FIC: Rewind Forward (D1) 12/63
Title: Rewind Forward (12/63)
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
It being a Sunday, there is no tennis practice.
Niou could, in theory, spend his day at the arcade, getting up before noon, taking the bus and playing all the darts he wanted, to his heart’s content.
Instead, he mopes around at home.
There is no way he can show his face there again.
Or tomorrow, how can he just walk into the tennis courts and pretend he didn’t run out of the arcade like the biggest ass, then come home and jerk himself off at night while thinking about said same person.
A fucking megane dork.
This is fucked up, he thinks. It becomes a sort of mantra. He mouths the words when his father hides behind the newspaper. He mouths the words when his mother’s back is turned to do the dishes. He mouths the words as his sister helps their younger brother with his geometry homework.
“Don’t you have somewhere to go?” his sister asks. “And stop talking to yourself. People will think you have a mental retardation.”
Niou can’t even be bothered to snap at her.
He shuffles upstairs and shuts his bedroom door. He can see in the mirror that his hair is as flat and lifeless as he is, hanging limp all around his head. The too-long ends brush his t-shirt collar and itch his neck.
Niou leaves his hair, letting it fall in his eyes. He slumps down on his bed with a sigh, but the sheets move under his weight, smelling faintly of dried spunk from last night. To make things worse, after the first time, he’d jerked himself off again. Thinking about it now just makes his cock start to tighten in his pants.
Niou stands up. He’s beyond this sort of thing. He’s not like the OBs, who used to joke about jerking off to pictures of girls in their classes, the ones with big boobs. No, Niou just thinks about megane dorks instead.
He feels sick inside, like he wants to barf but he can’t. His racket sits forlorn on the floor, leaning against his tennisbag. He picks it up, then starts to bounce a ball on the face. One, two, three.
He bounces it fifty times with his left hand, then he switches. Niou’s right hand isn’t strong, he rarely uses it, and he can barely bounce a ball three times before Yagyuu’s eyes flash in his mind and the ball flies across the room, scattering his cellphone from the top of his desk with a crash of papers and pens everywhere.
Out of anger, and boredom, and frustration, Niou works on two weeks of math homework. The numbers, so easily manipulated on paper, soothe his nerves a bit, but it doesn’t last and by supper time, he’s hearing Yagyuu’s voice in his ear again and his pants are too tight between the legs.
***
Monday arrives and Niou shows up at tennis practice, of course, but he’s subdued. And he knows it. His face feels hot. His shorts feel awkward, too tight, and his t-shirt isn’t long enough to cover everything the way he wants it. Niou keeps his back turned in the locker room. He can hear Yagyuu walk in and say hello to Jackal, but Yagyuu doesn’t sound any different from normal.
And something else has changed, too.
Yagyuu has somehow managed to learn more than just his laser beam: he can play tennis.
With the three monsters back at practice, everything falls into a strict pace and Niou pushes himself to finish his laps quickly. The burn in his calves takes his mind off the weekend for the moment.
Niou stands on the court where he and Yagyuu have been working. Yagyuu walks up to him and nods. Niou nods back. He can be completely normal, too.
Maybe it was puberty messing with his mind. Maybe he’d imagined Yagyuu playing darts.
But that doesn’t explain how Yagyuu manages to toss a ball up into the air and make a perfect serve across the net. Niou raises an eyebrow.
“Nice serve,” he says.
Yagyuu’s mouth twitches. “Thank you, Niou-kun.”
Once Niou returns the shot, a rally starts. It feels good to start moving across the court, even if the pace is slow and the shots predictable. Yagyuu tends to want to stay at the back of the court and move as little as possible, but Niou won’t have that. He angles his shots towards the corners, making him run.
Yagyuu’s muscles clench and shift and it’s not a bad combination, of watching him start to sweat, of watching his glasses slide down his nose, of watching Yagyuu start to finally make small grunts of effort to keep up with Niou.
Niou grins.
Yukimura stands on the sideline of their court, his arms folded over his chest. Niou looks at him, then hits a backhand to centre court. Yukimura’s eyes follow his movements, every motion he makes, like a hawk.
Niou turns away. Yukimura walks off towards Marui and Kirihara, who shoot lobs at each other, trying to out do the other player with the highest ball they can make.
In the changing rooms in the afternoon, Yukimura finally says something. Sanada and Yanagi, whatever they did on the weekend, haven’t mentioned the Senbatsu at all, which starts to make Niou a little skeptical of what exactly a Senbatsu is. Do they even play tennis? Well, they must, otherwise Yukimura would have never gone.
Niou avoids looking at Yagyuu, although the temptation is there now when he catches sight of bare skin as Yagyuu strips his t-shirt off and stretches his arms above his head. Niou can smell Yagyuu’s sweat, almost heady in a way. Kinda gross, but something he wants to breathe in, too, at the same time.
Niou’s face burns.
Niou slumps on the bench, untying his shoelaces with the utmost slowness. He can’t shower like this right now, not with the erection hot and hard in his shorts. It’s embarrassing sitting here with one, it would be death to waltz into the showers.
He might poke someone’s eye out.
But he isn’t the only slow person. Yanagi is careful and calm, smiling at Niou as he folds his uniform up and places it in his tennisbag, before grabbing a towel and walking to the showers. Wet feet slap across the tiles, then Niou makes for the showers himself. He passes Yagyuu in the corridor, who is wet and dripping with steam and sweat, his glasses completely fogged up.
Niou snorts.
At least that much is still the same.
From then showers, despite the spray of water and Yanagi humming to himself as he soaps his arms and legs, Niou can hear Yukimura talking in the locker room down the hall.
“We’ll be at the tournament next weekend,” he tells Kirihara. “I’ll have Jackal in charge of practice again on Saturday. We won’t be gone more than one day. I heard that the American team they are having us play is crap.”
“You can show them just how good we are, Yukimura-buchou!” Kirihara says.
When Yanagi and Niou walk into the locker room, Yukimura is fully dressed in his uniform pants and buttoned shirt. His tie hangs around his neck, undone. “I think we need to work on our team dynamics,” Yukimura announces.
“Eh?” Marui asks.
Sanada pushes his cap down his brow. “We’ve been lazy with our forms,” he grumbles. “Lazy asses!”
“No, no that, Sanada!” Yukimura snaps. “Well, yes, you all have been, but this is about teamwork. Atobe from Hyoutei said that his team takes mini-breaks to the mountains. We can’t let Hyoutei or any other team beat us. We will win the Nationals.” Yukimura slams his hand against his locker.
“If Atobe-”
Sanada’s eye twitches at the name.
“-‘s team is tight, we have to be tighter.”
“I’m not going on a minibreak with him,” Niou says, looking at Marui.
Marui gives him the finger.
Yukimura glares at both of them and Niou mouths “Fuck you” at Marui when Yukimura turns.
“No, we’re not going on a minibreak. We can’t afford to lose any more practices.”
“We could…go out for snacks?” Marui offers.
Yukimura’s grin is dark. “Exactly.”
***
Going out for snacks somehow turns out to mean wasting Friday nights at hotel buffets.
Niou just wants to go home. He’s at school from eight until five, and now he’s out at half-past seven sitting in a cheap hotel restaurant pushing fried shrimp around his plate.
Marui seems to think it is fabulous.
“See, the short ribs here are good,” he says, spewing his food all over his plate, his chin and the table. Niou turns, trying to escape the spray, but being wedged between Yagyuu and Kirihara means he has no room to move, not with Sanada and Yukimura sitting at the ends of the table.
He is, basically, trapped.
Niou pushes a piece of Chinese sausage around the brown mess of teriyaki sauce on his plate. He flicks rice grains at Marui’s napkin, tucked into his t-shirt like a baby’s bib.
“-but the fried rice is even better. I dunno what they use in it- you think it’s oyster sauce, Jackal?”
Jackal nods. “Maybe.”
“It might be the seaweed flakes. Man, I love those things.” Marui reaches across his plate and Yanagi’s to grab the shaker and dump half the contents onto his plate. “And the desserts! The hotel down the road has an awesome chocolate cake- it has three kinds, one kind with wasabi sauce, but the sweets here, the ones with the plums and the lychees- hey, Jackal, are you listening?”
Jackal closes his eyes. “Yes,” he says.
“Good,” Marui says. He shoves a piece of chicken into his mouth. The seaweed flakes coat it as thick as tempura batter.
Niou tries to tune Marui out, but he can’t eavesdrop on Sanada and Yanagi because Yanagi whispers and Sanada just grunts- most of their conversations are like that, monosyllables and hushed communication. At least Yukimura snaps and scowls and sighs in a huff.
The team really doesn’t have much dynamic as a whole. A few friendships here and there, some sort of weird Yukimura infatuation on Sanada’s part, but Niou isn’t friends with any of them. The team is a group of acquaintances, if that. Mutually connected through their positions on the tennis team, their skill and their interest in the sport.
