Fic: Scrimshander, Tezuka/Ryoma, Fuji, Sakuno
Look, I'm still alive! I'm staying home sick today- clearly in the best condition to post. It's been awhile since I've written anything so long (6,796 words). I'm not sure where it all came from. I'm not sure if I like this or not, and I'm not sure if it makes sense.
On certain days, Ryoma thinks that pools are the best things about hot weather. Not more than tennis- tennis has nothing to do with seasons- but better than anything else that summer strings along. In July he meets Ryuuzaki Sakuno halfway between her house and his, and she wears her braids pinned tight to her head so they won’t trail behind her in the water. Coming up the road, he can see the bright straps of her swimsuit, sea green against the peach of her neck, and her knapsack- all from blocks and blocks away. She says hi. She tips forward as she does, the way a girl too used to the backlash of her braided hair will bow, just low enough to daze him with the shine of sunlight off her skinny white shoulders. He doesn’t say anything back, makes a vague greeting sound in the back of his mouth, and while they walk, all their conversations are babbling, high-pitched things that start with the weather and always end up at tennis, when he’ll finally join in.
The pool is open until sunset, or at least that is what the sign has said for three years. Ryoma has never stayed long enough to find out. They get in their two hours and get out- Ryuuzaki rinses her hair under the too-low showerhead, shivers in the shade with goose bumps up and down her legs and her feet turned inward, crouching. But that is an hour in- the next hour she watches him from a lawn chair, stretched self-consciously the length of it, with a towel spread over her belly and thighs, a book propped up to hide her glances. Ryoma swims the length of the pool and begins doing lazy back-and-forths before the thought hits him that he is doing laps again, and he stops- spends the next half hour floating on his back and on his belly.
He likes finding things on the bottom of the pool that the younger kids can’t reach. He likes the smell of chlorine, the way it stays in his skin for hours- days, even, if he’s careful. The smell bothers Tezuka and those were the days Ryoma showered in the middle of practice, still able to hear, sometimes, Tezuka’s voice over the sound of water-on-tile. He hoped Tezuka-buchou couldn’t hear him, too.
He likes Ryuuzaki better in a bathing suit- because she is quieter that way, and her backstroke is better than her backhand any day. In the water she doesn’t have the same flimsiness. No one else will come anyway. Nanjiroh lets him hear it every time, and Ryoma only snaps back and doesn’t know how to explain how, like tennis, you can’t just go swimming alone.
Thank you, she tells him every time, and Ryoma asks her, what for, and then she blushes and he thinks, it’s probably a Japanese thing. He’s never sure anymore.
Thank you, he tells her back one day as she raises herself out of the pool. It is late afternoon and the lifeguard is dozing- boys running along the pool’s edge at impossible speeds- mothers dangling their feet in the water with their eyes on their inner-tubed daughters and sons, linen pants rolled up to the knees and still wet. The muscles in Ryuuzaki’s back stand out along her shoulder blades, and she looks at him, frozen, for a little too long, before she brings up her knee to lever herself out of the water.
Oy, he says, putting his hand on her ankle. Are you pruning already? Her face is turned away so he can’t see her blush.
You’re not making sense, she says. But she doesn’t move. Her braids are coming out around her face and the sun shines through them.
You don’t tan anyhow, he says. You freckle.
She looks as if she’ll say something, but doesn’t- only falls back into the water as her arms give way, and her elbows buckle. A wave of chlorine washes into Ryoma’s mouth and nose, and it burns, and his lungs want to kick it back up, but he chokes and turns his head away so she won’t see him and start apologizing again.
A boy swims slowly underfoot, gliding by with oxygen leaking out the corners out of his mouth, and the bubbles rise- Ryoma feels Ryuuzaki’s hand brush his in that particular way, time suddenly slowed by water pressure and their pinky fingers almost touching. He notices the water temperature rise and Ryuuzaki’s eyes, or the corners of them, because she won’t look in his direction. Suddenly it gets to be too much and he does what he always does- raises his eyebrows and calls her ‘still a silly girl’, dives and comes up by the ladder to climb out and look for a vending machine.
When all else fails, he thinks, pushing yen into the machine and pressing the Ponta logo as hard as he can, but the button only goes in so far. The can clatters down below and he retrieves it. His fingers fumble the tab, and then the can is at his mouth and he is gulping down mouthfuls so fast that he barely tastes the fake, medicinal grape before swallowing, swallowing, swallowing. Until the can is empty, and he takes change from his soggy pockets to buy more.
Scrimshander
i.
The meal finishes- Tezuka rises to clear the table, Father and Grandfather excuse themselves to smoke in the garden- Mother goes from room to room and unhooks the latch, turns the small crank, and lets air into their home. He accepts that this air will be tinged with cigarettes. He accepts what the newspapers tout as “the hottest week in the history of the Kantou region.” Never mind that the air is so thick he cannot breath in his sleep, and stops sometimes, and wakes momentarily to the stick of his sheets to his thighs, neck, and face.
This is summer.
Tezuka still smells of smoke when he returns upstairs, having brought orange sections out to Grandfather by the pond. He switches on the light. When the air touches his face, it is heavy with moisture, forming condensation on his glasses. The cicadas and the frogs call too loudly in the garden, and he approaches the window, takes off his glasses and holds them in his hand while he wipes his eyes.
Yet, when he replaces the glasses, there is still a figure waiting, slowly separating from the shape of the pond and the spread leaves of the ginkgo tree. The light from the kitchen window is hazy on Ryoma’s face, passing through the turning slats of the fan and the ginkgo before exposing bright triangles of skin, hat, eyes.
“Oyasumi,” Ryoma says, spreading his hands on the windowsill. Tezuka only looks back- that is what he is accustomed to doing, with Ryoma, observing the perfect snap of a backhand or the return made prematurely- and then Ryoma is pushing his knee through the just-wide-enough space, sliding the rest of himself up in smooth tandem- legs, followed naturally by bare feet, his mud-caked sneakers thrown off into the bushes below.
“Your parents will be worried. Your father,” Tezuka tells Ryoma who, straightening, pushes wet strands of hair out of his eyes and doesn’t blink at the puddles he begins on the floor.
“Whose father?” asks Ryoma. The smell of chlorine begins to permeate the room. “I hope I’m not interrupting, or anything.” He stands by the window, barefoot, eyes large and very wry around the edges. He removes his cap as he speaks and, as Tezuka watches, he shakes it, and water flies from the brim.
“Echizen,” Tezuka begins, wanting to sound stern. Ryoma’s mouth slides slowly into a grin, a familiar motion. He wanders towards Tezuka’s desk, picking up the pencil he finds there, making a vague ‘tch’ against the back of his teeth, and explores his way across the desk with his fingers, needing to touch everything. “Echizen. Echizen. Ryoma, that-”
Tezuka feels the muscles around his mouth tighten, and he moves toward the door; Ryoma, seeing this, lifts his hands away sharply, knocking Tezuka’s pencil holder to the floor.
“Play a set against me, Buchou,” he says suddenly, filling his pockets with his fists again, and his voice sounds, for a moment, like those of the other freshmen boys- perpetually on the edge of something, with that something changing from moment to moment, first nervous tears and then nervous laughter. “Please,” he says, a little softer.
The pencils click across the floor, scattering, and without saying anything, Tezuka crouches and picks up the cup and begins to replace them. Ryoma gets down, too, his knees hitting the floor without a sound, and between them they gather all twenty-four unsharpened pencils. Tezuka is careful never to touch Ryoma’s hand.
“As your captain,” Tezuka begins. Ryoma’s eyes snap up, fixing on him for a moment before flicking away in disappointment. “I think you should go home.”
“Is that an order?” Ryoma asks.
“It’s for your own good,” Tezuka replies, very carefully.
The silence between them fills with the buzz of cicadas, rising. Tezuka straightens the pencils and sets the cup back on the desk, listening for some protest with a tight feeling that sinks and rises in his stomach, though his vision is clear and uncompromising, and his hand is very certain, placing the cup precisely where Ryoma’s startled turn had lifted it from the table. The outline in the dust is still there. Ryoma leans out the window, his toes rising off the floor as he stretches to reach his sneakers, and then Tezuka walks behind him all the way to the front door. They don’t mention tennis at all, and Ryoma carries with him a knapsack that isn’t his- but these are details Tezuka doesn’t recall until after the phone call later that night. Afterwards, he takes a towel and soaks the pool water off the floor, wondering if there will always be stains, now, in the woodwork. He suspects that the chlorine smell will never go away.
