FIC: Rewind Forward (D1) 15/63
Title: Rewind Forward (15/63)
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Part 10] [Part 11] [Part 12] [Part 13] [Part 14] [Part 15]
The Seigaku data man shakes Niou up.
His tennis feels wrong, both with his right hand and his left. He chokes up during serves. He smashes balls around his room at night when he can’t even so much as control them in simple bounces against his racket. His throat feels constricted and his stomach feels gross.
In his dreams, everywhere he looks he sees a megane glint from behind hedges, hedges so high that Niou can’t see the top of them. The leaves prickle him, shoot out, screeching a hundred times over “Iiiiiiii data! Iiiii data!”
Niou wakes up in cold sweats, panting for his life. His room glitters in the early morning hours, the streetlights from outside his window causing shadows and glints, just like meganes.
He turns fourteen.
No one in the club knows.
His mother bakes him a rice-flour cake. It tastes like paste. Niou pushes it around his plate with his chopsticks, then dumps the rest behind a houseplant.
It goes mouldy within three days.
When his mother cleans it out, she doesn’t say anything to him.
Mentally, maybe his tennis suffers, but on the courts Niou refuses to let it show. Yagyuu doesn’t know about that other issue and no one knows about this new issue. He practices twice as hard, three times harder than in the summer. Niou runs laps after practice is over. He hangs around Yukimura in the locker room, as though he can absorb Yukimura’s skills through osmosis in the air.
Niou practices on the wall behind his house in the evenings. His brother refuses to go outside in this weather, instead staying inside with a science textbook. His parents refuse to let Niou drag his brother along to a street court.
“It’s too cold out,” his mother says. “You’ll make him sick, Masaharu. Use some judgment, please.”
Niou slams the balls against the stucco siding louder than before. His parents say nothing, but they frown at him when he slinks inside the back door after he’s finished, red-faced and panting from the cold and the effort.
His forearms hurt. His body hurts. His insides hurt, too. Thinking about Yagyuu’s laser beam doesn’t help either. Niou wants to try it with his right hand, but he won’t yet. He wouldn’t be able to hit it with the combination of his wrong hand and the wrist weights.
His roots start to grow out. He grows a pimple on the left side of his chin to match his mole on the right. It hurts, too.
Niou picks at it in the mirror, the flaming red spot a reminder that things seem to fucking suck right now.
The homework piles up. The nights out with Yagyuu and the team get longer, later and Niou sleeps less, he sleeps more, he doesn’t sleep at all from the awful visions of meganes and data and hedgerows.
The morning of December 20, Yukimura tacks a schedule up to the outside of the clubhouse. A list of names, a list of dates-
A list of matches.
Yagyuu gets to it first. He’s taller than Niou by a bit, an inch maybe, but Niou’s catching up, growing like a weed every other week, one winning, then the other. Their shoes are the perpetual losers, growing too small by the end of each month.
“Are we playing?” Niou asks.
Yagyuu pulls away and out of the crowd. He nods. “Marui-kun and Jackal-kun. On the 22nd. Do you think you’ll be able to play by then?”
Niou feels his throat constrict a little more. How did Yagyuu know? Niou smirks, but his heart isn’t in it. “If it’s against that fatty, I’ll fucking push myself to win until I drop dead.”
Two days. That leaves them two days to prepare.
Niou glances across the courts. Marui and Jackal are on the far side, rallying against a couple other junior students. Jackal stays at the net, Marui at the baseline. Sometimes they switch. They move around a lot. Marui likes to move. He pops bubbles, he rallies, he laughs and he grins. He has fun with Jackal, who always sports a serious face until finally, finally he gets to make a strong smash right between the players.
Marui and Jackal tap fists.
What a nice unit.
But no genius shit shown off there.
Could Yagyuu’s laser beam throw off a rally of Marui’s?
Could Niou manage to mimic the laser beam too?
He nods. “Let’s go,” he says to Yagyuu.
They practice that night until the sun has set and the last bus has stopped making its rounds at the entrance to the Rikkai Dai campus. The floodlights are bright, but the shadows over the courts are long. Niou has to squint to make out some of Yagyuu’s backhanded lobs. Sweat drips cold and congealing down the back of his t-shirt, his uniform jacket long ago having been thrown off.
Even Yukimura has gone home.
“Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says. He wipes his mouth, his own face wet and weary. His glasses reflect the light, the scum and grease catching the garish green of the fluorescent beams. “Aren’t you tired yet?”
Niou’s legs feel like they could crumple under his body at any minute. “Serve me again. But this time, bend at your hips again and keep your shot mid-range. Marui likes high balls and Jackal likes lower ones. We’ll mess them up with stuff like that.”
Yagyuu sighs. The back of his t-shirt is dark, soaked through with sweat, but he manages to toss another ball for yet another serve to Niou.
“Serve it with all your soul!” Niou shouts. He groans through his return, his arms straining, his eyes blurring. “Or some such shit, Yagyuu!”
Yagyuu laughs when Niou falls face-first on the court, too tired to pick himself up.
***
Niou falls asleep in English class.
Smith-sensai pokes him in the shoulder with a piece of chalk. “Can you explain what you were just doing, in the present active indicative case, to the class?” the smug Australian twit asks.
Niou cracks an eyes open. His head itches. Half of his face is numb and probably indented with his desk where he was lying on a pencil and a musty English textbook.
“Er…I am…to rest, no…” Niou scratches his head. The class titters. A stupid girl behind him snickers. A boy on his left two rows away whispers something to a friend. “I don’t know how to say ‘to sleep’,” Niou mutters.
I don’t fucking care, either.
The teacher smirks, obviously pleased with himself for catching a sleeping student.
Niou gets detention at lunch. Scrubbing desks with cleaner. It’s grimy and a bit gross, his hands black with pencil lead and scum, but it’s nothing worse than he’s done before. His cellphone buzzes the entire time, but the teacher just sits in his desk and shakes his head.
“You can’t touch your phone until you’re done, Niou,” he says. He leans back in his chair and munches on a sandwich made with peanut butter and something that looks a bit like sour plum jam.
Niou winces. Nasty. Only Marui would ever come up with a combination of food like that.
Thirty-six desks, six rows of six. At seven to the hour, Niou finally tosses the spray bottle and blackened rag on the teacher’s desk. “There,” he says.
The teacher looks up from his second sandwich. “Good, now bugger off, kid.”
Niou grabs his bag, walks out, closes the door behind himself and spits at the glass window. “Fuck you,” he whispers.
Niou sets his backpack down around the hallway, between a row of lockers and a lone garbage can. He flips his cell out and checks the messages. Three missed. He opens the first- the number is not one he recognizes, but it might be…Sanada’s?
something happened. no practice. clubhouse at 4.
Niou scratches his head again. He reads the other two messages, but they are exactly the same. Pity Marui or Sanada isn’t in his class this year. Niou has no idea what the hell happened. Something bad enough to cancel practice.
He peers out a window. The sky is clear, a blue wash tinged with winter grey. Free from clouds and any sea breezes. Niou shrugs. The bell for afternoon classes rings. He walks off to chemistry, puzzled but not too distressed.
Which is not entirely true, because Niou spends the entire length of Chemistry, Biology and Literature staring at his backpack, almost wishing his phone would ring in the middle of lectures on periodic tables and krebbs’ cycles of oxygen, or whatever the teachers babble on about.
Niou doodles in his notebooks. Circles with familiar lines of tennis balls. Circles with tiny eyes, like huge lenses of glasses. He draws the katakana for tennis all over the lines, a hundred times for each second passed without knowing what the hell is going on.
Four o’clock cannot come soon enough.
The clubhouse is crowded with kouhais. Niou elbows a couple freshmen out of the way. He can hear people whispering, muttering, talking, all about Yukimura-buchou.
