FIC: The Great Rikkai Camping Adventure (Rikkai ensemble + D1) Part 3/3
Title: The Great Rikkai Camping Adventure: Or, he who finds the hole first, wins (Part 3/3)
Author: Ociwen
Wordcount: 19000
Pairing/Characters: Rikkai ensemble + D1
Rating: NC17
Warnings: Potential poor taste in humour.
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: A fractured fairytale about the perils of camping with one’s teammates before the Nationals…
Author's Notes: Written for 0rien in rikkai_exchange. Thank you to my friends for feedback and advice.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]
Niou hated hiking.
He really, really hated hiking.
Yesterday had the reward, albeit unknown at the time, of the waterfall pool. Today it was nothing but some temple and praying their damnedest to make sure Rikkai won the Nationals for a third time and Yukimura they achieved their dreams of glory.
There really wasn’t much in it for Niou. Sure he wanted another dangly gold medal around his neck. Sure he wanted to be a member of the three-peat National champions team. Sure he wanted to win and have awesome victory sex with Yagyuu in the stadium bathrooms…
Therein lay the problem.
Last night was disastrous.
And now, Niou was wasting yet another day wandering through the damp, smelly forest hiking toward some temple in the middle of nowhere instead of petting Yagyuu’s naked, quivering body and coming inside Yagyuu’s hot, tight ass. And wet mouth. And maybe all over his glasses, too. And god, Niou was hard again just thinking about this.
“Niou! Pick up your PACE!” Yukimura shouted.
Niou glared at the back of Yukimura’s head. Like Yukimura understood any of the physical pain he was going through at the moment, hiking with his dick hard enough to poke someone’s eye out.
Thwack!
Niou fell forward, his ankles searing in agony for a split second. He looked up to see Yanagi holding a long, green stick, whacking it softly against his palm as he smiled.
“Oh, go stuff it,” Niou muttered. You three are a bunch of assholes, not monsters…
Not only did Niou’s calves ache from yesterday, and his dick throb, but his ankles were sore, too, as they rubbed against the heels of his sneakers. It wasn’t as though they needed to walk fast: today’s path was paved in places and had terraces up several steep hills, which made it easier to walk along. Blue-tailed skinks darted across the pathway, disturbed while sunning themselves. Marui and Kirihara plodded along behind Niou, moaning about how Niou and Yagyuu kept them awake and what the hell were those freaks doing and jeez, Jackal, your snoring didn’t help.
Yagyuu and Yanagi walked behind Yukimura, wearing matching hats. They looked like they belonged in some Indiana Jones movie, especially Yanagi, who wore khaki from head to toe. Yagyuu at least wore his favourite green Lacoste polo.
Niou thought it made him look sexy. Even the dark sweat patch on his back. The way Yagyuu’s butt moved in his shorts as he walked? Niou had to fan himself with his hand to stop himself overheating completely.
Jackal was beside him, a can of coffee milk in each hand. His pockets bulged with two more can-shapes. Despite the heat (Niou was dripping with sweat and panting hard), Jackal seemed to be in good spirits in jeans.
“How the hell can you wear those?” Niou asked. He paused on a terrace step. His lungs were about to burst.
Jackal shrugged. “This is nothing compared to Brazil.” He took a swig of his coffee and strolled ahead several steps. Yanagi paused, too, and patted his stick on his palm. He smiled at Niou.
Niou forced himself to walk faster. Freaks, he thought. His pockets jingled with the coins his mother gave him. 1000 yen in fives and fifties, all for appeasing the gods Sanada pissed off.
Sanada who had some lame-ass excuse of “acute skin irritation”, according to Yanagi. So far as Niou could tell, Sanada might have just borrowed some face paint and asked Yanagi to draw some spots on. Make-up wasn’t that hard. Yagyuu had a decent knack for it.
They passed no one on the trail, although there were a couple houses. Derelict-looking, with crumbling fences and ratty-bonsai trees at the gates, but the signs of civilization were small comfort, especially to Marui.
“Can we- can we-” he gasped for his last breath, turning red in the face as he leaned against a fencepost. “-stop for a sec.”
Yukimura turned around. His eyes narrowed into slits. His lips pursed. Sweat dribbled down the sides of his face, but he made no effort to wipe it away. “Stop?” he hissed.
“Yeah,” Marui managed. “C-caaaake.”
Kirihara, dutiful little kouhai he wasn’t to Niou, solemnly unwrapped a little cake for Marui and held it out to him.
Niou blinked. And the cake was gone. Nothing left but the tiniest of crumbs at the corners of Marui’s mouth, which he duly licked off.
Niou opened his mouth to make fun of Marui somehow, but the only thing that came to mind was, at least he’s walking off all those calories this weekend.
The heat was clearly making Niou delusional.
He shook his head, ran up to Jackal and bummed a coffee milk off him. Yanagi warned them about dehydration a million times. It tasted like bitter shit (not much better than Yagyuu’s paste, but then Niou was supposed to be a good, supportive boyfriend if he wanted sex, so he ate the damn paste!), but once the caffeine kicked in, Niou’s legs didn’t hurt as much and his head was clearer.
Or, buzzing at any rate.
He pushed himself onwards and upwards. They had to be almost there.
“We’ve got to be almost there,” Yukimura called out. “Yanagi, what are our coordinates?”
456m SWS of the temple, actually, according to Yanagi’s GPS. Niou fist-aired. Jackal tapped Niou’s hand with his own fist. “Maybe there’ll be some tennis babes there,” he said.
“Yeah, you pick those babes up,” Niou muttered. He looked up at Yagyuu’s ass, directly straight ahead on the hill, lovely and round and Niou could practically feel Yagyuu’s hot skin on his fingertips.
The coffee was wearing off. He must have been imagining things again.
One last hill. They had one last hill to scale. Niou grabbed onto tree branches and dragged his feet further along. He’d get to this temple, toss his coins into an offering box, splash water onto a statue, then find a nice shady nook and take a mid-day nap. Preferably with Yagyuu nearby.
He was so close to the crest. Yukimura had already started to descend, his body lost behind a boulder blocking the view. Niou climbed. And climbed. And fell in step with Yagyuu, who ascended and then-
They stared.
Yukimura, just below them, stared too.
In shock.
In terror.
In amusement.
“Oh my GOD!” Marui screamed. He flapped around in a circle and high-fived Jackal, then Kirihara. He skipped and screamed and fell down in a sobbing mess of laughter and thanks.
A lone Familymart sat in the middle of nowhere. The green, white and blue sign shone like a mirage through the trees.
“Hmmm,” Yanagi said. “Odd.” He said nothing more.
Niou just stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged.
“Cool.”
☆ ☆ ☆
For the third time, Yukimura led them around the perimeter of the Familymart. The girl inside looked hopeful- she had bad teeth, but a cute smile.
“But- but I don’t understand!” Yukimura shouted. He stomped his feet and turned around. Then he stomped his feet some more and bashed his fists against the exterior wall. Sanada wasn’t there to stop him and no one else dared to try. “It’s supposed to be here! The temple is supposed to be here! How the hell do we pray to the tennis gods now?!”
“I even brought some money,” Niou said, scuffing his sneaker against the cracking pavement.
“We’re supposed to find the hole!” Yukimura seethed.
“I couldn’t find it either,” Niou muttered. Yagyuu’s cheeks burned. He swatted Niou on the arm and glared as best he could. The afternoon sun shone so bright and hot it was hard to do more than squint irritably.
“What hole?” Jackal asked.
“There’s a well!” Yukimura said. “We come-”
Niou pouted. “I didn’t come eith-”
Yagyuu hit him harder.
“-we clap, we drop our coins down the well, we pray and then we turn around four times-”
“That’s unlucky,” Marui said.
“-we turn around four times, summon the spirit and then we win the Nationals.”
“That sounds a bit like voodoo,” Jackal said. “Yukimura, I’m not sure summoning-”
“Are you questioning me, Jackal?” Yukimura asked. He batted his lashes and raised his eyebrows.
Jackal shut up.
“The coordinates are correct,” Yanagi said. “Where did you read about this shrine, Seiichi?” He looked up at the Familymart sign.
Kirihara stepped towards the door again. Yagyuu reached out and grabbed the back of his t-shirt to stop him. If he had to stand out in the melting heat, so did Kirihara. Those automatic sliding doors could wait.
Yukimura clenched his jaw. Then he rolled his eyes and, hand on his hip, he said, “Yanagi, according to the internet, there should be a shrine here. It was a reputable website called wikipedia- an online encyclopedia. So, obviously, your GPS and the map are both wrong because there should be a hole. Right. Here.”
Yanagi was smart enough to tell Yukimura that yes, of course, his 500 000 yen GPS was faulty. Yagyuu bit his lip and happily allowed himself be dragged inside the Familymart, where Jackal and Marui were already clutching their stomachs and howling with laughter.
It was pleasant and cool inside, the A/C cranked up high and blasting chilly air over their sticky skin. Niou stuck his head in the ice cream freezer. Marui squealed over the candy aisle. Kirihara plowed into the store, made a beeline for the comic section and then started to prance around.
“They have the new issue!” he said, shoving the magazine in front of Yagyuu’s nose, before he danced off to show Jackal, who was leafing through a soft-core porn magazine. “The new Weekly Jump! Jackal-senpai, look! It’s two days early and all mine!” Kirihara cackled. His eyes lit up, white and creepy.
Yagyuu inched away. The bentos Marui was stacking up in his arms looked awfully tempting. As did the shelf of aspirin.
Yanagi and Yukimura entered the Familymart last. Yukimura sniffed and sent the cashier dirty looks, but he’d stopped his snit, more or less, when he passed the row of medicine. “What looks best for Sanada, Yanagi? This stuff?”
“Ah,” Yanagi didn’t even so much as snort when he said, “That’s for hemorrhoids. This other one here might be better for Genichirou’s problem.”
From the freezer, Yagyuu heard Niou hiss, “The first option was better!”
Yagyuu walked over and lifted the lid. Niou grinned at him. His hair was frosted at the tips and his earlobe, pressed against containers of Hagen Daaz, looked white. Sighing, Yagyuu asked, “What should we get for supper tonight, unless you want more of my paste-”
As Niou’s grin split wider, Yagyuu immediately regretted his choice of words. He spared himself the shame and just smacked his palm to his forehead before Niou could say it.
