...I updated. XD
I know this chapter is more than seven months late, but better late than never, right? And I've finally discovered the way I'm going to end it - which is a good thing, ne? (If you've been reading this story, you'll know that a proper plot with direction is... uh, not one of my talents. XD) In any case, I apologise with all my heart for making all my readers wait so long, but I can safely say that I am NOT abandoning this story to rot in the grave, and while it might take a little time to update, I'll try my best not to leave you all hanging ever again. T.T -is properly ashamed of herself-
This chapter sets the scene for the next few, so... uh, Tezuka/Maika/Atobe action will come a little later? ;D And you might want to reread the previous chapter in case you've forgotten where I left off. :3
Ja, read on, ne?
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"They're what?" From the split-second view of Fuji's blue orbs which they were treated to, Oishi didn't need Inui's data skills to know something bad was happening.
He looked again at the tensai, whose shoulders had tensed slightly.
Well, if something bad hadn't happened yet, it was going to happen soon if Fuji had any say in the matter. He shuddered inwardly as Fuji slid his phone shut with slightly more force than needed.
"Echizen and Momo are eating burgers." Fuji stated matter-of-factly.
Eiji blinked uncomprehendingly. "They're eating burgers with Hyoutei?"
He wasn't sure if it was just him, but he could have sworn that Fuji's smile had a sinister gleam to it. "No, they're eating burgers. By themselves."
"By themselves...?" The red-headed boy was stumped for a moment before his brain finally registered the stupendous statement.
"NYA! How can he treat ochibi and not treat me?! After all the times I've paid for them... that rascal!"
Oishi choked as he watched his doubles partner miss the point altogether and put himself in tremendous danger from a pissed-looking blue-eyed tensai.
"Ah-h-h, Eiji... could I talk to you for a moment? I think our Australian Formation needs a little more practice..." He wondered if Fuji would see through the lie.
"But I thought you just said today that it was coming along quite w - !" One hand clapped over Eiji's mouth, Oishi immediately dragged Eiji away before the former could cause any more trouble than he already had.
Fuji looked at the phone in his hand.
"Eating burgers, eh?" He smiled as an idea began to take root. "Interesting..."
And he sauntered merrily off to find Inui, an evil smirk firmly in place.
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Maika waited in one of the Atobe's many drawing rooms, wondering how the person she was supposed to paint would look like. As a general rule, she wasn't especially shallow when it came to judging people by their looks, but if she was required to sit there and stare at an unlovely person for a few whole days (not to mention studying every single pore and pimple on said person's face) she thought long trips to the toilet might be in order.
In any case, the person was taking an awfully long time to get here. She fidgeted on her chair, wondering if anyone would notice if a pear was gone from the artistically arranged fruit basket in front of her. She hadn't eaten much this morning, because her mum was far too excited to actually settle down to cook anything remotely edible – she winced at the memory of the very, very raw egg and the horribly burnt toast she'd had for breakfast not an hour ago.
Atobe-san wouldn't mind, right? She cast a longing glance at the tempting fruit. It's just a pear, ne?
Of course, the pear could poison her if she ate it. Knowing the amount of chemicals farmers sprayed on their crops nowadays, it would hardly be surprising if she choked and died two seconds after biting into the pear – just like Snow White and her infamous poisoned apple. She sighed, and settled instead for humming under her breath, tapping her fingers in time to the melody.
"Now that is one tuneless melody," A snide voice observed from behind her.
She turned around to see the bane of her existence come stalking up to her, tossing the very pear she had been admiring earlier in one hand.
"Really, I'd have expected a proper, qualified painter at the very least. After all the time I'm going to waste having my portrait painted, I'd have expected professional expertise, if nothing else."
Maika, however, was in too much shock to reply with a barb of her own.
"YOU?! AGAIN?!"
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"Two hours – with that insufferable prig – " Maika fumed, "I – I – gahh!"
Tezuka lifted an eyebrow at her unprovoked descent into incoherency.
"Can you imagine it? Two full hours with Atobe Keigo, looking at him, staring at that darned mole of his," the tone of disgust dripping from her voice expressed her opinion of said beauty mark all too eloquently.
Tezuka could only imagine it too well. With Atobe's ego and Maika's tongue, it was a wonder they hadn't torn each other apart yet. But then, perhaps it worked somewhat similar to the way planets orbited the sun – gravitational forces of both kept them in orbit, always at a certain distance from one another – he shook his head. What was he thinking?
"...you're not listening, are you?"
He blinked. "What?"
Maika opened her mouth, presumably to annihilate him, and closed it again. "Forget it. Anyway, I'm so glad that's over and done with. Don't you agree?"
Of course, it was completely irrelevant that she had spent one-eighth the time she would usually spend on a serious portrait, hence the result being somewhat more disastrous than usual. If he wanted a portrait, he'd get a portrait. She'd never said anything about it resembling the subject...
"Hn." His brain needed some serious disciplining, if the way it was dancing irrational circles in pure glee was anything to go by. It wasn't like he had anything to be happy about, at any rate.
Seriously.
His train of thought (totally unrelated to math, as he noted absently) was broken when Maika's phone rang.
"Doushite kimi wo suki ni natte shimattan darou..."
He raised a quizzical eyebrow at her ringtone.
"What? They did get first on the Oricon charts, so it's not just me who has bad taste. So there!"
"...I didn't say anything..."
"Whatever," She stuck out her tongue at him, flipping open her phone. "You didn't have to. Hello?"
"...why are you calling me?"
Tezuka blinked. Talk about impolite...
"Dinner? Parents?" Her brow furrowed. "I can't quite hear you, Atobe. Speak louder, for goodness' sake!"
