Round 1 - Uchida, "Uttegaeshi", Fic (○)

[uchikomi]

Pseudonym: Uchida
Title: Uttegaeshi
Characters/Pairings: Shindou Hikaru / Ko Yeongha
Rating: NC-17 (sex)
Warnings/Contains: none
Summary/Notes: Somehow Ko always knows how to get under Hikaru's skin

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2001
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The first time Ko Yeongha talked to him, Hikaru was fifteen years old and it was over a loudspeaker system in front of an audience of hundreds--thousands, maybe tens of thousands or even more when television and Internet simulcasts were considered. Most of his words were incomprehensible, but the shape of the name, Sai’s name, was impossible to miss; Hikaru would have been able to hear them if Ko had been whispering on the other side of the room.

Shuusaku, he had said, chin tilted upwards at an imperious angle, narrowed eyes on Hikaru through the russet strands of his too-long hair. Hikaru hadn’t needed to wait for the translation to know what he’d said, to know that Suyeong had been wrong and that Ko was indeed arrogant enough to shamelessly denigrate an acknowledged master of the art, to go so far as to place himself above one who had done so much to refine and define the game.

Hikaru had vowed then to show him what it meant to play Shuusaku’s go, but for all of his desperation and need he had failed, failed in his task, failed Sai, and as much as he wished he could shrug it off as merely the latest in the countless losses he’s earned in his life, he couldn’t help the tightness in his chest that wrapped around his heart and squeezed.

***

After the Hokutohai all Hikaru had wanted was to go back to his usual routine, but he’s thrown into another tournament less than two weeks later.

It’s been two years since his last Wakajishisen, and it’s almost funny now to think about how important it was to him then. He’d made it the centre of his life, his driving purpose, and he can still remember that bright, sharp snap of accomplishment he’d felt in managing to scrape into the tournament at very nearly the last moment.

Now, after the Hokutohai and its grandeur and bombast with speeches and cameras and analysts, the Wakajishisen seems almost quaint.

In the first round he’s matched against the rank-14 insei, a round-faced youth with serious eyes. At eleven years old he seems impossibly young, but he’s earned his place here and Hikaru knows he would have wiped the floor with Hikaru at the same age, so he can definitely respect his efforts.

His opening’s a little sloppy, allowing Hikaru a little too much leeway for any good to come of it, but his midgame tightens considerably and he’s not afraid to play interesting hands that he’s clearly been able to read with surprising depth for a player of his level. Hikaru’s almost tempted to bait him into a shidougo problem to see how he resolves his group on the lower right, but the insei’s obvious seriousness demands a serious response, and Hikaru resolves to play him as mercilessly as he would any other opponent he might face under the roof of the Ki’in.

Hikaru loses to Touya in the second round--disappointing, but he can’t help but feel a little thrill of excitement when he thinks about the game. He lost by only a half-moku, and at least with Touya Hikaru knows that his rival feels it too, knows what it means, can feel the soul of the game inside of him.

At least the tournament is in safe hands. Or at least it should be, and if Touya loses in the next round, Hikaru will definitely kill him.

As soon as he can sneak away he does, grabbing his knapsack and finding a quiet corner in which to hunker down and scribble down the kifu as quickly as he can, snapping between colours in his four-colour pen so quickly that he knocks the red out of alignment but it’s fine; it’s not like he has any use for blue or green anyway so with the green refill sacrificed long ago for a second red he is able to carry on with only the briefest of interruptions.

It’s not until the final stone has been written that Hikaru realizes how hard he’s breathing, how flushed his face has become but it’s fine, it’s all fine. This is how he’s supposed to feel, this is how he’s always going to feel. This is how go should make anyone feel: breathless and consumed and afire with wonderment at all of the countless possibilities that exist in every game, at every path not taken.

Hikaru feels it, and he knows Touya feels it too, and when his rival wins the Wakajishisen he knows there is no better person, that there is no one other than Touya who feels as passionately as he does, who could better embody the ideals Sai spent so long trying to impress upon Hikaru, and it’s all right, it’s fine, it’s good, it’s great.

That night Hikaru’s at home in his pajamas, cross-legged on the floor as he carefully tears his newest kifu off its perforations. He’s pulling out his Touya binder when the thought hits him: I don’t have kifu from that game.

That game, with that person--it’s distasteful even to think Ko Yeongha’s name, much less to think of his stupid face and his stupid voice, and it’s only when he hears the crumpling that he realizes that he’s fisted his hands around the kifu he was holding. Abashed, he straightens the sheet as best as he can, rubbing hard at the worst of the creases, and files it away before he can do anything else untoward.

He’s not even sure who to ask how to get a copy. Touya would know, of course, since he knows everything and can make freaking anyone do him favours, but the last thing he wants to do is have to talk about that game with Touya. Touya’d want to discuss it, and there’s absolutely no way he’d be able to sit through hours of what ifs and could haves and should haves without throwing a goke to the floor.

***

Weeks go by, and Hikaru’s dragging his heels towards the Nihon Ki’in’s administration desk tossing around the idea of seeing if there’s anyone who can help him when he runs into Kurata-san just past the elevators on the first floor.

“Hey, Shindou!” Kurata-san greets. His smile is broad, but Hikaru can’t help how all his muscles pull tightly in anticipation of having to make a lame excuse and bolt.

“Nice showing at the Wakajishisen,” Kurata-san continues. “Your game against Touya-kun was definitely the highlight.”

“U-um, thanks,” Hikaru stutters.

Okay, so they’re not going to talk about That. Which would be awesome, except now Hikaru has to be the one to talk about That.

“So, um,” he says, stopping to clear his throat. And now Kurata is looking at him expectantly and now Hikaru actually has to say something and then Kurata is going to tell him how disappointed he is that Hikaru had insisted on supplanting Touya only to lose and of course Hikaru lost against Touya in the Wakajishisen, he’s still not at Touya’s level and he’s never going to be at Touya’s level and Hikaru’s always going to be scraping and scrambling.

“So I was wondering if you had the kifu to the games at the Hokutohai?” Hikaru forces out all in one breath, hand gripping the strap of his knapsack so tightly that he can feel his knuckles aching.

“Kifu? Oh, yeah, for sure; I meant to ask you about that; sorry for the wait!” Kurata-san says with a little laugh. “I’ll email them to you. What’s your email address?”

Hikaru blinks. “Email? What?”

“So I can send you the files,” Kurata-san says, reaching into the inner pocket of his sportscoat and retrieving a pen and a business card. “Go ahead,” he says, clicking the end of the pen to extend the tip.

“Wait, I don’t have an email. Can’t you just get it to me on paper?” Hikaru asks. “I mean, uh, if it wouldn’t be inconvenient for you, would you mind...?” he corrects himself quickly.

Kurata-san clicks the pen again before replacing both items in his pocket. “Sure thing! I’ll leave it at Administration for you next Thursday; that work for you?”

“Yeah, thanks, that’s great; thanks so much,” he says, remembering to bow.

Hikaru figures Waya’s probably the guy to ask what that means, so the next time they have lunch together he does. “So can you email kifu?” Hikaru asks.

Waya stops chewing and stares at him for long seconds.

“I mean, duh, of course you can!” Hikaru tries to rescue himself. “But, so, like, do people just scan them? Is that how it works?”

Waya swallows his entire mouthful of food at once in one massive gulp that visibly bulges his throat. “Dude,” he says. “Oh my God, you’re terrible. Someone needs to save you from yourself. And since no one else seems to help, it seems like it’s gonna be me. Okay, you’re coming over to my house after games today.”

“But Touya and I always--” Hikaru begins to protest.

“Urgh, no one cares, and you’re welcome for the rescue,” Waya says, waving the hand that’s not holding his cheeseburger in a kind of flighty yet benevolent motion. “Trust me, this is more important.”

Hikaru isn’t able to catch Touya during the break, and after his game is over and the report made it’s with some trepidation that he looks over the room, taking stock of who is still playing. Waya is easy to spot in his black t-shirt and camo-print cargo pants with arms crossed as he contemplates the board with a serious expression. He doesn’t see Touya’s distinctive dark pageboy by any of the games still in progress, and his stomach does a flop as he realizes what that means.

He finds Touya outside the main Ki’in’s main entrance sitting on the bench, a book in one hand and a pen in the other that he is currently using to scribble notes on the page open in front of him.

“Um, hi,” Hikaru says.

Touya closes his book and caps his pen. “Shindou,” he says, placing both items in his bag. “I was thinking we could try someplace new for dinner today before the salon; have you been to Ajisai?”

Hikaru bites his lip. “Actually, I’m kind of busy today?” he says.

Touya pauses in his movements with his bag on his lap. “I see,” he says, buckling the flap down on his bag.

“I didn’t--it was kind of last-minute, and Waya’s going to do me a favour and help me out with something, and...” he trails off.

Touya gets to his feet, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “Another time, perhaps.”

“Yeah, next week, right?” Hikaru asks tentatively. “It’ll totally be my treat, okay?” he says a little more forcefully.

“That’s not necessary,” Touya demurs.

“I will, okay? So next week, right?” Hikaru presses.

“Next week,” Touya says, but his expression is mild and even and uncompromised and absolutely flat, and Hikaru realizes with a sort of creeping dread that this is his shidougo face, that Touya’s shutting him out the way Touya shuts out everyone who doesn’t matter, and he’s spent too long chasing Touya to let him escape so much as an inch.

But then Touya’s turned his back and it’s too late and Hikaru’s words are stuck in his throat and all he can do is watch him as he leaves, walking down the street without so much as a backward glance.

For lack of anything better to do Hikaru heads back into the Ki’in, stopping by the shop to pick up the latest Go Weekly since he hasn’t gotten around to doing that yet. He sits down in the lobby, figuring that Waya’ll have to walk by him to get his shoes anyway.

It’s not long ‘til Waya’s done his game, maybe twenty minutes or so until he emerges from the game room. “Yo,” he says, greeting Hikaru with a little wave. “Now let’s go let you buy me linner,” he says.

“What?” Hikaru asks. “You’re supposed to show me this email thing!” he says.

“And I will, right after you show your appreciation for my efforts by treating me to curry,” Waya says, clapping him on the shoulder.

Hikaru heaves a sigh. “‘Linner’ isn’t even a word.”

“And yet it’s still delicious,” he says.

They end up at Park Mori, which isn’t too bad since nothing on the menu costs more than 1000 yen and the food’s freaking amazing. Before too long they’re on the train making the trip to Waya’s, which takes a grand total of about 7 minutes since they’re just getting off at Kudanshita.

True to his word, Waya sits him down in front of his computer and tells him about digital kifu, showing him a few different programs and how he could open existing games and make notes or create alternatives, or plot a new game from scratch. “So just remember this icon here; they have this program on the computers at the Ki’in so if you click that, you’ll open the program,” he concludes.

“Yeah, yeah, I got that part,” Hikaru says, annoyed. “So how do you email kifu? It’s like a picture, right? But how do you make changes?”

Waya sighs deeply and embarks upon a long explanation involving a bunch of letters and way too much detail about formatting something called an SGF file.

“A wha?” Hikaru asks.

“It’s basically just a fancy text file. Look, don’t worry about it; use the program and you’ll be fine,” Waya says. “Here; I’ll email you some of my favourites and you can check it out.”

Hikaru waves him off. “But I don’t have an email address,” he protests.

Waya smacks him on the side of the head. “Then why are you wasting my time asking me about emailing kifu, dumbass? Okay, we’re getting you an email address. Get a pen and write this down,” Waya says, and in less than five minutes Hikaru is registered with some site called Yahoo.

“So how do I get people to email me stuff?” Hikaru asks.

Waya rolls his eyes. “Just download it yourself,” he says. “There are a bunch of sites you can check. My favourites are GoGoGo and World Igo Daily; GoGoGo has way more in terms of discussion and analysis but World Igo Daily has a totally ridiculous number of games available from all over the world.”

That catches his attention. “What, like games in other countries?” Hikaru asks, hoping he sounds totally normal and composed and casual and not at all like his heart is pounding a hundred beats a minute.

“Yeah, of course,” Waya says. “You can search by country or by competition or by date or by player or whatever you want,” he explains. “Let’s find you,” he says, typing into a box on the screen and hitting Enter.

The screen fills with results, and the very first one sets Hikaru’s teeth on edge and steals the breath from his lungs.

Shindou Hikaru Shodan vs Ko Yeongha 3-dan [2002-05-05].

It’s there, on the Internet, where anyone can see it, where 4,592 people have already seen it, according to the download count.

“Easy, then,” Hikaru says, tapping his fingers impatiently against his leg.

“Yeah, and how many times are you gonna bug me to do this for you?” Waya asks. “Just pay attention.”

