FIC: Growing Pains, Sanayuki, PG13
Title: Growing Pains
Author: Ociwen
Wordcount: 8500ish
Rating: PG13
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: In which Sanada grows up...
Author's Notes: The aforementioned Sanashrimp I spoke of, based on a blurb from the Tenipuri game about Sanada's growing pains. Thank to yuki_scorpio for the idea and pixxers for the help!
i. in which Sanada has a long way to go
Sanada was convinced he was never going to grow.
He would be shrimpy forever. The shortest in the class, beating Yanagi out by two centimeters. He’d be dwarfed by his perfect and tall older brother Gosouke and laughed at for being the world’s smallest tennis player.
He had to order size xsmall in the school uniform, but even then his mother had to turn up the pants for him.
It was the week before school started. Yanagi called, wanting to come over and play, but really inviting him out for a tennis game. They’d met in tennis club last summer. “I’m Yanagi,” Yanagi had said. “Are you any good?”
Sanada hadn’t answered. At the time, he’d been pissed off with his parents for making him sign up for tennis lessons. Kendo club at the local sports complex was full. His brother said, “Tennis is pretty cool” and for a few days, Sanada was convinced it might be. It could be.
Until had he showed up to tennis lessons.
An irritating kid with a mole on his chin had laughed at him, calling him a shrimp, asking him if the racket was too heavy for him. Sanada called him a lazyass- the first word that came to mind, what his brother said to his friends on the phone.
Stupid Niou Masaharu, Sanada thought.
Niou wasn’t so smug the first time they played. He might have been taking tennis lessons for a year more than Sanada, but the instructor told Sanada that he had something and that something made his shots faster and harder than Stupid Niou Masaharu’s.
Sanada had won the game.
And Yanagi had introduced himself. They hadn’t said anything before to each other, except hello or good morning because Yanagi was in the level above Sanada. Intermediate.
“Two shrimps,” stupid Niou Masaharu said. “Sanashrimp and Yanashrimp!”
“But we can both beat you at tennis,” Yanagi said.
Niou said: “Prove it.”
It took Yanagi seventeen minutes. Sanada held the stop watch.
And from then, they had played almost every day. Brought together closely by a mutual lack of height and reversely exponential skill at tennis. It was that week before junior high, a warm spring day with the sun bright and shining that Sanada beat Yanagi for the first time. He was sweating and so hot he felt like he was going to melt, but seeing that last lob glide into the court made Sanada’s eyes sting with something that was not so much sweat from his forehead as pride and accomplishment.
“I was wondering how long it would take you,” Yanagi said. They ate their lunches on the bench by the willow tree that smelled like herbal incense in the dojo. Yanagi brought extra sushi rolls and Sanada made sure to pack boiled shrimp for the two. They picked food out of each other’s bento boxes and drank juice boxes. Yanagi scribbled notes in on a pad of paper and Sanada leaned back against a root, watching the fat clouds float by.
“I hope that’s not what you call good tennis,” a voice said. “Because your form was crappy.”
Yukimura was as full of himself as he was tall, lording over Sanada and Yanagi that day. Sanada knew of him, had seen him in elementary school (in a different class, though) and at tennis lessons, too, though he didn’t remember really noticing if Yukimura was in Yanagi’s intermediate group or not.
Beside Yukimura stood another boy, grinning and chewing on a huge piece of gum, so big he spat constantly like a cow.
“And you’re any better?” Sanada snapped.
Yukimura laughed.
It was bad enough to lose 6-1, but it was worse when Yukimura stood on top of the net, as tall as a junior in junior high school, and said, “You have a ways to go, Shorty.”
Every single night, during the week before junior high school started, Sanada and Yanagi told their parents they were going to hang out. Instead they spent hours at the street courts near Yanagi’s house, smashing balls against cement dividers and trying to figure out what the hell Yukimura meant.
“Try bending your knees more,” Yanagi said. “That might give you more power if you push from the legs, not just your upper body.”
And Sanada told him, “Don’t swing through so much- it makes your ball go too much to the left.”
They picked and prodded each other. Sanada’s legs were tired, every night, but in a good way. He was covered in scrapes on his knees and elbows from diving to reach Yanagi’s drop shots. His hair dripped with sweat. His brother would ruffle his hair and ask, “Is it puberty yet?” Then, he would shake his head and laugh because, no, Sanada was still the same height, still had a little boy’s voice and was too skinny for the small in the school uniform.
It was Yanagi, too, who suggested it. “Let’s try out for the tennis team at school. I bet we can be the first freshmen to make the regulars.”
Sanada was skeptical, looking out at Yanagi from under his bangs. “I doubt we’re that good,” he said.
“Let’s play another game, then,” Yanagi said.
They played until the floodlights at the street court went black and neither of them could see, but the balls still smashed and bounced and Sanada ran as fast as his little legs could move, listening to the sound of Yanagi’s swings and breathing to know where and when to return the shots. It ended in a draw, both of them on their backs gasping for air into winded lungs, but Sanada said,
“Okay, let’s do it.”
In the halls of Rikkai Dai junior high Sanada was pushed around, asked by older students if he was old enough to go to school there. Sanada ground his teeth and said nothing to most, sometimes snapping “Lazy ass!” to a few with especially nasty grins on their faces. He and Yanagi weren’t in the same class- no Yanagi had class with stupid Niou Masaharu. Sanada did know Yagyuu Hiroshi. They went to elementary school together, but rarely spoke.
It didn’t help that Yagyuu was taller than him. Everyone was, except for the tiniest freshmen girls, the ones who still carried Hello Kitty backpacks from kindergarten.
Sanada wanted to punch something that afternoon when the crowd of freshmen at the tennis courts included Yukimura, hovering above the rest. “Watch me beat the senpais,” he told them. His friend, the bubble gum chewer clapped and cheered him on when Yukimura walked up to the captain and challenged him to a game. He was as confident and cocky as ever, smirking at the captain as he said, “Let’s end the game in fifteen minutes.”
Sanada threw his racket down on the ground. The clatter made the crowds part and the senpais stare at him, snickering and whispering about the shrimpy freshman with the scowl. Sanada pointed to the first senpai in front of him and shouted, “You! Let’s play!”
“Don’t you know who I am?” the senpai said. He turned to his friend and rolled his eyes. “You can pick up my balls, kid, if you want.”
“Shut up!” Yanagi added. He stepped up right alongside Sanada.
“A pair of shrimps!” the senpai said, laughing with his friends. All the freshmen laughed too.
Sanada picked his racket up, gripped the handle tight and pointed it at the senpai’s chest, the only part he could reach. “If I win against you, I want your regulars’ spot.”
The senpai grinned. “Sure, whatever, kid.”
Yanagi said, “If I win, I want his regulars’ spot.” Yanagi pointed to the senpai’s friend, chortling away and flipping his hair for the girls watching on the other side of the fence.
It took Sanada twenty minutes to win. He pushed himself harder than ever before. His lungs burned and his legs turned to jelly, but each successive point he took, each look of shock on the senpai’s face when he lost a set told Sanada he could do it.
It took Yanagi twenty-two minutes. The senpai he played might have laughed at Renji’s haircut before they started to play, but afterwards, when he was on the ground, the sore loser, he wasn’t saying anything about Renji’s hair then. Nothing except, “I can’t believe I lost to a fucking freshman with a fucking gay haircut!”
The benches were packed when Sanada’s knees gave out and he fell to the ground. No one rushed out to help him up, but it didn’t matter. His face hurt from smiling so much. He couldn’t feel his right hand, but he knew his racket was in it, right where it belonged. A weapon of battle, like a sword in some ways.
His elation was stung by Yukimura who stared down his nose at Sanada with a smirk. Sweat beaded along his forehead until Yukimura pushed his headband up. He was out of breath when he said, “It only took me fourteen minutes. What took you so long, Sanada and Yanagi?”
Sanada glowered at the back of Yukimura’s head. Winning a regular spot was sweet, but Yukimura had to sour everything.
“I hate that kid,” Sanada told Yanagi that night. “He’s an ass.” And tall. And better at tennis.
“But he’s not lazy,” Yanagi said.
“I still don’t like him,” Sanada insisted. He ground the toes of his sneaker into the dirt of Yanagi’s mom’s flower bed.
Yanagi didn’t say anything except, “No one said you had to like all your teammates, Genichirou.”
***
Okay, maybe Sanada didn’t hate Yukimura so much as he hated the fact that Yukimura was taller than him. And better at tennis. And he didn’t exhaust himself completely when he played to win against a senpai or an OB the way Sanada did.
Yanagi slept over at Sanada’s house. Two futons pushed next to each other in the dojo. His mother turned out the lights, but their whispers continued. Yanagi’s plans and menus to help them with tennis. Plots and schemes and shots to use against Uchiyama-senpai or even Yamaguchi-senpai, who has the killer smash.
“If we use two handed return shots, and avoid a backhand, we can try a rising shot against it,” Yanagi said. “I drew a diagram out to show you.”
Sanada looked down at the piece of paper, squinting in the darkness. It was covered in stickmen and squiggly lines. “You can’t draw,” he said. And then, he thought about it, visualizing the shot in his mind. Thinking about how he would smirk when Yamaguchi-senpai was blown backwards from the strength of Sanada’s play. Or maybe blown away in surprise because Sanada had managed a rising shot. It didn’t matter which.
“Is this what Yukimura uses?” he accused Yanagi.
Yanagi hesitated for a minute before he finally said, “Not…quite. Yukimura prefers a one-handed rising shot, actually.”
Sanada sniffed. He crossed his arms over his chest and told himself he wasn’t pouting even if Yanagi’s quirked eyebrow said differently.
“You know why he’s in the stupid class in school?” Yanagi said, completely out of the blue.
Sanada sat up so fast his head rushed. “Why?”
“He doesn’t do he his homework ever because he plays tennis instead.”
Sanada snorted again. “Well, that’s dumb.” Secretly, though, he was pleased with that. Beating Yukimura at something felt good, even if it was only because Sanada did his homework every night, sometimes with Yanagi, sometimes by himself. Sanada could do both tennis and school.
But Yukimura wasn’t so bad, not really. He had good ideas, and being one of the only three freshmen on the regulars, he tended to hang around Sanada and Yanagi at practices. “We should aim for the Nationals,” Yukimura told them. “I want a gold medal all three years of junior high school.”
Sanada grunted. It was a good idea, but he wasn’t going to admit that.
He and Yanagi spotted each other during weight training, using the smallest weights on the bench press and leg press because their own skinny arms and legs could barely manage those. Yukimura bulked up with the senpais, grunting from four times the weight Sanada used.
It was the middle of the season and Sanada was in the middle of a bench-press, face streaming with sweat and effort, when Yukimura walked up to him and Yanagi, shoved two extra weights onto the end of the bar and said, “You’re never gonna get muscles with that piddly amount of weight training, Sanada.”
Sanada’s arms retracted, the weight squashing hard down on his chest with a dull thump.
