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"C+?" Inui wondered out loud, staring down at his essay. He was too astonished even to feel affronted; he'd never received a C in his life. Except that one time he blew up the chemistry lab, but that was an F, and completely undeserved. Not just anyone could create a high explosive only from the limited materials available to an elementary school student.
"It was very well researched, Sadaharu-kun," Yamato-sensei said sternly, "but no creativity!"
"Creativity?"
"Creativity! Insight!" she declaimed vigourously, inflicting an energetic punch upon the air. Yamato-sensei also oversaw the drama club. "I want to see some creativity in your work! Some sense of wonder at the glory of our beautiful language! Poetry! Passion! That's what it will take if you ever want to get an A in my class!"
"Yes, Sensei," Inui agreed to her back as she went on to her next victim. Kato was apparently wishy-washy and half-hearted, and needed more oomph if he ever wanted to get an A in her class. Kato also, Inui added silently, needed to stop doing his essays the morning before they were due, but she didn't seem to care much about that.
He saw Fuji and Tezuka coming out of their homeroom as he left class and took a few long strides to catch up, the herd of students scurrying worshipfully aside to leave them - well, Tezuka - a clear path. "I got a C from Yamato-sensei," he announced as he fell into step with them, hearing surprise still lingering in his own voice. It had never been his best subject, but he'd always gotten by before. Read the assigned text, do the background reading: introduction, thesis, supporting arguments, conclusion. Include some quotations and an impressive bibliography. Essay writing was a learnable skill, it didn't require a sense of wonder. "Maybe I should've done more background reading," he mused.
"It wouldn't do any good," Tezuka said grimly, scattering students just by glancing in their general direction. Fuji surreptitiously joined in, picking the perfect moment to smile at Maeda Kyohei who reeled back in terror, sending Mori Jun ricocheting into Fujita Keiji, who stumbled into the captain of the basketball team, who hit the boy next to him, which set off a chain reaction of further violence all the way down the corridor that seemed likely to end with someone's expulsion. Or death, possibly, but Inui was more interested in the magnificent possibility that:
"She gave you a C, Tezuka?"
"B," Tezuka pushed past him frostily. "She doesn't give anyone As."
"I got an A," Fuji said brightly. Glaciers amassed themselves on Tezuka's frigid silence. "She said I had the heart of a poet and the soul of a fierce star, aglow in the firmament of life. Or," he paused thoughtfully, "possibly it was the other way around."
"As expected of Fuji," Inui murmured.
"She told Tezuka he needed to open his heart to the raw beauty of the universe and stop using sports-related metaphors."
Inui didn't quite dare comment but he silently noted the information down, fingers itching for a pen and a notebook. It wasn't exactly useful data but it was pretty funny, as well as soothing to his own bruised ego.
Thanks to the pace set by Tezuka's dignity, they reached the courts nearly two full minutes earlier than usual. Which was fortunate, since Inui suspected they would be wasting quite a lot of time doing laps.
His "Good afternoon, everyone," went largely unheard. The familar chaos of the club room prevailed, as if three years had passed in a single day: Echizen bored, Kikumaru hyper, Oishi worried, Momoshiro loud, the non-regulars wistful but, unless someone suffered a crippling injury, at this point irrelevant.
Kaidoh neat and quiet in one corner, his things already organised. Kaidoh with a thoughtful look on his face like he was already planning his next match or his next marathon. Kaidoh, not yet wearing his bandana, hair black and glossy and slightly too long for school regulation. He would be getting a haircut in the new couple of weeks, Inui predicted, probably Friday afternoon, and then the back of his neck would be all naked.
Kaidoh, not looking at him in rather a pointed fashion, as was becoming upsettingly usual.
Inui stowed his school bag and vengefully toed out of his shoes without unlacing them. He could feel Kaidoh wincing without even looking up. "She says I need insight and creativity," he continued, tugging his jersey out of its cubby. "I suppose it's true that I'm not very creative but --"
"Oh, I've always thought your juices were very creative," Fuji assured him.