Hikaru rolls his eyes.

He tries to skip out of Waya’s pretty quick out after that but Waya tries to talk him into staying until Isumi’s done shidougo and then they can round-robin speed-go.

“Dude, it’s been like for fricking ever,” Waya pushes. “C’mon, whatever you were gonna do totally isn’t that important.”

Hikaru’d kind of been hoping to maybe stop by the Murasakizui and see if Touya’d maybe gone there anyway and maybe he can sort of like apologize or something, so he makes up a totally bullshit excuse about needing to get home in time for dinner or his mom’ll freak out.

“Whatever,” Waya says, shooing him towards the door with a wave. “I’m never showing you how to do anything ever again if you’re gonna be such a dick about it.”

“I’ll buy you lunch next week,” Hikaru promises.

“And you’re bringing soda to the next study session on Saturday,” Waya pushes.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever; I got it,” Hikaru says, pulling on his sneakers.

“And not Dr Pepper this time! Dude, no one likes that but you. At least just get Coke or Calpis or something, got it?” Waya says.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says, and makes it out the door before Waya can lecture him further.

It’s just before five when he makes it to Shinjuku. He tears through the crowd, deking past the crush of people flooding the station and pushing through them to get up the stairs and up to street level. He races to the salon, pausing briefly at the elevator bank before writing off the delay and instead dashing up the stairs to the fifth floor.

He’s panting when he makes it to the salon, chest heaving.

“Welc--Shindou-kun!” Ichikawa interrupts herself, setting down her cup of tea. “What on earth happened to you?”

He makes a noncommittal noise that’s half ‘ehh’ and at least a quarter ‘urgh’. “Where is he?” he asks instead, leaning over and bracing his hands on his thighs and really, really hoping he doesn’t actually need to vomit and that this feeling will pass.

“Akira-kun?” she asks with an air of surprise. “He’s not with you?”

Before it can consciously register, a word slips from his mouth that would have earned him a smack on the back of his head from his mother. “Ah! I mean, um, whoops; I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he says, straightening up before offering her a hurried bow in apology. “But, um, he’s not here?” he asks.

Her expression is a little pinched, but she sighs, uncrossing her arms. “No. Did something happen?” she asks.

“No!” he says, a little too fast, maybe. “Okay, so he’s not here? Did he... like, come by earlier and then leave? Or...?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “He hasn’t been by today; I was quite surprised, actually,” she says, pursing her lips thoughtfully.

“Ah,” Hikaru says faintly, wiping his sweaty palms off on his shorts. “Um, if you do see him, could you...” he trails off.

“Did you want me to pass along a message?” she asks.

He stiffens. “No! I wasn’t going to say anything! In fact, don’t even mention I was here,” he says hastily, backing up so quickly he knocks into the automatic door which hadn’t had time to open for him. “Okay, um, see you next week!” he says, dashing off before she can ask him anything else.

It’s still way too early to head home, since if his mom’s awake then she’s going to maybe want to talk about stuff or whatever, so he’s got some time to kill before dark hits.

Might as well go try out what Waya taught him, he figures, so he wanders around Shinjuku looking for an Internet café, which takes about five minutes since it’s Shinjuku.

Unfortunately, the first café he finds doesn’t have go software, and neither does the one across the street. The annoying thing about internet cafés, he rapidly finds, is that apparently no one’s heard of MultiGo or or glGo or GoRilla or any of the other millions of programs out there available for reading kifu, and after he asked the attendant if she could install one for him she spent the rest of his visit glaring at him suspiciously, so this isn’t gonna work. And there are only a couple of computers in the Ki’in’s Internet study room and it’s not like he’s going to sit there working through kifu when someone he knows could come sneak up on him and demand to know what he’s doing so urgh, that’s not going to work either.

Hikaru’s been pretty diligent about his savings, since his mom made him set his bank account to do it automatically when he started making money, but the thing that surprises Hikaru when he looks is that his chequing account is actually in way better shape than he’d have thought, given that he lets himself go eat out all the time. But then again, he can’t think of the last time he bought a CD or went to the movies, and while he still buys the occasional manga tankoubon he’s gotten out of the habit of buying Shounen Jump every week since they just end up piling up at the end of his bed for a month until he finally gets around to reading them, so it’s just easier to buy Naruto and Prince of Tennis as they come out instead.

Still, he’s more than a little shocked that he’s going to be able to buy himself a computer without dipping into his savings at all.

Hikaru goes shopping for a laptop the very next afternoon, riding high on a wave of optimism and good cheer after his absolutely crushing dominance in his Meijin preliminaries match. He chooses a Sony in an unassuming gunmetal that’s small enough that he can cram it into the padded pocket of his backpack that he now realizes probably is actually meant to fit a laptop, so that’s kind of awesome.

That night he takes his purchase home and sets it up on his desk, a task that takes all of ninety seconds, and half of that time is spent figuring out which hole the plug goes into. Which isn’t that bad, once he finds it; at least since all the other holes are different sizes and shapes it’s not like it’ll let him do it wrong. And now that he knows where it is, it’ll be super easy.

The computer is pre-loaded with the operating system, so when it powers on all it does is prompt him for a username. He types in his name, and then up pops the desktop that he’s now finally starting to get comfortable with.

The first thing Hikaru does is open up the very first email Waya sent him, the one with the list of websites. He follows the first link and downloads MultiGo, which thankfully installs itself and puts its icon on the desktop and in the Start menu for him.

The second thing Hikaru does is go to World Igo Weekly and type ‘Ko Yeongha’ into the search bar.

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2002
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This time when the Hokutohai is officially announced and Touya receives his invitation, Hikaru is nothing but genuinely pleased for him. Touya’s having an extraordinary year, making quite respectable headway towards many of the major titles, winning the NHK Cup, and being all but undefeated in the ooteai.

Okay, so maybe it’s more than a little satisfying that Touya’s only loss in the ooteai was to him, and he’s going to carry with him to his deathbed the memory of the game they played that knocked Touya out of the Meijinsen.

There are a few weeks yet until the preliminaries to decide Team Japan and yet in his idle moments Hikaru’s finding his hands want to lay out only a single game, that game, and by now he’s got dozens of variations, maybe hundreds.

He and Touya end up in the salon more often these days; they have their usual Thursdays, of course, but they have Sundays as well ever since they rescheduled once around the Shinjin-Ou and now somehow they’ve slipped into Tuesdays as well.

It’s in their second game on a Tuesday evening when Touya plays a particular hand, balancing between baring his teeth and minding the fragility of his assembly of stones to the left, certainly honte by any measure Morishita-sensei or Serizawa-sensei might use, and yet all of Hikaru’s instincts begin shrieking at once and baying for blood. It takes Hikaru long seconds of staring at the board before he recognizes that shape, his shape, their shape, and instead of the keima he’d expect from himself he plays kosumitsuke, snapping the stone upon the board with such force that it rattles upon the pine.

Touya leans forward subtly, the movement almost unnoticeable, or at least it wouldn’t have been if the dark fall of his hair hadn’t swept forward as well. He ignores the stray strands, not bothering to push them back until after he plays hane, straightening up and turning his gaze to Hikaru with such naked inquiry that it’d be funny, almost, if the Hokutohai wasn’t less than three months away.

“Seriously?” Hikaru asks, flicking his gaze back down to the board.

Touya’s gaze narrows just enough to cause the suggestion of a furrow in his brow. “I confess I’m not entirely sure what you hope to accomplish here,” he says, and Hikaru readily recognizes the faint trace of hesitation in his voice that means that Touya would really like to say something much more blunt but is pretending at restraint to see if he can’t make Hikaru be the one to break their decorum first. Not that it matters; neither of them have broken a teacup or knocked over a goke in over a year and somehow that stupid Kitajima-san always acts like it was Hikaru’s fault to have angered the great Touya Akira-sama and that is definitely the best part about Tuesdays, the part where Kitajima-san never shows up.

Hikaru smooths his features into his calmest, most benevolent expression, the one he stole from Sai, and says merely “Ah, I see,” as he places his next stone with the lightest of hands.

Touya regards his hiki with polite suspicion, but his fingers dip into his goke without longer than a second’s thought.

“No rush,” Hikaru says benevolently, his words interrupting Touya’s movement. “Take your time.”

Touya snorts, and places his stone without further delay.

It’s like a game, almost, to stop and ask himself where would he go, what would he think, and it’s easier than Hikaru would have thought to shift his mind’s reflexes. He plays Touya with only the smallest of delayed reactions, and each step he takes closer to the game’s inevitable conclusion makes him a little calmer, a little more sure.

When Touya tosses a handful of stones upon the board with a sharp huff, it’s about twenty moves too late. “What were you doing?” Touya demands sharply.

Hikaru heaves a sigh of his own, and makes a show of picking out the extra stones and adjusting the stones Touya had disturbed with his little display back into their proper places. “You should recognize these plays,” he chides him.

“Those weren’t your plays,” Touya accuses him.

Maybe they should be.

Hikaru fixes his gaze on Touya, and waits until Touya’s attention is completely upon him before he continues. “The Hokutohai is in less than three months.”

Touya takes a measured blink. “Ah, I see.”

Someone who lost by over ten moku shouldn’t be so casual. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Hikaru asks bluntly.

“You’ve been studying,” Touya says,

“Of course I have,” Hikaru says. “Haven’t you?” And if Touya dares to say no, Hikaru will tie him to a chair and force him to replay the entire Chunwon tournament with him, and maybe the Siptan Cup for good measure.

“Of course,” Touya says simply, so Hikaru isn’t going to have to rethink this eternal rival thing after all.

“So,” Hikaru says, flattening his sweaty palms against his thighs, “you know Korea’s first board is going to be Ko Yeongha,” he says, and his words are calm and even because he’s calm and even and everything’s fine, everything’s totally fine. “So I wanted to see how you’d react to his hands.”

Touya’s mouth purses into the hint of a frown. “I’m not here today to play Ko; I’m here to play you,” he says, eyes narrowing.

“Worry about me when we meet in the Juudan. Worry about him now,” Hikaru says flatly.

Touya takes a slow, deliberate sip from his teacup before responding. “So you’re not going to be pushing to be first board again,” he says.

Hikaru swallows hard. “You really don’t think anyone would let Kurata bump you for me again, do you?” he asks, and it’s supposed to be, if not a joke, at least lighthearted, but his tone is too flat and uninflected for that. “You can’t look to me to take the heat off you this year,” he adds hastily, gripping his fan tightly and whipping it out to point at Touya. “So you’d better be taking this seriously.”

Touya’s hand rests on his teacup but he doesn’t fidget, doesn’t trace the outline of the cup the way Hikaru might. “I am taking this seriously,” he says quietly.

Hikaru sets his fan down on his side of the board. “So when’s the last time you looked at one of his games?” he asks.

There’s only one right answer, and Touya’s prompt response is a balm to Hikaru’s anxiety. “Saturday, when I reviewed his match against Choi Yejun in the Shinhan Invitational in which he won by resignation.”

“And why did he win?” Hikaru asks.

Touya straightens in his seat, folding his hands in his lap. “What a ridiculously reductionist question. Would you like me to summarize the game for you?” he asks, tone sharp.

And if he’s going to be an ass about it, might as well take him up on his offer. “Yeah, actually, that sounds great,” Hikaru says, getting to his feet. “Let me just pull out the kifu,” he says, and spins on his heel to go get his bag from Ichikawa-san so he can pull out his laptop.

***

The single knock-out tournament to determine the members of this year’s Team Japan is held in the last week of March. Hikaru’s first game is against Takabayashi Shodan from the Central branch in Nagoya, and while Takabayashi-pro shows a remarkable sense of the flow of the game, all it does is serve to engrave the furrow in his brow even more deeply with every one of Hikaru’s moves. They are just over 130 moves into the game when Takabayashi-pro resigns.

Hikaru’s second match is against Waya, and while he’s played countless games against Waya, surely hundreds of games over all of their study sessions, maybe thousands, there’s never before been an air between them like this, not even all the way back when they faced each other in the 26th round of the insei exam.

The game sprawls across the board, and as their stones wend ever closer Hikaru can feel Waya getting more and more desperate, his hands uncharacteristically defensive. Too late he throws himself wholeheartedly against Hikaru’s weak upper right, but he’s misread the stones Hikaru’s left scattered just below and while Hikaru knows full well they’re dead he’s still able to leverage them to force Waya into gote. Their deadlocked semeai that was going to lead them into seki is suddenly Hikaru’s as he claims his new advantage, and Waya abandons those seven newly-dead stones with click of his tongue against his teeth.

The match doesn’t last long after that; Waya holds out until yose, but Hikaru’s ahead by fourteen and a half insurmountable points.

