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It takes Niou two days, which is the longest anyone’s ever managed to pull the wool over his eyes, but then he’s never quite figured out the trick to Yukimura. It’s not much of a consolation that Yukimura, in turn, hasn’t quite figured out the trick to Niou; not even Yagyuu has. The oversight rests on his own shoulders—now there’s something else Yukimura’s got him doing that he never thought he would: taking responsibility. The thing is, Niou is supposed to be an expert at pattern-finding. That’s what makes him so good at what he does. So one day, fine, he can be generous with himself, chalk it up to the shock of Yukimura’s loss, Rikkaidai’s loss. Violation of a law of nature and all that; takes time to process. But any longer and it’s a scathing indictment of his observational skills.
Obscuring factor #1: Niou’d done doubles at Kanto and singles at Nationals, and he compartmentalises his record by match type. Of course, Yukimura, being a near-exclusive singles player, does no such thing, which is something Niou should have taken into account. He keeps forgetting the boundaries between the self and the not-self, lately. Too much time spent in other people’s skins and he’s starting to believe everyone thinks the same way he does.
Obscuring factor #2: Yukimura had directly asked for their cooperation in the semifinals strategy he’d outlined to engineer Kirihara’s trial by fire. Immediately Yagyuu, ever the gentleman, and Marui, who would never miss a chance to jump off a cliff for Yukimura’s sake, had volunteered to throw their matches (Me too?! Jackal had exclaimed, longsuffering, but even if Jackal was not overly desperate to jump off a cliff for Yukimura he was plenty willing to do so for Kirihara. In the instant before Yagyuu and Marui’s hands shot up Niou had even contemplated volunteering himself, just for fun, but he wasn’t upset the matter had been decided without him). There’s certainly no shortage of insane fanatics on the team clamouring to die first in the firing line of Yukimura’s will; why wouldn’t he ask again?
So two days after the end of the world, Niou is alone in his room when the pattern clicks. He puts down his pencil. Picks it up again. He scribbles out the Kanto and Nationals finals lineups along the margin of his geometry homework, just to be sure, though he knows already there is no error in his understanding. The distribution of wins and losses on paper is exactly as it had been in his mind. He taps the end of his pencil against his desk, then swivels around in his chair to toss the pencil at the dartboard hanging on the back of his door. It bounces uselessly off bullseye and clatters to the floor—
—Niou catches a stray tennis ball attempting jailbreak and lobs it back into its crate. Morning in the club storeroom. He’s rostered for taking inventory with Marui today. “One hundred and fifty in this last one. We seriously need to get a manager.” Niou takes a precarious seat on the edge of the nearest crate. “Yo, Marui. Did you notice what Yukimura did with the lineup for the Nationals finals?”
Marui finishes signing off the storeroom records and sinks down on the ground by the crates, heedless of the dust staining his trousers. “Huh? Yukimura-kun did something?”
“Didn’t anything about the lineup look off to you? Me in Singles Two, you in Doubles One…”
“Don’t be jealous just ‘cause me and Jackal scored Doubles One.”
Niou clicks his tongue. “Come on, Marui, you aren’t this stupid. Think! I don’t give a fuck what slot I play in, but you know what the Yagyuu-Niou pair win percentage is? One hundred. Remember the Kanto finals lineup?”
Despite everything Marui is still one of the best gamemakers on the best team in the country. Niou sees the shattering moment in his eyes, his brain racing along pathways he’s tried to blind himself towards, sieving out the logical conclusions. Is that what Niou’d looked like in his room last night, too? There had been no witnesses then but himself.
“No,” Marui says blankly.
“Yes,” Niou says. “He did. He wanted you to lose. Both of us.”
“But I could have won,” Marui says. Slow. That same blankness to his voice. He is very still. “We could have won for him.”
“Well, he didn’t want you to,” Niou says, a little more viciously than he’d intended. It’s too easy to be cruel to Marui; he can’t help it. “We already had our turns at Kanto. So the losers got to win, and the winners got to lose.” Niou spreads his hands. “It’s only equality.”
