FIC: Rewind Forward (D1) 6/63
Title: Rewind Forward (6/63)
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
Rikkai takes the prefectural championship the first day of the tournament with fast games and easy wins. Niou plays most rounds. Sitting with the regulars instead of in the rest of the stands gives him a sense of importance, to be able to sit in the front row next to Yanagi and turn around to see Marui scowling at him. Free griptape and sportsade bottles are passed around to regulars only and although Niou hates the fake orange drinks, he chugs them anyway. If only because he can and Marui can’t.
June brings the first cicadas of the year and the district games. Practices last longer into the nights for the regulars with each passing week until Niou starts to walk home in the dark, passing under glowing streetlamps that shine and hum with electricity and insects.
“The ball machines,” Nishiki tells them, “are your new best friends.”
“Maybe they’re Sanada’s,” Niou mutters when Sanada is the first up to practice with three at a time, three balls, non-existent intervals and so fast they are almost like Sanada’s invisible shots.
Kirihara sniggers beside Niou.
Yanagi whispers something to Yukimura, who sends Niou a pointed glare. The smile falls from Niou’s face. And then it falls into a frown when it is his turn to practice. Yanagi mans the machines.
He winks at Niou, then presses the green button.
Niou hits one ball, two, but misses the third. Before the third ball has even hit the gymnasium floor, a second round is shooting at him. He backhands one ball, manages to catch the second on the tip of his racket, but there is no way he can keep up like Sanada.
“Should I adjust the setting to slower?” Yanagi calls out, his voice calm and sweet.
It is Sanada and Yukimura’s turns to snicker this time.
Niou makes an effort to finish his Literature homework early that night at home. His mother seems impressed when, at half-past eight, he presents it to her in the kitchen.
“My hands are covered with rice,” she says. “Show it to me so I don’t get it dirty.” She forms another rice ball and presses a spoonful of bean paste into it, before closing the hole.
Niou shows it to her. Her glasses slide down her nose as she reads. She nods. Niou nods too.
“Can I go outside and play?” he asks his father. “I showed mom my homework already.”
His father raises an eyebrow, staring at him with a skeptical eye over his glasses. He sets down the newspaper. “Only if you take your brother with you.”
Niou groans.
His brother groans too.
They make it as far as the street when Niou stops.
“Why are you standing there?” his brother asks.
Niou brings a finger to his mouth. “Shhhh,” he says. In the west is a park. Perfect.
They walk there, crossing the street between bouts of traffic, all glowing headlights and engines roaring. Somewhere nearby a tomcat howls, his meowls echoing in the thick summer air. It is nearly the end of June. Regionals are coming up.
The world is completely alive at night, although the darkness would make it seem otherwise. Niou can hear better, every squeak of his brother’s shoes, every crunch of twigs and earth below their feet. A few lingering pigeons scatter when they walk into an open space of park. Benches line areas, garbage cans sit placid and festering on the edges of forested parts.
His brother runs off for the swings. Niou hangs back, choosing instead to wander into a thicket of bushes. They scratch his bare arms and his knees, but this is the perfect place.
The cicadas are the loudest at this time. He might not be able to see the insects to catch them, but he can hear them instead. Niou listens for the chirps to start again, and when they do, with slow and careful motions, he inches closer.
It takes him an hour to catch a bug, but having an insect cupped inside his hands, tickling his palms is worth it, knowing what could happen.
“Okay, let’s go now!” he shouts to his brother.
“What’s that?” his brother asks, nodding to Niou’s hands.
“Just a bug,” Niou says.
His brother says nothing, but waits, as if expecting Niou to throw it in his face or shove it down the back of his t-shirt.
Niou doesn’t.
“It’s just a bug,” he insists. “Not for you.”
“For nee-chan?”
Niou shakes his head. “Not her either.”
***
Yanagi doesn’t have a clue.
He’s just has his birthday a few weeks back, fourteen, old. Older than Niou, older than Yukimura, older than Kirihara. However, as far as Niou is concerned, it’s a birthday present he gave, happily shoving a bug through the slats of Yanagi’s locker at seven thirty in the morning.
Yanagi screams almost as shrill as Sanada when the cicada jumps out, except then his voice cracks and the moment of fear turns into one of embarrassment as well. Niou can’t stop himself from laughing. Kirihara stares and stares, unsure of whether to laugh at Yanagi or offer help finding the bug and squishing it, judging from the way he keeps opening and closing his mouth like a dying fish.
The seniors laugh along with Niou. Even Sanada’s mouth twitches.
But Yanagi goes on and on, not like Sanada, who stood on top of a bench, no Yanagi stomps around and flaps his arms and grabs the nearest racket (Sanada’s) and starts to bash the entire contents of his locker to a furious pulp, in between his croaking screams.
“I think the bug is dead now, Yanagi-senpai,” Kirihara says, the first one of them to venture to speak with Yanagi.
Yanagi pauses, mid-strike. His hair is plastered to his brow, he’s red-faced and panting, but the rest of his skin is white with fear. Or with anger. Yanagi turns to the team, wild-eyed, like an animal caught in a cage. He almost reminds Niou of Kirihara for a moment, that same sort of determination to destroy.
Albeit Yanagi just wants to squish a cicada, not an opponent on the court.
“Ah, yes,” Yanagi says, as though he hasn’t just spent five minutes straight flailing a racket.
Sanada takes a tentative step forward. He pats Yanagi on the shoulder. Yanagi’s eye twitches until he realizes that it is Sanada’s hand, not a bug.
“All right, all right, enough of this,” Niskiki says. “We’ve got to get out to practice. Regionals are coming up.”
It is almost fortuitous on Niou’s side when, as Yanagi starts to close his locker door, something small and black jumps out and lands square in the middle of Yanagi’s head.
Niou almost wants to offer Yanagi a racket to swing again, but he restrains himself, instead running out of the locker room to start the laps he knows are just waiting on the tip of Nishiki-buchou’s tongue.
***
The next morning Yanagi shows up at practice completely changed.
Niou feels his jaw drop.
The entire locker room goes silent as Yanagi walks in, tall and lanky and casual, as though nothing is different.
“Uh…nice haircut, senpai,” Kirihara says.
Yukimura pushes his headband up his forehead. “I didn’t think you hated cicadas that much, Yanagi.”
“At least your haircut isn’t as gay anymore,” Niou says.
He gets ten more laps from Nishiki-buchou, but Niou is convinced that is only because Nishiki starts to laugh at his joke and make those three monsters angry too early in the morning.
***
Not only is there tennis practice with the club, but in gym class they start a tennis unit.
Niou is all smiles the first day, even bothering to rush to gym class in the afternoon to change first into not his gym uniform, but his tennis jersey and shorts. Sanada had asked the teacher the day before and told Niou that, yes, they could wear their tennis club uniforms to class.
It is almost like showing off. Niou’s hands shake with the anticipation of holding his racket, of having the eyes of his classmates on him as he makes effortless swings and rallies. For marks, no less.
There are a few classmates on the tennis team, but no one except Sanada on the regulars with him.
Niou ruffles his hair, and steps out of the changing room. Sanada is already on the courts. They play outside and the mid-afternoon sun is warm on Niou’s face, a nice change from morning or after school practices.
Running laps in class is easy. Three laps, nothing more. Swing practice is something else. The girls in the class flap their arms and pathetically make motions, but they seem more interested in fixing their hair and adjusting their bras than they do in tennis.
Sanada and Niou catch each other’s eye. A collective shudder passes through both.
Girls and tennis. Together.
Yuck.
They practice real rallies in pairs. Normally Niou would have nothing to do with Sanada (who is crap at any sport they’ve ever played in class except tennis), but he nods when Sanada looks his way after the teacher announces they should pick a partner and a side of the court.
“Let’s show them real tennis,” Niou says.
Sanada’s lips curl up under his cap.
“Only rally,” the teacher says when he sees Sanada about to start a serve. Sanada’s smile crumbles and he makes a pathetic underhand shot at Niou. Pathetic to anyone else, but still fast and strong by gym class standards.
