unasked questions, and he’ll get through it with his dainty intact.

Right over his heart, the omamori seems to burn, as though it’s harnessing the heat of the sun.

It might be a dream, though; Kiyoomi can’t be sure, because he slips into sleep quickly, lulled by the subtle yet unfamiliar rock of the Suzaku-maru on the waves.

The Voyage begins. The sea, somewhere.

Polaris: pole star, ship star, nailstar.

A hundred different names, one purpose: location. Fixed above the Northern pole, the heavens rotate around her. On a clear night, look skyward, and you’ll always find the North Star.

She has a sister: Sigma Octantis, over the southern pole. But I have heard that she is faint, and hard to find.

We may easily find ourselves alone at sea, and lost.

But the sky has never failed me.

(From the notes of Kageyama Tobio, Suzaku Expedition)

They set sail quietly in the morning.

Though many men have safely reached the Antarctic — and fewer the pole — it’s no longer the fully unexplored country that harnesses the imagination of the common man.

“But,” Iizuna sighs, looking over the small crowd that has come to send them off — Kita’s grandmother waving at them, her smile the brightest thing on the dock — “despite all the evidence to the contrary, I don’t think people believe in us.”

Better to not waste a stately goodbye on a fool’s errand, or at least that’s the perception of their journey. It’s all Kiyoomi can take to not take it deeply to heart; it’s too similar to his family’s opinion.

“Worry not, Captain!” Bokuto says, suddenly, slapping Iizuna’s back with such force that he nearly pitches forward. “We know our journey has merit. That’s what matters; rest strong in that faith and go forward without fear!”

“Looks like you’re more than enough to push him forward, Bokuto,” Yaku mutters, but his words are lost as Iizuna laughs.

“You’re right, Bokuto,” Iizuna says, raising his cup of sake — a nicer one, a precious gift from one of their funders, and miraculous given that it survived Bokuto’s affection — and gesturing to the rest of them to follow suit. “We know the truth of what’s to come, and I have the utmost faith in all of you that this journey will not be wasted!”

That word again, Kiyoomi thinks, as he raises his cup in turn and drinks. Faith. It’s funny how often it’s come up in the past two days, when he hasn’t so much as considered it in years. Even when signing on for the journey — even in the months of fundraising and research — Iizuna hadn’t mentioned the word, focusing on the strength of his data and mission.

Seems like something’s catching, the way a bundle of dried leaves can start a forest fire.

He’s jolted from his thoughts by a hard elbow to his side, and when he turns to confront his assaulter, he sees —

“Miya,” he hisses, already rubbing at the spot which will certainly bruise.

“Mind your dour expression, Sakusa! We’re about to set sail. Isn’t that a joyous thing?” There’s less salt in seawater than in Miya’s voice, but his eyes widen as he leans forward, towards Kiyoomi. “Or are ya casting doubts on our expedition? There’s still time to turn back if ya think this effort is fruitless, ya know? Or if you’d rather run back home to your family estate.”

The last few sentences — the cutting ones, the cruel ones — are for Kiyoomi’s ears only, and they sting him more than they should.

What estate? He wants to say, though Miya wouldn’t understand. He’s divorced from his own family’s idea of legacy; though he grew up in their grounds, it wouldn’t be home to him. No comfort to be found in walls built on lonely achievements.

He’s not sure where he’ll find home, now, if Miya is going to spend this whole journey kicking the foundation out from under him.

“Don’t you have a job to be doing,” Kiyoomi sneers, instead. “Pray you don’t find yourself confused with useless ones, like me.”

The expression on Miya is unreadable as he walks away, but the crowd has already dispersed, Daichi looking expectantly for his cup to wash in the mess. There’s work to be done — for many of them, but not Kiyoomi — in order to set off on their journey properly.

Leaving Miya on the deck, he goes to find Kuroo — an ally in uselessness, if an enemy to his senses.

Kiyoomi was right to practice spinning; he spends the first day seasick, poised over a bucket and far away from the rooms he shares with Akaashi.

(“Aren’t you a doctor?” Kuroo asks, looking a little green but still better off than Kiyoomi. “Shouldn’t you be used to this kind of thing?”

“Would you let a hen lay her eggs in your hair?”

“...I see your point.”)

Once this ends — luckily before Tendou recovers from his own bout of the illness, otherwise he’d never hear the end of him crowing — he’s able to strike up a careful routine, in the interest of maintaining his sanity and strength onboard.

Everyone has to do their part on the ship, but Kiyoomi saves the majority of the sailing for the sailors, who have trained their bodies for this. He lets Aran — only a little older than him, but who's been on the water since boyhood — teach him some of the duties and sailing songs, in case he needs to get pulled in for support in an emergency, but he mostly spends his shifts sweeping and cleaning, tedious drudgery.

He’s no stranger to this — not in the sciences, where excitement pockmarks long periods of boredom. But what’s new to him is the way some of their crew — Miya, specifically — seem to sneer at him for pulling his weight.

Like: “Ain’t this below your station, Sakusa?” When he’s helping clean dishes in the mess with Daichi, with as much care as he’d use to clean a specimen.

Or: “Are ya sure you can be out here in the sun? Won’t it bake your brain? Then where will ya be when it comes time for you to do the work.” A little snide, when Kiyoomi’s scrubbing the deck in the boiling sun, his shirt wrapped around his waist. And — okay — Kiyoomi will admit, begrudgingly, that he understands why Miya might have take such offense to his comments on work.

And, oddly: “Didn’t take ya for someone who’d be good at this,” when Miya nods, grudgingly, at Kiyoomi hauling up a line beside him, nearly matching him in pace as they collect seawater for cleaning. “Does it make you yearn for a career change?”

“You don’t take me at all, Miya,” Kiyoomi bites back; he’s been trying to hold his tongue — believing, foolishly, that Miya would take the hint, if he wanted anything.

Instead of shutting up, Miya watches him for another moment as Kiyoomi slowly pulls up the next bucket — a bit self-consciously, feeling the sun-soaked weight of his stare on his body — until he feels a hand on his shoulder.

“Try it like this,” he says, demonstrating a particular way to hold the ropes in his hands that Kiyoomi quickly mimics. “It’ll be less hell on your wrists; you’ll probably be faster than me, too.”

“I don’t believe you for a second, Miya.”

To this, the sailor shrugs. “It ain’t about belief, is it? You’re no use with a bum wrist, and you’ve got the weirdest ones.”

He goes back to his work, a few more buckets left to haul, and — though he is dubious, and suspicious, because he’s seen what men in the sciences are capable of when they want sole-authorship on important papers — he tries Miya’s suggestion.

Kiyoomi is more surprised than anyone when he finishes first.

He doesn’t thank Miya before he leaves; just hands the last bucket to Ushijima to carry to their tank, and heads onto the next task.

What is he meant to make of this? Though he’s a scientist, it’s a question he doesn’t care to consider answering.

Aside from this, he makes use of the summer warmth to firm up his constitution: performing calisthenics with Bokuto — a danger to anyone’s health, leaving them all panting and passed out along the deck, which probably means it’s the best preparation for the treacherous cold in Antarctica — and doing the careful stretches his sister recommended while Tendou squints warily at his arms.

(“They’re scary,” Tendou admits. “I’ve never seen someone with limbs like noodles before.”

Kiyoomi squints. Tendou is currently curled into a shape that has not yet been discovered by mathematicians as he reads through pages of his notes. “Perhaps look in the mirror.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”)

He also spends a lot of his time avoiding the dogs.

It’s not a large ship but it isn’t small either, and they always seem underfoot, despite Hinata’s attempts to keep them corralled. They’re a little scary.

“They’re just pups, Kiyoomi!” Hinata assures him, when they sit next to each other over breakfast and Kiyoomi realizes that the swell in his shirt isn’t some sea-born illness but is, in fact, a small dog he’s feeding some of Daichi’s food to. “Nothing bad about ‘em. They’re even better than humans, sometimes.”

“They have teeth,” Kiyoomi insists. “They bite.”

“And so does Yaku!” He points across the table. Over the weeks at sea, Kiyoomi has learned that Yaku is not a fan of the morning and slow to move. He blinks warily, catlike, back at the two of them. “Do you think Yaku bites?”

Kiyoomi is cursed to value academic honesty and scientific scrupulousness at every turn.

“Yes,” he says, and flees the breakfast table.

Despite Hinata’s assurances, he still avoids the pack, which tends to bark at Miya and play with Bokuto, and love to fight over the fish Hoshiumi catches.

There’s still plenty of time for him to warm up to them. Maybe, he’ll find their value in the Polar cold.

The longer they travel, the lower the North star dips in the sky.

Kageyama points it out to him, gruffly and technically. “Polaris,” he says, after about a week at sea. “It hovers above the North pole.”

He traces out the constellations, too — Ursa’s Major and Minor, the star at the tail of the latter — first on a star map in the navigation room, and then in the sky. As much as Kageyama is a sailor, he’s also an academic of a sort; a scholar of the stars.

“That’s pretty fancy,” he frowns, when Kiyoomi suggests it to him. “I just like to know where I’m going, is all.

(According to Hinata, who spent a week sharing a room with him while they were still in port, Kageyama got lost for the first two days until Hinata and a pup decided to shadow him wherever he went. Even on the ship, he sleeps in the first set of rooms, so he doesn’t have far to walk in the maze of halls.

But on the water, Kageyama sails them like a dream; he’s able to keep his head as balances the heavens and the seas and guides the Suzaku-maru through rough currents, like he’s the fulcrum around which they turn.)

During the day, Kageyama busies himself with studying charts of the southern hemisphere; he’s not familiar with them, he reveals hesitantly, while refusing to look away from his maps, as he hasn’t crossed the equator yet.

Kiyoomi uses the star to track their distance from the equator. Not precisely, of course; he’s grateful he doesn’t have to understand the navigational equipment — more beautiful than anything he’s packed, certainly — but enough to know that each day they get a little closer to their destination, and further from the world they’ve known.

Sometimes he catches Miya talking with Kageyama; other times, he’s in the navigational room when Kiyoomi stops by to return a map, frowning at the astrolabes and gyroscopes and compasses.

When he asks Iizuna about it, his captain just laughs. “Miya knows a thing or two about navigation; he’s even sailed boats further south, so Kageyama’s just asking him for advice.”

“It didn’t look like Kageyama asked anything at all,” Kiyoomi mutters, recalling the way Miya followed him from dinner to the navigation room, all without Kageyama saying a word.

An uneasy feeling settles in his chest; not true discomfort, but it’s clear that there’s more to Miya than the man himself lets on. Sometimes, science is about unraveling mysteries, and Kiyoomi doesn’t want this man to count among their number.

And so, day after day, the North star hovers lower and lower in the sky. Though its position isn’t quite fixed, it stays nearly still in heavens, spinning in the smallest circles as the Earth rotates.

It’s nearly unchanging. And though Kiyoomi scarcely thinks about the stars when he’s in Japan, now that he’s on the ship they seem to be all he worries about. This, too, leaves him uneasy: the sensation that he’ll be leaving behind the whole world he’s known, with the men around him as allies.

Kita is the one to pull them all out when they reach the equator, knocking on their doors — for those, like Kuroo or Goshiki — who were sleeping in their rooms or escorting them from their duties. Kiyoomi was in the middle of scrubbing dishes when Kita came for him, Daichi elsewhere on the ship.

“This is an important moment for you all, if you choose to remember it,” he says, to the line of men standing at the edge of the ship, looking over the water as they head south. They’re projected to cross during the day, so when nighttime comes Kiyoomi will scour the horizon and see, for the first time in his life, a totally unfamiliar sky.

“There isn’t a choice, actually. You’ll bear the memory of your initiation for the rest of your life.”

That’s Ojiro’s voice, but as they turn to greet it they see —

“Oh my god,” someone — Hoshiumi, probably — calls out, and laughter breaks down the line.

— It’s definitely Ojiro, but he’s wearing netting on his head, like a waterfall of long, white hair, held in place by a crown made of thick rope and twisted wire, a sheet around his waist, and nothing else. The sun bears down on him like he’s graced by the heavens themselves, sweat — or seawater — glistening on his chest.

He points at Hoshiumi with the trident — where did they get that? Why do they have that? — and then pans it across the line of them until the laughter clears.

“Brothers!” he cries, loud enough to scare away one of the seabirds sitting on Goshiki’s watchtower, “I have been told that you all seek admittance to the court of King Neptune himself! But! Have you yet proven your worth?”

Kiyoomi looks towards Kita, who is doing his very best to maintain a stoic appearance, but there’s a little curve of a smile on his face. It’s an expression he’s seen often in life, and he knows it bodes poorly for him: it’s the same face Motoya makes, whenever he’s partaken in mischief.

Ojiro stamps his trident again. “Brothers! Have you proven it?”

In front of him, Kita, sensing they all need a bit of guidance, shakes his head back and forth to indicate the negative.

“No!” They all bark out, in line and sequence.

“Then allow me to welcome in my court, such that you may demonstrate before them your value!”

Three stamps with the trident, in quick succession, and the door to the navigation room opens.

It’s then that Kiyoomi realizes what all the men lined up with him have in common: Akaashi, Kuroo, Hoshiumi, Goshiki, Hinata, Bokuto, and Yaku. A wide swath of life experiences and skills, but not a single one of them have crossed the Equator.

Out from the navigation room trudges the rest of their party, all wrapped up in a variety of swimming gear, netting, and castoffs and detritus from their journey so far. Ushijima with ash painted onto his chest to look like the scales of a peculiar fish, and seaweed tangled in Iizuna’s green hair, accompanied by his delighted smile. Tendou — the traitor of their room, who likely kept this hidden just to surprise them at this moment — wears a long robe made solely of netting and cocks out his hip as he stands next to Ojiro. Holding another weapon, a thick club — with goggles pushing back his hair and a cape made of sealskin, is Daichi.

Following up their party, of course, is Miya — he trudges out behind them, a scowl on his face — and Kiyoomi understands, immediately, why.

Though his shoulders are protected by a thick collar made of netting, all he wears around his lower half is a rope, draped over with seaweed, still glistening and wet.

For a moment, Kiyoomi almost feels bad for him; he doesn’t want to imagine the sensation.

It lasts for just a moment, though, because then Miya makes eye contact with him and his grimace sharpens into a smirk, eyes filled with mean mirth and delight.

Kiyoomi shivers; this doesn’t bode well for his own humiliation, whatever is coming.

“Behold! My court!” Ojiro gestures again with his trident, and one by one their shipmates bow, Miya doing so very carefully, drawing laughter from the rest of the court. “So I ask you now, oh brothers who wish to be graced by the sea, sailors who seek to test their mettle, explorers begging permission for safe passage to unseen lands: Will you prove your worth?”

They don’t need Kita’s prodding this time to answer with a resounding: “Yes!”

“And so!” Another stamp, which sends Miya and Ushijima hurrying around to the other side of the deck for something. “Let the initiation begin!”

In another life Ojiro could have been good on stage, Kiyoomi thinks. Natural charisma is one thing, but he possesses another attribute critical to the whole endeavor: a good-natured commitment in even the strangest of situations, like welcoming their inexperienced crew to the Southern hemisphere in a sailor’s initiation ceremony, or pulling one of Iizuna’s seaweed hairs off of his chest.

Those are the men among them who have been this far south, so far from home and their known world; just barely over half of their number. The rest of them are so inexperienced — Goshiki young, Hoshiumi a child of the northern waters, while Kuroo has never been on a ship till now — that suddenly, this whole thing feels impossible.

Antarctica. Getting to the Pole. Returning home with a comprehensive scientific understanding of a little slice of the continent, from the shore to center. Surviving a long winter with this group of men.

Their numbers are small, both out of necessity — minimizing the supplies they need to bear across the oceans — and sanity. Not every man is in possession of an explorer’s heart, and even those with adrenaline pumping through their veins balked at the length of the journey, at the expectations of cold, at the distance from home.

These were the men Iizuna could scrounge up, virgins who’ve never seen a southern star and young shellbacks. Their captain is the oldest among them — somewhere in his thirties — with the lion’s heart of a youth who looks at the unmarked, unexplored places on the globe and wonders what secrets lay in the deep.

But —

“Oh my god,” a different voice — Akaashi’s, judging by the slow drawl of annoyance rendered in the syllables — shatters his thoughts.

Ushijima and Miya have returned, pushing their tub on wheels across the slightly uneven boards of the deck. With each shift and heave, seawater sloughs off the rim, splashing at their feet. When it’s in place in front of them, Miya slaps the metal edge, letting out a dull ring, as he looks right at Kiyoomi once again.

“Behold, sailors!” He sounds positively gleeful, gaze not straying. “Because what stands before you is the trial of Neptune!”

Silence, for a moment, then Ojiro sighs.

“That was my line, ‘Tsumu!” He points the trident at Miya with an accusatory thrust, and Kiyoomi winces, the glint of metal looking sharp. “We rehearsed this!”

“Sorry, Aran,” Miya rubs his head, looking genuinely shamed, “I guess I just got a little excited, is all.”

He looks once again at Kiyoomi, a brazen glance, before Ojiro sighs, shakes his shoulders, and once more inhabits the body and spirit of Neptune.

“Who will be the first to baptize themselves in my waters? Who will be the first to prove themselves worthy of entry to my court?”

But Miya’s gaffe has already disrupted the proceedings. Hoshiumi is already half naked, beating Goshiki who struggles with his shirt and his own exhaustion from being forced awake, while Hinata and Kageyama are at the edge of the tub, pushing each other away from the water. Kuroo is trying to shuffle back, quietly, to their rooms, but Bokuto and Yaku have a grip on either arm.

Tendou, some deity in the court, shuffles over to their line — his robes are tight — to whisper loudly, into Akaashi’s ear.

Akaashi, for his part, looks like he’s about to attempt a burial at sea.

“You’d never guess it looking at him,” gesturing at Miya, who seems to have forgotten about the tangle of seaweed around his nethers in favor of egging Kageyama and Hinata into a fight over who can be the first, “but he talked Ojiro down from making you all jump in the sea and tread water.”

“That doesn’t sound like him,” Kiyoomi cuts in, and Tendou looks delighted for him to join.

“Well of course you wouldn’t think that, you’re the best of friends!” He makes himself laugh, as Akaashi looks confused; who wouldn’t be, given that he’s witnessed much of his and Miya’s spats. “But I won’t tell a lie! He did, he did! Ojiro wanted to do it like how he faced the trials, and Miya made a case — said you’re not sailors, you shouldn’t have to go through the whole nightmare. And that Goshiki would probably pass out if we did.”

He nods at their youngest crewmate, leaning on Daichi while he continues to struggle out of his shirt.

Kiyoomi is blocked from asking any other questions or probing at Tendou’s words — and the way they still seem impossible — when he hears a splash and a cry.

“No!” Kageyama yelps, at the same time Hinata curses, “Asshole!”

The air fills with a seabird’s cry —

No.

It’s Hoshumi, laughing with pride, standing in the middle of the tub of water in all his naked glory, hair sticking to his skull from his seawater baptism and the members of Neptune’s court near the bath damp from the impact he must have made.

They take it in turns to collect more water, because Hoshiumi has nearly emptied the tub; they have to do it again when Hinata jumps in, trying to make a bigger splash, and a third time when Kageyama does the same, in some quiet competition.

Ojiro is practically on his knees when Akaashi strips down to step in, but he’s calmed with one look from their doctor as he steps, gingerly, into the tub, quickly submerging himself, with barely a ripple. That same stare, levied at Bokuto and Yaku, prevent them from making the same splash as Hoshiumi.

Kiyoomi takes his turn next, pulling off his clothes and folding them neatly, even though Miya scoffs behind him. They’ve added another few buckets, and the water is warm, baked from the sun and the tub and the — ugh — men who’ve already endured.

He takes a deep breath as he settles into the tub, falling first to his knees then dropping his head in. The seawater stings the cuts and marks on his hand, scratches from raw wood and blisters from the rope, a small cut from when Hoshiumi was teaching him how to cut a fish, and it makes his body tense underwater, bubbles of air leaking from his mouth.

It’s quiet, despite the raucous around him; almost peaceful. There’s a welling rush of water in his ears, but otherwise, as he lingers, he feels the gentle rock of the ship, like he’s part of the sea herself.

And then he feels it — a burning sensation in his lungs, a warmth in his chest, like he’s borrowed Iizuna’s lionheart. Suddenly, as he draws in a breath, it’s not water that wells into him — no, suddenly it’s something like faith: a divine trust, a belief in all of these men, barely crawled from their youth, to make it.

Here, the water is warm; soon, it will be frigid and dangerous, but still the same sea, the ocean who owns him now, after his induction.

He breaks the water suddenly, panting, tossing his hair back and — “Sakusa! Unfair!” — inadvertently drenching Miya.

But as the sunlight pours on his skin, as he steps out of the tub and accepts some of the broken netting to wrap around his shoulders — a cloak of Neptune — and clasps it closed with a seashell charm, Kiyoomi closes his eyes.

Blanketed by an unfamiliar sky, he licks the salt from his lips. No reason to worry over the stars, when they’re loved by the sea.

Chapter Text

Summertime, just south of the last island before Antarctica.

At night, the cold stings.

Summer sunlight soothes the ache.

But winter awaits.

A haiku by Bokuto Koutarou (From: ‘A Champion Ski Jumper’s Collected Notes: 1915-1920’)

Kiyoomi’s never experienced a cold like this.

These are the choppiest waters he’s ever seen, and each stinging inhale of salt air bursts a crystal of ice in his lungs.

And yet Iizuna insists that it’s still summer, and that they’re perhaps a week or two out from Antarctica, if Kageyama’s readings are correct. After watching him navigate them to New Zealand under an unfamiliar blanket of stars, and through waters he’d only heard of in stories from his grandfather, Kiyoomi’s inclined to believe in him.

But if it’s this cold in summer, he’s not sure how he’ll fare in the depths of a polar winter.

Iizuna and Kita both struggle to describe it, their tongues faltering when Yaku asks if it might be colder than Siberia, gaze skirting to the side when Tendou asks about the wind.

“It is an inexplicable cold,” Kita admits, finally, after sharing a glance with Iizuna. “There were no stories to prepare me, and no words that I can share with you that will prepare your bodies.”

There’s a beat of silence, the kind that you can’t help but lean towards; Kita has a way of being loud in the quiet. His voice is low when he speaks again. “Whenever I think I have forgotten the cold, I am reminded of it in my dreams, like it sneaks up on me in my sleep.”

“A cold that digs into your very soul,” Miya bites, voice dark, Ojiro trying to cut him off. “That slips into the shadows of your heart.”

Kiyoomi lets out a huff. “Leave the poetry to Bokuto,” he mutters, lowly under his breath, but Miya catches it.

“Maybe some of us are already cold enough, don’t ya think?” he sneers, sitting up and glaring right at Kiyoomi, trying to pin him in place with his stone-carved eyes, like a breaking wave on a cliff’s edge. “I’ve seen ya shiverin’, Sakusa, better watch out ya don’t freeze in your sleep.”

Ojiro looks both apologetic and sympathetic, which is the worst part for Kiyoomi; like he can read, plain as day on Kiyoomi’s face, his own doubts, stripped bare by Miya, as water wears away a stone.

“Alright,” Iizuna clears his throat, breaking Miya’s concentration, and drawing everyone’s attention towards him. He fixes a look upon Kiyoomi, though, one that says they’ll be needing to talk, soon; Kita sends the same, subtler one to Miya. “It doesn’t matter what stories you’ve been told about the winter, or how many mountains you’ve climbed, Bokuto, or avalanches you’ve survived—”

Hoshiumi, allegedly; he claims it’s the cause of his prematurely white hair, too.

“But all that matters is that we’re ready for it. And with all that we’ve acquired at our last stop on land, we'll be more prepared than any man. If you’re that worried, we can hoist up some gallons of water and acclimate you ourselves!”

Although Iizuna’s words seem to buoy the other men from their doubts — they did pick up more furs and clothes and fuel in New Zealand, though Hoshiumi had to be stopped from stealing a sheep — Kiyoomi isn’t swayed.

What Kita describes sounds like an impossibility to him. Nothing is inexplicable; everything has an explanation. That’s why he’s going to the end of the world: he’s going to catalog the unknown. That’s what he’s here for.

Neither is Miya swayed, he notices, the sailor sitting back on a bench with his hands stuffed in his pockets, and he bristles; what fault could he find with Iizuna’s words, or Kita’s? Of course Kiyoomi has his doubts — he’s a man of science, his very atoms are stuffed with doubts — but Miya doesn’t share his reason.

At least, as far as he knows, and he certainly doesn’t care to find out, even if it would complete the puzzle of him in his imagination.

(Although it goes against every fiber of his being, that’s a stone he can stand to leave unturned)

How will he survive being packed with Miya — with all of them, he corrects — into a single hut, prefabricated walls waiting in their cargo, as the ship stands coldly docked on the wild coast of Antarctica, likely trapped in the ice that Iizuna warned them will overtake the sea.

A landscape that changes so drastically from season to season is nearly unfathomable to him. Sure, tidewaters rise and fall, but to one day step out and realize that the land below your feet all winter has actually been ice, and melted back into the sea?

How can you live when you can’t trust the firmament?

Until he gets there, he can’t imagine it; more than once, already, Kiyoomi has woken from a nightmare in which a hole suddenly opens in the ice he’s walking over and he ends up trapped in the frigid waters, never to return home. Awake, the cold sweat that pools around his body reminds him of the dream, and his breaths come in shallow until he can reach out and touch something, anything, to remind him of who he is, where he is.

(Each time, he reaches for his cousin’s omamori. Each time, it steadies him.)

Even away from nightmares, on the ship, the cold already lingers, like the doubts in his will; it seeps into his bones, his very marrow.

Will it ever come out?

During the day, at least he can move — doing calisthenics with Bokuto or pacing endlessly around the ship, joining other walkers who shared the thought — to keep his body flexible and fluid. At night, it’s a struggle to keep warm, especially once the hot stones Daichi hands out before bed grow cool.

