Work Text:
Ogata Seiji, like any Go professional in their prime, gets better at the game with each passing year.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said for his personality.
“You can put away your raging hard-on for Honinbo Shusaku now,” he tells Hikaru with a roll of his eyes.
“Ogata, they’re children!” Ashiwara whirls around where he’s kneeling across a board from Hikaru. His elbow knocks over a Go bowl, sending pieces skittering across the floor behind him and under the armchair Ogata is lounging on.
Hikaru smacks his fan against the edge of the table. “I’m twenty!”
“Did you forget I used to live here?” Ogata drawls while Ashiwara swipes at his ankles, trying to make him move so he can reach the farthest flung stones. “Akira-kun saw every walk of shame I had back then.”
He nearly kicks Ashiwara in the face, and with a scowl, hooks his legs over the arm of the chair, sending him into an even more indolent, disheveled pose.
“His entire existence is shameful,” Akira mutters from where he’s kneeling on a cushion next to Hikaru.
Hikaru snorts and snaps his fan open, hiding his mouth as he leans back into Akira’s shoulder as if to whisper in his ear. “Being shameless explains why two grown-ass men keep following your dad around Tokyo like Go groupies,” he says loudly, completely defeating the purpose of the fan. “These losers won’t even stay at their own apartment, seesh!”
Ogata waves away the complaint with a twist of his wrist, drink in hand. “Neither do you.”
Hikaru whips his head around. “I live here now!”
“You technically live with your parents,” Ogata presses, “no matter how attached at the hip you are to your boyfriend.”
Hikaru snaps the fan shut and smacks the flat of it into his palm. He turns back to Akira. “When is your dad leaving, again?”
“There’s a game he’s scheduled with someone in the Kansai league that won’t be held for a few more days.” Akira lets his hand slide across the floor to the side of Hikaru’s thigh, apologetic but a soothing touch all the same.
“I don’t know why he pretends to chase after every new major Japanese player when none of them are Sai,” Ogata says, eyes boring into Hikaru.
Ashiwara groans as he thunks the refilled Go bowl onto the board. “Not this again.”
“Oh, are you back to acting like Sai was a collective hallucination of the international Go world?” Ogata asks, brimming with sarcasm. The ice in his drink clinks as he takes a hard sip, draining the glass in a long swallow.
Akira presses into Hikaru’s thigh once more before pulling away, retreating to his default Go posture, kneeling, back straight, head tall, and palms loose and facedown upon his knees. “No one is doubting he existed, least of all father.”
“Touya-sensei has spent the past five years denying anything he could tell us about Sai.” Ogata bolts upright, placing the empty glass on the side table with enough force to make everyone wince.
“It might be time to let it rest,“ Ashiwara starts, hand sliding over Ogata’s wrist. He knocks it off with a twist, shooting a quick glare at him.
“Maybe I’d give it a rest if I wasn’t surrounded by senile old men who think Sai was the actual ghost of Shusaku. If they want to be delusional, they should give up their titles and follow Touya-sensei’s footsteps out of the league.”
Akira raises his voice. “Their beliefs hardly reflect on their go—”
“Their belief,” Ogata says, matching the spike in volume, “is that all of us in Tokyo are no longer worth their time beyond our futile attempts to swipe their titles out from between their brittle claws. To chase after spirits when there’s a person of interest right in front of us—”
“How many times do I have to tell you I don’t know Sai before you get off my back?!” Hikaru hauls himself up, Akira scrambling up after him, one hand wrapped into the back of his jacket, straining to keep him from launching into Ogata.
Ogata stands up, too, towering above both men. Ashiwara cuts in between the stand-off, his nervous laughter fluttering around them, winding them up further.
“You can’t tell me, with what I know, that you don’t know him. You’re a terrible liar, Shindou, always have been. But now you’re old enough that it’s stopped being cute.”
“I’m telling the truth, asshole.”
“From the first day you walked into a Go Salon, you’ve been disrespectful, patronizing, and inconsistent, like you’re setting fire to the Go world just to watch us all jump. I do not appreciate being treated like a fool.”
“It isn’t like that!” Hikaru yells. His voice bounces across the room, notches louder than anything that’s been spoken in this room, shocking them into a heavy silence.
The fan clatters to the floor. Hikaru’s face is red and twisted up, a jittery hand fisted into his own shirt. Akira lets go of his boyfriend, warring between confusion and frustration as his eyes flicker between everyone in the room.
