FIC: Rewind Forward (D1) 19/63
Title: Rewind Forward (19/63)
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
Niou doesn’t ask, he just follows Yagyuu after their game has finished. His damp hair makes the back of his neck cold in the evening air. The city is dark, but awash with a hundred thousand tiny stars, the glittering lights illuminating the streets as they walk.
Marui and Jackal don’t ask either, they just follow behind Niou.
At the first crosswalk, Yagyuu stops dead-on. He turns around, looking over his shoulder as Niou skips, then hops, almost like his footwork. Niou feels like he could fly on the high he has right now.
Doubles one.
They are Doubles one. Not Marui and Jackal. But him and Yagyuu.
He flashes a grin at Yagyuu.
“Hey,” Jackal says. Niou steps off the curb as the light flashes for pedestrians, but when Yagyuu waits for Marui and Jackal to catch up, Niou steps back in a huff.
“Do you guys want to get some ramen?” Jackal asks.
No, Niou thinks. I’d rather be out with just Yagyuu.
Yagyuu waits a beat before he says, “Certainly.”
“Man,” Marui says, rubbing his stomach through his coat. “I’m so hungry. I’m almost fainting, I’m so hungry.” Dramatically, he wobbles across the street, almost bumping into a group of salarymen crossing the other direction. “I think I want some pork ramen. Tokyo-style, yeah, that’d be good…”
“There’s a good coffee place near the ramen shop,” Jackal says.
“Coffee?” Niou asks. The only experience he’s had with coffee has been the thick black brew his father drinks every morning with breakfast, or what his mother drinks with evaporated milk.
“Yeah,” Jackal says. Marui continues to ramble on about scrambled eggs and aonori on his ramen. Niou scratches his head. His hair itches.
“What’s it called?” Yagyuu asks.
Jackal’s face softens under the kaleidoscope of coloured lights around them: streetlights and shop fronts, flashing signs of pachinko parlours and hundreds of yellow-white car headlights zooming by. “Starbucks,” he says, his voice trailing off wistfully. “The Brazilian roast there isn’t anything like real Brazilian coffee, but-”
“Oh I love Starbucks!” Marui shouts. He pushes his way past Niou, elbowing Niou in the side, then drapes an arm over Jackal’s shoulder. Awkwardly, Marui hobbles along Jackal and Yagyuu, with Niou in the rear. “Their Carrot Passion Cake is delicious, but sometimes I get the Marshmallow Twists. Or, you know, the Chocolate Decadence Cake is soooo good. I think I might get that. Or two slices.”
Niou grinds his teeth. Marui goes on and on, licking his lips and moaning.
The ramen shop is dark, more like a bar than a restaurant, with unnatural blue lighting and a few too many drunk salarymen clustered around. Niou feels entirely out of place and too young. A young girl, about the age of his sister, curls up against a man twice her age and strokes his arm.
Niou wants to barf. He stares at his bowl of ramen, steaming noodles floating in dark broth. With a chopstick, he stirs the green onions around. Niou reaches across Marui to pilfer the aonori, which he shakes all over his bowl.
Marui steals the aonori back, then sprinkles so much over his bowl the surface of his broth is black.
Yagyuu slurps his noodles up, using his chopsticks to guide them. Jackal sips a coffee from the bar, glancing over the rim over the other patrons in the shop.
After, Jackal asks for the bill and four piles of change are gathered on the table. Niou smirks when he notices Marui puts down 500 more yen, so he slips some of his own change away and shoves it back in his pocket. The fatass doesn’t even notice he’s jipped.
Starbucks is a walk down the street, maybe ten minutes past several blocks of clothing shops interspersed with cheap restaurants and a club, already filling up with patrons lining up outside. Girls in miniskirts and knee-high boots, shivering under fake fur stoles. Boys with ripped jeans and tight tops, arms around their girlfriends, sometimes hands on the girls’ asses, possessive either way.
Even though they lost their game, Marui and Jackal laugh and talk and walk close to each other down the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians going the other way and stacks of crates outside shops, too. Niou buries his face inside the upturned collar of his coat and shoves his hands deep into his pockets. His mittens are at home and the January night is cold and windy. But the sky is clear, filled with stars and twinkling buildings.
It is so very tempting to reach an arm out and drape it across Yagyuu’s shoulder, or to walk into Yagyuu’s side and smile, all friends-like. Instead, Niou hangs back and walks into Starbucks behind the others. Jackal orders first, and Marui buys three slices of cake.
“You can put them all on the same plate,” Marui tells the pimply teen at the cash.
Yagyuu, ever the boring megane dork once more, orders a green tea. Niou eyes the mug of frothy, decorated something that Jackal cups. He looks around the shop, filled with yuppies and girls with perms. “I’ll have a…” Niou squints at the menu and names the first thing he sees.
“With froth? Low-fat milk? Cream on top?” the teen names a dozen options off.
Niou nods. “Sure, gimme the works.”
The teen’s eyes go wide, then he shouts at order to the girl at the milk frother. She groans, pushes back her hair and presses something; the machine roars into action, sloshing hot milk and steam everywhere.
Niou ends up with a large mug topped with a mountain of foam and sprinkles. At the napkin bar, Marui sprinkles chocolate and vanilla and matcha powder too all over the top of his cake.
