TITLE: Fairy Dust
FANDOM: The Prince of Tennis
PAIRING: Friendship!FujiOC
SUMMARY: She's a flower that's surrounded by so many nettles and looks like a weed. This doesn't seem to deter Fuji, cactus-collector extraordinaire.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Prince of Tennis.
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Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
"Whatcha doin', girlie?"
Amaya squinted up, and raised a grubby arm to shield the sun. "Drawin', mister."
"You're pretty good there, squirt. Did anyone ever tell you that?"
The little girl went back to rubbing her piece of chalk on the blacktop. "Yeah. I've heard it before. And I heard that if a stranger ever talks to me, I have to kick him here," she got up, and swiftly and unmercifully kicked the well-meaning man between the legs.
She dropped the chalk back in her basket with a plink, and walked off.
The man groaned. "Damn New Yorkers. We're getting too tough for our own good."
.
"What are you doing?"
Amaya looked up. "I'm drawing, Auntie."
Her aunt frowned. "Amaya, you know I love you, but I will not let a fourteen-year-old girl draw some stuff on my driveway. What are you drawing, anyway? It looks like a crime scene."
She wasn't far off, with the outline of a figure drawn on the black pavement.
Amaya shrugged. "Just… stuff. That was just a basic gesture drawing."
There was a sigh. "It's supposed to rain in a few minutes, so go inside. We'll let it wash my driveway, and look online for any parks with huge blacktops for you to draw on, okay?"
She smiled wryly. "Thanks, Auntie."
.
She hated school so much.
God, why couldn't it just end?
Japanese literature full of impossible metaphors and random symbolism, equations to find stupid things like the circumference of a circle, having to read children's books like Good Night, Moon in English class, when she'd had them read to her years ago.
Those were what she hated the most. She didn't mind science, because the way chemicals reacted were actually pretty cool, and the history textbooks had famous paintings to look at.
But every day, Amaya would stare out the window, looking at the blue of the sky and the green of the grass, and imagine what color the two would make if they were mixed together.
Her grades were horrendous, and she didn't care, and Auntie was too busy to ask for her report cards or about her school ranking.
But she hated the art program more than anything.
Sketching things to be perfect images, stroking oil paints on a canvas, swishing around water colors, carefully molding clay… They copied works to work on their technique, day in and day out.
What good was technique when you didn't have the creativity to apply it to?
Sometimes the copies were a little different. Instead of a man, it'd be a woman. Instead of a swan on the lake, it'd be a boat. Sometimes the sky would be clouds instead of sun.
But it was the same basic framework, and the same routine every day, and God she just wanted to quit the class.
She didn't, though. She could filch off some moleskin or charcoal to doodle with, or some pastels if she needed them.
Amaya hated Seigaku in general. It was quiet during class, except for the sound of the teacher's voice, and lead and rubber eraser rubbing against paper, and the flipping of notebooks. There were no rowdy bouts of laughing or crude comments, or even the basic snicker of gossip.
The kids in Japan were so goody-goody it was pathetic.
.
"I got a present for you, babe."
A dress. It was pink and frills and poof. It was made of cheap satin and fake tulle, and rhinestones and glitter were scattered around so the effect was blinding.
She loved it.
"It's for Halloween. You can be a princess."
She put it on.
"Aren't I pretty, Daddy?"
Daddy got a plastic crown and fastened it to her head. "You're perfect, princess."
"Daddy…"
"Yeah?"
"I wanna be a fairy."
He stared at her, hard.
"There's a friend of mine who works at that sewing factory. I'll sketch up some wings, and he'll make it for you, okay?"
"Daddy, I wanna be a fairy."
.
Amaya remembered every morning when she looked in the mirror.
It wasn't true. She didn't want to be a fairy.
She wanted to be like Daddy.
He looked fairy-like, but she never told him because he'd deny it. But he did. His hair had been a wispy blonde, and his pale blue eyes always looked cloudy and misted, and he was so thin, like they were in the pictures.
And, God, his art…
He'd gone to extremes. He did crack and weed and fairy dust. He'd drink alcohol. He wouldn't eat. But his art was pure and raw emotion, and it could choke up just about anyone.
She wanted to be that good, someday.
.
Amaya decided the person in front of her was a weirdo.
He was incredibly pretty in a feminine sort of way, which wasn't what bothered Amaya, since she'd seen all sorts of things in New York. No, he was always smiling, and his eyes were always closed.
His name was Fuji. The hyper kid with the cool red hair always called him that, but then again, he also talked about someone called Ochibi, which could never be someone's name.
.
The girl who sat behind him was very artistic.
Her grades didn't seem to be very good, but he'd see doodles or thumbnail sketches in the margins of her homework.
They changed every day. Sometimes she'd draw something that shows so much talent it almost made him breathless. It would be like looking at a tiny photograph. Other times, she'd draw strange shapes and blobs that he couldn't make out.
There were rumors about her.
She was a halfie. Her mother was supposed to be Japanese, and her father was supposed to be American. She supposedly was involved in gangs back in America, which was why she was sent to live with her aunt in Japan.
Fuji doubted this. She was too skinny to be involved in a gang. He could see the bones and muscles of her hands working whenever she reached out to grasp the papers he was passing back to her, and the jutting bones of her wrists and cheeks.
It was unnatural.
.