“Thanks for the game,” Waya says roughly, getting to his feet. “I gotta hit the head; go ahead and report to the proctor without me,” he says, turning on his heel and heading out of the game room.

Hikaru’s trying to figure out if that’s a ‘leave me alone I’m gonna pull an Ochi’ or a ‘dude let’s talk in private’ when he feels a familiar presence behind him.

“Well done,” Touya says. “Though it was an interesting choice to hold back for so long.”

Hikaru rocks back up on his heels so he can sprawl in agura and lean back to look up at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, casting a glance at the group huddled around Yashiro and Kitamura 2-dan’s board to make sure no one’s paying any attention to them.

“I wonder if you’d have played this game against someone who wasn’t your friend,” Touya says, his tone deceptively casual.

Hikaru’s eyes narrow sharply. “You’re full of crap.”

“You’re better than this,” Touya says flatly. “Yashiro won, by the way.”

Hikaru toys with avoiding the subject change, but fine, whatever, Touya can have whatever stupid opinions he wants. “Gang’s back together, huh?”

“Mm,” he says, turning to spare another glance at the back of Yashiro’s head. “Indeed we are.”

“We should do something tonight,” Hikaru says. “Before Yashiro has to head back to Kyoto. Two-board simultaneous speed-go,” he says.

Touya quirks an eyebrow. “I thought you were going to say we should go out to dinner,” he says.

Hikaru shrugs, turning his attention back to the board. “That too; whatever.”

“Shindou,” Touya says, commanding his attention back towards him. “We’ll be ready.”

***

The five weeks until the Hokutohai pass in two years or two days; Hikaru’s not sure. The plane trip to Beijing is the worst; the almost four hours they’re in the air are the longest of his life. But they make it, and by the time the airport shuttle reaches their hotel it’s finally sunk in that it’s here, that it’s now, that this time tomorrow they’ll be right in the thick of things. China and Korea face off first thing tomorrow morning, but Japan is slated to play against Korea in the afternoon. They play China the day after, but if Hikaru’s honest it’s not like China will matter if they can’t get past Korea.

Kurata-san checks them in, and the four of them trudge upstairs to their rooms on the 15th floor to dump their luggage before deciding to grab dinner at the restaurant downstairs.

“The Ki’in’s providing a per diem, so go nuts!” Kurata-san points out. “Order the tuna; it’s high in omega-3s!”

Free dinner is a pretty good incentive, but for once Hikaru’s sort of hungry, sort of not; it was a long, shaky flight and despite having been filled with nothing more substantial than juice and crackers all day, he’s still not sure if he feels like keeping anything down. But it’s not like he can just stay cooped up in the room by himself while the others get dinner, so he lets Yashiro clap a hand on his shoulder and steer him back out of the room and into the hallway.

They’re back in the hotel lobby trying to find a sign to direct them to the restaurant when he hears a voice calling him.

“Shindou!” It’s not one of his group, it’s someone else, the voice vaguely familiar but nothing he can place. It’s not ‘til he turns around and sees its owner that it clicks, that he can extrapolate the deeper voice to the higher one in his memory. “Shindou!”

Hikaru very nearly does a double-take. “Suyeong?” he asks the young man running over to him.

It’s him, definitely him, taller and a little more angular of feature but he’s got the same cast to his eyes, even the same dorky bowl cut. “Shindou!” Suyeong exclaims, hefting his bag to his other shoulder. “I did it! This year, I’m second board!” he says, using his free hand to point accusingly at Hikaru. “You’d better not run away!”

Hikaru sets a confident hand on his hip. “You’ve never beaten me, and you never will!” he declares.

Oddly enough, Suyeong smiles. “Private games don’t count,” he says. “This will be our first real game.” His eyes are bright and clear, possessed of great surety of purpose, and Hikaru finds himself answering with a smile of his own.

“I hope you’re prepared; you’ll need to do much better than you did in the Wangwi; Bak Hyeonu handed you that game,” Hikaru says. Which is a lie; it was a hell of a game and Suyeong’s got to know it, but he can’t help teasing someone so earnest.

Touya clears his throat, and Hikaru’s about to roll his eyes and tell him not to be so serious when a new voice intrudes upon their conversation, this one speaking Korean, and Hikaru’s smile is frozen on his face as he turns to see who’s joined them: Ko Yeongha, long dark-copper hair cascading past his shoulders, curling up at the end of his bangs and just above his ears and down at his collarbone. He looks impossibly neat next to Suyeong and Im Ilhwan’s travel-fatigued figures, his jacket slung over his arm and collar unbuttoned, giving him the relaxed air of someone who’s walked across the street for a cup of tea, not one who’s traveled a thousand miles in a single day.

Ko’s eyes meet his, and when he speaks again his eyebrow lifts just slightly enough that Hikaru doesn’t need to know what he’s saying to know that he’s being mocked.

“He says you’ve been busy,” Touya says.

Ko directs his next question at Suyeong, who shrugs and says something back to him in Korean. Then Ko returns his attention to Hikaru, stepping forward and rattling off a rapid-fire string of foreign words, though Hikaru does pick out the words ‘Myungin’, which he knows means ‘Meijin’, and ‘Chunwon’, which he knows means ‘Tengen’.

“He says he’s been following your performance in the leagues,” Touya adds.

Hikaru waves him off. “Yeah, yeah, yeah; I got that part. Tell him--” and then he breaks off because Ko takes another step forward, setting a hand on his shoulder and leaning in to murmur something in his ear. It’s nonsense that means nothing to him, but he can feel the strands of Ko’s too-long hair brushing across his cheek and can scent a low, dark spice that must be his cologne, and then in the mess of incomprehensible syllables Hikaru hears his own name, his first name, and Hikaru jerks abruptly back before he realizes that Ko’s won, that Ko’s made him retreat, and he bites the inside of his mouth so hard that the coppersalt tang of blood washes over his tongue.

Ko resumes a stance of absolute casual boredom, a smile tugging at his mouth. He makes one more statement at Hikaru before turning to Suyeong and Im in turn.

Ko and Im go to leave, but Suyeong’s eyes meet his one last time. “Tomorrow,” Suyeong says. “You better be second board!” Then he turns and heads after his teammates, running a couple steps to catch up.

Hikaru watches them go. “What else did he say?” he asks Touya.

“Don’t know, don’t care, doesn’t matter,” Yashiro says. “Nothing good. Come on, I’m hungry,” he says, giving Hikaru a friendly punch in the shoulder.

“That’s right!” Kurata-san agrees. “We’ll refuel, then we can all grab an early bed. Sound good?”

The figures of Ko, Suyeong, and Im disappear around the corner at last, and finally Hikaru can turn around and return his attention to the group. “Yeah, sure,” he says hollowly, and lets himself be led off to dinner.

***

Hikaru’s lying awake in bed listening to the soft, even cadence of Yashiro’s breathing in the bed next to him when he hears his phone vibrate on the bedside table next to him.

It’s not like he’s sleeping anyway, so grabs his phone and flips it open. It’s probably just his mom, but he’ll make a note to send her a quick note or something tomorrow first thing.

To his surprise, it’s a text from Touya. ‘Are you awake?’ it asks.

‘Yeah’, he texts back, pressing Send.

Touya texts back less than a minute later. ‘Do you have a moment?’

Hikaru’s just kidding himself if he thinks he’s going to be able to fall asleep before midnight. ‘Sure. I’ll be in the hall in a sec’, he replies, then sits up and tosses the blankets back. He shuffles over to the closet with tiny careful footsteps, mindful he doesn’t trip over anything. He finds a sneaker that’s definitely his, then two dress shoes one after the other that are Yashiro’s, but he’s able to nudge them out of the way instead of stepping on them. Having made it safely to the closet, he borrows one of the bathrobes and a pair of courtesy slippers. Suitably clothed for public (or at least acceptably clothed for a hotel hallway at 10:30 at night), Hikaru quietly pads his way to the door, closing it softly behind him.

It’s not until he hears the click of the door lock that he realizes he doesn’t have a keycard.

“Damn it,” he swears, letting his head slump forward and thump against the door in his frustration.

“Did you lock yourself out?”

Hikaru straightens up with a jerk, spinning around to find Touya standing by the next door down. Touya’s wearing a thin, lightweight summer robe of navy blue, under which Hikaru can see that he’s wearing a matching pair of silky blue pajamas. He even brought his own slippers, navy blue to match, and he’s kind of awed that Touya is apparently able to cram a whole wardrobe into his itty bitty luggage.

“Um,” he says.

“Kurata-san’s got a spare key,” Touya says, his hand going to his robe pocket where his own keycard is probably stowed. “It’ll be fine. Would you like to go up to the roof?” he asks.

“The roof?” Hikaru asks. Well, it beats standing around in the hall, and it’s not like they’re dressed to go down to the hotel bar.

“Yes, there’s an observation deck,” Touya says. “It’s fairly warm out; we should be comfortable enough like this.”

“Sure,” Hikaru agrees, following him towards the elevator. “How did you know about that?” he asks.

Touya turns and offers him a smile. “It’s on the website,” he says.

Of course Touya would look up the hotel; if there’s information available anywhere about anything, he’ll find it.

“Cool,” Hikaru says.

They fall quiet as they wait for the elevator car, and the trip up to the top of the hotel is made in silence interrupted only by the quiet ding of the elevator’s bell, and the beep of the RFID reader as Touya holds his keycard up to the device to unlock the door to the roof.

When Touya had said ‘observation deck’, Hikaru had thought of something like the Tokyo Tower, a plain industrial room with large glass ceilings. He should have realized he was wrong when Touya mentioned the temperature outside. This is completely different: it’s a rooftop garden--no, more like park, with paved paths winding through manicured grass alongside flowerbeds and dense, vibrant bushes, and even full-size trees.

The hotel has provided a box of shoe-covers next to the door, so they stop to slip the paper covers over their slippers before heading outside.

“Whoa,” Hikaru says as he looks around. He might not be able to appreciate the landscaping in the same way as he could during the daytime, but at night the dark sky is alit with all the glittering lights of the city. Only brief peeks are afforded through the greenery, but as they walk together along the path they come across a pebbled offshoot. Hikaru ventures a look, and tucked away behind a bush is a park bench right by the railing, offering an unobstructed look at the downtown core.

“You mind?” Hikaru asks, kicking the nearest leg of the bench to clarify his meaning. Touya nods, and so Hikaru sits down, making room for Touya to sit down next to him if he wants, which he does.

Hikaru picks a building with bright, distinctive lighting in electric green to focus his attentions on. There’s only one reason for Touya to call him out like this on tonight of all nights, but Touya’s the one who asked him, so he’ll wait for Touya to make the first move.

Touya doesn’t keep him waiting. “Shindou,” he says.

Hikaru can see him out of the corner of eye, can tell that Touya’s turned to face him, but Hikaru’s just going to keep staring at his building, thanks.

“We play Korea tomorrow afternoon,” Touya continues.

The words hang in the air, and Hikaru realizes that Touya is waiting for him to say something and isn’t going to continue until he does. “Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

And the words are obvious but they’re what Touya needed, because now he sallies forth. “We play Ko Yeongha tomorrow.”

He takes a deep breath. “You’re facing Ko Yeongha,” Hikaru corrects him. “I’m facing Suyeong.”

“You could,” Touya says. “If you want to face him, he’s yours. I’m not going to stand in your way.”

Hikaru can’t help the half-laugh that bubbles out of him. “Yeah, I did that, remember? I had my chance. I blew it. He’s all yours.”

“You’re talking like you endured some crushing defeat,” Touya says sharply. “There was a half-moku difference between you two on that day. Don’t you want to know what that difference is now?”

Hikaru’s hands fist themselves in the terrycloth of his robe, causing it to gape open and let the night air cool his bare legs. “This is bigger than me and what I want,” he says. “Everyone wants to see the game between you and him. Don’t you want to play it?”

“It’s important to you,” Touya says, and his avoidance of the direct question could not be more obvious. “I know what it means to need to face someone. This is your fight.”

“No,” Hikaru says, the word leaden in his throat. “No, it’s not. You’re first board; you earned it. I won’t steal it from you again.”

“Shindou--” Touya starts but Hikaru can’t take it, can’t handle it anymore, and he gets to his feet in a single motion, closing the distance between himself and the side of the building, grabbing the railing and leaning forward and letting the night wind blow the loose, ungelled strands of his hair as it wills.

“Ko’s not going anywhere, and neither am I. There are other international tournaments and competitions. The next time I play him, I’m going to have earned it,” Hikaru says flatly.