-
When the door closes behind him, Ryoma doesn’t stop, but follows along the side of the house to the garden again. It is dim enough now that no one will see him if they stand at the window. His footsteps are muffled by the saturated ground, giving way under his feet as he finds his way back to the shrubs where he hid his racket, his duffel bag- he crouches down there with his racket between his knees, his head ducked to avoid low branches.
For a moment, all he does is breathe, sucking in slow breaths through his teeth. The cicadas are so loud that he covers his ears. “Shut up,” he tells them under his breath. “Who do you think you are? Shut up.”
Ryoma guesses that they must have realized by now. There’s a sudden, dull throb at his temples as the scene replays and lights up the inside of his eyelids. He holds it there until the count of ten. His throat feels raw. He reaches for the zipper of his bag, has it half open before he remembers that he’s supposed to be rationing- that a liter of Ponta, under normal circumstances, lasts half a day- and settles for falling asleep.
He dreams, and forgets what he dreams about. It has something to do with her, the water growing cold as it pools in her hands and the lifeguard’s expression as he takes his fingers off the pulse point on her neck. But he forgets. He may have been awake.
When he opens his eyes later, it is still dark, and the phone is ringing somewhere inside. He thinks he hears Tezuka’s voice, but he isn’t sure of that either, so he tells his mind to stop fooling around and tells himself to go back to sleep. He blinks and rubs his face against the vinyl siding, and resolves that, in the morning, he will ask Tezuka for breakfast, and maybe a shower.
-
Ryuuzaki-sensei tells him very little over the phone. It is eleven something, nearly twelve. She sounds tired- she asks if Ryoma is there, and Tezuka pauses for a moment with his foot over the water stain on the floor, unfolding his glasses with difficulty, with one hand.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what to say. Echizen hasn’t been here.”
“He’ll come around,” she says. She stops with painful abruptness. There are people speaking in the background- loudly, Tezuka supposes, but over a phone connection, their voices sound hushed and very distant, little more than white noise. “Tell him that there’s no one to blame. It isn’t his fault. Tell him he can go home.”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“You will,” she says. There is a beat of silence, and then a terrible sound that Tezuka realizes, belatedly, is a laugh. “That idiot father of his told me. His racket is gone- if he hasn’t come yet, he will.”
“Ryuuzaki-sensei-”
“I’ll be out for a few days,” she says. “I know you’ll take care of everyone whether I’m there or not.”
“I understand,” he tells her. He turns to the window- he had forgotten to close it earlier, when he had gone to bed, and now the air in the room is thick, tangible, and his inhalations like lungfuls of water. His reaction time slows- his speech dulls. “Take as long as you need,” he says, and means it, but he can’t get the right sympathetic tone- sympathetic but competent, reassuring, strong- and the words come out cold and flat.
That laugh, again. “Don’t run them to death,” she says, very weary. More weary than he ever thought she could sound. He has heard, before, of people aging overnight, but he has never believed it until now, listening to the corrosion of her voice as it occurs.
-
Tezuka’s window is still open when Ryoma wakes again at six, his whole body stiff and his clothes damp with dew and perspiration. He stretches, arms crossed behind his head, and stands to lower his tennis bag over the sill, then his duffel bag. When he follows, knapsack slung over one shoulder, he kicks off his sneakers again and sits in the window for a moment on his heels.
Buchou sleeping is not so different than Buchou awake, he thinks, watching the rise and fall of Tezuka’s chest. His expression is as forbidding as always. For awhile Ryoma doesn’t breathe himself, waiting. He watches the slant of Tezuka’s legs beneath the sheet, the crease between his eyebrows, the firmness of that mouth. But Tezuka doesn’t stir, and Ryoma is impatient; he pushes off from the window and pads with bare feet to the door, finds it unlocked, and lets himself into the house.
Tadaima, he thinks. He puts his hand to the wall, passing his fingers over low-hanging photoframes, and finds his way down the hallway in the almost-dark, opening doors just wide enough to peer inside until he finds the bathroom.
The door, here, has no lock either. Ryoma thumbs the knob for a moment before closing it. He puts his bag down and begins to unbutton his shirt.
-
When the alarm goes off, his window is still open, and Tezuka lies there with his eyes still closed, thinking that it is raining again.
He sits upright and pushes the covers away from himself, and lowers his feet to the floor. With the window behind him, he can feel the sunlight coming down in squares against his back, already hot this early in the day. Sunshine. He turns his head and listens to the steady drum of the shower, just on the other side of the wall. His eyes fall upon the line of mud trailing from the window to the tennis bag- the small handprints on the window, smeared out of the fogged glass- the open door.
Before he knows for sure what he intends to do, Tezuka stands and heads for the bathroom. He pauses halfway down the hall to hear his grandfather setting water to boil downstairs- the customary click of the stove as it sparks and lights, the rustle of newspaper, the dull murmur of the radio, tuned to pick up police reports- and for seconds, he is frozen, staring down the hall as if, at any moment, the radio will go silent and Grandfather will begin to climb the stairs.
A stream of light seeps from beneath the bathroom door. The radio continues its discourse and, as Tezuka listens with his hand raised to knock, a low, tuneless hum escapes the sound of the water. Tezuka reminds himself that there is a shower curtain and lets himself in, closing the door quickly behind him.
His glasses cloud instantly. Tezuka waits with his hand still on the door and peers through the fog, and opens his mouth.
Afterwards, he isn’t sure if he said Ryoma’s name- if he called “Echizen” or “Ryoma” or something else entirely, something quiet and similarly desperate in a way that his voice was never meant to bend, that ought to be impossible; but the humidity swallowed his words, and then Ryoma was speaking, saying, “If you need a shower, Buchou,” and looking straight ahead, his silhouette very small through the shower curtain, and when Tezuka pushed the thin plastic aside, he found Ryoma’s skin an angry red from the onslaught of hot water, though that smile-smirk was still in place.
In the shower, Ryoma steps aside to make room for him, and Tezuka closes his eyes and is careful not to let their fingers touch.
ii.
Fuji is Fuji, has been Fuji almost every day of his life, and so when he sees Osakada Tomoka at the water fountain, he notices first that she is crying, second that her face and hands are wet. When he approaches her, she is splashing water on her face, and though he offers her a towel, she uses the back of her hand, the edge of her uniform, and finally his shirtfront.
He cups the back of her head and curls a little bit over her, his cheek resting lightly against her skull; her shaking shoulders send tremors through him and he murmurs something soothing into her rumpled hair, thinking of the last time he did this, three years ago, at least, with Yuuta.
“What am I doing?” she says suddenly, her face still buried against his ribcage. Slowly, he undoes the knots of her hands and uncrumples the fistfuls of jersey she had caught in them. She laughs a little, embarrassed, and backs away half a step. “There’s a tournament- I shouldn’t be…you should be back there, Fuji-sempai. It’ll hurt the team.”
“It’s fine,” he says. She shakes her head violently, pigtails thrashing side to side, and herds him back to the court, where Tezuka is waiting with his arms crossed. During footwork drills, she disappears; but then the practice matches begin, and while Fuji initiates a lazy rally against Oishi, who is still so rattled that he can barely tell fore from backhand, he sees her linger by the fence with her hands gripping the links. He smiles at her, but he doesn’t think she sees.
He begins to wonder, then, how long this will have to take. This being something he hesitates to put boundaries on. What he knows is that Osakada is right- it has hurt Seigaku, it is hurting Seigaku, and while Fuji feels that it is perfectly all right to play for something besides victory at times, there is something unacceptable about putting an entire team, an entire tournament, at stake.
Even Tezuka- especially Tezuka. Fuji had stood beside him, the day before, or maybe the day before that. Tezuka had been overseeing the freshmen at their stroke exercises; Ryoma had been firing furious returns at the ball machine one court over, his hat brim lowered to hide his eyes.
“I thought you would have stopped him by now,” Fuji said, a meter of space between them. They watched the court fill with tennis balls until there was more yellow than green. When the machine was spent, Ryoma circled, retrieving the balls and lobbing them back into loading bin, repeating the process.
Tezuka’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing, staring levelly over the heads of half a dozen freshmen to the neighboring court.
“What are you going to do about him?” Fuji asked. Tezuka’s expression said “this is his war,” but Fuji has never known a time when Tezuka’s expression has said anything else.
-
“Let’s do something after school,” he tells Eiji while they are eating lunch. Eiji is leaning out the window with his bento balanced, somehow, between his chest and the wall, in a way more foolish than particularly clever. In such a precarious position, any stray movement could send his rice and salmon tumbling to their demise, and Eiji isn’t known for his ability to stay still.