Whenever his situation grows dire enough that he thinks about joining a snoring Kuroo in the lower bunk and — Shock! Horror! Terror! — cuddling for warmth, in order to preserve whatever is left of his sanity he heads down to the engine room, where the rumble of machinery and ambient heat at least allowed him to think and warm up his joints, a little.

Although Ushijima — who seems to understand machines like he’s made of bolts and screws — had a bunk of his own somewhere on the ship, he tended to rest down here, in the heart of the Suzaku-maru.

Sometimes when Kiyoomi came down, he’d be awake, carefully watching the gauges and the pipes coughing steam for any sign of abnormality. With nothing but a nod between them, he’d allow Kiyoomi to sit patiently with him while he puzzled out another series of experiments he intended to run once they reached land. Occasionally, when the night grew long and dawn seemed inevitable, he’d explain to Kiyoomi some of the inner workings of the ship: the rising and falling pistons that kept their own careful time, dissonant with the outer waves; the pumps that poured cooling seawater over the boiler; the small window where he could let out the coal smoke.

Often, though, he was asleep, laid out on the floor with a thin blanket tugged over his body because there was little else he needed in the warm engine room. He was so still that Kiyoomi had to check his breathing — carefully watching the rise and fall of his chest — to ascertain that he was not cohabiting with a corpse.

It’s here, in these darkest hours, where Kiyoomi’s brain can finally run wild.

He doesn’t like what he sees.

The thing is —

As the boat rocks, and his body with it, the doubts seep in just like the bitter cold.

Against his will, Miya’s words and criticism stir within him. Of being a useless scientist, of leaving the important work to the actual crew; it’s been weeks of sailing, of camaraderie — unless your name was Tendou, and you had somehow adopted the Night's Watch like a bighearted child takes in a stray — turned friendship, and Kiyoomi has precious little to show for it, besides reading his books and knowing the best way to haul in seawater.

It’s menial work, and — his thrice damned pride cuts him where the salt wind cannot — a little below him, he thinks, uncharitably and unkindly. The work is foreign to him; his uselessness, also strange and unfamiliar. Except for his family dinners, especially the last, he’s never felt less welcome; and it’s all thanks to Miya getting under his skin.

Well.

Miya and his own doubts; he’s got an uncanny way of shining a light straight at Kiyoomi’s own doubts and the worst parts of his nature.

Though Kiyoomi isn’t his only target, he’s certainly the worst hit. Miya’s called Tendou an odd and lonely child, like an adult in suspended animation; he needles Bokuto when he’s in a mood; Akaashi is liable to poison him if he says another word about the wood carving he toys with in stress. But somehow, even despite the way he irritates — aiming his own acuity like an arrow — he comes out looking good.

Not like that.

He fits in, with the rest of the crew and the expedition; he is liked and loved, and appreciated, whereas Kiyoomi’s own prickliness has only drawn in Ushijima — who professed, once, to be fond of cacti — and makes Iizuna worry.

He doesn’t come off well.

And despite his baptism, the equator crossing, the brotherhood and friendship and community that was promised by Neptune’s court, it’s difficult to hold fast to a feeling that slips eagerly between your fingers like water. The sea, herself, is so different from the rocks and mountains he’s used to; ever changing, he can’t help but wonder how anyone can feel at home amongst the waves.

That’s not to say she’s foreign to him; the sea has as much a place in the Earth’s history as land does, touching the fossil record at the coast. Kiyoomi knows — intuitively — that there are secrets of the Earth far below her surface, although saying as much might put him on the same level as the madman Wegener. And when Iizuna proposed this journey, Kiyoomi took every pain to increase his understanding of oceanography, so that he may feel more comfortable during these months.

“They say knowledge is power, Kiyoomi. Don’t you agree?” Komori asked him, once, when his cousin was able to take a break from his work to visit him at university. It wasn’t an exciting trip; Kiyoomi mostly spent it in the library, and Komori picked a new volume off the shelf every day to read alongside him. He never lingered in one discipline, though. One day he might be reading a treatise on the grazing animals of the Savanna, another on Canadian river basins, and the next one of the British romances.

“If that’s true, you would have all the power of a basket of kittens,” Kiyoomi snipped, even though it was untrue and unfair.

Tilting his head to the side, Komori paused before he laughed, because he always knew when Kiyoomi was joking. “And you would be in possession of all the force of a cannon, don’t you think?”

True, Kiyoomi could have let the matter rest. If he were a more sensible person, if he were more attuned to the norms of his own social class, he would have been able to elegantly brush aside Komori’s question and change the flow of the conversation so that it suited him.

But Kiyoomi was an academic, and Komori was an expert pest. Kiyoomi was cursed with curiosity, while his cousin knew how to put pressure on a point until it gave.

“I don’t like to think of knowledge as a weapon, or force–” he started, only for Komori to cut him off.

“You don’t like to think? Or you don’t think? Be precise, cousin.”

Pest.

“I don’t think, then, cousin,” Kiyoomi sneered, “I know that the accumulation of knowledge has nothing to do with power, else the labored academics around us would be kings.”

“You’re an academic, aren’t you? Do you wish to be a king, too?”

Kiyoomi shook his head. “I seek out knowledge for its own sake,” he said, and it almost sounded true — he had to barrel on so that his cousin wouldn’t find the weakness in his own claim, “but Kings and statesmen use knowledge to augment their power, else how would they know how to rule?”

And how to subjugate, and how to conquer; it was also why they never seemed to know how to lose.

It was only by grace of happenstance — Komori’s stomach growling — that the conversation ended there.

Though, it left Kiyoomi thinking about knowledge and her uses: he studied oceanography to better understand the journey ahead of him, and he studied logic so he could make better arguments. But geography — the land and all her secrets — fulfilled a baser need.

When he stuck his shovel into the dirt, when he etched an awl into a mountain side, Kiyoomi left a little mark on the Earth; a little change, proof that he’s done something in the world.

Evidence of his existence.

No number of papers, no titles or academic positions, no accolades or praise from his parents, could ever begin to compare to the traces he leaves behind.

But on the ship, water slips through his fingers. Cold slips into his bones. He becomes the stone that must be moved, that could be carved; the cliffside that Miya’s water carves a gorge into, and it makes him envious of an impact he could never make.

Certainly Miya isn’t thinking about Kiyoomi this much.

But he can’t afford to let his mind wander for long; luckily, he’s saved when the boiler makes a sound that is questionable enough to force Ushijima to bolt out of sleep and look over the machine. His hands, long since callused over, touching the warm metal without flinching.

“Come here, Kiyoomi,” he says, his voice engine-deep, “lend me a light so I may see.”

And Kiyoomi — startled by the use of his first name, of quiet friendship — brings over a lamp.

At least he can be a little useful, and he forces the thought to warm him on the walk back to his own rooms for a dose of sleep.

“You look tired, Sakusa,” Iizuna says over breakfast later in their mess, while Kiyoomi grips onto his cup of lukewarm tea for dear life. “Tell me, are you getting enough rest?”

“Kuroo snores loud enough to wake the dead,” Kiyoomi drawls out, ignoring the cartographer’s protests from the other side of the table. “What do you plan to do with him when we reach camp? I propose mummification.”

Iizuna’s laugh is more muted; barely a sound. “I’ve heard no complaints from either of your bunkmates.”

That’s because Tendou barely sleeps and Akaashi stole someone’s pillow to cover his ears and ignore his caterwauling, though who he threatened, Kiyoomi doesn’t know.

“Akaashi and Tendou may well be human, but perhaps it’s in my nature to find more similarity with a walking corpse.

Someone at the table laughs, but the smile drifts away from Iizuna’s face, slowly replaced by a more serious disposition.

Shit. What had he said? He’d just rattled something off, but clearly it’s the wrong thing, again, somehow.

Both of their captains were shockingly astute, with Kita a touch less amiable than Iizuna. Normally, Iizuna possessed a positive disposition, allowing Kita to mete out harsher critiques, but every so often Iizuna saw fit to draw the uncompromising weapon within him.

“A word outside, Sakusa, perhaps?”

Kiyoomi curses the fact that he was born with an honest face; it betrays him everywhere, especially in lecture halls when he disagrees with some pompous lecturer’s conclusions, and on this ship it’s a liability.

He chugs the rest of his tea before following Iizuna out to the deck. There are a few sailors — on a different breakfast shift — milling around, some tugging at the sails while others chip ice off the hull. Even Hinata is out here, exercising a few of the dogs.

He makes sure to stand on the side of Iizuna that’s further away from them; they still make him uneasy.

“Sakusa,” Iizuna starts, and he looks genuinely concerned, which makes Kiyoomi’s heart stutter.. “Please tell me where your thoughts are, now. Speak honestly; I can’t afford one of my men considering himself a walking corpse this early in the journey. That’s for the quest to the pole,” he adds, finishing with a softening smile.

The joke doesn’t land on Kiyoomi.

“I told you,” Kiyoomi insists, “it’s just Kuroo and his infernal sounds.”

“Although I do not doubt that Kuroo is capable of producing a racket, that isn’t the only thing troubling you. This is not a journey that spares any doubters. You must be resolute in your commitment to our quest, and I thought I felt that from you when I asked you to join. Have your opinions changed?”

Kiyoomi tries to take a breath, but his lungs fill with ice instead. His captain is so reasonable; if he were a more frightening man, Kiyoomi would not even think twice before lying for the sake of self-preservation. But Iizuna demands an answer, not because he is powerful or strong, but because he is someone to believe in.

The ship rocks, and wind passes through him. He feels featherlight when he finally has an answer for Iizuna.

“If I may be frank — “

“I thought you were Kiyoomi, but continue.” Iizuna snorts at Kiyoomi’s unimpressed expression. “Sorry, couldn’t help it.”

“As of late, I have uncovered — not doubts, never doubts — but uncertainties over my usefulness on this excursion. The long time at sea has left me feeling rather useless; there is limited work I can do, except for preparations, and it feels as though I have been preparing for years.”

Iizuna nods. “For your purposes, the journey is more of a waiting game than anything else, and you are not the type to enjoy sitting idly by while someone carries you along.”

“How do you figure? We’ve never been on expeditions together, before this one.”

To his surprise, Iizuna’s smile doesn’t fade. “It’s easy, Kiyoomi — I’ve read your research. I’ve seen your work. You extracted twice as many papers from your fieldwork abroad than any other academic on the journey. In the quest for knowledge, you don’t pull ahead so much as you examined every foot of the path. You must be itching to get on with your work, and I am sorry that I have nothing to offer you in the meantime.”

Iizuna’s praise feels unearned and unwelcomed, but it stokes the soft flames of pride inside of him. “There’s no need for flattery when I’m already on this expedition. And besides, there’s no need to burden me with compliments; there’s no turning back, right? Wellington was our last chance.”

For their brief stop in New Zealand, to pick up provisions that Iizuna had written ahead for with the aid of a friend and fellow traveler from his previous expedition south, they had been warned that this would be their last taste of land before finding a home in Antarctica. If anyone wanted to quit the expedition, this was the final opportunity to do it; a kind leader, Iizuna also offered to provide aid for returning home, or for setting up a brief life dockside while waiting for their ship to return in two or three years to join the journey back north,

None of them had taken him up on the offer; Kiyoomi doesn’t know how many of them — if any of them — had wavered. He was still bold then, yet to fall into the depression that the cold air and the reality of a life in an untouched world would bring.

A weight falls on Kiyoomi’s shoulder. He imagines it to be ice, at first, until he feels warmth and realizes that it’s Iizuna’s hand. “It’s not like you for your resolve to waver like this, Kiyoomi, or for you to think of the easy way out. While it’s true that you could have enjoyed warmer climes — and, I must warn, a blistering deep summer — had we left you in New Zealand, or even on Macquarie, of the entire crew, you were the one I pegged as least likely to let that option linger in your head.”

“What are you saying?”

“I believe in you, Kiyoomi, and your willingness to see this through. More than anything else I understand your hunger for knowledge, and have the utmost faith in that. If anyone is going to see things through to the end, it would be you. After all,” and here Iizuna’s affection turns mischievous, “no one likes a quitter, do they?”

Kiyoomi’s heart stills.

He hates quitters, and he hates the fact that even for a moment his heart seemed fond of the option, however impossible, that he could leave this expedition behind.

It’s not enough to keep him sated, fully, but it does help. Iizuna’s faith in him. He will not misplace it.

“Thank you,” Kiyoomi says, hoping his gratefulness comes through. “I won’t let you do-”

“Did I hear you were quittin’, Sakusa?” a familiar, grating, ill-timed voice chimes in. “I’ve got a dinghy your size and some provisions too, if you want to sail your way back to Macquarie Island. Hope you don’t get eaten by a whale, though. Can’t imagine that’d be good for the poor creature.”

Over Iizuna’s shoulder stands Miya, winking at him while he leans on a broom that he’d been using to sweep up ice to toss overboard. Kiyoomi hadn’t even noticed him join the workers on the deck, not that he wished to become even more aware of Miya.

“No one is quitting,” Iizuna says, when Kiyoomi doesn’t answer, preferring to glare at Miya until the grin falls from his face, “and no one is getting eaten by whales. Honestly, where do you even get these ideas?”

His captain might be a great mediator, but there’s no real way to calm the flames that stir between him and Miya. “Thank you Captain,” he says, “I’ll see you for dinner.”

It’s curt.

It’s clipped.

And as he walks away, the burning feeling of pride is replaced by another sensation: one more familiar, but twice as galvanizing.

Annoyance.

He has to be better than Miya. Prove his worth. Just to wipe the smug look and the horrible jokes off of his face.

Kings might seek power, courtiers love, and misers money; academics are driven by spite.

A Late Night. Somewhere in the Southern Ocean.

Despite Kuroo’s infernal snoring keeping me awake till the late hours, I do still find time on this journey to enjoy reading. Iizuna has seen fit to keep our ship stocked with books — a mixture of scientific journals and treatises, more amiable books like the pulp detective novels that Bokuto devours.

(Soon enough, he will be solving crimes of his own invention!)

It is helpful to keep up on my studies while I am on this ship; it reminds me that there is no end to knowledge or research, and that it persists regardless of circumstance.

Although I do wonder — how much will the world and science change while we are down here? The Earth keeps turning, and we may well emerge from the southern pole into a world unlike that which we’ve ever known.

— The Journal of Sakusa Kiyoomi (1917)

Kiyoomi thrives at the edge of science, where everything stops making sense and all known laws of the world seem to turn on their head. When he looks back on his work, his favorite memories are of the frenzied hours examining some aberrant piece of data or an inexplicable outlier.

Compared to the aftermath of discovery, Kiyoomi would take the thrill of the unknown any day.

The morning where the Suzaku-maru crosses over that edge begins with Goshiki pounding at the door of his bunk.

He knows it’s Goshiki because he keeps calling out for “Sakusa-san! Sakusa-san!” in the kind of frothy whisper that carries louder than a yell. Someone has turned on the light as Kiyoomi clambers down from his bunk, an expert on his sea legs now, despite the rocking ship.

Akaashi glares at the door, like he could kill Goshiki through it.

“Easy,” Kiyoomi says, tugging Akaashi’s blanket over his head. “He’s young. Don’t scare him.”

“And if I said he scared me? No court of law would convict me.”

“No laws out here but the laws of nature, ‘Kaashi!” Tendou interrupts, already far too awake with his — no, that’s definitely Kuroo’s — jacket over his shoulders and his camera in his hands.

Kiyoomi, who was just slipping into his shoes, narrows his eyes. “Last I checked, you didn’t share my name.”

“Goshiki doesn’t panic easily, Sakusa. Whatever he’s calling you for, it’s going to be something good, and it’s my god given right to seek out adventure.”

Not even three nights ago, Goshiki was dealt such a good hand in a round of poker that he couldn’t keep from panicking over it, and fumbled his bets so tremendously that he lost his chocolate ration for the whole month.

“Sure,” Kiyoomi says, opening the door. “Just be wary of your infernal flash. Goshiki, what’s going on?”

He hopes he sounds like he carries some authority, but Goshiki’s eyes are wide with fright and his words do nothing to stop the Night Watch from grabbing his wrist and tugging him bodily to the deck.

Kiyoomi was already wrong about one thing: to call it morning would be to call a wooden log a ship.

The sky is so dark that it merges with the sea, with no difference between where it begins or ends, and the foam capped waves and slivers of ice in the distance reflecting the starlight perfectly. Only the moon — half curved and hungry — keeps them from losing track of their own gravity.

Goshiki explained nothing on his way up to the deck, instead gibbering on and on about demons and being chased by youkai. They’re not alone out here, either. A few sailors are out here, too, Ushijima hooking up a light and Miya with his rifle in hand.

Those are the only two standing near the gunwale, peering out into the sea.

“Goshiki, Goshiki, please explain why you’ve dragged me and half of our ship awake in the middle of the night,” he says, half protesting as Goshiki keeps dragging him to the edge of the ship. “I’m in my underthings, this is hardly proper.”

Miya snorts, the rifle jostling in his hold, while Goshiki glares at him. “It’s very serious!” he insists.

“If it’s serious, then why can’t you explain what’s going on?”

At this point, Goshiki throws up his hands in frustration, and pushes him to the gunwale. “If I could explain then I wouldn’t need your help, would I?”

The door that leads to their captains’ quarters opens. Likely drawn out by the commotion, Iizuna steps out onto the deck, the pale green of his hair picking up the starlight and shining brighter than it should. He frowns as he steps closer to them all, and Kiyoomi — feeling rather stupid standing around and looking at the crowd rather than whatever has frightened Goshiki — turns to look over the sea.

He frowns. “There’s nothing here.”

“Give your eyes time to settle, Sakusa,” Miya says, and it’s so reasonable that Kiyoomi almost imagines himself to still be dreaming. “Rich bastards like you aren’t used to darkness like us.”

It’s better than a pinch to wake him up.

Ignoring Miya’s last jab, Kiyoomi draws his jacket tighter around himself. “Turn off that light, Wakatoshi,” he demands.

“Awful familiar of ya, ain’t it?” he hears from Miya, before Ushijima complies.

Leaning against the edge, Kiyoomi squints his eyes. Lets them grow used to the darkness, staring off into the distance until he can just grasp the horizon. There’s a subtle difference in the shades of dark blue, but it’s there; the jittery line of waves standing out against the star-marked sky.

There’s no getting used to this kind of loneliness this far out onto the sea. No land in sight, in any direction. No terra firma on the distant horizon. This deep into the journey, the idea of land itself feels exotic and strange. Even on the calmest waters, the ship rocks gentle an unsteady thrum into their hearts. They internalize it, feeling shaky and uneven in the earth that should welcome them, because they’ve become attuned to the water without their knowing.

A man who feels comfortable at sea is a man who is no longer born of earth. A man who has forsaken home.

And at night, too, the sensation is multiplied a hundredfold. Sure, the stars might light their way, and on nights with a fuller moon it may seem bright as daylight. But it’s easy to get lost in the hypnotic darkness in the distance. On land, paths below our feet guide us home. At sea, men look skywards, and hope the stars — unfathomably far — are stable enough to follow.

Kiyoomi doesn’t know how these sailors can stand it. Luckily, they can rely on Kageyama.

When he’s on watch, Goshiki climbs up the crow’s nest — so quickly that Kiyoomi gets whiplash watching him — and stares out forward, keeping an eye out for icebergs or the foolish hope for land. He must have seen it up there, so Kiyoomi sets his gaze far, leaning further out into the water, until —

“Oh,” he gasps, catching what must have frightened Goshiki so.

“Did you find it? Where?” Miya demands, clapping a hand onto his back that Kiyoomi throws off just as quickly, pointing out towards it.

The threshold into the unknown.

There, on the water, is an uncanny glow. How he missed it at first, he doesn’t know; any source of light out here should shine bright, so it must have hidden itself till now, thinking itself safe in the silence of the night.

The glow — a peculiar blue, brighter than anything natural Kiyoomi can imagine this far south — looks like it could be over 100 meters wide, and who knows how long it stretches back. It pulses, too, unless his tiredness is playing tricks on him, the color flaring brighter before falling into near darkness.

He can tell the exact moment Miya sees it too, his body clattering against the gunwale in near disbelief.

A moment later, as they all notice it, calamity erupts on deck.

“See!” Goshiki shouts triumphantly at the rest of the crew, “I told you I wasn’t making it up! There’s something out there, and it’s coming closer to us with every waking moment! A demon swims below the sea, a demon!”

“There’s no such thing as demons, Goshiki,” Tendou says, trying to calm him down as the other sailors start loudly panicking, grabbing for weapons out of anything they can reach — some rope, a bucket — but he soon abandons even that work, in favor of setting up his camera to take a long exposure of the glow.

Who knows what will turn out on the film?

“Do ya think that’s a kraken? Or maybe a whale. I’ve heard other sailors talk of big sharks out at sea, maybe this one wants to feel fancy?”

It takes Kiyoomi a moment — he’s gotten used to blotting out Miya’s babble — to realize he’s talking to him. “What are you even saying? Kraken aren’t real.”

Allegedly, he adds, to himself, because he doesn’t want to admit there’s enough plausibility to their rumor.

“I’m just trying to figure out what’s out there, watching us, since you aren’t. Shame that you’ve got the muscle doing your job, right Sakusa? Bet we’d be just fine without you.”

Kiyoomi grips the edge of the wall tightly, so he doesn’t punch Miya and his rifle overboard. “Could be a whale,” he murmurs instead, and Miya, realizing that Kiyoomi won’t give him another inch, shuts up.

Around them, the rest of the crew work themselves deeper into their frenzy, postulating that the glow could be anything from an oversized shark ready to bite through the metal of their hull, to a ship pulled from the remnants of a wreck, steered by the lifeless and weary ghosts cursed to haunt the sea for eternity, to Goshiki’s favorite: demons.

“There are portals to hell in the sea! Deep at the bottom of the ocean, and we’ve clearly stumbled over a rift between worlds! What else could it be!”

Kiyoomi is inclined to believe Goshiki is closest to the truth.

Something prickles at the edges of his subconscious, like the answer is on the tip of his tongue. While he worries over it, wishing he had more textbooks — or more journals, more access to research, or maybe a scholar who spent a little bit more time studying the flora and fauna of the ocean instead of Kiyoomi, who is more interested in the volcanoes that dot the floor — to refer to in order to figure out the answer, the spot in the distance disappears and reappears several times.

Miya keeps his gun trained on the very spot, his aim straight and true, never wavering despite the rocking of the ship.

More people wake up — Akaashi ventures out of the room to catch a glimpse, and tells Kiyoomi that he better not touch it before going back to sleep — and become wary. Others start to pray, quietly, for dawn, so they could have a better view, but sunrise is so far away.

“Maybe we should sail out to it,” Kiyoomi suggests, when none of them are closer to answers, and Miya turns an inquisitive eye to him.

“You know, that’s the first logical thing you’ve said this whole night?”

“Never mind, clearly it’s a mistake.”

“Hey!” Miya kicks at his ankle, making Kiyoomi stumble and jostle into Iizuna, who still stares, curiously, out at the point where the glow should be.

“Easy, boys,” he chastises lightly.

It makes Kiyoomi feel the same kind of guilt he experienced whenever he got too deep in his books and missed the school bell, getting a scolding from his teacher for being late.

Kageyama and Kita are manning the helm, and they’ve let their path curve slightly west to avoid a large iceberg that Goshiki noticed.

The next time the glow emerges, the shape is slightly different.

And closer.

If he thought he was alone in noticing, Miya surprises him.

“Take this,” he says, shouldering his rifle for a moment, before handing him something solid and sturdy.

In Kiyoomi’s hands — clumsy and cold, because he’d forgotten to pull on his gloves before leaving the room — he feels the texture of unsanded wood converge into the rough shape of a wooden club.

“What am I meant to do with this?” He looks towards Miya, who hoists it up again, aiming directly at the shape without need to look.

“I dunno Sakusa, use that big brain of yours and think a little bit, will you?”

“If you want me to put you out of your misery, Miya, you need only ask. I’d push you overboard any day. I wouldn’t even need a club to do it.”

“Sakusa,” Iizuna chides, and Kiyoomi turns to him, once again made meek by the admonishment.

“My apologies,” he says. He’ll keep his murderous thoughts to himself, next time. “I understand that Miya is just trying to help.”

Iizuna fixes his gaze on him for a long moment like he’s studying him, trying to take stock of the man he is, before his posture settles again. “Ease up, will you? We all need to be looking out for each other’s best interests out here.”

Kiyoomi gulps and nods, once again struck by how brightly Iizuna’s hair seems to glow in the night. It’s distracting, and peculiar, and uncannily…

Familiar.

He looks out to the distant sea, then back at Iizuna. Pulls a spyglass away from Tendou — “Hey! I was using that!” — and replacing it with the club to get another close view of the luminescence.

The color shifts and changes, growing dark and bright in an uneven pattern. It glows like it sucks up light, the same way Iizuna’s hair does. As his view of it grows clearer, he realizes that the center of it is sharper, coming into focus sooner than the edges, like part of it is closer to him.

It hovers above the surface, too, rising high over it, instead of floating along the waves or just below, like he’d expect for a creature.

“I think…” Kiyoomi says, frowning, “I don’t think it will hurt us.”

It draws a look from both Iizuna and Miya, but he pays them no mind, still focused on the shape in the distance. There are spots, too, where the color seems thicker than the rest. All uneven, but the shape and spread irregular enough that it couldn’t be the mottled skin of an animal. Add to that the way it seemed to get closer as they curved towards it to get away from an iceberg, like the glow wasn’t even trying to flee from them…

A paper he quite enjoyed, published last year, focused on microscopic fauna that lined beaches. It postulated that some, in far different environments than the temperate shores that Kiyoomi grew up alongside, contained the same genes that allowed for lightning bugs to glow.

Bioluminescence, like in certain fish.