Yukimura drags it on for two more hours. Niou smears peas around his plate. He shreds his napkin and balls up the mess under the table, before throwing it at Marui’s legs. But Marui is too busy stuffing his face with as much food as is humanly possible. Niou had assumed that he ate a lot- his mother tells him as much when he serves himself three helpings of beef stew, but he doesn’t eat that much.
Five plates of custard cakes and cream puddings later, Marui pushes his chair back to get another bowl of ice cream from the dessert bar.
“Jackal!” Yukimura says, cutting through Kirihara’s describing of kamikaze pilots blowing American tankers to bits in a videogame to Yanagi.
Jackal stops stirring his flat coke with a chopstick. He looks up.
Yukimura hands a sheet of paper down the table. Niou takes it from Yagyuu and looks at it before passing it along to Kirihara.
10:50am: take first years to court A and have Kasahara lead the swings. 50 reps.
10:55am: take the second years to court B. Make sure they pair up for serve practice. 25 serves each.
11:00am: regulars on C court. Make sure than Niou and Yagyuu work on their doubles form. They have just fucked around since August. Have Yagyuu at net and Niou at baseline with Kirihara serving to them.
11:05am: have Marui and a senior (Yamada, if he shows up for practice, or use Murakami) feed balls to freshmen to work on backhands. Line them up in alphabetical order…
Niou can feel his eyes glazing over. Yanagi and Sanada must have helped with this schedule. Maybe they plan out every practice- that would explain Yanagi’s perpetual clipboard and their constant three-some hush-hush pow wows.
Niou shoves it into Kirihara’s hands. The wonderchibi’s eyes go wide. “Wow, Yukimura-buchou, this is a lot of work!”
“We can’t get lazy,” Yukimura says. “Jackal, make sure you follow that schedule. If anything comes up, don’t call me on my cellphone. I could be playing. Call Sanada’s cellphone instead.”
Jackal folds up the schedule. “Okay,” he mutters.
Niou yawns. Yukimura doesn’t notice. He rattles off, explaining drill after drill to Jackal. Niou checks his watch. Sanada scowls under his cap. Niou shakes his head, smirking. Slouching low in his chair, Niou sticks his foot out under the table, fishing around the legs and tennisbags in search of Sanada’s shin. Sanada jumps in his seat when Niou brushes his sneaker against Sanada’s ankle.
“Like that?” Niou mouths. Wish it was Yukimura?
And then Sanada turns a red so dark that Niou knows exactly what is happening to Sanada and he pulls his foot back, so fast he might as well have been burned. He grimaces. Sanada hides under his cap brim.
He probably was pretending it was Yukimura’s foot!
Niou shudders.
“Well, I’m tired, everyone, I’m going home now,” Yukimura says at long last. He stands up, grabbing his tennisbag, then pausing for a moment. Yukimura wiggles his fingers, frowning at them. He shakes his hand out, then shrugs.
“Yukimura?” Sanada asks.
“Seiichi?” Yanagi asks.
“I must just be antsy for tomorrow,” Yukimura says. He laughs, but it is forced and brittle.
As they walk towards the closest bus stop, Niou notices that Yukimura continues to wiggle his fingers, hitting his thigh softly, as though he can’t get the feeling back to them.
He plays too much tennis, Niou thinks. His own fingers feel fine.
***
As soon as Niou takes one step over the threshold, his mother stands there, lording over him with a plastic rice spoon and a frown. Her glasses have slid halfway down her nose.
“Masaharu, where have you been?” she asks.
Niou cringes. Then he sighs, peeling his running shoes off and setting them neatly against the wall, just for his mother.
But she keeps frowning at him. “Where have you been? You should have been home hours ago!”
Niou sighs again. He ducks his head scratches the back of his neck. “I- the tennis regulars went out for food.”
She stares at him, mouth hanging open for a minute. In the background, Niou can hear his father ask, “Is he home now? He has homework to be doing tonight!”
“He- he was out with friends!” his mother says.
Only Niou’s family could make such a big deal about something so stupid. His mother smiles and tells him how thrilled she is that he finally has friends.
He rolls his eyes behind her back. It’s not like that. He spent almost three hours bored and bothered as Yukimura blathered on about techniques and Kirihara talked about videogames until Yanagi’s ears must have bled. Last weekend with the arcade must have been an illusion because Yagyuu reverted to his dorky megane self and sat there, smiling blandly and eating bland white jellies and fried rice.
Yagyuu, Niou is convinced, has no concrete personality beyond the stereotype. The darts were a fluke. Niou’s temple hurts thinking about it. Yagyuu doesn’t make any sense. Niou wants to dig under his skin and see what is there, but at the same time, he doesn’t want to because he doesn’t care about fucking megane dorks at all.
He firmly believes that. All Niou has to do is glance down the stairwell at his family, the perfect nuclear unit. Mother, father, son, daughter, all sitting in the family room around a low table, all resembling each other: neat, straight black hair, parted immaculately. All wearing glasses with the same serious expressions as they move black and white playing chips across a boardgame.
Niou closes his bedroom door. In his mirror, he sees a pale, tired teenager with a frown on his face and his mole that seems to get darker in the light of his lamp. His hair is a mess, neither straight nor black. And he doesn’t wear glasses. Not even when he squints does he need them.
He flops back down on his bed, the dust motes swirling up in the air around him. His sheets smell of laundry soap- his mother has washed them again this week. Niou listens for his family, engrossed in their boardgame, then he switches his light off.
Niou can pretend that he’s being sneaky in the dark. If he can’t see himself, then no one will know that he’s got his shorts around his knees- his underpants, too- and his left hand curled around his half-hard penis.
If he closes his eyes, he can pretend that he’s not himself and that Niou isn’t jerking off and imagining that bland, boring megane face in front of his eyelids. He squeezes his hand harder, groaning at the friction. The pleasure rises within his stomach, a tingle of numb between his legs, one that he can ride out. Niou bites down on his lip. He’s thirteen. These things are normal, to jerk off to anything.
Except it should be boobs and girls, not a megane fixing his glasses. Niou moans as Yagyuu’s long fingers fix his frames. Niou-kun…
Niou pulls his hand away, spits on his palm, then starts to jerk faster. He digs his toes into his sheets, bunching them up. His mattress shifts and his hand starts to make noises as fights to keep from moaning. It feels good. Really good. At least as good as winning a tennis match.
And there is Yagyuu, posing and pointing his racket as a ball rips through the air, so fast it cuts, it burns and-
Niou grunts, unable to stop the gasps that come and the shudders, too. His mattress creaks, but his eyes roll back and his back arches and god, the feeling of release, of riding the wave of pleasure that ripples through his body.
It would feel good if only it weren’t so pathetically gross and…pathetic.
Niou rolls onto his side. He wipes his hands off with a Kleenex, but his hand still smells of the come, a smell that he can never seem to fully wash out of his skin, no matter how hard he scrubs with soap.
His hair is a mess, too, but he can’t be bothered to fix it. He pulls the elastic from his hair. The freedom feels good. Undressing out of his clothes (which were already half off), he grabs his pajamas, puts them on and crawls into bed.
It feels petty, but not brushing his teeth is another small rebellion against his family. Maybe he can die of rotten teeth. At least then he wouldn’t have to fall asleep to the thought of seeing Yagyuu tomorrow, and having to practice with him half-hard and embarrassed.
***
Saturday morning and Niou drags his body into the shower. The warm spray and the rising steam feels good, while the sound of the water dulls the slapping his hand on his cock. This is becoming more of a habit, at night, in the morning. Sometimes at lunch time he’ll think about sneaking into the tennis clubhouse for a private, quiet place to jerk off, but he’s fairly certain that only Yukimura, Sanada, and Yanagi (along with the coach) have copies of the key.
Breakfast he eats alone, in the semi-darkness just before dawn. The kettle chugs, the clicking noises the only sound besides the hum of the fridge as Niou rummages around for the last of the grapes to eat. There are cold tapioca puddings, which he takes two, and pops two slices of bread into the toaster.
No cherry or ginger jam- someone must have eaten them up: probably him, since his family is notoriously picky about writing down the used up foods on his mother’s grocery list. Niou pulls out a jar of mango chutney from the fridge door. It’s close enough. It will do on toast. The chili might wake him up.
By the time Niou leaves, he can hear his father moving around upstairs, flushing the toilet and running water. Niou grabs the newspaper from the front porch, throws it inside the hallway, and shuts the door behind himself. He mouth tastes of garlic and pudding, which is not exactly the most pleasant combination at half-past seven in the morning.
There is almost autumn in the air. The days are getting cooler, slightly, enough that running laps around the court doesn’t cause Niou to start sweating through every pore in his body. Jackal doesn’t need to assign laps- Niou knows how many Yukimura expects, everyone on the team knows. Still, without Yukimura or Sanada here to impose a dictatorial sense of order, teammates chat as they run, Marui takes breaks between laps to grab his Gatorade and Niou jostles into Jackal’s side.
