ERMAHGERD. ERMAHGERD. ERMAHGERD. Pride and Prejudice is so amazing. The movie, more specifically. After all, what writer hasn't read the book? (Not me, for one.)
DISCLAIMER: Sadly, I do not own Prince of Tennis or any of the characters that are featured within, only this measly story. By the way, though I doubt anyone would want to steal this, plagiarism is not cool.
Fail corner: Heh. Sorry about the last chapter. I forgot to take out my notes-to-self…WELL. That's embarrassing. Silly me.
And I've noticed a grammatical error or two, which is even more of a cardinal error on my part. Remind me to edit more.
This chapter may or may not be a little angst filled; I am new at this genre, not that I have much experience in the others. That's why they have reviews – so you can lament and complain all you want about how I failed and extol how I should do better. No offense shall be taken. (:
What began as a simple author's note has grown far to lengthy, so I'm just going to end it with the fact that y'all have made me feel so guilty. I made plans a while ago to include this character in the story, albeit in a different way, and now you've gotten your hopes up about it being Sanada or someone like that. I feel like an ingrate for not satisfying those hopes, seeing how you've given me so much support. Bah.
Congrats to The Weasel is MINE xP, I suppose, since her guess was the – er – warmest.
On the spur of a moment, I introduce a new challenge to you. Guess the quote-er (yeah, whatever, it's not a word) of the quoted quote. May the odds be ever in your favor.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
- pseudomorph, /noun/
1. An irregular or unclassifiable form
She blinked once. Then twice, eyes adhering to his face blankly. Confusion emanated from her, like a subtle aura.
Hazel eyes, wry and sagacious simultaneously, audaciously stared back.
Her vision went black.
"Guess who?" a voluble voice chimed from behind her. Rin could feel the sensation of his rough fingers obscuring everything from view.
There was only one potential answer to that, a truism so well known to her that there was little meaning in saying it. Nevertheless, she participated in his little game, which had been a nominal activity going on between them for a few days.
"Mada mada da ne, aniki," she said monotonously, her bored visage quickly quashing the manifesting event.
"Chibisuke, you're no fun at all." He ruffled her hair dotingly, pouted in a mock fashion, and she felt herself abruptly immersed in a warm grasp.
His eyes were a warm hazel, nothing like the eccentric golden that Rin had developed, a trait taken from her father, she had surmised. At least, she had hypothesized so from the health books about chromosomes she was able to get her pudgy hands on. Perhaps that was why Ryoga always seemed to have more friends than her; first impressions, after all, were important, and cold, calculating golden eyes weren't exactly the most hospitable of expressions. But she was totally complacent about her social life.
The four year old, a precocious child, was more eloquent than expected; she would have been admired had not her comments all been cynical and harsh. "I would rather give Karupin away than continue with this foolishness." That was a lie, obviously. She was almost as attached to her cat as she was to her brother.
There was a lapse in the banter, and then Ryoga's voice adopted a slightly forlorn tone. A slight shift, but the girl, who had been listening intently, caught it.
"Chibisuke, how would you feel if I left?"
The little girl stiffened and said in brusque manner, "Sad, I guess."
"That's not good – I mean, to be sad for …" Ryoga trailed off in the middle of his sentence.
"Why?" Rin's eyes narrowed in suspicion, and perhaps slight trepidation. "You're not thinking of leaving, are you?"
"No," Ryoga replied, a little too quickly, but Rin did not notice. Her posture relaxed quickly, never detecting the flaw.
"Hn. I might have liked that," she muttered, again, dishonestly, and sank into pensive thoughts.
Her companion soon continued to smile in that feckless way that had gotten him branded as a troublemaker, his eyes scintillating.
"You wanna play tennis?"
This seemed to rouse the pompous toddler from her daydreaming. Propping up her arms on his shoulder – and her chin on her chubby hands – she considered this for a moment.
"Fine." A facsimile of his smile briefly flashed across her face. "But," she added quickly, "you can't go easy on me."
"We'll see, Chibisuke, we'll see."
It was the opposite of what one might expect a normal young child to say, to ask an adept tennis player to play seriously with them and very possibly crush their aspirations of playing tennis.
