Mirror, Mirror
Summary: Fuji falls through a mirror one day and lands in a complete different world. Sometimes, while doing a favor for someone else, you realize that they're actually doing a favor for you.
Warnings: Shounen-ai
Pairings: Atobe x Fuji
Disclaimer: Prince of Tennis is not mine.
Yay! I remembered to update today, too! I'm writing another fanfiction, but it might not be finished, because after writing the first chapter, I don't really know where to go! xD I'm also going to start writing another fanfiction, but not for the Tenipuri fandom. I'm probably going to post it in my LJ, which is linked on my profile, since it's not an anime fandom, either. Anyway, enjoy this story while you can! Please read, review, and enjoy!
Chapter 10: The Orb of the Magician:
Fuji kicked tennis balls around the courts absently. He was currently in tennis practice, of course, and it was still the same day that Kikumaru had asked him about Tezuka. It was afternoon, after school, and the tennis team was getting ready for the nationals, as they always were. Fuji had just finished a warm up drill with the other members of the team, and he hadn't really been thinking about tennis at all. The freshmen had had the day off that day, since every once in a while, they were given a day off. This meant that the seniors and regulars had to go around retrieving balls.
"Yo! Fujiko! Are you helping at all??" Kikumaru shouted.
Fuji glanced up, awoken from his reverie. "Ah, yeah. Sorry about that." He walked back to the fence and started picking up the balls on his racquet. He stood up and before turning around, he noticed a ball that was stuck in the fence. That's strange, he thought. He hadn't remembered anyone hitting a ball so hard that it would've gotten stuck in the fence, but he shrugged it off. Some things just happened. Fuji pried the ball out of the fence and rotated it around to find the brand to see if it belonged to Seigaku or not. It was then that he noticed that there was none. It was just a tennis ball, white streaks and all, without a brand name.
Fuji shook his head. He shouldn't think of that as unusual. Why? A lot of tennis balls didn't have brand names anyway. He thought that all of Seigaku's balls were Penn, but apparently he was mistaken. Fuji squeezed the ball to test if it was dead or not, but surprisingly, it was perfectly pressurized. It was almost as if it was new, since the ball was not the least bit dirty. Fuji decided to pocket it. It might belong to a different school, and he should return it. How he would figure out where it came from troubled his mind for a moment, but it didn't really matter to him anyway.
"FUJIKO!!" Kikumaru shouted again, even louder this time.
Fuji smiled benignly. "Sorry about that, I was just distracted by something." Kikumaru sighed and shook his head.
"You know, if you weren't so amazing, then I'd kick you off if I was captain," Kikumaru said jokingly.
"Isn't that the case with most members?" Fuji asked.
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"FUJI'S RELATED TO US???!?!" Jiroh shouted, immediately waking up more than he had ever been able to before. "THAT'S AWESOME!!!!"
"Not really related much…" Yukimura said. "Just to me, mostly."
"That's still interesting, to say the least," Oshitari said.
Ryoma shook his head. "How is he your half brother? I still don't get it."
"Well, his parents are my father and an extremely powerful magician mother, who was kind of poor. They were in love, but my father had to marry the queen, or my mother. We were both born within a week of each other after that, and my mother never knew Fuji existed, or his mother, the magician. After a while, though, she somehow found out about Fuji's mother and ordered her to be executed. Afterwards, my father wanted to protect Fuji, so he sent him off to another world at a very young age, and then my father died," Yukimura explained.
Atobe nodded. "I supposed if you think about it, it all makes sense. Fuji is the one chosen to be able to travel between the worlds because he is an incarnation of the most powerful magician. Also, he is related to us and in our generation, yet he wasn't cursed, which also heightened his chances of being 'the Chosen One'. It also explains why your father died so unexpectedly and why there was a random magician executed way back when."
"All the strings are tied, then," Yukimura said. "Everything comes together. There's only a slight minor task at hand now."
"What?" all the princes asked.
"We have to get Fuji back here again," Yukimura said, sighing.