He hears Touya get to his feet and step forward behind Hikaru. “You don’t have to decide now,” Touya says. “I’ve studied both Ko and Hon; I’m familiar with both of their playstyles. I’ll play who you don’t.”

A genuine smile curves his lips at Suyeong’s name. “That’s right; I promised Suyeong a game, didn’t I? So it’s settled. Tomorrow afternoon, you’ll play Ko and I’ll play Suyeong and Yashiro will play Im,” he says, pushing back from the railing and turning to face Touya once more.

Touya’s expression is somber. “If it’s what you want,” he says simply.

“It’s what I want,” he says, repeating Touya’s phrasing precisely. “So no chickening out tomorrow; I won’t rescue you if you bail,” he teases. “Just...” he starts, and while he cuts himself off it’s too late, the sentence is already started, and Touya’s whole countenance straightens in anticipation.

“Just?” Touya prompts.

Hikaru waves him off. “Just nothing. We’ve been over everything; you know what I know. It’ll be great. You’ll be great. You’ll be amazing,” he says.

“Shindou,” Touya says, reaching forward, and his fingertips are bright hot and electric on Hikaru’s wrist. “I’ll win,” he says, and it’s stupid, it’s insane; Touya never makes ridiculous promises, not about go, not about anything, but he’s here, they’re here, and Touya’s leaning in so close that Hikaru can see the lights of the city behind them blazing in Touya’s eyes, he can breathe in the clean, fresh scent of Touya’s body wash, and Touya is giving him promises only a fool could make.

Hikaru’s fingers are scrabbling at Touya’s and before Touya can pull his hand away Hikaru’s caught him, meshes their fingers together, and he squeezes their hands so tightly that he can feel the bones in his fingers shifting with painful clarity. “Just don’t lose,” he whispers, voice hoarse with the effort to keep it from shaking. “Or I won’t ever forgive you.”

Touya’s hand squeezes him back, and for a moment they could be children sneaking out in their pajamas in the dead of night instead of two practically fully-grown adults with careers and responsibilities. “I won’t,” Touya vows.

Hikaru lets him go and steps back, shoving his hands into the pockets of his robe. “Okay,” he says, swallowing hard and hoping he sounds normal. “Okay. Come on,” he says, turning and heading for the door. “We should get to bed. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”

***

After the opening ceremonies, which Hikaru can follow only by context since they’re all in Mandarin, Team Japan settles in a small room off the main ballroom. China is playing Korea this morning, so they’ll be able to follow the games in privacy. There are three televisions set up, one for each game, and while the room is also for the use of Hokuto Communications’ VIPs, Team Japan gets the large centre table with three goban ready for their use.

Hikaru knows he should be paying attention, knows it’s horribly rude that he isn’t, but their games don’t matter. They don’t. Lù Lì is too sedate, playing hands that solicit, not demand. Wàng Shì Zhèn is immovable, focusing too much on his own defence. And Zhào Shí is a whirlwind of chaos, which would be almost awe-inspiring if he wasn’t completely unfocused and utterly unprepared for Suyeong’s measured brutality.

Hikaru knows there’s lunch, has a vague sense he may even have eaten some of it, but all he can remember of it is Kurata-san setting his own aside to come sit next to him.

“Shindou,” Kurata-san says. “How you doing?”

“Good,” he says. “Great. Awesome.”

“Okay,” Kurata-san says. “Touya told me you guys had a talk. So what’s the plan?”

“The plan is we kick some ass today,” Hikaru says, shooting him a grin.

Kurata-san grins back. “That’s what I like to hear. No second thoughts?”

Hikaru scoffs. “‘Course not. Yashiro’s all over Im, I’ve never lost to Suyeong, and Touya’s gonna crush Ko into tiny little pieces and grind him under his shoe.”

Kurata-san crosses his arms and nods in confirmation. “Okay. I’m counting on you,” he says.

***

Hikaru’s read dozens of Suyeong’s kifu in the last year, has followed him through the Guksu, through the Chosun Ilbo, and the Suyeong he sees today is the culmination of all of those games. Suyeong is brash, always ready to leap upon any perceived weakness, and relies upon his loose-spun network of stones to offer him a solution to any problem he might encounter.

It’s interesting, it’s passionate, but Suyeong is yet too raw. Hikaru systematically breaks apart the loosest of Suyeong’s stones, makes space for himself, and Hikaru can see in the tension of Suyeong’s shoulders and hear in the rattling of the stones he places that Suyeong knows it, too.

Suyeong places his next move with an oddly heavy thock. When he pulls away Hikaru sees it, two new stones upon the board, and Suyeong’s voice is so tight it cracks with the syllables of what must undoubtedly be his resignation.

Suyeong hangs his head, his glossy hair falling forward to obscure his eyes. He’s still, too still, and Hikaru has been still far too often himself not to recognize it.

He wants to say something, has to say something, and racks his brain through all of Touya’s pointless conversations about his language lessons to try and grasp hold of something. “Gomabseubnida,” he says, trying to mimic Touya’s pronunciation as best as he can, hoping he’s even remotely close to saying ‘thank you’. “Thank you for the game,” he says again in Japanese, voice stronger and surer.

Suyeong says nothing, so Hikaru gets to his feet, ignoring the aches in his back and his knees from sitting so long, and bows. “Thank you,” he repeats, and then leaves Suyeong to the board.

Now that his game is over and he’s up, he’s finally capable of absorbing more than just the game in front of him. Yashiro’s impossible to miss, sitting off to the side in front of a bank of three televisions with the journalists and team leaders.

“Hey,” Hikaru says quietly as he slips into the empty chair next to him. He looks like warmed-over hell, if he’s gonna be blunt; Yashiro’s tie hangs loosely around his neck by a good two or three inches, and his top two buttons are undone. “How’d it go?”

Yashiro groans and buries his head in his hands. “Urgh, just kill me. I completely misread his ko threats and got murdered; I lost by seven and a half. You played a pretty tight game, though; not bad, short-stuff,” he says, kicking at Hikaru’s foot with his own.

“‘Course I did; said I would, didn’t I?” he asks, kicking him back. “How’s Touya doing?”

“Driving me to drink,” Yashiro says, rubbing his eyes clear and focusing anew on the monitor showing Touya game with Ko. “He made an absolutely insane approach on the right and I thought for sure he was losing his marbles but look, you see how the battle moved down there? And then he was perfectly positioned so that when they were fighting in the corner he just snapped around for seki kuzure,” Yashiro says, waving vaguely at the monitor. “Kind of reminded me of something you’d do, actually.”

“Hah,” Hikaru says, turning to grin at him. “If by insane you mean insanely awesome, then yeah, it’s totally something I’d do.”

From what he can see, the game is close. It’s approaching yose, and Hikaru’s eyes are glued to the screen unwilling to blink lest he miss something important and game-altering as it happens.

He watches as Touya’s hand reaches into frame; when he goes too far, bypassing the bottom right in favour of the upper left, he has just enough time to hiss “Touya--” under his breath before Touya has placed his stone and it’s done.

It’s over. Ko has seen that, too, and plays against the possibility Touya had ignored in bottom right, solidifying his connection and making his stones solid and unassailable.

There is still more yet to be played out, but the game is over. In missing that opportunity the game has slid by three points, and Touya loses by one and a half.

Touya has never worn loss well, and Hikaru can read it in the tension in his shoulders, in the stiff way he holds his arms at his sides, hands pointedly open and not fisted or balled at all. His bow to Ko is stiff, lacking all but the least of his usual grace, and when he turns to leave the stage his gait is too quick as he all but flees the room, the door swinging heavily on its hinges behind him.

Hikaru doesn’t realize he’s been staring into space until Yashiro’s shoulder nudges his own. “So are you going to go after him or what?” Yashiro asks.

That decides him; Touya can be angry or pissed at him or whatever for following, but it’s better than the alternative. Hikaru remembers last year after his own loss, raw and aching with the agony of his humiliation of not only his weakness on the board but off in his inability to suppress his tears, but in that moment Touya had been there. Touya had been there, and Touya had known exactly what to say, and maybe Hikaru won’t, but he owes it to Touya to try.

When Hikaru leaves the ballroom, he takes a quick look up and down the hallway. No sign of Touya--although there probably wouldn’t be, since it’s not like Touya’s carrying around a loaf of bread or a ball of string, even though that would make things way easier.

Hikaru heads towards the lobby; maybe Touya wanted to go outside for some fresh air? But it’s busy and loud with the midday crush of people to be expected at a hotel during an international event in the middle of the afternoon, and he can’t really picture Touya pushing his way through that, not now.

Hikaru backtracks a bit, and notices the washroom down on the other side. He almost goes in, but he can hear the low murmur of voices and then the bright sound of laughter, so maybe not. He keeps going down the hall, going ‘round the corner, and when he sees the next bank of washrooms, his instincts send him inside.

He steps into the bathroom slowly, quietly. All he can hear is the sound of running water, and when he makes his way through the vestibule and into the bathroom proper he sees Touya standing at the sink, hands cupped under the water flowing from the faucet.

His footsteps echo off the tile and that’s good; he steps a little heavier so that he won’t sneak up on him. But Touya doesn’t turn to look, doesn’t turn off the faucet, doesn’t even move.

Hikaru walks up right beside him. Not even Touya’s gaze flickers; he’s staring at his hands, and--

--and they’re almost completely white, the skin under his fingernails a delicate blue.

“Jesus, Touya!” Hikaru says, grabbing his hands and pulling out from under the stream, pulling them close to his own chest. Touya’s hands feel like they could have been carved from a single block of ice; Hikaru rubs them between his own so quickly his hands blur in his vision. “What are you doing?”

Touya’s hands have warmed only all but imperceptibly before Touya bursts into motion, yanking them back and staggering backward. His eyes are glassy and far too bright even under the artificial lights, and it’s that more than anything else that leads Hikaru to raise his hand and reach forward before he realizes what he’s doing and thinks better of it, snapping back and wrapping his arms around himself instead.

“I saw it,” Touya says, his voice hoarse. “I saw it, I counted it, I juggled the order of our stones a dozen times or more. I thought I had it.”

Touya shuts his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them again his eyes are clear and dry, though his eyelashes glitter with the tears he refuses to shed. “I was wrong,” he says. “I counted it,” he repeats. “I just--I thought--I couldn’t--” he tries before breaking off. “No,” he says, shutting his eyes and breathing deeply before he continues. “I didn’t.”

Touya’s hands are working against each other, rubbing and squeezing and causing friction and when Hikaru thinks he can see colour returning to his skin at last, he lets out the breath he didn’t even realize he was holding.

“It was a good game,” Hikaru says. “No; it was an amazing game,” he corrects himself. “I can’t wait to sit down and go through it; I was trying to guess the progression, but the whole fight across the bottom left, I can’t read that at all. I can’t wait for you to walk me through it.”

“The bottom left,” Touya echoes. “Ah, yes, well, I wasn’t expecting him to hanazuke, so 7-17 was the only option.”

“Sekitou shibori!” Hikaru exclaims. “Of course; that’s the only way, right?” he asks. “Beautiful; really elegant,” he says admiringly. “The whole game,” he adds, gazing at Touya so that if he raises his eyes then he’ll see him, then he’ll know Hikaru is sincere. “It was beautiful. It was an amazing game, totally amazing--you know that, right?” he asks. “Yashiro told me about that thing you did, how you saw the seki coming a mile away and set up thirty hands in advance to break it, you crafty bastard. It’s good, you know--great, actually; people will be begging you to explain how you were able to read it out so precisely; they’ll write whole chapters about you in discussion books and on websites,” he says.

“No one’s going to write about this,” Touya says flatly, but he reaches forward and shuts off the water at last so it must be a good sign, or at least Hikaru hopes.

“Bullshit; Amano’s gonna use half the page on your game next week,” Hikaru insists.

“And yours?” Touya asks. “How was your game?”

“Oh, man,” Hikaru says, and he tries to bite down on the grin that comes unbidden and to shape his face into a more sober, introspective expression. “Well, he’s gotten vicious, I can tell you that. We’ll go over it later. And Yashiro’s,” he adds. “He lost, seven and a half moku, he said, but I haven’t seen it at all so I couldn’t tell you how that went down.”

Touya makes a noise of vague acknowledgement, but at least he’s adjusting back to polite, civilized Touya, so that’s good.

“Hey,” Hikaru says. “You know, they’re probably waiting for us. You wanna head back?” he asks.

In seconds Touya’s whole countenance changes: his posture straightens, he drops his hands back to his sides, his chin tilts up just slightly, and he’s lost that air of despondency that’s so foreign on Touya, of all people. “All right,” he agrees.