Niou slides into a seat in the café. Jackal has taken over cushy leather seats around a small round table. He sighs happily as he drinks his coffee. Niou is only more reminded of what his parents drink, the heady smell of the coffee permeating throughout the café. At least his own coffee- whatever it is- doesn’t look as black and boring. He gulps down a mouthful of foam. No coffee taste yet. It’s not so bad.
Marui chows down on his cake. “Ah, my love,” he says, waving his fork in the air. “If there’s one thing that’s better than tennis, it’s cake.”
Niou gets up, grabs a straw from the napkin bar, and slides back into his seat. Tennis bags litter the floor around them, making middle-aged patrons frown as they step over the bags awkwardly. Niou toes the edge of his bag with his sneaker and pushes it out further out from under his chair.
“Do you think Yukimura will be out soon?” Jackal asks out of the blue. Everyone looks at him, but Yagyuu is the first to move when he shrugs his shoulders.
“Sanada said he was looking better just a couple days ago,” Marui says. “I bet he’ll be out in a week and yelling at us for slacking off. Maybe he can reschedule our game, ne?” He narrows his eyes and grins.
“That game counted,” Niou says. Asshole, he thinks.
Marui rolls his eyes, then shoves another huge forkful of cake into his mouth.
“If Yukimura-kun doesn’t come out of the hospital soon, I wonder if Sanada will have to hold trials for an eight available player,” Yagyuu says.
Jackal shakes his head. “He wouldn’t do that. There are teams that only have seven. Rokkaku does. And there was some team from Hokkaido with only seven regulars a couple years ago. I heard Kawasaki-san talking about them once.”
“If the team strength is compromised-” Yagyuu starts.
Marui slams his fork down on the table, startling Yagyuu and making Jackal’s coffee slosh. “We’re the best team in the country, even without Yukimura, guys! We could all kick people like Atobe and that Tezuka and Shiraishi and those two birds from Kyuushu into the ground- anyone of us!”
For once, Niou agrees with Marui. But he doesn’t show it. Instead, he simply says, “We don’t even know what’s wrong with Yukimura yet.”
Marui leans back in his chair, tipping the legs so far he jerks forward to stop himself from falling back all the way. “See, I told you so. Yukimura’ll be out in a week. It’s probably the flu. Or pneumonia.”
Yagyuu frowns. He cleans his glasses with a cloth from his pocket. For a minute, Niou can see just how wide and round Yagyuu’s eyes are. Niou can see his big, unfocused pupils staring out black as Jackal’s coffee without the obscurity of steam in the locker room showers. And Yagyuu can’t see him staring back.
Marui and Jackal touch each other, hands on arms, poking each other in the side. Marui grabs Jackal’s shoulder and insists on having a sip of Jackal’s coffee. Niou never thought the two of them were friends exactly, just teammates, but then he never did give it much thought because he didn’t care.
He and Yagyuu only sit across the table from one another, neither speaking, as Marui talks and Jackal listens, occasionally interrupting with an expected nod or “mmm hmm”.
When Niou has sipped all the foam off the top of his coffee, he gets to the actual drink, which looks more like dirty dish water than coffee. He sniffs it, smelling the hot milk and pungent coffee. Then, he takes a tentative sip.
Yagyuu stares at him, his eyebrows rising as Niou finally tastes his drink. He clenches his teeth to keep from grimacing at the bitter, awful taste.
“Good?” Yagyuu asks. He dips his head down, trying but not really suppressing the twitch in his lips.
For measure, Niou gulps a mouthful down. The drink has sat long enough that it doesn’t burn his throat, but the bitter coffee taste combined with milk and something not sweet enough. The crumbs on Marui’s plate start to look appealing as something to chase the drink down with.
Niou sits on his hands to stop himself from even trying that. Shifting in his chair, his feet catch on the feet of the table, then something else. Yagyuu stiffens in his seat. Niou realizes that it’s Yagyuu’s foot his sneaker is touching.
His dreams have been like this, where Yagyuu sits across the table from him, only now they sit in a coffee shop, not a sushi bar, and Yagyuu has a cup of tea, not slices of tuna in front of him.
Still, the resemblance is more than enough for Niou’s cock. And he knows it. He knows that he’s got an erection and the more he knows this, the worse it gets because this isn’t a dream and his pants feel entirely too tight and small and his face is on fire, red like a drunk salaryman.
Niou tries not to wiggle in his seat, and he hopes that Yagyuu doesn’t notice. Breathe, he thinks. Think about breathing, not how swollen and aching you are.
The burning ache between his legs only worsens when Yagyuu’s brow knits. His glasses slide down the bridge of his nose.
Niou’s shoe is still touching Yagyuu’s foot. The entire situation could spiral downward, horribly, with the way that Yagyuu seems to be crawling back in his seat, blinking and frowning. “Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says.
As fast as Niou’s foot started to touch Yagyuu’s, Niou starts to move his sneaker up Yagyuu’s calf, catching the fabric with his shoe. He does his best to leer, and as he leans forward, his foot now halfway up to Yagyuu’s knee, he says “Enjoy that?”
Niou waggles his eyebrows.
Yagyuu snorts, shaking his head. For measure, Niou rubs his toes back down Yagyuu’s calf, enjoying seeing Yagyuu bristle at the touch. Besides, being a pest covers for the fact he’s extremely uncomfortable and horny and kinda wishing his dreams were more truth than fantasy. If only Yagyuu would slam his hands down on the table and lean across and lick his lips and sneer.
