Stand-Alone: Tsuke ga Mawaru (Pay the Piper)
Title: Tsuke ga Mawaru (Pay the Piper)
Rating: Meringue
Pairing: None, really, but AtoJi if you want to see it that way.
For: my creative writing class. Yep. So it's tailored for an unsuspecting audience, so to speak. Surprisingly, they liked it.
Notes: No, I don't know if it's finished, honestly. It's... AN ending, so to speak. Yes, it lacks a middle. Yes, it was supposed to have a middle. And... er, as I don't know, by this point, if I'm EVER going to write the intended ending, well... anyone who wants to know what it was can just, er, ask? ^^;
Notes Part 2: This is the UNREVISED version of the story. Looked over by typhoid_mary, oh yes, whose plotbunny this was originally. ^_^ Yes, there is a rewritten version (virtually identical in subject matter, a little different in style and scene) but I felt like posting two of them was probably overkill. I am probably not inflicting this story on the tenipuri_yaoi community, I think...
Notes Part 3: This is entirely too many notes for a fic that's this short... XD <----no, not even a little bit of confidence in this story...
WARNINGS: Uh, it's almost perfectly yaoi-less, but kind of, uh, dark in subject matter. AND. Anyone who's all that fond of Kirihara being, you know, cute, silly, sleepy, etc... yeah, NOT HAPPENING. I have NEVER seen the episodes with Kirihara in them. Anyone who flames me for my portrayal of him has been warned, okay?
Disclaimer: Hey, it could happen... but, er, it didn't. And won't. ^^; Because these are not my boys.
Tsuke ga Mawaru (Pay the Piper)
Once upon a time, there was a boy who slept.
*_*_*_*
"Tsuke ga mawaru tte?"
"To iu koto wa... shiai ga owaranai mon. Zettai owaranai. Wakatteru?"
"...zenzen. Nemui kara ka mo...gomen, Atobe."
"...Baka. Shikkari shirou, Jirou."
*_*_*_*
"What does 'Pay the Piper' mean?"
"It means... the game doesn't end. Never really. Do you understand?"
"...Nope. I guess 'cause I'm sleepy... sorry, Atobe."
"...You idiot. Get yourself together, Jirou."
*_*_*_*
The light, when it came through the window, was almost the shade of year-end peaches rolling in fat mouthfulls across the white sheets, and bruising off Jirou's brightly dyed blonde hair, tousled as he curled on his side, his eyes closed--as always.
He looked so damned small in that hospital bed.
"How is he?" Atobe heard his voice biting sharply away at the syllables that split, bitter as grape seeds in his mouth, and Ootori's head jerked up from seemingly blank contemplation of the way the wind shattered delicate white petals on the window glass as he snapped to his feet, the book that had been on his lap crashing to the floor with its pages splayed like careless legs.
His shift had ended quite awhile ago, but Atobe knew well that Ootori wouldn't leave unless someone came to replace him. He was a good kouhai--he'd watch over his diminutive upperclassman, even if it meant missing a meal. Atobe had meant to be back an hour before, but the talks with the student council hadn't gone well--he'd been too on edge to concentrate, and had snapped at one member coldly enough that she'd broken down in fat tears. He hadn't apologised--he never needed to apologise--simply walked out, by that point, and damn the whispers that had floated behind him and pushed him through that door. He'd never cared when people talked about him before.
Ootori looked down at him, eyes dimly empty of tears, before he bit his lip. "I don't know, Atobe-buchou," he whispered, and the voice was a summer breeze that didn't move the curtains or cool overheated skin, thick, stifling because Ootori couldn't ever keep his emotions from his voice. "He's still asleep."
Atobe closed his eyes to press away the scorn--or was it nausea?--as the quaver in Ootori's voice caught in the back of his throat, and reached for the metal of the bed frame--he hated the way it shone so coldly, but then again, he'd always hated hospitals. Jirou was too bright and small on that bed to be incarcerated in this too-hot white box, watched over by seven team members who weren't dwarves. He wasn't a surgeon's tool to be sterilised. Their coach had thought differently. How could he have sent Jirou back out onto the court? "Of course he's asleep. He's a hypersomniac. It's an actual condition. Remember?"
Ootori's breath stuttered in his throat, and he bit his lip to look away; suddenly, that lip, too, was pale and empty, bloodless as the room, and Atobe frowned. "I... I... yes, but--"
Ootori's partner would snap and snarl and call him a bastard again, and be in general a drama queen if Atobe somehow managed to hurt Ootori's tender feelings, and as entertaining as it was to watch sometimes, he didn't feel like playing with Shishido right now. Atobe paced, restless, to the TV, turned it on so that the only sounds in his room were not his breathing, or the echo behind his ears of their coach telling Jirou very, very softly to get back onto the courts, to win that game. The whining soprano chirp of a newscaster could drown out an hollow voice that couldn't have come from his own throat, and yet had, had damned dignity, damned any chance at making it to the Nationals, and told Jirou to lose. "Did the x-rays come in yet?"
Ootori's lip trembled, firmed, blood rushing back into it and past it to pool in his face, as he straightened where he stood, fingers rushing to the cross pitted silver at his throat--yes, there was still steel in him, it hadn't all melted to slag when Jirou had crumpled to the ground after the match, clutching his leg to his chest. Ootori's paper heart hadn't burnt to tin-laced ashes when Jirou had stumbled back from the side bench, back to his feet, and kept on playing. Good. Atobe couldn't afford weakness on his team, not ever, not then, not now. "No, buchou. W-why would anyone want to hurt Jirou-san?"