Yanagi stands in the doorway, tacking up a poster. When he turns, his eyes are bloodshot. Niou searches out Yagyuu, but he can’t move over to ask what happened.
Jackal steps up. “Practice is cancelled!” he yells, his voice strong and loud. The crowd goes deathly silent in an instant.
Niou shivers.
Marui and Sanada and Yukimura are all gone.
Kirihara grabs Niou by the wrist. The kid looks miserable, his lower lip shaking and his face contorted in a grimace. “Come on, Niou-senpai,” he croaks. “We gotta go.”
Niou lets himself be dragged through the masses and out towards the bus stops. Yagyuu, Jackal and Yanagi all run out behind them, dragging more backpacks than they should have. The bus pulls up- the bus on the route to Tokyo, but they all get onto it anyway.
“What is going on?” Niou asks. The four them share a pole at the front of the bus, wedged over and around two girls from the elementary attached school of Rikkai.
Yagyuu wraps his scarf around himself. Then he unzips Kirihara’s backpack and wraps the wonderchibi’s around the kid’s neck. Kirihara and Yanagi sniffle.
“Yukimura…” Yanagi starts, but he can’t finish his sentence.
The bus jostles.
“Yukimura-kun collapsed in the lunch line,” Yagyuu says.
Niou blinks. “But…what?”
Yagyuu shakes his head. “Marui-kun was with him, and-”
“He couldn’t breathe, he just…fell,” Jackal adds. “His face turned blue.”
“If buchou dies…” Kirihara says.
“Sanada said the hospital is on this route- Kanai General,” Yanagi mutters, but his voice cracks mid-way and he turns away, staring out the window, although the glass is fogged up over the entire length of the bus.
Any jokes on the tip of Niou’s tongue vanish instantly.
No one talks on the way to the hospital. Niou’s calves and feet ache from standing. He ought to be playing tennis right now, working on shots with Yagyuu, instead he is standing beside Yagyuu on a rocking train, hot and miserable with the collar of his wool coat itching the back of his neck.
Niou has never been to a hospital before. Not even the time his sister broke her foot from tripping on a skipping rope that Niou may or may have deliberately strung up a few inches above the base of her bedroom doorway when he was seven. His mother took her to the hospital and Niou stayed home to listen to his father’s extended lecture and explanation of Niou’s impending grounding.
Kirihara leads the way once Yanagi rings the bell for their stop. The hospital is an imposingly hideous white-façade of rows of tiny windows and a fence around the rooftop. Like a jail and just about as friendly when Kirihara explains to the front desk nurse that they want to see Yukimura Seiichi-san.
“We’re his friends,” Jackal explains, taking over when Kirihara gets flustered and red and his eyes look a bit too scarlet for anyone of the team to be entirely comfortable. “Please. It’s almost Christmas.”
Four miserable teenagers and one magic word gets the nurse to admit them to the fourth floor.
Niou would have known immediately where to go. As soon as they step out of the elevator, he can make out a hulking figure at the end of the corridor and a pink-haired short boy beside him, slumped down in a chair.
Sanada’s back is turned to them all, staring at a door. He’s not wearing his cap. His hair is as messy as Niou’s. Niou can hear the sounds of shuddered sobs, the sobs that make Sanada’s back shudder.
“Genichirou,” Yanagi says, placing a hand on Sanada’s shoulder. “Is he…?”
Sanada shakes his head.
Kirihara punches the wall.
Jackal slouches down beside Marui.
Niou bites his lip. The doorway is closed, no name-tag in the slot, but there are muffled voices on the other side and the sounds of a woman crying. Maybe Yukimura’s mother.
He tries to speak twice before the words finally make a noise, “What happened?” Niou asks. “I…I don’t know what happened.”
“There’s something wrong with him,” Marui says. “Doctors have been doing tests. They’ve got him hooked up to a feeding tube and a respirator because he can’t even breathe I heard them say.”
“Fuck,” Niou whispers. Puri doesn’t count it.
For the longest time, no one says anything. The sounds of machines beeping and doctors muttering filter through the tiny slat at the bottom of the doorway. Marui fishes through his backpack, pulling out a bento box of food, then gets up to throw the entire contents into a garbage bin.
Kirihara curls up into a ball, hugging his knees on one of the plastic-backed chairs lining the corridor.
“We can’t have practice tomorrow,” Sanada finally says. His voice is broken. He wipes his nose with the back of his fist, still wearing his wristweights, getting snot all over them.
“You have to do what Yukimura would have wanted,” Yanagi tells him. “If he can’t lead the team, Genichirou…”
It is Sanada’s turn to punch the wall. Twin chunks of plaster sit on the floor when doctors emerge from the room. Niou peeks around them. The sight of legs lying under a white blanket, tubes everywhere, running up into a hidden face, a hidden person. It could be anyone, and yet Niou has been told that it is their captain. Yukimura, the captain who’s an ass and gives a lot of laps and complains about form, but who is supposed to lead them to victory again.
“We all have to do what Yukimura would have wanted,” Niou says.
***
“I guess our Christmas party is cancelled,” Jackal says on the bus home.
***
Tokyo is out of the way.
And so is Kanai General Hospital.
Saturday practice is cancelled, but even if it wasn’t, Niou doesn’t think anyone would have showed up. He can’t stop thinking about all those tubes and those legs under the white hospital-issue blanket, doctors surrounding Yukimura, the hums and hisses of ventilators, the soft sobbing of Yukimura’s mother.
Niou texts a message Friday night. Or maybe it’s Saturday morning. He can’t sleep.
Do they know what’s wrong with Yukimura?
He clicks send to Yanagi’s number.
No response.
After the sun has risen, and a faded winter light filters in through the cracks in his blinds, Niou sees his mother tiptoe inside his room, careful to step over his strewn clothes and tennis bag. He shakes his side, but he’s awake.
“You need to get up for tennis practice,” she says. “It’s Saturday, Masaharu.”
Niou rolls over. “Our captain’s in the hospital,” he mutters. “We’re not going.”
His mother says nothing and leaves as quietly as she came in.
Niou shuffles down for breakfast when the smells of miso soup and fried eggs rise up the stairs and into his room. His hair is everywhere and he can’t be bothered to tie it back. It’s long and drags through his soup.
“We’re going shopping,” he sister says. “Are you coming?”
Niou shakes his head.
He stays home and curls up in front of the tv. His socks have holes in the heel, but he can’t be bothered to get a new pair out from his dresser. There are bad movies on tv, soap operas and talk shows from Osaka, all blinking lights and holiday cheer. His mother has tacked up garlands in the doorways, all sparkling green and red. There is a string of Christmas lights across the living room window and a derelict-looking tree in the corner, with fake pine needles sprinkled across the tatami mats.
Even the little Buddha statue is decked out with red and gold bows, tacked on by his brother like an accidental present.
Niou has completely missed all of this being so focused on tennis. Christmas is in a couple days and he would have forgotten entirely were it not for the planned party at Sanada’s house on Christmas Eve.
Not that it will happen now.
He cooks himself a pot of rice and dumps cold pickles and leftover fish from the fridge on top. Niou buries himself into a corner of the couch, digging his feet under the cushion. The bottom of the bowl burns the tips of his fingers, but he doesn’t care.
There is really nothing on tv at this hour, on this day. Pokemon reruns, all garish colours and stupid characters with even stupider creatures whiz across the screen. It numbs his brain. Good.
No one phones him.
He doesn’t touch his tennis bag, not a ball, not his racket.
Mid-afternoon, his family plows through the doorway, bags stuffed with tissue paper and gifts, faces red and smiling, all except for his father who checks his wallet and frowns.
“Did you just sit there all day?” his sister asks, noticing the emptied pot of rice at Niou’s feet, the wooden spoon crusted over.
