Fic: Egg Drop
Author: Aja
Archiving: just ask.
Rating: PG.
Pairing: Akira/Hikaru.
Date Written: January 23, 2007
Disclaimer: I only wish I were as talented as Hotta and Obata.
Notes: For Sam, of course.
[pretend this is an alternate universe where Go pros don't have to drop out of school at age 13, but rather have to wait a few years. So. Yeah.]
Akira doesn't have time to drop it off at his house before meeting Shindou after he's through at the club, so he takes his bundle and carefully sets it behind the counter at his father's salon.
He has no idea how Shindou finds it - Shindou says later, staring at the gloopy mess on the floor, that he was just looking for the sodas that the receptionist-lady keeps behind the desk. Touya didn't even know they had a cooler. He blinks a few times, wondering how Shindou knows these things like he's been coming here all his life instead of just two times a week after Touya is done with school.
(He's not allowed to come more often because the janitorial staff only comes bi-weekly, and ever since the Anpan Incident the staff at his father's salon flatly refuses to clean up the messes from their fights. Akira doesn't blame them. They were scraping beans off the windowsill for two weeks.)
"It just rolled off the ledge!" Shindou is saying, his eyebrows twisting a guilty wrinkle across his forehead. "Who gives out such a stupid assignment anyway!"
Akira looks down at the floor. His egg-baby, well, his and that of the boring girl from school he's been partnered with, is currently running across the even tiles of the salon in thin bright streaks the color of Shindou's hair. Akira laughs abruptly at the thought, then catches himself and looks up.
"You can't mess around with other people's things," he says sternly - but the reprimand isn't there, not really. He's thinking instead about how he'll be leaving school altogether in a few months, maybe even a few weeks. He's completely disinterested in school right now; all he thinks about while he stuffs his notebooks full of homework is Go. His next chance to take a title; his next match with Shindou; Shindou's next chance to take a title.
Go and Shindou. If he's being completely honest, sometimes he thinks just about Shindou. His clumsy movements, his shrill voice, his egg-yolk hair.
"I'll make it up to you," Shindou says, leaning his elbows on the counter.
"You'll have to," Akira responds dryly, letting his hair fall forward as he leans in too. "I'm not telling sensai my Go partner cracked my baby."
It's after he says it, and Hikaru's eyes light up in that certain, devious way, that he realizes he's been making the distinction between "rival" and "partner" for a long time now.
"Touya," Shindou laughs, and then his eyes narrow. "If I'm going to be your Go partner -"
He hesitates, and Akira can't help but draw in a breath.
"Yeah?"
" - I'm gonna crack a lot more than that," Shindou finishes with a flourish.
Then he slips and lands in the egg white.
Akira towers over him, feeling particularly tall. "If you're going to be my Go partner," he intones with perfectly rounded, suave diphthongs, "you should get used to having egg on your face."
When he offers a hand up, Shindou's fingers are sticky.
Akira doesn't mind.