[fic] Game Theory and Equilibriums, chapter one
Title: Game Theory and Equilibriums. Chapter One: Like a Polaroid picture.
Pairing: Pi/Koyama/Shige/Ryo
Author:
ezyls_girl . n____n
Rating: PG
Warnings: Crazy childish writing. Absurdities on many levels.
Summary: Yamapi likes to think that he's a genius at inventing games. But the fact that Nishikido can score higher than him on a standardized test just pisses him off.
School!AU, Pi-centric.
Notes: Um. So I lied about posting the KAT-TUN spinoff first. I was getting nowhere with it. This chapter's pretty poor-quality, too, but I really tried, and so it's a post-IB-exam cheer-up for
fairy_illusions . ILY and please don't hurt me I'll write a NEWS in Wonderland fic if you really don't think I'll destroy it. D: 1670 words.
Previously:
PART I ----- / prologue / chapter one / chapter two / chapter three / chapter four /
PART II ---- / chapter one / chapter two / chapter three / chapter four / chapter five / chapter six /
The total diameter of the large circle inscribed in the square is 12. Let the second largest be 12 - x and the smallest x. Find the perimeter of the square by measuring the practical figure and then solve for x.
He scratches his head.
What the hell, he thinks.
He fumbles around with the side of the square for a while, reads the units as well as he can, then randomly adds up the sides and bubbles in B, 32 cm.
The examiner smirks at him.
--
70/370, the paper reads in red ink, and at age eleven and a half Yamapi already wants to shoot himself.
After three consecutive seventies on the standardized math test, he is forced to conclude that he must be a failure at counting. While every other kid in the room had carried out the operation smoothly and diligently, some of them smiling grimly at the practical figure and others clucking their tongues with ease, his own regulation plastic ruler had been three centimeters off the side of the square. Instead of writing 5 cm, he had scribbled on 8 cm and then proceeded to do all the calculations with the scale set at 8 cm. Area, perimeter, volume of an imaginary cube, median in a set of similar cubes in normal curve. All off by a factor of three centimeters.
In turn, the score on his test is off by a factor of three hundred.
They leave the testing hall together, his friend Nishikido in high spirits and him sighing with every step. Ryo had gotten a perfect score into a really competitive school for kids with parents who drove Mercedes. He, on the other hand, had slaughtered the math section, barely passed the Japanese portion and sent the proctor in a nervous breakdown for tapping his pencil on the desk during History.
No wonder they were all annoyed at him. The students who had been sitting next to him during the History exam managed to develop simultaneous headaches and their complaints radiated into the principal’s office, giving the troublemakers leeway to gang up on him like a clump of bloodthirsty leeches. And in spite of his apologies and efforts at appearing remorseful, Yamashita-kun had been chased out of the exam room with a shower of pencils and someone’s biology textbook bouncing off his back.
It was also very damaging to his pride. Then again, he didn’t have much of that to begin with, anyway.
“What are numbers, really? Nothing but a way to keep track of time. Keep track of your possessions. How many points did you receive? I scored seventy. You scored three hundred seventy. They could all mean the same and they could all mean nothing.”
Ryo laughs. It’s been a while since his last laugh; he’s a little rusty. “Don’t go all philosophical on me, Pi. You’re just bitter.”
“I’m not bitter! I just don’t like math. It’s stupid. The teacher’s stupid. The homework’s stupid.”
“You’re stupid.”
He shuts up for a minute.
Maybe he was. (Stupid, that is. Yamashita is never bitter.)
When he slogs through the last of that junior high entrance exam, Yamapi decides that school is for losers. And that Ryo should stop calling people stupid when he’s not bright enough himself to screw in a light bulb without getting electrocuted.
--
Koyama says that he can recall perfectly the first time they meet each other, word for word and action for action, while he can only remember flashes of it. He always remembers things in flashes, never chunks and never slices, just quick flashes, lit up in one crazy parsec by a flashbulb and then tossed back and forth until it becomes clear. His recognition processes very much like a Polaroid camera. When he shakes his head around a little, the images come clearer to his head like a fresh picture and that’s when he gathers it up and recalls the scene. He tells Shige about it once, because Shige seems to know about this kind of thing, but Shige just frowns distractedly and tells him that the only thing he’s going to get from shaking his head around too much is probably a blackout.
He hasn’t spoken to Shige in a while, now.
There had been another tip-off that day from one his partners, something about a group of college freshmen willing to paying above normal price for a quick high. He’d been the only dealer around who still had extra bags of weed in his inventory left from the last police raid. While he had been emptying the goods into the hands of a guy with ugly pimples and chin hair, Koyama had tumbled into the bathroom stall and would’ve landed headfirst into the un-flushed toilet if he hadn’t caught him with his stomach.
