A/N: The idea for this story is stolen from "Kishi Kaisei" by Evenue. It's apparently been abandoned, but I thought that it was such a good idea that, in the fine tradition of fan fiction, I'm stealing it.

The idea I stole is ingeniously simple: Hikaru is in a very serious accident and ends up apparently brain-dead and on life support. When a certain goban is brought into Hikaru's hospital room, Sai takes possession of Hikaru's "unoccupied" body — and is able to walk, talk etc. My version starts with Hikaru already lying dead (or nearly so) in a hospital bed.

Disclaimers: I don't own any of the characters and not even the idea for this fanfic is mine. Pathetic, really.

This story includes pain, suffering, and arguably death (in such a story notions of who is alive and who is dead are bound to be slippery). No sex. Hints of Sai/Akira.

Shindou Heihachi walked awkwardly down the hospital corridor carrying a big unwieldy bag. He paused at the threshhold of his grandson's room and looked in. Not that he expected any change; there hadn't been any in weeks, and the doctors had all but said that there was no hope. And indeed Hikaru lay utterly motionless in the bed, his eyes closed. The only sounds were the beeping of the heart monitor and the wheezing of the respirator. Heihachi didn't much like being here, but came almost every day nonetheless. His daughter in law worried about the boy if no one was there to watch him. That didn't make much sense, he thought, but it was the least he could do for her. And he was an old man — more of his friends were dead than alive — so being in the presence of death day after day didn't bother him too much. If by being there he could take some of the burden off of Mitsuko, he might as well do it.

Entering the room, he set down the bag and lifted the old goban out. He set it carefully on the floor near the foot of the bed. He took out the boxes of stones and set them on the top of the board. The orderly who had promised him a game would be getting off duty any time now.

Sai became aware of himself, gradually. Once fully self-aware, his first thought was that he was dying. His second was to realize the absurdity of such an idea. He had been dead for over a thousand years. He couldn't possibly be dying. All the same, something was definitely strange, and wrong. There was a dull ache in his left side. His left shoulder and hip hurt particularly. Pain? Could this be possible? He had felt neither pain nor pleasure for centuries. What's more, he was lying on his back, which was highly unusual. He never needed sleep, didn't get tired. He couldn't remember the last time he'd lain down. Why now?

What little he remembered from his last moments of life—it was mercifully mostly a blur in his memory—was being unable to breathe. Now it seemed he was unable not to. Air was being forced into his lungs through some kind of a tube, then drawn back out. Then forced in again. He opened his eyes.

He was lying on a strange sort of bed. Higher than any bed he'd ever used when alive, or could remember seeing when he was with Torajirou. There were metal railings on the sides. How could the sleeper get in and out? The room was uncomfortably bright. He closed his eyes again. He listened and could make out a familiar sound. Amid an odd chirping noise to his right, which put him in mind of a cricket, and the distant murmur of voices coming from another room, he heard it. Pachi! Pachi! It was the sound of stones being played on a Go board. And quite close by, somewhere near his feet. He wanted to see the game. He had been waiting for over one hundred years.

He couldn't see the Go board; it was blocked by the foot of the bed. One of the players was blocked by the breathing apparatus attached to Sai's face, but he could see the other one clearly: an older man, simply but rather unusually dressed. He struggled to sit up but, weaker than he had realized, fell back with an inarticulate cry. As he lay there, trying to summon up the energy for another attempt, he became aware that the game of Go had stopped.

"Hikaru! Hikaru!" One of the Go players had come to his bedside. Sai opened his eyes and saw an elderly man who looked at him with a mixture of joy and astonishment. Presently his bedside was surrounded by people who poked and prodded him and shone lights into his eyes, talking excitedly to each other. Something momentous seemed to be occurring, but he couldn't think what it might be.

For his own part, he simply felt guilty at having disrupted a game of Go.

Touya Akira sat alone in the back of his father's Go salon, replaying a game he had played with his father a few days before. He had played well, he thought. Father hadn't said much about it, but these days he rarely did any more, leaving Touya to analyze his play for himself. Looking at the game now, he thought he might even have been able to win if he'd drawn back here and defended there, instead of continuing to press his attack. But it had been going so well, and he'd gotten excited. He'd try not to make that mistake again. He was learning more with every game. Maybe father would reduce his handicap to two stones soon.

"Akira-san," Ichikawa-san approached him, followed by the two visitors. "You remember Shindou-san, don't you?" She indicated an older man, accompanied by a boy about Touya's age. The boy had close-cropped hair and was rail thin. His clothes hung inelegantly on his skinny frame. His left leg was strapped in a metal brace and he propped himself on a crutch; just standing up was clearly an effort for him. Touya wondered why he was there. The older man seemed vaguely familar to Touya–but maybe it was just that he looked like the typical salon customer. The boy clearly did not. "Would you mind playing a game with Shindou-kun?"

The boy made his slow way to the goban. He seemed to have trouble with his left leg in particular, Touya saw. The rest of his body moved slowly but more or less normally; then with each step there was a pause as he half willed, half dragged the uncooperative limb along. Touya's first impulse was to get up and help him. Indeed he was on the point of doing so, but then he noticed the grandfather, who watched closely, but stayed back and let the his grandson get himself, slowly and awkwardly, seated. Their body language told the entire story: the boy's determination, and the grandfather's understanding that this was something the boy needed to do on his own, if he could.

Touya felt sympathy, but also discomfort. He knew that once he became a pro he'd have to play, not just teaching games, but games where the objective was to give his opponent an enjoyable game, regardless of the difference in their strengths. He had heard the pro players discussing how annoying it could be, and wasn't sure he could do a good job of it.