They bought food. They bought magazines. They cleaned the bento section out completely. Yagyuu didn’t have much change in his pockets- after all, they were supposed to be camping. About all he was supposed to need was admission to the temple (which didn’t exist after all) and coins to donate (which he spent on two mandarin jellies, instead). Marui heaved his two bags of food out of the store, but Kirihara lingered by the comics.
“Akaya!” Yukimura called out. He waved a water bottle in the air.
Kirihara twitched.
Yagyuu pushed his glasses up.
Kirihara whipped his head around. His ears were perked up, like a cat’s. His eyes glimmered a faint pink colour.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“Hear what, Kirihara-kun?” Yagyuu said. Pyscho, he thought.
“I- I thought I heard a weird noise from over there,” Kirihara said, nodding to the back of the store, “It sounded like a nfu. I think someone’s spying on us!”
“Kirihara-kun,” Yagyuu said as he pushed Kirihara out of the store to where the rest of the team was waiting, “I sincerely doubt any respectable team would come here to spy on us.”
Kirihara didn’t look convinced. He scratched his forehead. Then he stroked his chin.
At this point in time, after using the washrooms in Familymart and buying up half the food (if junk food counted as food too), the thought of walking back to camp in the buzzing, hazy heat of summer seemed less than a good idea to Yagyuu. He would have been more than content to have spent his afternoon sitting beside Niou by the freezer and eating popsicles. Yagyuu had even managed to swipe some extra paper towel in the bathroom so he could clean the grime off his glasses. Amazing what a world of different wiping the smudge-marks off his glasses made! Now he could see the demonic determination in Yukimura’s eyes as he stood in the middle of their group.
Yukimura sweated. Kirihara wiped his brow off with a cloth to try to earn brownie points with their captain. “The hole should be right here,” Yukimura said.
There he goes again! Yagyuu thought. He was this close to joining Niou in rolling his eyes.
Only, Niou had wandered off.
That was never a good thing.
As Yukimura started to clap and dump his water bottle onto the side of the building, Yagyuu slipped out behind Jackal to find Niou. Yukimura clapped again. “Let me- I mean us- win the Nationals again, oh gods!”
Yagyuu crept. The pavement was sticky with melting tar. His sneakers peeled off with each footstep. He cringed.
“-hear my- our- prayer and accept this offering of a can of coke and three sticks of Lotte gum-”
Over by the vending machines, of course, Yagyuu saw Niou’s bleached hair and black t-shirt. “What are you doing?” he asked, peering over Niou’s shoulder.
As soon as Yagyuu saw the vending machine was not for drinks so much as had the labels for Durex, Trojan and Easy Glide Lubricant, he groaned. Yagyuu hauled Niou off by the elbow and, behind the drink vending machine, which conveniently hid them from the rest of the team.
“Can’t you be a little more discreet?” he hissed.
“Look,” Niou snapped. He wrenched his elbow away and rubbed at his black wristband as he glared from under his bangs. “You want to mess up again? We almost ran out of that lube last night and I’m not leaving until-”
“Until what, Niou-senpai?” Kirihara asked.
Niou sniggered. Yagyuu’s stomach shriveled up as all eyes looked at them, except Yukimura, who was still prayer-clapping with a vengeance over a random spot of pavement.
“Until I find that hole,” Niou said.
Marui rummaged through his bag. Then he whipped out a pastry and crinkled the packaging in front of Yagyuu. “Doughnut hole, anyone?”
The clapping stopped for a moment and Yukimura said, “The hole is right here. It’s just paved over. Yanagi, don’t you have any surveying equipment with you?”
Yagyuu, however, was too busy slithering to the ground. And he promptly slithered the entire way back to the campsite, too. His dignity was left somewhere in the shrubberies that Yukimura would periodically disappear into, before emerging with, yes, even more bundles of weedy flowers or sketchy-looking fungi.
Yagyuu needed a very stiff drink. And possibly a shower.
☆ ☆ ☆
The campground was quiet when they returned, plastic bags crinkling, Marui munching, sneakers crunching on the forest floor, littered now with more than just pine needles and ginko leaves.
Maybe Sanada had died.
Niou touched his mole. He didn’t mind the thought that much. Sure it meant everyone would have to play a match, but they’d still have seven players left. No biggie. Thinking about seeing his name beside the S3 on the digital scoreboard at the stadium-
It made Niou tingle in a very good way. He skipped across the campsite. Along the way, Yagyuu hung back and walked off to their tent- still standing!- with an empty water bottle. As Marui and Kirihara and Jackal set the bags of food down at their makeshift table (made up of spare tent poles, a log and three strips of grip tape), Yagyuu stumbled back over to them, chugging away at something that was not the colour of water.
Unless said water came from a bottle labeled “plum wine”…
Unfortunately, Yukimura seemed to think Sanada hadn’t kicked the bucket yet. “I need to get my gloves,” he announced, to no one in particular, before he walked over to his tent. So far as Niou was convinced, Yukimura had brought an entire bag’s worth of medical supplies- syringes, gloves, face masks, suppositories, possibly some cosplaying nurse uniforms as well. Niou hadn’t had a chance to check it out yet, what with all the ridiculous hiking.
The only thing good that had come from today’s was a) food and b) buying a new bottle of lube. Yagyuu had sure as hell better be in the mood later because as it was Niou had an off-and-on shin split and a crick in his neck from sleeping on the lumpy ground last night. He felt like crap.
No moans came from Sanada’s tent: it was only Marui eating a chocolate bar. And Kirihara swearing at his gameboy game.
Yukimura’s voice cut over top Kirihara’s “fuck you piece of shit!” when he, soft and sweetly called out, “You guys…”
They walked over to the tent. Yukimura backed away with a slightly worried furrow in his forehead. He touched his hand to his brow and breathed very shallowly. Niou and Jackal stepped behind him. If he was about to faint in the forest, they’d be fucked. Hopefully Yanagi had long-distance range on his cell.
They were all kind, considerate teammates, after all. They couldn’t lose both Sanada and Yukimura in the woods. As much as Marui might claim the contrary, Sanada and Yukimura were their top players. They kinda needed them for the finals.
Kirihara looked inside the tent first. “I’m not afraid of snakes!” he announced, for no particular reason. He cackled, but it was forced through his teeth. Gingerly, he stuck his head inside.
“Crap,” he said.
This was not good.
Marui was next. He stuck his foot inside the flap and muttered something about his gum stash. The response he had was just as bad as Kirihara.
“Crap.”
Yanagi was next. Yukimura hadn’t fainted, but he did start to fan his face and look flushed. A greenish sort of flush, with profuse sweat around his neck. Niou bent his legs and readied himself to catch their captain.
For the longest time, Yanagi said nothing. Then, he unzipped the tent flap the whole way so the rest of them could see.
A deer lay spread-eagled on top of two messy sleeping bags and piles and piles of shiny silver and cellophane wrappers. Crumbs were everywhere. The stench of animal piss and apple bubblegum was overwhelming. And to top things off, flies had started to buzz in the approximate area of where the deer’s mouth and nose were.
“Oh dear,” Yanagi said.
Far off, in the distance, Niou thought he could hear the sound of someone yelling “DAVIDE!” But then again, he’d been hallucinating earlier, so he shook the thought off.
And then, from the direction of Sanada’s tent, a voice croaked, “No…food…in the…tents…”
“This is a bad sign,” Jackal said.
Niou agreed. Dead men shouldn’t talk.
“We have to dispose of the body,” Yukimura said.
Niou raised his hand. “Can we dump him under a log?” he asked. Hell, if it was up to him, they’d leave Sanada where he was, but it might look suspicious if the authorities found Rikkai jerseys in his bags.
“He’s sacred,” Jackal said. “Or I thought so, at least.”
Niou just about choked on his tongue. Yagyuu staggered over and stuck his head into the tent, too, then he managed to trip over a deer leg and land sprawled overtop of the carcass.
“I’ll confiscate this,” Yanagi said.
“Why?” Yagyuu said, his clipped tone now a happy slur. He held his hands out to Niou. Sighing, Niou pulled him back up to his feet.
“Sanada needs to be put out of his misery before Yukimura nurses his skin irritation,” Yanagi said. Then, pausing for a thoughtful moment, he added, “We’ll give it back when we’re done.”
“Not ‘we’, Yanagi,” Yukimura snapped. He grabbed the booze bottle and nodded to the deer. “You and Niou can dispose of this. If the gods don’t know, nothing bad will happen to us. Seigaku probably planted this on us to throw off our mojo.”
Jackal looked shifty. Niou could have sworn he was mouthing “voodoo curse” at Kirihara and making cutting motions across his neck.
“Yeah!” Marui said, nodding in agreement. Kirihara did the same, only because he was too dumb and naïve to know any better. “They can’t deceive our collective Genius, ne Yukimura?
Yukimura waved his hand airily. “Get rid of this,” he said. “Marui, get my gloves. Akaya, move my bags. It stinks in here. I’ll have to move tents.”
“I can room with you guys.” Marui waggled his eyebrows at Jackal and Kirihara.
Dragging the rear end of a deer carcass was not exactly what Niou wanted to spend his Saturday afternoon doing. It smelled like shit. Literally. He’d never been around dead animals before (except his sister’s cat, but he was five at the time and barely remembered anything except that the cat fit nicely into a shoebox), so the stiffness of the thing was a bit weird. And cool. In a gross way.
Yanagi took the front end. It had the flies. And the dead glassy eyes staring up at him. And the tongue hanging out.
“So, where do we hide this that the gods can’t find it?” Niou asked, feeling like a little bit of conversation ought to help matters. Or at least drown out the groans from Sanada’s tent and the “Would you hold STILL!”s from Yukimura.
“Just behind this boulder,” Yanagi said. He dropped the front of the deer neatly beside a rock. It was maybe as big as a tire.
Not much of a hidey hole here.
Niou kicked a few leaved over the legs.
Still not hidden very well. But his hands smelled like animal- all musky and sweaty and not good. Yagyuu lurched around the campsite, half-drunk. Sanada was squealing like a pig. There was no tennis happening, and the only thing remotely sport-like they’d done was for Marui and Jackal to have just started up a competition with Kirihara as to who could belch and fart the loudest.
