First Go Lesson
by Lady Addiction
DISCLAIMER: HnG is not mine, etc.
A little fic about a character I'm trying to get into the head of. Beware chibis.
WWWW
He had learned about Go when he was a precocious five-year-old dragged by his mother to visit one of her friends.
Bored at the adult chatter around him, he had slipped down from his mother's lap and padded on his sock-clad feet out of the small living room and out around a corner. He was clutching his Doraemon plushie tightly around one arm, while he looked around. The walls were filled with colorful pictures and scrolls he couldn't read. There were elegant stands with vases of dried flowers or cute little knickknacks. He eyed one of the decorations -- a stone lion with bulging eyes and a horribly-grinning face, but decided that he didn't want his mother yelling at him.
The corrider he was in was short and filled with closed doors. He was at the last door when he started hearing odd noises. Since it was the only thing he could hear aside from the adults in the other room, he was understandably curious.
He knocked on the door, his mother having always told him to be polite.
"Just a minute!" a girl's voice called out.
A few minutes and some more noises later, the door opened, revealing an older girl in a pair of jeans and a pretty blouse. Her face was cross as she looked at the little boy in front of her. "What do you want?"
"What are you doing?"
"I'm playing a game."
"A game?!" He started bouncing on his toes. "What game?!"
She sighed, leaned over his head to look at the corridor behind him. She grimaced. "Feh, well, come in then. Don't eat anything, okay?"
"Of course not!" he told her importantly, scowling. "I'm not a baby anymore, you know." Still, he toddled after her.
She was sitting cross-legged in front of a flat wooden board with a great deal of intersecting lines. At the side of the board were two plastic containers filled with black and white balls. He went over and settled close to her. Unable to restrain his curiousity, he reached over and plucked out a black piece. It was oddly shaped, spherical, but flat at the top and bottom.
"This game is called baduk. These are stones. One player uses the white stones, the other uses the black. This is how you play…"
And he sat there quietly, eagerly absorbing this new game. The more he stared at the board, the bigger it seemed, as if the intersecting lines were multiplying right before his very eyes. He clutched at the black stone, savoring its smoothness and warmth.
"So what's your name?" she asked that little boy on that quiet Sunday afternoon.
"Yeong-Ha!" the boy replied brightly with a cheerful, gap-toothed grin, as he copied the way she held a white stone and brought it down on the board clumsily.
Pachi.
Park Dae-Moon would never dream that the little brat she began to baby-sit at the age of eleven would come to dominate the Go world in the next few years.
-FIN-