“Yo,” he says. “Don’t look so serious. You’ll give yourself wrinkles on your pretty brown head.”
Niou picks his pace up, running ahead of Jackal before Jackal can mutter for him to shut up.
Neither Marui and Jackal nor he and Yagyuu have practiced as doubles yet. Niou doesn’t know quite how the hours of practice today will start them off on something they’ve never done before, but with the determined undercurrent for a threepeat Nationals win, Niou is willing to put himself out there.
Even if he does happen to jerk off to thoughts of that person at night. And in the mornings.
Yagyuu waits at the net for Niou, adjusting the weights on his wrist, pushing his watch up further on his hand.
“These things are crap to wear,” Niou says.
Yagyuu nods.
So much for attempts at conversation. Niou tries again. “Have you ever played doubles before?” he asks.
Yagyuu shakes his head. “No,” he says. Yagyuu pushes his glasses up his nose. “Has Jackal-kun told you how Yukimura-kun wants us to start practice?”
Niou shakes his head this time. “Ball machines?” he offers.
The juniors are swarming the courts by now, all eager to practice and get a rally in while they can. With Yukimura gone, they can slack off and play games for fun, rather than do endless drills and laps and work. Sure, the repetition of drills and motions helps with play, but what is the point if they never actually get to play.
But Kirihara hogs the ball machines.
“Wonderchibi, your turn’s up!” Niou yells.
Kirihara hits a ball back, slamming it into the wall before he turns around. “Niou-senpai, Jackal didn’t say anything about you guys practicing here.”
“Yeah, well, I’m saying we’re practicing here,” Niou says. “We need to work on doubles formations. Unless you want us to lose a game?”
Kirihara’s eyes go as wide as the moon. He shakes his head furiously. The balls fly out from the machine and he has to dodge them to come over and talk with Niou.
“Fine,” he says, pouting with his lower lip. “But I want to use them after you guys.”
Yagyuu smiles. “Of course, Kirihara-kun,” he says.
Why does Yagyuu say more to Kirihara than to me? Niou thinks. Out loud, he just clicks his tongue. “Hey, you!” he shouts to a passing freshman, who is either late for practice or helping Kirihara- Niou doesn’t care which. “Turn the machine off for now and wait until I say to start it again. Two second intervals, 40ks- got that?”
“Two seconds. 40k’s. Got it!” the freshman’s high voice squeaks. “Yes, senpai!”
Niou turns to Yagyuu. “So, maybe we should…” He rubs the back of his neck. He’s crap at this, teaching. Telling. Yagyuu should just get on the court and then Niou can take it from there, but Yagyuu stands, and waits, and anticipates Niou to suggest what they should do since Niou is the one with doubles experience, not Yagyuu.
“Basic formation?” he suggests.
“That sounds good,” Yagyuu says. “What position do you play?”
Yellow whizzes by, skimming Niou’s ear, burning the skin and fluttering his hair around his face. The fuck? He turns to glare at the freshman.
“Sorry, senpai!” the freshman shrieks as he frantically tries to change the adjustments on the machine, shaking his head and flapping his hands.
“Press the red button,” Niou says.
“Yes, senpai! Thank you, senpai!”
The bright lights on the machine stop and the clock freezes on the count.
Niou sighs heavily. Idiot kid, he thinks. “Okay,” he tells Yagyuu. “You stand at the baseline. Back left corner.”
Yagyuu nods. “Because you are left-handed, Niou-kun?”
Niou shrugs. He’s never though about why he stands where he does, except for the fact he just stands on the court where he does because it works. “Sure, whatever,” he says.
Niou stands in his place. Yagyuu stands at the baseline, in his place.
Niou nods to the freshman, and tightens his grip on his racket. Hand loose, better grip, better contact with the ball. Form, straight up, legs bent. He loosens his hand and listens as the ball shoots from the machine.
So now we play.
So now it starts.
Niou is defense. The ball is slow and steady, with a course towards the centre of the court. He steps right, to let Yagyuu get the ball. The dork needs the practice.
Niou motions with his hand behind his back. Move up, move right, use a straight shot, that’s all you need.
Yagyuu moves up slightly, but when Niou moves further right to encourage Yagyuu to take the shot, Yagyuu just stands there. The ball hits the ground and bounces off.
“Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says, “how do you know who will hit the ball?”
Niou closes his eyes. Instinct. Trial and error. I don’t know.
“Do you want me to set the pace?” he asks.
Yagyuu blinks. His lenses flash with the harsh fluorescent light of the gymnasium. A second ball whizzes between them.
“Can you vary the shots?” Niou tells the freshman. “Don’t have it on the standard setting.”
The freshman plays with the buttons. The balls start to change- high, low, left, right. Niou sidesteps to avoid a shot. He nods to Yagyuu. Get ready, megane dork.
The balls come. Niou takes the first shot. Yagyuu sways, keeping his feet planted. Niou motions during the next ball. Yagyuu can play amateur tennis, Niou knows this, but can he play better? Can he play at their level?
Yagyuu takes the shot. It’s easy, it’s steady: backhanded lob towards the far side of the other court. Maybe not the best place as the freshman kid yelps and runs out of the way for cover, but it’s a start.
Niou alternates. He chooses some shots at the net, but it gets too predictable and Yagyuu picks up in no time that every second shot is his. On the second shot in a row, Niou moves to the net and avoids a high shot.
“Yours!” he shouts.
“Got it!” Yagyuu yells back, running up, his racket face ready for the ball. He moves slightly, tipping his racket and making a short drop shot over the net.
Niou raises an eyebrow. “Not bad,” he murmurs.
“Thank you, Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says. He smiles.
Niou’s insides feel warm. Yagyuu wasn’t supposed to have heard that.
Half of practice is spent at the ball machine with the freshman dutifully feeding the balls and changing the settings as Niou yells at him to change the rotation, the speed, the angle.
Yagyuu stays at the baseline. Niou stays at the net. He doesn’t want to push too far.
But Niou does want to see Yagyuu in action with that laser shot. “Increase the speed by 10 clicks!” Niou yells as he swings a lob back to the other side.
The freshman, tired and sweating, nods. “Yes, senpai!” he croaks.
Come on. Come on.
Niou watches the ball shoot from the machine; the angle is right, not too low, not too high. The speed is good- if Yagyuu makes the shot, it’ll be brilliant.
Yagyuu’s eyes widen behind his lenses. Niou bites his lip. Do it!
Yagyuu swings back, his chest puffing up with breath, he moves forward, almost slow-motion, stepping with his swing and-
He lobs it.
Damn.
Not only is the ball a lob, but it’s out of bounds, crashing into the wall of the gym.
Niou clicks his tongue. Yagyuu frowns and fixes his glasses.
“Too much follow-through,” Niou says. “Good thing Yukimura didn’t see that.”
Yagyuu is about to say something, or just give Niou a long, bland dorkstare, but then the gymnasium doors crash open and Kirihara starts to shout, “Senpais! Jackal-senpai said that you’re both supposed to come out to the courts and have me serve to you and I’ve been looking for you!”
Niou snorts. He rubs the back of his neck. “Oh. Right.”
“I can use my kick serve, too,” Kirihara offers.
Yagyuu, ever the gentleman, humours Kirihara with a smile. “That would be nice, Kirihara-kun.”
“Don’t encourage the wonderchibi,” Niou mutters.
Yagyuu might hear him this time, too. Good.
But Yagyuu doesn’t say anything.
Kirihara doesn’t just want to use his kick serve, he wants to show it off.
Niou has already been at practice for three hours. His stomach growls when he steps onto the court. The glare of the sun is harsh compared with the dim fluorescent lighting of the gym. It’s noisier, with dozens of freshmen running around and playing awfully close- too close, for Niou’s comfort. Not that he cares if Kirihara smucks one in the head, more like one of the freshmen will have a stray ball and send it straight into their court.
“Having fun?” Marui asks.
Niou looks up to see Marui lurking on Kirihara’s side of the court. He can smell the apple of his bubblegum a mile away, and he can hear that awful pop of his bubbles. Niou breathes through his nose.
“Can you let the kid serve and fuck off?” Niou asks.
Marui laughs. For spite, he pops a huge bubble. Niou’s ears ring with the sound. He cringes. “You’re an asshole,” Marui says, pointing his racket at Niou. “I’m here for Kirihara’s moral support.”
Kirihara shakes his head. Niou does the same. Kirihara stands there, obviously unsure of exactly what he should do, judging from the lines in his forehead. Marui just stands there, popping his bubbles and watching.
Probably waiting to see us fuck up in doubles, Niou thinks.
“Marui!” Jackal’s voice booms across the court. He’s got the loudspeaker again and his second call of Marui’s name is followed by a deafening static that sends half the club members to their knees on the courts.
“Argh! Jackal!” Marui yells. His bubble deflates and sticks to his chin. Niou sniggers as Marui stalks off, trying to yank the loudspeaker from Jackal.
