Ceyrai Says: Whoo. Emo!Sakuno. I mean, reallyemo!Sakuno. Sorry I can't say more – if I do, I'd spoil the surprise of the fic. I guess what I can say is, read very very carefully.

Though, I must say, I'm not contented with this fic at all. I feel like it could use a bit more polishing, but this is really the best I can do. ARGH.

Notes:
Pair: RyoSaku
Universe: Canon, future-fic
Warnings: emo!Sakuno. And maybe spoilers from the last few episodes of the anime and the last episode of the OVA.
Rip-offs: None.
Additional Notes: The second chapter of New Prince of Tennis stated that Ryoma went to the US three days after the Nationals and came back after an unspecified period of time, but sometime before the third years graduated from Junior High. So we really don't know if Ryoma is going to spend the rest of the school year in Japan. But in this fic, let's pretend he stays till the third years graduate.
Disclaimer: There would be more RyoSaku if I owned TeniPuri. Srsly.

The Lonely Racket
but no amount of wishing could ever let it happen

I…

I want to see him.

…

The sun was setting on another ordinary day in Tokyo. Schoolchildren were either going home or heading to cram schools, and the streets and subways were filled with them. However, one certain school girl was not part of the evening rush.

Ryuuzaki Sakuno was still hard at work at a wall behind the tennis courts, long after tennis club practices ended. She had politely declined Tomoka's invitation to walk home with her and the sempais Eiji and Momo's invitation to go with them to the burger joint.

She smiled to herself as she bounced the neon ball. For some reason, in the past two years, she had become their beloved Ochibi's substitute in some of the things they loved to do. It obviously didn't have the same appeal to them, but they seemed to have a lot of fun alternately teasing her and doting on her. Eiji was already expressing his desire to call her Ochibiko.

But the ranking tournaments were fast approaching, and she was determined to become a Regular. Not that she was unskilled as she once was – she had, in fact, helped her junior high team get to Nationals and win second runner-up. She had been the vice-captain then, and though she often expressed her opinion that she really didn't deserve the rank, she was still very proud of her achievements. She was steadily closing the gap between her and the person she admired above anyone else.

But she was in high school now, and there were even more skilled girls who were aiming for the same spots as she was. Seigaku High was a particularly popular school when it came to tennis, and she was bound to have more rivals than before. But there was no way she was going to lose out on the Regular spot. If she didn't have the natural talent, then she was going to get to her goal through hard work.

Mada mada dane, she could almost hear that smooth, prepubescent voice mock her.

She hit a continued rally with the wall, aiming for the same spot over and over again. Of course, she still sometimes missed her designated target by a few centimeters, but it was a far cry from not even being able to return the ball – her original state of skill.

Sixty-six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight… she counted in her head. After she got to one hundred, she planned to do a few more training exercises that, as Inui had told her, would "increase her backhand efficiency by 127 per cent at maximum output." They were very good odds, Sakuno assumed, because her backhand still had a lot of glitches.

She caught the ball in her hand after she got to a hundred, breathing hard as she did. After all that time, her stamina also seemed to need a lot of work. Not that she was often tired out easily – no, this unusual lack of stamina only came during certain times. She hated how her emotions affected her tennis play negatively. He'd probably tell her that emotions should only be able to affect her play positively, but this was currently not the case.

Things had begun coming back to her, recently.

Perhaps it was the spring season. Because it was around the last week of March, three years ago, that she first laid eyes on him.

Perhaps it was because she had said goodbye to the cherry blossoms just the week ago. Because she could see, in her mind's eye, the airplane leaving a little over two years ago.

She gripped the handle of her red Bridgestone Dynabeam Grandea racket, now two years in her possession.

"Ah, mou."

It was most probably, most likely, most definitely because of the red racket in her hands.

Her eyes lidded, her expression tired, she hugged the racket to her chest as though it would lessen the ache.

I want to see him.

She wanted to see him so badly. She wanted to be able to show him how much she had improved – and to be acknowledged for it. She wanted him to see her.

They exchanged e-mails over the past two years, of course. They had somehow fallen into a routine of telling each other what had happened in their individual weeks. At first, Sakuno was thrilled – not only was he talking to her, he was doing so quite freely, without any obligations and with so much to say.

He had told her of his new school, though she had the impression he didn't really have as much friends as he had in Japan, due to the much too intense rivalries in the courts, as well as some discrimination for his race. He sounded enthusiastic about seeing various tennis styles, experiencing imaginative training programs, traveling to places to further his improvement. He even managed to insert some of his home life into the equation – she had laughed out loud when he sent pictures of himself with the newborn kittens of his precious Himalayan cat.

Sakuno, on the other hand, chronicled the various happenings that she knew would catch his interests, and had consequently become the others' line to relay any information they wanted to get to him.

She told him about the current lives of the former Seigaku junior high Regulars, based on what she heard from Momo and Eiji's weekly updates. She told him that Horio had developed a new tennis technique and was putting it to good use, though Kachiro had beaten him to the captain spot. She even told him about the installation of a top-of-the-line tennis ball machine in the Hyoutei courts, and because of the impression Tezuka had on Atobe, Tezuka and the others had been invited to try it out.

He had mailed her once or twice to tell him something more relevant to him than that, but he hadn't specified, so she continued mailing him the usual.

She managed to mention everyone at least once in her e-mails over the past two years – from Akazawa Yoshirou of St. Rudolph to Zaizen Hikaru of Shitenhouji. All the information she had told him was a way to get him to stay connected to the place he had considered home for a while. It was so he would never forget where he came from, and the people who shaped him.

