kirihara akaya VS fuji syusuke
must.. keep.. story.. PG. shouldn't have read doujin with beautiful sensual drawing of Fuji and tongue. Fuji and tongue! *spazzes and passes out*
Sanada Genichirou is counting to ten. He is not doing this the normal way; he is walking up and down the long row of dull grey lockers in the tennis team's changing room, and every time he reaches the end of the row he reaches out and taps the last locker with the tips of his fingers. That's one. Then he turns around and paces steadily down the length of the lockers, passing his teammates as he goes, until he reaches the first locker and he taps on it. That's two. Up and down; Yagyuu and Yanagi exchange wise glances, eyes hidden behind glass lens and half-drawn eyelids; they are packing, ready to exit at the first sign of trouble, but with all the dignity of gentlemen. Niou is winding a fresh piece of cord around his ponytail, Marui is unwrapping a fresh piece of bubble gum, and Kuwahara Jackal is giving him the 'you're not going to take a shower while chewing that, are you?' look. The last stretch of bench is empty. Sanada looks at it thoughtfully.
"I don't know where he is this time," Jackal says quickly.
"Check with Seigaku," Yanagi says. "Akaya has a 60% greater tendency to go and annoy them after school, as opposed to the other teams."
"Why is that?"
Yanagi shrugs. "Insufficient data," he says. "I can never keep up with him. Anyway, trying to detect patterns in Akaya's behaviour is hopeless, especially after school ends; he always buys a 500ml bottle of Coke and disappears in a totally random direction."
"But ends up at Seigaku?"
"Not very often, fortunately for them."
Sanada exhales sharply and pulls his baseball cap perfectly straight, an emperor adjusting his crown. "Hand me my sword," he says, "I mean, my bag, please, thank you, Renji. I'm going to go for a little walk. You call Akaya's tennis club; Yagyuu, you see if anyone's seen Akaya. Niou, Marui, try and see if he's gone to any of his usual hang-out spots."
"Wharr agraarr rearrarl?" Marui asks indignantly, then, after some impatient mogu-mogu-ing, he packs his entire wad of chewing gum into one cheek and repeats, "What about Jackal?"
"Jackal needs to shower because Bunta threw a bottle of syrup at Jackal," Jackal says, stepping out of his shoes; his feet go squelch in his socks and the rest of the Rikkai team pull a face in sympathy with him.
"It was a plastic bottle!"
"You didn't screw the cap back on."
Marui pops three quick bubbles in Jackal's direction, annoyed, but he shifts himself off the bench and follows Niou, who will spend the rest of the afternoon trying to replace Marui's chewing gum with a pack of trick cardboard gum. Sanada pauses by the drinks machine at the door, chin in hand. A memory is stirring in his mind, but he can't remember what it was. "Renji," he says; his head turns so slightly, as Yanagi walks past him, and as though in answer, Yanagi halts, turns his head by an equally tiny amount, not enough to look each other in the eyes. But that's the kind of sign language we've made for ourselves, isn't it? Sanada thinks. He glances quickly sideways, sees Yanagi's profile, half-swallowed by the light coming through the door; for the first time he realises how dark it is, in the locker room. Yanagi's eyelashes flicker, perhaps he is also taking a swift, sideways glance at Sanada. "It's too big, this room," Yanagi says, "we only ever use the center row of benches anyway, so I didn't turn on the rest of the lights. What were you going to ask?"
"Nothing."
But Sanada doesn't move, and so Yanagi waits for him, patiently, watching Yagyuu stride tall and straight down the gravel path to the school buildings, listening to the echoing sound of Jackal in the showers, cursing in Brazilian Portugese as he discovers the full extent of the damage done to his clothes. Eventually Sanada says, still looking into the darkness of the room: "Am I over-reacting, Renji?"
He is surprised to hear how raw his voice sounds. He knows the words will come out reluctantly, but it feels as if, leaving, they scrape his throat. Yanagi's eyelids lift, a switch to activate his question-answering mechanism.