Niou returns with his backhand, two hands on the racket for extra power. Sanada lobs the shot, then backs away when the teacher shakes his head. Niou sees the teacher turn his back.
He runs up to the net, jumping into the air and smashes the ball down.
“Fifteen-love,” he says, walking back to the baseline with his racket slung over his shoulder.
Sanada makes a noise. “We can play,” he says.
“No playing!” the teacher yells. “Sanada-kun, Niou-kun, this is a gym class not your after school club!”
“Let’s see you start the rally then,” Sanada says.
Niou shrugs. He pulls a tennis ball from his pocket. Around them, dozens of other students send half-asses shots into the nets, into other courts, at such obtuse angles they are more likely to his the walls than the other players. Niou wants to laugh. It’s worse than the freshmen in the tennis club.
He bounces the ball once and looks up.
Across the gymnasium he recognizes that megane dork from two failed tryouts for the tennis team. The ball sits forgotten on the floor as Niou watches.
Megane dorks can’t play tennis, he thinks.
The ball is moving towards the dork, who stays at the baseline. Go to the net, idiot! Niou would have rushes for the ball without a second thought. A real tennis player would have. But the megane stands there, too dumbstruck or too blind to move until the ball is too close.
And then something strange happens. The megane moves enough, steps backwards, and then he hits the ball, but it’s not any shot he makes.
It is, by far, the most brilliant fucking shot Niou has ever seen.
Like a laser beam it cuts through the air, the ball so fast in leaves a flashing trail of neon behind. The megane stands with a flourish for a moment as his partner’s jaw drops, then the megane fixes his glasses and the moment is ruined.
“Aren’t you going to hit the ball?” Sanada snaps. “Niou!?”
Niou shakes his head. A piece of hair falls in his eyes. He blows it away. “Who is that?” he asks, nodding as casually as he can towards the megane, who has gone back to proper rallying, although pathetically slow and easy. The megane has a good grip, controlling the pace of the rally well. His partner runs around like a moron, swinging too wide and with too much of a follow-through, but the megane manages to make every single return with ease.
“That kid- who is that?”
Sanada pushes his cap up, then turns back to Niou. “Yagyuu. He’s in my class. Why?”
“Did…” Niou scuffs the toe of his running shoe on the rubberized gym floor. “Did anyone know whether he could play tennis or not?”
Sanada looks even more confused. If it weren’t for his cap, Niou could count the furrows in his brow. “I heard he tried out for the tennis club but wasn’t interested. He plays golf.”
Niou wants to burst out laughing. Golf! The stereotype of megane dorks everywhere!
Instead, he says, “I see.”
***
Finding out about this Yagyuu is harder than Niou would have thought.
Niou knows that Yagyuu is in Sanada’s class, although he really never noticed him before. Or cared. Not that he cares now, but he wants to know why that megane hides such a brilliant tennis shot. And how can Niou copy that shot for himself?
The issue of the Regionals presses, though. Niou has an hour and a half of practice in the mornings before school, school, then two and a half hours of more practice afterwards.
“Make sure to get enough sleep!” Nishiki-buchou tells them.
“Should we prepare a training menu too?” Yanagi asks after Monday practice.
Nishiki shrugs. “We’re probably fine. Unless you suddenly go home and pork out on sushi and chocolate and beer after every practice.”
“I think we should prepare menus,” Yukimura says.
The seniors on the team ignore him. Yamada starts to talk about a girl whose top he felt up behind the cafeteria dumpsters last week.
“She had a rack!” he says, cupping the air with his hands and squeezing.
The senpais all laugh and slap each other on the shoulders.
Kirihara makes gagging noises at his locker.
Niou pulls his school shirt on and starts to button it up, leaving the top three loose. He can feel someone over his shoulder, a looming presence. Yanagi pokes his arm, reading off a clipboard. “Do you want to use our training menu we’ve prepared?”
“We?”
“Genichirou and I,” Yanagi says.
Niou looks at Yanagi for a moment, before he says, “No”. I’m busy.
“You should try it,” Yukimura says. “We want to win the Regionals and the Nationals-”
“Don’t worry so much, Yukimura-kun!” Kawasaki says. “You think about winning way too much for it to be healthy!”
Yukimura glares at him. He folds his arms over his chest. “When I’m captain, things will be different,” he says loudly.
“You gotta wait your turn,” Nishiki-buchou says.
Niou grabs his tennisbag, his backpack and walks out of the locker room before an argument starts. It’s not that he doesn’t want to stay and listen, but the sky is dim and he has to be home to finish his homework fast if he wants to go sleuthing anytime this week.
The teachers, though, seem to feel that now is the best time to give loads of work, when the weather is beautiful and warm outside, when there are sports tournaments coming up, and when Niou would rather be anywhere than sitting in his room, at his desk, at quarter past nine with his mother waiting to inspect his work.
He clicks his mechanical pencil furiously, snapping the leads off at the end between math problems. The answer to one is -2. The answer to two is x=3. Niou could do these problems with his eyes closed, or with a calculator.
But his father took that away, too.
“I need to calculate a few last measurements for a commission,” he said.
“You can use Masaharu’s graphing calculator,” his mother offered.
“Masaharu plays games on it!” his brother said.
The snitch.
He doesn’t finish chemistry and English for another hour. His brain hurts. His temple throbs. Niou scratches his scalp. He needs a shower, too- the fast, cold shower after tennis makes him feel dirtier than clean, especially with the weather so humid. His clothes stick to his arms and he can’t get comfortable in his deskchair because his body hurts from all the extra practices at tennis club.
It sucks.
And he can’t stop thinking about that shot. The way it looked, straight and fast and deadly accurate. The way that megane dork Yagyuu in crybaby Sanada’s class posed afterwards, as if giving the shot that little bit extra to make it special. To make it brilliant.
With a frustrated groan, Niou throws his English off the desk. The papers scatter onto the ground, a flurry of white across his bedroom floor. Niou kicks them aside. Across from his mirror, he watches himself.
He stands up as straight as that boy, so straight it hurts his back. He lifts his arm up, and with his left, he points an invisible racket. He looks good, but he feels like an idiot, posing there, all puffed up like Marui would. It just doesn’t work as well with his hair everywhere, messed up and prickled over his head like a hedgehog. No, he needs glasses and a frown and to flatten down his hair.
Would the shot even work for a southpaw?
Niou shakes his head. He doesn’t know and he can’t practice in his room. There is barely enough room to pose and pretend.
He grabs his dictionary, forms some pathetic half-assed sentences, runs down the stairs and shows his mother. She reads some of the words and looks skeptical, but then she was never good at English in school, so if it looks like English, it’s good enough for her.
Niou figures he can ad-lib in class if he’s called on anyway.
He slips his cellphone into his shorts pocket, then grabs his running shoes. Peering around the doorway, he can see his entire family watching a documentary on genetics. How boring. How fucking dorky. How perfect for a perfect family of megane dorks.
Niou ruffles a hand through his hair, making sure to make it as messy as he can. “Man, I’m tired. I’m gonna go to bed!” he says with a loud voice.
“Good night, Masaharu,” his parents both echo.
The show must be boring enough that no one notices when he doesn’t stomp up the stairs, but instead creaks open the front door and slides out, closing it behind himself as quietly as he can.
His shoes squeak on the porch. Niou stands on his tiptoes.
And then promptly trips onto the pavement.
Inside the house, his mother moves. A shadow flickers across the curtains, the light shifting. Niou crouches on the ground under the window, focusing on breathing through the pain in his knee. He can feel hot blood trickling down his shin. His skin throbs.
The shadow moves again, then goes still. Niou waits a minute longer, maybe more, before he stands up and limps off, trying to be more careful of his big, ungainly feet.
The nearest payphone is a good ten minute walk to the pharmacy. Niou walks quickly. It is dark out. He yawns, and then yawns again. The streetlamps hum with insects and the roads are lonely. No one is out tonight, not with the wind starting to pick up and the skies growing murky above. A storm is in the forecast. The air has a heavy sort of heat, thick and miserable, the kind that sticks to Niou’s skin and makes his scalp itch even more. His hair feels like crap. It will probably start to fall out in chunks soon, being fried and stiff and full of peroxide bleach and gel.