Sometimes he really did still hate Yukimura.
ii. in which Sanada experiences the pains of growing
In junior year, some brown half-Brazilian made the regulars, and stupid Niou Masaharu, too. Yukimura was fukubuchou, still taller than Sanada, still better at tennis. The clubhouse trophy room shone even brighter with the nationals’ cup sitting on the shelf, with the names of eight regulars carved into it.
Sanada hadn’t played in the finals. He was the alternate. Yanagi and Yukimura played doubles one- winning, of course.
He was still shrimpy, having barely grown at all. Yukimura only got taller, but gracefully. Stupid Niou Masaharu was gangly, but taller than Sanada, and the half-Brazilian Jackal, transfer student, was too. Neither of them said anything, not when Sanada could beat them at tennis with his eyes closed. His technique was improving- he and Yanagi worked together, worked hard to improve themselves and it was starting to show. Sanada could almost feel himself starting to float up and glow during games against Yukimura, but he never quite managed to reach that level, not like Yukimura, who swung and shot and lobbed, sucking the moves of every other player into his vortex of…perfect tennis.
Yanagi hadn’t grown either, so Sanada didn’t feel quite so alone in his shortness. Not until that kid started hanging around the tennis courts. He was a freshman with awful hair, some kid who Niou laughed at. He was taller than Sanada, too, when he sauntered up to Sanada and Yanagi one practice with a grin and a devilish glint to his eyes. “Wanna play, runts?” he asked.
Sanada clenched his fist. Yanagi held him back, stepping between them. “You are aware we are your senpais?” he asked.
The kid forced a high-pitched laugh. “Oops, sorry senpais,” he said. Then, “You wanna play, senpais? I bet I can crush you like I crushed all them!”
Sanada looked over his shoulder. Niou and Jackal were sitting on a bench, along with a crowd of seniors and juniors, all gasping for air and covering their hung heads with sweat towels, obviously having lost really badly to this cocky freshman with bad hair.
“Let’s play, then,” Yanagi said. He held his racket up, face-down on the court to start the spin. “Which?”
“Rough,” the kid said.
Yanagi looked calm and collected, as usual, despite losing the spin and the freshman wanting first serve. Sanada gripped his knees and watched Yanagi and the freshman play. The kid had guts, talking to his senpais like that, assuming he and Yanagi were freshmen. The kid had guts on the court, too, constantly changing his footwork and favouring smashes and counter-punches, straight to Yanagi’s face.
Yanagi deflected them all.
And he took the set, 6-3.
Sanada stood up, feeling his pride rise up taller than he could ever be. He looked up at the kid, smarting from defeat, and glared at him. “I’ll win in fifteen minutes,” Sanada told him. “Watch your mouth around your senpais.”
It felt good to tell the kid off. It felt even better to win against him, to see the kid throw his racket on the ground and stomp around and scream, “I’ll crush you both! Just wait!” before he realized he looked like a snotty brat and asked where to find the legendary Yukimura, Sanada and Yanagi.
Sanada blinked.
“I am Sanada Genichirou,” he said.
The kid’s face turned as red as his eyes. Sanada figured he had a disease. Or anger management problems at least.
The wind picked up and combed through Sanada’s hair as he stood there, watching the freshman pick himself up and rush off to find Yukimura. Yanagi walked up beside Sanada. He had cut his hair last week. Niou and their senpais stopped making jokes about it in the showers. No, their jokes were entirely about height now. “Yukimura will win against him,” Yanagi said. “6-0- in fourteen minutes.”
Yanagi was always right, data man that he was. Except he was off by seventeen seconds when Sanada checked the stopwatch. If the kid had yelled over losing to Sanada, he went completely batshit when he lost to Yukimura, screaming and flapping and vowing he’d crush them all one day,that he’d be the number one at tennis even if it killed him.
Yukimura seemed to like him, this Kirihara Akaya. He let the freshman trail around him, into the weight room, into the regulars’ changing rooms. He played games with the kid and helped him with swings sometimes. The rest of the time Yukimura acted the way he did with everyone else, complaining about their form but not offering any corrections except “If you don’t drop your shoulder when you swing, it would serve you right if you got injured.”
It was at some point in the summer, maybe just before the regionals, that one morning, Sanada went to put his foot in his running shoe and it didn’t fit. Or rather, he managed to squish his foot into his shoe, but his big toe stuck out the end and he could barely walk.
His feet got big. Not big, but big. He tripped over everything. Kirihara laughed at him: “Maybe I should get your spot on the team, huh Sanada-senpai?” Sanada felt his blood boil so hard that he slapped Kirihara straight across his grinning mug and shouted “Tarundoru!”
It earned them both fifty laps. Sanada tripped over every second one.
And then, during the regionals, he got all gangly. His short, compact child’s body lengthened out into something hideously tall. If Sanada though he had it bad before with his feet, but these new arms and legs were a hundred times worse. He was lucky to make it through the regionals alive, having only played singles three once. It was some no-name school in Kanagawa and Sanada could have won with his eyes closed, usually. Now, he had to concentrate hard to make plays and not fall over his feet. He had to work to swing his racket the right way and keep the ball in the court. The State of Self-Actualization was a hopeless fantasy for him now.
Still, he did win 6-0, it just took a half hour.
Sanada didn’t play again during the rest of the tournament. Yukimura and Yanagi alternated singles three. The captain must have taken pity on the kid with the arms like a gorilla, who swung them so awkwardly Sanada accidentally hit the coach in the eye.
That night, at home, still red-faced with embarrassment for his uncontrollable movements, Sanada swiped one of his brother’s ballcaps to hide under. He ate supper with his family, still hidden under the dark brim. His mother asked if he was all right.
“I’m fine,” Sanada said, but his voice cracked mid-sentence.
His brother laughed at him. His entire family did and his father patted Sanada’s shoulder, saying “You’re finally becoming a man, Genichirou.”
“It’s about time,” his brother said. “Oi- is that my hat?” He stole the hat back, but that evening their mother went out shopping and came back, handing Sanada a shopping bag in his bedroom.
Inside was a hat of his very own. Exactly the same with the white Jack Purcell logo on the front.
Sanada would have thanked her, but his throat was scratchy and he knew that saying anything would be mortifying if his voice squeaked. Instead, he grunted and bowed his head. He was taller than his mother now, but it didn’t stop her from ruffling his hair.
Nights were the worst. His legs hurt- his knees utterly ache and his back throbbed. Without tennis or schoolwork to distract his mind, the growing pains pierced his body will dull constant aching. Sanada could never get comfortable- he’d flip and flop, but it would only get worse. He lay awake half-asleep most nights, wishing he could nod off, wishing he could have an escape from this weird new body for at least a few hours of peace in a day.
Hormones struck that summer.
The warm summer nights meant that all the windows in his home were cranked open full, since they had no air conditioning. Sanada placed a fan at the foot of his bed, drifting into a state of semi-consciousness after a long evening of tennis practice. Shards of pain poked through his knee now and then, preventing full sleep, but he still managed to dream sometimes. Sanada could never remember quite what they were about, except that they would all inevitably leave him with sticky pajamas in the morning and the panic of oh god, did I piss the bed?!?
Awkward conversation with Yanagi, with his face hidden under his cap and Yanagi managing to turn just as red, and Sanada learned that no, it wasn’t piss and yes, these new feelings between his legs were probably normal.
“Don’t you…?” Sanada muttered.
“Aa, not yet,” Yanagi said under his breath. “Soon enough, I would imagine, judging from my last height measurement.”
The lack of sleep and pains in his legs and back made Sanada miserable during the day, miserable in general. He snapped at Kirihara when the kid would show up on his court and want to play. “Go away. Go practice with Niou!” Sanada growled. His arm was sore that day and the ball machine was going horribly. He wanted to wallow in his own puberty-induced misery by himself.
Yukimura didn’t go through this at all. Yukimura’s tennis got better with ease, although he did start to shuffle into morning practices later and later, yawning wider and complaining that he was tired.
Sanada felt a brief thrill inside. Finally, Yukimura was suffering like he was, long sleepless nights caused by growing. The day Sanada loomed over Yukimura’s head in the changing room, as tall as the seniors, the pain was almost worth it. Niou stopped teasing him in the showers when Sanada’s dick got bigger too. That felt even better.
During the Nationals Sanada had grown into his legs and arms enough to perform the State of Self-Actualization for the first time. He was playing Yukimura on a court outside the stadium, early morning before the semifinals against Shitenhoji. Yukimura approached him first, stretching his arms above his head. “Let’s play, Sanada.”
Yukimura hadn’t said much to Sanada since the day Sanada looked down on him for the first time. Sanada’s mouth was so dry that he nodded before he realized what he was agreeing to.
Yukimura glowed before the first serve was tossed up. He threw himself into the game immediately, smashing and volleying long and fast balls. Sanada inhaled as deep as he could, closing his eyes for an instant, and then he felt something weird pass through his body that for once wasn’t puberty, but more like electricity, the way it pulsed through his arms and legs.
The rest Sanada couldn’t remember. He woke up staring at the sky with a shadowy face in his field of vision, eclipsing the sun. “Sanada?” Yukimura asked. He held out his hand to help Sanada to his feet.
“Congratulations on achieving the State of Self-Actualization,” Yukimura said. “Took you long enough.”
“Did I win?” Sanada squeaked. Yukimura laughed, whether at his question or his voice, Sanada didn’t know. He fixed the brim of his hat to shield himself anyway.
“Obviously not,” Yukimura said. He stood in the sun that moment and stretched again, his yawn hidden by the glare of golden light over his body. With his arms over his head, his t-shirt rode up over his stomach as his headband slipped down over his hair, landing on the ground next to Sanada’s oversized shoe.
Sanada could feel his throat constrict. His blood pumped and he couldn’t hear a word Yukimura said, not when Yukimura turned, just enough that his face was in the sun, lit up like an angel. Or like he was still in the State of Self-Actualization.
Sanada felt funny between the legs too. As he lunged to pick up the headband, confused but feeling he needed to- a sense of nobility maybe- he realized that it wasn’t funny he was feeling, it was an erection pressing against his shorts and that looking up, Yukimura’s flat bum was right in his view and…
“Sanada?” Yukimura asked. He swiped the headband out of Sanada’s hands and smiled faintly. “Thanks. Let’s get back to the team. I think you and Yanagi might be doubles two today.”
For three weeks Sanada spent his free time trying to come up with ways to make Yukimura smile. He would follow behind Yukimura and Marui in the school hallways at lunch time, ostensibly trying to be casual and not, but ultimately failing when his height gave him away. He would watch Yukimura at tennis practice. When his nerves and his voice changing weren’t shot, Sanada would offer to spot Yukimura- instead of Yanagi- in stretches. Yukimura’s mouth would quirk and Sanada would be gone, melting into a puddle of teenage-hormones before he remembered the erection in his shorts and Yanagi’s scowl at being left to stretch with Kirihara or Jackal.