It occurs to Ogata that it’s almost Golden Week. Hikaru is already twenty, but he is still only twenty.
Ogata follows as Ashiwara folds him back out of the looming posture he’d fallen into mid-argument, but he shrugs free after a moment, pinning Hikaru with a troubled gaze. The color has leached from Hikaru’s face, but he’s breathing evenly again.
“Then what is it like, Shindou?” he says, firm, but not unkind.
Hikaru stares a moment longer then ducks down to swipe the fan up in hand. “Sai is never going to show up again in this lifetime. Maybe never again.” He looks up with every ounce of intimidation he’s learned to wield across a Go board, shaky but fierce. “So take your pride and shove it up your ass, you spiteful bastard. He’s gone.”
The door slides open. Touya-sensei steps in, hands folded in the sleeves of his haori. He’s about to speak when Hikaru excuses himself with a small bow and bolts out the room, only offering a single rushed nod towards Touya-sensei as he passes.
The men left behind in the room all slowly lower their outstretched hands—raised unconsciously towards Hikaru when he stormed away. Guilt spills from their sheepish postures.
Touya-sensei raises an eyebrow at them. “What was it this time?” he asks.
Akira sighs, and begins to speak.
***
The door opens. Hikaru turns further into the corner of the sofa, rolling his head away and back from the door. A sliver of sunlight escapes from between the curtains on the far wall and catches his face. He scowls and covers his eyes.
He doesn’t want to see Touya Koyo’s pity, anyway.
The door slides shut, a soft hiss cutting into Hikaru’s attempted cold shoulder. Touya-sensei treads lightly towards him, even though Hikaru expects an intimidating thud in each step from the weight of his reputation.
In the past five years, Touya-sensei’s temperament has shifted, its classic solemnity replaced by a wild energy that infuses his search for the divine hand. Every driven game is a move closer to a truth no one knows how to expect. Around him hangs a livewire of anticipation that makes his eyes bright and fingers light behind the wrinkles and sagging skin of old age.
The sofa dips a cushion over. Hikaru bolsters himself against whatever conversation was about to happen.
Touya-sensei claps his hands on his knees, head turned just enough towards Hikaru that they can see each other from the sides of their eyes. “Akira told me what transpired earlier between you and Seiji.”
Hikaru snorts. Their bickering was nothing new. By now it was funny to see people scuttle out of the room in terror when any combination of Hikaru, Akira, and Ogata entered without the pretext of an official match. “You didn’t hear it yourself?”
“I heard a few choice sentences, but that hardly accounts for the full argument.”
“What exactly did he tell you?” he says, pulling himself out of the corner hesitantly.
“Seiji pressed you about Sai, and you became more distraught than is usual.” Touya-sensei’s reply is placid by all accounts, but Hikaru can sense a droll twist in it. Like father, like son.
“Ogata doesn’t know how to shut up when he should.”
“It is an open secret that you become…agitated every year nearing Golden Week.” Touya-sensei clears his throat. “Which is next week.”
“That’s never gonna stop following me,” he muttered.
Touya-sensei laughs, to Hikaru’s surprise, and some small amount of annoyance. “Apologies, Shindou-kun. I don’t mean to laugh at you,” he says as he waves his hand. “It’s been a very long time since I was young and new enough to care about such matters. It’s not something to be ashamed of. All the best Go players have some …notable habit or another to them.”
“They do?” He thinks back to old conversations and games, but can’t remember seeing anything other than Ochi’s old bathroom wall-tapping, or maybe that one gorilla guy’s bike riding. “What’s yours?”
“If you haven’t heard of it yet, I’ll keep the novelty of my reputation a bit longer with you, then.”
“It can’t be that weird if Akira hasn’t complained about—” Hikaru smacks his hand to his mouth.
His deep gravel laughter scatters through the room again. “I’ve always considered the tendency towards the unusual as something given by the heavens to keep us grounded as we approach the hand of God.”
They fall quiet again.
The shelves lining the room are filled with game records, a personal version of the records room at the Go Association. A table is staged in front of the sofa, mostly for the ease of unfamiliar guests who hoped to soak in some of Touya-sensei’s luck and skill just from being near his belongings. Anyone who regularly visits the house takes what they need and scrambles to the warmer, lived-in parts of the house.
The main reason to linger in this room is for the computer. It sits on a desk by the window, shadowed next to the closed drapes. The clunky machine Akira used to beat Sai once upon a time is long gone, upgraded to a sleek monitor setup, computer tucked away below.
