Happy spring, cinamaroll!
Title: Quick to Bait
Recipient's name: cinamaroll
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Niou/Yagyuu
“Subtract x over to the other side of the equation,” Yagyuu instructs. He speaks softly, patiently, but there is a hard quality to his voice that challenges disobedience. His pupil obeys, readily, and Yagyuu leans over to circle another problem.
“Good. Now complete this one.”
The rain is beating steadily against the tiled roof of the house, suffocating and dreamlike like the heavy press of an ocean. It’s an almost calming drumbeat against the sometimes trying effects of his fellow classmates’ inability to comprehend basic algebra. But Yagyuu Hiroshi has always been known as the calm, patient one, it wouldn’t do to lose his temper.
“Like this, Yagyuu?”
“No.” Yagyuu responds, taking the pencil placidly from the other boy’s hand and marking out the simple errors in arithmetic that had been made.
At least the boy has perfected the art of looking sheepish, Yagyuu thinks, without malice. It takes a few more minutes of patient explanation, but eventually the boy understands. There, Yagyuu finishes, but there is no pride to accompany the accomplishment. He nods and sets aside a column of problems for the boy to finish.
“Good job, Noda.” Yagyuu says, getting solemnly to his feet. “Finish those problems, and tomorrow’s test should not be a problem.”
“Thanks, Yagyuu,” Noda replies, relief coloring his voice. He claps Yagyuu on the shoulder, in an all-too-familiar gesture that has Yagyuu struggling not to flinch away. “I don’t know what I’d do without your help, man.”
Yagyuu nods, politely, and lets himself out of the house.
---
“Why do you waste your time with boring shit like that?”
Yagyuu keeps walking. The cold air is a comfort as it blankets his body, tucks in against the loose ends of his patience, reshaping, remolding him into the perfection that is Yagyuu Hiroshi. Yagyuu could lose himself in this weather, could walk and walk for an eternity and never grow tired of the steady chill.
Niou slings a heavy arm over Yagyuu’s shoulders. He’s wearing nothing but the thin cotton of his button-up school shirt, mismatched almost comically with his tennis shorts. Yagyuu ignores him.
“You could be tutoring me instead.” Niou continues, seemingly unaware of Yagyuu’s cold shoulder. “Or if you got tired of that, I’m sure I could find something else for us to do, eh, Hiroshi?”
Yagyuu shrugs off Niou’s arm, and begins to walk faster.
---
“Yagyuu and Niou,” Yanagi says, eyes pressed into calculating arcs as he regards the two players. “Should play doubles.”
“Why.” asks Sanada, without a question in his voice.
Yukimura smiles, delicately, but there is a fine, sharp edge to his eyes. “Perfect, Renji,” he says, and marks them in for the ranking matches.
---
Sometimes, they go to Niou’s house. Never to Yagyuu’s, always to Niou’s.
“Shit, Hiroshi,” Niou curses, leaning back against the faded couch in the corner of his tiny room. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Yagyuu is standing over him, hands clenched into grinding fists. “Noda’s mother left me a message yesterday.”
“Who the hell’s Noda?” Niou asks, carelessly, his eyes sparking with easy ferocity. “And why would I care if you and his mother had something going on?”
“Noda’s math portfolio for the semester has mysteriously vanished. He has received a failing grade for the semester, and may possibly have to repeat this year because of it.”
Niou lets out a loud guffaw of laughter, sharp and angry. “That’s life, isn’t it?”
The silence sets into his skin, drawing hooks under his flesh and pulling it away, harsh and unforgiving. Yagyuu’s mouth straightens into a black slash across his face. He looks wooden, unreal, like a puppet sitting in the back of its puppeteer’s shelf, paint fading, joints creaking. There is a jilting moment where he knows he is going to hit Niou, and he can feel it, feel his knuckles slamming into the smooth curve of Niou’s face.
But the moment passes. Yagyuu turns around, and leaves.
He gets past the front gate of Niou’s apartment complex before there is an insistent hand at his shoulder. “And where are you going, my dear Hiroshi?” Niou asks, all teasing camaraderie.
Yagyuu’s ice-fine control slips, gently, and then he is spinning around. He barely has the chance to enjoy the surprise cross Niou’s smug face before his fists are crunching into that beautiful bone structure. I hope you can never see straight again, Yagyuu thinks, with uncharacteristic cruelty.
