Summary: The day Touya Akira plays Shindou Hikaru for the first time, his opponent is a smiling boy without a ghost in his shadow. From there, a fragile rivalry begins, but what happens when fate meets Hikaru overseas? AU, chocking full of spoilers.
Note & Disclaimer: Hikaru no Go is most certainly not mine. Please redirect all hearts and Sai-related grievances that way. swooping hand gesture
Aaaaand here we go! I warn you, I'm not very good at long-term fanfiction that requires commitment and lots and lots of willpower, so bear with me here. Feedback and concrit are oxygen at this point, but hey, you already knew that. Also, here's a resounding thanks to my beta, Sze Lok, who hasn't faced any frustration just yet but will be hating me once this is finished and all is said and done.
For everyone else, enjoy!
TENGEN SEASONS
Rasielle
-I. The Shuusaku Calligraphy Expert
"My name is Touya Akira," said the boy hesitantly. He had a page-boy haircut and Hikaru could not tell if what he wore was still part of his school uniform, but he also had clever hands and an earnest smile. It disappeared when, later, Hikaru informed him that no, he did not play Go, but did Akira-san ever try playing sports with those hands?
"Go is the only sport," he replied politely. "Aside from that, no."
It was the standard summer afternoon, free of school and obligation. Hikaru could have spent this particular one, as he did for every other, punished in some way for the rummaging and scavenging his grandfather had caught him at in the family shed. But something had fallen into place as Hikaru's grandfather spied on the boy and caught him grumbling about homework and a too-low allowance.
What a kid, the old man had thought exasperatedly before the whim to improve him struck, to broaden his horizons and give him some kind of center, or just redirect that effort he put into draining his parents' money. At Shindou's age and with his rickety lifestyle, there was only one hobby he could think worth passing down.
And that was a few days and a week ago. Presently, the Dorky Haired Boy in Uniform, as Hikaru privately called him, was playing Hikaru's grandfather, and to his disbelief, it was not Dorky Haired Boy who was scratching his head in confusion.
"That's no fun," Hikaru chimed, already getting bored. With as little of the game as he understood so far, he seldom forgot that he was here for the promise of a raised allowance. So far, he had watched countless games, fidgeted, and learned only the very basics from his grandfather in between tutors. "Soccer's better. I wouldn't be here if Oji-san weren't paying me, you know-"
Noisily, black stones tumbled from the go-ke and broke wildly into the game's elegant patterns of black and white. Hikaru, who had leaned forward too far, stepped back hurriedly and rushed to gather them, feeling bizarrely unnerved by the jumble of Go stones, as he would by an unintelligible jumble of words.
"You idiot!" exploded a vicious, almost unrecognizable voice, with not a trace of its usual winter calm. For a second, Hikaru, without looking up, wondered if it had come from someone else.
Hikaru's grandfather eyed Touya askance, startled by such a noise from such a well-bred boy. "Hikaru, leave it alone. Touya-sensei can fix it-"
But Hikaru ignored them both and cleared the mess on the goban, parting it easily with a wide, tan, confident pair of hands. Touya and Hikaru's grandfather fell silent as they watched him take the white and black stones and move them fluidly, replace them perfectly, in perfect order, down to the very last move: a black stone that would fortify black's position, in a place nearly suffocated by the complex fight that coiled around it. He placed stones like a beginner.
In no time, Hikaru finished with a small smile and jumped to his feet, his bleach fringe bouncing and catching the light like the edges of a small, round-cheeked sun. He looked up eagerly into Touya's shocked expression, feeling strange.
The boy's face was blank. Many years later, out of nowhere, Hikaru would recall the look that had rested in Touya's eyes, the dullness and the depth. He would never understand it, but it would reappear in the future, again and again, as their lives changed.
Suddenly, it occurred to him that he might one day want to play the Dorky Haired Boy in Uniform, to match the passion in his eyes, if someone would teach him. "By the way, I am not 'you idiot!'" he declared into the hush around the goban, as boldly as ever. "My name is Shindou Hikaru."
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The man made a sterling point when he insisted that the goban would do more for the Go world than for any of the Shindou's. Even as Hikaru's grandfather, bemused and bewildered, watched the expert circle the goban like a hawk, he could not deny that it was something his family possessed without using, that it did nothing more than take up space. Not that he had been particularly attached to the goban itself; it was worn, layered with dust, and supposedly haunted, inhabiting the shed like a soundless, slumbering animal. He might've been its technical owner, of course, but he had never felt the goban was his.
At the same time, it was a keepsake, a concrete form of his brother's curious and long-dead nature. Despite his wife's good-humored suggestions, he had never chosen to sell it.
Besides, if a set of hands he loved ever reached for it, he would not hesitate to pass it on.
But Hikaru's grandfather stood in silence and felt older than he ever had as he watched the invader preparing to take it from him. He didn't come up into his shed often, seeing the dust-coated walls and and feeling acutely the sensation of frozen time coming at him from all corners. Supposedly there had been a ghost sighted in the past, specifically around the goban; but to him, everything looked lonely, ordinary.
"Haven't you asked yourself where it came from, Shindou-san?" asked the expert wonderingly, putting out a hand to skim its surface. He swept it reverently across, watching the gray film of dust disappear into brown kaya wood. Not only was it intact, he was pleased to see, but also stainless from edge to edge.
"I can tell you where it came from," he replied flatly, "if that's what you're asking. I already mentioned the pawn shop-"
"Yes, you did, but I meant before that," blurted the expert, his awed expression vanishing. He was a tall, skinny rake of a man; when he twitched suddenly and began to turn the goban with overeager hands, Hikaru's grandfather could see his arms trembling like tree branches in a thunderstorm. The veins on his hands stood out as he tilted the goban back and shoved its bottom in Shindou's face.
"Read that again," he ordered impatiently, his knuckles turning white. Hikaru's grandfather squinted and tried to find something spectacular, but the artifact was only old and the bottom face shriveled, dry, and plain except for a few elegant characters written in the very middle. Their shade of black, strangely, did not seem as faded as the rest of the goban.
"It's the name I mentioned in the store," mused Hikaru's grandfather reasonably. It didn't hold a whit of meaning for him. "I don't know who he is, tho-"
"Torajirou," breathed the calligraphy expert. "Honinbou Shuusaku. That was his childhood name, and this," he added, setting the board upright like it was a holy thing, "was his goban."
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Hikaru's grandfather had mixed feelings about selling a family curiosity in exchange for the price of an invaluable Go relic. In the end, he accepted a reduced amount from the Shuusaku calligraphy expert's sponsor - a Go museum in Beijing, China, with owners who leaped at the mention of the almost mythological Go player.
After he parted with it, he visited his shed once more, as if to protect the rest of his family's keepsakes by standing as a stone guardian might. The name of all names - not merely Shuusaku's name, but that of his childhood, a mystery most rare and overlooked - still failed to register completely, but he was aware that this past owner of the goban was now, as far as the world was concerned, the only owner. As far as the world was concerned, his brother had never had a goban, and certainly not Shuusaku's; and as far as the world was concerned, it was better off behind glass and underneath pamphlets than beneath a pair of fighter's hands.
"What is the honor in keeping a goban that you would never use?" the Shuusaku calligraphy expert had asked. There was none if his description rang true: a goban that should never die, having lived and thrived beneath the Go world's most legendary pair of hands.
Unfortunately, it would never live under another.
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