After Golden Week of three years ago, Hikaru isn’t allowed to play online Go anymore. Some days, he’s surprised he’s even allowed in this house again, and that Akira ever forgave him.
The years since then have been …manageable. By comparison.
“You’ve lived by the certainty you will never have to say anything about who Sai was to you,” Touya-sensei says, jerking Hikaru’s attention from the computer. “That still holds true. I had never planned on asking further questions of you, to be sure.”
Hikaru rolls his eyes. “Want me to tell you thanks?”
“I would like to assure you that you are also allowed to talk about him, if you need to. It does not need to be a complete story, it does not have to make sense to anyone but yourself—but if you need to speak it, do so, Hikaru. For your own sake.”
“I don’t wanna be interrogated about him. Again.”
“I offer a conversation. Or if you would prefer, just the open ear of an old, retired man.”
“But you have questions.”
“I do. I can ask the ones I’ve been holding onto. I cannot imagine releasing years of secrets comes easily to anyone. It may help you find a point to start from. But I can also sit here in sympathy and say nothing.”
Hikaru kicks his feet. Even grown, he barely skims the tatami floor, still short and young enough that even a few dans more to his name haven’t stopped people from mistaking him Insei at Go conferences.
A single thumb slides the fan in his lap half-open and shut, an easy motion after years of practice. The fan itself is relatively new, though, custom made last Golden Week in a fit of pique after accidentally buying the same fan as Kurata again.
He designed it to be identical to Sai’s—or, at least what he remembered of it. Because Sai isn’t here anymore. And that still hurts.
“Okay,” he says. “Have at it.”
Touya-sensei shifts slightly towards Hikaru, sitting straight up at the edge of the seat. A single finger taps at his elbow as he considers Hikaru fidgeting next to him. “You have yet to reschedule another match between Sai and I.”
Hikaru winces. “That wasn’t a question.” Touya-sensei doesn’t react, and the emptiness hooks into his gut and yanks an admission free. “I haven’t. I can’t.”
“You can’t,” he repeats softly. He ducks his head down a little, staring straight at Hikaru. “I had assumed the worst.”
Hikaru breaks eye contact. His tense fingers are laced around the fan. “You got the right idea,” he says, voice tight.
The words sit in the air. Touya-sensei caves into sorrow as he closes his eyes, yielding to the same grief that’s lived in Hikaru’s chest for five long years and drags him under. There is no clock, no steady march of time to pull their sorrow into order. The room keeps silent, two men breathing in stillness together.
“My condolences, Shindou-kun,” he finally says. “I do not know what your relationship with Sai was—I cannot imagine I could come close to guessing—but it is clear that it was important.”
“Thanks,” he whispers. Touya-sensei looks like he’s already stitched himself up back into the composed man he always is, and Hikaru wants to shake him and ask how, if it’s a skill that comes with age or something he’ll always be chasing aimlessly.
“I am glad to have had the chance to play him.”
“He was chasing after you, ever since he saw you play.” The sharp regret spills out of Hikaru, aiming to cut even when he knows he’s only hurting himself. He doesn’t want to make an enemy out of Akira’s dad and the most influential man in Go, but he thought this year would finally be the year he could move on, or whatever they called it. “That part of his dream, he got. I should be happy about it, but then he left. It—playing you made him leave. Like it was all he was meant to do, and I was just an afterthought.”
Touya Koyo does not rush. He stands up, hands behind his back as he paces towards the back of the room. Just watching him go feels like an obscure lesson from a master—how does someone make even plain old walking thoughtful?—and it raises the hair on the back of Hikaru’s neck, bitter this is all he gets from admitting a truth.
“What are you—”
“I ask a moment of patience from you, Shindou-kun.” He pauses briefly at his own game records, stored on the shelf closest to the couch, to pull out a thin notebook Hikaru doesn’t recognize. He then continues on, reaching further back in history with each passing shelf.
Hikaru knows the shelf he stops in front of as well as anything in his own room, for all the time he’s spent scouring its contents. He knows the creases he’s folded into now-broken spines, the way you couldn’t slide one specific record past the others because it would rip the cover, a split in the wood that could roughen the edges of the delicate pages. Honinbo Shusaku’s shelf, and those of his contemporaries.