But she could never bring herself to mention what was going on in her life.

She could never tell him about how she nearly got run over by a shopping cart driven by Tomoka's little brothers the other week, or that she had been going to an after-school English program since she was in second year middle school. Those things wouldn't mean anything to him. But she could tell him about her tennis.

But she didn't.

She wanted so much to tell him of every victory, every loss, every scratch and wound and tear and sweat that she had experienced. But she couldn't. Every time she typed her name into the e-mail to tell him what her tennis was like, she would delete every word, and it would get replaced by some nonsensical new information about the other middle and high school teams of Japan.

It wasn't that she was not proud of how far she had come. It wasn't even because she thought that she was still not good enough by his standards.

What she thought, or what she thought he thought didn't matter.

The main reason was that she wanted so much for him to tell her what he thought about her tennis. She wanted him to see it firsthand and in person, and not shape his preconception of it with her words. And only his opinion would matter to her, no one else.

But how could he give her his opinion, when he could not see her (and might never see her), and was so far away?

Sakuno bit her lip, hating herself for being superficial, selfish, and downright childish.

She gripped the red racket tighter.

I want to see him.

She had connected him to the world he had left, and he had connected her to the world he now lived in. But somehow, they weren't connected to each other. Not really. Not when she withheld information about herself because they weren't relevant to him.

Her only connection to him, she thought, was the red racket she was clutching on for dear life, trying not to let her tears fall.

He had told her, sometime during winter break in their freshman year in middle school, that her pink racket wasn't of a good enough make, and she had taken insult in that. She had chosen it herself – not only for the color, but also for the way it felt in her hand. It was the sloppy judgment of a novice, but she had chosen it herself and that was a tiny victory in itself.

A little more than a week after winter break ended, lo and behold – there was a late birthday present in the form of a red racket in his hand, being held out to her. It wasn't even wrapped; for all she knew, he could have been giving her one of his extra rackets without knowing it was her birthday two days ago. But she couldn't care less. Who would care about something so nonsensical when the boy they loved was giving them a present?

"That's the best model of a racket there is," he had said. "Use it."

She had taken it with an overjoyed smile and struggled not to hug him right then and there.

Since then, she had been using the red racket – a Bridgestone Dynabeam Grandea racket, as she had later learned from him – and it had become something of a lucky charm to her. It was like some of his skill had rubbed off on the racket, and onto her. That was what she liked to think.

But it was a racket. It was just a racket. It could never connect her to him like seeing him would.

I want to see him.

All her eyelash wishes, shooting stars, and birthday candles had been wasted on one wish when she could have wished for better grades, increased tennis skills, or indeed, peace on earth. But no amount of wishing could ever let it happen.

Thoughts like this never plagued her too often – but they were certainly plaguing her then, when she should have been focused on her goal.

"It's lonely," was all she could say, swiping her tears from her face.

Underneath those words were two years of longing and unanswered feelings.

She heaved a sigh. Being overly-analytical about her emotions would get her nowhere near her goal. She gave her racket one last squeeze before she turned and tried to look for the tennis ball she had been using.

Only, it was nowhere to be found.

"Mou," she pouted. "Acting all emo cost me a tennis ball…"

"Looking for this?"

Before she could react, someone had tossed her the tennis ball. Instinctively, her gaze followed the arc of the ball and caught it in her hands. "Thank you," she said, bowing quickly to whoever had given her the ball. "I needed to-"

Wait.

This wasn't the ball she was using. This one looked a little older.

She turned the ball over, frowning. Why was it differe-

Oh.

My.

A likeness of a tennis prodigy scowled at her from under his sketched cap.

"This… ball…" she whispered.

It couldn't be. Just couldn't be. The likelihood was close to zero.

"How have you been treating your birthday present?"

She looked up to a smirking face, real this time.

"You…" she breathed.

"Hmm," he took the racket from her frozen hands and examined it, turning it over and pulling on the strings. "Looks used. Very well used. You never told me how you used it though… I keep telling you to mail me something relevant."

She opened her mouth, and tried several times to coax a sound out of it. Finally-

"Ryoma… kun…"

Echizen Ryoma quirked an eyebrow. "Yo."

Sakuno was stunned, too shocked to even cry.

"But… why…?"

Why are you here? Why are you here, with me? Aren't there things more important to you? Don't you have friends more precious than me? Isn't there are dream you want to grasp?

He shrugged, and answered, as though hearing the questions in her head, "To continue what I've started? To pick up where I left off? To fulfill my dream in a way that I would be happy with? Who knows?"

He touched the ball in her hand lightly, running his fingers on the worn neon-green surface. She waited.

"Or maybe it's just that," he continued quietly with a small smile (not so gentle, not so arrogant either), "the ball was lonely without the racket."

Her hand trembled, and her face broke into a crooked, watery smile.

And he saw me.

Ceyrai Says: Another of the various takes on how Ryoma and Sakuno meet after years of separation. I just wanted to play with the fact that in the anime, Ryoma received two "customized" tennis balls from Sakuno, and Sakuno was shown, in the closing clips of the final OVA, with a red racket. Ryoma always had a red racket.

They had, in fact, exchanged tennis equipment.

(Cue highpitched fangirl screeching.)

It's said that Ryoma's favorite racket is a Bridgestone Dynabeam Grandea, and I incorporated that little fact into this fic.

The ending feels rushed though. I think I could have elaborated on Sakuno's thoughts a little more. Oh well. What do you guys think?