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The Gratitude of Cranes
Part One: Fable
I. Overture

Once upon a time there was a poor rice farmer, who lived with his old mother in a small house next to his fields. So it was that once upon going out to tend his crop that he saw a crane start up from the paddy, and immediately fall back to earth.

He went to it and saw it lying upon the earth with an arrow in its wing, and upon its white feathers drops of blood like rubies. Because he was a compassionate man he took pity on the poor bird and carefully removed the arrow and tended the wound; when he had finished it bowed to him gravely before flying away.

He returned to his home that evening to find his old mother sitting with a young woman in a white kimono on the front steps of their small house. When he asked his mother "who is this woman?" all she would say is "she has come to be your wife, my dear son, and isn't it good fortune?". And because the farmer was a good son and could never refuse his mother anything, before long he and the girl in the white kimono were married—though soon enough he began to love her in her own right, for she was beautiful and kind—and everything her hands touched prospered.

They were not married long, however, before a terrible drought came over the land, and the farmer's crops failed. So he feared for his family, for the little money he had managed to save through the years would not last.

"Do not fear, husband," his wife told him when he spoke of this matter to her, "for I know a little of the fibre-craft, and if you give me three days' time I will weave for you a cloth worthy of the daimyo himself. Only you must promise me that you will not look in on me when I am weaving, or it will go the worse for you."

So the farmer did as his wife demanded, and left her meals outside of the closed door of her room, and waited. And on the third day she emerged bearing a great expanse of delicate white cloth, made of no thread he could name, and speckled here and there with tiny flecks of red that shimmered like rubies in firelight. "This shall fetch a great price at market," he said, and kissed his wife upon the cheek and set out, but every merchant he brought the cloth to turned him down. "This is too fine for us," they said, "we might never hope to afford it. Take it to the daimyo, he will give you a fair price for it."

So the farmer carried his wife's homespun cloth to the daimyo, who took one look at its weave and offered him fifty gold pieces, and another fifty for the promise of another such length of wondrous cloth.

The farmer returned home joyously to show his wife and his mother the result of his barter, and his wife smiled and said, "of course I will weave you another, but again you must swear to me that you will not peep in on me while I am weaving, or it will go the worse for you."

"I swear it," he said, but oh how quick men are in forgetting! For when his wife had secluded herself in her chamber again for her weaving he became overcome with curiosity, and, poking a hole in the paper of the door, peeked into the room.

And what did he see then! Standing before the spindle stood a white crane, proud and beautiful, and with its foot it turned the spindle while with its beak it pulled the soft white feathers from its breast and spun them into thread; and every here and there a drop of blood fell upon the spinning.

The farmer gasped in shock, and, looking round at the noise, the crane caught the flash of light across his eyes peeking through the hole in the door. Shrieking in outrage at the man's betrayal of his oath, she tore the thread to pieces with her beak and flew out of the wide open window, never to be seen again in those lands.

The farmer and his mother starved to death, that winter, and it is said that the farmer died at last weeping, clutching a length of white and red thread in his hand.

***

"The crane was selfish," Tezuka says, later, when his mother asks him what he thought of the story, "keeping secrets and hiding and then running away."

"Love is selfish, always, always," his mother says, patting him on the head and turning off the light. "But I don't expect that you'll understand."

II. Interlude

Pillar, they say of Tezuka, only son, favoured son. He is straight as an arrow and proud, tranquil like a frozen sea, like a windless day—and he is stifling, choking on his own heat. He is rooted deep and unmoving, a stationary object for others to measure their strength against. And he is beginning to be broken—though he does not see it yet—battered by expectation, obligation, the force of his own resolve.

He does not see it, and there is no one to tell him, to show him all the things that he cannot see. There is no one for him to measure himself against; and in his own estimations he always, will always, come up short.

But that is not the story, only the circumstances; and Tezuka has always concerned himself not with choices or changes, but with results.

***

The boy who stumbles on his way past the tennis courts dislocates Tezuka from himself for moment, so that he has difficulty remembering I am here, he is there and for a fraction of a second he feels his knees and palms sting, smells asphalt and the sharp tang of broken skin against his tongue. The tennis ball he had been in the motion of serving drops and hits the court with a muffled thwack, but he doesn't notice.

