FIC: Rewind Forward (D1) 16/63
Title: Rewind Forward (16/63)
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
Considering that they have two whole weeks off from school, it is not entirely clear to Niou how the tennis club still manages to hold practices five days a week. Surely the school gates must be locked at this time of year.
But it’s not the same. There is no practice on Saturdays. Regular weekday practices are held at 3pm until 5:30.
And Sanada is left in charge.
Still, Niou enjoys sleeping in. His family wakes up promptly some time between 8 and 9am, every single one of them, even his sister, who Niou would think, being seventeen, ought to be a miserable surly bitch who sleeps in.
But she doesn’t.
She’s just a dorky bitch who meets up with her friends to go to haiku club and Go Players’ get-togethers and the flower-arranging class she and their mom signed up to.
Niou’s brother and father drive off at 9:30am sharp for his brother’s chess club, then his father spends half the day in the office. In the afternoons, Niou is fairly certain his brother and father have been going to the museums and the exhibitions about future technology and robots and computers, both dressed in their dorky button-down vests and perfectly-pressed beige pants.
Despite the morning noises, pots banging and people walking up and down the stairs, scraping chairs and clinking chopsticks on ceramic rice bowls, Niou manages to roll over and be promptly back asleep by quarter to ten.
It is nice to have the entire house to himself. It is even nicer to wake up a just past noon, to be able to crawl out of bed and walk into the bathroom, have a long shower, then a longer bath, soaking himself in the hot water until his fingers are as shriveled up as umeboshi. Niou steals the new bath salts his sister got for Christmas- they smell good, all tropical and ginger, but mostly because it pisses her off when she sees the line of salt in the jar slowly going down.
“Stop using my things, Masaharu!” she yells at supper time. “They’re my bath salts!”
“You aren’t using them,” Niou says. He smiles at her. “Much.”
It is also more than nice to be by himself because Niou can jerk himself off in the shower, in the tub, in his bed, and no one is there to hear his moans, his breathy sighs and the grunts that sound a bit like Yagyuu’s name. He can’t help it- he’ll be rubbing his balls and pulling at his cock, trying to come faster and harder, and things happen. Like biting his pillow and sobbing “Yagyuu” into the pillowcase.
It’s not just the laser beam he thinks about anymore.
Niou lays in bed, cock lying flaccid and out of his pajamas, hands sticky between the fingers with his come, and he’ll look around his room, thinking about what it would be like to be on Yagyuu’s bed instead. It was a big, comfy futon that they sat cross-legged on, full of crumbs and rumpled sheets. Niou wanted to dig his face in and smell them, to see if they smelled like Yagyuu, maybe like come, too, to prove to himself that some sort of sexual side exists to the megane dork, but Niou didn’t.
Niou will lounge around in his pajamas, eating leftover rice from the pot and instant miso soup. Sometimes he’ll bother to fry himself an egg and with tomatoes and wilted green onions from the bottom of the vegetable keeper. Niou piles that into a bowl, and watches the television as he eats.
On his ambitious days, Niou will even change into his uniform before catching the bus, which means he doesn’t need to change in the locker room and can instead spend five minutes sitting on the bench there pretending to absorb the conversations about tennis, but really catching side-glances towards Yagyuu. His stomach flip-flops when Yagyuu pulls his shirt over his head and Niou can see his chest, his stomach, sometimes a glimpse of the few hairs moving into a line under his bellybutton.
Yagyuu is also as pasty as Marui. All over. Niou’s own skin at least retains the slightest bit of colour from the summer sun all year long.
The first day Sanada attempts to hold practice is more or less a failure on everyone’s part. Niou is ambitious, arriving early, already changed and with a bit of a heavy heart. It’s been over a week since Yukimura was hospitalized and it seems weird not to see him here, scowling in the regulars’ locker room and telling Sanada off about something or other.
Unlike Jackal, Sanada doesn’t bring a megaphone.
Unlike the rest of the team, he doesn’t even wear mittens.
Kirihara walks out of the changing room in a wool coat, mittens and two scarves. “My mom said she’d kill me if I got pneumonia again,” he mutters through his scarves.
Yanagi stares at Kirihara. “You’ve had pneumonia before, Akaya?”
Kirihara makes a noise. “Yeah, but that was two years ago and it wasn’t my fault there was an old man with germs who liked to hang around the street tennis courts in January. My mom didn’t believe me.”
Niou stifles a snicker. It would be funny, and yet, with Yukimura in the hospital, it’s not really. Kirihara looks like an idiot, but he’s not sick.
Sanada stands at one of the benches, breathing heavily and gulping down the air. His ears are red from the cold, sticking out like beacons against his black cap and hair. His hands clutch a clipboard, his skin splotched white and red, but Niou isn’t sure whether it is just the cold or maybe nervousness too.
Yukimura had complete control over the club. Sanada has…
“Everyone!” he bellows. “Fifty laps! Now! Get going, you lazy asses!”
No one in the club moves an inch, not even the freshmen.
One asks, “Where’s buchou?”
Another says, “Fifty laps is impossible.”
Marui says, “What. The. Fuck.”
Which is exactly what Niou thinks because Yukimura, even though he’s an asshole, rarely starts off the practice shouting fifty laps.
Sanada burrows further into his cap and hands the clipboard to a flustered Yanagi. “Get going!” he yells. “We have to pick up the slack, lazy asses!”
“What happened to Yukimura?” someone calls.
Silence.
Nothing but the sound of a lone cooing pigeon somewhere on the school campus and Sanada’s heavy breathing.
“He’s…” Sanada’s voice cracks. Niou cringes, expecting the worse for Sanada. Sanada was a crybaby in freshman year; he has mostly grown out of it into a burly boor, but…
“Maybe twenty laps would be enough,” Jackal says.
“Yeah, sounds good to me,” Kirihara nods frantically, glancing between Jackal and Sanada until Sanada finally looks up and mutters “Fine”.
Niou runs his laps right beside Yagyuu. Yagyuu exhales, his breath clouding out in front of his face. “Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says.
“Yeah?” Niou answers.
“Do you think we should push for our game against Marui-kun and Jackal-kun to be sometime soon?”
Niou grunts. “Sanada looks a bit…” Niou looks over his shoulder. Sanada and Yanagi are skipping laps and instead talking on the court. Yanagi waves his hands and Sanada shakes his head, then stomps his feet and hisses something. Yanagi shakes his head, too. Niou can read his lips saying Genichirou, blah blah blah something about Yukimura blah blah blah.
Sanada adjusts his hat again. His shoulders fall. Whatever argument it was, he’s lost it. Yanagi doesn’t smile and they both look miserable and pissed off and a bit defeated, a bit lost with their third limb missing.
Practice doesn’t improve when they all split into sections. The freshmen lump around A court, confused and scratching their heads with mittened paws. The juniors stand at B court with Yanagi, yelling something at him about games that “Buchou promised we could play!”
The rest of the regulars sit on the benches. Marui pops his bubbles. Kirihara struggles with his scarf, trying to loosen his noose enough to breath. Jackal sighs and tries to ignore all of them. Yagyuu checks his watch, looks at Sanada, looks at the courts, then checks his watch again.
Niou raps his knuckles on the edge of the bench.
“Why are the freshmen just standing around?” Sanada grumbles. He folds his arms over his chest. “They should be working on swing practices by now.”
“Five minutes,” Yagyuu murmurs.
When Yagyuu murmurs “Ten minutes,” a scared, shivering freshman has gathered up the gumption to walk up to Sanada, who must be twice his height and three times his weight.
“Um,” he says, swallowing his tongue and any colour in his face, “Buchou normally leads our swing practices, Sanada-senpai, because we don’t know what to do…”
Sanada glares at the group of them, sitting around, hanging around the benches. Why didn’t you tell me this? He glowers at Niou.
