Standard disclaimers apply.
Summary: Rukawa returns from America in the hope that he and Sendoh can pick up where they left off. He has much to be sorry for. RuSen. One-Shot.
Atonement
"Since when—?"
Rukawa fiddled idly with a bronze trophy on the mantelpiece that had become shockingly blackened over the years—but surely it couldn't have been that long? He could still feel his muscles ache with the ecstasy of activity, could still feel the same languor when he exhaled sometimes that he used to feel in high school after a particularly good game.
Was there a magical clock somewhere? Was there a sorcerer who had cast a spell on him, and made his five years' absence from the country seem like ten?
"It's been fifteen years since you left, Rukawa." Sendoh's voice, always gentle, seemed piteously weak now—as if the source of its energy were the glow of the flickering fire on his face, and in the shadows he was doomed to silence. "I long stopped hoping you would return."
The head of the bronze figure Rukawa had been fiddling with broke with a soft metallic pop, and he hurriedly put it down on the mantelpiece. Then he turned to Sendoh, and for the first time that evening, looked him in the eye. The act was unexpectedly difficult.
Those brown eyes he had known, or had thought he had known—at once bright and mysterious—with a mischievous glint pirouetting in and out of sight in them perpetually—were gone. Now they were hollow eyes in sunken sockets, staring up at him out of the skull of an attenuated being in a wheelchair.
Dare he ask how Sendoh came to be like this? It was a simple question. He had asked more difficult questions with infinite ease before.
"Why…?" The question slipped out of his mouth before he could reflect on its ludicrousness. He had meant to ask, How?
"I did this to myself. I crashed my car the day after you'd left, hoping it would kill me. But it left me in far worse a condition than before."
Rukawa swallowed. He was salivating more than usual, though his mouth was still dry and his tongue slightly raw from being rubbed against his teeth. Sendoh was blaming him for his disability—and for almost having killed himself.
"You seem to be doing well now." He referred to Sendoh's wealth.
"Yes, I managed to get a desk job somewhere, and proved quite competent at it." He obviously hated his job. His dream, like Rukawa's, had been to play for the NBA; but only Rukawa's had been fulfilled. "Why did you want to see me?"
"I thought…" How should he put it? "I thought we could pick up where we left off."
"Oh?"
The silence that followed was tense, made the tenser by the soft crackling of the fire.
Without another word, Sendoh turned his wheelchair a full 180 degrees, and left the room. His answer was plain.
"It's late, and I want to go to bed now."
Rukawa shuffled uncertainly.
"Please leave."
Rukawa opened his mouth, and closed it again. After a while, he managed to choke out a few sincere but ineffective words of apology:
"I am sorry for everything. I wish it didn't have to be this way."
"As do I."
When Rukawa reached the end of the driveway, he paused and looked up at the house again. It was reasonably big. Sendoh must have got a decent deal on account of the graves in the front yard, where the previous owners had been interred. When Rukawa crept up to the graves, he could just make out the names on the tombstones in the moonlight: Akagi Takenori and Akagi Haruko.
"So we've come full circle," Rukawa whispered to himself, not sure what he meant by that.
He decided to go back, and beg Sendoh on his hands and knees to take him back. When he went back in, he saw a picture of an old man with a striking resemblance to Sendoh on the wall of the living room that hadn't been there before, but no sign of Sendoh. The wood in the fireplace, which should have been smoldering, had not been lit in years, and was covered with rot and cobwebs. The trophy on the mantelpiece was gone; and when Rukawa looked at his reflection in the dusty mirror above, he saw an old man staring with grotesque horror back at him.
He screamed.
His body was not discovered until a month later.
/end