Niou shivers at the thought. His thighs shake. He could almost come at the thought. Dragging his foot away, he hunches over and tries to keep anyone else from possibly noticing his erection. Yagyuu sighs heavily, then goes back to drinking his tea.
He doesn’t sneak back home until past eleven. All the lights in the house are dark and Niou’s sneakers squeak on the floor right as he moves to take them off. He pauses, waiting for the sound of a parent to come downstairs and frown at him, but no one does. Niou grins. Although he’s hungry, he has to piss from that awful coffee and he’s still hard.
In the bathroom Niou turns the shower on to mask the sounds of his masturbating. It doesn’t take long before he’s gasping and groaning and frantically moving his hand against himself, harder and harder until that rising wave wracks his body. Niou gapes, falling forward as his body shudders and he spurts come all over the back of the toilet seat.
It looks gross this way. Niou winces as he cleans the spot up with toilet paper. He sniffs and figures that the air freshener his mother uses in here will mask the smell of his come soon enough.
My room smells the same, Niou thinks when he finally peels off his clothes, pulls on a sorta-clean pair of pajamas and crawls into bed. His toes are cold, but he can’t be bothered to put a pair of socks on. In the distance, a train rattles by, the horn so faint that it almost lulls Niou to sleep.
The first thing Niou does in the morning, after yawning good morning to his mother is say, “Can you wash my sheets?” He avoids her eyes, instead focusing on the sputtering rice cooker.
“I just washed them last week,” she says, but her voice trails off and Niou is too embarrassed to explain any further.
***
A week passes and Marui isn’t right.
Niou isn’t the least surprised about that, but he is surprised that Yukimura continues to lay, half-dead, in a hospital on the outskirts of Tokyo.
Yanagi walks back from speaking with the nurse, and Yagyuu, too. Neither say a word.
Sanada leans against the hallway wall, arms crossed and a frown on his mouth. What doesn’t show are the lines in brow: worry, angst, fear. He’s been here since tennis club finished earlier in the evening. The rest of the team stopped for fried tofu at a stand not far from the hospital when Kirihara and Marui didn’t shut up about being hungry.
“They’ve been running tests and the doctors think it might be something like Guillain-Barré Syndrome,” Yanagi says.
Yagyuu’s frown deepens. Sanada ducks his head; the brim of his cap entirely covers his face.
“What’s Guillain-Barré Syndrome?” Kirihara asks.
Ditto, Niou thinks.
“It seems to be a disease of the immune system whose causes are unknown,” Yagyuu says. “It typically begins with weakness in the arms and legs, and eventually the body will lose its ability to move around freely.” Yagyuu takes a deep breath. If Niou wasn’t as desperate to hear what the hell is wrong with Yukimura, then he might accuse Yagyuu of being a walking textbook.
“If the situation worsens, the respiratory system can become paralyzed and the patient will have trouble breathing, talking and even eating. The disease reaches its peak two weeks after the initial outbreak.”
From the wall, Sanada’s voice breaks as he mutters, “Can it be cured…?”
Yagyuu breathes through his nose. “At the earliest it takes at least a month. At the latest it could take over a year.”
“Well, Yukimura’s been here over a month,” Marui says. “So he’ll be out in another week, I bet. I’ll even bake him a cake to celebrate.”
Jackal shakes his head, but it’s Niou who says, “Are you fucking stupid?” Niou points to the doorway to Yukimura’s room, where the still figure lies on his back, as unmoving today as he was a month ago. “He’s barely moved since December. He’s not gonna get any better in a week.”
“Fuck all you know,” Marui snaps.
“Fuck off!” Niou shouts. “Your cake would probably poison him-”
Marui lunges. Niou pulls his fists from his pockets and moves to push Marui off him, but it is Yanagi who steps between them, arms out and eyes open.
“Stop it!” Yanagi yells. “You’re not helping the situation with this.”
Niou and Marui both step back. “Fucktard,” Marui mutters.
“Fatass,” Niou murmurs, right back at him.
Something smacks the wall, a dull thump. Everyone looks over to see Sanada smashing his fist against the wall. Niou stiffens, the memory of Sanada’s slaps to his own cheek ghosting pain across his face. But Sanada doesn’t slap either of them, instead he stomps off towards the stairwell.
Yanagi opens his mouth to say something, but instead grabs Sanada and his own tennisbags and runs after him.
Kirihara blows through his teeth, and says, “This sucks.”
***
Niou knows a lot about Yagyuu and at the same time, he doesn’t know very much.
Yagyuu only shares gym class with Niou and after the basketball unit finishes, they start wrestling. Niou might have muscles from tennis, but he doesn’t have the weight and he spends more time than he’d like pinned on his back or in a headlock. He could, he knocks, wrestle back or give his opponents a quick jab to the crotch to free himself, but he doesn’t care.
Yagyuu just barely outweighs him. Enough to be classed in a different group from Niou.
Niou sits on the benches and stews. His hair gets messed up. He starts to twist his favourite elastic around his hair again, but then with a sharp pain to his fingers, it breaks, flying across the room.
“Puri,” he whispers.
At least the elastic hits Sanada square in the back. Sanada whips his head around and gives Niou a glare. Niou waves at him, forcing himself to smirk, if only to piss Sanada off more.
Sanada must have woken up on the wrong side of the futon this morning. At practice, he yells out laps, then, purposely, tacks on a “Niou- 70 laps!”