But, then again, Rin was not a normal four year old, and this was not a normal household.
But even for a normal household, what was about to happen turned the entire household upside-down, and inside-out.
The shouting match had been going on for some time now, and Rin sank onto her bed, attempting to ignore the raised voices in the kitchen below. Ranting about frivolous matters again, no doubt.
The last time, it had been something about how long it had taken Ryoga to put on his shoes – which, Rin noted, had ended up with Ryoga being tardy to school, not because of tying his shoes, but because of her mother's distracting dialogue. Sometimes she wished her mother wasn't a lawyer; arguing was her passion, and nothing could change that.
But she had to admit, something was wrong. It wasn't like the normal banters that occurred back and forth between her parents. There was a sharp edge to them, yes, but there was always more playfulness, like cats swiping at each other with sheathed claws.
They had let the claws come out this time.
She caught a few words here and there, and she admitted that none of them were particularly friendly, generally carrying a harsh tone. The argument quickly shifted to the location that it always ended up in, and Rin sighed. Didn't they ever get tired of this?
"You know what, Ryoga? You're a leech! Living here, eating our food, pretending that Rin was your sister to begin with!" Her mother's words quickly turned into an unrestrained shriek that she barely recognized.
Rin flinched as she heard her own name enter the stream of words. As usual, it was one-sided. Her brother was probably holding a staunch position of his own – silently, that is. It always seemed to aggravate her mother further.
"I don't know why Nanjiroh wanted to let you stay in the first place! A tennis companion, or something like that." Her mother snorted in repulsion. "No one wants you here! Not even Rin."
Her brother's resolve seemingly broke. "And how do you know that?"
"I-She doesn't need you!" her mother blurted out wildly.
There was a mingle of voices now, the low bass-like rumble of Ryoga's, and her mother's high pitched tone that she only adopted when she was furious, like that time her father instructed her to fetch his adult magazines without getting caught by her mother.
He had topped it off with a well-placed statement of, "I bet you'll never be able to do it in a million years, Rin." The challenge made the two year-old instantly comply.
Three minutes later, to Nanjirou's utter disbelief, the smirking girl returned, hands full of his precious images of women strutting around in bikinis.
Her father didn't get off easy for that one.
The loud voices below acted like a twisted lullaby for Rin, quickly lulling her to sleep like the drone of white noise. Her anxiety ebbed – after all, when it came to drowsiness, she was just a normal child – and her eyelids drooped over her metallic orbs.
It wasn't long until Rin fell into the clutches of sleep, but a sort of worry had surmounted her previous thoughts. And once the seed is planted, if nurtured, it doesn't stop until it sprouts into a parasitic flower.
"Just leave, Ryoga." Her mother's voice was a deadpan, as if she didn't even have the energy to push the point anymore. "If you want to leave, just go."
Rinko seemed to be more tired lately – even Rin could see that. Not that the effect hadn't spread to every family member. Rin looked older than any other five year-old child within her kindergarten classroom.
No one could fathom why the change had undertaken her mother. No one could trace the roots of it either. It had come on gradually, but by the time that they had realized it, it was already too late. When her mother took on a case, she rarely ever stopped.
Ryoga's face grew hard, and Rin emerged from her stooping position underneath the covers. Her brother determinedly avoided her gaze.
"An-aniki?" she ventured, and was ignored by both.
A book dangled freely from Ryoga's hand, a bedtime story that he had been reading to her.
"Aniki." Her voice was barely audible, but steady. "Are you –"
"Rin." Her mother's voice was emotionless. "Go, this doesn't concern you."
She stood firmly in place, waiting for her brother's answer. Some sort of recognition, at least. There was none.
"Aniki, are you going to finish that sto-"
"Rin, shut up and leave, NOW!"
A lump worked its way up her throat, but she forced it back down. Moisture treacherously formed in the corners of her eyes and the crooks of her lips wobbled slightly.
"Rin."
She looked up, directly into the eyes of her brother. They were fierce now, and she could see – not just a spark – but a fully-fledged flame burning within them.
