The third-years left first. Then the second-years, peeling off in pairs toward the bike racks. Kai sat on the dugout bench and pulled at the collar of his practice jersey, which had welded itself to his shoulders somewhere around the fourth inning of drills. April in Miyazaki stuck to the skin. April in Regensburg was still wearing a jacket.
Daiki came out of the storage room, rolling his wrists. He'd been putting away the catcher's gear, squatting and lifting and stacking with the same quiet precision he brought to everything. His knees popped when he straightened up.
"Bike?" Daiki said.
Kai looked at the rack. His loaner bike, the one from the shed behind the Nishimura house, leaned against the fence with its rear tire flat against the ground. He'd noticed it that morning and forgotten.
"Walking," Kai said.
Daiki didn't argue. He left his own bike in the rack, shouldered his bag, and started toward the road.
On foot, with their legs heavy from two hours of drills, the walk would take longer than the usual ride. Daiki turned left at the first intersection.
He turned wrong.
Half a block past a convenience store that used to be, according to Daiki, a bookshop. Then the road ended at an apartment building that shouldn't have been there. Daiki stopped. Looked at the building like it owed him an explanation. Turned around. Kai followed without comment.
"It was a through-road," Daiki said. In Japanese, short and flat.
At the right fork, the road led uphill past houses with laundry on the balconies and a vending machine humming in front of a closed barbershop. The road curved and Daiki stopped again, jaw tight, scanning both sides of the street.
He switched to German. "I lived here until I was ten."
Kai waited.
"The shrine was right there." Daiki pointed at a parking lot. A low concrete wall ran along its edge, stained with water marks. No torii gate. No stone. Just cars and faded paint lines. "Stone torii. You could see it from the road."
"Now it's a parking lot."
"Now it's a parking lot." Daiki looked at the concrete for another second. "Maybe it moved."
"Shrines move?"
"Things move." He picked a direction and kept walking.
German settled around them. It happened every time, once the last teammate was out of earshot. A whole day of constructing sentences in Japanese, choosing the short word because the long one might be wrong, and then the switch. Kai's shoulders dropped a centimeter. His sentences came out longer, less assembled.
"My shirt is part of me now," Kai said.
"You'll adjust by June."
"What happens in June?"
"It gets worse."
"Helpful."
"I'm being honest."
Daiki was scanning side streets as they went, looking for something he recognized. His eyes moved from one building to the next, fast, checking, not finding. A woman in a wide hat was watering plants on her doorstep and stared at Kai as they passed. He was used to the staring. In Regensburg, he'd been tall. Here, he was a different category of tall. People looked up and kept looking, trying to make the height make sense.
"There." Daiki pointed ahead. The blue-and-green sign of a FamilyMart, bright against the grey shopfronts. He went straight for the drink case and came back with two cans of melon soda, cold against Kai's palm.
They stood on the narrow sidewalk outside, backs against the wall, bags at their feet. Cars passed. A kid on a bicycle slowed down, goggled at Kai, and nearly rode into a parked scooter. Kai watched him wobble away without correcting.
"Does that happen a lot?" Daiki asked.
"Every day."
"In Regensburg?"
"No."
"Welcome to Minamisaki."
Kai drank. The soda was sweet, fizzy, and the color of a tennis ball. His arms ached from the bullpen session, a deep tiredness that sat in the triceps and wouldn't move. Standing here, drinking something cold, not walking, not throwing, not trying to understand anyone, was the best his body had felt in hours.
"Different from what I remember," Daiki said, tilting the can. "Sweeter. Or less sweet. I can't tell which direction the memory went."
He took another sip, frowning at the can like it owed him a better answer. Kai had no memory to compare it against. It was green soda. It was cold. That covered it.
"The jersey was the biggest they had," Kai said after a while. He pulled the collar. The shoulder seam sat a full hand-width above where it should have been, the sleeves ending before his biceps did. "The batting helmet sits on top of my head." He held up his right hand. The knuckles were bruised, a dark line across the first and second joints. "This morning. Hallway to the bathroom."
"You forgot to duck."
"I forget every morning."
"You'll stop forgetting."
"Or the doorframe will give up first."
Daiki smiled.
Kai turned the can in his hands. "Everything is built for someone else. The desks. The shoes they gave me for indoors. The bathroom stall is a joke."
"My problem is the opposite." Daiki crushed his empty can and held it. "Everything fits but it's in the wrong place. The light switches are on the wrong side. The bathroom is left instead of right. I poured soy sauce into my miso soup two days ago because the bottles are where the other bottles used to be."
"You speak the language, though."
"Speaking it and thinking in it are different." He tapped the side of his head with the crushed can. "I still translate. In my head, behind every sentence. After a full practice in Japanese, my brain is wrung out."
"And then German."
"German is the rinse cycle." Daiki flipped the crushed can between his fingers, a catcher's idle habit. "When I was a kid here, I thought in Japanese. Then Regensburg rewired it. Now I'm back and the wiring is wrong again."
Kai turned his own can, empty now. He'd spent the whole walk not thinking about which language he was using, and that was the point. In German, his mouth moved and words came out. In Japanese, there was a gap between the thought and the sentence, a pause where he assembled things from parts.
"Ready?" Daiki said.
They walked. Daiki found the road.
It was a wall that did it. An old concrete block wall running along someone's property line, grey and cracked. One crack ran diagonally from the top, branching near the middle like a river delta. Daiki stopped in front of it and his shoulders dropped.
"I walked past this every day in elementary school." The house behind the wall was different. New roof, new paint, a satellite dish that hadn't existed when Daiki was eight. But the wall was the same wall, and the same crack, and that was enough to tell him which direction home was.
They turned and the road sloped downhill toward the residential streets near the coast. Somewhere under the traffic and the insects, a low wash of sound pressed through. Ocean. Kai heard it before he knew what it was. Daiki tilted his head, listening, and then nodded once.
The walk was easier downhill. Their shadows stretched out in front of them, long and dark on the warm pavement.
"I don't know anyone's name," Kai said.
Daiki looked at him.
"Not just the team. The teachers. The neighbors. The woman at the school gate who bows every morning." He rolled the empty melon soda can between his palms, the aluminum clicking softly against his bruised knuckles. "I know faces. I don't have any words to put on them."
Daiki was quiet for a few steps. "I know the names," he said. "But the faces are wrong. The kids I knew are teenagers now. I look at someone in class and think, that might be Hayashi. Or it might not be. I can't match the person to the memory."
"Have you asked?"
"Asked what? 'Were you seven years old in 2017?' That's a strange question."
"At least the FamilyMart doesn't care who I am," Kai said.
Daiki exhaled through his nose. Close enough to a laugh.
Lights on in the kitchen. Haruka's voice carried through the open windows, talking to someone on the phone, her laugh sharp and warm in the evening air. Daiki sped up half a step. Kai had seen it before. His mother's voice pulled him forward, every time, a fraction faster.
Kai stopped at the gate. The melon soda can was empty and warm in his hand. Inside, the lights made yellow squares on the ground and Haruka was still laughing and the hallway to his room had a doorframe that would catch him at the eyebrows if he forgot to duck.
He went in.
Haruka had set out barley tea. Cold, in tall glasses, condensation already running down the sides. She looked at them standing in the genkan, sweaty and grass-stained, Kai's knuckles dark with bruising, and said something in Japanese. Fast, amused, with a gesture at Kai's hands.
Kai looked at Daiki.
"She says you look like you lost a fight with the building."
Kai picked up the glass. The tea was cold and good and had a name he didn't know yet.