Tezuka, plainly still holding a grudge about a small misjudgement in respect of Inui's High Intensity Go Go Inhibition Release Juice, looked up at once. "There will be no creative juices brought to practice."
"Oh, you made a pun," Momo said cheerfully. Tezuka looked at him. "Or not, never mind. Um."
"At any rate," Inui tugged off his shirt, "I'm fairly insightful, surely --" An odd noise interrupted him, and he glanced up to see Kaidoh staring at him and then suddenly flushing, the colour starting at his forehead and drifting down, like ink had been injected into the top of his head. Inui imagined it going all the way down and down and -- "ah, Kaidoh are you all right?"
Kaidoh turned away instantly. "Fine, senpai."
"You've gone very flushed," he moved over and reached out a hand to touch the warm, smooth skin of his face - just to check he wasn't running a fever - but Kaidoh jerked away like he was poisonous. Inui bit his lip, hand hovering stupidly in the air, and shuffled a few miserable steps backwards.
"I'm fine. It's nothing."
"Yeah, he's fine, Inui-senpai," Momo chirped up, laughter bubbling under his words, "all it is, is --" and then Kaidoh turned around and punched Momo in the face which led in short order to Inui's shirt getting trampled, Momo getting a bloody nose and a trip to the nurse and Kaidoh getting a bloody t-shirt and a trip around the courts (times fifty).
"Yes," Fuji went on, as if nothing had happened, "You're quite right, Inui. I don't know what Yamato-sensei was talking about. Your insight is a marvel to us all."
*
Naturally Kaidoh refused to talk about it.
In fact catching up with him at all had been difficult all year, even before he started making a special effort at avoidance. Between practice, extra practice (Tezuka had declared they would get to the Nationals yet again and the words "or die trying", if unspoken, were nonetheless perfectly clear), working out training menus for everyone, collecting data on their upcoming opponents, keeping up with the insane level of homework inflicted on high school seniors and going to the cram school his parents insisted upon, he barely had time to sleep, let alone figure out why Kaidoh kept trying to kill Momo and learn to appreciate the glorious beauty of his language so that he could get into his chosen university and not, as his father kept hysterically insisting was inevitable, end up as a plumber.
At practice itself seemed the best time, but Kaidoh managed to keep himself constantly in Tezuka's line of sight for three days straight, which meant Inui couldn't talk to him for more than thirty seconds without their obsessed captain demanding to know why they weren't practicing.
The next best thing was nowhere near as good at avoiding him: "This is an extremely stressful time, Momoshiro. I'm sure you would be happy to assist me by explaining the nature of the difficulty between you and Kaidoh."
"We've always fought, senpai," Momo said, with an unconvincing shrug. "It's no big deal."
"According to my data, it had in fact been over 19 months since you last had a violent altercation, and both the frequency and sincerity of your verbal arguments have been decreasing steadily for at least two years." He produced a graph he'd made of it; a ragged line with the occasional blip but an unmistakably downward trend, dating more or less from their first match as doubles partners.
"You graphed our fights?" Inui presented the rest of his evidence with a flourish. "And a pie chart. Wow." Momo grinned, unaffected by the carefully orchestrated glint of Inui's glasses. He was nearly Inui's own height now and, since Tezuka had banned Juice from the courts, sadly difficult to intimidate. "You certainly do spend a lot of time thinking about Kaidoh, don't you senpai?"
"Inui! Momoshiro! Why aren't you practicing?" came, inevitably, before he could get out the calculations which would definitively show that Momoshiro was an unhelpful asshole who would never have a girlfriend. "Ten laps!"
Fuji was only too happy to fall in beside him as he made his rounds, but his idea of being helpful: "'What is man's ultimate direction in life? It is to look for love, truth, virtue, and beauty'," as usual, wasn't.
