The Bluntness of Arrows
How blunt are all the arrows of thy quiver in comparison with those of guilt. - Robert Blair
It had been years since the last time Ryoma had willingly forsaken sleep on a school day. Relaxing in the warm bundle of blankets that swaddled his bed was the most satisfying thing he did all day. There simply hadn't been anything that could inspire the dedication necessary to give it up.
Tennis was interesting, sure, but it wasn't inspiring. It didn't call to him in the guise of a game or the joy of a hobby; it had long ago become no more than the means to engaging his father. Tennis was a tool, used to play in the old man's select arena. And a tool didn't encourage devotion. At least, not enough for Ryoma to surrender his slumber.
School was inevitably a problem.
Routine dictated that two alarms should be set: the first a fist-sized, durable, black box with space on a red tinted screen for the bare bones of a 24-hour digital clock to sit, which would always be set to an hour before the first school bell rang, the second was nicer, a birthday gift form an aunt who only knew him well enough to know he owned a cat. It would be set for the amount of minutes necessary to rush through his morning routine and be seated at his desk before the teacher arrived. For Seigaku, Ryoma didn't think it would take very long at all.
Still, today called for the utmost vigilance to implement his plan, and the sacrifice of sleep was only a necessity to achieve the watchfulness he craved.
Ryoma woke with the drone of the first alarm and stumbled through his normal morning habits. It took, in total, five minutes to achieve the basics of the school standard, and another two to make himself presentable. Karupin blinked balefully from the bed, offended to realize his usual source of warmth would be disappearing. All it took was an agitated flick of the tail, and Ryoma was dutifully across his room in an instant softly stroking underneath the pampered pet's chin. When the purring steadied and the insult was adequately repaid, the smells of breakfast began. Quickly, the freshman shouldered his bag and bade the cat goodbye.
Two places were set, at opposite sides, but no one was seated at the breakfast table. Nanako was busy humming softly in the kitchen as she tended to a stack of dirty plates, and although he couldn't see him from the doorway, Ryoma knew he was outside resting on the structure that contained the bell waiting for the time when it needed to be rung. No doubt with one of his perverted magazines in hand.
A glance down at the table left a look of disgust on the boy's face. American breakfast: all stodge and no substance. First pancakes; thick and hot, yet inexplicably, unexpectedly bouncy. A bottle of golden syrup lurked at one side, a bacon platter to the other. Ryoma balked at the meal, his stomach murmuring its disinterest. An orange found its way into his hand.
"Rinko-san left instructions for it to be eaten," Nanako smiled and brushed a stray piece of hair from his eyes in a motherly gesture that Ryoma couldn't recall his own mother ever performing. Her eye line held straight out, into the gardens and towards the backyard temple. "But I know uncle will eat it all, without your help. You should eat some more fruit anyway; the doctor said Vitamin C is good for bones. So oranges should be perfect, no?" She paused, a little shamefaced and her hand dropped from his temple. "The doctor also said you should be drinking more milk, Ryoma-san."
The doctor had indeed said something about milk being good for someone of his height. He'd even had the audacity to add that it would help Ryoma grow up big and strong.
Generally, Ryoma understood that it was a good idea not to take the guidance of a person that couldn't make it a few words before feeling the need to patronize you, but Ryoma felt he'd have to concede to the milk. Nanako would be put out for days, if she felt she'd been too pushy in getting what she'd wanted, or if he'd, however inadvertently, caused damage to himself because he hadn't listened. And after a few hasty dismissals here and a few stoppable accidents there, the boy had learned that a put out Nanako was not someone to be around. A shrug forced its way to his shoulders.
"Aa…" She turned away and folded her hands in front of her. Evidently, taking the words for consent.
"Stay right there, I'll only be gone a minute." True to her word, she wasn't more than 60 seconds gone when she returned, milk in hand. "It was the last of it," Nanako chuckled ruefully "I nearly had to rip the jug from uncle's hand this morning to make sure you got it. Sooner or later, I'm going to nail all the food to the floor, to make sure it doesn't disappear down his throat."
Ryoma looked up through bangs of black and green. "It's only milk." You don't need to do that for me, was left unsaid.
The sound of the temple's bell accompanied a sip of milk. Nanako slid the window open and thrust her head out. "Uncle, your breakfast's ready." A thump and a muffled yelp as Nanjiro fell from his podium, and a giggle escaped from his niece. Hiding a smirk behind the glass, Ryoma quickly downed the liquid and stuck the orange in his pocket. "You'd better eat that at school, Rinko-san will be angry if she finds out you haven't been eating your breakfast." The cousins faced each other across the room, and Ryoma shrugged again, then turned to leave. "Oh, I almost forgot, that boy's here, he's been waiting outside for the last 15 minutes." She paused questioningly, sparing another look out the window. "If you'd like, I'll ask Nanjiro-san to accompany you to school."
