FIC: Six Percent Doki Doki, NiouKiri, NC17 (2/5)
Title: Six Percent Doki Doki (Part 2/5)
Author: Ociwen
Wordcount: 36000
Rating: NC17
Pairing: Niou/Kirihara + others (if you squint)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: In High School, Kirihara realizes that something is wrong when Niou stops showing up to tennis practice. Tennis, misunderstandings and Genius abounds.
Author's Notes: Written for pixxers in rikkai_exchange. Pixxers, I really hope you like this! Thanks to shikishi for the help.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]
Failing his English test from last week doesn’t faze Kirihara. He almost expects the marks now, the red pen scribbled all over his half-assed romanji gobbledygook answers. He sits and daydreams about playing tennis and crossing Niou’s name off his list.
Niou, who hasn’t shown up to practice for more than a week and a half now.
Yagyuu, on the other hand…scares Kirihara. He must hear the whispers as loud as everyone else. At lunch time, Kirihara sees him start to walk down the hallways hand-in-hand with a pretty, petite girl. One with big boobs and hips who blushes and tucks her hair behind her ear as often as Yagyuu pushes his glasses up.
Maybe it’s to stop the rumours in the tennis club.
The talk is quieter in the pre-regulars’ showers the afternoon after Kirihara first sees Yagyuu with this girl. He himself played another senpai, sweating hard from the temperature and the haze filtering in from Tokyo, the smog that makes the sky a funky yellow colour. The thickness in the air makes tennis seem more of an effort.
Kirihara’s lungs hurt, but in the good way from a decent game of tennis. Nishiki-senpai, who is one of his senpais’ senpais, is a good player and for once Kirihara’s been pushed harder than usual. The mirror reflects pink eyes as he combs his hair down after the shower.
In the reflection, he can see the door to the regulars’ changing room open. Yagyuu walks by it, frowning slightly, but he still nods politely at Kirihara and says, “Good practice.” The door closes behind Yagyuu and the sound of a female voice, all dulcet tones and sweet words, filters into the air, a notch below the loud boys all around Kirihara.
Kirihara whips his head around. He chucks his brush into his bag- it’s useless most of the time anyway. He grabs his backpack and runs out behind Yagyuu.
Yagyuu and the girl walk down the campus, towards the end closer to the university gymnasium. He walks slower than usual, bending down to her level and nodding to things she must be telling him, things that Kirihara can’t hear.
The last of the regulars are still playing on the courts, and Jackal and Marui, too. Jackal yells out “FIYAH” as Kirihara shuffles nearby, hands in his pockets and eyes still looking out at Yagyuu and his girlfriend. The ball Marui returns is a nice high volley, an easy ball for Jackal to smash behind Marui’s head.
Of course, Kirihara isn’t gonna tell his senpai that because it’s more fun watching him work.
Yanagi sits on the bench by the pathway, supposedly writing things down on his clipboard, but even Kirihara can see the earbuds in his ears and the shape of an mp3 player through his pocket. His head bobs to the music softly and his pencil scribbles things on his paper now and then, more token-like, if Kirihara were asked. The late sun shines across the courts, hitting the posts and turning the painted metal surface to gilt. The shadows from Yagyuu and the girl grow longer and longer across the campus grass, hindered by nothing but a few bushes and the soccer field goal posts.
Kirihara gives up, whatever he was doing, and starts to walk the opposite way towards the train station. His feet are sweaty between the toes and he’d rather not wear his sneakers home because they smell, too. He pouts and thinks about where he saw his sandals last.
Maybe in the closet of his room. Maybe his sister stole them to glue rhinestones to, or something dumb like that.
Stupid sister, he thinks.
The trees rustle when Kirihara walks by. The stale summer air makes his hair even hotter and heavier. I could shave my head like Jackal-senpai. It’d be cooler than this. He shakes his hair and flicks water all around, but more ends up in his eyes, still stinging from his game.
Kirihara squeezes them shut until the sharpness passes.
The leaves swish again.
He stops walking first, then he realizes that there’s no breeze right now.
Huh.
“Er…hello?” he calls out. For measure, Kirihara kicks his foot out into the bushes. A few petals from pink flowers flutter to the ground, then the smell of hydrangeas curls around the air as a head of bleached hair pops out of the waxy leaves.
Niou steps out, whistling a tune that cracks and breaks and falls short. He looks at Kirihara. His eyes are so dark they’re almost black, all pupil, all-staring at him.
Kirihara’s knees shake. He starts to fall forward, until he catches his balance on a branch. Niou says nothing and his eyes, black all over, are equally as dead. There’s no shine to them, no smirk on his face, just a blank set to his jaw.
“S-senpai?” Kirihara says.
Niou’s shoes crunch on the pavement, the only sound between them as he gives Kirihara one long look. A piece of hair falls over his eyes and he’s got a dark patch of sweat on the back of his shirt, as if he’s been in the bushes a long, long time.
Those eyes…
More than his just knees shake. Kirihara’s hands are clammy at his sides, stiff like a soldier’s and swaying back and forth as his insides twist up in a weird way. It’s as if his intestines are tangling with his pounding heart and sending blood to weird parts of his body that they shouldn’t be- his rushing head, his dick, too.
His face gets even hotter.
Niou’s black eyes flash at him. For the briefest instant they shine so bright that Kirihara feels every ounce of himself laid open and bare and he fights not to look down to make sure he’s still wearing clothes.
Because it feels like he’s forgotten them. Like Niou can see not just his naked skin, but his muscles and twisting guts and his bones, too.
And this feels the same as his dream.
Was it Niou-senpai-
“Akaya!”
Niou’s shoulder tightens at the sound of Jackal’s voice. Before Kirihara can ask Niou when he’s coming back to tennis, he’s gone. Which is probably for the best, because Kirihara’s mouth is filled with cotton and he can barely nod when Jackal says “Bye-nara! See ya tomorrow!”
The image of Niou’s eyes burns so deep down into Kirihara that he doesn’t even care when he sees his sister pasting plastic flowers to his sports sandals that evening. He shrugs and slams his bedroom door shut behind himself, picking at his cold bento for so long the fruit flies eat more of it than he does.
He dreams of shining black eyes and bleached hair that night and by morning, Kirihara doesn’t forget this time just why there’s sticky and hot come between his thighs and a musky smell to his sheets.
I need help.
***
He may be hopeless in school, he may be hopeless in a hundred other things in life, but when it comes to senpais, Kirihara knows he’s lucky.
Saturday is the start of the regionals. Kirihara shows up early like everyone else, hoping for that last spot as team alternate. He yawns and shuffles and his eyes are red, but he’s there, racket in his bag and bag over his shoulder.
“Already in red-eye mode?” Marui asks. He pops a bubble and slings an arm over Kirihara’s shoulder. “You’re prepared, ne?”
“I’m just tired,” Kirihara says. He can feel a yawn rising, but with the captain approaching the them, he bites back the yawn in favour of a mumbled “Good morning.”
“Kirihara- you’re on this weekend.” The captain nods to him as Kirihara takes the words in, his eyes going wide as Marui clicks his tongue.
“Don’t know why you wouldn’t want my genius in the alternate spot. Didn’t you see Akaya’s serve this week? He slammed the ball into-”
Jackal claps a hand over Marui’s mouth and whistles loudly to cover up the sound of Marui’s muffled words. “Good for you,” he tells Kirihara with a big grin. To Marui, he narrows his eyes, leans in close and whispers, “Don’t spoil his moment. You were the alternate at the prefecturals.”
Being an alternate at Rikkai is nothing exciting, not really. It’s all about the prestige of sitting beside the regulars in the stands. Kirihara wedges himself between Sanada and Yukimura, pleased as punch to have the opportunity this year finally. He sits up straight and watches the games zip by: the regionals round one is against some no name team and by singles three, Yanagi takes the entire win for the team before lunch.
It gets kinda boring sitting and watching the matches, so Kirihara is glad for lunch and gladder still for the bento his mother bought for him. Yakitori skewers and macaroni salad. Marui and Jackal sidle over to Kirihara at the patio tables and spread out Marui’s bento box- family-sized and filled with sweet buns and cakes and cucumber pickles and cold eel. Or, it was originally cold and has now gone a bit warm. Still, it’s tasty and Kirihara stuffs his face, boredom having made him hungrier than usual. The patio tables are filled with the yellow jerseys from Rikkai. Maybe if the other teams played as fast and won as easily, they’d have as long for lunch too.
The captain calls out the afternoon roll call from the table beside Kirihara. Kirihara sips at his juice box and chucks it out, right before he hears his name.
“Here!” he yells.
Jackal passes Kirihara a milk tea carton across the table. “You want?”
Kirihara nods. He stabs the straw into the carton and looks down as he sips. Summer Package, his favourite. He leans back into the chair, feeling his tennisbag under the seat with his feet, and he sucks his straw harder.
“Nakamura?”
“Here!”
“Niou?”
Silence.
Marui glances over his shoulder, chewing loudly on a slice of pineapple. He looks back at Jackal and Kirihara and shrugs. Marui resumes his chewing and before he’s finished his first piece, his fingers are grabbing another slice.
Kirihara can feel a lump forming in his throat the longer the pause in the attendance goes on. Without wanting to be obvious, he shifts his eyes. There’s Yagyuu seated on the far side by the vending machines, at the same table as Yanagi. There’s Nishiki and Yoshimoto and Murakami by them, near the fukubuchou and his friends. There’s Sanada in his black cap and Yukimura’s dark hair and the frosted hair of another senpai, but no Niou.
No Niou anywhere.