The bento slips a few notches, while Eiji’s eyes widen; grains of rice slide ominously from the tips of his chopsticks, like the first rumblings of a landslide, and soon the rest follows- a great calamity of clattering plastic and a shower of takoyaki.
Eiji curses, flies to his feet, starts on about being stupid. Apologizing, Fuji crouches down to help salvage what he can, but he stops and finds himself looking at Eiji, who is not allowed to swear at home.
And Eiji stares back, silent only a moment before giving a grin that shows all his teeth. “You’re weird sometimes, Fuji,” he says, his Cheshire-cat mouth stretched out of shape. “Don’t apologize for no reason.”
They end up at Eiji’s house after practice, taking turns using the shower. Eiji leaves traces of toothpaste on the bathtub floor, but Fuji is used to this, and moves the toothbrush back to the sink. In the next room, Fuji can hear the shrill beeps and snarls of Eiji’s latest video game, but the sound dies out while Fuji is still rinsing off soap, eyes closed from the sting.
When he emerges, Eiji is lying flat on his back in the middle of the floor, limbs splayed and wet hair, sans gel, slick and stuck to his cheeks.
“Practice wore you out?” asks Fuji lightly, sitting down with his back against the dresser near Eiji’s feet. He crosses his ankles and leans his head against the edge of his knee.
Eiji shakes his head no, staring blankly at the ceiling.
“I see. A bad day, then,” Fuji says, and smiles, because smiling is neutral.
Eiji nudges him with his foot. “Fuji,” he says finally, releasing his breath in a long mewling sound of disapproval. “Fuji, it’s not funny. I can’t tell when you’re kidding around.”
“I am?” Fuji says, and apologizes; with a little moue, Eiji sits up, and at the expression on his face, Fuji softens a little and says, “I guess I am,” really meaning, what else can we do?
-
Fuji arrives home late that night; the subway line that runs near his house is delayed, leaving him stranded on the platform for one stifling hour, next to a salaryman whose sharp black dress shoes, obviously new, seem to pinch more and more as the seconds tick past. The scent of his cologne is overwhelming, threatening to engulf the platform, the city, the world. He reminds Fuji of one of Yumiko’s old boyfriends.
“The fool,” the salaryman mutters to the man to his left, similarly dressed, who he must assume to be some kind of kindred spirit. Now and then, the two will flick their sleeves back in tandem, checking the time. “Couldn’t have held out an hour longer? Life treating him so unjustly? This is Tokyo, isn’t it- this is life, he ought to realize.” The other man nods at this in an appropriately thoughtful manner; encouraged, the salaryman goes on. “What do any of us have besides a sixty hour work week and a good-for-nothing wife living off our salaries? The poor wretch can’t even prepare store-bought sushi without switching soy sauce with the vinegar. It’s indecent.”
“Terrible,” agrees the other man. He is older, with a little mustache about the size of the bald patch in his hair, and an expression of polite disinterest. Fuji looks longer at this man, able to imagine himself just like this in thirty, forty years, and touches the outer edge of his eyes, where the man has furrows at the corners. Smile lines.
“Please pardon the delay,” says the loudspeaker, a woman with a toneless, pleasant voice. “There has been an accident on the tracks. The train will be running again momentarily. Thank you for your patience.”
“I ought to be home,” says the salaryman, glancing again at his watch. “That selfish bastard. If he’d waited another hour to throw himself off the platform…”
“Excuse me,” says Fuji. The two blink, turning to face him- “Is there a problem?” says the one- Fuji squeezes past, and begins to extract himself from the crowd. He rifles through his bag for a bus schedule.
-
At practice the next afternoon, the day is hazy, and Ryoma is missing for the first hour. The freshmen whisper; Tezuka favors his shoulder and defeats Oishi in straight sets; Fuji passes a towel over his face and feels as if the air pressure will soon crush them all into the ground.
When Tezuka catches him idling, Fuji meets his eyes and holds them.
“Will you have me run laps, Tezuka?” he asks. Oishi stops nearby to catch his breath, yet hearing the question, he turns away sharply, his face an apology.
Tezuka appears unmoved. “The tournament is next week. I shouldn’t need to remind you how important it is that we remain in top condition.”
Fuji makes a sound at the back his throat, a vague affirmation. Sweat shines on the line of Tezuka’s jaw and, behind his glasses, his eyes are very bright. At this rate, there will be no tournament, Fuji wants to say.
“Thirty laps, then, for negligence?” he says instead, very softly. He knows he needs this, or deserves it, though he isn’t sure which of the two it is. Maybe both.
“Fuji,” says Tezuka, in warning.
Oishi flushes, finally turning to grasp Fuji by the shoulder. “Show some respect, Fuji- !” he cries- but his hand slips away as easy as water, and by then Fuji is gone, jogging slow, penitent circles around the court.
When Fuji passes Ryoma coming up the path from the school, Ryoma looks up but refuses to acknowledge him. He drops his bag by the fence and begins to unpack his racket; Fuji looks for Tezuka even though he is certain he knows where Tezuka will be looking, where everyone must be looking, though only the racquet holds Ryoma’s attention.
He cannot hear what Tezuka says to Ryoma, but Ryoma nods, taps his racquet against his back, and walks onto the court facing Taka.
Ryoma serves. He serves as if to separate his arm from his shoulder, and Taka can do nothing but return, a helpless fury overtaking him as he drives back the attack with a force that causes the muscles in his hands and wrists to shake. The light is in Ryoma’s eyes as he pursues, tendons straining and his calves taut and trembling with the desperate pressure of each stride.
He isn’t going fast enough, Fuji realizes. Ryoma realizes this simultaneously, crying out, and his voice breaks. As if one rallying cry could breach the distance, he reaches anyway, the knowledge in his eyes and his teeth bared, the racket fused with his hand.
Fuji finds he cannot catch his breath- that his limbs are numb, that he can no longer remember how many times he has gone around the compound and that he no longer cares. Ryoma’s face is wet. He wipes it with his racket hand, viciously, his eyes gleaming white under the brim of his hat and filled with some fear that makes Fuji stop, unable to look away. He wonders if it is possible to kill yourself with tennis.
iii.
The first Monday, Tezuka wakes early and goes down to the garden to do exercises with his grandfather. He leaves Ryoma asleep on the tatami mat at the foot of his bed, and when he returns, Ryoma is still curled there, his sheets thrown off and tangled about his legs, and his face half-buried in the pillow. His eyelashes are stuck together and he gazes blearily at Tezuka, frozen in the doorway, before falling back asleep.
Tezuka goes to close the window. Outside, he can see the steam rising from the pavement. A crow perched on a telephone wire calls out a brassy declaration, but an early train mutes it and, as Tezuka watches, its beak seems to open and close without making a sound.
The radio hums downstairs. The teapot begins to whistle shrilly and his grandfather ignores it to finish the last few lines of his newspaper article; still, Ryoma sleeps. Tezuka considers, for a moment, waking Ryoma himself, but does not, finds that he cannot, and leaves for school with the feeling of failed duty weighing on him.
Ryoma doesn’t attend class. Tezuka knows this because the teachers discuss it in voices lazily hushed, not making the effort to whisper under the assumption that it is no secret anymore. “We’ll have to make allowances,” they say, leaning towards each other in classroom doorways. “Poor boy- I can understand that he must be shaken- and who can blame him?”
Tonshi, they call it- an unexpected death. “Leave him be,” they murmur, citing the circumstances of the accident, which are hazy and have led to an explosion of speculation. “Poor boy- no one should have to witness that so young.”
Tezuka approaches one teacher in confidence, an older man with a passion for science that Tezuka has come to respect. “I would appreciate it if you could speak to them for me,” Tezuka says, bowing. “The rumors are affecting the team’s morale.”
Ishikawa-sensei only smiles, inviting Tezuka to have tea with him after practice, which Tezuka declines. The smiles fades- it was a weak one to begin with, not reaching the man’s eyes. “And you, Tezuka-kun?” he asks. He dries the inside of the beaker he is holding and sets it gently aside. “How are you, as captain?”
The question catches Tezuka off-guard, and Ishikawa-san, expecting this, leans back in his chair and says heavily, “I see,” knitting his fingers and letting them rest on his belly.
“I have a responsibility-” Tezuka stands; he pushes his chair back so sharply that it tips off balance, falling backwards to hit with a deafening crack that jars them both. As Tezuka bends to set it upright, Ishikawa-sensei dries another beaker and heaves a sigh that hangs in the air between them, stifling, until Tezuka bows in apology and asks to clean the rest of the equipment himself.