“Let’s go back,” Yanagi suggested. He dusted off his hands, then fished a little bottle out of his fanny pack. It looked like lube, but he rubbed it all over his hands, which made everything smell like…fake raspberries.
Niou shrugged. He pulled out his own little bottle from his pocket and rubbed some lube all over them. His hands smelled…like dead animal and lube. Yummy. Maybe it was some sort of weird disinfectant use that Yanagi had never cared to share.
Raising an eyebrow, Yanagi gave Niou a long, amused look. They tromped back through the low ferns and mossy stumps, back to the campsite. On their way to the tents, Niou removed the bottle from Yagyuu’s hands. He was too mellow to care, he just smiled back and tried to fix his glasses. With uncoordinated motions, Yagyuu only managed to get more grubby hand marks over the lenses.
Inside Sanada’s tent, Yukimura had him spread out over the sleeping bags on his stomach. Niou cringed, expecting to see naked bits of Sanada, but instead all he could see was a mess of poorly-wrapped bandages interspersed with powdery pink lotion. His hands and arms were wrapped up like a mummy. It was like really, really bad cosplay. With a moaning, groaning Sanada.
“Oh, Genchi,” Yukimura cooed. “We’re not finished yet, boo-kins. Sei-sei can’t get your chest if you lie on it like that!”
Heads crowded around the doorway. “Sanada-fukubuchou,” Kirihara said, “you look like that freaky captain from Osaka.”
“Naw,” Jackal shook his head. Then he belched.
“Big one!” Marui clapped his hands. “Very impressive.”
“Naw, Sanada plays tennis better,” Jackal said. He bowed to Marui, then to his invisible other audience.
“And he’s much better looking,” Yanagi added.
Niou stared at him. Marui’s mouth hung open. Jackal cringed. Kirihara looked puzzled. Yukimura patted Sanada’s shoulder and said, “Do you or do you not want to cream that Tezuka Kunimitsu this week? MOVE OVER so we can finish!”
Yanagi shrugged. “It’s true, though.”
It turned out that Yukimura wasn’t tuning them out entirely, not when he murmured, “Genchi-wenchi is the bestest, hottest fukubuchou ever, isn’t he?”
No one said a thing. There was no sound, except for Kirihara scratching his head.
“ISN’T HE?” Yukimura seethed, his jaw set in a line and his spit flying onto Sanada’s naked back.
“Yes!” they chorused.
Really, no one, not even Niou, could argue with their formerly-terminally-ill completely-asshole team captain who could beat them to a pulp in thirty seconds flat.
Yagyuu hiccupped.
☆ ☆ ☆
Memory was a fickle thing.
Yagyuu remembered consciously deciding to drink the alcohol. He vaguely remembered, too, wandering around the campsite- it must have still been the afternoon- and he sorta remembered seeing Yukimura straddling Sanada’s back and pulling long bandages tight over Sanada’s ribs. It was wrong, horribly wrong, so maybe his mind blanked everything out beyond that.
He came to over supper.
There was a bento, half-eaten, half on the ground by his feet. Cold soba noodles, mystery chicken yakitori skewer. There was a wet patch on the front of his polo of indeterminate origin that Yagyuu wasn’t sure he wanted to ask Niou about. Not when Niou was leering at him like that.
“I seem to have been under the weather,” Yagyuu said out loud, to no one in particular. Nevertheless, he felt the need to be somewhat apologetic, just in case he’d done something he’d regret when fully sober.
“Or under the influence,” Marui muttered. He and Jackal snickered on the other side of the fire. They had a fire again: a sparking, smoking pile of logs that Niou and Kirihara seemed to both want to poke at once with what looked suspiciously like the tent poles from Yukimura and Marui’s tent.
The tent must have been taken down after they found the dead deer. Yagyuu didn’t remember.
Sanada sat with them; in the half-shadows of dusk, his skin didn’t look so bad. He was covered in a random combination of flaking lotion and white bandages, artfully arranged in cross-hatching over his arms and a sort of weave up his calves. Yukimura fed him from a bento box.
“Say ah,” he told Sanada.
Sanada might have been scarlet. It was hard to tell in the firelight. His hair was flattened on one side and mussed up on the other, made worse by Yukimura ruffling it with his hand.
“Say. Ah!” Yukimura snapped.
Sanada said ah.
Yukimura spoon-fed him the rice. And then clapped as though Sanada had just perfected his Rai tennis move he was working on last week.
Yagyuu didn’t ask any questions. Yagyuu didn’t want any answers. He ate his supper without a word. He drank the fanta Yanagi passed him without saying anything except a polite thanks. He sat stiff and straight and watched the flames lick the darkening sky.
Tonight was considerably cooler than last night, without the warm rain and heavy clouds to seal the heat in the forest. Yagyuu didn’t quite shiver, but once or twice when the wind picked up from the opposite direction of the fire, all his leg hair pricked up.
Out of the blue, Yanagi cleared his throat. Yukimura had just returned from the tent he’d moved into (Yanagi and Sanada’s, thank god) and wore his jacket slung over his shoulders. He sat close to Sanada as Yanagi spoke.
“Did you ever hear the story about the haunted racket?”
Kirihara shook his head vehemently. Jackal perked up from the porno magazine he and Marui were not-so-discreetly looking at behind a stump. Niou kept poking embers, licking his lips a little too much like Kirihara. Sanada stiffened beside Yukimura- he wriggled a fraction of an inch closer, Yagyuu could tell.
Yagyuu just pushed his glasses up his nose. Oh? he thought.
The floodlight of the bathroom flickered in the distance. Bamboo stalks rustled in the wind, now starting to pick up again. There was a howling sound haunting the air, like a wolf, as Yanagi leaned close and shone a flashlight up from his chin.
“You want to hear about it no matter what?” Yanagi asked.
They nodded.
Yagyuu didn’t move.
“You won’t have any regrets at all?” Yanagi pressed. He leaned ever closer. The bathroom light kept flashing on and off. The flames of the fire started to subside as Niou stopped pestering them.
“Lemme get out the bananas, first,” Marui said loudly. He stood up and grinned. “Tonight, it’s banana boats!”
Yagyuu had no idea what a banana boat was, but if it made Yanagi procrastinate with the story, all the better. “I’ll help you, Marui-kun,” he offered.
Banana boats turned out to not be anything that could really float. Nominally, they contained banana, but Marui stuffed more chocolate and marshmallows into them then fruit. Yagyuu said nothing, he just wrapped the boats in foil, neatly creasing the edges on eight boat packages. They sky was black and the wind rattled the leaves overhead. Being in the middle of nowhere where bears and deer and vipers and other equally unpleasant things could get them didn’t sit well on Yagyuu’s stomach.
Plus, he didn’t like ghost stories.
He was like Sanada that way, only he tented to faint standing up. Yagyuu wasn’t scared he just…didn’t like ghosts.
Yagyuu shuddered.
“Cold?” Niou asked as Yagyuu handed the boats to him.
“No,” Yagyuu said. He pushed his glasses up. “You’re mistaken, Niou-kun.”
Niou shoved the foil packets around the fire, merrily poking at them with his stick. Kirihara returned, too, with a stick of his own and a glow to his eyes. He poked. Niou prodded.
Yanagi went on. “Shall I begin, then?” he asked. When nobody opposed him, he lowered his voice, closed his eyes and began…
“I recently received a strange email about this…”
The wind howled through the trees. Yagyuu jerked backwards when a cold current blew across his back.
“The sender was a…” Yanagi paused for a moment, “he was a tennis friend I’d met on an internet forum. His email was urgent and I was online late-”
“-was it because of that English exam we had in June?” Jackal asked.
Yanagi’s lips curled up deviously. “Yes, it was. But returning to the racket-”
Yagyuu shivered. A hush fell over them, punctuated only by the crackling of the coals and the tapping of Kirihara’s stick over Niou’s. Yagyuu gripped his bare knees and dug his fingernails in as hard as he could.
“…according to my friend, there was a racket on the ground. Because he lived in Tokyo-”
“Is this about that old friend of yours?” Yukimura asked.
Sanada grunted.
Yanagi’s eye twitched. “No,” he said, maybe a little too slowly to be believed. “No, it was a different friend. I’ve never met him face-to-face-”
“But you said he was a tennis friend,” Kirihara said. “Tokyo’s not that far, senpai.”
Yanagi breathed through his nose. “Do you want me to continue or not?”
Silence.
Yagyuu concentrated on breathing carefully. The wind, the crackling fire, the pitch-black sky overhead…He rocked forward on his stump and leaned over his stomach, trying to keep his head down so he didn’t faint.
“The email said: ‘I’ve been cursed by a racket. Please help me!’ Naturally, I was skeptical, until I checked my voice mail.”
Yanagi exhaled.
Yagyuu stopped breathing. He waited, his heart starting to race and his mind pulsing. Every twitch in the forest, every whistle of wind became a potential-
“’It’s a ghost!’” Yanagi howled.
Yagyuu stood up as fast as he could.
Seven pairs of eyes stared at him. Yanagi set the flashlight down and clasped his hands together.
“I- I need to go get my jacket!” Yagyuu said. His voice cracked, but the twigs cracked even louder under his shoes as he ran off to the tent.
Yanagi’s ghoulish chortle sent chills down Yagyuu’s spine.
He did not want to hear the rest. Banana boats or no.
☆ ☆ ☆
He found Yagyuu in the tent, maybe an hour later, after eating the weird banana concoctions of Marui’s (which turned out to be tasty, but Niou wasn’t going to let Marui know that he even arm-wrestled Kirihara for Yagyuu’s uneaten boat) and listening to Yanagi’s lame ghost story.
Haunted racket? Friend off the internet?
Niou snickered. Even Sanada rolled his eyes at one point. Or maybe that was a trick of the firelight too.
As soon as Yagyuu had rushed off, Niou got to thinking. Sex thinking, because it was dark, it was cooler tonight (almost to the point where he contemplated his jacket, but not quite) and the wind was loud enough it might drown out moans. And pants. And howls of ecstasy, because Niou was a Casanova and Yagyuu would writhe and howl from Niou’s infinite love-making skills.
Eventually.