"Gosh, it wouldn't hurt to say please, you know." She could almost imagine him rolling his eyes at her. "Dinner tomorrow night, in the gardens."
She made a face. "Gardens? But there'll be mosqui – "
"See you."
A string of curses followed from her side, almost drowning out the persistent beeping tone that told her oh-so-politely that Atobe Keigo had, for all effects and purposes, hung up on her.
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On the other end of the line, a certain grey-haired boy was left with the phone in one hand, a Picasso-like painting of something that looked vaguely like a distorted monkey in the other, and a very bemused expression on his face.
"...what did I just do?"
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"Tezuka?" There was a speculative note in her voice.
"Hn."
"What do you think of Atobe?"
He nearly spat out his food. "What?!"
She looked at him somewhat curiously, wondering how her question had warranted such an extraordinary response. "Well, I was just thinking – you've known him for a long time, right?"
When Tezuka looked like he was about to protest, she cut him off. "Well, longer than me, at any rate. So logically speaking, you'd know him better than I do, wouldn't you? What would you say his character is like?"
"..."
The burning question at the tip of his tongue refused to go away, and he finally succumbed to it. "Why?"
It was her turn to look blank. "Why what?"
Sometimes he really wondered just how her brain worked, so much so that it couldn't even make the most logically obvious connections. "Why are you suddenly so interested in Atobe?"
"Oh, it's nothing, really! It's just that our families seem really keen to get - unified," Maika was talking fast, he realised. Really fast. "But it's okay, 'cause he doesn't like me and I don't like him either and so nothing's gonna happen! Forget I said anything."
"..."
"Remember, forget what I just said, okay?"
"...okay."
They turned back to their respective bentos, and Tezuka began eating mechanically without even thinking about it. Instead, his mind was going over what Maika had, ironically enough, just told him to forget, and he suddenly realised something amidst growing alarm.
Family wishes were pretty much the law in Japan. Which would mean – according to Maika, and he hoped to goodness she was mistaken – she was going to change her name soon, and not to Tezuka either.
Wait a moment. Where did that come from?
It wasn't like he wanted to get marr - He stopped that thought firmly in its tracks, and concentrated very hard instead on picking out every single grain of rice from his almost-empty lunchbox.
Maika was looking at him with a queer expression on her face. "You know, Tezuka, if you're really hungry, you could just have asked. I still have about half my lunch left."
"...I'm not hungry."
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Tennis practice had just finished, and all the regulars save Tezuka were busy packing. After checking that Tezuka was safely occupied by Ryuuzaki-sensei, Fuji decided it was time to put his plan into action.
He strolled casually over to Momo, who was busy complaining how empty his stomach had been for the past hour and a half.
"Say, Momo... what did you and Echizen do when I asked you to distract Hyoutei? I never bothered to ask - how impolite of me," Fuji chuckled.
Momo was seized with a sudden choking fit. "Uh... no, no... Not impolite at all... not at all..."
He looked around frantically for Ryoma, but the young boy had already squashed himself into the farthest available corner of the locker room. Being small did have its uses after all.
"Uh... actually, we, uh, challenged some of them to a game at the street tennis courts, and we beat them all, and then, um... we... we went for burgers together!" Momo brightened considerably, inwardly congratulating himself on conjuring up such a believable tale. "That's it!"
In the corner, Ryoma huddled closer to the wall, resisting the urge to bang his head at Momo-sempai's absolutely brilliant lie. Whatever happened now, it definitely wasn't going to be pretty.
"Souka." The honey-haired tensai smiled angelically at his beloved kouhai. "Since you've performed the task so efficiently, how 'bout I treat you to a round of burgers?"
Momo's eyes nearly fell out of his head. "Really?"
Whoa. Not only had he escaped Fuji-sempai's punishment, he'd also earned himself a free meal! Whoever said honesty is the best policy had obviously never tried lying before.
"Ja, let's go!" His bag was packed at lightning speed, and when he finally found Ryoma wedged in between a locker and the wall, he dragged the boy out with brute force. "Yah, Echizen! What are you playing hide-and-seek for? Let's go!"
Ryoma put his hands in his pockets. "Che... I'm busy. You can eat my share."
"Really?" For a split second, he wondered whether he had died and gone to heaven.
But before he could dash off to fulfill his true calling, Fuji-sempai's voice intruded itself into his pleasant daydreaming.
"Echizen's worked so hard with you, distracting them and winning all those matches... I'm sure it mustn't have been easy to beat the whole Hyoutei team, right? Come on, let your sempai treat you, ne?" He slung a friendly arm over Ryoma's shoulder.
"...mada mada dane." Ryoma tried, with spectacular failure, to dislodge Fuji's arm.
"Saa, ikou!"
And their fate was sealed.
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Fuji looked at the two twitching bodies lying on the floor of the hamburger joint and smiled serenely, blissfully oblivious to the fact that the eyes of the thirty-odd customers were fastened on the fascinatingly terrifying scene before them.
"Don't forget to invite me the next time you decide to eat burgers with an invisible Hyoutei team, ne?" His grin was positively evil. "Ja, mata ashita!"
And the brunette exited the fast food parlour, looking for all the world like a harmless student returning from a long day at school.
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Notes:
Doushite kimi wo suki ni natte shimattandarou - Why did I fall in love with you? (It's a DBSK song, but it's going to be of some importance in the later chapters, so no, I did not put it in just because DBSK sings it. .. It's hasn't been released yet, so the no. 1 Oricon chart spot is just, uh... fiction. For now, at least. ;P)
Saa, ikou - Well, let's go!
Well, how was it? Do review, if only to tell me that you're still reading this story, 'kay? :P Have a great day!