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Akira slid the door open. It was dark inside his room: Hikaru had not turned on the lights, probably in an attempt to mislead others into thinking it was empty. It was a futile attempt, in his opinion. "Hikaru?" he said.

Someone grabbed him and pulled into the room, with the door sliding closed with a loud 'clack' almost immediately.

"What-"

The same person placed a hand over his mouth. "Shh! They'll hear you!" Hikaru whispered, none too loudly. There was a click, and dim light revealed his boyfriend, half-sitting on him.

Akira pulled him off. "What are you doing?" he asked. "And with that?"

In the light of his penlight (held in the mouth), Hikaru looked like a ghoul, with wild eyes and hair. "Have they gone yet?" he asked.

"Who?"

"The reporters!"

"No, they haven't."

Hikaru's lips parted in a silent and, in Akira's view, an exaggerated scream.

Akira kept an iron grip on his composure, taking the penlight from Hikaru and getting up to turn on the lights. "Why are you hiding in my room," he asked, keeping his voice mild, "when there are..." he paused to do a mental tally, "six groups of reporters in my family's main hall?"

Hikaru winced. "I didn't know they'd be following me!" he wailed. "And six? I only counted four!"

It had been two weeks. To Hikaru's barely concealed horror, Go Weekly, Electric Go, and Everybody Go! had all expressed interest in interviewing him. Ostensibly, it was to highlight his achievements as an amateur Go player. However, Hikaru insisted--not without justification, Akira acknowledged--that all they wanted to do was to quiz him about Sai. The news had taken on a life of its own when it emerged that Hikaru was also dating Touya Akira, son of Touya Kouyo.

"You might be interested to know that Baduk Baduk and Weiqi 1-2-3 have also heard about you," Akira said dryly. He had progressed from concern, embarrassment, and a little envy, to amusement at Hikaru's predicament. "The local newspaper also sent someone."

"Damn it," Hikaru said, without heat. "I thought it'd blow over after a few days."

"It would have taken longer," Akira said, more familiar with the press from the time his father was still a professional. "You did manage to shut down half the internet Go websites around the world."

Hikaru whimpered.

"My mother's talking to them right now," Akira said. "Luckily, she's used to entertaining reporters. But it's impolite to keep them waiting. You should come out and meet them, even if it's just to say 'No comment.' But if you want to leave now-"

Hikaru looked hopefully at him.

"Keep in mind that these are Go reporters."

"Not going to give up easily, huh?" Hikaru said.

Akira agreed silently. Few people were more tenacious than reporters who were also Go-obsessed.

"But I can't tell them all about Sai!" Hikaru said. "They'll think I'm crazy!"

"You don't have to. Tell them as little as you like."

After long seconds, Hikaru sighed. "All right, let's go."

---

"I met Sai in an internet café..."

"...he just disappeared one day..."

"I miss him."

Hikaru gave a deliberately vague account of his friendship with Sai, ending with how he had continued to play as Sai. With deep confusion, but sensing that he was not about to say anything more after repeated questions, the reporters finally left the Touya residence. The day after the story was printed, Hikaru had a panic attack, ate six bowls of ramen, and locked himself in the bathroom again.

Hikaru and Akira had expected the accusations of duplicity--using another person's name in public was suspicious behaviour, no matter how one looked at it--and the disbelieving reception from segments of the Go-playing public. There were the complaints of publicity for publicity's sake. They had even come to expect hostility from those who insisted that Shindou Hikaru, a mere high school student, was perpetuating a giant hoax on everyone. They were prepared to hunker down and wait for all of it to go away.

What they did not expect, were the challengers. And who.

"Kuwabara Honinbou?" Hikaru repeated, staring at Akira in bewilderment. "Isn't he the one with the title-"

"The Honinbou title," Akira said. "The name 'Honinbou' is used as a courtesy name by those who hold the title. I've told you this before."

"Uh, yeah, you did... Hey! Just like your father," Hikaru's eyes lit up in understanding. "I've always wondered why some people call him 'Touya Meijin'..."