Ryoma rolled his eyes as he stepped into the hallway. His dignity had taken too many hits in the last couple of days to even consider being taken to school by his father. Especially if, and it was quite a high possibility, Nanjiro came to Seigaku adorned in the black robes he'd taken to wearing and started pretending to be someone else again. The last couple of times had been embarrassing enough; the pervert had established himself as a lingerie salesman. He had created a false placard that had hung on the door, and when female neighbors had passed, he had called and cajoled, offering free bra sizing services.
Ryoma opened the door and walked outside.
A gleaming smile, leaking bravado all over his front gate, greeted him as he stepped into the early morning sun. Had it not been for the nervous trembles trailing down the boy's arm, reducing into taps as fingers scrambled on rubber, Ryoma would have felt it his duty to lean over and cheerfully strangle the boy. Reluctant relief swept through him. For it would be hard, he supposed, to strangle someone successfully with a broken thumb. The junior, two polished pins on his collar declared him so, swung his foot over the crossbar of the bike, nudging the kickstand and bringing his foot down to join its match. Jittery fingers made to wipe at his forehead but stopped halfway. Instead, he ducked his head into a bow; his body moments behind. The smile stayed firmly in place.
"My name is Takeshi Momoshiro, I'm really sorry I hurt you yesterday." His shoulders clenched and tightened, the violet colored eyes flickered upwards. "Please let me make this up to you." Sincerity flowed from his words, and his eyes pled forgiveness.
Forgiveness was not an art of Ryoma's, despite his remarkable aptitude for causing offense. Reluctant apologies were usually sent his way, if any were sent at all. No one had thought him blameless for far too long of a time. Ryoma favored the other boy – Momoshiro-sempai –with a nod and a slight shrug, shifting his backpack into a more comfortable position. The smile on the other's face dimmed slightly, but a nod was returned and the junior returned to his original position astride the bicycle. Glad that the apology was over, Echizen pushed past the older boy and began making his way towards the school. The sound of bike wheels followed. Ryoma stopped, the bike stopped. Ryoma started, his sempai pressed forward on the peddles. Ryoma turned around, eyes flashing,
"What do you want, Sempai?"
"Call me Momo-chan," The words slipped past his lips, no doubt a practiced line that fell in with generally cheerful attitude. 'Momo-chan' blushed and he rubbed the back of his neck hesitantly. "I mean I wanted to make it up to you, like I said." Ryoma nodded, he had understood the apology; it hadn't been terribly difficult to understand. Karupin would probably have understood the apology; it was pretty simple after all. "I just… do you need a ride to school?" His arm was still held behind his head, awkwardly suspended, and his eyes traveled down the freshman's right arm. "You can ride on the back, if you'd like."
Brick red plaster wrapped the appendage from mid forearm to just under the knuckle of his little finger. Ryoma followed the gaze, and smirked. "It seems safer than walking." When you're on the road. Momo pulled the bike forward and offered a hand to help the smaller boy up. He was treated to another glare and a muttered "Che," as the boy shrugged off his help and unhurriedly made his way onto the bars. One hand clutched his uniform, wrinkling it within a firm hold. For a moment, he considered requesting it be lessened, and then the other arm came down. The words dried before they could reach his lips.
Guilt weighed stronger than he'd remembered. Maybe it would stop the bicycle moving altogether.
Cycling had always been Takeshi's favorite way of getting to school, even before he'd learned to ride without safety wheels, even when his mother had sternly forbidden it. Every part of the ritual of bicycling was sacred; it was the echoes of freedom before the drudgery of school. The wind would whip past his face, brushing of the remnants of sleep as he sped by, and the colors of the houses and shrubbery would bleed together, swirling into nothing as they rounded the corners of consciousness. And when the Seigaku blazer was undone, flapping wildly behind, Momoshiro had dreams of superheroes and flight. The weight would fall from his shoulders, his hands would uncurl, releasing the handlebars, and his eyes would drift. Not really closed but not really seeing, and the world could never feel so calm. Until the wheels twisted and the course abruptly veered, then eyes would fly open, the hands would grip once more, and the path would be righted.
Superheroes didn't crash; but Momo sometimes did.
Sometimes into bushes and shrubs, sometimes into trees, occasionally a car would get scratched. Yesterday, he'd crashed into Echizen Ryoma.
"Aren't we going to move sempai?"
"Oh…" Takeshi stared dumbly down at his foot, it hadn't moved. A nervous chuckle left his throat. "Sorry."
And then, they were off, slowly, entertaining no ideas of flight.
English lessons were not the same. Workbooks were filled with words and grammar he'd grown up being aware of. A seminar in condensed English: stripped to its bare parts and butchered by a class of preteens. Ryoma didn't consider himself to be sympathetic to teachers, mainly because their general assumption of unwavering respect reminded him far too much of 'the Samurai' of the tennis courts. But for an hour a day, when letters and syntax ran amok in room 1-2, he understood their troubles.