“Ready senpais?” Kirihara asks.
Finally.
Niou gives him a fast nod. His mouth is dry, his tongue like cotton. He can feel his insides twisting, wanting to eat lunch sooner rather than later. But this feeling of hunger is at war with the desire he has to see that laser beam shot of Yagyuu’s. From the baseline he has a good view of Yagyuu’s backside. He shouldn’t be thinking too much about it, he should be keeping his eyes on the ball, and yet he is strangely fascinated at the same time by the way Yagyuu’s muscles shift ever so slightly under the crisp white of his shorts.
And Kirihara’s kick serve slams the ground beside Niou.
He blinks.
What the hell?
Yagyuu looks over his shoulder, the corners of his mouth downturned. “I thought you had that shot,” he says.
“Ah,” Niou says. “My bad.” He bends his knees, moving back and forth as Kirihara bounces a second ball, then he tells Yagyuu, “That was a test! Don’t take your eyes off the ball. Ever.”
Yagyuu doesn’t respond to Niou’s lie, instead he rushes right for Kirihara’s shot. He could make it, but he hasn’t gotten the knack of judging every shot yet and Niou knows as soon as he sees the arc of the ball, that it is too far back for Yagyuu to get any good swing out of it.
“Mine!” Niou calls. He steps up with an angled racket. His backhand isn’t as strong- Kirihara’s ball presses his racket hard into his palm, straining his wrist. The increased weight of those damned bands Yukimura gave them only add to the stress. Niou shakes, struggling to push back against the ball and shoot but…
His racket flies backwards. It clatters against the bench and a junior yells, “Hey! That almost hit me!” Niou moves to take his racket that the junior kicks at him.
“Don’t kick my fucking racket,” Niou snarls, snatching his racket up and holding it against his chest. “I’m a regular and I can let Yukimura know about this.”
The junior’s face blanches. His almond eyes go round. He flings himself down in a low bow. “I’m sorry!” he says. “I’m sorry!”
Niou waves him off. Checking over his racket, he doesn’t notice anything more than the usual scratches along the frame. It’s nice what a bit of seniority on the team brings.
“Are you done now?” Kirihara shouts. “I’m waiting, senpai! I want to show Yagyuu-senpai my moves! Come on!”
Seniority, however, doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.
Niou sighs. His wrists ache. The damned weights make his skin sweaty and irritated underneath and he’s been the good little teammate for the past few weeks and worn them, but he wants control back. Niou bites his lip. He could easily pull the Velcro and toss the weights off.
But.
Yagyuu watches him. And Kirihara. And they are both waiting to play.
Whatever special new move Kirihara wants to show Yagyuu, Niou isn’t sure. Kirihara doesn’t get into the full swing of things- he can’t. It’s one-way with him working on his serves and Yagyuu and Niou trying out basic doubles formations. Yagyuu doesn’t pace himself well. He’s crap at the net, crap at judging when he should get the balls and when Niou should.
That, and Niou can’t read him very well. Yagyuu’s expressionless face and relative silence don’t help. He doesn’t turn around to catch Niou’s eyes and convey the game plan, but then he’s a megane. He’d have to cram his whole head. Yagyuu can’t see out of the sides of his lenses, just like Niou’s entire family.
Kirihara has the full advantage. He can tell where Yagyuu wants to move because Yagyuu makes the classic, very wrong move and turns his head to the direction he hits. He looks up, lifting his chin when he wants to lob or make a high shot. He looks down to his racket when he wants to make a low shot.
Niou can tell bits and pieces, but he doesn’t like playing baseline. Usually he was dumped at the net by a senpai, but without the familiar net and the sense of space and closeness to the other court, he feels a bit lost.
They aren’t awful, but they aren’t that great either. Kirihara trumps them again and again, occasionally Yagyuu will return a shot, or Niou will manage a volley, but one wonderchibi against a brand new doubles team with no coordination- the balance is clear.
“Did you like my new footwork?” Kirihara asks them at the bench. Niou chugs his waterbottle. By now, it’s a lukewarm slosh of water, but it’s better than nothing. Kirihara bounces, his grin from ear to ear. “Yukimura-buchou was saying I should work on my coordination-”
“Not your form?” Niou asks.
Yagyuu spits out his water. Choking, he manages to say, “Excuse me.”
Kirihara makes a noise. “Well, he said that too, but Yukimura-buchou said I could borrow his videotape of last year’s Wimbledon match and that I should watch the players and I saw some cool stuff so I tried to do the same thing and it worked! My serve felt stronger.” Kirihara laughs to himself. He leans closer and narrows his eyes, his grin quirking to a sly smile. “You could tell, couldn’t you, Niou-senpai?”
Niou says nothing. He sets his waterbottle down on the bench.
Jackal can’t end practice soon enough. Niou trudges into the changing rooms, strips down to his skin, and pads into the showers so quickly he and Kirihara nearly plow into each other in the corridor, feet slipping on damp tiles and naked arms flapping.
Niou glares at him. But he knows as well as Kirihara that it isn’t Kirihara who is all ungainly legs and feet and arms. Kirihara still has the compact childish body with an equally childish attitude.
“Jeeze, Niou-senpai, where are you going so fast?”
Jackal gives the two of them a long look before sighing. It’s a good thing he has no hair, otherwise dealing with this team might cause baldness. Niou snickers to himself at the thought.
With the three monsters in Tokyo, the remaining four regulars spread out across the showers. Steam rises along with Marui’s warbling. “I feel like chicken tonight! Like chicken tonight!” he sings, stomping his feet as he shampoos his hair. “I feel like chicken tonight!”
“What the heck is Marui-senpai singing?” Kirihara asks, to no one in particular.
Yagyuu stops soaping his armpit. Niou glances away, carefully staring at the off-white tiles surrounding them. He wasn’t just watching Yagyuu’s naked chest, with the water rolling off his smooth skin. That would be gross. And gay.
“It’s English,” Yagyuu says. “Something about a chicken, Kirihara-kun.”
“It sounds like a tv jingle,” Jackal says.
Marui ignores all of them, turning around to wash his stomach and wiggling his ass in the mean time. Niou wants to barf. There are hundreds of things beyond Marui’s pasty white fat ass jiggling that he would rather see.
Without Yukimura, Yanagi or Sanada here, Niou takes his time. They all do. Kirihara makes shampoo spikes in his hair and wanders around looking for his soap, not worried about reaching between Jackal’s feet when he finally sees a slippery green bar on the far side of the showers. The steam and the sounds of soap, of wet skin fill the air when Marui finally corks it.
Niou can watch Yagyuu when Jackal finishes washing himself. Yagyuu is as blind as a bat, Niou knows that much, from the way Yagyuu looks out with wide, myopic eyes, from the way Yagyuu feels around like a blind man for his shampoo bottle. He should be able to see it, a bright blue plastic bottle against pale tiles, and yet he doesn’t.
And Yagyuu can’t see Niou watching him. It’s perfect.
Marui leaves, yelling something to Jackal about checking out a new hotel buffet afterwards, and then just Kirihara is left with the two of them. “Niou-senpai,” Kirihara asks, “have you ever been to the arcade on fifth? I want to go there, but my mom says I can’t go by myself because she thinks that some foreign pervert will kidnap me.”
Shampoo stings Niou’s eye when he turns to Kirihara. “Ow!” he hisses, wiping his eyes with a wet hand. “No,” he snaps. “I haven’t.”
“Kirihara-kun,” Yagyuu says “if you want we can go there sometime.”
“Thank you, Yagyuu-senpai!”
It stings, too, that Yagyuu and Kirihara are quick to a sort of friendship that Niou doesn’t know how- or won’t bother- to try to make. “Well,” he says, trying to keep his voice even, “if you’re going to make it a team outing, I might as well go with you guys.”
Yagyuu says nothing. Kirihara pumps his fist. “Yeah! I heard they have cool team games and we can play Circle of Hell! It’s a multiplayer game, senpais. But I want to be Beelzebub. You guys can pick between Lucifer and Mestopheles.”
Niou has no idea what the hell Kirihara is talking about. Arcades are good for darts, or if he’s really pressed and bored, whack-a-mole. Niou can bash the pop-up moles, pretending they are Sanada’s face.
Before Yagyuu leaves Niou to turn into a shrivel prune completely, for the shortest of moments after turning off his shower, Yagyuu stands as if frozen. Water slides down his body as though his skin is faintly oiled, slightly tanned from the sun, except where the lines of his shorts cut across his thighs and stomach. He’s naked, a faint line of dark hair running down from his stomach, down between his legs where-
Niou’s mouth feels dry. He breathes out. Yagyuu’s about his size, nothing spectacular, nothing special, not hung like some of the biggest seniors or even Sanada or Yanagi, but…
If he’s so like Niou, would it feel the same?
Something twitches between Niou’s own legs.