Akira felt a familiar mixture of exasperated affection well up in him as Hikaru began to muse about the first time he met--"No, I literally ran into him! Bam!"--Akira's father. He shook Hikaru's arm to get his attention. "Are you listening to me? I said, Kuwabara-sensei is here, and he wants to play with you."

Hikaru looked puzzled. "But you're planning on challenging him for his title, aren't you? So shouldn't he be here to play with you?"

There were times when Akira wished he could bludgeon Hikaru over the head and reduce that obliviousness. "No, he's here to play with you. Now. He's in the classroom." He tugged Hikaru away from his attempts to rearrange Akira's wardrobe and pushed him into the classroom.

Kuwabara looked as formidable as Akira knew him: sparse, white hair on a balding head and hooded, watchful eyes set on a wrinkled face. He had been talking to Akira's father, both sitting before a Go board, and when he looked up at his entrance, Akira could have sworn he saw a particularly sly smile flash on his lips.

Beside him, Hikaru 's eyes fell on Kuwabara immediately. "It's you!" he said--pointing, Akira noted with a mental groan--and stomped forward. "You insulted Akira, that time!"

Akira could feel his eyebrows go up at Hikaru's words, and glancing at his father, he saw that he had done the same. Thinking back, he remembered that Hikaru had met Kuwabara once, at the Go Institute.

Kuwabara seemed to know what Hikaru was referring to. "If you're too stupid to realize that it was just a way of challenging him, then you don't deserve to play with me," he said.

"S-stupid!" Hikaru said scornfully, and sat down opposite him without being asked. "You were insulting him, and don't you dare to deny it!"

"Hikaru-" Akira murmured.

"Nigiri!" Hikaru shouted, scooping a handful of stones and putting his clenched fist on the Go board.

If anything, the smirk on Kuwabara's face only widened. "Avenging your boyfriend's honour, huh, punk?" He started to wheeze with laughter.

Hikaru's eyes narrowed. "If I win, you have to apologize to Akira!"

Even Akira's father looked startled at that, but Kuwabara only grinned. "Ah, young love," he said in a saccharin voice and a fake, coy expression that looked as though a crocodile was pretending to be a rabbit. "And if you lose?"

"Then I'll apologize to you, for thinking you unworthy of the name of Honinbou," Hikaru said. "Come on, old man!"

Even Kuwabara looked startled, Akira thought, at Hikaru's words about Honinbou, but it was only a flicker of the pro's eyelids, and he had regained his composure at "old man".

"All right," Kuwabara said. He looked at Hikaru's fist with a smile. "Odd, then. For an odd duck like you."

Hikaru visibly ground his teeth as he relaxed his fist, letting the stones fall onto the Go board. Some stuck to his fingers, and he had to shake them off before counting them. "Even," he said.

Kuwabara took the white stones without comment, waiting as Hikaru changed to a cross-legged position.

With the most perfunctory of courtesies--"Get on with it!" and "You're supposed to start, remember?"--they played a game.

And another one.

Akira, still sitting beside Hikaru, looked up from the Go board at the end of the second one, his eyes widening to see Kaneda and Fujimoto in the room as well. When had they come in, he wondered? He had heard nothing. Beside them sat Ashiwara, who looked serious for once, though his eyes twinkled when he caught Akira's look. Behind him, Akira could see Ochi, too engrossed in watching the Go board to notice that he was under scrutiny. Isumi sat near the door, next to Ohda. And to his left was Waya.

Who looked away the moment he noticed Akira's eyes on him. He looked angry, though, and Akira ticked off a mental list. He had suspected Waya all along of being the person who revealed Hikaru's secret.

Though the second game had come to a close, Hikaru and Kuwabara were, to put it politely, still exchanging comments.

"Best two out of three!"

"I think we can call it a draw."

"You just want to get out of apologizing to Akira!"

"What, your boyfriend won't put out if you can't avenge his honour?"

Akira flushed to his roots, while his ears caught a snicker from the watchers that was hastily stifled.