Small groups of teenagers linger near the main roads. Niou slinks along in the shadows. He’s smaller, he’s alone, they could beat him up for money. He watches the ground and moves faster.
The smog from Tokyo has made the air stagnant. Garbage litters the sides of the streets, shivering with each passing vehicle. The voices of teenagers, swearing and smoking and groping each other. Niou walks past the pharmacy, then steps into the phone booth.
He flips through the tissue pages, searching the columns for the right family name. There are several Yagyuu families listed. Niou has no idea which one to call. Any of them could be his.
His change clinks in the phone. Niou picks up the receiver, clears his throat and hopes his voice doesn’t crack. He doesn’t even know this Yagyuu’s first name, which makes his plan seem even less likely to work.
The first number an old woman’s voice answers. “Hello?” she croaks.
Niou slams the phone down.
The second number is no better. A pulsing ringtone sounds five times before a voice machine picks it up. It sounds like university students, young male voices on the background of the recording. They could go to any one of the universities nearby. Niou can count a dozen potential schools off the top of his head alone, including Rikkai Dai.
Niou sighs into the receiver. The machine records his breathing, then he hangs up on that too.
The third number and Niou’s initial reservations about calling have fizzled along with his hope that Yagyuu will pick up at any of these listed numbers. He’s a megane. His family is probably all the same, just like Niou’s. They could have an unlisted number, for all he knows.
Except when that voice answers, Niou doesn’t know what to say. He listens as Yagyuu says “Hello? Hello?”
Niou could say something.
His mouth goes dry. A noise in the back of his throat echoes in the plexiglass walls around him. Yagyuu says, “Is someone there? Hello?”
And then, in the background, a girl’s voice asks, “It’s probably just a prank, Hiroshi.”
Niou slams the phone down. It clicks, hanging up, but falls down, dangling underneath the machine. The line beeps continuously, dead.
Niou reads the address in the phone book one more time, committing the numbers to memory. It’s on the other side of the school from where he lives, several stops on the train away, a neighbourhood where Niou has never been.
But now he knows that much.
Niou licks the back of his teeth, testing the sound. “Yagyuu Hiroshi,” he says. “Yagyuu Hiroshi.”
***
Still, all Niou has to do is walk past Yagyuu in gym class and he remembers the fact that Yagyuu is a megane. A fucking megane dork. His tennis shot aside, Yagyuu Hiroshi could be just another person for Niou to have fun with.
Yagyuu pushes his glasses up his nose constantly. Niou shoves into Yagyuu’s side at the bin of tennis balls, where Yagyuu carefully picks up one in each hand. “What are you, blind?” Niou whispers when Yagyuu stares at the balls in his hand, as though he can’t quite see them.
Yagyuu won’t look him in the eye. He’s so predictable, even more than Sanada is, when he stares at the wall and mutters, “Excuse me.”
That laser shot aside, Yagyuu Hiroshi might as well be playing golf. He swings his racket too much like a golf club. He’s too polite, always giving his partner the first serve. He’s too quiet on the court- Sanada huffs and puffs and grunts his way through every swing and every shot. Even Niou finds himself exhaling as he serves, making little noises when he moves across the court. Tennis isn’t supposed to be silent. It’s sweaty and noisy, with bouncing balls and the smash of rackets and the cheering.
Yagyuu probably golfclaps when his partners manage to make a shot over the net.
Niou rolls his eyes. Fucking dork, he thinks, as he sees Yagyuu push his frames up the bridge of his nose for the eleventh time this class.
“Hey! We’re playing right now!” Sanada shouts across the court. “Would you pay attention, Niou?”
Niou blinks. He can feel something hot flush across his face and it is extremely uncomfortable, for Sanada to have caught him in the middle of watching Yagyuu like this. Not that he doesn’t watch people, but…it was his moment and….
Niou looks up across the net. He snorts through his nose. He can’t think of anything to say, so he says nothing and takes a spot at centrecourt to wait for Sanada’s serve. Sanada gives him a long, hard look from under his cap, then frowns.
Everything completely as it should be. Everything completely normal again.
But Niou can hear the sounds of balls bouncing and slapping against the hard gym floor, and he knows some of those are from the court where Yagyuu is playing.
The class is instructed to pick up their balls, something which Sanada grumbles about. He wouldn’t know anything about how to best scoop them up without the balls rolling away because he never had to do anything like that as a freshman. Niou makes sure to go slow when reaching for the balls. Sanada needs his ballboy practice more than Niou does.
The showers after gym class are much more disgusting and haphazard than the tennis club. Now, after being a regular these past months, Niou has gotten used to having his own showerhead, not having to wait, and usually managing to get hot water and good pressure. Here, in the gym locker room, water sprays everywhere, there is mould creeping up the tiles where students haven’t bothered to clean. It’s stinky and sweaty and steamy and too full.
Niou gasps under the cold spray. His hair plasters down over his face. When he dries his head, a classmate snorts at him and says, “Nice look, Niou-san.”
Niou sticks out his chin and snorts. Idiot, he thinks.
A few students have their own rackets, which they bring in cheap cracking covers, which they toss onto the ground, completely unthinking. Sanada’s eye twitches every time someone throws their racket down and flops down on the bench to untie their sneakers.
Niou stands with his back to everyone else, his tiny tin locker cubby door open. He can’t be bothered to rub any gel through his hair, so he ties it back with an elastic and leaves it at that. No one tugs his hair at school, although Niou knows that from the look in some of their eyes, they want to. They roll their eyes behind his back, whisper about rat tails being dumb and lame.
Niou doesn’t care.
Instead, he takes his time to slowly button his shirt and loop his belt, to ease his arms into his school blazer and redo his tie three times, before he pulls it loose and messy again. The motions are ingrained on him. He doesn’t need to think.
Yagyuu doesn’t slouch like Niou does. And he is the only other person, besides Sanada and himself, to carefully put his racket away in a small navy tennisbag. It’s not a bad racket, but it’s obviously not the best. If Yagyuu were to use a racket with tighter strings, would his shot be even faster? If he knew about overgrips, would his laser be scarier?
“You think you’re good at tennis, do you?” Niou asks. More than half the students have left the locker room by now, and Yagyuu doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to make it to his next class. He leans over the bench tying his shiny black shoes and fixing his damp, perfectly parted hair.
Niou’s father parts his hair right down the middle too.
Yagyuu ties his left shoe, then stands up. He fixes his glasses, pushing down the rim to straighten them out. Yagyuu looks at Niou through slitted eyes, but not really. His gaze seems focused not on Niou’s eyes, but something deeper, as though he the one picking at Niou’s brain, not the other way around.
Niou snorts, a smile forming on his mouth.
“Why would you think that?” Yagyuu says, his words slow to form.
Niou clicks his tongue. “Where’d you learn that shot?” he asks.
Yagyuu looks at his tennisbag, then back up at Niou’s face. “From no one,” he says. “Doesn’t the tennis team teach you how to make your own shots?”
Touché!
“If you’d joined, you would have found out for yourself,” Niou counters.
Yagyuu’s shoulders stiffen. He picks his tennisbag up and walks past Niou, shoving into Niou’s side. “I don’t need to hear about that,” he snaps.
The door swings closed behind him, but it might as well have slammed in Niou’s face.
***
Niou gives up on Yagyuu Hiroshi, for the rest of the week, at any rate. On Saturday, the Regionals begin. They breeze through rounds one and two. Niou plays in round one, doubles two with Yanagi. The pairing is interesting, but works out well enough. Yanagi keeps exactly to his section of the court and nods for Niou to do the same. Niou misses points, one here, another there, but he focuses his mind on his half of the court. He’s not an iron wall of defense, but he has the moves. A split step, a twist serve, a slice like Sanada would use, it’s easy to win the game.
Round two, Niou is scheduled for singles two. He doesn’t get to play.