His cock stiffens at the thought. Dammit, he thinks.
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
It being a Sunday, there is no tennis practice.
Niou could, in theory, spend his day at the arcade, getting up before noon, taking the bus and playing all the darts he wanted, to his heart’s content.
Instead, he mopes around at home.
There is no way he can show his face there again.
Or tomorrow, how can he just walk into the tennis courts and pretend he didn’t run out of the arcade like the biggest ass, then come home and jerk himself off at night while thinking about said same person.
A fucking megane dork.
This is fucked up, he thinks. It becomes a sort of mantra. He mouths the words when his father hides behind the newspaper. He mouths the words when his mother’s back is turned to do the dishes. He mouths the words as his sister helps their younger brother with his geometry homework.
“Don’t you have somewhere to go?” his sister asks. “And stop talking to yourself. People will think you have a mental retardation.”
Niou can’t even be bothered to snap at her.
He shuffles upstairs and shuts his bedroom door. He can see in the mirror that his hair is as flat and lifeless as he is, hanging limp all around his head. The too-long ends brush his t-shirt collar and itch his neck.
Niou leaves his hair, letting it fall in his eyes. He slumps down on his bed with a sigh, but the sheets move under his weight, smelling faintly of dried spunk from last night. To make things worse, after the first time, he’d jerked himself off again. Thinking about it now just makes his cock start to tighten in his pants.
Niou stands up. He’s beyond this sort of thing. He’s not like the OBs, who used to joke about jerking off to pictures of girls in their classes, the ones with big boobs. No, Niou just thinks about megane dorks instead.
He feels sick inside, like he wants to barf but he can’t. His racket sits forlorn on the floor, leaning against his tennisbag. He picks it up, then starts to bounce a ball on the face. One, two, three.
He bounces it fifty times with his left hand, then he switches. Niou’s right hand isn’t strong, he rarely uses it, and he can barely bounce a ball three times before Yagyuu’s eyes flash in his mind and the ball flies across the room, scattering his cellphone from the top of his desk with a crash of papers and pens everywhere.
Out of anger, and boredom, and frustration, Niou works on two weeks of math homework. The numbers, so easily manipulated on paper, soothe his nerves a bit, but it doesn’t last and by supper time, he’s hearing Yagyuu’s voice in his ear again and his pants are too tight between the legs.
***
Monday arrives and Niou shows up at tennis practice, of course, but he’s subdued. And he knows it. His face feels hot. His shorts feel awkward, too tight, and his t-shirt isn’t long enough to cover everything the way he wants it. Niou keeps his back turned in the locker room. He can hear Yagyuu walk in and say hello to Jackal, but Yagyuu doesn’t sound any different from normal.
And something else has changed, too.
Yagyuu has somehow managed to learn more than just his laser beam: he can play tennis.
With the three monsters back at practice, everything falls into a strict pace and Niou pushes himself to finish his laps quickly. The burn in his calves takes his mind off the weekend for the moment.
Niou stands on the court where he and Yagyuu have been working. Yagyuu walks up to him and nods. Niou nods back. He can be completely normal, too.
Maybe it was puberty messing with his mind. Maybe he’d imagined Yagyuu playing darts.
But that doesn’t explain how Yagyuu manages to toss a ball up into the air and make a perfect serve across the net. Niou raises an eyebrow.
“Nice serve,” he says.
Yagyuu’s mouth twitches. “Thank you, Niou-kun.”
Once Niou returns the shot, a rally starts. It feels good to start moving across the court, even if the pace is slow and the shots predictable. Yagyuu tends to want to stay at the back of the court and move as little as possible, but Niou won’t have that. He angles his shots towards the corners, making him run.
Yagyuu’s muscles clench and shift and it’s not a bad combination, of watching him start to sweat, of watching his glasses slide down his nose, of watching Yagyuu start to finally make small grunts of effort to keep up with Niou.
Niou grins.
Yukimura stands on the sideline of their court, his arms folded over his chest. Niou looks at him, then hits a backhand to centre court. Yukimura’s eyes follow his movements, every motion he makes, like a hawk.
Niou turns away. Yukimura walks off towards Marui and Kirihara, who shoot lobs at each other, trying to out do the other player with the highest ball they can make.
In the changing rooms in the afternoon, Yukimura finally says something. Sanada and Yanagi, whatever they did on the weekend, haven’t mentioned the Senbatsu at all, which starts to make Niou a little skeptical of what exactly a Senbatsu is. Do they even play tennis? Well, they must, otherwise Yukimura would have never gone.
Niou avoids looking at Yagyuu, although the temptation is there now when he catches sight of bare skin as Yagyuu strips his t-shirt off and stretches his arms above his head. Niou can smell Yagyuu’s sweat, almost heady in a way. Kinda gross, but something he wants to breathe in, too, at the same time.
Niou’s face burns.
Niou slumps on the bench, untying his shoelaces with the utmost slowness. He can’t shower like this right now, not with the erection hot and hard in his shorts. It’s embarrassing sitting here with one, it would be death to waltz into the showers.
He might poke someone’s eye out.
But he isn’t the only slow person. Yanagi is careful and calm, smiling at Niou as he folds his uniform up and places it in his tennisbag, before grabbing a towel and walking to the showers. Wet feet slap across the tiles, then Niou makes for the showers himself. He passes Yagyuu in the corridor, who is wet and dripping with steam and sweat, his glasses completely fogged up.
Niou snorts.
At least that much is still the same.
From then showers, despite the spray of water and Yanagi humming to himself as he soaps his arms and legs, Niou can hear Yukimura talking in the locker room down the hall.
“We’ll be at the tournament next weekend,” he tells Kirihara. “I’ll have Jackal in charge of practice again on Saturday. We won’t be gone more than one day. I heard that the American team they are having us play is crap.”
“You can show them just how good we are, Yukimura-buchou!” Kirihara says.
When Yanagi and Niou walk into the locker room, Yukimura is fully dressed in his uniform pants and buttoned shirt. His tie hangs around his neck, undone. “I think we need to work on our team dynamics,” Yukimura announces.
“Eh?” Marui asks.
Sanada pushes his cap down his brow. “We’ve been lazy with our forms,” he grumbles. “Lazy asses!”
“No, no that, Sanada!” Yukimura snaps. “Well, yes, you all have been, but this is about teamwork. Atobe from Hyoutei said that his team takes mini-breaks to the mountains. We can’t let Hyoutei or any other team beat us. We will win the Nationals.” Yukimura slams his hand against his locker.
“If Atobe-”
Sanada’s eye twitches at the name.
“-‘s team is tight, we have to be tighter.”
“I’m not going on a minibreak with him,” Niou says, looking at Marui.
Marui gives him the finger.
Yukimura glares at both of them and Niou mouths “Fuck you” at Marui when Yukimura turns.
“No, we’re not going on a minibreak. We can’t afford to lose any more practices.”
“We could…go out for snacks?” Marui offers.
Yukimura’s grin is dark. “Exactly.”
***
Going out for snacks somehow turns out to mean wasting Friday nights at hotel buffets.
Niou just wants to go home. He’s at school from eight until five, and now he’s out at half-past seven sitting in a cheap hotel restaurant pushing fried shrimp around his plate.
Marui seems to think it is fabulous.
“See, the short ribs here are good,” he says, spewing his food all over his plate, his chin and the table. Niou turns, trying to escape the spray, but being wedged between Yagyuu and Kirihara means he has no room to move, not with Sanada and Yukimura sitting at the ends of the table.
He is, basically, trapped.
Niou pushes a piece of Chinese sausage around the brown mess of teriyaki sauce on his plate. He flicks rice grains at Marui’s napkin, tucked into his t-shirt like a baby’s bib.
“-but the fried rice is even better. I dunno what they use in it- you think it’s oyster sauce, Jackal?”
Jackal nods. “Maybe.”
“It might be the seaweed flakes. Man, I love those things.” Marui reaches across his plate and Yanagi’s to grab the shaker and dump half the contents onto his plate. “And the desserts! The hotel down the road has an awesome chocolate cake- it has three kinds, one kind with wasabi sauce, but the sweets here, the ones with the plums and the lychees- hey, Jackal, are you listening?”
Jackal closes his eyes. “Yes,” he says.
“Good,” Marui says. He shoves a piece of chicken into his mouth. The seaweed flakes coat it as thick as tempura batter.
Niou tries to tune Marui out, but he can’t eavesdrop on Sanada and Yanagi because Yanagi whispers and Sanada just grunts- most of their conversations are like that, monosyllables and hushed communication. At least Yukimura snaps and scowls and sighs in a huff.
The team really doesn’t have much dynamic as a whole. A few friendships here and there, some sort of weird Yukimura infatuation on Sanada’s part, but Niou isn’t friends with any of them. The team is a group of acquaintances, if that. Mutually connected through their positions on the tennis team, their skill and their interest in the sport.