In spite, Niou wastes half of practice on his laps, leisurely jogging along the perimeter the courts, slowing down to a walk every time he passes Sanada and Yanagi’s game.
“Am I in your way?” he asks. “Sorry!”
Yanagi doesn’t seem to mind, but Sanada’s right eye twitches and he messes up his fuurinkazan bad enough that Yanagi wins the game.
Yagyuu confuses Niou. He thinks about it in the showers. His hair feels dirtier than usual and he feels a bit naked, exposed with his hair wet against his neck, nothing to tie it back. It’s girly to have his this long, Niou thinks.
If Yagyuu thinks it’s girly, he doesn’t say. But he keeps turning his head to Niou in the locker room as he buttons his school uniform shirt. Niou’s fingers itch to touch the back of his neck. The damp ends of his hair are irritating, weird. He doesn’t like them, but he’s not girly enough to carry extra elastics around in his tennis bag for pigtails like some of the popular seniors Niou has seen walking around the school hallways.
Niou can’t pull that off as a second year, but maybe as a senior himself, he can try. I’ll have to remember that, he tells himself.
And then: Sanada might look good in pigtails.
Niou can see the scowl on Sanada’s mouth and the narrowed eyes already. The image of Sanada lording over the tennis court, hat replaced by two spiky ponytails on his head makes Niou laugh under his breath.
Until Niou notices Yagyuu walking towards the bus stops. Not that they walk together and not that today is their day or the team evening, but a group of girls, shivering in their short skirts and kneesocks, no mittens on and only tiny pink and purple scarves, they wave to Yagyuu, shout out his name and call out, “Come and ride on this route, Yagyuu-kun! Take the bus with us, Hiroshi!”
Niou slows down walking. Maybe he had been picking up his pace to catch up to Yagyuu after the showers, but now with Yagyuu nodding to those girls and talking with them, it’s pointless. Niou purses his lips. He grinds his teeth when he sees a couple of the girls start to giggle, sounding like idiots with their fake high-pitched tones, their blushing and their acting coy.
Barf, he thinks.
Dorks should be flustered by girls like that, and yet Yagyuu isn’t. Niou ends up half-hidden behind a tree, watching Yagyuu stand and smile with the girls. They touch his arms, and call him by his first name, familiar with him in a way that Niou isn’t. It turns Niou’s stomach and when Yagyuu steps onto the same bus as the girls, Niou’s stomach turns again, with acrid bile stinging his throat.
Niou drowns himself in the bathtub thinking about this. All around him smells like cheap vanilla and cherry blossoms, courtesy of his sister’s bathsalts. He hugs his legs, now flushed pink from the hot water. Niou blows against the surface of the water. “Stupid bitches,” he mutters. The water gurgles his words. Megane dorks should be losers without friends, or with very few at least.
Instead, Yagyuu always seems to have friends. Niou is the one without them.
Not that I care, he tells himself.
Mentally, he goes over the faces of the girls. One is in class D, with Sanada and Yagyuu. Two are in G. There was one- the girl with the long face and the crooked bottom teeth, who had the bow in her hair- isn’t she in Niou’s class? He could swipe her pencilcase in class. Or maybe trip her in the hallway, that might work. Smear deodorant on her locker padlock and colour “I’m a slut” with whiteout onto her backpack.
Niou should be smiling at the plan, but he can’t be bothered to.
The ends of his hair fan out across the water, a weird greenish-tinted mat, like seaweed floating on the ocean. When his fingertips are so wrinkled he can’t feel anything, Niou pulls the plug and gets out, leaving wet footprints all over the bathroom floor.
He pulls his sister’s bathroom drawer open, fishes a hand around the back, and finds her slash of elastics.
Niou looks at the elastics he takes out. Every single one of them is pink. Pink!
“Puri,” he says.
With fast, trained hands, he pulls his wet hair back. It feels better already. He feels better already.
His sister glares at him in the living room. Niou pads into the room, then sinks back on the couch next to her. He drapes his head on her shoulder, wiggling just to make her irritated.
“Is that my elastic?” she snaps.
“Yeah,” Niou says.
“I bought those pink ones so you wouldn’t use them! Masaharu!”
Niou smiles. He doesn’t even need to let her see the five other pink elastics wound around his right wrist, just below his wristweight. Her huff is music to Niou’s ears.
***
Niou has always been the sneaky one in his family. There has never been any question about that, no doubt in Niou’s mind.
Still, waking up the following morning, he can sense something is wrong. He doesn’t know what, but there’s something weird going on. He stumbles downstairs, careful not to trip. He scratches his armpit and asks his mother what breakfast is.
His little brother starts to snicker.
Niou blinks. He narrows his eyes. “What’s your problem?”
His brother fixes his glasses, his laughter getting louder.
“Oi Masaharu!” his sister calls.
Niou looks over his shoulder. Just as he starts to say, “Yeah?” a light flash blinds him with a lightning-fast shot, yellow-green-white so bright that Niou jerks a hand up to spare his eyes the shock.
His sister smiles. The sides of her mouth make her glasses rise up her face. On her cellphone screen is the entirely non-photogenic image of Niou, wide and droopy-eyed, mouth a contorted morning grimace. But worse, his hair has been pulled up onto the top of his scalp into the dumbest looking ponytail Niou has ever seen.
“Don’t steal my things,” she tells him.
Niou sticks his tongue out at her.
Out of spite, he swipes four more elastics from her drawer before he leaves for school.