And the glow would certainly explain why —

“Sakusa,” Miya says, loud enough that it cleaves through his thoughts. “We’re not in your head. You’ve gotta tell us what you’re thinking.”

“Sorry,” Kiyoomi apologizes, twice like a habit now. “But I don’t think we’re in any danger. I think by daybreak you’ll find that this is… a common sight, but in the evening it takes on a new form.”

“Speak plainly, Sakusa, now is not the time for riddles.” Iizuna, this time. The sleeplessness must be getting to him, because he’s not usually this sharp.

Kiyoomi isn’t a lecturer; he lacks the charisma for it, and only gives presentations and talks when necessary. At some point in his career he will be forced to contend with the requirement to teach and present to go further in academia.

It’s a shame. Lecture tours are lucrative, and he’s sure that after the expedition he could command a pretty penny with just this single incident at its center.

Every student who has ever been forced to listen to Kiyoomi explain the chemical composition of igneous rocks or discuss the geologic record of Northern Japan has also experienced the best nap of their lives. It’s novel for Kiyoomi, then, that both Iizuna and Miya look upon him with rapt attention.

“What we are seeing is a congregation of an incomprehensible number of microorganisms — each smaller than the naked eye can see alone, but when grouped in such high volume become visible. They’re likely spread out upon the sides of a table iceberg. My current hypothesis is that the iceberg flipped over, and the microfauna — which had been clinging to the underside — are now, under the influence of stored sunlight and reactions to the night, glowing.”

Miya blinks, while Iizuna stays silent, looking out into the distance, considering. Kiyoomi hands him the spyglass.

“Here, captain, so you may see for yourself. Note the spread and the layout, as if they’re collecting the water worn cracks and crevices of an iceberg. And notice, specifically, how sharply delineated the top edge is; the fauna do not thrive in snow, which is likely topping it.”

“When you say small, do you mean like bugs?” Miya asks, while Iizuna observes.

Kiyoomi shakes his head. “Even smaller.”

“Huh.”

Miya tugs the soft brim of his cap low over his curls while he lets his rifle settle by his side. It’s like he believes Kiyoomi without wanting to say it. Part of Kiyoomi desperately wants Miya to admit that Kiyoomi’s explanation is logical; the desire is even stronger than his wish for Iizuna to declare him correct.

Why is that happening? Iizuna’s opinion is the only one that matters. He’s the captain and expedition leader. Not Miya.

But even so, when Miya lets out a low chuckle, disarming his rifle, it feels like victory. “Guess I won’t be needing this, huh? It feels a little silly, aiming at nothing.”

In the darkness, Kiyoomi almost imagines the blue glow sucked into the deep color of his eyes.

“No way we could have known. I’d assumed Goshiki was right at first, and we would have had to prepare to meet our makers at the gates of hell, too.”

Miya looks a little uneasy at that, staring off into the distance for longer. He stays quiet, too. There’s no other tell on his face that gives away what he’s thinking, or wondering, except for the hand gripping the edge of the hull. It’s as though he were trying to brace himself to jump out, swim in the cold ocean until he reached the glow.

But that’s crazy. Miya’s a sailor; he wouldn’t abandon ship for something like this.

A hand on Kiyoomi’s shoulder breaks his reverie. “You’re right, Sakusa,” Iizuna says, pride and delight in his voice. “Or at least, I’ll believe your explanation for it. Stand down, lads. Back to your beds, and perhaps tell Daichi to give us a slightly later morning to compensate for our excitement this evening.”

Daichi, a notorious heavy sleeper, is one of the few who didn’t break away from his slumber to come to the surface. Goshiki salutes Iizuna, taking on the responsibility, before clambering up to his spot in the crow’s nest.

As everyone filters out — Iizuna with a “get some sleep, Sakusa,” as a parting comment — Kiyoomi stays behind. So too does Miya, who keeps staring off at the pulsing blue glow, and Hinata, who has a dog by his side as always.

“Miya?” Kiyoomi says, and it breaks his concentration for just a moment. All Miya gives him is a narrow tilt of his head to the side, just a glimpse of his narrowed eyes, just barely out of profile.

“What?”

Kiyoomi taps his head. “Thanks for the advice,” he says. Then he turns on his heel and leaves before Miya can sputter and react in disbelief at the slight.

Contrary to expectation, he does not scurry.

Atsumu stays out on the deck much later. He can’t sleep, not this close to dawn, and not when the ocean he’s come to love has felt so foreign to him. He’s never seen something like this before, and he’s seen a lot — schools of dolphins, swimming alongside his raft; the blue shadow of a whale passing under the ship; great waves, practically a mile high, when the sea has cast away calmness.

But this peculiar blue… he watches until it finally disappears into the darkness of the horizon, obscured by waves or other icebergs. He can’t get rest until the fear in his body that’s been alight ever since he heard Goshiki’s scream finally settles, the hair on the back of his neck settling down.

Luckily he’s not alone — Hinata’s out here, with one of the dogs who refuses to get tugged back in her kennel.

“Dedicated, ain’t ya, Shouyou?” he asks, inviting him to come closer.

“I don’t want to leave her alone, not on a night like this,” Hinata replies, gesturing to the dog who follows him at his heel. She’s well trained. All of Hinata’s dogs are. This one, with her mottled, gray and white coat, looks like Ringo if he’s not mistaken. Named because she was the apple of Shouyou’s mother’s eye.

Atsumu nods. “You feel it too, huh? How strange it is?”

“I don’t mind Sakusa’s explanation,” Hinata hedges. “I’ll defer to his expertise as a man of science, and I’ve no doubt that he believes what he’s saying…”

Instead of answering, Atassumu stays silent. Hinata’ll fill the space before long — a yapper of the highest order, always having conversations with the dogs that baffle both Kageyama and Akaashi whenever they notice — and he’s rewarded by his patience.

“But it was weird, Atsumu. Ringo and the other dogs, they were all barking up a storm at nothing. That’s what got Goshiki’s attention first. He woke me up because he thought there might be someone or something overboard in the water that he couldn’t see, but that they could smell.”

Hinata takes a deep breath, leaning in closer to Atsumu. “And I went and tried to settle them, but nothing was getting them quiet, and they weren’t barking at anything in particular. Just making noise for the sake of it. It was like nothing I said — none of my commands or anything — were getting through to them. They’re well trained dogs, Atsumu!” He gives Ringo a rub, her head tilting as she leans into his touch. “But then suddenly, all at once, they all went quiet. And the worst thing was? They all started staring at the ocean, finally, at the same point in the sea.”

Chill fear runs down Atsumu’s spine. “At the glow,” he fills in, Hinata’s eyes wide and nervous, like he can’t bring himself to say it.

After a moment, Hinata gulps. “Yeah. Goshiki turned and saw it first, and I couldn’t believe my eyes either. It was like something out of a story.”

The ocean is full of stories. Atsumu’s got a dozen of his own, at least, and even more if you get him drunk. You can’t spend time out on her without having a story: of a giant, impossible storm; of dark, dangerous clouds hanging low over the horizon; of a massive school of fish surrounding your ship like a whirlpool; of whales — bigger than your imagination could ever conjure — pressing their bodies against the side of a fishing boat to tip you over.

Humans crawled out of the sea, and the ocean keeps giving us stories to stop us from going back in.

“I’ve heard all kinds of stories, Shouyou, but none quite like this.” Atsumu pitches his voice low, and hopes that Hinata can’t hear the quaver of fear. He’s supposed to be steady at sea, dammit, and look at him now: shaky, like a greenhorn. “There’s something weird about this patch of sea. Something alive. I don’t understand it.”

It isn’t that he doesn’t trust in science — if there’s one thing Sakusa’s good for, it’s a hypothesis — but rather that, in his own experience, the sea is weirder, and stranger, and wilder than anything a person can dream up.

He looks out at the horizon, slowly growing bright with the distant peak of sunrise.

“And you know what? Honestly, I’m not sure if it’s worth tryin’ to understand.”

But he doesn’t stop staring out to sea; not when Hinata yawns and Ringo falls asleep, not when the sun has fully risen, and not even when Kita wakes once more and places a mug of bitter coffee in his hands.

He only leaves when he’s finally bleached away the memory of that peculiar blue, until he can pretend he isn’t afraid of what awaits them in the Southern continent.

Chapter Text

The Southern Ocean. Close, but not close enough.

[Image of Kiyoomi gesturing towards a map, in the library room of the Suzaku-maru. Surrounding him are Goshiki Tsutomu, Hoshiumi Kourai, and an unidentifiable man with his back to the camera. Photograph undated.]

A note, in faded pencil, is on the back of the photograph.

‘As of late, the good ol’ Professor’s been giving us lectures.’

For some reason — atypically divorced from logic or science — Kiyoomi thought that the Antarctic would be gray.

In his Tokyo winters, he’s grown used to a bleary sky, the light snow mixing with mud. The city bustled, but the gray overhang of the clouds blurred out all the color that would come alive in spring and summer.

But down here, the cold is life. Each shiver, each pinprick of cold in Kiyoomi’s ears, each tear frozen on his lashes as he works the stern is proof of it. To survive, you have to give into the cold; slow down, just like the Suzaku-maru as she navigates the ice-speckled sea, for fear of a misstep sending you hurtling into the unstable grasp of inertia.

The Tokyo in him — the city in him — wants to fight against the slow glaciering of his body.

Still, there’s a shock that rushes through his body when hears Goshiki cry out the first yell of Land!

They all rush out to view it — except for Akaashi, who cherishes the peace of being left behind, and Tendou, who yawns and returns to bed, although it’s late afternoon — their first glimpse of their home for the next two years, or more.

Land is a thin band of white, stretching along the horizon, flattened between the impossible twinned blues of the sky and sea. For so long they had nearly merged into one, the gradient of the hazy horizon almost hypnotizing them, so the stark whiteness stands out with shocking and immediate clarity. Goshiki would’ve seen her facing homeward with both eyes closed.

“By the gods,” calls out Aran, voice rattled with awe. “I had scarcely believed her to be real, myself.”

None of the stories, or the science, or the trust they have in their captains could ever hold a candle to the power of their own gaze; man himself is the arbiter of his own reality. Kiyoomi’s just here to find enough science to help him decide.

“Pinch me, I might be dreaming — ow, Yakkun. That hurt!” Bokuto this time, and his anger breaks the reverie that had fallen upon them, as a quiet murmur of discussion and awe overtakes them.

They stand there for a while, observing and blinking their eyes and squinting at the distance, until Kita lets out a sharp whistle to remind them of their duties..

Most of them disperse, but Kiyoomi remains. He imagines that he can see the imperceptible way the continent grows as they draw closer and closer; the white line spreading to take up even more and more of the horizon, until all the water is replaced by land and he finally feels normal again, no longer adrift in the endless ocean.

That’s impossible, though; you can’t catch change like the flicker of a flame. It’s slow, perilously so. Once you step away, you have to trust that the boat keeps moving forward, that the land keeps drawing closer; then, you have to trust that your memory isn’t playing tricks on you, too, when you come back to view it.

Watching the shore like this, all you’re doing is guaranteeing you’ll never trust the Southern country.

He’s not the only one lingering like he doesn’t want change to come, either.

“This is what we’ve been sailing for, huh?” Miya says, mostly to himself. He’s not looking towards Kiyoomi, at least; his eyes are glued to the white horizon. The sun paints his face golden, like he could warm the frozen sea. “The end of the world’s in sight. How does it feel, Sakusa, to see it so plainly?”

Kiyoomi doesn’t have an answer for him; Miya’s voice is so serious that it unnerves him, like it’s coming from another world. He’s used to a happier sound: delight over the dinner table or the diamond-braced cut of meanness that comes naturally whenever they interact.

Not this: a man who sounds like he carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders.

He doesn’t say a word in return. They stand, near each other, but not close enough to make out their breaths or heartbeat. Kiyoomi stays outside, watching, until his hands are so cold that they’ll take all night to warm again. He leaves Miya at the bow, alone.

Just one man on the bottom of the earth.

Ice, as plentiful as mosquitoes in the summer, dots the ocean, and the Shizuka-maru sails at a snail’s pace as it makes its way through the field. It stretches what could be a quick journey into hours as they pick a careful path through nature’s debris, and Kiyoomi spends the time taking measurements and notes of the ice floes, their width and dimensions, their color, the presence of algae.

Every so often, he catches an albatross gliding in the white-capped waves.

Their pace is so remarkably slow that Ushijima makes a rare appearance on the upper deck of the ship in order to frown at the ice and hull. He must hear the echoes when they occasionally hit a floe, how it rocks all of them.

“Wakatoshi!” Tendou says, swanning over to the door their mechanic has just emerged from. “What brings you out? Fresh air? A need for good company? Wanted to make sure we hadn’t turned around?”

He leaves Kiyoomi kneeling alone on the cold floor to hold up a heavy camera. Tendou is — or was, until he’d been so cruelly and immediately abandoned — attempting to rig its stand with a gyroscope in order to keep it steady against the rocking ship while he photographed the landscape. He’d gotten the idea after staring over Kageyama’s shoulder at navigational equipment for hours, and once he’d been kicked out of the nav room, he decided to embark on a new project.

Kiyoomi was the unlucky bastard conscripted to help.

“Are you suggesting that you are good company, Satori?” From anyone else’s lips, it might have been an insult, but from Ushijima’s mouth you knew it was honest.

“I wouldn’t say I’m better company than the engine, but I’m plenty good.” He winks.

Kiyoomi shivers. “Stop confusing Wakatoshi or allow me to give up my position,” Kiyoomi mutters, low enough that the duo couldn’t possibly hear him.

Miya — on the deck behind him, helping exercise some of Hinata’s dogs — coughs, like he’s hiding a laugh.

Looking between all three of them, Ushijima shrugs. “I am concerned about the ship. There’s much more ice than I expected out here, and I’m worried our engine can’t withstand the pressure of icebreaking, if necessary,” he explains. “I came out here to get a better view and understanding of the conditions at sea, and — Satori, what is Kiyoomi doing with your camera? He might break it. He is not a photographer like you.”

That infernal Miya coughs again. “Are you sick?” Kiyoomi hisses. He’d glare at him, too, if it didn’t risk that Tendou’s entire structure would collapse.

“I’m hale as a horse,” Miya bites back, as one of the dogs jumps into his arms.

Ushijima turns to frown at Kiyoomi, who is doing his level best to hold the structure together..He’s not sure how Tendou cobbled together this assemblage of equipment; it’s about as flimsy as a deck of cards. How does he manage doing shoots in the wild, completely alone?

“Oh, that old thing?” Tendou waves his hand at Kiyoomi and his camera. “I’ve got a spare, don’t you worry about a thing, Wakatoshi!”

“Tendou,” Kiyoomi says, seeing an escape. “I think Wakatoshi wants to help you. Maybe you could let him.”

He shoots up a prayer to every god he knows, and the Ushijima ancestors for good measure.

Tendou tilts his face at Ushijima, peering curiously at him. Even though they’re the same height, he gives the illusion of being smaller, even when his long, gangly limbs whirlwind around him. “Is that true?”

“Allow me to assist, Satori,” Ushijima says, finally, after considering the structure. “Maybe that way we can save our geologist’s hands.”

There’s a hint of a smirk in Ushijima’s smile as he replaces Kiyoomi — something a little mischievous — that he does not like.

“They’re rubbing off on each other,” Miya notes, as Kiyoomi backs away from the duo. “And what’s Tendou doing with all of that, anyway?”

Kiyoomi cannot feel his fingers; he doesn’t want to think about what Tendou’s been trying to do, but every questions deserves an answer. “The inner workings of his mind elude me, but I think he wants to take long-exposure pictures of the coast from a distance, at night. It requires as stable of a base as possible, hence the gyroscope.”

“Where’d he get that?”

“Either he brought it with him or Kageyama’s about to commit homicide,” Kiyoomi says, rubbing his hands together, frowning when they don’t seem to be any colder. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Miya snorts. “Hey, here, come on.” He grabs at Kiyoomi’s hands, and for a brief, horrible second, Kiyoomi thinks he’s going to warm them himself.

But instead, he shoves them into the fur of a confused dog, tilting his head up at the both of them.

Kiyoomi winces, but the dog is warm, so he keeps his hands where Miya guides them, and relaxes for once.

“What was that?”

Unfortunately, Miya will not let him rest.

“What was what?” The dog turns to lick at Kiyoomi’s jacket, and his eye twitches.

“That! You’re flinching. Do you not like dogs, Sakusa?” Miya rubs the dog’s head, his tongue lolling out of his mouth before it snaps back in when he realizes how cold it is. “Do you think Mikan is gross?”

“Don’t read into things you couldn’t possibly understand,” Kiyoomi snips back. “Why do they all have fruit names?”

“To remind us to eat our oranges and not get scurvy. Don’t avoid the question, Sakusa. You’re gonna make the puppy mad.”

The dog doesn’t seem mad, but Miya drops to his knees, rubbing both sides of the dog’s head and turning it up to him so Mikan looks mournful and sad.

Kiyoomi has a weakness for sad looking things; it’s how Motoya always tricked him into yet another round of hanafuda. Because he wants to remain in this dog’s good graces — Miya can choke — he elaborates. “I’m not used to dogs. We never had any around, or underfoot. Can you blame me for being a little wary?” The Sakusa family estate was sprawling and mostly empty, lifeless but for Kiyoomi sometimes.

He shoots a glare at Miya, who looks back at him, considering.

“Well, these dogs are gonna save our lives out there, so you better start getting used to ‘em.” He tilts his head at the horizon, where their view of the continent has grown enough that he can start to make out the peaks and valleys of glaciers and distant mountains. Kuroo’s been excited enough about the cartographic possibilities and additions to their maps that he spends hours staring out at it, observing the distant storms and minute changes in clouds and funneling all the data back to Kiyoomi, who yells at him about his shitty handwriting.

“I’m sure I will,” Kiyoomi says, and there’s no heat to it. As he pulls away, he lets the dog lick his hand. He doesn’t flinch at all this time, and looks up towards Miya triumphantly.

As he heads back inside — with Ushijima still worried about the hull, and elbows deep in Tendou’s contraption, so he can spend a few free hours in the engine room, enjoying the heat — he realizes that, to his consternation, the conversation with Miya was almost…

Pleasant.

The day that Kita believes they can start thinking about landfall, someone wakes him up by shaking his shoulder.

For a second he thinks it’s Miya fucking with him, and he’s about to snap something sharp when he turns and realizes — from the messy, black bedhead — that it’s Kuroo.

Somehow, this is worse. “I will murder you in your sleep tonight,” Kiyoomi hisses, conscious of the fact that Akaashi is still deeply asleep. On the opposite bunk, Tendou stares at them both with his wide and uncanny eyes.

“You’ll thank me later. Wanna see something cool?” Kuroo looks genuinely excited.

Kiyoomi doesn’t understand how anyone can have so much energy at such an early hour. His body knows that he went to bed a scant few hours ago, and that he hasn’t gotten enough sleep for it to be morning yet. Hell, Hoshiumi might not even be awake, and he always beats the sun.

When Kiyoomi doesn’t respond, Kuroo pouts. “C’mon, I thought you were a scientist. Isn’t it our job to seek out the interesting and uncanny? ’m sure you’ll appreciate this!”

“I reserve the right to push you overboard if you’re messing with me,” Kiyoomi says. “You’ll turn into an iceberg, and we’ll mark your location on one of your stupid maps. And on our way back, we’ll make sure to pick you up and tug you behind us so that — if you are lucky – you will have defrosted by the time we reach New Zealand again.”

“On my honor, you’ll like this!”

Kuroo has no honor, but Kiyoomi slips out of his bunk anyway. Once Kuroo gets an idea into his head he can’t stop. “Stop pouting at me, I’m getting up! You’re a grown man, act like it.”

“I’m just a boy on an adventure, Sakusa, and you’re a child like me no matter how serious you pretend to be.”

Tendou snorts. He’s also pulling on his coat, clearly intent on joining them.

They do their best to remain quiet. But even so, as they try to pull the door closed behind them while they leave, the door is stopped in place by a strong hand. Akaashi stands in the gap glaring at the three of them, his coat and shoes on.

“We didn’t hear you get up!”

“You were all too busy making a racket to notice me,” Akaashi says. “And if this isn’t good, I will throw you overboard myself and erase the mark Sakusa makes on the map.”

“On my honor!” Kuroo repeats.

“You are in possession of none.”

Kuroo holds a finger to his mouth. “Shh! People are still sleeping. Be more conscientious, Akaashi.”

It’s a blessing — for the rest of them — that Akaashi swore an oath to do no harm. Otherwise less than half their number would return home, by virtue of testing Akaashi’s patience, mostly through ignoring their own injuries. Kuroo is one of the exceptions to the rule, provoking him purely through strength of will.

Although, Kiyoomi considers, still a little asleep as Kuroo leads them down the winding hall to the deck, I’m not sure the Hippocratic Oath applies in Antarctica.

He wakes up the moment Kuroo opens the outside door, though, and is rendered speechless with the same action.

For a moment, it’s like they’ve stepped into another world. Everything is purple, the snow and sea painted a pretty shade of lavender. The distant clouds look like the most delicate wagashi that Kiyoomi’s parents always purchased as an indulgence and treat for the family, while the floating icebergs flicker with a peculiar interior light, looking like portals to the world of monsters. There are stars, too, glittering the sky, sugar of the cosmos.

How quickly had they gotten used to the cavernous shades of blue that were a familiar sight, only to be replaced by something inexplicable, as rich and beautiful as any sunrise?

Which reminds him…

Kiyoomi turns, suddenly, to the east, squinting against the horizon until he can find — there! In the distance, just barely inching over the sea, the familiar sun. In the daylight, it’s the only sign of reality they can count on, proof that they’re still in the same world and haven’t, overnight, slipped into another.

If there were twinned suns, or if she were no longer in the sky, or if the moon was hanging fat and heavy overhead, then there’d be trouble. But Kiyoomi can count on the sun, and he lets out a sigh of sweet relief that turns into a laugh.

“See? Isn’t this worth waking up to?” Kuroo sounds gleeful as he looks sideways at all of them, but most tellingly at Akaashi, who can’t seem to take his eyes off the clouds.

“You’ll live another day,” he mutters.

He looks like he’s on the verge of rescinding that when Kuroo catches him tightly around the shoulders in joy, hugging him close and shaking him.

Tendou, meanwhile, has already made a makeshift cushion of a pile of ropes, pulling out his journal to record the moment and the scene. The only thing that’s changed about the landscape is her color, though, so Kiyoomi wonders what he’s going to draw or notate inside.

In many years, when he re-reads his words, will he remember how the sea looked plum deep, and the sky like primrose, and the clouds like the most delicate desserts? How the ice crackled like konpeito, so pretty and impossible that Kiyoomi wanted to reach out into the sea and put them on his tongue? How even their skin was stained purple under this peculiar sky?

“I’m shocked that you’re not screaming about demons again,” Kiyoomi says to Goshiki, who came down from the crow’s nest when he saw them start to convene. Even Iizuna has stepped onto the deck, grinning at all of them, his pale hair painted lavender. “It’s quite unlike you to be silent in the face of something unimaginable.”

“Are you taking up Tendou’s insistence on teasing me while he’s occupied?” Goshiki accuses, narrowing his eyes at him, before his expression softens, and he turns away from Kiyoomi, looking instead out to sea. “Truthfully, I was contemplating waking you up again.”

“Oh?” Maybe Kiyoomi will never get a full night of sleep again.

Goshiki nods. “After last time, I realized that it might be sensible to await a rational explanation from you. After all, only two of us have been here before. Who knows what might await us out there? If I am to be the Nightswatch, I can’t be afraid of shadows that are easily explained, can I?”

“You’ve been thinking!”

“Don’t sound too surprised, Sakusa,” Goshiki grumbles. “I have a brain, after all. I might as well use it, don’t you think?”

Something in his voice connects a few interconnected thoughts in his brain, and he snaps his fingers.

Well.

He tries to, anyway; he is very cold.

“Tendou’s been speaking to you, hasn’t he? Trying to instill the value of an education? I noticed some of my books were out of order in the library. Have you been reading them?”

Goshiki stiffens. “They’re open to all!” he protests.

“That they are, but next time, I’ll recommend you better ones. It’s to be celebrated, after all, your choice to attain a rational education.”

Kiyoomi might be young, but there’s something very affirming at the thought that Goshiki might be — even in part — inspired by him to learn. He’s still not cut out for lecturing, but if the spark of knowledge can be shared, he’s glad for it.

“Don’t let your head get too filled with rations, little Goshiki,” a grating, irritating, and infernal voice appears from nowhere, “else you might leave the rest of us starved!”

Miya — and a few other crewmen, likely drawn out by the noise — are awake, too, and murmuring in quiet awe at the color. Hinata’s drawn out one of the pure white dogs, showing his tone and color off to Tendou, who scribbles another note down in his book.

“Silence, Miya, the scientists are thinking.”

Goshiki requested a rational explanation, and he’ll give him one.

As more of the crew emerge and awaken to admire the sunrise — Daichi poking his head out with a “Would you look at that?” before disappearing once again to the mess — Kiyoomi stands at the hull to think.

Science is not a spectator sport, and despite the thrill of understanding the mysterious blue glow that plagued them, he’s not quite comfortable with standing around and waiting for the synapses to click, for discovery to come. Honestly, science is quite slow, and acts of sudden, serendipitous understanding are rare. As a geologist, he is very careful about putting the pieces together.

He has an advantage here, at least: unlike the men of other disciplines, his work is the most like piecing together a puzzle; tracing together a history of the earth from layers of rock and the connections across hundreds of miles. The geologic record is a thing of beauty, and the bulk of the work is accomplished by men out on the field, in expeditions, chipping away at rock and recording what they see.

The rest happens hunched over a desk, or against a chalkboard, playing with the pieces until everything lines up.

But Kiyoomi has no chalkboard, and he has no desk. He doesn’t even have the benefit of being alone so he can tear out his hair in peace while he thinks; instead, he has an audience, and he has the soft layer of frost icing over the surface of the deck.