It’s cold, and colder. Maybe it’s raining, but Yagyuu can’t quite tell, the heat is rising in his like a storm, rendering his eyesight useless, everything useless.
Niou is reaching back out, trading blow for blow, and Yagyuu buries his fingers in Niou’s hair, yanks that face back onto his fist. Niou’s face is smeared with blood, but Yagyuu doesn’t stop punching, where he lacks in technique, he compensates in ferocity. Duck, slam, punch, roll, it’s like the simple repetition of a math problem.
Niou smirks through the blood and knees him in the gut, and the black blossom of pain is sudden and jolting. They’re on their hands and knees, now, trying to pin each other the ground, forcing submission with their pride hanging out into the dust. “Stay away from me,” Yagyuu pants, arms locked with Niou’s, almost like an embrace. Niou’s rattail hangs against Yagyuu’s face, a feathery weight, but then they’re rolling over and Yagyuu is seeing stars as his head slams against the pavement. Yagyuu tastes blood, and for a second all he can see is the red-brown streaked against Niou’s face.
“I won’t,” Niou promises.
---
“Hiroshi,” Yagyuu’s mother says, disapprovingly, when he comes home. “Did you get into a fight?”
“No, mother,” Yagyuu lies, and he’s become so good at it that she does not see through it. “I was attacked on the way back from the subway.”
She looks surprised. “Don’t take that route anymore!” Her hands are gentle as she washes the blood from his face.
---
Yagyuu has no classes in school with Niou, but the boy manages to slouch in after him the whole day, like a sloppy stalker.
“That bandage looks sexy, Hiroshi-kun,” Niou says. Then, “Come over to my house after school.”
Yagyuu ties his scarf around his neck, but not before pulling out the spare one he always brings for Niou.
“Let’s skip practice,” Niou says. Yukimura’s in the hospital, dying, and Sanada is doing the best he can to ready the team for the regional tournament. They shouldn’t skip.
Yagyuu nods, wordlessly, and listens half-heartedly to Niou’s babble about some big-breasted girl in his math class.
---
“Do you want me to tutor you?” Yagyuu asks, after he’s taken off his coat. He’s settled himself neatly onto a corner of Niou’s faded couch. Niou lounges, catlike, across the rest of the space, one of his arms flung carelessly across Yagyuu’s legs.
“I have a good grade in math,” Niou informs him, bored. “I’m probably better than you at math.”
Yagyuu pinches his mouth shut before the anger can rise up again, waiting for Niou to finish.
“Plus, it’s not about the tutoring, Yagyuu,” Niou says, in a quiet, painful voice. He looks up, his face bruised and still swollen from the previous day. Yagyuu straightens a crooked bandage, and knows silently that no one told Niou to take a different route the previous night.
“I spoke with Noda’s math teacher. He will allow Noda to pass the class if he does well on the final exam, granted that he make up the portfolio over winter recess.”
Niou glances up, but his gaze is utterly unconcerned. “Why the hell do I care about that bastard?”
Yagyuu suddenly feels awkward under the scrutiny of Niou’s gaze. He pushes himself free of Niou’s arm, his palms sweating. “We have practice tomorrow morning. Don’t be late,” he says, and escapes.
---
Niou’s flirting with the big-breasted girl in his math class when Yagyuu arrives at his last period class. There is no shame in the saucy look that Niou sends his way.
“My dear Hiroshi,” says Niou, and drapes himself over Yagyuu. “I was desolate without you here.”
---
“Buchou’s damn strong,” Niou says, one day, after practice. There’s a video game controller in one of his hands, and his player is dying on the screen. Yagyuu takes the controller from him, and beats the level, smoothly, easily.
“You bastard, you’re not even listening to me,” Niou says, five minutes later, when Yagyuu hands the controller back, without a word.
“He is strong,” Yagyuu concedes.
“You think I’m hot, Hiroshi?” Niou suddenly asks, languidly. He’s sprawled out against the floor, his shirt riding up and the first button on his pants is undone. His hair has unraveled from its messy rattail, and the bruises are just beginning to disappear from his face.
Yagyuu snatches the controller back, keeping his expression schooled. Niou begins to howl with amusement, and even Yagyuu can’t help the twitching smile that inches across his face.