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
Niou doesn’t ask, he just follows Yagyuu after their game has finished. His damp hair makes the back of his neck cold in the evening air. The city is dark, but awash with a hundred thousand tiny stars, the glittering lights illuminating the streets as they walk.
Marui and Jackal don’t ask either, they just follow behind Niou.
At the first crosswalk, Yagyuu stops dead-on. He turns around, looking over his shoulder as Niou skips, then hops, almost like his footwork. Niou feels like he could fly on the high he has right now.
Doubles one.
They are Doubles one. Not Marui and Jackal. But him and Yagyuu.
He flashes a grin at Yagyuu.
“Hey,” Jackal says. Niou steps off the curb as the light flashes for pedestrians, but when Yagyuu waits for Marui and Jackal to catch up, Niou steps back in a huff.
“Do you guys want to get some ramen?” Jackal asks.
No, Niou thinks. I’d rather be out with just Yagyuu.
Yagyuu waits a beat before he says, “Certainly.”
“Man,” Marui says, rubbing his stomach through his coat. “I’m so hungry. I’m almost fainting, I’m so hungry.” Dramatically, he wobbles across the street, almost bumping into a group of salarymen crossing the other direction. “I think I want some pork ramen. Tokyo-style, yeah, that’d be good…”
“There’s a good coffee place near the ramen shop,” Jackal says.
“Coffee?” Niou asks. The only experience he’s had with coffee has been the thick black brew his father drinks every morning with breakfast, or what his mother drinks with evaporated milk.
“Yeah,” Jackal says. Marui continues to ramble on about scrambled eggs and aonori on his ramen. Niou scratches his head. His hair itches.
“What’s it called?” Yagyuu asks.
Jackal’s face softens under the kaleidoscope of coloured lights around them: streetlights and shop fronts, flashing signs of pachinko parlours and hundreds of yellow-white car headlights zooming by. “Starbucks,” he says, his voice trailing off wistfully. “The Brazilian roast there isn’t anything like real Brazilian coffee, but-”
“Oh I love Starbucks!” Marui shouts. He pushes his way past Niou, elbowing Niou in the side, then drapes an arm over Jackal’s shoulder. Awkwardly, Marui hobbles along Jackal and Yagyuu, with Niou in the rear. “Their Carrot Passion Cake is delicious, but sometimes I get the Marshmallow Twists. Or, you know, the Chocolate Decadence Cake is soooo good. I think I might get that. Or two slices.”
Niou grinds his teeth. Marui goes on and on, licking his lips and moaning.
The ramen shop is dark, more like a bar than a restaurant, with unnatural blue lighting and a few too many drunk salarymen clustered around. Niou feels entirely out of place and too young. A young girl, about the age of his sister, curls up against a man twice her age and strokes his arm.
Niou wants to barf. He stares at his bowl of ramen, steaming noodles floating in dark broth. With a chopstick, he stirs the green onions around. Niou reaches across Marui to pilfer the aonori, which he shakes all over his bowl.
Marui steals the aonori back, then sprinkles so much over his bowl the surface of his broth is black.
Yagyuu slurps his noodles up, using his chopsticks to guide them. Jackal sips a coffee from the bar, glancing over the rim over the other patrons in the shop.
After, Jackal asks for the bill and four piles of change are gathered on the table. Niou smirks when he notices Marui puts down 500 more yen, so he slips some of his own change away and shoves it back in his pocket. The fatass doesn’t even notice he’s jipped.
Starbucks is a walk down the street, maybe ten minutes past several blocks of clothing shops interspersed with cheap restaurants and a club, already filling up with patrons lining up outside. Girls in miniskirts and knee-high boots, shivering under fake fur stoles. Boys with ripped jeans and tight tops, arms around their girlfriends, sometimes hands on the girls’ asses, possessive either way.
Even though they lost their game, Marui and Jackal laugh and talk and walk close to each other down the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians going the other way and stacks of crates outside shops, too. Niou buries his face inside the upturned collar of his coat and shoves his hands deep into his pockets. His mittens are at home and the January night is cold and windy. But the sky is clear, filled with stars and twinkling buildings.
It is so very tempting to reach an arm out and drape it across Yagyuu’s shoulder, or to walk into Yagyuu’s side and smile, all friends-like. Instead, Niou hangs back and walks into Starbucks behind the others. Jackal orders first, and Marui buys three slices of cake.
“You can put them all on the same plate,” Marui tells the pimply teen at the cash.
Yagyuu, ever the boring megane dork once more, orders a green tea. Niou eyes the mug of frothy, decorated something that Jackal cups. He looks around the shop, filled with yuppies and girls with perms. “I’ll have a…” Niou squints at the menu and names the first thing he sees.
“With froth? Low-fat milk? Cream on top?” the teen names a dozen options off.
Niou nods. “Sure, gimme the works.”
The teen’s eyes go wide, then he shouts at order to the girl at the milk frother. She groans, pushes back her hair and presses something; the machine roars into action, sloshing hot milk and steam everywhere.
Niou ends up with a large mug topped with a mountain of foam and sprinkles. At the napkin bar, Marui sprinkles chocolate and vanilla and matcha powder too all over the top of his cake.
Niou slides into a seat in the café. Jackal has taken over cushy leather seats around a small round table. He sighs happily as he drinks his coffee. Niou is only more reminded of what his parents drink, the heady smell of the coffee permeating throughout the café. At least his own coffee- whatever it is- doesn’t look as black and boring. He gulps down a mouthful of foam. No coffee taste yet. It’s not so bad.