He found Yagyuu in the tent, of course. Niou made sure to keep his footsteps quiet and his breathing minimal. Without a flashlight, he could only guess where the tree roots were so as not to trip. Ever so slowly he crouched down, unzipped the doorway one tooth at a time, and then-
“BOO!”
Niou flashed his hands. He had a big grin. Hell, he was posed to scare Yagyuu best.
Instead, Yagyuu stayed huddled on the sleeping bags with his arms around his knees. The tent smelled like sweet, fruit plum wine.
Have you been hitting the bottle again, Hiroshi? Niou thought.
“Oh, it’s you,” Yagyuu said. Or more, he breathed, all warm and heavy on the air. He untangled his limbs and stretched his arms out to Niou.
Niou was suspicious of this Yagyuu clinging to him. Of this Yagyuu wrapping his arms around Niou’s neck and kissing him sloppily on the mouth, tongue licking Niou’s chin and nostrils because Yagyuu couldn’t see a damned thing with his glasses flung off.
It was also incredibly hot.
He could taste the buzz of alcohol on Yagyuu’s saliva, on Yagyuu’s lips and it energized him. It made his dick throb between their bodies when Yagyuu leaned back and let himself be pushed down. He groaned into their kiss, tongues sliding over each other. Niou groaned, too, and combed his hands through Yagyuu’s hair. There were twigs in it. It was dirty and greasy and smelly, but so was he.
And they were going to do it, dammit!
Clothes were whipped off, faster this time because Niou was harder than ever, desperate to stick his dick in somewhere that wasn’t his fist, but slower because Yagyuu mewled and moaned and his hands didn’t work right, not when he felt the need to unbutton Niou’s t-shirt. Which had no buttons.
Some might say he was taking advantage of an intoxicated boy. Niou would say that Yagyuu was more than consensual when he slapped Niou’s naked ass and whispered, “Let’ssss fucking do it.”
He wasn’t drunk as a skunk. He’d drank just enough to let go of his inhibitions. Niou stuck his knee between Yagyuu’s legs and rubbed his dick against Yagyuu’s. It made him see stars. It made him bite back a “fucking god yes” and settle on a grumble that rose from the base of his throat. Yagyuu’s fingertips lingered everywhere on Niou’s skin- they were feverish, they were icy, they caused electric shocks of pleasure to settle in his dick.
They were sweating and panting and pre-come made things sticky and lovely and Yagyuu kept kissing Niou’s neck and sucking oh his rat tail (normally kinda gross, but hell, if it meant Yagyuu would unclench his tight ass, Niou was all for it!). Niou pinched his nipples and tried to say dirty things in Yagyuu’s ear, but somehow when Yagyuu cupped his balls and stroked the sweet spot under the head of his dick, the slit at the end, then back down under again and everything came out garbled into Yagyuu’s jaw instead.
Yagyuu was hard. Yagyuu was moaning. Yagyuu murmured “Masaharu” and panted and scraped his nails down Niou’s back. Niou made sloppy work of the condom, and sloppier work still with the lube.
But…
He found the hole.
He nearly died when his finger slid inside far enough to wiggle it around a bit. Yagyuu sucked in a breath and grunted. He touched himself- which was hotter than hot, to see Yagyuu bite his lip and work his hands harder than Niou would have thought on his balls, his dick, even licking the tips of his fingers and wetting his nipples.
Then he pressed a damp finger to Niou’s nipple.
Niou nearly came on the sleeping bag.
“Not yet,” Yagyuu whispered. “God, fuck, come inside me. Pleeease.” He practically whined. Niou shuddered and shivered so hard, he practically lost his concentration on sticking it in.
He did.
It was fucking awesome. That first, brief moment of being surrounded by something so amazingly tight and hot and slick with lube. Niou’s eyes rolled back. His thighs shook. The wind howled and he did too, thrusting his dick blindly deeper and harder, fast as he could because oh my fucking god I’m coming Hiroshi...!
After, Yagyuu lay beside him and jerked himself off with barely more than a muffled snort and then a heavy sigh. Niou couldn’t remember pulling out. But he was almost certain that squishy thing he was lying on top of was the used condom.
“We did it,” Niou whispered. The back of his throat felt dry. His body was tired, and it was hard to keep prying his eyes open to stay awake.
Fingers laced through his own and raised their joined hands in a sort of victory salute to the lone mosquito buzzing around the top of the tent.
“We did it,” Yagyuu repeated. He squeezed their hands tight.
Then he rolled over and started to snore.
☆ ☆ ☆
The first thing he did when he woke up was stretch.
And grunt.
The birds chirped loudly. Too loud. And the morning light, even though it was probably the crack of dawn, seeped through every miniscule pore of the nylon tent walls.
Yagyuu’s feet, pressed against the tent wall, were damp. And cold. He peeled himself off the sleeping bag. He was cold, too. At least the parts that weren’t pressed against Niou’s skin.
Niou was warm, naked and comfortable. As comfortable as a bony naked male teenage body could be. He was also covered in scratch marks, red rakes of nails over his shoulders and back. His thighs had odd, hickey-like marks, and so did his jaw. And forearm?
Yagyuu shook his head. It was still a bit fuzzy without his glasses on. His glasses, though, only confirmed the marks to be hickeys: deep purplish blooms across Niou’s pale skin.
No one, not even Kirihara, could mistake them for insect bites.
He had to take his morning shit. Yagyuu liked to be regular. His bowels knew the drill- wake up, shuffle to the bathroom, shit, eat breakfast, etc. This morning, though, there was a new sensation in his sphincter.
It was weird. Kinda sore, but mostly…stretched.
That would explain his and Niou’s mutual nakedness. And gradually, gradually Yagyuu’s morning brain started to have memories of last night float through: kissing Niou on the stomach, slapping Niou’s ass, hooking his leg around Niou’s jutting hipbone. The pants, the moans, the breathy sobs and “Oh god, harder!” Only Niou never did it harder because by the point he managed to hit that intangible, knee-shaking and eye-rolling spot deep inside, he was on his last vestiges of orgasm and Yagyuu got to finish himself off.
“Lazy ass,” he grumbled. Somehow, his words weren’t very nasty when his hand reached out to tuck a stray piece of hair behind Niou’s ear. Yagyuu smiled wryly.
They had finally had sex.
Adieu to virginity.
They. Had. Had. SEX.
And he really still had to take a morning dump.
By the time Yagyuu finished in the bathroom- god, the stall stunk worse than yesterday and it was hard to go when a) he kept gagging whenever he opened his mouth to breath, since his nose was plugged, and b) yesterday’s food made him the teensiest constipated- everyone else was in stages of consciousness outside the tents.
Jackal was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, teasing a red-eyed Kirihara about some secret they must have gabbed about in their tent last night. Sanada and Yanagi ate breakfast in silence. Yukimura started to take down a tent, but after one of the poles poked Sanada in the bandages, he’d been told to wait by Yanagi.
“We don’t need to meet the bus until noon,” he told Yukimura.
“Come eat, Yukimura,” Sanada said. “Your medicine needs-”
“-to be taken with food, yes, I know, Sanada. I can take my damn medicine myself!” Yukimura huffed over to the cooler and grabbed his bag of drugs. Then, he grabbed the pastry that Marui had just finished unwrapping and stuffed it into his mouth. “Haffy?” he asked Sanada.
Sanada nodded, still a bit bleary-eyed.
But he was nothing compared to Marui. He was…
Zoned out.
Out to lunch.
No one was home and all the lights were off inside.
Marui sat, mechanical and dazed, beside Niou, who was drinking a can of Red Bull Yagyuu did not want to know where from. Marui, who should have been chowing down on the pastries he bought yesterday, instead had a spot of drool at the side of his mouth, dribbling down his chin and making a wet patch on his old, bleach-spotted Rikkai jersey.
“Earth to Marui-senpai!” Kirihara said. He waved his hand in front of Marui’s face. No movement.
“Do we need to call Baron Samedi and ask him to take you back to the cemetery?” Jackal asked. He laughed.
No one else did.
“Well, you guys are idiots!” Jackal said. “He’s a zombie, get it? Like Bunta is now.”
Yagyuu nodded. He would have sat down, but his ass was still sweaty from sitting on the toilet seat for so long and also, well, his ass hurt a bit, too, from last night. He’d already had to force himself to try to walk normally and not mince back from the bathroom, lest someone notice.
“Didn’t you sleep last night?” Yukimura asked. “After Sanada rolled onto his side of the tent, I was fine.”
Sanada didn’t even blush.
Clearly he’d spent a long night awake too. Or it really was too early.
A bullfrog croaked in the quiet that followed.
Marui’s mouth moved.
Oh. Wait. It was Marui croaking.
“Snore…” he managed. “Snore. Too. Loud.”
“Eh?” Jackal and Kirihara said at the same time.
A quivering finger rose in the air as Marui pointed to Jackal and Kirihara. “You. Both. Snore.”
Then, Marui fell straight backwards off the stump he sat on, his legs bent at the knees in the air as if he was sitting on an invisible chair.
He snored louder than a shink train.
☆ ☆ ☆
They sat in separate seats on the drive home. They were all too raunchy to share, even Niou and Yagyuu, who everyone knew had been going at it last night, but it was too weird and creepy and weird to discuss.
Except for Kirihara. He thought it was a bear in the woods and wanted to throw fanta cans at it and chain it up in a zoo and name it Fuji Shuusuke.
He’d always had a sick sense of humour like that.
Yanagi sat directly behind the driver. It was closest to the A/C fan (which blew their stink to the back of the bus and away from him) and it was also where he had a good view of the wheel. You see, Yanagi loved driving. He’d never done it legally, of course, seeing as he was only fifteen, but he’d driven his father’s Porsche by now. And his mother’s Volkswagen.
A van was something he’d have to try next.
Yanagi chuckled to himself. The driver was certain to pull into the Mobil Gas Station past the turn off to Chichibu-tama National Park. He’d been constantly fingering his left breast pocket, indented with the shape of a cigarette pack. The gas meter read low. It was inevitable. The data did not lie.
Yanagi set his notebook down on the empty seat between himself and the window. Ah, there it went! The van slowed as it turned onto the off ramp towards the gas station, looming into view in the brackish sky.