He knew then, from the moment he had saved Koyama from the dirty toilet bowl water. He knew then, observing him flush like a bell pepper in front of Ryo from the darkest, farthest corner of the murky club, his own eyes flicking back and forth like a cat’s from his friend, Ryo, to Shige and then back to Koyama, he knew then, way back then, that he had -that they both had- been fighting a losing battle.
Koyama asked him later, about how he had figured it out so fast. His voice had been cold and emotionless, barely masking the apathy in the undertone. He replied, gently at first, but more as a lame excuse later, the plead of someone nearly out of excuses, that he had known Ryo all his life, and despite his enigmatic nature, it was hardly a difficult riddle, this time.
“Why?” Koyama spoke in less than a whisper. Every word he uttered sounded like it’d been ripped from the deepest, nether reaches of his heart, grating against the hollows of his throat like a giant windmill cutting across stalks of grain-painful to watch. “Was it really that visible?”
He found an easier answer this time. “You know…to all of us that have met and experienced the wrath of Nishikido Ryo, whether you’re straight, gay, tone-deaf or color-blind, I can guarantee that it’s impossible not to have fallen in love with him.”
Koyama stared. There’s a short period of silence where neither of them knows what to say.
“You can think of it like a game,” he tried again, and because he really likes games, “‘Impress the Ryo’, or maybe ‘Amuse the Ryo’, ‘Provoke the Ryo’ ‘Succeed in the Seduction of’-that sort of thing…” he trailed off, landed. “We were contestants. Shige just beat us all at it.”
“…Why does it have to be this way?”
He doesn’t know. He honestly doesn’t know. “Because it’s one of those games with irrational rules and imaginary consequences that only become real when you cross an irrational rule. Ryo-chan thinks people twice his age are attractive. He’s a sex maniac. Go by his tastes, his rules? It’ll pitch everyone into the odd boat.”
Koyama nodded and they seemed to have reached a mutual understanding then, because he never heard him ask about it again.
He likes to play games. He learned chess at the age of four, and got bored of it by five because it was too pointless-too many restrictions, too many fancy maneuvers. The knight couldn’t ever move in a straight line. That surely meant they were cowards. They deserved to be chopped-up by the white-lacquered queen piece. The castles always moved in straight lines. They had no imagination. But the pawns were what did it for him. You’d expect that, even in checkers, the game pieces, upon reaching the other side, made a measured if-not violent pilgrimage to home base. But those pawns went crazy. They assembled full-on killing sprees, machine-gun massacres.
Chess. What a boring game.
He invented his own games after that. They were never perfect -he never expected perfection- the rules slid in on themselves and the biconditionals became so unruly that he doubted anyone but Einstein could’ve de-wrinkled.
His favorite one began with the tree. It was like one of those twisted, childish paintings, full of primary colors and lopsided heads. Imagination played a bigger role than anything else.
“If you touch a tree, you become a tree,” he says. “And if you close your eyes, you’ll become an ant in the grass.”
“Really?” Koyama asks, “Then I want to become one.” He closes his eyes. “Maybe then I’ll forget everything that ever happened to me.”
“No, not really,” he kisses Koyama’s eyelids. He loves Koyama’s eyelids. They’re like those thin linen curtains that you can buy at a décor store. The pretty lace ones that look so delicate that he wonders if they could break just by touching them.
Koyama cannot smile. He often tries to make Koyama grin, chuckle, snort…show some form of amusement, but it’s like trying to tunnel through a mountain of stone with a bent shovel. Koyama’s smile is at the heart of that hill. It’s set into the granite. When he pushes the shovel in, a little crumble of the dirt scaffolding slips down, pushing him back a few steps, bending the tip of the shovel further, and he’s stuck farther away from where he had begun.
But he’s seen Koyama smile before, twice. It was when he was still going around with Ryo. Koyama never noticed him on those occasions; he only had eyes for his boyfriend and his devotion was recognizable even to someone blind and deaf.
He’ll dig out a thousand mountains to see that smile, again.
He kisses Koyama on the lips. Koyama pulls back, flustered.
“I’m sorry, Yamashita-san…I-I really shouldn’t be doing this.” Koyama mutters softly, and he feels cold air settle on his chest, where warm shoulders had been. It’s a hostile feeling.
“Doing what?” He replies cheerfully, “We’re friends, aren’t we? And stop calling me Yamashita-san. I’m not forty.”
Koyama bites his lip. They’re a little red.
A thousand mountains, he promises himself.