"Maybe Seiichi would have made a different decision, in this situation," he says. "But you are here, and he isn't. And the situation would not be the same if he was here, so it wouldn't ever be his decision to make. Do you see.." Yanagi smiles at the sight of the confusion on Sanada's face, and he says, "Ah, I've lost you!" The smile fades, but the emotion remains in his voice when he says, "How about this: you're fulfilling a promise. Seiichi wants us to win, but he also wants you to take care of the team. Maybe your methods are different from his. The intention is still the same."
Sanada's fingers tap on the smooth surface of the drinks machine. When he eventually looks up, all he says is, "You ought to smile more often," but he moves to leave, and he thumps Yanagi on the shoulder as he goes. Tall and high-shouldered, he never walks without a sense of confidence so strong it scatters people out of his path, but now it seems that nothing, truly, can stop him. Yanagi looks after him, eyelids settling low once again. The drinks machine makes a rumbling noise, but Yanagi pays it no attention; he walks off, his mind apparently dislocated from his body.
Out of sight behind the drinks machine, Kirihara whimpers. He knows sometimes he must be restrained for his own good, but it would be nice also if his senpais could remember where they tied him up. He tried kicking out at the drinks machine when Jackal passed by him on his way to the showers, but Jackal's back was turned to him and he was still cussing about the syrup in his shoes. Nevermind, Kirihara thinks; he'll see me on his way out, for sure.
He relaxes, leans back against the drinks machine, closes his eyes. The machine smells of old metal and the rank, metal sourness of coins; apart from that, there's only the usual reek of unwashed shirts stuffed and forgotten in the backs of lockers, the powerful disinfectant smell of someone's foot deodorant spray, a faint tang of something clean and flowery floating warm and damp from the shower room. Kirihara snickers to himself, makes a mental note to inspect Jackal's shower stuff later. In a haze of dim-lit darkness and pleasant dreams of doing evil deeds, it takes him a while to register the sound of footsteps in the room, quiet and cautious. A figure disappearing into the space between the center rows of lockers; who's that? Kirihara automatically tries to stand up and stalk the intruder, but all he does is crash back into the drinks machine and the pillar he's tied to, sitting down very very hard and suddenly on the wooden bench.
Shadow across his face; he glares upward, trying to kill with his eyes alone, or at least to see who it is. Shadow filling face, light falling from behind and bouncing off a polished button on a matte black uniform; blue ring of reflected sky tracing the outline of a round head, haloing shivering strands of pale hair. Kirihara sits up very straight and glares into the glow of a familiar smile.
"Hello to you too!" Fuji Syusuke says, smiling. "I wondered why I passed the entire Rikkai team on my way here, and yet I didn't see you. How are you?"
Kirihara fumes and frets and wriggles in every direction, but fails to overcome the power of good strong support bandages tied together, and Niou's magical knots.
"I'm so glad to see you so healthy and energetic," Fuji purrs. "But you've never been this polite and quiet before. You know, I was just passing by, but having the entire Rikkai team minus a particular member walk past you, don't you think that's some kind of sign? I'm so glad I listened to my instincts."
He sits down on the bench opposite Kirihara, black blazer pulling tight against the curve of his back, forearms braced on thighs; folded hands, fingers twisted together like some cunning puzzle, point downwards, or do they point at Kirihara? He notices how Kirihara has stopped struggling to break free, is fully occupied watching him, like an animal in a cage wondering what the scientist observing it is going to do next. "You know," Fuji says, lifting his hands to cup his chin, "if I had the kind of dreams where I was lost in a dangerous place, and I was not alone - if there was some kind of dark and terrible beastie in this dangerous place with me - if I had those kind of dreams, and suddenly I saw in my dream, the face of this unmentionable monster - do you know what it would look like?"
Kirihara's eyes sneer at Fuji, staring down his sharp nose; you? Fuji laughs. "Oh, that's too kind of you!" he says. "No, I think I would be something small, maybe furry, quite insignificant and not grand at all.. something quite humorous to look at, you know. Like a hedgehog? They close their eyes a lot, too. No.." Fuji flicks tongue over lower lip, so fast it is perhaps something involuntary, not something planned, and his blue eyes focus suddenly, sharp and clean, so that when his mouth says, "Not me," the rest of him, angled like an arrow pointing to Kirihara, says, you.
