My first Prince of Tennis fan fic! Hooray! I guess I should add in a note thanking Ryan and Ashley from my History class for pre-reading this.
The Eyes of the Monster
By Sour Schuyler
A/N: For reference, "Mada mada da ne" means "You have a lot to learn"
Why?
"Maybe his eyes are horribly disfigured," Horio suggested. He waggled his fingers in a creepy manner to accentuate the point that the subject of their conversation could be a hideous monster. Thunder rumbled in the dark sky outside, and Kachirou, seated adjacent to Horio, shivered in the chill cafeteria air.
Across from his friend Katsuo, Ryoma Echizen was turned around in his seat, lazily gazing out the windows and taking in the dreary, wet scenery. His hat shielded his visage. As lightning struck and Kachirou squealed, he gave the group a cursory glance. "You can't play tennis with horribly disfigured eyes," he corrected smoothly, before turning his head to once again regard the outside world.
"That's right," Katsuo agreed. "He couldn't have disfigured eyes. He couldn't be a regular if he had them."
"I didn't say his vision was impaired," Horio decried in Katsuo's ear, "just that his eyes could be messed up in some way. That's why he always wears glasses, to cover them. He's hiding his monstrousness from everyone." Horio grinned eerily. "He's really a monster, and when nightfall comes he devours—"
"FRESHMEN!" Kachirou eeped and looked directly up, only to find the dominating face of his upperclassman, who looked about ready to bite the head off a puppy. Luckily, Kaidoh Kaoru's attention was focused more on Horio.
"Don't speak badly about your superiors!" he snapped, leaving Horio shaking in his shoes. Then the sophomore stalked off with his lunch tray.
"I guess he figured out who we were talking about," Katsuo gulped.
"K-Kaidoh's the real monster," Kachirou whined. Ryoma smiled.
Kaidoh's gaze snapped over his shoulder, directed at Kachirou from across the refectory. "Fushuu," he hissed, just as lightning struck outside. This induced an interesting-sounding "MEEP" from frightened freshman Kachirou.
The second that Kaidoh was out of earshot, Horio was shooting off his mouth again. "Of course he defends his favorite upperclassman. Kaidoh is the one who should be wearing glasses," he criticized. "His eyes are too scary."
"Hmmmm." This noise was emitted by Ryoma as his body slumped over the cafeteria table. He cradled his chin boredly in his hand, his eyes now fixed firmly on the hallway leading to the classrooms instead of the rain he'd been watching earlier.
"Do you think he's in the science lab now, Ryoma?" Kachirou asked.
"I don't care."
"Then why are you looking down the hallway?"
"I don't want Tomoka to sneak up on me," Ryoma declared. Thunder rippled, sounding as if the sky was cracking open in response to what Ryoma's statement.
"You know, the person we were just talking about is really good at sneaking up on people too," Kachirou offered.
"That's true," Ryoma murmured. He reached into a greasy basket sitting on their lunch table, pulled out a chicken finger, and pulled it in front of his face.
"It's his glasses," Horio insisted. "They've got highly sensitive equipment installed in them so that he can judge when the best time is to catch people off guard!"
"So he's some sort of secret agent?" Katsuo summed up. "I guess I can see him taking down information on rival spies." Ryoma grinned.
Kachirou nodded in agreement. "He'd be very good at it," he opined.
"Or maybe his glasses are there to hide the fact that he's an alien from another planet!" Horio decided wildly. "A planet where everyone has neon glowing eyes…" This idea was accompanied by the sound of rain hammering down on the cafeteria ceiling.
"We would see the glow," Katsuo rebuked him.
"Not if it was just a tiny glow! Have you seen Wesker from the Resident Evil video game series? He takes off his sunglasses and his eyes are a weird color, because he's been infected with a virus." Horio over-emphasized the word virus, whispering it loudly like it was a secret he wanted everybody to 'accidentally' overhear. "His sunglasses completely hide it."
"So you really think that he's a monster?" Ryoma queried with unconcealed amusement.
Katsuo shook his head. "He said a virus, Ryoma; that means he thinks our senpai is ill!"
