This is my first story with this fandom and this 'ship, and I really intended dipping my toes into it to be with something easier, but I fell in love with this idea when it came to me and it just built on itself.
I've 'shipped these boys since the first time I read the manga, because it feels impossible not to, at least a little.
Akira is born when his father is playing the last game of a title match, and when her new infant is settled in her arms, his mother smiles over him alone, content.
She has always known that there are twin loves in her husband's life, and is pleased when he comes to meet their son straight from the match. She expected - and needed - nothing more, nor less.
He does not mention the match until she asks, captivated instead by their son, by her, and she smiles at them both - little Akira, quietly murmuring in his sleep, cradled against his father's chest, and her husband, clasping her hand even when he cannot drag his eyes from the new little life he holds.
But Akira's mother loves her husband and so loves Go, because it is impossible to remove the one from the other, and after they have cooed over their son and made countless promises in their hearts, and she has rested - her husband solicitous and refusing to leave her side, now - she asks about the match.
Akira's first night in the world is spent first listening to his parents murmur their love for him, their precious and much-hoped-for son, and then to his father recount the hard-fought battle that had spread over the Go board for the hours of the match.
Akira sleeps, secure in his father's arms.
Akira is two years old when he plonks a stone down on his father's goban and refuses to be moved. The stubborn set of his jaw is beholden more to his mother's face than his father's, though it rarely graces her oft-gentle features, and he glares at the little stone he has just clumsily placed and waits.
His father is surprised, but does not force him away or scold him.
He asks if Akira knows what he has done, and Akira only stubbornly says Go! and his father smiles. Yes.
This is how Akira takes his first steps along his path - as he takes his first steps in the real world, so they are mirrored in the play of black stones against white, on a board of nineteen by nineteen places - an infinite world waiting to be filled.
His mother laughs fondly and kisses the top of his head, and says that she wondered when she would see him lost in the endless battles and waves upon the goban. She kisses Akira's father on the cheek, then leaves them to it with a knowing light in her eyes.
Akira's father is steady and serious as he instructs Akira patiently in the simplest steps. He does not send Akira away, or tell him he is too young. He does not insist they move to a board that is less fine - or even one that is shorter, as Akira, sitting clumsily in something that may one day refine into a neat, elegant seiza, can barely reach the surface.
Akira wishes to learn, and so his father teaches him. Akira soaks it in with eager adoration, loving his father, loving the game, though he is still too young to understand.
Akira is five years old when some of his father's friends - students and compatriots - begin to play him. They give him handicaps only slightly less than he takes against his father, and they play him, none of them, so seriously as his father does, but play him they do.
Akira soaks in their Go, demands consideration with the very sincerity of his own serious, intense nature, and several of them come to enjoy playing him. Akira grows, and learns, and falls ever more in love with the goban and the endless ebb and flow of the games that play out upon it.
His father smiles with pride, and Akira blossoms, in his quiet, intent way, beneath the consideration. His mother smiles knowingly and kisses them both with affection, spending hours with them as they play and watching her son grow stronger and surer, watching her husband's love for the game grow and change along with their son.
Akira is eight years old when his soulmark fades into place on his wrist.
It is made up of Go stones, stark and simple, played in what makes a pretty swirl that is open to black or white equally. Akira's mother is surprised - even her own wrist does not bear Go stones, for all her husband's love of the game - and Akira's father is quiet, but Akira knows him well enough to see that he is curious.
Ogata-san makes what Akira can recognise are quite flippant comments, even if he doesn't understand them.
Akira looks at the play his wrist now bears, thinks I always knew that, and smiles as he takes one less stone as a handicap against his father the next day.
He strokes the stones on his wrist and thinks I want to meet the you that plays so beautifully, thinks find me, play with me, thinks I love you already.
He lays out the pattern of stones on his own goban in his room, but he never plays it, whether he is black or white, in any of his games. No. This is . . . special.
He thinks come to me and we'll play forever, and smiles, and traces the stones on his skin as he falls asleep.
Akira is nine years old when he dreams of Go - that is nothing new, he has for years - but also of hands.