The captain shrugs his shoulders too and crosses the name on his list. “If he doesn’t show up to next weekend’s games, he’s off the team- remember that Kuwahara, got it?”
Jackal nods once. “Yes!” he shouts, almost mocking when he salutes the captain behind his back. Marui starts to snicker.
But hearing his senpais say these things hurts. Kirihara doesn’t get why the lump in his throat gets harder and drier because there’s nothing in his throat- no food, no lumps of candy. He slurps his drink to get rid of it, but it doesn’t go away the entire afternoon.
He sits and watches the matches and feels weird, feels guilty for some reason, like he needs to get Niou and tell him to come back and tell him that it doesn’t matter, at least to Kirihara, if Niou is fighting with Yagyuu and being strange and like that because he mostly wants to cross Niou’s name off his list.
Right?
Kirihara nods to himself. Yeah, that’s right. My list.
“What are you nodding about?” Yukimura hisses in his ear. “That player just fouled the ball.”
Kirihara sits up as straight as he can, blinking twice. “Sorry,” he mumbles.
Yukimura gives him a lop-sided smile and touches Kirihara on the arm. “I’m just looking out for you, Akaya,” he says. “I want you to be the best player you can and you can’t creep this year’s captain out too much, okay?”
Kirihara nods again, his cheeks stinging a bit. “Got it,” he says quickly. “Sorry, Yukimura-buchou.”
“I’m not the captain,” Yukimura says.
Sanada looks over at the two of them, grunting something and glaring under the shade of his cap at Kirihara. He looks a bit confused, until Yukimura smiles. Yukimura leans over and tells Kirihara in a sweet tone, “But it doesn’t mean I don’t want you calling me that.”
***
Sunday morning, Kirihara hangs around at home, bothering his sister in the main room. She has ribbons and sequins and sparkly things streaming across the tatami floor, organized in neat little piles as she pastes them to hair pins and t-shirts. His sandals are nowhere in sight.
Kirihara stomps through the lot his sister has strewn around, relishing her yells as he picks up the telephone.
“AKAYA!” she shrieks.
“I’m ON THE PHONE!” he yells back, cupping the receiver before he dials.
She pinches his leg after he hears the first ring.
He kicks back, then runs off with the phone to his room. His cell phone is lost somewhere in his tennisbag today and his bag smells too much to look for it right now. His mother needs to clean it out for him soon. Flopping back on his bed, he waits for someone to pick up.
“Hello?”
Yukimura’s voice.
A knot forms in his belly. Right. Just ask for help. Just ask for advice. Yukimura’ll help me, no problem.
“Um, Yukimura-buchou, can I come over? I gotta get your help with something,” Kirihara says. When Yukimura doesn’t answer, the knot gets tighter and starts to choke a bit. Kirihara tryies to be cool and play things off. Somehow, it comes out more rushed than ever. “AndIthoughtyoucouldhelpme please.”
“Yeah I’m home all day. My doctor’s appointment is tonight after supper, so come before then, Akaya.” Yukimura hangs up; his words are short and concise and so in control that Kirihara sighs with relief.
Yukimura will help. Kirihara knows he’s lucky with his senpais. Yukimura will know exactly what to do.
His tennisbag reeks of old sweat, smelling more like barf than the rubber of tennis balls, as Kirihara paws through it to find his cellphone and his wallet. He gags and looks away, thinking, Stupid mother, I need it clean now!
In the front zip, he feels his wallet, but inside it’s empty of everything except a couple 500 yen coins.
Enough to take the bus there. His phone turns out to be hidden in the toe of his spare canister of balls. Kirihara pockets it, grabs his other pair of sandals from under his bed and slams the door behind himself when he leaves.
It’s a muggy day; the sky is a shade of slate overhead. Kirihara walks as far as the bus stop before he looks back up at the sky. The air smells of rain to come and his cargo shorts don’t have his spare umbrella packed in the side pocket. He kicks himself inwardly and mutters, “Fuck it, I’ll take the train instead.”
He jogs to the station just in time before the first fat drops of warm rain fall down. As he ascends the escalator to the platform, the rain splatters outside, rushing with the sound of the approaching train. Kirihara steps forward to get into the first line he can see and make this train, but something catches his eye further up the platform.
A bleached head of hair sticks out among the dark auburns and black. Kirihara pushes in front of a middle-aged woman to get closer and see. If it’s Niou, he’s too far down the platform for Kirihara get a good look, especially when the train sing-songs and the doors open. People rush past Kirihara, bumping into him as he struggles to get closer to see.
“NIOU!” he shouts. “NIOU-SENPAI!”
Kirihara’s taller than most of the other commuters now, but the doors start to sing their closing and he has to decide: get on or look for Niou. He bites his lip, hesitating for just a millisecond before he grabs the door long enough to squeeze inside.
The train jerks into motion and he falls forward. Kirihara reaches for the hand-hold above his head just in time. He walks towards the end of the carriage, hoping he’ll catch a break and be able to walk down the train to find Niou, but the carriage isn’t through and he’s not dumb enough to open the doors between moving trains.
Kirihara sighs heavily and sinks into the priority seat by the doorway. He feels a bit like a moron for yelling out to Niou again- if it was even Niou, he doesn’t know for certain. He does know, though, that his heart flutters in his rib cage and tickles his lungs in that weird way like at school and those black, shining eyes flash across his vision, long enough to make his legs twitch.
He fidgets for a moment, hoping no one notices he was the idiot yelling on the platform. His face feels warm, too warm in the air conditioning on the train, so he ducks his head, grabs his phone from his pocket and reflexively starts to check his messages. Kirihara can pretend to distract himself, but his eyes…he can’t stop himself from looking down at the door between the carriages and hoping to find that distinctive bleached hair.
You have: 0 new messages…
No Niou either. Just a sea of dark heads, all bobbing with the gentle sway of the train, or the slow slide into a nap.
Yukimura lives on the edge of a suburb, in the other direction of the school from Sanada. Kirihara rather likes coming out here, not just because there’s an awesome little comic store on the walk from the train station at the corner with the traffic lights, but because it’s nice here: large expanses of park and gardens interspersed with older houses, low and familial with hanging vines over their stuccoed fences. It smells like a rice cooker and the yakiniku joint down the opposite end of the road spills fumes of BBQ sauce and fatty grilled meat all around.
His stomach growls. It’s almost lunch. Maybe Yukimura will have something at home to eat. Kirihara’s spent almost 300 yen on the train ticket and he needs to get back home eventually, too. Yukimura could lend him money.
The afternoon is calm, which makes the temperature seem even hotter. The air is clearer out here, further from Tokyo and Yokohama’s factories. Sweat forms at the back of Kirihara’s neck, under his arms and on his back. He fans himself with his hand and darts under fences to try to catch what little shade there is.
Yukimura lives in one of those many identical pre-fab sorts around here, surrounded by high garden walls and dripping vines, tiny bonsais poking their heads up against the ledge. Kirihara takes a deep breath and buzzes himself in.
Yukimura’s mom answers the door. She’s older and shorter than Kirihara’s mom, with a really bad perm and a faded apron. “Seiichi’s out back, Kirihara-chan,” she says.
Kirihara cringes. Considering he towers over her head, he hates the way she calls him that. Trying to be polite, he ducks his head in a nod and mutters “Thanks, Yukimura-san.” Right on cue, his stomach gurgles.
“I can bring you boys some lunch,” she offers.
Yes!
Kirihara smiles and thanks her again.
Yukimura’s house might be in a nice area, but inside it has that weird smell of old people and incense from temples and cheap soap. The alcove by the main room has a placid Kanon statue staring through slitted eyes at Kirihara, with a tiny incense stick on the brazier by its feet. Kirihara bows his head instinctively and makes for the back doorway.
Plants hang everywhere. Bushes drape over a flagstone pathway that crunches under Kirihara’s feet. Everything drips with the morning’s rain, right onto the back of Kirihara’s t-shirt. The humidity in Yukimura’s garden stifles it’s so thick. It’s like a rainforest here, complete with the tinkling sound of a bamboo fountain and the gurgling of water in the pool below it.
Someone grunts, just beyond a hibiscus bush. Kirihara shoves a branch away to see Yukimura’s back, hunched over a cluster of flowers. Snip snip snip- he attacks the flowers with a pair of scissors, laughing about something under his breath.
“Buchou?” Kirihara says.
Yukimura whips his head around. He’s red in the face and his hair hangs in limp strands. He jabs the flowers with another cut, the dead buds falling to his feet, right before he stands up and wipes his forehead with the hem of his t-shirt.
Considering he’s worried about these strange thoughts over Niou, Kirihara probably shouldn’t be checking out Yukimura’s stomach either. Yukimura is pasty, sure, but he’s got faint lines of abs and a couple stray dark hairs under his bellybutton that make Kirihara look away and swallow a lump in his chest.
Would Niou-senpai…
NO! Don’t think about that!
“Akaya?” Yukimura snaps. “I’m not your buchou anymore.”
“I know…” Kirihara says, his voice fading into the bubble of the tiny pond. Foam floats along the edges, broken up by spiny grasses lining the pond’s edge. A frog croaks, then jumps off behind a clump of tall bamboo.
“Well I didn’t say you couldn’t call me that,” Yukimura says. He tosses his hair back and shakes it out for a moment. Then, he says, “Next year’ll come soon enough, ne? Takiguchi-buchou should really retire and leave the team to us before then. He’s too…”
“Not you?” Kirihara offers.
“Exactly,” Yukimura says, nodding sagely. Kirihara nods too, because, well, Yukimura is brilliant at tennis and he’s Kirihara’s senpai and he knows all sorts of things Kirihara doesn’t which is why Kirihara came over. Yukimura will know what to do.
