firstlight | [PoT] Connect (2/2)

Hah. Fear my ability to lie about the number of sections any given fic will have.

As with the first part, this part does have closure of its own, so it's not like you're being left hanging for a third part - just that there will eventually be one, when I have the time and attention span. [Edit] Actually, it's complete. Part three? Is a sequel, because the style of writing is substantially different and Connect was put there as a get-together fic anyway, so it's really fulfilled its purpose in these two parts.

Oh yes - and as of about three hours' time I'll no longer have a net connection, so lack of response to anything you have to say about this isn't me being rude, it's me being off in a tent in a field somewhere in Eastern England without a computer. For the next five weeks. So don't hold your breath for updates to anything else, either...

I finally decided to stop beating myself up over quality and just post this. So here it is.

Title: Connect (2/2)
Rating: PG/PG-13
Characters: Niou, Yagyuu; Yagyuu's POV. (No longer gen.)
Summary: Niou and Yagyuu build a relationship. This section set in high school. The tennis seems to be hiding again. Oops. XD

Part One

-
High school, first year
-

High school is peculiar. They go from being the national champions to being first-years again, supposedly bottom of the pecking order. “But I’d like to see the second or third year who could keep Yukimura in check for long,” Niou mutters on the first day as they listen to their new captain talk about the high standards of Rikkai Dai and upholding the reputation of the tennis club. If Yagyuu felt sorry for the captain they had in their second year of Junior High he absolutely pities this one, having to deal with a newly recovered Yukimura -- not to mention seven out of eight of the players who made Rikkai’s Junior High team so feared.

-

When one of the third years asks him if Niou is actually as much trouble as it looked like he would be when he was beginning Junior High, Yagyuu responds with polite incomprehension.

“I simply can’t imagine what you mean,” he offers apologetically. “I play with Niou, but there’s been no difficulty.”

“Ah, I’d just heard he had a bit of a reputation.” the older boy replies, looking a bit uncomfortable. Yagyuu wonders what his name is; he can’t remember it. He wasn’t at Rikkai for the first year of Junior High, so it’s probable he’s never met the other before.

“I can assure you, I have always found him to be perfectly agreeable,” he says, neutral but apparently sincere.

When Niou emerges from around the corner after the third-year departs, he’s obviously fighting down laughter. “You should get an award,” he tells Yagyuu. “Perfectly agreeable, indeed. You’re no gentleman. If you were, you’d have warned him. Given him a sporting chance or something.”

“If he believes that you will be no trouble then he deserves anything he gets,” Yagyuu returns, amused. “I have no obligation to save the foolish from you.”

“That’s my doubles partner. Loyal. Unfaltering. Doesn’t get in the way of good dishonest fun.”

“Unless I think it will get you suspended.”

“Yeah. There is that... I make sure not to tell you about those plans,” Niou grins, and Yagyuu decides that there’s about a 50-50 chance that this is actually the case. He does not want Niou to be suspended, or removed from the tennis club, although by now they are close enough that they would almost certainly not loose touch because of such a thing. This doesn’t make it desirable.

“I trust you to look after yourself,” he settles for. I trust you. Thousands wouldn’t, and they’d be right not to.

Niou just nods. After the last year, they trust one another deeply. What the rest of the world thinks doesn’t matter, because the rest of the world doesn’t actually know anything about them; both of them work to keep it like that, in their own ways.

-
High school, second year
-

Until now they have barely questioned the nature of their relationship, Yagyuu realises. Although he is far happier to touch Niou than anyone else he knows, and far happier to allow Niou to touch him, they’ve never done anything which definitively crosses the boundary between friends and...

Yagyuu can’t finish that sentence, even in his head. If there is a single respect in which he is a coward, it is this. But it doesn’t matter terribly much: he an Niou have a functional relationship, and if the nature of this relationship is somewhat atypical for Yagyuu then this can be put down to the fact that Niou is his best friend. It doesn’t have to mean anything else, or so he is content to keep believing.

It begins to seem as though Niou may have other ideas. Niou generally does.

Yagyuu finds himself alone with Niou even more than usual, finds that he is being teased, provoked. Not with malice any more. He understands that this is all entirely deliberate; that Niou is testing him. Trying to work out what exactly Yagyuu wants.

It was simpler when they were younger. They were doubles partners first, then best friends, and they weren’t interested in much beyond that - not consciously.

“Thinking too much,” Niou hisses, very close. Yagyuu does not jump or give any such undignified reaction, but he does look up, intending to give a sharp response about Niou thinking too little - even though he knows how far it is from the truth - until his eyes meet Niou’s, barely five inches away. He can’t think of a thing to say. “You’re no fun when you do that,” his doubles partner continues before he can collect his wits, but Niou’s voice doesn’t sound quite right. Too tense.

