FIC: Rewind Forward (D1) 22/63
Title: Rewind Forward (22/63)
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
The official tennis season opens with the prefecturals in late May. Niou isn’t too concerned about winning; it’s more a question of winning by how much. Yagyuu has never played any official games before, but they beat Marui and Jackal, so it shouldn’t be too hard to take prefectural games at least 6-3 or 6-2.
On rare Sunday mornings, Niou manages to sleep in. Sun streams into his bedroom, warm and bright across his blankets. He’s sticky between the legs- he’s almost always when he wakes up now: long-forgotten wet dreams in the night that probably included a certain gentlemanly megane dork.
After a long hot shower and a comfortable jerk off in the privacy of the bathroom, Niou shuffles downstairs where his sister sits at the table, eating a piece of toast. “There’s some eggs left over,” she tells him, not looking up from the newspaper she has spread out in front of her.
“Thanks,” Niou belches into her ear.
She pushes him away in disgust. “You’re gross, Masaharu!” she snaps.
“Morning gas,” Niou says, patting his stomach. “It could be worse.”
He has nothing better to do with himself all day without practice. And it is really too nice to stay indoors all day, unlike his nerdy brother, who sits placidly in the living room arranging kinetics and gears into perfect geometric forms, proudly showing their father his architectural know-how at the tender age of eleven.
Niou rolls his eyes. Megane dork, he thinks.
“I’m out,” he mutters, but no one pays attention to him, not really, when he grabs his tennis bag, shoves his feet into his sneakers and slams the door closed. He wears his Rikkai Dai uniform- Niou is more than smart enough to know that if he does, only the dumbest idiots would challenge him to a streetcourt game. That makes it all the more enjoyable.
He takes the bus half-way across town, up north a bit, away from the harbour and the canals. It’s closer to where Kirihara lives, in the rows of townhouses and mid-range apartment complexes, with dozens of local parks and streetcourts. It is, in effect, perfect for picking up some loser to play and test out his right-handed laser beam.
Niou does his best to look as inconspicuous as he can, walking through a park and keeping his head down to avoid weird stares at his hair, but keeping his head up enough to see where the streetcourts are nearby. Sure enough, the sound of balls hitting the court and the tread of several sets of sneakers sounds through the trees before he’s walked two blocks from the bus stop. Niou cuts through the grass, smirking to himself when he sees two entwined teenagers behind some bushes.
It’s funny, all right, until Niou starts to wonder what it would be like if he were the guy there, instead of that young university student and his girlfriend, necking in a public park, her hands splayed on his back and his hands on her ass. What if Niou’s hands were on Yagyuu’s ass- would it feel squishy? Hard? Niou’s seen Yagyuu’s ass enough that he can almost imagine feeling the contours under his fingertips, the swell of flesh, the skin.
Yagyuu has a bit of a bubblebutt, kind of like that girl, rounded and probably perfect to touch, to cup his palms over and push closer to himself. Yagyuu’s shorts are always pulled tighter over his ass than someone like Sanada, whose ass is as flat as his hat hair.
Would he and Yagyuu make noises like that if they kissed, all sloppy and hungry at once? The girl and the university make smacking noises, little moans and slimy-sounding grunts.
Niou walks faster toward the courts. Not once do the teenagers look up at the bleached-haired kid who spent a good minute staring straight at them, curious and envious all wrapped into one.
The courts are surrounded by furry pine trees and fan-leafed ginko, brighter green than the faded clay ground inside the fenced courts. Niou peaks through the chainlink fence, grabbing it to get a closer look through the metal lace. All three courts are filled with players: a middle-aged pair of woman in designer white tennis outfits in the centre court, a group of junior high or maybe freshman high school students on the courts closest to Niou, and in the far court, two players making fast work of the ball, constant zooming lobs and volleys. Niou’s view is partly blocked by as a group of onlookers, but the thwop and swoosh of the ball is distinct.
Niou walks around the fence, then pushes open the gate to go inside. The small crowd gathered on the far court oohs and ahhs and talks a lot, too loud for just streetcourt games, unless maybe they do that in Tokyo. He scuffs his shoes on the ground and dumps his tennis bag on the nearest bench, right next to another Rikkai Dai tennis club bag.
Interesting…
He cracks his knuckles and looks up with a grin. The wonderchibi must be on the prowl today.
“Is that all you’ve got?” Kirihara shouts with an added cackle. The laughter on his voice gives edge to his words that makes Niou nod because he knows that Kirihara is out in full-force with his tennis.
Niou pushes through the crowd and sticks his head up. On the court closest to him, Kirihara rushes across the baseline, grinning his head off and panting hard. “Do you want to see my twist serve?” he yells.
“When it’s your serve, kid!” the other player shouts. The voice sounds oddly familiar, with the tone similar to his own.
Niou looks up and sees himself.
He blinks.
And looks again.
No, there is definitely him on the court across from Kirihara, close to the net and following Kirihara’s every move with a self-satisfied smirk, bouncing lazily from side to side. It is Niou, with the wild bleached hair and the pink hair tie. It’s Niou with the dark eyes and the mole on his chin. It’s Niou with his racket in his left hand and the sneakers- well, Niou only has to look down at his own to see the same grimy grey as that other Niou has.
Except there are two differences. It takes Niou a moment, but the tell-tale upturned collar and socks pulled up to his shins shows Niou that this imposter is none other than-
“Oi!” he calls out, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Let’s see your laser beam!”
Niou looks at Niou.
Kirihara stares at Niou, too- the Niou in the crowd of people, who start to part and allow Niou to walk onto the court when the ball has bounced off the top of the net.
Kirihara looks from one Niou to the other, gaping like a fish. “Niou-senpai…” he starts.
Niou rolls his eyes at the imposter. “Your collar’s turned up, Yagyuu,” he says. Niou jumps over the net and walks up to himself, whose face hardens with the harsh line of Yagyuu’s mouth taking over the closer Niou gets. He pokes Yagyuu on the chin. “And my mole’s not that dark.”
The sudden slam of a racket on the ground startles Niou. He turns around to see Kirihara seething, his eyes faintly pink and his fists balled up. “I thought…” he struggles to say, “I thought Niou-senpai called me to practice! You’re Yagyuu-senpai!”
Yagyuu smiles faintly. He reaches up to his nose, but there are no glasses to push up his nose and his index falters. He might be decent at observing, but he’s got aways to go. He blinks too much- it must be from contacts, because his eyes are a bit pink and irritated too. Kirihara redux.
