A/N: More from Akira's pov next chapter... he needs time to process. :)
Stepping Stones
~29~ In which Hikaru and Sai become partners
The last round of games ended conveniently a little early, which plunged the back room into a chaos of trying to clean up and keep a miniature horde of kids entertained until their parents showed up. In any other circumstances Hikaru would have found an inescapable reason to be elsewhere in the first fifteen seconds, but as it was he waded cheerfully through the midst of it, casually picking loose Sai's stones and stuffing them first in his pocket and then his backpack while absolutely no one noticed.
Waya and Akari were occupied defending the cookies—'Not after the games, at the door—' Isumi had been recruited to find someone's missing sock—'Here, I see it!—' Miniboss was dogging Hikaru enumerating how he should up Akari's training so she wouldn't suck so much next time—'Kozue will be here next time, not Akari—'
Akira's dad reappeared and started chatting with some of the kids about how the tournament had gone, fortunately after Hikaru finished collecting and stowing away the stones. He decided it was high time to go see if any parents had shown up yet. Or see where Akira had gotten off to. Or chat with the nice receptionist lady.
Parents began to arrive and cull their kids from the herd. Hikaru posted himself out in the main salon, with Nase, to wave the kids off and admonish them one last time not to eat their cookies until they were outside. Almost all of them chirped gratifying variations of 'Thanks I had fun!'
'This was fun,' Nase commented to him during a brief lull. 'Are you doing it again?'
'This headache—?' Hikaru started to scoff.
The sniffly insei, now bundled up to his nose in a scarf his mom must have just brought, stopped as he went by with parent and piped, 'Please tell your students I will be better next time! When do we play again?'
'In a month. Or two.'
The insei said goodbye and thank you and Hikaru said goodbye and glad you had fun. Nase was gracious enough to just look her amusement instead of say it.
'I was saying, yes we do it again,' Hikaru invented, though he suspected it was too late to save face, 'if Mr. Touya agrees.'
But heck, why not? The kids had liked it, Sai'd had a great time; it hadn't been that bad.
'Maybe he's still here. I'll ask.'
Nase turned and headed toward the back. It struck Hikaru that she was an excellent friend he really ought to have around more often, especially when ghost-like formal-Japanese adults he needed to impress were concerned. Another couple kids swirled past he cheerfully bade goodbye.
"Hikaru?"
'Hey Akira!' Hikaru grinned as the other boy came up beside him. "Sorry for all the noise out here. But that didn't go so bad after all, huh?"
"...Yes." For some reason Akira looked preoccupied with something. "Hikaru, you always teach your students like that?"
"Eh? Well they're not my—" Oh screw it, he was the intermediary. "Yeah, why?"
"Where did you learn to talk like that? So... practiced. You sound like... you know lots of Japanese."
What—oh. shit.
He'd been speaking for Sai. Like he always did with the gang, running his mouth repeating whatever the ghost said because if he stopped to concentrate he'd get distracted with solving the meaning of words and his own opinions. Except he wasn't in the shed, he was around his friends, who knew this was his second and still practically infant language...
He wished, fervently, that one of the kids would suddenly come back in screaming about a crazy man with an axe. Or the building would crumble around them in a freak earthquake.
"My gramps," Hikaru blurted. How did that make any sense? "He, uh, teaches—taught me like that, so I guess I just tried doing the same—"
Akira still looked dubious. Oh god, how had he let this happen? Waya and the others were probably already scheduling brain scans for him.
"He... taught Jaro Japanese, and... uh..."
Akira looked baffled. Why did it have to be Akira so he couldn't switch to Japanese and then claim mistranslation?
Hikaru sighed and pulled Akira away from the door. Not that he was really concerned about their being overheard at the moment rather than just being believed, but no reason to invite anyone passing to listen in. Or lose a couple extra seconds to figure out what to say—and untangle what he'd already said.
"Okay, see, you know how I pretty much dumped Go for a while when I had to start learning Japanese?"
Akira nodded.
"Well, Jaro found out—I mean, I was playing him a lot, and then I didn't have time, and he decided to help me learn Japanese instead..." Truth would not work here. "But he didn't know it either, so he started learning from my gramps..." Please don't ask how he and Gramps know each other. "And, so, since I started playing again he's been teaching me in Japanese, like my gramps I guess, and when I started passing it on to the squirts—" was that safe to admit? "—I guess I just did it the same way without even thinking. I mean, it's not me teaching them really, I'm just passing on what Jaro says."
Akira considered, his expression wrinkled in a still faintly dubious frown. "Your teacher must learn very fast," he said slowly. "English is very different to Japanese."
