PoT: blind man's bluff
For sesame_seed, because she was sick and because she writes D1 fic better than I will EVER do ANYDAY. And I'm sorry. There's no sex in this fic either. There are however little things in this fic I was too lazy to think about, like whether or not Yukimura would be around the first time Niou and Yagyuu pull off their stunt. Erm. *weeps* I'm such a lazy bum.
It starts because Niou, sitting backward in his chair, leans over Yagyuu's desk and, staring straight into Yagyuu's face, says, "You know, we really don't look alike at all." It's simple reverse psychology from there. Yagyuu doesn't want to, after that, but he does think about it, day in and day out, starts comparing his face to Niou's every time he sees him, starts wondering about their cheekbones, their face structures, the lines of their eyebrows, the bridges of their noses, until he wonders if he isn't turning into some kind of Yanagi.
So it's Niou's idea when it starts, but by the time Niou finally backs Yagyuu up after tennis practice and says, "You know, have you ever thought of doing a switchover?", it's already Yagyuu's idea.
*
They try to make Yagyuu into Niou first.
"I'm a fast learner," Niou assures Yagyuu. "It'll be harder for you to let go than it will be for me to act like a pompous bastard with a stick up my ass." Which is supposed to be a joke, Yagyuu thinks, not that he's ever really sure. Niou's sense of humor is another thing Yagyuu will have to learn.
Yagyuu finds out from the very start that hardest thing about switching is not thinking, "What would Niou do?" but instead thinking, "I am Niou. Now what would I do?" The slightest bit of hesitation between these two statements is what makes being Niou different from Yagyuu playing Niou. Confidence is tantamount with definition. Yagyuu eventually adapts this as his mantra. Still, they spend so much time practicing being someone else in the school bathrooms after tennis practice that Yagyuu figures he knows how many tiles are on the ceiling and which lights shine brighter than the others and which sinks get warm water quicker like he knows his own name and his own birthday, Niou's name and Niou's birthday. Gradually, it gets easier being someone else, like all things do with time, but it so hard in the beginning that Yagyuu almost gives up. Little things, like standing still. Niou makes sure to catch even the most insignificant of errors ("Yagyuu, I always fidget with my right foot"). Yagyuu starts from slouching to walking and in between there are thousands of little things, like how to arrange his shirttails and how to zip his pants or button his buttons so they're right, or how to breathe ("Through your nose if you're angry, Yagyuu. People tell me that my nose flares like that all the time").
Genius, Yagyuu finally understands, is not exactly 99% perspiration and only 1% inspiration, but it's pretty close. It may be Niou's stroke of brilliance that kicks the whole thing off, and it will be Niou's innate ability to impersonate anyone, even himself, that will keep them going ("You look through people a lot. If I turn my head a little like this, does it give you that impression?") But in the end it depends on how hard Yagyuu works for his impersonation of Niou, how much of Niou he can take into himself, and how often he can trick himself into thinking he's someone else.
It gets to the point that Yagyuu starts hearing Niou's voice in his head more than he hears his own. The day he even dreams through Niou's point of view, they pull off their first switch. Niou grabs Yagyuu's glasses off his face and in a few rapid movements straightens up his clothes, which is Yagyuu's clue to mess up his. They stand side by side in front of a mirror to do their hair. Niou says, "It's easier for it to work if no one's planning for it, not even us." Yagyuu mutely nods.
The first time, it's disorientating, and Yagyuu finds his mind tripping all over itself, trying out its new shape. For one thing, he can't see as clearly as he usually can without his glasses, and for another, he still hasn't gotten used to the whole idea and still has to translate some of his thoughts from Yagyuu to Niou, but no one else notices. Yagyuu's proudest moment that day is when he turned his back on two freshmen. One of them had asked the other, "Is he always like this?" and the other had said emphatically, "Yes."
After school they try it out at tennis practice, but Yanagi catches it right away. "Niou," he calls out to Yagyuu's doppelganger from his own game, not even looking at either of them, "Yagyuu lowers his racket just a half a centimeter lower to hit that shot, normally." Yanagi's smile, though, is indistinctly impressed, so even though it's a failure at first sight, it's really a sort of perverse victory for the both of them.