He buys himself a hot dog, pleased with himself and the team. In the line, he sees a head of pink hair just ahead of him. Marui orders four hot dogs, smothering each with mayonnaise, chili sauce, seaweed flakes, dried fish and ketchup. It dribbles down his chin, a disgusting mess smeared around his mouth.
“No wonder you can’t make the regulars if you do that,” Niou says.
Marui takes too long to swallow, too long to respond and he misses his chance to kick Niou. “Fuck you!” he shouts after Niou. “I’ll make the team next season! I’m working on my secret plan!”
The semifinals start promptly after lunch break. Niou checks the time on the digital scoreboards posted by the courts. Five minutes until start time. He meets up with the regulars under a shaded picnic area deep in the heart of the Rikkai camp.
Cheerleaders are already out on the courts, their breasts jiggling, their pompoms flashing yellow and black. The element of win buzzes through the atmosphere. Niou inhales it all in.
The Regionals should be an easy win.
“We’ll take the semifinals easy,” Nishki tells them. “It’s some team from Tokyo called Seigaku. Apparently they’re all crap, except one kid. I’ll play him in singles three. Yukimura, Yanagi, singles one and two. Niou, you’re in doubles two with Yamada. Sanada, doubles one with Kirihara.”
“Eh?” Kirihara says, his eyes bugging out of his head.
“Not with him,” Sanada booms. “Anyone but him!”
“All you have to do is win,” Nishiki says.
***
Yamada is a better doubles player than Yanagi. Niou relaxes on the court, taking the net and making the moves. Behind his back, he motions to Yamada. Left, right, back, centre. Seigaku’s doubles two are a kid with a buzzcut and a tall senior. They play like crap together and the buzzcut kid seems too intent on making shots from the baseline to be of much other help.
But the few shots the buzzcut kid does make, Niou raises an eyebrow and watches them arc over Yamada’s head. A few points by Seigaku is nothing in the big picture and the game ends with a 6-0 win.
A good way to start the countdown towards the Regional title.
Sanada-Kirihara pair, Niou doesn’t know what to make of them. He sits in his uncomfortable aluminum seat in the stands. Everyone around him cheers, claps and whistles as Sanada and Kirihara walk onto the court, as far apart from each other as they could possibly be.
They are, in a word, a mess.
Sanada shouts, Kirihara screams. Sanada goes for a shot, Kirihara lunges for it. Kirihara plays net and smashes every ball he gets. His eyes are red before the end of the second game, but not from the tennis. No, his eyes are red from frustration as Sanada yells, “I’ll get it!” and swings back to hit a deep shot.
“I wanted that!” Kirihara shouts back. “It was on my side!”
“Seigaku to serve!” the referee announces. Kirihara stomps back to the baseline. Sanada glares and crouches down at the net this time.
Despite the mess, Sanada manages to keep the stamina in Rikkai’s favour with his immovability at the net. Like a mountain, he pounds every shot back to Seigaku taking point after point after point.
“We won’t try that pair ever again,” Yukimura tells Nishiki.
“You wait your turn to be captain, Yukimura,” Nishiki says, clenching his jaw. Yukimura’s eyes narrow. When Sanada comes off the court, Yukimura grabs him by the sleeve and tugs him to the edge of the stands. Niou tries to listen what Yukimura tells him, but they are too far away, there are too many people in between and the Seigaku side have burst out with renewed clapping for their singles three loser.
Nishiki-buchou hops over the ledge, speaks with the coach at the bench, then steps onto the court, smiling and smirking and standing tall.
Seigaku’s player is a lanky, scrawny junior named Tezuka.
A megane dork playing tennis.
Niou laughs.
The player next to him inches away.
Tezuka even has the same bland, boring expression as Yagyuu. He probably excuses himself onto the court and offers Nishiki the first serve, too.
Niou yawns. It’s just another win.
But immediately after Nishiki serves, something is wrong. The lanky megane dork doesn’t miss the shot, he doesn’t make a slow underhand, or a baseline lob, no, he’s playing like his life is on the line. And maybe Seigaku’s life is on the line, being singles three, but there is no way they can win.
Tezuka, though, he has a shot that Niou can’t work out. At first he thought it was nothing special, just Tezuka refusing to move from the baseline like that buzzcut doubles player, but after two or three shots, it isn’t that. Tezuka isn’t moving because he has the ball completely in his control. Nishiki runs around frantically, making smashes and two-handed shots that skim the net, anything to change the pace, but Tezuka sucks every single shot towards him.
Seigaku screams like kids at Christmas when the final score is announced.
The Rikkai Dai side is stone silent. Even Niou’s mouth hangs open.
They lost a match.
They lost a match.
No one says a word as Yanagi makes his way onto the court. No one says a word to Nishiki-buchou, who hangs his head under a limp sweat towel on the bench. Niou sits at the very end of the row. The view is better here. And there is a smear of ketchup beside Nishiki on the bench anyway.
Yanagi sets his racket on the bench, zipping his bag up. He nods to Sanada, who stands pinkfaced near Yukimura, neither of them willing to sit down. Yanagi completely ignores the coach as he strides out onto the court. He should be confident, he’s one of the best players on their team, maybe on the circuit, but….
After the sting of loss, no one knows what to think. Niou’s hands feel unnaturally cold resting on his knees, even though the air is thick and hot.
Seigaku’s singles three is a senior about the same height as Yanagi, but as skinny as Yukimura. The entire Seigaku team is scrawny, from Tezuka to the buzzcut doubles kid to their seniors. Do they not ever do any weight training? As much as Niou hates it, at least he’s got more muscle mass. All he has to do is squeeze his arm and flex his biceps to know how much the benchpress and weight machines have helped.
Yanagi holds his racket so tight his hands are splotched red and white. He’s paler than usual and his lips move constantly as he runs across the court. There is no playing around. He’s there to win, to avenge their loss.
Nishiki doesn’t watch the game. He stands up after Yanagi’s second serve and walks up the bleachers with his back turned. Niou watches him for a minute, but the game is much more interesting. The crowds are hushed. Seigaku has simmered down, realizing their mistake with the win as Yanagi plays baseline, sending fast, high shots over the senior’s head, then down to his feet, always aiming for a blind spot at the back of his court.
Yanagi serves, he volleys, he takes the points, he wins the games, then the set.
Despite a hitch, Rikkai has taken the semifinals. The teams shake hands at the net. Niou claps along with everyone else, but the elation has left their side. Only the freshmen smile and whoop and pump their arms.
It’s not the Nationals. Everyone in the club should know better than to get excited over a flawed semifinals.
The regulars take the BMV bus back to Kanagawa. The rest of the team is packed into the coach buses, rented specially for the tournament. As they stepped onto the buses, Niou could see Marui handing out celebratory snacks and candies to friends and teammates. The tennis club laughs and chats and talks loudly, but the regulars’ bus is quiet, subdued. Nishiki sits by the coach at the front, looking greener by the minute.
Yukimura sits in the back, across the aisle from Sanada and Yanagi. Niou sits in front of Yukimura. Kirihara is packed into a seat ahead of the other two seniors. “Do you have your seatbelt on, Akaya-chan?” Yamada asks.
Kirihara drops his gameboy on the floor and attacks Yamada, his fists flying. “Shut up!”
Yanagi scrambles over Sanada, and reaches over the seats awkwardly, pushing Kirihara back. “Don’t, Akaya!” he says.
Kirihara seethes through his teeth. Yamada rubs his neck, moaning about the bruises he’ll have in the morning. Yanagi sits beside Kirihara for the rest of the ride home, listening to his mp3 player as Kirihara finally sits still with his gameboy, clacking away at the buttons.
“We need to stay undefeated,” Yukimura hisses to Sanada. “We can’t lose any more games, Sanada.”
“Yes, Yukimura,” Sanada mumbles.
“We need to work on our net play,” Yukimura says. “Yanagi looked sloppy. Your form was crap, Sanada, and Niou-”
Niou starts to turn around to look over his shoulder.
“-Niou’s working on something, I know it, but he’s distracted and his shots have too much of a follow-through. They’re crap, Sanada. This is all crap. We have to win.”
“Yes, Yukimura,” Sanada says.
“I can hear you,” Niou says.