“You’re lazy, Masaharu,” his brother says. “You didn’t even fill out any wishes for the tree.”
Niou grunts. “Fine. Gimme some paper, then.”
“Mom bought a Christmas cake, too,” his brother announces.
“Good,” Niou mutters.
The cake is beautiful, sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be eaten. As Niou walks by, he can see the perfect little peaks of white cream, topped with strawberries, immaculate, festive.
And somehow it only makes him feel worse inside. He should be playing his match with Yagyuu today, instead, he sits miserable at his desk in his bedroom writing stupid Christmas wishes for the stupid tree. I wish for a new tennis racket. I wish for Yonex Power Cushion Wide shoes.
He wants to write I wish for a game with Yagyuu. I wish for the team to be right again. I wish for Yagyuu…
Niou looks down at the papers in front of him, realizing that at least one has the first three strokes of Yagyuu’s name written down.
“Puri,” he says, ripping it up as fast and as viciously as he can.
He’s so distracted. They were on course for good things, everything was fine, mostly, until Yukimura keeled over and now Niou doesn’t know what to think.
He leaves his wishes on his desk, grabs his coat and wallet, and walks out to the pharmacy. Niou passes the bleach aisle entirely and buys a tennis magazine, the first one he can find on the rack.
No one has texted him, so he texts Yagyuu, standing in a phonebooth, away from the barest of winter winds that cuts through his hair, his coat and his scarf.
Want to visit Yukimura on Monday? No school. Let’s go at ten from waterfront station.
Within five minutes, Yagyuu has texted back yes.
***
Christmas Eve is a day to spend with friends, dates, lovers, family.
It feels right when Niou sees Yagyuu get off bus 57 at the school entrance and walk over to the bus shelter for bus 653 to Tokyo via the waterfront station in Yokohama. Yagyuu is bundled up, complete with scarf and mittens. Niou shoves his hands deeper into his pockets, his fingertips ice-cold.
Yagyuu has a large totebag slung from his arm. Niou has a plastic bag from his wrist.
Yagyuu says nothing as he reaches into his bag and grabs a second pair of mittens, handing them to Niou.
“Here,” he says. “I didn’t have time to wrap them.”
Niou blinks. “Thank you,” he mutters. Matching mittens to Yagyuu, moss green in colour, but the fleece lining them inside is warm and welcome. “Did you get something for Yukimura, too?”
“I brought a Go game,” he says. “Kirihara-kun sent me a message that Yanagi-kun had heard from Sanada-kun that Yukimura-kun is off the ventilator and can move his toes now.”
“I hadn’t heard,” Niou says. He frowns. Always the last to know. Figures.
“Sanada-kun has been there everyday,” Yagyuu says. “It’s very nice of him to do that.”
The train would take only thirty minutes from Yokohama, but seeing that neither Niou or Yagyuu have the money to spend, they take the bus, change at the station, and catch the second bus. It takes over an hour. Yagyuu rings the bell a stop too early and they spend another twenty minutes dodging last-minute shoppers, and groping couples, to get to the hospital.
The streets are lined with blinking santa clauses and blow up jesuses, ten feet high. Trees covered with pink wishes, banners advertising Christmas sales and excuses to go out and spend money on girlfriends and family. Sides of buildings are covered with evergreen wreathes and streams of red ribbon.
The stark interior of the hospital reception is obvious. A single table-top tree sits by a pay phone, no wishes on it, not even sick children and seniors. Cheery Christmas songs play over the PA, but they only make Niou feel more depressed here. The bleak walls, the smell of antiseptic over vomit and shit and death?
It sucks.
Yukimura’s ward is empty except for a lone nurse pushing a stainless steel cart down the corridor. She says nothing about the two teenagers wandering by, reading name plates on the doors. Niou remembers the chairs from Friday, still pushed against the wall where they were three days ago.
Now, Yukimura’s door has his name in bold, black characters.
Niou raises his hand to knock, but he stops himself when he sees the door opened, a tiny crack showing into the room. Yagyuu stands behind him, staring at Niou, but Niou shakes his head.
There’s someone else in the room. A second person, a shadow over the bed. No one speaks, but Niou can hear the bed creak. Slowly, he pushes at the door, curious to see more because that shape doesn’t look like a mother or a family member, not the way it has bad hat hair and leans over the bed, whispering something that Niou doesn’t catch and-
Niou’s mouth hangs open.
Did Sanada just…?
Niou pushes at the doorway with his head. No fucking way. No. Fucking.
Sanada leans over the bed lower, moving his hands out to the sides for balance. He is kissing Yukimura. Definitely kissing Yukimura. Very slow and very scared at first, the way Sanada barely touches Yukimura’s mouth with his own. He must be murmuring Yukimura’s name. It sounds like that, almost.
And Niou thinks that Yukimura just might be kissing back. There are no tubes from his mouth, just one from his forearm, and aside from his toes wiggling down the bed, nothing but his mouth moves. Niou sees the sheen of tongues, wet and slimy and-
Niou pulls back, grabbing the doorknob and closing the door.
He knows his face is red. It burns. He shouldn’t have seen that. He did see that.
He could grill Sanada with that information.
But…
There is the problem of Yagyuu and Niou’s own little ideas with the laser beam and meganes and what would it feel like to kiss another guy?!?
“Niou-kun?” Yagyuu asks.
Niou coughs. He pushes his bangs back from his eyes. This is so awkward. “Uh…Sanada’s in there right now and-”
“Yo!”
Marui calls from the end of the hallway as the rest of the team piles out, all trudging with muddy shoes and heavy coats. Marui holds a large box against his chest and a small bag with a bow on top of that. Jackal and Kirihara follow him, with Yanagi in the rear.
“Everyone’s here now,” Yagyuu says.
“We must have caught the next bus after you,” Jackal says.
“Is Genichirou…?” Yanagi starts.
Niou clears his throat and nods towards the doorway, just as Sanada steps through, his cap covering his hair once more. His face is flustered and flushed and he stares down. “Yukimura is off the ventilator right now,” he mumbles. “But he can’t talk.”
“The nurse was in the elevator,” Yanagi says.
“One toe wiggle for yes,” Kirihara says, counting off on his fingers, “and two for no. Is going to be released soon? Tomorrow?”
Sanada says nothing.
Yanagi is silent.
Jackal says, “Probably not, Akaya.”
Kirihara’s smile falls.
“I brought a Christmas cake for him,” Marui says. “And shortbread. Mom and I baked the stuff. Stupid brother got dog hairs in the cookies, though. God.”
Niou can feel the contents of his stomach curdling. Yuck.
Sanada knocks on Yukimura’s doorway and again and announces that the team is here to see him. For the first time, Niou steps into the room. It’s tiny and white-walled, caving in on them. There is a bouquet of evergreens and bright red hibiscus blossoms in a vase on the tiny table, surrounded with cards. Machines beep and whiz. Yukimura is hooked up to several with electrodes on his right arm and an IV drip from his left. He looks pale, staring up at the ceiling, unable to even smile.
This is not their teammate. Hollow cheeks and greenish pallour. He looks like death.
“How are you?” Yanagi asks.
No one says anything, but Yukimura wiggles his toes twice.
Not so good.
Niou watches as Sanada stands firm at Yukimura’s head, his fingers moving out across the pillow to touch Yukimura’s hair, as if no one will see this. But no one does, because they are too busy oohing and aahing over the cake Marui made.
Yanagi, however, his eyes catch Niou’s.
He knows about Sanada. And Yukimura. He must.
Marui’s cake is…beyond anything Niou’s mother could have purchased. The cream is a buttery yellow piped along the round edges, with white fluffy blooms on the top, strawberries arranged between, slices in a pattern of a poinsettia flower in the centre. Even the shortbread in his bag, Niou can feel his mouth watering. Small moon-shaped crescents with silver foil inserts at their centre.