"Well well," the boy says, rolling up his pants legs and gazing mildly at his scraped and bleeding knees. "Isn't this something." Tezuka is still unbalanced, halfway between the definitions of I and he and so he walks over and says, without thinking, "Let me help you to the nurse's office." (Later, when he knows more, he will begin to suspect that their first meeting was dictated entirely by Fuji's design; and though he will later dismiss it primarily for the reason that Fuji is far too self-centred to willingly harm himself; still, it will hang unpleasantly at the corners of his recollection.)

The boy's smile is brilliant as he accepts Tezuka's hand to help him up, and on the way to the nurse's office he cheerily divulges that his name is Fuji Syuusuke, that he's in class 2-b, that he's actually also a member of the tennis club, that he's been skipping practice. "Because practising every day, isn't it so tiring, Tezuka-kun? Isn't it so boring?" he asks, and Tezuka wants to say, how could it be? But instead he doesn't say anything, shrugs. He can't expect this boy to understand him, or anything about him. He doesn't expect it; and so when he leaves him with the nurse and says goodbye he fully expects that he will never speak with Fuji ever again.

With Fuji, however, Tezuka must learn to expect the unexpected—but he doesn't know that yet; and so when the brown-haired boy comes up to him the next day at practise asking for a game (and his smile, Tezuka will remember, was like a blade across his face), Tezuka is completely taken aback.

"All right," he says eventually, and Fuji's smile curls into a tighter curve. For a moment Tezuka considers turning away, unnerved; but there is something compelling in the way that Fuji holds his racket, out and away from his body; there is something persuasive in the way that he speaks. There is something even more captivating in the way that he plays tennis, all curved lines and sharp edges and a lazy, easy grace that seems as natural as breathing. Tezuka cannot pull his eyes away—but then he doesn't want to, either, and this alone would tell him that Fuji is dangerous.

Fuji loses, but in the way of startling enlightenments and moments of pure clarity, Tezuka understands that this means exactly the same thing that the benign look on Fuji's face means, which is nothing. Nothing at all.

"Why did you want to play me?" Tezuka asks when the game is over, and Fuji tilts his head to the side so that his bangs feather lightly across his cheekbones, tilts the edges of his mouth up into something that in some other light might look like a smile, but in the fading afternoon sun only looks like a challenge. "This is what they call the gratitude of cranes, isn't it?" he asks, and Tezuka frowns.

Later, all he will remember of that game is the heat of the sun across the back of his neck, the rhythmic thump of the ball off the court, and the startling red, red, red of the reopened scrapes on Fuji's knees against his tennis whites, like poppies blooming in the snow.

***

All through junior high and into high school, Fuji is there—through the nationals and everything that comes after them, through Echizen going back to America, through the giving up and the starting over and the moving on. He is the constant pull against Tezuka's roots of stone; a hammer hanging over his feet of clay, rival-friend, protector-weakness.

It has been so many years and still Tezuka does not understand him at all.

"Your thinking is flawed, Tezuka," Fuji says. "No one ever said you needed to understand."

That's not the point, Tezuka wants to say, but then he doesn't know what the point is, either, so he doesn't say anything at all. He is, after all, still caught in stone, favoured son though now not the only—and still the one who might hold up a mirror to show him who he is, the damage that he has called down upon his own head, either can not or will not.

But in the end, the can and the will do not matter. Only results matter, in this as in so many other things, and the results for either option are the same.

The day of their graduation from high school is the day Tezuka announces that he's going pro, if only to the thinned-out crowd lingering at the end of his graduation party. They are all old friends, most of them old team-mates, and everyone cheers and claps him on the back even though they'd known it already, perhaps had known it since the first time he had ever swung a racket at a tennis ball. But the face Tezuka scans the small crowd for is not there not smiling or talking or stretching out a hand to squeeze his shoulder in congratulations. The face he looks for isn't there – and he tries so hard not to think abandonment, even if that's the way it feels.

The day they graduate from high school is the day that Fuji disappears.