"No, Echizen's right; in the video game, the virus makes it so Wesker isn't even really human anymore," Horio explained.
"Well, I think that everyone that goes to our school is human," Kachirou contested, fiddling with his white plastic fork before sinking into his baked potato.
"Kaidoh might not be able to take it if someone wasn't," Ryoma mused, smiling in remembrance of how Kaidoh had run away when he thought Horio's tennis racket was cursed.
The others looked stunned. "What makes you say that, Ryoma?" Katsuo wanted to know.
Kachirou shushed him. "We shouldn't be talk badly about our superiors, remember?" He glanced nervously around the room.
"Come on! Tell us!" Horio begged aggressively. The patter of raindrops on the roof subsided for a moment. A girl sitting at a neighboring table looked up in relief. But seconds later the rain was pounding on the roof harder than before, and a swirly wind kicked up, screaming against the windows and whistling around the school's edges.
"It's nothing," Ryoma said dismissively.
Horio raised his brow at the freshman regular and released a sigh that was both agitated and agitating. "You're so nonchalant!" he accused, as if nonchalant was a terrible thing to be. In any case, Ryoma didn't seem to care, as he took a large, noisy bite of his chicken finger. After releasing another agitating sound upon seeing Ryoma's persistent apathy, Horio decided to go back to what they had already been discussing.
"You've spent more time with him then we have, and he must've taken his glasses off in front of you before. Think back," Horio barked, "or else we'll resign ourselves to the fact that he's a monster or an alien."
"We never said we would," Kachirou interjected. Horio only looked a little abashed.
"With the stuff he drinks, one would think he could be an alien," Katsuo said sadly.
"That would make Fuji an alien, too, though," Kachirou pointed out.
"What about an illness?" Katsuo interpolated.
"What kind do you think he has?" Kachirou asked Katsuo.
Katsuo leaned forward, taking a deep breath. The strong wind, sounding like a wolf howling outside, died down to hear what he had to say.
"…A writing illness." Even Ryoma stared. "…What?"
"That's dumb!" Horio roared.
"As dumb as your idea that he has neon glowing eyes?" Kachirou inquired innocently. Horio growled, and Kachirou laughed until the loudest thunderclap yet sounded; it seemed to physically take a hold of the school and shake it.
"Kyeeee!" A shrill sound behind Ryoma nearly gave the four freshman boys heart attacks. Katsuo literally grabbed his chest. Kachirou took deep breaths to calm down. Ryoma's hat fell off.
Horio was the first to recover. "You!" he screeched, trying to sound intimidating like a lion, but coming off sounding like a cat being thrown against a fence. "Don't scare us like that!" he growled.
"You're just a 'fraidy cat," Tomoka Osakada shot back. "Ah! Ryoma! You're almost out of French fries! I'll go get you some more!"
The girl rushed off to the lunch lines before Ryoma could mention that he had had his fill and didn't want anymore. Horio, Kachirou, Katsuo and Ryoma still looked as if a whirlwind had struck.
"I thought you said you were going to keep an eye out for her," Kachirou complained to Ryoma. The freshman tennis regular had dropped his chicken finger on the floor, and was in the middle of reaching down for it so that he could toss it in the trash.
"I—"
"And Sakuno," Katsuo wondered, "where is she? Usually the two of them are together."
"Echizen," Horio said slyly, "you only told Kachirou you were hoping that Osakada wouldn't sneak up on you. You didn't say anything about Sakuno, did you? Eh? Eh?" His unibrow rolled suggestively.
"I don't remember," Ryoma replied, sitting up again. Katsuo and Kachirou looked at him with fascination. Subdued, Ryoma redirected them back toward the subject they'd broached at the beginning of lunch.
"I saw him without his glasses on once," he revealed.
Gasps. "Really??" "Really, Ryoma??" Katsuo and Kachirou both said at the same time. Horio made a bizarre guttural noise like a howler monkey with a cold.
"Did you see what color they were?"
"…He was wearing a sleeping mask over his eyes," Ryoma said antidramatically. The other three boys groaned and slumped backwards, Horio nearly slipping out of his chair.
"Don't get our hopes up like that!" Horio screeched.