Yukimura chuckles. “I know.”
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
Rikkai takes the prefectural championship the first day of the tournament with fast games and easy wins. Niou plays most rounds. Sitting with the regulars instead of in the rest of the stands gives him a sense of importance, to be able to sit in the front row next to Yanagi and turn around to see Marui scowling at him. Free griptape and sportsade bottles are passed around to regulars only and although Niou hates the fake orange drinks, he chugs them anyway. If only because he can and Marui can’t.
June brings the first cicadas of the year and the district games. Practices last longer into the nights for the regulars with each passing week until Niou starts to walk home in the dark, passing under glowing streetlamps that shine and hum with electricity and insects.
“The ball machines,” Nishiki tells them, “are your new best friends.”
“Maybe they’re Sanada’s,” Niou mutters when Sanada is the first up to practice with three at a time, three balls, non-existent intervals and so fast they are almost like Sanada’s invisible shots.
Kirihara sniggers beside Niou.
Yanagi whispers something to Yukimura, who sends Niou a pointed glare. The smile falls from Niou’s face. And then it falls into a frown when it is his turn to practice. Yanagi mans the machines.
He winks at Niou, then presses the green button.
Niou hits one ball, two, but misses the third. Before the third ball has even hit the gymnasium floor, a second round is shooting at him. He backhands one ball, manages to catch the second on the tip of his racket, but there is no way he can keep up like Sanada.
“Should I adjust the setting to slower?” Yanagi calls out, his voice calm and sweet.
It is Sanada and Yukimura’s turns to snicker this time.
Niou makes an effort to finish his Literature homework early that night at home. His mother seems impressed when, at half-past eight, he presents it to her in the kitchen.
“My hands are covered with rice,” she says. “Show it to me so I don’t get it dirty.” She forms another rice ball and presses a spoonful of bean paste into it, before closing the hole.
Niou shows it to her. Her glasses slide down her nose as she reads. She nods. Niou nods too.
“Can I go outside and play?” he asks his father. “I showed mom my homework already.”
His father raises an eyebrow, staring at him with a skeptical eye over his glasses. He sets down the newspaper. “Only if you take your brother with you.”
Niou groans.
His brother groans too.
They make it as far as the street when Niou stops.
“Why are you standing there?” his brother asks.
Niou brings a finger to his mouth. “Shhhh,” he says. In the west is a park. Perfect.
They walk there, crossing the street between bouts of traffic, all glowing headlights and engines roaring. Somewhere nearby a tomcat howls, his meowls echoing in the thick summer air. It is nearly the end of June. Regionals are coming up.
The world is completely alive at night, although the darkness would make it seem otherwise. Niou can hear better, every squeak of his brother’s shoes, every crunch of twigs and earth below their feet. A few lingering pigeons scatter when they walk into an open space of park. Benches line areas, garbage cans sit placid and festering on the edges of forested parts.
His brother runs off for the swings. Niou hangs back, choosing instead to wander into a thicket of bushes. They scratch his bare arms and his knees, but this is the perfect place.
The cicadas are the loudest at this time. He might not be able to see the insects to catch them, but he can hear them instead. Niou listens for the chirps to start again, and when they do, with slow and careful motions, he inches closer.
It takes him an hour to catch a bug, but having an insect cupped inside his hands, tickling his palms is worth it, knowing what could happen.
“Okay, let’s go now!” he shouts to his brother.
“What’s that?” his brother asks, nodding to Niou’s hands.
“Just a bug,” Niou says.
His brother says nothing, but waits, as if expecting Niou to throw it in his face or shove it down the back of his t-shirt.
Niou doesn’t.
“It’s just a bug,” he insists. “Not for you.”
“For nee-chan?”
Niou shakes his head. “Not her either.”
***
Yanagi doesn’t have a clue.
He’s just has his birthday a few weeks back, fourteen, old. Older than Niou, older than Yukimura, older than Kirihara. However, as far as Niou is concerned, it’s a birthday present he gave, happily shoving a bug through the slats of Yanagi’s locker at seven thirty in the morning.
Yanagi screams almost as shrill as Sanada when the cicada jumps out, except then his voice cracks and the moment of fear turns into one of embarrassment as well. Niou can’t stop himself from laughing. Kirihara stares and stares, unsure of whether to laugh at Yanagi or offer help finding the bug and squishing it, judging from the way he keeps opening and closing his mouth like a dying fish.
The seniors laugh along with Niou. Even Sanada’s mouth twitches.
But Yanagi goes on and on, not like Sanada, who stood on top of a bench, no Yanagi stomps around and flaps his arms and grabs the nearest racket (Sanada’s) and starts to bash the entire contents of his locker to a furious pulp, in between his croaking screams.
“I think the bug is dead now, Yanagi-senpai,” Kirihara says, the first one of them to venture to speak with Yanagi.
Yanagi pauses, mid-strike. His hair is plastered to his brow, he’s red-faced and panting, but the rest of his skin is white with fear. Or with anger. Yanagi turns to the team, wild-eyed, like an animal caught in a cage. He almost reminds Niou of Kirihara for a moment, that same sort of determination to destroy.
Albeit Yanagi just wants to squish a cicada, not an opponent on the court.
“Ah, yes,” Yanagi says, as though he hasn’t just spent five minutes straight flailing a racket.
Sanada takes a tentative step forward. He pats Yanagi on the shoulder. Yanagi’s eye twitches until he realizes that it is Sanada’s hand, not a bug.
“All right, all right, enough of this,” Niskiki says. “We’ve got to get out to practice. Regionals are coming up.”
It is almost fortuitous on Niou’s side when, as Yanagi starts to close his locker door, something small and black jumps out and lands square in the middle of Yanagi’s head.
Niou almost wants to offer Yanagi a racket to swing again, but he restrains himself, instead running out of the locker room to start the laps he knows are just waiting on the tip of Nishiki-buchou’s tongue.
***
The next morning Yanagi shows up at practice completely changed.
Niou feels his jaw drop.
The entire locker room goes silent as Yanagi walks in, tall and lanky and casual, as though nothing is different.
“Uh…nice haircut, senpai,” Kirihara says.
Yukimura pushes his headband up his forehead. “I didn’t think you hated cicadas that much, Yanagi.”
“At least your haircut isn’t as gay anymore,” Niou says.
He gets ten more laps from Nishiki-buchou, but Niou is convinced that is only because Nishiki starts to laugh at his joke and make those three monsters angry too early in the morning.
***
Not only is there tennis practice with the club, but in gym class they start a tennis unit.
Niou is all smiles the first day, even bothering to rush to gym class in the afternoon to change first into not his gym uniform, but his tennis jersey and shorts. Sanada had asked the teacher the day before and told Niou that, yes, they could wear their tennis club uniforms to class.
It is almost like showing off. Niou’s hands shake with the anticipation of holding his racket, of having the eyes of his classmates on him as he makes effortless swings and rallies. For marks, no less.
There are a few classmates on the tennis team, but no one except Sanada on the regulars with him.
Niou ruffles his hair, and steps out of the changing room. Sanada is already on the courts. They play outside and the mid-afternoon sun is warm on Niou’s face, a nice change from morning or after school practices.
Running laps in class is easy. Three laps, nothing more. Swing practice is something else. The girls in the class flap their arms and pathetically make motions, but they seem more interested in fixing their hair and adjusting their bras than they do in tennis.
Sanada and Niou catch each other’s eye. A collective shudder passes through both.
Girls and tennis. Together.
Yuck.
They practice real rallies in pairs. Normally Niou would have nothing to do with Sanada (who is crap at any sport they’ve ever played in class except tennis), but he nods when Sanada looks his way after the teacher announces they should pick a partner and a side of the court.
“Let’s show them real tennis,” Niou says.
Sanada’s lips curl up under his cap.
“Only rally,” the teacher says when he sees Sanada about to start a serve. Sanada’s smile crumbles and he makes a pathetic underhand shot at Niou. Pathetic to anyone else, but still fast and strong by gym class standards.