Sanada still wanted Yukimura to know the awkwardness he went through with growing, but at the same time, he wanted to do other things with Yukimura. What, he wasn’t entirely sure, but if it meant Yukimura made his dick twitch and his heart pound harder in his chest, all the better.
iii. in which Sanada experiences pain of a different sort of growth
Yanagi started puberty right after junior tennis season ended. His was graceful, if just as fast as Sanada’s. Or so it seemed from Sanada’s point of view.
Sanada should have known something was wrong when Yukimura missed the Junior Senbatsu because of the flu, according to his mother. Instead, Sanada was too busy fantasizing about beating that cocky Atobe Keigo at tennis and Yukimura’s bony ass to think about those things.
Until the day Yukimura collapsed.
Sanada hated himself in that instant he first heard from Marui, still white with shock and unable to speak in full sentences. Sanada hated himself for ever once hating Yukimura when Yanagi told them the diagnosis. The word “chronic” rang in Sanada’s ears.
His knees didn’t hurt so much anymore, just his heart.
The courts felt empty without Yukimura, although he and Sanada didn’t play together much. With Yanagi they were the three monsters, but Yukimura tended to hang out with Marui most, not Sanada. Sanada didn’t want to hang out with him until it was almost too late, and by then, two years of junior high had passed. Two years were a lot to overcome: the anger Sanada had towards Yukimura, the indifference Yukimura probably had towards him.
It was Yukimura’s year to be captain. But it was Sanada, the vice-captain, who was the one to hold practice come spring. He’d grown into himself by then and his third black ball cap (the first two faded and frayed beyond recognition). Sanada was no good at leading- barking out laps, yes, but helping with swing practice? Teaching the freshmen how to hit the ball so it didn’t knock Jackal unconscious again?
Yanagi took over swing practice. Jackal helped with the freshmen. Marui even assisted him occasionally, or swapped spots on the days Kirihara was being particularly pesty and the team needed Jackal to babysit the kid.
Sanada made sure to take every schedule, every lineup to the hospital to show Yukimura. His eyes stung seeing Yukimura lying wan on the colourless bed in the colourless room that smelled like the biology lab at school. His face was translucent, the blue veins showing through his too-thin skin. His cheeks sank. His eyes were yellow-tinged. Sometimes he couldn’t speak.
Sanada spoke to him, trying to make conversation. A good six months of keeping his mouth shut because of his voice changing had progressed into senior year and he wasn’t practiced at chatting- not that he had talked much as a kid, either.
“Kirihara is our singles three,” Sanada told him. “And Yagyuu, the new kid, is in doubles one with Niou.”
Yukimura blinked.
Sanada tried to think of something to say. He looked out the hospital room window. The Tokyo sky was grey and miserable. The bunch of flowers the team brought last week drooped, dying along with Yukimura’s body. “I don’t know if this Yagyuu is a friend of Niou’s, or if Niou harasses him the most. He seems to be able to keep Niou under control, though.”
And out of my hair, Sanada didn’t add. Niou-induced headaches had been happening off and on since the spring.
Ironically, it was when Yukimura was in the hospital that he grew. It seemed like every week his pajamas changed. Sanada didn’t say anything; it was Yagyuu who pointed out that Yukimura seemed to take up more space in his bed. One evening, Sanada came to visit after supper. Yukimura’s mother walked out of the room, carrying a bag. She smiled faintly at Sanada, bobbing her head. “Seiichi seems to be growing out of his pajamas as soon as I buy him new ones,” she said.
Knowing that made Sanada’s stomach flutter with hope. And it made him feel less guilty, on some level, about the occasional fantasies he sported on the commuter train to Tokyo about feeding Yukimura rice from his hospital tray, having Yukimura open his mouth as Sanada fumbled with the spoon, spilling grains of rice onto Yukimura’s bed, across Yukimura’s blue pajama shirt.
“Sanada?” Yukimura asked. He was in bed, of course, shivering although it was summer and the sheets were pulled up to his neck. Sanada stood awkwardly until he got the better of his nerves and pulled Yukimura’s blanket up over his body, too. The back of his hand brushed Yukimura’s hair, Yukimura’s clammy neck. Sanada sucked in a breath. He told his body to calm down and stop getting so excited over this.
“Sanada, did your back ever hurt when you were growing?” Yukimura asked, his voice rasping to the point of intelligibility.
Sanada swallowed and managed to nod once.
On the bus home, Sanada brought his hand to his face, touching the back to his cheek. If he pretended, it wasn’t his hand that he was touching, but Yukimura’s. He could smell Yukimura’s hospital-issue soap on his skin and the clean smell of laundry detergent too.
There was no excuse for his loss at the regionals. His body was in shape. Sanada finally understood it and Niou’s jokes about his gorilla arms stopped months ago. His body was no distraction, instead, it was Yukimura. It was always Yukimura.
For a brief moment when Sanada saw the flash of gold medals around the necks of the Seigaku players, he hated Yukimura all over again.
But guilt got the better of him.
He couldn’t bring himself to tell Yukimura. It was Yanagi and Kirihara who went first, the next day, the first day Yukimura woke up from the operation.
Sanada slunk into the hospital two days afterward. Yukimura sat up in bed, scowling like he did in first year. Head hung low, Sanada shuffled closer. “I’m…” sorry, Sanada was about to say, but the sharp blow to his face caught him off guard.
Yukimura cradled his hand, wincing through his teeth as he said, “You had no excuse, Sanada.”
I did! Sanada thought. But he couldn’t tell Yukimura why, he couldn’t give a good reason, so he just bowed his head to agree. His cheek prickled from the force of Yukimura’s slap. “Forgive me,” he tried to say, but his voice didn’t work and his throat locked up and it was even more of a mess than the incident with Niou and the hair dye in the changing room showers.
When Yukimura showed up that first day at practice in August, Sanada’s heart flip-flopped so much he thought he might have a heart attack. He was a junior all over again, tripping over his feet, turning red, stammering over his words when he asked Yukimura if he wanted to use the ball machine.
Yukimura walked with pain, Sanada could tell. Yanagi whispered to him, “He should be taking the week off, just in case.”
Yukimura must have heard. He whipped his head around, jaw tense and long arm holding his racket out at Yanagi. “Get onto the court,” he told Yanagi. “I’ll show you who needs practice.”
Sanada shook his head hard enough to make his cap fall to the ground. “Yukimura, no-”
It took almost an hour for Yukimura to win. By that time the rest of the club had gone home, everyone except the eight regulars, who stood in silence and watched Yukimura pant and sweat and groan his frustration into the game. If Yanagi wasn’t playing at full strength, no one hinted about that. Sanada wasn’t entirely sure if Yanagi was or not; his eyes rested only on Yukimura.
Yukimura collapsed onto the bench after. Sanada caught him, helped him down before he hurt himself. Yukimura tried to swat him away, but his hands only waved through the air, weak and limp.
His grin was infectious. “I told you so,” Yukimura muttered.
The Nationals finals, too, were so close. Sanada expected another tight set of matches with Seigaku. He wanted revenge for losing to Echizen, bitterness still twinging his play. Yukimura said “I’ll play singles one. They’ll field Tezuka there, obviously. I’ll win it for us if it gets that far.”
Kirihara was their alternate.
Echizen was supposed to play singles two against Sanada. Yanagi calculated it out: every situation, every permutation. It wasn’t supposed to be Momoshiro.
Technically Sanada won 6-0. But Momoshiro managed to plow himself into the net trying to catch Sanada’s last dropshot and the game was declared invalid.
Yukimura won, too.
The finals went into the alternates. Akaya, try as he might, was so close but Echizen reached the State of Self-Actualization first. Echizen was one split-step ahead. Echizen scored those last two points in the tie-breaker and left Kirihara kissing dust on the court, left the entire team with silver around their necks instead of gold for a third time.
Oddly enough, Yukimura smiled at Kirihara and shook his hand after the kid’s losing game. He ruffled Kirihara’s hair in a way that Sanada wished Yukimura might touch his, with that same sort of familiar amusement and easy laughter. “Your form was good,” Yukimura told him.
He looked over to Sanada after that. His eyes were dark, unreadable in the late afternoon sun shining in streams into the arena stadium, now starting to clear of spectators. “Yours too, Sanada,” Yukimura murmured.
Even though his face was too warm and his eyes too wet, Sanada took off his cap and bowed to Yukimura. He didn’t need to say thank you with words.
***
Niou-induced headaches got worse in the autumn. And not just when Niou was around. Sanada was walking home from school with Yanagi and Yukimura one afternoon. The maples trees were on fire, brilliant shades of red against the yellow ginkos. The air was sharp with impending frost.
Sanada’s temple throbbed so hard that he fell back from the other two and squeezed his eyes shut. He tried to rub his hairline, circling with his fingertips, but it did nothing. The painkillers he’d popped at lunch still hadn’t kicked in either, four hours later.
Yanagi said, “Have you been to a dentist recently, Genichirou?”
A week later, the dentist took one look at the xray of his jaw. “Wisdom teeth,” he said.
Sanada’s mother scheduled the appointment for the day of Yagyuu’s birthday party. Not that Sanada would have wanted to go, knowing that Niou and Yagyuu would have probably wanted karaoke, cosplay, or something that Sanada would regret come morning, alcohol-induced or not.
The room for the surgery was filled with strange beeping machines that reminded Sanada a bit too much of Yukimura’s hospital room. The drip they poked into his hand even more. His heart started to pound faster, awful memories of months of worrying flooding back in a second.
“Count backwards from ten,” the anesthetist said.
Sanada froze. Think about tennis, he told himself. Think about Yuki-
He didn’t remember the rest.
If there was pain when he came to, he didn’t realize it. Sanada was aware of the cotton in his mouth, filled with the taste of his blood and then he started to heave. Bile and blood mixing in the back of his mouth and making him gag more on the cotton lumps between his cheek and jaw. A nurse came running with a bowl for him. “It’s normal,” she told Sanada’s mother. “Here’s his prescription. He can start taking it after three hours.”
The half hour between the anesthetic wearing off and being able to take his prescription was death. Sanada curled up on his futon at home and made strange noises, cotton balls still shoved in the back of his mouth. His jaw hurt like hell. His head pounded. He couldn’t even curl up properly because that meant lying on his side, lying on his jaw- accidentally doing that once taught him a good, agonizing lesson.
His brother hadn’t been through this yet- why him?
But the drugs were wonderful.
After they started to work, it didn’t matter if Sanada couldn’t drink properly and got milktea down the front of his shirt like a baby. It didn’t matter if his face was starting to puff up into the dimensions of a beach ball. It didn’t matter that his brother laughed at him during supper when Sanada was served jelly and gruellish rice instead of the grilled beef the rest of their family ate.
Sanada sat back, feeling his body loll slightly to the side, feeling something wet slide down his chin (saliva, which he did wipe up). He wasn’t even that tired, just…not…there.
Yanagi called from Yagyuu’s party. “How was it?” he asked, the only words Sanada could hear over the loud music in the background. So it was karaoke after all.
Sanada said, “It was fine.”
Somehow, the words didn’t sound like that when he heard himself speak. It was more like the slurring of a drunken old salaryman. But, at the same time, the drugs in his body made him not particularly embarrassed at all.
