Fuji notes the start of the tennis season with a slightly sinking feeling: part boredom, part dismay, mostly just sheer dread.
Because already Tezuka feels the adrenaline like a jolt to the heart, feels the slight pull in his left shoulder like a distant memory of glistening snow, during summer; sees the dark spots of sweat on the dull red court, the glint of sunlight off a metal trophy. Already he is no longer one half of an equation, and they are imbalanced: Fuji is waiting too much, and Tezuka retreating into some remote part of him that is tied inextricably and irrevocably to tennis.
If he was the competitive sort Fuji would be bitter about taking only second place, but he's used to being behind Tezuka (second singles in junior high, second place in academics in high school, always a breath too far in front to catch up with, is Tezuka), and this is just another instance, a supporting role. So he sits silently on the bench during matches, aligns his hands fingertip to fingertip, puts them together rhythmically and nearly soundlessly in a simulation of applause.
Love is nothing on the tennis courts, and Tezuka sometimes takes the tennis-is-life philosophy a bit too literally.
Tezuka wonders if there isn't something in the fact that the ball keeps going over his head, today.
Fuji on the other court is playing less well than he actually can: to be expected, certainly, but he is tensing slightly at the instant of impact, like he's afraid the vibration from hitting the ball will shiver him to pieces, little Fuji-fragments scattered over the court.
The sweat is seeping into his vision, a sourness that stings (uric acid, says the textbook), turns Fuji momentarily into a figure slightly blurred at the edges, faceless, indistinct. For a moment he is at sea.
When he was younger it was easy to pretend during matches that all that mattered was the ball coming towards him, the world shrinking to a round green blur of motion, a single point. Everything else was merely peripheral: tennis simply was, essential as the blue-green vein that snakes its way across the back of his hand.
(Fuji has followed this vein with his finger before, all the way to his heart, a meandering river course of deoxygenated blood. When the vein disappears he simply makes up a course of his own, finger whisper-ticklish across Tezuka's skin, which feels thin like parchment, easily punctured.)
The tennis tunnelvision thing is perhaps why he doesn't understand what he subconsciously observes: that Fuji's shoulders are a little more hunched than usual, his fingers curled a little more tightly around the white porcelain mug with the chip in the rim he usually keeps only for days when Yuuta calls and they end up arguing (over Mizuki, usually), or when Tezuka comes home especially late from classes.
There is that moment of clarity at the highest point of the ball's bounce, when it hangs in the air in anticipation of the fall, the precise moment of return. Tezuka knows when to return it, but not how this time, because he's afraid that it might be way out if he doesn't do it right.
"Fuji."
"Tezuka."
They could be doing this all night, Fuji thinks tiredly, passing names back and forth, a subtle, verbal method of finger-pointing, pushing of blame (that shouldn't exist, but does, the human need to assign fault) This isn't something doubles partners can afford to do, but then again this is why they are not doubles players.
It's the first he's seen of Tezuka in days, between Fuji's queer course hours and Tezuka's insane ones and his tennis practice. In some ways it could be an affair, except that Tezuka is really just being faithful to his true love and Fuji settles for being second best because he is resigned to it: without his tennis, he would've been without Tezuka. An irony of the highest degree.
He picks at the fraying hem of his pajamas, faded and striped and too big for him ("You'll grow into it, Syuusuke," insisted his mother over Yumiko's predictions.) It was too big back when he was sixteen; it still slips off his shoulder occasionally, at twenty-something years (actually five and a bit, because he is a leap year baby).
They stop, and there is silence punctuated sharply by the boys next door dropping something that lands with a heavy thunk.
Everyone thinks Fuji is patient, but he's actually just gotten used to waiting. He waits now, watching Tezuka not-fidgeting, straight and tall and still, an unbending lamppost with the rustle of leaves blowing past at its base, the depths of an undisturbed lake, limpid and endorheic. Nothing enters, nothing leaves.
So he does, snatching a coat off the rack on the way.
Tezuka looks at the door, shut quietly and politely after Fuji, swears out loud for the first time in his life.
Outside it is dark; the lamps attempt, feebly, to dispel the darkness, an unsure orange bloom in the night. Fuji wonders if the stars are watching like Neil Gaiman says they do, if there are little princes traversing the galaxy, suffering wanderlust and wonderlust both.
Lust is such an ugly word, uncontrolled desires and impatience and base implications, reeking of desperation. What he feels for Tezuka has never been that: it is instead the need to reach out and feel something solid, something that isn't a vague notion or impossibly heroic ideal. It isn't a thrill with every beat of his heart, more the burn of helpless need that is not dependency; it fills him, overflows, surely he glows with this yearning, some days.
In a way it's an avenue to the end to the one kind of love he knows how to give, stifling and protective and ultimately destructive. This is why he holds back, in declaring affection and bestowing it, his fear of domination. (but whether of himself, or by himself, he isn't sure.)