Niou returns with his backhand, two hands on the racket for extra power. Sanada lobs the shot, then backs away when the teacher shakes his head. Niou sees the teacher turn his back.
He runs up to the net, jumping into the air and smashes the ball down.
“Fifteen-love,” he says, walking back to the baseline with his racket slung over his shoulder.
Sanada makes a noise. “We can play,” he says.
“No playing!” the teacher yells. “Sanada-kun, Niou-kun, this is a gym class not your after school club!”
“Let’s see you start the rally then,” Sanada says.
Niou shrugs. He pulls a tennis ball from his pocket. Around them, dozens of other students send half-asses shots into the nets, into other courts, at such obtuse angles they are more likely to his the walls than the other players. Niou wants to laugh. It’s worse than the freshmen in the tennis club.
He bounces the ball once and looks up.
Across the gymnasium he recognizes that megane dork from two failed tryouts for the tennis team. The ball sits forgotten on the floor as Niou watches.
Megane dorks can’t play tennis, he thinks.
The ball is moving towards the dork, who stays at the baseline. Go to the net, idiot! Niou would have rushes for the ball without a second thought. A real tennis player would have. But the megane stands there, too dumbstruck or too blind to move until the ball is too close.
And then something strange happens. The megane moves enough, steps backwards, and then he hits the ball, but it’s not any shot he makes.
It is, by far, the most brilliant fucking shot Niou has ever seen.
Like a laser beam it cuts through the air, the ball so fast in leaves a flashing trail of neon behind. The megane stands with a flourish for a moment as his partner’s jaw drops, then the megane fixes his glasses and the moment is ruined.
“Aren’t you going to hit the ball?” Sanada snaps. “Niou!?”
Niou shakes his head. A piece of hair falls in his eyes. He blows it away. “Who is that?” he asks, nodding as casually as he can towards the megane, who has gone back to proper rallying, although pathetically slow and easy. The megane has a good grip, controlling the pace of the rally well. His partner runs around like a moron, swinging too wide and with too much of a follow-through, but the megane manages to make every single return with ease.
“That kid- who is that?”
Sanada pushes his cap up, then turns back to Niou. “Yagyuu. He’s in my class. Why?”
“Did…” Niou scuffs the toe of his running shoe on the rubberized gym floor. “Did anyone know whether he could play tennis or not?”
Sanada looks even more confused. If it weren’t for his cap, Niou could count the furrows in his brow. “I heard he tried out for the tennis club but wasn’t interested. He plays golf.”
Niou wants to burst out laughing. Golf! The stereotype of megane dorks everywhere!
Instead, he says, “I see.”
***
Finding out about this Yagyuu is harder than Niou would have thought.
Niou knows that Yagyuu is in Sanada’s class, although he really never noticed him before. Or cared. Not that he cares now, but he wants to know why that megane hides such a brilliant tennis shot. And how can Niou copy that shot for himself?
The issue of the Regionals presses, though. Niou has an hour and a half of practice in the mornings before school, school, then two and a half hours of more practice afterwards.
“Make sure to get enough sleep!” Nishiki-buchou tells them.
“Should we prepare a training menu too?” Yanagi asks after Monday practice.
Nishiki shrugs. “We’re probably fine. Unless you suddenly go home and pork out on sushi and chocolate and beer after every practice.”
“I think we should prepare menus,” Yukimura says.
The seniors on the team ignore him. Yamada starts to talk about a girl whose top he felt up behind the cafeteria dumpsters last week.
“She had a rack!” he says, cupping the air with his hands and squeezing.
The senpais all laugh and slap each other on the shoulders.
Kirihara makes gagging noises at his locker.
Niou pulls his school shirt on and starts to button it up, leaving the top three loose. He can feel someone over his shoulder, a looming presence. Yanagi pokes his arm, reading off a clipboard. “Do you want to use our training menu we’ve prepared?”
“We?”
“Genichirou and I,” Yanagi says.
Niou looks at Yanagi for a moment, before he says, “No”. I’m busy.
“You should try it,” Yukimura says. “We want to win the Regionals and the Nationals-”
“Don’t worry so much, Yukimura-kun!” Kawasaki says. “You think about winning way too much for it to be healthy!”
Yukimura glares at him. He folds his arms over his chest. “When I’m captain, things will be different,” he says loudly.
“You gotta wait your turn,” Nishiki-buchou says.
Niou grabs his tennisbag, his backpack and walks out of the locker room before an argument starts. It’s not that he doesn’t want to stay and listen, but the sky is dim and he has to be home to finish his homework fast if he wants to go sleuthing anytime this week.
The teachers, though, seem to feel that now is the best time to give loads of work, when the weather is beautiful and warm outside, when there are sports tournaments coming up, and when Niou would rather be anywhere than sitting in his room, at his desk, at quarter past nine with his mother waiting to inspect his work.
He clicks his mechanical pencil furiously, snapping the leads off at the end between math problems. The answer to one is -2. The answer to two is x=3. Niou could do these problems with his eyes closed, or with a calculator.
But his father took that away, too.
“I need to calculate a few last measurements for a commission,” he said.
“You can use Masaharu’s graphing calculator,” his mother offered.
“Masaharu plays games on it!” his brother said.
The snitch.
He doesn’t finish chemistry and English for another hour. His brain hurts. His temple throbs. Niou scratches his scalp. He needs a shower, too- the fast, cold shower after tennis makes him feel dirtier than clean, especially with the weather so humid. His clothes stick to his arms and he can’t get comfortable in his deskchair because his body hurts from all the extra practices at tennis club.
It sucks.
And he can’t stop thinking about that shot. The way it looked, straight and fast and deadly accurate. The way that megane dork Yagyuu in crybaby Sanada’s class posed afterwards, as if giving the shot that little bit extra to make it special. To make it brilliant.
With a frustrated groan, Niou throws his English off the desk. The papers scatter onto the ground, a flurry of white across his bedroom floor. Niou kicks them aside. Across from his mirror, he watches himself.
He stands up as straight as that boy, so straight it hurts his back. He lifts his arm up, and with his left, he points an invisible racket. He looks good, but he feels like an idiot, posing there, all puffed up like Marui would. It just doesn’t work as well with his hair everywhere, messed up and prickled over his head like a hedgehog. No, he needs glasses and a frown and to flatten down his hair.
Would the shot even work for a southpaw?
Niou shakes his head. He doesn’t know and he can’t practice in his room. There is barely enough room to pose and pretend.
He grabs his dictionary, forms some pathetic half-assed sentences, runs down the stairs and shows his mother. She reads some of the words and looks skeptical, but then she was never good at English in school, so if it looks like English, it’s good enough for her.
Niou figures he can ad-lib in class if he’s called on anyway.
He slips his cellphone into his shorts pocket, then grabs his running shoes. Peering around the doorway, he can see his entire family watching a documentary on genetics. How boring. How fucking dorky. How perfect for a perfect family of megane dorks.
Niou ruffles a hand through his hair, making sure to make it as messy as he can. “Man, I’m tired. I’m gonna go to bed!” he says with a loud voice.
“Good night, Masaharu,” his parents both echo.
The show must be boring enough that no one notices when he doesn’t stomp up the stairs, but instead creaks open the front door and slides out, closing it behind himself as quietly as he can.
His shoes squeak on the porch. Niou stands on his tiptoes.
And then promptly trips onto the pavement.
Inside the house, his mother moves. A shadow flickers across the curtains, the light shifting. Niou crouches on the ground under the window, focusing on breathing through the pain in his knee. He can feel hot blood trickling down his shin. His skin throbs.
The shadow moves again, then goes still. Niou waits a minute longer, maybe more, before he stands up and limps off, trying to be more careful of his big, ungainly feet.
The nearest payphone is a good ten minute walk to the pharmacy. Niou walks quickly. It is dark out. He yawns, and then yawns again. The streetlamps hum with insects and the roads are lonely. No one is out tonight, not with the wind starting to pick up and the skies growing murky above. A storm is in the forecast. The air has a heavy sort of heat, thick and miserable, the kind that sticks to Niou’s skin and makes his scalp itch even more. His hair feels like crap. It will probably start to fall out in chunks soon, being fried and stiff and full of peroxide bleach and gel.