“MOM! Can we have some lunch soon? I’m starving!” Yukimura pats his stomach. To Kirihara, he says, “Gardening makes me hungry.”
The platter Yukimura’s mom brings is covered in food. Saliva forms under Kirihara’s tongue as he stares at the food she lays out on the porch for them. Yukimura’s mom sets out two cushions and frowns at her son. “Wash your hands, Seiichi. They’re dirty.”
Yukimura wipes them on the back of his capris as soon as she turns her and goes back inside the house. “Let’s eat,” he says.
“Let’s eat,” Kirihara echoes as he eyes the cold slices of roast pork.
It’s one of those days that feels so hot and sticky that there should be a thunderstorm roll through, only the sky isn’t murky enough here. The yellow-tinted sky is dotted with a few thin clouds in the east, but nothing more. Kirihara pants and wipes his own sweaty hands off on his shorts, too. He slurps up cold noodles and sauce and leftover curry rice as Yukimura gobbles up half a baked fish: cold, of course, and he does offer some to Kirihara, but the evil look in Yukimura’s eyes makes Kirihara shrink back and say, “It’s okay, you can have it all, Yukimura-buchou.”
“So,” Yukimura says as he chews, spitting fish onto the food between them, “where’s your tennisbag? Your swing looked like crap this past week and you wanted help with that. We can probably go to the park down the street and work on it. There’s more room there. Or my bedroom, I guess. I have A/C in there.” Yukimura stabs another piece of fish with his chopsticks and licks his lips. “It’s too hot today, isn’t it?”
Kirihara sets down his cup of green tea. “Eh?”
Yukimura blinks. “What?” He narrows his eyes, squinting against the streams of sunlight shining into the garden, making the plants steam. “It’s hot?”
“No,” Kirihara says, “my serve?”
“It looked terrible,” Yukimura says, waving his chopsticks in the air. “I think your problem was the angle. And were you distracted, Akaya?”
That hard lump starts to form again, right at the base of his throat, making it hard to swallow the rice. Kirihara nods slowly. “That’s what I wanted to ask your help for, buchou.”
Yukimura puts his chopsticks down. One rolls off the holder as he leans forward, resting his chin on his elbows and staring intently at Kirihara. “Shoot.”
“I…” Be calm and cool, just like Yanagi-senpai. Be cool. Kirihara looks at Yukimura, trying hard to keep eye contact and not blush and look away. “Buchou, I…if I- I mean, if someone I knew maybe thought weird thoughts about someone they-”
“Like a chick?” Yukimura asks. His forehead wrinkles.
Kirihara hesitates for a second, then he nods. “Yeah, yeah, like a chick.” It’s almost like that, he thinks. It’s easier to ask for help like this. “But…if this girl was like, um…” He twists his hands around, just the way his insides are twisting up, too. Yukimura gives him weird looks, glancing up at Kirihara and tilting his head from side to side as if he can figure out what’s going on through brain waves alone.
A bead of sweat slides down Kirihara’s upper lip. He licks it off and goes on. “If she maybe…had some guy reject her and she wasn’t hanging around anymore, then if I- my friend wanted to talk to her then what would he, um, do? To help fix things?”
Yukimura says nothing. A fly buzzes beside his ear that he swats at blindly without moving the rest of his body.
Kirihara bites the inside of his mouth. He looks from Yukimura to the fly to the food it lands on. The pork he just ate churns in his stomach and acid rises in his throat and he feels more than a little ill waiting for Yukimura to say anything.
“Akaya,” Yukimura says, his voice nice and even.
Kirihara sits up straight and leans forward, eager for Yukimura’s help. “Buchou?”
“You should ask Marui about this.”
Kirihara falls face-first into the soy sauce dish.
“Because I don’t know a thing about girls.” Sighing, Yukimura looks out at his garden with a dreamy look in his eyes. On his fingers, he counts off as he talks. “See, there’s tennis, which is the most important thing in life right now. Then everything else. Marui is the person you should ask.” Laughing darkly under his breath, he adds, “He’s a tensai, you know. Has he reminded you of that recently?”
Kirihara’s hand twitches, and his right eye too. He forces himself to sit still. Now would be a bad time to get angry at Yukimura. Marui can help, even if Yukimura can’t. Yukimura starts to drone on about something to do with Kirihara’s terrible serve from last week, but all Kirihara can remember is slamming that ball into his one senpai because he was laughing at Niou and calling him names and it wasn’t Kirihara’s tennis that suffered. It was his mood.
His tennis was just more violent was all. Yukimura never corrected that when he was in junior high. He would pat Kirihara on the shoulder and tell him how proud he was that he beat Tachibana, or that he got four games off Sanada one time at practice-
“Oh, it’s my cell!”
Kirihara snaps out of his pout. Yukimura’s phone rings with a song that sounds more like techno yakuza music than anything else. It’s kinda catchy, but before Kirihara can tap his fingers to the beat, Yukimura answers it.
“Sanada? Yeah, yeah, I’m home…I’m done my appointment at 7:30, probably. No…no, Akaya’s here right now, but he’s just stopping by…You can come over after that…yeah, but I broke the strings on my spare last weekend so you’ll have to bring your own…okay, yeah, see ya.” Yukimura clicks end and smiles at Kirihara, his lips curling up so slightly and sweet it makes Kirihara start to smile back.
“Marui can help you- your friend, Akaya,” Yukimura says. The hand Yukimura claps a down heavily on Kirihara’s shoulder makes Kirihara jump a bit. “And if he can’t, I’ll owe you a game. You can even have first serve, okay?”
***
On Monday morning at practice, the first thing Marui says when Kirihara shuffles into the changing room half-awake is:
“So, you need the tensai’s genius at long last.”
Marui gives Kirihara a sly grin and waggles his eyebrows. Kirihara inches back, slightly worried by the way Marui cracks his knuckles in tune with his bubble popping.
Jackal shakes his head. “Oh god, not this again. You shouldn’t have asked him for help, Akaya. You shouldn’t-”
Marui prods Jackal in the arm and backs him up into a locker beside Kirihara. “I’ll have you know that my genius extends to more than just tennis, Jackal.”
Inhaling deeply, Marui flings his arms above his head (in the process, smacking both Kirihara and Jackal in the face), turns to the entire pre-regular team, all in various states of changing into their uniforms, and announces, “I am the Love Master Marui-sama!”
Jackal slaps his forehead. Kirihara can see the stubble of hair dot his scalp. “Oh Jesus,” he mutters. “Not this. Anything but this, Bunta.”
A few of the senpais across the bench snicker and lean to each other, their eyes shifting towards Marui. Marui just keeps on prancing on top of the second bench, pointing his fingers and flailing his arms and going on about something called a “Casanova to get chicks.”
Kirihara slithers to the floor. The grit catches his uniform pants on the bottom of the locker. Not a girl, Marui-senpai! he thinks, but there’s no way in hell he can say anything now, not with a senior clapping him on the shoulder, saying, “No way she can’t fall for this stud.”
Kirihara shrivels up under his shirt. His stomach flops onto the side and his salad breakfast starts to rise in his throat, all gross and barf-like. He closes his eyes shut until the captain walks into the room and shouts, “Let’s go, Rikkai Dai!”
Marui shuts up, having to rush to change into his uniform. Kirihara starts to unzip his tennisbag when Jackal whispers, “Don’t listen to a word he says, Akaya. Bunta’s never had a girlfriend ever. He doesn’t know-”
A head pokes between Kirihara’s arm and Jackal’s face. Marui head-butts Jackal out of the way. Standing there topless and self-assured, Marui waves his finger. “I’ll have you know, Jackal, that I am a genius in the art of love. And I can help Akaya find a girlfriend like that!” He snaps his fingers and cranes his neck up. “So. There.”
Kirihara can’t hold back. His mouth starts to work before his brain. “But I-”
Jackal cuts him off, which makes Kirihara slacken a bit. “He doesn’t-”
“Yukimura said,” Marui says, “that Akaya was having girl trouble. And, being the magnanimous senpai I am- unlike you, Jackal-” Marui shakes his head and sighs, “I offered my tensai services for my beloved kouhai to benefit from.”
“Do you even know what half those words mean?” Jackal asks.
Marui sniffs.
Kirihara scratches his head. Magnanimous…?
“Kuwahara! Marui! Kirihara! Asses on the courts, now!” the captain’s voice booms through the doorway. Kirihara drops his t-shirt, then grabs it again, shoving his arms through the holes. Marui straightens the hem of his own t-shirt and rushes past Jackal to grab his racket. Jackal pulls his shorts up and tosses Kirihara his fallen sweat towel. They all make a run for the door at the same time and crash into the frame, legs and arms tangling. Kirihara squawks when Marui steps on his foot- he’s heavy and pain throbs in Kirihara’s toes as he trips out behind his senpais.
The sky is overcast, the air heavy with dampness. Kirihara looks out toward the bushes by the gymnasium wall where Niou hid last week, watching Yagyuu, maybe, or just watching the tennis practice. Something twists in his chest. Kirihara pauses to catch his breath because it’s hard to breathe like this, to think about what Niou might be thinking.
He grabs a ball from the basket and bounces it against his racketface. Fifty, 100, 200 bounces, backhand, forehand, they’re all perfect and he catches them all. He’s not a social outcast. And he’s still able to play tennis.
Even though he’s been thinking about Niou way more than can be normal.
No one seems to have noticed.
Kirihara exhales. Phew!
He flips his racket over and starts a fresh set of bounces, this time against the rim of his racket. Plong plong plong, he hits them all.