Helping solve them however, was completely out of his league. Instead, he'd put his head down and endeavored to sleep away the responsibility. Less than ten minutes had passed when he'd felt the first poke in his back. Ryoma gave no response, bar moving a little closer to the desk and curling a tiny bit more in on himself. It took less than ten seconds for the assailant to work up the courage to poke him again. Echizen snatched the hand as it retreated.
"What?" It came out as harsh as he'd intended. The caught boy gulped.
Dark hair lowered to hide dark eyes. "I didn't mean to startle you, I just… well, I wanted to ask you a question." He paused, averting the veiled eyes to his desktop as if it were the most interesting thing in the world, more interesting than Ryoma at least. "If that's alright with you, I mean."
"Yes?"
"Oh," Another pause. Ryoma let the boy's hand go, and it dropped limply to the desk, the fingers twitching a little as they hit the wood. "It's just yesterday, when you weren't here, not that that was your fault, and I didn't mean to imply that it was your fault in case you thought I did mean to imply that it was, which it wasn't. Yesterday, Horio-kun," He nodded his head towards a brunette classmate with an unfortunate looking monobrow, who was frowning in confusion at the board, "told the class that a sempai from the tennis club broke your arm." The fallen hand clenched, and the boy seemed to gather his courage as his eyes met Ryoma's. "Well?"
Ryoma stared back until the boy blinked and looked a little to the left, a flush creeping onto his cheeks. "What?"
"Did he?" Anticipation dripped from the words, and the freshman leaned forward. "Did the sempai from the tennis club break your arm?"
A shrug was given. "Don't know."
"But, Horio-kun said…" The smaller boy stopped, and gave a wary look towards the brunette, who was too wrapped up in chewing off the eraser of his pencil to notice a pair of eyes leveled at his desk. A notable absence of work lay apparent on his worksheet, and the frown from earlier was more prominent than before. "How did you break your arm then?"
Ryoma turned back to his own table and buried his head indifferently in the crook of his arm. "I didn't."
"But it's in a cast."
An eyebrow raised, and a golden eye half followed it. "Yes."
The dark-haired boy stared at him incredulously, his mouth dumbly half-open and his eyebrows hidden underneath his shock of bangs. It seemed for a moment that he was about to begin his questioning again, but then his mouth shut abruptly. Ryoma gave a little smirk to the table as he settled back down to sleep. Finally, he could catch up on the sleep that he had abandoned in sake of escaping the demented junior who had run him over the previous day, a plan which had the audacity to fall flat, which was horribly annoying. And it was annoying, not only because he had lost sleep, but because it had appeared for a moment that his plan had been worked out by a junior, who for all his years, had not been able to figure out how to ride a bicycle. Either that or the teen – Momo-sempai – had gotten so used to running over people he knew what the victim of such an act would do. Which just wasn't fair, he should at least give the person a chance at regaining their pride.
And he was a tennis player, quite possibly a regular at that. At least, that was what the jacket poking through theside had seemed to indicate.
It hadn't clicked yesterday, as he was lying on the ground, the wind knocked out of him, staring at his tennis bag a few feet away from the hand it was in an instant before, and then at the secondary tennis bag that joined it as the junior got down from his bike and flung his own bag to the side. But now, looking back on it, Ryoma could definitely identify the jacket as belonging to a regular.
For a brief moment, the freshman entertained the idea that the regular was deliberately out to get him. Almost immediately, the thought was discarded. It would have been silly for a tennis team, with the emphasis on team, to scrap potential players, especially at the start of the season. And from what the pervert had said, the coach wouldn't take kindly to sabotage of any kind.
Lunch had dawned unexpectedly, and Ryoma wasn't prepared for it. He had spent the last few lessons dozing quietly at the back of the class and hadn't so much as twitched when the bell had rung, encased as he was in his dreams. And he definitely wasn't prepared for the circle of arms.
"Echizen-kun!" Ryoma jerked, his head flying upwards, missing Momoshiro by inches. The junior smiled and reached out a hand to ruffle the sleepy boy's hair. Ryoma slapped it away. "I've come to take you to lunch."
A scowl decorated the freshman's face. "No"
The older boy laughed. "You can't really intend to sleep lunch away; it's the most important meal of the day."
Someone in the class snorted. "Doctors say breakfast is the most important meal of the day."
Momoshiro waved an arm in the speaker's direction. "Every meal is the most important." He spoke to the air in the classroom. "Anyway," His attention suddenly switched back to Ryoma, who had managed to curl back up on the desk with the diversion. "I promised all my Sempai that you'd get to meet them today."
"Not happening."