Atobe turned away from the question, from the way Ootori called him 'captain' with such painful hope. The room was hideous, really, melted with water and the prints of other people's pain to a stain in the corner, and the TV blurred with static like Ootori's eyes were blurred still. It would have been easy to tell his kouhai, naïve underclassman that he was, that Kirihara hadn't meant to hurt Jirou--or, rather, he hadn't meant to hurt Jirou in particular. He'd simply had every intention of hurting the boy who would be playing across from him, Singles Two at the Kantou regional finals. It would have been easy, and it would have been the truth, because Kirihara was known for playing a destructive game--except, even knowing that, it didn't matter.
Not even Ootori--as raw as he was, sometimes, the youngest in years where Jirou was the youngest of them all, mirror mirror on the wall--would have believed the lie that wasn't quite a lie--because Kirihara had grinned, oh yes, grinned, and when his grip had loosened halfway through his smash, the racquet sailing across the net and striking Jirou's knee...
Atobe saw it every time he closed his eyes, because Jirou had been smiling, too--he always smiled when he played, joy enough to fill his small body and spill upwards into hands that were too big for his frame, awkward as a tadpole that would never be a frog prince. It was the only time he was actually awake enough to smile like that, all teeth and mischief--and the sight of those wide, cheerful eyes going too wide, for an instant, before the racquet smashed into his bent knee, had been like the sensation of an elegant festival fan stretched to its limits between his hands before it crumpled.
Jirou had already been on the ground. He dove for the ball too often, Atobe told him that, he'd told him that too many times until there was no longer any point to wasting his breath on the stubborn boy. Jirou never listened, not even to his team captain--simply took kobujutsu classes so he'd learn how to fall without hurting himself.
"This is the way I play, Atobe," he'd chirruped, dropping a towel over his sunshining hair before he'd flopped onto the bleachers, on his stomach, and rested his chin on the crook of his elbow. "You play your tennis, and I play mine. Ne?"
"What are you still doing here, Ootori?" Atobe snapped, and Ootori jumped. "Go home."
The eyes were accusing, but there weren't any questions left in a mouth that screwed itself as tight as the lock on the windows, and Atobe wouldn't have answered any even if the boy had asked. Ootori stalked stiff-legged for the bed as if he had his nonexistent tail between his long legs, a mournful russet look over his shoulder before he patted Jirou's head once and left, but Atobe had known that he would. They all obeyed him, except Jirou, Singles Two, who had the finest wristwork that anyone had ever seen--utterly unexpected in someone who barely passed his classes because he was barely awake for most of them.
His team always had been under his voice, he was Atobe Keigo, buchou, captain of Hyotei Gakuen's tennis team, undefeated in seven years of playing, president of the Student Council, and why hadn't Jirou listened to him?
Atobe didn't realise that Jirou was awake--probably nudged from his dreamland by Ootori's pat--until a finger prodded him in the small of his back, a pinprick that might have been a spindle's worth of guilt over the empty look in Ootori's eyes, and he jumped.
"Shouldn't be mean to 'Tori-chu, Atobe," Jirou's voice was warm and heavy as spun gold with slumber, but then, it always was. He chuckled, eyes still closed, dark under lids traced delicately with fingertip veins. "Not his fault. I played a good game, huh?"
Atobe could have predicted the moment Jirou yawned, stretching his arms upwards before he finally opened his eyes and blinked upwards, looking rather confused, at the IV that was a papery silver sliver on his tanned forearm before he brought it down and poked at it. "Leastwise it's not my wrist. That'd be bad." Poke. Poke. "This itches."
Atobe closed his eyes. Jirou didn't understand, but considering that, given the choice and a lack of the prescribed stimulants that kept him semi-lucid through classes, Jirou would be asleep seventeen hours out of the day... how could he? When Jirou really only woke up, really woke up, for tennis practice, how could he really understand how badly a shattered knee could affect his game? There was no telling a sleeping beauty that there was no escape from the stab of bone-tipped thorns, crusting on a damaged joint.
They all watched out for him, as it was--they had to. Jirou asleep was harmless, drawn on by classmates so often that the team members all carried wipes to smudge away the sad circus mask, Jirou awake ineffably cheerful until even the sourfaced Shishido, Princess and Prick, had to smile at him. There were few people that Atobe felt worth his time to sit with in the hospital, but really--he suddenly wondered if perhaps there wasn't something else he was supposed to be doing, so he didn't have to respond to that. Jirou's wristwork and serve-and-volley might have been his specialty, but... how could anyone volley if they couldn't get to the net to do it?
"Sorry I..." Jirou yawned, mouth swallowing his eyes, and Atobe no longer bothered telling him to cover his mouth when he did that. "I couldn't win. I know you could've beat Sanada if we'd gone on to Singles One. I mean, you're Atobe, right? No-one's cooler than you." He grinned, and flashed a fingertip V. "Guess... guess we're out of the Nationals. Oh well."
Atobe's voice was thick and strange with the sensation of Jirou's smile pushing against his eyes, the flavour of words in his mouth sickly sweet as an overdose of the cherry petals shattering outside the window that should have marked them going to Nationals, should have marked their graduation, and he wondered if perhaps this was what betrayal tasted like. "Don't worry about it."
Cherry bark had cyanide in it, he'd been told.
Jirou smiled up at him, sweet, his eyes slivers of chocolate underneath a half-open wrapper before he curled over again and snuggled into the hard hospital pillow. Atobe had to remember to bring him one of the down ones from his own room. "I'm not. S'okay. Just a game, right? And then the next time I play him... what's his name? I know he's from Rikkai, but..."
"Kirihara," Atobe supplied, the clash of hard spat stops in his mouth walking him down the path of pins, the scars that had crawled onto his palms because his fists had been too hard when Jirou had chosen--yes, chosen--to walk back onto the court to destroy the rest of his career. Their coach had told Jirou to win in his deep, undeniable voice; Atobe had told him to drop the game before it put him in the hospital. Jirou hadn't listened to either of them. The idiot. The idiot.