---
They’ve surpassed even Marui and Kuwahara, now. It’s almost second nature to step onto the same side of a court together. Yagyuu - Niou - Yagyuu - Niou, the names, the faces, they blur together until all that’s left is the single entity, the driving, hating, angry force that they embody on the court.
They never talk to each on the courts; rarely acknowledge each other’s presence. Standing there, they are alone in the universe, pinpricks of light on the blackness of the sky, so alone that there are no words to describe that agony.
And, then, one day, Niou snatches Yagyuu’s glasses and balances them on his own nose.
“My dear Hiroshi,” he says, breath warm against Yagyuu’s cold cheek, “what do you think about becoming me?”
---
“Niou,” Yagyuu says, later, when they’ve won their own battle, lost Regionals to Seigaku. Niou’s arms are as hot and heavy as a firebrand around his waist. The little details are suddenly important, like how Niou is a good three or four centimeters shorter than him, like how Niou grins with his lips hanging open, like how Niou’s eyes are white-cold but sparkling.
“Niou,” Yagyuu says, as blunt fingertips press bruises into his arms.
“No,” Niou replies, and their gazes catch, hold. Something splinters and smolders, blackens, dies to nothing. That agony bubbles over in Yagyuu’s chest, and he remembers Noda, remembers beating a video game that isn’t his, remembers the shape of Niou’s hands down to the bitten, bleeding stumps of fingernails.
“Stay away from me,” Yagyuu breathes out, a shatter of warmth against Niou’s throat.
Their hands meet, melt together. Niou’s eyes are raw, fluorescent in their brightness, and Yagyuu sees himself, sees himself.
They move together, like serpents coiling, liquid-fine and sure. Niou’s lips are chapped and Yagyuu’s are soft, but they touch, sift against each other. Steady and shifting as sand. “I won’t,” Niou promises.
---
“Nationals,” says Sanada, and there is a brokenness to him that Yagyuu has always dismissed as weakness. Today, it’s anything but.
“No problem,” says Niou, as Marui pops a bubble and Jackal’s hand tightens on Kirihara’s shoulder.
“Always win, Rikkaidai,” says Yagyuu, and, catching Niou’s laughing eyes, he means it.
Recipient's name: cinamaroll
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Niou/Yagyuu
“Subtract x over to the other side of the equation,” Yagyuu instructs. He speaks softly, patiently, but there is a hard quality to his voice that challenges disobedience. His pupil obeys, readily, and Yagyuu leans over to circle another problem.
“Good. Now complete this one.”
The rain is beating steadily against the tiled roof of the house, suffocating and dreamlike like the heavy press of an ocean. It’s an almost calming drumbeat against the sometimes trying effects of his fellow classmates’ inability to comprehend basic algebra. But Yagyuu Hiroshi has always been known as the calm, patient one, it wouldn’t do to lose his temper.
“Like this, Yagyuu?”
“No.” Yagyuu responds, taking the pencil placidly from the other boy’s hand and marking out the simple errors in arithmetic that had been made.
At least the boy has perfected the art of looking sheepish, Yagyuu thinks, without malice. It takes a few more minutes of patient explanation, but eventually the boy understands. There, Yagyuu finishes, but there is no pride to accompany the accomplishment. He nods and sets aside a column of problems for the boy to finish.
“Good job, Noda.” Yagyuu says, getting solemnly to his feet. “Finish those problems, and tomorrow’s test should not be a problem.”
“Thanks, Yagyuu,” Noda replies, relief coloring his voice. He claps Yagyuu on the shoulder, in an all-too-familiar gesture that has Yagyuu struggling not to flinch away. “I don’t know what I’d do without your help, man.”
Yagyuu nods, politely, and lets himself out of the house.
---
“Why do you waste your time with boring shit like that?”
Yagyuu keeps walking. The cold air is a comfort as it blankets his body, tucks in against the loose ends of his patience, reshaping, remolding him into the perfection that is Yagyuu Hiroshi. Yagyuu could lose himself in this weather, could walk and walk for an eternity and never grow tired of the steady chill.
Niou slings a heavy arm over Yagyuu’s shoulders. He’s wearing nothing but the thin cotton of his button-up school shirt, mismatched almost comically with his tennis shorts. Yagyuu ignores him.
