Disclaimer: the original manga Tennis no Oujisama is the work of Konomi Takeshi. Characters and settings have been adapted without authorization or approval, and I am making no profit from their use.

Author's Note: takes place during Echizen's second year of high school, assuming he returned to Japan after some time in America as a professional.

Sirius

Snow fell lightly from clear skies as black as darkest indigo that had long ceased to be blue. The air was chilly but hardly freezing around the clay tennis courts that lay unused for the evening as the weather claimed the spot. Two young men were out for a quiet stroll, despite the late hour, talking of classes and teachers and tournaments that filled the lives of a high school junior and a college freshman alike. They barely felt the dusting of snow as it fell on their heads. The flakes seemed to form from nowhere in the cloudless sky, dancing and scattering on a whisper of wind and then melting on the quiet streets with almost no delay as they hit; but while they drifted in the air, they shone in the moonlight, twinkling as if the canopy of stars had settled low in the frost of winter to surround the two old friends walking together and conversing on the otherwise empty streets. They'd met here, four and a half years ago, a chance encounter on these plain, dirt courts before their school clubs could compete in an official tournament, neither one giving much thought to the paths their lives would follow after that day. They didn't discuss it now, even as their meandering route through the night led them back here.

The couple walked close, the one unconsciously and imperceptably slowing his long strides to match the other's pace, but they didn't hold hands. Echizen, going on seventeen now, had his hands in hidden inside gloves that were two sizes too large and tended to keep them in his pockets. At his side, Atobe kept them crossed in front of his chest or on his hips, when he wasn't gesturing as part of some description. He pushed open the gate to the courts - they were closed, technically, but no one bothered to lock a simple tennis court in a small, peaceful town like this - and they walked in, laughing over an experiment gone wrong in a high school lab. There was plenty to discuss, since the college Atobe attended was so much further away from Seigaku than Hyoutei had been. Outside of school breaks like this one, they saw each other more rarely these days. Now the distance between them was about to increase again.

Atobe had stopped by the center of the net, resting a hand on his hip as he pointed the other upward at the stars. "Look at the sky. Do you see it?" His eyes were gazing far off, as if he could see the swirling gases that burned lightyears away if he looked hard enough.

"What'm I looking at?" Echizen rested his back against his companion's chest, eyes following the line of the arm that was now pointing over his shoulder toward the heavens. Atobe chuckled in Echizen's ear and placed his other hand on the net in front of them both, a hair's breadth away from where the Seigaku student rested his own.

At the end of the finger pointing towards the skies was a particular star, shining with particular brilliance. "Sirius," he proclaimed, letting his hand drift down to rest on his friend's shoulder, hardly needing to distinguish it from the crowd of lights once Echizen had found it. "It shines twice as brightly as any other star. Did you know that?"

"Not really." It was clear enough from looking how the star shone, even if astronomy wasn't something he'd studied. This was, of course, one of the five or six stars he could name from memory, though he probably wouldn't have been able to find it in the sky before now if he'd wanted to. Perhaps, after tonight, it wouldn't be so difficult.

"Ptolemy of Alexandria counted it among the red stars in his Almagest. Many from Greece and Egypt described it as red, even though modern science has proven that it never burned red. Some try to explain why it might have appeared so, others claim it was poetic - that the color was for strife, and if the star was called 'as red as Mars' then the author who wrote this meant the god and not the planet. If you speak of Ptolemy, however... well, he of all people surely meant the hue, and doubtless saw it with his own eyes. His report bears weight. Here in Japan, of course, we named it Aoboshi. Blue, we called it, as certainly as Ptolemy called it red. Who could say now, who did not stand on the same ground in the same age?"

That wasn't a question to be answered, Echizen knew. "You're awfully well-informed," he muttered. He kept his eyes up, listening to the familiar voice at his ear, incredulous but unfazed by the extended non-sequitir. It was something you got used to.