He smiled. Yukimura might have dragged them out into the forest as punishment, but damned if he, Yanagi Renji, wasn’t going to have some fun of his own sometime this weekend too…
Author: Ociwen
Wordcount: 19000
Pairing/Characters: Rikkai ensemble + D1
Rating: NC17
Warnings: Potential poor taste in humour.
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: A fractured fairytale about the perils of camping with one’s teammates before the Nationals…
Author's Notes: Written for 0rien in rikkai_exchange. Thank you to my friends for feedback and advice.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]
Niou hated hiking.
He really, really hated hiking.
Yesterday had the reward, albeit unknown at the time, of the waterfall pool. Today it was nothing but some temple and praying their damnedest to make sure Rikkai won the Nationals for a third time and Yukimura they achieved their dreams of glory.
There really wasn’t much in it for Niou. Sure he wanted another dangly gold medal around his neck. Sure he wanted to be a member of the three-peat National champions team. Sure he wanted to win and have awesome victory sex with Yagyuu in the stadium bathrooms…
Therein lay the problem.
Last night was disastrous.
And now, Niou was wasting yet another day wandering through the damp, smelly forest hiking toward some temple in the middle of nowhere instead of petting Yagyuu’s naked, quivering body and coming inside Yagyuu’s hot, tight ass. And wet mouth. And maybe all over his glasses, too. And god, Niou was hard again just thinking about this.
“Niou! Pick up your PACE!” Yukimura shouted.
Niou glared at the back of Yukimura’s head. Like Yukimura understood any of the physical pain he was going through at the moment, hiking with his dick hard enough to poke someone’s eye out.
Thwack!
Niou fell forward, his ankles searing in agony for a split second. He looked up to see Yanagi holding a long, green stick, whacking it softly against his palm as he smiled.
“Oh, go stuff it,” Niou muttered. You three are a bunch of assholes, not monsters…
Not only did Niou’s calves ache from yesterday, and his dick throb, but his ankles were sore, too, as they rubbed against the heels of his sneakers. It wasn’t as though they needed to walk fast: today’s path was paved in places and had terraces up several steep hills, which made it easier to walk along. Blue-tailed skinks darted across the pathway, disturbed while sunning themselves. Marui and Kirihara plodded along behind Niou, moaning about how Niou and Yagyuu kept them awake and what the hell were those freaks doing and jeez, Jackal, your snoring didn’t help.
Yagyuu and Yanagi walked behind Yukimura, wearing matching hats. They looked like they belonged in some Indiana Jones movie, especially Yanagi, who wore khaki from head to toe. Yagyuu at least wore his favourite green Lacoste polo.
Niou thought it made him look sexy. Even the dark sweat patch on his back. The way Yagyuu’s butt moved in his shorts as he walked? Niou had to fan himself with his hand to stop himself overheating completely.
Jackal was beside him, a can of coffee milk in each hand. His pockets bulged with two more can-shapes. Despite the heat (Niou was dripping with sweat and panting hard), Jackal seemed to be in good spirits in jeans.
“How the hell can you wear those?” Niou asked. He paused on a terrace step. His lungs were about to burst.
Jackal shrugged. “This is nothing compared to Brazil.” He took a swig of his coffee and strolled ahead several steps. Yanagi paused, too, and patted his stick on his palm. He smiled at Niou.
Niou forced himself to walk faster. Freaks, he thought. His pockets jingled with the coins his mother gave him. 1000 yen in fives and fifties, all for appeasing the gods Sanada pissed off.
Sanada who had some lame-ass excuse of “acute skin irritation”, according to Yanagi. So far as Niou could tell, Sanada might have just borrowed some face paint and asked Yanagi to draw some spots on. Make-up wasn’t that hard. Yagyuu had a decent knack for it.
They passed no one on the trail, although there were a couple houses. Derelict-looking, with crumbling fences and ratty-bonsai trees at the gates, but the signs of civilization were small comfort, especially to Marui.
“Can we- can we-” he gasped for his last breath, turning red in the face as he leaned against a fencepost. “-stop for a sec.”
Yukimura turned around. His eyes narrowed into slits. His lips pursed. Sweat dribbled down the sides of his face, but he made no effort to wipe it away. “Stop?” he hissed.
“Yeah,” Marui managed. “C-caaaake.”
Kirihara, dutiful little kouhai he wasn’t to Niou, solemnly unwrapped a little cake for Marui and held it out to him.
Niou blinked. And the cake was gone. Nothing left but the tiniest of crumbs at the corners of Marui’s mouth, which he duly licked off.
Niou opened his mouth to make fun of Marui somehow, but the only thing that came to mind was, at least he’s walking off all those calories this weekend.
The heat was clearly making Niou delusional.
He shook his head, ran up to Jackal and bummed a coffee milk off him. Yanagi warned them about dehydration a million times. It tasted like bitter shit (not much better than Yagyuu’s paste, but then Niou was supposed to be a good, supportive boyfriend if he wanted sex, so he ate the damn paste!), but once the caffeine kicked in, Niou’s legs didn’t hurt as much and his head was clearer.
Or, buzzing at any rate.
He pushed himself onwards and upwards. They had to be almost there.
“We’ve got to be almost there,” Yukimura called out. “Yanagi, what are our coordinates?”
456m SWS of the temple, actually, according to Yanagi’s GPS. Niou fist-aired. Jackal tapped Niou’s hand with his own fist. “Maybe there’ll be some tennis babes there,” he said.
“Yeah, you pick those babes up,” Niou muttered. He looked up at Yagyuu’s ass, directly straight ahead on the hill, lovely and round and Niou could practically feel Yagyuu’s hot skin on his fingertips.
The coffee was wearing off. He must have been imagining things again.
One last hill. They had one last hill to scale. Niou grabbed onto tree branches and dragged his feet further along. He’d get to this temple, toss his coins into an offering box, splash water onto a statue, then find a nice shady nook and take a mid-day nap. Preferably with Yagyuu nearby.
He was so close to the crest. Yukimura had already started to descend, his body lost behind a boulder blocking the view. Niou climbed. And climbed. And fell in step with Yagyuu, who ascended and then-
They stared.
Yukimura, just below them, stared too.
In shock.
In terror.
In amusement.
“Oh my GOD!” Marui screamed. He flapped around in a circle and high-fived Jackal, then Kirihara. He skipped and screamed and fell down in a sobbing mess of laughter and thanks.
A lone Familymart sat in the middle of nowhere. The green, white and blue sign shone like a mirage through the trees.
“Hmmm,” Yanagi said. “Odd.” He said nothing more.
Niou just stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged.
“Cool.”
☆ ☆ ☆
For the third time, Yukimura led them around the perimeter of the Familymart. The girl inside looked hopeful- she had bad teeth, but a cute smile.
“But- but I don’t understand!” Yukimura shouted. He stomped his feet and turned around. Then he stomped his feet some more and bashed his fists against the exterior wall. Sanada wasn’t there to stop him and no one else dared to try. “It’s supposed to be here! The temple is supposed to be here! How the hell do we pray to the tennis gods now?!”
“I even brought some money,” Niou said, scuffing his sneaker against the cracking pavement.
“We’re supposed to find the hole!” Yukimura seethed.
“I couldn’t find it either,” Niou muttered. Yagyuu’s cheeks burned. He swatted Niou on the arm and glared as best he could. The afternoon sun shone so bright and hot it was hard to do more than squint irritably.
“What hole?” Jackal asked.
“There’s a well!” Yukimura said. “We come-”
Niou pouted. “I didn’t come eith-”
Yagyuu hit him harder.
“-we clap, we drop our coins down the well, we pray and then we turn around four times-”
“That’s unlucky,” Marui said.
“-we turn around four times, summon the spirit and then we win the Nationals.”
“That sounds a bit like voodoo,” Jackal said. “Yukimura, I’m not sure summoning-”
“Are you questioning me, Jackal?” Yukimura asked. He batted his lashes and raised his eyebrows.
Jackal shut up.
“The coordinates are correct,” Yanagi said. “Where did you read about this shrine, Seiichi?” He looked up at the Familymart sign.
Kirihara stepped towards the door again. Yagyuu reached out and grabbed the back of his t-shirt to stop him. If he had to stand out in the melting heat, so did Kirihara. Those automatic sliding doors could wait.
Yukimura clenched his jaw. Then he rolled his eyes and, hand on his hip, he said, “Yanagi, according to the internet, there should be a shrine here. It was a reputable website called wikipedia- an online encyclopedia. So, obviously, your GPS and the map are both wrong because there should be a hole. Right. Here.”
Yanagi was smart enough to tell Yukimura that yes, of course, his 500 000 yen GPS was faulty. Yagyuu bit his lip and happily allowed himself be dragged inside the Familymart, where Jackal and Marui were already clutching their stomachs and howling with laughter.
It was pleasant and cool inside, the A/C cranked up high and blasting chilly air over their sticky skin. Niou stuck his head in the ice cream freezer. Marui squealed over the candy aisle. Kirihara plowed into the store, made a beeline for the comic section and then started to prance around.
“They have the new issue!” he said, shoving the magazine in front of Yagyuu’s nose, before he danced off to show Jackal, who was leafing through a soft-core porn magazine. “The new Weekly Jump! Jackal-senpai, look! It’s two days early and all mine!” Kirihara cackled. His eyes lit up, white and creepy.
Yagyuu inched away. The bentos Marui was stacking up in his arms looked awfully tempting. As did the shelf of aspirin.
Yanagi and Yukimura entered the Familymart last. Yukimura sniffed and sent the cashier dirty looks, but he’d stopped his snit, more or less, when he passed the row of medicine. “What looks best for Sanada, Yanagi? This stuff?”
“Ah,” Yanagi didn’t even so much as snort when he said, “That’s for hemorrhoids. This other one here might be better for Genichirou’s problem.”
From the freezer, Yagyuu heard Niou hiss, “The first option was better!”
Yagyuu walked over and lifted the lid. Niou grinned at him. His hair was frosted at the tips and his earlobe, pressed against containers of Hagen Daaz, looked white. Sighing, Yagyuu asked, “What should we get for supper tonight, unless you want more of my paste-”
As Niou’s grin split wider, Yagyuu immediately regretted his choice of words. He spared himself the shame and just smacked his palm to his forehead before Niou could say it.