“You could be tutoring me instead.” Niou continues, seemingly unaware of Yagyuu’s cold shoulder. “Or if you got tired of that, I’m sure I could find something else for us to do, eh, Hiroshi?”
Yagyuu shrugs off Niou’s arm, and begins to walk faster.
---
“Yagyuu and Niou,” Yanagi says, eyes pressed into calculating arcs as he regards the two players. “Should play doubles.”
“Why.” asks Sanada, without a question in his voice.
Yukimura smiles, delicately, but there is a fine, sharp edge to his eyes. “Perfect, Renji,” he says, and marks them in for the ranking matches.
---
Sometimes, they go to Niou’s house. Never to Yagyuu’s, always to Niou’s.
“Shit, Hiroshi,” Niou curses, leaning back against the faded couch in the corner of his tiny room. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Yagyuu is standing over him, hands clenched into grinding fists. “Noda’s mother left me a message yesterday.”
“Who the hell’s Noda?” Niou asks, carelessly, his eyes sparking with easy ferocity. “And why would I care if you and his mother had something going on?”
“Noda’s math portfolio for the semester has mysteriously vanished. He has received a failing grade for the semester, and may possibly have to repeat this year because of it.”
Niou lets out a loud guffaw of laughter, sharp and angry. “That’s life, isn’t it?”
The silence sets into his skin, drawing hooks under his flesh and pulling it away, harsh and unforgiving. Yagyuu’s mouth straightens into a black slash across his face. He looks wooden, unreal, like a puppet sitting in the back of its puppeteer’s shelf, paint fading, joints creaking. There is a jilting moment where he knows he is going to hit Niou, and he can feel it, feel his knuckles slamming into the smooth curve of Niou’s face.
But the moment passes. Yagyuu turns around, and leaves.
He gets past the front gate of Niou’s apartment complex before there is an insistent hand at his shoulder. “And where are you going, my dear Hiroshi?” Niou asks, all teasing camaraderie.
Yagyuu’s ice-fine control slips, gently, and then he is spinning around. He barely has the chance to enjoy the surprise cross Niou’s smug face before his fists are crunching into that beautiful bone structure. I hope you can never see straight again, Yagyuu thinks, with uncharacteristic cruelty.
It’s cold, and colder. Maybe it’s raining, but Yagyuu can’t quite tell, the heat is rising in his like a storm, rendering his eyesight useless, everything useless.
Niou is reaching back out, trading blow for blow, and Yagyuu buries his fingers in Niou’s hair, yanks that face back onto his fist. Niou’s face is smeared with blood, but Yagyuu doesn’t stop punching, where he lacks in technique, he compensates in ferocity. Duck, slam, punch, roll, it’s like the simple repetition of a math problem.
Niou smirks through the blood and knees him in the gut, and the black blossom of pain is sudden and jolting. They’re on their hands and knees, now, trying to pin each other the ground, forcing submission with their pride hanging out into the dust. “Stay away from me,” Yagyuu pants, arms locked with Niou’s, almost like an embrace. Niou’s rattail hangs against Yagyuu’s face, a feathery weight, but then they’re rolling over and Yagyuu is seeing stars as his head slams against the pavement. Yagyuu tastes blood, and for a second all he can see is the red-brown streaked against Niou’s face.
“I won’t,” Niou promises.
---
“Hiroshi,” Yagyuu’s mother says, disapprovingly, when he comes home. “Did you get into a fight?”
“No, mother,” Yagyuu lies, and he’s become so good at it that she does not see through it. “I was attacked on the way back from the subway.”
She looks surprised. “Don’t take that route anymore!” Her hands are gentle as she washes the blood from his face.
---
Yagyuu has no classes in school with Niou, but the boy manages to slouch in after him the whole day, like a sloppy stalker.
“That bandage looks sexy, Hiroshi-kun,” Niou says. Then, “Come over to my house after school.”
Yagyuu ties his scarf around his neck, but not before pulling out the spare one he always brings for Niou.
“Let’s skip practice,” Niou says. Yukimura’s in the hospital, dying, and Sanada is doing the best he can to ready the team for the regional tournament. They shouldn’t skip.
Yagyuu nods, wordlessly, and listens half-heartedly to Niou’s babble about some big-breasted girl in his math class.