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Fuji walked down the street with his best friend, Kikumaru Eiji, tossing the mysterious tennis ball up and down in his hand. Tennis practice had just finished, after a couple sprints and rounds of 'Suicides' for conditioning. By now, though, they had gotten used to it. Besides, it was better than laps.
"Why are you so obsessed with that tennis ball?" Kikumaru asked Fuji, who just shrugged.
"I'm not," he said.
"Yes you are. You've been playing with it ever since tennis practice ended. Why do you even have it, anyway? Doesn't it belong to Seigaku?"
Fuji shook his head. "No, it doesn't have the Penn brand name. It doesn't even have a brand name."
"That's strange and all, but is it any reason to obsess over a tennis ball??" Kikumaru said.
"I'm not obsessing over it," Fuji replied without even looking at his friend, and Kikumaru sighed.
By now, the two were already at Fuji's house, and Fuji was unlocking the door and going inside. He didn't expect anyone to be home, and there wasn't anyone home. The two friends walked up to Fuji's room to study for a test that they had the next day, since they always did that. They had just walked into Fuji's room when the brunette noticed something strange—his mirror was…glowing? He couldn't tell if it was really glowing or not, but it seemed like it was. Fuji didn't know why; maybe it was just his eyes, but there was something different about the mirror. He, again, decided to take it lightly.
"Fujiko, what are you staring at?" Kikumaru asked. "You've been spacing out a lot lately, nya."
Fuji shook his head. "Nothing."
Kikumaru glanced at the mirror. "Hey, when did that get there? I've never seen it before. Is it one of Yumiko's old mirrors?"
Fuji caught the tennis ball. "Yeah," he lied. "She gave it to me when she got her new one the other day." He looked at the mirror, and it had stopped glowing. Strange, he thought and started tossing the ball up and down again. The mirror started glowing again. Fuji blinked. "Hey, Eiji, do you notice anything strange about that mirror?"
"Something strange about it? No, not really, why?"
"Oh, it's nothing," Fuji said. "It must be my imagination." Fuji tossed the ball to Kikumaru, who caught it quickly. They absentmindedly tossed it back and forth between each other, talking a bit, too. The mirror was glowing the entire time.
Fuji, in the silence, thought about the tennis ball. It was perfectly round, of course, and in any case, it was new. The fuzz was still on it, seeming like little shatters all over the ball, interrupted by the white line that curved around the ball every now and then. Fuji blinked again. Shatter marks? White lines? The mirror glowing? No brand name? It couldn't be…No. It couldn't be the orb. It could not be the orb that the princes were so caught up by.
But the more Fuji thought about it and contradicted himself, the more it made sense. Shizuma had said two white lines, but she had only been looking at once side of it, and from one side, it certainly looked like it had two white lines. The fuzz actually did look like shatter marks, if you looked closely and paid attention. But tennis hadn't even existed in the mirror world! He thought about this for a while and deducted that since he was a reincarnation of the magician, they would have somewhat of the same personality and thought patterns. Fuji loved tennis, and even though tennis didn't exist in the mirror world, it still existed a bit in the magician's (who created the orb) consciousness, and it was probably the first image that came to mind. All in all, a tennis ball was perfect, because it was small and portable. It was a bright green-yellow color, almost like a warning color.
Fuji was tired of all this thinking. He wanted to test it out, and actionsdid speak louder than words. "Hey, Eiji, can you get up for a moment?" Fuji asked, breaking the silence. Kikumaru looked at him quizzically, but stood up regardless. Fuji stood up with him. "This is for the other day," he said.
Kikumaru barely had time to utter a small "Huh?" before he was shoved into the mirror, tennis ball in hand. Fuji easily stepped through after him.
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"So how do you plan on doing it this time?" Atobe asked Yukimura. "How are we going to get Fuji to come back?"
Yukimura shrugged. "I thought of the last plan; I think it's time for you guys to think a bit, for a change."
Kikumaru pointed a finger accusingly at Yukimura. "A plan that almost got us killed!"
"What are you talking about?" Saeki asked.
"Did you see how dangerous Fuji looked when he was angry? I don't want to see that face again!" Kikumaru whined.