As for the rest of the team: Oishi patted him on the hand, suggested he get a good night's sleep and made a lot of incomprehensible references to playing doubles, Kikumaru appeared to honestly not have a clue but thought it all very funny regardless, and Echizen's only contribution was to roll his eyes and say, "It's not about Momo, senpai. Aren't you supposed to be smart?"
"Opinions differ," Inui said grimly, and went to class.
"Your assignment this week," Yamato-sensei trilled, after she had finished dissecting their characters again, "is to write a poem."
"But that's not on the syllabus," burst indignantly out of him. Yamato-sensei favoured him with an almost Tezuka-like glare until he bowed his head and mumbled an apology. "How long should it be?" he asked, without much hope. "Is there an assigned form? Haiku? Sestina?" Yamato-sensei just looked at him sadly, shaking her head.
He announced his fate to the regulars that afternoon. Or, at least, the regulars minus Kaidoh, who had changed in 46 seconds and flung himself onto the court where he was already warming up against two doomed but heroic seniors. "It's supposed to be about something beautiful."
Fuji's head popped up through his t-shirt like a meerkat who'd just had an appalling idea. "Oh, Tezuka, you could write about Echizen's backhand!" Tezuka took a breath, "Laps!" Fuji filled in cheerfully before he could expel it, and trotted off to do them.
In the week that followed, Kaidoh got into 23 fights with Momoshiro (a record), Fuji ran 320 laps (not a record), Echizen's backhand measurably improved, and Inui got his first ever D.
"She said it would have had more emotion if I'd picked words out of the dictionary at random," he reported glumly. "Do you think that would work?"
"What did you write about?"
"Pi." There was a speaking silence. "Pi is beautiful."
"Quite," Tezuka said darkly. Presumably he'd decided not to write about Echizen's backhand.
"I have to do it again," he offered. Tezuka volunteered no information himself, but his forbidding visage told a story even Yamato-sensei would've found compelling, had it only been possible to distill it into verse.
He managed to corner Kaidoh by racing out during lunch the next day and sneaking into his homeroom. Hands on either side of Kaidoh's elaborate bento, eyes fixed to Kaidoh's dark, wary eyes, he cheated: "I have a new formation." It was obvious and unfair, but preying on Kaidoh's work ethic had a 98% success rate. "We really need to train, Kaidoh, our next opponents will be a challenge. And, well. I hate to say it, but --"
"What?"
"Your concentration has decreased by 11%." Ironically, he'd spent as much time making this number up as he might usually have spent working it out. Kaidoh looked even more horrified than he'd predicted, however, and guilt roiled forcefully inside him. Playing angry in fact tended to improve Kaidoh's tennis; a clever and talented opponent - like Inui, say - might use it against him, but most were simply overpowered by the strength of his focused rage. But, Inui reminded himself, it really wouldn't help for Kaidoh to know that, he'd only start making himself angry before every match and then he'd get an ulcer or be sent to an anger management class, or prison, and that would obviously be to his ultimate detriment. So:
"Shall we meet up after practice?"
Kaidoh of course agreed, though with a reluctance that made Inui's stomach hurt even more, setting a brutal pace to the park the second Tezuka dismissed them. Inui loped behind him, mind darting uselessly from tennis to poetry to Kaidoh, until they all jumbled together into an ode to the Boomerang Snake. Sonnets to Kaidoh's amazing stamina. Kaidoh's bare ankles, Kaidoh's hands, the back of his muscular thighs, the inviting curve of his cheek. Something beautiful.
Something else beautiful, he told himself firmly. It shouldn't be that hard. He found lots of things beautiful, even if his best attempt so far began:
I wish that I could ever make
a shot as lovely as a Snake.
At the park Kaidoh casually darted around to get a bench between them as they stretched. Inui pretended not to notice. He ought to be taking the opportunity to interrogate him, he thought tiredly, but after all, Kaidoh could still run faster. And he still had a poem to write, one that would prove he was not, as Yamato-sensei had tearfully suggested, so out of touch with his feelings as to effectively be a robot, doomed never to make any real human connections.