His list sits forgotten in his pocket, collecting weight and creases, though his fingers touch it idly as he waits by a net post, still bouncing the ball. Marui strides up to Kirihara with a gum-popping grin. “Oi! Kid! Tonight, after practice, meet me at the school gate and let the tensai fix your problem.”
Kirihara swallows the acridness in his throat, nodding because he can’t say anything else.
***
When Kirihara has a regular day of classes, he’s lucky to only feel like an idiot a few times per class. When Kirihara has a shit day of classes, he feels like an idiot constantly. Even in gym class, his favourite, even though it’s the tennis unit and they get to use the indoor university courts (nice and air-conditioned and beautiful traction for runners!), even though Kirihara gets stuck playing against some kid who can’t hit a ball straight, Kirihara feels dumb.
His partner, some megane with bad acne, sniffles and tosses the ball up. He hits a shot at such a hard angle, he nets the ball and manages to ding the post in one go.
Kirihara cringes. He doesn’t have the heart to point and laugh. The way the megane flounces across the court to get the ball looks a bit like how Marui walks and Marui thinks that Kirihara wants to fix girl problems and-
“Kirihara-kun?”
-and it’s not a girl he’s worried about at all, it’s a guy and Kirihara doesn’t know what he wants to do or why he wants to do something for Niou, but he does and he can’t stop imagining those dark eyes looking at him and making him feel like he’s walking around naked, but not just naked naked, but naked with an erect-
“Kirihara-kun?”
“What?” he snaps.
The megane points down to Kirihara’s racket. Kirihara’s eyes follow. His hand clutches the racket strings so tight his knuckles look greenish in the artificial lighting here and…
Kirihara unhooks his fingers from the racket strings.
The megane starts to snicker: a weird, snorting little laugh. The same sort he and the other smart kids use in class whenever Kirihara messes up an English answer or gets caught sleeping in Literature class.
Three racket strings have snapped. On his favourite Wilson racket, too.
“Aw, fuck,” Kirihara grumbles. The megane keeps snickering on the other side of the net. Kirihara grinds his teeth against the noise, the wheezy laugh making his ears grate and his eye twitch and his hands shake hard enough to drop his racket and he can feel his blood rushing- to his head, to his legs, to every part of his body.
“SHUT UP!” he yells. “JUST SHUT YOUR DAMN MOUTH!” Kirihara lunges for the net. A cackle of his own surfaces when the megane runs off, his own racket thrown to the ground behind him. He can’t stop laughing until the megane has run out of the gym completely.
Kirihara gets fifty laps and detention after school.
The fifty laps are nothing compared to what he could rack up when Sanada was fukubuchou and in charge of tennis club in junior high: 200 was common, 300 if Sanada was particularly nasty. Kirihara finishes his laps just before class ends, panting and red-faced, but grateful to be inside a gymnasium and not outside in the dripping summer heat.
In the gymnasium changing rooms, he’s given a wide berth. The megane and his friends whisper, all hush-hush and huddled together in the corner by the toilets. Everyone else just shakes their head at him. Kirihara turns his back so they can’t see the flush of his face and mistake the effort of running laps for shame.
But, judging by the emptiness inside and the hard set of his jaw, maybe it’s not so different after all.
He can’t stop thinking about Niou.
Detention for phys ed is held in the high school gymnasium at the same time as tennis practice. No one else in his class is on the team, so during English class Kirihara hunches over his desk and types out a quick text to Jackal.
detention. cant go to practice. tell buchou it wont happen again
The teacher drones on about the subjunctive. Or subjects. It all sounds the same to Kirihara. He leans on his elbow and pretends to pay attention, but he mostly sits in his desk chair worried and feeling the tips of his fingers go dumb around his cell as he waits for a response.
At least his cell is on silent mode, but he can tell when it buzzes with Jackal’s response.
i’ll tell bunta you might be a bit late waiting for him, kk?
~~~!!JACKAL!!~~~
“Kirihara-kun, are you paying attention!?”
Kirihara whips his head up and shoves his cell in his pocket. He nods once, smiling as innocently as he can, and picks his English textbook up in his hands. He holds it up to the teacher as proof.
“I’m glad you can read,” the teacher says, “upside down.”
Kirihara’s smile falters. His cheeks feel warm when the class snickers at him and the tell-tale word of “idiot” sounds off the tongues of his classmates.
Kirihara is glad to hear the bell signaling the end of class and the end of the day. He might be the last one into class, but he’s the first to leave, rushing past his classmates so fast he manages to trip a girl in the process.
“Watch your big feet!” she snaps. Her friends all nod their heads in tandem, one collective girly sniff. Kirihara opens his mouth to tell them all to shut up- or maybe go fuck off- but as he’s about to speak, his voice hangs in the air.
He stares at the girl’s one friend. The shortest of the bunch. He hadn’t recognized her before, because in class she’s just another nameless girly face, generically ‘pretty’, maybe, with big round eyes and pink glossy lips, but…
This is the girl that Yagyuu was holding hands with!
He gapes, just for a moment. He never realized that Yagyuu was going out with a girl in his class. The thought makes him scratch his temple, because it’s weird, just about as weird as Niou liking guys, only-
“What are you staring at?” she hisses. Her friends all give him sour looks, their lips pursed so tight they might as well have just eaten gouya.
“I’ll crush you,” Kirihara grumbles, the words the only coherent thing that comes to mind. They all shake their heads and roll their eyes, calling him a weird jock, but Kirihara’s out of earshot in two steps, running through the school hall to get to the gymnasium.
It’s strange not to be on the tennis court at this hour- to walk by the open hallway windows and hear the afternoon cicadas humming in the waves of heat, to see the first tennis club members start to loiter around the courts instead of running laps, to have his head tell him he has something else to do, but his heart being pulled towards the clay courts…
Kirihara shakes his head. It won’t happen again. I have to be calm and cool like Yanagi-senpai. Calm and cool and not think about Niou-senpai, too.
Kirihara nods to himself and balls up his hand, shaking his fist at his vow. Gambatte, Akaya!
The high school gymnasium is everything the university gym isn’t- scratched wooden floors with faded basketball lines, sweltering air filtering in through the high windows above, harsh fluorescent lights that make Kirihara squint as soon as he walks through the doors.
Maybe a half-dozen people hang around the doorway, all boys, all here for detention. Kirihara tosses his bags onto a bench against the wall and sighs heavily. He shifts his weight, momentarily moving into a split-stepped dance out of boredom when he looks up and sees Niou.
Kirihara trips over his feet and falls onto his knees with a loud SPLAT against the wooden floor. As Kirihara stands up, Niou’s head turns toward him slowly. Niou’s hair is messier than ever and he’s shrugged his shoulders so much he looks practically hunched back. He stands there with his hands in his pockets and his school pants slung low enough to show the waistband of his underpants.
Kirihara rips his eyes away from Niou’s waist, from seeing the shape of Niou’s hip through the hang of his uniform. The phys ed teacher storms into the gym, carrying a sack full of soccer balls over his shoulder. He points to all of them, then to a side closet and tells them to start sweeping.
Kirihara takes a broom from the closet and hangs back, unlike Niou who starts to push his around the perimeter of the gymnasium at the far wall. He’s slow and self-absorbed, and entirely emotionless. Kirihara looks at him- it must be a lot because the phys ed teacher notices and says “Get sweeping, Kirihara or you’ll be back tomorrow, too!”
He pushes aimlessly, making lazy swirls in the dust and dirt on the floor. There’s more collecting on the other side of his broom than Kirihara would have thought, but he’s not thinking much right now so much as glancing back at Niou when the teacher isn’t watching.
Niou’s eyes are dark like those ones in his dream, like those Kirihara saw last week, but they’re dull and defeated today. They don’t shine. They stare out blankly across the gym, almost as if Niou’s in some trance or State of Self Actualization, only a miserable State. The way Niou frowns and breathes and holds his broom, his big hands curled around the handle, the way he moves and looks around like he’s looking for someone makes Kirihara’s chest ache in that weird way. It makes his heart pound doki doki-like, too, thumping against his ribs so it’s hard for him to breathe.
Kirihara wants to…not sweep, for one thing. He shakes his head and wishes he could fix things and make Niou smirk and come back to tennis and stuff bugs in Sanada and Yanagi’s lockers and just…be more than this shadow sweeping in detention.
The sound of the door swinging open makes Kirihara drop his broom. He turns to the person coming into the gym to speak with the phys ed teacher in low tones. It makes a second broom slam to the floor. It resounds once, then twice over before Kirihara blinks.
Yagyuu stands beside the storage room as the phys ed teacher goes inside, shouting something about a spare basket of tennis balls.
“Yagyuu!”
No!
Kirihara can’t move when Niou yells out Yagyuu’s name a second time. It’s painful to hear the scratch in Niou’s voice and even more painful when Yagyuu’s eyes narrow. His glasses shine in the lights, blindingly bright as he turns, his lip curled up in disgust.
Kirihara doesn’t see Niou’s reaction, but he does see Yagyuu acknowledge him with a tiny nod as he wheels the basket of balls out of the gym.
Kirihara is too surprised to even nod back.
“Get back to sweeping, Kirihara! Niou!”
Kirihara bends down to pick his broom up, but Niou doesn’t do the same. The sound of a second door slamming closed- the back door to the swimming pool this time- says everything.
“What a fag,” one of the other boys in detention says. “Did you hear Niou in 2B was a faggot for that tennis guy who just came in?”
The broom handle looks way too inviting to be snapped in half and used to hit the guy in the head. Kirihara trembles with effort to keep himself calm and cool and not freak out. He grinds his teeth to keep quiet and bites his lip until he can taste the metal of his blood swirling in his mouth.
