[Log] Just another arrival
Characters: Kaidoh Kaoru, Zaizen Hikaru
Location: Beach
Time: July 6th- Noonish?
Rating: G
Summary: Zaizen realizes the island he's on is inhabited, but that he is in fact not saved.
Kaidoh swiped the back of his hand across his forehead. It was a hot day. He dragged a sizeable bundle of palm leaf stalks behind him in the sand. He was going to use them to thatch a roof on the hut he was building. He'd seen something about it once on TV, so how hard could it be? If idiots could make shacks then so could he.
The palms traced spirals into the sand behind him, leading a path back to Momoshiro's shack. It extended quite a distance; Kaidoh had been walking for a while now.
He stopped to take a drink from his canteen and look out over the ocean into the horizon when he spotted something that should by no means be this far down the peninsula: another person. Kaidoh glanced around, but the figure seemed to be alone. He didn't recognize him, and his guard went up immediately, as it tended to around strangers.
He took a few careful steps forward and then his foot crunched loudly over a fallen tree branch. Kaidoh froze.
Zaizen jerked his head up at the sound of the crack, looking around wildly to find the source of the sound. He was still pretty disoriented from the whole being swept off a ship and washing up ashore what appeared to be a deserted island thing, and that had him on edge. When his eyes finally landed on a distinctly human shaped form, however, all he could feel was relief.
Good. He was going to be rescued.
Kaidoh's face pulled into a scowl and he dropped the pile of palm leaves in the sand. Then he raised his hand in greeting, because that was what people did when they encountered each other. It looked a little awkward coming from Kaidoh. The other guy didn't look familiar to him, but Kaidoh hadn't met everyone on the island yet.
As he drew closer, he could see that the guy's clothes looked tattered, his shirt caked with sand. His hair was a mess. It didn't take a genius to see that this guy clearly hadn't just been out for a leisurely stroll down the shoreline.
"Uh, are you all right?" Kaidoh asked, his voice gruff. He didn't really know how to handle the situation so he just shoved his hands into his pockets and stood there staring.
Zaizen opened his mouth to say something, but the words wouldn’t come out. Damn, he must be more shaken up than he thought. He gave it another shot. “I think I was knocked off a boat.” Well, that went a little better. “Am I dead?”
He wasn’t sure, really. He might be soon if he didn’t manage to find something to drink. He’d just... not really had the energy to do much moving since he washed up here. Kind of understandable, really
Kaidoh snorted. "No, you're not dead. But I guess... welcome." Did this island have some weird gravitational pull? Just how many people were going to show up on its shores?
"How long have you been..." He gestured vaguely in the air. Lost? Sitting here? Floating around helplessly in the ocean? "Do you want some water?" He lifted his hand out of his pocket, pulling his canteen out with it. When he offered it to the other man, he remembered his manners and said, "Oh. I'm Kaidoh. Do we... Do we know each other?" It seemed like a weird thing to ask someone who'd just washed up on a random island in the middle of the Atlantic, but Kaidoh had realized by now that this was no ordinary island.
Zaizen didn’t bother answering Kaidoh’s questions as he grabbed the canteen and proceeded to consume all of it’s contents eagerly. Ah, that was much better. He must have been pretty dehydrated- that was probably why he felt so out of it. “I don’t know how long I’ve been here. It was dark for awhile, so at least overnight. I think.” He handed the empty canteen back to Kaidoh and squinted at the man. He seemed kind of familiar, but Zaizen couldn’t quite put a finger on it in his current condition.
"Where did you come from?" Kaidoh asked shortly. The question sounded ruder than he'd intended. "I mean, what were you doing on a boat?" The guy had a bunch of piercings, but he didn't look scary or dangerous. Just confused, and maybe a bit exhausted. Who could blame him? Kaidoh tried to soften the expression on his face so he wouldn't look scary either, since, according to some people, he sometimes did.
Zaizen didn’t seem too bothered by the rudeness. In fact, his answers were all pretty blunt and to the point to. “Getting knocked overboard, apparently.”
"That's rough," Kaidoh replied flatly. He looked over at the other guy. "You don't seem hurt. Are you?"
“My head is spinning, but I don’t think I’m injured.” Zaizen started to shakily pull himself to his feet. “I’m just glad that there’s civilization around here.”
Kaidoh hissed. "Sure, if you can call it that." He shrugged. "There's a few of us though. Some people crashed in a cruise ship a while back. I got here like you did though. What's your name anyway?"
Zaizen stared blankly at Kaidoh. And then frowned. Wonderful. He WASN’T rescued after all. He’d just been found by other castaways. just great. Oh well, being stuck with other people while waiting for help made life a little easier for him. Kinda. If the people weren’t too annoying. “...Show me where they are?”
He still didn’t bother answering Kaidoh’s question of who he was.
"Yeah, okay," Kaidoh agreed. He didn't really like being demanded to do things, but he didn't know who this other guy was, let along trust him, and Kaidoh could be polite and helpful when he needed to be, so he started leading Zaizen back along the beach, picking up his bunch of palm leaves from the ground as they went.
When they reached Momoshiro's shack, Kaidoh stopped and dropped the leaves down around the side. "That's where I'm staying right now," he said dismissively. "Most people are in some caves on the other end of the beach. Unless you want to meet Momoshiro and Echizen. They're the guys I'm staying with. We have some fish and rice too, if you're hungry."