"I'm a passionate person," he said outloud, irritably. "I'm filled with emotion."
"Senpai?"
"I feel strongly about a great many things. Very strongly."
"Oh. S-so do I, senpai."
"It's just hard to put it into words, that's all." He wasn't at all sure Yamato-sensei was even properly qualified to teach. You couldn't go around calling students robots and giving them Ds just for being bad at poetry, surely. If that wasn't covered in the Education Reform proposals, it ought to be.
"Yeah." Kaidoh pulled off his bandana, clenching it in his fist emotionally. "I know. I don't. Some things aren't. Words aren't." He was such a good kouhai, Inui thought, filled with affection for him. He'd even come out from behind the bench, his gentle heart and strong hand reaching out to his senpai in his time of need. Or perhaps he was just worried about having Yamato-sensei next year.
"You might get Takahashi-sensei instead," he said kindly. "Kikumaru says he just makes them do a lot of grammar sheets."
"I wanted to tell you, but - what?"
"Perhaps I should write a poem about a tree or something," he mused, casting about for a poetic looking one. Inexplicably, Kaidoh punched him in the face.
"-- and then he just ran off." Inui dabbed at his cheek with an ice pack and a great deal of bewilderment.
"You really are completely oblivious, aren't you." Tezuka's lack of sympathy, always vast, seem to be compressed down the telephone line into something with its own gravity. Though at least he hadn't hung up yet.
"Do you know what's wrong with him?"
"I think you should ask him."
"He won't tell me."
Snidely: "Be creative."
"I'm not allowed to follow him anymore. For his birthday he made me promise not to take his data without informing him."
"... My birthday's in October." Most people thought Tezuka was unemotional and humourless. The longer Inui knew him, the funnier that became.
"Absolutely not."
"I didn't think so," Tezuka didn't sound offended, in fact his voice held the very dry quality that usually meant he was making some sort of joke. "Perhaps you should ask yourself why not. Or rather - why Kaidoh."
"... do you think there might be a problem with his family--" Tezuka hung up.
Inui flipped the phone onto his desk and fell back on the bed, letting the ice pack drop to his side.
The problem was, he really was smart. Smart enough, at the very least, to know Kaidoh's problem was him. Smart enough to know he was wilfully ignoring all the available evidence to come to a conclusion he liked better: Momoshiro. His parents. Girl trouble - well, not girl trouble. School trouble. Tennis trouble. An ulcer. The stress of maintaining a secret, crime fighting identity.
Not a scientifically rigourous approach, but thinking about the alternative caused an unpleasant twisting sensation in his abdomen and a hollowed out sort of feeling in his chest, and the idea that Kaidoh was angry enough to hit him was a great deal more painful than the bruise itself. Although that certainly did sting rather a lot. He gingerly draped the ice pack back over the right side of his face and stared miserably at the ceiling through one slightly leaky eye.
There was no escaping the truth, however.
Kaidoh didn't want to be friends anymore.
*
The next day Inui slept through practice and barely dragged himself out of bed in time for history. He spent the lesson writing a poem about how wet leaves, flattened into the pavement by careless shoes and winter rain, resembled ripped off bird wings. He showed it to Fuji that afternoon, while he was waiting for Tezuka to give him laps for missing morning practice.
"A+ material, do you think?"
Fuji, eyes open, looked right through him. "I think," he said slowly, "we'd better have a talk."
"No, thank you," Inui said, and took his dead bird poem back.
Fuji's gaze only sharpened. "Where did you get that bruise?"
He touched his fingers to it, pressing hard. It didn't hurt enough. "It doesn't matter."
"Inui -"
"Oh look, there's Tezuka." He moved a few steps further out of the clubhouse's shadow and stood patiently. Tezuka opened his mouth, caught Fuji's eye, closed it again. Inui watched in fascination as he turned in place, visibly fighting two competing impulses until his gaze fell, unfortunately, on salvation. "Echizen," he barked, "come and play a match with me." Echizen, eyes lit up, practically flew over to C court and Inui sighed, knowing Tezuka was shortly to go from pretending not to notice him to entirely forgetting he even existed.