The tone of Atobe's speech always changed slightly when he smiled. "The Ancient Greeks called it the Dog Star for its place in the constellation Canis Major, the great dog of the hunter Orion. I believe it's the eye, if you trace the constellation like this..." Echizen's eye followed the hand as it raised up again, making ears around one star, then tracing the shape of a head around Sirius and the next star over. Turning down, Atobe sketched out a neck and foreleg, then dropped his arm to wrap it tightly around Echizen's waist. He'd heard it called the Dog Star in America when he was young, and he'd heard about the constellation. He remembered that much as Atobe spoke, but it still looked more like a bunch of stars than a dog. It was comfortably warm, though, standing close. "For them it heralded the hottest days of the year - the dog days of summer, the Greeks called them. The name itself, Seirios, means 'scorcher'."

"They teach you a lot of Greek at that college of yours?"

"If you want to study Greek." Echizen turned his eyes down from the skies to look at the clay court dampened with melted snow, the flakes starting to stick enough now to just barely obscure the white lines defining the ground. Atobe's bare hand on the net next to his had to be cold, even if he'd insisted that 'ice was his dominion and could do him no harm', which was bullshit, but it hadn't been that cold out at the time. "And I, of course, am just such a 'gray spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought'."

Echizen's mouth curled up at the corner in a laugh. "That's English. It's Tennyson."

"It's thematic." There was a quiet sigh in the pause between them. "That looks like one star, but it's actually two," Atobe continued, the brush of his chin in Echizen's hair telling the high school student that his companion was looking at the skies again. "Each moving forward, but drawn in continually toward the other so they circle always, maintaining an orbit at about twenty astronomical units..."

"Which is how far?"

He could feel Atobe's breath above his ear. "Slightly more than seventy-four thousand times the circumference of the Earth," the man said with a quiet intensity. "Not that far, all things considered."

Echizen turned around to sit on the top of the net and look Atobe in the eye. It was insane to think that people, who change in time, could could stay together over a distance like two stars circling, but to expect this man, crazy as he was, would have treated the oceans and continents as anything but minor obstacles... that, he supposed, would have been true madness. Atobe's arms circled him without touching, holding on to the net on either side of him; the small space of air between them pulled so tightly that he could already imagine what it would feel like to get on the plane in a week. "If you're trying to be subtle, it's not working." Atobe had ties that would keep him close to home, inevitably. Family, business - Echizen knew that. And Atobe knew that settling down wasn't in Echizen's blood. He wasn't planning his future after the pro circuit, but now was the problem at hand.

"Don't think you will escape me so easily," Atobe said with an edge on his voice that always tingled in Echizen's spine. "You'll be in New York, I presume?" He'd guessed right that Echizen would make his home there, as much as he'd have one. Still, there wasn't any reason he'd be in that city any longer than he'd be in another.

"I'll be where the tennis is."

One hand ran through the young man's hair, and he could feel the chill on the bare skin against his scalp. If he hadn't made Echizen take his gloves, they'd be warm now, but Atobe didn't show any evidence of minding. "Anywhere you could be is less than twelve hours away by plane." He rested his hand at last on the back of his companion's neck, on the collar of the jacket he still thought was too light. "And this is my gift to you," he said, pointing again overhead, "This star is yours henceforth."

"Sirius?" Echizen asked, non-plussed as ever at the behavior that came naturally to his long-time friend.

"As if I would give you anything less than the brightest star in the heavens..." Atobe scoffed, brushing Echizen's neck fondly with his thumb. "Take it with you, and remember that I'm here at those moments when I can't be by your side."

The man's arms drifted around his shoulders, and Echizen let his hands rest on Atobe's waist. Like the stars wouldn't have been up there anyway. He said the most ridiculous things some days. That was fine, Echizen thought. The world wasn't so big. He shivered as the wind picked up, and his companion held him closer. "It's cold out," he said.

"I told you, you should have worn a warmer coat," Atobe replied, pulling back slightly and rubbing Echizen's arms to make heat.

"And I told you, you're not my mom." He thought for a second about the small apartment where he'd been living alone since he left his father in New York to come back to school. Tonight, he'd been expecting they'd go their separate ways, and he'd head back by himself after they'd said goodbye. It seemed even more unappealing now than it did before. "Why don't we go back to your place?"

A loud laugh echoed off the backboards on the deserted court. "We are in your town, of course. Shall I send for the car, or the helicopter?"

"I was thinking we'd take the subway," Echizen said with a shrug, "but whatever."

His lover brushed off a snowflake that had settled on his nose with a careless flick of his finger and smiled, pulling out his phone. "I'll fly you there..."

The End