Hikaru put his father in Sai's place mentally for a second. "Got that right," he sighed enviously. Then he paused. Was that really realistic? How long did that give Sai to have supposedly gone from nothing to fluent? "If he didn't know some already."
"Is Jaro not American?"
"Um..." He was not referencing Waya's ridiculous conspiracy theories online, no sane person would credit those. He stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. "I don't actually know. I only ever played online until I came here, so I haven't actually met him in person. He could be from anywhere. No borders on the Internet, you know."
"Oh." Akira still looked surprised, but that was better than suspicious.
"We don't talk about personal stuff, just Go," Hikaru added, hoping that would sound credible, and tried to discreetly fumble with his phone in his pocket. Why hadn't he learned how to make it ring without looking?
"Oh," Akira repeated, slowly. "Are you s—"
"Whoops, hang on!" Hikaru pulled his phone out and mashed buttons, careful to hold it so Akira couldn't see the screen. "Text from Mom—oh, sorry, gotta get home, I'm late. We can talk more later, okay?"
He rushed back to the back room to collect his backpack and Sai, fervently glad he'd already collected the stones from underneath the tables, and told everybody there that he was late getting home and his mom was mad so he had to go right now, sorry-bye-see you later, so none of them had the opportunity to interrogate him too. On the way to the front door he paused by Akira one more time and added in a hurried undertone, "And hey, uh, don't tell anybody I know Jaro, okay, because... er... not the kinda attention I want if that got out."
There. That sounded more tactful than those people are fanatics and I'd fear for my life.
Then before Akira could answer he looked at his phone again, yelled, "Bye!" and ran for the station.
He didn't stop to catch his breath until he got on the bus and sat down, and then slumped forward with his head in his hands, blocking out the rest of the world, including Sai's concerned queries beside him. Shit. He'd talked for Sai in front of his friends, they'd noticed—of course they had—and he'd probably convinced Akira he was crazy with such a random made-up excuse.
His gramps had taught Jaro Japanese? Seriously? Why hadn't he come up with something like... like...
Fortunately the bus trip was long enough for Hikaru to work through his initial panic, self-recrimination and attempts to conjure a genie to make the last day not have happened before he got home. He also calmed down enough to hold his cell phone to one ear as a prop and explain to the ghost what had happened and why it would be very bad if it happened again. Multiple-personality Hikaru locked in a therapist's office and Sai back in the shed with no visitors and no Go for who knew how long.
By the time he got home the last of his panic had firmed into resolve. He passed his mother with a brief exchange of "yeah had fun" "dinner will be ready in a bit" and went straight to his room and shut the door before turning to face Sai with his conclusion.
'We talk too different. We can't go out like that again.'
'Yes...' But the ghost was upset, fan whirring in gentle anxiety.
They'd pretty much promised the kids more tournaments, after all, and Hikaru couldn't think of a time he'd seen the ghost look happier before today except maybe when he'd first figured out how to cart him around with the stones instead of the whole board.
'So, I will practice until I sound like you.'
'I'll help,' Sai promised instantly.
'But you have to practice too. Not sound like a different century, or I can't talk for you anymore.'
The fan stuttered for a few seconds before Sai nodded. 'I will. I promise!' The fan picked up to a whir again. 'But... how?'
'Start here.' Hikaru opened his laptop, navigated to YouTube, and decided on Gurren Lagann to begin Sai's introduction to modern Japanese vernacular. It had worked for him; why shouldn't it work for a ghost too? 'Just pay attention to words. I'll explain what happens after dinner.'
.
After dinner they divided the rest of the evening into Sai watching more anime clips and attempting to parrot the characters' slang (which was usually hilarious) and Hikaru attempting to explain things like giant earth-boring drill mechas that operated on fantasy physics in formal Japanese (which usually made the explanation incomprehensible to both of them). By the end of a couple hours Sai could repeat 'Who the hell do you think I am?' perfectly on prompt, which led to excessive preening on his part and endless chortling on Hikaru's as he fed the ghost questions to use his new line on.
By the end of the night Sai had clued in on what exactly he was saying and was so horrified he went into a still-fanned, hat-bent sulk and refused to even acknowledge the laptop's existence until Hikaru finally switched it to Prince of Tennis. Even then he only listened, with a deeply suspicious expression, and refused to repeat anything out loud.
Hikaru might have been able to get him over it faster if he'd acted contrite instead of pointing out that everybody in anime worth watching was rude, fine he was sorry, but come on, admit it, it was a little bit funny...