"Kirihara," the syllables were blurred with the sleepy optimism, sleepier confidence, voice melting to a mumble as Jirou's eyes drifted closed again, dreamy little smile curling his lips. "That's it. I'll beat him. No stupid accidents next time."
Atobe opened his mouth to tell his Singles Two player--there were no accidents, in the games they played, and was it sweet, or funny, or simply pitiful that Jirou was likely the only person on the team who honestly believed that it had been one?
But the sakura broke against the window as if the petals fought to clog his throat, beating in his eyes like swans' wings, and he said, instead, something that bloomed like bloodred roses in a beast's garden pushing onto his lips, "When you get better. But I'll beat you at chess now."
*_*_*_*
The first question Jirou had asked the doctor, rubbing one eye drowsily as he stretched upwards, as if to reach for the little tennis-racquet dangler that one of the team had brought him for luck, had been "So when can I play again, sensei?"
The racquet grip was too thin over the delicate frame of metal, thin as the leathery hold that Atobe had on his temper, and coarse in his hand--he'd meant to replace it, but with this, and that, and standing awkwardly at the cracked-open door, time had melted with silvery heat into anger when Jirou's parents told the boy curled into a twist of misery on the staid white sheets, well, he really should have been more careful, he'd taken this tennis thing too seriously for too long, and wasn't it about time that he really started working on the rest of his life? He'd been skipping his cram school classes to play tennis? What had he been thinking?
Jirou didn't cry--Atobe didn't think much of boys crying, in any case--but for the first time, tapping his foot as he waited for Kirihara to come to the net, Atobe wondered if Jirou knew how, because Jirou had simply turned his face from his parents and toyed with the petals of the small branch of flowering sakura that Ootori had brought him, ripping them to accusing fragments as soft as the brace on his leg before he'd spread them onto the covers on his lap and patted them into patterns, as if in apology.
The right wrist, first, Atobe decided. It would make the rest easier. Kirihara was right-handed, and there were no shimpan, no coaches lounging in too-hot tweed suits on the coaching benches by the courts, just two teams lined out on the bleachers, as if at a tournament--witnesses, bathed in colourless spotlights.
This court was theirs, Tokyo was theirs, and it didn't matter if Jirou had been coiled in the hospital that afternoon because the doctors thought that maybe surgery could fix him, tie his torn ligaments in sailor knots to mend together his spirits, or maybe it couldn't. Maybe there wasn't anything that could hold together the slippery golden fragments of Jirou's characteristic optimism, when the doctor had too-gently informed him that he would be fortunate if he could walk, and if he were sensible, he would never play tennis again.
Kirihara was taller than Atobe remembered, a ghastly grinning imp in an offensively yellow jersey standing across the net from him, with a handful of gel plastering his hair to tousled horns, and his eyes reddened with mirth in the cold light as he chuckled, holding out his hand for the shake across the net. He didn't bother to lower his racquet from his shoulder, hand wrapped around it like a leatherbound weapon. "Am I going to be able to break you as easily as I broke your Singles Two, Atobe?" he cocked his head, and his eyes twinkled with Nativity cheer. Merry Christmas! "He sucked. Okay, yeah, sure, he fell, and my grip slipped, but geez, couldn't he keep it together?"
It was likely a good thing that the rest of the varsity team had either a hold on their tempers or a hold on their doubles partners. He'd led them well. He always had.
But who would hold back Atobe?
He didn't bother raising his hand to shake Kirihara's, which lingered above the heavy white of the net, suspended like a slender, pale spider with three of its legs shredded. "Smooth or rough?" Atobe balanced his racquet on its edge, waiting for the whirlwind.
Kirihara looked down at his hand, as if he couldn't believe it were his, before pulling it back and smirking. "Sanada-buchou never said you had bad manners, Atobe. Should've known. Hyotei brats are all alike. Rough."
The racquet was a silver spindle in his hand as it spun, coarse as the words that he would not let free before it fell. It was 'smooth,' Atobe's racquet clattering to the ground on the so-empty tennis courts with his initial on its base upright, all points and angles aiming for the sky in a beanstalk of lettering, and he took the serve, reaching higher yet with the reverberation of impact shuddering like screaming harpsong down his arm.
It was strange to play on an empty court, with no-one but his varsity team--seven, minus one sunshine head, lined up in their crisp blue track suits without needing a salute--and Rikkaidai's, vivid as Jirou's hair in their signature yellow jerseys. No-one cheered when he took the first point, and his breath reverberated behind his ears like a shock whenever he coaxed at his prey with the face of his silver racquet, driving him further and further towards the baseline despite pitiful efforts to distract him by aiming at his joints. Pitiful. Atobe didn't play for fun--he never had. The lob came, a distant soaring pinprick of yellow that crashed from the sky, and Atobe smirked and reached for it--not copper, not silver, but gold.
He was famous for his smash--pinpointed, a shot for the body, but no-one ever learned--no-one ever saw it coming who had not played him before, or even if they had, crying Wolf! Wolf! like lost children whenever his elbow jerked upwards for the shot. Kirihara's smirk, stretched wide in a wasted grin underneath the white lights that left hollow shadows cast by his hair, sepulchral on pale skin, twitched to a grimace when Atobe's first smash crashed into his wrist and sent his racquet clattering to the ground like the applause of empty cherry branches, and Atobe bowed to them, a long sweep of his arm outwards.
It was no longer anything even resembling a smile, Kirihara's lips peeled back until his teeth were resplendent and skeletal under the lights that drowned his eyes, by the fourth time, or the fifth, or the tenth, and adrenaline sounded like hounds baying in Atobe's ears when it pounded in time with every stroke, a keening like the petals that had been between Jirou's fingers were crying, or perhaps that was the sounds that Jirou had made, little broken echoes, nothing at all like his triumphant "Hah!" gasp, every time he'd put his weight onto his injured knee.