Fingers he can't really see, but that play out beautiful hands of Go against him, building and turning and weaving together until Akira is breathless with the beauty and the anticipation and the want of it. The soundless crash of white into black, the surge of black twining back through white's wave of exploratory tendrils.
A battle that is also a dance, two opponents - two partners - building together rather than struggling independently.
He doesn't remember the patterns of them when he wakes - Akira always remembers games, when they're good ones, when they're important - and he cannot wait to meet his soulmate and play those games for real.
For now, he fights even harder to learn, to become better, to be worthy of that Go.
I'm waiting. . . he thinks, with the solemnity that makes Ichikawa-san pat him fondly and talk about how old his soul is.
Akira is eleven years old when he first thinks maybe I don't have a soulmate.
It isn't a distressing thought, really. Akira looks at the pattern on his wrist - it is still beautiful, still complex and open and special, he still loves it - and thinks maybe Go is my soulmate, where I am supposed to be forever and doesn't smile as he plays hane and watches Ogata-san's eyes narrow at the board.
Akira doesn't smile so much any more, not so brightly, but he still loves Go - loves it more than anything, dreams of the time when he may catch up to his father and challenge him. There are pros just waiting for him to grow up and come into their world, and they will be his only true opponents, their Go strong and steady.
Akira is eager to meet that challenge, and he walks the path that leads to it with single-minded focus and patience.
Go is on his wrist and Go fills his mind and Go is Akira's life, and he smiles slightly as his fingers clasp a stone.
Akira is twelve years old when a loud boy tumbles into his father's Go salon and demands, playfully, to face him over a goban. Akira smiles - Akira does not smile often, any more, but he does now - and consents easily, to Ichikawa-san's surprise.
He is not only being polite, he is curious - this boy is, as he had so brashly observed himself, Akira's age. Is there another player who loves Go so much who is Akira's age?
Akira hesitates when he claims no need for a handicap, but it only whets his interest.
When he sees the slowness of the other boy's hands, and the awkwardness of his fingers on the stones, Akira sighs inwardly. This boy, he is not another Akira, he is not a challenge, not even a rock that throws out ripples in the cool stream that is Akira's progress. He is a child, with a child's fleeting interest and undeserved confidence.
Then. . .
Oh, but then.
Shindou does not simply challenge Akira, he decimates Akira's Go, leading him a merry chase in what Akira only realises into the middlegame is shidougo - very advanced shidougo, a player with strength like his father's guiding him and testing him.
Akira is amazed and hurt and intrigued and-
Akira is left staring at the board, his strongest attacks defanged and gently turned aside, directed into harmless, often blocked off shapes as black maintains sente - although each hand, each progression of black across the board, shows Akira where he could grow stronger, makes his next attack sharper and more refined.
This shidougo is beautiful and Akira is still shattered by the very idea of it.
Akira is sixteen years old when he realises he knows who the stones, the pattern, on his wrist are for - realises he has known, truly, for some time.
Akira is sixteen and a 4 Dan and his heart is racing and he is losing to Shindou - losing badly, Shindou is insane and no one should have played there let alone have succeeded in making it myoushu - and he loves it and then Shindou is kissing him and he thinks-
Oh.
He kisses back and he feels the stones on the board digging into his forearm, more on the floor harsh under his knee and shin. He doesn't care.
He thinks I knew it was you and I've been waiting and it could never have been anyone else and I love you and your crazy, beautiful Go and winds his hands into Shindou's wild, two-toned hair as they come together.
Shindou laughs into his mouth and hands roam his back, pulling him close, and more Go stones dig into them as they topple, slow and entwined, to the floor.
Shindou promises love and laughter and the match Akira had been waiting for his whole life - the match he had seen in his future at eight, had longed for at nine, had fought to be worthy of at ten, had doubted at eleven, and had found for the first time hiding behind someone else's Go at twelve.
Akira clings to him and says all these things and none of them, for the first time able to offer the words to his soulmate and not to the silence of his own mind. Now Akira is not waiting, Akira has found, has been found.