Yukimura drags it on for two more hours. Niou smears peas around his plate. He shreds his napkin and balls up the mess under the table, before throwing it at Marui’s legs. But Marui is too busy stuffing his face with as much food as is humanly possible. Niou had assumed that he ate a lot- his mother tells him as much when he serves himself three helpings of beef stew, but he doesn’t eat that much.
Five plates of custard cakes and cream puddings later, Marui pushes his chair back to get another bowl of ice cream from the dessert bar.
“Jackal!” Yukimura says, cutting through Kirihara’s describing of kamikaze pilots blowing American tankers to bits in a videogame to Yanagi.
Jackal stops stirring his flat coke with a chopstick. He looks up.
Yukimura hands a sheet of paper down the table. Niou takes it from Yagyuu and looks at it before passing it along to Kirihara.
10:50am: take first years to court A and have Kasahara lead the swings. 50 reps.
10:55am: take the second years to court B. Make sure they pair up for serve practice. 25 serves each.
11:00am: regulars on C court. Make sure than Niou and Yagyuu work on their doubles form. They have just fucked around since August. Have Yagyuu at net and Niou at baseline with Kirihara serving to them.
11:05am: have Marui and a senior (Yamada, if he shows up for practice, or use Murakami) feed balls to freshmen to work on backhands. Line them up in alphabetical order…
Niou can feel his eyes glazing over. Yanagi and Sanada must have helped with this schedule. Maybe they plan out every practice- that would explain Yanagi’s perpetual clipboard and their constant three-some hush-hush pow wows.
Niou shoves it into Kirihara’s hands. The wonderchibi’s eyes go wide. “Wow, Yukimura-buchou, this is a lot of work!”
“We can’t get lazy,” Yukimura says. “Jackal, make sure you follow that schedule. If anything comes up, don’t call me on my cellphone. I could be playing. Call Sanada’s cellphone instead.”
Jackal folds up the schedule. “Okay,” he mutters.
Niou yawns. Yukimura doesn’t notice. He rattles off, explaining drill after drill to Jackal. Niou checks his watch. Sanada scowls under his cap. Niou shakes his head, smirking. Slouching low in his chair, Niou sticks his foot out under the table, fishing around the legs and tennisbags in search of Sanada’s shin. Sanada jumps in his seat when Niou brushes his sneaker against Sanada’s ankle.
“Like that?” Niou mouths. Wish it was Yukimura?
And then Sanada turns a red so dark that Niou knows exactly what is happening to Sanada and he pulls his foot back, so fast he might as well have been burned. He grimaces. Sanada hides under his cap brim.
He probably was pretending it was Yukimura’s foot!
Niou shudders.
“Well, I’m tired, everyone, I’m going home now,” Yukimura says at long last. He stands up, grabbing his tennisbag, then pausing for a moment. Yukimura wiggles his fingers, frowning at them. He shakes his hand out, then shrugs.
“Yukimura?” Sanada asks.
“Seiichi?” Yanagi asks.
“I must just be antsy for tomorrow,” Yukimura says. He laughs, but it is forced and brittle.
As they walk towards the closest bus stop, Niou notices that Yukimura continues to wiggle his fingers, hitting his thigh softly, as though he can’t get the feeling back to them.
He plays too much tennis, Niou thinks. His own fingers feel fine.
***
As soon as Niou takes one step over the threshold, his mother stands there, lording over him with a plastic rice spoon and a frown. Her glasses have slid halfway down her nose.
“Masaharu, where have you been?” she asks.
Niou cringes. Then he sighs, peeling his running shoes off and setting them neatly against the wall, just for his mother.
But she keeps frowning at him. “Where have you been? You should have been home hours ago!”
Niou sighs again. He ducks his head scratches the back of his neck. “I- the tennis regulars went out for food.”
She stares at him, mouth hanging open for a minute. In the background, Niou can hear his father ask, “Is he home now? He has homework to be doing tonight!”
“He- he was out with friends!” his mother says.
Only Niou’s family could make such a big deal about something so stupid. His mother smiles and tells him how thrilled she is that he finally has friends.
He rolls his eyes behind her back. It’s not like that. He spent almost three hours bored and bothered as Yukimura blathered on about techniques and Kirihara talked about videogames until Yanagi’s ears must have bled. Last weekend with the arcade must have been an illusion because Yagyuu reverted to his dorky megane self and sat there, smiling blandly and eating bland white jellies and fried rice.
Yagyuu, Niou is convinced, has no concrete personality beyond the stereotype. The darts were a fluke. Niou’s temple hurts thinking about it. Yagyuu doesn’t make any sense. Niou wants to dig under his skin and see what is there, but at the same time, he doesn’t want to because he doesn’t care about fucking megane dorks at all.
He firmly believes that. All Niou has to do is glance down the stairwell at his family, the perfect nuclear unit. Mother, father, son, daughter, all sitting in the family room around a low table, all resembling each other: neat, straight black hair, parted immaculately. All wearing glasses with the same serious expressions as they move black and white playing chips across a boardgame.
Niou closes his bedroom door. In his mirror, he sees a pale, tired teenager with a frown on his face and his mole that seems to get darker in the light of his lamp. His hair is a mess, neither straight nor black. And he doesn’t wear glasses. Not even when he squints does he need them.
He flops back down on his bed, the dust motes swirling up in the air around him. His sheets smell of laundry soap- his mother has washed them again this week. Niou listens for his family, engrossed in their boardgame, then he switches his light off.
Niou can pretend that he’s being sneaky in the dark. If he can’t see himself, then no one will know that he’s got his shorts around his knees- his underpants, too- and his left hand curled around his half-hard penis.
If he closes his eyes, he can pretend that he’s not himself and that Niou isn’t jerking off and imagining that bland, boring megane face in front of his eyelids. He squeezes his hand harder, groaning at the friction. The pleasure rises within his stomach, a tingle of numb between his legs, one that he can ride out. Niou bites down on his lip. He’s thirteen. These things are normal, to jerk off to anything.
Except it should be boobs and girls, not a megane fixing his glasses. Niou moans as Yagyuu’s long fingers fix his frames. Niou-kun…
Niou pulls his hand away, spits on his palm, then starts to jerk faster. He digs his toes into his sheets, bunching them up. His mattress shifts and his hand starts to make noises as fights to keep from moaning. It feels good. Really good. At least as good as winning a tennis match.
And there is Yagyuu, posing and pointing his racket as a ball rips through the air, so fast it cuts, it burns and-
Niou grunts, unable to stop the gasps that come and the shudders, too. His mattress creaks, but his eyes roll back and his back arches and god, the feeling of release, of riding the wave of pleasure that ripples through his body.
It would feel good if only it weren’t so pathetically gross and…pathetic.
Niou rolls onto his side. He wipes his hands off with a Kleenex, but his hand still smells of the come, a smell that he can never seem to fully wash out of his skin, no matter how hard he scrubs with soap.
His hair is a mess, too, but he can’t be bothered to fix it. He pulls the elastic from his hair. The freedom feels good. Undressing out of his clothes (which were already half off), he grabs his pajamas, puts them on and crawls into bed.
It feels petty, but not brushing his teeth is another small rebellion against his family. Maybe he can die of rotten teeth. At least then he wouldn’t have to fall asleep to the thought of seeing Yagyuu tomorrow, and having to practice with him half-hard and embarrassed.
***
Saturday morning and Niou drags his body into the shower. The warm spray and the rising steam feels good, while the sound of the water dulls the slapping his hand on his cock. This is becoming more of a habit, at night, in the morning. Sometimes at lunch time he’ll think about sneaking into the tennis clubhouse for a private, quiet place to jerk off, but he’s fairly certain that only Yukimura, Sanada, and Yanagi (along with the coach) have copies of the key.
Breakfast he eats alone, in the semi-darkness just before dawn. The kettle chugs, the clicking noises the only sound besides the hum of the fridge as Niou rummages around for the last of the grapes to eat. There are cold tapioca puddings, which he takes two, and pops two slices of bread into the toaster.
No cherry or ginger jam- someone must have eaten them up: probably him, since his family is notoriously picky about writing down the used up foods on his mother’s grocery list. Niou pulls out a jar of mango chutney from the fridge door. It’s close enough. It will do on toast. The chili might wake him up.
By the time Niou leaves, he can hear his father moving around upstairs, flushing the toilet and running water. Niou grabs the newspaper from the front porch, throws it inside the hallway, and shuts the door behind himself. He mouth tastes of garlic and pudding, which is not exactly the most pleasant combination at half-past seven in the morning.
There is almost autumn in the air. The days are getting cooler, slightly, enough that running laps around the court doesn’t cause Niou to start sweating through every pore in his body. Jackal doesn’t need to assign laps- Niou knows how many Yukimura expects, everyone on the team knows. Still, without Yukimura or Sanada here to impose a dictatorial sense of order, teammates chat as they run, Marui takes breaks between laps to grab his Gatorade and Niou jostles into Jackal’s side.