“Yukimura said he was going to come over,” Yanagi said, “if you’re up to seeing him.”
Sanada said yes.
Yanagi said “What?”
Sanada grunted.
Yanagi hummed, finally understanding. “I’ll tell him that, then.”
His parents, however, had other ideas. Come ten o’clock, Yukimura hadn’t shown up and his mother knocked on his bedroom door. Sanada blinked. He might have been lying around looking at old tennis magazines for the past few hours, he might not have been. He couldn’t really remember. For all he knew, he could have been thinking about Yukimura being featured in that article from August.
“Time for bed, Genichirou,” his mother said. “You’ve had a long day.”
Were Sanada all there, he would have protested, considering she was half his weight and two-thirds his height. Instead, he grunted and when she left, he put on his pajamas. It was with a pathetic sort of glee that he remembered he wouldn’t have to brush his teeth tonight, either.
Sanada stashed his magazines on his bookshelf and stood up. His head felt light, his movements dizzied. And then from the hallway, his brother shouted, “Genichirouuuuu-chan! Your friend is here!”
Sanada smiled. The drugs were really too lovely.
Yukimura breezed into his bedroom, stopping suddenly when he saw Sanada sitting cross-legged on his futon and staring back at him, albeit with less coordination and concentration. “You- your face is…” Yukimura started to snicker.
Sanada nodded. It didn’t really matter though.
Yukimura closed the door and set down the plastic bag he carried. “Your mother said you wouldn’t be able to eat the cake I brought, but…” Yukimura’s eyes narrowed and his mouth curled into a devious grin. Sanada thought he might have been spending too much time with Niou. For once, his head didn’t throb at the thought of this.
His jaw was faintly tender; he was completely out to lunch, but other than that things seemed fine to Sanada. Yukimura knelt down beside him and opened up a box. Inside sat a badly-squashed piece of what was once chocolate cake, with a section of the kanji for “Yagyuu”.
“You look a bit loopy, Sanada,” Yukimura said.
Sanada blinked again.
“Good,” Yukimura said. “I always wanted you to do this for me, but you never did. Kirihara always brought me birthday cake pieces. Or Marui.” Yukimura poked at the piece of cake with his fingers, mashing a section of frosting into the box. Sanada thought he should be trying to figure out what Yukimura was doing, but that required too much effort.
Yukimura said, “Open wide.”
Had he more dignity at the present time, Sanada would have refused. Instead, he tried his best, managing to open his mouth a centimeter, maybe. His jaw wouldn’t budge any further. Yukimura’s warm hand brushed his mouth, and a small bit of frosting was pushed onto his tongue.
Sanada moaned. The frosting was too sweet, and although he couldn’t do much more than attempt to lick Yukimura’s finger inside his mouth (and fail), he couldn’t stop himself. Yukimura smiled even wider. Drugged as he was, Sanada could still feel his body melting into his sheets.
“Hold on!” Yukimura said. He grabbed Sanada’s arm and caught his balance before lying Sanada back down onto his futon cover. Then he lay down beside Sanada, his face hovering over Sanada’s.
“You face is as round as a tennis ball, you know that?” Yukimura asked. His fingers combed through Sanada’s hair, pushing it back from his forehead.
Sanada sighed; his body continued to grow even more lethargic. Take advantage of the situation! a voice told him.
Sanada could feel his eyelids drooping. The fingers continued to move over his scalp, soothing and soft and making his mind wander into an even happier place.
“Are you done growing yet?” Yukimura asked him.
Yukimura might have kissed him on the forehead. Yukimura might have breathed onto his ear. Yukimura might have touched his hand, tickling his fingers over the back of Sanada’s, feeling the bump from where the drip poked into him.
“When you stop,” Yukimura said, talking into Sanada’s neck, “maybe I’ll have time to catch up.”
Sanada was convinced that day couldn’t come soon enough.
iv. in which Sanada is done growing. sorta.
Maybe he had hallucinated things.
It was four days before Sanada came back to tennis practice. His jaw was still puffy, but only Niou and Kirihara joked about it behind his back in the locker room. Without any more of those wonderful painkillers, the world of reality was set firmly in front of Sanada. His face was tender- his jaw, his teeth. Eating his bento at lunch was a trial on its own, with Yanagi and Yagyuu watching his every move. It didn’t help that it was more tasteless jelly, more rice, more milktea and his mouth still couldn’t open very much.
Not that he could have chewed much anyway.
And his mouth ached. A dull throbbing at the back of his mouth, blooming through his jawbone almost all the way to his ears. Sanada hid his grimacing under his cap, freshly washed by his mother so it fit all funny on his head and the brim wasn’t bent the way he liked.
During practice, Sanada kept looking towards Yukimura. Yukimura hadn’t said a word to him this morning besides “Good morning”. Sanada’s face was warm even just thinking about Yukimura. It had to be real, Yukimura visiting him. There were still crumbs on his bedroom floor from the cake. Sanada’s forehead still tingled with the memory of a kiss, and yet…
If it was real, Yukimura should have been looking at him, giving him glances, maybe. Asking if he was okay, if his jaw hurt. Yukimura should have said at least more than “Hello” in the clubhouse, then rushed off to start laps.
To Yanagi, Yukimura started asking about the practice roster for the next set of intra-team games. “I don’t think we should have Obara play in this block,” he said, pointing to Yanagi’s list. Sanada watched them, talking for five, maybe ten minutes.
Marui pranced up to the two of them, launching an attack from behind to ruffle Yukimura’s hair. Yukimura yelled and laughed and ran after Marui across the courts, before he caught up and ground his fist into Marui’s pink mop.
Sanada stomped off to the ball machines. Instinctively, he started to grind his teeth, but the fresh sting of pain made him regret that immediately. He cringed, willing the throbbing to dissipate again.
However, he’d barely managed a half dozen shots with the machine before the gymnasium doors swung open and Kirihara walked in, right alongside a smiling Yukimura.
“Oi! Fukubuchou!” Kirihara shouted.
Sanada tried to ignore the kid, but he missed the ball anyway. He grunted, looking up to catch Yukimura’s eye in the hope that…
Yukimura didn’t look at him at all. Yukimura said something to Kirihara, and then he started to twirl his racket around, looking rather bored with things.
“I wanna use the machines,” Kirihara said. “Buchou’s gonna show me a new move.”
“Yukimura,” Sanada muttered.
Yukimura said, “Come on, Akaya. Let’s start off with some 80kmph balls and use your backhand.” He walked past Sanada, his shoulder stiff and cold.
Sanada blinked.
Fine, he thought.
It was a hallucination. Yukimura wasn’t giving him the time of day. And as soon as Sanada walked out onto the main courts where he could hear Niou tell Yagyuu about the serves he had worked on with Yukimura just beforehand. Sanada’s mouth hurt even more. And his chest, too. He clenched his fist, shoved his racket in his tennisbag and went straight to the showers, ignoring the curious look Yanagi gave him.
Sanada tried to drown himself in the showers. He was alone. The first person to leave practice. He never did that, but today he didn’t care. Yanagi could tell them his jaw was sore. Niou could make jokes about him being a bigger grouch than usual. Sanada just. didn’t. care.
At the first sounds of Yagyuu and Marui’s voices in the locker room, Sanada shut the tap off. He shook his head, grabbed his towel, plodded into the locker room, and turned his back to the rest of the team. Yanagi asked him if he was fine. Sanada snorted.
Yukimura’s head appeared in the corner of Sanada’s eye. Talking with Jackal now, joking about their English teacher. Not him. Not one word to him when he had been the one Yukimura had kissed, right? Yukimura kissed him! Sanada’s forehead burned with the memory of it. He could still feel Yukimura’s hair tickling his neck.
Slamming his locker door shut, Sanada grabbed his tennisbag, his backpack and stomped out of the clubhouse. To make matters worse, the bus was packed so tight that a girl managed to propel herself into Sanada’s face at a red light, her pigtail mashing into his jaw and making him bite down on his lip so hard he was sucking blood the rest of the ride home.
He got off two stops later. His temple pulsed with angry stabbing pain. His jaw was on fire. His eyes stung. The shadows were long under tall garden walls dripping with green vines, cooler and more miserable than the pavement closer to the road. Sanada trudged through them, trying to hide himself, wishing he was smaller so that he could hide better.
He could hear Yukimura’s voice in his mind, saying his name. “Sanada…” he whispered. “Are you done growing yet…?” Sanada wanted to float off into that happy dreamy haze where Yukimura kissed him, but the real world wasn’t so nice and a passing car managed to spray exhaust into his face.
Sanada stopped for a minute, coughing and pressing his palm against a cement garden wall, squeezing his eyes shut at the renewed ache in his jaw. He needed a painkiller as soon as he got home.
“Sanada!”
Sanada kept walking. If he ignored his mind’s tricks, they might go away.
“SANADA!”
This time, Yukimura’s voice was not the calm, quiet tone it had been in his memory. Sanada slowed his pace and, swallowing the fuzzy gross feeling in his throat, he turned around, just in case.
Sanada’s throat closed up entirely when he saw Yukimura running down the sidewalk, his face red and determined, his backpack bouncing up and down. Sanada couldn’t have moved, even if he wanted to.
Yukimura was out of breath, breathing hard and leaning his hands on his knees to rest for a moment.
“Are you okay?” Sanada asked, the habit never having left him.
Yukimura wiped his forehead with his hand before rubbing the sweat onto his pants. “Why’d you leave practice like that?” he asked, panting between words.
Sanada said nothing. He inched backwards into a darker shadow.
“Sanada,” Yukimura said. He stepped closer to Sanada, making Sanada move away until the wall blocked his path. Yukimura’s hair was messy, wind-blown from running. His face was flushed. It made Sanada’s heart pound and blood rush all over his body. “Don’t be like that,” Yukimura said.
Then, Sanada felt something brush against his hand. He looked down to see Yukimura’s fingers stroking the skin on the pad of his thumb, so light it tickled. So light it made him shiver.
Sanada closed his eyes. He couldn’t look at Yukimura looking at him like that, with his eyes big and dark and shining with promise.
Yukimura’s fingertips continued to make circles and swirls over Sanada’s hand. He tried to ball it up, but Yukimura wedged his fingers between Sanada’s, their hands entwining, all sweaty and warm and wonderful.
Sanada swallowed again. It was getting hard to breath. The air felt too hot and he was sweating under his cap.
“Invite me over for dinner, you ass,” Yukimura said.
Sanada opened his eyes to blink. A hand shot out in front of his face and grabbed his cap, striking fast like lightning. Yukimura laughed and ruffled his hair, burying his free hand in Sanada’s sweat-damp hair, messing it up completely to rival his own.
“Well?” Yukimura asked.
His hand might have been shaking. His head might have been rushing, lightheaded. His mouth might have been dry, but Sanada squeezed Yukimura’s hand back and muttered, “Do you want to come for dinner?”
In that moment when Yukimura nodded, Sanada felt like he’d just asked the most grown-up question of his life.
