"Oh," Ryoma said, gazing into Keigo's soul with the fire of a thousand suns. "You again."
"Me again," Keigo replied, and for a second they could pretend it hadn't been thirteen years since they'd last seen each other.
"How… are you?" Ryoma said, scuffing the toe of his shoe against the concrete path of the park walkway, twelve again.
"Still immensely better at conversation than you," Keigo said pleasantly. Ryoma snorted, whatever tension there had been in his mien melting away to familiar insouciance.
"All right, Mon—"
"Some things need to stay in the past, however."
Ryoma rolled his eyes but stayed silent, smiling oddly.
"What do you do these days?" Keigo asked. "Shall we sit down, for a coffee, perhaps?"
"No, I—I have to get back to my—my fiancée." Ryoma glanced down at his feet. Keigo caught his unhappy frown regardless.
"Ships that pass in the night," Keigo said gently, instead of we could always postpone that coffee. Ryoma pursed his lips and checked his watch.
"Oh, I also have this book signing to go to—"
"You do know I can see right through you—"
Something wild and furious rushed over Ryoma at that.
"It was just a puppy crush," he shouted. "You're fucking chasing me."
Keigo took a step back, stunned. To think Ryoma would bring that up, now of all times—he really was utterly shit at etiquette; he really was still the same person Keigo had fallen in love with.
"I haven't chased you in more than a decade," he said, low and deadly enough to offset Ryoma. "I'll thank you to not get pissy with me."
Ryoma bit his lip, hands balling into fists, entirely different from the twenty-five-year-old man Keigo had had the (good? bad?) luck to run into. He deflated just as quickly as he'd raged.
"Why didn't you?" Ryoma asked weakly, almost defeated. "Why the hell didn't you chase me?"
Keigo inhaled sharply.
"I don't have the time for this," he snapped. "You were a heartless prick who liked to fuck around with the people who loved you and leave them for dead."
A couple of joggers stared at them as they jogged by. Keigo ignored them in favour of resolutely watching Ryoma's face turn ashen and chagrined.
"I have to go," Keigo said, and he really, really did.
Ryoma nodded once, stilted.
"It was a pleasure meeting you, Echizen," and Keigo once upon a time might have been surprised at how effortlessly he slid into his clinical, charismatic façade but he was much older than the boy who had promised the world to a tennis prodigy in exchange for the tiny favour of the prodigy's heart—"Let's keep in touch. No more of that chasing nonsense."
"No more," Ryoma agreed, never meeting Keigo's eyes. He walked off the concrete onto the wide, green spread of the lawn, to a picnic basket and a blanket far from the path—amazing, really, how he'd been able to recognise Keigo from so far away—or perhaps not amazing at all. Someone with long red hair waved at Ryoma gaily.
Keigo turned and walked back the way he'd come, a sour taste in his mouth. His phone rang.
"Don't forget the plums on your way back! Were the cherry blossoms pretty?"
"Yes, my dear," Keigo said into the phone. "Not prettier than you."
prince of tennis fic! after so long! feedback welcomed with open arms.