Hikaru gives him a critical appraisal. “One thing,” he says, reaching forward, but when Touya’s eyes go wide he suddenly thinks better of it and he draws his hand back, instead waving his fingers vaguely in the direction of his own throat. “Your tie, it’s all, you know, gibbledy and stuff,” he says, clearing his throat with a cough.

“Ah, I see,” Touya says, and reaches up to flip up his collar and undo his tie entirely so he can start from scratch. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to appear ‘gibbledy’,” he says, enunciating the word with exaggerated precision.

“Pfft,” Hikaru huffs dismissively. “You’re welcome, jerk.”

Touya’s hands don’t pause from their smooth, exact movements, but Touya’s gaze in the mirror does flick up from his handiwork with his tie to Hikaru’s own face. “Thank you,” he says simply.

Hikaru looks away, coughing. “Yeah, um. You too. Thanks. You--” did great today, he thinks better of saying; he probably shouldn’t bring up the game again yet for at least a little while.

The hallways are a little busier when they emerge from the bathroom but only barely, and when they slip back into the ballroom the commentators are still discussing Touya and Ko’s game.

Yashiro and Kurata-san are standing on the near wall less than ten feet from the door. “Hey,” Hikaru says, tossing them a little wave as they approach. “We don't have to stick around, do we?” he asks. “Because I am fricking starving.”

“Yeah, no kidding; you ate like two bites of your rice bowl at lunch,” Yashiro says.

“Sounds like a plan,” Kurata-san says with a decisive smack of a fist against his open palm. “We want to do the hotel restaurant again?”

“We came all the way to Beijing; we may as well see some of it,” Yashiro points out.

Kurata-san laughs nervously. “How about we see the parts of it that speak Japanese?” he asks.

Touya cracks a smile, slight and lopsided but still recognizably his first of the afternoon. “I’m sure I can get us through dinner,” he says.

They don’t venture far, probably not two blocks from the hotel, but they end up in a lively, cramped dim sum place. It turns out that they can pretty much just wave and point to flag down the waitstaff and add new dishes to their selection, but Touya does take a moment to order something called ‘cháo zhōu fĕn guŏ’, which is what Hikaru is pretty sure happiness tastes like.

“You’ve had this before,” Touya tells him when Hikaru can’t suppress his giddiness. “The Chinese place in Chiyoda-ku, five blocks from the Ki’in, remember?”

“Whatever,” Hikaru says around a mouthful of dumpling. “It totally didn’t taste like this.”

Touya arches an eyebrow. “You liked it at the time,” he points out.

“And now we can’t ever go back, because it’s not this place,” Hikaru says. “Oh my God. Can we get some more?” he asks.

The same magic that keeps Touya in favour with the patrons at his father’s salon and young women of all descriptions seems to work in China as well; within mere seconds of Touya straightening up and making eye-contact with a waitress she comes heading right over, and soon he has her heading off to the kitchen to fetch them some more.

Dinner has definitely lifted their spirits; by the time their group is headed back to the hotel Hikaru thinks they might even be able to have some fun tonight.

Kurata-san checks his watch once they hit the lobby. “Oh, cripes, I gotta dash. Okay, you’re all responsible adults--well, almost,” he amends. “Sort of. Keep out of trouble; Touya, you’re in charge of Shindou,” he says, pointing a finger at him.

“I’m right here!” Hikaru protests.

To his chagrin, Touya merely bows his head in acknowledgement. “Certainly. Have a good night, Kurata-san.”

“You know it!” Kurata-san says. “An Taeseon, Yáng Hǎi and I have a little speed-go competition planned. Just make sure to tuck in at a reasonable time; I expect you all to be razor-sharp for your matches against China tomorrow!”

“Yessir,” Hikaru says, tossing off a casual salute.

Yashiro’s foot taps the floor impatiently as they watch Kurata-san make his way across the lobby and around the corner to the bank of elevators. “Okay,” he says at last. “You know the best thing about China?”

“The food?” Hikaru asks, and then a thought slams into him so hard he feels his jaw literally drop. “Oh my God. We are not leaving the country until I’ve had real, honest-to-God Chinese ramen.”

“We’ll have plenty of time tomorrow after the closing ceremonies,” Touya assures him before turning to humour Yashiro. “And that would that be?” he asks.

Yashiro grins. “The beer.”

Hikaru rolls his eyes. “Dude, we’re sixteen.”

His grin widens. “So?”

Touya sighs deeply. “We have games in the morning,” he says, which is absolutely not what Hikaru had expected. ‘You dissolute wretch, how could you possibly entertain the idea of underage drinking’, maybe. But definitely not that.

“Come on,” Yashiro says, reaching out and slinging an arm around each of them. He has to lean over kind of wonky to reach Hikaru, but whatever, Hikaru totally doesn’t even care. “You’re only young once, right? I’ll buy the first round!”

“Wait,” Hikaru says. “Are you serious? Who’s going to sell us booze? We’re totally going to get carded,” he says.

“Dude,” Yashiro says slowly, mimicking Hikaru’s earlier protest. “We’re in China. No one cares. We’re respectable professionals, right? And it’s super early, so we have plenty of time to get in a drink or two or three and hit the sack well before midnight,” he says, turning to reassure Touya.

“One round,” Touya says, shrugging out from under Yashiro’s arm.

“Two,” Yashiro insists.

“Two,” Touya agrees.

“So this is a thing?” Hikaru asks incredulously. “We’re gonna go drinking?”

“Hell yeah!” Yashiro says.

“We’ll stick close to home just in case; the hotel bar should be fine,” Touya says.

Hikaru lets out a whoop. “Awesome! All right; let’s do this thing!”

The hotel isn’t too busy when they arrive, and they have a brief discussion about where to sit. Yashiro points out that they’re at a bar, so they might as well sit at the bar, so they snag three seats at the end.

Their first few minutes there are spent arguing about beer and whether they should get a domestic or imported brand--or at least Hikaru and Yashiro are arguing, Touya is sitting primly, waiting for them to grow up and realize they’re in public and should probably behave accordingly. Eventually, they settle on a domestic brand and fall into an easy conversation about the pros and cons of traveling overseas.

Yashiro breaks off in mid-sentence.

Hikaru looks up. "Sorry, what?" he asks.

"Dude, dun' freak out but you-know-who just walked in and he just noticed us and he's coming right over here," Yashiro mutters sotto voce, his Kansai slur more pronounced than ever.

"Who--" Hikaru starts but there's only one person it could be, and when a hand settles on his shoulder and he hears that low, lyrical drawl in his ear, the expectant tension knots itself so tightly in his chest that he can almost breathe through it to calm.

"Yeongha," Suyeong chides, annoyed, following that with a short string of foreign words that mean nothing to Hikaru.

Normally Hikaru would turn and greet Suyeong, but that would require him to acknowledge the hand on his shoulder and Hikaru will give Ko nothing, not the slightest thing, not now, not ever.

Then Ko is speaking again, his tone light, but Suyeong interrupts him again and the hand is knocked off Hikaru's shoulder.

Now Hikaru can turn. "Hey, Suyeong, you guys," he says. He kind of feels like a dick for lumping Im in with Ko, that irritating pissbag, but if he acknowledges Suyeong and Im but not Ko then it's almost worse, like Hikaru's ignoring him on purpose and it'll be obvious and just give Ko another thing to bitch at him about.

"I'm glad to have run into you," Suyeong says. "I should buy you a drink."

"You can't buy me a drink; you're a kid!" Hikaru protests.

Suyeong's shoulders hitch. "I'm not a kid!" he shouts so loud that half the bar must have heard him.

"You're fifteen!" Hikaru says.

"Only one year younger than you!" Suyeong exclaims. "I'm taller than you!" he insists.

"No way!" Hikaru protests, because that's gotta be bullshit because there's no way Suyeong could be taller than him because that's just crazy, okay, but he sits a little straighter on his stool just in case.

"Am too!" Suyeong insists, grabbing him by the arm, and encouraging him up.

"Totally aren't!" Hikaru shoots back and gets to his feet, resolute. Suyeong turns his back and Hikaru leans back against him, reaching up to touch their heads and see how they measure up.

Ko says something short and playful, batting his hand away and setting his own flat upon Hikaru's head, a smile curving his fox's face even as Hikaru glares. "Ah, Suyeong," he begins, following it up with a long stream of incomprehensible Korean in a tone of droll amusement.

"What did he say?" Hikaru demands, turning to ask Suyeong but Ko uses his free hand to grab him by the chin and hold him in place.

“Don’t you even--” Hikaru starts but then Ko tilts his face up to catch his eye and then he’s caught, transfixed; for the space of what must be a dozen stammering heartbeats Hikaru is frozen, breath caught in his throat as Ko's eyes are on his, narrow and an impossibly bright shade of brilliant golden amber.

Then Ko is leaning in, his voice a silky murmur, and in that lyrical mess of nonsensical syllables Hikaru hears his own name, his given name, and then Ko is pulling back and laughing, brushing back the strands of his hair as they slide out of place.

Hikaru’s hands are balled into fists and he’s trembling, shaking with the effort of not lashing out and punching Ko in his stupid face but it’s fine, he’s fine, he’s not going to break, he’s not going to give that asshole the satisfaction of being owed a single goddamn thing.

“Tell me what he said,” Hikaru says, his voice flat and hard. “Someone tell me what he said.”

Touya’s voice is calm. “He said if Hon had an extra moku for every centimetre he has over you that he would have won today.”

Ko leans in towards Suyeong, though his voice is so low Hikaru can’t hear a thing. Suyeong starts talking, and from the way he’s looking at Touya Hikaru figures maybe Suyeong’s translating for Ko the way Touya’s translating for him.

“That’s not all he said,” Hikaru says, watching the way the smirk on Ko’s face only curves more deeply as Suyeong translates for him. “Tell me what he said.”

Touya hesitates. “He--something about how it suits him to look down on you, and that you have a mouth--”

“It doesn’t matter!” Suyeong yells, leaping forward and grabbing Touya by the arm.

Touya almost lurches off his stool but he manages to brace himself against both Suyeong and the counter.

“What?” Hikaru demands, and if Touya doesn’t tell him right this second then he’s going to be the one dragging him off the stool and shaking him.

Touya looks back up at him. “A mouth made for eating, he said,” he finishes.

Suyeong is eyeing him warily; maybe fat jokes are ruder in Korean, or something. Hikaru rolls his eyes; if that’s the best Ko can do, then he can bring it.

Hikaru runs a hand down his (extremely flat, with no pooch at all, thank you) stomach, angling a narrowed look at Ko. “Someone tell him that he’s welcome to take the express train straight to hell,” Hikaru snaps.

Touya sighs. “Shindou, don’t bother lowering yourself to his level; just ignore him.”

Ko’s eyes curve in obvious amusement; he asks a lilting question at Suyeong, who shakes his head and mutters something back at him.

“Screw that,” Hikaru growls. “I’ll go down as far as that bastard wants to go. How do I tell him his mother’s a whore?”

“Shindou!” Touya hisses. He slides off the stool, reaching into his jacket for his wallet and pulling out a couple of bills to settle their tab. “I think we’re done here; let’s head back,” he says forcefully, shooting Yashiro a significant glance.

“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” Yashiro says, getting to his feet and shooting Hikaru a significant glance.

Hikaru stands his ground. “Seriously, I don’t have to take any of his bullshit. Suyeong, tell him,” he says.

“You’re both idiots,” Suyeong says, and he heaves an aggrieved sigh, but he does dutifully rattle off something in a tone that sounds so put-upon that Hikaru can recognize it even though he doesn’t have a clue what any of the words mean.

Ko only laughs, then sets his hand on his hip and says something in response, his words light and snappy, and he punctuates the whole thing with a dismissive gaze he trails down Hikaru and then back up again.

Suyeong gives Ko an unsubtle jab in the ribs and says something sharply, just a few well-chosen syllables, and the smug curve of Ko’s mouth fades into something a little duller. “And you,” Suyeong says, whirling to point an accusing finger at Hikaru. “You’re almost as bad as he is!” he complains. “I’m not translating for either of you anymore, so if you want to say more stupid things to each other then you’d better buy a dictionary.”

“Hey--” Hikaru starts, but Touya cuts him off.

“Thank you for your advice; I’m sure neither will find it necessary,” Touya says with a sharp nod of his head in acknowledgement. “We were just leaving.”

“You can go,” Hikaru says shortly. “I’m not done.”

Yashiro steps forward. “Hey, Shindou,” he says, setting a hand on Hikaru’s shoulder. “I think we are done, you know?”

“Never mind,” Suyeong says. “We’re not staying,” he says, then switches to Korean and talks at Im and Ko. Im nods, and he himself turns to Ko and says something briefly.