So far.
Author: Ociwen
Wordcount: 8500ish
Rating: PG13
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: In which Sanada grows up...
Author's Notes: The aforementioned Sanashrimp I spoke of, based on a blurb from the Tenipuri game about Sanada's growing pains. Thank to yuki_scorpio for the idea and pixxers for the help!
i. in which Sanada has a long way to go
Sanada was convinced he was never going to grow.
He would be shrimpy forever. The shortest in the class, beating Yanagi out by two centimeters. He’d be dwarfed by his perfect and tall older brother Gosouke and laughed at for being the world’s smallest tennis player.
He had to order size xsmall in the school uniform, but even then his mother had to turn up the pants for him.
It was the week before school started. Yanagi called, wanting to come over and play, but really inviting him out for a tennis game. They’d met in tennis club last summer. “I’m Yanagi,” Yanagi had said. “Are you any good?”
Sanada hadn’t answered. At the time, he’d been pissed off with his parents for making him sign up for tennis lessons. Kendo club at the local sports complex was full. His brother said, “Tennis is pretty cool” and for a few days, Sanada was convinced it might be. It could be.
Until had he showed up to tennis lessons.
An irritating kid with a mole on his chin had laughed at him, calling him a shrimp, asking him if the racket was too heavy for him. Sanada called him a lazyass- the first word that came to mind, what his brother said to his friends on the phone.
Stupid Niou Masaharu, Sanada thought.
Niou wasn’t so smug the first time they played. He might have been taking tennis lessons for a year more than Sanada, but the instructor told Sanada that he had something and that something made his shots faster and harder than Stupid Niou Masaharu’s.
Sanada had won the game.
And Yanagi had introduced himself. They hadn’t said anything before to each other, except hello or good morning because Yanagi was in the level above Sanada. Intermediate.
“Two shrimps,” stupid Niou Masaharu said. “Sanashrimp and Yanashrimp!”
“But we can both beat you at tennis,” Yanagi said.
Niou said: “Prove it.”
It took Yanagi seventeen minutes. Sanada held the stop watch.
And from then, they had played almost every day. Brought together closely by a mutual lack of height and reversely exponential skill at tennis. It was that week before junior high, a warm spring day with the sun bright and shining that Sanada beat Yanagi for the first time. He was sweating and so hot he felt like he was going to melt, but seeing that last lob glide into the court made Sanada’s eyes sting with something that was not so much sweat from his forehead as pride and accomplishment.
“I was wondering how long it would take you,” Yanagi said. They ate their lunches on the bench by the willow tree that smelled like herbal incense in the dojo. Yanagi brought extra sushi rolls and Sanada made sure to pack boiled shrimp for the two. They picked food out of each other’s bento boxes and drank juice boxes. Yanagi scribbled notes in on a pad of paper and Sanada leaned back against a root, watching the fat clouds float by.
“I hope that’s not what you call good tennis,” a voice said. “Because your form was crappy.”
Yukimura was as full of himself as he was tall, lording over Sanada and Yanagi that day. Sanada knew of him, had seen him in elementary school (in a different class, though) and at tennis lessons, too, though he didn’t remember really noticing if Yukimura was in Yanagi’s intermediate group or not.
Beside Yukimura stood another boy, grinning and chewing on a huge piece of gum, so big he spat constantly like a cow.
“And you’re any better?” Sanada snapped.
Yukimura laughed.
It was bad enough to lose 6-1, but it was worse when Yukimura stood on top of the net, as tall as a junior in junior high school, and said, “You have a ways to go, Shorty.”
Every single night, during the week before junior high school started, Sanada and Yanagi told their parents they were going to hang out. Instead they spent hours at the street courts near Yanagi’s house, smashing balls against cement dividers and trying to figure out what the hell Yukimura meant.
“Try bending your knees more,” Yanagi said. “That might give you more power if you push from the legs, not just your upper body.”
And Sanada told him, “Don’t swing through so much- it makes your ball go too much to the left.”
They picked and prodded each other. Sanada’s legs were tired, every night, but in a good way. He was covered in scrapes on his knees and elbows from diving to reach Yanagi’s drop shots. His hair dripped with sweat. His brother would ruffle his hair and ask, “Is it puberty yet?” Then, he would shake his head and laugh because, no, Sanada was still the same height, still had a little boy’s voice and was too skinny for the small in the school uniform.
It was Yanagi, too, who suggested it. “Let’s try out for the tennis team at school. I bet we can be the first freshmen to make the regulars.”
Sanada was skeptical, looking out at Yanagi from under his bangs. “I doubt we’re that good,” he said.
“Let’s play another game, then,” Yanagi said.
They played until the floodlights at the street court went black and neither of them could see, but the balls still smashed and bounced and Sanada ran as fast as his little legs could move, listening to the sound of Yanagi’s swings and breathing to know where and when to return the shots. It ended in a draw, both of them on their backs gasping for air into winded lungs, but Sanada said,
“Okay, let’s do it.”
In the halls of Rikkai Dai junior high Sanada was pushed around, asked by older students if he was old enough to go to school there. Sanada ground his teeth and said nothing to most, sometimes snapping “Lazy ass!” to a few with especially nasty grins on their faces. He and Yanagi weren’t in the same class- no Yanagi had class with stupid Niou Masaharu. Sanada did know Yagyuu Hiroshi. They went to elementary school together, but rarely spoke.
It didn’t help that Yagyuu was taller than him. Everyone was, except for the tiniest freshmen girls, the ones who still carried Hello Kitty backpacks from kindergarten.
Sanada wanted to punch something that afternoon when the crowd of freshmen at the tennis courts included Yukimura, hovering above the rest. “Watch me beat the senpais,” he told them. His friend, the bubble gum chewer clapped and cheered him on when Yukimura walked up to the captain and challenged him to a game. He was as confident and cocky as ever, smirking at the captain as he said, “Let’s end the game in fifteen minutes.”
Sanada threw his racket down on the ground. The clatter made the crowds part and the senpais stare at him, snickering and whispering about the shrimpy freshman with the scowl. Sanada pointed to the first senpai in front of him and shouted, “You! Let’s play!”
“Don’t you know who I am?” the senpai said. He turned to his friend and rolled his eyes. “You can pick up my balls, kid, if you want.”
“Shut up!” Yanagi added. He stepped up right alongside Sanada.
“A pair of shrimps!” the senpai said, laughing with his friends. All the freshmen laughed too.
Sanada picked his racket up, gripped the handle tight and pointed it at the senpai’s chest, the only part he could reach. “If I win against you, I want your regulars’ spot.”
The senpai grinned. “Sure, whatever, kid.”
Yanagi said, “If I win, I want his regulars’ spot.” Yanagi pointed to the senpai’s friend, chortling away and flipping his hair for the girls watching on the other side of the fence.
It took Sanada twenty minutes to win. He pushed himself harder than ever before. His lungs burned and his legs turned to jelly, but each successive point he took, each look of shock on the senpai’s face when he lost a set told Sanada he could do it.
It took Yanagi twenty-two minutes. The senpai he played might have laughed at Renji’s haircut before they started to play, but afterwards, when he was on the ground, the sore loser, he wasn’t saying anything about Renji’s hair then. Nothing except, “I can’t believe I lost to a fucking freshman with a fucking gay haircut!”
The benches were packed when Sanada’s knees gave out and he fell to the ground. No one rushed out to help him up, but it didn’t matter. His face hurt from smiling so much. He couldn’t feel his right hand, but he knew his racket was in it, right where it belonged. A weapon of battle, like a sword in some ways.
His elation was stung by Yukimura who stared down his nose at Sanada with a smirk. Sweat beaded along his forehead until Yukimura pushed his headband up. He was out of breath when he said, “It only took me fourteen minutes. What took you so long, Sanada and Yanagi?”
Sanada glowered at the back of Yukimura’s head. Winning a regular spot was sweet, but Yukimura had to sour everything.
“I hate that kid,” Sanada told Yanagi that night. “He’s an ass.” And tall. And better at tennis.
“But he’s not lazy,” Yanagi said.
“I still don’t like him,” Sanada insisted. He ground the toes of his sneaker into the dirt of Yanagi’s mom’s flower bed.
Yanagi didn’t say anything except, “No one said you had to like all your teammates, Genichirou.”
***
Okay, maybe Sanada didn’t hate Yukimura so much as he hated the fact that Yukimura was taller than him. And better at tennis. And he didn’t exhaust himself completely when he played to win against a senpai or an OB the way Sanada did.
Yanagi slept over at Sanada’s house. Two futons pushed next to each other in the dojo. His mother turned out the lights, but their whispers continued. Yanagi’s plans and menus to help them with tennis. Plots and schemes and shots to use against Uchiyama-senpai or even Yamaguchi-senpai, who has the killer smash.
“If we use two handed return shots, and avoid a backhand, we can try a rising shot against it,” Yanagi said. “I drew a diagram out to show you.”
Sanada looked down at the piece of paper, squinting in the darkness. It was covered in stickmen and squiggly lines. “You can’t draw,” he said. And then, he thought about it, visualizing the shot in his mind. Thinking about how he would smirk when Yamaguchi-senpai was blown backwards from the strength of Sanada’s play. Or maybe blown away in surprise because Sanada had managed a rising shot. It didn’t matter which.
“Is this what Yukimura uses?” he accused Yanagi.
Yanagi hesitated for a minute before he finally said, “Not…quite. Yukimura prefers a one-handed rising shot, actually.”
Sanada sniffed. He crossed his arms over his chest and told himself he wasn’t pouting even if Yanagi’s quirked eyebrow said differently.
“You know why he’s in the stupid class in school?” Yanagi said, completely out of the blue.
Sanada sat up so fast his head rushed. “Why?”
“He doesn’t do he his homework ever because he plays tennis instead.”
Sanada snorted again. “Well, that’s dumb.” Secretly, though, he was pleased with that. Beating Yukimura at something felt good, even if it was only because Sanada did his homework every night, sometimes with Yanagi, sometimes by himself. Sanada could do both tennis and school.
But Yukimura wasn’t so bad, not really. He had good ideas, and being one of the only three freshmen on the regulars, he tended to hang around Sanada and Yanagi at practices. “We should aim for the Nationals,” Yukimura told them. “I want a gold medal all three years of junior high school.”
Sanada grunted. It was a good idea, but he wasn’t going to admit that.
He and Yanagi spotted each other during weight training, using the smallest weights on the bench press and leg press because their own skinny arms and legs could barely manage those. Yukimura bulked up with the senpais, grunting from four times the weight Sanada used.
It was the middle of the season and Sanada was in the middle of a bench-press, face streaming with sweat and effort, when Yukimura walked up to him and Yanagi, shoved two extra weights onto the end of the bar and said, “You’re never gonna get muscles with that piddly amount of weight training, Sanada.”
Sanada’s arms retracted, the weight squashing hard down on his chest with a dull thump.