Niou shrugs. You never asked.
Niou should feel bad, and yet, Sanada shouldn’t have it easy. After all, he got the nice Christmas present and Niou got an evening of sitting on Yagyuu’s messy bed, no kiss, no touching, nothing except stale cookies and Yagyuu’s dumpy room that, in retrospect, had a funny smell too.
“It’s not the same without Yukimura-buchou,” Kirihara whines. “I miss him. He said he’d show me this cool new move I could use against lefties that pros use.”
Niou stiffens. “Puri.” He swings his legs under the bench and makes sure to whack Kirihara in the shin.
“Ow!” Kirihara yells. “Niou-senpai!”
“Please don’t fight, you two,” Yagyuu says. His voice is stern, mean even, the way his lips purse and his eyes go cold and dark behind his glasses. Niou looks away, because he can’t hold Yagyuu’s eyes and he feels stupid and dumb for Yagyuu having to tell him off like a little kid.
“I’m going to practice with the machines,” Kirihara announces. “This is boring just sitting here, senpais. Yukimura-buchou would be pissed if we did that when he was around.”
The corners of Yanagi’s mouth twitch. “So he would,” he says.
“I’ll come with, kid,” Marui says. “It’s too cold out here. Jackal’s practically a popsicle just standing there. His Brazilian blood can’t take our winters.” Marui slings his racket over his shoulder, popping a bubble in Niou’s ear for measure.
Jackal says, “We do get snow sometimes in the far south…” but Marui doesn’t bother to listen to him.
“Game?” Niou raises an eyebrow and looks at Jackal, then Yanagi. Yanagi shakes his head.
“Genichirou needs help,” he says.
Sure enough, Sanada does need more than help. The entire freshmen group of the tennis team (with the exception of Kirihara) has swarmed Sanada, flailing their rackets and yelling at him to slow down so they can see how to do it properly. Sanada, red-faced and choking, mouths “Help me, Renji!” when he’s not trying to yell at the freshmen to back off.
He looks like he is about to cry, too, because there are at least a good twenty-five freshmen to his one fukubuchou. “Back away!” he yells, but it doesn’t help. Two dozen voices yell back, a cacophony of childish and cracking voices, all reminding Sanada that he isn’t the captain.
Yanagi runs over to help.
Jackal hesitates, then runs over behind Yanagi.
“This is a waste of my time,” Niou mutters.
“Saa, Niou-kun?” Yagyuu asks. He pokes Niou in the arm, very carefully and gently with the frame of his racket. “Should we just work on what we’ve been doing lately instead?”
Niou shrugs. Why the hell not.
***
The very next practice, a Friday, Sanada tacks a memo up in the main changing room.
I will respect my vice-captain in the absence of Yukimura or I will forfeit my uniform and leave the tennis club.
“Sign it,” Sanada tells the first junior to cross his path.
Yanagi hands the boy a pen. “On the top line, please.”
Order restored.
One hundred twenty three names sign the memo, taking up three sheets of additional lines of signatures. No one walks out of the school gates before 5:30pm.
“Does Yukimura know about this?” Niou asks Sanada in the showers.
Sanada stares at Niou through his wet bangs, water sliding down his face.
“Do not question my authority, Niou,” he warns.
“Just asking,” Niou says. He smiles.
With Sanada not being swarmed by freshmen anymore, practices run more smoothly. Fifty laps is awful, Niou knows. He’s practically gasping for breath himself and he’s a regular. He should be used to working this hard.
Sanada appoints a junior in charge of the freshman drills and another junior in charge of round-robin games for the second years to keep them busy. Niou plays Yagyuu with his right hand and Yagyuu returns shot with his left, a hundred lobs and rallies moving towards some sort of ambidextrous doubles goal. Niou isn’t entirely sure why they still work on it, besides the fact that a kick serve really does work better with his right hand, although his footwork messes things up sometimes. Niou moves right, expecting a forehand shot, but should instead use a backhand.
“Are you ready, Niou-kun?” Yagyuu shouts.
Niou hits the ball, smiling as he follows-through. The muscles in his right arm are getting stronger, bigger and his shots are much more in control. “Ready for what?” he asks. Yagyuu doesn’t cock his head, he doesn’t drop his shoulders, he doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary in their rally.
Except smirk.
“This,” he says.
Niou doesn’t even have time to blink before Yagyuu swings back, that arcing motion the same, yet on the opposite side and so he doesn’t recognize it when he should that shot.
When Niou has managed to blink, nothing is left except the ruffling of his hair and a ball slammed so hard and so fast that is has wedged itself into the chain link fence behind the baseline.
Niou walks back, drops his racket, then tugs at the ball. “It’s stuck!” he says. “Nice shot, Yagyuu.”
Yagyuu snorts, adjusting his glasses before he looks up, evidently pleased with himself but not smiling very warmly. His eyes have that cold glimmer, icy and dark, that he often has when he plays. It gives Niou the chills, withering his insides and his erections, too.
Yagyuu is scary sometimes.
“I thought you could read me better than that,” Yagyuu tells him.
Niou says nothing the rest of the practice to Yagyuu. He doesn’t know how to answer Yagyuu. He should know Yagyuu better. He should be able to predict even a left-handed laser beam. He should have expected Yagyuu would try it today.
Whatever insight Niou might have, he thought he had, it fails him with Yagyuu. Niou buries himself in the showers afterward, the water so hot he feels feverish and lightheaded. Niou presses his palms against the tile wall and hangs his head. He sighs into the dripping water.
Someone touches his bicep.
Niou doesn’t move.
“I apologize for today, Niou-kun. It was uncalled for when I said that,” Yagyuu says.
“Uh…” Niou can’t answer Yagyuu now, either. Yagyuu may be close, too close, but it’s painfully obvious that he can’t see worth shit this close to Niou. Yagyuu stares at him with big myopic eyes, misty from the steam. His hair is plastered to his head all the wrong way. Niou is so used to seeing Yagyuu with his part down the side, his bangs brushed away, falling more or less into perfect place.
He can see Yagyuu but Yagyuu can’t see him.
Yagyuu can’t see his blush. Or the twitch of Niou’s cock between his legs. He clears his throat. “Uh, don’t worry about it,” he mutters. His cock gets harder and Niou wants Yagyuu to leave, to give him peace to jerk off in the showers.
Yagyuu doesn’t move. “If you would accept it, I’d like to say I’m sorry-” Yagyuu starts to bow, but Niou reaches out, stopping Yagyuu before he does because no no no this is too close to down there and maybe he’d notice something.
Except Niou isn’t all that graceful and poised and grabbing Yagyuu in a slippery communal shower with water pouring down all over them; it doesn’t work out. Niou moves too far, too fast and before he realizes it, they’re slipping to the floor in a clash of wet legs and scrambling hands.
Niou lands on his back, on his soap. He winces, winded for an instant, then reaches under himself to get the soap from digging into his lower back.
Yagyuu lands at a weird angle, half-on top of Niou, half-sitting on Niou’s knee.
Niou sucks in his breath.
He’s still hard. And getting harder, with Yagyuu’s hip jutting sharp into his thigh. Niou closes his eyes. God, don’t let Yagyuu feel this. Don’t let Yagyuu-
Yagyuu pushes himself up on his knees, then he stands up completely. He blinks and pushes his hair back. Subconsciously, his long fingers move to his nose, but there are no glasses to adjust. “I’d like to apologize,” he says, not losing face at all, “and offer to pay for supper tonight, if you would like that. Your stomach was growling when were playing and I thought you might like that, Niou-kun.”
Niou stands up, too. He keeps his hands at his sides, playing it as cool as he can, avoiding covering himself. “I guess so,” he says. Yagyuu’s brow scrunches up, a bit much for Niou’s comfort, so he adds, “That’d be cool.”
