You two, Oshitari once said, wonderingly, you two. I never knew.
It's good that he never suspected. It's good that we had fooled them all, your teammates and mine, saw their faces stone cold as you held my wrist tightly as you said the words first, with your mocking air, your childish smirk, your cold fingers. It's good that we took them by surprise. I relish in the unexpected. Or I did, back then, when we were younger, wilder.
/
I remember your eyes when your father died, when your body stiffened and you whipped around after you heard the doctor utter his diagnosis. You did not utter a word, not yet, but your eyes blazed and hardened as your hands curled into tiny fists. You had small hands. You stared at the doctor as he tried to cough and mumble out the death in a rush—I am so sorry for your loss—and looked away. You did not speak, even after I spoke to the faltering doctor and thanked him for his troubles, even after I looked at you. You did not look at me then; you did not look at me after that.
I remember your choked gasp, your rush or hurried words during the funeral and after you breathed those words you looked so shocked, so utterly shocked that you believed in the blasphemy, but fortunately for you, your mother never heard them. Even to my ears your words sounded inane and childish, but to be fair, you were always a child and a brat. Without your tennis skills, I always thought, you weren't worth very much. You were just another boy who aspired for greatness and who would ultimately fail. But without tennis you also did not exist. I did not try to, especially on the day your father passed away.
But I haven't beaten him yet.
It was the aggressiveness that took me by surprise, your voice that rasped and floundered in the wind. It was a winter day and your father looked serene as you raged inside your brain. I merely looked and did not try to hold your hand.
/
I recollect fragments of you: how you dangled the racket between your fingers, how you tapped the brim of your cap that I abhorred, how you snarled obscenities into my ear as we pressed against the wired fence after a match and how I gripped your tattered shirt as we sucked each other dry. I remember your drawl and your brilliance. I only remember how you were such a child; I purposefully forget how sometimes you were only a kid who lost a father; for years I could not grapple myself with that fact. You were my equal, you always have been. To admit otherwise was to admit my own fallacies in loving a broken human being.
/
Years later, I still can mouth the words I first said to Oshitari when I heard the news. I see, I said then, and stopped. It was a clear word, no hissing and no sighs, no gasps of shock and disbelief. I accepted the facts that Oshitari presented to me as if I had known.
Oshitari looked at me and thought I did not understand. "Echizen," he repeated, slower this time, "Echizen. They found his body off the bridge."
"Yes," I said, "I heard you the first time, Oshitari. I haven't gone deaf."
It was the shock, I suppose, but even then I did not feel a wave of grief as if I had to sit down or topple over. My mind closed down and my mouth moved accordingly and I was able to execute my daily routine after that. I thought it was because you did not matter to me. I said as such when my teammates (and later, yours) pestered me for emotions and reactions. They thought I was in denial, so one day I snapped, "I know that Echizen is dead, perhaps I should weep, would that make you feel more comfortable around me?" And everyone gaped, silenced, as I walked away and still could not feel anything. I thought that was proof, we were rivals and sometimes partners but I did not love you. I was too young.
Years later, my mother died it was only then I knew. I acted the same way as I had with her death as I had with yours: a blank face, the right words and no tears to shed. My father looked away and called me a cold-hearted boy without malice. I stood in front of her grave for a long time without much thought until I realized that I did not know how to express my emptiness. It was when I knew I never quite moved on from your death and hated you for it. I would have hated you but I could not conjure up rage.
I always mocked that you were young, but by doing so I forgot that I was just as foolish as well.
/
Memories are precise: I see you as when you were young and shining, preserved inside my mind as a boy, forevermore, your small smirk and your raised eyebrows, your mockery, your laugh and your preen. It is better this way, I think to myself sometimes, we would have never had a future together. It was better that you disappeared and made be made a martyr inside my mind. My eyes glaze over when I see others and they are all so pale compared to you.
And then, memories are incomplete: I forget the name of your cat, once I bumped into your cousin and she gave me a small, timid small that was too sad for me to dismiss so I lifted my lips to mirror her grief. Only later when we got around to engaging small talk did I remember her as your cousin, and she pretended I knew all along. Another time I forget that you were sometimes too much to be around, that you were selfish and arrogant in your childlike way, that we fought many times and fucked little, that once you almost punched me save for the fact that my butler was there to hold you back. But once I remember this fragment, I cannot forget the fire in you eyes as they spitted hatred.
Did you sometimes hate me, I wonder.
Those are answers you took to the grave.
/
Before you jumped off a bridge and drowned yourself you left a will. Inside the will you gave me your tattered and dirty rackets and a few tennis balls. You left no note. For weeks afterwards, I took those rackets home and stared at it, thinking I missed an inside joke. I was trying to ask myself why you would leave me such rot riddled with sentiment. I stared at your red, chipped racket for days until my eyes burned, and soon I had them taken away to be trashed. I thought that was moving on and forgetting. It was convenient that way.
/
People forget. My teammates did, surely: they think that you were another dalliance in my life who met a bizarre and tragic end, and now years later they are drunk and silly enough to mention it is false-bravado words to my second fiancée that I have not broken off yet. They tell her about my tennis captaincy, and suddenly I am hearing a story about a younger boy who was good at tennis who died. It was a good story, a tragic and interesting one that happened when we were young. But in your dead state you cannot defend yourself. I am forced to with the hardening of my face, the steel in my eyes.
"Keigo?" My fiancée looks at me and soon everyone else does too, and Oshitari shifts, and I look away. I cannot smoothen my face. I stand up and excuse myself.
Later, the others tell me, in some state of disbelief: But I thought you never cared, you acted as if you never did, you were so normal and composed afterwards. I thought…
They all trail off. I look at them and do not see them.
/
There is no one way to manage grief, I learned. You follow me around in your distilled youth, mock me for the things that could have become, dismiss me in ways that I failed to be at. You are with me always, in worse ways than better, but you are there, hovering in the background, your consistent smirk playing around your lips that I cannot kiss.
Till death do us part, so the old marriage vows went. I heard those vows in a church and you were laughing inside my head the entire time.
/
A/N: Can I explain this piece? I really can't.