At least his opponent's right arm and hand seemed not to have been affected by the accident, he noticed. The black stones were delivered precisely, even gracefully to their positions on the board. Touya played the first half-dozen moves or so without thinking about them much. He made some basic opening shapes, watching as his opponent did the same. A couple of odd hands (who played kosumi nowadays — maybe the kid had picked that habit up from the grandfather?) but mostly solid play. Touya decided on a subtle attack. He could test his opponent's skill in two ways: if the kid even recognized the attack for what it was, he was probably a halfway decent player. If he knew what to do about it, he might make a fairly interesting opponent. Maybe.

The kid brushed Touya's attack aside as easily as if he was swatting a fly.

Touya Akiko was just starting to get dinner ready when her son bounced into the house. Yes, bounced. That was the only word for it. He said hello and asked what time dinner was, then fairly flew to his room. She could hear the sound of stones hitting the goban and—was that Akira whistling? Akiko knew her son. He wasn't an unhappy child, not exactly. But she sensed how much he struggled sometimes. When you're twelve it isn't easy to be different — and how many twelve year olds are aspiring Go professionals, dedicating every spare moment to the game? It was little wonder that Akira, while not bullied, not so far as she knew anyway, had few friends. Or to be honest, none at all, unless Akira could reasonably count someone as old as Ashiwara-kun as a friend. Which Akiko doubted. She sighed. Her son's only real friends, she sometimes thought, were the Go stones.

Akira's mood hadn't changed by dinner time. He sat less patiently than he usually would as his father talked at length about some repairs that needed to be made to the roof of the house. As soon as the head of the household was finished with what he had to say, Akiko stepped in.

"Did anything interesting happen to you today, Akira-san?"

"I played the most amazing game of Go! That is," Akira continued with a glance at his father, "the most unexpectedly amazing game."

"How 'amazing' and how 'unexpected'?" Touya Kouyou asked with one slightly raised eyebrow.

"It was against a kid! A kid my age! I figured there was no way he'd be any good. I mean, he could barely walk or talk. It took him forever just to say 'Onegaishimasu.' He had this big metal leg brace, and a crutch, and this big scar all down one side of his head. Ichikawa-san talked to his grandfather while we were playing, and later she told me he'd been in a really, really bad car accident. He was in a coma and had to have brain surgery! Twice!"

One way in which Akira was perfectly normal for a twelve-year-old boy was that he had something of a fascination for the gruesome.

"So I thought he'd be terrible. His grandfather said he could play, but ...I figured he was just trying to be encouraging. He wouldn't be mean to a kid who'd just practically died—if he could play at all it would be pretty amazing, right?"

"And he could play well, apparently?"

"We played an even game. I was white, and would have lost except for komi. And—he didn't always play the best move. On purpose, I think."

"He was playing a teaching game?" The Meijin sounded skeptical, to say the least.

Akira hesitated, and his mother saw an expression on his face of — what was it — joy?

"No, not like that. He wasn't trying to guide me to make the correct moves. Not so far as I could see, anyway. It was more like, instead of always playing the strongest move, he always played the most beautiful."

Touya Kouyou frowned, and said nothing.

Shindou Mitsuko dropped Hikaru off at physical therapy and walked to a different wing of the hospital for her appointment with the psychologist. At the urging of the hospital staff, she had started seeing Dr. Hosada when Hikaru had been in the coma. Right from the beginning she had suspected that what they had in mind was for Dr. Hosada to talk her into letting go, to come around to the opinion, shared by almost everyone, that it was OK to 'pull the plug' and let her son die. She'd never wavered in her determination to keep Hikaru alive, but strangely enough, after his amazing recovery she had begun feeling the need of someone to talk to. Masao wasn't any help at all in that department.

"So how is Hikaru doing, Shindo-san?"

"He keeps getting better, always faster than the doctors predict he will."

"Ah. He's working hard?"

"He always has been. When he was just out of the wheelchair and wearing that terrible leg brace, he would keep on trying to walk, even if it took him half an hour to cross the room. I'm sure it must have hurt, but he never complained. Of course he couldn't really talk at first."

"How's his speech doing?"

"He's gotten much— " She faltered. Dr. Hosada calmly waited for her to finish. "I almost wish he hadn't learned to talk again! The things he says—it's not like him! Not like Hikaru at all!"

"How is that?"

"He's so polite! Always apologizing for the tiniest things, or thanking me when I do something for him."

"That seems very nice."

"But Hikaru's not like that! It makes me wonder if he's really my son. His 'humble unworthy self' indeed! Who talks like that nowadays? Especially a twelve year old!"

"Your son had a very serious brain injury. That's not my specialty, of course, but I remember a little about it from medical school. Personality is controlled by the brain, and it's by no means unknown for a severe brain injury to cause someone's personality to change. There was a famous case where a man who lost a large chunk of his brain in an accident and became a reckless alcoholic, when before that he had been sober, polite and careful. If the accident has made Hikaru more polite and thoughtful, is that such a terrible thing?"

"I miss my son. The Hikaru I know." Shindou-san pursed her lips and frowned. "He's taken up with this boy, Touya-kun. Another polite one. Touya-kun comes over almost every day. They sit there for hours and hours playing Go. When they're not playing Go they're talking about playing Go. Or Touya's reading Go magazines to Hikaru. Why Go? Hikaru never played a game of Go in his life, not before the accident."

"But surely it must be a good thing that Hikaru has found such a good friend, not to mention a pastime that he can enjoy given, er, his current physical condition."

Shindou-san sighed. "I suppose so," she said. But she didn't sound convinced.

This story will not be very long. Probably three chapters. I know how it will end, which makes it more likely that I'll actually finish the thing.