When Niou kisses him barely a half-second later it’s not exactly great - they’re inexperienced and Niou’s teeth knock against his own, and in any case Yagyuu is too shocked to respond much - but he knows with absolute certainty that he wants to do it again.

The implications still scare him.

He’s just had his first kiss, and it was with another boy. He enjoyed it.

This is not how it’s meant to go, although he’s known in the back of his mind that this would happen for a while. He just never dared to define it, to admit (even to himself) that he seems to be gay. That he’s fallen for his doubles partner.

“Is it really so bad?” Niou asks when Yagyuu fails to say anything. “I guess I should leave, huh?”

Niou looks, if anything, grateful that Yagyuu hasn’t broken his jaw for presuming. It’s not that, Yagyuu wants to say, or maybe, no. Stay. But he just stares at Niou until the other boy shrugs and turns away.

-

Niou doesn’t do anything so dramatic as refusing to attend club practices any more, but he doesn’t speak to Yagyuu when he can avoid it.

“Work it out,” Yukimura tells them after a week, brutally honest and openly annoyed. “You’ll be on reserve otherwise. At best.”

“Can I try singles again?” Niou asks.

Yagyuu wants to punch him, and restrains himself only because of the awareness that it’s his own fault they’re a mess right now. With Niou, what is proper is not a concern as it is with anyone else; but the knowledge that he is the one at fault makes him hold back.

Yukimura gives Niou a dangerous look. “You’ve been the best doubles pair we’ve had for the past three years. Maybe one of the best doubles pairs out there at this level. Work it out.”

Niou doesn’t argue, but he doesn’t look at Yagyuu either.

Yagyuu feels like a piece of himself is falling apart.

-

“You got me, I’ll admit,” Niou says. They’re getting changed, having run laps until well after practice ended for being, in the words of the captain, highly uncooperative. Yagyuu is studiously avoiding looking at Niou, but he can feel Niou’s eyes on him, and it makes him feel edgy, ill at ease. “I actually thought you gave a fuck for a while there.”

Yagyuu packs his tennis clothes away neatly, focusing on his bag; but then everything is put away, he has nothing to do, and Niou is still watching him. Waiting for a response.

“Guess I was wrong.”

Yagyuu’s hand tightens on his bag. He has to say something, or he’ll lose Niou entirely, if he hasn’t already.

“No,” he says, very quietly. “You weren’t wrong.” He cares. That much is (painfully) obvious. But he can’t control this. He has always considered control to be the most important thing.

But when he really thinks about it, what can he control about his doubles partner?

Niou isn’t moving. The entire room seems still, uncomfortably so, until Yagyuu can’t stand it any more and finally turns to face Niou. Niou, who looks confused, upset and much more like an ordinary boy than his usual detached self.

“Then...” Niou tries, but breaks off.

“Let me think about it?” Yagyuu asks. He almost hates how calm his voice sounds. Like he actually doesn’t care, even though his chest feels tight with anxiety. Niou looks at him carefully, trying to read him; at length he nods, and Yagyuu can breathe again.

Maybe this will be alright if Niou accepts that he will have to work himself up to things slowly.

-

He thinks about it. He can’t stop thinking about it.

In his mind it’s not straightforward. He thinks in Niou’s mind it must be; Niou can take complex problems and dives straight through them towards a solution so quickly that Yagyuu sometimes struggles to follow, as though it was the easiest thing in the world. It’s unfair that he seems able to do this with both numbers and people, but he wonders if Niou has miscalculated on this one.

It’s becoming obvious that he, for one, isn’t going to get any flash of insight on this situation. This is just what life is like, he supposes. It seems there’s a vast gap between acting in an adult manner and being able to deal with adult issues.

But things between him and Niou aren’t the same as they were before, although they’re playing doubles well enough again; and he knows he could still lose Niou very easily.

The fact that he does not want this to happen is what finally motivates him, weeks later.

“I’ve thought about it,” he tells Niou. The spiky-haired boy is walking slightly ahead of him through a park - a short-cut on the way home. At Yagyuu’s words, he freezes, and Yagyuu gathers his courage, steps forward, slides an arm around Niou’s waist from behind. “I think we should try,” he adds, whispered into Niou’s ear.

“Took you bloody long enough,” Niou says, and the next moment Yagyuu is being kissed, right there in the middle of the park where anyone could see.

They get it mostly right this time.