He spends the rest of the day waiting for Ryoma to appear, and everything else passes unchecked by his deadened senses. He finds himself scanning the freshmen classrooms, the alcoves and doorways where Ryoma will stand, bickering with Momoshiro, and seeing traces of him there- until his eyes clear, and the boy will have the wrong nose, or mouth, or hair, and Tezuka will turn away and his stomach will unclench at intervals.
-
At one, Ryoma stands two hundred and fifty feet above sea level, with Tokyo spread below his feet. He leans into the long metal bar that curves around the observation deck, looking through the panes of blue glass with an over-priced Ponta in his hand- it costs five hundred yen for children’s admission and two hundred forty for a small fountain drink with the Mori Building insignia stamped in cool blue across the cup. Ryoma has visited Tokyo Tower, Odaiba, Rainbow Bridge, and bought a Ponta at each location, and now his pockets are so empty that he feels he has finally made up for all the sightseeing he failed to do upon moving to Japan.
The building is kept very cold, and it seems strange, to Ryoma, to see how violently bright the sun is outside, gleaming so fiercely off the tiny city blocks of polished metal that continue, uninterrupted, to the line of the horizon. With glass and more than two hundred meters between him and the city, he can hardly recognize it- can hardly bring himself to care about the maze of pavement that is supposed to be his hometown. When he tries to find his house, his tennis court, his school, he can’t, no matter how long he squints, and it is cold and he can’t imagine himself living down there. If he leans far enough to press his hand against the glass, he can feel the heat seep through into his fingers, but he pulls his hand away with a “che” and digs for loose change in the elevator- it is still not enough, not nearly.
-
He goes home.
Nanjiroh is sleeping on the living room floor when Ryoma lets himself in, not bothering to take off his shoes or set down his tennis bag as he walks to his bedroom. The house is silent and warm- Tadaima, he thinks, belatedly. His bed is made when he remembers not making it; everything else has been left untouched.
Ryoma feels the conscientiousness, the deliberation, behind this. Standing just inside the doorway, he looks from side to side and imagines his mother coming into this room and biting her cheek as she leaves the tennis magazines slumping onto the floor, turning a blind eye to the shirt shed onto the back of his chair, stiff with salt. He crosses the floor, kicking a tennis ball out of the way as he goes to open his drawer, and begins pulling out shirts and shoving them into his tennis bag. Shorts next, then underwear, and socks as an afterthought. He doesn’t stop until the bag has reached its limit and he is only just able to pull the zipper closed- mission completed, he stands, brushes dust from his clothes, settles his bag, once again, on his shoulder.
He stops in the hall, looking at Karupin, only the tips of his ears visible in the curl of Nanjiroh’s arm. It is so typical a scene that Ryoma nearly calls “I’m leaving” as he passes, and he stops from the effort of swallowing the words, wanting, almost, to move closer. He isn’t a fool, though. He doesn’t trust Nanjiroh, not for a moment, and he tells himself that every second spent standing in plain view, here, is another tick of a bomb.
So he leaves, ignoring the sound of Nanjiroh rising suddenly. At the door, he opens and closes it, and Nanjiroh opens and closes it again, and from behind him comes a long yowl of discontent.
Ryoma feels something lean against his ankle, and stops to pick up Karupin, who looks back at him wide-eyed, whiskers crumpled from where he has been pressed against Nanjiroh’s body.
“Hey, boy. This is your father speaking,” says Nanjiroh. Ryoma puts his hand on Karupin’s head and begins to stroke him just behind the ears, feeling the vibrations of the purr pass through him, thrumming in his own chest. The feeling is unnerving, out of sync with the rhythm of his own body, and when it enters his chest cavity it stays there- lingers, setting his ribs in motion, until his whole body is humming, shivering faintly.
“Won’t even turn and face me?”
“Shut up, old man.” Ryoma speaks before he means to.
“I always told your mother you were a lot of big talk for such a scrawny thing,” Nanjiroh says, and Ryoma can hear the lazy dismissal in his voice, trailing off into a scratch of his chin. “Never thought I’d raised a little coward on top of it.”
Ryoma’s fingers curl into fists against Karupin’s fur. He tells himself that Nanjiroh is just trying to get a rise out of him, like always, imagining the way Nanjiroh is standing just above him on the steps, hands tucked into the folds of his yukata and his feet planted at brash shoulder-width. The image only irritates him further and he growls, dropping Karupin and pushing his hands into his pockets.
“Are you going to stand there and take that?” Nanjiroh sneers.
“It’s better to ignore you.”
Nanjiroh shrugs. “You can ignore me when you can play a set against me and finish still standing. Can you do that? Want to prove it now, boy?”
Karupin pushes against Ryoma’s leg again, weaving around his feet, but when Ryoma doesn’t respond, he sighs and slips away, his tail brushing against Ryoma’s bare ankles. Ryoma follows him with his eyes, back to Nanjiroh, who is nearer than Ryoma expects him to be.
There’s nothing there that Ryoma hasn’t seen before. Something loosens in his chest that he doesn’t realize he’d been holding there. Relief, disappointment- he doesn’t know what to call it.
“I’m leaving,” he says. “It’s quieter at Buchou’s house.”
“You aren’t going to that boy for tennis,” Nanjiroh says, hips forward, eyes lazy and mouth sly and suggestive. “Come play a game against me.”
Ryoma looks at him coldly, as coldly as he can manage. “I don’t want to play tennis-”
“Why not?” says Nanjiroh.
Ryoma stops. Nanjiroh’s voice is suddenly louder, harder, hitting Ryoma like a blow to face- he steps back for a moment, trying to reorient himself, but it is like reaching for a handrail and finding one isn’t there. Ryoma doesn’t remember his father ever sounding like this, ever appearing so tall, in his life. The light comes in from behind Nanjiroh, and his shadow stretches toward Ryoma, overtaking him as Nanjiroh walks forward to pick the wooden racket off the ground.
For a moment Ryoma can’t move, and then he remembers that it is air in his lungs, and his racket in his hand, and everything is clearer, then. “Fine, my serve,” he says. He looks up and he is on the court facing Nanjiroh, and the ball is in his hand. Nanjiroh calls something, and Ryoma’s eyes narrow even though he can’t hear what it is, and he raises his arm back to fire the ball across the net, sends it clawing the white line and the spin grinding into the earth.
Nanjiroh’s racket is there to scoop it up and fling it back into the air. It’s still not enough, Ryoma thinks- but it will be.
-
When Ryoma appears at practice, one hour late, he has already played tennis that day. Tezuka sees his face gleam with sweat and his cheeks flushed, his eyes sharply focused on whatever he fixes them on. When he is near enough, Tezuka can feel the raw heat from Ryoma’s body wash against him, and he takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes.
“You’ve stretched already,” Tezuka says, already wondering- can you do this?- is that enough?- as he sends Ryoma to face Taka on the nearest court.
“I want you to come swimming with me, after practice,” Ryoma says suddenly, lingering a moment by his racket bag. He looks up at Tezuka, and Tezuka feels for a moment as if his body is transparent, the hazy sky visible through the space between his shoulders. “You’re not listening, Buchou,” Ryoma says. And then he is running away and Tezuka realizes that it was meant to be this way- there were only two directions to begin with. He cannot be everything to Ryoma at once.
He knows that, if he complies and goes swimming with Ryoma, he will end up pressing Ryoma against the side of the pool, and Ryoma will not resist. He knows how Ryoma’s mouth will part against his own, how it will taste, faintly chlorinated, needy. How the flavor will stay in his mouth and leave the taste of pool water on everything he eats.
He accepts this.
“Stop him-,” Fuji says, when Tezuka turns to see a hand on his arm and Fuji gasping, his breathing ragged with thirty laps and fear. “What are you doing- he’s destroying himself, Tezuka-! You know that better than anyone- he’s going to kill himself this way-”
Tezuka looks at Fuji and doesn’t understand. After a moment, Fuji releases his arm, his breath slowing, but his eyes on Tezuka are still horrified, more horrified until, like Tezuka, he cannot help but turn as Ryoma serves again.
“Wait,” Tezuka says.
Watching Ryoma play, Tezuka sees an act of creation.
---
A/N: Let me just say that this is probably the fic that I should've written upon discovering Prince of Tennis, and that it was something that I never thought would take over my life for so long. (I posted the first part of this in November, and took it down because I was incredibly embarassed.) Tezuka/Ryoma was one of the first pairings I noticed when I watched the show, and there is so much brilliant fic out there for it that I almost didn't want to finish this. Needless to say, from now on I think I'll leave Seigaku to the experts. Concrit is greatly appreciated, as I'll be fiddling with this for years to come. Much love to takenoko and alissa, who have been absolutely invaluable, plus everyone else who has listened to me whine for the past two months.
