Don't own.

There will be longer ones ahead. Just not now.

Yaoi, Momo/Ryoma, Tezuka/Fuji.

………

I never saw a hero.

The topic didn't particularly consume me as it did some of my other friends, one of which nagged his parents into going to a comic convention some four hundred miles away, just to see one in the flesh, and returned announcing that his particular hero liked tuna fish and mumbled a lot when kids asked him questions. Then again, that was America.

I saw a few of the shows when I had a spare moment to waste, which wasn't usual, since practice took up most of my time. It wasn't terribly fascinating; to watch brightly colored characters, seemingly as dimensional as paper, flicker on and off the screen with increasing speed.

None of them played tennis.

The girls might have been interesting, had they shown any more aptitude or skill. They certainly were more focused than the guys, who posed a lot and smiled often, showing flashes of white teeth and discreet spandex logos.

I thought I could beat them in a game of tennis, provided they didn't call me bud. Or little feller.

I'd have won anyway.

Watching great tennis players was boring, most of them looked glazed, with like haircuts flopping over sweaty brows. They looked asleep, unenthusiastic, or chillingly cold with the eyes of predators. The stands were full of people with the same looks in their eyes, or worse, enthusiastic ecstasy. I think those scared me the most; that bone deep worship of people as distant as the stars to them, as far away as a figure on a screen. People they didn't know but loved unconditionally.

I thought all adults were like that, but I guess they weren't.

Maybe fathers were supposed to be heroes, but I couldn't imagine it. Most people seemed to be content to whine a little about their allowance and their fathers, and be happy staring at a cardboard cutout, elbows against the glass of a comic book store window. I didn't really understand.

There wasn't much point in worshiping someone you were determined to beat, and I told that to my teacher when she asked us who our heroes were. She choked a little, and fumbled with the string around her neck that her glasses hung onto, like she did whenever she was nervous or didn't know what to say. I sat there; thinking that was fine, at least honest, but she didn't call on me again for the rest of class.

My father read porn and drank sake; he lounged around in a robe with stubble on his chin. He couldn't have been a hero if he tried. Even if I wasn't quite sure what a hero was.

Then we moved to Japan, and I didn't expect to find any heroes there.

I thought I saw one once, he was tall against the bright afternoon sky, with a tennis racket on his shoulder. His eyes were dark and amused, and purple when he smiled, and his hair looked red-dark in the light.

I remember his eyes that day. They were almost unnatural, like slate, the color of brick shadows and ripe plums and paint; like the lilacs my cousin grew.

I beat the hero, and he was everything he should have been, strong and strangely tactful, laughing at everything, wanting more than everything. He was cleverer than I had thought he'd be, exhilarating and happy and sarcastic.

His clothes looked like splotches of white and yellow, awkward on the uniform lines of green court, the ball bouncing softly before our waiting rackets. He shaded his eyes often with raw, calloused hands, and I didn't like that.

I thought that was that, and didn't dream that night.

He couldn't have been a hero, though, because heroes are never defeated. Never. But I didn't win.

How confusing.

I met another hero at that school.

He was tall and cold, almost brusque, with uniformly brown hair and sleek, steel rimmed glasses, everything about him gleamed with golden fire.

He won, so I followed him.

I knew he couldn't be a hero. He cared about his team distantly, stubbornly. He didn't love to show off, but he watched so avidly from the shadows of the sidelines.

I saw something more than that in the lines of his throat, the tension in his back and the gesture of his wrists when he talked to another boy.

That boy was neither a villain nor a hero, and I might have felt sorry for him is there was anything I could pity him for. There wasn't.

There was something horrible in the brightness of his smiles, the genuine sympathy. He loved too much and knew enough to keep from being truly honest. The flickering sunlight cast too many shadows over his face to read, and his eyes were clear.

His hair was gilt, his skin like paper.

I'd never seen anything like that smile.

I couldn't look at anybody like that, wanting to breathe and touch and devour them; more than longing or love, more that hatred but something like, cold and delirious and shuddering, never touching, always denying. I wanted to tell him that if was impossible to love a hero, or at least someone very close to it, because they would never, ever, love you back that way, but I couldn't, so I watched.

I couldn't love someone until bits and pieces of them became part of you, molded into skin and brushed through hair, facts and facets fluttering in your mind.

I didn't think I could.

I didn't understand, that something so hopeless and clumsy and rough could have been called love. I thought that love was gilded mirrors and Christmas tinsel, pink satin ribbons and fairy tale endings, white as porcelain angels.

I couldn't love like that, alien and unforgettable.

At least that's what I thought for years while I kept winning, defeating and dethroning. Vanquishing.

Until one day, when someone out of a page of the past smiled at me with slate colored eyes.

And then I could, against the red sunlight and white sky, someone who wasn't a hero and wasn't defeated.

Owari…

Etc.

Ki-ku-maru BEAM; Eh, sorry about the short chapters, but now and then the drabbles appear, and it just turns out really short. Like this…I promise I'm trying!

It's easier to write than think. It's easier to type than to write by hand. It's easier to write idea and concepts and themes than to write stories- it's easier to sit, and read, and let your soul blossom in the light of the sun…

-And I am so very afraid of living by that principle.