“Puri,” Yagyuu says, his impression of Niou’s voice spot-on. He swings his racket over his shoulder, and slouches his posture. It makes Niou stand up slightly straighter, just for comparison- does he really act like that? Does he really stand and smirk like that, with his head cocked to the side and his hair over his eyes?
Niou flashes Yagyuu a thumbs-up.
Kirihara sticks his lip out, pouting for a moment, before he says in a loud voice, “What about me versus both of you?”
The crowds have started to dissipate, the entertainment over for now. Yagyuu shakes his head, pulling out his hair tie and then ripping the wig off his head. Kirihara shrugs. He runs off to the other courts asking if anyone has the balls to play him.
Niou sits down on the bench next to Yagyuu. “Your socks are wrong for me,” he says.
Yagyuu nods. “I’ll remember that.”
“I didn’t know you were into cosplay.”
Yagyuu starts to laugh. “Kirihara-kun texted Niou about playing today and he must have hit my number by accident. It’s fun to…play with him.”
Niou starts to laugh too.
***
Niou could tick off all the points he’s learned about Yagyuu in the past year, from his young doctor father who wears a ponytail, to his ability to use his left hand almost as well as his right, to his smoking, to his cosplay fetish.
Niou can’t stop thinking about Yagyuu as himself. Looking back, it seems hotter and less shocking, to see Yagyuu’s face with his smirk. To hear Yagyuu say his catchphrases and play his tennis. To be able to trick Kirihara.
Surely, Yagyuu as himself wouldn’t make the same noises as Niou if their skin touched, if their mouths met. Surely Yagyuu would look like himself still, under his Rikkai uniform. He’d worn shorts that day; Niou wore pants. His legs looked like Yagyuu’s, Niou thinks- or did they look like his own? Similar dark hair on his calves, similar shifting and constricting of muscles as he dashed along the net, enticing Kirihara to hit shots straight at him.
Thinking about it makes Niou rub his palm against his cock under the sheets. It’s gotta be messed up, getting hard and masturbating over seeing a version of himself playing tennis, but…what would it be like to have that same person pushing him down on top on his bed and whispering “Puri” in his ear?
Niou rubs his hand faster against himself. He bites back a moan and as the pleasure builds, numb and addictive between his legs, all he can think about is that white hair falling over eyes that glistened pink from contacts.
When a text message from Yagyuu waits for him in the morning, Do you want to work on math together tonight? We can get take out for dinner.
Niou doesn’t hesitate one second to reply yes.
***
Niou likes to think himself as a bit of an opportunist. If given the chance to do something once, therefore it would make sense that he is welcome to continue t doing that thing, regardless of whether he is necessarily wanted or not.
The first evening, he’s careful going back with Yagyuu on Yagyuu’s bus route. His knees shake, just enough for Niou to consciously aware of it, as they sit crammed into bucketseats on the bus right next to each other. Yagyuu is closest to the window. Niou, the aisle, where other students pack the bus. A university student’s armpit is a bit too close to Niou’s nose and he gets the lovely waft of ripe twenty-year male old all the way back to Yagyuu’s neighbourhood.
“Next stop,” Yagyuu says with a sharp nod. Niou pushes his way out of the seat towards the exit. Yagyuu is right behind.
Niou’s thought about it all day: coming over to Yagyuu’s house. He doodled all through math to avoid doing any work, more of an excuse to stay longer tonight. He thought about it all through tennis practice, being in Yagyuu’s bedroom, full of Yagyuu’s things, maybe sitting on Yagyuu’s bed.
More than a pleasant thought, that.
He’s learned to control himself, sort of. The ball machines at practice were hell, with Niou’s mind drifting off to being pushed down to Yagyuu’s mattress, with its messy sheets and slightly stale and fruity and sweaty and soapy smell, like Yagyuu, only concentrated ten times over.
Sanada, the ass, switched the settings on high, with impossible intervals between the balls. Niou ran and rushed and lunged for balls, nearly tripping over himself with effort. He glared at the back of Sanada’s head afterwards, and gave him the finger.
Yagyuu’s street is filled with trees, dripping with buds and the freshest green leaves, but his own house is a stark contrast. The sad-looking potted plants sit yellowed and half-dead on the porch. Yagyuu fishes his keys out of his pocket, glancing around the side of the house into the empty drive.
“They must be out,” he murmurs.
“Parents?” Niou asks. His heart pounds. Thud thump. Thud thump.
Yagyuu nods.
Yes! Niou thinks.
Until he sees a face press through the window as Yagyuu turns the knob. Yagyuu opens the door, and his sister stands in front of them, hands on her hips. She doesn’t look that much like Yagyuu- well, maybe her pointed features are similar, but she’s not a megane and the end of her nose is round. And her hair longer and darker.
“What?” Yagyuu asks, narrowing his eyes.
His sister sniffs, says nothing, and runs off upstairs to her bedroom. The door slams behind her, echoing through the house as the walls shake with the force.
“Happy thing, is she?” Niou asks. He peels kicks his sneakers off. Yagyuu arranges his, perfectly lining up the heels against the wall.
Yagyuu grunts. “PMS isn’t an excuse yet,” he says.
“That’ll be worse,” Niou says as they trudge upstairs.
Yagyuu raises an eyebrow at Niou. “You have a sister?”
Niou shrugs. Don’t ask anymore about it!
They drink coke and Yagyuu brings up a bag of rice cakes from his kitchen that he slathers mayonnaise all over. He offers the kewpie bottle to Niou, who just shakes his head. Math homework spreads out over Yagyuu’s bedroom floor, but neither one of them make much effort to begin the assignments.
The rain starts. Outside, the light grows dimmer and dimmer. Yagyuu’s curtains ruffle as the winds whip back in and out of his open window. The clouds open up with their downpour, a rush of rain soaking the entire world beyond Yagyuu’s bedroom.
The weather makes everything stickier, quieter compared to the rush of raindrops outside. Yagyuu sets down his pencil when Niou bounces to his feet, stepping over piles of Yagyuu’s dirty clothes to look through his closet.
He doesn’t really have anything better to do. The math homework is easy. Niou could rattle the answers off the top of his head: -4, x=3, (x+2)(x+5). Yagyuu has to put in more of an effort, judging by the lines in his forehead.