Damn, that fatty can bake.
Or at least fake it well.
“We can leave you a piece, Yukimura-buchou,” Kirihara says. “Because it’s for you.”
Yagyuu piles a red-wrapped game of Go beside Yukimura’s bed and Niou stacks the magazine on top. Jackal and Yanagi leave small bundles wrapped with gold and yellow ribbons.
Niou doesn’t know how to act around this sick shell of their captain. It’s surreal because he might be Yukimura, but gone is his complaining about their games. He can’t speak, he doesn’t speak, he just lays there, his toes occasionally moving, but no real conversation.
Kirihara forces himself to laugh. Yagyuu smiles, but his lips are tight. Niou doesn’t smile, he doesn’t laugh, he just feels weird. It is the first real day of the winter holidays, they should be playing tennis and having fun, not crammed into this hospital room.
The sky is grey through Yukimura’s cell-like window. Grey and tinged yellow from the Tokyo smog. It is an ugly vista, overlooking nothing but more concrete buildings in the area. Niou stays as long as he can force himself to, but it’s miserable to be here. No one wants to stay, but no one wants to leave Yukimura, either.
Kirihara and Jackal leave, then Marui. Yagyuu raises his chin, cocking his head slightly to the side. “Ah, unfortunately we have to leave soon,” he says. “Get well soon, Yukimura-kun. Happy Holidays, everyone.”
Niou darts out with him. The three monsters can have a pow wow of their own.
Relief lifts off Niou’s shoulders in the elevator. He sighs. “Thanks.”
Yagyuu nods. “It was…”
“Like death?”
Yagyuu nods again. The elevator dings, the doors open and they walk through the reception room, in step with each other. Yagyuu checks his watch. “It’s three thirty- Niou-kun, do you want to come over?”
Niou doesn’t know what Yagyuu means, but they’re close right now, standing here in the lobby, listening to tacky and faux-cheery carols between calls to the reception desk. He feels low after seeing Yukimura like that. It should be a good time of the year. “Okay,” he says.
***
Deep down, Niou knows it would take a miracle to get what Sanada did on Christmas Eve for himself, almost he doesn’t stop wishing the entire bus ride back to Kanagawa. He doesn’t lean on Yagyuu’s shoulder, he doesn’t try to tap Yagyuu’s knee with his own, no, it’s Niou’s turn to sit straight and uncomfortable with his insides twisting up. Nervous. Afraid. Confused.
Yagyuu’s house looks the same as the one time Niou saw it, months ago. The expensive car sits in the driveway. The high gate is closed until Yagyuu punches in the pin code and announces on the PA, “I’m home. I have a friend with me.”
Niou stops breathing for a minute. Friend?
He has a friend now? Not doubles partner, not acquaintance, but-
“Niou-kun?”
“Ah, coming,” Niou says, rushing up behind Yagyuu. He ducks his head, unable to look Yagyuu in the eye and wanting to hide the perpetual stain of pink that seems to be creeping over his cheeks.
Yagyuu’s doorway is decked out with white lights and heavy evergreen wreaths, red bows and planters of poinsettias. “My mother hires a decorator,” he says. Yagyuu glances around the side of his house, down the driveway. “She must be out. Her car’s gone.”
Niou raises an eyebrow. Two cars? His father must be a lawyer or an accountant or a doctor or a foreign investor or something rich and boring like that.
Yagyuu’s house is big. And impressive. The entranceway inside is flanked with two large Chinese vases, both filled with seasonal white flowers. It smells like a tropical forest, with baskets of mangoes and pineapples and prickly jackfruit laid out on lacquered tabletops. Niou is afraid to even walk inside in his sock feet.
His socks are dirty, brown on the bottom.
The carpets, American-style, are a pristine egg-shell colour. Yagyuu stomps across them, leaving indents in the weave. On the walls there are scrolls of calligraphy, big black letters with curly cues and arabesques, flourishes and poetic accents. Yagyuu wanders off into another room, opens something, then slams a door and walks back out into the hallway where Niou stares up at the glass chandelier.
“I think my father’s asleep maybe,” Yagyuu says. “He has night shift tonight.”
Niou nods. He tiptoes across the carpet, trying to keep as little of his feet from touching as possible.
“He’s a doctor,” Yagyuu explains. “My room’s up this way.”
They creep up the stairs. Doors open out onto the catwalk, overlooking the main room, the only room covered in tatami mats. An ebony-coloured kotatsu table is set up in the middle of the room, decorated with a bowl of mandarins on top studded with cloves, smelling spicy and wonderful, even up on the second floor.
Yagyuu’s room has a sign on the door. Hiroshi’s Room, written in simple black characters on a plastic plaquard. Niou smiles to himself. It’s so expected, it’s so boring.
But once Yagyuu opens his room, Niou feels his jaw drop a second time today.
There is no way this is real. He pinches his arm, but the sharp pain makes him blink and realize that, no, this has to be real.
Yagyuu nods to Niou for him to come in. He pushes aside a path through the piles and piles of clothes across his floor. A bookshelf in the corner is stacked with books, spines bent and titles obscured. Papers are stacked up a foot high on what might be Yagyuu’s desk, except it looks a bit like a kitchen table, too, because there are four or five glasses of cola and plates of half-eaten sandwiches and meat buns.
The walls are packed with posters for musicians, books, concerts, golfers, tennis, celebrities, anything and everything. As though newspaper advertisements exploded on Yagyuu’s walls. Not even the ceiling is free- posters and a chemistry periodic table, a biological poster of sections of the brain, and a cheesy art print of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa.
The wave is all power, white foam and strength, the water something both soft and fierce. Unassuming. Maybe a bit like Yagyuu in some ways.
Niou sits down on Yagyuu’s bed, keeping to a small and relatively not-messy corner, the only one he can find. Yagyuu pushes a huge pile of junk off his desk, fishes around, then pulls a box of cookies out from behind a stack of cd cases.
“Cookie?” he offers.
Niou takes one. It tastes a bit stale as he chews. The sugar brushes all over his pants, tiny green crystals against the black jeans.
Yagyuu flicks on a light. The sky grows dimmer by the minute. The lampshade turns, twinkling with cut-out images of green Christmas trees and red santa-shapes.
“How festive,” Niou mutters.
“I hate that lamp,” Yagyuu says. “My sister gave it to me last year and my father said I can’t throw it out.”
Niou sets his cookie down. “Really?”
A cough in the doorway makes Yagyuu and Niou both turn around. A tall man with hair tied back in a stumpy ponytail stands there, yawning loudly. “Hiroshi, watch your sister until your mother comes back from the shopping centre. I got a call and have to go to the hospital early tonight.”
Yagyuu nods. “Fine,” he says. He snorts as the man turns around, clomping down the stairs just as loudly as Yagyuu seems to walk here.
Niou stares at Yagyuu. “Who was that?” he asks.
Yagyuu rolls his eyes. “My father.”
“But…” Niou shakes his head. Where is this strict boring megane family with the spotless house and the spotless, bland…everything?
“I’m the only one who wears glasses in my family,” Yagyuu says. “My parents were pretty young when I was born. My father just finished his residency a year or so ago.”
Niou gapes. He can’t help it. He shakes his head, smiling and looking down at his half-eaten cookie. “I- you’re not what I thought,” he says.
Yagyuu smiles back, his glasses reflecting the corny red santa shapes from his lamp. “Merry Christmas, Niou-kun,” he says. Yagyuu raises his stale cookies into a mock toast.
Niou holds out his cookie to tap Yagyuu’s. They both laugh and the crumbs mingle between them, spread across Yagyuu’s messy sheets, grinding into his bed, almost like a symbol of something new.
