A Mother's Love

Akira closed his eyes so he couldn't see his hands shaking in anger, confusion, and pain. He was in his room, fairly messy in comparison to the rest of the high-class traditional home with the sliding cupboard doors left open to reveal a clutter of books, papers, and knickknacks he'd collected. Before him he had two go boards: on his right his formal practice board and to the left an abused folding board he'd used when he was much younger and never felt right about trashing. On his practice board he had the game Shindo had played at the tournament, next to it on the old folding board was the best game Shindo had played against him in the last week. He simply would not believe these two games came from the same hand. Shindo's comments after a game, and his opinions about a few games Akira had shown him from one of his father's books, were amazing. Sometimes he seemed unsure in odd places, but he'd come out with brilliant ideas and suggestions after a moment or two of thought. Clearly, the game on the formal goban was his full and true strength. Shindo was brilliant, so much so that it made Akira tremble with both fear and desire. He did not want to play this terrifying Shindo, but he needed to play against that impossible strength. He had to go through him, the path to the divine move traced through this obstacle, but Shindo would not play Akira with that strength.

Every time Shindo sat across a goban from him, he judged Toya Akira too little of a challenge to take seriously. He judged Toya Akira too insignificant to bother pitting his full strength against. What of Toya Meijin? He had not decided to show his game with Shindo to his son, and Akira would not ask. To ask would only confirm that Akira was so low he must beg for scraps at Shindo's feet.

Today he'd run into Tsutsui in a bookstore, and the older boy had been quite happy to talk to him. Apparently he was also frustrated with Shindo's Go. The four eyed boy had twitched and shuffled his feet as he admitted he wanted to play the Shindo from the tournament himself. He made excuses for it, saying it was not, perhaps, Shindo's fault and that he most defiantly didn't want Shindo to get sick again, but eventually he was forced to admit that he felt cheated. He'd asked if Akira had ever played the 'other Shindo.' Akira had bitterly spat out his reply, though exactly what words he'd used eluded his memory. The wide-eyed look and flustered shuffling Tsutsui had responded with seemed to imply Akira had cursed, but Akira had to admit he was too sheltered to know very many impolite words so his options were limited. Tsutsui had told Akira he'd seen Shindo do it one other time, against Kaga.

If he hadn't been so embarrassed by his earlier use of profanity, he'd probably had sputtered out something more intelligent and much less polite when his brain kicked up the dusty memory of Kaga Tetsuo and connected it with the loud boy he'd seen putting Shindo in a headlock. When pressed, Tsutsui told Akira the whole story of how Shindo came to play in the middle school tournament. Akira had asked the older boy to show him the game, but Tsutsui's mother had pulled him away before he was finished the review. Tsutsui had pointed the hands out on a blank page out of one of the kifu books, but the other boy had a hard time remembering the exact placement of stones without actually marking the places and moved slowly. From what Akira had seen Shindo had been toying with Kaga, shoving him around before giving him a taunting gift of a hand. One bad move gave Kaga about five points and the next three savagely ripped eight points out of the middle of what should have been well defended territory.

The board on Akira's left could not have been played by someone capable of moves as artful and savage as that. The board on his right could well have belonged to that person. The tournament game was kinder, but also twisted. It started out so poorly played that white's win seemed inevitable, but then black had shifted gears and white's defenses suddenly meant nothing. That board could have been played by his father if he had been recovering from some bad sushi: a weak start but once he got settled he bulldozed the truly weaker opponent.