Niou talks it over with Sanada later, Yagyuu trailing behind still trying to tame his hair down. It's Yanagi who puts in a good word for them, staring straight at Sanada as he says, "Even if we know the difference, our opponents won't."
Marui snaps his bubble gum and says, "It'll be a good trick." And Sanada, looking at Niou still holding Yagyuu's racket and wearing Yagyuu's glasses even though his hair had long ago come undone, looking at Yagyuu with his hair half in Niou's messy style and half going back to what it normally looked like and his buttons undone with flair, has to agree.
*
Yagyuu and Niou end up spending a lot of their tennis practice time pretending to be each other, and as long as neither of their performances suffers for it, Sanada lets them be. They've fooled a lot of their other teammates, sometimes not even when they look like each other, sometimes just in the locker room pretending to say something as someone else. Niou spends a lot of time coaching Yagyuu to sound just like him.
Of course Niou's a natural at it, so it's only a few steps for him to travel from being able to fool some people most of the time to everybody all of the time.
But tennis is another thing, because when you play tennis you don't stare at yourself making a shot. That's what Yanagi's for. He tells them if they're doing it wrong or just slightly off, and he tells them when they get it mirror-perfect.
Yanagi acts as their measuring stick.
The first time they even manage to fool Yanagi during a practice doubles game, Niou completely ruins it by screaming, "Yes!" as he throws his racket up in surprise and elation, completely forgetting about the game. After that, Yanagi refuses to play either one of them unless he has a guarantee of who's who. Niou and Yagyuu don't talk about the times they even manage to get around that. Talking about it would somehow make it less real, less impossible, and easier for Yanagi to find out.
"Plus," Niou points it after the third time, "it would hurt Yanagi's pride if he ever overheard."
Even their teammates don't give it a name. don't even dare to call it "the switch" like they do on occasion, when Yagyuu's feeling brave and Niou's feeling even more reckless than usual. It's "the trick" or just "it", and they look at Yagyuu and Niou with sharp, waiting eyes when they mention it, as if expecting the magic to suddenly appear with the words. It becomes a little bit like an inside joke. Only the tennis team members know about it; teachers and some students still don't, just assume that Niou dyes his hair a lot and drags Yagyuu down with him like a lifesaver. They shake their heads when they see Yagyuu and Niou spend more and more time with each other. In time Yagyuu has to find a way to stop laughing whenever someone says to him, "What do you see in Niou, Yagyuu? He's nothing like you at all."
Yagyuu, of course, still refuses to switch with Niou on test days.
*
It's not being a twin that gets Yagyuu addicted to the whole switch. It's the experience of becoming, of thinking as someone else. Yagyuu isn't sure if they have it easier or if real twins actually do. After all, he doesn't spend every minute of his life with Niou's version of him, but those moments he does spend, it really is Yagyuu and Yagyuu, not Yagyuu and Yagyuu's twin, which is all the difference.
A twin, after all, is still another person, with their own thoughts, their own body, their own identity.
He and Niou, when they switch, still have their own thoughts, but unlike twins who try to get farther away from each other, they try their hardest to be as close as possible to the real thing. So it's a matter of intent, almost, a matter of being and becoming and predefined as opposed to molded.
After all, what Yagyuu and Niou share isn't a set of similar features but an almost universal pool of thought, a similar ambition, a similar progression of procession, a similarity in they believed to be self-evident truths, and that, on occasion, ran even deeper than bloodlines.
*
Yagyuu spends a lot of his time with his glasses off, and Niou spends a lot of his time with Yagyuu's glasses on, the effect being that they spend a lot of their time together not seeing clearly.
Eventually they get a pair of no degree glasses and Yagyuu gets contacts, and like always Niou gets used to his glasses a lot sooner than Yagyuu gets used to his contacts. There's a lot of blinking involved. Plus Yagyuu's never liked touching his eyeball, and putting his contacts he has to do that too, although usually behind the cover of a small, soft plastic thing.