He frowns down at it.

“Goshiki,” he directs, because it’s too early to deal with Miya, “has the snow always been that color?”

Unfortunately, Miya is always listening. “It’s a little darker than normal, I’d say, but that might just be because of this madness.” He waves his hand as if to gesture towards the violet glow, and Kiyoomi watches the motion for longer than he wants to admit.

“There’s always meaning in madness, Miya, don’t mistake me.” Sometimes science is, well, science. Trial and error and hypothesis; statistics and formula meant to explain everything.

But right now, science is an art, and Kiyoomi is using it to paint a picture of the world around him.

“Hmm.” Crouching down, he runs a finger along the boards and scrapes up some snow. Without a wince, and with no flinching, he tastes the snow — Miya makes a face of disgust — while he lets the flavor melt across his tongue. “Interesting.”

“Really? You’re afraid of the dogs, but you’ll taste the muck we walk on? You’re a weird guy, Sakusa.”

“No one’s walked on that spot since we cleaned it last night,” Kiyoomi snaps back — ignoring Hinata’s confused outburst of “You don’t like dogs, Sakusa?” — “and besides, what’s science without eating a little dirt?”

Or rock, or — well, the less Kiyoomi thinks about coprolite, the better off he is.

(It nearly turned him off the discipline entirely.)

Miya squints at him. “Is he fucking with me? I think he’s fucking with me. Do scientists eat dirt? Kuroo, rooster-head, get over here!”

“Shut up!” Kiyoomi snaps. It’s on the tip of his tongue — literally. The snow tastes wrong, and it reminds him of something: of his father’s tobacco, of a childhood trip to Mount Asama. There, they hiked around the Onioshidashi — remnants of an eruption from so long ago, his grandfather watched it as a boy — the jagged rocks like a parade of fleeing demons. He climbed up one to get a better view of the rest of the mountain, inhaling the smoky air that still leaked from the crater; the kiss of science, cradling him. The early call to explore.

And then — in Wellington, when a small group of them went out to drink. There were rumors he overheard, and couldn’t help but listen to as he struggled to match his English to the local accent, of an eruption somewhere in the island chain.

Ash, in the air.

And — despite the audience, despite whatever bickering argument Miya has drawn Kuroo into, despite Goshiki’s earnest and pure desire for knowledge — Kiyoomi paints a pretty picture.

“The eruption, a month ago,” he blurts out, rendering everyone around him silent, “with the wind patterns, and the currents — I’m sure Kuroo can corroborate, if you check his maps — the ash must have finally reached our position.”

“What’s a volcano got to do with this?” Goshiki asks.

“I’ll get there,” Kiyoomi snaps, which makes Iizuna fix him with a glare. Shit. He’s still not cut out for lecturing, is he? “I mean — that’s an excellent question, Goshiki.”

Miya coughs something that sounds like the word suck-up, but perhaps he’s just coming down with a cold and needs a special visit to their doctor.

“Sunrise is fickle,” he starts again, Goshiki nodding in rapt attention. “The sun’s rays lack their full power, coming in at an angle, so it has to trickle through the atmosphere. It reacts to the fragments and particles in the air — snow, rain —”

“Ash,” Goshiki and Miya say in unison.

It’s very peculiar, having a classroom in front of him, watching with rapt attention, and engaging.

Maybe he likes it. Twice now, his crewmates have listened to him, like he belongs among their number, respected.

Useful, even.

“Y-yes. And ash — it’s rare, so the effects aren’t studied — this is just a hypothesis, after all, there’s limited evidence —”

“Sakusa,” Iizuna barks, and Kiyoomi prepares himself for the admonishment, but what he gets instead is — “I believe you know what you’re talking about. Have faith in your conclusions, lad.”

“Well,” Kiyoomi inhales, looking out towards the rising sun. The color is dissipating as she grows higher, and he already mourns the loss of it. His hands, instead of a brilliant lilac, look pale and faintly blue-tinged, as though they’ve been cold for too long. He hadn’t noticed, feeling warm with the power of discovery. “It is reasonable to assume that, as fine as ash is, it also alters the quality and color of the light. And it’s not a stretch to believe that it would lead to a purple sunrise.”

He could go into detail on the spectrum of light, the rainbow of colors that shine from a prism, but Kiyoomi was not built for a lecture hall. He’s used to writing his papers and reading them aloud at conferences and hoping to be understood. People don’t tend to take interest in his extemporaneous analysis; people like his parents would prefer he didn’t say anything at all.

The small group around him — Akaashi has retreated back inside, but Kuroo hovers nearby — is quiet as they process.

“Ash, huh?” Miya says, finally, sticking out his tongue like he can taste the particles in the air. “It makes enough sense to me.”

Kiyoomi startles, but he does his best to hide it. That’s twice now that Miya’s accepted his analysis, but why?

It confounds him.

He doesn’t want to be confounded by this man.

Staring him right down, Miya scrapes a finger across the boards to taste the snow, sucking it down and closing his eyes as he considers the flavor. Kiyoomi gulps. “Sakusa’s right. It does taste weird. Like my b- like smoking pipes.”

He looks more relaxed, less tense, now that he’s tried it for himself.

“Please stop eating the snow,” Ushijima says, his voice tinged with irritation. “I have built a water filtration system so we do not have to do this..”

“What! Sakusa gets to eat it, and I get chastised? Me?”

“Kiyoomi was doing it in the name of science. You were doing it because you have a death wish.”

Miya huffs, and it might be the dawn light or Kiyoomi’s imagination, but something dark crosses his face. “That ain’t true, I just wanted the guy to have back up-”

“Gentlemen!” Iizuna cuts in, clapping his hands. “I’m glad there’s a scientific and rational explanation to all of this, and that we’re likely at no risk of our landing going poorly. Sailors are a superstitious lot, and Kita…” he trails off, looking askance. “He didn’t want to come out when he saw the color. Told me to let him know when the sky was normal. It’s not auspicious.”

“But it is harmless,” Kiyoomi contends, his hand going up involuntarily to tug at the cord of Komori’s omamori. It hasn’t left his neck since he got it, and he tells himself it’s for his cousin’s sake.

Miya’s eyes track the motion, his brow furrowing suspiciously, but Kiyoomi doesn’t notice.

“Aye, that it is. Maybe you try explaining it to him, then.”

Kiyoomi shivers, and not because of the cold. There's something uncanny about their second-in-command; he respects him, but he’s a little afraid, too..

Since the sun is high in the sky — and Goshiki lets out a pointed yawn — most of them disperse for breakfast, Goshiki at the front of their little phalanx so that Daichi can feed him first.

Miya stays behind.

Somehow, that’s become all too common; he and Miya lingering, like the last remnants of color on the distant icebergs in the horizon, the parts of the sea that still enjoy the sunrise.

“It might not be scientific to say, but it is kinda pretty, isn’t it?” Miya asks, out of nowhere. “The color, I mean.”

Kiyoomi hesitates, then nods. “It was a lovely color.”

“Didn’t expect a man of science like you to appreciate these sorts of aesthetics.”

He’s a little too tired to fight this point; Kuroo did steal him away from sleep a few hours too early for his liking. Instead, he looks out onto the sea, Antarctica rising rapidly before them. It’s so different, now that they’re closer, than the first time they saw her: that narrow band of white occluded the rocky tops of mountains and glaciers, like the sky was shaving off the jagged band. Closer, now, it looks like something real; something conquerable, like the lava flow Kiyoomi once scrambled over, boyish in his excitement and desire to reach higher.

“Only an irrational man would be unable to appreciate such a peculiar beauty,” he says, as their ship carries on through the water, leaving little foaming wakes in the deep blue.

Miya is quiet again, and Kiyoomi thinks there’s another kind of beauty in this peace.

Of course he has to ruin it.

“Well, thanks for the lesson, Professor,” Miya sneers, smacking his hands against the gunwale as he turns to leave, but there’s no bite to it.

“I’m not a professor, please don’t misstate my title. Some stodgy old academics take this very seriously; you might get me in trouble.”

MIya looks slowly from left to right, very purposefully, a devilish smirk rising on his face. He always wants to get Kiyoomi in trouble. “I don’t see any old academics on this ship, Sakusa. Unless, of course, you’re hiding something from us.”

“What would I be hiding?” Kiyoomi scoffs, crossing his arms.

“I dunno.” Miya steps forward to peer at him, close enough he can feel a little touch of heat from his body. “A beard, some wrinkles, white hair.” He pokes at his chest, and Kiyoomi takes a step back.

He doesn’t mean to try to hide the talisman; it’s just a reflex, and his hand comes up to cup it through his sweater.

“But I’ll take your word for it that you’re not ancient, Sakusa. Just know, I’ll be keepin’ my eyes on you.”

He winks as he exits back into the ship, leaving Kiyoomi leaning against the hull, this time. Alone.

Change is coming faster than he ever thought possible.

The end of the world isn't far behind.

Kiyoomi bottles some of the ice on the ship’s floor, melting it in the engine room and waits for it to settle.

It’s just to double check.

Although it takes a few hours, eventually the ash settles to the bottom of his sample jar, just as he expected.

This is the gray he thought he’d find out here; who knew it could bring such vivid color, too?

Chapter Text

Knowledge is a peculiar affliction.

My experience allows me to know that I am guiding these men into an unknowable, impossible hell, the likes of which no foresight could prepare them. At the same time, there’s nothing quite like the clarity of mind which the Southern continent offers, as you are well aware. I am honored to share this with them.

Down here — or up here, depending on who you ask — my heart feels open, once again. Limitless energy floods me, especially as we draw nearer to where we once marked our spot upon this lonely globe.

This planet doesn’t feel so crowded when you’re the only men for a thousand miles, after all.

At the same time, fear prickles at my skin. Are we truly ready to take on this endeavor? Will I make it to the Pole? Is my desire — as you have all warned, multiple times, in public and in private — the root of my undoing?

Only time will tell. For now, I breathe in the salt-cleaved air. Feel the sea wind against my frozen lips. Brace myself in the glory of living to see this world again.

Excerpt from the Personal Journals of Iizuna Tsukasa (Private Collection)

January, Circling the Continent

They’ll land when Kita decides the conditions are right for it, though he won’t tell them what he’s looking for.

He stands on the bow for hours, watching the distant edge of shore. Kageyama is always by his side, a clever shadow, taking notes, making comparisons to maps, pulling out his peculiar tools to determine things. Despite the jostling of the ship against the thick pack ice, the slow progress they make, the groan of the engine stoked by Ushijima down below, he always looks steady, and eased; a lighthouse, Kiyoomi thinks, or a point in the storm.

The continent stands unyielding before them. Thick walls of snow and ice, ancient and untouched. It makes Kiyoomi shiver, and not from the cold. The sheer vastness of the land here, where the cold and lack of human interference seems to have aligned to make everything bigger as if in rebuttal to the usual refrain of the dominance of humanity.

Man has no place here, Kiyoomi thinks, after yet another day of false-hope, their ship stopped by a possible landing spot that had seemed likely in the dark but proved, in light of day, to be no use for them. Honestly, he’s beginning to wonder if something shouldn’t be explored.

Blasphemy.

He’s seen incredible things so far on this trip, without even making landfall: the Suzaku-maru surrounded by a pack of eager whales, breaching the frigid surface, scars dug into their faces marking the remnants of deep sea battles; the massive ice-bergs, bigger than anything he’s ever seen before, a veritable mountain of cracked ice floating in the sea; seals who had never seen a human before, who look at them curiously from ice floes, as if they unsure what to make of them.

Kiyoomi understands that quite well; he’s not sure what to make of his compatriots, either.

With land in sight yet out of reach, the men have become antsy, like the touchy schoolboys Kiyoomi knew in his youth. It’s an uneasy reminder of the kind of boyhood Kiyoomi always felt detached from, an outsider. They always throw their arms around each other, tug each other close when they see what might be good land, or when someone yields a victory in a round of koi-koi. By the time winter comes, and they’re trapped in the hut for a long, uneasy season, Kiyoomi will need to be used to it.

Worst of all: Yaku is always ready to wrestle, and Kuroo always takes him up on it.

(And each match ends with the geographer pressed against the cold, wooden floor of the ship while crying “Yield! Yield! Have mercy, man!” as Yaku’s laughs echoed over the lonely horizon.)

In order to quell potential riot — or, in the manner of a mother hen trying to keep them occupied — Iizuna sets them all to the task of watching the shore, asking them to make note of the fauna they see.

“Surely it’ll be of some use to the scientists,” he winked while clapping a grimacing Kiyoomi on the shoulder. “They’ll find something to do with the data. Isn’t that how it works?”

Kiyoomi could barely suppress his groan. After all, this meant that he would have to find something worthy of reporting from their data, lest they get the sense that they were being coddled.

He’s shocked how well it works, though. It seems all the antsy crew needed was something to do, some goal to work towards, and it swiftly becomes a game that they all compare notes over at dinner.

(And prevents Kuroo from going to Akaashi with even more injuries levied upon him by Yaku.)

Who had spotted the widest variety? Who had the highest count? Was Hoshiumi sure he saw a mermaid, or is he lying?

Bokuto in particular becomes an expert in spotting flocks of penguins huddling together, all of them squinting into the distance at their ship like they’re a particularly confounding shape of whale.

“Like attracts like,” is all Akaashi can say of the matter, and he refuses to elaborate when anyone presses him.

(Kiyoomi finds himself squinting, occasionally, at Bokuto; in his hair and the great barrel of his chest, he can see something of the birds in him.)

Others look towards the water, spying the bored shapes of seals and whales below the dark surface, tracking their motion as they sail closer to shore and splay themselves on the beach and ice floes, enjoying the summer sun — and the dry air.

“If only that could be me,” Yaku sighs, as the seal closes his eyes on the rocky outcrop, unwilling to move again for hours, “basking in the sun on some foreign shore. Ow, that hurt!”

“You’ve had worse,” Miya says, rubbing the hand he used to punch him in the side, “and besides, it’s too early to fantasize about other climates. Save your dreams of warmth for the dead of winter. That’s when it’ll get real dire, and an active imagination is necessary, if not critical.”

Kiyoomi doesn’t like the way Miya stares him down as he speaks,

For his part, Kiyoomi favors the pretty snow petrels. So pure-white, you can only spot them against grainy, rock-strewn snow. On brightest ice, though, you can only pick them out once you spotted the trio of dots of their dark eyes and black beak, and then — peculiar pareidolia — does their small shape come into view.

Or, he can just look up and see them soaring across the bluest, biggest sky he’s ever seen.

He’s still trying to figure out what to make of the numbers he tabulates over their raucous dinner, his notes on the matter a devastatingly confounding series of overlapping tally marks as the men argue and bray over their counts. More than once he curses their captain for entrusting him with such an activity.

It’s only after a week of this does he realize that Iizuna’s been fretting about him too; at least worrying over it is keeping him occupied.

Out of all of them, Iizuna is the most level-headed; even Kita has his mysterious streaks, which often end in mischief. But Kiyoomi’s followed him for years, and half of the other sailors, too. He knows that Iizuna is a rare specimen in the way he handles his duties and responsibilities with care, that his explorer’s streak is balanced with a healthy understanding of his limits and luck, and that he’d never tell someone to take a risk he wouldn’t take himself.

That’s why it’s so concerning when Iizuna starts to resemble the common man.

One morning, he abandons the steering to Kageyama to stand on the deck, looking towards the shore with his spyglass out. He keeps muttering under his breath for close to an hour, drawing a growing crowd of curious, worried watchers; enough so that Kiyoomi wonders if their ship will tip over from the unbalance.

A moment later he recalls the tons of supplies and materials below deck, makeshift ballast, and feels embarrassed for half a second before Iizuna makes an ungainly squawk, bent at the waist over the hull, his feet off the ground.

Is this the cabin fever Kita warned them all about? Should their captain fall to this so easily?

“Should we… do something?” Kuroo whispers to Kiyoomi and Goshiki, the trio who have been watching him the longest and stand closest to him. “Do we intervene?”

“You can stop gossiping about me and come look!” Iizuna calls back, making Kuroo nearly jump and slip on the deck in shock at being caught.

“Please, Kuroo, take care,” Kiyoomi sneers. “Don’t make Akaashi set a bone, least of all yours.”

“I’ll just ask Yaku then! He’s a doctor, too.”

Kiyoomi fixes him with a funny look. “An animal doctor.”

“You’re a devotee of science, too! Didn’t Darwin say we’re just animals?”

“Upon our return, I am writing to your university and suggesting they rescind your degree.”

“Gentlemen! Join me, and look there,” Iizuna demands, pointing offshore. “In the shadow of that ice cliff, can you just make out that grey-brown strip of shelter? That’s where we made camp a few years ago, I’m sure of it!” There’s pride in his voice, all well-earned; his expedition had been a fruitful one, although Iizuna didn’t get a chance to reach the Pole.

He’s hungry for it now. When he approached Kiyoomi about this journey the longing in his voice had been palpable, and Kiyoomi thought to himself: Iizuna won’t be complete until he reaches the Southern Pole.

Exploration is a peculiar and cruel desire; one that sates man’s curiosity and empire’s devouring.

Ownership is asserted through discovery, flags planted by eyes that have never seen a Southern sunset. Land becomes opportunity, which becomes money, which becomes power, which had never interested Kiyoomi. All that is to be known — the sum total of human knowledge — can only be shared by exploration, by people crossing unknown borders and stumbling into strangers, but gets locked away by entrepreneurial men who put up fences and gates around the free world and charge entry.

But reaching the Pole — desolate, lonely, cold — pushes the limits of human endurance for little more than the satisfaction of getting there, knowing that you — or whichever brazen fools end up making the final, frigid trek — have done something impossible.

Although Kiyoomi’s goal on this trip is ostensibly to survey the land and gain a better understanding of the resources here through the geologic makeup of the continent, he can already tell that any attempt to extract power from this land would incur a steep, impossible cost.

An impossible landscape — a difficult landscape — is one that only the most desperate men seek to tame. All they can do is attempt to survive it.

“We spent two whole winters holed up in there,” Iizuna says, throwing his arm around a startled Goshiki’s shoulders. “One room, mostly, besides the storage area and a run for the dogs. Our beds lined the walls, and more than once I woke up in the middle of the night to the bark of a dog that someone tried to sneak in for the sake of more warmth at night.”

There’s a fond smile on his face, like he’s trapped in the memory. Kiyoomi looks behind them to make sure Hinata doesn’t get any ideas from Iizuna’s story, and breathes a sigh of relief when his orange hair is nowhere to be seen. It draws a strange look from Goshiki, who then yawns.

Two winters, yet even in the summer there would have been little else for them to do, or see, but each other. Iizuna must have grown very close with the men on his expedition. Whenever he marks down his daily log, he makes two entries: one for the official record, and one for the men he last travelled with, comparing the two voyages. He doesn’t talk about them often — “Lest I start to imagine Clemson or Kai among our number, I must keep my wits about me.” — but occasionally stories slip from him.

Just like his last crew, they would be the only men on the continent.

if Iizuna has his way, they will be the only men on the very end of the Earth.

It strikes him, like the tick of a clock, that with each passing moment, they were further south than Kiyoomi’s ever been.

“How did you pass the time?” Goshiki asks, innocent and young and still learning the peculiar game Yaku’s set up with hanafuda cards.

Iizuna thinks for a moment. “The usual ways,” he shrugs. “Cards and stories, memories and work. It keeps you busier than you might think, maintaining a life out there. Mostly, we did our best to not go mad.”

A dark shadow crosses his face as he stares hard at the settlement on the edge of the continent. It’s so small; half the size of Kiyoomi’s pinky nail at this distance, and to think it held a dozen men for so long. All their hopes, all their whims, all their fights and furies. He’s about to ask about that, madness, when Iizuna’s body loosens from the tight curl of anxiety it had taken on.

“Oh, Kita should see this!” he says, abruptly, before heading towards the room where Kita is likely taking a rest after watching the shore all night.

Goshiki blinks. “He wasn’t serious, was he, Professor? Do you think it will be difficult to avoid succumbing to madness? What does that mean?”

“Well, he’s the only one with experience, isn’t he? I can only hope not,” Kiyoomi replies, choosing to ignore the question of madness, since he can’t begin to answer it. “One can only hope that the usual ways do not involve wrestling, or else Bokuto and Yaku will break all our bones before we could have any hope of seeing the pole.”

The day they land dawns bright and normal, the air dry, a snow petrel trying to nest on the stern, confused looking seals watching the ship make its slow journey through the pack ice.

Kiyoomi wakes just after dawn when the ship starts to list southward. They’ve been traveling so steadily west, seeking a base for their camp, that he’d grown a little too accustomed to the pattern of the waves and currents. Either they’d been lucky to not run into ice too thick or impenetrable, which had delayed other expeditions, or Wakatoshi’s work at the engine’s had been incredibly fruitful. Either way, it kept them from endlessly ping-ponging between north and south, turning back and forth to find a break in the ice.

He finds his heart racing, like even the slightest shift triggered anticipation.

Across from him, Tendou is also blinking himself awake, and he can see the moment the dots connect for him as well.

“Landing?” he mouths, and Kiyoomi — learning to trust his instinct — nods.

And their ship, headed directly towards the coast.

Riotous clattering at their door wakes Kuroo up, while Akaashi continues to feign sleep. Before either Kiyoomi or Tendou can clamber down to open the door — Kuroo is useless in the early morning — it opens, revealing that the veritable demon making such a racket is, of course —

“Miya,” Kiyoomi says, glaring down at him, hair lopsided from sleep. “To what do we owe this pleasure?”

He looks too good for just past dawn, his hair stuffed under a maroon knit watch cap, a glimmer in his eyes as he grins. “Captain’s callin’ for ya, Professor; looks like you’re about to earn your keep, so get out of your jammies and come greet the dawn, alright?” He taps his wrist. “Time’s ticking, better hurry-”

“If you do not stop talking I will ensure that an emetic finds its way into your morning gruel.” Akaashi’s voice is low, toneless, and muffled by his pillow. It makes it all the more threatening, and Kiyoomi shivers, not because of the cold.

Even Miya looks cowed and sheepish, eyes wide. “Is that what Kuroo deals with all the time?” he mutters, stepping into the hall, but not fast enough.

“I know where you sleep,” Akaashi adds, and Miya closes the door behind him.

Tendou, of course, follows him out — Kuroo as well, his flight instinct triggered by Akaashi’s voice — and Miya nods at them before guiding them to the deck. It’s unnecessary, because they know the path well, but perhaps even Miya doesn’t want to be alone when experiencing what Kiyoomi can only think is monumental.

A normal morning greets them; the pink sky making the snow glitter like cherry blossoms, the deep layers of blue hidden below ice, darkest at the cracks, the slight tang of salt in the dry air. They’ve turned into some kind of inlet, a break in the nearly relentless ice wall before them. Kiyoomi can even make out some dark stone, the bedrock of the continent, where a glacier must have sloughed off of the land.

The entire continent is hidden under thick layers of ice, unaltered by humanity for time immaterial. Kiyoomi’s going to turn it all over for the sake of knowledge.

Iizuna’s also standing by the door, clearly waiting for them. “Sakusa!” He sounds bright, like the dawn. “Kita has a good feeling about today, and Miya got very excited.”

“I’ve learned to trust Kita’s gut almost more than mine,” Atsumu shrugs. “Aran’ll tell ya the same.”

“We’ll need your assistance in checking the seafloor again. Miya and — um, Kuroo can help you.” He’s clearly flustered by the additional hands making themselves known. “And Tendou, you can — you know what, you just keep doing that, sure.”

He sounds flustered; Tendou has his camera equipment out and is already working to set up a stand. Kiyoomi can’t blame him; from an artistic standpoint, there’s nothing so inspirational as a potential safe harbor.

This isn’t the first time Kita’s thought they might make landfall, but this is the first time Iizuna seemed to be excited about it, and Miya isn’t the type to misplace faith. Even though his heart is still pounding, he knows they have to be patient. He’s not the type to celebrate too early, only when the work is done, so he tries to settle his pulse, nodding to Kuroo and Miya to join him at the windlass,

Although technically anyone could operate the sounding machine, the duty often fell to Kiyoomi, especially in the shallower part of the sea. They’ll be constantly taking measurements to make sure the Suzaku-maru doesn’t run afoul of a sudden undersea protrusion, mostly sunken ice or unexpected crevasses. Out in the deep sea, Hoshiumi would also run the machine, but closer to shore they all defer to Kiyoomi’s uncanny mental calculations, and careful hand, deft at feeling the difference between seaweed and seafloor, through the lead weight on a line of piano wire.

A small group had been sent out on a rowboat to scout ahead, and Kiyoomi can see their shape in the distance, Yaku and Ojiro — two of their strongest — navigating the shallow waters to make certain that the potential site for camp that Kita had spotted was, in fact, suitable.

“They’ll be the first of our men to step onto the Continent,” Miya observes, pausing briefly to look towards them. “The place we’re gonna make our home. Don’t ya feel envious?”

Kiyoomi barely spares him a glance as he adjusts the machine, temperamental but sweet in his hands. “We’ll shortly be spending the better part of the next few years there, so, no, I don’t feel much envy.” Satisfied, and waiting for Kuroo to unfurl a roll of paper such that they can start measuring the seafloor, he turns to him. “You really believe this is the spot, Miya?”

If he sounds doubtful, it’s only because he’s grown so used to the sea that he can’t fathom the notion of being on land again, of being a man who could find home in it. Miya makes it almost sound like he’s longing for it, but Kiyoomi had believed him to be the truest sailor of them all, able to cast off the land entirely, living on nothing but the sea.

“I’ve got a good feelin’,” Miya shrugs. “Doesn’t it look comfortable, just right? All the penguins and seals, ready for us to hunt. A long stretch of open shore so we can easily make land anywhere we need, and a clear shot of the rest of the landscape so we don’t have to work too hard to explore or push ahead.”