Marui chows down on his cake. “Ah, my love,” he says, waving his fork in the air. “If there’s one thing that’s better than tennis, it’s cake.”
Niou gets up, grabs a straw from the napkin bar, and slides back into his seat. Tennis bags litter the floor around them, making middle-aged patrons frown as they step over the bags awkwardly. Niou toes the edge of his bag with his sneaker and pushes it out further out from under his chair.
“Do you think Yukimura will be out soon?” Jackal asks out of the blue. Everyone looks at him, but Yagyuu is the first to move when he shrugs his shoulders.
“Sanada said he was looking better just a couple days ago,” Marui says. “I bet he’ll be out in a week and yelling at us for slacking off. Maybe he can reschedule our game, ne?” He narrows his eyes and grins.
“That game counted,” Niou says. Asshole, he thinks.
Marui rolls his eyes, then shoves another huge forkful of cake into his mouth.
“If Yukimura-kun doesn’t come out of the hospital soon, I wonder if Sanada will have to hold trials for an eight available player,” Yagyuu says.
Jackal shakes his head. “He wouldn’t do that. There are teams that only have seven. Rokkaku does. And there was some team from Hokkaido with only seven regulars a couple years ago. I heard Kawasaki-san talking about them once.”
“If the team strength is compromised-” Yagyuu starts.
Marui slams his fork down on the table, startling Yagyuu and making Jackal’s coffee slosh. “We’re the best team in the country, even without Yukimura, guys! We could all kick people like Atobe and that Tezuka and Shiraishi and those two birds from Kyuushu into the ground- anyone of us!”
For once, Niou agrees with Marui. But he doesn’t show it. Instead, he simply says, “We don’t even know what’s wrong with Yukimura yet.”
Marui leans back in his chair, tipping the legs so far he jerks forward to stop himself from falling back all the way. “See, I told you so. Yukimura’ll be out in a week. It’s probably the flu. Or pneumonia.”
Yagyuu frowns. He cleans his glasses with a cloth from his pocket. For a minute, Niou can see just how wide and round Yagyuu’s eyes are. Niou can see his big, unfocused pupils staring out black as Jackal’s coffee without the obscurity of steam in the locker room showers. And Yagyuu can’t see him staring back.
Marui and Jackal touch each other, hands on arms, poking each other in the side. Marui grabs Jackal’s shoulder and insists on having a sip of Jackal’s coffee. Niou never thought the two of them were friends exactly, just teammates, but then he never did give it much thought because he didn’t care.
He and Yagyuu only sit across the table from one another, neither speaking, as Marui talks and Jackal listens, occasionally interrupting with an expected nod or “mmm hmm”.
When Niou has sipped all the foam off the top of his coffee, he gets to the actual drink, which looks more like dirty dish water than coffee. He sniffs it, smelling the hot milk and pungent coffee. Then, he takes a tentative sip.
Yagyuu stares at him, his eyebrows rising as Niou finally tastes his drink. He clenches his teeth to keep from grimacing at the bitter, awful taste.
“Good?” Yagyuu asks. He dips his head down, trying but not really suppressing the twitch in his lips.
For measure, Niou gulps a mouthful down. The drink has sat long enough that it doesn’t burn his throat, but the bitter coffee taste combined with milk and something not sweet enough. The crumbs on Marui’s plate start to look appealing as something to chase the drink down with.
Niou sits on his hands to stop himself from even trying that. Shifting in his chair, his feet catch on the feet of the table, then something else. Yagyuu stiffens in his seat. Niou realizes that it’s Yagyuu’s foot his sneaker is touching.
His dreams have been like this, where Yagyuu sits across the table from him, only now they sit in a coffee shop, not a sushi bar, and Yagyuu has a cup of tea, not slices of tuna in front of him.
Still, the resemblance is more than enough for Niou’s cock. And he knows it. He knows that he’s got an erection and the more he knows this, the worse it gets because this isn’t a dream and his pants feel entirely too tight and small and his face is on fire, red like a drunk salaryman.
Niou tries not to wiggle in his seat, and he hopes that Yagyuu doesn’t notice. Breathe, he thinks. Think about breathing, not how swollen and aching you are.
The burning ache between his legs only worsens when Yagyuu’s brow knits. His glasses slide down the bridge of his nose.
Niou’s shoe is still touching Yagyuu’s foot. The entire situation could spiral downward, horribly, with the way that Yagyuu seems to be crawling back in his seat, blinking and frowning. “Niou-kun,” Yagyuu says.
As fast as Niou’s foot started to touch Yagyuu’s, Niou starts to move his sneaker up Yagyuu’s calf, catching the fabric with his shoe. He does his best to leer, and as he leans forward, his foot now halfway up to Yagyuu’s knee, he says “Enjoy that?”
Niou waggles his eyebrows.
Yagyuu snorts, shaking his head. For measure, Niou rubs his toes back down Yagyuu’s calf, enjoying seeing Yagyuu bristle at the touch. Besides, being a pest covers for the fact he’s extremely uncomfortable and horny and kinda wishing his dreams were more truth than fantasy. If only Yagyuu would slam his hands down on the table and lean across and lick his lips and sneer.