Katsuo lamented, "Maybe we'll never know what his eyes look like."
"I bet he leaves them on even when he bathes," Kachirou added naively.
"You think about him bathing?" Horio taunted. Katsuo rolled his eyes.
"Of course not like that," Kachirou protested.
"That would actually explain a lot about you," Horio teased, even though it wouldn't.
Kachirou faced Horio, looked as murderously angry as Kaidoh usually did. The normally calm and meek boy was a balloon waiting to burst. Horio, not getting the hint, broke out into song:
"You like—"
"Shut up!" Kachirou snarled in a tone that cut off Horio's singing and ended it completely.
"You know," Katsuo interjected hastily, not liking the sparks flying from Kachirou's eyes, "we didn't agree on what was wrong with his eyes."
"If anything is wrong," Ryoma pointed out.
"He's a monster or an alien!" Horio blurted, gripping the table and leaning into it. "Or he's infected with a DNA-altering virus."
"Or he may just have weak eyesight," Ryoma offered sensibly. "…And you just spit in my food."
Katsuo nodded. "Vegetables like carrots are supposed to be good for the eyesight, right? It would explain why he makes those awful drinks!"
The following shudder that ran down all of their backs had nothing to do with the storm wailing outside.
"Why would somebody have such a weird habit?" Horio wondered. "And to wear something like that all the time…"
"That's not weird at all," Kachirou said. "Lots of people have them. Even Captain Tezuka."
"But it doesn't explain why he never takes them off!" Kachirou pointed out.
"It would be hard to write things in my notebook if I took my glasses off," said the calculated voice behind them. Katsuo, Kachirou and Horio froze.
"How long have you been standing there Inui?" Ryoma asked nonchalantly.
"2.4 seconds," Inui replied matter-of-factly. "There were good percentages that you could be discussing the tennis team's habits, such why Eiji never takes that bandage off his cheek or why Kaidoh always wears bandanas, and a smaller percentage you could be wondering why Ryoma always wears his hat. But once you added in Tezuka's name and said 'It doesn't explain why he takes them off,' I knew there was a 67.9 percent chance that you were talking about glasses, specifically, mine." Inui pushed those very glasses further up the bridge of his nose, smiling somewhat sadistically. The light reflected off the lenses made it impossible to see the eyes behind them.
"We could… we could have been talking about pants!" Horio challenged. "There! Your data could have been wrong!"
"Tezuka always wore clean clothes," Inui chided. "Are you saying that our Captain has body odor?"
The senior's hands twitched, as if he were ready to crack open his blue data book and record Horio's accusation. Horio floundered. "N… No…"
"Inui, just tell us: What color are your eyes?" Ryoma demanded, even though it wasn't polite to question an upperclassman so brusquely.
Inui's sadistic smile grew, giving him a mad scientist look. "There is… a .00 percent chance of you finding that out in your lifetime," he intoned nebulously. Even Ryoma seemed freaked out. "…For all you will ever know, I don't have eyes." Lightning forked behind him. Inui chuckled darkly to himself as he walked away, adding, "And Echizen, you're not supposed to wear your hat indoors. This is a rule that you obey only 89.9 percent of the time." These were Sadaharu Inui's parting words as he moved towards another table, carrying his own lunch pack and a water bottle filled with alarmingly purple liquid.
Ryoma's face contorted slightly, but he didn't move to take his hat off. His friends turned to him and stared, as if seeing him for the first time.
The heavens rumbled ominously.
"Why do you like that hat so much, Echizen?" Horio asked curiously.
"Is it because there's an R on it, for Ryoma?" Katsuo guessed reasonably.
"A bad hair cut?" Katsuo speculated.
"To hide your antennas! …Or maybe Tomoka told you she thought it was hideous! I want one to repel her!"
"If that's what it for, it's obviously broken," Kachirou pointed out, before adding slyly and with a smile: "…Does Sakuno like it?"
"It's to hide your alien antennas! You're a monster at tennis and a monster in real life!" Horio announced.
"Hmph." Ryoma tugged his hat defensively over his eyes. "Mada mada da ne."
A WARNING: If you don't review, Inui will force his vegetable juice on you!