Niou happily pushes around Yagyuu’s pants hanging up, his shirts, three identical white school shirts, then checkered plaid and a couple sweaters. Deeper inside, though, a strip of bright shiny fabric catches Niou’s eye.
He tugs, and then he yanks. Papers rustle as Yagyuu stands up, stiff and scowling and opening his mouth probably to tell Niou to stop snooping, but Niou manages to grab hard enough and pull the shiny object from Yagyuu’s closet.
Niou holds it up. It’s a puffy conglomeration of foam and shiny fabric and wide, wide stripes and large red letters that read: AAA. “Is this a…” He grabs the other side of it, holding it up against Yagyuu to check, “is this a battery costume?”
Yagyuu’s thin lips are more than enough of an answer.
Niou bursts out laughter, throwing the costume at Yagyuu. He keeps laughing as Yagyuu shoves the costume back into his closet and slams the folding doors closed. Niou laughs and laughs, doubled up on the floor in agony and unable to stop.
When he does, he gasps, “Are you into fucking…cosplay?”
Yagyuu pushes his glasses up his nose, refusing to answer directly. “I don’t consider it a hobby, Niou-kun,” he says.
“Naw,” Niou says, scoffing. He flops back on Yagyuu’s bed with a big grin. “You just get your jollies out of pretending to be other people.”
With a hard shove backwards, Yagyuu pushes Niou off the edge of his bed. Niou rolls onto the floor, right on top of his math text book. Yagyuu looks down his nose at him, clicking his tongue once. “Maybe you should try it sometime,” he says. Then, a beat later, “What was your answer for question 7 on page 74?”
***
For being so smart, Yagyuu should have known that inviting Niou once is an open invitation. Niou starts to show up on the same bus as Yagyuu after tennis practice, sit in the seat next to him and get off at the same stop.
Yagyuu doesn’t question it. All he does ask is “Do you want a coke or some tea, Niou-kun?”
Sometimes Yagyuu will work on homework, the good student. Sometimes Yagyuu will offer snacks and Niou will sit at Yagyuu’s kitchen table, or start to open the cupboards and drawers. Yagyuu’s house has more sweet snacks that Niou’s- stacks of jellies with foil tops, opened bags of shrimp crackers, boxes of Pocky sticks and Koala Yummies. Gummies and sugared cakes from the shop, the kind with the cherry and cream on top.
“You don’t ever invite that fatass here, do you?” Niou asks. He rummages behind an open box of hamburger-shaped jellies and finds a container of matcha-filled buns still pristine in their plastic wrapping.
Yagyuu dunks a tea bag into a mug. “Pardon?”
Sometimes, after Yagyuu pushes his front door open, he’ll look down at the pile of shoes by the doorway and frown. “My father’s sleeping,” he tells Niou. Then, they’ll creep up to Yagyuu’s bedroom. Niou lounges around, staring at flies on the ceiling. Yagyuu works on English for a while, until he tosses his textbook away with a disgusted grunt.
Yagyuu’s family isn’t around much. His sister lives in her bedroom, sullen and miserable and hunched over her glowing computer monitor. Niou isn’t quite sure how she is related to Yagyuu, except for the fact they have the same oval face and the same look that they give Niou sometimes, a bland sort of distaste. Yagyuu’s father, occasionally around, seems to spend his time shuffling around in a bathrobe and carrying around a cup of coffee, his eyes a bit pink and his hair a bit messy.
“He’s on shift a lot,” Yagyuu says.
Yagyuu’s mother…Niou has never seen her. Out shopping with friends, Yagyuu will say, or out for dinner, or out in Hiroshima or on a vacation to see a sick friend in Saipan. It doesn’t seem to bother Yagyuu. Niou appreciates the lack of parents. His own ask too many questions, are around too much.
Yagyuu’s house is freedom in a way. No one to tell him to do his homework and mean it. No one to roll their eyes at his bleached hair and his attitude. No one to chide him for this or that, for not being the perfect little megane gentleman.
Sometimes, he and Yagyuu talk a bit. The nights are warm, the days getting longer. City lights twinkle like fireflies in the summer, an endless field of lights spreading out above to the stars. Yagyuu keeps his bedroom window open constantly. Sometimes, he’ll hang out over the ledge with a cigarette dangling from his fingers.
“Did you enjoy dressing up as me?” Niou asks.
Yagyuu takes a long drag from his cigarette, then says, “It was enjoyable enough.”
“Notice anything good about the wonderchibi?”
Yagyuu turns around, then stubs his cigarette out on a glass paperweight before he flicks the butt out of the window. “Anything good? What do you mean?”
“Don’t you pay attention to people when you play?” Niou asks. He sits up when Yagyuu settles down on his desk chair, swinging it around to face Niou.
Yagyuu shakes his head. “Should I be looking for something?”
Niou stalks over, and ruffles Yagyuu’s hair. Yagyuu cringes. Niou lets his fingers linger for a moment longer. Yagyuu’s hair is soft, unlike his own bristly, dry mess. Yagyuu’s scalp is warm and his hair smells like tropical shampoo. Niou knows the scent will stay on his fingers tonight, and he’ll smell them in the privacy of his own bedroom, breathe deep the Yagyuu.
“If you paid attention to your opponents,” Niou says, “you’ll notice things.”
“Is that so?”
Niou cocks his head, staring at Yagyuu from an angle. Yagyuu starts to tip his head in response, like a mirror. It makes Niou start to smile.
“Have you pretended to be me before?”
“No,” Yagyuu says, his words slow to come. “It was just that one time. But Kirihara-kun didn’t suspect a thing.” A ghost of a smile hovers over his lips. “I had to restrain myself from using my laser beam.”
“I can do your laser beam,” Niou scoffs. “It’s not that hard.”
Yagyuu hums in agreement. “Yanagi-kun doesn’t have very good data on you, Niou-kun.”
“Jeez, too bad for him,” Niou says. He sticks his head outside Yagyuu’s window and sniffs the air. It still smells a bit like cigarette smoke. His lungs fill up, that addictive sort of ache that Niou, unlike Yagyuu, doesn’t bother to indulge in. He taps his chin, feeling the familiar rise of his mole. Yagyuu looks at him, his lenses reflecting the light of his lamp and obscuring his eyes.
“You could mess a lot of people up, pretending to be someone else,” Niou says.
“Yes,” Yagyuu says. “You can.”