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Part 10] [Part 11] [Part 12] [Part 13] [Part 14] [Part 15]
The Seigaku data man shakes Niou up.
His tennis feels wrong, both with his right hand and his left. He chokes up during serves. He smashes balls around his room at night when he can’t even so much as control them in simple bounces against his racket. His throat feels constricted and his stomach feels gross.
In his dreams, everywhere he looks he sees a megane glint from behind hedges, hedges so high that Niou can’t see the top of them. The leaves prickle him, shoot out, screeching a hundred times over “Iiiiiiii data! Iiiii data!”
Niou wakes up in cold sweats, panting for his life. His room glitters in the early morning hours, the streetlights from outside his window causing shadows and glints, just like meganes.
He turns fourteen.
No one in the club knows.
His mother bakes him a rice-flour cake. It tastes like paste. Niou pushes it around his plate with his chopsticks, then dumps the rest behind a houseplant.
It goes mouldy within three days.
When his mother cleans it out, she doesn’t say anything to him.
Mentally, maybe his tennis suffers, but on the courts Niou refuses to let it show. Yagyuu doesn’t know about that other issue and no one knows about this new issue. He practices twice as hard, three times harder than in the summer. Niou runs laps after practice is over. He hangs around Yukimura in the locker room, as though he can absorb Yukimura’s skills through osmosis in the air.
Niou practices on the wall behind his house in the evenings. His brother refuses to go outside in this weather, instead staying inside with a science textbook. His parents refuse to let Niou drag his brother along to a street court.
“It’s too cold out,” his mother says. “You’ll make him sick, Masaharu. Use some judgment, please.”
Niou slams the balls against the stucco siding louder than before. His parents say nothing, but they frown at him when he slinks inside the back door after he’s finished, red-faced and panting from the cold and the effort.
His forearms hurt. His body hurts. His insides hurt, too. Thinking about Yagyuu’s laser beam doesn’t help either. Niou wants to try it with his right hand, but he won’t yet. He wouldn’t be able to hit it with the combination of his wrong hand and the wrist weights.
His roots start to grow out. He grows a pimple on the left side of his chin to match his mole on the right. It hurts, too.
Niou picks at it in the mirror, the flaming red spot a reminder that things seem to fucking suck right now.
The homework piles up. The nights out with Yagyuu and the team get longer, later and Niou sleeps less, he sleeps more, he doesn’t sleep at all from the awful visions of meganes and data and hedgerows.
The morning of December 20, Yukimura tacks a schedule up to the outside of the clubhouse. A list of names, a list of dates-
A list of matches.
Yagyuu gets to it first. He’s taller than Niou by a bit, an inch maybe, but Niou’s catching up, growing like a weed every other week, one winning, then the other. Their shoes are the perpetual losers, growing too small by the end of each month.
“Are we playing?” Niou asks.
Yagyuu pulls away and out of the crowd. He nods. “Marui-kun and Jackal-kun. On the 22nd. Do you think you’ll be able to play by then?”
Niou feels his throat constrict a little more. How did Yagyuu know? Niou smirks, but his heart isn’t in it. “If it’s against that fatty, I’ll fucking push myself to win until I drop dead.”
Two days. That leaves them two days to prepare.
Niou glances across the courts. Marui and Jackal are on the far side, rallying against a couple other junior students. Jackal stays at the net, Marui at the baseline. Sometimes they switch. They move around a lot. Marui likes to move. He pops bubbles, he rallies, he laughs and he grins. He has fun with Jackal, who always sports a serious face until finally, finally he gets to make a strong smash right between the players.
Marui and Jackal tap fists.
What a nice unit.
But no genius shit shown off there.
Could Yagyuu’s laser beam throw off a rally of Marui’s?
Could Niou manage to mimic the laser beam too?
He nods. “Let’s go,” he says to Yagyuu.
They practice that night until the sun has set and the last bus has stopped making its rounds at the entrance to the Rikkai Dai campus. The floodlights are bright, but the shadows over the courts are long. Niou has to squint to make out some of Yagyuu’s backhanded lobs. Sweat drips cold and congealing down the back of his t-shirt, his uniform jacket long ago having been thrown off.
Even Yukimura has gone home.
“Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says. He wipes his mouth, his own face wet and weary. His glasses reflect the light, the scum and grease catching the garish green of the fluorescent beams. “Aren’t you tired yet?”
Niou’s legs feel like they could crumple under his body at any minute. “Serve me again. But this time, bend at your hips again and keep your shot mid-range. Marui likes high balls and Jackal likes lower ones. We’ll mess them up with stuff like that.”
Yagyuu sighs. The back of his t-shirt is dark, soaked through with sweat, but he manages to toss another ball for yet another serve to Niou.
“Serve it with all your soul!” Niou shouts. He groans through his return, his arms straining, his eyes blurring. “Or some such shit, Yagyuu!”
Yagyuu laughs when Niou falls face-first on the court, too tired to pick himself up.
***
Niou falls asleep in English class.
Smith-sensai pokes him in the shoulder with a piece of chalk. “Can you explain what you were just doing, in the present active indicative case, to the class?” the smug Australian twit asks.
Niou cracks an eyes open. His head itches. Half of his face is numb and probably indented with his desk where he was lying on a pencil and a musty English textbook.
“Er…I am…to rest, no…” Niou scratches his head. The class titters. A stupid girl behind him snickers. A boy on his left two rows away whispers something to a friend. “I don’t know how to say ‘to sleep’,” Niou mutters.
I don’t fucking care, either.
The teacher smirks, obviously pleased with himself for catching a sleeping student.
Niou gets detention at lunch. Scrubbing desks with cleaner. It’s grimy and a bit gross, his hands black with pencil lead and scum, but it’s nothing worse than he’s done before. His cellphone buzzes the entire time, but the teacher just sits in his desk and shakes his head.
“You can’t touch your phone until you’re done, Niou,” he says. He leans back in his chair and munches on a sandwich made with peanut butter and something that looks a bit like sour plum jam.
Niou winces. Nasty. Only Marui would ever come up with a combination of food like that.
Thirty-six desks, six rows of six. At seven to the hour, Niou finally tosses the spray bottle and blackened rag on the teacher’s desk. “There,” he says.
The teacher looks up from his second sandwich. “Good, now bugger off, kid.”
Niou grabs his bag, walks out, closes the door behind himself and spits at the glass window. “Fuck you,” he whispers.
Niou sets his backpack down around the hallway, between a row of lockers and a lone garbage can. He flips his cell out and checks the messages. Three missed. He opens the first- the number is not one he recognizes, but it might be…Sanada’s?
something happened. no practice. clubhouse at 4.
Niou scratches his head again. He reads the other two messages, but they are exactly the same. Pity Marui or Sanada isn’t in his class this year. Niou has no idea what the hell happened. Something bad enough to cancel practice.
He peers out a window. The sky is clear, a blue wash tinged with winter grey. Free from clouds and any sea breezes. Niou shrugs. The bell for afternoon classes rings. He walks off to chemistry, puzzled but not too distressed.
Which is not entirely true, because Niou spends the entire length of Chemistry, Biology and Literature staring at his backpack, almost wishing his phone would ring in the middle of lectures on periodic tables and krebbs’ cycles of oxygen, or whatever the teachers babble on about.
Niou doodles in his notebooks. Circles with familiar lines of tennis balls. Circles with tiny eyes, like huge lenses of glasses. He draws the katakana for tennis all over the lines, a hundred times for each second passed without knowing what the hell is going on.
Four o’clock cannot come soon enough.
The clubhouse is crowded with kouhais. Niou elbows a couple freshmen out of the way. He can hear people whispering, muttering, talking, all about Yukimura-buchou.