“We still have to gauge what’s down below,” Kiyoomi hedges. “You know better than I do that the ocean can obscure her greatest risks, and for all we know the continental shelf could be uniquely treacherous here. It’s not only what we see, that matters.”

Miya turns to him, a wild look in his eyes that sharpens with the clarity of shattered ice. “So why don’t ya go and gauge it, Professor?” he sneers, before turning to help Kuroo with his pencils.

Suppressing a shiver, Kiyoomi returns to the machine. Miya’s moods seem able to turn on a dime, which should frighten him; but compared to the relentless, looming unknown lurking before them, it feels almost comforting in its familiarity. Honestly, it settles him; the jeer, the insult-via-title. His heartbeat pounds evenly, at a steady pace, and he licks his lips before dropping the lead to take his first reading.

All the numbers that the three of them take down point towards Miya’s good feeling being proven right. The shelf slopes gently and steadily forward, no signs of crags or craters that can cause unfamiliar wave patterns or signal an obstruction the ship could crash into. Closer to shore, the story is likely different, but their plan all along has been to moor the Suzaku-maru a mile or so offshore, navigating themselves and all their supplies over by boat. There are no convenient docks or shipyards out here, after all.

Even Yaku and Ojiro seem to have no trouble out on the water. As the morning turns to afternoon, the faint fog dissipates, leaving the air cold and dry once more. Sunshine blares down, bleaching the ice and thin snow white, nearly blinding if they try to look at it face on. Meanwhile, Iizuna does his best to keep the men and their excitement settled, giving them tasks to help guide the ship or ready her for docking, to monitor the ice floes and do another check of their supplies, making sure that the things they plan to carry off first are ready.

As Kiyoomi reads off the numbers on the line, the meter ticking evenly, all the din fades away. It’s just him and the math, the underlying geology; they paint a picture in his mind of the seafloor, crowded with seaweed and rocks. At one point, the line jostles, jumping, and he imagines it being nudged by a curious seal. The unseen world opens in his imagination, the leaden end of the sounding line carving a shallow gash in the ice, a brief mark upon the world.

This, too, is science: the ability to see beyond his senses, like ancient astronomers looking towards the sky to see the farthest reaches of space. There’s no empire here, just math and meaning.

“Oh!” Atsumu lets out a shout that breaks his concentration, and he’s surely about to say something clever and cutting before he looks towards where Atsumu’s pointing and sees —

“Oh!” Kiyoomi mimics, eyes wide, joyous, ignoring the snort Kuroo tries to stifle.

— Out on the shore, standing on the shore, are Ojiro and Yaku. Ojiro holds his arm aloft, a burning flare in his hands signalling that he and Yaku agree with Kita’s assessment, and that this will be their camp.

Yaku, meanwhile, is squaring off against a curious and fearless penguin.

Kiyoomi feels a hand on his shoulder and for a moment thinks it must be Miya, caught in a moment of levity, overjoyed at the prospect of this next stage of their journey. He’s one of the touchiest on board the ship, but he touches Kiyoomi the least.

He doesn’t know why.

But instead it’s Kita, with his soft little smile, tugging both him and Miya close. “Break now, men,” he says. “It’s time to have a little celebration.”

It’s still too early, Kiyoomi thinks, but Kita insists, and they all pass around a dram of some sweet umeshu.

Miya snorts when Kiyoomi wipes off the lip of the bottle with a handkerchief, but does the same when Kiyoomi passes the bottle to him after taking a sip. Is he making fun of Kiyoomi? Or is he just suddenly deciding to be particular about some things? It’s unclear.

“Looks like you do have a use after all,” Miya says, winking, once they all break to go back to work. “And maybe you’ll have better faith in my good feelings, next time.”

Kiyoomi groans as he heads back to the sounding machine; in order to dock, they’ll need to get as close as they possibly can, and his measurements will be crucial. Kuroo will be joining him to continue to take notes, but Miya’s going to start loading a boat onto their launch, so they’re ready to start heading ashore.

The rest of the day passes in a rush, as they set their anchor, steady the rocking Suzaku-maru for the first time since New Zealand. It feels like he barely blinks before he’s on one of the boats — the rowboat, this time, with Bokuto rowing and Yaku egging him on — taking notes of the seafloor with the handline, pulling it up higher and higher the slower they get to shore.

Twenty fathoms… Ten… five…

He looks deep into the water instead of the encroaching coast, clear enough that he can see the rocks scattered across the ice shelf, imagining the lead disappearing between them. Bokuto’s oars shoot pretty arcs into the shallow waves, the tips of them foaming lightly as they crest against the rocks at Ojiro’s waiting feet, ready to help pull them onto the shore.

It’s with one last heaving sigh that Bokuto pushes them far enough into the rocks that Ojiro can pull, and then suddenly there is nothing left to measure. If he reaches into the frigid water, he could easily feel the continent.

Suddenly, it’s all he can do to stand and rise, to clamber out of the vessel and onto the waiting shore, falling to his knees on the rocks and snow because he’s gotten too much of his sea-legs about him and forgot that the Earth is still and steady and home to him.

This is what he was made for, this frozen, lonely world. This unexplored monster of a landscape.

Terra firma. Their home, at the end of the world.

Chapter Text

The Southern Continent

[An image of the Suzaku camp under construction, at a distance. It is daylight, and the crew are scattered around the camp, undergoing various construction efforts. Iizuna and Kita stand in the center of them, one gesturing at the ground and the other looking towards the mountains. On the edge of the image, just over the mountains, there is a blur in the sky.]

On the back of the photograph is a note in faded pencil.

‘I must have touched my plates while developing this one and smudged it. A shame!’

Setting up camp takes both an eternity and a moment.

Each moment passes long, but the hours go by quickly; before Kiyoomi knows it, he’s exhausted and asleep on the ship, rocking gently in the shallow waves near the shore.

On the first day they erected a makeshift storage hut, and have been moving supplies over to land from the boat. It’s slow-going, because everything needs to be loaded on one of their smaller boats first, then sailed to shore, then unpacked, and back again. That night, all of them slept on the ship — with the exception of Hinata, who nestled in a corner of the storage hut in a pile of the dogs he’d brought over, who yipped and ran wild over the land as if it were their native home.

It’s nothing like Kiyoomi’s ever seen; on his other research expeditions, they’ve trekked to places where people have already made a life, or were within a day’s travel. Though he often strayed and orienteered, he was never truly far from even a makeshift road, trodden by some traveler long-past.

But here, there’s no returning now that they’ve made landfall. Not for years, and he’s yet to grasp just how long that is.

Moreover, he’s never truly seen something built from the ground up the way their camp is being constructed. Sure, he's been able to witness buildings going up in Tokyo and streets getting set down, but all the raw materials came from elsewhere and, for the most part, the land was there.

But for this expedition, they had to pack everything they might need. There is no store they can go to in order to pick up a replacement saw should one of theirs fail; they had a limited number of nails, and even their sewing thread needed to be carried over here, marked down, and rationed, though Yaku has a few good ideas on how to use sinews and sealskins if they should need it.

In their hold were the prefabricated walls and floor of the hut that they would be living in; it’s a peculiar sensation, travelling with the foundation of the life you’re building. These had to get carefully unloaded into one of their launch boats before getting propelled to shore. Ojiro was in charge of steering for this, with Kiyoomi on the line; they needed as much expertise as they could get, for if they lost too many raw materials at this stage, there would be no home to build.

***

“I feel as though I should have expected this,” Kiyoomi sighs, stepping out of the path of a curious penguin while he watches a far more human stand-off unfurl. “Mankind’s very nature is most thoroughly illuminated through argument, don’t you think?”

Kuroo nods. “Although I prefer to consider the heart of our humanity to be our willingness to debate, not argue, I find myself having to agree. This feels like a tremendous waste of time and resources, and especially when I look so dashing with this shovel!”

He’s leaning on it like a garden wall, the blade of the shovel embedded in the ground; although Kuroo had been assigned to dig away at their new home’s foundations, the ongoing argument over where they should actually set up, and how they should orient the hut, was keeping him from being able to fulfill his duties.

Although there was still some unloading to be done at the boat, they’re mostly stalled until they can figure out placement. Feeling useless on the ship, Kiyoomi had returned to land in order to offer a hand, but found his assistance turned away.

The more he watches, the more he realizes that the members of their crew working on the foundations are constantly moving and adjusting the same set of rocks in an illusion of work.

Clever.

It’s strange how things so quickly become mundane; just a few days earlier, Kiyoomi would have killed to have his feet on solid ground. Now, having found it, he’s already itching for more, the spirit of exploration fluttering inside of him.

This must be how Icarus felt, he reminds himself, lest he melt in the southern sun.

“I do not know who lied to you about the shovel,” he sighs instead, looking at the sky — it’s so bright, everything seemingly bleached white. He’ll have to carve blinders out of rock or shells.

“In the pursuit of camaraderie, I will ignore your slight against this beautiful, handwrought shovel-”

“You’re making an excellent case for the beauty of the shovel, but none of that benefits you-”

“And,” continues Kuroo, bullishly refusing to acknowledge Kiyoomi’s interruption, “I’ll return to the original point at hand. All of this arguing really puts a damper on the excitement, doesn’t it? Expedition? Discovery? Promise? But instead of all of that, we’re just standing around in the cold doing nothing.”

Kiyoomi understands that. Really, he does. But - “Exploration is mostly mundane, Kuroo.”

“Still,” he blathers, gesturing at their captains. “At least invite the rest of us in! Don’t keep all the fun of arguing to yourself!”

“So you do find something of humanity in an argument!”

Kuroo considers his remark, before kicking snow petulantly at him.

The tussle which follows is not something that should be recorded in the name of science, but Yaku does steal Kuroo’s shovel while they wrestle.

(If Kiyoomi’s being honest, Yaku actually looks quite fetching with it.)

***

Iizuna and Kita seem to be at odds over where they should place the core structure of the hut on the mostly flat stretch of land they’ve staked out as their campsite.

Or rather, Kiyoomi should say, they’re in disagreement over how it should be oriented, to provide the least disturbance to them all over winter — the roof angled here to block out the wind, or here to provide a better site for storage. The argument requires a lot of gesturing and carving gestural lines with a shovel, and if it were any other duo, and any other discussion, Kiyoomi might even find the graffiti they leave in the snow to be funny.

As it stands, he just feels impatient.

In all honesty, this shouldn’t matter much; come winter, there will only be one singular concern: the relentless cold that shears off the sanity that lesser men come to hold dear.

Arguments like this — over things which seem trivial — tend to be about something deeper, unspoken. They make other issues rise to the surface; like a fracture appearing suddenly in a foundational stone, after carrying the weight of centuries of ancestors.

It becomes clear, even in the short span of time during which Kiyoomi is eavesdropping, that Iizuna has been upset for a while that Kita vetoed his original site for camp: just west of where Iizuna’s original expedition had set up. That Kita had refused even his suggestion that they travel nearer to land and explore the campsite must have been a tremendous blow to his pride.

Where humans make home, memory follows; the place must hold meaning in Iizuna’s mind, and to see it, so close, but unable to reach it, made him ache. And if he’s only allowing the pain to seep out now, well, he’s better at hiding his feelings than Kiyoomi thought, which does befit a captain. None of them had had an inkling of his disappointment until he admits in in the heat of the argument, and silence hangs over the southern continent for a while afterwards.

Kita, meanwhile, continues to assert that, for the sake of their future journey, he wanted to be closer to the mountain range, and had opinions on the nature and quality of the sea ice. It’s a practical and lively discussion, but they’re at an impasse.

Much like Kiyoomi, who hasn’t found anything to do on land; even Kuroo is attempting to make a deal with Yaku to return his shovel, and the penguin was scared away by the dogs.

He’s not giving up when he walks back to their landing site, an indent in the rocky shore from where they’ve dragged their supplies on sledges. He’s observing the shoreline, like a scientist; looking at the water, the waves, the pack-ice with a meticulous eye.

At least, that’s what he tells himself.

Someone waves from the deck of the Suzaku-Maru. His shape is just a little too hard to make out, but once he pulls off his hat and raises it to the sky, the image of the man’s thrice-damned smirk becomes clear in Kiyoomi’s mind.

Strictly in the interest of expedition harmony he waves back at Miya, until his arm starts to hurt, until someone calls for his attention from within the ship. He tugs the hat on and disappears from Kiyoomi’s view, leaving him curiously, and peculiarly, alone.

Had it just been to tease him?

Strange.

***

Although normally their captains were level-headed, reasonable men, it seems as though the argument has enough kindling to continue through dinner.

After they had all sailed back to the ship, climbing up a ladder along the side, thankful that the winds weren’t churning, they settled in for a meal, courtesy Daichi — and some of the penguin which Yaku had acquired.

They’ll spend the night here, but the hope that they’ll have a steady place on land to lay their heads grew lower and lower the longer the dinner raged on.

Kita and Iizuna sit on opposite sides of the mess, focused on their meals instead of each other, or the crew. Normally, Iizuna’s the one to lead the conversation, with Kita chiming in at moments of quiet; they’re good at keeping things lively and in line.

But with both of them out of sync, the ship feels like it’s teetering over.

“So, Bokkun - did ya see any more of your cousins out there?” Miya blurts out, suddenly, leaning across the table and pointing a spoon at him.

Well.

At least there’s someone trying to keep them afloat, even if he has a peculiar choice of ballast.

“Huh?” Bokuto’s eyes go wide. “All of my cousins are out in Tsuruta, no one’s got a relative on the ship, Tsum-tsum, are you getting a fever?”

“You mean cabin fever, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi mutters under his breath. Kuroo, sitting next to him, snorts.

There’s a thud, and suddenly Kuroo looks like he is in tremendous pain, and Akaashi has a dangerous little self-satisfied smirk on his face.

Atsumu shakes his head, laughing, before gesturing somewhere around his waist.” “Nah, your cousins. About yea high, feathered and flightless?”

A beat of silence, before — “I’m not related to penguins, Tsum-tsum! That’s Hoshiumi!”

“What do I have to do with this?” Hoshiumi squawks in response, rising to his feet, holding his spoon like it’s a weapon.

It’s too much; Kiyoomi looks down at his bowl of mushy nonsense that may or may not be a penguin and tunes them out.

At least they’re all lively again; he’d thought they were in for a boring and sullen dinner, but somehow Atsumu’s able to get them all started back up. Although their captains stay quiet, Yaku, Aran, and Tendou join in the fray; it looks like they’ve started to take a tally of who among them is most likely to be related to the penguins, and it’s an even tie between Bokuto and Hoshiumi, with one vote for Akaashi — likely Kuroo, who is only escaping the man’s ire because they’re using his slate for the tally.

Beside him, Atsumu — who lets out a low chuckle but otherwise has left the converation entire — leans back. He’s finished his food and spreads his arms across the bench they’re sitting on, one behind Ojiro and the other behind Kiyoomi.

He’s warm, somehow, even though Kiyoomi feels frozen from the inside out. It’s peculiar, how they can have the same experiences but feel them so differently. What causes his heat?

Some men are furnaces, ever burning; others, like Kiyoomi, accept the cold and blend in.

Miya isn’t capable of blending in.

“Good job,” Kiyoomi says, suddenly, the words slipping out of his mouth. He wants some of Atsumu’s attention — his fire. A little taste of it blooms, a desperate urge in his chest to escape the cold. When Miya looks at him, puzzled, Kiyoomi sighs. “Getting them all to…” he waves a hand. “Talk again. It’s admirable.”

He should have predicted it, the slowteasing grin that spreads across Miya’s unfortunately handsome face, one of his eyebrows raising. “A compliment? From the professor himself? Must be my lucky day.” Withdrawing his arm from around Ojiro — hitting him lightly on the back accidentally — he rests a rude elbow on the table and his head on hand, peering up at Kiyoomi from below.

This angle makes him look boyish, young.

“Oh, hush,” Kiyoomi chides. “It’s good; even I know when to recognize that.”

“Aw, shucks. You’ll make a boy blush.” Miya flutters his lashes, and a heat rises in Kiyoomi.

Not the kind he wanted.

“Have you led a crew like this before?” He asks, partly to distract himself and partly out of idle curiosity. “On an expedition like this, I mean. You seem like the type.”

“Should’ve expected all these questions from a professor.”

“It was only the one,” Kiyoomi mutters.

Miya snorts.

“You’d be good,” he presses, unsure why he’s insisting so hard; he really shouldn’t care this much about Miya.

“And you would know,” Miya sneers, sitting back up. Kiyoomi has just enough time to half-mourn the way Miya almost looked reasonable, for a moment before he turns to him, the full force of his stare on Kiyoomi yet again.

Despite the heat emanating from him and the clear fire in his heart, his eyes — those sacred windows to the soul — are inert. The kind of cold that burns.

“I ain’t cut out for leadership like that, Sakusa.” Miya looks like he’d been insulted. “I don’t really feel any type of way about the spirit of exploration, or any other noble cause.”

“Then why are you on this expedition?” Even if Kiyoomi feels off-balance, somehow, unsure when this conversation turned sharp and jagged, he’s not going to let Miya end it for him.

The men here — to a fault — are fueled by exploration. They yearn to see the world, otherwise they would’ve stayed back in Japan or whatever northern morass they were pulled off of, taken easy jobs, charted known seas. Each of them wants to turn an unread page.

But Miya just shrugs. “It’s a good paycheck,” he says, before turning back to the table and yelling about Yaku looking like the ship’s cat, and the conversation is as good as over.

Kiyoomi’s not a scientist for nothing, though; he’s an observer at heart, and he noticed it — a momentary hesitation, like Miya hadn’t expected his question, or known how to answer.

In his time, he’s learned that those inexplicable, microscopic moments contain multitudes.

Miya’s got something burning him from the inside out; that’s why his skin is warm when his eyes are cold.

***

Sleep doesn’t come easily to Kiyoomi that night. Although everyone else —-his entire bunk, even Tendou who seems to have drained his limitless font of energy — passes out immediately, Kiyoomi finds himself awake for hours, blinking into the darkness.

It’s hard work, unpacking the ship. Even for those among the crew who had to find busy-work on land, getting used to working and moving in this weather, this territory, is hard. It must have exhausted them, but Kiyoomi still has energy to spare.

He knows they need to be a finely honed team. He knows that, in due time, his skills will be of use.

But for right now, he feels useless, and that makes him restless, and with restlessness comes guilt.

And there’s only one cure for restlessness in the middle of the night.

Carefully, he slips out of his bunk — making not a sound lest he draw Akaashi’s ire, though their doctor seems, for once, to be fully knocked out — and walks with nearly silent footsteps to the deck.

All of them have found the need to do this at some time or other, and on the trip here they’d all become a dab hand at it. But soon enough they’ll share a one-room hut, and the small rooms and narrow hallways of the ship will seem luxurious in comparison to their accommodations. Even the thought of being trapped together in such a tight space makes Kiyoomi feel claustrophobic.

And when winter comes, that brutal, impossible season, and they’re stuck with each other and the relentless darkness…

He doesn’t know what to expect, but he’s thankful that he at least has this experience navigating by starlight.

The weather is already starting to turn cooler, and his eyes are getting used to the dark. As he settles on the deck, looking out towards where they will make camp, he can just make out the shadow smudge of penguins waddling through their debris.

Back in Tokyo, Kiyoomi’s limited experience with the cold made him worry that he would be completely useless when the mercury dropped low, but the slow journey south has acclimated him to the nuances of the cold.

Iizuna’s stories help, too: he talks of a bone-chilling cold that digs into your marrow; one that settles soft on your shoulders, full of the sun’s phantom warmth; and the worst of the bunch, the sun-burnt cold where everything is white and blinding, and the freeze sneaks up on you.

Kiyoomi’s travelled in harsh, burning deserts, and while his guides knew exactly what kind of heat and weather was safe and unsafe, to Kiyoomi it was just hot. Towards the end, though, he’d started to understand the differences.

And then — just as he was finally feeling comfortable in that world — his research stint ended, and he found himself back home.

The nature of his fieldwork meant that just as Kiyoomi found himself at ease somewhere, his funding would run out or his study would end, and he’d be whisked back to the comfortable life he’s always known. The quest for knowledge meant chasing all the different places where he could push at the boundaries of science, so the rug was constantly pulled out from underneath him.

Some scholars were drawn to the lands they studied in; fell in love with it, as though they were their own home, and kept chasing funding or stipends to remain behind and expatriate.

Every so often, when Kiyoomi is being Romantic, he wishes he were like them; able to find comfort in a place once foreign, home in an unfamiliar world. Kiyoomi, meanwhile, is unrooted.

Even when returning to the family home — where his ancestor’s spirits rest, the place where his seed of life was planted — he felt unbound. Treated as if he never left, as if his experiences abroad were just passing dreams and not an indelible part of his life, now; his whole history, ignored.

Honestly, that’s part of what he was looking forward to on this expedition: since they would be here for at least two years, he would have time to get used to this world, find something familiar in a land so uninhabited that, upon his return to polite society, he would have something in common with a handful of individuals spread across the globe, and millions of penguins. A home, in the camaraderie of strangers.

“It’s nice tonight, isn’t it, Sakusa?” Goshiki interrupts his thoughts, quietly sure-footed as always. He has two cups of warm tea in his hands — must have just returned from the mess — and hands one to Kiyoomi, who takes it gratefully. “Just a little wind, and a clear, beautiful sky.”

It is beautiful, he’ll give it that. The southern sky still feels wrong to Kiyoomi, so used to the northern hemisphere. But on nights like tonight, he can almost imagine it will bring him the same comfort, one day.

“You’re not going to ask me why I’m up so late?” Kiyoomi smiles around his tea, hands a little warmer now.

Goshiki shrugs. “Would you rather I ask why you’re awake so early?”

An interesting point, Kiyoomi contends. Already Goshiki is figuring out the shape of a life that makes sense in this desolate land. In lieu of answering, he asks another question. “Are you climbing up to the nest tonight, or keeping watch on the deck?”

“I’m going up! As long as we’re on the water, and until the pack-ice surrounds our ship entirely, you’ve got to keep an eye out at sea. You never know what might be coming.”

“Sea monsters? Demons?”

Goshiki shivers, but not from cold. “Tendou told me about these horrible whales with horns on their noses. Apparently they occupy the northern oceans, but we’ve spent so little time in these seas, who knows what could be lurking in the deep?”

Kiyoomi blinks. Goshiki pointedly refuses to look at him. He’s afraid of — what, myth? Oceanic unicorns? Their watchman is so young, sometimes; luckily Kiyoomi has faith in science and fact. There’s little to fear when everything can be known.

“Well, tell me if you find something worth seeing,” Kiyoomi says, finishing the last of his tea and reaching for Goshiki’s mug. “I’ll return these when I decide to go back to bed.”

Goshiki salutes him — Kiyoomi definitely doesn’t need that — before clambering up to the nest with his peculiar agility. Where Iizuna found him, Kiyoomi’ll never know, but he could certainly live a full life swinging from ship to ship, never touching ground. It’s like he’s born from the wind itself, and just as fickle, just as patient.

He’s meant to watch the night, but so far, the days have been incredibly long. To say that dawn has come really means the sun has only sunk partially over the horizon, but Kiyoomi can feel the darkness encroaching. The evenings getting longer, the sun more precious. Eventually, they’ll all settle into that relentless, endless night that comes with the hell of winter — the season that sticks to your bones, the cold that never leaves you, that Iizuna is chasing.

They’ll need to build their shelter well before Winter is more than a whisper on a distant wind.

Setting the mugs down, Kiyoomi holds out his hands to frame the patch of land that will be their home. The rough outlines of where Iizuna and Kita have decided their hut will be, for all they’re continuing to fight over its orientation, the holes for supplies that Kuroo — mostly Yaku — have dug, the curious penguins waddling around the piles of wood that will be their roof and walls.

The wind kicks up a featherlight layer of gritty snow, frosting the whole image over.

How can they ever survive like this? On little land, in such a small space?

Kiyoomi spreads his hands further apart.

Their hut will make up a fraction of a portion of the world he can see. The continent spreads ungainly out before him, tipping over the horizon; there are mountains, craggy and dark, jutting out of the Earth. What made them? What set them down? In a just world, maybe the southern continent would be entirely flat, and easy to traverse. Why, then, raise a phalanx of mountains to cut the land in two?

He’s small, out here. Practically nothing. They’re the only living humans for thousands of miles; we’re not meant for this kind of isolation, Kiyoomi certainly isn’t made for it, when he’s already borrowing from future fear.

“I can feel lonely in winter, when the sun abandons us,” he mutters out loud, partly to steel his nerves but mostly to warm his lips.

Has it gotten colder? He can barely feel his hands.

And what was that?

Kiyoomi frowns, putting down his hands so he can lean against the hull as if he can get any closer to the curiosity he just witnessed. He rubs his eyes for good measure, but it’s clearly there.

A shimmer, out in the distant galaxies, hovering over the landscape. It sits somewhere below the stars and above the ice, caught in the liminal space that humanity inhabits. And it glitters like the crystal of a fresh snowfall, like the twinkle of the milky way brought down to earth.

The first thing Kiyoomi thinks of is a mirage: those fantastical illusions explorers describe in the hottest deserts, tricks played on their mind by the heavy sun.

But the sun lacks dominion.

Iizuna’s spoken to them of the southern lights as well, and Kiyoomi’s read about them from other explorers, but this, too, feels different. The lights had color, toyed with electrical signals, and danced high above them, kissing the stars.

What Kiyoomi sees, now, still shimmering out there, is colorless and bright, and slowly making its way across the land before melting into the mountains.

Once the aberration has finally disappeared, he realizes that it has gotten colder; it’s like the ice has sunk into the very marrow of his bones, and he’s frozen in place, unable to move. Forced to stare out at whatever had walked across the land. The cold passes through him like a sharp wind, and as he shakes his head free from its hold, everything rapidly warms up. His joints melt, and he can move again.

The first thing he does is gasp, over and over, as he brings much needed and familiar air into his lungs; the cold had frozen all of it to nothing.