Small groups of teenagers linger near the main roads. Niou slinks along in the shadows. He’s smaller, he’s alone, they could beat him up for money. He watches the ground and moves faster.
The smog from Tokyo has made the air stagnant. Garbage litters the sides of the streets, shivering with each passing vehicle. The voices of teenagers, swearing and smoking and groping each other. Niou walks past the pharmacy, then steps into the phone booth.
He flips through the tissue pages, searching the columns for the right family name. There are several Yagyuu families listed. Niou has no idea which one to call. Any of them could be his.
His change clinks in the phone. Niou picks up the receiver, clears his throat and hopes his voice doesn’t crack. He doesn’t even know this Yagyuu’s first name, which makes his plan seem even less likely to work.
The first number an old woman’s voice answers. “Hello?” she croaks.
Niou slams the phone down.
The second number is no better. A pulsing ringtone sounds five times before a voice machine picks it up. It sounds like university students, young male voices on the background of the recording. They could go to any one of the universities nearby. Niou can count a dozen potential schools off the top of his head alone, including Rikkai Dai.
Niou sighs into the receiver. The machine records his breathing, then he hangs up on that too.
The third number and Niou’s initial reservations about calling have fizzled along with his hope that Yagyuu will pick up at any of these listed numbers. He’s a megane. His family is probably all the same, just like Niou’s. They could have an unlisted number, for all he knows.
Except when that voice answers, Niou doesn’t know what to say. He listens as Yagyuu says “Hello? Hello?”
Niou could say something.
His mouth goes dry. A noise in the back of his throat echoes in the plexiglass walls around him. Yagyuu says, “Is someone there? Hello?”
And then, in the background, a girl’s voice asks, “It’s probably just a prank, Hiroshi.”
Niou slams the phone down. It clicks, hanging up, but falls down, dangling underneath the machine. The line beeps continuously, dead.
Niou reads the address in the phone book one more time, committing the numbers to memory. It’s on the other side of the school from where he lives, several stops on the train away, a neighbourhood where Niou has never been.
But now he knows that much.
Niou licks the back of his teeth, testing the sound. “Yagyuu Hiroshi,” he says. “Yagyuu Hiroshi.”
***
Still, all Niou has to do is walk past Yagyuu in gym class and he remembers the fact that Yagyuu is a megane. A fucking megane dork. His tennis shot aside, Yagyuu Hiroshi could be just another person for Niou to have fun with.
Yagyuu pushes his glasses up his nose constantly. Niou shoves into Yagyuu’s side at the bin of tennis balls, where Yagyuu carefully picks up one in each hand. “What are you, blind?” Niou whispers when Yagyuu stares at the balls in his hand, as though he can’t quite see them.
Yagyuu won’t look him in the eye. He’s so predictable, even more than Sanada is, when he stares at the wall and mutters, “Excuse me.”
That laser shot aside, Yagyuu Hiroshi might as well be playing golf. He swings his racket too much like a golf club. He’s too polite, always giving his partner the first serve. He’s too quiet on the court- Sanada huffs and puffs and grunts his way through every swing and every shot. Even Niou finds himself exhaling as he serves, making little noises when he moves across the court. Tennis isn’t supposed to be silent. It’s sweaty and noisy, with bouncing balls and the smash of rackets and the cheering.
Yagyuu probably golfclaps when his partners manage to make a shot over the net.
Niou rolls his eyes. Fucking dork, he thinks, as he sees Yagyuu push his frames up the bridge of his nose for the eleventh time this class.
“Hey! We’re playing right now!” Sanada shouts across the court. “Would you pay attention, Niou?”
Niou blinks. He can feel something hot flush across his face and it is extremely uncomfortable, for Sanada to have caught him in the middle of watching Yagyuu like this. Not that he doesn’t watch people, but…it was his moment and….
Niou looks up across the net. He snorts through his nose. He can’t think of anything to say, so he says nothing and takes a spot at centrecourt to wait for Sanada’s serve. Sanada gives him a long, hard look from under his cap, then frowns.
Everything completely as it should be. Everything completely normal again.
But Niou can hear the sounds of balls bouncing and slapping against the hard gym floor, and he knows some of those are from the court where Yagyuu is playing.
The class is instructed to pick up their balls, something which Sanada grumbles about. He wouldn’t know anything about how to best scoop them up without the balls rolling away because he never had to do anything like that as a freshman. Niou makes sure to go slow when reaching for the balls. Sanada needs his ballboy practice more than Niou does.
The showers after gym class are much more disgusting and haphazard than the tennis club. Now, after being a regular these past months, Niou has gotten used to having his own showerhead, not having to wait, and usually managing to get hot water and good pressure. Here, in the gym locker room, water sprays everywhere, there is mould creeping up the tiles where students haven’t bothered to clean. It’s stinky and sweaty and steamy and too full.
Niou gasps under the cold spray. His hair plasters down over his face. When he dries his head, a classmate snorts at him and says, “Nice look, Niou-san.”
Niou sticks out his chin and snorts. Idiot, he thinks.
A few students have their own rackets, which they bring in cheap cracking covers, which they toss onto the ground, completely unthinking. Sanada’s eye twitches every time someone throws their racket down and flops down on the bench to untie their sneakers.
Niou stands with his back to everyone else, his tiny tin locker cubby door open. He can’t be bothered to rub any gel through his hair, so he ties it back with an elastic and leaves it at that. No one tugs his hair at school, although Niou knows that from the look in some of their eyes, they want to. They roll their eyes behind his back, whisper about rat tails being dumb and lame.
Niou doesn’t care.
Instead, he takes his time to slowly button his shirt and loop his belt, to ease his arms into his school blazer and redo his tie three times, before he pulls it loose and messy again. The motions are ingrained on him. He doesn’t need to think.
Yagyuu doesn’t slouch like Niou does. And he is the only other person, besides Sanada and himself, to carefully put his racket away in a small navy tennisbag. It’s not a bad racket, but it’s obviously not the best. If Yagyuu were to use a racket with tighter strings, would his shot be even faster? If he knew about overgrips, would his laser be scarier?
“You think you’re good at tennis, do you?” Niou asks. More than half the students have left the locker room by now, and Yagyuu doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to make it to his next class. He leans over the bench tying his shiny black shoes and fixing his damp, perfectly parted hair.
Niou’s father parts his hair right down the middle too.
Yagyuu ties his left shoe, then stands up. He fixes his glasses, pushing down the rim to straighten them out. Yagyuu looks at Niou through slitted eyes, but not really. His gaze seems focused not on Niou’s eyes, but something deeper, as though he the one picking at Niou’s brain, not the other way around.
Niou snorts, a smile forming on his mouth.
“Why would you think that?” Yagyuu says, his words slow to form.
Niou clicks his tongue. “Where’d you learn that shot?” he asks.
Yagyuu looks at his tennisbag, then back up at Niou’s face. “From no one,” he says. “Doesn’t the tennis team teach you how to make your own shots?”
Touché!
“If you’d joined, you would have found out for yourself,” Niou counters.
Yagyuu’s shoulders stiffen. He picks his tennisbag up and walks past Niou, shoving into Niou’s side. “I don’t need to hear about that,” he snaps.
The door swings closed behind him, but it might as well have slammed in Niou’s face.
***
Niou gives up on Yagyuu Hiroshi, for the rest of the week, at any rate. On Saturday, the Regionals begin. They breeze through rounds one and two. Niou plays in round one, doubles two with Yanagi. The pairing is interesting, but works out well enough. Yanagi keeps exactly to his section of the court and nods for Niou to do the same. Niou misses points, one here, another there, but he focuses his mind on his half of the court. He’s not an iron wall of defense, but he has the moves. A split step, a twist serve, a slice like Sanada would use, it’s easy to win the game.
Round two, Niou is scheduled for singles two. He doesn’t get to play.
He buys himself a hot dog, pleased with himself and the team. In the line, he sees a head of pink hair just ahead of him. Marui orders four hot dogs, smothering each with mayonnaise, chili sauce, seaweed flakes, dried fish and ketchup. It dribbles down his chin, a disgusting mess smeared around his mouth.