Yanagi stands in the doorway, tacking up a poster. When he turns, his eyes are bloodshot. Niou searches out Yagyuu, but he can’t move over to ask what happened.
Jackal steps up. “Practice is cancelled!” he yells, his voice strong and loud. The crowd goes deathly silent in an instant.
Niou shivers.
Marui and Sanada and Yukimura are all gone.
Kirihara grabs Niou by the wrist. The kid looks miserable, his lower lip shaking and his face contorted in a grimace. “Come on, Niou-senpai,” he croaks. “We gotta go.”
Niou lets himself be dragged through the masses and out towards the bus stops. Yagyuu, Jackal and Yanagi all run out behind them, dragging more backpacks than they should have. The bus pulls up- the bus on the route to Tokyo, but they all get onto it anyway.
“What is going on?” Niou asks. The four them share a pole at the front of the bus, wedged over and around two girls from the elementary attached school of Rikkai.
Yagyuu wraps his scarf around himself. Then he unzips Kirihara’s backpack and wraps the wonderchibi’s around the kid’s neck. Kirihara and Yanagi sniffle.
“Yukimura…” Yanagi starts, but he can’t finish his sentence.
The bus jostles.
“Yukimura-kun collapsed in the lunch line,” Yagyuu says.
Niou blinks. “But…what?”
Yagyuu shakes his head. “Marui-kun was with him, and-”
“He couldn’t breathe, he just…fell,” Jackal adds. “His face turned blue.”
“If buchou dies…” Kirihara says.
“Sanada said the hospital is on this route- Kanai General,” Yanagi mutters, but his voice cracks mid-way and he turns away, staring out the window, although the glass is fogged up over the entire length of the bus.
Any jokes on the tip of Niou’s tongue vanish instantly.
No one talks on the way to the hospital. Niou’s calves and feet ache from standing. He ought to be playing tennis right now, working on shots with Yagyuu, instead he is standing beside Yagyuu on a rocking train, hot and miserable with the collar of his wool coat itching the back of his neck.
Niou has never been to a hospital before. Not even the time his sister broke her foot from tripping on a skipping rope that Niou may or may have deliberately strung up a few inches above the base of her bedroom doorway when he was seven. His mother took her to the hospital and Niou stayed home to listen to his father’s extended lecture and explanation of Niou’s impending grounding.
Kirihara leads the way once Yanagi rings the bell for their stop. The hospital is an imposingly hideous white-façade of rows of tiny windows and a fence around the rooftop. Like a jail and just about as friendly when Kirihara explains to the front desk nurse that they want to see Yukimura Seiichi-san.
“We’re his friends,” Jackal explains, taking over when Kirihara gets flustered and red and his eyes look a bit too scarlet for anyone of the team to be entirely comfortable. “Please. It’s almost Christmas.”
Four miserable teenagers and one magic word gets the nurse to admit them to the fourth floor.
Niou would have known immediately where to go. As soon as they step out of the elevator, he can make out a hulking figure at the end of the corridor and a pink-haired short boy beside him, slumped down in a chair.
Sanada’s back is turned to them all, staring at a door. He’s not wearing his cap. His hair is as messy as Niou’s. Niou can hear the sounds of shuddered sobs, the sobs that make Sanada’s back shudder.
“Genichirou,” Yanagi says, placing a hand on Sanada’s shoulder. “Is he…?”
Sanada shakes his head.
Kirihara punches the wall.
Jackal slouches down beside Marui.
Niou bites his lip. The doorway is closed, no name-tag in the slot, but there are muffled voices on the other side and the sounds of a woman crying. Maybe Yukimura’s mother.
He tries to speak twice before the words finally make a noise, “What happened?” Niou asks. “I…I don’t know what happened.”
“There’s something wrong with him,” Marui says. “Doctors have been doing tests. They’ve got him hooked up to a feeding tube and a respirator because he can’t even breathe I heard them say.”
“Fuck,” Niou whispers. Puri doesn’t count it.
For the longest time, no one says anything. The sounds of machines beeping and doctors muttering filter through the tiny slat at the bottom of the doorway. Marui fishes through his backpack, pulling out a bento box of food, then gets up to throw the entire contents into a garbage bin.
Kirihara curls up into a ball, hugging his knees on one of the plastic-backed chairs lining the corridor.
“We can’t have practice tomorrow,” Sanada finally says. His voice is broken. He wipes his nose with the back of his fist, still wearing his wristweights, getting snot all over them.
“You have to do what Yukimura would have wanted,” Yanagi tells him. “If he can’t lead the team, Genichirou…”
It is Sanada’s turn to punch the wall. Twin chunks of plaster sit on the floor when doctors emerge from the room. Niou peeks around them. The sight of legs lying under a white blanket, tubes everywhere, running up into a hidden face, a hidden person. It could be anyone, and yet Niou has been told that it is their captain. Yukimura, the captain who’s an ass and gives a lot of laps and complains about form, but who is supposed to lead them to victory again.
“We all have to do what Yukimura would have wanted,” Niou says.
***
“I guess our Christmas party is cancelled,” Jackal says on the bus home.
***
Tokyo is out of the way.
And so is Kanai General Hospital.
Saturday practice is cancelled, but even if it wasn’t, Niou doesn’t think anyone would have showed up. He can’t stop thinking about all those tubes and those legs under the white hospital-issue blanket, doctors surrounding Yukimura, the hums and hisses of ventilators, the soft sobbing of Yukimura’s mother.
Niou texts a message Friday night. Or maybe it’s Saturday morning. He can’t sleep.
Do they know what’s wrong with Yukimura?
He clicks send to Yanagi’s number.
No response.
After the sun has risen, and a faded winter light filters in through the cracks in his blinds, Niou sees his mother tiptoe inside his room, careful to step over his strewn clothes and tennis bag. He shakes his side, but he’s awake.
“You need to get up for tennis practice,” she says. “It’s Saturday, Masaharu.”
Niou rolls over. “Our captain’s in the hospital,” he mutters. “We’re not going.”
His mother says nothing and leaves as quietly as she came in.
Niou shuffles down for breakfast when the smells of miso soup and fried eggs rise up the stairs and into his room. His hair is everywhere and he can’t be bothered to tie it back. It’s long and drags through his soup.
“We’re going shopping,” he sister says. “Are you coming?”
Niou shakes his head.
He stays home and curls up in front of the tv. His socks have holes in the heel, but he can’t be bothered to get a new pair out from his dresser. There are bad movies on tv, soap operas and talk shows from Osaka, all blinking lights and holiday cheer. His mother has tacked up garlands in the doorways, all sparkling green and red. There is a string of Christmas lights across the living room window and a derelict-looking tree in the corner, with fake pine needles sprinkled across the tatami mats.
Even the little Buddha statue is decked out with red and gold bows, tacked on by his brother like an accidental present.
Niou has completely missed all of this being so focused on tennis. Christmas is in a couple days and he would have forgotten entirely were it not for the planned party at Sanada’s house on Christmas Eve.
Not that it will happen now.
He cooks himself a pot of rice and dumps cold pickles and leftover fish from the fridge on top. Niou buries himself into a corner of the couch, digging his feet under the cushion. The bottom of the bowl burns the tips of his fingers, but he doesn’t care.
There is really nothing on tv at this hour, on this day. Pokemon reruns, all garish colours and stupid characters with even stupider creatures whiz across the screen. It numbs his brain. Good.
No one phones him.
He doesn’t touch his tennis bag, not a ball, not his racket.
Mid-afternoon, his family plows through the doorway, bags stuffed with tissue paper and gifts, faces red and smiling, all except for his father who checks his wallet and frowns.
“Did you just sit there all day?” his sister asks, noticing the emptied pot of rice at Niou’s feet, the wooden spoon crusted over.