Author: Ociwen
Wordcount: 36000
Rating: NC17
Pairing: Niou/Kirihara + others (if you squint)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: In High School, Kirihara realizes that something is wrong when Niou stops showing up to tennis practice. Tennis, misunderstandings and Genius abounds.
Author's Notes: Written for pixxers in rikkai_exchange. Pixxers, I really hope you like this! Thanks to shikishi for the help.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]
Failing his English test from last week doesn’t faze Kirihara. He almost expects the marks now, the red pen scribbled all over his half-assed romanji gobbledygook answers. He sits and daydreams about playing tennis and crossing Niou’s name off his list.
Niou, who hasn’t shown up to practice for more than a week and a half now.
Yagyuu, on the other hand…scares Kirihara. He must hear the whispers as loud as everyone else. At lunch time, Kirihara sees him start to walk down the hallways hand-in-hand with a pretty, petite girl. One with big boobs and hips who blushes and tucks her hair behind her ear as often as Yagyuu pushes his glasses up.
Maybe it’s to stop the rumours in the tennis club.
The talk is quieter in the pre-regulars’ showers the afternoon after Kirihara first sees Yagyuu with this girl. He himself played another senpai, sweating hard from the temperature and the haze filtering in from Tokyo, the smog that makes the sky a funky yellow colour. The thickness in the air makes tennis seem more of an effort.
Kirihara’s lungs hurt, but in the good way from a decent game of tennis. Nishiki-senpai, who is one of his senpais’ senpais, is a good player and for once Kirihara’s been pushed harder than usual. The mirror reflects pink eyes as he combs his hair down after the shower.
In the reflection, he can see the door to the regulars’ changing room open. Yagyuu walks by it, frowning slightly, but he still nods politely at Kirihara and says, “Good practice.” The door closes behind Yagyuu and the sound of a female voice, all dulcet tones and sweet words, filters into the air, a notch below the loud boys all around Kirihara.
Kirihara whips his head around. He chucks his brush into his bag- it’s useless most of the time anyway. He grabs his backpack and runs out behind Yagyuu.
Yagyuu and the girl walk down the campus, towards the end closer to the university gymnasium. He walks slower than usual, bending down to her level and nodding to things she must be telling him, things that Kirihara can’t hear.
The last of the regulars are still playing on the courts, and Jackal and Marui, too. Jackal yells out “FIYAH” as Kirihara shuffles nearby, hands in his pockets and eyes still looking out at Yagyuu and his girlfriend. The ball Marui returns is a nice high volley, an easy ball for Jackal to smash behind Marui’s head.
Of course, Kirihara isn’t gonna tell his senpai that because it’s more fun watching him work.
Yanagi sits on the bench by the pathway, supposedly writing things down on his clipboard, but even Kirihara can see the earbuds in his ears and the shape of an mp3 player through his pocket. His head bobs to the music softly and his pencil scribbles things on his paper now and then, more token-like, if Kirihara were asked. The late sun shines across the courts, hitting the posts and turning the painted metal surface to gilt. The shadows from Yagyuu and the girl grow longer and longer across the campus grass, hindered by nothing but a few bushes and the soccer field goal posts.
Kirihara gives up, whatever he was doing, and starts to walk the opposite way towards the train station. His feet are sweaty between the toes and he’d rather not wear his sneakers home because they smell, too. He pouts and thinks about where he saw his sandals last.
Maybe in the closet of his room. Maybe his sister stole them to glue rhinestones to, or something dumb like that.
Stupid sister, he thinks.
The trees rustle when Kirihara walks by. The stale summer air makes his hair even hotter and heavier. I could shave my head like Jackal-senpai. It’d be cooler than this. He shakes his hair and flicks water all around, but more ends up in his eyes, still stinging from his game.
Kirihara squeezes them shut until the sharpness passes.
The leaves swish again.
He stops walking first, then he realizes that there’s no breeze right now.
Huh.
“Er…hello?” he calls out. For measure, Kirihara kicks his foot out into the bushes. A few petals from pink flowers flutter to the ground, then the smell of hydrangeas curls around the air as a head of bleached hair pops out of the waxy leaves.
Niou steps out, whistling a tune that cracks and breaks and falls short. He looks at Kirihara. His eyes are so dark they’re almost black, all pupil, all-staring at him.
Kirihara’s knees shake. He starts to fall forward, until he catches his balance on a branch. Niou says nothing and his eyes, black all over, are equally as dead. There’s no shine to them, no smirk on his face, just a blank set to his jaw.
“S-senpai?” Kirihara says.
Niou’s shoes crunch on the pavement, the only sound between them as he gives Kirihara one long look. A piece of hair falls over his eyes and he’s got a dark patch of sweat on the back of his shirt, as if he’s been in the bushes a long, long time.
Those eyes…
More than his just knees shake. Kirihara’s hands are clammy at his sides, stiff like a soldier’s and swaying back and forth as his insides twist up in a weird way. It’s as if his intestines are tangling with his pounding heart and sending blood to weird parts of his body that they shouldn’t be- his rushing head, his dick, too.
His face gets even hotter.
Niou’s black eyes flash at him. For the briefest instant they shine so bright that Kirihara feels every ounce of himself laid open and bare and he fights not to look down to make sure he’s still wearing clothes.
Because it feels like he’s forgotten them. Like Niou can see not just his naked skin, but his muscles and twisting guts and his bones, too.
And this feels the same as his dream.
Was it Niou-senpai-
“Akaya!”
Niou’s shoulder tightens at the sound of Jackal’s voice. Before Kirihara can ask Niou when he’s coming back to tennis, he’s gone. Which is probably for the best, because Kirihara’s mouth is filled with cotton and he can barely nod when Jackal says “Bye-nara! See ya tomorrow!”
The image of Niou’s eyes burns so deep down into Kirihara that he doesn’t even care when he sees his sister pasting plastic flowers to his sports sandals that evening. He shrugs and slams his bedroom door shut behind himself, picking at his cold bento for so long the fruit flies eat more of it than he does.
He dreams of shining black eyes and bleached hair that night and by morning, Kirihara doesn’t forget this time just why there’s sticky and hot come between his thighs and a musky smell to his sheets.
I need help.
***
He may be hopeless in school, he may be hopeless in a hundred other things in life, but when it comes to senpais, Kirihara knows he’s lucky.
Saturday is the start of the regionals. Kirihara shows up early like everyone else, hoping for that last spot as team alternate. He yawns and shuffles and his eyes are red, but he’s there, racket in his bag and bag over his shoulder.
“Already in red-eye mode?” Marui asks. He pops a bubble and slings an arm over Kirihara’s shoulder. “You’re prepared, ne?”
“I’m just tired,” Kirihara says. He can feel a yawn rising, but with the captain approaching the them, he bites back the yawn in favour of a mumbled “Good morning.”
“Kirihara- you’re on this weekend.” The captain nods to him as Kirihara takes the words in, his eyes going wide as Marui clicks his tongue.
“Don’t know why you wouldn’t want my genius in the alternate spot. Didn’t you see Akaya’s serve this week? He slammed the ball into-”
Jackal claps a hand over Marui’s mouth and whistles loudly to cover up the sound of Marui’s muffled words. “Good for you,” he tells Kirihara with a big grin. To Marui, he narrows his eyes, leans in close and whispers, “Don’t spoil his moment. You were the alternate at the prefecturals.”
Being an alternate at Rikkai is nothing exciting, not really. It’s all about the prestige of sitting beside the regulars in the stands. Kirihara wedges himself between Sanada and Yukimura, pleased as punch to have the opportunity this year finally. He sits up straight and watches the games zip by: the regionals round one is against some no name team and by singles three, Yanagi takes the entire win for the team before lunch.
It gets kinda boring sitting and watching the matches, so Kirihara is glad for lunch and gladder still for the bento his mother bought for him. Yakitori skewers and macaroni salad. Marui and Jackal sidle over to Kirihara at the patio tables and spread out Marui’s bento box- family-sized and filled with sweet buns and cakes and cucumber pickles and cold eel. Or, it was originally cold and has now gone a bit warm. Still, it’s tasty and Kirihara stuffs his face, boredom having made him hungrier than usual. The patio tables are filled with the yellow jerseys from Rikkai. Maybe if the other teams played as fast and won as easily, they’d have as long for lunch too.
The captain calls out the afternoon roll call from the table beside Kirihara. Kirihara sips at his juice box and chucks it out, right before he hears his name.
“Here!” he yells.
Jackal passes Kirihara a milk tea carton across the table. “You want?”
Kirihara nods. He stabs the straw into the carton and looks down as he sips. Summer Package, his favourite. He leans back into the chair, feeling his tennisbag under the seat with his feet, and he sucks his straw harder.
“Nakamura?”
“Here!”
“Niou?”
Silence.
Marui glances over his shoulder, chewing loudly on a slice of pineapple. He looks back at Jackal and Kirihara and shrugs. Marui resumes his chewing and before he’s finished his first piece, his fingers are grabbing another slice.
Kirihara can feel a lump forming in his throat the longer the pause in the attendance goes on. Without wanting to be obvious, he shifts his eyes. There’s Yagyuu seated on the far side by the vending machines, at the same table as Yanagi. There’s Nishiki and Yoshimoto and Murakami by them, near the fukubuchou and his friends. There’s Sanada in his black cap and Yukimura’s dark hair and the frosted hair of another senpai, but no Niou.
No Niou anywhere.
The captain shrugs his shoulders too and crosses the name on his list. “If he doesn’t show up to next weekend’s games, he’s off the team- remember that Kuwahara, got it?”