I’ll have to remember that, Niou thinks. Yagyuu’s yawn is infectious it must be late, because his eyes keep flicking off towards his clock. Niou doesn’t want to go home just yet. Before Yagyuu attempts to make polite pushes for Niou to go home, Niou jumps over Yagyuu’s bed, grabs the feathered end of a boa out of a pile of junk on Yagyuu’s closet shelf and tosses the boa to Yagyuu.
Yagyuu backs up, holding the purple boa in his hands.
Out loud, he says, “The prefecturals are next weekend. Ready for your big debut, Hiro-chan?”
Yagyuu just rolls his eyes. As Niou turns to pick up his backpack and leave first before he’s told to, for show, Yagyuu poses with the boa around his neck. With his hands clasped, Yagyuu makes a gun with his fingers and blows the tip.
Mocking Jackal, Yagyuu says, “We’ll be on fiya.”
***
Despite wanting more than anything to sleep in from wet dreams involving Yagyuu and cigarettes and school ties and possibly feather boas too, and despite wanting to relive those fleeting nighttime thoughts during the day, Niou pushes himself out of bed each and every morning. He pushes himself through practices.
The prefecturals are coming.
With only seven regulars, he’s bound to be playing almost every round, especially since he and Yagyuu and Doubles One with a capital D.
“Eyes up!” Niou shouts during practice. “Watch my racket, Yagyuu. Watch what I’m going to do!”
Yagyuu hits a hard, long shot across the net. His face is red, streaming with sweat and he’s panting as hard as Niou. They’ve been working on shots for at least an hour now. Niou lost track of the time a long while ago when he accidentally caught the side of his watch against his racket and stopped it.
“I can’t predict your…shots,” Yagyuu says, grunting through his return to Niou’s volley, “Niou-kun, if I can’t look at your feet!”
Niou spins around, just to throw Yagyuu’s bad insight off. Then he jumps to the left side and hits a backhand, grinning all the while. Yagyuu runs, lunging to make the shot with the tip of his racket.
Yagyuu yells, one of the multitudes of unintelligible tennis-sounding noises that echo across the courts. The rest of the team have all gone home, leaving only the regulars, spread out over three courts. Sanada disappeared into the gymnasium to work with the ball machine by himself before practice even ended.
Niou waits a split-second, noting the slight tip of Yagyuu’s racket, enough to cause the ball to shoot straight up rather than across. Leaning forward, he holds his breath, but when the ball bounces right behind Yagyuu, Niou exhales and swings his racket wide. Casually, he waltzes up to the net to say, “I thought I told you to keep your eyes up?”
At least without the hoards of juniors and freshman lobbing balls onto the school roof and swinging blindly, Niou can get some serious practice in with Yagyuu. He changes hands- racket in left, then right, then left again, with each successive play. Yagyuu yells, “Lob!” and sends a smash ripping through the air. Niou saw the rise in Yagyuu’s shoulder that said more than his words lied.
Yagyuu frowns when Niou takes a point. Not even his laser beam stops it- Niou uses both hands with a forward shot, running up to the net, determined to make the play. If he has enough momentum, he can gather a spin to the shot and return it.
The ball arcs above Yagyuu’s head, landing just shy of the baseline.
“It’s not unreturnable,” Niou says.
“Not yet,” Yagyuu says.
Niou’s stomach flutters. He can’t wait to see an unreturnable laser beam- it would be exactly that, so fast and so sharp that it would cut- no, burn through the opponents.
“You’re a bit like Kirihara,” Niou says between chugs from his waterbottle. On the bench, Yagyuu exhales heavily and dabs at the sweat on his forehead with a towel.
“That seaweed head?”
Niou snorts. “That what you call him?”
“Not to his face,” Yagyuu says. He drapes his towel over his face, leans back against the bench and sighs again. He must be exhausted, since he can’t be bothered to cross his legs like his usual prissy self. Instead, they hang wide open, almost enough for Niou’s eyes to stray up along the inside of Yagyuu’s thigh. The hair gets sparser above his knees, almost disappearing from his pasty thighs above the hem of his shorts. Niou can feel his eyes drooping, half-slitted from the sun and from seeing the tiny little mole above Yagyuu’s hemline on his left leg. He never noticed it before in the showers.
Kirihara runs over to the bench as soon as his game against Jackal finishes, crashing into Yagyuu’s knees with a tired grin on his face. Niou glares at Kirihara. Yagyuu glares at Kirihara. Kirihara doesn’t notice, except to look up when Yanagi throws a water bottle at Kirihara.
“You forgot it in the locker room, Akaya,” Yanagi says.
Niou pops his lips off his own waterbottle. Saliva stains the rim. Niou hovers the bottle just above Kirihara’s head- the kid’s too busy wiping his face off to notice. But Jackal does.
His eyebrow rise up into his forehead, tiny lines forming in his brown skin.
“Shhh,” Niou mouths, holding a finger up to his lips.
Jackal asks, “Akaya, how come it took you so long to finish the game today?”
When Niou dumps his water down the kid’s back Kirihara screeches. He jumps off the bench and whips his dripping head around to yell, “Niou-SENPAI!”
“There,” Niou says, doing his best to ignore the splash of water against his face from Kirihara’s waterbottle, “now he’s a stupid seaweed head.”
Everyone- even Yanagi- laughs. At least Yagyuu has the manners to attempt to hide it behind his hand.
Niou tosses his head back, spraying water on Kirihara a second time. “Don’t really need to hit the showers now,” he says. He packs up his tennis racket, then zips up his bag.
“Unless you want your stench to drive the chicks away,” Jackal says.
Not really an issue, Niou thinks. He looks at Yagyuu. He can’t help it.
Yagyuu isn’t looking at him though; Yagyuu is agreeing with Jackal. He walks off with Jackal toward the club house changing rooms and showers, with Kirihara hanging off him and asking about the seaweed head comment.
Right behind Niou’s ear, Yanagi mutters, “That’s not a problem for you, is it?”
Niou freezes. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He feels bristly all over, like a hedgehog, and his intestines feel cold and heavy, the same as the lump in his throat. He won’t turn around and give Yanagi an answer to his unsaid data. No, Niou walks off, moving his feet forward one at a time as normally as he can manage. He can hear Sanada approach Yanagi, words between them lost in the rush of blood to his head.
Yanagi wouldn’t say anything.
But his little smirks will make things all the worse. As soon as biology class begins the following morning, Niou is torn between wanting to shrivel up under a rock somewhere in the south pacific region, and adding Yanagi’s photograph to the dartboard in his bedroom.