“What- what?”

What had happened, just now? Nothing like this was ever mentioned in his research, or by Iizuna; mentions of a sudden, bone-deep chill, of a distant figure walking across the horizon.

“Goshiki?” he calls out loudly, unafraid of waking anyone because the cold has been replaced by fear, and worry. “Did you see that? Something strange over the continent?”

It’s difficult to make out his expression when Goshiki is all the way at the top of the crow’s nest, but he can tell he’s shaking his head. “No, Sakusa, I’m afraid I was watching the sea. Why? Did you see something? The southern lights? One of those whales?”

That isn’t real, Kiyoomi wants to say, gripping the barrier, but neither could what he just saw or experienced. It must be some kind of madness, taking hold.

Or maybe he’s in a walking dream. By morning — true morning, when Daichi rings the breakfast bell — he’ll be back in his bed and sleeping.

It takes him the whole walk back to the bunks to convince himself that it was all just a figment of his imagination.

If it’s just his dreams, he doesn’t have to investigate. Dreams don’t have to make sense, unlike reality where everything must have an explanation, and one rooted in science.

And when he wakes up, if he’s still shivering from the phantom chill and needs to steal Kuroo’s blanket to warm up, well.

That’s between him and his journals; no one else.

Chapter Text

An Unnamed Campsite by the Shore

Science can answer all questions.

Just… not all at once. There will always be mysteries in this universe, and it will always be mankind’s priority to strive to find those answers.

This is what I believe.

I must.

- The Journal of Sakusa Kiyoomi (1917)

By the time Kiyoomi finally makes it out of bed, it’s nearly lunch.

It had taken a while, but eventually he’d fallen into a rough, dreamless sleep — as if the visions from last night had sucked all the imagination from him.

He hadn’t taken the omamori charm off from around his neck before falling asleep.

Emerging onto the deck of the ship, he stares out at the — clear, distinct — shape of the land, just to make sure it’s still there.

That the strange, hazy shape in the sky hadn’t erased it all in his sleep.

Thankfully, Bokuto is leading a boat out to their landing site as he steps out, and he accepts Kiyoomi’s explanation of illness.

Mostly — he seems pretty insistent that Kiyoomi share from his secret stash, but Kiyoomi has nothing of the sort.

(That’s a lie; Motoya made sure to outfit him with something, but he means for that to be used as a celebration of some kind. Not some cheap cooking wine to get drunk off of.)

“Fancy seeing you out here, Professor,” Miya calls out, the first one to greet him as he scrambles gracelessly off the boat. There’s a heavy mallet by his feet, and the rest of the crew are dotted around the landscape, looking lost and aimless. “Thought you might sleep the whole day away. No skin off my nose, though; don’t know what difference you’d make out here.”

“Will you cease and desist in calling me by that infernal nickname, Miya?”

“And why should I do that, when you’re as good as one to me?”

Kiyoomi grumbles, but he doesn’t feel as hurt by Miya’s insults as usual. It’s not because they aren’t cutting, or because he’s suddenly grown soft on him, but instead because it’s clear that he isn’t the object of Miya’s frustration.

His eyes, as are the rest of the crew’s are focused on their captains, engaged in rapt conversation. Aran over Kita’s shoulder and Ushijima next to Iizuna, right on the plot of land where their hut should be.

Clearly Kiyoomi hasn’t missed much while sleeping in; their hut is no closer to being built than it had been yesterday.

“Are they still arguing?” Kiyoomi frowns. “I would’ve thought they’d finish this up last night.”

“Kita said he needed a break, and everyone took it seriously because, well, it’s Kita.” He says it simply, as though it’s an explanation in and of itself, and in a way it was.

Kita is extraordinarily — and scarily — dedicated to the mission. Although he understands the value of a break and of rest, and always advocates for them to take a pause when they need, Kiyoomi can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen Kita voluntarily step aside.

Hell, he only needs three fingers; who cares about his thumb or pinky?

So for Kita to take a break? From Iizuna and from the whole conversation? It must be serious. And stranger still that they haven’t come to an accord, so deadlocked over something so simple as the orientation of their hut.

“What goes on in their minds, I wonder.”

Miya shoots him an annoyed look. “Oh? And what do you wonder? Do you think you know better than them?”

“Nothing of the sort,” Kiyoomi replies, conscious of how little he understands, in practice, of cold weather, no matter how much theory he has behind him, “only that they’re both aware of how little time we have left before winter comes on and shelter becomes a necessity, and that our captains are wasting time by arguing about geometry.” He says the last part loud enough that it carries on the light breeze to where the foursome are gathered.

Three heads turn to him. Kita keeps his eye on Iizuna.

This time, Miya looks impressed. “Is it just me, or does Aran look annoyed with you, huh?”

“Do you have something to add to this discussion, Sakusa, or do you just want to laugh over there with Atsumu?” Ojiro yells, even louder than Kiyoomi did; his voice echoes over the empty country, and they hear the distant squawk of a seabird.

“Finally, someone else appreciates your comedy, Aran!” Miya laughs.

Ojiro looks apoplectic, starting to walk towards them, but Kita — without looking — reaches out and grabs his arm, stopping him in his tracks.

“Atsumu,” he says, in a tone that is both soft yet pointed, “do you also have something you want to share?”

“How did I get involved with this? Sakusa’s the one who upset ya!”

“Everything has a voice, if only you listen, Atsumu,” Kita replies. “Now come.”

It’s eerie how easily Kita commands, and Miya listens.

Miya coughs, but gestures to Kiyoomi all the same. “Come on, Prof. Better go take it on the chin like men, huh?”

“As opposed to what, Miya, penguins?” He says it in a huff, but Miya has already started trudging ahead, flipping the hammer in his hand airily, like he’s paying no heed to Kiyoomi.

If there were a scoreboard marking whatever feud was sparked between the two of them, Kiyoomi is probably losing.

When he reaches the small gathering, he’s struck by how anticlimactic it all feels. This spot on the ice is going to be their home for the next many, many months. This location is their attempt at creating a familiar ground on the most foreign shore; a continent which belonged to no single man or nation, but upon whose land they exist strictly as guests.

Though that first step onto land felt immense, each thereafter has felt no different than any other step he’s taken on this whole journey so far, except for the harsh wind that rolls over his body. Including into this space which is to be their home.

Strangely enough, the others seem unaffected by it.

“So, Sakusa, Miya. Do you have any insight you’d like to share?” Iizuna starts, arms crossed in the dark indigo sweater he’s taken to wearing while on the ship. With leather patches sewn into the elbows, and a few lines of sashiko embroidered onto the sides, it hardly seems like a reasonable article to take on the journey. Most others have new sweaters, new clothes, paid for by their sponsors and meant to keep them warm. He only knows, on from one of those storm-drunk days on the ship, when they all said anything that came to mind to keep from freezing against the rain, that Iizuna had apparently worn it on his previous expedition, and called it lucky.

A strange thing, luck.

Despite the cold, Komori’s charm is warm against his neck.

At the very least Miya looks a little contrite, gritting his teeth and averting his gaze while he answers: “No, sir.”

Clipped. Icy, like a trained soldier.

“Easy, Miya, none of that here.” Iizuna sounds a little too light, too easy going, for someone trapped in an argument that’s lasted either a day or a week, depending on who you ask. “All I’m asking is for a bit of honesty, lad. And you, Sakusa? Anything you want to add?”

Kiyoomi opens his mouth with every plan to mimic Miya, but his treacherous throat betrays him. “Actually, I do,” he says, and Miya snaps to him.

“Sakusa,” he hisses. “What are you doing?” He looks panicked, as if they’re schoolchildren ready for a scolding.

“No, let the man speak,” Ojiro smirks, crossing his arms, too. “I want to hear this. Don’t you, Shinsuke?”

Kita looks like he wants no part of what Ojiro expects will be a humiliation ritual, but he sighs, anyway, nodding as though he doesn’t want to waste words on this whole affair.

Kiyoomi curses the part of him that did.

In lieu of answering at first, he looks out at the marked out patch of land — the rocks denoting the outline of the furthest possible reaches of their layout, the diagrams drawn into the snow where both of their leaders pressed their argument — and beyond, at the nearby mountains, the distant call of seabirds, the now-familiar sound of the waves crashing against the shore.

This is no time for lectures — Kita and Iizuna have experience out here, and don’t need to be talked down to. And besides, he doesn’t want to give Miya any more ammo to call him Professor.

It irks him, this title he hasn’t earned being used as an insult.

“I’ve been considering this since last night,” Kiyoomi admits, biting his lip which is chapped against the cold. When the shimmer that glittered the landscape left his mind, the question of their habitation entered it, “and after conferring with Kuroo —” that is, listening to Kuroo’s endless treatises and hypothesis on Antarctic wind patterns, and arguing back with him for hours over hastily drawn maps of the region “ — I believe that the dominant blizzard winds will be directed here.”

He takes Miya’s hammer — ignoring his bark of protest — and uses the head to draw an arrow into the shallow snow. Kita furrows his brows as he leans over it, giving it due consideration, while Iizuna and Ojiro keep an eye on him.

“The dominant winds will pile snow on this face, when the winter comes in; ideally, we’d like to avoid that, unless one of us wants to cut a door into the roof.” He’d spent some time looking at the slats that would be their roof, yesterday, when he was looking for something to do. They were fairly solid and, from the way Iizuna winces at his words, he gathers that he’d rather no one cut into the slats unless they were absolutely desperate. “That side will also likely be the coldest, so-”

“A good place for the dogs,” Ojiro offers, scratching his chin. “Or sample storage, or things of that nature.”

“And a bad side for humans to sleep on,” Kiyoomi nods. “Perhaps, the stove —”

Kita brightens. “Which would allow us additional space to meltwater and —”

Ojiro and Kita start discussing the placement in earnest, with Iizuna joining in, until the trio have completely shut Kiyoomi and Miya out. He can tell, though, that they’re taking his consideration to heart, and that it’s spurred them into action, rather than argument.

Miya claps him on the shoulder, tugging him close and off his feet, forcing him to stumble against Miya and his bulk. “Well done Professor,” he says, a gruff whisper in his ear. “And thank you, for stopping this infernal argument in its tracks. Even our faithful leaders sometimes need an outside perspective to remind them of how foolish they’re being. Honestly, I was getting ready to club them myself if they wouldn’t stop.”

There’s no heat to his words, no anger or mocking. He’s completely earnest.

Kiyoomi’s never heard Miya like this before. This time, when a shiver passes through his body, it’s not because of the cold.

“Let’s leave ‘em to it. They’ll call us when they need our labor to build. Come on, over to the camp stove,” Miya offers, gesturing to the shallow shack where Daichi’s set up a small heating source with Ushijima to start melting snow into water, unaware that Kiyoomi’s shivers come from another, inexplicable source, “perhaps Daichi will have some tea for us, or a greater treat.”

His arm trails across Kiyoomi’s shoulders and down the sleeve of his sweater as he pulls away, and Kiyoomi feels something tug against his hand quickly.

For a brief and terrible moment, Kiyoomi thinks that Miya is trying to hold his hand.

But when Miya turns, grinning, the gold of his tan skin already shimmering in the late summer sun, to call — “Make haste, Sakusa, or I’ll drink your serving too!” — he realizes that he just stole his hammer back.

“Thief!” Kiyoomi spits, but there’s no heat to it, either.

The Hut of the Suzaku Expedition

The hut went up quickly, with all working together; even that Professor of ours proved himself handy with a hammer. Once the walls were intact and the roof tightly pressed into place, the work began in earnest. Some of us focused on unloading more supplies from the ship to place in our large storage area, others on moving the great stove and other necessary supplies in the hut. Aran and I taught Bokuto some songs to make the work go faster, and he’s a fast learner and strong, though he can’t carry a tune.

Inside, space is tight, but bunks are only stacked two high and against an insulated wall to keep us warm. Can’t remember the last time I slept in a bunk in a house instead of a ship, asleep with someone over me. Can’t remember when last I knew I’d be on solid ground for this long, instead of chasing charter after charter, contract after contract, ship after ship. Must’ve been around when [text is crossed out and indecipherable.]

Sometimes I think I have spent more of my life on the sea than on land. I do not wish to count the years.

There was a merry argument about the hut’s name over dinner the night before we officially moved out of the ship and into our new living quarters, but eventually — and with only the slightest of fisticuffs — we came to a gentlemanly conclusion.

Hoshiumi’s got a steady hand, so he painted the sign that hangs over the entrance to The Southern Gate.

- Undated excerpt from an unnamed journal found in the archives of the Suzaku Expedition

It’s rare that Kiyoomi finds himself grateful for the crowded dormitories he’s lived in. Normally, he looks back on them with a mixture of horrified nostalgia and disgust; large groups of boys in tight spaces make a lot of horrible noises, and smells too.

Luckily, that part of his education prepared him for life in the hut — or the palace, as Iizuna liked to call it.

Iizuna also liked to think he was funny.

“It’s luxurious,” Iizuna explains, when they have their first official meeting in the hut — which they called The Southern Gate after Yaku nearly lost an eyeball during the argument about naming it — once all of the walls are up and some of the key furniture has been moved in, “because there are rooms. When I was last down here, we only had a single room, and I learned the faces of my bunkmates better than my own!”

“Iizuna is far too young to be so nostalgic of the past,” Kiyoomi mutters under his breath to Kuroo, who honks in his familiar, grating laugh. Despite their playful enmity, proximity turns enemies into allies.

To call them rooms is generous. There are parts of the wall assigned to different tasks, partially divided out with shelving, and more shelving above them on the roof that might fit Yaku if he wouldn’t glare at them all for suggesting it. Their storage room is connected to the main hut, but is currently only accessible from the outside; the dog run is much the sale, but a separate building entirely.

In fact, the only section that could truly be called a room — in the sense that there’s some privacy afforded to its inhabitants, cordoned off as it is by curtains and shelving — is the captain’s quarters. Here, there are two narrow beds, side by side, and a small desk set against the wall for them to share. Additional shelves line the walls above them, though Kiyoomi doesn’t know what will go on them.

“We can pull this curtain back if we get lonely!” Iizuna says, demonstrating the rope and pulley system that does, in fact, open the area up to the rest of the hut.

The flatness of Kita’s expression belies his enthusiasm for the notion. The pulley may rust before Iizuna has a chance to use it again.

Next to the captain’s quarters, taking up half of two separate walls and meeting in a corner, are bunks for everyone else. They’re wooden and sturdy, and the lower bunk has enough space for each of them to sit up in their bed —

“And for Hoshiumi to stand!” Bokuto hoots, as Yaku contemplates letting a rabid Hoshiumi attack Bokuto.

One sharp look from Akaashi has him thinking the better of it. Their doctor is far more skilled at preventative medicine than any other in the known world, and it doesn’t require a single pill or elixir.

Each bunk has a shallow shelf running along half the length of the bed, and he can already see some of their number — the hoarders, like Kuroo, or the sentimental, like Ushijima — organizing them with stuff.

The bunks have also already been assigned.

“I took careful consideration in setting out the order,” Kita explains, noting the place on the wood where everyone’s name is marked.

“Uh-oh,” Miya says, loud enough that even Kiyoomi, across the room, hears it, and Ojiro shoots him a stern glare.

Kita lets them investigate on their own, and Kiyoomi goes to find Miya — an action he cannot believe he’s undertaking on purpose. Call it scientific inquisition, if you want to be fancy, or nosiness, if you want to call it what it is.

“What was with your reaction to Kita? I thought you admired him?” Kiyoomi asks, as they scan for their names.

“I do admire him, don’t put words in my mouth,” Miya scoffs. “But he’s a bit of a prankster, haven’t you noticed?”

Kiyoomi frowns. “Kita is perfectly sensible and even handed,” he declares, firmly, “and I believe he has made the best personnel decisions he could make —”

“I will suffocate you if you even attempt to wake me up before breakfast, Kuroo,” Akaashi hisses. Kiyoomi watches, a little disbelieving, as he registers that Kita has set Akaashi and Kuroo next to each other, while Bokuto is in the bunk above their doctor and Yaku on the other side.

“Do you believe me, yet, Professor? Looks like I’ve got somethin’ to teach ya.” He grins, but it slowly slides off his face as he looks to the corner.

“Your silence is appreciated, but abnormal,” Kiyoomi says, before he follows his gaze and groans. “I’m blaming you for this.”

“Me? Blame Kita!”

“I will do nothing of the sort!”

“Gentlemen?” Kita appears next to Kiyoomi as if a specter; he hadn’t even heard the man sneaking up behind him. “Is there a problem?”

“There ain’t no problem, Kita, we’re just getting to know our bunks, you know? Just like ya asked!” Miya rubs the back of his head bashfully.

Kiyoomi cannot believe what he’s seeing. What is it about Kita that renders Miya so docile? He’s spent little time with the second in command on the journey here; Kita preferred to be working, and rarely made idle conversation with anyone who wasn’t Ojiro. When Iizuna would enter the mess and lead the crew through raucous, companionable songs, Kita would be standing near Daichi, going over their stocks of goods.

This isn’t to say that Iizuna is an irresponsible captain; just that Kita, like all men, seemed to have particular roles and activities which he preferred and which suited him. Just like Tendou — inquisitive and free — circumnavigated the globe in search of curious things to photograph, while Kuroo — curious, sharply intellectual, and a little adrift in the world — loved his maps. Kita’s interests merely kept him from enjoying Kiyoomi’s company.

“Ah, well! I hope you enjoy your placements,” Kita says. “It seems as though I must mitigate another altercation.” He nods to the other wall, where Goshiki and Hoshiumi are at odds over something on the upper bunk. As he turns to leave them, Kiyoomi catches the slight edge of a smile on his face, and that’s when he finally has to admit that Miya has a point.

“I fear you might be right about our vice captain,” Kiyoomi says, his voice low in a whisper practiced from many long nights at the campus reading room. “He’s a trickster, isn’t he?”

“Of the highest order,” Miya agrees, as he reaches into his coat pocket to set something upon the shelf in his bunk.

His bunk, which — in a fit of Kita’s comedy — shares a corner with Kiyoomi’s bunk, their pillows already set up against each other.

“What is that? What have you been carrying?” Kiyoomi frowns, leaning into Miya's bunk. “How are you decorating already?”

“I had a feelin’. And hey, wow, nosy, aren’t ya?” He’s kneeling on the bunk and trying out different placements on the shelf, testing whether or not the object will fall if given the chance; they did their best to level out the hut, but everything has its quirks. Perfection is an unattainable dream, and life is made from imperfections.

“Look around, Miya. There’s no privacy here.” All of their shelves and everything are out in the open. From this part of the room, Kiyoomi can take in the entire hut, with the exception of whatever is hidden — slightly — by the sheet. If any of them want privacy, they will have to redefine it, or escape out into the endless wild.

Even then, they’d be visible to the naked eye for a long time, a single dark speck against the horizon. There’s no privacy when everyone can see you. To be truly alone, you’d have to find your way to the other side of the mountain range.

“Why don’t ya teach me something I don’t know, professor?” Miya grumbles, then “shit, fuck” as the object rolls off of the shelf.

Kiyoomi catches it before it hits the bed.

Miya is just as fast, though, his hand charting a direct course for the object, and catches it, too; though it’s already enveloped in Kiyoomi’s hand.

He can feel the tough skin of his fingertips where he’s grazing Kiyoomi’s fingers, both of them cupping the object tight.

Despite the outside temperatures, he’s warm. Or maybe Kiyoomi is just frightfully cold.

“What is this?” Kiyoomi frowns. The object — some kind of doll with a man’s face — is red, with black writing and details. The pupil of only one eye is filled in, the other empty and blank, and the effect is rather unsettling. “This is meant to watch over me in my sleep?”

“It’s not some kind of protective charm, Sakusa. Seriously, you haven’t seen one of these?” Kiyoomi shakes his head, and Miya sighs. “It’s a daruma. You draw in the pupil of one of the eyes when you make a wish, and you fill in the other when it comes true.”

“Oh.” Kiyoomi blinks. “What did you wish for?”

“Blunt, aren't you? Do you go around asking everyone what their wishes are?”

“Do you think I’m in the business of befriending people who often make wishes, Miya?”

The most frivolous of his friends — his friends being small in number — was Komori, who believed, despite all of Kiyoomi’s cynicism, in the power of symbols like the omamori he still keeps around his neck, or the offerings he made to the gods. He’s always thought wishing was frivolous, and unnecessary; if you wanted something, you worked for it, and that was all.

It’s so simple.

“Hmm. I dunno, Sakusa. Maybe you’re an outlier among your own kind. Maybe you’re surrounded by people who make wishes, and it tires you out! Honestly, maybe you make wishes, and you’re just messing with me!”

Although he gets the sense that messing with Miya would be fun, Kiyoomi is woefully bereft of wishes, or the inclination to it. The omamori on his chest tingles, but he attributes it to the cold.

Instead, he lets a small smirk start to grace his lips.

“Well, Miya, I’m glad one of my assumptions about you was correct,” he says. Miya tilts his head, clearly confused. “You’re not good at reading.”

People, he adds, mentally, while Miya squawks in disbelief, words of protest that Kiyoomi refuses to heed. It is funny, though. He doesn’t want to admit that Miya is charming, in his own clownish way, but it’s easy to see why he has the ear of the men on the ship, the ability to turn the tides on tense dinner gatherings and harsh toil on the sea.

Some men truly are made for this sort of thing; this brotherhood, this journey. Able to withstand the loneliness and hardship of an expedition like this by virtue of a boisterous, warm personality.

And some men are Kiyoomi.

“Anyway,” he clears his throat, “your wish? What was it?”

“Oh. Ain’t it obvious?” He fixes Kiyoomi with a puzzled expression. “I wished for us to make it to the Pole, and back.”

Kiyoomi blinks.

“Of course. The Pole.” The key objective of their journey, in fact; Kiyoomi wasn’t just here to analyze the coast; he’s meant to procure the best understanding of the quality of Antarctic rock and ice, and see if there’s any change in makeup closer to the poles.

It’s then that he realizes his hand and Miya’s are still joined. Because he’s holding the daruma doll, he can’t easily slip free of Miya’s grasp.

Instead, he carefully lifts their joined hands and sets the doll on Miya's shelf, finding a level spot on the wood. Unlike before, when Miya was trying, it stays in position.

“Thanks,” Miya says, and the silence between them sits uncomfortable and thick, before Kita claps his hand.

“Now that everyone has found their bunks,” Kita says, “allow me to take you through our work rotas. We have a short window of time to get everything ready before ya really start to feel the cold.”

All of the eyes, even the daruma's lonely one, turn to listen.

If Kiyoomi thought the hut was cramped when it was mostly empty, it’s nothing compared to how crowded it feels when their supplies and equipment are brought in.

They bring enough for a winter and a little extra off the ship — ideally, they’ll keep her doors shut tight and insulated while they’re wintering so no one has to go on or off, keeping the supplies stable in storage and not risking running the boat out there when the pack ice gets too dense.

At least the bulk of their supplies, and the dogs, as their loudest roommates — Bokuto and Hoshiumi aside — are separated by walls.

At night, alongside the eerie howl of the wind, they also hear the muffled whines and barks of the dogs, as well as distant birdcalls. All peculiar sounds, all so unfamiliar to Kiyoomi.

Tendou’s darkroom is in a corner of the storage area — he refers to it as The Dark, and it’s catchy enough that Ushijima makes him a sign for the windowless section that he haunts like a specter. Most of the time, he’s the only one able to actually take a moment alone, unless another one of their party follows him in to try and nudge him to develop pictures of themselves first.

A part of the wall — separating their beds from the dining area in the corner next to the stove, which sits on the opposite side of the beds in the center of the wall — is dedicated to science.

The labs, which are yet-to-be-named, lest Yaku nearly suffer another injury, has desk space for Kiyoomi and Kuroo. Not at the same time, of course — far too luxurious for so small a space — but they split their time, or split the desk if they’re working through notes. The space isn’t large enough to fit the biggest of Kuroo’s maps, so oftentimes he works at their dining table, much to Daichi’s consternation.

Or as he puts it: “If you want to get seal oil on your maps, that’s your prerogative, Kuroo, but don’t yell at me when it happens.”

Yaku, who fancies himself a biologist and naturalist as much as he’s a doctor in his own right, also makes a home there, and the space is fully consecrated once Yaku’s microscope is tracked down, having been in a mislabeled box.

“What are you even planning to research out here, Yakkun?” Bokuto asks, frowning as Yaku arranges his glass plates. It stresses Kiyoomi out how close Bokuto is to the pile; clearing out glass fragments from the pine floor seems like an immeasurably miserable activity, and yet Kiyoomi would be compelled to find every remaining speck of glass. “You don’t think there’s anything interesting out here, do you? It’s so cold, and germs are so small, surely the temperature kills off everything?”

Bokuto’s scientific spirit is admirable, if ill-directed.

Yaku, who — Kiyoomi knows now — is about to be overtaken by a fit of passion, turns to Bokuto. “Aren’t we out here, Bokuto? The weather hasn’t killed us, yet.”

“Yeah, but of course we survive, we’re big!” Bokuto exclaims, spreading out his arms. “Well, I guess you aren’t. And neither is Hoshiumi. And Shouyou is kinda small.”

Across the room, Hoshiumi pops his head up from a dead sleep because he can sniff out an insult in his dreams, and Kuroo — whose self-preservation instincts have gotten better after sharing a sleeping quarters with Akaashi — promptly covers his face with a pillow to force him back to bed.

(“It’s like how birds will go to sleep when it’s dark because they think it’s nighttime,” Kuroo explains, later. “They lack an internal clock, relying instead on external stimuli. So if you need a bird to shut up, you just put it in the dark for a while!”

“Ah.” Kiyoomi didn’t ask, and he’d much rather they not talk about birds where the penguins can hear them, lest they get ideas.

Miya, though, has protests. “Who let you experiment on birds? You make maps!”