Just then, there was a shout and then a thud near the mirror. All of the princes turned around, hooded cloaks still on, to see what had caused the disturbance. They found another Kikumaru Eiji lying on the floor rubbing his head, and Fuji standing just beside him with an accomplished look on his face. "Everyone, meet Kikumaru of my world," Fuji said triumphantly, and everyone gaped at him.
A tennis ball rolled across the floor to Ryoma's feet. The dark haired boy picked it up. "Hey, what's this?" he said. Shizuma, who had been sitting beside him, glanced at it, and her eyes widened.
"That's the orb! That's it! See the shatter marks and the white streaks??" she said excitedly, jumping out of her seat.
Ryoma turned the ball around and around in his hand. "Yeah, I reeeaally see those shatter marks," he said sarcastically. "It's so shattered it feels fuzzy."
Jiroh took the ball out of Ryoma's hand and examined it. "Hey, it only has one white line on here! And it's not even a line; it goes in a circle!"
"Whatever! I did the best I could!" Shizuma shouted back at the two princes, shutting them up.
Fuji, the current pacifist, changed the subject. "So, Atobe, why don't you tell all of us how this works?" he said, hinting at the fact that Atobe already had his real body back.
Atobe glared at Fuji. "I'll reveal it when all the bodies are back in this world," he hissed. "Until then, keep your mouth shut."
Fuji smirked. "Yes, master," he said jokingly.
Atobe just shook his head and turned back to the two Kikumarus who were staring at each other. "You clasp hands with your mirror self, like this." He took each of Fuji's hands and held them in each of his own, corresponding to each other as if they were facing each other (like they were) and held them up in front of his face. "And the body should disappear back into the soul."
Meanwhile, Fuji's world's Kikumaru was shouting at the mirror Kikumaru. "Who the heck is this?!?! He looks just like me, in weirder clothes!!!"
Mirror Kikumaru was now mad, too. "Me?! Weirder clothes?!? You've got to be kidding me!! No sensible person wears blue and red together!"
Yukimura sighed and rubbed his temples. "It'll all be over soon," Fuji assured him.
"You said you have to go through this every day?" Yukimura asked Fuji, referring to a story that Fuji had told him about Kaidoh and Momoshiro.
Fuji nodded. "Yeah, But Tezuka usually makes them do conditioning by running laps around the courts if they fight too much."
Suddenly, there was a bright flash and the high pitched shouting ceased. Yukimura and the other princes, along with Atobe and Fuji, sighed in relief. "Glad that's over with," Ryoma said.
"Sometimes, you have to use force," Atobe said, shaking his head.
"He started it!" Mirror Kikumaru said.
"Sure he did," Fuji said, surreptitiously taking off Kikumaru's cloak and draping it around himself so that the redhead didn't even notice.
"Hey, that's my cloak!" Kikumaru said, finally noticing the lack of weight on his back.
Fuji smiled. "Sure it is."
Everyone's eyes widened in unison, with the exception of Yukimura, Atobe, and Fuji. "That's Eiji's cloak!!!" Saeki shouted first.
"It worked!" Shizuma shouted afterwards, clapping her hands. "Good work, Fuji!"
"How did you find this orb? I bet it's the same as a bunch of other ones in your world," Oshitari asked curiously. "Shizuma didn't really give the best oral description of it, anyway."
Fuji took the orb back from Jiroh, who had been playing with it and bouncing it on the floor. "There's normally a brand name printed right here," he said, pointing to the space between the 'two white streaks'. "Our school carries all Penn tennis balls, which is what this is called normally. But this one doesn't have a brand name, yet it's new, which was something I found strange. I took it home and I was going to return it to another school that I thought it came from, since a ball as perfect as that would probably be missed. And then I noticed that the mirror was glowing whenever I would move the ball. So I just assumed this was the orb you guys were all hyped up about."
Fuji tossed the ball to Ryoma, who started turning it around in his hands again. "So, what is this ball normally used for?" he asked in his usual tone, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
Fuji laughed at the irony.