“Yo,” he says. “Don’t look so serious. You’ll give yourself wrinkles on your pretty brown head.”
Niou picks his pace up, running ahead of Jackal before Jackal can mutter for him to shut up.
Neither Marui and Jackal nor he and Yagyuu have practiced as doubles yet. Niou doesn’t know quite how the hours of practice today will start them off on something they’ve never done before, but with the determined undercurrent for a threepeat Nationals win, Niou is willing to put himself out there.
Even if he does happen to jerk off to thoughts of that person at night. And in the mornings.
Yagyuu waits at the net for Niou, adjusting the weights on his wrist, pushing his watch up further on his hand.
“These things are crap to wear,” Niou says.
Yagyuu nods.
So much for attempts at conversation. Niou tries again. “Have you ever played doubles before?” he asks.
Yagyuu shakes his head. “No,” he says. Yagyuu pushes his glasses up his nose. “Has Jackal-kun told you how Yukimura-kun wants us to start practice?”
Niou shakes his head this time. “Ball machines?” he offers.
The juniors are swarming the courts by now, all eager to practice and get a rally in while they can. With Yukimura gone, they can slack off and play games for fun, rather than do endless drills and laps and work. Sure, the repetition of drills and motions helps with play, but what is the point if they never actually get to play.
But Kirihara hogs the ball machines.
“Wonderchibi, your turn’s up!” Niou yells.
Kirihara hits a ball back, slamming it into the wall before he turns around. “Niou-senpai, Jackal didn’t say anything about you guys practicing here.”
“Yeah, well, I’m saying we’re practicing here,” Niou says. “We need to work on doubles formations. Unless you want us to lose a game?”
Kirihara’s eyes go as wide as the moon. He shakes his head furiously. The balls fly out from the machine and he has to dodge them to come over and talk with Niou.
“Fine,” he says, pouting with his lower lip. “But I want to use them after you guys.”
Yagyuu smiles. “Of course, Kirihara-kun,” he says.
Why does Yagyuu say more to Kirihara than to me? Niou thinks. Out loud, he just clicks his tongue. “Hey, you!” he shouts to a passing freshman, who is either late for practice or helping Kirihara- Niou doesn’t care which. “Turn the machine off for now and wait until I say to start it again. Two second intervals, 40ks- got that?”
“Two seconds. 40k’s. Got it!” the freshman’s high voice squeaks. “Yes, senpai!”
Niou turns to Yagyuu. “So, maybe we should…” He rubs the back of his neck. He’s crap at this, teaching. Telling. Yagyuu should just get on the court and then Niou can take it from there, but Yagyuu stands, and waits, and anticipates Niou to suggest what they should do since Niou is the one with doubles experience, not Yagyuu.
“Basic formation?” he suggests.
“That sounds good,” Yagyuu says. “What position do you play?”
Yellow whizzes by, skimming Niou’s ear, burning the skin and fluttering his hair around his face. The fuck? He turns to glare at the freshman.
“Sorry, senpai!” the freshman shrieks as he frantically tries to change the adjustments on the machine, shaking his head and flapping his hands.
“Press the red button,” Niou says.
“Yes, senpai! Thank you, senpai!”
The bright lights on the machine stop and the clock freezes on the count.
Niou sighs heavily. Idiot kid, he thinks. “Okay,” he tells Yagyuu. “You stand at the baseline. Back left corner.”
Yagyuu nods. “Because you are left-handed, Niou-kun?”
Niou shrugs. He’s never though about why he stands where he does, except for the fact he just stands on the court where he does because it works. “Sure, whatever,” he says.
Niou stands in his place. Yagyuu stands at the baseline, in his place.
Niou nods to the freshman, and tightens his grip on his racket. Hand loose, better grip, better contact with the ball. Form, straight up, legs bent. He loosens his hand and listens as the ball shoots from the machine.
So now we play.
So now it starts.
Niou is defense. The ball is slow and steady, with a course towards the centre of the court. He steps right, to let Yagyuu get the ball. The dork needs the practice.
Niou motions with his hand behind his back. Move up, move right, use a straight shot, that’s all you need.
Yagyuu moves up slightly, but when Niou moves further right to encourage Yagyuu to take the shot, Yagyuu just stands there. The ball hits the ground and bounces off.
“Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says, “how do you know who will hit the ball?”
Niou closes his eyes. Instinct. Trial and error. I don’t know.
“Do you want me to set the pace?” he asks.
Yagyuu blinks. His lenses flash with the harsh fluorescent light of the gymnasium. A second ball whizzes between them.
“Can you vary the shots?” Niou tells the freshman. “Don’t have it on the standard setting.”
The freshman plays with the buttons. The balls start to change- high, low, left, right. Niou sidesteps to avoid a shot. He nods to Yagyuu. Get ready, megane dork.
The balls come. Niou takes the first shot. Yagyuu sways, keeping his feet planted. Niou motions during the next ball. Yagyuu can play amateur tennis, Niou knows this, but can he play better? Can he play at their level?
Yagyuu takes the shot. It’s easy, it’s steady: backhanded lob towards the far side of the other court. Maybe not the best place as the freshman kid yelps and runs out of the way for cover, but it’s a start.
Niou alternates. He chooses some shots at the net, but it gets too predictable and Yagyuu picks up in no time that every second shot is his. On the second shot in a row, Niou moves to the net and avoids a high shot.
“Yours!” he shouts.
“Got it!” Yagyuu yells back, running up, his racket face ready for the ball. He moves slightly, tipping his racket and making a short drop shot over the net.
Niou raises an eyebrow. “Not bad,” he murmurs.
“Thank you, Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says. He smiles.
Niou’s insides feel warm. Yagyuu wasn’t supposed to have heard that.
Half of practice is spent at the ball machine with the freshman dutifully feeding the balls and changing the settings as Niou yells at him to change the rotation, the speed, the angle.
Yagyuu stays at the baseline. Niou stays at the net. He doesn’t want to push too far.
But Niou does want to see Yagyuu in action with that laser shot. “Increase the speed by 10 clicks!” Niou yells as he swings a lob back to the other side.
The freshman, tired and sweating, nods. “Yes, senpai!” he croaks.
Come on. Come on.
Niou watches the ball shoot from the machine; the angle is right, not too low, not too high. The speed is good- if Yagyuu makes the shot, it’ll be brilliant.
Yagyuu’s eyes widen behind his lenses. Niou bites his lip. Do it!
Yagyuu swings back, his chest puffing up with breath, he moves forward, almost slow-motion, stepping with his swing and-
He lobs it.
Damn.
Not only is the ball a lob, but it’s out of bounds, crashing into the wall of the gym.
Niou clicks his tongue. Yagyuu frowns and fixes his glasses.
“Too much follow-through,” Niou says. “Good thing Yukimura didn’t see that.”
Yagyuu is about to say something, or just give Niou a long, bland dorkstare, but then the gymnasium doors crash open and Kirihara starts to shout, “Senpais! Jackal-senpai said that you’re both supposed to come out to the courts and have me serve to you and I’ve been looking for you!”
Niou snorts. He rubs the back of his neck. “Oh. Right.”
“I can use my kick serve, too,” Kirihara offers.
Yagyuu, ever the gentleman, humours Kirihara with a smile. “That would be nice, Kirihara-kun.”
“Don’t encourage the wonderchibi,” Niou mutters.
Yagyuu might hear him this time, too. Good.
But Yagyuu doesn’t say anything.
Kirihara doesn’t just want to use his kick serve, he wants to show it off.
Niou has already been at practice for three hours. His stomach growls when he steps onto the court. The glare of the sun is harsh compared with the dim fluorescent lighting of the gym. It’s noisier, with dozens of freshmen running around and playing awfully close- too close, for Niou’s comfort. Not that he cares if Kirihara smucks one in the head, more like one of the freshmen will have a stray ball and send it straight into their court.
“Having fun?” Marui asks.
Niou looks up to see Marui lurking on Kirihara’s side of the court. He can smell the apple of his bubblegum a mile away, and he can hear that awful pop of his bubbles. Niou breathes through his nose.
“Can you let the kid serve and fuck off?” Niou asks.
Marui laughs. For spite, he pops a huge bubble. Niou’s ears ring with the sound. He cringes. “You’re an asshole,” Marui says, pointing his racket at Niou. “I’m here for Kirihara’s moral support.”
Kirihara shakes his head. Niou does the same. Kirihara stands there, obviously unsure of exactly what he should do, judging from the lines in his forehead. Marui just stands there, popping his bubbles and watching.
Probably waiting to see us fuck up in doubles, Niou thinks.
“Marui!” Jackal’s voice booms across the court. He’s got the loudspeaker again and his second call of Marui’s name is followed by a deafening static that sends half the club members to their knees on the courts.
“Argh! Jackal!” Marui yells. His bubble deflates and sticks to his chin. Niou sniggers as Marui stalks off, trying to yank the loudspeaker from Jackal.
