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On the Christmas Eve when Gakuto is ten years old, his older sister drags him with her to the circus.
"I was going to take you both," she says once they've found their seats, referring to their younger brother who had to stay home with a fever.
"Can't see why you don't go with your friends," Gakuto grumbles. He doesn't share his sister's newly found obsession with the circus, and he's not in a very good mood to begin with anyway. He lost a tennis game the day before that he's sure he should have been able to win, and he is preoccupied with trying to understand what it was that he did wrong, because he can't spot it at all. He should have won.
His family doesn't really celebrate Christmas, so that doesn't much cheer him up either.
His sister rolls her eyes and tells him to stop sulking. "Who knows, it could actually be interesting," she says. "You might even have fun."
Then she goes into a tirade about how she got the idea of going from the fact that in some places going to the circus on Christmas used to be a tradition, and Gakuto stops listening. He isn't all that impressed once the show starts either, so he bugs her for to buy him some popcorn instead. She rolls her eyes again and tells him to use his own money, which Gakuto doesn't want to do, so he just sits in his place and watches anyway until she hands him some money after all. "We'll share," she says.
There's an acrobatics number starting just when he gets back with the popcorn. It's probably not that extraordinary as far as acrobatics goes, Gakuto thinks, but there's something else poking at his brain now, an idea taking form.
Perhaps he's been thinking about it the wrong way, he thinks. Perhaps there wasn't something wrong in his play the other day, perhaps there was just something missing instead.
Gakuto is silent on their way home, and his sister takes this and the lack of visible sulking as a sign that he enjoyed himself.
"I told you it wouldn't be that bad," she tells him, beaming.
"It wasn't... that bad," he agrees, frowning to himself as he's picturing one of the acrobatic move he's just seen in his head, trying to figure out exactly how it's done.
"I knew you'd like it! Want to borrow some of my books?" she asks, a teasing note in her voice now.
"No."
She has books on circus history, and novels - probably unrealistic, overly romantic, sappy ones anyway, Gakuto thinks - and he has no need for those. He remembers she has taped some shows as well, though, and thinks that m might come in handy some day, but he doesn't tell her that.
When they get home, Gakuto goes to his room. His tennis racquet is leaning to the wall next to his bed. He looks at it for a while before picking it up, weighing it in his hand. Perhaps going to the circus wasn't a waste of time after all, he decides. He'll know soon enough.
A few days later he goes to the library and borrows some books on acrobatics.
The Hyotei tennis club is a pyramid, and the competition to climb it is fierce.
This is what the coach tells the new members on their first day. This is what the upperclassmen keep telling them, to remind them exactly where their place in the hierarchy is. This is what the first years keep talking about between them, dreaming of the day they'll get to be the ones to wear the regular jerseys and look down on the rest of the club from the top.
Gakuto thinks it's all kind of silly. The pyramid isn't something you should talk about and think about, it's something that's just there, like the sky or the sun or the laws of gravity. Honestly, had they expected it to be anyway else?
Gakuto also figures out pretty soon that he's not the only one who looks at it like that, and that the people who don't think too much about it are the ones you need to watch out for. Because those are the ones that are good enough to be so confident in their tennis to simply assume that they either are or soon will be good enough to go the top.
He can't help but feel pretty smug that he's figured this out.
But he also knows that there are a lot of players at Hyotei who are better than him. Pretending anything else would just be stupid. So he doesn't expect to make regulars yet when the third years retire after Nationals - really, he doesn't - but he's still furious for weeks when he doesn't. He supposes it should cheer him up slightly that there's only one first year regular anyway, but it doesn't really. Though maybe, he acknowledges, he would have felt even worse if there would have been more of them.
It's been pretty obvious from the first day he set foot in the Hyotei tennis club that Atobe is going to be their leader in a not too far-off future. It's just that the Gakuto hasn't really thought too much about it before, he thinks as he watches Atobe play a training match with one of the second years and win so easily it's almost ridiculous.
When that game is finished, Gakuto plays a game with another first year, a boy named Mitani who is okay but nothing spectacular. Gakuto has to entertain himself somehow anyway, and the look on the other boy's face when Gakuto jumps is really quite satisfying.
There may be other people going to the top faster than him, Gakuto thinks as he hits the ball past the other boy's ear and wins the point. But at least he's the only one who's there literally.
The first time Gakuto plays doubles with Oshitari Yuushi is in the autumn of their first year, a couple of months after Nationals. The coach has been testing out various doubles combinations over a couple of weeks, and Gakuto has played with a couple of people already. He figures he's an okay doubles player. Not outstanding, but certainly not bad either.
Playing with Oshitari makes him reconsider this assessment.
Because they're good. Really, really good.