Yagyuu’s face softens. “I apologize, again-”
“Yeah, yeah,” Niou scoffs. He waves Yagyuu off.
The voices of the regulars are loud as they carry in from the locker room down the hallway, but Niou’s practiced long enough at home that he can bite his lip and jack the water pressure up to keep down the sounds of his moans as he tugs at his cock and comes against the bathroom tiles.
***
Yagyuu knows his way around the city better than Niou does. They take a bus from the bus stop by the school, then Yagyuu dings the bell some time later, and they switch routes to a completely different part of the city. Niou has absolutely no idea where they are, but he’s not going to let Yagyuu know that.
When they walk off the bus into a busy shopping district, Niou nods casually and shoves his hands in his coat pockets. It’s cold outside compared to the cramped, warm bus. “So, where is this place?” he asks.
They must be near the harbour. Niou can smell the fishy scent of the ocean and the sulphurous smog of the oil refineries and industrial complexes. The sun has set leaving everything awash in neon signs and electronics ads, blinking lights pointing towards love hotels and sales.
Niou ducks his head at those signs. Love hotels. He’s still a kid enough to snicker at the thought of adults sneaking off for a night of screwing around in a fantasy theme room, but he’s grown up enough to almost want to try it.
Maybe with someone like Yagyuu…
“It’s this way, Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says, keeping his voice loud above the rush of crowds of people. Everywhere are red and gold signs advertising the new year, champagne and caviar, sushi and sake, days off for holiday with friends and family.
New Year’s might fall on a weekday, but Niou has a bad feeling that Sanada will insist on holding tennis practice anyway. Stupid Sanada, he thinks.
One turn and Yagyuu leads him down a packed alleyway, overhangs so thick above that they might as well be ceilings. Niou scrambles to keep Yagyuu’s head in sight- it’s Yagyuu’s black tennis bag slung over his bag that Niou follows more than the megane himself. At least the tennisbag sticks out enough for Niou to see.
Yagyuu’s restaurant is a hole in the wall place, dimly lit with blue lights and cheesy tea lights at every table. It smells like mildew and old tea, a bit dusty, but over everything else Niou can smell one thing:
“Yakiniku?”
Yagyuu nods. “You said you liked it.”
Niou scratches his head as they sit down at a free table near the back of the restaurant. “I did?” he asks. He shoves his tennis bag between his legs, trying to squish it down underneath the table.
Yagyuu hums vaguely. He picks up the menu, his eyes not even glancing up once to Niou. “You seem to eat a lot of grilled meat at Marui-kun’s buffets,” he says. Yagyuu passes Niou the menu.
Niou takes it, dragging it close enough to the tip of the tea light flame for Yagyuu to flinch. He’s in control of himself again. Yagyuu makes him a bit uneasy sometimes, like he’s a train on magnets, coasting along so fast that he might crash.
“The beef is good. And the prawns.”
“You order then,” Niou gives Yagyuu the menu back. He leans back in his chair. “You know this place better than me.”
Niou wouldn’t ever admit it, but Yagyuu probably already knows that he loves this food, that he loves the little grill in the centre of the table a waitress turns on for them, scraping the charred remains from the last patrons off. Niou loves listening to the sizzle of meat all around them, the smell of BBQ floating up in the smoky air.
The waitress brings their meat, arranged in dishes of perfect clumps of colour- bright red beef, pink fleshy prawns and round white scallops. Niou shoves his rice bowl off to the side, and grabs a stack of beef strips.
He lays them out across the grill, the smoke rising up high above them.
“What do you think Yukimura has?” he asks Yagyuu.
Yagyuu sets his miso soup down, wiping the sides of his mouth with a napkin. “I don’t know. I’d assume that it must be something neurological since he was paralyzed, but…”
“Would your father know?”
Yagyuu shrugs. “I hadn’t thought to ask him. He’s been on nights mostly.”
“Crap shifts,” Niou says.
Yagyuu nods.
“How come you live in such a big house, then? Your mom do something?”
Yagyuu chokes, coughing on his soup. He grabs his napkin again, wiping the soup that dribbles down his chin. He clears his throat and pushes his glasses back up his nose. “Aa, no,” he says. He snorts, then the sides of his mouth twitch. “She doesn’t work anymore. We got a bunch of money when my grandfather died. He was a doctor, too.”
Yagyuu doesn’t talk much about his family. And he doesn’t ask Niou about his, which is good because Niou can feel his brow sweat every time he so much as thinks about what Yagyuu would think. No one really know about his family- although Sanada and Marui have seen his mother walk through the school before when Niou has been sent to the principal’s.
Not recently. He’s been good. Tennis keeps him too busy to get into trouble. And with Yukimura sick, he hasn’t thought about anything to pester Sanada or Yanagi or Marui at all.
Being with Yagyuu gets easier. Yagyuu talks a bit as Niou flips his beef strips over, then gobbles them up with his chopsticks. Niou lets Yagyuu have most of the seafood, and Yagyuu lets him have most of the beef. Niou dips his beef into the special sauce- whatever it is, he doesn’t care, because it tastes delicious.
Yagyuu dips everything into the fish-shaped bowl of ponzu. Even his rice.
They order cokes and stay inside the warm, smoky restaurant as long as they can. “Tea?” the waitress offers.
Yagyuu nods, but Niou shakes his head. “Another coke.”
“Are you doing anything for New Year’s?” Yagyuu asks between sips of his tea. He cradles the teacup between his palms, blowing the steam off the top. His glasses fog up.
Niou smirks. He fakes a yawn. “Naw,” he says. A bead of sweat starts to form at his hairline. It itches.
Yagyuu says nothing. “I might visit Yukimura-kun tomorrow. I told Sanada-kun I would go with him today, but…” Yagyuu breathes through his nose and trails off. He looks away at the wall, at the tacky black and white photos of Tokyo from the fifties, all new buildings and industry after the war.
“The gentleman breaks promises?” Niou can’t resist. He leans down low over the table, careful not to touch the still-hot grill between them. “Really?”
Yagyuu shrugs.
“It’s depressing seeing Yukimura-kun like that,” he says.
It feels good to know that Yagyuu blew Sanada off for him. On the walk back to the bus stop, Niou’s hands don’t feel as icy and his cheeks don’t feel as numb. He burrows his face into his school-issue scarf and smothers his smile. Niou feels like a complete dork, but so long as Yagyuu doesn’t see, he doesn’t stop.
***
Monday happens to be New Year’s Eve.
No school, but of course there is tennis practice at 3pm still.
Gone are the Christmas decorations at home, replaced with red banners for the New Year and a decoration on the front door- made by his mother and sister at some boring class they took together, tacking mandarins to green branches and calling it art.
“It’s for prosperity,” his sister tells him, for the seventh time. “Don’t be so uncultured, Masaharu.”
His mother says nothing to him, but when Niou reaches under her elbow to swipe a rice ball, she swats the back of his hand.
He eats a bowl of cold cereal for breakfast, and leaves the dirty bowl on the table for his sister to clean up. She gives him a dirty look.
Niou gives her the finger.
“Can’t you stop fighting for once?” his mother asks. “Masaharu, put your bowl in the sink.”
Niou rolls his eyes when she turns her back. Then, he swipes one of the rice balls for later.
She doesn’t notice one missing anyway.
Not until Niou slinks out the front doorway with his tennis bag strapped to his shoulder. He cringes when he hears her exasperated sigh of “Masaharu! I thought I told you-” but he closes the door before she finishes.
He could, he knows, be a better son to her. He could behave like his brother. He could grow out his black roots, cut off his rat tail and maybe pop a pair of fake glasses on his nose. He could stop pestering his brother and his sister. He could pick up his room and stop swiping rice balls.
But…
He doesn’t.