Jackal nods once. “Yes!” he shouts, almost mocking when he salutes the captain behind his back. Marui starts to snicker.
But hearing his senpais say these things hurts. Kirihara doesn’t get why the lump in his throat gets harder and drier because there’s nothing in his throat- no food, no lumps of candy. He slurps his drink to get rid of it, but it doesn’t go away the entire afternoon.
He sits and watches the matches and feels weird, feels guilty for some reason, like he needs to get Niou and tell him to come back and tell him that it doesn’t matter, at least to Kirihara, if Niou is fighting with Yagyuu and being strange and like that because he mostly wants to cross Niou’s name off his list.
Right?
Kirihara nods to himself. Yeah, that’s right. My list.
“What are you nodding about?” Yukimura hisses in his ear. “That player just fouled the ball.”
Kirihara sits up as straight as he can, blinking twice. “Sorry,” he mumbles.
Yukimura gives him a lop-sided smile and touches Kirihara on the arm. “I’m just looking out for you, Akaya,” he says. “I want you to be the best player you can and you can’t creep this year’s captain out too much, okay?”
Kirihara nods again, his cheeks stinging a bit. “Got it,” he says quickly. “Sorry, Yukimura-buchou.”
“I’m not the captain,” Yukimura says.
Sanada looks over at the two of them, grunting something and glaring under the shade of his cap at Kirihara. He looks a bit confused, until Yukimura smiles. Yukimura leans over and tells Kirihara in a sweet tone, “But it doesn’t mean I don’t want you calling me that.”
***
Sunday morning, Kirihara hangs around at home, bothering his sister in the main room. She has ribbons and sequins and sparkly things streaming across the tatami floor, organized in neat little piles as she pastes them to hair pins and t-shirts. His sandals are nowhere in sight.
Kirihara stomps through the lot his sister has strewn around, relishing her yells as he picks up the telephone.
“AKAYA!” she shrieks.
“I’m ON THE PHONE!” he yells back, cupping the receiver before he dials.
She pinches his leg after he hears the first ring.
He kicks back, then runs off with the phone to his room. His cell phone is lost somewhere in his tennisbag today and his bag smells too much to look for it right now. His mother needs to clean it out for him soon. Flopping back on his bed, he waits for someone to pick up.
“Hello?”
Yukimura’s voice.
A knot forms in his belly. Right. Just ask for help. Just ask for advice. Yukimura’ll help me, no problem.
“Um, Yukimura-buchou, can I come over? I gotta get your help with something,” Kirihara says. When Yukimura doesn’t answer, the knot gets tighter and starts to choke a bit. Kirihara tryies to be cool and play things off. Somehow, it comes out more rushed than ever. “AndIthoughtyoucouldhelpme please.”
“Yeah I’m home all day. My doctor’s appointment is tonight after supper, so come before then, Akaya.” Yukimura hangs up; his words are short and concise and so in control that Kirihara sighs with relief.
Yukimura will help. Kirihara knows he’s lucky with his senpais. Yukimura will know exactly what to do.
His tennisbag reeks of old sweat, smelling more like barf than the rubber of tennis balls, as Kirihara paws through it to find his cellphone and his wallet. He gags and looks away, thinking, Stupid mother, I need it clean now!
In the front zip, he feels his wallet, but inside it’s empty of everything except a couple 500 yen coins.
Enough to take the bus there. His phone turns out to be hidden in the toe of his spare canister of balls. Kirihara pockets it, grabs his other pair of sandals from under his bed and slams the door behind himself when he leaves.
It’s a muggy day; the sky is a shade of slate overhead. Kirihara walks as far as the bus stop before he looks back up at the sky. The air smells of rain to come and his cargo shorts don’t have his spare umbrella packed in the side pocket. He kicks himself inwardly and mutters, “Fuck it, I’ll take the train instead.”
He jogs to the station just in time before the first fat drops of warm rain fall down. As he ascends the escalator to the platform, the rain splatters outside, rushing with the sound of the approaching train. Kirihara steps forward to get into the first line he can see and make this train, but something catches his eye further up the platform.
A bleached head of hair sticks out among the dark auburns and black. Kirihara pushes in front of a middle-aged woman to get closer and see. If it’s Niou, he’s too far down the platform for Kirihara get a good look, especially when the train sing-songs and the doors open. People rush past Kirihara, bumping into him as he struggles to get closer to see.
“NIOU!” he shouts. “NIOU-SENPAI!”
Kirihara’s taller than most of the other commuters now, but the doors start to sing their closing and he has to decide: get on or look for Niou. He bites his lip, hesitating for just a millisecond before he grabs the door long enough to squeeze inside.
The train jerks into motion and he falls forward. Kirihara reaches for the hand-hold above his head just in time. He walks towards the end of the carriage, hoping he’ll catch a break and be able to walk down the train to find Niou, but the carriage isn’t through and he’s not dumb enough to open the doors between moving trains.
Kirihara sighs heavily and sinks into the priority seat by the doorway. He feels a bit like a moron for yelling out to Niou again- if it was even Niou, he doesn’t know for certain. He does know, though, that his heart flutters in his rib cage and tickles his lungs in that weird way like at school and those black, shining eyes flash across his vision, long enough to make his legs twitch.
He fidgets for a moment, hoping no one notices he was the idiot yelling on the platform. His face feels warm, too warm in the air conditioning on the train, so he ducks his head, grabs his phone from his pocket and reflexively starts to check his messages. Kirihara can pretend to distract himself, but his eyes…he can’t stop himself from looking down at the door between the carriages and hoping to find that distinctive bleached hair.
You have: 0 new messages…
No Niou either. Just a sea of dark heads, all bobbing with the gentle sway of the train, or the slow slide into a nap.
Yukimura lives on the edge of a suburb, in the other direction of the school from Sanada. Kirihara rather likes coming out here, not just because there’s an awesome little comic store on the walk from the train station at the corner with the traffic lights, but because it’s nice here: large expanses of park and gardens interspersed with older houses, low and familial with hanging vines over their stuccoed fences. It smells like a rice cooker and the yakiniku joint down the opposite end of the road spills fumes of BBQ sauce and fatty grilled meat all around.
His stomach growls. It’s almost lunch. Maybe Yukimura will have something at home to eat. Kirihara’s spent almost 300 yen on the train ticket and he needs to get back home eventually, too. Yukimura could lend him money.
The afternoon is calm, which makes the temperature seem even hotter. The air is clearer out here, further from Tokyo and Yokohama’s factories. Sweat forms at the back of Kirihara’s neck, under his arms and on his back. He fans himself with his hand and darts under fences to try to catch what little shade there is.
Yukimura lives in one of those many identical pre-fab sorts around here, surrounded by high garden walls and dripping vines, tiny bonsais poking their heads up against the ledge. Kirihara takes a deep breath and buzzes himself in.
Yukimura’s mom answers the door. She’s older and shorter than Kirihara’s mom, with a really bad perm and a faded apron. “Seiichi’s out back, Kirihara-chan,” she says.
Kirihara cringes. Considering he towers over her head, he hates the way she calls him that. Trying to be polite, he ducks his head in a nod and mutters “Thanks, Yukimura-san.” Right on cue, his stomach gurgles.
“I can bring you boys some lunch,” she offers.
Yes!
Kirihara smiles and thanks her again.
Yukimura’s house might be in a nice area, but inside it has that weird smell of old people and incense from temples and cheap soap. The alcove by the main room has a placid Kanon statue staring through slitted eyes at Kirihara, with a tiny incense stick on the brazier by its feet. Kirihara bows his head instinctively and makes for the back doorway.
Plants hang everywhere. Bushes drape over a flagstone pathway that crunches under Kirihara’s feet. Everything drips with the morning’s rain, right onto the back of Kirihara’s t-shirt. The humidity in Yukimura’s garden stifles it’s so thick. It’s like a rainforest here, complete with the tinkling sound of a bamboo fountain and the gurgling of water in the pool below it.
Someone grunts, just beyond a hibiscus bush. Kirihara shoves a branch away to see Yukimura’s back, hunched over a cluster of flowers. Snip snip snip- he attacks the flowers with a pair of scissors, laughing about something under his breath.
“Buchou?” Kirihara says.
Yukimura whips his head around. He’s red in the face and his hair hangs in limp strands. He jabs the flowers with another cut, the dead buds falling to his feet, right before he stands up and wipes his forehead with the hem of his t-shirt.
Considering he’s worried about these strange thoughts over Niou, Kirihara probably shouldn’t be checking out Yukimura’s stomach either. Yukimura is pasty, sure, but he’s got faint lines of abs and a couple stray dark hairs under his bellybutton that make Kirihara look away and swallow a lump in his chest.
Would Niou-senpai…
NO! Don’t think about that!
“Akaya?” Yukimura snaps. “I’m not your buchou anymore.”
“I know…” Kirihara says, his voice fading into the bubble of the tiny pond. Foam floats along the edges, broken up by spiny grasses lining the pond’s edge. A frog croaks, then jumps off behind a clump of tall bamboo.
“Well I didn’t say you couldn’t call me that,” Yukimura says. He tosses his hair back and shakes it out for a moment. Then, he says, “Next year’ll come soon enough, ne? Takiguchi-buchou should really retire and leave the team to us before then. He’s too…”
“Not you?” Kirihara offers.
“Exactly,” Yukimura says, nodding sagely. Kirihara nods too, because, well, Yukimura is brilliant at tennis and he’s Kirihara’s senpai and he knows all sorts of things Kirihara doesn’t which is why Kirihara came over. Yukimura will know what to do.