Sometimes he really did still hate Yukimura.
ii. in which Sanada experiences the pains of growing
In junior year, some brown half-Brazilian made the regulars, and stupid Niou Masaharu, too. Yukimura was fukubuchou, still taller than Sanada, still better at tennis. The clubhouse trophy room shone even brighter with the nationals’ cup sitting on the shelf, with the names of eight regulars carved into it.
Sanada hadn’t played in the finals. He was the alternate. Yanagi and Yukimura played doubles one- winning, of course.
He was still shrimpy, having barely grown at all. Yukimura only got taller, but gracefully. Stupid Niou Masaharu was gangly, but taller than Sanada, and the half-Brazilian Jackal, transfer student, was too. Neither of them said anything, not when Sanada could beat them at tennis with his eyes closed. His technique was improving- he and Yanagi worked together, worked hard to improve themselves and it was starting to show. Sanada could almost feel himself starting to float up and glow during games against Yukimura, but he never quite managed to reach that level, not like Yukimura, who swung and shot and lobbed, sucking the moves of every other player into his vortex of…perfect tennis.
Yanagi hadn’t grown either, so Sanada didn’t feel quite so alone in his shortness. Not until that kid started hanging around the tennis courts. He was a freshman with awful hair, some kid who Niou laughed at. He was taller than Sanada, too, when he sauntered up to Sanada and Yanagi one practice with a grin and a devilish glint to his eyes. “Wanna play, runts?” he asked.
Sanada clenched his fist. Yanagi held him back, stepping between them. “You are aware we are your senpais?” he asked.
The kid forced a high-pitched laugh. “Oops, sorry senpais,” he said. Then, “You wanna play, senpais? I bet I can crush you like I crushed all them!”
Sanada looked over his shoulder. Niou and Jackal were sitting on a bench, along with a crowd of seniors and juniors, all gasping for air and covering their hung heads with sweat towels, obviously having lost really badly to this cocky freshman with bad hair.
“Let’s play, then,” Yanagi said. He held his racket up, face-down on the court to start the spin. “Which?”
“Rough,” the kid said.
Yanagi looked calm and collected, as usual, despite losing the spin and the freshman wanting first serve. Sanada gripped his knees and watched Yanagi and the freshman play. The kid had guts, talking to his senpais like that, assuming he and Yanagi were freshmen. The kid had guts on the court, too, constantly changing his footwork and favouring smashes and counter-punches, straight to Yanagi’s face.
Yanagi deflected them all.
And he took the set, 6-3.
Sanada stood up, feeling his pride rise up taller than he could ever be. He looked up at the kid, smarting from defeat, and glared at him. “I’ll win in fifteen minutes,” Sanada told him. “Watch your mouth around your senpais.”
It felt good to tell the kid off. It felt even better to win against him, to see the kid throw his racket on the ground and stomp around and scream, “I’ll crush you both! Just wait!” before he realized he looked like a snotty brat and asked where to find the legendary Yukimura, Sanada and Yanagi.
Sanada blinked.
“I am Sanada Genichirou,” he said.
The kid’s face turned as red as his eyes. Sanada figured he had a disease. Or anger management problems at least.
The wind picked up and combed through Sanada’s hair as he stood there, watching the freshman pick himself up and rush off to find Yukimura. Yanagi walked up beside Sanada. He had cut his hair last week. Niou and their senpais stopped making jokes about it in the showers. No, their jokes were entirely about height now. “Yukimura will win against him,” Yanagi said. “6-0- in fourteen minutes.”
Yanagi was always right, data man that he was. Except he was off by seventeen seconds when Sanada checked the stopwatch. If the kid had yelled over losing to Sanada, he went completely batshit when he lost to Yukimura, screaming and flapping and vowing he’d crush them all one day,that he’d be the number one at tennis even if it killed him.
Yukimura seemed to like him, this Kirihara Akaya. He let the freshman trail around him, into the weight room, into the regulars’ changing rooms. He played games with the kid and helped him with swings sometimes. The rest of the time Yukimura acted the way he did with everyone else, complaining about their form but not offering any corrections except “If you don’t drop your shoulder when you swing, it would serve you right if you got injured.”
It was at some point in the summer, maybe just before the regionals, that one morning, Sanada went to put his foot in his running shoe and it didn’t fit. Or rather, he managed to squish his foot into his shoe, but his big toe stuck out the end and he could barely walk.
His feet got big. Not big, but big. He tripped over everything. Kirihara laughed at him: “Maybe I should get your spot on the team, huh Sanada-senpai?” Sanada felt his blood boil so hard that he slapped Kirihara straight across his grinning mug and shouted “Tarundoru!”
It earned them both fifty laps. Sanada tripped over every second one.
And then, during the regionals, he got all gangly. His short, compact child’s body lengthened out into something hideously tall. If Sanada though he had it bad before with his feet, but these new arms and legs were a hundred times worse. He was lucky to make it through the regionals alive, having only played singles three once. It was some no-name school in Kanagawa and Sanada could have won with his eyes closed, usually. Now, he had to concentrate hard to make plays and not fall over his feet. He had to work to swing his racket the right way and keep the ball in the court. The State of Self-Actualization was a hopeless fantasy for him now.
Still, he did win 6-0, it just took a half hour.
Sanada didn’t play again during the rest of the tournament. Yukimura and Yanagi alternated singles three. The captain must have taken pity on the kid with the arms like a gorilla, who swung them so awkwardly Sanada accidentally hit the coach in the eye.
That night, at home, still red-faced with embarrassment for his uncontrollable movements, Sanada swiped one of his brother’s ballcaps to hide under. He ate supper with his family, still hidden under the dark brim. His mother asked if he was all right.
“I’m fine,” Sanada said, but his voice cracked mid-sentence.
His brother laughed at him. His entire family did and his father patted Sanada’s shoulder, saying “You’re finally becoming a man, Genichirou.”
“It’s about time,” his brother said. “Oi- is that my hat?” He stole the hat back, but that evening their mother went out shopping and came back, handing Sanada a shopping bag in his bedroom.
Inside was a hat of his very own. Exactly the same with the white Jack Purcell logo on the front.
Sanada would have thanked her, but his throat was scratchy and he knew that saying anything would be mortifying if his voice squeaked. Instead, he grunted and bowed his head. He was taller than his mother now, but it didn’t stop her from ruffling his hair.
Nights were the worst. His legs hurt- his knees utterly ache and his back throbbed. Without tennis or schoolwork to distract his mind, the growing pains pierced his body will dull constant aching. Sanada could never get comfortable- he’d flip and flop, but it would only get worse. He lay awake half-asleep most nights, wishing he could nod off, wishing he could have an escape from this weird new body for at least a few hours of peace in a day.
Hormones struck that summer.
The warm summer nights meant that all the windows in his home were cranked open full, since they had no air conditioning. Sanada placed a fan at the foot of his bed, drifting into a state of semi-consciousness after a long evening of tennis practice. Shards of pain poked through his knee now and then, preventing full sleep, but he still managed to dream sometimes. Sanada could never remember quite what they were about, except that they would all inevitably leave him with sticky pajamas in the morning and the panic of oh god, did I piss the bed?!?
Awkward conversation with Yanagi, with his face hidden under his cap and Yanagi managing to turn just as red, and Sanada learned that no, it wasn’t piss and yes, these new feelings between his legs were probably normal.
“Don’t you…?” Sanada muttered.
“Aa, not yet,” Yanagi said under his breath. “Soon enough, I would imagine, judging from my last height measurement.”
The lack of sleep and pains in his legs and back made Sanada miserable during the day, miserable in general. He snapped at Kirihara when the kid would show up on his court and want to play. “Go away. Go practice with Niou!” Sanada growled. His arm was sore that day and the ball machine was going horribly. He wanted to wallow in his own puberty-induced misery by himself.
Yukimura didn’t go through this at all. Yukimura’s tennis got better with ease, although he did start to shuffle into morning practices later and later, yawning wider and complaining that he was tired.
Sanada felt a brief thrill inside. Finally, Yukimura was suffering like he was, long sleepless nights caused by growing. The day Sanada loomed over Yukimura’s head in the changing room, as tall as the seniors, the pain was almost worth it. Niou stopped teasing him in the showers when Sanada’s dick got bigger too. That felt even better.
During the Nationals Sanada had grown into his legs and arms enough to perform the State of Self-Actualization for the first time. He was playing Yukimura on a court outside the stadium, early morning before the semifinals against Shitenhoji. Yukimura approached him first, stretching his arms above his head. “Let’s play, Sanada.”
Yukimura hadn’t said much to Sanada since the day Sanada looked down on him for the first time. Sanada’s mouth was so dry that he nodded before he realized what he was agreeing to.
Yukimura glowed before the first serve was tossed up. He threw himself into the game immediately, smashing and volleying long and fast balls. Sanada inhaled as deep as he could, closing his eyes for an instant, and then he felt something weird pass through his body that for once wasn’t puberty, but more like electricity, the way it pulsed through his arms and legs.
The rest Sanada couldn’t remember. He woke up staring at the sky with a shadowy face in his field of vision, eclipsing the sun. “Sanada?” Yukimura asked. He held out his hand to help Sanada to his feet.
“Congratulations on achieving the State of Self-Actualization,” Yukimura said. “Took you long enough.”
“Did I win?” Sanada squeaked. Yukimura laughed, whether at his question or his voice, Sanada didn’t know. He fixed the brim of his hat to shield himself anyway.
“Obviously not,” Yukimura said. He stood in the sun that moment and stretched again, his yawn hidden by the glare of golden light over his body. With his arms over his head, his t-shirt rode up over his stomach as his headband slipped down over his hair, landing on the ground next to Sanada’s oversized shoe.
Sanada could feel his throat constrict. His blood pumped and he couldn’t hear a word Yukimura said, not when Yukimura turned, just enough that his face was in the sun, lit up like an angel. Or like he was still in the State of Self-Actualization.
Sanada felt funny between the legs too. As he lunged to pick up the headband, confused but feeling he needed to- a sense of nobility maybe- he realized that it wasn’t funny he was feeling, it was an erection pressing against his shorts and that looking up, Yukimura’s flat bum was right in his view and…
“Sanada?” Yukimura asked. He swiped the headband out of Sanada’s hands and smiled faintly. “Thanks. Let’s get back to the team. I think you and Yanagi might be doubles two today.”
For three weeks Sanada spent his free time trying to come up with ways to make Yukimura smile. He would follow behind Yukimura and Marui in the school hallways at lunch time, ostensibly trying to be casual and not, but ultimately failing when his height gave him away. He would watch Yukimura at tennis practice. When his nerves and his voice changing weren’t shot, Sanada would offer to spot Yukimura- instead of Yanagi- in stretches. Yukimura’s mouth would quirk and Sanada would be gone, melting into a puddle of teenage-hormones before he remembered the erection in his shorts and Yanagi’s scowl at being left to stretch with Kirihara or Jackal.