“No wonder you can’t make the regulars if you do that,” Niou says.
Marui takes too long to swallow, too long to respond and he misses his chance to kick Niou. “Fuck you!” he shouts after Niou. “I’ll make the team next season! I’m working on my secret plan!”
The semifinals start promptly after lunch break. Niou checks the time on the digital scoreboards posted by the courts. Five minutes until start time. He meets up with the regulars under a shaded picnic area deep in the heart of the Rikkai camp.
Cheerleaders are already out on the courts, their breasts jiggling, their pompoms flashing yellow and black. The element of win buzzes through the atmosphere. Niou inhales it all in.
The Regionals should be an easy win.
“We’ll take the semifinals easy,” Nishki tells them. “It’s some team from Tokyo called Seigaku. Apparently they’re all crap, except one kid. I’ll play him in singles three. Yukimura, Yanagi, singles one and two. Niou, you’re in doubles two with Yamada. Sanada, doubles one with Kirihara.”
“Eh?” Kirihara says, his eyes bugging out of his head.
“Not with him,” Sanada booms. “Anyone but him!”
“All you have to do is win,” Nishiki says.
***
Yamada is a better doubles player than Yanagi. Niou relaxes on the court, taking the net and making the moves. Behind his back, he motions to Yamada. Left, right, back, centre. Seigaku’s doubles two are a kid with a buzzcut and a tall senior. They play like crap together and the buzzcut kid seems too intent on making shots from the baseline to be of much other help.
But the few shots the buzzcut kid does make, Niou raises an eyebrow and watches them arc over Yamada’s head. A few points by Seigaku is nothing in the big picture and the game ends with a 6-0 win.
A good way to start the countdown towards the Regional title.
Sanada-Kirihara pair, Niou doesn’t know what to make of them. He sits in his uncomfortable aluminum seat in the stands. Everyone around him cheers, claps and whistles as Sanada and Kirihara walk onto the court, as far apart from each other as they could possibly be.
They are, in a word, a mess.
Sanada shouts, Kirihara screams. Sanada goes for a shot, Kirihara lunges for it. Kirihara plays net and smashes every ball he gets. His eyes are red before the end of the second game, but not from the tennis. No, his eyes are red from frustration as Sanada yells, “I’ll get it!” and swings back to hit a deep shot.
“I wanted that!” Kirihara shouts back. “It was on my side!”
“Seigaku to serve!” the referee announces. Kirihara stomps back to the baseline. Sanada glares and crouches down at the net this time.
Despite the mess, Sanada manages to keep the stamina in Rikkai’s favour with his immovability at the net. Like a mountain, he pounds every shot back to Seigaku taking point after point after point.
“We won’t try that pair ever again,” Yukimura tells Nishiki.
“You wait your turn to be captain, Yukimura,” Nishiki says, clenching his jaw. Yukimura’s eyes narrow. When Sanada comes off the court, Yukimura grabs him by the sleeve and tugs him to the edge of the stands. Niou tries to listen what Yukimura tells him, but they are too far away, there are too many people in between and the Seigaku side have burst out with renewed clapping for their singles three loser.
Nishiki-buchou hops over the ledge, speaks with the coach at the bench, then steps onto the court, smiling and smirking and standing tall.
Seigaku’s player is a lanky, scrawny junior named Tezuka.
A megane dork playing tennis.
Niou laughs.
The player next to him inches away.
Tezuka even has the same bland, boring expression as Yagyuu. He probably excuses himself onto the court and offers Nishiki the first serve, too.
Niou yawns. It’s just another win.
But immediately after Nishiki serves, something is wrong. The lanky megane dork doesn’t miss the shot, he doesn’t make a slow underhand, or a baseline lob, no, he’s playing like his life is on the line. And maybe Seigaku’s life is on the line, being singles three, but there is no way they can win.
Tezuka, though, he has a shot that Niou can’t work out. At first he thought it was nothing special, just Tezuka refusing to move from the baseline like that buzzcut doubles player, but after two or three shots, it isn’t that. Tezuka isn’t moving because he has the ball completely in his control. Nishiki runs around frantically, making smashes and two-handed shots that skim the net, anything to change the pace, but Tezuka sucks every single shot towards him.
Seigaku screams like kids at Christmas when the final score is announced.
The Rikkai Dai side is stone silent. Even Niou’s mouth hangs open.
They lost a match.
They lost a match.
No one says a word as Yanagi makes his way onto the court. No one says a word to Nishiki-buchou, who hangs his head under a limp sweat towel on the bench. Niou sits at the very end of the row. The view is better here. And there is a smear of ketchup beside Nishiki on the bench anyway.
Yanagi sets his racket on the bench, zipping his bag up. He nods to Sanada, who stands pinkfaced near Yukimura, neither of them willing to sit down. Yanagi completely ignores the coach as he strides out onto the court. He should be confident, he’s one of the best players on their team, maybe on the circuit, but….
After the sting of loss, no one knows what to think. Niou’s hands feel unnaturally cold resting on his knees, even though the air is thick and hot.
Seigaku’s singles three is a senior about the same height as Yanagi, but as skinny as Yukimura. The entire Seigaku team is scrawny, from Tezuka to the buzzcut doubles kid to their seniors. Do they not ever do any weight training? As much as Niou hates it, at least he’s got more muscle mass. All he has to do is squeeze his arm and flex his biceps to know how much the benchpress and weight machines have helped.
Yanagi holds his racket so tight his hands are splotched red and white. He’s paler than usual and his lips move constantly as he runs across the court. There is no playing around. He’s there to win, to avenge their loss.
Nishiki doesn’t watch the game. He stands up after Yanagi’s second serve and walks up the bleachers with his back turned. Niou watches him for a minute, but the game is much more interesting. The crowds are hushed. Seigaku has simmered down, realizing their mistake with the win as Yanagi plays baseline, sending fast, high shots over the senior’s head, then down to his feet, always aiming for a blind spot at the back of his court.
Yanagi serves, he volleys, he takes the points, he wins the games, then the set.
Despite a hitch, Rikkai has taken the semifinals. The teams shake hands at the net. Niou claps along with everyone else, but the elation has left their side. Only the freshmen smile and whoop and pump their arms.
It’s not the Nationals. Everyone in the club should know better than to get excited over a flawed semifinals.
The regulars take the BMV bus back to Kanagawa. The rest of the team is packed into the coach buses, rented specially for the tournament. As they stepped onto the buses, Niou could see Marui handing out celebratory snacks and candies to friends and teammates. The tennis club laughs and chats and talks loudly, but the regulars’ bus is quiet, subdued. Nishiki sits by the coach at the front, looking greener by the minute.
Yukimura sits in the back, across the aisle from Sanada and Yanagi. Niou sits in front of Yukimura. Kirihara is packed into a seat ahead of the other two seniors. “Do you have your seatbelt on, Akaya-chan?” Yamada asks.
Kirihara drops his gameboy on the floor and attacks Yamada, his fists flying. “Shut up!”
Yanagi scrambles over Sanada, and reaches over the seats awkwardly, pushing Kirihara back. “Don’t, Akaya!” he says.
Kirihara seethes through his teeth. Yamada rubs his neck, moaning about the bruises he’ll have in the morning. Yanagi sits beside Kirihara for the rest of the ride home, listening to his mp3 player as Kirihara finally sits still with his gameboy, clacking away at the buttons.
“We need to stay undefeated,” Yukimura hisses to Sanada. “We can’t lose any more games, Sanada.”
“Yes, Yukimura,” Sanada mumbles.
“We need to work on our net play,” Yukimura says. “Yanagi looked sloppy. Your form was crap, Sanada, and Niou-”
Niou starts to turn around to look over his shoulder.
“-Niou’s working on something, I know it, but he’s distracted and his shots have too much of a follow-through. They’re crap, Sanada. This is all crap. We have to win.”
“Yes, Yukimura,” Sanada says.
“I can hear you,” Niou says.
Yukimura chuckles. “I know.”