Atobe had decided. It would be the right wrist, first. Then the right shoulder. Then the left knee. Then the right, if Kirihara lasted that long--and Atobe could make absolutely certain that he did. It wouldn't be the first career he'd broken--simply the first one that he'd aimed for for a reason other than that he could.
It was Japanese tradition, after all--for every gift given, to give one back fourfold.
"Atobe?" it would have been a puppy's yelp when its tail was trampled on, a swallow's shivering wings, if it hadn't been his name. "Atobe, why--what's happening?"
It was reflex, first, to turn, the ball in his hand loose as a bird he was about to free, and snarl, "You know better than to come onto the court in the middle of a game."
Then he blinked, because with the world focusing in slow reverberations to something other than the opponent across from him, Jirou looked taller, somehow, on crutches, a blonde giant in miniature in the wrong garden. But perhaps that was because the props were too long for him and they hauled him onto his tiptoes until he teetered--and even still, he barely passed Atobe's shoulders, looking up at him with eyes that swam in the sweat gathering along the bridge of Atobe's nose.
"Why aren't you in the hospital?" he bit out, adrenaline sweet and silky as another spring midnight behind his tongue, and his pulse pounded in the grip he had in his racquet, rolled like a poisoned apple in his mouth with something that might have almost been shame, tasting of cherry blossoms in the wind that whipped his jersey and lashed his face with petals. Out of the corner of his eyes, Kirihara rubbed at his wrist, sullenly, and the pink of his tongue seemed so vulgar when he licked his lips. Atobe looked away, repulsed.
"Mari--she called, she said that you were playing Kirihara." Jirou's eyes were wide, the whites about them clouded with the reflections of the light that made his pupils jerk, between shadows and spotlight. "You didn't tell me."
There was no response he could give to that, and not even Jirou, with his eyes clear despite the late hour--someone must have given him chocolate, or coffee--could possibly be naïve enough that he couldn't see why. "You're holding up the game, Jirou," he pressed the ball in his hand, but there was no magic to it to make him disappear, and the gold was a fool's.
Perhaps it was only the shadows, or the wind, but Jirou's chin tilted upwards in something that might have almost been defiance. "You're not playing fair, Atobe."
Yes. No. Don't you want to break him, Jirou? he'd asked, and Jirou had not understood, perhaps because it had been Jirou's choice, in the end, to walk back into the courts.
"You mean beat him? I want to beat him. People can't be broken," Jirou had replied.
Atobe raised his head back, tossing his hair from his temples with a flick of his wrist. "You said it yourself. It's just a game," he shook his head--and pushed Jirou from the court with one hand, nudging. "Go watch from the bench coach seat, if you want."
It's just a game.
Jirou's chin tilted visibly upwards, mouth parted as he hopped, lacking anything that might have even been considered dignity as his legs swung like a toy model's towards the bench by the side of the courts, tongued with darkness away from the merciless spotlights, and his crutches were awkward stilts. "Don't use it. Okay?" he settled onto the bench with a clatter of wood and something that might have almost been an uncoordinated golden sense of poise. "Don't. That's... that's not fun, Atobe!"
And Jirou's game was all about 'fun', wasn't it...?
How funny--how very, very funny, when he'd knocked Jirou's racquet out of his hand a dozen times, a hundred, over the years they'd been on the team together, and Jirou had--he'd laughed, anything but ordinary when he tossed his head back and sparkled as he snatched his racquet up again, bouncing on the tips of his toes with eyes wondering at more than a name.
Atobe served, pulling, the stretch on his shoulder not so different from the stretch on his soul to accommodate Jirou's request. It was strange to feel the sensations of his own body sliding against itself when he checked the angle of his wrist to send the ball to corners, not at a wisp of mustard-gas yellow that he couldn't disperse. It was an insult, that burning of muscles that clenched in the way he had trained them to and were denied their release, the way Kirihara's smile burnt wider and wider in gaping white as the boy rushed helter and skelter to return one shot, then another, his crimson racquet loose in a wrist swollen enough that even in the hectic shadows, Atobe imagined that perhaps he could see it throb underneath skin, tell-tale heartbeat.
But the utterly irreverent 'Go Atobe!' that broke the punctuated, solemn silence from the bleachers was carried by the wind further than Kirihara's smirk and the sickly scent of sakura, and oh, he could laugh for Jirou, just this once--rushing to the net for a volley that made Jirou squeal, throwing his arms out with enough exuberance that there was a rattle of crutches to the ceramic floor covering the sound of Kirihara's hiss when he reached for the ball and missed.
Winning had never been an issue. He was Atobe Keigo, he was undefeated, and no vicious brat with a few nasty tricks was going to drown out the fact that victory rose in his throat in bubbles like Jirou's applause, despite the fact that his fans were noticeably absent from the courts, and his team was utterly silent.
He was Hyotei's captain, and the score was five to three. It was strange how quickly match point came when he wasn't trying to draw it out. It was strange how he'd never really noticed how much Jirou enjoyed watching him play, when he played to win, not to crush.
Atobe smiled, once, at a team whose backs were straight as toy soldiers', at the static that ran empty through his head like the noise ofa blurred TV in an empty white hospital room, or the sound of a flute that he could almost hear. He never took his eyes off the ball--he never, ever took his eyes off the ball, but Jirou's hair burned his eyes in the court's lights from the bench coach position, blinding him with something that might have been hatred. In the middle of his famous smash, Atobe watched with distant, surprised pleasure as his racquet soared from his hand as gracefully as a mermaid rising in slow coasts of foam, sweet suicide.
"Sorry," he whispered expressionlessly, in memoriam, and the sight of Kirihara clutching at his knee, patella too far to the right in an empty insectoid shell that had crawled underneath his skin, was too different from the tiny cries Jirou had made when he'd played to actually touch him. He didn't look at the sudden vacant silence from the bench at the courtside, limned by spotlights. "My grip slipped."