On certain days, Ryoma thinks that pools are the best things about hot weather. Not more than tennis- tennis has nothing to do with seasons- but better than anything else that summer strings along. In July he meets Ryuuzaki Sakuno halfway between her house and his, and she wears her braids pinned tight to her head so they won’t trail behind her in the water. Coming up the road, he can see the bright straps of her swimsuit, sea green against the peach of her neck, and her knapsack- all from blocks and blocks away. She says hi. She tips forward as she does, the way a girl too used to the backlash of her braided hair will bow, just low enough to daze him with the shine of sunlight off her skinny white shoulders. He doesn’t say anything back, makes a vague greeting sound in the back of his mouth, and while they walk, all their conversations are babbling, high-pitched things that start with the weather and always end up at tennis, when he’ll finally join in.
The pool is open until sunset, or at least that is what the sign has said for three years. Ryoma has never stayed long enough to find out. They get in their two hours and get out- Ryuuzaki rinses her hair under the too-low showerhead, shivers in the shade with goose bumps up and down her legs and her feet turned inward, crouching. But that is an hour in- the next hour she watches him from a lawn chair, stretched self-consciously the length of it, with a towel spread over her belly and thighs, a book propped up to hide her glances. Ryoma swims the length of the pool and begins doing lazy back-and-forths before the thought hits him that he is doing laps again, and he stops- spends the next half hour floating on his back and on his belly.
He likes finding things on the bottom of the pool that the younger kids can’t reach. He likes the smell of chlorine, the way it stays in his skin for hours- days, even, if he’s careful. The smell bothers Tezuka and those were the days Ryoma showered in the middle of practice, still able to hear, sometimes, Tezuka’s voice over the sound of water-on-tile. He hoped Tezuka-buchou couldn’t hear him, too.
He likes Ryuuzaki better in a bathing suit- because she is quieter that way, and her backstroke is better than her backhand any day. In the water she doesn’t have the same flimsiness. No one else will come anyway. Nanjiroh lets him hear it every time, and Ryoma only snaps back and doesn’t know how to explain how, like tennis, you can’t just go swimming alone.
Thank you, she tells him every time, and Ryoma asks her, what for, and then she blushes and he thinks, it’s probably a Japanese thing. He’s never sure anymore.
Thank you, he tells her back one day as she raises herself out of the pool. It is late afternoon and the lifeguard is dozing- boys running along the pool’s edge at impossible speeds- mothers dangling their feet in the water with their eyes on their inner-tubed daughters and sons, linen pants rolled up to the knees and still wet. The muscles in Ryuuzaki’s back stand out along her shoulder blades, and she looks at him, frozen, for a little too long, before she brings up her knee to lever herself out of the water.
Oy, he says, putting his hand on her ankle. Are you pruning already? Her face is turned away so he can’t see her blush.
You’re not making sense, she says. But she doesn’t move. Her braids are coming out around her face and the sun shines through them.
You don’t tan anyhow, he says. You freckle.
She looks as if she’ll say something, but doesn’t- only falls back into the water as her arms give way, and her elbows buckle. A wave of chlorine washes into Ryoma’s mouth and nose, and it burns, and his lungs want to kick it back up, but he chokes and turns his head away so she won’t see him and start apologizing again.
A boy swims slowly underfoot, gliding by with oxygen leaking out the corners out of his mouth, and the bubbles rise- Ryoma feels Ryuuzaki’s hand brush his in that particular way, time suddenly slowed by water pressure and their pinky fingers almost touching. He notices the water temperature rise and Ryuuzaki’s eyes, or the corners of them, because she won’t look in his direction. Suddenly it gets to be too much and he does what he always does- raises his eyebrows and calls her ‘still a silly girl’, dives and comes up by the ladder to climb out and look for a vending machine.
When all else fails, he thinks, pushing yen into the machine and pressing the Ponta logo as hard as he can, but the button only goes in so far. The can clatters down below and he retrieves it. His fingers fumble the tab, and then the can is at his mouth and he is gulping down mouthfuls so fast that he barely tastes the fake, medicinal grape before swallowing, swallowing, swallowing. Until the can is empty, and he takes change from his soggy pockets to buy more.
Scrimshander
i.
The meal finishes- Tezuka rises to clear the table, Father and Grandfather excuse themselves to smoke in the garden- Mother goes from room to room and unhooks the latch, turns the small crank, and lets air into their home. He accepts that this air will be tinged with cigarettes. He accepts what the newspapers tout as “the hottest week in the history of the Kantou region.” Never mind that the air is so thick he cannot breath in his sleep, and stops sometimes, and wakes momentarily to the stick of his sheets to his thighs, neck, and face.
This is summer.
Tezuka still smells of smoke when he returns upstairs, having brought orange sections out to Grandfather by the pond. He switches on the light. When the air touches his face, it is heavy with moisture, forming condensation on his glasses. The cicadas and the frogs call too loudly in the garden, and he approaches the window, takes off his glasses and holds them in his hand while he wipes his eyes.
Yet, when he replaces the glasses, there is still a figure waiting, slowly separating from the shape of the pond and the spread leaves of the ginkgo tree. The light from the kitchen window is hazy on Ryoma’s face, passing through the turning slats of the fan and the ginkgo before exposing bright triangles of skin, hat, eyes.
“Oyasumi,” Ryoma says, spreading his hands on the windowsill. Tezuka only looks back- that is what he is accustomed to doing, with Ryoma, observing the perfect snap of a backhand or the return made prematurely- and then Ryoma is pushing his knee through the just-wide-enough space, sliding the rest of himself up in smooth tandem- legs, followed naturally by bare feet, his mud-caked sneakers thrown off into the bushes below.
“Your parents will be worried. Your father,” Tezuka tells Ryoma who, straightening, pushes wet strands of hair out of his eyes and doesn’t blink at the puddles he begins on the floor.
“Whose father?” asks Ryoma. The smell of chlorine begins to permeate the room. “I hope I’m not interrupting, or anything.” He stands by the window, barefoot, eyes large and very wry around the edges. He removes his cap as he speaks and, as Tezuka watches, he shakes it, and water flies from the brim.
“Echizen,” Tezuka begins, wanting to sound stern. Ryoma’s mouth slides slowly into a grin, a familiar motion. He wanders towards Tezuka’s desk, picking up the pencil he finds there, making a vague ‘tch’ against the back of his teeth, and explores his way across the desk with his fingers, needing to touch everything. “Echizen. Echizen. Ryoma, that-”
Tezuka feels the muscles around his mouth tighten, and he moves toward the door; Ryoma, seeing this, lifts his hands away sharply, knocking Tezuka’s pencil holder to the floor.
“Play a set against me, Buchou,” he says suddenly, filling his pockets with his fists again, and his voice sounds, for a moment, like those of the other freshmen boys- perpetually on the edge of something, with that something changing from moment to moment, first nervous tears and then nervous laughter. “Please,” he says, a little softer.
The pencils click across the floor, scattering, and without saying anything, Tezuka crouches and picks up the cup and begins to replace them. Ryoma gets down, too, his knees hitting the floor without a sound, and between them they gather all twenty-four unsharpened pencils. Tezuka is careful never to touch Ryoma’s hand.
“As your captain,” Tezuka begins. Ryoma’s eyes snap up, fixing on him for a moment before flicking away in disappointment. “I think you should go home.”
“Is that an order?” Ryoma asks.
“It’s for your own good,” Tezuka replies, very carefully.
The silence between them fills with the buzz of cicadas, rising. Tezuka straightens the pencils and sets the cup back on the desk, listening for some protest with a tight feeling that sinks and rises in his stomach, though his vision is clear and uncompromising, and his hand is very certain, placing the cup precisely where Ryoma’s startled turn had lifted it from the table. The outline in the dust is still there. Ryoma leans out the window, his toes rising off the floor as he stretches to reach his sneakers, and then Tezuka walks behind him all the way to the front door. They don’t mention tennis at all, and Ryoma carries with him a knapsack that isn’t his- but these are details Tezuka doesn’t recall until after the phone call later that night. Afterwards, he takes a towel and soaks the pool water off the floor, wondering if there will always be stains, now, in the woodwork. He suspects that the chlorine smell will never go away.
-
When the door closes behind him, Ryoma doesn’t stop, but follows along the side of the house to the garden again. It is dim enough now that no one will see him if they stand at the window. His footsteps are muffled by the saturated ground, giving way under his feet as he finds his way back to the shrubs where he hid his racket, his duffel bag- he crouches down there with his racket between his knees, his head ducked to avoid low branches.