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Fuji crept quietly into Atobe's room, closing the door behind him. He had been doing this every night since he had been first staying at the castle. Atobe and he got along fairly well. Well, not fairly well, more like very well. They would talk about all sorts of things, Fuji explaining daily life in his world, and Atobe explaining a day in his own. This time, Fuji had something to confess to Atobe, and it was about Yukimura's father's journal. He hadn't told anyone about that yet, and he thought Atobe would be the best person to tell, since Atobe was the closest prince to him, and Yukimura was right after that.
"You're here again?" Atobe asked before Fuji even had a chance to turn around from closing the door. The dark room suddenly became illuminated as the lamps and the fireplace were lit.
Fuji nodded. "I have something to confess," he said.
Atobe had the feeling that he already knew what Fuji was going to say. He had the feeling that Fuji was going to tell him about the journal, but he kept his mouth shut anyway. He wanted to see how Fuji would present it. "What is it?"
Fuji sighed. "You're probably going to kill me for this. I can't believe Yukimura hasn't yet, anyway. But I was in the library the other day and I read Yukimura's father's journal without permission because I thought that Yukimura meant that everything in the library was actually open for me to read."
"Relax, Fuji," Atobe said, surprisingly. "I don't think he'd have expected you to find it."
"Why not? That's the exact same thing he said when he walked in. Do you know something about it?"
Atobe nodded. "Yeah. Only people with Seiichi's father's blood in them can read that journal."
"Are you sure?" Fuji asked, not quite believing what he was hearing.
Atobe nodded. "Positive. And I also know why you have Seiichi's father's blood in you, or in other words, why you were able to find the key and journal."
Fuji blinked for a moment, and then his eyes widened. "You don't mean…that brunette…who was sent to a different world…"
Atobe nodded. "Yeah. That would be you."
Fuji shook his head. "You've got to be kidding me! There's no way…"
Atobe cut him off. "Think about it. If this is the case, then it all makes sense. Here, Seiichi left a picture of the brunette in my room in case you decided to come and talk to me."
"So he noticed?" Fuji asked.
"Who wouldn't have?" Atobe countered, retrieving the picture from the desk by his bed. He handed it to Fuji and created a ball of fire by Fuji's face so that he could see it. "There's no way you're going to tell me that that person isn't you. It's a spitting image of you."
Fuji gasped. "You're right. And I'm with Yukimura…I don't remember any of this, though. And I was clearly old enough to begin remembering things like that."
Atobe shrugged. "They probably wiped your memory before they sent you away."
"You can do that?"
"Sure. Not many people do it, though, since it's a highly advanced spell, and it's pretty much useless in battle. The clerics and mages learn it, though. And I think Saeki will have to learn it at some time."
"I still can't believe that I'm related to him…"
"You say it like it's a bad thing," Atobe said, chuckling.
"No, of course it's not a bad thing!" Fuji said quickly. Then he smirked. "It's not like we're going to be having children together, anyway."
Atobe laughed. "I didn't think that was what you were referring to."
"I didn't think so, either. It was just a random thought that crossed my mind. We've only kissed a couple times, anyway."
Atobe smiled at Fuji. "Want to make that one more?" He leaned in and kissed Fuji tenderly on the lips, without waiting for him to reply. Of course, Fuji wouldn't have had any objections, anyway.
After Atobe had pulled away, Fuji smiled. "Do you think that it's sick, because now you know I'm related to you?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Remember a little while ago when I was healing from my injuries; you thought that kissing Ryoma would be sick because he was your cousin? Do you think that kissing me is sick because I'm your half-cousin?"
Atobe chuckled again. "Not really. You're too pretty."
Fuji laughed. "That explains a lot, neh?"
Atobe nodded.
Fuji leaned his head on Atobe's shoulder. "By the way, Keigo, you haven't confessed your undying love for me yet."
Atobe rolled his eyes. "You and your need for attention. I confess my undying love for you. Happy?"
Fuji yawned and stretched his arms. "That's better. I love you too, Keigo." With that, he drifted off to sleep. Atobe wrapped his arms around Fuji's shoulders and pressed a kiss to the top of his head.
Ahh, sweet, sweet fluff. xDD Hope you enjoyed this chapter, and please be courteous and review before you fave/alert! Thanks! And a big special thanks to all my reviewers!