~owari~
Start: March 14, 2004
End: March 15, 2004
Rating: Meringue
Pairing: None, really, but AtoJi if you want to see it that way.
For: my creative writing class. Yep. So it's tailored for an unsuspecting audience, so to speak. Surprisingly, they liked it.
Notes: No, I don't know if it's finished, honestly. It's... AN ending, so to speak. Yes, it lacks a middle. Yes, it was supposed to have a middle. And... er, as I don't know, by this point, if I'm EVER going to write the intended ending, well... anyone who wants to know what it was can just, er, ask? ^^;
Notes Part 2: This is the UNREVISED version of the story. Looked over by typhoid_mary, oh yes, whose plotbunny this was originally. ^_^ Yes, there is a rewritten version (virtually identical in subject matter, a little different in style and scene) but I felt like posting two of them was probably overkill. I am probably not inflicting this story on the tenipuri_yaoi community, I think...
Notes Part 3: This is entirely too many notes for a fic that's this short... XD <----no, not even a little bit of confidence in this story...
WARNINGS: Uh, it's almost perfectly yaoi-less, but kind of, uh, dark in subject matter. AND. Anyone who's all that fond of Kirihara being, you know, cute, silly, sleepy, etc... yeah, NOT HAPPENING. I have NEVER seen the episodes with Kirihara in them. Anyone who flames me for my portrayal of him has been warned, okay?
Disclaimer: Hey, it could happen... but, er, it didn't. And won't. ^^; Because these are not my boys.
Tsuke ga Mawaru (Pay the Piper)
Once upon a time, there was a boy who slept.
*_*_*_*
"Tsuke ga mawaru tte?"
"To iu koto wa... shiai ga owaranai mon. Zettai owaranai. Wakatteru?"
"...zenzen. Nemui kara ka mo...gomen, Atobe."
"...Baka. Shikkari shirou, Jirou."
*_*_*_*
"What does 'Pay the Piper' mean?"
"It means... the game doesn't end. Never really. Do you understand?"
"...Nope. I guess 'cause I'm sleepy... sorry, Atobe."
"...You idiot. Get yourself together, Jirou."
*_*_*_*
The light, when it came through the window, was almost the shade of year-end peaches rolling in fat mouthfulls across the white sheets, and bruising off Jirou's brightly dyed blonde hair, tousled as he curled on his side, his eyes closed--as always.
He looked so damned small in that hospital bed.
"How is he?" Atobe heard his voice biting sharply away at the syllables that split, bitter as grape seeds in his mouth, and Ootori's head jerked up from seemingly blank contemplation of the way the wind shattered delicate white petals on the window glass as he snapped to his feet, the book that had been on his lap crashing to the floor with its pages splayed like careless legs.
His shift had ended quite awhile ago, but Atobe knew well that Ootori wouldn't leave unless someone came to replace him. He was a good kouhai--he'd watch over his diminutive upperclassman, even if it meant missing a meal. Atobe had meant to be back an hour before, but the talks with the student council hadn't gone well--he'd been too on edge to concentrate, and had snapped at one member coldly enough that she'd broken down in fat tears. He hadn't apologised--he never needed to apologise--simply walked out, by that point, and damn the whispers that had floated behind him and pushed him through that door. He'd never cared when people talked about him before.
Ootori looked down at him, eyes dimly empty of tears, before he bit his lip. "I don't know, Atobe-buchou," he whispered, and the voice was a summer breeze that didn't move the curtains or cool overheated skin, thick, stifling because Ootori couldn't ever keep his emotions from his voice. "He's still asleep."
Atobe closed his eyes to press away the scorn--or was it nausea?--as the quaver in Ootori's voice caught in the back of his throat, and reached for the metal of the bed frame--he hated the way it shone so coldly, but then again, he'd always hated hospitals. Jirou was too bright and small on that bed to be incarcerated in this too-hot white box, watched over by seven team members who weren't dwarves. He wasn't a surgeon's tool to be sterilised. Their coach had thought differently. How could he have sent Jirou back out onto the court? "Of course he's asleep. He's a hypersomniac. It's an actual condition. Remember?"
Ootori's breath stuttered in his throat, and he bit his lip to look away; suddenly, that lip, too, was pale and empty, bloodless as the room, and Atobe frowned. "I... I... yes, but--"
Ootori's partner would snap and snarl and call him a bastard again, and be in general a drama queen if Atobe somehow managed to hurt Ootori's tender feelings, and as entertaining as it was to watch sometimes, he didn't feel like playing with Shishido right now. Atobe paced, restless, to the TV, turned it on so that the only sounds in his room were not his breathing, or the echo behind his ears of their coach telling Jirou very, very softly to get back onto the courts, to win that game. The whining soprano chirp of a newscaster could drown out an hollow voice that couldn't have come from his own throat, and yet had, had damned dignity, damned any chance at making it to the Nationals, and told Jirou to lose. "Did the x-rays come in yet?"
Ootori's lip trembled, firmed, blood rushing back into it and past it to pool in his face, as he straightened where he stood, fingers rushing to the cross pitted silver at his throat--yes, there was still steel in him, it hadn't all melted to slag when Jirou had crumpled to the ground after the match, clutching his leg to his chest. Ootori's paper heart hadn't burnt to tin-laced ashes when Jirou had stumbled back from the side bench, back to his feet, and kept on playing. Good. Atobe couldn't afford weakness on his team, not ever, not then, not now. "No, buchou. W-why would anyone want to hurt Jirou-san?"
Atobe turned away from the question, from the way Ootori called him 'captain' with such painful hope. The room was hideous, really, melted with water and the prints of other people's pain to a stain in the corner, and the TV blurred with static like Ootori's eyes were blurred still. It would have been easy to tell his kouhai, naïve underclassman that he was, that Kirihara hadn't meant to hurt Jirou--or, rather, he hadn't meant to hurt Jirou in particular. He'd simply had every intention of hurting the boy who would be playing across from him, Singles Two at the Kantou regional finals. It would have been easy, and it would have been the truth, because Kirihara was known for playing a destructive game--except, even knowing that, it didn't matter.