Ko sighs and tilts his head, the strands of his hair gliding against each other and catching the fainter light of the bar. But then he turns to Touya and smiles pleasantly, taking a moment to say something in a casual tone.

Touya’s tone is much drier when he responds with a short, simple phrase, bowing his head only just barely enough for it to be acknowledged as a bow at all, and his expression is decidedly flat after Ko turns and heads out of the bar with his teammates.

“So what was that?” Hikaru asks and too late he realizes what a dumb question it was; Ko was shit-talking Touya’s loss, of course, and if he could take it back he would in an instant.

Touya’s tone is unimpressed but only mildly irritated; after what happened earlier it could be worse, Hikaru realizes. “He asked me to give his regards to my father, and that he hopes my father will come visit him again the next time he’s in Seoul.”

“Huh?” Hikaru asks, surprised. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“He--” Touya takes a breath but stops himself midway. “Nevermind,” he says. “Let’s head back.”

“But they’re already gone,” Hikaru protests.

Touya shrugs. “I was done.”

“I’ll stay if you’re staying, Shindou,” Yashiro offers.

“Yeah, we’re both staying, so you might as well,” Hikaru says, slipping back over to his spot at the bar. “Come on,” he says, patting Touya’s recently-vacated seat. “Besides, you promised Kurata-san you’d watch out for me, right?” he teases.

Touya rolls his eyes.

“C’mon; next round’s on me,” Hikaru says, and turns his attention to the bartender, offering her a smile. She holds up three fingers, raising her eyebrows in inquiry, and when Hikaru nods emphatically she nods back, turning around to fetch them three more bottles.

Hikaru’s not really that surprised when Touya resumes his perch on his stool, but he is more than a little pleased.

“We haven’t gotten a chance to talk about our games yet today,” Yashiro says after a long, companionable silence, and Hikaru wishes he would shut his stupid Kansai face. He was just starting to have a good time. He considers ‘accidentally’ knocking Yashiro’s beer over in retaliation, but thinks better of it when Touya picks up the thread of conversation.

“I should apologize to you,” Touya starts, but Hikaru doesn’t want to hear it. He’s done with it. All his words on the subject have been used up.

"It's fine," he says, waving it off. "That's how it is; it can't be helped."

"Shindou..." Touya begins again. "I just... wanted to say that I know what it meant for you to let me play in your place, and--"

"You were playing in your own place. Last year I had no right to play first board, as was made perfectly obvious to everyone. You don't have to apologize to me; you don't owe me anything. You lost; so what?" Hikaru asks, and when Touya's shoulders stiffen he knows exactly what to say to bring this conversation to a close. "He's just better than you."

And it works, and Touya is silent for long seconds until he breathes once more, blinks to clear his eyes, and his voice is as calm and as smooth as ever it is when he says, "So he is."

Touya holds his gaze for too long, neither moving nor drinking and Hikaru almost wonders if he's gone too far.

Hikaru breaks first, turning to grab his Tsing Tao and polish off the last couple inches in a single gulp. "Yeah, well, he's better 'n me, too, so you're in good company. That makes it Yashiro's turn next year, huh?" Hikaru asks, peeling at the bottle's label with his too-short nails.

"What? Oh, hell no," Yashiro says. "I'll let the two of you fight over that guy, thanks."

"Next year--" Touya starts, but Hikaru's tired of anything Touya could have to say right now.

"Next year, today; stop spinning your wheels. You should be worried about tomorrow," Hikaru says. “Focus on China.”

Finally he’s found an answer acceptable to Touya, who presses his lips flat briefly before drawing himself up straight. “Naturally,” Touya says,

The conversation lapses just long enough for Yashiro’s attention to wander to the other patrons of the bar, and Hikaru is considering stuffing a few of the salty bar snacks into his bottle of beer while he’s not paying attention when he feels an insistent poking at his arm.

“Dude dude dude check her out,” Yashiro says in a low voice, pointing at a woman seated alone at a table near the window. Hikaru snorts in amusement, shaking his head.

“Yeah and?” He asks, wondering if Yashiro remembers he’s sixteen and the woman is gorgeous and not likely to be into underaged kids who play a board game for a living.

“Oh, come on, quick, help me out here,” Yashiro says. “What’s Mandarin for ‘You’re the hottest woman here’?”

Hikaru snorts. “That’s not gonna get you very far,” he warns him.

Yashiro rolls his eyes. “Yeah, pick up tips from the virgin, I’ll totally take those. Ignore Shindou,” he counsels Touya. “So what’s ‘You are so beautiful’?”

Touya shakes his head, but he’s smiling just a little when he leads Yashiro through a very carefully enunciated phrase.

It takes him eight tries, but “Nǐ hěn piào liang,” Yashiro says at last, eyes narrowed in concentration, and Touya finally nods his approval.

“Okay, awesome; you’re the best,” Yashiro says, digging into his pocket and setting a bill on the counter in front of Touya. “Carry on without me. Shindou, don’t wait up,” he says, waggling his eyebrows ridiculously.

Hikaru rolls his eyes at Yashiro, who’s already started to make his way across the bar. “So, what is he really saying?” he asks.

Touya shoots him an arch look. “Why would you need to ask that?”

“Just checking,” he says. “So, what do you think of his chances?”

“Yashiro?” Touya asks. “Probably pretty good, actually. Do you see her phone?”

It’s sticking out of the pocket on the side of her purse, so yeah, he can, though he hopes this isn’t a skill-testing question and Touya’s gonna make him try and guess the brand or whatever to estimate how much money she’s likely to spend on drinks or something like that. “Yeah, kinda. Why?” Hikaru asks.

“There’s a Japanese flag strap attached to it,” Touya says. “She’s probably Japanese. She might even be here for the Cup.”

Hikaru turns to shoot Touya an evaluative look. “Not bad,” he says. “So did you want to get another one, or...?” he trails off, wobbling his almost-empty beer bottle against the counter in illustration.

“I’m done,” Touya says. “Shall we head back? I wouldn’t mind a game of speed-go, if you’re up for it,” he says.

“Sounds like a plan!” Hikaru says.

Touya leaves Yashiro’s bill for the bartender, taking a moment to catch her attention and to give her a quick ‘xièxiè’, which Hikaru echoes in what he hopes is a reasonable facsimile.

The lobby is all but deserted when they head back through it; Hikaru would have thought there would be more people milling about, given the Cup and all. He glances at the clock hanging behind the front desk: it’s barely half past ten, so maybe they’re between the past-dinner and the past-drinking crowds.

Neither of them have said anything since they left the bar, and by the time they get to the elevator bank the silence has stretched out long enough between them that it’s become almost its own entity, monstrous in its size and yet Hikaru knows that all it would take is a single syllable of Korean to shatter it and move them forward again. And yet he can’t; he’s too tired and too empty and just so exhausted all the way down to the marrow of his bones that all he can do is wait as Touya presses the button to call the elevator car, as Touya guides them inside, as Touya selects the floor.

The car hums and vibrates around them as they ascend at a steady clip, but the deceleration he’s expecting doesn’t come. “Hey,” Hikaru says when he notices that their floor isn’t lit up but the roof instead. “I thought we were going to play go.”

Touya stares straight ahead. “I thought it might be easier to talk up there,” he says quietly.

And that’s the last thing they need, is to go up there and talk yet again and remind themselves of last night’s terrible conversation that never should have happened. “We’ve talked a million times today; we don’t have to talk anymore. Let’s just go back; all I want to do is play go,” Hikaru says, catching his foot tapping against the floor and stilling himself.

The elevator reaches the top with a soft ding, but when Hikaru makes no move to leave the car Touya doesn’t either, and the doors close of their own accord after a few seconds.

“What is it about him?” Touya asks suddenly. “What is it about Ko?”

He can’t help but stiffen at the name. “What do you mean? He beat me, I’m gonna get even. That’s all there is to it.”

The button for the lobby lights up of its own accord, and the elevator begins to descend.

“People beat you, Shindou,” Touya points out. “Ogata-sensei, Kurata-san, Morishita-sensei, Ichiyou 7-dan, Shigaki 8-dan--lots of people beat you. Why him? Why does it matter?”

Hikaru bites his lip, wishing Touya would stop starting these stupid, cyclical conversations. “It’s not about him. It’s bigger than that. It’s...” he trails off, not even sure if there’s an answer he can give Touya.

“Why?” Touya repeats. “Why does Shuusaku mean so much to you? Is it because you started by playing his go? Is that what Sai taught you?”

Touya’s eyes are on his, his gaze reflected against the chrome doors of the elevator, and Hikaru can only turn his head. “Stop it. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But it’s about Sai. It is, isn’t it?” Touya asks. “All of this, your obsession with Ko--”

“I’m not obsessed!” Hikaru protests, voice cracking on the word.

Touya’s tone is flat. “Yes you are. You obsess, Shindou; I know what that looks like on you. I thought it was fine, that it’s only natural you’d focus on a player like Ko, but it’s killing you. It’s eating you from the inside.”

“Stop it,” Hikaru says, voice hollow.

“You haven’t played me in months,” Touya accuses. “The only thing you’ve done is play his go. And it’s more than just about his go; all he has to do is look at you to rile you up. You don’t even know what he’s saying and he can still lead you around by the nose.”

“Stop it,” Hikaru repeats, voice stronger this time. “Stop talking about stuff you don’t understand.”

“That’s right,” Touya says quietly. “I don’t understand. Why does he matter so much? How is he connected with Sai?”

And it’s wrong, hearing that name from Touya’s lips, and there’s nothing Hikaru can say to fix it. “That’s none of your business!” he snaps, lashing out and hitting a handful of buttons at once on the elevator panel, something, anything to get him out of here and out of this conversation and as far away from Touya as he can possibly run.

“It is my business!” Touya shouts, his voice echoing in the confines of the elevator car. “I’m your rival; everything about you is my business. And you told me that you’d tell me about this, about Sai; you promised--”

“Neither one of us can keep our promises,” Hikaru says softly.

Then the elevator comes to a stop, its door sliding open. Hikaru doesn’t know what floor they’re on and doesn’t care; he leaves without a single backwards glance but he hears no footsteps behind him in the hallway so he assumes that was it, he’s done it, and that Touya is gone.

He’s able to find the stairwell, but he gets up one floor before he realizes that he’s on the fourth floor and needs to be on the fifteenth and oh hell no, he’s not going to climb a hundred flights of stairs.

Hikaru exits to the fourth floor, heading down the hallway back to the elevator bank. The hotel has six elevators and Touya was going down anyway so Hikaru’s not going to run into him. Probably won’t. Isn’t going to. And if he does, fine, whatever; he’ll ignore Touya. Touya can rant and rail and yell and holler and Hikaru won’t care, he won’t even care at all.

He hammers at the call button, wishing that they’d speed up even a fraction of an inch a second with every push.

Finally the elevator announces its arrival. Hikaru steels himself just in case Touya is there, and when the doors open, he’s prepared for anything.

Except for this.

Im, Suyeong, and Ko stand before him.

Oh God.

Hikaru stands stock-still; he won’t move an inch.

“Shindou,” Suyeong says, and Hikaru raises his gaze and means to make eye contact but it falls on Ko instead: Ko, whose mouth curves into a smile as their eyes meet.

Ko says something, short, his tone light, almost pleasant if Hikaru didn’t know the words were sure to be vile.

“See you around,” Hikaru says shortly for Suyeong’s benefit.

Ko makes an inquiring sound and Suyeong says something quietly to him; Ko smirks, and before Hikaru can react he’s reaching forward and grabbing him, pulling him inside the elevator, talking incomprehensibly all the while.

Hikaru jerks out from his grip but fine, he’s not bothered at all, and when he turns to face the doors he is resolute.

“What floor?” Im asks in careful, polite Japanese.

“Fifteen,” Hikaru says. “Thank you,” he adds.

“Thank you,” Im echoes back, leaning forward to key for Hikaru’s floor. “I hope you are having a good evening.”

“You too,” Hikaru says back to him.

And of course Ko, that irritating ass, has to fill the silence with words, and Hikaru is really freaking tired of hearing his voice and understanding nothing.

“He’s asking if you’re lost,” Suyeong explains.

“I don’t care what he’s asking,” Hikaru snaps. “Ah! I mean, I’m sorry; he’s not your fault,” Hikaru says, chancing an apologetic glance back at Suyeong.

“Yeah, no, I get you,” Suyeong says with a nod.

Ko laughs, then says something else. Irritated, Hikaru straightens up and resumes facing forward.

Ko, who can’t take a freaking hint, continues to speak, and Hikaru doesn’t care, and when Ko sets a hand on his shoulder and leans in to whisper in his ear Hikaru still doesn’t care, he never will, when Ko murmurs Hikaru’s given name Hikaru balls his hands into fists so tightly clenched that he can feel himself shaking.