Hikaru flushed, too. "Akira wouldn't refuse... n-none of your business!" he finished hastily, the tips of his ears turning red.

Kuwabara began laughing.

"You! You're insulting Akira again!"

"Kuwabara-sensei, Shindou, it's getting late. I think we should stop for the day, don't you think?" Touya Kouyo's voice was polite, but firm.

The reminder that Akira's father had been in the room all this time dashed away Hikaru's belligerence. Even his neck turned red. "Uh, of c-course, Touya-sensei!"

Kuwabara gave Akira's father a sly look. "Looking out for your son-in-law already?" he asked.

"Kuwabara-sensei."

Kuwabara snorted, but gave a slow nod. "My old bones can't take this much sitting, anyway," he said. He looked at Hikaru firmly. "Punk, we each won a game, even though they were just speed Go games. Very well." He looked at Akira. "If you have been playing with the punk here all this while, there may be hope for you."

Akira inclined his head, still too embarrassed to react in any other way. "Thank you, Kuwabara-sensei."

"Huh." Kuwabara turned back to Hikaru. "Well?"

Hikaru spluttered. "You call that an apology?" he shouted. Or rather, he tried to, but Akira hurriedly nudged his foot. "Uh," he wound down. "I mean, thank you. And you aren't such a bad sort. Shuusaku would have liked to play with you."

Kuwabara looked startled for the second time that afternoon, but he nodded. "I see," he said cryptically. He got to his feet slowly. "Yes, it's time for me to leave," he announced to the room.

Akira stood up, and with a tug, Hikaru got up as well. With Akira's father, both of them saw Kuwabara all the way to the front door of the Touya residence. Before he left, though, Kuwabara turned back, his eyes firmly fixed on Hikaru's head. "And what name will you be playing under from now on?"

Hikaru froze at the question, but he recovered. "Mine," he said. "It's 'Starmaker', by the way," he added.

"Che. I knew that."

Akira felt only mild surprise at the confirmation that Kuwabara played NetGo, and belatedly realized that Kuwabara had initially come to play with 'Sai', but had seen for himself the actual player under that name, after only two games. His respect for the pro rose even higher.

"Good," Hikaru said to his back. "I'll be looking out for you, too. 'Kawaii Sweetie'."

Kuwabara paused, but did not look back.

On the way back, Hikaru grumbled, as they walked behind Akira's father. "It just goes to show, Akira, that everyone is pretending to be a fourteen-year-old girl on the internet."

Akira tried to equate old, wily Kuwabara with the username 'Kawaii Sweetie", and failed.

"But his Go skills gave him away," Hikaru went on. "You know," he paused, gathering his thoughts.

Akira stopped as well, watching as his father entered the classroom ahead of them. "Yes?"

"Sai would have loved to play with him," Hikaru said, then grinned the same cocky grin he had aimed at Kuwabara when he won the first game, the one that made Kuwabara scowl, and clear the board immediately for a second game. "I'm glad it was me, though."

The next few days continued to be interesting.

"Ichiryu 9-dan's NetGo name is 'Moonlit-9'?"

"Yup," Hikaru said, still laughing, as he sat down at the table in Akira's room. "Very p-poetic, right?"

Akira thought of Ichiryu's shiny bald pate, and understood why Hikaru had excused himself halfway through the game, where they all heard him laughing outside. Perhaps discomfited by Hikaru's behaviour, Ichiryu had miscalculated, and lost the game. That was the day before yesterday.

Hikaru sat up, biting into the one of the cookies provided by Akira's mother. He had become more relaxed after several days, as it slowly dawned on him that the visiting pros to the Touya residence only wanted to play Go with him. Unlike with Kuwabara, though, he had not revealed that he knew any of their NetGo names to them. "I thought he wanted to kill me!" he said, spraying crumbs everywhere.

Akira pushed the glass of juice into his hands. "Not in our house," he said.