The Child of God, in his infinite benevolence, extending a chance for redemption to Sanada, to Yanagi, to Kirihara. And the flipside: his closed fist pulping the rest of them, a necessary sacrifice for his grand rebirth. How perfectly he’d orchestrated it. An exact inversion of their Kanto results. Yukimura has always been the furthest-seeing one of them all.
Marui puts his hands to his face. His shoulders tremble, but his voice, when it comes, is low and steady. “We failed him,” he says. “Of course he couldn’t trust us to win after that.”
“We didn’t fail him,” Niou corrects. “We won our matches, remember?”
But he knows Marui will always consider himself as having failed Yukimura for the simple fact that Yukimura lost six months of his life to a hospital ward while Marui had not. And what had their reward been, for winning, for not failing Yukimura where the others had? Between semifinals and finals Niou had barely slept, replaying the footage of the semifinals match between Shiraishi and Fuji over and over on his phone until his eyes blurred and when he blinked to resolve his vision, his right forearm swathed itself in bandages. Shiraishi’s racquet grip, Shiraishi’s footwork, Shiraishi’s meticulous focus, pulled close around him like a shroud; during that deliriously endless insomnia there were moments he thought he might suffocate to death.
And all along Yukimura had intended failure for him. It stung, even though he got it, he really did. How do you begrudge your newly resurrected captain fresh from the clutches of death one moment of selfishness? Niou wanted to win mainly for himself, yes, but he’d wanted to win for Yukimura, too. Hard not to crave the open flame of Yukimura’s regard, the way he smiled, warm and quiet, like your victory was his own. Maybe Niou hadn’t truly believed Yukimura capable of that kind of callous calculation, his personal victory at the expense of his own team. Mistake after mistake after mistake.
Marui drops his hands. An unsteady shine to his eyes; he’s close to tears. It won’t take much more. “Who else knows?”
Niou shrugs. “Yanagi should, but he’s worse than you. Yagyuu might know, I haven’t asked him yet. Not like he’d care. Everyone else… well, do I even have to say it?” He stretches his legs out in front of him. “But really, Yukimura should be selfish more often. It’s good for him. Nobody should be so—like that—all the time.”
“But I would have lost for him too! If he just asked me like he did at semis—why wouldn’t he ask, I don’t get it—”
“You know,” Niou says. “I think he was trying to be kind.”
Amazingly enough, this is what finally does Marui in. His face crumples, shoulders hunching. The tears well up and spill over. It’s more or less what Niou had been aiming for, but now that he has it, it isn’t what he’d wanted at all. He doesn’t want to hurt Marui, except that he does, and he has. He slides off the crate, kneeling in front of Marui, and plucks one of Yagyuu’s embroidered handkerchiefs out of Marui’s pocket, stupid sleight of hand, some hindsight attempt at cheer. While Marui blows his nose and subsides into sniffles, Niou says, “You realise he’s never going to love you back, right? Or at least not as much as you love him. He just isn’t wired like that.”
Yukimura’s love is an impersonal thing, scalar and directionless. It’s something that can’t help its intrinsic nature, the crushing water pressure at the bottom of the ocean, but still you find yourself diving lower and lower, trying to reach the source, the pearl within the razor-edged oyster. Marui will kill himself trying to bear the weight. Niou, by now, knows better. Should know better. Semantics, whatever.
“I don’t need him to,” Marui says thickly. “I never needed him to. I only—I just wanted to be there. I wish he—” He breaks off, crushing Yagyuu’s handkerchief into a ball.
“So noble,” Niou says.
Marui’s mouth creaks upwards. “That’s what love’s supposed to be like, isn’t it?”
What does Niou know about love? Singles Two against Fuji, sweat plastering his jersey to his back. He’d squinted past the haze of Illusion and the sun-glare to Yukimura on the bench, the steel trap of Yukimura's game face giving nothing away. And then, a little beyond Yukimura, Yagyuu seated in the stands with his hands clasped primly in his lap. It was too far to tell for sure what expression Yagyuu was wearing; Niou could guess, could conjure up the mirror on his own face, but he wanted the reassurance of absolute certainty. He felt like he was moving through honey. His left elbow had the blown-out deadened feeling of anaesthesia, a pain staved off. Briefly, childishly, he wished Yukimura's mouth would relax into a smile. He was no Kirihara, but in that moment he probably would have cut off a limb for a visible sliver of Yukimura’s approval.