Niou shivers at the thought. His thighs shake. He could almost come at the thought. Dragging his foot away, he hunches over and tries to keep anyone else from possibly noticing his erection. Yagyuu sighs heavily, then goes back to drinking his tea.
He doesn’t sneak back home until past eleven. All the lights in the house are dark and Niou’s sneakers squeak on the floor right as he moves to take them off. He pauses, waiting for the sound of a parent to come downstairs and frown at him, but no one does. Niou grins. Although he’s hungry, he has to piss from that awful coffee and he’s still hard.
In the bathroom Niou turns the shower on to mask the sounds of his masturbating. It doesn’t take long before he’s gasping and groaning and frantically moving his hand against himself, harder and harder until that rising wave wracks his body. Niou gapes, falling forward as his body shudders and he spurts come all over the back of the toilet seat.
It looks gross this way. Niou winces as he cleans the spot up with toilet paper. He sniffs and figures that the air freshener his mother uses in here will mask the smell of his come soon enough.
My room smells the same, Niou thinks when he finally peels off his clothes, pulls on a sorta-clean pair of pajamas and crawls into bed. His toes are cold, but he can’t be bothered to put a pair of socks on. In the distance, a train rattles by, the horn so faint that it almost lulls Niou to sleep.
The first thing Niou does in the morning, after yawning good morning to his mother is say, “Can you wash my sheets?” He avoids her eyes, instead focusing on the sputtering rice cooker.
“I just washed them last week,” she says, but her voice trails off and Niou is too embarrassed to explain any further.
***
A week passes and Marui isn’t right.
Niou isn’t the least surprised about that, but he is surprised that Yukimura continues to lay, half-dead, in a hospital on the outskirts of Tokyo.
Yanagi walks back from speaking with the nurse, and Yagyuu, too. Neither say a word.
Sanada leans against the hallway wall, arms crossed and a frown on his mouth. What doesn’t show are the lines in brow: worry, angst, fear. He’s been here since tennis club finished earlier in the evening. The rest of the team stopped for fried tofu at a stand not far from the hospital when Kirihara and Marui didn’t shut up about being hungry.
“They’ve been running tests and the doctors think it might be something like Guillain-Barré Syndrome,” Yanagi says.
Yagyuu’s frown deepens. Sanada ducks his head; the brim of his cap entirely covers his face.
“What’s Guillain-Barré Syndrome?” Kirihara asks.
Ditto, Niou thinks.
“It seems to be a disease of the immune system whose causes are unknown,” Yagyuu says. “It typically begins with weakness in the arms and legs, and eventually the body will lose its ability to move around freely.” Yagyuu takes a deep breath. If Niou wasn’t as desperate to hear what the hell is wrong with Yukimura, then he might accuse Yagyuu of being a walking textbook.
“If the situation worsens, the respiratory system can become paralyzed and the patient will have trouble breathing, talking and even eating. The disease reaches its peak two weeks after the initial outbreak.”
From the wall, Sanada’s voice breaks as he mutters, “Can it be cured…?”
Yagyuu breathes through his nose. “At the earliest it takes at least a month. At the latest it could take over a year.”
“Well, Yukimura’s been here over a month,” Marui says. “So he’ll be out in another week, I bet. I’ll even bake him a cake to celebrate.”
Jackal shakes his head, but it’s Niou who says, “Are you fucking stupid?” Niou points to the doorway to Yukimura’s room, where the still figure lies on his back, as unmoving today as he was a month ago. “He’s barely moved since December. He’s not gonna get any better in a week.”
“Fuck all you know,” Marui snaps.
“Fuck off!” Niou shouts. “Your cake would probably poison him-”
Marui lunges. Niou pulls his fists from his pockets and moves to push Marui off him, but it is Yanagi who steps between them, arms out and eyes open.
“Stop it!” Yanagi yells. “You’re not helping the situation with this.”
Niou and Marui both step back. “Fucktard,” Marui mutters.
“Fatass,” Niou murmurs, right back at him.
Something smacks the wall, a dull thump. Everyone looks over to see Sanada smashing his fist against the wall. Niou stiffens, the memory of Sanada’s slaps to his own cheek ghosting pain across his face. But Sanada doesn’t slap either of them, instead he stomps off towards the stairwell.
Yanagi opens his mouth to say something, but instead grabs Sanada and his own tennisbags and runs after him.
Kirihara blows through his teeth, and says, “This sucks.”
***
Niou knows a lot about Yagyuu and at the same time, he doesn’t know very much.
Yagyuu only shares gym class with Niou and after the basketball unit finishes, they start wrestling. Niou might have muscles from tennis, but he doesn’t have the weight and he spends more time than he’d like pinned on his back or in a headlock. He could, he knocks, wrestle back or give his opponents a quick jab to the crotch to free himself, but he doesn’t care.
Yagyuu just barely outweighs him. Enough to be classed in a different group from Niou.
Niou sits on the benches and stews. His hair gets messed up. He starts to twist his favourite elastic around his hair again, but then with a sharp pain to his fingers, it breaks, flying across the room.
“Puri,” he whispers.
At least the elastic hits Sanada square in the back. Sanada whips his head around and gives Niou a glare. Niou waves at him, forcing himself to smirk, if only to piss Sanada off more.
Sanada must have woken up on the wrong side of the futon this morning. At practice, he yells out laps, then, purposely, tacks on a “Niou- 70 laps!”