Sanada is an asshole at practice. Niou knows that it isn’t easy for any of them with Yukimura in the hospital, but that doesn’t mean Sanada has to give then all sixty laps for no apparent reason other than the pissy expression pasted on Sanada’s perpetual scowl.
Niou wants to run up alongside Sanada and ask if his kiss didn’t fix the princess like in the fairytales. Or maybe it’s meant to be a bittersweet ballad with Yukimura dying, but love remaining ever green.
It skeeves Niou out remembering what he saw in the crack of the hospital door. It is as though there are two sides to Sanada- the miserable unpleasant tennis player with the killer game and even worse backhand slap, and the other Sanada.
The one who kisses Yukimura.
The one who needs Yukimura, maybe even more than the rest of the team.
Niou holds his tongue and runs his laps. His calves ache. His shins feel like they will split down the bone, but he won’t let Sanada break him. We have to be stronger than ever for Yukimura, he thinks.
Now, he knows, with each passing day, Yukimura becomes less of an ass, who complained at the team all the team, who frowned and scowled and stomped around and was mean when he forced matches against Sanada. Yukimura becomes that beacon of their team, that goal like the Nationals.
When he gets out of the hospital…
When the team wins a threepeat of the Nationals...
Niou heaves through his last lap, then collapses onto the ground beside Yagyuu, who has already started on his leg stretches, touching his toes with his long fingers curled over the end of his sneakers.
“Practice?” Niou asks.
A shadow darkens Niou’s face, blotting out the sun.
Sanada stands in front of Niou, hands on his hips like Yukimura sometimes used to do.
“You’re practicing with Jackal, today,” he says. “Yagyuu, with Marui.”
Damn, not even an ounce of holiday spirit, Niou thinks.
Yagyuu just nods at Sanada, his bland mask hiding any emotion he might have.
Niou doesn’t see Yagyuu for the rest of practice. Jackal keeps him on his toes with his strong net play, his defensive balls so much different than Yagyuu’s preferred style of volleys and laser beams. Niou knows, deep down, that he needs to vary his opponents to get ready for the season, and yet that doesn’t stop him from spending his spare moments trying to find Yagyuu on the courts.
He must be in the gymnasium with Marui. No hideous pink hair in sight, just Yanagi’s long legs and Kirihara’s panting from the court beside Niou, and Sanada with juniors on the other court. Freshmen, everywhere, dash between plays to pick up balls.
Niou toes a ball out of his way before a serve. A freshman darts out of the bushes and makes a grab for the rolling ball. “Get those out of our way!” Niou snaps.
The freshman stumbles over the ball, backs into another freshman and both end up scrambling to hold onto their balls. A farce of squeaks and neon yellow and Niou rolling his eyes at them.
“Don’t torment them,” Jackal says, sighing heavily. “That was you back in the day.”
Niou bounces his own ball, keeping his wrist loose and light. “It feels good to be a senpai, ne?” he asks.
When Jackal rolls his eyes the whites are even brighter against his brown skin.
The showers afterward are filled with the sounds of Kirihara shrieking when he soaps his eyes by mistake and Marui listing things off on his fingers.
“Yeah, mom is making chicken wings and gyouza and mochi and we’re ordering sushi,” Marui starts on his left hand, numbering everything off as he licks his lips under the water, “and yogurt jellies and cake and red bean paste dumplings and…”
Niou tunes him out as best he can. He almost wishes that Sanada would sing in the showers sometimes- that would be an awful noise worth listening to.
“Oi, Yanagi! Don’t be jealous- you not ordering sushi at all for tonight?” Marui shouts. “What are you doing?”
Yanagi turns off his shower. “Genichirou and I are having a sleepover.”
Niou snickers. Like girls.
Sanada glares from underneath his wet bangs. “What?” he grumbles.
Niou slathers the last few chunks of his soap across his chest. “Nothing,” he says.
“Probably more fun that what you’re doing,” Sanada mutters.
Niou can already see the fourteen years of New Years’ celebrations he’s had with his family. He can remember being five and having to climb all the way up a mountain at some dark hour of the morning in the cold in the mud with his shoes soaked through and his neck too hot. The crowds were always full of old people who smelled musty and of too much floral perfume. His mother’s hand was always sticky and clammy in his own.
“Come on, Masaharu,” his father called. “Keep up!”
Stupid first sunset of the year…
Niou snorts. “Yeah, probably,” he says dryly. “Whatever.”
Sanada, of course, doesn’t need to know about any of that.
In the locker room, Niou sneaks one last look at Yagyuu for the year. If only he could freeze-frame the moment in his mind forever, that skin covered in water droplets, Yagyuu’s chest and stomach and the towel around his waist, perfectly tucked in on the left side of his hip. Even the way his glasses, steaming up from his warm, wet skin.
Niou sinks onto the bench, reaching absently for his socks, closing his eyes to savour this.
And then Yagyuu ruins everything when his phone buzzes down in the bottom of his tennis bag. He picks it up and mutters, “Shit”.
Niou opens his eyes.
Every regular on the tennis team stares at Yagyuu.
Yagyuu pushes his glasses up his nose. “I mean, pardon me,” he says. “My mother is calling me.”
Niou pries. He doesn’t even try to hide it. He listens in on Yagyuu’s phone call, inching over on the bench and shoving Kirihara off the end in the process.
Yagyuu nods. “Yes. Again?” He groans, sounding more like a petulant teenager than ever before. “So what am I supposed to do? Where are you?” A pause. “In Hiroshima?” Yagyuu sighs. “And dad?” He clicks his tongue. “Well, I can ask, but…” Niou can hear the sounds of someone else speaking on the phone, but he can’t make out the words.
Kirihara shoves back at Niou. “Senpai, what the hell was that for?”
Niou brings his index finger to his lips.
Yagyuu says, “Fine. Yeah, whatever,” groans again, then clicks his end button.
He sets his cellphone down on the bench next to Niou’s thigh. Niou shivers at the touch, as though it is Yagyuu by proxy, not an inanimate piece of plastic. He looks at it- nothing but a small green pompom tassel as a phone charm.
How…uninteresting.
“We have bugs in the house again,” Yagyuu tells them. “My mother neglected to call an exterminator before the holidays and we can’t go inside tonight with all the bug bombs going off.” He stares at his phone and frowns.
Niou shifts over further on the bench. He elbows Kirihara in the side, knocking the wonderchibi off the end a second time.
Kirihara glares at Niou.
Niou doesn’t care. His cock is stiff. Again.
Kirihara, being the youngest, doesn’t seem to care about ever using a towel. Instead, he stands up, wipes himself dry while managing to moon Niou at the same time, and tosses his towel into his locker, still damp.
“Hey, Yagyuu-senpai, wanna sleep over at my house tonight?”
Niou can hear his own teeth grind when Yagyuu graciously accepts with a bow.
***
“Come on, Masaharu!” his father shouts. He raps his walking stick against a tree. “Keep up!”
Niou groans. An elderly woman hobbles past him, pushing him into a bush off the pathway. His shoe squelches in the mud. He’s cold. He’s wet. He’s miserable.
And to make things even worse, he’s tired and his stomach growls.
Niou yawns.
The first hints of grey appear on the horizon, almost enough to light Niou’s way to the top of the mountain.
“Stupid Kirihara,” he grumbles.
But you didn’t offer first, he thinks. You could have offered, and you didn’t.
Niou’s mother reaches for his hand. Her grip is clammy.
He wrenches his hand away. “I’m not a kid!” he says.
“Hurry up then!” his father calls. “It’s almost sunrise.”
When the sun does rise, and Niou stands at the summit, winded and panting from being dragged up here by his family in a mad dash to make dawn, the sky is streaked with violet and umber and the brightest of salmons. In the distance, the first bells peel with the new year.
Despite the crowd, despite the people breathing down Niou’s neck and pushing into his sides, he feels completely alone.