Not a moment too soon the elevator dings and Hikaru escapes without even saying goodnight to Suyeong or Im. He strides back to his room, his rapid pace doing nothing to slow his breathing, but he comes to a complete stop when he sees who’s outside his room, palm placed tentatively against the door.

Touya. Of course.

Go away, he wishes he could say. Just leave me alone.

Touya looks up when he hears Hikaru approaching. “Shindou,” he says.

This is where Hikaru says Touya, and then Touya will speak to him very sincerely about his feelings and about their games and maybe he won’t even mention Sai and maybe they’ll go a whole ‘nother year until Touya asks him again.

“No,” Hikaru says instead.

Touya straightens. “Excuse me?”

“No,” he repeats himself, fishing out his keycard from his seat pocket. “Just go to bed.”

“Shindou!” Touya protests.

“Touya,” he says at last, his voice quiet, and that is all it takes for his rival to fall silent. “Please.”

Touya says nothing, though he does take a step back and allow Hikaru open the door and step inside.

“Goodnight,” Hikaru says.

“Goodnight,” Touya echoes him softly, and when Hikaru closes the door Touya doesn’t reach forward to stop him, doesn’t try to force himself inside, doesn’t pound and pound until Hikaru has to give in.

Hikaru’s hands are shaking as he fumbles with the door latch, and once it clicks into place and he’s safe he stumbles into the room without bothering to flick on the light, kicking off his loafers as he goes, and lets himself collapse on the bed.

Touya, Hikaru thinks, shutting his eyes tightly against the dark. Stupid Touya. Touya, standing there for God knows how long, talking to a door behind which no one is there, demanding secrets of Hikaru that he hasn’t any right to after breaking promises he hadn’t any right to make.

That match. Hikaru needs to know about the match, every detail, every hand; it’s too complex for him to guess the progression from just the shot of the board and yet he can’t help himself from wondering, from trying to worry out the meaning of every single stone.

Hikaru’s blood thunders in his ears; his pulse pounding a hundred times a second, and under the shortness of his breath and the tightness in his chest and the all-but-uncomfortable twist in his belly he feels it, that dark spark of need inside of him that he’s so grateful Sai never had a chance to see.

Maybe it’s kind of sick. Maybe there’s something wrong with him. But he doesn’t care; his fingers tremble as he unbuckles his belt, as he unbuttons his fly, as he lifts his hips up off the bed and shoves his slacks down along with his underwear. The air of the room is cool against his skin, and his dick is achingly hard as he takes himself in hand and begins to stroke.

It’s been awhile since he’s had a game that’s made him feel this way, all of his muscles tensed and coiled and just waiting, waiting for a resolution that will never come; this is the first time he’s ever felt this way for a game that wasn’t his.

But it was his, whispers a voice in the back of his head. Or it was supposed to be. And when he turned it down Touya promised it to him anyway, had let Hikaru try to mould him into the player Hikaru wanted him to be, and had faced Ko with all of the knowledge Hikaru could pour into his head and in his hands.

“Touya,” he breathes, biting back on a gasp. Always his games with Touya: Hikaru remembers the last time they met like this, bare weeks ago in the Meijinsen. With losses already under his belt this was it; if Hikaru won that game then he’d knock Touya out for another year, and the knowledge had hummed inside his brain and led his hands with bright, passionate focus.

Hikaru remembers the shapes of their stones, the rhythm of their hands, the call-and-response that Touya had baited and that Hikaru had wrenched out of his control. He had found that one tiny crack in Touya’s armour, had burst it open, and they’d both been playing so furiously and with such speed that they’d been drenched in sweat, finishing a four hour game in just over two hours.

Hikaru’d been hard all through yose, as hard then as he was now, and he’d kicked over his teacup in his haste to flee from the game room to the relative privacy of the basement bathroom where after less than two minutes of stroking he’d come all over his hand, Touya’s beautiful shapes the only things his eyes could see.

This game, he thinks, is different. Instead of Touya showing weakness he’d ignored one, had sheathed his claws instead of recognizing an opportunity to strike.

Touya didn’t see it, but Hikaru would have. Ko’s far too fond of this little trick, and Hikaru’s seen it too many times in his games against practically everyone Ko’s played for the past three years not to recognize this insouciant little trap.

He should have seen it, is the thought that thunders through his brain. Touya should have seen it. Hikaru’s drilled him on it, has played it in a dozen games, and for all of Touya’s focus and insight and guile he’d missed it.

And that’s it, he realizes, heart hammering in his chest, that’s it. It wasn’t Touya’s misstep in yose, it was here. He missed this, the play right here; this shape that could have only been the result of the uttegaeshi of which Ko is so fond.

And Touya knew, Hikaru realizes, biting down hard on his lip as he remembers how Touya had looked after the game: perspiration beading at his temples, his hair sticking to the sweat on his neck, his tie pulled out of symmetry, his lips chapped from hours of licking and biting. Touya fucked up and he knew it, and that’s what he’s been trying to tell Hikaru all night, and it was never about the hand in yose at all, it was about this.

It should have been him playing Ko. It should have been Hikaru there in his place, sitting across from Ko, playing those hands. Underneath, he thinks, pausing to spit in his hand for lubrication before quickening the pace of his hand on his dick. Hikaru would have played underneath. And Hikaru’s read too many of Ko’s kifu not to know what comes next: Ko would tack off the bottom with the threat of hasamitsuke, would push to resume the battle for the left. Which would be fine with Hikaru; he knows he’s not going to be able to make more than seven points there so he won’t overextend, will let Ko draw him forward. Ko will think he’s setting the pace, will get cocky and overconfident, but Hikaru knows that playing lightly will draw them inevitably back up to the top, which with Hikaru’s shape instead of Touya’s, Hikaru will be able to shatter with a single stone.

It should have been me, echoes inside of him over and over and over again. It should have been me.

And it’s all he can think about, all he can see: Ko seated across from him last year, his sharp features narrowed with focus; Ko’s face in his picture on his official profile on the Hanguk Kiwon homepage wearing an uncharacteristically solemn expression; Ko on the television with his mouth curved into a low, satisfied smirk after winning the LG Cup; Ko leaning in close yesterday with his sharp, spicy scent filling Hikaru’s senses; Ko leaning in even closer today, and when Hikaru comes it’s with the memory of Ko’s silky voice purring ‘Hikaru’ into his ear that Hikaru comes, choking down a sob as his cock throbs and pulses and he convulses with the force of it, arching himself up off the bed as he spurts into his hand over and over and over again.

----
2003
----

Hikaru has been clawing his way through the Meijinsen for the last four years, and yet he’s twenty minutes into the first game of the Meijin title challenge when it hits him: Holy shit, I’m challenging for Meijin.

His hand tightens briefly around his fan, and then with a practised flick of his wrist he snaps it open, drawing forth an amused chuckle from Ogata-san.

Hikaru raises his gaze from the board to meet Ogata-san’s gaze. Ogata-san reaches into his goke with deliberate slowness, then places his nobi down with exquisite care.

Hikaru loses the first game, which, yeah, okay, it’s not his first time in a major televised challenge with cameras but it is his first time where there are three cameras but they’re all on his board, and every single journalist and timekeeper and proctor and observer was there for his game because he’s playing for a title, oh my God.

Hikaru wins the second. And then the third, and that’s when it actually hits him, really hits him for real this time, that he’s seventeen years old and four months and if he does this, if he beats Ogata-san, he will be the youngest Meijin ever, and Touya’s not even in the league anymore.

He chokes in the fourth game. The fifth game is close, so close, but it’s Ogata-san’s by a mere moku and a half.

Game six is a roaring triumph; when Ogata-san resigns by tipping his lid to pour his prisoners across the board before lighting up a cigarette Hikaru almost gives in to the urge to whoop and pump his fist.

Game seven is an absolute nightmare. The bed in the suite the Asahi Shinbun is paying for is huge and incredibly soft and decadent but Hikaru can’t sleep a wink. He ends up huddled on the floor wrapped in the comforter, and he calls Touya three times in the middle of the night to panic.

Finally Touya cuts him off. “Shindou,” he says, his tone crisp despite his lack of sleep. “You have one more day of one more game. You’ve made it this far; you can endure just a little longer.”

Which isn’t really the reassurance Hikaru was looking for. “What am I doing? I’m insane, right? I’m insane,” he babbles.

“Yes, you are. I’m going to turn off my phone, and you’re going to go to bed, and tomorrow you’re going to finish that game, and when you get back into Tokyo on Monday you’re going to come straight to the salon and we are going to discuss it in great detail,” Touya instructs.

“But we have Serizawa-sensei’s group on Mondays--” Hikaru starts, but Touya doesn’t let him finish.

“We’re skipping it. Come to the salon. Now go to bed,” Touya says, and Hikaru’s phone beeps to tell him that Touya’s disconnected, so he tosses it in the corner of his hotel room and somehow sleep comes to claim him after all.

Just over an hour into the final day of the final game of the 28th Meijinsen, Hikaru’s had enough. He’s already loosened his tie, already unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, so who cares, what the hell, and he unbuttons the rest and chucks his overshirt vaguely in the direction of the wall by his shoes.

Sitting in just his undershirt and slacks he actually does feel better, come to think of it, and when he plays his next hand he gets a very good feeling about the chances of his group on the bottom left after all.

Ogata-san draws it out, dragging himself into byouyomi, but his moves when he makes them are sharp-edged and incisive, and Hikaru can’t bring himself to be too despondent when they work their way carefully through yose and it becomes clear that he won’t be able to flip those three moku he needs to pull ahead.

Instead, all he wants is to nap for about a hundred years.

He doesn’t get to nap. When he gets back Touya is raging at him for something he did way back in game five, which happened like a million years ago and about which they’ve already hashed out a million times, and his mom is asking him why all these foreign reporters keep calling, and the Ki’in keeps asking if he wants to take on any more shidougo students, and it turns out that even losing Meijin is a pretty big deal.

Hikaru arrives home late one evening. “Hikaru,” his mom calls. “There’s a letter for you on the table by the phone.”

He shouts a thank-you and heads upstairs before she can bug him about what it’s for, working his finger under the teensy gap between the seal and ripping it open.

It’s a letter from Hokuto Communications, he sees, and wow, it totally is that time of year again, isn’t it? They don’t usually send him anything except for a little perfunctory notecard after each cup, though he’s not too offended because to be fair Japan does lose every single year so he wouldn’t be too jazzed with their team too, to be honest.

Hikaru reads the letter. Then he reads it again. Then he flips open his phone, thumb hovering over the number 3 for his quickdial, but then he decides against calling Touya just in case he’s an idiot who can’t read and puts his phone away and then puts the letter away to look at tomorrow when he’s not tired and when the light’s better and when it doesn’t look like they’ve just automatically invited him.

So it turns out that they did automatically invite him, which he finds out when he asks Touya over lunch about them sending letters.

“Yes,” Touya says. “They send out one letter a year, and run the preliminaries for the other two spots.”

“Okay, gotcha,” Hikaru says. “Wait, one?” And it’s a stupid thing to say but he can’t take it back once it’s out of his mouth.

Touya arches an eyebrow. “Yes, one. Congratulations, first board,” he says, and his voice is so light and mild-mannered that Hikaru’s all but pretty sure he means it.

First board, he thinks, the words rattling around in his brain. First board.

Ko, he thinks. Ko Yeongha turned eighteen years old this year, and his final year of eligibility in the Hokutohai is going to be in his hometown of Seoul, and Hikaru is going to face him and he is going to grind his stones into dust.

Hikaru only realizes he’s dropped his soda when he feels the liquid soaking through the fabric of his shoe.

It’s kind of neat getting to watch the excitement building up towards the preliminaries to determine Team Japan now he no longer has to worry about participating in them. He studies with Touya just as much as ever, and even Yashiro’s started playing NetGo with him on weekends. He sort of expects to see more of Waya this year but Waya’s all but disappeared, cancelling his study group, turning down Hikaru’s invitations for salon cruising, and making himself totally unavailable for lunch.

Hikaru had wondered about Kurata-sensei, since him taking the time to supervise them as a 7- and 8-dan is one thing but as a titleholder it's entirely another, but Kurata-sensei lays his fears to rest by inviting him out to lunch personally the day before he made the announcement about the preliminary knock-out tournament. They don’t talk about the Hokutohai, not really; instead, Kurata-sensei is more interested in needling him about losing the Meijin games.

“Oh man,” Kurata-sensei despairs. “What a wasted opportunity going for that seki on the right in game four! If only it had been me--”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t, so there. How many of Ogata-san’s titles do you need, anyway? You can keep Juudan, I’ll grab Meijin next year, and we’ll let him keep Gosei, how about it?” he offers.