In spite, Niou wastes half of practice on his laps, leisurely jogging along the perimeter the courts, slowing down to a walk every time he passes Sanada and Yanagi’s game.
“Am I in your way?” he asks. “Sorry!”
Yanagi doesn’t seem to mind, but Sanada’s right eye twitches and he messes up his fuurinkazan bad enough that Yanagi wins the game.
Yagyuu confuses Niou. He thinks about it in the showers. His hair feels dirtier than usual and he feels a bit naked, exposed with his hair wet against his neck, nothing to tie it back. It’s girly to have his this long, Niou thinks.
If Yagyuu thinks it’s girly, he doesn’t say. But he keeps turning his head to Niou in the locker room as he buttons his school uniform shirt. Niou’s fingers itch to touch the back of his neck. The damp ends of his hair are irritating, weird. He doesn’t like them, but he’s not girly enough to carry extra elastics around in his tennis bag for pigtails like some of the popular seniors Niou has seen walking around the school hallways.
Niou can’t pull that off as a second year, but maybe as a senior himself, he can try. I’ll have to remember that, he tells himself.
And then: Sanada might look good in pigtails.
Niou can see the scowl on Sanada’s mouth and the narrowed eyes already. The image of Sanada lording over the tennis court, hat replaced by two spiky ponytails on his head makes Niou laugh under his breath.
Until Niou notices Yagyuu walking towards the bus stops. Not that they walk together and not that today is their day or the team evening, but a group of girls, shivering in their short skirts and kneesocks, no mittens on and only tiny pink and purple scarves, they wave to Yagyuu, shout out his name and call out, “Come and ride on this route, Yagyuu-kun! Take the bus with us, Hiroshi!”
Niou slows down walking. Maybe he had been picking up his pace to catch up to Yagyuu after the showers, but now with Yagyuu nodding to those girls and talking with them, it’s pointless. Niou purses his lips. He grinds his teeth when he sees a couple of the girls start to giggle, sounding like idiots with their fake high-pitched tones, their blushing and their acting coy.
Barf, he thinks.
Dorks should be flustered by girls like that, and yet Yagyuu isn’t. Niou ends up half-hidden behind a tree, watching Yagyuu stand and smile with the girls. They touch his arms, and call him by his first name, familiar with him in a way that Niou isn’t. It turns Niou’s stomach and when Yagyuu steps onto the same bus as the girls, Niou’s stomach turns again, with acrid bile stinging his throat.
Niou drowns himself in the bathtub thinking about this. All around him smells like cheap vanilla and cherry blossoms, courtesy of his sister’s bathsalts. He hugs his legs, now flushed pink from the hot water. Niou blows against the surface of the water. “Stupid bitches,” he mutters. The water gurgles his words. Megane dorks should be losers without friends, or with very few at least.
Instead, Yagyuu always seems to have friends. Niou is the one without them.
Not that I care, he tells himself.
Mentally, he goes over the faces of the girls. One is in class D, with Sanada and Yagyuu. Two are in G. There was one- the girl with the long face and the crooked bottom teeth, who had the bow in her hair- isn’t she in Niou’s class? He could swipe her pencilcase in class. Or maybe trip her in the hallway, that might work. Smear deodorant on her locker padlock and colour “I’m a slut” with whiteout onto her backpack.
Niou should be smiling at the plan, but he can’t be bothered to.
The ends of his hair fan out across the water, a weird greenish-tinted mat, like seaweed floating on the ocean. When his fingertips are so wrinkled he can’t feel anything, Niou pulls the plug and gets out, leaving wet footprints all over the bathroom floor.
He pulls his sister’s bathroom drawer open, fishes a hand around the back, and finds her slash of elastics.
Niou looks at the elastics he takes out. Every single one of them is pink. Pink!
“Puri,” he says.
With fast, trained hands, he pulls his wet hair back. It feels better already. He feels better already.
His sister glares at him in the living room. Niou pads into the room, then sinks back on the couch next to her. He drapes his head on her shoulder, wiggling just to make her irritated.
“Is that my elastic?” she snaps.
“Yeah,” Niou says.
“I bought those pink ones so you wouldn’t use them! Masaharu!”
Niou smiles. He doesn’t even need to let her see the five other pink elastics wound around his right wrist, just below his wristweight. Her huff is music to Niou’s ears.
***
Niou has always been the sneaky one in his family. There has never been any question about that, no doubt in Niou’s mind.
Still, waking up the following morning, he can sense something is wrong. He doesn’t know what, but there’s something weird going on. He stumbles downstairs, careful not to trip. He scratches his armpit and asks his mother what breakfast is.
His little brother starts to snicker.
Niou blinks. He narrows his eyes. “What’s your problem?”
His brother fixes his glasses, his laughter getting louder.
“Oi Masaharu!” his sister calls.
Niou looks over his shoulder. Just as he starts to say, “Yeah?” a light flash blinds him with a lightning-fast shot, yellow-green-white so bright that Niou jerks a hand up to spare his eyes the shock.
His sister smiles. The sides of her mouth make her glasses rise up her face. On her cellphone screen is the entirely non-photogenic image of Niou, wide and droopy-eyed, mouth a contorted morning grimace. But worse, his hair has been pulled up onto the top of his scalp into the dumbest looking ponytail Niou has ever seen.
“Don’t steal my things,” she tells him.
Niou sticks his tongue out at her.
Out of spite, he swipes four more elastics from her drawer before he leaves for school.