“I’m a scholar of the known world,” Kuroo shrugs. “And birds are part of it!”)

“We survive because we have brains,” Yaku taps his skull, then rises on his toes to touch Bokuto’s head. His arms start to settle by his side, like Yaku has tapped into something in Bokuto’s subconscious. “You’ve got a pretty big brain yourself, and that’s helped you survive things no one could have possibly survived, right?”

“Everything I survive is perfectly normal!”

Yaku snorts. “I highly doubt that. Our brains tell us things, right? Like to wear warmer clothes when it’s colder, or to seek shelter when we’re shivering, or how to pack enough food to feed a whole cohort of men for three years, right?”

Bokuto nods, squinting dubiously.

“But not everyone can think like that, and so some men perish. And some men just get unlucky, but the odds aren’t good for everyone, Bokuto. Anything could happen. Freak accidents, or they could reach the limits of their knowledge, even if they have ability to spare. That’s where men like Sakusa come in — he’s here to help us know more about the world, and increase our odds of survival.”

“I wouldn’t say the odds are that dire,” Kiyoomi murmurs, his feet drawn up into his bunk and a blanket strewn over them. He’s darning socks, because it’s on the rota which Kita drew up without regard for their extant skills, though he’s finding the act quite enjoyable, even if he doesn’t understand how Ushijima wore out his socks so quickly.

“But smaller things are hardier. They’re a single cell, Bokuto, and even you couldn’t squish that.” Yaku squeezes his fingers tightly together, and holds them up to Bokuto’s eyes. “Even between my fingers, there could be any millions of micro-fauna, and all of them withstand the pressure of my touch.”

“So…” Bokuto frowns at his hand, reaching out to grab the digits and inadvertently dragging Yaku close to him. “They have fewer parts, and fewer things that can go wrong, which makes it easier for them to adapt, unlike humans, which adapt slowly?”

Yaku looks a little shocked. “Remarkably astute, Bokuto!”

“I’ve read Darwin! I understand things!”

“And yet you choose to plunge off of mountainsides, armed only with planks of wood and metal poles.”

“I understand that life’s too short to not have fun! And microfauna aren’t as interesting as humans, are they? They’ve got no brain cells, and fewer things to make them cool, and —”

“Fewer things to break,” Akaashi adds, and Bokuto brightens.

“Akaashi! Where did you come from? Yaku was just explaining that we might all die!”

Akaashi’s dangerous gaze swivels to Yaku. “You were what?”

Trapped, like a doe to a wolf, Yaku gulps. “Were you not listening? You know that’s not what I was saying! He’s just trying to sick you on me! You can’t kill me, Akaashi, or else you’ll be stuck looking at gut bacteria alone.”

The only reason Kiyoomi suppresses his laugh at the disgusted expression that Akaashi makes is because he values his life.

Honestly, isn’t that enough?

Slowly, though, the crowded hut becomes as comfortable as a home to Kiyoomi.

Or, at least, what he imagines home to be like.

The Sakusa family home is relatively sterile; there’s an altar, and pretty inlaid furniture inherited through the matrilineal line, but throughout history his family weren’t sentimentalists.

In fact, one of his grand-uncles was a renowned ascetic monk, who lived a life of relative poverty and peace.

In contrast, the hut picks up characteristics of all of them.

Given the number of men inside, the hut is never perfectly clean — despite Kiyoomi’s best efforts — but it is neat and orderly, thanks to Kita, whose disposition makes no one want to upset him.

(Or they fear being pranked by him in retaliation.)

There’s a shelf of pottery in the kitchen holding all of their cups and plates, lined up out of order because Akaashi is always the last person to wake up, dozing in his cot until breakfast is nearly over, while Hoshiumi and Tendou rise shockingly early.

Kiyoomi’s bunk, meanwhile, is always covered with stray hairs because Hinata sleeps over him and there’s no good way to brush it all away. In the corner, by their dining table, is a piece of graphite embedded in the wall from a heated drawing competition between Tendou — shockingly skilled, fond of realism — and Kageyama — who can draw curtains better than he can draw a man.

It’s almost too cozy, and they’re all too aware that the days are growing shorter and shorter as the summer swiftly ends. Though they have each other, and mountains of work to do, nothing can stop their wandering minds from imagining what is yet to come: the endless months of darkness, the bleak freeze, blizzards and worse.

But for now, there is joy. Bright, brazen joy; the unearned optimism of explorers, warming their hearts. And they must hold fast to it, lest the polar dark let demons grow in shadows.

Chapter Text

The Southern Gate at Midday

It’s unfair that our most plentiful food source is also so… charming.

- The Journal of Sakusa Kiyoomi (1917)

Kiyoomi wakes up to a heated argument.

“No, I’m telling you it’s true!”

It’s fair to say, in fact, that a heated argument wakes him up.

“And I’m saying there’s no way that penguins’ll like the records you play. You’ll probably scare them all away!”

Or maybe he’s still dreaming.

What on Earth are they yelling about?

He opens a single eye; that’s all they deserve right now.

“What’s your proof, Bokkun?” Miya tilts the chair he’s sitting on onto its back legs until Ojiro smacks his skull like a schoolmarm and he straightens up. “What makes you think this’ll draw the penguins out?”

“Akaashi,” Kiyoomi hisses, sitting up in bed now that his curiosity has won the battle against rest. “Have I woken up in another world?”

“Yes,” Akaashi replies, flatly.

He shouldn’t have asked.

Miya turns to him, a devil’s look in his eye. “Ah, Professor! Glad to see you’re back among the living.”

“It was just a nap, Miya, and don’t call me that. I’ve completed my darning for the day and there’s precious little to do.” He gestures at the pile of colorful socks next to him, Ushijima’s purple socks making up most of them. They’re more patch than sock, at this point. Just what is that man doing to wear them out so quickly? “What’s this about penguins?”

Bokuto perks up. “Omi-omi doesn’t know? About the penguins?”

“He’s been asleep, Bokkun,” Miya explains, at the exact same time Kiyoomi says “and don’t call me that either.”

“Aww, you don’t like that one? And here I thought I was special, Omi-omi!”

When he laid down for a nap two hours ago, Hinata had been pulling on his boots to exercise the dogs while Tendou was showing off some of the photos he’d taken on the ship to a small crowd of the crew.

It had been a normal and agreeable day in the hut; welcome after Kiyoomi had spent most of yesterday wrangling with a particularly finicky piece of equipment before giving up and trading darning duties for help with fixing it from Ushijima.

He is a righteous haggler, and apparently learned it from his father who makes his living doing trading abroad.

But now it’s like the world has turned on his head, and everyone is talking nonsense.

“I will ask one. More. Time,” Kiyoomi grits out, gripping his pillow tightly to tamp down the impulse to throw it at whatever unlucky soul aggravates him first. He knows from experience that Bokuto will not give it back, and sleeping on a pile of his folded up sweaters is undesirable. “What is the deal with pengui- hmmph!”

“Bokuto thinks penguins are attracted to music,” Daichi explains, appearing as if out of nowhere. He brushes crumbs off of Kiyoomi’s shirt that have fallen from the cracker he just stuffed in his mouth. “And you wake up angry, don’t you Sakusa? Better eat something before they throw you out in the cold and turn you into ice.”

“Aww, we’d never throw the professor out!” Miya says.

“Thank you, Miya-”

“He wouldn’t be very flavorful kakigori, now would he?”

The pillow is still locked in his ironclad grip. He is not going to lose it today.

Daichi shoves another cracker at him, but he allows him the space to bite it gracefully, at least.

Small mercies in the southern continent.

How Kiyoomi ends up on a penguin hunt the next day is beyond him.

He’s done stranger things in the name of curiosity, both scientific, academic, and — well, otherwise. His whole career has rested on the strength of his determination and curiosity both, but in his youth, it was well known that leaving him and Komori together would spell disaster for their clothes, their possessions, or their home.

It’s not his fault that Komori was willing to entertain him on the rare occurrence that something interested him, and it’s not his fault that that was often something destructive, like wondering whether or not clothing dyes would stain their skin — he can’t tell if his veins are tinted blue naturally, or if it’s still a remnant of the indigo on his hands — or how high of a fall it would take to crack a vase in his father’s study — not very high, apparently, and easily replaced with one from a room on the other side of the Sakusa family home — or if there were a limit to the number of beetles one could catch in a day — technically no, but on the practical side of things, storing them was a different matter entirely.

All that being said, tugging on his cap and holding a heavy club in hand, stalking across the desert snow with Hinata — and his favored pup, Mikan — Bokuto — holding Ojiro’s stolen cornet, which he certainly didn’t know how to play — and Miya — in possession of his rifle, which he handled with a level of care that a sailor wouldn’t usually possess — was entirely novel.

“First time?” Miya murmurs from behind him, when he steps out hesitantly behind Bokuto and Hinata, following the dog who seems at home in the cold.

Kiyoomi hasn’t reached that level of comfort yet, and he certainly envies it.

“You know full well, Miya-” Kiyoomi cuts himself off abruptly when he turns to see Miya leering at him, waggling his eyebrows.

“Don’t worry, Omi, I’ll make sure it’s good for ya. Can’t have ya goin’ around saying I did ya wrong on your first time out.”

Kiyoomi splutters. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ll be gentle!” Miya cackles, before bounding ahead to pat the dog’s head and get scolded by Hinata for distracting him.

Despite the — crude — phrasing, Miya isn’t wrong. So far, Kiyoomi’s avoided being on the hunting and scavenging rota, trading chores and taking over other duties so that people who favored being on the hunt — Yaku, specifically — could get their fill of it.

So all of this is new to him; following Mikan as she tracks an invisible trail through the snow in search of a cluster of penguins, the heavy weight of the club in his hand like he’s one of his ancient forebears, the way Miya scans the horizon line like he’s searching for any disturbances.

Kiyoomi can’t see what he sees; just the big sky, so empty you could get lost in it.

He had the sense Iizuna was concerned about it, frowning as he does when he observes the task rota. His captain would probably have something to say about it; about Kiyoomi not putting his whole heart into the life here, how hunting was a key part of supplementing their stores and how every man needed to do it, how educational and interesting it could be.

But something about penguins — their excited little faces, the way they bounded up to them while they set up the hut with no fear, no hesitation, just curiosity — made him feel, well…

“It’s a shame that they’re cute,” Kiyoomi says, when he catches up to the trio.

They remind him of his cousin.

He’d gotten distracted while thinking of the snow beyond them; how so much of this land has never been walked upon by humans — only penguins — and likely will remain untouched; how they were the first men to breathe in this particular air, trod on this land. It’s a peculiar feeling, being the first — and, god-willing — the only men to make a life in this patch of forsaken and lonely earth.

Hubris of intellectual curiosity, and that thrice-damned explorer’s heart, landing him out here.

“Me?” Bokuto’s eyes are wide as he turns to Kiyoomi, grin as wide as the sky “why’s it a shame that I’m cute, Omi-omi?”

“Yeah, why is it a shame?” Miya chimes in.

Kiyoomi shoots him a glare. “Must you always exacerbate a situation, Miya?”

“I’ll -acerbate all I want.”

“And not you, Bokuto; it’s a shame that the penguins are cute, do you know what I mean?”

Bokuto blinks at him. “Food isn’t cute, Omi-omi,” he says, before walking away. As if it’s that simple.

Maybe it is, for men like Bokuto, the survivalists who come from humble backgrounds, who know what it takes to live in this world; but it’s a foreign concept for men like Kiyoomi. In a rare moment of kindness — or perhaps they just didn’t care — his parents let him adopt a chicken at the wet market, give it a name, and let it live out its life on the Sakusa family grounds until its natural death.

Even now, he eats his chicken with a twinge of peculiar regret, but he eats it nonetheless.

Kiyoomi stares at him in disbelief. “I was sure he’d understand,” he mutters, under his breath, forgetting that Miya is still close enough to catch it.

“What’s that? I didn’t peg your icy heart to also be a bleedin’ one. Are ya feelin’ soft, Professor?” Miya raises an eyebrow at him.

With the point of his rifle rising behind him, he looks far more intimidating than Kiyoomi could ever manage, and twice as prepared, at least.

“Look upon their faces.” Kiyoomi waves a hand out into the distance, where a trio of penguins are crossing the ice together. Their gait is cute, too, the curious way they waddle, stepping carefully over the cold ground. They seem to be heading back the way Kiyoomi and the rest of them came, possibly from the clutch that Bokuto is about to — attempt to — hypnotize with sound. “There is something about their character and demeanor that, well, charms. Don’t you see it?”

He’s not sure what he’s expecting to see when he turns back to Miya, but it’s certainly not an expression as hard as the Kiso mountains on his face, banked by a dark shadow that crosses over his eyes.

“You’ll have to shed your soft heart, Sakusa, if ya wanna survive out here. Charm can be the devil’s work, but if we only needed to kill ugly things to survive, we’d die within a week. Steel yourself, lest you find yourself lost, too.”

Miya’s voice is sharp, cutting deep into Kiyoomi’s chest. But his eyes — his eyes — are what raise the hackles of his neck, triggering an instinct in him so ancient and fearbound that he can’t help but feel like prey.

Though he’s looking at Kiyoomi, his gaze lands a million miles away; maybe a lifetime away, too. To some place beyond Kiyoomi’s ability to imagine.

It chills him to the core, freezing him in place, as if Miya is cut straight from the ancient ice underfoot.

Then the sun glints across the polished metal of the rifle, blinding him briefly, and the Miya he knows returns, a smile on his face as he claps Kiyoomi on the shoulder.

“Better catch up to them, Professor. Bokuto’ll lose us in a pinch if he has his way,” he says, before loping off to follow.

But Kiyoomi can’t help but remain behind, needing to catch the breath that Miya stole from him. Who was that serious man, hiding under the skin of the comrade he thought he knew? Why did he use his last name? And where was he if not here, at that moment?

If there’s one thing that Kiyoomi knows, it’s to always be conscious of the land underfoot. It’s the only real thing, and it can catch you by surprise when you least expect it. On an expedition, the most dangerous man is the one thinking of the book he will write, the lectures he will give, or someone waiting for him at home: he is distracted, and his heart isn’t in the journey.

But, as Kiyoomi marches on, he has the uncanny feeling that Atsumu wasn’t looking towards home, or to the glories that could await them.

No.

He was looking far, far beyond what is fathomable, to that place where no man can cross and hope to return.

It takes an hour — Kiyoomi’s face tingles in the cold — to reach the patch of snow where Bokuto believed penguins huddled.

He has a sneaking suspicion that this is because Bokuto went the wrong way at first and didn’t want to alert them. The hut is far closer than it has any right to be despite how long they’ve been walking, even when he accounts for the fact that his pace is slower under these layers.

Mikan, at least, looks pleased, though Hinata has to restrain her; the penguins, for all that they so easily cozied up to the humans, were afraid of the dogs.

It doesn’t help that, whenever she found a lonely penguin on the tundra she’d give chase, expecting to play. The penguins probably tell stories about her.

But now that they’re here, the science can begin.

The experiment is simple: draw the penguins out by playing the cornet.

The hypothesis, according to Bokuto, is — “That this will work!”

“That isn’t strictly the methodology you might use, Bokuto,” Kiyoomi warns, gently.

Bokuto frowns at him. “What does methodology matter when I’m trying to find us dinner, Omi-omi?”

He doesn’t have a rebuttal for that.

What he does realize is — “oh give me that!” — Bokuto definitely doesn’t know how to play a cornet, blowing air uselessly into the mouthpiece.

“Why didn’t you take an instrument you were better suited to?” Kiyoomi sighs, holding the cold instrument in his hands and pressing the buttons to warm up the machinery, as well as remember how the notes should form. “Doesn’t Yaku have a drum? Or a flute? Weren’t you arguing about records? Is there some reason that wouldn’t work?” It might be worth an actual experiment, to see if something of the pre-recorded nature filled the penguins with fear, rather than curiosity, or if they could sense the electricity.

“Kita said we weren’t risking bringing the record player further than five feet from the hut,” Bokuto explains.

Kiyoomi freezes. “Then why didn’t we just attempt to draw penguins closer to the hut?”

“That can be a follow-up experiment! Look at you, Omi-omi! You’re getting the hang of it!” He claps Kiyoomi on the back, and, despite his best efforts to brace himself against the force, Kiyoomi slips a foot or so along the snow.

“I thought you didn’t care for methodology!”

“Well, people change!”

People do, but one thing hasn’t: it is dreadfully cold to try to play a brass instrument, but Kiyoomi is determined to follow through on the cause for their outing. He can’t leave a stone unturned, or an experiment unresolved.

Before he raises the coronet to his lips, he looks around. There are no penguins in sight, just a few shallow hills of snow, and a rocky outcrop that is mostly ice. Bokuto claims there are penguins scattered amidst the cracks and crevices. That he saw them, and thought it might be interesting to draw them out.

Mikan stands alert, but her tail wags, while Miya stares at them incredulously.

“Well go on, Omi. Serenade us,” he says, drolly. “I’m sure it’ll be a performance worthy of a symphony.”

They say — or at least Kiyoomi says — that spite is a great motivator, and the grating way Miya implies that he can’t carry a tune makes him burn hotter than even academic curiosity.

(He will never admit this.)

In lieu of an answer, he raises the cornet to his pursed lips, and —

The Itachiyama Institute March is certainly no sweet symphony, but it is technically music, and Kiyoomi is grateful for the year he spent learning to play so he could avoid being forced to partake in the track and field events for their sports festival.

— thank the stars for muscle memory, because he hasn’t tried to play this in years. No one looks at Kiyoomi and thinks ‘ah, there is a virtuoso of our time,’ so no one asks him to serenade them, with the exception of Miya, who is, by his very nature, a fool.

He plays with his eyes shut because they water in the wind, and because he’s worried that seeing the faces of his comrades will distract his memory, and also because the idea of seeing penguins waddling out in curiosity — if Bokuto’s experiment works — is going to be too shocking a sight to bear.

It’s only when he reaches the end, the last note ringing out and echoing across the land, a peculiar cacophony that this part of the Earth will never hear again, that he opens his eyes.

“What the fu-”

“Excellent work, Professor,” Miya claps, while trying to avoid getting knocked over by the curious penguins milling around his waist, “looks like Bokuto’s experiment was a success.”

Bokuto, for his part, is distracted by the penguins — he’s attempting to get them all to line up and follow him while he hums an out-of-tune version of the March.

To Kiyoomi’s shock, it’s working. “How is he accomplishing that?”

Miya shrugs. “Like attracts like, I’m afraid. Now, are you ready for your first time?”

Kiyoomi freezes.

Right. They’d come out for the hunt, and the two penguins milling between them are perfect targets for Kiyoomi to try his hand at something Yaku described as a “great sport!” and which Akaashi called a “necessary barbarity.”

“I’m — well, Miya, my hands are full.”

And they are, technically: he’s still got the cornet in his hands, and had dropped the club earlier to make room for it.

Miya sighs. “What about the rest of you lot, huh?” His voice carries like music in the cold, but Bokuto doesn’t seem to hear him, enamored by his train of penguins.

Hinata, meanwhile, shrugs apologetically. “They don’t like Mikan,” he says, to explain the wide circle around him that is mostly free of penguins. “And I don’t want to know what she’ll do if I leave her alone.” For his part, Mikan looks fine, ignoring the penguins in favor of scratching idly at a patch of ice.

With another aggrieved groan — like he’s contemplating every decision that led him here — Miya bends down, pushing aside a penguin, to pick up Kiyoomi’s abandoned club. A flash of that dark look from earlier passes across his face, but it disappears in an instant.

“You’re going to have to learn this eventually, Sakusa,” Miya says. “You can’t be useless forever.”

Before Kiyoomi can protest, or even blink, Miya swings at a penguin.

Bokuto’s music stops abruptly.

In the end, Miya takes down three penguins before the rest of the flock remembers to be scared. Kiyoomi’s the one to drag all three of the penguins back on the sledge that Mikan had originally been harnessed to.

As if in penance, Kiyoomi takes care as he stacks them onto the sledge and straps them into place. Their warmth fades quickly, overcome by the cold of death and the continent. Their shattered skulls are unnervingly soft; he can’t withhold his grimace as he turns them so their beaks face the sun.

“Sorry about Mikan. She can only do left turns,” Hinata apologizes, as they stare in the direction of their hut, clearly to the right of them.

Kiyoomi looks at the small clutch of dead penguins, then back at Hinata. “It’s no trouble,” he explains.

It’s better that he doesn’t have to look at them.

He’s not weak, nor ignorant; he knows, intellectually, that they need to supplement their provisions via hunting. There was no way for a single ship to provide every need for their number for two years, no matter how much foresight Iizuna and Kita could have possibly had. The expense would be impossibly high, and they simply lacked the space.

Since the beginning, their plan was to hunt penguins and scavenge their eggs, and club seals for additional food and fuel. On the ship, Kiyoomi had begun work with Ushijima and Daichi on methods for extracting the oil from their flesh, and though they had yet to find a seal, he knew that soon the time would come when their research would be useful.

But Kiyoomi’s never had to kill, not like this. And it makes him uncomfortably aware of the comfort and privilege his family and their money provided him.

When he was young, he refused to visit his grand-uncle's farm, throwing a tantrum loud enough to wake the dead. It was uncharacteristic of him — usually a docile child — and clearly shocked his parents and siblings, who had no idea how to handle him. In the end, they travelled north and left Kiyoomi alone in the company of a cook who would drop off meals once a day, and he spent an entire three weeks in the summertime on his own.

It was quiet then, just as it is quiet now — none of them making much noise as they make their way back to the hut. The cornet is once more in Bokuto’s hands, though he still can’t play it, and Hinata keeps pace with Mikan, clearly enjoying the chance to exercise her out. His step is light, like he can’t feel the cold, or he can leap onto each gust of wind and carry himself forward.

Miya, meanwhile, walks beside Kiyoomi, holding the club loosely in his hand, the rifle heavy on his shoulder.

Kiyoomi can’t read his expression; it’s carefully blank, the way his father’s face looks when he’s disappointed with Kiyoomi’s goals and aspirations but doesn’t want to show it.

Careful, though; it’s easy to cast assumptions onto masks.

He misses the noise, the music; the march echoing far over snow, Bokuto’s humming, Miya’s incredulity over the penguins. Even in the hut, there’s sound; dogs stretching and barking in their compound, Yaku picking an argument with someone, Tendou needling at Ushijima or Akaashi or whoever his target of the day is, or Goshiki’s light snores as he sleeps through the day so he can stay up all night.

All he hears are his footsteps in the snow, and the scratch of the sledge behind him, scraping a wound into the untouched ice that might take a lifetime to disappear.

“Miya,” he says, needing to break the silence before he gets sucked up by it, “have you always known how to use a club like that, or is it a skill you’ve picked up since coming here?”

He finds no humor in it. “What, Professor, are you askin’ if I was born a brute or if it came upon me honestly?”

“Nothing of the sort. I was merely curious.” And desperate for distraction, he doesn’t add, lest Miya acquire an undue sense of self importance at the idea that Kiyoomi might desire the sound of his voice.

“Ah.” He almost sounds disappointed, like he yearned for a taunt.

Foolish men hide behind insults, but to his credit, normally Miya successfully makes a fool of him.

“It strikes me that I know little of your life before this expedition,” Kiyoomi goes on to say, because it’s true, and unsettlingly so. Between their journey over sea and everyone’s desire to talk and overshare, he’s learned much about them all.

Too much about some people, in fact; he could probably recite Kuroo’s dissertation if he really wanted to, and against his will he knows the reason behind every scar on Yaku and Bokuto’s bodies.

But Miya is elusive, like the first glint of dawnlight. He hoards his past more closely than the rest of them.

“Do we need to know each other to be comrades?”

“With truth comes understanding, Miya, don’t you think so?”

His footsteps in the snow, crunching below them. Miya’s slowing down to match his pace.

“Is it the truth you seek, Professor? I thought it was knowledge.”

There’s a light tint of mockery in his tone, and Kiyoomi will not take the bait.

“You know enough about me,” Kiyoomi tries. “Some might call it quid pro quo. Others might call it fair.”

“The both of us know full well that life ain’t fair, Professor.” Miya steps just a bit forward, so all Kiyoomi sees is the strong line of his back. “And you’re not as much of an open book as ya seem to think, you know? I barely know a damn thing about you.”

“You know I’m an academic. You know that I’m a child of privilege. You know that I —”

Miya interrupts him, turning around, like he’s gracing Kiyoomi with the honor of seeing his expression. “I know that you’ve got a fondness for that talisman around your neck, even when ya didn’t know what my daruma was.”

If his hands weren’t occupied with the sledge, he’d touch the omamori. “It was a gift, Miya. I’m sure you’re familiar with them.”

He turns back again, shrugging.

Miya offers nothing, and there’s a part of Kiyoomi that yearns for anything — the knowledge-seeker in him, the explorer — that he can divine from the man.

But there’s another part of Kiyoomi that doesn’t want to dig, out of fear of what could lay beneath. His fingers clenching around the club, the care with which he assembles his rifle. There’s a lot to assume about a man from the way he handles his tools, and the tools he handles.

All Kiyoomi’s willing to assume is that he has a past.

Just like the rest of them.

Kiyoomi opens his mouth to press him, to nudge him, to provoke, but, as though he can sense what Kiyoomi’s about to do, Miya turns around and the look on his face is sharp enough to cleave the words from his throat.

“Some of us don’t sit comfortably in our history, Sakusa,” Miya says. “It might be good of ya to remember that the past is behind us for a reason.” He turns forward, towards the hut. “Keep your eyes on what’s to come. That’s my advice to ya; concern yourself with the man I am now, and the man you wanna be. Not who we were before.”

With that, he picks up his pace, walking forward to catch up with Bokuto, and leaving Kiyoomi alone. Trailing a sledge of penguins behind him, the Southern Pole further beyond.

It’s one thing to keep an eye on the future; on what they’re searching for.

But how can you trust the men by your side if you don’t know what pushes them forward?

