Disclaimer: All creative rights to the Hikaru no Go characters belong to Yumi Hotta and Takeshi Obata; I am not getting any profit from this story.
A/N: There was one part in the manga where a pro was talking about yose, and how there's only one correct path (I forget where exactly..). Ruminating when walking home I thought that if life was a game of Go, all the "defining" parts of our life—the beginning of the game, when the battle is shaped—happen early on, and afterwards it's just following the "path" that we have set ourselves on… Yeah, I was feeling a bit down at the time. :P
A Single Path
.o.
.o.
Akira smiled uncertainly at the girl sitting across from him, who blushed and averted her eyes. She had the typical modest blouse and skirt, hair tied back in a low ponytail, a brown sweatshirt cast off onto the chair. Her fingers were pale, but nimble. He wondered if her mother had made her take tea ceremony lessons when she was young, or if she made her learn an instrument, to have such small skilled hands. They reminded him of his.
Akira cleared his throat, a blush settling on his own cheeks. The girl started a bit, then focused on his face again.
"So, what things do you like to do … in your spare time?"
"Oh… I'm—I like reading. Western literature."
"Translations?" His right hand, hidden from view, began to pick at a slightly frayed hole in the pleather cushion cover. Still, despite Akira's hate to slight people, especially girls, he couldn't pay attention. He had returned from school, exhausted, to suddenly be confronted by his mother, who rushed him into a car and to a matchmaking agency, where he was told that there was a "nice girl waiting" to speak to him.
"No. I've … had English and French tutors … ever since I was five."
Yes, she did seem like a "nice," meek, perfect housewife. Perfect for the type of traveling he would be doing, a perfect accessory for his illustrious Go career—the type of woman that would sit by his side, as he played game upon game of Go. She would sit by his side patiently, as he was consumed by his only passion, and wash the dishes in the evening. This nameless girl would wear an apron over her best sweater to make dinner for all his Go colleagues, when he would finally become Meijin, and bear him a child he would raise to breath Go like he does.
He could see the endless possibilities, the paths, and like in yose they narrowed down to a single treacherous trail. A few stones cast into the regulated chaos, without further affecting the balance of power.
"Um… Touyo-san, how long have you been playing Go?"
His hand stilled, and he looked past her dark eyes and remembered the earliest memory of Go he could think of. As with many other memories of his childhood, he could hardly tell when he had really run up to his father's Go board and asked his father to let him sit on it.
And that memory of his father's hand gently maneuvering his fingers into the proper position to place the stone…
"Touyo-san?"
"Ah," he smiled. "I think I've played it ever since I was born."
Her face looked confused, and Akira suppressed a sigh and went back to picking at the rip, his slim stone-white fingers rubbing the rough edge.
Shuban.
His life had been determined by the actions of himself and his family, until now was just the endgame, and he would only be able to play the narrow path that was left to him.
Yose.
Like footsteps striding down a hallway, these words echoed in Akira's mind, and he knew them. How could he not? Ever since he invited Shindou to play with him, ever since he asked his father to lift him onto the Go board—no, before—with the unremembered stone pressed into his hand, he had become a Go player. With that single word, "yose," he could recall a thousand different games and their strategies, and they surfaced briefly in his memory, a thousand thousand possibilities. A single path.
Go was his life, and like his father, and like so many other Go players before him, all he could do was play, with whatever skill God gave him the only options he was left. For, there was, of course, a reason why it was called endgame.