Sanada still wanted Yukimura to know the awkwardness he went through with growing, but at the same time, he wanted to do other things with Yukimura. What, he wasn’t entirely sure, but if it meant Yukimura made his dick twitch and his heart pound harder in his chest, all the better.
iii. in which Sanada experiences pain of a different sort of growth
Yanagi started puberty right after junior tennis season ended. His was graceful, if just as fast as Sanada’s. Or so it seemed from Sanada’s point of view.
Sanada should have known something was wrong when Yukimura missed the Junior Senbatsu because of the flu, according to his mother. Instead, Sanada was too busy fantasizing about beating that cocky Atobe Keigo at tennis and Yukimura’s bony ass to think about those things.
Until the day Yukimura collapsed.
Sanada hated himself in that instant he first heard from Marui, still white with shock and unable to speak in full sentences. Sanada hated himself for ever once hating Yukimura when Yanagi told them the diagnosis. The word “chronic” rang in Sanada’s ears.
His knees didn’t hurt so much anymore, just his heart.
The courts felt empty without Yukimura, although he and Sanada didn’t play together much. With Yanagi they were the three monsters, but Yukimura tended to hang out with Marui most, not Sanada. Sanada didn’t want to hang out with him until it was almost too late, and by then, two years of junior high had passed. Two years were a lot to overcome: the anger Sanada had towards Yukimura, the indifference Yukimura probably had towards him.
It was Yukimura’s year to be captain. But it was Sanada, the vice-captain, who was the one to hold practice come spring. He’d grown into himself by then and his third black ball cap (the first two faded and frayed beyond recognition). Sanada was no good at leading- barking out laps, yes, but helping with swing practice? Teaching the freshmen how to hit the ball so it didn’t knock Jackal unconscious again?
Yanagi took over swing practice. Jackal helped with the freshmen. Marui even assisted him occasionally, or swapped spots on the days Kirihara was being particularly pesty and the team needed Jackal to babysit the kid.
Sanada made sure to take every schedule, every lineup to the hospital to show Yukimura. His eyes stung seeing Yukimura lying wan on the colourless bed in the colourless room that smelled like the biology lab at school. His face was translucent, the blue veins showing through his too-thin skin. His cheeks sank. His eyes were yellow-tinged. Sometimes he couldn’t speak.
Sanada spoke to him, trying to make conversation. A good six months of keeping his mouth shut because of his voice changing had progressed into senior year and he wasn’t practiced at chatting- not that he had talked much as a kid, either.
“Kirihara is our singles three,” Sanada told him. “And Yagyuu, the new kid, is in doubles one with Niou.”
Yukimura blinked.
Sanada tried to think of something to say. He looked out the hospital room window. The Tokyo sky was grey and miserable. The bunch of flowers the team brought last week drooped, dying along with Yukimura’s body. “I don’t know if this Yagyuu is a friend of Niou’s, or if Niou harasses him the most. He seems to be able to keep Niou under control, though.”
And out of my hair, Sanada didn’t add. Niou-induced headaches had been happening off and on since the spring.
Ironically, it was when Yukimura was in the hospital that he grew. It seemed like every week his pajamas changed. Sanada didn’t say anything; it was Yagyuu who pointed out that Yukimura seemed to take up more space in his bed. One evening, Sanada came to visit after supper. Yukimura’s mother walked out of the room, carrying a bag. She smiled faintly at Sanada, bobbing her head. “Seiichi seems to be growing out of his pajamas as soon as I buy him new ones,” she said.
Knowing that made Sanada’s stomach flutter with hope. And it made him feel less guilty, on some level, about the occasional fantasies he sported on the commuter train to Tokyo about feeding Yukimura rice from his hospital tray, having Yukimura open his mouth as Sanada fumbled with the spoon, spilling grains of rice onto Yukimura’s bed, across Yukimura’s blue pajama shirt.
“Sanada?” Yukimura asked. He was in bed, of course, shivering although it was summer and the sheets were pulled up to his neck. Sanada stood awkwardly until he got the better of his nerves and pulled Yukimura’s blanket up over his body, too. The back of his hand brushed Yukimura’s hair, Yukimura’s clammy neck. Sanada sucked in a breath. He told his body to calm down and stop getting so excited over this.
“Sanada, did your back ever hurt when you were growing?” Yukimura asked, his voice rasping to the point of intelligibility.
Sanada swallowed and managed to nod once.
On the bus home, Sanada brought his hand to his face, touching the back to his cheek. If he pretended, it wasn’t his hand that he was touching, but Yukimura’s. He could smell Yukimura’s hospital-issue soap on his skin and the clean smell of laundry detergent too.
There was no excuse for his loss at the regionals. His body was in shape. Sanada finally understood it and Niou’s jokes about his gorilla arms stopped months ago. His body was no distraction, instead, it was Yukimura. It was always Yukimura.
For a brief moment when Sanada saw the flash of gold medals around the necks of the Seigaku players, he hated Yukimura all over again.
But guilt got the better of him.
He couldn’t bring himself to tell Yukimura. It was Yanagi and Kirihara who went first, the next day, the first day Yukimura woke up from the operation.
Sanada slunk into the hospital two days afterward. Yukimura sat up in bed, scowling like he did in first year. Head hung low, Sanada shuffled closer. “I’m…” sorry, Sanada was about to say, but the sharp blow to his face caught him off guard.
Yukimura cradled his hand, wincing through his teeth as he said, “You had no excuse, Sanada.”
I did! Sanada thought. But he couldn’t tell Yukimura why, he couldn’t give a good reason, so he just bowed his head to agree. His cheek prickled from the force of Yukimura’s slap. “Forgive me,” he tried to say, but his voice didn’t work and his throat locked up and it was even more of a mess than the incident with Niou and the hair dye in the changing room showers.
When Yukimura showed up that first day at practice in August, Sanada’s heart flip-flopped so much he thought he might have a heart attack. He was a junior all over again, tripping over his feet, turning red, stammering over his words when he asked Yukimura if he wanted to use the ball machine.
Yukimura walked with pain, Sanada could tell. Yanagi whispered to him, “He should be taking the week off, just in case.”
Yukimura must have heard. He whipped his head around, jaw tense and long arm holding his racket out at Yanagi. “Get onto the court,” he told Yanagi. “I’ll show you who needs practice.”
Sanada shook his head hard enough to make his cap fall to the ground. “Yukimura, no-”
It took almost an hour for Yukimura to win. By that time the rest of the club had gone home, everyone except the eight regulars, who stood in silence and watched Yukimura pant and sweat and groan his frustration into the game. If Yanagi wasn’t playing at full strength, no one hinted about that. Sanada wasn’t entirely sure if Yanagi was or not; his eyes rested only on Yukimura.
Yukimura collapsed onto the bench after. Sanada caught him, helped him down before he hurt himself. Yukimura tried to swat him away, but his hands only waved through the air, weak and limp.
His grin was infectious. “I told you so,” Yukimura muttered.
The Nationals finals, too, were so close. Sanada expected another tight set of matches with Seigaku. He wanted revenge for losing to Echizen, bitterness still twinging his play. Yukimura said “I’ll play singles one. They’ll field Tezuka there, obviously. I’ll win it for us if it gets that far.”
Kirihara was their alternate.
Echizen was supposed to play singles two against Sanada. Yanagi calculated it out: every situation, every permutation. It wasn’t supposed to be Momoshiro.
Technically Sanada won 6-0. But Momoshiro managed to plow himself into the net trying to catch Sanada’s last dropshot and the game was declared invalid.
Yukimura won, too.
The finals went into the alternates. Akaya, try as he might, was so close but Echizen reached the State of Self-Actualization first. Echizen was one split-step ahead. Echizen scored those last two points in the tie-breaker and left Kirihara kissing dust on the court, left the entire team with silver around their necks instead of gold for a third time.
Oddly enough, Yukimura smiled at Kirihara and shook his hand after the kid’s losing game. He ruffled Kirihara’s hair in a way that Sanada wished Yukimura might touch his, with that same sort of familiar amusement and easy laughter. “Your form was good,” Yukimura told him.
He looked over to Sanada after that. His eyes were dark, unreadable in the late afternoon sun shining in streams into the arena stadium, now starting to clear of spectators. “Yours too, Sanada,” Yukimura murmured.
Even though his face was too warm and his eyes too wet, Sanada took off his cap and bowed to Yukimura. He didn’t need to say thank you with words.
***
Niou-induced headaches got worse in the autumn. And not just when Niou was around. Sanada was walking home from school with Yanagi and Yukimura one afternoon. The maples trees were on fire, brilliant shades of red against the yellow ginkos. The air was sharp with impending frost.
Sanada’s temple throbbed so hard that he fell back from the other two and squeezed his eyes shut. He tried to rub his hairline, circling with his fingertips, but it did nothing. The painkillers he’d popped at lunch still hadn’t kicked in either, four hours later.
Yanagi said, “Have you been to a dentist recently, Genichirou?”
A week later, the dentist took one look at the xray of his jaw. “Wisdom teeth,” he said.
Sanada’s mother scheduled the appointment for the day of Yagyuu’s birthday party. Not that Sanada would have wanted to go, knowing that Niou and Yagyuu would have probably wanted karaoke, cosplay, or something that Sanada would regret come morning, alcohol-induced or not.
The room for the surgery was filled with strange beeping machines that reminded Sanada a bit too much of Yukimura’s hospital room. The drip they poked into his hand even more. His heart started to pound faster, awful memories of months of worrying flooding back in a second.
“Count backwards from ten,” the anesthetist said.
Sanada froze. Think about tennis, he told himself. Think about Yuki-
He didn’t remember the rest.
If there was pain when he came to, he didn’t realize it. Sanada was aware of the cotton in his mouth, filled with the taste of his blood and then he started to heave. Bile and blood mixing in the back of his mouth and making him gag more on the cotton lumps between his cheek and jaw. A nurse came running with a bowl for him. “It’s normal,” she told Sanada’s mother. “Here’s his prescription. He can start taking it after three hours.”
The half hour between the anesthetic wearing off and being able to take his prescription was death. Sanada curled up on his futon at home and made strange noises, cotton balls still shoved in the back of his mouth. His jaw hurt like hell. His head pounded. He couldn’t even curl up properly because that meant lying on his side, lying on his jaw- accidentally doing that once taught him a good, agonizing lesson.
His brother hadn’t been through this yet- why him?
But the drugs were wonderful.
After they started to work, it didn’t matter if Sanada couldn’t drink properly and got milktea down the front of his shirt like a baby. It didn’t matter if his face was starting to puff up into the dimensions of a beach ball. It didn’t matter that his brother laughed at him during supper when Sanada was served jelly and gruellish rice instead of the grilled beef the rest of their family ate.
Sanada sat back, feeling his body loll slightly to the side, feeling something wet slide down his chin (saliva, which he did wipe up). He wasn’t even that tired, just…not…there.
Yanagi called from Yagyuu’s party. “How was it?” he asked, the only words Sanada could hear over the loud music in the background. So it was karaoke after all.
Sanada said, “It was fine.”
Somehow, the words didn’t sound like that when he heard himself speak. It was more like the slurring of a drunken old salaryman. But, at the same time, the drugs in his body made him not particularly embarrassed at all.