Gakuto doesn't know Oshitari very well, but judging from what he does know, the two of them are very different. They play very different styles of tennis. However, despite these differences they still manage to work very well together. Somehow, it's surprisingly easy for the two of them to coordinate their game, and to trust the other to do what they're supposed to in any given situation. In fact, they do so well that when they finish - with the two of them winning easily - there has actually gathered quite a few people to watch the match. Usually, practise matches of this kind at Hyotei are good enough, but not so exciting that anyone would stop to watch unless it is the regulars playing.
"That," Oshitari tells him as they walk off the court, "was interesting."
Gakuto thinks about the looks on the faces of the second years they were playing, and of the interest on the faces of the people watching. "Yeah," he agrees. "And fun, too."
Oshitari doesn't answer, but the smirk on his face makes Gakuto think that the he probably agrees, and he suddenly has the feeling that maybe he knows why they worked so well together after all. They may be as different as you can be in many ways, but apparently there are ways they're not so different after all.
He decides then and there that whether Oshitari likes it or not, they'll be playing doubles again in the future. From what he now knows about Oshitari, though, he thinks he might very well be thinking the same thing.
Gakuto cuts his hair on a Sunday. He stands in front of the mirror in the bathroom for a long time staring at himself before he raises the scissors and cuts the it just above his shoulders. He doesn't look into the mirror while he cuts it, but looks at the red locks falling into the wash-stand instead.
When he's finished and looks up again, there's a different person staring at him in the mirror. He's had hair that goes past his shoulders and that he occasionally ties up into a ponytail for a couple of years now, and this feels very strange. His head feels too light.
He stares into the mirror for a while again, frowning. This still isn't what he had in mind, and he tries to figure out what else to do.
Finally, he raises the scissors again and cuts his fringe as well, so that it frames his face in very strict lines.
He smiles when he's done. This is much more different from how he used to wear it, and he should look much more like a different person now. Instead he thinks he looks a lot more like his old, real self again now than he did a couple of seconds ago.
The moment of introspection is interrupted when there's a knock on the door. "You've been in there for ages! Have you fallen asleep or something? There are other people who need to use the bathroom as well!" his brother tells him.
Gakuto yells back at him not to take it easy and not get his knickers in a twist, and then gathers up the locks of hair from the wash-stand and from the floor, and throws them away. His brother's eyes widen as he walks out past him, and Gakuto smirks. He heads to his sister's room and knocks on her door. She's lying on her bed, reading manga and her eyes widen as well when she looks up.
"What do you think?" he asks.
She stares at him for a while, and then smiles and gets up from the bed. "At least let me even it for you a bit," she says, grabbing a pair of scissors from her desk.
"You still look like a girl," Shishido tells him when they meets in the changing room on Monday.
Gakuto looks at Shishido's hair and thinks of all the versions of pot, meet kettle that he could tell him, but instead settles on telling him,
"At least it's not boring."
Shishido snorts and says something snarky, and Gakuto retorts without really thinking about it, and they bicker until practise starts.
They continue to bicker once they're put to play each other, and when Gakuto does a somersault he can feel how much lighter his hair is and how it flies just like him.
He decides he really likes his new haircut.
Not long after Atobe is made Captain and Gakuto first makes regulars, just after the third years retire after Nationals in their second year, Atobe arranges a training trip to the mountains for the new regulars. Gakuto has always liked the mountains, and is actually quite excited about it, although he tries not to show it too much - especially once he finds out the place they're staying at actually belongs to Atobe.
He's not disappointed in the least once they get there. The mountains are as beautiful as ever, and Atobe's cottage is fascinating in a weird way. It's very over-the-top and full of things of very questionable taste, but Gakuto doesn't mind that as long as it's interesting. And it's full of servants who are so silent unless Atobe talks to them that it makes Gakuto wonder whether they're really real or just part of the house.
The first night they're there, there's a thunder storm. It wakes Gakuto up only an hour or so after he's gone to sleep, and he since he can't fall back asleep anyway, he goes over to sit by the window to stare out at the bolts of lightning crossing the sky and the rain lashing down. Some time later Shishido, who's his roommate for the trip, wakes up as well. He sits up and blinks at the darkness for a while before asking Gakuto what he's doing up.
"Maybe I'm afraid of the thunder," Gakuto says.
Shishido stares at him. "No your not," he says flatly.
Gakuto smirks and turns to stare out of the window again. Shishido snorts and turns around in the bed and goes back to sleep.
Gakuto stays up and watches the storm die down. It's almost morning when he finally goes back to sleep.
The next day the weather is fine, but Gakuto is so tired that he plays sloppily and loses all his matches. Atobe isn't pleased with him at all.
He sleeps through the whole night the night after that, and plays like himself again the next day. He practises his acrobatic play, and as he lands after one of his Moon Salutes he tells Yuushi that he's sure he's never gone that high up before.
He's going to the top (literally), Gakuto thinks, and he's damn well going to have fun getting there.