As a result of the NetGo connection, Hikaru had been finding himself playing with people whose Go he recognized. It pointed to the widespread popularity of NetGo with Japanese pros, though the fact that Hikaru could identify them through their playing styles was frankly amazing.

Hikaru washed the rest of the cookie down with the juice, and wiped his mouth with a hand. "And then there's that Zama. He kept chewing on that fan. I thought he wanted to bite on me!"

"It's a well-known habit of Zama-sensei's."

"It's damn creepy," Hikaru declared. Spooked at first, Hikaru had retaliated too late and eventually lost by half a moku. Afterwards, he had said wryly that he needed to improve his composure when he played in person. That was yesterday.

"You also know him from NetGo?" Akira asked.

Hikaru nodded, grabbing another cookie, popping the entire thing into his mouth. "Yeah," he said, and mumbled something else around the cookie.

Akira, used to interpreting his food-related mumbles, heard what he said, and felt his eyebrows rose. "What?"

Hikaru tried to nod, laugh and chew at the same time. Not surprisingly, he ended up choking, and drank all the juice in his glass and half of Akira's.

Akira was still surprised. "Zama-sensei is 'Russian Bear'?" he said, wondering if he heard wrongly.

Hikaru started to laugh, but stopped and clutched at his stomach again, complaining that it hurt from too much coughing. "You can't make this up, Akira. Yes, that's really his NetGo name. And he uses the same one for the 'Freestyle Go' and 'Black and White' websites, too."

Akira rubbed his forehead, trying not to laugh. "This isn't good, Hikaru. I won't be able to play with him with a straight face in the future."

"No, it's good! You know his secret NetGo name! And I-" he shrugged, "well, Sai played many games with him. I'll show you the kifu, and you can study his style."

It seemed as though Hikaru was getting better at putting the 'Sai' persona behind him--though he would never forget the real Sai, Akira knew.

"That would be very useful, yes," Akira said. "But I don't see how knowing his NetGo name will help."

"I think it sort of suits his Go style. You'll understand him better. At first it's like he's very slow, even clumsy, then suddenly, he just lunges at you and claws off your arm or something."

Hikaru's grasp of Go styles, and the way he saw them, never failed to amaze Akira.

"Some of the pros have pretty boring names, though," Hikaru said, taking the opportunity to crawl into Akira's lap. "I mean, both you and your father use your own names. So does that Isumi." He did not mention Isumi's friend, Waya.

Akira suspected that Hikaru, too, had concluded that it was Waya who revealed his identity. It looked like Hikaru planned to go out of his way to avoid him. "Well, you did say that Ogata-san's is 'Great White Shark'," he said. "And Morishita-sensei's is 'Tanker'."

Hikaru made a face at the mention of Ogata, but brightened up at the mention of Morishita. "Morishita is a scary man," he said, but he sounded good-humoured. He had lost a game against Morishita, by one-and-a-half moku, but Morishita had surprised everybody by openly inviting him to the study sessions he held in his home.

Hikaru had stuttered a promise to think about it, too intimidated by the pro's fierce expression to refuse right away.

That was today.

"Did you see the way he frowned at me?" Hikaru went on, wrapping his arms around Akira. "I mean, he won! I wonder why."

Akira rather thought it was because Morishita realized through mid-game that Hikaru was treating the game as a chance to experiment on a number of risky hands. "It's an interesting name," he said, choosing not to comment on that. The fact that Hikaru felt relaxed enough to do that was a heartening sign. Despite his skill, Hikaru's performance against the pro visitors was still inconsistent. He was still adapting to face-to-face confrontations with high-level players, and stumbled more often than not. But he did not seem to mind; on the contrary, Akira could see his determination to win grow with each game.

"Yeah," Hikaru agreed, snuggling closer. "Suits him, huh? Only An Taeson has a scarier name: 'Black Ops'. You know, I bet Kurata would be totally jealous if he knew that."

"Wait, how do you know what An Taeson's NetGo name is? You've never played with him in person. And what do you mean, Kurata-san would be jealous?"

