Author's Note: This is my first ever PoT fic, people, so do try to be kind. The story is set shortly after the events in Episode 36 of the anime, and we're basically pretending that Yuuta has returned to St. Rudolph after having given in to his older brother's alluring promises of pumpkin curry and raspberry pies. It's written exclusively from Yuuta's point of view, so you'll find it completely and unashamedly biased. Anyway, please forgive any and all OCCness, and I wish you an enjoyable read! (^.^)/

Disclaimer: I don't own The Prince of Tennis, nor do I claim any ownership of the Nike brand and its famous slogan.


Josephine

#

Fuji Yuuta slowly unlocked the door to his dorm room (home, sweet home. not) and automatically reached for the light switch he knew was located directly in line with his right elbow. Then, once the ugly lamp above his head finally flickered to life, the youngest of the Fuji Trio let out a heavy sigh at the sorry sight that unwittingly etched itself onto his poor cornea… and he suddenly felt utterly compelled to turn off the light, slowly back out of the room, call Nee-chan and simply return to the place from where he had just come.

Of course, he didn't do any of those things. He couldn't. Mainly because he was fully aware of the fact that going back also meant going home – to his real home with his real room and his real bed and real food, but which unfortunately also happened to be Aniki's permanent place of residence.

…aniki no baka!

There weren't enough raspberry pies in all of Japan to persuade Yuuta to go back home, when only spending a weekend under the same roof as that unchanging, impenetrable smile had been scary enough; especially after his team's chilling defeat to his school, which had looked very strong indeed. Aniki certainly hadn't exaggerated when he warned him about the newest addition to the Seigaku bunch: that super-rookie Echizen-something rivalled Aniki not only in skills but in smugness, too! But more importantly, the prodigy newcomer had been the one to end Yuuta's streak.

Now, Yuuta wasn't the type to blow his own trumpet, but even he had to admit that it had been a rather good streak: sixteen consecutive scalps was nothing to be ashamed to. Even compared to Aniki's unbeaten record, it wasn't all too shabby, really. So everything had been fun and games and victory, until Echizen and his annoying ambidexterity just had to come along and ruin it.

Yuuta twitched. Even as he was standing there in his own doorway, contemplating his chances of somehow escaping the tiny room in front of him and despite the fact that it had been a very good match, the memories of his defeat to the first-year from Seigaku still stung, dammit!

The twitch was followed by a deep sigh when he conceded a second defeat, concluding that unless he wanted to room with Mizuki-san (who was bound to be in a perfectly pesky mood after losing) for the night, or Yanagisawa (who had taken a strange liking to calling him 'otouto', which was beyond annoying), there would be no avoiding sleeping in his own overcrowded room. So he took a brave step forward, only narrowing avoiding stumbling over a heap of old tennis shoes, and shut the door behind him.

Oh well.

Since neither going home nor temporarily bunking up with somebody less messy was going to happen, he would just have to find a way to safely reclaim the room littered with power wrists and ankle straps, textbooks, odd socks, scrap pieces of paper, old tennis magazines, random packets of gum, laundry, the dumbbell set he got for Christmas, a couple of towels that may or may not have been clean, colourful candy bar wrappers, CDs, pens, a few sweaters, empty water bottles, stray tennis balls, paperclips, and so on.

In the midst of the chaos that swallowed his cubbyhole of a dorm room whole, Yuuta thought that he could distinguish a tennis racquet (in all likelihood it was the lost, broken spare he had meant to take to the shop to be restrung as soon as he found it again) from the general mess over by the foot of his unmade bed, and the discovery spread a faint glow of rose-tinted light over the devastation by his feet. That particular racquet had actually been giving him a bit of a headache lately, because even after scouring both the clubhouse and his room (or so he had thought), it had remained mysteriously absent. But upon failing to locate and retrieve his lost possession, Yuuta had taken the only reasonable course of action available to him at the time: he had given up the search and eventually forgotten about it altogether.

What with the timing of the disappearance being what it was, it was not only natural but also completely understandable. After all, the long-anticipated Tokyo Prefectural Tournament had been looming ever closer then, and all of his time and effort had been poured into intensive training in preparation for an eventual St. Rudolph-Seigaku showdown on the courts. And compared to the possibility of facing (and finally defeating!) his annoying tensai of a brother at his own game, a few broken strings were totally trivial and well-worth the sacrifice.

As it turned out, however, he hadn't been able to play against Aniki in an official match this time around, so it seemed only fair that he should be compensated by the magical reappearance of his vanished tennis racquet.

After a series of rather impressive acrobatic feats (enough to make Aniki's friend Kikumaru Eiji-san cry with envy), he was able to get himself and his weekend bag over to his bed.

...well, there was no way that he would do that again, so Yuuta decided that he might as well dig up his sleeping attire (consisting of a rather unattractive pair of shorts and an old Nike T-shirt with its customary 'Just Do It' printed across the front in bold letters) from the dark depths of his bag, go to sleep and hope the mess around him would somehow tidy itself up during the night.

Yes. That was a good plan, he thought happily to himself. Good plan.

And it was a decidedly good plan, until Yuuta made the fatal mistake of unzipping his bag and absentmindedly rummaging through it without looking.

Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain coming from the index finger of his right hand and he withdrew it so quickly that the momentum caused him to jerk back a lot further than he had planned for.

Gravity did the rest.