Some members of the tennis team were going to the park to fool around at the street courts. Fuji chuckled as he watched Eiji and Momoshiro simultaneously pinch Ryoma's cheeks.
A crowd was gathering around nearby, and as eye-catching as the Seigaku regulars were, Fuji could see that they, for once, were not the spectacle to see.
They made their way through the crowd to see what was going on.
A boy was hopping up and down excitedly, screaming, "This is the coolest one yet!"
Fuji could see Eiji fall silent, and Oishi's jaw drop.
He could see why.
There was a birds-eye view of a grassy cliff that jutted out over angry, tumbling waves. A stick-skinny girl in too-long, once-white, button-up shirt was standing on the water, scrutinizing the blades of grass, brandishing a piece of green chalk.
"Why is there a cliff in the middle of the park?" Momoshiro muttered, rubbing his eyes. "How is that girl standing on the side of the cliff without falling?"
The girl threw the chalk into a nearby basket, and pulled a deep blue one out of the breast pocket of her shirt. She leaned over to add something onto the waves, and the hem of her shirt rode up her legs.
"Is she even wearing pants?"
Oishi nudged Momoshiro, instantly shushing him.
"Hey, Fuji, isn't that the girl who sits behind us?"
Fuji looked at the girl, and was surprised to find that her face was familiar. "Yes, it is."
Eiji wasted no time in shoving his way through the crowd. "Amaya-chan! Oy, Amaya-chan!"
Amaya turned around, surprise etched all over her face.
Eiji bounced forward. "I didn't know you could draw!"
She narrowed her eyes at his feet. "Step back. You're about to smudge the waves."
He looked surprised to be answered with such hostility, but he plowed on through anyway. "Sorry about that, Amaya-chan!"
Her normally large eyes (Fuji supposed she inherited them from her Caucasian parent) were slits. "Who said you could call me by my first name?"
"…Sorry? I just call everyone –"
Amaya cut him off when her upper lip curled into a condescending sneer. "What did you want?"
Eiji, whose confidence had been plummeting, perked up again. "I just wanted to say your picture's really cool."
She raised an eyebrow. "Really?"
He beamed and nodded. "Yeah! It's just like a real cliff!"
This comment made her frown thoughtfully. "Hm… Is that so…"
She reached for a bucket of water, and dumped its contents all over the drawing with a swing of her arm.
Eiji's expression of pure shock froze the moment. Water droplets hung in the air like crystal, reflecting beams of light and casting flecks of rainbows everywhere.
They shattered on the ground with a splash, just barely missing Eiji's shoes.
The water began to run downhill, and blue suddenly smeared with green. Fuji could see that she'd used yellow in the grass, and purple in the water.
She thrust the now-empty bucket to the boy who had been bouncing up and down earlier. "Hey, kid. I'll show you how to draw that cool design you liked if you do me a favor and fill this up at the fountain."
The boy eagerly nodded and bounded off, and the crowd, seeing that the subject of their interest had been washed away, slowly began to disappear.
Momoshiro, having recovered from his shock, began muttering something darkly under his breath about manners before turning around and heading off towards the tennis courts.
Eiji stepped back, stunned into speechlessness, and slowly swiveled on the heel of his foot before walking after Momoshiro.
The others began to do the same, and when Fuji looked back, he saw her standing on the blacktop in her oversized shirt, her bare feet being covered in the liquefied chalk.
Her legs looked like twigs.
.
The kid was back, lugging the bucket behind him, a banana-shaped grin on his face.
Amaya could see that he had cavities forming on his molars.
"Thanks, kid."
Half of the chalk had rubbed out, and she'd picked a spot that was close to the drainage pipe. She estimated that she'd need about two more buckets of water to clean it up.
"Hey, Smith?"
The kid couldn't pronounce "Smith" correctly, making it sound more like "smit", but he tried, and Amaya appreciated the fact that the kid didn't give up common courtesy for the sake of correct pronunciation.
"What?"
He stepped back as she flung the water over her drawing. "Why'dja get rid of it after the guy said it looked like a real cliff? Do you hate him or something?"
She snapped the gum she had been chewing, watching as the layer of chalk ran down with the water. "Nah. He's okay when he's not about to smudge my work."
She walked over to her bag to get some paper towels for her feet. "Lemme tell you something, kid. The first thing that people notice in art is either the biggest thing, or the most important thing. Got it?"
He nodded eagerly, but Amaya could tell that he just wanted her to show him how to draw the flame design on his hat.
"But when you're an artist, you want people to see the most important thing. The most important thing in that picture was supposed to be the waves, but the guy noticed the cliff first. So that drawing was a fail."
She threw a piece of red chalk at him. "Now gimme your hat. I'll show you how to draw that flame."
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That night, Amaya weighed herself on the scale.
It read forty kilos.
She quickly converted that to pounds in her head. She was good at math when it mattered.
She was five foot seven.
She weighed ninety pounds.
She looked at her hand and wrapped it around her upper arm.
It fit around the limb snugly, and she cursed.
'Not yet, not yet…'
She looked at her legs. The skin was like tracing paper, and she could trace the web of her veins if she wanted to.
She smushed the flesh her calf, and she could feel her fingers sink into the fat.
A hairbrush went flying into the wall.
She wasn't fairy thin yet.
'Not yet, not yet…'
.
"Aren't I pretty, Daddy?"
"You're perfect, princess."