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
Considering that they have two whole weeks off from school, it is not entirely clear to Niou how the tennis club still manages to hold practices five days a week. Surely the school gates must be locked at this time of year.
But it’s not the same. There is no practice on Saturdays. Regular weekday practices are held at 3pm until 5:30.
And Sanada is left in charge.
Still, Niou enjoys sleeping in. His family wakes up promptly some time between 8 and 9am, every single one of them, even his sister, who Niou would think, being seventeen, ought to be a miserable surly bitch who sleeps in.
But she doesn’t.
She’s just a dorky bitch who meets up with her friends to go to haiku club and Go Players’ get-togethers and the flower-arranging class she and their mom signed up to.
Niou’s brother and father drive off at 9:30am sharp for his brother’s chess club, then his father spends half the day in the office. In the afternoons, Niou is fairly certain his brother and father have been going to the museums and the exhibitions about future technology and robots and computers, both dressed in their dorky button-down vests and perfectly-pressed beige pants.
Despite the morning noises, pots banging and people walking up and down the stairs, scraping chairs and clinking chopsticks on ceramic rice bowls, Niou manages to roll over and be promptly back asleep by quarter to ten.
It is nice to have the entire house to himself. It is even nicer to wake up a just past noon, to be able to crawl out of bed and walk into the bathroom, have a long shower, then a longer bath, soaking himself in the hot water until his fingers are as shriveled up as umeboshi. Niou steals the new bath salts his sister got for Christmas- they smell good, all tropical and ginger, but mostly because it pisses her off when she sees the line of salt in the jar slowly going down.
“Stop using my things, Masaharu!” she yells at supper time. “They’re my bath salts!”
“You aren’t using them,” Niou says. He smiles at her. “Much.”
It is also more than nice to be by himself because Niou can jerk himself off in the shower, in the tub, in his bed, and no one is there to hear his moans, his breathy sighs and the grunts that sound a bit like Yagyuu’s name. He can’t help it- he’ll be rubbing his balls and pulling at his cock, trying to come faster and harder, and things happen. Like biting his pillow and sobbing “Yagyuu” into the pillowcase.
It’s not just the laser beam he thinks about anymore.
Niou lays in bed, cock lying flaccid and out of his pajamas, hands sticky between the fingers with his come, and he’ll look around his room, thinking about what it would be like to be on Yagyuu’s bed instead. It was a big, comfy futon that they sat cross-legged on, full of crumbs and rumpled sheets. Niou wanted to dig his face in and smell them, to see if they smelled like Yagyuu, maybe like come, too, to prove to himself that some sort of sexual side exists to the megane dork, but Niou didn’t.
Niou will lounge around in his pajamas, eating leftover rice from the pot and instant miso soup. Sometimes he’ll bother to fry himself an egg and with tomatoes and wilted green onions from the bottom of the vegetable keeper. Niou piles that into a bowl, and watches the television as he eats.
On his ambitious days, Niou will even change into his uniform before catching the bus, which means he doesn’t need to change in the locker room and can instead spend five minutes sitting on the bench there pretending to absorb the conversations about tennis, but really catching side-glances towards Yagyuu. His stomach flip-flops when Yagyuu pulls his shirt over his head and Niou can see his chest, his stomach, sometimes a glimpse of the few hairs moving into a line under his bellybutton.
Yagyuu is also as pasty as Marui. All over. Niou’s own skin at least retains the slightest bit of colour from the summer sun all year long.
The first day Sanada attempts to hold practice is more or less a failure on everyone’s part. Niou is ambitious, arriving early, already changed and with a bit of a heavy heart. It’s been over a week since Yukimura was hospitalized and it seems weird not to see him here, scowling in the regulars’ locker room and telling Sanada off about something or other.
Unlike Jackal, Sanada doesn’t bring a megaphone.
Unlike the rest of the team, he doesn’t even wear mittens.
Kirihara walks out of the changing room in a wool coat, mittens and two scarves. “My mom said she’d kill me if I got pneumonia again,” he mutters through his scarves.
Yanagi stares at Kirihara. “You’ve had pneumonia before, Akaya?”
Kirihara makes a noise. “Yeah, but that was two years ago and it wasn’t my fault there was an old man with germs who liked to hang around the street tennis courts in January. My mom didn’t believe me.”
Niou stifles a snicker. It would be funny, and yet, with Yukimura in the hospital, it’s not really. Kirihara looks like an idiot, but he’s not sick.
Sanada stands at one of the benches, breathing heavily and gulping down the air. His ears are red from the cold, sticking out like beacons against his black cap and hair. His hands clutch a clipboard, his skin splotched white and red, but Niou isn’t sure whether it is just the cold or maybe nervousness too.
Yukimura had complete control over the club. Sanada has…
“Everyone!” he bellows. “Fifty laps! Now! Get going, you lazy asses!”
No one in the club moves an inch, not even the freshmen.
One asks, “Where’s buchou?”
Another says, “Fifty laps is impossible.”
Marui says, “What. The. Fuck.”
Which is exactly what Niou thinks because Yukimura, even though he’s an asshole, rarely starts off the practice shouting fifty laps.
Sanada burrows further into his cap and hands the clipboard to a flustered Yanagi. “Get going!” he yells. “We have to pick up the slack, lazy asses!”
“What happened to Yukimura?” someone calls.
Silence.
Nothing but the sound of a lone cooing pigeon somewhere on the school campus and Sanada’s heavy breathing.
“He’s…” Sanada’s voice cracks. Niou cringes, expecting the worse for Sanada. Sanada was a crybaby in freshman year; he has mostly grown out of it into a burly boor, but…
“Maybe twenty laps would be enough,” Jackal says.
“Yeah, sounds good to me,” Kirihara nods frantically, glancing between Jackal and Sanada until Sanada finally looks up and mutters “Fine”.
Niou runs his laps right beside Yagyuu. Yagyuu exhales, his breath clouding out in front of his face. “Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says.
“Yeah?” Niou answers.
“Do you think we should push for our game against Marui-kun and Jackal-kun to be sometime soon?”
Niou grunts. “Sanada looks a bit…” Niou looks over his shoulder. Sanada and Yanagi are skipping laps and instead talking on the court. Yanagi waves his hands and Sanada shakes his head, then stomps his feet and hisses something. Yanagi shakes his head, too. Niou can read his lips saying Genichirou, blah blah blah something about Yukimura blah blah blah.
Sanada adjusts his hat again. His shoulders fall. Whatever argument it was, he’s lost it. Yanagi doesn’t smile and they both look miserable and pissed off and a bit defeated, a bit lost with their third limb missing.
Practice doesn’t improve when they all split into sections. The freshmen lump around A court, confused and scratching their heads with mittened paws. The juniors stand at B court with Yanagi, yelling something at him about games that “Buchou promised we could play!”
The rest of the regulars sit on the benches. Marui pops his bubbles. Kirihara struggles with his scarf, trying to loosen his noose enough to breath. Jackal sighs and tries to ignore all of them. Yagyuu checks his watch, looks at Sanada, looks at the courts, then checks his watch again.
Niou raps his knuckles on the edge of the bench.
“Why are the freshmen just standing around?” Sanada grumbles. He folds his arms over his chest. “They should be working on swing practices by now.”
“Five minutes,” Yagyuu murmurs.
When Yagyuu murmurs “Ten minutes,” a scared, shivering freshman has gathered up the gumption to walk up to Sanada, who must be twice his height and three times his weight.
“Um,” he says, swallowing his tongue and any colour in his face, “Buchou normally leads our swing practices, Sanada-senpai, because we don’t know what to do…”
Sanada glares at the group of them, sitting around, hanging around the benches. Why didn’t you tell me this? He glowers at Niou.
Niou shrugs. You never asked.