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17 (eventual)
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Niou, meet Yagyuu.
Author's Notes: Spoilers for everything.
The official tennis season opens with the prefecturals in late May. Niou isn’t too concerned about winning; it’s more a question of winning by how much. Yagyuu has never played any official games before, but they beat Marui and Jackal, so it shouldn’t be too hard to take prefectural games at least 6-3 or 6-2.
On rare Sunday mornings, Niou manages to sleep in. Sun streams into his bedroom, warm and bright across his blankets. He’s sticky between the legs- he’s almost always when he wakes up now: long-forgotten wet dreams in the night that probably included a certain gentlemanly megane dork.
After a long hot shower and a comfortable jerk off in the privacy of the bathroom, Niou shuffles downstairs where his sister sits at the table, eating a piece of toast. “There’s some eggs left over,” she tells him, not looking up from the newspaper she has spread out in front of her.
“Thanks,” Niou belches into her ear.
She pushes him away in disgust. “You’re gross, Masaharu!” she snaps.
“Morning gas,” Niou says, patting his stomach. “It could be worse.”
He has nothing better to do with himself all day without practice. And it is really too nice to stay indoors all day, unlike his nerdy brother, who sits placidly in the living room arranging kinetics and gears into perfect geometric forms, proudly showing their father his architectural know-how at the tender age of eleven.
Niou rolls his eyes. Megane dork, he thinks.
“I’m out,” he mutters, but no one pays attention to him, not really, when he grabs his tennis bag, shoves his feet into his sneakers and slams the door closed. He wears his Rikkai Dai uniform- Niou is more than smart enough to know that if he does, only the dumbest idiots would challenge him to a streetcourt game. That makes it all the more enjoyable.
He takes the bus half-way across town, up north a bit, away from the harbour and the canals. It’s closer to where Kirihara lives, in the rows of townhouses and mid-range apartment complexes, with dozens of local parks and streetcourts. It is, in effect, perfect for picking up some loser to play and test out his right-handed laser beam.
Niou does his best to look as inconspicuous as he can, walking through a park and keeping his head down to avoid weird stares at his hair, but keeping his head up enough to see where the streetcourts are nearby. Sure enough, the sound of balls hitting the court and the tread of several sets of sneakers sounds through the trees before he’s walked two blocks from the bus stop. Niou cuts through the grass, smirking to himself when he sees two entwined teenagers behind some bushes.
It’s funny, all right, until Niou starts to wonder what it would be like if he were the guy there, instead of that young university student and his girlfriend, necking in a public park, her hands splayed on his back and his hands on her ass. What if Niou’s hands were on Yagyuu’s ass- would it feel squishy? Hard? Niou’s seen Yagyuu’s ass enough that he can almost imagine feeling the contours under his fingertips, the swell of flesh, the skin.
Yagyuu has a bit of a bubblebutt, kind of like that girl, rounded and probably perfect to touch, to cup his palms over and push closer to himself. Yagyuu’s shorts are always pulled tighter over his ass than someone like Sanada, whose ass is as flat as his hat hair.
Would he and Yagyuu make noises like that if they kissed, all sloppy and hungry at once? The girl and the university make smacking noises, little moans and slimy-sounding grunts.
Niou walks faster toward the courts. Not once do the teenagers look up at the bleached-haired kid who spent a good minute staring straight at them, curious and envious all wrapped into one.
The courts are surrounded by furry pine trees and fan-leafed ginko, brighter green than the faded clay ground inside the fenced courts. Niou peaks through the chainlink fence, grabbing it to get a closer look through the metal lace. All three courts are filled with players: a middle-aged pair of woman in designer white tennis outfits in the centre court, a group of junior high or maybe freshman high school students on the courts closest to Niou, and in the far court, two players making fast work of the ball, constant zooming lobs and volleys. Niou’s view is partly blocked by as a group of onlookers, but the thwop and swoosh of the ball is distinct.
Niou walks around the fence, then pushes open the gate to go inside. The small crowd gathered on the far court oohs and ahhs and talks a lot, too loud for just streetcourt games, unless maybe they do that in Tokyo. He scuffs his shoes on the ground and dumps his tennis bag on the nearest bench, right next to another Rikkai Dai tennis club bag.
Interesting…
He cracks his knuckles and looks up with a grin. The wonderchibi must be on the prowl today.
“Is that all you’ve got?” Kirihara shouts with an added cackle. The laughter on his voice gives edge to his words that makes Niou nod because he knows that Kirihara is out in full-force with his tennis.
Niou pushes through the crowd and sticks his head up. On the court closest to him, Kirihara rushes across the baseline, grinning his head off and panting hard. “Do you want to see my twist serve?” he yells.
“When it’s your serve, kid!” the other player shouts. The voice sounds oddly familiar, with the tone similar to his own.
Niou looks up and sees himself.
He blinks.
And looks again.
No, there is definitely him on the court across from Kirihara, close to the net and following Kirihara’s every move with a self-satisfied smirk, bouncing lazily from side to side. It is Niou, with the wild bleached hair and the pink hair tie. It’s Niou with the dark eyes and the mole on his chin. It’s Niou with his racket in his left hand and the sneakers- well, Niou only has to look down at his own to see the same grimy grey as that other Niou has.
Except there are two differences. It takes Niou a moment, but the tell-tale upturned collar and socks pulled up to his shins shows Niou that this imposter is none other than-
“Oi!” he calls out, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Let’s see your laser beam!”
Niou looks at Niou.
Kirihara stares at Niou, too- the Niou in the crowd of people, who start to part and allow Niou to walk onto the court when the ball has bounced off the top of the net.
Kirihara looks from one Niou to the other, gaping like a fish. “Niou-senpai…” he starts.
Niou rolls his eyes at the imposter. “Your collar’s turned up, Yagyuu,” he says. Niou jumps over the net and walks up to himself, whose face hardens with the harsh line of Yagyuu’s mouth taking over the closer Niou gets. He pokes Yagyuu on the chin. “And my mole’s not that dark.”
The sudden slam of a racket on the ground startles Niou. He turns around to see Kirihara seething, his eyes faintly pink and his fists balled up. “I thought…” he struggles to say, “I thought Niou-senpai called me to practice! You’re Yagyuu-senpai!”
Yagyuu smiles faintly. He reaches up to his nose, but there are no glasses to push up his nose and his index falters. He might be decent at observing, but he’s got aways to go. He blinks too much- it must be from contacts, because his eyes are a bit pink and irritated too. Kirihara redux.