"I saw the kifu for those games your father played with him last year," Hikaru said, stretching like a cat. Slowly, he unbuttoned Akira's jeans.

Amused and indulgent, Akira let Hikaru pull the jeans from him. "And Kurata-san?" he prompted, idly wondering if they had remembered to lock the door. "What's his NetGo name?"

"Oh, he calls himself 'Flower Power'."

That spoilt the mood.

Akira made a mental note never to discuss NetGo names with Hikaru again.

-----

April came, and Hikaru finally graduated from high school. He had been invited by the Go Institute to take part in the Pro Exams; the preliminary exams were in July. It was a long wait, but Akira was glad about it, because Hikaru seemed to be more confident about himself as the days went on. He had, after all, played with more than a dozen pros since the news about Sai broke, and though he played less NetGo now, when he did, it was as himself as the weeks went on. A period of adaptation would only help him to grow as a player.

Now, all that Akira had to do was to work even harder at his own Go. Hikaru was still far ahead, but watching him play with the pros that Akira himself had met made the distance seem traversable. They would be in the same world, after all.

And now Hikaru was going to introduce him to a part of that world he seldom encountered.

"You've never done this before? Really?" Hikaru was shifting his weight from foot to foot. He seemed much too gleeful.

"No." Akira shook his head for emphasis, and leant back in his chair, turning around from the computer so he could look at Hikaru directly.

Hikaru frowned suddenly. "But you're more experienced than me!" he said, with an air of pointing out the obvious. "Years and years and years! And you're always so knowledgeable about Go!" His tone grew higher and higher, until it squeaked on the last 'Go.'

"No," Akira repeated, half-amused by his boyfriend, and half-annoyed. What Hikaru meant by 'knowledgeable' was really basic information about the Go world that anyone with a passing familiarity with Go would know. One day, he was going to tie Hikaru to a chair and not give him any ramen until he had pounded something about the Go world into that empty head. "Not about this."

"Hah!"

But that was neither here nor there. Akira reached out and grabbed Hikaru's arms, stopping him from dancing around in triumph. "I told you before, my father forbade me from taking part in amateur competitions, even though I started playing Go at a young age. He didn't want me to become competitive too early." He raised his eyebrows. "What reason would there be for me to go to such events?"

"Wow," Hikaru looked awed. "You mean, even when you were young, Touya-sensei thought you were that good?"

Sometimes, Akira thought as he revisited the urge to knuckle Hikaru on his head, it was refreshing to know that Hikaru was the only person who did not automatically remember, or assume, that Akira was a child prodigy just because of his father. Even now, years after he had turned pro, he still came across players (who should have known better) who saw the name 'Touya' and connected it with 'Touya Meijin', before anything else. Hikaru's years-ago assumption of 'We're the same age, of course we should play with each other!' had been startling, but it was also, Akira thought, a sign of some sort.

He pulled Hikaru down to sit beside him on the floor, close to each other, their shoulders matching. He had never thought about it before, but he and Hikaru had always seemed to grow at the same pace, neither becoming much taller than the other. "Hikaru, until I became a pro, I hadn't even gone to the Go Institute. I played at home and the Go salon, or at the Go Study Centre."

Hikaru pushed up more closely against him for a second, like a cat angling for a pat or a rub, then stood up again, evidently too restless to sit down. "All right!" he punched the air like one of the characters on those foreign television programs. "Finally, there's something in Go that I know better than Akira!"

Akira reached up and gave him a gentle push. "That's true. So you'll have to show me around this time," he finished.

"No problem!" Hikaru pulled him to his feet. "Let's go," he said, ushering Akira towards the door. "We're going to have a great time!"

They were hardly out of the door and walking towards the train station when Hikaru slung an arm around his shoulders, "Just you wait, there's this ramen stand outside the main hall that has a beef stock to kill for..."

Akira watched the others on the street, smiling or frowning at Hikaru's loud speech about hand-made ramen. The sunlight was warm on his face, and warmer still was Hikaru's presence next to him. It was a good day to be outside.

-----------the end-------------