Niou should feel bad, and yet, Sanada shouldn’t have it easy. After all, he got the nice Christmas present and Niou got an evening of sitting on Yagyuu’s messy bed, no kiss, no touching, nothing except stale cookies and Yagyuu’s dumpy room that, in retrospect, had a funny smell too.
“It’s not the same without Yukimura-buchou,” Kirihara whines. “I miss him. He said he’d show me this cool new move I could use against lefties that pros use.”
Niou stiffens. “Puri.” He swings his legs under the bench and makes sure to whack Kirihara in the shin.
“Ow!” Kirihara yells. “Niou-senpai!”
“Please don’t fight, you two,” Yagyuu says. His voice is stern, mean even, the way his lips purse and his eyes go cold and dark behind his glasses. Niou looks away, because he can’t hold Yagyuu’s eyes and he feels stupid and dumb for Yagyuu having to tell him off like a little kid.
“I’m going to practice with the machines,” Kirihara announces. “This is boring just sitting here, senpais. Yukimura-buchou would be pissed if we did that when he was around.”
The corners of Yanagi’s mouth twitch. “So he would,” he says.
“I’ll come with, kid,” Marui says. “It’s too cold out here. Jackal’s practically a popsicle just standing there. His Brazilian blood can’t take our winters.” Marui slings his racket over his shoulder, popping a bubble in Niou’s ear for measure.
Jackal says, “We do get snow sometimes in the far south…” but Marui doesn’t bother to listen to him.
“Game?” Niou raises an eyebrow and looks at Jackal, then Yanagi. Yanagi shakes his head.
“Genichirou needs help,” he says.
Sure enough, Sanada does need more than help. The entire freshmen group of the tennis team (with the exception of Kirihara) has swarmed Sanada, flailing their rackets and yelling at him to slow down so they can see how to do it properly. Sanada, red-faced and choking, mouths “Help me, Renji!” when he’s not trying to yell at the freshmen to back off.
He looks like he is about to cry, too, because there are at least a good twenty-five freshmen to his one fukubuchou. “Back away!” he yells, but it doesn’t help. Two dozen voices yell back, a cacophony of childish and cracking voices, all reminding Sanada that he isn’t the captain.
Yanagi runs over to help.
Jackal hesitates, then runs over behind Yanagi.
“This is a waste of my time,” Niou mutters.
“Saa, Niou-kun?” Yagyuu asks. He pokes Niou in the arm, very carefully and gently with the frame of his racket. “Should we just work on what we’ve been doing lately instead?”
Niou shrugs. Why the hell not.
***
The very next practice, a Friday, Sanada tacks a memo up in the main changing room.
I will respect my vice-captain in the absence of Yukimura or I will forfeit my uniform and leave the tennis club.
“Sign it,” Sanada tells the first junior to cross his path.
Yanagi hands the boy a pen. “On the top line, please.”
Order restored.
One hundred twenty three names sign the memo, taking up three sheets of additional lines of signatures. No one walks out of the school gates before 5:30pm.
“Does Yukimura know about this?” Niou asks Sanada in the showers.
Sanada stares at Niou through his wet bangs, water sliding down his face.
“Do not question my authority, Niou,” he warns.
“Just asking,” Niou says. He smiles.
With Sanada not being swarmed by freshmen anymore, practices run more smoothly. Fifty laps is awful, Niou knows. He’s practically gasping for breath himself and he’s a regular. He should be used to working this hard.
Sanada appoints a junior in charge of the freshman drills and another junior in charge of round-robin games for the second years to keep them busy. Niou plays Yagyuu with his right hand and Yagyuu returns shot with his left, a hundred lobs and rallies moving towards some sort of ambidextrous doubles goal. Niou isn’t entirely sure why they still work on it, besides the fact that a kick serve really does work better with his right hand, although his footwork messes things up sometimes. Niou moves right, expecting a forehand shot, but should instead use a backhand.
“Are you ready, Niou-kun?” Yagyuu shouts.
Niou hits the ball, smiling as he follows-through. The muscles in his right arm are getting stronger, bigger and his shots are much more in control. “Ready for what?” he asks. Yagyuu doesn’t cock his head, he doesn’t drop his shoulders, he doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary in their rally.
Except smirk.
“This,” he says.
Niou doesn’t even have time to blink before Yagyuu swings back, that arcing motion the same, yet on the opposite side and so he doesn’t recognize it when he should that shot.
When Niou has managed to blink, nothing is left except the ruffling of his hair and a ball slammed so hard and so fast that is has wedged itself into the chain link fence behind the baseline.
Niou walks back, drops his racket, then tugs at the ball. “It’s stuck!” he says. “Nice shot, Yagyuu.”
Yagyuu snorts, adjusting his glasses before he looks up, evidently pleased with himself but not smiling very warmly. His eyes have that cold glimmer, icy and dark, that he often has when he plays. It gives Niou the chills, withering his insides and his erections, too.
Yagyuu is scary sometimes.
“I thought you could read me better than that,” Yagyuu tells him.
Niou says nothing the rest of the practice to Yagyuu. He doesn’t know how to answer Yagyuu. He should know Yagyuu better. He should be able to predict even a left-handed laser beam. He should have expected Yagyuu would try it today.
Whatever insight Niou might have, he thought he had, it fails him with Yagyuu. Niou buries himself in the showers afterward, the water so hot he feels feverish and lightheaded. Niou presses his palms against the tile wall and hangs his head. He sighs into the dripping water.
Someone touches his bicep.
Niou doesn’t move.
“I apologize for today, Niou-kun. It was uncalled for when I said that,” Yagyuu says.
“Uh…” Niou can’t answer Yagyuu now, either. Yagyuu may be close, too close, but it’s painfully obvious that he can’t see worth shit this close to Niou. Yagyuu stares at him with big myopic eyes, misty from the steam. His hair is plastered to his head all the wrong way. Niou is so used to seeing Yagyuu with his part down the side, his bangs brushed away, falling more or less into perfect place.
He can see Yagyuu but Yagyuu can’t see him.
Yagyuu can’t see his blush. Or the twitch of Niou’s cock between his legs. He clears his throat. “Uh, don’t worry about it,” he mutters. His cock gets harder and Niou wants Yagyuu to leave, to give him peace to jerk off in the showers.
Yagyuu doesn’t move. “If you would accept it, I’d like to say I’m sorry-” Yagyuu starts to bow, but Niou reaches out, stopping Yagyuu before he does because no no no this is too close to down there and maybe he’d notice something.
Except Niou isn’t all that graceful and poised and grabbing Yagyuu in a slippery communal shower with water pouring down all over them; it doesn’t work out. Niou moves too far, too fast and before he realizes it, they’re slipping to the floor in a clash of wet legs and scrambling hands.
Niou lands on his back, on his soap. He winces, winded for an instant, then reaches under himself to get the soap from digging into his lower back.
Yagyuu lands at a weird angle, half-on top of Niou, half-sitting on Niou’s knee.
Niou sucks in his breath.
He’s still hard. And getting harder, with Yagyuu’s hip jutting sharp into his thigh. Niou closes his eyes. God, don’t let Yagyuu feel this. Don’t let Yagyuu-
Yagyuu pushes himself up on his knees, then he stands up completely. He blinks and pushes his hair back. Subconsciously, his long fingers move to his nose, but there are no glasses to adjust. “I’d like to apologize,” he says, not losing face at all, “and offer to pay for supper tonight, if you would like that. Your stomach was growling when were playing and I thought you might like that, Niou-kun.”
Niou stands up, too. He keeps his hands at his sides, playing it as cool as he can, avoiding covering himself. “I guess so,” he says. Yagyuu’s brow scrunches up, a bit much for Niou’s comfort, so he adds, “That’d be cool.”