“Puri,” Yagyuu says, his impression of Niou’s voice spot-on. He swings his racket over his shoulder, and slouches his posture. It makes Niou stand up slightly straighter, just for comparison- does he really act like that? Does he really stand and smirk like that, with his head cocked to the side and his hair over his eyes?
Niou flashes Yagyuu a thumbs-up.
Kirihara sticks his lip out, pouting for a moment, before he says in a loud voice, “What about me versus both of you?”
The crowds have started to dissipate, the entertainment over for now. Yagyuu shakes his head, pulling out his hair tie and then ripping the wig off his head. Kirihara shrugs. He runs off to the other courts asking if anyone has the balls to play him.
Niou sits down on the bench next to Yagyuu. “Your socks are wrong for me,” he says.
Yagyuu nods. “I’ll remember that.”
“I didn’t know you were into cosplay.”
Yagyuu starts to laugh. “Kirihara-kun texted Niou about playing today and he must have hit my number by accident. It’s fun to…play with him.”
Niou starts to laugh too.
***
Niou could tick off all the points he’s learned about Yagyuu in the past year, from his young doctor father who wears a ponytail, to his ability to use his left hand almost as well as his right, to his smoking, to his cosplay fetish.
Niou can’t stop thinking about Yagyuu as himself. Looking back, it seems hotter and less shocking, to see Yagyuu’s face with his smirk. To hear Yagyuu say his catchphrases and play his tennis. To be able to trick Kirihara.
Surely, Yagyuu as himself wouldn’t make the same noises as Niou if their skin touched, if their mouths met. Surely Yagyuu would look like himself still, under his Rikkai uniform. He’d worn shorts that day; Niou wore pants. His legs looked like Yagyuu’s, Niou thinks- or did they look like his own? Similar dark hair on his calves, similar shifting and constricting of muscles as he dashed along the net, enticing Kirihara to hit shots straight at him.
Thinking about it makes Niou rub his palm against his cock under the sheets. It’s gotta be messed up, getting hard and masturbating over seeing a version of himself playing tennis, but…what would it be like to have that same person pushing him down on top on his bed and whispering “Puri” in his ear?
Niou rubs his hand faster against himself. He bites back a moan and as the pleasure builds, numb and addictive between his legs, all he can think about is that white hair falling over eyes that glistened pink from contacts.
When a text message from Yagyuu waits for him in the morning, Do you want to work on math together tonight? We can get take out for dinner.
Niou doesn’t hesitate one second to reply yes.
***
Niou likes to think himself as a bit of an opportunist. If given the chance to do something once, therefore it would make sense that he is welcome to continue t doing that thing, regardless of whether he is necessarily wanted or not.
The first evening, he’s careful going back with Yagyuu on Yagyuu’s bus route. His knees shake, just enough for Niou to consciously aware of it, as they sit crammed into bucketseats on the bus right next to each other. Yagyuu is closest to the window. Niou, the aisle, where other students pack the bus. A university student’s armpit is a bit too close to Niou’s nose and he gets the lovely waft of ripe twenty-year male old all the way back to Yagyuu’s neighbourhood.
“Next stop,” Yagyuu says with a sharp nod. Niou pushes his way out of the seat towards the exit. Yagyuu is right behind.
Niou’s thought about it all day: coming over to Yagyuu’s house. He doodled all through math to avoid doing any work, more of an excuse to stay longer tonight. He thought about it all through tennis practice, being in Yagyuu’s bedroom, full of Yagyuu’s things, maybe sitting on Yagyuu’s bed.
More than a pleasant thought, that.
He’s learned to control himself, sort of. The ball machines at practice were hell, with Niou’s mind drifting off to being pushed down to Yagyuu’s mattress, with its messy sheets and slightly stale and fruity and sweaty and soapy smell, like Yagyuu, only concentrated ten times over.
Sanada, the ass, switched the settings on high, with impossible intervals between the balls. Niou ran and rushed and lunged for balls, nearly tripping over himself with effort. He glared at the back of Sanada’s head afterwards, and gave him the finger.
Yagyuu’s street is filled with trees, dripping with buds and the freshest green leaves, but his own house is a stark contrast. The sad-looking potted plants sit yellowed and half-dead on the porch. Yagyuu fishes his keys out of his pocket, glancing around the side of the house into the empty drive.
“They must be out,” he murmurs.
“Parents?” Niou asks. His heart pounds. Thud thump. Thud thump.
Yagyuu nods.
Yes! Niou thinks.
Until he sees a face press through the window as Yagyuu turns the knob. Yagyuu opens the door, and his sister stands in front of them, hands on her hips. She doesn’t look that much like Yagyuu- well, maybe her pointed features are similar, but she’s not a megane and the end of her nose is round. And her hair longer and darker.
“What?” Yagyuu asks, narrowing his eyes.
His sister sniffs, says nothing, and runs off upstairs to her bedroom. The door slams behind her, echoing through the house as the walls shake with the force.
“Happy thing, is she?” Niou asks. He peels kicks his sneakers off. Yagyuu arranges his, perfectly lining up the heels against the wall.
Yagyuu grunts. “PMS isn’t an excuse yet,” he says.
“That’ll be worse,” Niou says as they trudge upstairs.
Yagyuu raises an eyebrow at Niou. “You have a sister?”
Niou shrugs. Don’t ask anymore about it!
They drink coke and Yagyuu brings up a bag of rice cakes from his kitchen that he slathers mayonnaise all over. He offers the kewpie bottle to Niou, who just shakes his head. Math homework spreads out over Yagyuu’s bedroom floor, but neither one of them make much effort to begin the assignments.
The rain starts. Outside, the light grows dimmer and dimmer. Yagyuu’s curtains ruffle as the winds whip back in and out of his open window. The clouds open up with their downpour, a rush of rain soaking the entire world beyond Yagyuu’s bedroom.
The weather makes everything stickier, quieter compared to the rush of raindrops outside. Yagyuu sets down his pencil when Niou bounces to his feet, stepping over piles of Yagyuu’s dirty clothes to look through his closet.
He doesn’t really have anything better to do. The math homework is easy. Niou could rattle the answers off the top of his head: -4, x=3, (x+2)(x+5). Yagyuu has to put in more of an effort, judging by the lines in his forehead.