“Yukimura said he was going to come over,” Yanagi said, “if you’re up to seeing him.”
Sanada said yes.
Yanagi said “What?”
Sanada grunted.
Yanagi hummed, finally understanding. “I’ll tell him that, then.”
His parents, however, had other ideas. Come ten o’clock, Yukimura hadn’t shown up and his mother knocked on his bedroom door. Sanada blinked. He might have been lying around looking at old tennis magazines for the past few hours, he might not have been. He couldn’t really remember. For all he knew, he could have been thinking about Yukimura being featured in that article from August.
“Time for bed, Genichirou,” his mother said. “You’ve had a long day.”
Were Sanada all there, he would have protested, considering she was half his weight and two-thirds his height. Instead, he grunted and when she left, he put on his pajamas. It was with a pathetic sort of glee that he remembered he wouldn’t have to brush his teeth tonight, either.
Sanada stashed his magazines on his bookshelf and stood up. His head felt light, his movements dizzied. And then from the hallway, his brother shouted, “Genichirouuuuu-chan! Your friend is here!”
Sanada smiled. The drugs were really too lovely.
Yukimura breezed into his bedroom, stopping suddenly when he saw Sanada sitting cross-legged on his futon and staring back at him, albeit with less coordination and concentration. “You- your face is…” Yukimura started to snicker.
Sanada nodded. It didn’t really matter though.
Yukimura closed the door and set down the plastic bag he carried. “Your mother said you wouldn’t be able to eat the cake I brought, but…” Yukimura’s eyes narrowed and his mouth curled into a devious grin. Sanada thought he might have been spending too much time with Niou. For once, his head didn’t throb at the thought of this.
His jaw was faintly tender; he was completely out to lunch, but other than that things seemed fine to Sanada. Yukimura knelt down beside him and opened up a box. Inside sat a badly-squashed piece of what was once chocolate cake, with a section of the kanji for “Yagyuu”.
“You look a bit loopy, Sanada,” Yukimura said.
Sanada blinked again.
“Good,” Yukimura said. “I always wanted you to do this for me, but you never did. Kirihara always brought me birthday cake pieces. Or Marui.” Yukimura poked at the piece of cake with his fingers, mashing a section of frosting into the box. Sanada thought he should be trying to figure out what Yukimura was doing, but that required too much effort.
Yukimura said, “Open wide.”
Had he more dignity at the present time, Sanada would have refused. Instead, he tried his best, managing to open his mouth a centimeter, maybe. His jaw wouldn’t budge any further. Yukimura’s warm hand brushed his mouth, and a small bit of frosting was pushed onto his tongue.
Sanada moaned. The frosting was too sweet, and although he couldn’t do much more than attempt to lick Yukimura’s finger inside his mouth (and fail), he couldn’t stop himself. Yukimura smiled even wider. Drugged as he was, Sanada could still feel his body melting into his sheets.
“Hold on!” Yukimura said. He grabbed Sanada’s arm and caught his balance before lying Sanada back down onto his futon cover. Then he lay down beside Sanada, his face hovering over Sanada’s.
“You face is as round as a tennis ball, you know that?” Yukimura asked. His fingers combed through Sanada’s hair, pushing it back from his forehead.
Sanada sighed; his body continued to grow even more lethargic. Take advantage of the situation! a voice told him.
Sanada could feel his eyelids drooping. The fingers continued to move over his scalp, soothing and soft and making his mind wander into an even happier place.
“Are you done growing yet?” Yukimura asked him.
Yukimura might have kissed him on the forehead. Yukimura might have breathed onto his ear. Yukimura might have touched his hand, tickling his fingers over the back of Sanada’s, feeling the bump from where the drip poked into him.
“When you stop,” Yukimura said, talking into Sanada’s neck, “maybe I’ll have time to catch up.”
Sanada was convinced that day couldn’t come soon enough.
iv. in which Sanada is done growing. sorta.
Maybe he had hallucinated things.
It was four days before Sanada came back to tennis practice. His jaw was still puffy, but only Niou and Kirihara joked about it behind his back in the locker room. Without any more of those wonderful painkillers, the world of reality was set firmly in front of Sanada. His face was tender- his jaw, his teeth. Eating his bento at lunch was a trial on its own, with Yanagi and Yagyuu watching his every move. It didn’t help that it was more tasteless jelly, more rice, more milktea and his mouth still couldn’t open very much.
Not that he could have chewed much anyway.
And his mouth ached. A dull throbbing at the back of his mouth, blooming through his jawbone almost all the way to his ears. Sanada hid his grimacing under his cap, freshly washed by his mother so it fit all funny on his head and the brim wasn’t bent the way he liked.
During practice, Sanada kept looking towards Yukimura. Yukimura hadn’t said a word to him this morning besides “Good morning”. Sanada’s face was warm even just thinking about Yukimura. It had to be real, Yukimura visiting him. There were still crumbs on his bedroom floor from the cake. Sanada’s forehead still tingled with the memory of a kiss, and yet…
If it was real, Yukimura should have been looking at him, giving him glances, maybe. Asking if he was okay, if his jaw hurt. Yukimura should have said at least more than “Hello” in the clubhouse, then rushed off to start laps.
To Yanagi, Yukimura started asking about the practice roster for the next set of intra-team games. “I don’t think we should have Obara play in this block,” he said, pointing to Yanagi’s list. Sanada watched them, talking for five, maybe ten minutes.
Marui pranced up to the two of them, launching an attack from behind to ruffle Yukimura’s hair. Yukimura yelled and laughed and ran after Marui across the courts, before he caught up and ground his fist into Marui’s pink mop.
Sanada stomped off to the ball machines. Instinctively, he started to grind his teeth, but the fresh sting of pain made him regret that immediately. He cringed, willing the throbbing to dissipate again.
However, he’d barely managed a half dozen shots with the machine before the gymnasium doors swung open and Kirihara walked in, right alongside a smiling Yukimura.
“Oi! Fukubuchou!” Kirihara shouted.
Sanada tried to ignore the kid, but he missed the ball anyway. He grunted, looking up to catch Yukimura’s eye in the hope that…
Yukimura didn’t look at him at all. Yukimura said something to Kirihara, and then he started to twirl his racket around, looking rather bored with things.
“I wanna use the machines,” Kirihara said. “Buchou’s gonna show me a new move.”
“Yukimura,” Sanada muttered.
Yukimura said, “Come on, Akaya. Let’s start off with some 80kmph balls and use your backhand.” He walked past Sanada, his shoulder stiff and cold.
Sanada blinked.
Fine, he thought.
It was a hallucination. Yukimura wasn’t giving him the time of day. And as soon as Sanada walked out onto the main courts where he could hear Niou tell Yagyuu about the serves he had worked on with Yukimura just beforehand. Sanada’s mouth hurt even more. And his chest, too. He clenched his fist, shoved his racket in his tennisbag and went straight to the showers, ignoring the curious look Yanagi gave him.
Sanada tried to drown himself in the showers. He was alone. The first person to leave practice. He never did that, but today he didn’t care. Yanagi could tell them his jaw was sore. Niou could make jokes about him being a bigger grouch than usual. Sanada just. didn’t. care.
At the first sounds of Yagyuu and Marui’s voices in the locker room, Sanada shut the tap off. He shook his head, grabbed his towel, plodded into the locker room, and turned his back to the rest of the team. Yanagi asked him if he was fine. Sanada snorted.
Yukimura’s head appeared in the corner of Sanada’s eye. Talking with Jackal now, joking about their English teacher. Not him. Not one word to him when he had been the one Yukimura had kissed, right? Yukimura kissed him! Sanada’s forehead burned with the memory of it. He could still feel Yukimura’s hair tickling his neck.
Slamming his locker door shut, Sanada grabbed his tennisbag, his backpack and stomped out of the clubhouse. To make matters worse, the bus was packed so tight that a girl managed to propel herself into Sanada’s face at a red light, her pigtail mashing into his jaw and making him bite down on his lip so hard he was sucking blood the rest of the ride home.
He got off two stops later. His temple pulsed with angry stabbing pain. His jaw was on fire. His eyes stung. The shadows were long under tall garden walls dripping with green vines, cooler and more miserable than the pavement closer to the road. Sanada trudged through them, trying to hide himself, wishing he was smaller so that he could hide better.
He could hear Yukimura’s voice in his mind, saying his name. “Sanada…” he whispered. “Are you done growing yet…?” Sanada wanted to float off into that happy dreamy haze where Yukimura kissed him, but the real world wasn’t so nice and a passing car managed to spray exhaust into his face.
Sanada stopped for a minute, coughing and pressing his palm against a cement garden wall, squeezing his eyes shut at the renewed ache in his jaw. He needed a painkiller as soon as he got home.
“Sanada!”
Sanada kept walking. If he ignored his mind’s tricks, they might go away.
“SANADA!”
This time, Yukimura’s voice was not the calm, quiet tone it had been in his memory. Sanada slowed his pace and, swallowing the fuzzy gross feeling in his throat, he turned around, just in case.
Sanada’s throat closed up entirely when he saw Yukimura running down the sidewalk, his face red and determined, his backpack bouncing up and down. Sanada couldn’t have moved, even if he wanted to.
Yukimura was out of breath, breathing hard and leaning his hands on his knees to rest for a moment.
“Are you okay?” Sanada asked, the habit never having left him.
Yukimura wiped his forehead with his hand before rubbing the sweat onto his pants. “Why’d you leave practice like that?” he asked, panting between words.
Sanada said nothing. He inched backwards into a darker shadow.
“Sanada,” Yukimura said. He stepped closer to Sanada, making Sanada move away until the wall blocked his path. Yukimura’s hair was messy, wind-blown from running. His face was flushed. It made Sanada’s heart pound and blood rush all over his body. “Don’t be like that,” Yukimura said.
Then, Sanada felt something brush against his hand. He looked down to see Yukimura’s fingers stroking the skin on the pad of his thumb, so light it tickled. So light it made him shiver.
Sanada closed his eyes. He couldn’t look at Yukimura looking at him like that, with his eyes big and dark and shining with promise.
Yukimura’s fingertips continued to make circles and swirls over Sanada’s hand. He tried to ball it up, but Yukimura wedged his fingers between Sanada’s, their hands entwining, all sweaty and warm and wonderful.
Sanada swallowed again. It was getting hard to breath. The air felt too hot and he was sweating under his cap.
“Invite me over for dinner, you ass,” Yukimura said.
Sanada opened his eyes to blink. A hand shot out in front of his face and grabbed his cap, striking fast like lightning. Yukimura laughed and ruffled his hair, burying his free hand in Sanada’s sweat-damp hair, messing it up completely to rival his own.
“Well?” Yukimura asked.
His hand might have been shaking. His head might have been rushing, lightheaded. His mouth might have been dry, but Sanada squeezed Yukimura’s hand back and muttered, “Do you want to come for dinner?”
In that moment when Yukimura nodded, Sanada felt like he’d just asked the most grown-up question of his life.
So far.