They bought food. They bought magazines. They cleaned the bento section out completely. Yagyuu didn’t have much change in his pockets- after all, they were supposed to be camping. About all he was supposed to need was admission to the temple (which didn’t exist after all) and coins to donate (which he spent on two mandarin jellies, instead). Marui heaved his two bags of food out of the store, but Kirihara lingered by the comics.
“Akaya!” Yukimura called out. He waved a water bottle in the air.
Kirihara twitched.
Yagyuu pushed his glasses up.
Kirihara whipped his head around. His ears were perked up, like a cat’s. His eyes glimmered a faint pink colour.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“Hear what, Kirihara-kun?” Yagyuu said. Pyscho, he thought.
“I- I thought I heard a weird noise from over there,” Kirihara said, nodding to the back of the store, “It sounded like a nfu. I think someone’s spying on us!”
“Kirihara-kun,” Yagyuu said as he pushed Kirihara out of the store to where the rest of the team was waiting, “I sincerely doubt any respectable team would come here to spy on us.”
Kirihara didn’t look convinced. He scratched his forehead. Then he stroked his chin.
At this point in time, after using the washrooms in Familymart and buying up half the food (if junk food counted as food too), the thought of walking back to camp in the buzzing, hazy heat of summer seemed less than a good idea to Yagyuu. He would have been more than content to have spent his afternoon sitting beside Niou by the freezer and eating popsicles. Yagyuu had even managed to swipe some extra paper towel in the bathroom so he could clean the grime off his glasses. Amazing what a world of different wiping the smudge-marks off his glasses made! Now he could see the demonic determination in Yukimura’s eyes as he stood in the middle of their group.
Yukimura sweated. Kirihara wiped his brow off with a cloth to try to earn brownie points with their captain. “The hole should be right here,” Yukimura said.
There he goes again! Yagyuu thought. He was this close to joining Niou in rolling his eyes.
Only, Niou had wandered off.
That was never a good thing.
As Yukimura started to clap and dump his water bottle onto the side of the building, Yagyuu slipped out behind Jackal to find Niou. Yukimura clapped again. “Let me- I mean us- win the Nationals again, oh gods!”
Yagyuu crept. The pavement was sticky with melting tar. His sneakers peeled off with each footstep. He cringed.
“-hear my- our- prayer and accept this offering of a can of coke and three sticks of Lotte gum-”
Over by the vending machines, of course, Yagyuu saw Niou’s bleached hair and black t-shirt. “What are you doing?” he asked, peering over Niou’s shoulder.
As soon as Yagyuu saw the vending machine was not for drinks so much as had the labels for Durex, Trojan and Easy Glide Lubricant, he groaned. Yagyuu hauled Niou off by the elbow and, behind the drink vending machine, which conveniently hid them from the rest of the team.
“Can’t you be a little more discreet?” he hissed.
“Look,” Niou snapped. He wrenched his elbow away and rubbed at his black wristband as he glared from under his bangs. “You want to mess up again? We almost ran out of that lube last night and I’m not leaving until-”
“Until what, Niou-senpai?” Kirihara asked.
Niou sniggered. Yagyuu’s stomach shriveled up as all eyes looked at them, except Yukimura, who was still prayer-clapping with a vengeance over a random spot of pavement.
“Until I find that hole,” Niou said.
Marui rummaged through his bag. Then he whipped out a pastry and crinkled the packaging in front of Yagyuu. “Doughnut hole, anyone?”
The clapping stopped for a moment and Yukimura said, “The hole is right here. It’s just paved over. Yanagi, don’t you have any surveying equipment with you?”
Yagyuu, however, was too busy slithering to the ground. And he promptly slithered the entire way back to the campsite, too. His dignity was left somewhere in the shrubberies that Yukimura would periodically disappear into, before emerging with, yes, even more bundles of weedy flowers or sketchy-looking fungi.
Yagyuu needed a very stiff drink. And possibly a shower.
☆ ☆ ☆
The campground was quiet when they returned, plastic bags crinkling, Marui munching, sneakers crunching on the forest floor, littered now with more than just pine needles and ginko leaves.
Maybe Sanada had died.
Niou touched his mole. He didn’t mind the thought that much. Sure it meant everyone would have to play a match, but they’d still have seven players left. No biggie. Thinking about seeing his name beside the S3 on the digital scoreboard at the stadium-
It made Niou tingle in a very good way. He skipped across the campsite. Along the way, Yagyuu hung back and walked off to their tent- still standing!- with an empty water bottle. As Marui and Kirihara and Jackal set the bags of food down at their makeshift table (made up of spare tent poles, a log and three strips of grip tape), Yagyuu stumbled back over to them, chugging away at something that was not the colour of water.
Unless said water came from a bottle labeled “plum wine”…
Unfortunately, Yukimura seemed to think Sanada hadn’t kicked the bucket yet. “I need to get my gloves,” he announced, to no one in particular, before he walked over to his tent. So far as Niou was convinced, Yukimura had brought an entire bag’s worth of medical supplies- syringes, gloves, face masks, suppositories, possibly some cosplaying nurse uniforms as well. Niou hadn’t had a chance to check it out yet, what with all the ridiculous hiking.
The only thing good that had come from today’s was a) food and b) buying a new bottle of lube. Yagyuu had sure as hell better be in the mood later because as it was Niou had an off-and-on shin split and a crick in his neck from sleeping on the lumpy ground last night. He felt like crap.
No moans came from Sanada’s tent: it was only Marui eating a chocolate bar. And Kirihara swearing at his gameboy game.
Yukimura’s voice cut over top Kirihara’s “fuck you piece of shit!” when he, soft and sweetly called out, “You guys…”
They walked over to the tent. Yukimura backed away with a slightly worried furrow in his forehead. He touched his hand to his brow and breathed very shallowly. Niou and Jackal stepped behind him. If he was about to faint in the forest, they’d be fucked. Hopefully Yanagi had long-distance range on his cell.
They were all kind, considerate teammates, after all. They couldn’t lose both Sanada and Yukimura in the woods. As much as Marui might claim the contrary, Sanada and Yukimura were their top players. They kinda needed them for the finals.
Kirihara looked inside the tent first. “I’m not afraid of snakes!” he announced, for no particular reason. He cackled, but it was forced through his teeth. Gingerly, he stuck his head inside.
“Crap,” he said.
This was not good.
Marui was next. He stuck his foot inside the flap and muttered something about his gum stash. The response he had was just as bad as Kirihara.
“Crap.”
Yanagi was next. Yukimura hadn’t fainted, but he did start to fan his face and look flushed. A greenish sort of flush, with profuse sweat around his neck. Niou bent his legs and readied himself to catch their captain.
For the longest time, Yanagi said nothing. Then, he unzipped the tent flap the whole way so the rest of them could see.
A deer lay spread-eagled on top of two messy sleeping bags and piles and piles of shiny silver and cellophane wrappers. Crumbs were everywhere. The stench of animal piss and apple bubblegum was overwhelming. And to top things off, flies had started to buzz in the approximate area of where the deer’s mouth and nose were.
“Oh dear,” Yanagi said.
Far off, in the distance, Niou thought he could hear the sound of someone yelling “DAVIDE!” But then again, he’d been hallucinating earlier, so he shook the thought off.
And then, from the direction of Sanada’s tent, a voice croaked, “No…food…in the…tents…”
“This is a bad sign,” Jackal said.
Niou agreed. Dead men shouldn’t talk.
“We have to dispose of the body,” Yukimura said.
Niou raised his hand. “Can we dump him under a log?” he asked. Hell, if it was up to him, they’d leave Sanada where he was, but it might look suspicious if the authorities found Rikkai jerseys in his bags.
“He’s sacred,” Jackal said. “Or I thought so, at least.”
Niou just about choked on his tongue. Yagyuu staggered over and stuck his head into the tent, too, then he managed to trip over a deer leg and land sprawled overtop of the carcass.
“I’ll confiscate this,” Yanagi said.
“Why?” Yagyuu said, his clipped tone now a happy slur. He held his hands out to Niou. Sighing, Niou pulled him back up to his feet.
“Sanada needs to be put out of his misery before Yukimura nurses his skin irritation,” Yanagi said. Then, pausing for a thoughtful moment, he added, “We’ll give it back when we’re done.”
“Not ‘we’, Yanagi,” Yukimura snapped. He grabbed the booze bottle and nodded to the deer. “You and Niou can dispose of this. If the gods don’t know, nothing bad will happen to us. Seigaku probably planted this on us to throw off our mojo.”
Jackal looked shifty. Niou could have sworn he was mouthing “voodoo curse” at Kirihara and making cutting motions across his neck.
“Yeah!” Marui said, nodding in agreement. Kirihara did the same, only because he was too dumb and naïve to know any better. “They can’t deceive our collective Genius, ne Yukimura?
Yukimura waved his hand airily. “Get rid of this,” he said. “Marui, get my gloves. Akaya, move my bags. It stinks in here. I’ll have to move tents.”
“I can room with you guys.” Marui waggled his eyebrows at Jackal and Kirihara.
Dragging the rear end of a deer carcass was not exactly what Niou wanted to spend his Saturday afternoon doing. It smelled like shit. Literally. He’d never been around dead animals before (except his sister’s cat, but he was five at the time and barely remembered anything except that the cat fit nicely into a shoebox), so the stiffness of the thing was a bit weird. And cool. In a gross way.
Yanagi took the front end. It had the flies. And the dead glassy eyes staring up at him. And the tongue hanging out.
“So, where do we hide this that the gods can’t find it?” Niou asked, feeling like a little bit of conversation ought to help matters. Or at least drown out the groans from Sanada’s tent and the “Would you hold STILL!”s from Yukimura.
“Just behind this boulder,” Yanagi said. He dropped the front of the deer neatly beside a rock. It was maybe as big as a tire.
Not much of a hidey hole here.
Niou kicked a few leaved over the legs.
Still not hidden very well. But his hands smelled like animal- all musky and sweaty and not good. Yagyuu lurched around the campsite, half-drunk. Sanada was squealing like a pig. There was no tennis happening, and the only thing remotely sport-like they’d done was for Marui and Jackal to have just started up a competition with Kirihara as to who could belch and fart the loudest.