The thing about genius is that you can afford to choose how much you want to give, because there is no limit but the degree of your want. Fuji revels in the freedom of this, has never known any different, easily mastered the art of making things look easy.
Odd, how different it is with Tezuka. If he had to describe it he would say it feels like an infringement of his negative liberty, almost a compulsion, a coercion into perseverance. But in many ways it makes him a better person, this thing, it makes him try harder, be gentler and more accommodating, practice forgiveness and compromising. Greater positive liberty, then.
It's colder than he thought it would be, the chill seeping through the little spaces between the fibres of his coat, into his bones. Tezuka might be worried, might have called the police, might even now be running frantically through the streets calling for him, at the expense of his dignity and self-composure. There could be white floodlights cutting wide white swathes across the grounds, a mournfully howling dog in the distance, a lone bat winging its way home, an eerie herald of dark.
Fuji looks up at the sky, at the silvery moon, beautiful and mysterious from a distance, the stuff of romance and sonnets and poetry; pockmarked up close, luminously alone.
(There was a story about a Chinese poet who drowned because he reached for the moon's reflection in the water: but he doesn't see the moral in that (unless it's don't imbibe too much alcohol, that he can understand). He tried, didn't he, at the very least. Died trying.)
The boys in his class used to tease him; good-naturedly, of course, because boys are like that. He had too much of an imagination, they said, too much intelligence. He stared out of the window during class at the leaves on the tree in the courtyard, watching the leaves changing colours, wrote compositions about their bleeding yellow-orange-red outwards from the stalk, detaching and catching on the air currents, one-winged butterflies in their quest to be whole and mate as real ones do; severed goldfish tails jagged at the edges, lost in space. During lunch he arranged his bento according to colour, took the laughter and the teasing and the lack of understanding into himself, returned it with a smile that was only slightly shaky for the first term.
He should quit deluding himself, because Tezuka doesn't go to people (another thing to resent Echizen for, though it isn't his fault that he is brilliant and young and full of potential that he isn't afraid to fulfill, because he has a never-ending source of it), he waits and eventually his natural magnetism kicks in, people re-align themselves towards him, gravitate in his direction.
Fuji clutches his coat at the neck with one hand, sticks his other hand into his pocket, and walks in the general direction of home.
When he gets back there is only a note on the door in Tezuka's writing, a single line scrupulously straight across the paper, evenly spaced words.
Gone to bed, key in the usual place.
Tezuka defies expectation easily, transcends it: but he doesn't, where it actually matters.
They leave the house together the next morning, because it's pretty much impossible to avoid someone you live with, and they do have the same class. But they take care not to accidentally-brush, as if overnight someone has carefully demarcated the boundaries of personal space and it is unthinkable to overstep them, a crossing of the demilitarized zone. Washing up after breakfast becomes a tiresome and complicated ritual, resembling a bizarre mating dance that really means mutual avoidance.
The class they share isn't something they're both terribly passionate about, it's to do with physical geography and has nothing very much in common with either medicine or photography. Tezuka chose it as a rare indulgence to himself, because he likes mountains and nature; Fuji chose it simply because it hasn't got anything to do with what he's majoring in and what he learns might make for good dinner conversation ("Lake overturn is when carbon dioxide is released from the bottom of a lake and suffocates things. It killed 1,800 people in Cameroon. Also, the Yellowstone National Park caldera might explode any time.")
Right now they're doing the continental drift theory, as proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1915. That the seven continents were once a giant landmass is an amazing thing to Tezuka, as is the fact that the mountains he so respects are the cumulative result of little movements, a few centimeters a year. There is only that much distance between him and Fuji, now: if he so wished he could shift his weight a little to the right and bump their elbows together.
He's forgotten to factor in the geologic time scale, the eons needed for the collision. One needs to think in millions of years, not minutes. It could take that much time to understand Fuji, more to chart the path they're taking, figure out whether they're converging, diverging, chafing each other. And beneath everything there is that which simmers, semi-molten and perpetually only on the verge of solidifying, never verbalized.
Possibly it is time for something to give: he is not as dense as Fuji thinks he is, and since subduction could be a sort-of illustration of the meaning of compromise, something good might come of it all. Good as mountains, hopefully.
Fuji stops doodling on his handout when a note lands on the centre of his desk, folds crisp and corners aligned.
Dinner at five,there's a photography exhibition downtown open until ten, and the park is open all night.
You have tennis practice until seven, Tezuka.
Tezuka looks at Fuji over the rims of his glasses, severely. He could be a teacher speaking to a particularly slow child; Fuji fights the sudden irrational urge to giggle.
The note lands back on his desk.
It wasn't a suggestion, Fuji. But I would like to add that the street tennis courts are open all night, too.
Fuji twists in his seat, looks up at Tezuka and the corners of his mouth crook upwards in a syncline of a smile.
Of course, Tezuka.
Maybe Tezuka does exceed all expectations, after all.