Title: 'Waiting for Touya.'
Pairing: Touya Shindo, though it is more correctly gen.
Warnings: Death fic. I am so depressing!
Betaed by Kelley (strychnon).
Disclaimer: I have nothing. Thus, I most definitively don't own Hikaru no Go.
Given the earthquake, Shindo felt that he had been particularly lucky. He had walked away from one of the worst recorded earthquakes in Japan (after the famous Kantou one in the Taisho era) with minor scratches and a bump on his head. But no concussion: proof that maybe Touya was right to say he was hard-headed.
Later when he realised what he had lost, Shindo felt that he should have known. Such a loss should have left behind a visible sign. That, barring that, he should at least have felt something! Felt some foreboding. He hadn't. He had lost the most important person in his life a second time and he had been clueless about it for over a day.
In the beginning Shindo was worried when his call to Touya's mobile went directly to voicemail. But then, he rationalised, it was hardly surprising. Touya forgot to turn his portable phone on at least once a week. During an earthquake it was almost excusable. Also the whole population was probably phoning friends and family; the lines were surely overcharged. Above all Shindo was confident that, had anything happened to Touya, he would have known for sure, for wasn't he Shindo's eternal rival?
Then came the desperate searching, in the Touyas' empty home, at the Go Institute, at the destroyed Go salon, at Ogata's, at Ashiwara's. In a fit of desperation Shindo had even managed to extract Kuwabara Honinbo address from a secretary at the Go Institute and went to see the old man because, maybe, Akira had decided to play with the old master on a Tuesday instead of on a Wednesday. When Shindo tracked down Touya's last student on the morning of the Earthquake and ascertained that Akira had left her house half an hour before the Earthquake, he started combing her whole district. But on the Yamanote, for example, Touya would have gotten very far in half an hour. And the metro lines had been heavily damaged. Shindo tried nonetheless. When that turned out to be a fool's hope he realised he had run out of places to look.
In a very real way the worst part was that smidgeon of hope that refused to die. For Akira was not dead, he was missing. And, even if, after three weeks, missing was a way of saying that his body had not been found, still Hikaru could not squash the unreasoning hope that surely today someone would remove some rubble and there would be Akira. Not unscathed, to be sure, but alive... In his darker moments Hikaru felt that even finding Akira dead would be better than never knowing.
Most of the time, though, he kept feeling as if he had just been looking in the wrong place. One day he would just phone some distant cousins of the Touyas and discover that Akira was with them. It was the morning, one month after the Earthquake, when Shindo's mind offered up the possibility of Akira having gone on a Go pilgrimage to Innoshima that Hikaru realised fully just what he was doing. He cried that day, as he had done for Sai, and buried the living Akira in his heart. It was then that he started to wait for something to catch his eye, for a beloved voice to reach his ears again, for someone only he would see and hear.
Weekly Go May 5th 20xx
After a long four month leave of absence Shindo-Honinbo once more defended his title against Waya-7dan. Waya-sensei didn't seem intimidated in spite of having qualified for the final on a forfeit of the late Touya-Juudan. Using a Joseki eerily reminiscent of Touya-sensei himself Shindo-sensei however quickly put to rest his best friends' hopes for a title... Shindo-Honinbo refused to comment on his change of style.