Akira couldn't understand it. Kaga was nothing special. His father hadn't so much as hinted that he'd seen anything as impossible as Shindo's tournament match. What was so special about those two games that made Shindo pull out his full strength? One was a game played at a school festival and another in a middle school tournament. Both against people he'd never met before, so what was the trigger? One played in a haze of rage and insulted pride, the other through a haze of dizzy illness. Wait…

Shindo was desperate in that festival game not only to beat Kaga but also to humiliate him as retribution for his disrespect to the game and Shindo personally. At the tournament he'd had such a terrible start he was desperate to make a comeback due to the likelihood of Tsutsui loosing. Even with Akira's limited interaction and disinterest in asking Shindo about the other players, Akira knew the joke about the founder and club president being the weakest male member. In both cases there was something big on the line: his health, his friends, and his reputation were all threatened. That Mitani boy had put money on his private games with Shindo, and was possibly seeing a stronger hand because of it. That was the trigger, Akira was sure. Shindo didn't, or couldn't if Tsutsui was to be believed, play with that impossible strength unless he had to. Perhaps it pained him somehow? It didn't matter. Akira would have to challenge Shindo with something on the line to test his theory.

What could he put on the line? Shindo was already aware that Akira was irritated by his flakey behavior, so lost friendship didn't seem to be a good motivation. If it was Shindo would have played a stronger hand from the second game against Akira. Unfortunately, money wasn't an option. Akira might live in a comfortable upper class home, but he did not get a straight weekly allowance. That was part of the reason he hung out at his father's salon: he had a tab for sweets, takeout, and tea. He doubted Shindo would play well for an extra slice of strawberry shortcake. It had to be something that lit a passion, something that sparked whatever it was inside Shindo into action, something Shindo really cared about. His door slid open.

"Akira, I didn't know you were home," Akira's mother gasped. She stood in the open door, a vacuum in hand, and tilted her head to the side. "Aren't you usually hanging out with your friends about now?" She always spoke of Shindo in plural. It bugged Akira a little, but he understood her point: she wanted her son to have more friends his own age.

"Shindo couldn't make it today because the Go club he's in is training for an exhibition at a community center. They are trying to stir up more interest in primary school kids," he moped. He wanted Shindo to play him, not waste his time teaching fourth graders how to play on a nine by nine board.

"An exhibition while still in junior high school? They must be a very good club," she assured cheerily.

"Actually they are just getting organized. This is their first year, and somehow they got the local community center to let them come to a pre-arranged social event. They made a bunch of flyers but they are really just a little side table." Akira started cleaning away the stones so he could pick up the gobans and let his mother vacuum. He couldn't study the games anyway; they made him too angry when he looked at them. "It's nothing impressive."

"Well, maybe not to you, but if they worked so hard at it then it must be important to them. It is a lot of hard work to make something out of nothing." She brushed some hair that escaped her ponytail out of her hair and cleared away Akira's futon.

"That's what they keep saying," Akira admitted. "Shindo keeps talking about how they'll all be immortalized in the school records and that he doesn't mind playing endless teaching games because he has fun being a part of the club. I don't get it; he should be getting ready to take the pro test and looking ahead! It's not like he isn't good enough! He should be striving for the pros, working hard to rise up, not clinging to people who just started playing and trying to impress hopeless cases!" Akira ranted. "Ah, sorry, I didn't mean to shout."

"Oh," she said suddenly, and grabbed her son's hand. "This is the same boy who was sick for a long time, right?"

"Yes," he nodded, wondering why his mother's expression had become so clouded.

"Akira…" she started, looking out the window for a moment before coming to a decision about something and leading him into the kitchen. "Let's have some tea, alright? I always put a pot on while I'm cleaning."

"Sure, mother," Akira mumbled, truly confused. When they had fixed their tea at the counter and sat down on the kitchen barstools she turned to him and placed her hand on his shoulder. The last time she'd been like this was when Akira was five and she was explaining why his goldfish was floating at the top of the bowl.

"Shindo lived in a hospital for a while, and he was very sick for a very long time, right?" He nodded again, not wanting to break his mother's momentum. "Sometimes when a person deals very closely with mortality they get scared of it. Nurses and doctors who are just starting out have to deal with it within themselves, and then they have to help their patients and younger colleagues deal with it. Your friend had to deal with the idea that he could die right now, not in sixty or seventy years when he was an old man. He had to deal with the idea that lots of people die before they get old."

