Authors Note: I hate writing dialogue…just keep that in mind. And this is probably going to end up a lot more twisted than I intended…that's what you get when I plan these things in the study room! Also, I apologise, I'm not very happy with this chapter but this is version number 4 and I'm just going to have to leave it or I'll never get anywhere. I might rewrite it later…

Chapter One

The beginning of a story is always the most difficult part of it to write. Like everyone else who has ever attempted to tell a story I find it very difficult to pinpoint exactly where it's beginning is. The beginning of the important events isn't necessarily the beginning of the story and there is no way you can tell a story without first allowing the audience a glimpse into the characters and their lives so they don't feel confused and lost when the story actually begins. So I will begin this story on the last day of the school year, the day before the start of yet another long summer holiday and I will begin it on the walk home from school.

For once we were walking at a leisurely pace, in no hurry, school had ended early there had been no tennis practice and there was no need to hurry home to complete any neglected homework. It was warm, the sun was shining and we had all the time in the world to enjoy our new freedom. Not that it was that new, it came around at almost exactly the same time every single year, but the extended periods spent in school made it seem like our first holiday in absolutely years. We weren't totally free of school of course, the tennis club would continue to meet almost daily, but none of us considered that a chore. Now, I'm using the word's we, our and us a lot and you must be wandering exactly who I'm talking about. I'm talking about my friends. In general terms I'm talking about the entire tennis team, Kyousuke, Tatsunori, Tetsu and Masaya. More specifically I'm talking about the three me people who help to form my quartet of closest friends, An, Tachibana-san and Shinji. That's who I'm talking about when I say we, and that's who I was walking with.

"How about we go to the street courts? Get some more practice in," Tachibana-san suggested, shooting an evil smile at me.

I rolled my eyes and didn't rise to the bait. Ever since I'd literally begged him to cancel practise on the last day of term to make it feel like a real holiday, everyone had been teasing me, making plans that involved 7 hour long marathon practices, endurance runs and other such disgustingly un-holiday like activities.

"What a good idea!" An exclaimed in blatantly artificial tones, "We've got all this free time we could stay there for hours!"

"You're really bad at this, I can tell you're not serious."

"An might have been joking but I wasn't," was the calm response, "I really do think that we need to keep up our practise over the holiday. We should start now. You know, avoid starting on the wrong foot, right Shinji?"

Shinji nodded, "Akira's getting lazy. I never thought he'd get lazy. He's far too active. That rhythm obsession makes sure he never keeps still. Perhaps Akira is ill and that's why he's so keen on not practising today."

I rolled my eyes again and glared at him. To be fair Shinji probably hadn't intended to say anything beyond the first sentence, the rest was probably meant to stay inside his head as part of his thoughts, but Shinji's thoughts hardly ever managed to stay thoughts and as they had now been spoken out loud I reserved the right to get annoyed about them, "I do not have a rhythm obsession. I'm not ill and I'm not getting lazy!"

Shinji blinked and tipped his head slightly to the side a quizzical expression on his face that changed to one of understanding as he realised that once again he'd vocalised thoughts he'd never intended to be said out loud. The realisation didn't trouble him, he was far too used to it and so were we, "So…?"

"So we'll go to the courts. Happy now?"

And as I marched off I heard An chuckle and Tachibana-san make an unkind comment about red heads and their tempers. For the record my hair is not red it is simply an odd shade of brown. Besides I wasn't even really angry, the marching off was just for show, honestly it was. I had absolutely no desire to scream and shout about the injustices of being teased into doing things by my friends. No desire at all. Really. Why oh why did I make any objection to the practise in the first place?

Predictably enough, at least predictably if you're familiar with the nature of the members of school tennis teams, the courts were crowded. I'd say pretty much every local team had done exactly what we had, cancelled their practise, school had gotten out early and they had ended up down here. In fact, the rest of our team had done exactly the same thing. Why did I ever attempt to fight it? Why did I just not accept that the first day of the holiday was not going to be a restful day? We were going to train and work hard…and oh my god I really had gotten lazy.

Right, that's it, I turned to face Tachibana-san, "I challenge you to a match!" because hey, can you think of a better way to get over laziness than challenging the best tennis player I know to a match which will probably involve me being run ragged?

"Ok. I accept, but lets play doubles. You can have Shinji and I'll ask," he scanned the courts searching for someone worthy of partnering him, his eyes finally settled on someone and an evil smile crossed his face, "I'll ask Fuji."

Oh great. Fuji. Not that I didn't like Fuji, I was sure that he was a very nice person and a great friend to have, but I was also sure he was very dangerous and feared for my life whenever I was in his presence. Not that I was very often in his presence, Seishun Academy was a world away from Fudomine, the school I went to, and we only ever encountered each other at tennis matches so I can't say that I've spent an extensive amount of time with Fuji. As far as I'm concerned that's a very good thing and I hope it stays like that.

Shinji had moved closer to me as Tachibana-san went to ask Fuji to play with him, "Do we have to play against him?" he grumbled quietly, "His eyes are strange. Most people keep their eyes open at all times. Fuji seems to like keeping them half closed. Anyone who walks around with their eyes half closed is a bit odd as far as I'm concerned and also isn't someone I really want to spend a lot of time with. Imagine if you ended up walking home in the dark with him, you wouldn't have the benefit of four eyes like you would if you were walking with a normal person, you'd only really have three eyes, two wholes and two halves, and that could lead to car accidents."

"I don't think we're ever going to end up walking home in the dark with him," I replied, smiling at him, "And I don't think we have a choice about playing against him either."

"It's your fault. You challenged him."