For a moment, all he does is breathe, sucking in slow breaths through his teeth. The cicadas are so loud that he covers his ears. “Shut up,” he tells them under his breath. “Who do you think you are? Shut up.”
Ryoma guesses that they must have realized by now. There’s a sudden, dull throb at his temples as the scene replays and lights up the inside of his eyelids. He holds it there until the count of ten. His throat feels raw. He reaches for the zipper of his bag, has it half open before he remembers that he’s supposed to be rationing- that a liter of Ponta, under normal circumstances, lasts half a day- and settles for falling asleep.
He dreams, and forgets what he dreams about. It has something to do with her, the water growing cold as it pools in her hands and the lifeguard’s expression as he takes his fingers off the pulse point on her neck. But he forgets. He may have been awake.
When he opens his eyes later, it is still dark, and the phone is ringing somewhere inside. He thinks he hears Tezuka’s voice, but he isn’t sure of that either, so he tells his mind to stop fooling around and tells himself to go back to sleep. He blinks and rubs his face against the vinyl siding, and resolves that, in the morning, he will ask Tezuka for breakfast, and maybe a shower.
-
Ryuuzaki-sensei tells him very little over the phone. It is eleven something, nearly twelve. She sounds tired- she asks if Ryoma is there, and Tezuka pauses for a moment with his foot over the water stain on the floor, unfolding his glasses with difficulty, with one hand.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what to say. Echizen hasn’t been here.”
“He’ll come around,” she says. She stops with painful abruptness. There are people speaking in the background- loudly, Tezuka supposes, but over a phone connection, their voices sound hushed and very distant, little more than white noise. “Tell him that there’s no one to blame. It isn’t his fault. Tell him he can go home.”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“You will,” she says. There is a beat of silence, and then a terrible sound that Tezuka realizes, belatedly, is a laugh. “That idiot father of his told me. His racket is gone- if he hasn’t come yet, he will.”
“Ryuuzaki-sensei-”
“I’ll be out for a few days,” she says. “I know you’ll take care of everyone whether I’m there or not.”
“I understand,” he tells her. He turns to the window- he had forgotten to close it earlier, when he had gone to bed, and now the air in the room is thick, tangible, and his inhalations like lungfuls of water. His reaction time slows- his speech dulls. “Take as long as you need,” he says, and means it, but he can’t get the right sympathetic tone- sympathetic but competent, reassuring, strong- and the words come out cold and flat.
That laugh, again. “Don’t run them to death,” she says, very weary. More weary than he ever thought she could sound. He has heard, before, of people aging overnight, but he has never believed it until now, listening to the corrosion of her voice as it occurs.
-
Tezuka’s window is still open when Ryoma wakes again at six, his whole body stiff and his clothes damp with dew and perspiration. He stretches, arms crossed behind his head, and stands to lower his tennis bag over the sill, then his duffel bag. When he follows, knapsack slung over one shoulder, he kicks off his sneakers again and sits in the window for a moment on his heels.
Buchou sleeping is not so different than Buchou awake, he thinks, watching the rise and fall of Tezuka’s chest. His expression is as forbidding as always. For awhile Ryoma doesn’t breathe himself, waiting. He watches the slant of Tezuka’s legs beneath the sheet, the crease between his eyebrows, the firmness of that mouth. But Tezuka doesn’t stir, and Ryoma is impatient; he pushes off from the window and pads with bare feet to the door, finds it unlocked, and lets himself into the house.
Tadaima, he thinks. He puts his hand to the wall, passing his fingers over low-hanging photoframes, and finds his way down the hallway in the almost-dark, opening doors just wide enough to peer inside until he finds the bathroom.
The door, here, has no lock either. Ryoma thumbs the knob for a moment before closing it. He puts his bag down and begins to unbutton his shirt.
-
When the alarm goes off, his window is still open, and Tezuka lies there with his eyes still closed, thinking that it is raining again.
He sits upright and pushes the covers away from himself, and lowers his feet to the floor. With the window behind him, he can feel the sunlight coming down in squares against his back, already hot this early in the day. Sunshine. He turns his head and listens to the steady drum of the shower, just on the other side of the wall. His eyes fall upon the line of mud trailing from the window to the tennis bag- the small handprints on the window, smeared out of the fogged glass- the open door.
Before he knows for sure what he intends to do, Tezuka stands and heads for the bathroom. He pauses halfway down the hall to hear his grandfather setting water to boil downstairs- the customary click of the stove as it sparks and lights, the rustle of newspaper, the dull murmur of the radio, tuned to pick up police reports- and for seconds, he is frozen, staring down the hall as if, at any moment, the radio will go silent and Grandfather will begin to climb the stairs.
A stream of light seeps from beneath the bathroom door. The radio continues its discourse and, as Tezuka listens with his hand raised to knock, a low, tuneless hum escapes the sound of the water. Tezuka reminds himself that there is a shower curtain and lets himself in, closing the door quickly behind him.
His glasses cloud instantly. Tezuka waits with his hand still on the door and peers through the fog, and opens his mouth.
Afterwards, he isn’t sure if he said Ryoma’s name- if he called “Echizen” or “Ryoma” or something else entirely, something quiet and similarly desperate in a way that his voice was never meant to bend, that ought to be impossible; but the humidity swallowed his words, and then Ryoma was speaking, saying, “If you need a shower, Buchou,” and looking straight ahead, his silhouette very small through the shower curtain, and when Tezuka pushed the thin plastic aside, he found Ryoma’s skin an angry red from the onslaught of hot water, though that smile-smirk was still in place.
In the shower, Ryoma steps aside to make room for him, and Tezuka closes his eyes and is careful not to let their fingers touch.
ii.
Fuji is Fuji, has been Fuji almost every day of his life, and so when he sees Osakada Tomoka at the water fountain, he notices first that she is crying, second that her face and hands are wet. When he approaches her, she is splashing water on her face, and though he offers her a towel, she uses the back of her hand, the edge of her uniform, and finally his shirtfront.
He cups the back of her head and curls a little bit over her, his cheek resting lightly against her skull; her shaking shoulders send tremors through him and he murmurs something soothing into her rumpled hair, thinking of the last time he did this, three years ago, at least, with Yuuta.
“What am I doing?” she says suddenly, her face still buried against his ribcage. Slowly, he undoes the knots of her hands and uncrumples the fistfuls of jersey she had caught in them. She laughs a little, embarrassed, and backs away half a step. “There’s a tournament- I shouldn’t be…you should be back there, Fuji-sempai. It’ll hurt the team.”
“It’s fine,” he says. She shakes her head violently, pigtails thrashing side to side, and herds him back to the court, where Tezuka is waiting with his arms crossed. During footwork drills, she disappears; but then the practice matches begin, and while Fuji initiates a lazy rally against Oishi, who is still so rattled that he can barely tell fore from backhand, he sees her linger by the fence with her hands gripping the links. He smiles at her, but he doesn’t think she sees.
He begins to wonder, then, how long this will have to take. This being something he hesitates to put boundaries on. What he knows is that Osakada is right- it has hurt Seigaku, it is hurting Seigaku, and while Fuji feels that it is perfectly all right to play for something besides victory at times, there is something unacceptable about putting an entire team, an entire tournament, at stake.
Even Tezuka- especially Tezuka. Fuji had stood beside him, the day before, or maybe the day before that. Tezuka had been overseeing the freshmen at their stroke exercises; Ryoma had been firing furious returns at the ball machine one court over, his hat brim lowered to hide his eyes.
“I thought you would have stopped him by now,” Fuji said, a meter of space between them. They watched the court fill with tennis balls until there was more yellow than green. When the machine was spent, Ryoma circled, retrieving the balls and lobbing them back into loading bin, repeating the process.
Tezuka’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing, staring levelly over the heads of half a dozen freshmen to the neighboring court.
“What are you going to do about him?” Fuji asked. Tezuka’s expression said “this is his war,” but Fuji has never known a time when Tezuka’s expression has said anything else.
-
“Let’s do something after school,” he tells Eiji while they are eating lunch. Eiji is leaning out the window with his bento balanced, somehow, between his chest and the wall, in a way more foolish than particularly clever. In such a precarious position, any stray movement could send his rice and salmon tumbling to their demise, and Eiji isn’t known for his ability to stay still.
The bento slips a few notches, while Eiji’s eyes widen; grains of rice slide ominously from the tips of his chopsticks, like the first rumblings of a landslide, and soon the rest follows- a great calamity of clattering plastic and a shower of takoyaki.