“Ready senpais?” Kirihara asks.
Finally.
Niou gives him a fast nod. His mouth is dry, his tongue like cotton. He can feel his insides twisting, wanting to eat lunch sooner rather than later. But this feeling of hunger is at war with the desire he has to see that laser beam shot of Yagyuu’s. From the baseline he has a good view of Yagyuu’s backside. He shouldn’t be thinking too much about it, he should be keeping his eyes on the ball, and yet he is strangely fascinated at the same time by the way Yagyuu’s muscles shift ever so slightly under the crisp white of his shorts.
And Kirihara’s kick serve slams the ground beside Niou.
He blinks.
What the hell?
Yagyuu looks over his shoulder, the corners of his mouth downturned. “I thought you had that shot,” he says.
“Ah,” Niou says. “My bad.” He bends his knees, moving back and forth as Kirihara bounces a second ball, then he tells Yagyuu, “That was a test! Don’t take your eyes off the ball. Ever.”
Yagyuu doesn’t respond to Niou’s lie, instead he rushes right for Kirihara’s shot. He could make it, but he hasn’t gotten the knack of judging every shot yet and Niou knows as soon as he sees the arc of the ball, that it is too far back for Yagyuu to get any good swing out of it.
“Mine!” Niou calls. He steps up with an angled racket. His backhand isn’t as strong- Kirihara’s ball presses his racket hard into his palm, straining his wrist. The increased weight of those damned bands Yukimura gave them only add to the stress. Niou shakes, struggling to push back against the ball and shoot but…
His racket flies backwards. It clatters against the bench and a junior yells, “Hey! That almost hit me!” Niou moves to take his racket that the junior kicks at him.
“Don’t kick my fucking racket,” Niou snarls, snatching his racket up and holding it against his chest. “I’m a regular and I can let Yukimura know about this.”
The junior’s face blanches. His almond eyes go round. He flings himself down in a low bow. “I’m sorry!” he says. “I’m sorry!”
Niou waves him off. Checking over his racket, he doesn’t notice anything more than the usual scratches along the frame. It’s nice what a bit of seniority on the team brings.
“Are you done now?” Kirihara shouts. “I’m waiting, senpai! I want to show Yagyuu-senpai my moves! Come on!”
Seniority, however, doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.
Niou sighs. His wrists ache. The damned weights make his skin sweaty and irritated underneath and he’s been the good little teammate for the past few weeks and worn them, but he wants control back. Niou bites his lip. He could easily pull the Velcro and toss the weights off.
But.
Yagyuu watches him. And Kirihara. And they are both waiting to play.
Whatever special new move Kirihara wants to show Yagyuu, Niou isn’t sure. Kirihara doesn’t get into the full swing of things- he can’t. It’s one-way with him working on his serves and Yagyuu and Niou trying out basic doubles formations. Yagyuu doesn’t pace himself well. He’s crap at the net, crap at judging when he should get the balls and when Niou should.
That, and Niou can’t read him very well. Yagyuu’s expressionless face and relative silence don’t help. He doesn’t turn around to catch Niou’s eyes and convey the game plan, but then he’s a megane. He’d have to cram his whole head. Yagyuu can’t see out of the sides of his lenses, just like Niou’s entire family.
Kirihara has the full advantage. He can tell where Yagyuu wants to move because Yagyuu makes the classic, very wrong move and turns his head to the direction he hits. He looks up, lifting his chin when he wants to lob or make a high shot. He looks down to his racket when he wants to make a low shot.
Niou can tell bits and pieces, but he doesn’t like playing baseline. Usually he was dumped at the net by a senpai, but without the familiar net and the sense of space and closeness to the other court, he feels a bit lost.
They aren’t awful, but they aren’t that great either. Kirihara trumps them again and again, occasionally Yagyuu will return a shot, or Niou will manage a volley, but one wonderchibi against a brand new doubles team with no coordination- the balance is clear.
“Did you like my new footwork?” Kirihara asks them at the bench. Niou chugs his waterbottle. By now, it’s a lukewarm slosh of water, but it’s better than nothing. Kirihara bounces, his grin from ear to ear. “Yukimura-buchou was saying I should work on my coordination-”
“Not your form?” Niou asks.
Yagyuu spits out his water. Choking, he manages to say, “Excuse me.”
Kirihara makes a noise. “Well, he said that too, but Yukimura-buchou said I could borrow his videotape of last year’s Wimbledon match and that I should watch the players and I saw some cool stuff so I tried to do the same thing and it worked! My serve felt stronger.” Kirihara laughs to himself. He leans closer and narrows his eyes, his grin quirking to a sly smile. “You could tell, couldn’t you, Niou-senpai?”
Niou says nothing. He sets his waterbottle down on the bench.
Jackal can’t end practice soon enough. Niou trudges into the changing rooms, strips down to his skin, and pads into the showers so quickly he and Kirihara nearly plow into each other in the corridor, feet slipping on damp tiles and naked arms flapping.
Niou glares at him. But he knows as well as Kirihara that it isn’t Kirihara who is all ungainly legs and feet and arms. Kirihara still has the compact childish body with an equally childish attitude.
“Jeeze, Niou-senpai, where are you going so fast?”
Jackal gives the two of them a long look before sighing. It’s a good thing he has no hair, otherwise dealing with this team might cause baldness. Niou snickers to himself at the thought.
With the three monsters in Tokyo, the remaining four regulars spread out across the showers. Steam rises along with Marui’s warbling. “I feel like chicken tonight! Like chicken tonight!” he sings, stomping his feet as he shampoos his hair. “I feel like chicken tonight!”
“What the heck is Marui-senpai singing?” Kirihara asks, to no one in particular.
Yagyuu stops soaping his armpit. Niou glances away, carefully staring at the off-white tiles surrounding them. He wasn’t just watching Yagyuu’s naked chest, with the water rolling off his smooth skin. That would be gross. And gay.
“It’s English,” Yagyuu says. “Something about a chicken, Kirihara-kun.”
“It sounds like a tv jingle,” Jackal says.
Marui ignores all of them, turning around to wash his stomach and wiggling his ass in the mean time. Niou wants to barf. There are hundreds of things beyond Marui’s pasty white fat ass jiggling that he would rather see.
Without Yukimura, Yanagi or Sanada here, Niou takes his time. They all do. Kirihara makes shampoo spikes in his hair and wanders around looking for his soap, not worried about reaching between Jackal’s feet when he finally sees a slippery green bar on the far side of the showers. The steam and the sounds of soap, of wet skin fill the air when Marui finally corks it.
Niou can watch Yagyuu when Jackal finishes washing himself. Yagyuu is as blind as a bat, Niou knows that much, from the way Yagyuu looks out with wide, myopic eyes, from the way Yagyuu feels around like a blind man for his shampoo bottle. He should be able to see it, a bright blue plastic bottle against pale tiles, and yet he doesn’t.
And Yagyuu can’t see Niou watching him. It’s perfect.
Marui leaves, yelling something to Jackal about checking out a new hotel buffet afterwards, and then just Kirihara is left with the two of them. “Niou-senpai,” Kirihara asks, “have you ever been to the arcade on fifth? I want to go there, but my mom says I can’t go by myself because she thinks that some foreign pervert will kidnap me.”
Shampoo stings Niou’s eye when he turns to Kirihara. “Ow!” he hisses, wiping his eyes with a wet hand. “No,” he snaps. “I haven’t.”
“Kirihara-kun,” Yagyuu says “if you want we can go there sometime.”
“Thank you, Yagyuu-senpai!”
It stings, too, that Yagyuu and Kirihara are quick to a sort of friendship that Niou doesn’t know how- or won’t bother- to try to make. “Well,” he says, trying to keep his voice even, “if you’re going to make it a team outing, I might as well go with you guys.”
Yagyuu says nothing. Kirihara pumps his fist. “Yeah! I heard they have cool team games and we can play Circle of Hell! It’s a multiplayer game, senpais. But I want to be Beelzebub. You guys can pick between Lucifer and Mestopheles.”
Niou has no idea what the hell Kirihara is talking about. Arcades are good for darts, or if he’s really pressed and bored, whack-a-mole. Niou can bash the pop-up moles, pretending they are Sanada’s face.
Before Yagyuu leaves Niou to turn into a shrivel prune completely, for the shortest of moments after turning off his shower, Yagyuu stands as if frozen. Water slides down his body as though his skin is faintly oiled, slightly tanned from the sun, except where the lines of his shorts cut across his thighs and stomach. He’s naked, a faint line of dark hair running down from his stomach, down between his legs where-
Niou’s mouth feels dry. He breathes out. Yagyuu’s about his size, nothing spectacular, nothing special, not hung like some of the biggest seniors or even Sanada or Yanagi, but…
If he’s so like Niou, would it feel the same?
Something twitches between Niou’s own legs.
His cock stiffens at the thought. Dammit, he thinks.