"Yes I know that." Yes I know that sounded snappy, but Shinji knows me too well to take it personally or very seriously when I snap at him.

Unsurprisingly Fuji agreed to play. He's quite good friends with Tachibana-san these days, though I don't know why. An decides to umpire. She'd much rather be playing but she does accept that no matter how good she is she can't compare to the guys when it comes to strength…yet. She's working on it and I have every confidence that she'll soon be every bit as good as the rest of us. Well, hopefully she won't ever be quite as good as me. Call me a chauvinist but I really wouldn't like to be beaten by a girl, even if it is An Tachibana!

I think that in this case, the less said about the match the better. Shinji and I are good, really good, and together we're even better. That's not boasting, look at our match history, figures don't lie. Anyway, we're good, but Tachibana-san is far better and Fuji's just as good as he is, if not better on a good day, so really, we didn't stand a chance, and we knew that when we started. I just didn't expect the match to end with me flat on my back on the tennis court begging for mercy because I was just exhausted. I'm almost certain that Tachibana-san did it on purpose, making me run, making me run more than Shinji, just in general trying to wear me out in revenge. Sometimes, I detest him and I detest the fact that he probably told Fuji to do it too and I hate the fact that Fuji probably participated gleefully and probably got at least a little too much pleasure from making me run. Bastards.

Shinji was standing over me, blinking innocently at me, "Are you ok?"

"Yes Shinji I'm fine."

"Are you going to get up anytime soon? The floor is dirty. You'll get your clothes dirty and then you'll have to wash them. You'll have to wash them anyway because they're all sweaty…"

"Shinji. Please stop thinking about my sweaty clothes."

Tachibana-san and Fuji joined Shinji to stare down at me. Fuji was smiling (obviously) and Tachibana-san was trying hard not to giggle, well he wasn't trying very hard, "I'm sorry," he said, straight face cracking in the wake of the pissed off glare I was directing at him, it probably wasn't that threatening considering I was lying on the floor, "But I can't have any of my team getting at all lazy," he stuck a hand out to help me up from the floor, I didn't take the hand, just glared, "I'll buy you ice cream."

I took the hand, "It had better be a bloody big ice cream."

"It will be," he assured me.

Now, no one could ever accuse Tachibana-san of doing things half heartedly, he always did things very thoroughly and when he had promised to do something, to say he was doing it thoroughly would almost be an understatement. So around fifteen minutes later in an ice cream parlour just down the road from the tennis courts I found myself presented with an ice cream that was so big I almost couldn't look over the top of the glass. All it needed now were musical sparklers and it really would be worthy of the term, all singing all dancing. God I love ice cream and god I love Tachibana-san. Mentally apologising for the less than complimentary terms I had been using for him in my head, I pulled out one of the huge wafers stuck through the top of the cream (it was almost as big as my hand) and munched on it happily.

"Wow, I've never seen ice cream disappear so fast," An laughed while eating her own, considerably smaller, portion much more daintily that I was.

"Akira always eats that fast when he likes something. It's a compliment."

"Yes it is! You know me too well Shinji." Mmmm…more ice cream less talk. Tachibana-san was still trying not to laugh, he still wasn't succeeding and it was making it very hard for him to eat his ice cream. Really, we're not very mature sensible people. In fact, we're positively immature. Not such a shocking thing really, looking at me and An, everyone knows we're silly, but Tachibana-san and Shinji? Shinji is the class genius and has a reputation for being deadly serious at all times. It's not true; his sense of humour is just a lot darker and more twisted than most peoples. As for Tachibana-san, he is the captain of the tennis team, he has responsibilities and other such grown up things, so he must be mature. Unfortunately, Tachibana-san's sense of humour is every bit as twisted as Shinji's and he's only responsible when he absolutely has to be.

Keeping that lack of responsibility in mind and therefore removing any possibly steadying influence from the equation, I don't think anyone would be particularly surprised to learn that once we were done with our ice cream we didn't go home like good boys. We didn't go back to the tennis courts like good tennis players. We may project a clean cut good boy image (ok, we may try to project) at the tournaments to blend in with all the private school boys, but we're not in the same league as they are and therefore are a little bit rougher around the edges than they are and in our spare time do some things that people might consider…a little bad.

Don't get any dramatic ideas. We're not exactly the angelic tennis player by day, hard-core gangster by night types. For one thing, with practises morning, evening and weekends we just can't put in the hours to be proper bad boys, which takes time and dedication. No, we're very small time and really only offensive to the prim and proper, the parents of our private school rivals for example. Our early evening activities tonight consisted of heading to a local park, not the park where the street courts are located that's a nice posh park, to a local park where no one will mind if we just sit around for hours. In this park we joined up with the rest of our school friends and quite a few people I wouldn't class as friends at all, just people I spend time with, and well, had a little drink.

Not such a great crime right? You'd think we were killing people by the reactions some people have to something like that. You drink alcohol??? At 14??? Oh my! Yes, we may be 14 year olds, but that's only 6 years away from the legal age and 6 years really isn't that long in the great scheme of things. At least that's how we choose to look at it and it's really a very useful perspective. We never get extremely drunk and sitting in a park on a warm summers evening with friends and a few drinks is a very nice thing to do. Why should the adults have it all to themselves?

So we were sitting in the park, I was sitting in between Tachibana-san and Shinji until An dragged Shinji off to help her retrieve her jumper which had somehow ended up in a tree. I was watching them and smiling to myself, enjoying the opportunity, I don't often get to just sit and watch Shinji, especially not in a way that means he doesn't know I'm watching him, and Tachibana-san was watching me. He chuckled and the next sentence that came out of his mouth was the sentence that started the whole thing off.

Thanks for reading!