Air seems to concentrate and strain in the silence that follows; the sound of falling water from the showers loses meaning, becomes just white noise from another world. An upward curve of mouth bears a different meaning when the blue eyes above it stare unblinkingly, no longer fully shut; no longer can be called a smile. Kirihara stares back, but something is breaking behind his fierce front. Suddenly he shies his head to one side, lifting a shoulder but not high enough - a frustrated bubble growls in his throat, one eye blinks and creases furiously. Fuji, watching, feels his eyes curving shut once again.
"Is something troubling you?" he asks.
Kirihara glares at him from one dark eye.
"I don't think I should untie you," Fuji says. "I mean, things are always done for a reason. Also, I think our conversations are more enjoyable like this. But you've got something in your eye, hmm?"
Almost guiltily, that single dark eye flinches. Kirihara's face shifts to look down for a moment, and Fuji's insane eye for detail fixes on the forward slump of Kirihara's thin shoulders, pulling his collar back and deepening a long hollow of collarbone that disappears into the buttoned fold of white shirt. He is surprised to feel his own breath catching in his throat; even more surprised to feel himself standing up, leaning over Kirihara, looking down, one hand slowly coming closer to some great discovery. The whole matter has an urgent feel to it. It is as though he has been granted the chance to come across the beast in a moment of vulnerability, so that he might reach into it and - what is it there, what does his fingertip find, tracing the edge of one small ear? The peculiar sensation of thin cartilage bound by warm skin, the curiously pointed edge at the top of the ear, arches and curves like the inside of a seashell. Fingertips draw a line, follow the hard contour of cheekbone, dance up the slope of narrow nose, glide along the thick arch of eyebrow, riding precarious on the arch of browbone, and finally settle on shut eyelid, run along double-row of eyelashes shivering together.
"I can't find anything," Fuji says. Only later, when he is recalling this encounter, will he remember that he was whispering. "Maybe it was just a speck of dust."
Beneath his fingers, both eyes snap open, dark with a red glow around their edges; muscle bunches as feet leave the ground. Fuji smells danger but doesn't react in time; an iron grip tightens around his waist and the hard heels of Kirihara's sneakers dig into the small of his back, won't let go no matter how hard he tries to push or claw or beat them away. Some kind of mad giggle tickles in Kirihara's throat, a sensation of madness passing through his body, passing to Fuji, who is growing short of breath. In a very rare moment of panic he grabs at handfuls of Kirihara's curls and hears a thin whine whistles past the gag in the boy's mouth; when he relaxes his hold out of pity, Kirihara headbutts him savagely, skulls connecting so hard they ring separately but in resonance for a minute after impact.
Fuji's head slumps forward, Kirihara's eyes widen in alarm and he twists his head aside so that Fuji's face lands in the crook of his neck instead of right smack on his own face. Tension bleeds dry from the atmosphere, and he unwinds his legs, lowers them shakily to the floor. All he wants to do is to go to sleep and wake up in his bed, look at the alarm clock and then go back to sleep again, but he can't sleep sitting up, his shoulders and head are aching like hell, and there is something unsettling in how smoothly Fuji's body settles into his, Fuji's thin hands still tangled in his hair. So silent that you can almost the dust motes singing as they drift in a shaft of light falling through the door, not even the sound of water any more..
Kirihara's eyes jerk wide open and he looks up. A figure tall and dark and motionless as a statue is watching him; it shuts its open jaw with a snap as he looks at it.
"Aka-chan," Jackal says, speaking for the first time in the two minutes he has stepped out of the shower, "there you are."
He steps carefully around Fuji's limp legs, and unties the gag in Kirihara's mouth. The first thing Kirihara says is, "You're not talking to anyone about this."
"Silent as the grave," Jackal says. "But I think you should talk to each other about this. And it should be supervised. Okay?"
"Okay. Please untie me now?"
"In a minute. I have a feeling I'd better shift this guy somewhere else where you can't get at him first."
Kirihara growls, but he doesn't complain, only leans back and watches Jackal carefully lift Fuji off to a discreet place. The red glow has left his eyes, but the triumphant glow on his face is going to be there for a while.
so.. the kirihara-fuji game is now 1-1 xD