“Let’s go back,” Yanagi suggested. He dusted off his hands, then fished a little bottle out of his fanny pack. It looked like lube, but he rubbed it all over his hands, which made everything smell like…fake raspberries.
Niou shrugged. He pulled out his own little bottle from his pocket and rubbed some lube all over them. His hands smelled…like dead animal and lube. Yummy. Maybe it was some sort of weird disinfectant use that Yanagi had never cared to share.
Raising an eyebrow, Yanagi gave Niou a long, amused look. They tromped back through the low ferns and mossy stumps, back to the campsite. On their way to the tents, Niou removed the bottle from Yagyuu’s hands. He was too mellow to care, he just smiled back and tried to fix his glasses. With uncoordinated motions, Yagyuu only managed to get more grubby hand marks over the lenses.
Inside Sanada’s tent, Yukimura had him spread out over the sleeping bags on his stomach. Niou cringed, expecting to see naked bits of Sanada, but instead all he could see was a mess of poorly-wrapped bandages interspersed with powdery pink lotion. His hands and arms were wrapped up like a mummy. It was like really, really bad cosplay. With a moaning, groaning Sanada.
“Oh, Genchi,” Yukimura cooed. “We’re not finished yet, boo-kins. Sei-sei can’t get your chest if you lie on it like that!”
Heads crowded around the doorway. “Sanada-fukubuchou,” Kirihara said, “you look like that freaky captain from Osaka.”
“Naw,” Jackal shook his head. Then he belched.
“Big one!” Marui clapped his hands. “Very impressive.”
“Naw, Sanada plays tennis better,” Jackal said. He bowed to Marui, then to his invisible other audience.
“And he’s much better looking,” Yanagi added.
Niou stared at him. Marui’s mouth hung open. Jackal cringed. Kirihara looked puzzled. Yukimura patted Sanada’s shoulder and said, “Do you or do you not want to cream that Tezuka Kunimitsu this week? MOVE OVER so we can finish!”
Yanagi shrugged. “It’s true, though.”
It turned out that Yukimura wasn’t tuning them out entirely, not when he murmured, “Genchi-wenchi is the bestest, hottest fukubuchou ever, isn’t he?”
No one said a thing. There was no sound, except for Kirihara scratching his head.
“ISN’T HE?” Yukimura seethed, his jaw set in a line and his spit flying onto Sanada’s naked back.
“Yes!” they chorused.
Really, no one, not even Niou, could argue with their formerly-terminally-ill completely-asshole team captain who could beat them to a pulp in thirty seconds flat.
Yagyuu hiccupped.
☆ ☆ ☆
Memory was a fickle thing.
Yagyuu remembered consciously deciding to drink the alcohol. He vaguely remembered, too, wandering around the campsite- it must have still been the afternoon- and he sorta remembered seeing Yukimura straddling Sanada’s back and pulling long bandages tight over Sanada’s ribs. It was wrong, horribly wrong, so maybe his mind blanked everything out beyond that.
He came to over supper.
There was a bento, half-eaten, half on the ground by his feet. Cold soba noodles, mystery chicken yakitori skewer. There was a wet patch on the front of his polo of indeterminate origin that Yagyuu wasn’t sure he wanted to ask Niou about. Not when Niou was leering at him like that.
“I seem to have been under the weather,” Yagyuu said out loud, to no one in particular. Nevertheless, he felt the need to be somewhat apologetic, just in case he’d done something he’d regret when fully sober.
“Or under the influence,” Marui muttered. He and Jackal snickered on the other side of the fire. They had a fire again: a sparking, smoking pile of logs that Niou and Kirihara seemed to both want to poke at once with what looked suspiciously like the tent poles from Yukimura and Marui’s tent.
The tent must have been taken down after they found the dead deer. Yagyuu didn’t remember.
Sanada sat with them; in the half-shadows of dusk, his skin didn’t look so bad. He was covered in a random combination of flaking lotion and white bandages, artfully arranged in cross-hatching over his arms and a sort of weave up his calves. Yukimura fed him from a bento box.
“Say ah,” he told Sanada.
Sanada might have been scarlet. It was hard to tell in the firelight. His hair was flattened on one side and mussed up on the other, made worse by Yukimura ruffling it with his hand.
“Say. Ah!” Yukimura snapped.
Sanada said ah.
Yukimura spoon-fed him the rice. And then clapped as though Sanada had just perfected his Rai tennis move he was working on last week.
Yagyuu didn’t ask any questions. Yagyuu didn’t want any answers. He ate his supper without a word. He drank the fanta Yanagi passed him without saying anything except a polite thanks. He sat stiff and straight and watched the flames lick the darkening sky.
Tonight was considerably cooler than last night, without the warm rain and heavy clouds to seal the heat in the forest. Yagyuu didn’t quite shiver, but once or twice when the wind picked up from the opposite direction of the fire, all his leg hair pricked up.
Out of the blue, Yanagi cleared his throat. Yukimura had just returned from the tent he’d moved into (Yanagi and Sanada’s, thank god) and wore his jacket slung over his shoulders. He sat close to Sanada as Yanagi spoke.
“Did you ever hear the story about the haunted racket?”
Kirihara shook his head vehemently. Jackal perked up from the porno magazine he and Marui were not-so-discreetly looking at behind a stump. Niou kept poking embers, licking his lips a little too much like Kirihara. Sanada stiffened beside Yukimura- he wriggled a fraction of an inch closer, Yagyuu could tell.
Yagyuu just pushed his glasses up his nose. Oh? he thought.
The floodlight of the bathroom flickered in the distance. Bamboo stalks rustled in the wind, now starting to pick up again. There was a howling sound haunting the air, like a wolf, as Yanagi leaned close and shone a flashlight up from his chin.
“You want to hear about it no matter what?” Yanagi asked.
They nodded.
Yagyuu didn’t move.
“You won’t have any regrets at all?” Yanagi pressed. He leaned ever closer. The bathroom light kept flashing on and off. The flames of the fire started to subside as Niou stopped pestering them.
“Lemme get out the bananas, first,” Marui said loudly. He stood up and grinned. “Tonight, it’s banana boats!”
Yagyuu had no idea what a banana boat was, but if it made Yanagi procrastinate with the story, all the better. “I’ll help you, Marui-kun,” he offered.
Banana boats turned out to not be anything that could really float. Nominally, they contained banana, but Marui stuffed more chocolate and marshmallows into them then fruit. Yagyuu said nothing, he just wrapped the boats in foil, neatly creasing the edges on eight boat packages. They sky was black and the wind rattled the leaves overhead. Being in the middle of nowhere where bears and deer and vipers and other equally unpleasant things could get them didn’t sit well on Yagyuu’s stomach.
Plus, he didn’t like ghost stories.
He was like Sanada that way, only he tented to faint standing up. Yagyuu wasn’t scared he just…didn’t like ghosts.
Yagyuu shuddered.
“Cold?” Niou asked as Yagyuu handed the boats to him.
“No,” Yagyuu said. He pushed his glasses up. “You’re mistaken, Niou-kun.”
Niou shoved the foil packets around the fire, merrily poking at them with his stick. Kirihara returned, too, with a stick of his own and a glow to his eyes. He poked. Niou prodded.
Yanagi went on. “Shall I begin, then?” he asked. When nobody opposed him, he lowered his voice, closed his eyes and began…
“I recently received a strange email about this…”
The wind howled through the trees. Yagyuu jerked backwards when a cold current blew across his back.
“The sender was a…” Yanagi paused for a moment, “he was a tennis friend I’d met on an internet forum. His email was urgent and I was online late-”
“-was it because of that English exam we had in June?” Jackal asked.
Yanagi’s lips curled up deviously. “Yes, it was. But returning to the racket-”
Yagyuu shivered. A hush fell over them, punctuated only by the crackling of the coals and the tapping of Kirihara’s stick over Niou’s. Yagyuu gripped his bare knees and dug his fingernails in as hard as he could.
“…according to my friend, there was a racket on the ground. Because he lived in Tokyo-”
“Is this about that old friend of yours?” Yukimura asked.
Sanada grunted.
Yanagi’s eye twitched. “No,” he said, maybe a little too slowly to be believed. “No, it was a different friend. I’ve never met him face-to-face-”
“But you said he was a tennis friend,” Kirihara said. “Tokyo’s not that far, senpai.”
Yanagi breathed through his nose. “Do you want me to continue or not?”
Silence.
Yagyuu concentrated on breathing carefully. The wind, the crackling fire, the pitch-black sky overhead…He rocked forward on his stump and leaned over his stomach, trying to keep his head down so he didn’t faint.
“The email said: ‘I’ve been cursed by a racket. Please help me!’ Naturally, I was skeptical, until I checked my voice mail.”
Yanagi exhaled.
Yagyuu stopped breathing. He waited, his heart starting to race and his mind pulsing. Every twitch in the forest, every whistle of wind became a potential-
“’It’s a ghost!’” Yanagi howled.
Yagyuu stood up as fast as he could.
Seven pairs of eyes stared at him. Yanagi set the flashlight down and clasped his hands together.
“I- I need to go get my jacket!” Yagyuu said. His voice cracked, but the twigs cracked even louder under his shoes as he ran off to the tent.
Yanagi’s ghoulish chortle sent chills down Yagyuu’s spine.
He did not want to hear the rest. Banana boats or no.
☆ ☆ ☆
He found Yagyuu in the tent, maybe an hour later, after eating the weird banana concoctions of Marui’s (which turned out to be tasty, but Niou wasn’t going to let Marui know that he even arm-wrestled Kirihara for Yagyuu’s uneaten boat) and listening to Yanagi’s lame ghost story.
Haunted racket? Friend off the internet?
Niou snickered. Even Sanada rolled his eyes at one point. Or maybe that was a trick of the firelight too.
As soon as Yagyuu had rushed off, Niou got to thinking. Sex thinking, because it was dark, it was cooler tonight (almost to the point where he contemplated his jacket, but not quite) and the wind was loud enough it might drown out moans. And pants. And howls of ecstasy, because Niou was a Casanova and Yagyuu would writhe and howl from Niou’s infinite love-making skills.
Eventually.
He found Yagyuu in the tent, of course. Niou made sure to keep his footsteps quiet and his breathing minimal. Without a flashlight, he could only guess where the tree roots were so as not to trip. Ever so slowly he crouched down, unzipped the doorway one tooth at a time, and then-
“BOO!”