Yagyuu’s face softens. “I apologize, again-”
“Yeah, yeah,” Niou scoffs. He waves Yagyuu off.
The voices of the regulars are loud as they carry in from the locker room down the hallway, but Niou’s practiced long enough at home that he can bite his lip and jack the water pressure up to keep down the sounds of his moans as he tugs at his cock and comes against the bathroom tiles.
***
Yagyuu knows his way around the city better than Niou does. They take a bus from the bus stop by the school, then Yagyuu dings the bell some time later, and they switch routes to a completely different part of the city. Niou has absolutely no idea where they are, but he’s not going to let Yagyuu know that.
When they walk off the bus into a busy shopping district, Niou nods casually and shoves his hands in his coat pockets. It’s cold outside compared to the cramped, warm bus. “So, where is this place?” he asks.
They must be near the harbour. Niou can smell the fishy scent of the ocean and the sulphurous smog of the oil refineries and industrial complexes. The sun has set leaving everything awash in neon signs and electronics ads, blinking lights pointing towards love hotels and sales.
Niou ducks his head at those signs. Love hotels. He’s still a kid enough to snicker at the thought of adults sneaking off for a night of screwing around in a fantasy theme room, but he’s grown up enough to almost want to try it.
Maybe with someone like Yagyuu…
“It’s this way, Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says, keeping his voice loud above the rush of crowds of people. Everywhere are red and gold signs advertising the new year, champagne and caviar, sushi and sake, days off for holiday with friends and family.
New Year’s might fall on a weekday, but Niou has a bad feeling that Sanada will insist on holding tennis practice anyway. Stupid Sanada, he thinks.
One turn and Yagyuu leads him down a packed alleyway, overhangs so thick above that they might as well be ceilings. Niou scrambles to keep Yagyuu’s head in sight- it’s Yagyuu’s black tennis bag slung over his bag that Niou follows more than the megane himself. At least the tennisbag sticks out enough for Niou to see.
Yagyuu’s restaurant is a hole in the wall place, dimly lit with blue lights and cheesy tea lights at every table. It smells like mildew and old tea, a bit dusty, but over everything else Niou can smell one thing:
“Yakiniku?”
Yagyuu nods. “You said you liked it.”
Niou scratches his head as they sit down at a free table near the back of the restaurant. “I did?” he asks. He shoves his tennis bag between his legs, trying to squish it down underneath the table.
Yagyuu hums vaguely. He picks up the menu, his eyes not even glancing up once to Niou. “You seem to eat a lot of grilled meat at Marui-kun’s buffets,” he says. Yagyuu passes Niou the menu.
Niou takes it, dragging it close enough to the tip of the tea light flame for Yagyuu to flinch. He’s in control of himself again. Yagyuu makes him a bit uneasy sometimes, like he’s a train on magnets, coasting along so fast that he might crash.
“The beef is good. And the prawns.”
“You order then,” Niou gives Yagyuu the menu back. He leans back in his chair. “You know this place better than me.”
Niou wouldn’t ever admit it, but Yagyuu probably already knows that he loves this food, that he loves the little grill in the centre of the table a waitress turns on for them, scraping the charred remains from the last patrons off. Niou loves listening to the sizzle of meat all around them, the smell of BBQ floating up in the smoky air.
The waitress brings their meat, arranged in dishes of perfect clumps of colour- bright red beef, pink fleshy prawns and round white scallops. Niou shoves his rice bowl off to the side, and grabs a stack of beef strips.
He lays them out across the grill, the smoke rising up high above them.
“What do you think Yukimura has?” he asks Yagyuu.
Yagyuu sets his miso soup down, wiping the sides of his mouth with a napkin. “I don’t know. I’d assume that it must be something neurological since he was paralyzed, but…”
“Would your father know?”
Yagyuu shrugs. “I hadn’t thought to ask him. He’s been on nights mostly.”
“Crap shifts,” Niou says.
Yagyuu nods.
“How come you live in such a big house, then? Your mom do something?”
Yagyuu chokes, coughing on his soup. He grabs his napkin again, wiping the soup that dribbles down his chin. He clears his throat and pushes his glasses back up his nose. “Aa, no,” he says. He snorts, then the sides of his mouth twitch. “She doesn’t work anymore. We got a bunch of money when my grandfather died. He was a doctor, too.”
Yagyuu doesn’t talk much about his family. And he doesn’t ask Niou about his, which is good because Niou can feel his brow sweat every time he so much as thinks about what Yagyuu would think. No one really know about his family- although Sanada and Marui have seen his mother walk through the school before when Niou has been sent to the principal’s.
Not recently. He’s been good. Tennis keeps him too busy to get into trouble. And with Yukimura sick, he hasn’t thought about anything to pester Sanada or Yanagi or Marui at all.
Being with Yagyuu gets easier. Yagyuu talks a bit as Niou flips his beef strips over, then gobbles them up with his chopsticks. Niou lets Yagyuu have most of the seafood, and Yagyuu lets him have most of the beef. Niou dips his beef into the special sauce- whatever it is, he doesn’t care, because it tastes delicious.
Yagyuu dips everything into the fish-shaped bowl of ponzu. Even his rice.
They order cokes and stay inside the warm, smoky restaurant as long as they can. “Tea?” the waitress offers.
Yagyuu nods, but Niou shakes his head. “Another coke.”
“Are you doing anything for New Year’s?” Yagyuu asks between sips of his tea. He cradles the teacup between his palms, blowing the steam off the top. His glasses fog up.
Niou smirks. He fakes a yawn. “Naw,” he says. A bead of sweat starts to form at his hairline. It itches.
Yagyuu says nothing. “I might visit Yukimura-kun tomorrow. I told Sanada-kun I would go with him today, but…” Yagyuu breathes through his nose and trails off. He looks away at the wall, at the tacky black and white photos of Tokyo from the fifties, all new buildings and industry after the war.
“The gentleman breaks promises?” Niou can’t resist. He leans down low over the table, careful not to touch the still-hot grill between them. “Really?”
Yagyuu shrugs.
“It’s depressing seeing Yukimura-kun like that,” he says.
It feels good to know that Yagyuu blew Sanada off for him. On the walk back to the bus stop, Niou’s hands don’t feel as icy and his cheeks don’t feel as numb. He burrows his face into his school-issue scarf and smothers his smile. Niou feels like a complete dork, but so long as Yagyuu doesn’t see, he doesn’t stop.
***
Monday happens to be New Year’s Eve.
No school, but of course there is tennis practice at 3pm still.
Gone are the Christmas decorations at home, replaced with red banners for the New Year and a decoration on the front door- made by his mother and sister at some boring class they took together, tacking mandarins to green branches and calling it art.
“It’s for prosperity,” his sister tells him, for the seventh time. “Don’t be so uncultured, Masaharu.”
His mother says nothing to him, but when Niou reaches under her elbow to swipe a rice ball, she swats the back of his hand.
He eats a bowl of cold cereal for breakfast, and leaves the dirty bowl on the table for his sister to clean up. She gives him a dirty look.
Niou gives her the finger.
“Can’t you stop fighting for once?” his mother asks. “Masaharu, put your bowl in the sink.”
Niou rolls his eyes when she turns her back. Then, he swipes one of the rice balls for later.
She doesn’t notice one missing anyway.
Not until Niou slinks out the front doorway with his tennis bag strapped to his shoulder. He cringes when he hears her exasperated sigh of “Masaharu! I thought I told you-” but he closes the door before she finishes.
He could, he knows, be a better son to her. He could behave like his brother. He could grow out his black roots, cut off his rat tail and maybe pop a pair of fake glasses on his nose. He could stop pestering his brother and his sister. He could pick up his room and stop swiping rice balls.
But…
He doesn’t.
