A/N: I had a raging oneshot plotbunny in math class today before tennis tryouts. 0_0 Enjoy the product of momentary randomness and be assured that the next BBSLR chapter is coming out soon! Don't kill me!
One day, you could meet someone very significant in the history of the universe and not even know it. It's interesting to see the things we all can't see, the things that we could never be able to tell just from looking.
"Bye." Erin, the newly minted coach of the developmental tennis team, called as the underclassmen walked away. She wiped sweat from her brow, exhaling in exhaustion. Today had been a hard day. The ambitious twenty-two-year-old's ongoing service project was to teach the visiting young high school sophomores how to improve their tennis skills, and it was harder than she had expected. They had run a few miles, played one game each while paired up, and headed to the blacktop to do random speed training. All the while, Erin kept them in order, told them off for talking, taught them better posture and swing position, and retrieved errant tennis balls.
Kchok!
It was the sound of a perfect hit, a sound Erin herself relished and cherished whenever she could. But the tennis courts had been abandoned for hours now! Huffing and puffing up the hill, seizing her bag along the way, she was surprised to see one player at the court, a single white bucket beside him. Probably for tennis balls, she reasoned, and her reckoning became fact as she watched the newcomer remove one from the bin.
One step, an odd shuffling motion, three even bounces. He tossed the ball up in an arc at perfect height, and with speed he looked unable to possess, he struck it, sending it soaring into the exact back of the court, right before the serving line.
Kchok!
In one fluid step he got another ball and served it in the exact same manner.
Unable to believe her eyes, Erin jogged closer until her face was practically pressed up against the chain-link fence. She squinted against the late-afternoon sun to get a better look at the player.
He was male, that much was clear. For a seemingly superior athlete, he certainly was dressed inappropriately, clad in a simple white long-sleeved shirt and baggy jeans. The sun burned mercilessly against his ivory-white skin; he had visible sunburn on his wrists already. His hair was a mess, dark and spiky and in his eyes, and his feet were stuffed into raggedy grey sneakers.
As he continued his mechanical strikes, he maintained the same calm but driven expression, like a confident speaker before an audience.
"Who are you?" When he finally paused to fetch all of the balls he'd scattered, the awestruck girl had to ask him this one question.
He turned and his eyes pierced her, taking note of every little detail. He looked even younger than she, but he spoke as if he was much older and wiser.
"I am Ryuzaki."
Erin felt a shiver, that cold chill that presses against the back of your neck when someone seems unsettling. She pressed on, curious nonetheless.
"You're great at tennis! Is it your main thing? Like, at school?"
"No." He turned around and hit another ball a few seconds later. She was obviously being dismissed.
"See you around, I guess?" Erin made the logical assumption he attended her college as she jogged away.
She was too far away to hear the reply.
"Actually, no, you won't. Never, really."
Other times, we judge too quickly based on the things we can see and miss opportunities.
"Who's the new kid?" The speaker was the blonde six-year-old resident fashionista, Mello, and the place was the dining room of Wammy's House.
His peers laughed in hilarity as they explained. That Matt kid was clearly a misbehaving little punk, with those stupid goggles and that idiotic striped shirt and baggy pants. Didn't he know that it looked weird, that he looked weird? He was about six too, but sat alone, and based on the attitudes the others had, he'd be sitting alone for awhile. He didn't shut up, they repeated emphatically, and nobody cared about what he had to say. He wasn't a genius, like you had to be to qualify to be in the orphange; he was most certainly a dumb fluke, talented at some obscure thing that didn't matter. They were sure of it.
"I think he looks cool." Mello stuck his nose in the air and strutted defiantly across the room to sit next to this punk kid Matt, and fourteen years and thousands of lunches together later, doing everything together, they owed each other so many life debts they lost count.
If heaven exists it's them at that table when they were six, talking nonstop and feeling incomprehensible, wonderful love, because they died. On the same day.
Together.
And neither one would have had it any other way.
La Fin