But that isn't until later, when they think of it. At first they both just get used to the not-seeing feeling when they switch. Even afterwards, when they do get the extra pair of glasses and Yagyuu's contacts, there's still a lot of times when Niou thinks of switching quite randomly, right before tennis practice or during a free period in their school day, neither of them prepared, and it's quite apropos of the moment, Niou reaching for the bridge of Yagyuu's glasses in his patented careless, cautious way, fingers outstretched and smiling, not even having to say a word. Yagyuu comes to look for that more and more instinctively.
Sometimes when he's being Niou, he does the same thing to Niou being him.
What also happens is that Yagyuu start to forget what he actually look like. Yagyuu sees Niou's face blurry without his glasses, and when Niou has his glasses and they both looking at each other as sort of softened loosened sketches of themselves more often then they look in the mirror without switching, Yagyuu starts to think, my face really does rise at that angle, or, my eyes really do have that strange, inhuman sparkle to them. In the morning when he looks in the mirror while he brushes his teeth, he doesn't think the person reflected back at him is him at all. He traces that outline, watches as the person in the mirror moves his hand too, and doesn't ask "Who are you?" Just thinks it really, really hard in his mind and forgets all about it when he sees Niou at school that morning.
*
It happens on a day they're not supposed to be switching. At lunch Yagyuu goes to the roof for a breath of air. He doesn't see them because they're on the other side of the building, but when he leans over the railing he hears a sound, a rustle, voices talking to softly to each other in hushed, anxious tones.
He rounds the corner to tell them that the bell is going to be ringing in a minute or two. Freezes in his tracks when he sees himself, one hand leaning against the wall, kissing a girl.
*
They make a pact of sorts in the beginning that said essentially that they would always do this as a pair. "Because," Yagyuu reasoned, "it started off being a stunt for doubles tennis, right?" Niou had nodded to that one even though they both knew the truth.
It's really because of confusion. Obviously the confusion of what would happen if anyone besides their tennis teammates found two copies of the same person, but also the confusion that's already come to pass. Forgetting which one is really supposed to be Yagyuu or Niou. They have to have a strong sense of self to pass it off, and it's much easier when they're both switching, because the shock, then, is mutual.
Occasionally Yagyuu finds himself imaging memories for himself that would be things Niou would do being him. Not blackouts, really, but times when he would blank, and some indescribable memory would come to him, something he knows he didn't remember before, something he really would never do, and when he remembered it he would know that he was remembering it as Niou remembering. But it would be as if, for a moment, Niou's copy of Yagyuu was truly Yagyuu, a possession of sorts.
Things like that are the reason why they never really became the other person alone. It works in pairs, Yagyuu believes, because they started the idea as a pair, they worked it as a pair, they made it into a doubles tennis prank, and because in the infallibility of twos, it was only supposed to work with the two of them both, together, like a bond that would never, ever break.
*
Yagyuu has the good sense to not say anything, not do anything, just turn back around and wait on the other side of the building until he's absolutely sure that he can't hear anybody anymore. When he goes back it's just Niou, really Niou this time, because he's running a hand through his hair and messing it up again, loosening his tie, unbuttoning his shirt. Niou tugs a little at his earlobe too, which has become a habit of his after switching.
"She said to me, 'You don't kiss like I expected." Niou's affecting a high voice like a girl, and a strange lilt at the end of his words give them a vapidity Yagyuu doesn't expect. "'It's so different,' she had said." Niou tilts his head in the way he always does when he's impersonating Yagyuu looking through someone. "I told her I only kiss girls like that when I'm rejecting them."
Yagyuu's nails are biting into his palm so hard that his fist is shaking by his sides. Niou doesn't say anything for a long, long while. He pockets the extra pair of glasses and shifts his gaze so he's looking any where else besides Yagyuu.
"You shouldn't have," Yagyuu says, voice trembling just a little. Niou looks at him calculatingly, and Yagyuu can just hear him think, hear him store that sound away for a time when he needed to imitate it as well. Yagyuu catches his breath, didn't even realize he had lost it, and for a while eyes the bulge in Niou's shirt pocket from the glasses. "What did you have to kiss her for, anyway?" Yagyuu continues. He losses his hand and wipes his palm neatly against the side of his pants.