It’s funny. Niou’d been a singles player before he brought Yagyuu into the fold, but in the intervening period he’d forgotten how lonely it was, being the only person on your side of the court. What was it that he’d told Yagyuu, back then? The court seemed so small but when you were out there it felt vaster than even the sky. Even the distance from the baseline to the net, barely a handspan when you were looking down from the stands, could be insurmountable. That freezing flash of blue as Fuji said I never lose to the same opponent twice. The noose of Yukimura’s kindness pulling tight around his neck. And Yagyuu—
Afternoon practice had not been cancelled the day after finals, because they were Rikkaidai, still, even after the unthinkable had come to pass. Actually Niou had been planning to skip but habit tripped him up; on autopilot he’d made his way to the locker room after school and was three steps from the front doors before he remembered his intentions, and by that point Sanada had also arrived and the trouble of sneaking away after that was simply not worth the payoff.
Still seated on the bench, Yagyuu caught Niou’s wrist as Niou brushed past him on the way into the locker room, arresting his forward motion. Niou-kun, how many times must I remind you to tuck your school shirt in? I cannot keep overlooking these uniform code violations.
I'm taking my shirt off in five minutes, Niou said flatly. To change. For training. Which I can't do if you don't let go of me.
Yagyuu did not let go. His grip wasn’t painful, but it was firm enough to hold Niou in place. There was an unsettling gleam in his eyes, or perhaps only a trick of the light refracted through his glasses.
Tell me something. When you were watching me play, up there in the stands, Niou said. What were you thinking?
I was hoping for your victory, of course, Yagyuu said.
Not an answer! Niou said.
What would you like me to say?
I don’t fucking know, Niou said. That’s why I’m asking. I’m—would you have done it differently? If it were you?
The lenses flashed as Yagyuu tilted his head. But I am not you, Niou-kun, he said. It would hardly be productive to speculate.
Niou wrenched his wrist free. His skin prickled, a sensation halfway to how the mantle of Illusion felt settling over him, but he was only himself, and Yagyuu was only Yagyuu, and they had been inside each other’s skins but they were not touching anymore, though Yagyuu was barely a hand’s breadth away. Suddenly Niou ached with incompleteness. One more person on his side of the court; it was all he wanted.
“Marui,” Niou says. “You have a really fucked up idea of love.”
A choking noise that could pass as a laugh. “We’re Rikkaidai,” Marui says. “We kinda have a fucked up everything.”
“Didn’t know you knew it too.” A few strands of Marui’s hair are sticking to his wet and flushed cheeks. Niou reaches forward to brush them free, tuck them back behind Marui’s ear. “Your crying face is so ugly,” he says gently.
Marui swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Fuck you, no it’s not,” he says, almost like normal, but then Marui has to go and ruin everything by flashing Niou a wobbly smile, pressing his palm to Niou’s cheek, and saying, “Why’s it so hard for you to admit he hurt you too?”
Before he can stifle the reflexive response, Niou tenses. “That’s not—”
“It’s alright,” Marui says. Soothing. All wrong, this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. There is no heat needling Niou’s eyes. Niou lifts a hand to remove Marui's but once he makes contact he finds that he can't. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, don’t you think I get it? I know, Niou. I know.”
It’s not like Marui is applying any particular pressure with his hand but Niou’s immobilised anyway, just as surely as he was in the locker room with Yagyuu’s fingers braceleting his wrist. One more person on his side of the court, isn’t that why he told Marui in the first place? This persistent weakness, this pattern he’s discerned too late in himself, care inculcated into habit before he realised the misstep. The immeasurable damage Yukimura's love has done to him. Opening him up to the want of more, the staved-off pain making itself known at last. Niou's hand folded over Marui's on his face, keeping Marui in place with him for just a little while longer. Just a little while longer.