THUD

Now, that would have been (relatively) good and well, and not at all overly dramatic, hadn't it been for the fact that he landed on his geometry textbook, which was stacked on top of his history book, which in turn had been balancing on a hole-puncher prior to the fall.

And for what happened next… well. To make a rather painful story short, Yuuta let some pretty unsavoury language escape from his seemingly perpetually downturned lips, and the furrows on his forehead deepened to a point where he could feel his skin tighten around his temples.

Then swearing once more for good measure, he picked himself up from the floor, dusting off his battered backside while glaring daggers at the offending pile of books, careful not to injure himself any further. It wouldn't do if his carelessness led to a dip in his performance. Not only would Mizuki-san be seriously ticked off, but it would be ultimate proof that he was losing what little ground he had worked so hard to gain in his pursuit of Aniki and his footsteps, which were always echoing faintly ahead of him…

But he had to put that to the side for the moment, because he couldn't allow himself to be distracted from the matter at hand. He could not forget what had caused him to fall off the bed in the first place.

Sitting down on the bed again, Yuuta eyed his bag with utmost suspicion:

There was something in that bag… something bad.

Being Aniki's little brother, he immediately recognized the feeling of dread originating from his stomach area, and all of his finely-tuned senses screamed at him that whatever this 'something' was, it had to be Aniki's doing. Yes. There was no question about it, and yet it didn't make any sense.

Why on earth would Aniki put something sharp in his bag?

He was well aware of his genius brother's unusual playfulness and creepy partiality towards the inducement of suffering upon others, but Yuuta had always clung to the childish notion that his older sibling would never actually turn against one of his own. After all, even after his refusal to join the Seigaku tennis club, his befriending of Mizuki-san, his transfer to St. Rudolph and subsequent decision to leave home to be a full-time dormer, they were still family! Surely, that mattered even to Aniki, right?

Right?

But the more Yuuta thought about it, the less certain he felt. Aniki had looked unusually determined in his match against Mizuki-san, hadn't he? A bit angry, even? But then he had been just as unusually cheerful once the match was over. Maybe—

Oh dammit! He didn't know. He had no clue whatsoever. Aniki was beyond unpredictable, and whatever was going on here, it was utterly bizarre… and just a little bit frightening.

Still, being a brave and rather impatient boy, Yuuta thought that he should just grab the bull by its horns and get it over and done with. Of course, that was not to say that he would confront whatever the mysterious horrors Aniki had in store for him, completely unarmed: Yuuta was no genius, but he certainly wasn't stupid and he wanted to live if only so that he could finally crush Aniki on a tennis court. So he bent down to pick up his weapon of choice from the floor by his feet – the broken tennis racquet, since it happened to be closest – and after inspecting its busted strings with a critical eye, he decided that it was far from perfect but that it would have to do.

Next, confidently gripping the tennis racquet in his left hand, his right slowly reaching out to snatch open and then emptying out the contents of his bag onto his bed in one smooth, sweeping motion.

To be honest, Yuuta hadn't given much thought to what he might actually find in that bag, but even his absolutely wildest imagination – really, nothing! – could not have prepared him for what met his terrified eyes.

"What the—" he started after a moment of complete and utter stupefied silence, during which he had lessened his frantic grip around the tennis racquet that promptly fell back to the floor. "That… a cactus?!"

Why, yes. It was a cactus indeed.

There, in the midst of various pieces of clothing, toiletries and plenty of displaced soil, there was a medium-sized potted cactus staring back at him accusingly in its full, prickly glory. And next to it was a piece of paper, and once he had recovered enough of his wits to pick it up, Yuuta recognized the handwriting at an instant.

"Best of luck for the consolation matches…" he read out loud. N-No way. Aniki hadn't actually— "Do your best, Yuuta! I know you can do it!" he continued in total disbelief, before reaching the postscript. "P.S. Please take good care of Josephine. She's very particular about her feeding schedule, so I would recommend watering her three times per week."

…just what the HELL was all this?

And why on earth would a cactus, which was a native to the desert, need so much damn water?

He skimmed through the short message again, even flipping over the paper to scan the back for more clues but finding none, before he dared to shift back his attention to the plant in question.

Yuuta stared at the green, spiky thing, which seemed to snuggle into his sheet, in thoughtful silence, while desperately trying to fathom the situation.

'Josephine', was it? Right.

He had always suspected as much, but now it was definitely official:

Crazy.

Aniki had finally cracked for some reason and gone all-out, flipping-mad crazy.

There really was no other reason for this weird development, unless…

Wait. A sudden, unbidden thought hit him with the speed of Hyoutei's ace-server and it almost knocked the metaphorical wind out of him. Aniki knew that something strange like this was likely to really freak him out, didn't he? So why would—

Ah.

#

A lone, anguished roar ripped through the quiet hallway of the third floor of St. Rudolph Gakuin's second dormitory,

"BAKA-BAKA-BAKA-BAKA-BAKA-BAKA NO ANIKI!"

"Ehhh? Sounds like Yuuta's back, dane…" said the boy occupying the room next over to no-one in particular, before he put his yellow headphones back in his ears and turned his attention back to the book in front of him. "I wonder if he had a good weekend, dane?"


End note: Yuuta is being just a tad paranoid and believes that his older brother planted the cactus (sorry, Josephine) in his bag as a joke, knowing full well that it would scare the living daylights out of him, when it's actually rather innocent. In fact, Fuji Syusuke just wanted to wish his adorable little brother the best with an admittedly unusual good-luck charm, a potted cactus.