Chapter Text

Just outside of camp, late summer.

[A photo of a penguin. On the back, a note in Iizuna Tsukasa's handwriting.]

The little troublemaker.

Kiyoomi realizes he’s losing his mind when he trips over a sunbathing penguin.

“Sakusa!” Iizuna yells out, as Kiyoomi makes contact with the packed snow, rolling his body over to protect the sheaf of unbound notes in his hands. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine!” He hears Iizuna’s padded footsteps on the snow as he shuffles over to him. There’s a dull ache in his right arm as he rolls over to sit up, brushing snow from his knees while he catches his breath.

In the ever-shortening band of sunlight they’re allotted by nature, Kiyoomi had wanted to gather some observations of the landscape before darkness overtook them. Even though Kiyoomi knew he could do it on his own — “It’s just notes, Captain. I can cause no harm with a pencil.” — Kita insisted that every man needed to take a partner out, and Kiyoomi wasn’t in the business of wanting to argue with the man too much.

(Their second in command is as mysterious as he is powerful, and Kiyoomi’s been trying to stay on his good side, lest he draw the kind of disappointed look often directed towards Miya that seemed to chill him to the depths of his bones.)

This time, Iizuna was Kiyoomi’s unlucky victim.

Accomplice.

“Comrade, Sakusa,” Iizuna’d corrected. “Teammate, even. It’s not like we’re committing a crime!”

Kiyoomi had blinked against the wind. “It certainly feels like it, sometimes,” he muttered. Even in the lingering summer, Antarctica already felt unwelcoming. To stay longer, an encroachment.

Perhaps they are all accomplices when it came to this; to remain where they were not wanted.

Normally, when in need of a comrade, he’d pick Kuroo or Bokuto; the former to piss him off, and the latter because Bokuto’s strength and stamina were nearly unmatchable. Iizuna had weaseled his way into joining him this time, saying that he couldn’t let the two of them have all the fun, though very few in general found any interest in sketching rock after rock, and painstakingly calculate their coordinates so that Kiyoomi may observe them again a few months later.

(Kiyoomi, of course, is one of the few madmen who could draw rocks for hours. Though Kuroo found the process maddening, he delighted in orienteering and wayfinding, and Bokuto was a dab hand at distracting the pigeons.)

As he sighs, his ego likely more bruised than any other part of his body, he can imagine Kita’s look: the one that would practically scream See? without him having to utter a single word. Perhaps someone should study his hitherto unforeseen knack for telepathic communication; surely there are awards to be won in that field.

Iizuna drops to one knee before him, his face a little red from the cold, green hair a peculiar and uncanny seafoam against a backdrop of sky and snow. Though Kiyoomi’s grown used to the myriad of colors present in both — the veritable rainbow buried under ice — the luminous green, haloed by sun, makes him almost wary.

“Allow me to look you over,” Iizuna says, wiping the snow off Kiyoomi’s back as the unphased penguin nudges against a sleeve of his woolen sweater.

Do penguins know what sheep look like? What would they do if they encountered one?

Surely these are the most important questions of scientific inquiry. Right now it seems that way, filling Kiyoomi’s head so he can ignore the way Iizuna’s friendly touch makes him feel warm — cared for, even, as he mother hens him.

Like — “You’ve a loose thread here,” he frowns, tugging lightly at the wayward strand on Kiyoomi’s shoulder. “I think Hoshiumi’s got the mending rota today — you should put it in his pile to fix.”

He would say something snide, but Hoshiumi — so used to the biting cold and relentless snow of his northern town — is the best at all of them when it came to mending, somehow able to make Kiyoomi feel even more protected from chill than when his clothes were newly made.

Instead, he shoves his papers at Iizuna. “Take this,” he grumbles, pushing himself up — and trying to nudge the penguin away.

He fails.

Resilient. Kiyoomi likes that in a bird.

A few stretches and his arm will be fine; he’s not unused to injury, after all.

Now that he’s sure Kiyoomi’s fine, Iizuna can crow. “See, Sakusa?” he says, giving voice to Kita’s unsounded words, proving why they balance each other out as captains. “This is exactly why everyone needs to go out with a teammate.”

The penguin squawks. Kiyoomi looks at him; away from Iizuna, the blinding light.

“Do you have something to add to this conversation?” Kiyoomi presses, narrowing his eyes at the bird until the penguin, as if sensing Kiyoomi’s murderous intent — or, more realistically, confused by Iizuna’s roaring laughter — flees.

See! Losing his mind. Conversing with penguins.

They make their way to the viewing point that Kiyoomi had identified on one of Kuroo’s increasingly accurate maps of their surroundings as having the potential for being a good vantage point of the mountains they planned to cross to reach the Pole.

He’ll have to report back to Kuroo, later, that his cartography was sound; he does get a better view of the mountains, thanks to a slight incline in the ground that Kuroo had pointed out. It makes it easier to start the preliminary sketches, to peer through his binoculars to look closer at the crags of the mountain, the slabs of ice hanging like masks from the cliffs.

This is only a start; a small section of their journey. It’s even likely that Kiyoomi’s analysis wouldn’t amount to anything but a narrowing down of the path they should take.

But it was a start, and Kiyoomi has nothing but time out here.

It’s easy to get lost in this; drawing, marking, attempting to build a likely image of the mountain’s face from so far away. Kiyoomi has years of science and experience to judge how steep the cliffs are, but who knows how different things are down here, at the end of the world? He’s seen glimmers hovering over land, luminescent algae in the water, strange animals below the surface of the ice.

There’s so much more for them to uncover.

Beside him, he can tell Iizuna’s patience is being tested. At least Kiyoomi has something to occupy himself.

All Iizuna has is the cage of his mind as the cold settles around them, watching the sun start to paint the ice pink and purple as their slim window of daylight closes. He should project, though; if Kiyoomi were left alone like this, he’d lose his mind. As their captain, as a true blue explorer, as someone who has been to the Southern continent and is crazy enough to come back, Iizuna must be made of sterner stuff.

But just as madmen have their limits, so do their bulwarks.

“How did you manage that, Sakusa?” Iizuna asks, later, once he’s gotten bored with watching Kiyoomi shiver around his calipers. He snorts when Kiyoomi answers him with a confused look.

“Draw?”

“No! Missing the penguin, earlier. They are rather obvious, and you woke it from its slumber!”

Kiyoomi blinks. Trust Iizuuna to start talking as though no time had passed. Out here, minutes were both precious currency and nigh-infinite. “Am I meant to feel bad? Surely this was the most exciting part of the penguin’s day, and it’s lucky it wasn’t slaughtered!”

If a part of him is glad that Kuroo didn’t join him today, it’s because he’s become fond of searching for penguins, singing off-key songs he half remembers from his childhood, and sending his caterwaul free across the tundra. Allegedly, he’s doing it to hunt penguins, but Kiyoomi thinks he’s just doing it to be a bit of a bastard to Kiyoomi’s poor ears.

In lieu of an answer, there’s silence till Kiyoomi turns to Iizuna; the expression on his face is…

Is that pitying?

When was the last time someone felt that way towards him, and dared to be so obvious with it? Kiyoomi can’t remember; doesn’t want to. He doesn’t like the way it makes him feel. Stripped bare, like the cold’s in his bones, now, an immortal chill.

“You’re distracted, Sakusa,” he says, his tone unerringly gentle. It’s too soft for Kiyoomi, who wants the sharp edge of academia, the acrid sting of his father’s disappointment, Miya’s —

“I am focused on the mission at hand,” Kiyoomi lies, but it falls flat.

Iizuna shakes his head. “You forget that I’ve been around sailors and scholars alike in my time, Sakusa, and I know the look of a man lost in his own mind. Are you concerned about the expedition again? About what lay out there? The winter ahead?”

He can hear the unspoken question. You’re not thinking less of yourself again, are you?

And the thing is —

Kiyoomi can’t help it. Back in Japan, he wasn’t prone to fits of thinking like this; he’d never accidentally convinced himself he was out of place, even if he didn’t quite fit in with some of the academics around him. His family was another matter entirely, but at the University, his research and expertise could stand on its own.

Back there, he wasn’t someone who was often invited out for casual drinks, or a round of cards. It wasn’t necessary for his role. In his mind, he’d drawn himself as the stalwart, science-minded academic. But that kind of scholar was one who would pad the walls of their university and coast to old age on a line of decreasingly relevant papers, burying themselves deeper and deeper into their niche.

Kiyoomi — he wanted more. Wants more. And the only way to find it was to get out, to leave, to explore and discover and uncover the hidden secrets of the world.

But doing that has taken him from the comfortable and familiar halls of academia into a world he barely understands. A world of camaraderie, of Akaashi’s quiet reign of terror, Aran’s knack for memorizing old, long poems, of shared bunks and drinks and stories.

And maybe, just maybe, he’d bought into it, too. The allure of long nights spent telling stories to keep from feeling cold, endless games of shogi or go. Of shared songs, small expeditions out, inside jokes and joy.

It had slipped under his skin, that most insidious, unfamiliar thing — the hope for friendship. For belonging.

Too bad Kiyoomi is shit at it.

He doesn’t seem to fit here, either. On the cusp of having what he most desires — a knowledge and understanding no other man possesses — he finds himself flailing and that most simple thing: making a place for himself among others.

“Two years is a long time to feel this way, Kiyoomi,” Iizuna says, as though he can read his mind. He’s still several feet away, but it’s like Kiyoomi can feel his hand on his shoulder, squeezing tight, like a lifesaver thrown to the sea of him. “We can’t live in fear all the time; sure, there are many unknowns to be afraid of, but it’s hardly a reasonable state of mind-”

“I’m not afraid,” Kiyoomi snaps, before biting his tongue and squeezing his fists. He feels like a child; even more so when Iizuna comes around to look him in the eye. “I’m not.”

It’s almost pathetic.

So is the way Iizuna stares at him, full of pity.

Honestly, Kiyoomi would do the same; how pitiful is he, filled to the brim with distraction because he doesn’t have friends.

“Then what are you, Kiyoomi?” Iizuna squeezes his arm this time, firmly, pleadingly. “What is happening to you? You’re one of my men. I’m here to help you.

“That’s just it, Captain — I might be one of your men, but I don’t feel as though I belong. It’s — it’s hard,” Kiyoomi gulps. It’s strange; he never thought he’d share secrets like this. His father and family have taught him to keep such things locked away, tightly.. But down here, in the thin, cold, air — in this lonely land, where they are the only men in the world — it feels critical. “It’s hard to be friendly, to be part of them. To feel as though I fit. It was the same on the ship as it is here, and I fear there will be no way to change it, because doing it means changing who I am.”

He can’t look at Iizuna as he says it. It feels too intimate, too much; he looks towards the sky instead, to a seabird silhouetted ‘gainst the clouds, its dark shape cutting through the wind. This bird stands alone.

Why can’t he?

“Kiyoomi, please look at me,” Iizuna implores. For a moment it’s like he’s frozen in place, but then he remembers that Iizuna’s his captain, and he obeys. “I have — noticed, that you still seem out of place. That you haven’t gotten your rhythm. I was unaware that you felt it so acutely, though; you must know that with the air you give off… people think that you are unaffected by things like this.”

“Normal, human needs?” Kiyoomi snorts.

“The most base ones,” Iizuna corrects. “You have perfected the art of seeming like you can hover above it all. Try coming back down to earth, with us; you don’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to focus solely on the mission. And for all that I know you feel out of place because you lack the same experience as the rest of us, well, let that in-experience bring you joy. To many others on this expedition, these things are old hat! You’re still green enough to have some novelty left in you.”

He slaps Kiyoomi’s chest, and Kiyoomi feels winded.

To use his inexperience as… a cudgel against his embarrassment? How strange. How novel.

How curious.

Iizuna laughs. “I can see the cogs of your mind turning; treating friendship as an experiment is perhaps the best way for you to function, I should have known. Ushijima speaks well of you, and Miya —-”

Kiyoomi narrows his eyes, but Iizuna just smiles.

“What about Miya?”

“He’s clearly fascinated by you.”

“Have you considered glasses?” Kiyoomi mutters, and Iizuna laughs, despite himself.

“I know what I see, Sakusa. You’ve a friend there, I’m sure. And Goshiki, too! Our little watch has a fondness for you!

“He thinks of me as a teacher.”

“Yes, well, he’s young, and it seems like both of you have a lot to learn. Maybe even from each other!”

Kiyoomi scoffs, but a little edge of a smile lingers behind. It makes Iizuna grab him by the shoulder, squeezing tight. On his face is more of that unbearable earnestness, the kind that could make men follow him to the very edge of the map.

“And listen, Sakusa,” he says, his voice low and honest, eyes glowing golden in the remnant sunlight, “Earlier, I said you were one of my men, but I need to amend that statement. You’re my friend too, after all, and you were my friend before you were a member of this crew. So please, Sakusa —” It’s hard to look at him, and Kiyoomi squints, seeing the outline of his captain, the hazy shape of him, as if he’s dissolving into the cold, the green of his hair like the lights that ribbon the southern sky at night. “Please. For my sake, do not believe you are alone on this journey, nor are you out of place. You’re exactly where you’re meant to be.”

The silence between them hangs heavy for a while, until it becomes restless. Kiyoomi’s searching for something to say, some way to acknowledge Iizuna’s words, but all he can do is grasp onto the anchor of Iizuna’s touch and the way his presence grounds him.

Once more, his captain throws him a lifetime. “I know you’ve heard me, Sakusa. You’re a man of letters, not a man of speech, so I won’t press you more. But, tell me — do you think that’s the same penguin you woke from slumber, coming to exact its revenge?”

But when Kiyoomi looks, there’s no penguin. And when he turns to Iizuna, baffled, the man is bent double at the waist, laughing because — “The oldest trick in the book! I can’t believe you fell for that one!”

All he can do is let out a snort of laughter, before returning to his work. There’s precious little light, after all, and Kiyoomi must make the most of what he’s got.

A bunk in the corner of The Summer Gate, Late Evening; and a bathhouse, Some Winter

Before embarking on this expedition, I gave some thought as to what might help mitigate certain matters of the body's southern hemisphere. I have heard of an American grain cereal that alleviates symptoms, and have explored all manner of tinctures and tonics recommended to me by other sailors. Some suggestions were so... objectionable as to be insulting, while others - a precise application of incense, a medicine - seemed more fruitful.

Ultimately, Ojiro reminded me that this was a group of explorers, and there was nothing more tantalizing as a far-off goal. For the sake of the Suzaku-maru, the goal was the Southern Pole. But for the sake of each individual man, I feared that, suppressing their base needs and desires would ultimately have a negative effect. That it would lead them to, effectively, transmute their goal from reaching the pole to reaching their pleasure.

This expedition could not afford much, and it more certainly could not have afforded distracted men.

Therefore, I found that the best solution was to let them figure it out for themselves.

At the very least, this was the most interesting option for me.

[Excerpt from 'Seeking the Vermillion Bird: A Journey to the Southern Pole' by Kita Shinsuke]

Besides the weather, there are three topics that drive the vast majority of conversation and engagement within the hut: food, fun, and sexual relations.

— “Atsumu, you’re forgetting I was with you the whole time we were stuck in the Port of Hakodate, which means I know for a fact that you were as chaste as the Virgin Mary back then, quit lying.”

“Aran! How could you!” —

And although they could eat, and they could play games, the latter is… mostly a matter of fantasy.

The conversations about sex could go on for hours, with each member of their expedition prattling on about memories — either real or imagined — of past encounters, or their ideal type, or scenarios.

(Honestly, most of them seem beyond the realm of human physicality. Kiyoomi’s pretty sure legs can’t stretch that far, or that there are a few too many limbs in some of Yaku’s taller tales.)

“Eventually the cold will stifle their libidos,” Akaashi says, before looking thoughtfully through a narrow window. “I will make sure of it.”

Unfortunately, Yaku catches him. “You can’t freeze off our dicks, Akaashi!” His voice carries enough to make it to Bokuto and Kuroo’s ears, who both turn to their doctor, eyes wide.

“Whose dick are you talking about, doctor? Care to share with the class?” Kuroo waggles his eyebrows. “Are there any instruments you’re particularly fond of?”

If he’s not careful, he’ll wake up missing an instrument of his own.

It really is all encompassing, though. After dinner, when their stomachs are as full as they’ll get out here and Daichi’s cleaning up the stove, and when Kita and Tendou have commandeered the games board, there’s little left to do but talk about it. The things they miss, what they long for.

Talk long enough, and even the fucking falls away; instead, their voices and stories tinge with longing, of first dates, of secret kisses, of stolen moments in their youth spent in the warm embrace of someone else, the kind of warmth that fills your dreams and keeps your joints moving through the endless cold.

Luckily, just like the stretched sky packed with stars, there are no limits to dreams.

Talking is one thing.

Taking care of those needs, meanwhile, is another.

There are no secrets in the hut, not really, and despite Akaashi’s best efforts, no one’s cock has fallen off in the cold.

There are few opportunities for solitude here; even the captain’s quarters are shared by Iizuna and Kita, who sleep head to foot and switch their mattresses every week so they wear evenly. Kiyoomi, sitting at his corner bunk, can see every inch of their living space, with the exception of the few above him. Their storage hut is empty but frigid, and the dog run is fine if you’re willing to entertain the company of, well, dogs, but there’s no place of pure privacy.

(And Kiyoomi is staying far away from the dog run.)

It’s almost maddening, honestly. Were it not for their regular sojourns into the cold, Kiyoomi might lose his mind.

But that meant that taking care of one’s own needs had to be done rather out in the open; bathtimes are communal and teasing, but for masturbation, they at least maintained the illusion of privacy.

At night, when you hear quiet thumps and bitten off gasps, you close your eyes and cover your ears and pray that they return you the same courtesy.

Kiyoomi holds out on the urge for a while.

“What, are you a eunuch?” Bokuto asks, once, when he — and Kuroo and Yaku, all pests — are talking about it. Their fantasies, their dreams. Everyone else is out of the hut, with the exception of Goshiki, who is sound asleep and gently snoring in his corner bunk. The boy’s been carrying on the watch at night — taking notes on distant storms and changes on the horizon — and it’s strange to think he’d have the least light of them all.

“Bokuto, don’t be so —” Kiyoomi cuts himself off. He’d been about to call him crude, but didn’t want to get marked as being prissy or proper, especially at what seemed to be an honest question. He’d barely joined in with the chatter till now; Hoshiumi has some kind of ludicrous woodblock print that he’d carried from his hometown for years, and much of the intrigue in their hut had been surrounding it, as well as requests to borrow it.

Hoshiumi, of course, had declined. “You’ll all get it dirty, I know you will, messy bastards,” he’d said, grumbling, and although Kiyoomi appreciates the sentiment, he’d rather not too strongly about how the artwork could be dirtied.

Kuroo smirks. “Of course he’s not a eunuch, have you heard his voice? It’s nowhere near high enough.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works, Kuroo! What if they’d, you know, when he got older?” Bokuto accompanies his words with a gesture that seems anatomically reasonable if medically improbably, and Kiyoomi wonders, briefly, if Akaashi has finally figured out how to harness the power of the cold.

Kuroo, the bastard, considers it, leering at Kiyoomi and forcing himself into his space, hand trailing low like he wants to check for himself, before Kiyoomi pushes him away.

“Enough. Of course I think of carnal pleasure, I’m a man, just like either of you.” It takes all his strength to keep the red out of his face — it’s schoolyard teasing, that’s all, but it’s been years since he’s been targeted like this — and he’s pretty sure he fails.

“That’s why we’re curious,” Yaku says, though he’d been observing quietly till now. “Because you use words like carnal and pleasure. Can’t you just say dirty thoughts, like the rest of us?”

Even the verbiage makes Kiyoomi wince, though he tries his best to hide it. Kuroo clearly catches it, though, and something like understanding passes across his face.

At least, he steps back of his own accord.

“You’re one to talk, Yakkun!” Bokuto rounds on him, pointing a finger. “You won’t say a word about the blonde you’ve got back home!”

“I thought it was a brunette.” Kuroo winks at Kiyoomi, as Bokuto rounds his attention onto Yaku. Though he’s thankful that the spotlight is off of him, he should probably try to join in in the future.

Unfortunately, it’s a little hard to discuss when, well —

Even though there are a healthy mix of interests in the hut — some perhaps too healthy, Tendou, — Kiyoomi’s only ever been interested in receiving rather than giving, which puts him at odds with most of the conversations and the crewmates.

Kita may have been raised on a farm, but even he speaks fondly of plowing summer fields.

Back in Japan, there were places for him to go to sate his needs; a bathhouse on the edge of the city, a boarding house with like-minded fools. And though his parents might despair at his permanent state of bachelorhood — yet another mark against him in their ledger — Kiyoomi’s fine with this existence. He’s under no illusions that it’s sustainable, and in fact it may have prepared him even better than expected for this journey.

Sex doesn’t come easily or often to men like him. At least he can bear to be without it for a long while; Kuroo gave up the first week on the ship, and woke their whole cabin up.

But it prickles his skin, the thought of sex, the memories of fucking, even as the day carries on and the rest of the men return. He’s quiet at dinner, eyes half glazed over from the memory of shared heat, of a strong chest pressed against his back, a hand sitting low on his stomach; it’s notable enough that even Kita addresses him about it, though Kuroo — his savior, twice over now — diverts his attention, too.

He’s so distracted he doesn't notice the way Miya’s gaze seems to track him, like a fox unto prey.

And then, when he slips into his bunk that night, he pinches himself every five minutes to stay awake, to last just a bit longer.

Hoshiumi’s the lightest sleeper of them all. When his snores finally fill the room, Kiyoomi knows that everyone else is surely deep in their dreams, and none of them will know what he’s doing.

It’s not that he’s embarrassed.

He’s just found himself suddenly self-conscious.

Which is utterly ridiculous.

This is natural. It’s a human need. And he’s held himself back for so long, restricting his desires for months, even. Given how hard he was working beforehand — spending long days and longer nights in the reading room at the University, exercising to increase his stamina — it’s been even longer than since the journey began that he’s indulged.

No man is an island, and no man is a rock. Kiyoomi, too, must move.

Taking a deep breath, he licks his hand before slipping it into the waistband of his pants, palming his soft cock.

It doesn’t take much. Just the memory of his last visit to the bathhouse, the warm body pressed up behind him, is enough to make him stiffen.

Although it had been one of those unseasonably cold days, the bath was still empty. It was a little run down — Kiyoomi’s foot flexes with the memory of the chipped tile that he has to avoid — the wood stained dark with memories of a distant era. Once upon a time it had been a mixed bathhouse, but now it only served men. The divider had been taken down, leaving an indent on the walls and floor where it had once stood.

Kiyoomi only visited this particular bathhouse late in the evening, when the water had grown murky and dubious from a full day of bathers. Luckily, he had no interest in entering the water, even though he shivered as he stripped down. The university had baths for its students and scholars’ he knew when they changed water, and adjusted his schedule accordingly.

Despite the chill of the hut, it’s like he can still feel the sweltering steam coming off of the water in the baths and the pipes that were always just a little bit too hot.

In the bathhouse, he would sit on one of the small, wooden blocks and clean himself, taking so long to do it that he felt as if his skin might fall off. At that hour, there was no overseer; the only men still in the bath were older, and one of them would eventually slip out to eye Kiyoomi, lingering behind, with interest.

And soon enough — “Ah…”

Kiyoomi bites his lip to kill the involuntary noise, opening an eye to scan the room. His cock is fully hard now, dripping pre-cum as he slowly twists his hand around. Luckily, no one is awake, everyone still in their sleep.

He closes his eyes again, heart racing.

That was close.

He covers his mouth with his hand, just in case.

In his imagination, he can feel the warm, sweat slick body press against his back, a hand coming around to cup his chest, before he gets pushed to his knees on the inclined floor, the water from the showers sloughing down to the drain. The warm tile on his hands, the braziers hidden underneath. The dim light from half-broken lamps. There were no witnesses to this stolen pleasure, to a stranger’s fingers opening him up, the cock filling him.

Any other bathers averted their eyes. Dipped into the water so their splashes would cover the sounds of Kiyoomi’s moans.

He has to bite his sleeve when he comes, because he knows — from memory, from experience — that he’s loud when he does, and he collects it in his hand with the intention of cleaning himself off with their snowmelt.

The cold of it would remind him where he is: in a frigid hellscape, on the far side of the world, far removed from the decrepit bathhouses and the memories that were worn into the tile.

Kiyoomi’s too used to the applied ignorance of his fellow bathers, which is why he yelps when he opens his eyes to see Miya staring at him, the whites of his eyes blunt like stars in the night.

Fuck.

How long had he been watching?

Miya’s sitting up in his bunk, his knees pulled to his chest as he fiddles with the daruma that usually sits on the small shelf over where he keeps his head. He puts it back, leaning towards Kiyoomi in the corner.

“Don’t worry, Prof,” Miya smirks, the infernal nickname taking on a teasing tone in his whisper. “I made sure to avert my eyes, most of the time.”

Kiyoomi fixes him with a glare.

“Make sure not to piss Akaashi off the next time you touch yourself, by the way. You’re not as quiet as you think you are. Wouldn’t want your instrument gettin’ cold, would ya?” He leers at Kiyoomi, looking him up and down.

Kiyoomi blushes, his hand still shoved down his pants.

“Piss off, Miya,” he says, before standing on his wobbly legs to hobble over to their sink.

He doesn’t return to bed until he’s sure Miya’s laid back down and his eyes are no longer piercing Kiyoomi.

There’s a dangerous little shiver in the pit of his stomach, though.

Kiyoomi doesn’t think he’s quiet. He knows that he’s loud, even if he should have learned secrecy in all these years. The only reason he’s aware, though, is because his former lovers have told him.

Miya’s the first person to notice it without needing to draw it from his lips.

He can’t help the thrill that runs up his spine from this new, shared secret; this perverse camaraderie.

Perhaps this is what Iizuna means by fascination.