Niou happily pushes around Yagyuu’s pants hanging up, his shirts, three identical white school shirts, then checkered plaid and a couple sweaters. Deeper inside, though, a strip of bright shiny fabric catches Niou’s eye.
He tugs, and then he yanks. Papers rustle as Yagyuu stands up, stiff and scowling and opening his mouth probably to tell Niou to stop snooping, but Niou manages to grab hard enough and pull the shiny object from Yagyuu’s closet.
Niou holds it up. It’s a puffy conglomeration of foam and shiny fabric and wide, wide stripes and large red letters that read: AAA. “Is this a…” He grabs the other side of it, holding it up against Yagyuu to check, “is this a battery costume?”
Yagyuu’s thin lips are more than enough of an answer.
Niou bursts out laughter, throwing the costume at Yagyuu. He keeps laughing as Yagyuu shoves the costume back into his closet and slams the folding doors closed. Niou laughs and laughs, doubled up on the floor in agony and unable to stop.
When he does, he gasps, “Are you into fucking…cosplay?”
Yagyuu pushes his glasses up his nose, refusing to answer directly. “I don’t consider it a hobby, Niou-kun,” he says.
“Naw,” Niou says, scoffing. He flops back on Yagyuu’s bed with a big grin. “You just get your jollies out of pretending to be other people.”
With a hard shove backwards, Yagyuu pushes Niou off the edge of his bed. Niou rolls onto the floor, right on top of his math text book. Yagyuu looks down his nose at him, clicking his tongue once. “Maybe you should try it sometime,” he says. Then, a beat later, “What was your answer for question 7 on page 74?”
***
For being so smart, Yagyuu should have known that inviting Niou once is an open invitation. Niou starts to show up on the same bus as Yagyuu after tennis practice, sit in the seat next to him and get off at the same stop.
Yagyuu doesn’t question it. All he does ask is “Do you want a coke or some tea, Niou-kun?”
Sometimes Yagyuu will work on homework, the good student. Sometimes Yagyuu will offer snacks and Niou will sit at Yagyuu’s kitchen table, or start to open the cupboards and drawers. Yagyuu’s house has more sweet snacks that Niou’s- stacks of jellies with foil tops, opened bags of shrimp crackers, boxes of Pocky sticks and Koala Yummies. Gummies and sugared cakes from the shop, the kind with the cherry and cream on top.
“You don’t ever invite that fatass here, do you?” Niou asks. He rummages behind an open box of hamburger-shaped jellies and finds a container of matcha-filled buns still pristine in their plastic wrapping.
Yagyuu dunks a tea bag into a mug. “Pardon?”
Sometimes, after Yagyuu pushes his front door open, he’ll look down at the pile of shoes by the doorway and frown. “My father’s sleeping,” he tells Niou. Then, they’ll creep up to Yagyuu’s bedroom. Niou lounges around, staring at flies on the ceiling. Yagyuu works on English for a while, until he tosses his textbook away with a disgusted grunt.
Yagyuu’s family isn’t around much. His sister lives in her bedroom, sullen and miserable and hunched over her glowing computer monitor. Niou isn’t quite sure how she is related to Yagyuu, except for the fact they have the same oval face and the same look that they give Niou sometimes, a bland sort of distaste. Yagyuu’s father, occasionally around, seems to spend his time shuffling around in a bathrobe and carrying around a cup of coffee, his eyes a bit pink and his hair a bit messy.
“He’s on shift a lot,” Yagyuu says.
Yagyuu’s mother…Niou has never seen her. Out shopping with friends, Yagyuu will say, or out for dinner, or out in Hiroshima or on a vacation to see a sick friend in Saipan. It doesn’t seem to bother Yagyuu. Niou appreciates the lack of parents. His own ask too many questions, are around too much.
Yagyuu’s house is freedom in a way. No one to tell him to do his homework and mean it. No one to roll their eyes at his bleached hair and his attitude. No one to chide him for this or that, for not being the perfect little megane gentleman.
Sometimes, he and Yagyuu talk a bit. The nights are warm, the days getting longer. City lights twinkle like fireflies in the summer, an endless field of lights spreading out above to the stars. Yagyuu keeps his bedroom window open constantly. Sometimes, he’ll hang out over the ledge with a cigarette dangling from his fingers.
“Did you enjoy dressing up as me?” Niou asks.
Yagyuu takes a long drag from his cigarette, then says, “It was enjoyable enough.”
“Notice anything good about the wonderchibi?”
Yagyuu turns around, then stubs his cigarette out on a glass paperweight before he flicks the butt out of the window. “Anything good? What do you mean?”
“Don’t you pay attention to people when you play?” Niou asks. He sits up when Yagyuu settles down on his desk chair, swinging it around to face Niou.
Yagyuu shakes his head. “Should I be looking for something?”
Niou stalks over, and ruffles Yagyuu’s hair. Yagyuu cringes. Niou lets his fingers linger for a moment longer. Yagyuu’s hair is soft, unlike his own bristly, dry mess. Yagyuu’s scalp is warm and his hair smells like tropical shampoo. Niou knows the scent will stay on his fingers tonight, and he’ll smell them in the privacy of his own bedroom, breathe deep the Yagyuu.
“If you paid attention to your opponents,” Niou says, “you’ll notice things.”
“Is that so?”
Niou cocks his head, staring at Yagyuu from an angle. Yagyuu starts to tip his head in response, like a mirror. It makes Niou start to smile.
“Have you pretended to be me before?”
“No,” Yagyuu says, his words slow to come. “It was just that one time. But Kirihara-kun didn’t suspect a thing.” A ghost of a smile hovers over his lips. “I had to restrain myself from using my laser beam.”
“I can do your laser beam,” Niou scoffs. “It’s not that hard.”
Yagyuu hums in agreement. “Yanagi-kun doesn’t have very good data on you, Niou-kun.”
“Jeez, too bad for him,” Niou says. He sticks his head outside Yagyuu’s window and sniffs the air. It still smells a bit like cigarette smoke. His lungs fill up, that addictive sort of ache that Niou, unlike Yagyuu, doesn’t bother to indulge in. He taps his chin, feeling the familiar rise of his mole. Yagyuu looks at him, his lenses reflecting the light of his lamp and obscuring his eyes.
“You could mess a lot of people up, pretending to be someone else,” Niou says.
“Yes,” Yagyuu says. “You can.”