"I know everyone dies someday," Akira pointed out. His mother sat back, shaking her head slowly.

"No, Akira, you don't. I don't mean to insult you. I know you are old enough to know in your mind that everyone dies, but it's a different thing to know that in your heart as well. I think your friend just wants to leave a mark. He wants to do something for the first time, something people will notice, or something he can be remembered for. Becoming a pro and working up the ranks would take a long time. In a little while I'm sure he will calm down and realize he has his whole life ahead of him, but for right now he is being a bit impatient and rushing to get something done right away, don't you think?" She sipped her tea to hide whatever twitch of expression threatened to come forward.

"I don't think he'd…," Akira broke off and tried again. "He doesn't sound scared, just excited. He's always pushing for more, but he won't consider the pros…"

"He's pushing for a goal closer at hand," she soothed. "The pros are too far ahead, much too distant to consider. He doesn't have long term plans, though to be fair most boys your age do not have many long term plans. He has to sort this out for himself, that's part of growing up, but the best thing for anyone in that position is a few good friends by their side." Her warm, dark eyes met his aqua green and willed him to understand. "Now you have to decide what you are going to do about it."

"What?" he asked, startled by the sudden declaration.

"I don't know much about Go, but I do know people. You have two general choices, assuming you want to keep your friendship. Either you can leave him behind and ensure he chases you, or follow him down his little detour and give him a good shove from behind."

"I don't… How would…," he stuttered. This was the most he'd talked to his mother in a long while. He'd forgotten she was a therapist before she married his father.

"If you are resolved to pull him into becoming a proper Go player you can help him in two ways. If you take the pro test this year you can pull him along after you, provided you think you can pull him along and come up with a way of making him chase after you that isn't taunting. If you go into Kaio's Go club you can follow along beside him a while and give him a hard shove toward the pros at an opportune moment. In either case, you will fail if he doesn't have any interest in becoming a pro Go player, at which point you have to accept that just because someone is good at something that does not mean that they want to do it for a living," she explained. Akira sipped his tea for a while, thinking hard.

"It sounds easy when you say that, but I don't know how I could get him interested. He always changes the subject when I talk about becoming a pro," Akira sighed.

"You don't want to be too pushy if he isn't interested, and you might have to give up." Akira's head snapped up at that, a deep desperation spreading through him. His mother read it in an instant. "I don't mean give up being his friend, just on making him a pro. If he hasn't even considered it or if it's just that he hasn't planned that far ahead then it's fine, but if he honestly doesn't want it then you have no right to force it on him."

"He wouldn't chase me," Akira admitted, hanging his head in defeat. "He'd congratulate me, but I don't think he'd come after me just because I became a pro."

"Then you can go after him, and maybe both of you will be better for it," she assured, punctuating her point with a sharp tap on the countertop. "It might do you some good to slow down and try something new."

"You want me to transfer to Haze?"

"I want you to join Kaio's Go club. Try to do the sort of thing Shindo is doing: have fun and make some more friends. If he can do it then so can you, right?" she encouraged, urging him with a vague hand gesture.

"Kaio's Go club is big and has been around for decades, I don't think I can do what he is doing there."

"You can do similar things, though, right? Play teaching games and work to help out the club," she wondered.

"I don't know if the other members would like that."

"Some of the kids might mistake your pride for arrogance, but you are a good person. I'm sure if you try to be helpful most of them will appreciate it. The dean wanted you to join, remember?"

"I suppose," Akira mumbled uncomfortably. He couldn't count the number of kids who had walked away from him when they realized how strong he was. On the other hand, his mother made a lot of sense. Shindo was passionate about the Go club. If he could tap into that somehow he might be able to play Shindo at full strength and please his mother at the same time.

AN: I love my reviews; it's always nice to see them in my inbox. I got lots of comments about Akira Toya's character, and I feel mildly guilty for not getting this chapter out faster considering how glowing they all are. It's been spring break, and that means I've actually developed a social life, and I ended a lagging relationship with my now former boyfriend.

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