Please, please don't kill me. Any mistakes, do tell. n____n AND SHAKE IT LIKE A POLAROID PICTURE.
Pairing: Pi/Koyama/Shige/Ryo
Author:
ezyls_girl . n____n
Rating: PG
Warnings: Crazy childish writing. Absurdities on many levels.
Summary: Yamapi likes to think that he's a genius at inventing games. But the fact that Nishikido can score higher than him on a standardized test just pisses him off.
School!AU, Pi-centric.
Notes: Um. So I lied about posting the KAT-TUN spinoff first. I was getting nowhere with it. This chapter's pretty poor-quality, too, but I really tried, and so it's a post-IB-exam cheer-up for
fairy_illusions . ILY and please don't hurt me I'll write a NEWS in Wonderland fic if you really don't think I'll destroy it. D: 1670 words.
Previously:
PART I ----- / prologue / chapter one / chapter two / chapter three / chapter four /
PART II ---- / chapter one / chapter two / chapter three / chapter four / chapter five / chapter six /
The total diameter of the large circle inscribed in the square is 12. Let the second largest be 12 - x and the smallest x. Find the perimeter of the square by measuring the practical figure and then solve for x.
He scratches his head.
What the hell, he thinks.
He fumbles around with the side of the square for a while, reads the units as well as he can, then randomly adds up the sides and bubbles in B, 32 cm.
The examiner smirks at him.
--
70/370, the paper reads in red ink, and at age eleven and a half Yamapi already wants to shoot himself.
After three consecutive seventies on the standardized math test, he is forced to conclude that he must be a failure at counting. While every other kid in the room had carried out the operation smoothly and diligently, some of them smiling grimly at the practical figure and others clucking their tongues with ease, his own regulation plastic ruler had been three centimeters off the side of the square. Instead of writing 5 cm, he had scribbled on 8 cm and then proceeded to do all the calculations with the scale set at 8 cm. Area, perimeter, volume of an imaginary cube, median in a set of similar cubes in normal curve. All off by a factor of three centimeters.
In turn, the score on his test is off by a factor of three hundred.
They leave the testing hall together, his friend Nishikido in high spirits and him sighing with every step. Ryo had gotten a perfect score into a really competitive school for kids with parents who drove Mercedes. He, on the other hand, had slaughtered the math section, barely passed the Japanese portion and sent the proctor in a nervous breakdown for tapping his pencil on the desk during History.
No wonder they were all annoyed at him. The students who had been sitting next to him during the History exam managed to develop simultaneous headaches and their complaints radiated into the principal’s office, giving the troublemakers leeway to gang up on him like a clump of bloodthirsty leeches. And in spite of his apologies and efforts at appearing remorseful, Yamashita-kun had been chased out of the exam room with a shower of pencils and someone’s biology textbook bouncing off his back.
It was also very damaging to his pride. Then again, he didn’t have much of that to begin with, anyway.
“What are numbers, really? Nothing but a way to keep track of time. Keep track of your possessions. How many points did you receive? I scored seventy. You scored three hundred seventy. They could all mean the same and they could all mean nothing.”
Ryo laughs. It’s been a while since his last laugh; he’s a little rusty. “Don’t go all philosophical on me, Pi. You’re just bitter.”
“I’m not bitter! I just don’t like math. It’s stupid. The teacher’s stupid. The homework’s stupid.”
“You’re stupid.”
He shuts up for a minute.
Maybe he was. (Stupid, that is. Yamashita is never bitter.)
When he slogs through the last of that junior high entrance exam, Yamapi decides that school is for losers. And that Ryo should stop calling people stupid when he’s not bright enough himself to screw in a light bulb without getting electrocuted.
--
Koyama says that he can recall perfectly the first time they meet each other, word for word and action for action, while he can only remember flashes of it. He always remembers things in flashes, never chunks and never slices, just quick flashes, lit up in one crazy parsec by a flashbulb and then tossed back and forth until it becomes clear. His recognition processes very much like a Polaroid camera. When he shakes his head around a little, the images come clearer to his head like a fresh picture and that’s when he gathers it up and recalls the scene. He tells Shige about it once, because Shige seems to know about this kind of thing, but Shige just frowns distractedly and tells him that the only thing he’s going to get from shaking his head around too much is probably a blackout.
He hasn’t spoken to Shige in a while, now.
There had been another tip-off that day from one his partners, something about a group of college freshmen willing to paying above normal price for a quick high. He’d been the only dealer around who still had extra bags of weed in his inventory left from the last police raid. While he had been emptying the goods into the hands of a guy with ugly pimples and chin hair, Koyama had tumbled into the bathroom stall and would’ve landed headfirst into the un-flushed toilet if he hadn’t caught him with his stomach.