I’ll have to remember that, Niou thinks. Yagyuu’s yawn is infectious it must be late, because his eyes keep flicking off towards his clock. Niou doesn’t want to go home just yet. Before Yagyuu attempts to make polite pushes for Niou to go home, Niou jumps over Yagyuu’s bed, grabs the feathered end of a boa out of a pile of junk on Yagyuu’s closet shelf and tosses the boa to Yagyuu.
Yagyuu backs up, holding the purple boa in his hands.
Out loud, he says, “The prefecturals are next weekend. Ready for your big debut, Hiro-chan?”
Yagyuu just rolls his eyes. As Niou turns to pick up his backpack and leave first before he’s told to, for show, Yagyuu poses with the boa around his neck. With his hands clasped, Yagyuu makes a gun with his fingers and blows the tip.
Mocking Jackal, Yagyuu says, “We’ll be on fiya.”
***
Despite wanting more than anything to sleep in from wet dreams involving Yagyuu and cigarettes and school ties and possibly feather boas too, and despite wanting to relive those fleeting nighttime thoughts during the day, Niou pushes himself out of bed each and every morning. He pushes himself through practices.
The prefecturals are coming.
With only seven regulars, he’s bound to be playing almost every round, especially since he and Yagyuu and Doubles One with a capital D.
“Eyes up!” Niou shouts during practice. “Watch my racket, Yagyuu. Watch what I’m going to do!”
Yagyuu hits a hard, long shot across the net. His face is red, streaming with sweat and he’s panting as hard as Niou. They’ve been working on shots for at least an hour now. Niou lost track of the time a long while ago when he accidentally caught the side of his watch against his racket and stopped it.
“I can’t predict your…shots,” Yagyuu says, grunting through his return to Niou’s volley, “Niou-kun, if I can’t look at your feet!”
Niou spins around, just to throw Yagyuu’s bad insight off. Then he jumps to the left side and hits a backhand, grinning all the while. Yagyuu runs, lunging to make the shot with the tip of his racket.
Yagyuu yells, one of the multitudes of unintelligible tennis-sounding noises that echo across the courts. The rest of the team have all gone home, leaving only the regulars, spread out over three courts. Sanada disappeared into the gymnasium to work with the ball machine by himself before practice even ended.
Niou waits a split-second, noting the slight tip of Yagyuu’s racket, enough to cause the ball to shoot straight up rather than across. Leaning forward, he holds his breath, but when the ball bounces right behind Yagyuu, Niou exhales and swings his racket wide. Casually, he waltzes up to the net to say, “I thought I told you to keep your eyes up?”
At least without the hoards of juniors and freshman lobbing balls onto the school roof and swinging blindly, Niou can get some serious practice in with Yagyuu. He changes hands- racket in left, then right, then left again, with each successive play. Yagyuu yells, “Lob!” and sends a smash ripping through the air. Niou saw the rise in Yagyuu’s shoulder that said more than his words lied.
Yagyuu frowns when Niou takes a point. Not even his laser beam stops it- Niou uses both hands with a forward shot, running up to the net, determined to make the play. If he has enough momentum, he can gather a spin to the shot and return it.
The ball arcs above Yagyuu’s head, landing just shy of the baseline.
“It’s not unreturnable,” Niou says.
“Not yet,” Yagyuu says.
Niou’s stomach flutters. He can’t wait to see an unreturnable laser beam- it would be exactly that, so fast and so sharp that it would cut- no, burn through the opponents.
“You’re a bit like Kirihara,” Niou says between chugs from his waterbottle. On the bench, Yagyuu exhales heavily and dabs at the sweat on his forehead with a towel.
“That seaweed head?”
Niou snorts. “That what you call him?”
“Not to his face,” Yagyuu says. He drapes his towel over his face, leans back against the bench and sighs again. He must be exhausted, since he can’t be bothered to cross his legs like his usual prissy self. Instead, they hang wide open, almost enough for Niou’s eyes to stray up along the inside of Yagyuu’s thigh. The hair gets sparser above his knees, almost disappearing from his pasty thighs above the hem of his shorts. Niou can feel his eyes drooping, half-slitted from the sun and from seeing the tiny little mole above Yagyuu’s hemline on his left leg. He never noticed it before in the showers.
Kirihara runs over to the bench as soon as his game against Jackal finishes, crashing into Yagyuu’s knees with a tired grin on his face. Niou glares at Kirihara. Yagyuu glares at Kirihara. Kirihara doesn’t notice, except to look up when Yanagi throws a water bottle at Kirihara.
“You forgot it in the locker room, Akaya,” Yanagi says.
Niou pops his lips off his own waterbottle. Saliva stains the rim. Niou hovers the bottle just above Kirihara’s head- the kid’s too busy wiping his face off to notice. But Jackal does.
His eyebrow rise up into his forehead, tiny lines forming in his brown skin.
“Shhh,” Niou mouths, holding a finger up to his lips.
Jackal asks, “Akaya, how come it took you so long to finish the game today?”
When Niou dumps his water down the kid’s back Kirihara screeches. He jumps off the bench and whips his dripping head around to yell, “Niou-SENPAI!”
“There,” Niou says, doing his best to ignore the splash of water against his face from Kirihara’s waterbottle, “now he’s a stupid seaweed head.”
Everyone- even Yanagi- laughs. At least Yagyuu has the manners to attempt to hide it behind his hand.
Niou tosses his head back, spraying water on Kirihara a second time. “Don’t really need to hit the showers now,” he says. He packs up his tennis racket, then zips up his bag.
“Unless you want your stench to drive the chicks away,” Jackal says.
Not really an issue, Niou thinks. He looks at Yagyuu. He can’t help it.
Yagyuu isn’t looking at him though; Yagyuu is agreeing with Jackal. He walks off with Jackal toward the club house changing rooms and showers, with Kirihara hanging off him and asking about the seaweed head comment.
Right behind Niou’s ear, Yanagi mutters, “That’s not a problem for you, is it?”
Niou freezes. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He feels bristly all over, like a hedgehog, and his intestines feel cold and heavy, the same as the lump in his throat. He won’t turn around and give Yanagi an answer to his unsaid data. No, Niou walks off, moving his feet forward one at a time as normally as he can manage. He can hear Sanada approach Yanagi, words between them lost in the rush of blood to his head.
Yanagi wouldn’t say anything.
But his little smirks will make things all the worse. As soon as biology class begins the following morning, Niou is torn between wanting to shrivel up under a rock somewhere in the south pacific region, and adding Yanagi’s photograph to the dartboard in his bedroom.