“You’re lazy, Masaharu,” his brother says. “You didn’t even fill out any wishes for the tree.”
Niou grunts. “Fine. Gimme some paper, then.”
“Mom bought a Christmas cake, too,” his brother announces.
“Good,” Niou mutters.
The cake is beautiful, sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be eaten. As Niou walks by, he can see the perfect little peaks of white cream, topped with strawberries, immaculate, festive.
And somehow it only makes him feel worse inside. He should be playing his match with Yagyuu today, instead, he sits miserable at his desk in his bedroom writing stupid Christmas wishes for the stupid tree. I wish for a new tennis racket. I wish for Yonex Power Cushion Wide shoes.
He wants to write I wish for a game with Yagyuu. I wish for the team to be right again. I wish for Yagyuu…
Niou looks down at the papers in front of him, realizing that at least one has the first three strokes of Yagyuu’s name written down.
“Puri,” he says, ripping it up as fast and as viciously as he can.
He’s so distracted. They were on course for good things, everything was fine, mostly, until Yukimura keeled over and now Niou doesn’t know what to think.
He leaves his wishes on his desk, grabs his coat and wallet, and walks out to the pharmacy. Niou passes the bleach aisle entirely and buys a tennis magazine, the first one he can find on the rack.
No one has texted him, so he texts Yagyuu, standing in a phonebooth, away from the barest of winter winds that cuts through his hair, his coat and his scarf.
Want to visit Yukimura on Monday? No school. Let’s go at ten from waterfront station.
Within five minutes, Yagyuu has texted back yes.
***
Christmas Eve is a day to spend with friends, dates, lovers, family.
It feels right when Niou sees Yagyuu get off bus 57 at the school entrance and walk over to the bus shelter for bus 653 to Tokyo via the waterfront station in Yokohama. Yagyuu is bundled up, complete with scarf and mittens. Niou shoves his hands deeper into his pockets, his fingertips ice-cold.
Yagyuu has a large totebag slung from his arm. Niou has a plastic bag from his wrist.
Yagyuu says nothing as he reaches into his bag and grabs a second pair of mittens, handing them to Niou.
“Here,” he says. “I didn’t have time to wrap them.”
Niou blinks. “Thank you,” he mutters. Matching mittens to Yagyuu, moss green in colour, but the fleece lining them inside is warm and welcome. “Did you get something for Yukimura, too?”
“I brought a Go game,” he says. “Kirihara-kun sent me a message that Yanagi-kun had heard from Sanada-kun that Yukimura-kun is off the ventilator and can move his toes now.”
“I hadn’t heard,” Niou says. He frowns. Always the last to know. Figures.
“Sanada-kun has been there everyday,” Yagyuu says. “It’s very nice of him to do that.”
The train would take only thirty minutes from Yokohama, but seeing that neither Niou or Yagyuu have the money to spend, they take the bus, change at the station, and catch the second bus. It takes over an hour. Yagyuu rings the bell a stop too early and they spend another twenty minutes dodging last-minute shoppers, and groping couples, to get to the hospital.
The streets are lined with blinking santa clauses and blow up jesuses, ten feet high. Trees covered with pink wishes, banners advertising Christmas sales and excuses to go out and spend money on girlfriends and family. Sides of buildings are covered with evergreen wreathes and streams of red ribbon.
The stark interior of the hospital reception is obvious. A single table-top tree sits by a pay phone, no wishes on it, not even sick children and seniors. Cheery Christmas songs play over the PA, but they only make Niou feel more depressed here. The bleak walls, the smell of antiseptic over vomit and shit and death?
It sucks.
Yukimura’s ward is empty except for a lone nurse pushing a stainless steel cart down the corridor. She says nothing about the two teenagers wandering by, reading name plates on the doors. Niou remembers the chairs from Friday, still pushed against the wall where they were three days ago.
Now, Yukimura’s door has his name in bold, black characters.
Niou raises his hand to knock, but he stops himself when he sees the door opened, a tiny crack showing into the room. Yagyuu stands behind him, staring at Niou, but Niou shakes his head.
There’s someone else in the room. A second person, a shadow over the bed. No one speaks, but Niou can hear the bed creak. Slowly, he pushes at the door, curious to see more because that shape doesn’t look like a mother or a family member, not the way it has bad hat hair and leans over the bed, whispering something that Niou doesn’t catch and-
Niou’s mouth hangs open.
Did Sanada just…?
Niou pushes at the doorway with his head. No fucking way. No. Fucking.
Sanada leans over the bed lower, moving his hands out to the sides for balance. He is kissing Yukimura. Definitely kissing Yukimura. Very slow and very scared at first, the way Sanada barely touches Yukimura’s mouth with his own. He must be murmuring Yukimura’s name. It sounds like that, almost.
And Niou thinks that Yukimura just might be kissing back. There are no tubes from his mouth, just one from his forearm, and aside from his toes wiggling down the bed, nothing but his mouth moves. Niou sees the sheen of tongues, wet and slimy and-
Niou pulls back, grabbing the doorknob and closing the door.
He knows his face is red. It burns. He shouldn’t have seen that. He did see that.
He could grill Sanada with that information.
But…
There is the problem of Yagyuu and Niou’s own little ideas with the laser beam and meganes and what would it feel like to kiss another guy?!?
“Niou-kun?” Yagyuu asks.
Niou coughs. He pushes his bangs back from his eyes. This is so awkward. “Uh…Sanada’s in there right now and-”
“Yo!”
Marui calls from the end of the hallway as the rest of the team piles out, all trudging with muddy shoes and heavy coats. Marui holds a large box against his chest and a small bag with a bow on top of that. Jackal and Kirihara follow him, with Yanagi in the rear.
“Everyone’s here now,” Yagyuu says.
“We must have caught the next bus after you,” Jackal says.
“Is Genichirou…?” Yanagi starts.
Niou clears his throat and nods towards the doorway, just as Sanada steps through, his cap covering his hair once more. His face is flustered and flushed and he stares down. “Yukimura is off the ventilator right now,” he mumbles. “But he can’t talk.”
“The nurse was in the elevator,” Yanagi says.
“One toe wiggle for yes,” Kirihara says, counting off on his fingers, “and two for no. Is going to be released soon? Tomorrow?”
Sanada says nothing.
Yanagi is silent.
Jackal says, “Probably not, Akaya.”
Kirihara’s smile falls.
“I brought a Christmas cake for him,” Marui says. “And shortbread. Mom and I baked the stuff. Stupid brother got dog hairs in the cookies, though. God.”
Niou can feel the contents of his stomach curdling. Yuck.
Sanada knocks on Yukimura’s doorway and again and announces that the team is here to see him. For the first time, Niou steps into the room. It’s tiny and white-walled, caving in on them. There is a bouquet of evergreens and bright red hibiscus blossoms in a vase on the tiny table, surrounded with cards. Machines beep and whiz. Yukimura is hooked up to several with electrodes on his right arm and an IV drip from his left. He looks pale, staring up at the ceiling, unable to even smile.
This is not their teammate. Hollow cheeks and greenish pallour. He looks like death.
“How are you?” Yanagi asks.
No one says anything, but Yukimura wiggles his toes twice.
Not so good.
Niou watches as Sanada stands firm at Yukimura’s head, his fingers moving out across the pillow to touch Yukimura’s hair, as if no one will see this. But no one does, because they are too busy oohing and aahing over the cake Marui made.
Yanagi, however, his eyes catch Niou’s.
He knows about Sanada. And Yukimura. He must.
Marui’s cake is…beyond anything Niou’s mother could have purchased. The cream is a buttery yellow piped along the round edges, with white fluffy blooms on the top, strawberries arranged between, slices in a pattern of a poinsettia flower in the centre. Even the shortbread in his bag, Niou can feel his mouth watering. Small moon-shaped crescents with silver foil inserts at their centre.