"She said she liked you," Niou answers, subdued and drab, a monotone, and Yagyuu can almost hear the smile shrivel off his face.
Yagyuu laughs shakily at the idea. "No one could possibly like me," he says, still sort of absently rubbing his palm against his pants, mostly because he's forgotten about it, caught up in the way Niou says that, she said she liked you. Very carefully, very precisely, as afraid of dropping the words. Yagyuu remembers that the girl was very thin and had hair that looked very soft, that she had seemed frail from the angle he had seen her at, looked small in comparison to Niou being Yagyuu. She was probably pretty, Yagyuu thinks nervously, because otherwise Niou wouldn't have kissed her, but now he thinks, would I have? Except the answer is, in a way, that he already had.
"Oh yeah?" Niou says before he leans in to kiss him full on the mouth, hard, relentless, and definitely at least a bit angry.
It's quick, of course, because after all Yagyuu's taller, deceptively slim, a lot of power stored up in his hands and his arms, and so even though Niou shocked him, he still has the instinct to shove very hard, almost hard enough to dislodge Niou. But Niou holds on, keeps kissing until Yagyuu's a little breathless. Yagyuu does the only thing he can think of doing. He knees Niou in the stomach, closer to the crotch, and Niou doubles over, coughing and spitting.
"What do you think you're doing--" Yagyuu starts, and can't finish, because Niou touches his fingers to his own mouth, licks his upper lip slowly and laboriously, still heaving a little, and, smiling grimly, says, "To make sure I know how to kiss like you next time."
The bell rings, but neither of them hear it at first, Niou still sort of bent and Yagyuu so stunned he's stiff. Yagyuu's late to his next class, not late enough to get into trouble. Late enough, though, so that's he's breathless when he slips into his seat and still breathless when he pulls out his notebook, and breathless so he still thinks of Niou on the roof, gasping, and breathless so that he keeps breathing through his mouth instead of his nose, breathless so that he thinks of Niou kissing him all the while, the air like weight against his lips.
A/N: Drabble/request ficlet thing to the first person who guess the name of the song and the artist name of the reference in the cut-text summary. And again, please no rotten tomatoes.
It starts because Niou, sitting backward in his chair, leans over Yagyuu's desk and, staring straight into Yagyuu's face, says, "You know, we really don't look alike at all." It's simple reverse psychology from there. Yagyuu doesn't want to, after that, but he does think about it, day in and day out, starts comparing his face to Niou's every time he sees him, starts wondering about their cheekbones, their face structures, the lines of their eyebrows, the bridges of their noses, until he wonders if he isn't turning into some kind of Yanagi.
So it's Niou's idea when it starts, but by the time Niou finally backs Yagyuu up after tennis practice and says, "You know, have you ever thought of doing a switchover?", it's already Yagyuu's idea.
*
They try to make Yagyuu into Niou first.
"I'm a fast learner," Niou assures Yagyuu. "It'll be harder for you to let go than it will be for me to act like a pompous bastard with a stick up my ass." Which is supposed to be a joke, Yagyuu thinks, not that he's ever really sure. Niou's sense of humor is another thing Yagyuu will have to learn.
Yagyuu finds out from the very start that hardest thing about switching is not thinking, "What would Niou do?" but instead thinking, "I am Niou. Now what would I do?" The slightest bit of hesitation between these two statements is what makes being Niou different from Yagyuu playing Niou. Confidence is tantamount with definition. Yagyuu eventually adapts this as his mantra. Still, they spend so much time practicing being someone else in the school bathrooms after tennis practice that Yagyuu figures he knows how many tiles are on the ceiling and which lights shine brighter than the others and which sinks get warm water quicker like he knows his own name and his own birthday, Niou's name and Niou's birthday. Gradually, it gets easier being someone else, like all things do with time, but it so hard in the beginning that Yagyuu almost gives up. Little things, like standing still. Niou makes sure to catch even the most insignificant of errors ("Yagyuu, I always fidget with my right foot"). Yagyuu starts from slouching to walking and in between there are thousands of little things, like how to arrange his shirttails and how to zip his pants or button his buttons so they're right, or how to breathe ("Through your nose if you're angry, Yagyuu. People tell me that my nose flares like that all the time").