“MOM! Can we have some lunch soon? I’m starving!” Yukimura pats his stomach. To Kirihara, he says, “Gardening makes me hungry.”
The platter Yukimura’s mom brings is covered in food. Saliva forms under Kirihara’s tongue as he stares at the food she lays out on the porch for them. Yukimura’s mom sets out two cushions and frowns at her son. “Wash your hands, Seiichi. They’re dirty.”
Yukimura wipes them on the back of his capris as soon as she turns her and goes back inside the house. “Let’s eat,” he says.
“Let’s eat,” Kirihara echoes as he eyes the cold slices of roast pork.
It’s one of those days that feels so hot and sticky that there should be a thunderstorm roll through, only the sky isn’t murky enough here. The yellow-tinted sky is dotted with a few thin clouds in the east, but nothing more. Kirihara pants and wipes his own sweaty hands off on his shorts, too. He slurps up cold noodles and sauce and leftover curry rice as Yukimura gobbles up half a baked fish: cold, of course, and he does offer some to Kirihara, but the evil look in Yukimura’s eyes makes Kirihara shrink back and say, “It’s okay, you can have it all, Yukimura-buchou.”
“So,” Yukimura says as he chews, spitting fish onto the food between them, “where’s your tennisbag? Your swing looked like crap this past week and you wanted help with that. We can probably go to the park down the street and work on it. There’s more room there. Or my bedroom, I guess. I have A/C in there.” Yukimura stabs another piece of fish with his chopsticks and licks his lips. “It’s too hot today, isn’t it?”
Kirihara sets down his cup of green tea. “Eh?”
Yukimura blinks. “What?” He narrows his eyes, squinting against the streams of sunlight shining into the garden, making the plants steam. “It’s hot?”
“No,” Kirihara says, “my serve?”
“It looked terrible,” Yukimura says, waving his chopsticks in the air. “I think your problem was the angle. And were you distracted, Akaya?”
That hard lump starts to form again, right at the base of his throat, making it hard to swallow the rice. Kirihara nods slowly. “That’s what I wanted to ask your help for, buchou.”
Yukimura puts his chopsticks down. One rolls off the holder as he leans forward, resting his chin on his elbows and staring intently at Kirihara. “Shoot.”
“I…” Be calm and cool, just like Yanagi-senpai. Be cool. Kirihara looks at Yukimura, trying hard to keep eye contact and not blush and look away. “Buchou, I…if I- I mean, if someone I knew maybe thought weird thoughts about someone they-”
“Like a chick?” Yukimura asks. His forehead wrinkles.
Kirihara hesitates for a second, then he nods. “Yeah, yeah, like a chick.” It’s almost like that, he thinks. It’s easier to ask for help like this. “But…if this girl was like, um…” He twists his hands around, just the way his insides are twisting up, too. Yukimura gives him weird looks, glancing up at Kirihara and tilting his head from side to side as if he can figure out what’s going on through brain waves alone.
A bead of sweat slides down Kirihara’s upper lip. He licks it off and goes on. “If she maybe…had some guy reject her and she wasn’t hanging around anymore, then if I- my friend wanted to talk to her then what would he, um, do? To help fix things?”
Yukimura says nothing. A fly buzzes beside his ear that he swats at blindly without moving the rest of his body.
Kirihara bites the inside of his mouth. He looks from Yukimura to the fly to the food it lands on. The pork he just ate churns in his stomach and acid rises in his throat and he feels more than a little ill waiting for Yukimura to say anything.
“Akaya,” Yukimura says, his voice nice and even.
Kirihara sits up straight and leans forward, eager for Yukimura’s help. “Buchou?”
“You should ask Marui about this.”
Kirihara falls face-first into the soy sauce dish.
“Because I don’t know a thing about girls.” Sighing, Yukimura looks out at his garden with a dreamy look in his eyes. On his fingers, he counts off as he talks. “See, there’s tennis, which is the most important thing in life right now. Then everything else. Marui is the person you should ask.” Laughing darkly under his breath, he adds, “He’s a tensai, you know. Has he reminded you of that recently?”
Kirihara’s hand twitches, and his right eye too. He forces himself to sit still. Now would be a bad time to get angry at Yukimura. Marui can help, even if Yukimura can’t. Yukimura starts to drone on about something to do with Kirihara’s terrible serve from last week, but all Kirihara can remember is slamming that ball into his one senpai because he was laughing at Niou and calling him names and it wasn’t Kirihara’s tennis that suffered. It was his mood.
His tennis was just more violent was all. Yukimura never corrected that when he was in junior high. He would pat Kirihara on the shoulder and tell him how proud he was that he beat Tachibana, or that he got four games off Sanada one time at practice-
“Oh, it’s my cell!”
Kirihara snaps out of his pout. Yukimura’s phone rings with a song that sounds more like techno yakuza music than anything else. It’s kinda catchy, but before Kirihara can tap his fingers to the beat, Yukimura answers it.
“Sanada? Yeah, yeah, I’m home…I’m done my appointment at 7:30, probably. No…no, Akaya’s here right now, but he’s just stopping by…You can come over after that…yeah, but I broke the strings on my spare last weekend so you’ll have to bring your own…okay, yeah, see ya.” Yukimura clicks end and smiles at Kirihara, his lips curling up so slightly and sweet it makes Kirihara start to smile back.
“Marui can help you- your friend, Akaya,” Yukimura says. The hand Yukimura claps a down heavily on Kirihara’s shoulder makes Kirihara jump a bit. “And if he can’t, I’ll owe you a game. You can even have first serve, okay?”
***
On Monday morning at practice, the first thing Marui says when Kirihara shuffles into the changing room half-awake is:
“So, you need the tensai’s genius at long last.”
Marui gives Kirihara a sly grin and waggles his eyebrows. Kirihara inches back, slightly worried by the way Marui cracks his knuckles in tune with his bubble popping.
Jackal shakes his head. “Oh god, not this again. You shouldn’t have asked him for help, Akaya. You shouldn’t-”
Marui prods Jackal in the arm and backs him up into a locker beside Kirihara. “I’ll have you know that my genius extends to more than just tennis, Jackal.”
Inhaling deeply, Marui flings his arms above his head (in the process, smacking both Kirihara and Jackal in the face), turns to the entire pre-regular team, all in various states of changing into their uniforms, and announces, “I am the Love Master Marui-sama!”
Jackal slaps his forehead. Kirihara can see the stubble of hair dot his scalp. “Oh Jesus,” he mutters. “Not this. Anything but this, Bunta.”
A few of the senpais across the bench snicker and lean to each other, their eyes shifting towards Marui. Marui just keeps on prancing on top of the second bench, pointing his fingers and flailing his arms and going on about something called a “Casanova to get chicks.”
Kirihara slithers to the floor. The grit catches his uniform pants on the bottom of the locker. Not a girl, Marui-senpai! he thinks, but there’s no way in hell he can say anything now, not with a senior clapping him on the shoulder, saying, “No way she can’t fall for this stud.”
Kirihara shrivels up under his shirt. His stomach flops onto the side and his salad breakfast starts to rise in his throat, all gross and barf-like. He closes his eyes shut until the captain walks into the room and shouts, “Let’s go, Rikkai Dai!”
Marui shuts up, having to rush to change into his uniform. Kirihara starts to unzip his tennisbag when Jackal whispers, “Don’t listen to a word he says, Akaya. Bunta’s never had a girlfriend ever. He doesn’t know-”
A head pokes between Kirihara’s arm and Jackal’s face. Marui head-butts Jackal out of the way. Standing there topless and self-assured, Marui waves his finger. “I’ll have you know, Jackal, that I am a genius in the art of love. And I can help Akaya find a girlfriend like that!” He snaps his fingers and cranes his neck up. “So. There.”
Kirihara can’t hold back. His mouth starts to work before his brain. “But I-”
Jackal cuts him off, which makes Kirihara slacken a bit. “He doesn’t-”
“Yukimura said,” Marui says, “that Akaya was having girl trouble. And, being the magnanimous senpai I am- unlike you, Jackal-” Marui shakes his head and sighs, “I offered my tensai services for my beloved kouhai to benefit from.”
“Do you even know what half those words mean?” Jackal asks.
Marui sniffs.
Kirihara scratches his head. Magnanimous…?
“Kuwahara! Marui! Kirihara! Asses on the courts, now!” the captain’s voice booms through the doorway. Kirihara drops his t-shirt, then grabs it again, shoving his arms through the holes. Marui straightens the hem of his own t-shirt and rushes past Jackal to grab his racket. Jackal pulls his shorts up and tosses Kirihara his fallen sweat towel. They all make a run for the door at the same time and crash into the frame, legs and arms tangling. Kirihara squawks when Marui steps on his foot- he’s heavy and pain throbs in Kirihara’s toes as he trips out behind his senpais.
The sky is overcast, the air heavy with dampness. Kirihara looks out toward the bushes by the gymnasium wall where Niou hid last week, watching Yagyuu, maybe, or just watching the tennis practice. Something twists in his chest. Kirihara pauses to catch his breath because it’s hard to breathe like this, to think about what Niou might be thinking.
He grabs a ball from the basket and bounces it against his racketface. Fifty, 100, 200 bounces, backhand, forehand, they’re all perfect and he catches them all. He’s not a social outcast. And he’s still able to play tennis.
Even though he’s been thinking about Niou way more than can be normal.
No one seems to have noticed.
Kirihara exhales. Phew!
He flips his racket over and starts a fresh set of bounces, this time against the rim of his racket. Plong plong plong, he hits them all.