The wheels in Zaizen’s head started to turn a bit at the mention of those names. Momoshiro, Echizen, and Kaidoh. Definitely familiar. But... where? Then it clicked, and he frowned. “Ah. tennis camp.” That one he’d ended up attending even though he hadn’t wanted to. You know, just like just about everything else he’d done back in middle school. Why on earth were people from tennis camp here?
Well, at least they weren’t the especially annoying ones.
Kaidoh nodded. "Yeah, everyone here used to play tennis," he said. He looked at Zaizen again and then a lightbulb of recognition clicked on his mind.
"Oh. We shared a room at that camp, didn't we?" He tried to think of the guy's name. He was from... Shitenhouji. Yeah. It was coming back to Kaidoh now. "Zaizen?" he asked hesitantly. It sounded right but he couldn't be sure. It had been six long years.
Zaizen nodded, face still rather deadpan. “Yeah. You’re the one that woke up insanely early to go running.” It was still preferable to the other roommates they’d had. That noisy Rikkaidai kid and the UFO obsessed one. Come to think of it, most of that tennis camp had been full of troublesome people, huh? “...So what? Is this some kind of tennis player magnet island or something?”
Kaidoh glanced around. "Well, most people came on that guy Atobe's ship. You remember him, right?" He snorted derisively. "Kind of a moron. But that's how they all knew each other..." But Kaidoh couldn't explain how the rest of them were ending up here too. It couldn't all just be a big coincidence, could it? He shivered slightly. Maybe the place really was cursed. Maybe there was … something … drawing them all here.
"So do you still play?" Kaidoh asked with a hiss, intent on shifting the subject away from such creepy thoughts.
Zaizen blinked. Atobe... oh yeah, he’d gotten an invitation for some tennis cruise thing. It was still on the counter back in his apartment, probably. He’d never really even considered actually going- it was too much work, and he had other things to do. “I don’t really play too much anymore. Other things taking up my time, you know?”
Kaidoh nodded. "Yeah," he said simply. He didn't ask what. It wasn't really his business. "There might be some people from your old team here," he added, trying to be helpful, or comforting, or whatever the appropriate response was in this kind of situation. Whatever it was, Kaidoh wasn't too great at it.
Zaizen looked HORRIFIED. People from his old team were here? This was some kind of nightmare. Well... he supposed he could be lucky, and it could be Gin-san or Koishikawa or someone here on the island. But when was he ever lucky?
“Which people?” Knowing his luck it would be Kin-chan and Koharu.
"I'm... not sure," Kaidoh said honestly. "I don't talk to a lot of the people here." Or particularly like them. Then his mouth pulled into a scowl as he remembered. "Oh, I think that really loud little one is running around this island somewhere. Maybe others too."
Zaizen groaned. “Great. Kintarou.” Well, he supposed that it could be worse. At least he had experience dealing with the little idiot. “Oh well. Hopefully we won’t be stuck here too long.”
Zaizen settled down under a tree and started attempting to clean himself up a bit. Now that he was less dehydrated and ill he wanted to, well, feel a little more human again.
Kaidoh stood next to him, still at a bit of a loss for what to do. The guy seemed fine. Maybe a little shaken up and annoyed, but he didn't seem hurt. He wasn't asking for help.
He did look like a bit of a mess though.
Kaidoh toed the ground with his sneaker. "Do you want some clean clothes?" he asked suddenly.
Zaizen blinked. And then nodded. “Yeah, probably. Mine are pretty much ruined.”
Okay, this Kaidoh could do. He disappeared into the shack for a minute and returned with a clean and pristinely folded pile; a tank top and a pair of shorts. What...? Kaidoh liked doing laundry.
"I only had sleeveless shirts," he said, thrusting the clothes at Zaizen with a downward glance. "Hope that's cool."
Zaizen shrugged. He really didn’t care what kind of clothes he was given, as long as they were clean. And in one piece. The club clothes he had been wearing when he was knocked off the ship looked cool, sure, but they hadn’t been made to withstand being tossed around in the ocean, and were pretty much shredded now.
Still, as nice as clean clothes were, they would be even better if he didn’t have sand lodged in orifices he hadn’t even known existed. “...Is there someplace I can take a bath around here?”
Kaidoh nodded his head back towards the shack. "Yeah," he said, "Momoshiro built a bathroom in there, if you can call it that." It was more like a very primitive room with a bucket and some water, but it beat bathing in the ocean at least. "You're welcome to use it." Both Momoshiro and Echizen were out, but they probably wouldn't protest given the circumstances. "There's shampoo and soap and stuff in there too."
“Not bad, for a bunch of castaways.” Zaizen mused, getting up to go take a shower. “Anyway, thanks for the water. And getting me off the beach.”
"Don't mention it," Kaidoh replied gruffly. "Once you're, uh, clean and changed, I guess I can take you down to the caves to meet the others." Momoshiro might freak out if he found some random guy in the shack's bathroom. The idea didn't make Kaidoh super comfortable either, but he was doing his best to be polite. It wasn't like Zaizen was a complete stranger. They'd known each other once, however briefly, and somehow by bizarre circumstances they'd met again now.
“Yeah, sure. Whatever.” Zaizen replied, heading into the bathroom to clean himself up.
He could tell he hated it here already.