Genius, Yagyuu finally understands, is not exactly 99% perspiration and only 1% inspiration, but it's pretty close. It may be Niou's stroke of brilliance that kicks the whole thing off, and it will be Niou's innate ability to impersonate anyone, even himself, that will keep them going ("You look through people a lot. If I turn my head a little like this, does it give you that impression?") But in the end it depends on how hard Yagyuu works for his impersonation of Niou, how much of Niou he can take into himself, and how often he can trick himself into thinking he's someone else.
It gets to the point that Yagyuu starts hearing Niou's voice in his head more than he hears his own. The day he even dreams through Niou's point of view, they pull off their first switch. Niou grabs Yagyuu's glasses off his face and in a few rapid movements straightens up his clothes, which is Yagyuu's clue to mess up his. They stand side by side in front of a mirror to do their hair. Niou says, "It's easier for it to work if no one's planning for it, not even us." Yagyuu mutely nods.
The first time, it's disorientating, and Yagyuu finds his mind tripping all over itself, trying out its new shape. For one thing, he can't see as clearly as he usually can without his glasses, and for another, he still hasn't gotten used to the whole idea and still has to translate some of his thoughts from Yagyuu to Niou, but no one else notices. Yagyuu's proudest moment that day is when he turned his back on two freshmen. One of them had asked the other, "Is he always like this?" and the other had said emphatically, "Yes."
After school they try it out at tennis practice, but Yanagi catches it right away. "Niou," he calls out to Yagyuu's doppelganger from his own game, not even looking at either of them, "Yagyuu lowers his racket just a half a centimeter lower to hit that shot, normally." Yanagi's smile, though, is indistinctly impressed, so even though it's a failure at first sight, it's really a sort of perverse victory for the both of them.
Niou talks it over with Sanada later, Yagyuu trailing behind still trying to tame his hair down. It's Yanagi who puts in a good word for them, staring straight at Sanada as he says, "Even if we know the difference, our opponents won't."
Marui snaps his bubble gum and says, "It'll be a good trick." And Sanada, looking at Niou still holding Yagyuu's racket and wearing Yagyuu's glasses even though his hair had long ago come undone, looking at Yagyuu with his hair half in Niou's messy style and half going back to what it normally looked like and his buttons undone with flair, has to agree.
*
Yagyuu and Niou end up spending a lot of their tennis practice time pretending to be each other, and as long as neither of their performances suffers for it, Sanada lets them be. They've fooled a lot of their other teammates, sometimes not even when they look like each other, sometimes just in the locker room pretending to say something as someone else. Niou spends a lot of time coaching Yagyuu to sound just like him.
Of course Niou's a natural at it, so it's only a few steps for him to travel from being able to fool some people most of the time to everybody all of the time.
But tennis is another thing, because when you play tennis you don't stare at yourself making a shot. That's what Yanagi's for. He tells them if they're doing it wrong or just slightly off, and he tells them when they get it mirror-perfect.
Yanagi acts as their measuring stick.
The first time they even manage to fool Yanagi during a practice doubles game, Niou completely ruins it by screaming, "Yes!" as he throws his racket up in surprise and elation, completely forgetting about the game. After that, Yanagi refuses to play either one of them unless he has a guarantee of who's who. Niou and Yagyuu don't talk about the times they even manage to get around that. Talking about it would somehow make it less real, less impossible, and easier for Yanagi to find out.
"Plus," Niou points it after the third time, "it would hurt Yanagi's pride if he ever overheard."
Even their teammates don't give it a name. don't even dare to call it "the switch" like they do on occasion, when Yagyuu's feeling brave and Niou's feeling even more reckless than usual. It's "the trick" or just "it", and they look at Yagyuu and Niou with sharp, waiting eyes when they mention it, as if expecting the magic to suddenly appear with the words. It becomes a little bit like an inside joke. Only the tennis team members know about it; teachers and some students still don't, just assume that Niou dyes his hair a lot and drags Yagyuu down with him like a lifesaver. They shake their heads when they see Yagyuu and Niou spend more and more time with each other. In time Yagyuu has to find a way to stop laughing whenever someone says to him, "What do you see in Niou, Yagyuu? He's nothing like you at all."
