Disclaimer: Prince of Tennis is Konomi Takeshi's. If it's mine, may lightning hit my brother –shot-
Niou Masaharu disappeared on December sixteenth, on a cold and windy night. The few stars that braved the Tokyo lights had glittered coldly in the winter sky. They were the only witness to what had happened.
The next day, the news was out: Niou Masaharu had been abducted.
It was the only explanation that made enough sense. Because he's not the type to run away, his family said. He wouldn't, his friends added; and they were all shocked when Yagyuu Hiroshi was deemed responsible for his disappearance.
They should have seen it coming.
--
"Stupid," Niou snorted. "Like a fourteen-year-old could actually abduct another fourteen-year-old."
"Not if he went willingly with the fourteen-year-old," Yagyuu said, bluntly.
"Touché." The silver-haired teen lazily flicked the newspaper away from him; it hit the ground and skidded to a corner before stopping.
Yagyuu wisely chose not to say another word, instead going back to the book he had brought. Niou only reclined back on the couch, with all the coolness in the world. Silence encroached their settings and settled there.
--
"Why'd they think it was you, anyway?"
A stiff shrug.
"Oi."
"I suspect because we're…" He stopped; the word in his head could not transfer to his tongue; it seemed too sentimental to say, too awkward. He wanted to choke it out, noticing that the silence following his halt was dragging on much too far; his mind immediately went into a frenzy of thought, of words. He struggled to speak at the same time—a wonder he was not eliciting a muffled line of "er"'s and "um"'s.
Niou stared at him from sharp eyes, an eyebrow quizzically raised at the slightest. Yagyuu managed to note, through the hurricane of thought, that such patience was unusual for him. Perhaps confinement in this small, abandoned apartment had somehow hammered softness into him. It was a marvel, how the boy did not even make a snarky comment.
Doubles partners, doubles partners…
"We're doubles partners," he said, inwardly flinching at the somewhat hasty tone in his voice.
A quirk of the eyebrows was all the answer he was given.
It satisfied him.
--
Yagyuu visited Niou less and less often. The police were still onto him.
Yagyuu wanted very much to tell them to leave him alone—that Niou wanted the chance of freedom, and the faking of his abduction was supposed to be a bid for time until—
--
"You're my best friend," Niou said, and snorted in derision to his own comment. He never told Yagyuu the real reason he wanted him to help him run away from home—to disappear.
--
"I suppose I should've told you this earlier," Yagyuu said, almost slowly.
Niou threw him a look to show that he was listening. His legs were crossed over as he sat on the shabby, beaten couch; the newspaper, with its composure of recycled gray paper, was resting lazily on his lap. He reclined slightly.
Yagyuu took a moment further to wait before speaking, only hoping his voice was flat as it always was. "I still don't know," he said, calmly, "why you ran away. I still don't understand."
Niou stared at him for a moment. Two moments. Three. Then, softly, "I wanted to escape." With a shrug, he went back to the thin text.
--
Yagyuu should've known. Yagyuu should've told.
--
The next day, Niou Masaharu was found dead, an arm cleaved in two—his left. The body was not hard to identify; he was almost a living cadaver, and fresh from life. He had bled to death, the scientists declared. And it seemed to have been his own work. The corpse was in a tree, sitting there and dripping blood.
The sky was ironically beautiful, as if glorifying a painful death by his own hand; the timeless blue and the streaks of ever-changing white—and the sun beamed with twisted happiness; it was the opposite of the uncaring night Niou Masaharu left for a life entrusted to his other half.
Yagyuu Hiroshi, when he was brought in to see the dead body, slumped over as if crying in agony; murmuring, "I still don't understand..."
And then the heart slid from the broken left shoulder, looked alive and well and silky; slid into his clutching hands, and he squeezed, murmuring, "I should've told you..."
Someone watching screamed.
Niou had, quite literally, given Yagyuu Hiroshi his heart. If only he had accepted it earlier.
--
PT: ...-ponders- Eh...I'm a little more than half-satisfied than this. And if you complain about the length without a good reason...