Akira is shown the fierce lion on Shindou's wrist, black and white and calm for all its fury, and he sees himself there even if it is not the same - never will be the same - as the beautiful, perfect, crazy Go.
Shindou twines their bodies together and would have it no other way. Akira smiles.
He insists they play the rest of their game, and is not swayed by kisses or the amazed sensation of finding the other half of his soul. Shindou may be half of his soul, may have claimed his heart already, but Go has lived in that heart forever.
They play, because Shindou loves Go as much as Akira, and they fight and they kiss with every hand played, every trade of sente, every brief squabble over territory.
They dance and they battle and they play, and they laugh because this, this is why they are here.
Akira is twenty years old when he plays the pattern on his wrist for the first time.
He is Meijin now, and has been for three years, had ripped the title away from Ogata-san as soon as he could. Akira still thinks of Ogata-san as a favoured uncle, but that title is not his, and he will not have it.
Akira's father won the Meijin title the day he was born, and Akira grew up being the Meijin's son. His father may be retired now, but that title will not go to Ogata-san.
He doesn't mean to play the pattern of his Mark, really. He knows it - of course he does - but he was so wrapped up, the game was so intense, he hadn't seen it forming before he played that last, shimmery white stone. He loses his breath, fingers shaking as he lifts them away from the board, and looks up at his opponent.
It is Shindou, of course - it could never have been anyone else - and he hesitates.
This is wrong, Shindou doesn't hesitate when he plays, except- Except of course Shindou hesitates, because Akira probably looks like he is about to faint. And because. . .
Akira does not believe that Shindou brought them to this pattern, this play, intentionally any more than he did himself - but Shindou does know this pattern. Has spent what feels like almost as many nights - even though Akira knows it cannot be - as Akira has tracing the stones before he falls asleep, has studied them and stroked them and kissed them.
He knows, of course, that Shindou is his soulmate - they have known that for years now - but the play on his wrist has been . . . special, reserved . . . something that cannot be forced. It is a play waiting to happen, waiting to be chased, but never appearing unless. . .
He thinks that neither of them knew and yet clearly they both knew exactly what was spiralling out, growing beneath their hands with every new stone.
I love you Akira thinks and does not have to say, for when he looks up Shindou's eyes show the same.
Akira plays his black stone - it is his move next of course, of course, for it has always been Akira's to start, then Shindou sweeps in, stealing sente away and challenging Akira to chase him. Akira counters with a simple hane that extends to a ni-dan bane, and then twists his focus when Hikaru plays atari.
A sharp nerai makes Hikaru go breathless even as he counters, trying to turn his position into a pincer. Akira cuts the head off that move, but is pushed into chasing after Shindou briefly again - then he extends, diagonal, a small keima where Shindou had anticipated a large one, the shadowy slide of his inimitable, dominating Go spreading across the goban only to be lashed through by Shindou's bright, darting, endlessly flexible Go.
They play, breathless and hurried and endlessly patient, their Go twining around each other lovingly, and as the game ends - Akira has won, this time - Shindou drags him down alongside the goban and they lose themselves in each other in another way, almost as familiar between them.
Akira's fingers trace Shindou's sides, Shindou's hands splay over his chest, and Akira knows they are both thinking of the game, the beautiful, wonderful game that has left them so desperate for each other.
Shindou's breath is warm on Akira's Marked wrist, his lips just as warm and soft. Akira threads his fingers into Shindou's hair but he doesn't pull his hand away as their bodies move together. Shindou kisses his Mark again, murmuring hands from their game, and Akira keens, returning those low, passionate murmurs with a soft recitation of his own.
Shindou counters with another option of play and Akira bucks against him, yes, yes that would- He offers his own alternate route, drawing onwards, and Shindou nips and bites at his Mark, the only one it ever could have been for, and they will play this game, these fierce and yet loving battles against each other, forever, but for now, for now-
An endless moment, heady pleasure, and they sweep away in it together, bodies curling into one another by the side of the goban.
I played with the timing of the Meijin title, for symmetry's sake.
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