Yagyuu, of course, still refuses to switch with Niou on test days.
*
It's not being a twin that gets Yagyuu addicted to the whole switch. It's the experience of becoming, of thinking as someone else. Yagyuu isn't sure if they have it easier or if real twins actually do. After all, he doesn't spend every minute of his life with Niou's version of him, but those moments he does spend, it really is Yagyuu and Yagyuu, not Yagyuu and Yagyuu's twin, which is all the difference.
A twin, after all, is still another person, with their own thoughts, their own body, their own identity.
He and Niou, when they switch, still have their own thoughts, but unlike twins who try to get farther away from each other, they try their hardest to be as close as possible to the real thing. So it's a matter of intent, almost, a matter of being and becoming and predefined as opposed to molded.
After all, what Yagyuu and Niou share isn't a set of similar features but an almost universal pool of thought, a similar ambition, a similar progression of procession, a similarity in they believed to be self-evident truths, and that, on occasion, ran even deeper than bloodlines.
*
Yagyuu spends a lot of his time with his glasses off, and Niou spends a lot of his time with Yagyuu's glasses on, the effect being that they spend a lot of their time together not seeing clearly.
Eventually they get a pair of no degree glasses and Yagyuu gets contacts, and like always Niou gets used to his glasses a lot sooner than Yagyuu gets used to his contacts. There's a lot of blinking involved. Plus Yagyuu's never liked touching his eyeball, and putting his contacts he has to do that too, although usually behind the cover of a small, soft plastic thing.
But that isn't until later, when they think of it. At first they both just get used to the not-seeing feeling when they switch. Even afterwards, when they do get the extra pair of glasses and Yagyuu's contacts, there's still a lot of times when Niou thinks of switching quite randomly, right before tennis practice or during a free period in their school day, neither of them prepared, and it's quite apropos of the moment, Niou reaching for the bridge of Yagyuu's glasses in his patented careless, cautious way, fingers outstretched and smiling, not even having to say a word. Yagyuu comes to look for that more and more instinctively.
Sometimes when he's being Niou, he does the same thing to Niou being him.
What also happens is that Yagyuu start to forget what he actually look like. Yagyuu sees Niou's face blurry without his glasses, and when Niou has his glasses and they both looking at each other as sort of softened loosened sketches of themselves more often then they look in the mirror without switching, Yagyuu starts to think, my face really does rise at that angle, or, my eyes really do have that strange, inhuman sparkle to them. In the morning when he looks in the mirror while he brushes his teeth, he doesn't think the person reflected back at him is him at all. He traces that outline, watches as the person in the mirror moves his hand too, and doesn't ask "Who are you?" Just thinks it really, really hard in his mind and forgets all about it when he sees Niou at school that morning.
*
It happens on a day they're not supposed to be switching. At lunch Yagyuu goes to the roof for a breath of air. He doesn't see them because they're on the other side of the building, but when he leans over the railing he hears a sound, a rustle, voices talking to softly to each other in hushed, anxious tones.
He rounds the corner to tell them that the bell is going to be ringing in a minute or two. Freezes in his tracks when he sees himself, one hand leaning against the wall, kissing a girl.
*
They make a pact of sorts in the beginning that said essentially that they would always do this as a pair. "Because," Yagyuu reasoned, "it started off being a stunt for doubles tennis, right?" Niou had nodded to that one even though they both knew the truth.
It's really because of confusion. Obviously the confusion of what would happen if anyone besides their tennis teammates found two copies of the same person, but also the confusion that's already come to pass. Forgetting which one is really supposed to be Yagyuu or Niou. They have to have a strong sense of self to pass it off, and it's much easier when they're both switching, because the shock, then, is mutual.