Damn, that fatty can bake.
Or at least fake it well.
“We can leave you a piece, Yukimura-buchou,” Kirihara says. “Because it’s for you.”
Yagyuu piles a red-wrapped game of Go beside Yukimura’s bed and Niou stacks the magazine on top. Jackal and Yanagi leave small bundles wrapped with gold and yellow ribbons.
Niou doesn’t know how to act around this sick shell of their captain. It’s surreal because he might be Yukimura, but gone is his complaining about their games. He can’t speak, he doesn’t speak, he just lays there, his toes occasionally moving, but no real conversation.
Kirihara forces himself to laugh. Yagyuu smiles, but his lips are tight. Niou doesn’t smile, he doesn’t laugh, he just feels weird. It is the first real day of the winter holidays, they should be playing tennis and having fun, not crammed into this hospital room.
The sky is grey through Yukimura’s cell-like window. Grey and tinged yellow from the Tokyo smog. It is an ugly vista, overlooking nothing but more concrete buildings in the area. Niou stays as long as he can force himself to, but it’s miserable to be here. No one wants to stay, but no one wants to leave Yukimura, either.
Kirihara and Jackal leave, then Marui. Yagyuu raises his chin, cocking his head slightly to the side. “Ah, unfortunately we have to leave soon,” he says. “Get well soon, Yukimura-kun. Happy Holidays, everyone.”
Niou darts out with him. The three monsters can have a pow wow of their own.
Relief lifts off Niou’s shoulders in the elevator. He sighs. “Thanks.”
Yagyuu nods. “It was…”
“Like death?”
Yagyuu nods again. The elevator dings, the doors open and they walk through the reception room, in step with each other. Yagyuu checks his watch. “It’s three thirty- Niou-kun, do you want to come over?”
Niou doesn’t know what Yagyuu means, but they’re close right now, standing here in the lobby, listening to tacky and faux-cheery carols between calls to the reception desk. He feels low after seeing Yukimura like that. It should be a good time of the year. “Okay,” he says.
***
Deep down, Niou knows it would take a miracle to get what Sanada did on Christmas Eve for himself, almost he doesn’t stop wishing the entire bus ride back to Kanagawa. He doesn’t lean on Yagyuu’s shoulder, he doesn’t try to tap Yagyuu’s knee with his own, no, it’s Niou’s turn to sit straight and uncomfortable with his insides twisting up. Nervous. Afraid. Confused.
Yagyuu’s house looks the same as the one time Niou saw it, months ago. The expensive car sits in the driveway. The high gate is closed until Yagyuu punches in the pin code and announces on the PA, “I’m home. I have a friend with me.”
Niou stops breathing for a minute. Friend?
He has a friend now? Not doubles partner, not acquaintance, but-
“Niou-kun?”
“Ah, coming,” Niou says, rushing up behind Yagyuu. He ducks his head, unable to look Yagyuu in the eye and wanting to hide the perpetual stain of pink that seems to be creeping over his cheeks.
Yagyuu’s doorway is decked out with white lights and heavy evergreen wreaths, red bows and planters of poinsettias. “My mother hires a decorator,” he says. Yagyuu glances around the side of his house, down the driveway. “She must be out. Her car’s gone.”
Niou raises an eyebrow. Two cars? His father must be a lawyer or an accountant or a doctor or a foreign investor or something rich and boring like that.
Yagyuu’s house is big. And impressive. The entranceway inside is flanked with two large Chinese vases, both filled with seasonal white flowers. It smells like a tropical forest, with baskets of mangoes and pineapples and prickly jackfruit laid out on lacquered tabletops. Niou is afraid to even walk inside in his sock feet.
His socks are dirty, brown on the bottom.
The carpets, American-style, are a pristine egg-shell colour. Yagyuu stomps across them, leaving indents in the weave. On the walls there are scrolls of calligraphy, big black letters with curly cues and arabesques, flourishes and poetic accents. Yagyuu wanders off into another room, opens something, then slams a door and walks back out into the hallway where Niou stares up at the glass chandelier.
“I think my father’s asleep maybe,” Yagyuu says. “He has night shift tonight.”
Niou nods. He tiptoes across the carpet, trying to keep as little of his feet from touching as possible.
“He’s a doctor,” Yagyuu explains. “My room’s up this way.”
They creep up the stairs. Doors open out onto the catwalk, overlooking the main room, the only room covered in tatami mats. An ebony-coloured kotatsu table is set up in the middle of the room, decorated with a bowl of mandarins on top studded with cloves, smelling spicy and wonderful, even up on the second floor.
Yagyuu’s room has a sign on the door. Hiroshi’s Room, written in simple black characters on a plastic plaquard. Niou smiles to himself. It’s so expected, it’s so boring.
But once Yagyuu opens his room, Niou feels his jaw drop a second time today.
There is no way this is real. He pinches his arm, but the sharp pain makes him blink and realize that, no, this has to be real.
Yagyuu nods to Niou for him to come in. He pushes aside a path through the piles and piles of clothes across his floor. A bookshelf in the corner is stacked with books, spines bent and titles obscured. Papers are stacked up a foot high on what might be Yagyuu’s desk, except it looks a bit like a kitchen table, too, because there are four or five glasses of cola and plates of half-eaten sandwiches and meat buns.
The walls are packed with posters for musicians, books, concerts, golfers, tennis, celebrities, anything and everything. As though newspaper advertisements exploded on Yagyuu’s walls. Not even the ceiling is free- posters and a chemistry periodic table, a biological poster of sections of the brain, and a cheesy art print of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa.
The wave is all power, white foam and strength, the water something both soft and fierce. Unassuming. Maybe a bit like Yagyuu in some ways.
Niou sits down on Yagyuu’s bed, keeping to a small and relatively not-messy corner, the only one he can find. Yagyuu pushes a huge pile of junk off his desk, fishes around, then pulls a box of cookies out from behind a stack of cd cases.
“Cookie?” he offers.
Niou takes one. It tastes a bit stale as he chews. The sugar brushes all over his pants, tiny green crystals against the black jeans.
Yagyuu flicks on a light. The sky grows dimmer by the minute. The lampshade turns, twinkling with cut-out images of green Christmas trees and red santa-shapes.
“How festive,” Niou mutters.
“I hate that lamp,” Yagyuu says. “My sister gave it to me last year and my father said I can’t throw it out.”
Niou sets his cookie down. “Really?”
A cough in the doorway makes Yagyuu and Niou both turn around. A tall man with hair tied back in a stumpy ponytail stands there, yawning loudly. “Hiroshi, watch your sister until your mother comes back from the shopping centre. I got a call and have to go to the hospital early tonight.”
Yagyuu nods. “Fine,” he says. He snorts as the man turns around, clomping down the stairs just as loudly as Yagyuu seems to walk here.
Niou stares at Yagyuu. “Who was that?” he asks.
Yagyuu rolls his eyes. “My father.”
“But…” Niou shakes his head. Where is this strict boring megane family with the spotless house and the spotless, bland…everything?
“I’m the only one who wears glasses in my family,” Yagyuu says. “My parents were pretty young when I was born. My father just finished his residency a year or so ago.”
Niou gapes. He can’t help it. He shakes his head, smiling and looking down at his half-eaten cookie. “I- you’re not what I thought,” he says.
Yagyuu smiles back, his glasses reflecting the corny red santa shapes from his lamp. “Merry Christmas, Niou-kun,” he says. Yagyuu raises his stale cookies into a mock toast.
Niou holds out his cookie to tap Yagyuu’s. They both laugh and the crumbs mingle between them, spread across Yagyuu’s messy sheets, grinding into his bed, almost like a symbol of something new.