Not even Ootori--as raw as he was, sometimes, the youngest in years where Jirou was the youngest of them all, mirror mirror on the wall--would have believed the lie that wasn't quite a lie--because Kirihara had grinned, oh yes, grinned, and when his grip had loosened halfway through his smash, the racquet sailing across the net and striking Jirou's knee...
Atobe saw it every time he closed his eyes, because Jirou had been smiling, too--he always smiled when he played, joy enough to fill his small body and spill upwards into hands that were too big for his frame, awkward as a tadpole that would never be a frog prince. It was the only time he was actually awake enough to smile like that, all teeth and mischief--and the sight of those wide, cheerful eyes going too wide, for an instant, before the racquet smashed into his bent knee, had been like the sensation of an elegant festival fan stretched to its limits between his hands before it crumpled.
Jirou had already been on the ground. He dove for the ball too often, Atobe told him that, he'd told him that too many times until there was no longer any point to wasting his breath on the stubborn boy. Jirou never listened, not even to his team captain--simply took kobujutsu classes so he'd learn how to fall without hurting himself.
"This is the way I play, Atobe," he'd chirruped, dropping a towel over his sunshining hair before he'd flopped onto the bleachers, on his stomach, and rested his chin on the crook of his elbow. "You play your tennis, and I play mine. Ne?"
"What are you still doing here, Ootori?" Atobe snapped, and Ootori jumped. "Go home."
The eyes were accusing, but there weren't any questions left in a mouth that screwed itself as tight as the lock on the windows, and Atobe wouldn't have answered any even if the boy had asked. Ootori stalked stiff-legged for the bed as if he had his nonexistent tail between his long legs, a mournful russet look over his shoulder before he patted Jirou's head once and left, but Atobe had known that he would. They all obeyed him, except Jirou, Singles Two, who had the finest wristwork that anyone had ever seen--utterly unexpected in someone who barely passed his classes because he was barely awake for most of them.
His team always had been under his voice, he was Atobe Keigo, buchou, captain of Hyotei Gakuen's tennis team, undefeated in seven years of playing, president of the Student Council, and why hadn't Jirou listened to him?
Atobe didn't realise that Jirou was awake--probably nudged from his dreamland by Ootori's pat--until a finger prodded him in the small of his back, a pinprick that might have been a spindle's worth of guilt over the empty look in Ootori's eyes, and he jumped.
"Shouldn't be mean to 'Tori-chu, Atobe," Jirou's voice was warm and heavy as spun gold with slumber, but then, it always was. He chuckled, eyes still closed, dark under lids traced delicately with fingertip veins. "Not his fault. I played a good game, huh?"
Atobe could have predicted the moment Jirou yawned, stretching his arms upwards before he finally opened his eyes and blinked upwards, looking rather confused, at the IV that was a papery silver sliver on his tanned forearm before he brought it down and poked at it. "Leastwise it's not my wrist. That'd be bad." Poke. Poke. "This itches."
Atobe closed his eyes. Jirou didn't understand, but considering that, given the choice and a lack of the prescribed stimulants that kept him semi-lucid through classes, Jirou would be asleep seventeen hours out of the day... how could he? When Jirou really only woke up, really woke up, for tennis practice, how could he really understand how badly a shattered knee could affect his game? There was no telling a sleeping beauty that there was no escape from the stab of bone-tipped thorns, crusting on a damaged joint.
They all watched out for him, as it was--they had to. Jirou asleep was harmless, drawn on by classmates so often that the team members all carried wipes to smudge away the sad circus mask, Jirou awake ineffably cheerful until even the sourfaced Shishido, Princess and Prick, had to smile at him. There were few people that Atobe felt worth his time to sit with in the hospital, but really--he suddenly wondered if perhaps there wasn't something else he was supposed to be doing, so he didn't have to respond to that. Jirou's wristwork and serve-and-volley might have been his specialty, but... how could anyone volley if they couldn't get to the net to do it?
"Sorry I..." Jirou yawned, mouth swallowing his eyes, and Atobe no longer bothered telling him to cover his mouth when he did that. "I couldn't win. I know you could've beat Sanada if we'd gone on to Singles One. I mean, you're Atobe, right? No-one's cooler than you." He grinned, and flashed a fingertip V. "Guess... guess we're out of the Nationals. Oh well."
Atobe's voice was thick and strange with the sensation of Jirou's smile pushing against his eyes, the flavour of words in his mouth sickly sweet as an overdose of the cherry petals shattering outside the window that should have marked them going to Nationals, should have marked their graduation, and he wondered if perhaps this was what betrayal tasted like. "Don't worry about it."
Cherry bark had cyanide in it, he'd been told.
Jirou smiled up at him, sweet, his eyes slivers of chocolate underneath a half-open wrapper before he curled over again and snuggled into the hard hospital pillow. Atobe had to remember to bring him one of the down ones from his own room. "I'm not. S'okay. Just a game, right? And then the next time I play him... what's his name? I know he's from Rikkai, but..."
"Kirihara," Atobe supplied, the clash of hard spat stops in his mouth walking him down the path of pins, the scars that had crawled onto his palms because his fists had been too hard when Jirou had chosen--yes, chosen--to walk back onto the court to destroy the rest of his career. Their coach had told Jirou to win in his deep, undeniable voice; Atobe had told him to drop the game before it put him in the hospital. Jirou hadn't listened to either of them. The idiot. The idiot.
"Kirihara," the syllables were blurred with the sleepy optimism, sleepier confidence, voice melting to a mumble as Jirou's eyes drifted closed again, dreamy little smile curling his lips. "That's it. I'll beat him. No stupid accidents next time."