He knew then, from the moment he had saved Koyama from the dirty toilet bowl water. He knew then, observing him flush like a bell pepper in front of Ryo from the darkest, farthest corner of the murky club, his own eyes flicking back and forth like a cat’s from his friend, Ryo, to Shige and then back to Koyama, he knew then, way back then, that he had -that they both had- been fighting a losing battle.
Koyama asked him later, about how he had figured it out so fast. His voice had been cold and emotionless, barely masking the apathy in the undertone. He replied, gently at first, but more as a lame excuse later, the plead of someone nearly out of excuses, that he had known Ryo all his life, and despite his enigmatic nature, it was hardly a difficult riddle, this time.
“Why?” Koyama spoke in less than a whisper. Every word he uttered sounded like it’d been ripped from the deepest, nether reaches of his heart, grating against the hollows of his throat like a giant windmill cutting across stalks of grain-painful to watch. “Was it really that visible?”
He found an easier answer this time. “You know…to all of us that have met and experienced the wrath of Nishikido Ryo, whether you’re straight, gay, tone-deaf or color-blind, I can guarantee that it’s impossible not to have fallen in love with him.”
Koyama stared. There’s a short period of silence where neither of them knows what to say.
“You can think of it like a game,” he tried again, and because he really likes games, “‘Impress the Ryo’, or maybe ‘Amuse the Ryo’, ‘Provoke the Ryo’ ‘Succeed in the Seduction of’-that sort of thing…” he trailed off, landed. “We were contestants. Shige just beat us all at it.”
“…Why does it have to be this way?”
He doesn’t know. He honestly doesn’t know. “Because it’s one of those games with irrational rules and imaginary consequences that only become real when you cross an irrational rule. Ryo-chan thinks people twice his age are attractive. He’s a sex maniac. Go by his tastes, his rules? It’ll pitch everyone into the odd boat.”
Koyama nodded and they seemed to have reached a mutual understanding then, because he never heard him ask about it again.
He likes to play games. He learned chess at the age of four, and got bored of it by five because it was too pointless-too many restrictions, too many fancy maneuvers. The knight couldn’t ever move in a straight line. That surely meant they were cowards. They deserved to be chopped-up by the white-lacquered queen piece. The castles always moved in straight lines. They had no imagination. But the pawns were what did it for him. You’d expect that, even in checkers, the game pieces, upon reaching the other side, made a measured if-not violent pilgrimage to home base. But those pawns went crazy. They assembled full-on killing sprees, machine-gun massacres.
Chess. What a boring game.
He invented his own games after that. They were never perfect -he never expected perfection- the rules slid in on themselves and the biconditionals became so unruly that he doubted anyone but Einstein could’ve de-wrinkled.
His favorite one began with the tree. It was like one of those twisted, childish paintings, full of primary colors and lopsided heads. Imagination played a bigger role than anything else.
“If you touch a tree, you become a tree,” he says. “And if you close your eyes, you’ll become an ant in the grass.”
“Really?” Koyama asks, “Then I want to become one.” He closes his eyes. “Maybe then I’ll forget everything that ever happened to me.”
“No, not really,” he kisses Koyama’s eyelids. He loves Koyama’s eyelids. They’re like those thin linen curtains that you can buy at a décor store. The pretty lace ones that look so delicate that he wonders if they could break just by touching them.
Koyama cannot smile. He often tries to make Koyama grin, chuckle, snort…show some form of amusement, but it’s like trying to tunnel through a mountain of stone with a bent shovel. Koyama’s smile is at the heart of that hill. It’s set into the granite. When he pushes the shovel in, a little crumble of the dirt scaffolding slips down, pushing him back a few steps, bending the tip of the shovel further, and he’s stuck farther away from where he had begun.
But he’s seen Koyama smile before, twice. It was when he was still going around with Ryo. Koyama never noticed him on those occasions; he only had eyes for his boyfriend and his devotion was recognizable even to someone blind and deaf.
He’ll dig out a thousand mountains to see that smile, again.
He kisses Koyama on the lips. Koyama pulls back, flustered.
“I’m sorry, Yamashita-san…I-I really shouldn’t be doing this.” Koyama mutters softly, and he feels cold air settle on his chest, where warm shoulders had been. It’s a hostile feeling.
“Doing what?” He replies cheerfully, “We’re friends, aren’t we? And stop calling me Yamashita-san. I’m not forty.”
Koyama bites his lip. They’re a little red.
A thousand mountains, he promises himself.
Please, please don't kill me. Any mistakes, do tell. n____n AND SHAKE IT LIKE A POLAROID PICTURE.