“As Go players,” Touya-sensei starts, tapping each collection one by one with a single finger, “we strive for the divine move. For the hand of God to inhabit our own.” Each word is placed with the force of a stone snapping onto the table. For a moment, it’s as if they’re facing each other across a board, but Touya-sensei is already pressing hard in the endgame while Hikaru is fumbling through the opening steps of a joseki. “There’s much we could say about how living a life is and is not like the order of a Go match, if the movements of the board are reflections of ourselves or vice versa.”
A little sound of triumph accompanies him tilting a book from the shelf. He flips through its pages as he comes back towards Hikaru. “Whether it was you or I, Sai, or any god we know that brought him to you only to take away, the move has been made. It cannot be undone. Instead, we must continue on with the counter, and it is all we can do to carry the shape of what we’ve played before into our future. That, I am sure you know well by now.”
He sits down next to Hikaru and hands him the collection he’d pulled. “I said I am glad to have played Sai. But Shindou-kun, I am equally glad of your own blossoming skill, of the opponent you are becoming. It is beautiful, how he carried you in his game, and how you continue to carry him in yours. Your Go is entwined, like I imagine your lives were.”
One page is dogeared gently. Hikaru runs his thumb against the side of the book, its pages soft from use. He knows, already, what Touya-sensei marked, the volume one he’d poured over any time Sai lingered in his thoughts more than usual. He recognizes how far into the book the page is, and as he lets the book fall open, gently pressing the corner back to rights, he sees the game record for Honinbo Shusaku’s infamous ear-reddening move, a divine move in a beautiful game. Hikaru’s thoughts are scattered across the pages, layers of notes incomprehensible to anyone but himself.
“You only played Sai once,” Hikaru says, pressing his thumb into the one stone of the game most people claimed Shusaku had mistakenly placed. The yellowing paper is old and cheap, fuzzy against his skin. “How would you know?”
Touya-sensei places the other open notebook on the couch by Hikaru’s hand. Facing up towards him is an exact copy of this game with his notes, except that Akira’s scrawled all over it with his own musings. The other side of the spread is a roughshod replica of the first game Akira had ever played with Sai, notes of Shusaku’s influence barely legible in tiny print next to wild extrapolations of how Hikaru fit into it all. There’s question marks all over the margins of the page and one corner is ripped through from overzealous crossing out; Hikaru sputters with a wet laugh.
Hikaru looks up at Touya-sensei and can’t be bothered to feel embarrassed at how close he is to crying in front of his boyfriend’s dad. “He never told me he still…”
“We are lucky that life is not Go.” He clasps Hikaru’s shoulder, a rare, thin smile on his face. “You do not play it against any one single person, nor do you play it alone. I warrant Sai was never meant to be the only meaningful Go companion of your life. You carry more than just him in your game now. Your Insei friends, your study group, your opponents.” He taps the notebook twice. “How you move others and how others move you—is that not divine, too?”
Akira pokes his head into the room, barging into the sight of Hikaru patting at his eyes with his sleeves. “What’s wrong?” he says, taking several abrupt steps forward, stopping himself, then moving swiftly towards them anyway. He reaches out for Hikaru’s hand and thinks twice again, but before he pulls away too far, Hikaru grabs onto it.
Hikaru shakes his head. Touya-sensei rolls his shoulders as he gets off the couch with a huff, heavy from the pieces of grief he’d captured from Hikaru. “The invitation to play against me has never expired, Shindou-kun. We have yet to play that even match I requested of you.”
Finally playing Touya-sensei after all he’s done to avoid it for five years will take some time to work up to. But for now, he can say, “Thank you.”
Touya-sensei inclines his head and leaves.
Akira settles down next to Hikaru, his weight tilting the cushion to the middle from how close they sit together. Their thighs press together. Between his black pants and Akira’s white, their knees look like little Go stones attached to each other. Hikaru shifts his grip on Akira’s hand, and feeling their callouses reminds him of the early days of Akira chasing him through the streets of Tokyo, ever the detective in pursuit of Hikaru.
Somehow, eight years later, that still hasn’t really changed. He starts laughing until he cries. “Hikaru? Are you okay?” Akira says, alarmed.
He takes a deep breath and says with more ease than he feels, “I finally told your dad Sai is gone.”
Akira cycles through too many emotions to count, but doubt and hope shine brightest behind it all. “He’s—? How do you—? Did—?” Akira has spent nearly half his life asking questions about this, only to get esoteric non-answers at best, and patronizing, callous lies at worst. It’s no wonder he can’t believe this, too, isn’t an act.
“Do you wanna hear a story, Akira?” Hikaru asks, wiping away his tears with the back of his hand. “I think it’s time.”