III. Fugue

Fuji's family, at first, is unconcerned, and so is Tezuka. Fuji has always been unpredictable, whimsical; it is not outside the scope of imagination to think that he has taken himself off somewhere, free of the constraints of school and scheduling and obligation. But the days wear into weeks turn into months and even the unflappable Yumiko begins to worry, laying cards searching for her equally imperturbable brother, while Yuuta at his most unconvincingly unconcerned hangs over her shoulder. In the end all she says is, "well, he's not dead, at least."

"When he comes back he might think better of that," Yuuta growls, stomping out of the room and slamming the door. The unspoken if he comes back hangs in the air behind him, and Tezuka feels as if he inhaling it with every breath, a poison that seeps into his lungs, his blood, his skin.

"I'm sorry, but I have to go. I have a plane—" he begins to say, but Yumiko waves him silent. "I know, I know You've other things you ought to be doing rather than worrying about Syuusuke. Let us do that. You have a career to consider."

He knows this, but still; he visits the Fujis, eldest and youngest (and they are impossible, disparate bookends), at least once a month, a first because he feels as if he should, because they are the last connection he has with the carelessly unconnected Fuji, and then later because it has become an almost habit, something he almost does without thinking. Of course he's more often than not out of the country, but there's always the phone, always Yumiko's soothing voice on the other end of the line seeming glad to hear from him. It's not that there's no one else he can call so much as it's there's no one else he wants to call; because there's no one else who, like him, is waiting for something that may never happen, for someone who may never return.

***

The last visit he pays to the Fuji household he remembers clearly not because it was remarkable in any way—and it wasn't—but because as he steps off the front porch Yumiko calls out, "Good luck, Tezuka-kun, in your next match," which is something he's pretty sure she'd never told him before.

Perhaps, he thinks fatalistically, later, she had never thought that he'd need it, before; but that's beside the point. The point is that it is almost immediately after this last visit that he plays his last match as a professional tennis player. The point is that he has, over the years, slowly and systematically destroyed—his shoulder, his elbow, himself. The point is that during all the rushing in and out of the paramedics and the surgeons and the painkillers beneath the too-bright hospital lights, he doesn't hear his cell phone ringing, doesn't notice this one last tenuous connection to earth, and so does not learn right away the bitterest irony, the sharpest point of them all.

(It is Yumiko calling, but that is beside the point and a fact he will not learn until much later when she mentions it to him—because he never does get the message she leaves on his voicemail, though in the end the message delivers itself, in its usual infuriating way.)

The day Fuji returns is the day Tezuka wrecks his shoulder for good.

***

It isn't until the day after his surgery that Tezuka begins to register other presences in his hospital room. "He's been pretty out of it," he hears the a woman he presumes to be the nurse tell a vaguely-familiar shadow in the doorway, quietly and kindly. "The pain medication does that to some people. You're more than welcome to sit with him, but I can't guarantee that he'll know you're here, much less who you are."

"That's all right," an all-too-familiar voice murmurs, and he watches hazily as Fuji brushes past the nurse into the room. "I'd prefer to be here."

"Well, I'll be by to check on him in an hour," the nurse says, and closes the door. Tezuka remains perfectly still, tries to even his breath out, tries to work out in his head in the time before Fuji realises that he's awake whatever it was that he should say should Fuji ever, in fact, return. It doesn't work.

"I know you're awake, Tezuka," Fuji says. "You woke up when I came into the room, didn't you?"— and Tezuka wants to shout, to scream and make ultimatums and demand to know what right—what right— Fuji has to know him so well and still think it's all right to just walk out of his life for years without a word. But Tezuka is muddled with drugs and pain and just-waking and has nothing solid to lean on any more, now that the last certainty in his life has been taken away, so all he says is "don't, Fuji."

"Don't what, Tezuka?" Fuji asks, and Tezuka can hear the mocking half-smile in his voice even if his eyes can't quite focus right on Fuji's face at the moment.

"Don't leave," he pleads desperately as he falls back into sleep, and he can barely feel it when Fuji's fingers curl around his hand and squeeze. "No," he says.

No what Tezuka wants to ask, but by the time the words might reach his lips he's already fast asleep and dreaming fever-dreams; of failures, of regrets, of things that will never be. And in all of them there is at last a white crane, blood on its breast and on its beak over and over, and words like stones into an abyss: I did it for you. I did it for you

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