"Oh look," Fuji said, bright with victory, "there's Kaidoh. Kaidoh, did you see Inui's poem?" He snatched it back and handed it over. "The one about how his heart is like a bird with no wings, cruelly trampled underfoot, trapped forever in a frozen, loveless wasteland?"
"That's not what it's about," Inui said, vainly grabbing at it. Fuji, absurdly, held him off with a single hand and a look of concern on his face, like he was keeping Inui from falling over. He managed to get his fingers on the corner, but what ripped free was just the bit where he'd doodled a snake eating an elephant. Kaidoh didn't look up, studying the poem with even more than his usual intensity.
"Senpai..." He lifted his head and gazed into Inui's eyes, for a moment looking like he didn't want to rip his head off at all.
"So I'll just leave you two to talk then, shall I?"
"We don't need to talk," Inui said quickly.
Kaidoh's face went dark again. "Yes we do."
"Fine," he surrendered, "go ahead."
Kaidoh crossed his arms, uncrossed them, glared sideways at the assembled forces of darkness (Fuji, Kikumaru, two frightened first years) making a poor show of pretending not to watch avidly, and stalked off. "After practice," he snarled over his shoulder and went to destroy the hopes of a few more of his senpai, this time with tennis.
After Tezuka and Echizen had played each other into exhaustion, after Fuji had made several more loud inquiries about his bruise, after Momo and Kaidoh had got into yet another fight, after he'd run 20 laps because Tezuka just couldn't help himself, 'after practice' came.
He found he couldn't deal with the regulars pretending they weren't going to make every effort to eavesdrop any better than Kaidoh could; he took him home instead. Usually they made the trip walking beside each other as they talked (Inui, admittedly, supplying 75% of the actual conversation). Or they ran, side by side.
Today Inui marched ahead to execution, Kaidoh trudging stubbornly and silently behind him, not coming forward until Inui waved him in at the door.
His father thundered downstairs and was hovering in the doorway of the genken, wringing his hands, before they'd even finished taking off their shoes. "Ah, Sadaharu, you don't have cram school?"
"Not tonight."
"You need to work hard if you want to get into a good university." His eyes took on a manic gleam as they landed on Kaidoh. "You're going to be studying? Hello, Kaoru-kun. You need to study too, I'm sure."
"Um, yes, Inui-san."
His father lowered his voice, as if Kaidoh wasn't going to be able to hear him from two feet away. "But you can't spend all your time tutoring your kouhai, Sadaharu. The entrance exams are just around the corner!"
"They're nearly eight months away, father. And Kaidoh won't be staying long." He slid his feet into his slippers and gestured Kaidoh in front of him. "Come on."
"You have to work hard, Sadaharu!" came ruthlessly up the stairs after them. "Or you won't get in! Only to plumbing school!"
"I'm not going to be a plumber, father." He closed the door to his bedroom quickly, cutting off his father's final admonition. It sounded like "or a pharmacist!", but it could've been anything.
"My uncle was a plumber," he explained to Kaidoh's politely frozen expression. "It's something of a family tragedy."
He left Kaidoh by the door and carefully organised his bag and his dirty uniform, tidily disposing of all the things he generally dumped on the nearest flat surface. Given that Kaidoh had, in fact, met him, it surely didn't fool him for a moment, but he couldn't bring himself to look around.
"I should get us some tea. Some snacks. Please sit down, Kaidoh, make yourself --" at home. Kaidoh had been there so many times before. This was probably the very last time. He tried to think of something to say to make that not happen, to stop Kaidoh saying what he was about to say, but his tongue stayed tied. He could feel the seconds he had left counting down in the sounds behind him; Kaidoh shuffling and then setting his feet firmly. His chin going up, his shoulders back. He would be opening his mouth to put an end to everything right about --
"Senpai -- senpai, I'm sorry for hitting you --"
"Don't," he said instantly, wheeling around. "It's my fault."