Niou flashed his hands. He had a big grin. Hell, he was posed to scare Yagyuu best.
Instead, Yagyuu stayed huddled on the sleeping bags with his arms around his knees. The tent smelled like sweet, fruit plum wine.
Have you been hitting the bottle again, Hiroshi? Niou thought.
“Oh, it’s you,” Yagyuu said. Or more, he breathed, all warm and heavy on the air. He untangled his limbs and stretched his arms out to Niou.
Niou was suspicious of this Yagyuu clinging to him. Of this Yagyuu wrapping his arms around Niou’s neck and kissing him sloppily on the mouth, tongue licking Niou’s chin and nostrils because Yagyuu couldn’t see a damned thing with his glasses flung off.
It was also incredibly hot.
He could taste the buzz of alcohol on Yagyuu’s saliva, on Yagyuu’s lips and it energized him. It made his dick throb between their bodies when Yagyuu leaned back and let himself be pushed down. He groaned into their kiss, tongues sliding over each other. Niou groaned, too, and combed his hands through Yagyuu’s hair. There were twigs in it. It was dirty and greasy and smelly, but so was he.
And they were going to do it, dammit!
Clothes were whipped off, faster this time because Niou was harder than ever, desperate to stick his dick in somewhere that wasn’t his fist, but slower because Yagyuu mewled and moaned and his hands didn’t work right, not when he felt the need to unbutton Niou’s t-shirt. Which had no buttons.
Some might say he was taking advantage of an intoxicated boy. Niou would say that Yagyuu was more than consensual when he slapped Niou’s naked ass and whispered, “Let’ssss fucking do it.”
He wasn’t drunk as a skunk. He’d drank just enough to let go of his inhibitions. Niou stuck his knee between Yagyuu’s legs and rubbed his dick against Yagyuu’s. It made him see stars. It made him bite back a “fucking god yes” and settle on a grumble that rose from the base of his throat. Yagyuu’s fingertips lingered everywhere on Niou’s skin- they were feverish, they were icy, they caused electric shocks of pleasure to settle in his dick.
They were sweating and panting and pre-come made things sticky and lovely and Yagyuu kept kissing Niou’s neck and sucking oh his rat tail (normally kinda gross, but hell, if it meant Yagyuu would unclench his tight ass, Niou was all for it!). Niou pinched his nipples and tried to say dirty things in Yagyuu’s ear, but somehow when Yagyuu cupped his balls and stroked the sweet spot under the head of his dick, the slit at the end, then back down under again and everything came out garbled into Yagyuu’s jaw instead.
Yagyuu was hard. Yagyuu was moaning. Yagyuu murmured “Masaharu” and panted and scraped his nails down Niou’s back. Niou made sloppy work of the condom, and sloppier work still with the lube.
But…
He found the hole.
He nearly died when his finger slid inside far enough to wiggle it around a bit. Yagyuu sucked in a breath and grunted. He touched himself- which was hotter than hot, to see Yagyuu bite his lip and work his hands harder than Niou would have thought on his balls, his dick, even licking the tips of his fingers and wetting his nipples.
Then he pressed a damp finger to Niou’s nipple.
Niou nearly came on the sleeping bag.
“Not yet,” Yagyuu whispered. “God, fuck, come inside me. Pleeease.” He practically whined. Niou shuddered and shivered so hard, he practically lost his concentration on sticking it in.
He did.
It was fucking awesome. That first, brief moment of being surrounded by something so amazingly tight and hot and slick with lube. Niou’s eyes rolled back. His thighs shook. The wind howled and he did too, thrusting his dick blindly deeper and harder, fast as he could because oh my fucking god I’m coming Hiroshi...!
After, Yagyuu lay beside him and jerked himself off with barely more than a muffled snort and then a heavy sigh. Niou couldn’t remember pulling out. But he was almost certain that squishy thing he was lying on top of was the used condom.
“We did it,” Niou whispered. The back of his throat felt dry. His body was tired, and it was hard to keep prying his eyes open to stay awake.
Fingers laced through his own and raised their joined hands in a sort of victory salute to the lone mosquito buzzing around the top of the tent.
“We did it,” Yagyuu repeated. He squeezed their hands tight.
Then he rolled over and started to snore.
☆ ☆ ☆
The first thing he did when he woke up was stretch.
And grunt.
The birds chirped loudly. Too loud. And the morning light, even though it was probably the crack of dawn, seeped through every miniscule pore of the nylon tent walls.
Yagyuu’s feet, pressed against the tent wall, were damp. And cold. He peeled himself off the sleeping bag. He was cold, too. At least the parts that weren’t pressed against Niou’s skin.
Niou was warm, naked and comfortable. As comfortable as a bony naked male teenage body could be. He was also covered in scratch marks, red rakes of nails over his shoulders and back. His thighs had odd, hickey-like marks, and so did his jaw. And forearm?
Yagyuu shook his head. It was still a bit fuzzy without his glasses on. His glasses, though, only confirmed the marks to be hickeys: deep purplish blooms across Niou’s pale skin.
No one, not even Kirihara, could mistake them for insect bites.
He had to take his morning shit. Yagyuu liked to be regular. His bowels knew the drill- wake up, shuffle to the bathroom, shit, eat breakfast, etc. This morning, though, there was a new sensation in his sphincter.
It was weird. Kinda sore, but mostly…stretched.
That would explain his and Niou’s mutual nakedness. And gradually, gradually Yagyuu’s morning brain started to have memories of last night float through: kissing Niou on the stomach, slapping Niou’s ass, hooking his leg around Niou’s jutting hipbone. The pants, the moans, the breathy sobs and “Oh god, harder!” Only Niou never did it harder because by the point he managed to hit that intangible, knee-shaking and eye-rolling spot deep inside, he was on his last vestiges of orgasm and Yagyuu got to finish himself off.
“Lazy ass,” he grumbled. Somehow, his words weren’t very nasty when his hand reached out to tuck a stray piece of hair behind Niou’s ear. Yagyuu smiled wryly.
They had finally had sex.
Adieu to virginity.
They. Had. Had. SEX.
And he really still had to take a morning dump.
By the time Yagyuu finished in the bathroom- god, the stall stunk worse than yesterday and it was hard to go when a) he kept gagging whenever he opened his mouth to breath, since his nose was plugged, and b) yesterday’s food made him the teensiest constipated- everyone else was in stages of consciousness outside the tents.
Jackal was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, teasing a red-eyed Kirihara about some secret they must have gabbed about in their tent last night. Sanada and Yanagi ate breakfast in silence. Yukimura started to take down a tent, but after one of the poles poked Sanada in the bandages, he’d been told to wait by Yanagi.
“We don’t need to meet the bus until noon,” he told Yukimura.
“Come eat, Yukimura,” Sanada said. “Your medicine needs-”
“-to be taken with food, yes, I know, Sanada. I can take my damn medicine myself!” Yukimura huffed over to the cooler and grabbed his bag of drugs. Then, he grabbed the pastry that Marui had just finished unwrapping and stuffed it into his mouth. “Haffy?” he asked Sanada.
Sanada nodded, still a bit bleary-eyed.
But he was nothing compared to Marui. He was…
Zoned out.
Out to lunch.
No one was home and all the lights were off inside.
Marui sat, mechanical and dazed, beside Niou, who was drinking a can of Red Bull Yagyuu did not want to know where from. Marui, who should have been chowing down on the pastries he bought yesterday, instead had a spot of drool at the side of his mouth, dribbling down his chin and making a wet patch on his old, bleach-spotted Rikkai jersey.
“Earth to Marui-senpai!” Kirihara said. He waved his hand in front of Marui’s face. No movement.
“Do we need to call Baron Samedi and ask him to take you back to the cemetery?” Jackal asked. He laughed.
No one else did.
“Well, you guys are idiots!” Jackal said. “He’s a zombie, get it? Like Bunta is now.”
Yagyuu nodded. He would have sat down, but his ass was still sweaty from sitting on the toilet seat for so long and also, well, his ass hurt a bit, too, from last night. He’d already had to force himself to try to walk normally and not mince back from the bathroom, lest someone notice.
“Didn’t you sleep last night?” Yukimura asked. “After Sanada rolled onto his side of the tent, I was fine.”
Sanada didn’t even blush.
Clearly he’d spent a long night awake too. Or it really was too early.
A bullfrog croaked in the quiet that followed.
Marui’s mouth moved.
Oh. Wait. It was Marui croaking.
“Snore…” he managed. “Snore. Too. Loud.”
“Eh?” Jackal and Kirihara said at the same time.
A quivering finger rose in the air as Marui pointed to Jackal and Kirihara. “You. Both. Snore.”
Then, Marui fell straight backwards off the stump he sat on, his legs bent at the knees in the air as if he was sitting on an invisible chair.
He snored louder than a shink train.
☆ ☆ ☆
They sat in separate seats on the drive home. They were all too raunchy to share, even Niou and Yagyuu, who everyone knew had been going at it last night, but it was too weird and creepy and weird to discuss.
Except for Kirihara. He thought it was a bear in the woods and wanted to throw fanta cans at it and chain it up in a zoo and name it Fuji Shuusuke.
He’d always had a sick sense of humour like that.
Yanagi sat directly behind the driver. It was closest to the A/C fan (which blew their stink to the back of the bus and away from him) and it was also where he had a good view of the wheel. You see, Yanagi loved driving. He’d never done it legally, of course, seeing as he was only fifteen, but he’d driven his father’s Porsche by now. And his mother’s Volkswagen.
A van was something he’d have to try next.
Yanagi chuckled to himself. The driver was certain to pull into the Mobil Gas Station past the turn off to Chichibu-tama National Park. He’d been constantly fingering his left breast pocket, indented with the shape of a cigarette pack. The gas meter read low. It was inevitable. The data did not lie.
Yanagi set his notebook down on the empty seat between himself and the window. Ah, there it went! The van slowed as it turned onto the off ramp towards the gas station, looming into view in the brackish sky.
He smiled. Yukimura might have dragged them out into the forest as punishment, but damned if he, Yanagi Renji, wasn’t going to have some fun of his own sometime this weekend too…