"I'm going to leave now. But don't worry, I'll come back eventually and finish that story." Errantly, she wondered if those were tears glistening in her brother's eyes. A moment of weakness.
"I promise, Rin. Wait for me."
Six years later, she was still waiting.
She heard nothing from her brother, despite her extensive research; staying up late, calling detectives behind her mother's back, trying to bribe her father into telling her what had happened (he really didn't know, apparently, since when she was about to burn his magazines, he had asserted the same answer of ignorance) all to no avail.
It was almost as if he had wanted to hide from her.
And so she took those memories of the times that she had cherished, the person that she had worshipped above all others, and instead of consecrating them, she locked them away in that deep, dark chamber of her mind. She sank into the comfort of her own life and tried to pretend that everything was alright, that no such person had existed, and he had made no impact on her.
She didn't want to feel the pain of it anymore, like any other rational human being. It was her attempt to forget it all and make a utopia of her own in the sport that she loved most – tennis.
She trained to the point of harmful exhaustion, causing her to be hospitalized several times because of moderate to severe injuries, one of which included a few broken ribs, a sprained ankle, a deep gash on her forehead, and innumerous bruises. If she trained harder, she was less likely to remember, she deduced.
But there were always those times when she would wake up with tears streaming down her face, clutching her mouth to muffle the sobs.
Her mother returned back to the carefree, happy person that she once knew, but she couldn't help but flashback each time she saw her to the times when she wasn't. The yelling, the screaming, the abuse. It just wasn't the same; like a torn and wrinkled piece of paper, her life could never return to the blissfully ignorant state that it had belonged to shortly beforehand.
What had happened?
But even the crushing defeat of endless despair cannot hope to snuff out every last flicker of the flames. Snuggled between two of her schoolbooks was the old and dusty book that kept that hope alive, that Ryoga Echizen would return one day.
She was still waiting. Waiting for him to come and finish that it.
Those eyes fit into the safe she had locked her memories into, opened the lock with ease; they were the keys.
Like a broken dam, the reminiscences of old times rushed forth; driven by the sheer power of will, they were unstoppable.
Time had come by and hardened those eyes, twisted and turned them into something different. But time could not alter the genius of the human mind. She could have recognized those eyes from a mile away, one eye closed and all.
It was her missing brother. Ryoga.
Rin promptly collapsed unconscious.
It was the perfect way to start out her first day of school.
OHGODOHGODOHGODOHGOD. How was it? Bad?
Yes, no, maybe so? I'm guessing it's most likely the first choice, wasn't it?
You know, I always say to myself that one of these days, I'm going to write a totally humorous and romantic fanfic without a single darn trace of angst.
Yeah, well, I'm still waiting for that to happen.
And the funniest thing is – I fail at angst, epically, so I have no idea why I continue to include it in my stories. Maybe it's because I like reading angst?
Hmm…
If anyone's a psychologist, you're going to have to give me an answer to that. Please. Tell me in your reviews, or something like that.
DUNDUNDUN.
THE NOTORIOUS VILLAIN, WRITER'S BLOCK, HAS STRUCK FEAR AND THE SENSE OF HOPELESSNESS INTO THE HEARTS OF WRITERS YET AGAIN! IT LEAVES NO VICTIM KNOWING OF WHAT THEY WILL WRITE NEXT. NOT TO FEAR, THE REVIEWERS ARE HERE! HEROICALLY LAUNCHING THEMSELVES FROM ONE STORY TO THE NEXT, THEY OFFER THEIR BRILLIANT SUGGESTIONS TO EACH WRITER, RIDDING OF THE EVIL WRITER'S BLOCK. BUT WILL THE REVIEWERS REIGN TRIUMPHANT – OR WILL WRITER'S BLOCK FOREVER PLANT ITSELF DEEP INTO THE MINDS OF YOUR FAVORITE WRITER'S AND CONFUSE THEM? ONLY YOU CAN STOP HIM!
Continued in the next edition, JK. :)
Lol. I just had a random weirdo attack back there.
By the way, I'm sorry for not updating faster. I would promise to do so at a faster pace, but you all know that it would be a complete lie.
-SER3NADE