Kaidoh went very still. He really was a bit snake-like at times like this. More a cobra than a viper, deadly and ready to strike. Inui felt appropriately terrified. "Is it."
Inui ventured a smile, feeling it flat and fake on his lips. "Well, it must be. I'm sure you wouldn't hit me without a reason." Kaidoh stared at him, utterly expressionless. "I don't suppose you'd consider telling me what that reason was?"
More blank staring - no, there was a bit of an expression there. Almost certainly anger, but Inui couldn't help poking at it. He was starting to feel almost Momoshiroesque. "A hint?"
It was not possible to hiss words that had no sibilants, but Kaidoh made a good faith effort. "You know."
"I don't --"
"Stop messing me around!" Yes, definitely anger. "Everyone knows. You're not an idiot --"
"Apparently I am!" Inui shouted back. It felt surprisingly good, no wonder Momo did so much of it. "And no-one will tell me what I did!" His anger, paper thin, crumpled up in the face of Kaidoh's stony silence. "Kaidoh, what did I do?" he said plaintively, sagging like a melted test tube. "Why are you so angry at me?"
Kaidoh took three short, threatening steps towards him, fists clenching and unclenching. "You're so stupid," he snarled, grabbed Inui by the shoulder, and kissed him.
It was too unexpected to really be enjoyable, more like he was being smacked in the face by Kaidoh's mouth than offered a gesture of affection. He struggled to make sense of it.
"Stupid," Kaidoh muttered again when he pulled away, hand maintaining a death grip on Inui's shoulder. "Everyone knows."
"Oh." Inui's mind helpfully played back the past several weeks, with his brain turned on this time. He could almost hear Fuji narrating the voiceover. "Oh, yes. I see." Kaidoh stared at the floor, looking humiliated and somehow grief stricken. Like he thought maybe Inui wouldn't want to be friends anymore. "It's just that I haven't got any insight," Inui said apologetically, and very tentatively ducked his head to kiss him back.
Obviously he had researched kissing, though there were surprisingly few resources available. Visual demonstrations by the thousands; detailed instructions: no. It proved, irritatingly, not to be an especially intuitive activity; though once he threw his glasses to the side, once Kaidoh pushed him down on the bed and determinedly held Inui's head still, one hand threaded through his hair, one curved warmly against his neck, thumb rubbing his jaw -- well, he thought they began to get the hang of it.
"I've got no creativity either," he explained breathlessly, biting experimentally at Kaidoh's collarbone. "Poetry. Passion --"
"We'll work on that," Kaidoh said, short and dry. "Wouldn't want -- oh. yes. -- wouldn't want you to end up at plumbing school, senpai."
Inui thought he could really get to like the glorious beauty of his language even if, for the next while, they mostly only used the really short words.
*
He sidled up to leave his third attempt at poetry at the teacher's station as soon as Suzuku-sensei left, hands absurdly clammy as he tried to simultaneously shuffle it off to one side and leave it in plain sight. But he had to wait until the final bell, the other students loudly filing out, before Yamato-sensei called him up. He stood in front of her, scratching his head, adjusting his glasses and rubbing his hickey, as she perused it.
"Sadaharu-kun. You wrote this?"
"Yes, Sensei. Uh - is it any good?"
She looked up, finally. "It's wonderful! Such insight into the human condition! Such passion!" She smiled at him beatifically, as to a favoured disciple. "I sense such a change in you, Sadaharu. Like a flower, unfolding in the first days of spring!"
"I suppose you could say I, ah, found a muse, Sensei," he said, beaming foolishly back.
"But your meter is terrible," she added, mood shifting mercurially, "Did you do the background reading?"
"Ah - "
"You need to work on your sense of rhythm!" she declared emphatically, scrawling a B+ across the top of his poem. "Rhythm, Sadaharu-kun, that's what you need if you ever want to get an A in my class!"
Inui sighed.
"Yes, Sensei," he said.