Eiji curses, flies to his feet, starts on about being stupid. Apologizing, Fuji crouches down to help salvage what he can, but he stops and finds himself looking at Eiji, who is not allowed to swear at home.
And Eiji stares back, silent only a moment before giving a grin that shows all his teeth. “You’re weird sometimes, Fuji,” he says, his Cheshire-cat mouth stretched out of shape. “Don’t apologize for no reason.”
They end up at Eiji’s house after practice, taking turns using the shower. Eiji leaves traces of toothpaste on the bathtub floor, but Fuji is used to this, and moves the toothbrush back to the sink. In the next room, Fuji can hear the shrill beeps and snarls of Eiji’s latest video game, but the sound dies out while Fuji is still rinsing off soap, eyes closed from the sting.
When he emerges, Eiji is lying flat on his back in the middle of the floor, limbs splayed and wet hair, sans gel, slick and stuck to his cheeks.
“Practice wore you out?” asks Fuji lightly, sitting down with his back against the dresser near Eiji’s feet. He crosses his ankles and leans his head against the edge of his knee.
Eiji shakes his head no, staring blankly at the ceiling.
“I see. A bad day, then,” Fuji says, and smiles, because smiling is neutral.
Eiji nudges him with his foot. “Fuji,” he says finally, releasing his breath in a long mewling sound of disapproval. “Fuji, it’s not funny. I can’t tell when you’re kidding around.”
“I am?” Fuji says, and apologizes; with a little moue, Eiji sits up, and at the expression on his face, Fuji softens a little and says, “I guess I am,” really meaning, what else can we do?
-
Fuji arrives home late that night; the subway line that runs near his house is delayed, leaving him stranded on the platform for one stifling hour, next to a salaryman whose sharp black dress shoes, obviously new, seem to pinch more and more as the seconds tick past. The scent of his cologne is overwhelming, threatening to engulf the platform, the city, the world. He reminds Fuji of one of Yumiko’s old boyfriends.
“The fool,” the salaryman mutters to the man to his left, similarly dressed, who he must assume to be some kind of kindred spirit. Now and then, the two will flick their sleeves back in tandem, checking the time. “Couldn’t have held out an hour longer? Life treating him so unjustly? This is Tokyo, isn’t it- this is life, he ought to realize.” The other man nods at this in an appropriately thoughtful manner; encouraged, the salaryman goes on. “What do any of us have besides a sixty hour work week and a good-for-nothing wife living off our salaries? The poor wretch can’t even prepare store-bought sushi without switching soy sauce with the vinegar. It’s indecent.”
“Terrible,” agrees the other man. He is older, with a little mustache about the size of the bald patch in his hair, and an expression of polite disinterest. Fuji looks longer at this man, able to imagine himself just like this in thirty, forty years, and touches the outer edge of his eyes, where the man has furrows at the corners. Smile lines.
“Please pardon the delay,” says the loudspeaker, a woman with a toneless, pleasant voice. “There has been an accident on the tracks. The train will be running again momentarily. Thank you for your patience.”
“I ought to be home,” says the salaryman, glancing again at his watch. “That selfish bastard. If he’d waited another hour to throw himself off the platform…”
“Excuse me,” says Fuji. The two blink, turning to face him- “Is there a problem?” says the one- Fuji squeezes past, and begins to extract himself from the crowd. He rifles through his bag for a bus schedule.
-
At practice the next afternoon, the day is hazy, and Ryoma is missing for the first hour. The freshmen whisper; Tezuka favors his shoulder and defeats Oishi in straight sets; Fuji passes a towel over his face and feels as if the air pressure will soon crush them all into the ground.
When Tezuka catches him idling, Fuji meets his eyes and holds them.
“Will you have me run laps, Tezuka?” he asks. Oishi stops nearby to catch his breath, yet hearing the question, he turns away sharply, his face an apology.
Tezuka appears unmoved. “The tournament is next week. I shouldn’t need to remind you how important it is that we remain in top condition.”
Fuji makes a sound at the back his throat, a vague affirmation. Sweat shines on the line of Tezuka’s jaw and, behind his glasses, his eyes are very bright. At this rate, there will be no tournament, Fuji wants to say.
“Thirty laps, then, for negligence?” he says instead, very softly. He knows he needs this, or deserves it, though he isn’t sure which of the two it is. Maybe both.
“Fuji,” says Tezuka, in warning.
Oishi flushes, finally turning to grasp Fuji by the shoulder. “Show some respect, Fuji- !” he cries- but his hand slips away as easy as water, and by then Fuji is gone, jogging slow, penitent circles around the court.
When Fuji passes Ryoma coming up the path from the school, Ryoma looks up but refuses to acknowledge him. He drops his bag by the fence and begins to unpack his racket; Fuji looks for Tezuka even though he is certain he knows where Tezuka will be looking, where everyone must be looking, though only the racquet holds Ryoma’s attention.
He cannot hear what Tezuka says to Ryoma, but Ryoma nods, taps his racquet against his back, and walks onto the court facing Taka.
Ryoma serves. He serves as if to separate his arm from his shoulder, and Taka can do nothing but return, a helpless fury overtaking him as he drives back the attack with a force that causes the muscles in his hands and wrists to shake. The light is in Ryoma’s eyes as he pursues, tendons straining and his calves taut and trembling with the desperate pressure of each stride.
He isn’t going fast enough, Fuji realizes. Ryoma realizes this simultaneously, crying out, and his voice breaks. As if one rallying cry could breach the distance, he reaches anyway, the knowledge in his eyes and his teeth bared, the racket fused with his hand.
Fuji finds he cannot catch his breath- that his limbs are numb, that he can no longer remember how many times he has gone around the compound and that he no longer cares. Ryoma’s face is wet. He wipes it with his racket hand, viciously, his eyes gleaming white under the brim of his hat and filled with some fear that makes Fuji stop, unable to look away. He wonders if it is possible to kill yourself with tennis.
iii.
The first Monday, Tezuka wakes early and goes down to the garden to do exercises with his grandfather. He leaves Ryoma asleep on the tatami mat at the foot of his bed, and when he returns, Ryoma is still curled there, his sheets thrown off and tangled about his legs, and his face half-buried in the pillow. His eyelashes are stuck together and he gazes blearily at Tezuka, frozen in the doorway, before falling back asleep.
Tezuka goes to close the window. Outside, he can see the steam rising from the pavement. A crow perched on a telephone wire calls out a brassy declaration, but an early train mutes it and, as Tezuka watches, its beak seems to open and close without making a sound.
The radio hums downstairs. The teapot begins to whistle shrilly and his grandfather ignores it to finish the last few lines of his newspaper article; still, Ryoma sleeps. Tezuka considers, for a moment, waking Ryoma himself, but does not, finds that he cannot, and leaves for school with the feeling of failed duty weighing on him.
Ryoma doesn’t attend class. Tezuka knows this because the teachers discuss it in voices lazily hushed, not making the effort to whisper under the assumption that it is no secret anymore. “We’ll have to make allowances,” they say, leaning towards each other in classroom doorways. “Poor boy- I can understand that he must be shaken- and who can blame him?”
Tonshi, they call it- an unexpected death. “Leave him be,” they murmur, citing the circumstances of the accident, which are hazy and have led to an explosion of speculation. “Poor boy- no one should have to witness that so young.”
Tezuka approaches one teacher in confidence, an older man with a passion for science that Tezuka has come to respect. “I would appreciate it if you could speak to them for me,” Tezuka says, bowing. “The rumors are affecting the team’s morale.”
Ishikawa-sensei only smiles, inviting Tezuka to have tea with him after practice, which Tezuka declines. The smiles fades- it was a weak one to begin with, not reaching the man’s eyes. “And you, Tezuka-kun?” he asks. He dries the inside of the beaker he is holding and sets it gently aside. “How are you, as captain?”
The question catches Tezuka off-guard, and Ishikawa-san, expecting this, leans back in his chair and says heavily, “I see,” knitting his fingers and letting them rest on his belly.
“I have a responsibility-” Tezuka stands; he pushes his chair back so sharply that it tips off balance, falling backwards to hit with a deafening crack that jars them both. As Tezuka bends to set it upright, Ishikawa-sensei dries another beaker and heaves a sigh that hangs in the air between them, stifling, until Tezuka bows in apology and asks to clean the rest of the equipment himself.
He spends the rest of the day waiting for Ryoma to appear, and everything else passes unchecked by his deadened senses. He finds himself scanning the freshmen classrooms, the alcoves and doorways where Ryoma will stand, bickering with Momoshiro, and seeing traces of him there- until his eyes clear, and the boy will have the wrong nose, or mouth, or hair, and Tezuka will turn away and his stomach will unclench at intervals.