Atobe opened his mouth to tell his Singles Two player--there were no accidents, in the games they played, and was it sweet, or funny, or simply pitiful that Jirou was likely the only person on the team who honestly believed that it had been one?
But the sakura broke against the window as if the petals fought to clog his throat, beating in his eyes like swans' wings, and he said, instead, something that bloomed like bloodred roses in a beast's garden pushing onto his lips, "When you get better. But I'll beat you at chess now."
*_*_*_*
The first question Jirou had asked the doctor, rubbing one eye drowsily as he stretched upwards, as if to reach for the little tennis-racquet dangler that one of the team had brought him for luck, had been "So when can I play again, sensei?"
The racquet grip was too thin over the delicate frame of metal, thin as the leathery hold that Atobe had on his temper, and coarse in his hand--he'd meant to replace it, but with this, and that, and standing awkwardly at the cracked-open door, time had melted with silvery heat into anger when Jirou's parents told the boy curled into a twist of misery on the staid white sheets, well, he really should have been more careful, he'd taken this tennis thing too seriously for too long, and wasn't it about time that he really started working on the rest of his life? He'd been skipping his cram school classes to play tennis? What had he been thinking?
Jirou didn't cry--Atobe didn't think much of boys crying, in any case--but for the first time, tapping his foot as he waited for Kirihara to come to the net, Atobe wondered if Jirou knew how, because Jirou had simply turned his face from his parents and toyed with the petals of the small branch of flowering sakura that Ootori had brought him, ripping them to accusing fragments as soft as the brace on his leg before he'd spread them onto the covers on his lap and patted them into patterns, as if in apology.
The right wrist, first, Atobe decided. It would make the rest easier. Kirihara was right-handed, and there were no shimpan, no coaches lounging in too-hot tweed suits on the coaching benches by the courts, just two teams lined out on the bleachers, as if at a tournament--witnesses, bathed in colourless spotlights.
This court was theirs, Tokyo was theirs, and it didn't matter if Jirou had been coiled in the hospital that afternoon because the doctors thought that maybe surgery could fix him, tie his torn ligaments in sailor knots to mend together his spirits, or maybe it couldn't. Maybe there wasn't anything that could hold together the slippery golden fragments of Jirou's characteristic optimism, when the doctor had too-gently informed him that he would be fortunate if he could walk, and if he were sensible, he would never play tennis again.
Kirihara was taller than Atobe remembered, a ghastly grinning imp in an offensively yellow jersey standing across the net from him, with a handful of gel plastering his hair to tousled horns, and his eyes reddened with mirth in the cold light as he chuckled, holding out his hand for the shake across the net. He didn't bother to lower his racquet from his shoulder, hand wrapped around it like a leatherbound weapon. "Am I going to be able to break you as easily as I broke your Singles Two, Atobe?" he cocked his head, and his eyes twinkled with Nativity cheer. Merry Christmas! "He sucked. Okay, yeah, sure, he fell, and my grip slipped, but geez, couldn't he keep it together?"
It was likely a good thing that the rest of the varsity team had either a hold on their tempers or a hold on their doubles partners. He'd led them well. He always had.
But who would hold back Atobe?
He didn't bother raising his hand to shake Kirihara's, which lingered above the heavy white of the net, suspended like a slender, pale spider with three of its legs shredded. "Smooth or rough?" Atobe balanced his racquet on its edge, waiting for the whirlwind.
Kirihara looked down at his hand, as if he couldn't believe it were his, before pulling it back and smirking. "Sanada-buchou never said you had bad manners, Atobe. Should've known. Hyotei brats are all alike. Rough."
The racquet was a silver spindle in his hand as it spun, coarse as the words that he would not let free before it fell. It was 'smooth,' Atobe's racquet clattering to the ground on the so-empty tennis courts with his initial on its base upright, all points and angles aiming for the sky in a beanstalk of lettering, and he took the serve, reaching higher yet with the reverberation of impact shuddering like screaming harpsong down his arm.
It was strange to play on an empty court, with no-one but his varsity team--seven, minus one sunshine head, lined up in their crisp blue track suits without needing a salute--and Rikkaidai's, vivid as Jirou's hair in their signature yellow jerseys. No-one cheered when he took the first point, and his breath reverberated behind his ears like a shock whenever he coaxed at his prey with the face of his silver racquet, driving him further and further towards the baseline despite pitiful efforts to distract him by aiming at his joints. Pitiful. Atobe didn't play for fun--he never had. The lob came, a distant soaring pinprick of yellow that crashed from the sky, and Atobe smirked and reached for it--not copper, not silver, but gold.
He was famous for his smash--pinpointed, a shot for the body, but no-one ever learned--no-one ever saw it coming who had not played him before, or even if they had, crying Wolf! Wolf! like lost children whenever his elbow jerked upwards for the shot. Kirihara's smirk, stretched wide in a wasted grin underneath the white lights that left hollow shadows cast by his hair, sepulchral on pale skin, twitched to a grimace when Atobe's first smash crashed into his wrist and sent his racquet clattering to the ground like the applause of empty cherry branches, and Atobe bowed to them, a long sweep of his arm outwards.
It was no longer anything even resembling a smile, Kirihara's lips peeled back until his teeth were resplendent and skeletal under the lights that drowned his eyes, by the fourth time, or the fifth, or the tenth, and adrenaline sounded like hounds baying in Atobe's ears when it pounded in time with every stroke, a keening like the petals that had been between Jirou's fingers were crying, or perhaps that was the sounds that Jirou had made, little broken echoes, nothing at all like his triumphant "Hah!" gasp, every time he'd put his weight onto his injured knee.