His list sits forgotten in his pocket, collecting weight and creases, though his fingers touch it idly as he waits by a net post, still bouncing the ball. Marui strides up to Kirihara with a gum-popping grin. “Oi! Kid! Tonight, after practice, meet me at the school gate and let the tensai fix your problem.”
Kirihara swallows the acridness in his throat, nodding because he can’t say anything else.
***
When Kirihara has a regular day of classes, he’s lucky to only feel like an idiot a few times per class. When Kirihara has a shit day of classes, he feels like an idiot constantly. Even in gym class, his favourite, even though it’s the tennis unit and they get to use the indoor university courts (nice and air-conditioned and beautiful traction for runners!), even though Kirihara gets stuck playing against some kid who can’t hit a ball straight, Kirihara feels dumb.
His partner, some megane with bad acne, sniffles and tosses the ball up. He hits a shot at such a hard angle, he nets the ball and manages to ding the post in one go.
Kirihara cringes. He doesn’t have the heart to point and laugh. The way the megane flounces across the court to get the ball looks a bit like how Marui walks and Marui thinks that Kirihara wants to fix girl problems and-
“Kirihara-kun?”
-and it’s not a girl he’s worried about at all, it’s a guy and Kirihara doesn’t know what he wants to do or why he wants to do something for Niou, but he does and he can’t stop imagining those dark eyes looking at him and making him feel like he’s walking around naked, but not just naked naked, but naked with an erect-
“Kirihara-kun?”
“What?” he snaps.
The megane points down to Kirihara’s racket. Kirihara’s eyes follow. His hand clutches the racket strings so tight his knuckles look greenish in the artificial lighting here and…
Kirihara unhooks his fingers from the racket strings.
The megane starts to snicker: a weird, snorting little laugh. The same sort he and the other smart kids use in class whenever Kirihara messes up an English answer or gets caught sleeping in Literature class.
Three racket strings have snapped. On his favourite Wilson racket, too.
“Aw, fuck,” Kirihara grumbles. The megane keeps snickering on the other side of the net. Kirihara grinds his teeth against the noise, the wheezy laugh making his ears grate and his eye twitch and his hands shake hard enough to drop his racket and he can feel his blood rushing- to his head, to his legs, to every part of his body.
“SHUT UP!” he yells. “JUST SHUT YOUR DAMN MOUTH!” Kirihara lunges for the net. A cackle of his own surfaces when the megane runs off, his own racket thrown to the ground behind him. He can’t stop laughing until the megane has run out of the gym completely.
Kirihara gets fifty laps and detention after school.
The fifty laps are nothing compared to what he could rack up when Sanada was fukubuchou and in charge of tennis club in junior high: 200 was common, 300 if Sanada was particularly nasty. Kirihara finishes his laps just before class ends, panting and red-faced, but grateful to be inside a gymnasium and not outside in the dripping summer heat.
In the gymnasium changing rooms, he’s given a wide berth. The megane and his friends whisper, all hush-hush and huddled together in the corner by the toilets. Everyone else just shakes their head at him. Kirihara turns his back so they can’t see the flush of his face and mistake the effort of running laps for shame.
But, judging by the emptiness inside and the hard set of his jaw, maybe it’s not so different after all.
He can’t stop thinking about Niou.
Detention for phys ed is held in the high school gymnasium at the same time as tennis practice. No one else in his class is on the team, so during English class Kirihara hunches over his desk and types out a quick text to Jackal.
detention. cant go to practice. tell buchou it wont happen again
The teacher drones on about the subjunctive. Or subjects. It all sounds the same to Kirihara. He leans on his elbow and pretends to pay attention, but he mostly sits in his desk chair worried and feeling the tips of his fingers go dumb around his cell as he waits for a response.
At least his cell is on silent mode, but he can tell when it buzzes with Jackal’s response.
i’ll tell bunta you might be a bit late waiting for him, kk?
~~~!!JACKAL!!~~~
“Kirihara-kun, are you paying attention!?”
Kirihara whips his head up and shoves his cell in his pocket. He nods once, smiling as innocently as he can, and picks his English textbook up in his hands. He holds it up to the teacher as proof.
“I’m glad you can read,” the teacher says, “upside down.”
Kirihara’s smile falters. His cheeks feel warm when the class snickers at him and the tell-tale word of “idiot” sounds off the tongues of his classmates.
Kirihara is glad to hear the bell signaling the end of class and the end of the day. He might be the last one into class, but he’s the first to leave, rushing past his classmates so fast he manages to trip a girl in the process.
“Watch your big feet!” she snaps. Her friends all nod their heads in tandem, one collective girly sniff. Kirihara opens his mouth to tell them all to shut up- or maybe go fuck off- but as he’s about to speak, his voice hangs in the air.
He stares at the girl’s one friend. The shortest of the bunch. He hadn’t recognized her before, because in class she’s just another nameless girly face, generically ‘pretty’, maybe, with big round eyes and pink glossy lips, but…
This is the girl that Yagyuu was holding hands with!
He gapes, just for a moment. He never realized that Yagyuu was going out with a girl in his class. The thought makes him scratch his temple, because it’s weird, just about as weird as Niou liking guys, only-
“What are you staring at?” she hisses. Her friends all give him sour looks, their lips pursed so tight they might as well have just eaten gouya.
“I’ll crush you,” Kirihara grumbles, the words the only coherent thing that comes to mind. They all shake their heads and roll their eyes, calling him a weird jock, but Kirihara’s out of earshot in two steps, running through the school hall to get to the gymnasium.
It’s strange not to be on the tennis court at this hour- to walk by the open hallway windows and hear the afternoon cicadas humming in the waves of heat, to see the first tennis club members start to loiter around the courts instead of running laps, to have his head tell him he has something else to do, but his heart being pulled towards the clay courts…
Kirihara shakes his head. It won’t happen again. I have to be calm and cool like Yanagi-senpai. Calm and cool and not think about Niou-senpai, too.
Kirihara nods to himself and balls up his hand, shaking his fist at his vow. Gambatte, Akaya!
The high school gymnasium is everything the university gym isn’t- scratched wooden floors with faded basketball lines, sweltering air filtering in through the high windows above, harsh fluorescent lights that make Kirihara squint as soon as he walks through the doors.
Maybe a half-dozen people hang around the doorway, all boys, all here for detention. Kirihara tosses his bags onto a bench against the wall and sighs heavily. He shifts his weight, momentarily moving into a split-stepped dance out of boredom when he looks up and sees Niou.
Kirihara trips over his feet and falls onto his knees with a loud SPLAT against the wooden floor. As Kirihara stands up, Niou’s head turns toward him slowly. Niou’s hair is messier than ever and he’s shrugged his shoulders so much he looks practically hunched back. He stands there with his hands in his pockets and his school pants slung low enough to show the waistband of his underpants.
Kirihara rips his eyes away from Niou’s waist, from seeing the shape of Niou’s hip through the hang of his uniform. The phys ed teacher storms into the gym, carrying a sack full of soccer balls over his shoulder. He points to all of them, then to a side closet and tells them to start sweeping.
Kirihara takes a broom from the closet and hangs back, unlike Niou who starts to push his around the perimeter of the gymnasium at the far wall. He’s slow and self-absorbed, and entirely emotionless. Kirihara looks at him- it must be a lot because the phys ed teacher notices and says “Get sweeping, Kirihara or you’ll be back tomorrow, too!”
He pushes aimlessly, making lazy swirls in the dust and dirt on the floor. There’s more collecting on the other side of his broom than Kirihara would have thought, but he’s not thinking much right now so much as glancing back at Niou when the teacher isn’t watching.
Niou’s eyes are dark like those ones in his dream, like those Kirihara saw last week, but they’re dull and defeated today. They don’t shine. They stare out blankly across the gym, almost as if Niou’s in some trance or State of Self Actualization, only a miserable State. The way Niou frowns and breathes and holds his broom, his big hands curled around the handle, the way he moves and looks around like he’s looking for someone makes Kirihara’s chest ache in that weird way. It makes his heart pound doki doki-like, too, thumping against his ribs so it’s hard for him to breathe.
Kirihara wants to…not sweep, for one thing. He shakes his head and wishes he could fix things and make Niou smirk and come back to tennis and stuff bugs in Sanada and Yanagi’s lockers and just…be more than this shadow sweeping in detention.
The sound of the door swinging open makes Kirihara drop his broom. He turns to the person coming into the gym to speak with the phys ed teacher in low tones. It makes a second broom slam to the floor. It resounds once, then twice over before Kirihara blinks.
Yagyuu stands beside the storage room as the phys ed teacher goes inside, shouting something about a spare basket of tennis balls.
“Yagyuu!”
No!
Kirihara can’t move when Niou yells out Yagyuu’s name a second time. It’s painful to hear the scratch in Niou’s voice and even more painful when Yagyuu’s eyes narrow. His glasses shine in the lights, blindingly bright as he turns, his lip curled up in disgust.
Kirihara doesn’t see Niou’s reaction, but he does see Yagyuu acknowledge him with a tiny nod as he wheels the basket of balls out of the gym.
Kirihara is too surprised to even nod back.
“Get back to sweeping, Kirihara! Niou!”
Kirihara bends down to pick his broom up, but Niou doesn’t do the same. The sound of a second door slamming closed- the back door to the swimming pool this time- says everything.
“What a fag,” one of the other boys in detention says. “Did you hear Niou in 2B was a faggot for that tennis guy who just came in?”
The broom handle looks way too inviting to be snapped in half and used to hit the guy in the head. Kirihara trembles with effort to keep himself calm and cool and not freak out. He grinds his teeth to keep quiet and bites his lip until he can taste the metal of his blood swirling in his mouth.