-
At one, Ryoma stands two hundred and fifty feet above sea level, with Tokyo spread below his feet. He leans into the long metal bar that curves around the observation deck, looking through the panes of blue glass with an over-priced Ponta in his hand- it costs five hundred yen for children’s admission and two hundred forty for a small fountain drink with the Mori Building insignia stamped in cool blue across the cup. Ryoma has visited Tokyo Tower, Odaiba, Rainbow Bridge, and bought a Ponta at each location, and now his pockets are so empty that he feels he has finally made up for all the sightseeing he failed to do upon moving to Japan.
The building is kept very cold, and it seems strange, to Ryoma, to see how violently bright the sun is outside, gleaming so fiercely off the tiny city blocks of polished metal that continue, uninterrupted, to the line of the horizon. With glass and more than two hundred meters between him and the city, he can hardly recognize it- can hardly bring himself to care about the maze of pavement that is supposed to be his hometown. When he tries to find his house, his tennis court, his school, he can’t, no matter how long he squints, and it is cold and he can’t imagine himself living down there. If he leans far enough to press his hand against the glass, he can feel the heat seep through into his fingers, but he pulls his hand away with a “che” and digs for loose change in the elevator- it is still not enough, not nearly.
-
He goes home.
Nanjiroh is sleeping on the living room floor when Ryoma lets himself in, not bothering to take off his shoes or set down his tennis bag as he walks to his bedroom. The house is silent and warm- Tadaima, he thinks, belatedly. His bed is made when he remembers not making it; everything else has been left untouched.
Ryoma feels the conscientiousness, the deliberation, behind this. Standing just inside the doorway, he looks from side to side and imagines his mother coming into this room and biting her cheek as she leaves the tennis magazines slumping onto the floor, turning a blind eye to the shirt shed onto the back of his chair, stiff with salt. He crosses the floor, kicking a tennis ball out of the way as he goes to open his drawer, and begins pulling out shirts and shoving them into his tennis bag. Shorts next, then underwear, and socks as an afterthought. He doesn’t stop until the bag has reached its limit and he is only just able to pull the zipper closed- mission completed, he stands, brushes dust from his clothes, settles his bag, once again, on his shoulder.
He stops in the hall, looking at Karupin, only the tips of his ears visible in the curl of Nanjiroh’s arm. It is so typical a scene that Ryoma nearly calls “I’m leaving” as he passes, and he stops from the effort of swallowing the words, wanting, almost, to move closer. He isn’t a fool, though. He doesn’t trust Nanjiroh, not for a moment, and he tells himself that every second spent standing in plain view, here, is another tick of a bomb.
So he leaves, ignoring the sound of Nanjiroh rising suddenly. At the door, he opens and closes it, and Nanjiroh opens and closes it again, and from behind him comes a long yowl of discontent.
Ryoma feels something lean against his ankle, and stops to pick up Karupin, who looks back at him wide-eyed, whiskers crumpled from where he has been pressed against Nanjiroh’s body.
“Hey, boy. This is your father speaking,” says Nanjiroh. Ryoma puts his hand on Karupin’s head and begins to stroke him just behind the ears, feeling the vibrations of the purr pass through him, thrumming in his own chest. The feeling is unnerving, out of sync with the rhythm of his own body, and when it enters his chest cavity it stays there- lingers, setting his ribs in motion, until his whole body is humming, shivering faintly.
“Won’t even turn and face me?”
“Shut up, old man.” Ryoma speaks before he means to.
“I always told your mother you were a lot of big talk for such a scrawny thing,” Nanjiroh says, and Ryoma can hear the lazy dismissal in his voice, trailing off into a scratch of his chin. “Never thought I’d raised a little coward on top of it.”
Ryoma’s fingers curl into fists against Karupin’s fur. He tells himself that Nanjiroh is just trying to get a rise out of him, like always, imagining the way Nanjiroh is standing just above him on the steps, hands tucked into the folds of his yukata and his feet planted at brash shoulder-width. The image only irritates him further and he growls, dropping Karupin and pushing his hands into his pockets.
“Are you going to stand there and take that?” Nanjiroh sneers.
“It’s better to ignore you.”
Nanjiroh shrugs. “You can ignore me when you can play a set against me and finish still standing. Can you do that? Want to prove it now, boy?”
Karupin pushes against Ryoma’s leg again, weaving around his feet, but when Ryoma doesn’t respond, he sighs and slips away, his tail brushing against Ryoma’s bare ankles. Ryoma follows him with his eyes, back to Nanjiroh, who is nearer than Ryoma expects him to be.
There’s nothing there that Ryoma hasn’t seen before. Something loosens in his chest that he doesn’t realize he’d been holding there. Relief, disappointment- he doesn’t know what to call it.
“I’m leaving,” he says. “It’s quieter at Buchou’s house.”
“You aren’t going to that boy for tennis,” Nanjiroh says, hips forward, eyes lazy and mouth sly and suggestive. “Come play a game against me.”
Ryoma looks at him coldly, as coldly as he can manage. “I don’t want to play tennis-”
“Why not?” says Nanjiroh.
Ryoma stops. Nanjiroh’s voice is suddenly louder, harder, hitting Ryoma like a blow to face- he steps back for a moment, trying to reorient himself, but it is like reaching for a handrail and finding one isn’t there. Ryoma doesn’t remember his father ever sounding like this, ever appearing so tall, in his life. The light comes in from behind Nanjiroh, and his shadow stretches toward Ryoma, overtaking him as Nanjiroh walks forward to pick the wooden racket off the ground.
For a moment Ryoma can’t move, and then he remembers that it is air in his lungs, and his racket in his hand, and everything is clearer, then. “Fine, my serve,” he says. He looks up and he is on the court facing Nanjiroh, and the ball is in his hand. Nanjiroh calls something, and Ryoma’s eyes narrow even though he can’t hear what it is, and he raises his arm back to fire the ball across the net, sends it clawing the white line and the spin grinding into the earth.
Nanjiroh’s racket is there to scoop it up and fling it back into the air. It’s still not enough, Ryoma thinks- but it will be.
-
When Ryoma appears at practice, one hour late, he has already played tennis that day. Tezuka sees his face gleam with sweat and his cheeks flushed, his eyes sharply focused on whatever he fixes them on. When he is near enough, Tezuka can feel the raw heat from Ryoma’s body wash against him, and he takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes.
“You’ve stretched already,” Tezuka says, already wondering- can you do this?- is that enough?- as he sends Ryoma to face Taka on the nearest court.
“I want you to come swimming with me, after practice,” Ryoma says suddenly, lingering a moment by his racket bag. He looks up at Tezuka, and Tezuka feels for a moment as if his body is transparent, the hazy sky visible through the space between his shoulders. “You’re not listening, Buchou,” Ryoma says. And then he is running away and Tezuka realizes that it was meant to be this way- there were only two directions to begin with. He cannot be everything to Ryoma at once.
He knows that, if he complies and goes swimming with Ryoma, he will end up pressing Ryoma against the side of the pool, and Ryoma will not resist. He knows how Ryoma’s mouth will part against his own, how it will taste, faintly chlorinated, needy. How the flavor will stay in his mouth and leave the taste of pool water on everything he eats.
He accepts this.
“Stop him-,” Fuji says, when Tezuka turns to see a hand on his arm and Fuji gasping, his breathing ragged with thirty laps and fear. “What are you doing- he’s destroying himself, Tezuka-! You know that better than anyone- he’s going to kill himself this way-”
Tezuka looks at Fuji and doesn’t understand. After a moment, Fuji releases his arm, his breath slowing, but his eyes on Tezuka are still horrified, more horrified until, like Tezuka, he cannot help but turn as Ryoma serves again.
“Wait,” Tezuka says.
Watching Ryoma play, Tezuka sees an act of creation.
---
A/N: Let me just say that this is probably the fic that I should've written upon discovering Prince of Tennis, and that it was something that I never thought would take over my life for so long. (I posted the first part of this in November, and took it down because I was incredibly embarassed.) Tezuka/Ryoma was one of the first pairings I noticed when I watched the show, and there is so much brilliant fic out there for it that I almost didn't want to finish this. Needless to say, from now on I think I'll leave Seigaku to the experts. Concrit is greatly appreciated, as I'll be fiddling with this for years to come. Much love to takenoko and alissa, who have been absolutely invaluable, plus everyone else who has listened to me whine for the past two months.