Atobe had decided. It would be the right wrist, first. Then the right shoulder. Then the left knee. Then the right, if Kirihara lasted that long--and Atobe could make absolutely certain that he did. It wouldn't be the first career he'd broken--simply the first one that he'd aimed for for a reason other than that he could.
It was Japanese tradition, after all--for every gift given, to give one back fourfold.
"Atobe?" it would have been a puppy's yelp when its tail was trampled on, a swallow's shivering wings, if it hadn't been his name. "Atobe, why--what's happening?"
It was reflex, first, to turn, the ball in his hand loose as a bird he was about to free, and snarl, "You know better than to come onto the court in the middle of a game."
Then he blinked, because with the world focusing in slow reverberations to something other than the opponent across from him, Jirou looked taller, somehow, on crutches, a blonde giant in miniature in the wrong garden. But perhaps that was because the props were too long for him and they hauled him onto his tiptoes until he teetered--and even still, he barely passed Atobe's shoulders, looking up at him with eyes that swam in the sweat gathering along the bridge of Atobe's nose.
"Why aren't you in the hospital?" he bit out, adrenaline sweet and silky as another spring midnight behind his tongue, and his pulse pounded in the grip he had in his racquet, rolled like a poisoned apple in his mouth with something that might have almost been shame, tasting of cherry blossoms in the wind that whipped his jersey and lashed his face with petals. Out of the corner of his eyes, Kirihara rubbed at his wrist, sullenly, and the pink of his tongue seemed so vulgar when he licked his lips. Atobe looked away, repulsed.
"Mari--she called, she said that you were playing Kirihara." Jirou's eyes were wide, the whites about them clouded with the reflections of the light that made his pupils jerk, between shadows and spotlight. "You didn't tell me."
There was no response he could give to that, and not even Jirou, with his eyes clear despite the late hour--someone must have given him chocolate, or coffee--could possibly be naïve enough that he couldn't see why. "You're holding up the game, Jirou," he pressed the ball in his hand, but there was no magic to it to make him disappear, and the gold was a fool's.
Perhaps it was only the shadows, or the wind, but Jirou's chin tilted upwards in something that might have almost been defiance. "You're not playing fair, Atobe."
Yes. No. Don't you want to break him, Jirou? he'd asked, and Jirou had not understood, perhaps because it had been Jirou's choice, in the end, to walk back into the courts.
"You mean beat him? I want to beat him. People can't be broken," Jirou had replied.
Atobe raised his head back, tossing his hair from his temples with a flick of his wrist. "You said it yourself. It's just a game," he shook his head--and pushed Jirou from the court with one hand, nudging. "Go watch from the bench coach seat, if you want."
It's just a game.
Jirou's chin tilted visibly upwards, mouth parted as he hopped, lacking anything that might have even been considered dignity as his legs swung like a toy model's towards the bench by the side of the courts, tongued with darkness away from the merciless spotlights, and his crutches were awkward stilts. "Don't use it. Okay?" he settled onto the bench with a clatter of wood and something that might have almost been an uncoordinated golden sense of poise. "Don't. That's... that's not fun, Atobe!"
And Jirou's game was all about 'fun', wasn't it...?
How funny--how very, very funny, when he'd knocked Jirou's racquet out of his hand a dozen times, a hundred, over the years they'd been on the team together, and Jirou had--he'd laughed, anything but ordinary when he tossed his head back and sparkled as he snatched his racquet up again, bouncing on the tips of his toes with eyes wondering at more than a name.
Atobe served, pulling, the stretch on his shoulder not so different from the stretch on his soul to accommodate Jirou's request. It was strange to feel the sensations of his own body sliding against itself when he checked the angle of his wrist to send the ball to corners, not at a wisp of mustard-gas yellow that he couldn't disperse. It was an insult, that burning of muscles that clenched in the way he had trained them to and were denied their release, the way Kirihara's smile burnt wider and wider in gaping white as the boy rushed helter and skelter to return one shot, then another, his crimson racquet loose in a wrist swollen enough that even in the hectic shadows, Atobe imagined that perhaps he could see it throb underneath skin, tell-tale heartbeat.
But the utterly irreverent 'Go Atobe!' that broke the punctuated, solemn silence from the bleachers was carried by the wind further than Kirihara's smirk and the sickly scent of sakura, and oh, he could laugh for Jirou, just this once--rushing to the net for a volley that made Jirou squeal, throwing his arms out with enough exuberance that there was a rattle of crutches to the ceramic floor covering the sound of Kirihara's hiss when he reached for the ball and missed.
Winning had never been an issue. He was Atobe Keigo, he was undefeated, and no vicious brat with a few nasty tricks was going to drown out the fact that victory rose in his throat in bubbles like Jirou's applause, despite the fact that his fans were noticeably absent from the courts, and his team was utterly silent.
He was Hyotei's captain, and the score was five to three. It was strange how quickly match point came when he wasn't trying to draw it out. It was strange how he'd never really noticed how much Jirou enjoyed watching him play, when he played to win, not to crush.
Atobe smiled, once, at a team whose backs were straight as toy soldiers', at the static that ran empty through his head like the noise ofa blurred TV in an empty white hospital room, or the sound of a flute that he could almost hear. He never took his eyes off the ball--he never, ever took his eyes off the ball, but Jirou's hair burned his eyes in the court's lights from the bench coach position, blinding him with something that might have been hatred. In the middle of his famous smash, Atobe watched with distant, surprised pleasure as his racquet soared from his hand as gracefully as a mermaid rising in slow coasts of foam, sweet suicide.
"Sorry," he whispered expressionlessly, in memoriam, and the sight of Kirihara clutching at his knee, patella too far to the right in an empty insectoid shell that had crawled underneath his skin, was too different from the tiny cries Jirou had made when he'd played to actually touch him. He didn't look at the sudden vacant silence from the bench at the courtside, limned by spotlights. "My grip slipped."
~owari~
Start: March 14, 2004
End: March 15, 2004