---
“Do you want me to tutor you?” Yagyuu asks, after he’s taken off his coat. He’s settled himself neatly onto a corner of Niou’s faded couch. Niou lounges, catlike, across the rest of the space, one of his arms flung carelessly across Yagyuu’s legs.
“I have a good grade in math,” Niou informs him, bored. “I’m probably better than you at math.”
Yagyuu pinches his mouth shut before the anger can rise up again, waiting for Niou to finish.
“Plus, it’s not about the tutoring, Yagyuu,” Niou says, in a quiet, painful voice. He looks up, his face bruised and still swollen from the previous day. Yagyuu straightens a crooked bandage, and knows silently that no one told Niou to take a different route the previous night.
“I spoke with Noda’s math teacher. He will allow Noda to pass the class if he does well on the final exam, granted that he make up the portfolio over winter recess.”
Niou glances up, but his gaze is utterly unconcerned. “Why the hell do I care about that bastard?”
Yagyuu suddenly feels awkward under the scrutiny of Niou’s gaze. He pushes himself free of Niou’s arm, his palms sweating. “We have practice tomorrow morning. Don’t be late,” he says, and escapes.
---
Niou’s flirting with the big-breasted girl in his math class when Yagyuu arrives at his last period class. There is no shame in the saucy look that Niou sends his way.
“My dear Hiroshi,” says Niou, and drapes himself over Yagyuu. “I was desolate without you here.”
---
“Buchou’s damn strong,” Niou says, one day, after practice. There’s a video game controller in one of his hands, and his player is dying on the screen. Yagyuu takes the controller from him, and beats the level, smoothly, easily.
“You bastard, you’re not even listening to me,” Niou says, five minutes later, when Yagyuu hands the controller back, without a word.
“He is strong,” Yagyuu concedes.
“You think I’m hot, Hiroshi?” Niou suddenly asks, languidly. He’s sprawled out against the floor, his shirt riding up and the first button on his pants is undone. His hair has unraveled from its messy rattail, and the bruises are just beginning to disappear from his face.
Yagyuu snatches the controller back, keeping his expression schooled. Niou begins to howl with amusement, and even Yagyuu can’t help the twitching smile that inches across his face.
---
They’ve surpassed even Marui and Kuwahara, now. It’s almost second nature to step onto the same side of a court together. Yagyuu - Niou - Yagyuu - Niou, the names, the faces, they blur together until all that’s left is the single entity, the driving, hating, angry force that they embody on the court.
They never talk to each on the courts; rarely acknowledge each other’s presence. Standing there, they are alone in the universe, pinpricks of light on the blackness of the sky, so alone that there are no words to describe that agony.
And, then, one day, Niou snatches Yagyuu’s glasses and balances them on his own nose.
“My dear Hiroshi,” he says, breath warm against Yagyuu’s cold cheek, “what do you think about becoming me?”
---
“Niou,” Yagyuu says, later, when they’ve won their own battle, lost Regionals to Seigaku. Niou’s arms are as hot and heavy as a firebrand around his waist. The little details are suddenly important, like how Niou is a good three or four centimeters shorter than him, like how Niou grins with his lips hanging open, like how Niou’s eyes are white-cold but sparkling.
“Niou,” Yagyuu says, as blunt fingertips press bruises into his arms.
“No,” Niou replies, and their gazes catch, hold. Something splinters and smolders, blackens, dies to nothing. That agony bubbles over in Yagyuu’s chest, and he remembers Noda, remembers beating a video game that isn’t his, remembers the shape of Niou’s hands down to the bitten, bleeding stumps of fingernails.
“Stay away from me,” Yagyuu breathes out, a shatter of warmth against Niou’s throat.
Their hands meet, melt together. Niou’s eyes are raw, fluorescent in their brightness, and Yagyuu sees himself, sees himself.
They move together, like serpents coiling, liquid-fine and sure. Niou’s lips are chapped and Yagyuu’s are soft, but they touch, sift against each other. Steady and shifting as sand. “I won’t,” Niou promises.
---
“Nationals,” says Sanada, and there is a brokenness to him that Yagyuu has always dismissed as weakness. Today, it’s anything but.
“No problem,” says Niou, as Marui pops a bubble and Jackal’s hand tightens on Kirihara’s shoulder.
“Always win, Rikkaidai,” says Yagyuu, and, catching Niou’s laughing eyes, he means it.