Sanada is an asshole at practice. Niou knows that it isn’t easy for any of them with Yukimura in the hospital, but that doesn’t mean Sanada has to give then all sixty laps for no apparent reason other than the pissy expression pasted on Sanada’s perpetual scowl.
Niou wants to run up alongside Sanada and ask if his kiss didn’t fix the princess like in the fairytales. Or maybe it’s meant to be a bittersweet ballad with Yukimura dying, but love remaining ever green.
It skeeves Niou out remembering what he saw in the crack of the hospital door. It is as though there are two sides to Sanada- the miserable unpleasant tennis player with the killer game and even worse backhand slap, and the other Sanada.
The one who kisses Yukimura.
The one who needs Yukimura, maybe even more than the rest of the team.
Niou holds his tongue and runs his laps. His calves ache. His shins feel like they will split down the bone, but he won’t let Sanada break him. We have to be stronger than ever for Yukimura, he thinks.
Now, he knows, with each passing day, Yukimura becomes less of an ass, who complained at the team all the team, who frowned and scowled and stomped around and was mean when he forced matches against Sanada. Yukimura becomes that beacon of their team, that goal like the Nationals.
When he gets out of the hospital…
When the team wins a threepeat of the Nationals...
Niou heaves through his last lap, then collapses onto the ground beside Yagyuu, who has already started on his leg stretches, touching his toes with his long fingers curled over the end of his sneakers.
“Practice?” Niou asks.
A shadow darkens Niou’s face, blotting out the sun.
Sanada stands in front of Niou, hands on his hips like Yukimura sometimes used to do.
“You’re practicing with Jackal, today,” he says. “Yagyuu, with Marui.”
Damn, not even an ounce of holiday spirit, Niou thinks.
Yagyuu just nods at Sanada, his bland mask hiding any emotion he might have.
Niou doesn’t see Yagyuu for the rest of practice. Jackal keeps him on his toes with his strong net play, his defensive balls so much different than Yagyuu’s preferred style of volleys and laser beams. Niou knows, deep down, that he needs to vary his opponents to get ready for the season, and yet that doesn’t stop him from spending his spare moments trying to find Yagyuu on the courts.
He must be in the gymnasium with Marui. No hideous pink hair in sight, just Yanagi’s long legs and Kirihara’s panting from the court beside Niou, and Sanada with juniors on the other court. Freshmen, everywhere, dash between plays to pick up balls.
Niou toes a ball out of his way before a serve. A freshman darts out of the bushes and makes a grab for the rolling ball. “Get those out of our way!” Niou snaps.
The freshman stumbles over the ball, backs into another freshman and both end up scrambling to hold onto their balls. A farce of squeaks and neon yellow and Niou rolling his eyes at them.
“Don’t torment them,” Jackal says, sighing heavily. “That was you back in the day.”
Niou bounces his own ball, keeping his wrist loose and light. “It feels good to be a senpai, ne?” he asks.
When Jackal rolls his eyes the whites are even brighter against his brown skin.
The showers afterward are filled with the sounds of Kirihara shrieking when he soaps his eyes by mistake and Marui listing things off on his fingers.
“Yeah, mom is making chicken wings and gyouza and mochi and we’re ordering sushi,” Marui starts on his left hand, numbering everything off as he licks his lips under the water, “and yogurt jellies and cake and red bean paste dumplings and…”
Niou tunes him out as best he can. He almost wishes that Sanada would sing in the showers sometimes- that would be an awful noise worth listening to.
“Oi, Yanagi! Don’t be jealous- you not ordering sushi at all for tonight?” Marui shouts. “What are you doing?”
Yanagi turns off his shower. “Genichirou and I are having a sleepover.”
Niou snickers. Like girls.
Sanada glares from underneath his wet bangs. “What?” he grumbles.
Niou slathers the last few chunks of his soap across his chest. “Nothing,” he says.
“Probably more fun that what you’re doing,” Sanada mutters.
Niou can already see the fourteen years of New Years’ celebrations he’s had with his family. He can remember being five and having to climb all the way up a mountain at some dark hour of the morning in the cold in the mud with his shoes soaked through and his neck too hot. The crowds were always full of old people who smelled musty and of too much floral perfume. His mother’s hand was always sticky and clammy in his own.
“Come on, Masaharu,” his father called. “Keep up!”
Stupid first sunset of the year…
Niou snorts. “Yeah, probably,” he says dryly. “Whatever.”
Sanada, of course, doesn’t need to know about any of that.
In the locker room, Niou sneaks one last look at Yagyuu for the year. If only he could freeze-frame the moment in his mind forever, that skin covered in water droplets, Yagyuu’s chest and stomach and the towel around his waist, perfectly tucked in on the left side of his hip. Even the way his glasses, steaming up from his warm, wet skin.
Niou sinks onto the bench, reaching absently for his socks, closing his eyes to savour this.
And then Yagyuu ruins everything when his phone buzzes down in the bottom of his tennis bag. He picks it up and mutters, “Shit”.
Niou opens his eyes.
Every regular on the tennis team stares at Yagyuu.
Yagyuu pushes his glasses up his nose. “I mean, pardon me,” he says. “My mother is calling me.”
Niou pries. He doesn’t even try to hide it. He listens in on Yagyuu’s phone call, inching over on the bench and shoving Kirihara off the end in the process.
Yagyuu nods. “Yes. Again?” He groans, sounding more like a petulant teenager than ever before. “So what am I supposed to do? Where are you?” A pause. “In Hiroshima?” Yagyuu sighs. “And dad?” He clicks his tongue. “Well, I can ask, but…” Niou can hear the sounds of someone else speaking on the phone, but he can’t make out the words.
Kirihara shoves back at Niou. “Senpai, what the hell was that for?”
Niou brings his index finger to his lips.
Yagyuu says, “Fine. Yeah, whatever,” groans again, then clicks his end button.
He sets his cellphone down on the bench next to Niou’s thigh. Niou shivers at the touch, as though it is Yagyuu by proxy, not an inanimate piece of plastic. He looks at it- nothing but a small green pompom tassel as a phone charm.
How…uninteresting.
“We have bugs in the house again,” Yagyuu tells them. “My mother neglected to call an exterminator before the holidays and we can’t go inside tonight with all the bug bombs going off.” He stares at his phone and frowns.
Niou shifts over further on the bench. He elbows Kirihara in the side, knocking the wonderchibi off the end a second time.
Kirihara glares at Niou.
Niou doesn’t care. His cock is stiff. Again.
Kirihara, being the youngest, doesn’t seem to care about ever using a towel. Instead, he stands up, wipes himself dry while managing to moon Niou at the same time, and tosses his towel into his locker, still damp.
“Hey, Yagyuu-senpai, wanna sleep over at my house tonight?”
Niou can hear his own teeth grind when Yagyuu graciously accepts with a bow.
***
“Come on, Masaharu!” his father shouts. He raps his walking stick against a tree. “Keep up!”
Niou groans. An elderly woman hobbles past him, pushing him into a bush off the pathway. His shoe squelches in the mud. He’s cold. He’s wet. He’s miserable.
And to make things even worse, he’s tired and his stomach growls.
Niou yawns.
The first hints of grey appear on the horizon, almost enough to light Niou’s way to the top of the mountain.
“Stupid Kirihara,” he grumbles.
But you didn’t offer first, he thinks. You could have offered, and you didn’t.
Niou’s mother reaches for his hand. Her grip is clammy.
He wrenches his hand away. “I’m not a kid!” he says.
“Hurry up then!” his father calls. “It’s almost sunrise.”
When the sun does rise, and Niou stands at the summit, winded and panting from being dragged up here by his family in a mad dash to make dawn, the sky is streaked with violet and umber and the brightest of salmons. In the distance, the first bells peel with the new year.
Despite the crowd, despite the people breathing down Niou’s neck and pushing into his sides, he feels completely alone.