Occasionally Yagyuu finds himself imaging memories for himself that would be things Niou would do being him. Not blackouts, really, but times when he would blank, and some indescribable memory would come to him, something he knows he didn't remember before, something he really would never do, and when he remembered it he would know that he was remembering it as Niou remembering. But it would be as if, for a moment, Niou's copy of Yagyuu was truly Yagyuu, a possession of sorts.
Things like that are the reason why they never really became the other person alone. It works in pairs, Yagyuu believes, because they started the idea as a pair, they worked it as a pair, they made it into a doubles tennis prank, and because in the infallibility of twos, it was only supposed to work with the two of them both, together, like a bond that would never, ever break.
*
Yagyuu has the good sense to not say anything, not do anything, just turn back around and wait on the other side of the building until he's absolutely sure that he can't hear anybody anymore. When he goes back it's just Niou, really Niou this time, because he's running a hand through his hair and messing it up again, loosening his tie, unbuttoning his shirt. Niou tugs a little at his earlobe too, which has become a habit of his after switching.
"She said to me, 'You don't kiss like I expected." Niou's affecting a high voice like a girl, and a strange lilt at the end of his words give them a vapidity Yagyuu doesn't expect. "'It's so different,' she had said." Niou tilts his head in the way he always does when he's impersonating Yagyuu looking through someone. "I told her I only kiss girls like that when I'm rejecting them."
Yagyuu's nails are biting into his palm so hard that his fist is shaking by his sides. Niou doesn't say anything for a long, long while. He pockets the extra pair of glasses and shifts his gaze so he's looking any where else besides Yagyuu.
"You shouldn't have," Yagyuu says, voice trembling just a little. Niou looks at him calculatingly, and Yagyuu can just hear him think, hear him store that sound away for a time when he needed to imitate it as well. Yagyuu catches his breath, didn't even realize he had lost it, and for a while eyes the bulge in Niou's shirt pocket from the glasses. "What did you have to kiss her for, anyway?" Yagyuu continues. He losses his hand and wipes his palm neatly against the side of his pants.
"She said she liked you," Niou answers, subdued and drab, a monotone, and Yagyuu can almost hear the smile shrivel off his face.
Yagyuu laughs shakily at the idea. "No one could possibly like me," he says, still sort of absently rubbing his palm against his pants, mostly because he's forgotten about it, caught up in the way Niou says that, she said she liked you. Very carefully, very precisely, as afraid of dropping the words. Yagyuu remembers that the girl was very thin and had hair that looked very soft, that she had seemed frail from the angle he had seen her at, looked small in comparison to Niou being Yagyuu. She was probably pretty, Yagyuu thinks nervously, because otherwise Niou wouldn't have kissed her, but now he thinks, would I have? Except the answer is, in a way, that he already had.
"Oh yeah?" Niou says before he leans in to kiss him full on the mouth, hard, relentless, and definitely at least a bit angry.
It's quick, of course, because after all Yagyuu's taller, deceptively slim, a lot of power stored up in his hands and his arms, and so even though Niou shocked him, he still has the instinct to shove very hard, almost hard enough to dislodge Niou. But Niou holds on, keeps kissing until Yagyuu's a little breathless. Yagyuu does the only thing he can think of doing. He knees Niou in the stomach, closer to the crotch, and Niou doubles over, coughing and spitting.
"What do you think you're doing--" Yagyuu starts, and can't finish, because Niou touches his fingers to his own mouth, licks his upper lip slowly and laboriously, still heaving a little, and, smiling grimly, says, "To make sure I know how to kiss like you next time."
The bell rings, but neither of them hear it at first, Niou still sort of bent and Yagyuu so stunned he's stiff. Yagyuu's late to his next class, not late enough to get into trouble. Late enough, though, so that's he's breathless when he slips into his seat and still breathless when he pulls out his notebook, and breathless so he still thinks of Niou on the roof, gasping, and breathless so that he keeps breathing through his mouth instead of his nose, breathless so that he thinks of Niou kissing him all the while, the air like weight against his lips.
A/N: Drabble/request ficlet thing to the first person who guess the name of the song and the artist name of the reference in the cut-text summary. And again, please no rotten tomatoes.