"You're so stubborn," A roll of the eyes and a tiny shake of the head were used to punctuate the statement. "You know someone's gonna mistake that for arrogance one of these days." He sighed, long and drawn out, as if all the troubles in the world had fallen onto his shoulders, and all of a sudden, it had made him very, very wise. Ryoma felt the undeniable urge to strangle him again. "Tell you what, I'll keep you company in here instead then." Momo smiled, uncaring or unaware of the fleeting thought in the freshman's mind, pulling out a couple of shrink-wrapped sweet buns. Happily, he set about eating.
Ryoma didn't spare another look to the taller teen, as he turned back around and began to doze again.
Silence reigned for a moment, as the rest of the class slowly processed the conversation. And then Horio came back from the restroom, and the silence fell. "Ahh? It's the sempai that broke Echizen's arm!" He shot a smug look to a group of pre-teens that were lurking at the door to the classroom and continued in an attempt at a whisper. "I told you he'd be back!"
The dark haired boy that had sat behind Ryoma for all of his lessons shook his head. "That sempai didn't break Echizen-kun's arm," He looked towards the dozing boy. "Echizen said he didn't, after all."
"I saw it happen!" Horio all but screeched. "With my own two eyes!" He gestured wildly towards his face, in case anyone had any doubts as to where his eyes were located.
The junior turned to the hoard of children. "When did he tell you that?" His question directed at the smaller boy.
"Well, he didn't say that exactly…umm?"
"Call me Momo-chan, any friend of Echizen is a friend of mine."
The boy looked down a slight tinge of pink coloring his cheeks. "We're not really that close, I just sit behind him." It was mumbled, but Momoshiro smiled sympathetically.
"He's quite antisocial, isn't he?" The teen leaned over, gave the boy in question a playful shove, and waved the remaining half of his snack to the class, the same air of false wisdom settling once again on the boy. "If you get more than two words from him, count yourself a friend." Smiling as the boy didn't even move to right himself in his sleep. "So, what did he tell you?"
"He said he didn't know who it was who broke his arm, and he obviously knows you, Momo-chan-sempai."
"But I did break his arm." A frown flickered across the sempai's face. "Oi, Echizen, why did you tell him that I didn't break your arm?" Another frown. "Because I thought I had."
The golden-eyed boy grunted. "I didn't tell him, and you didn't break my arm, you broke my thumb." He stretched languidly, his cast clunking as it slid from the desk. Ryoma grabbed his bag as he stood. "Mada mada dane, Momo-sempai."
Momoshiro scrambled to his feet as well and thrust his remaining food into his pockets. "Echizen, give me a little warning, where are we going?"
Ryoma shot a look at the teen, as he neared the door. "I am going to the roof." He shrugged dismissively. "You're too noisy." His left hand lazily rubbed the sleep from his eyes as he took the steps to exit the classroom. It was really unfortunate that there were so few places to comfortably sleep in school, and it was even more unfortunate that he had to share that space with the horribly disruptive Horio-kun, not to mention that Momo-sempai had managed to track him down. Perhaps, that was the most unfortunate of all. The roof seemed like a good idea, and maybe, he could even lock the door from the outside. Regardless of the health and safety conflicts that the school would probably have problems with.
He was so caught up in entertaining ideas of escaping the over-zealous sempai that he almost missed the two arms wrapping around his neck and chest, and the chin settling on top of his hair. Almost.
"You didn't tell us that he was cute Momo-chan!" The arms tightened as the cheery voice washed over Ryoma, and the freshman froze. "Nya, come look how cute he is Fujiko!"
It was tempting to struggle out of the hold, if only to implement his plan of losing Momoshiro, but Ryoma very quickly realized there was no point. The arms, while not outrageously muscled, held him tightly, and the grip spoke of years of practice; both at hugging – strangling – and a sport of some kind. Maybe tennis. Besides Momo-sempai, while a weird pseudo-stalker seemed to have an excessive tendency towards guilt, would probably step in to stop any harm that could come to him.
A feminine chuckle escaped from further down the hallway, and although Ryoma knew it wasn't his savior in the form of a spiky haired junior, he half turned prepared to witness his rescue. Instead, a slim, light-haired brunette smiled at him.
"Saa, definitely adorable." The fair-haired boy titled his head slightly. "But it seems like you're choking him Eiji." Ryoma felt his attacker shake his head, and the arms tightened even further.
"But he's so cute, and look Fujiko," Eiji swiveled, and Ryoma placidly swiveled too. "He's not even struggling, nya! Not." He swiveled to the right. "One." Swivel to the left. "Bit!" Back to the right. Ryoma's right eye developed a tic.
Momo sniggered, possibly at the situation, possibly at the indignant expression that Ryoma just knew had to be on his captor's face, possibly at the thought of what he was about to say.
"Hey, Echizen it looks like you'll be eating with us after all!"
Re-post of my previous story in an attempt to rekindle a desire to write. Sorry for nothing new