Kurata-sensei laughs.

Hikaru spends the preliminaries all but glued to Touya’s board. He knows he should wander around and at least pretend he’s interested in the other games--and besides, it’s not like he has anything to worry about because it’s Touya, right? And Touya’s fine; he carves out his position with an almost bloodless precision, forcing both of his opponents (Ochi in the first round, Takabayashi 2-dan from Nagoya in the second) to resign well within chuuban. Yashiro's position is equally assured; though his game with Waya in the second round has to be counted out, he wins by five and a half moku.

“So hey,” Hikaru says after bows have been made and papers have been signed. “Wanna go hit up Suyeong’s uncle’s salon?”

The final weeks before the Hokutohai pass in a daze. The Up and Down arrow keys wear off Hikaru’s laptop, and when his attempt to repair them with superglue ends in disaster, Hikaru ends up buying a cheap number-pad to plug in separately and use to navigate through his endless files of downloaded kifu.

The night before the 2003 Seoul Hokutohai, Team Japan and its leader pull into the Lotte Hotel Seoul at quarter to six in the evening.

“Dinner?” Kurata-sensei asks brightly.

“We don’t have time for dinner!” Hikaru says, exasperated. “We’ll do room service or something; we’ve got both games tomorrow so we’ve got to last-minute cram for both Korea and China.”

“Dude,” Yashiro says. “What do you think we’ve been doing for the last, oh, forever?”

“This is our last chance,” Hikaru insists. “Fine; you guys do what you want, and I’m gonna study and focus and you guys are going to be so jealous when I win everything ever and you guys lose.”

“Shindou, it’s going to be fine. We’re all going to be fine. We’ll have room service, and we will play speed-go,” Touya says calmly. “No more kifu.”

Hikaru hefts his backpack a little closer to his body, feeling the reassuring weight of his laptop. “But we’ve only been through Suyeong’s game last week against China’s Hsiao that one time,” he says.

“One afternoon for four and a half hours,” Touya says with a sigh. “We’re prepared. We just need to relax. Our game against China starts at nine.”

And the game against Korea starts at three.

When they enter the ballroom it’s only a little crowded; people haven’t yet started arriving in earnest. They’re getting their participant ribbons pinned on at the entry table when Team China enters. They exchange awkward greetings--well, Touya says something, and Hikaru and Yashiro parrot him as best as they can.

Then Team Korea arrives.

“Hey, Japan!” calls Suyeong, Ko and Sobong alongside.

Hikaru bites his lip, torn between wanting to not be a dick and wanting not to be anywhere near Ko. He settles on a wave.

“Okay, come on, we’re going now, right now,” he hisses sotto voce at Touya and Yashiro.

“Yeah, no, good call, let’s skedaddle,” Yashiro agrees.

Spinning on his heel, Hikaru turns and heads towards the green room, team in tow, and for the first time in two years he escapes Ko’s lilting, incomprehensible taunts.

Hikaru had kind of forgotten about the part of the opening ceremonies where he had to make a speech, so when he sees Ko step forward after introductions to accept the mic, a bright burst of panic goes through him.

Touya leans in and murmurs an ongoing translation into Hikaru’s ear: thank you, we are pleased to accept this opportunity to represent our country and to facilitate international cooperation and to popularize the spread of baduk, et cetera, et cetera.

Touya doesn’t say there’s any shit-talking, but he kind of gets the feeling that Touya wouldn’t mention it even if he did. But the crowd is quiet, clapping politely; there are no gasps of horror--or, given that he’s speaking to a chiefly Korean audience, no enthusiastic hoots of agreement--so Hikaru figures he can probably trust it.

Wàng is next, and according to Touya he’s saying pretty much the same thing.

Well, Hikaru figures when they indicate to him to step forward, no sense rocking the boat.

However, once he has the microphone in his hand and staring out at an expectant sea of total strangers in a hall lined with bright lights and cameras, it’s a whole different story.

“Um,” he says, pausing to clear his throat. “Thank you very much, from Team Japan. Thank you for hosting us, and for giving us to opportunity to play. Um, thank you,” he adds for good measure, bowing in punctuation.

When it’s time to leave the stage Hikaru keeps his eyes fixed firmly in front of him, and if some tall Korean jackass with ridiculous flippy hair is staring at him, well, he’s not going to stare back.

There’s no time for outside worries; their games against China will begin in less than fifteen minutes, just long enough for them to re-set the stage for play.

China is back in full-force this year, it seems; Wàng’s play is solid, surprisingly well-rounded despite the laconic, almost bored way he prowls about the board. It’s more than a little gratifying to see his casual mask slip almost a third into the game, and Hikaru takes great satisfaction in claiming his resignation before they need to bother with stitching the game closed in yose.

When Hikaru gets to his feet he sees Touya standing back against the side wall near the door, which seems a little ominous, but he seems absorbed in the bank of monitors just ten feet away, so that’s probably a good sign. Yashiro is still bent over his board, but Chéng is wringing his hands--oh, he’s actually just wiping the sweat off with a towel, but that’s still probably a good sign, so good signs all around.

Touya’s head turns to follow Hikaru as he approaches.

“How’d it go?” Hikaru asks.

“Six and a half points,” Touya says, nodding over at the monitor showing his completed game.

Hikaru takes a brief moment to cast his eye appreciatively over the shapes, but then he focuses his attentions on the game in progress. “Hey,” he says. “They’re still playing?” he asks.

Touya crosses his arms and hums affirmatively. “I don’t know what Chéng thinks he’s going to do; Yashiro’s got the game by at least fifteen and a half moku. He should have resigned thirty hands ago,” he says disapprovingly.

Hikaru flicks his gaze from the monitor to the stage. Chéng looks like he’s in absolute misery, the bright stage lighting making his sweat glitter in the strands of his short military-style buzzcut. “He’s what, fourteen?” he asks.

“Thirteen,” Touya corrects. “Shodan, just made pro in February. This is a lot of pressure for a new player.”

Understatement of the year. “No kidding,” Hikaru says, and ten hands later when Chéng finally resigns with a sob, he joins what is probably the entire auditorium in a sigh of relief.

Hikaru can’t eat. Kurata-sensei, Touya, and even Yashiro try and mother-hen him but he just waves them off, sitting with his hands knit in his lap and his leg jiggling with excess undirected energy.

“I can’t eat. Are you insane? How can you eat? It’s going to redirect your bloodflow from your brain to your stomach and your stomach is not gonna let you win this one, okay,” Hikaru argues.

“Don’t be ridiculous. We have two hours. If you don’t eat lunch you’ll starve yourself of nutrition and pass out midmatch and lose by default,” Touya says, shoving Hikaru’s untouched bento closer to him. “Take one bite of everything.”

He does, just to make Touya shut up, and then somehow half an hour later his bento is empty and his leg isn’t jiggling anymore and he’s feeling pretty good, actually.

When they return to the auditorium, Team Korea is already on the stage. Suyeong offers him a greeting, which Hikaru returns, and Ko stays blessedly silent for once.

One of the organizers gestures towards the tables. “Please,” she says. “We’ll begin in five minutes.”

Hikaru watches Ko, waits for him to seat himself, and when Hikaru joins him on the other side of the goban it’s with a feeling of quiet inevitability, as if Hikaru is opening a move he had sealed long ago to now finally after all this time play out.

As the team leaders, it’s their responsibility to nigiri. Hikaru squeezes a handful of stones and opens it upon the board as Ko sets down a single black stone, and Hikaru counts out his stones with a trembling hand.

Nine. He is white.

When the proctor gives the direction to begin, Hikaru doesn’t break eye contact with Ko as he inclines his head and murmurs “Please.”

Ko’s lips curve into a smile.

Hikaru has spent far too long poring over hundreds of Ko’s kifu for Ko to surprise him now, and yet in the space of fewer than a dozen stone, Ko does just that.

Wearing a gentle smile that tells Hikaru that Ko knows exactly what he’s doing, Ko plays the Shuusaku opening.

And if Ko wants Hikaru to play not Ko but Shuusaku, that is absolutely fine with him. Hikaru has played against Shuusaku’s go, has played it himself, has unspun a hundred variations if he’s played one, and Hikaru responds with the same sort of unassuming light touch that Sai had so favoured to entice his opponents into making careless mistakes with their fuseki to be prised open in yose.

They lay out their claims, territories winding across the board. Their first major clash is in the bottom left where Hikaru pushes against a questionable stone of Ko’s, and nearly forty minutes they end up inevitably wrapped up in seki, almost thirty points on the board blown into dust merely so that neither of them may possess it and it’s fine, everything’s fine, it’s great, and when Hikaru plays nozoki against Ko’s upper right Ko answers him with an insouciant tenuki.

If Ko had placed it only one space to the left, Hikaru would have been in trouble, but placed where it is Hikaru is able to twist it against him forty hands later, using it to force him to throw in to defend a group that Hikaru has absolutely zero designs upon, but it serves to draw Ko back and Hikaru throws himself forward into the void, carving himself another six points.

They are on the brink of yose when Ko bows his head over the board, and in crisp, nearly unaccented Japanese, he says, “I resign.”

Hikaru stares dumbfounded at him as Ko gets to his feet and walks off stage, and it’s not until he hears the bamboo snap in his hand that he realizes he’s crushing his fan, and he shoves it in his inside jacket pocket. Hikaru pushes his chair back, leaping to his feet, knocking the goban with his elbow, and it slides off the table and hits the stage floor with a crack, its stones cascading along with it.

Hikaru starts after him, skidding momentarily on the stones beneath his feet before staggering back upright, and jumps down off the stage to back door of the auditorium that leads to the hallway to the green room.

“Wait!” he shouts, throwing the door open and running down the hallway past the room where Team Japan had spent the break, past a second door, past a third, and just as Ko stops to open the door to the fourth Hikaru catches up with him, colliding into him with full force.

Ko’s hands are on his shoulders, holding him up, and Hikaru’s free to pound his fist against Ko’s chest. “What the hell were you doing? We were still playing! What if you had played in the corner? What if you had played 17-17; I would have responded at 17-16 but then you have that hane you could leverage, and--” he breaks off only when Ko shoves him in the room, sending Hikaru staggering.

It’s their team room, Hikaru realizes, Korea’s; it’s about three times the size of theirs and filled with flowers and bouquets from well-wishers.

“Ko!” he shouts again. “How dare you resign? We weren’t done; what if you--” and Ko steps forward, placing his hand over Hikaru’s mouth.

Ko’s eyes are bright, glassy; he says a long string of very clear, plainly enunciated Korean in a hoarse voice. “You understand?” he asks in Japanese at the end, taking his hand off Hikaru’s mouth at last.

“No!” Hikaru explodes. “How am I supposed to understand? Do you have any idea what this is? Of course I don’t freaking understand, how could anyone understand you?”

Ko’s mouth is flat and his eyes are hard; he says something quickly, two syllables.

“You,” Hikaru says, balling his hands at his sides, trembling, shaking. The words are in his mouth and he might as well say them; it’s not like Ko is going to know the difference. “Fuck you,” Hikaru says, and after two years of swallowing them down the obscenity tastes so, so good in his mouth. “Fuck you,” he repeats more clearly, his voice gaining strength. “You, who insults Shuusaku.”

Ko says something quickly, incomprehensible except for the word ‘Shuusaku’.

“You, who insults Sai,” Hikaru says to the only person in his world who wouldn’t recognize the name.

Again Ko says something, but it doesn’t matter because Hikaru has no clue what he’s said.

“You, who insults me,” Hikaru finishes.

Ko says nothing to that.

“This is all your fault. Everything. Everything is your fault,” he says, and his brittle voice cracks on the final syllable and the tears he didn’t even feel in his eyes are spilling out and down his cheeks.

Ko steps forward and Hikaru holds himself still, holds himself perfectly still, and when Ko reaches up to brush his fingers across Hikaru’s cheekbone Hikaru doesn’t move at all.

Ko’s not wiping his tears. No, he’s just touching them; he rubs his wet thumb and fingertips together slowly, contemplatively, and the single word he asks is enough to break Hikaru entirely.

Hikaru throws the first punch, aiming wildly at his face, and when his knuckles hit bone the pain sends Hikaru reeling long enough for Ko to grab Hikaru by the shirt and shove him back against the door, the doorknob digging into the small of his back, and when he pins Hikaru there with his body Hikaru can feel Ko’s erection through his trousers just as hard and as aching as his own is right now.

Ko freezes for a moment, and then the corners of his eyes curve up in a smile as he rocks his hips experimentally against Hikaru’s. “Ah,” he murmurs, leaning in so close that his lips brush Hikaru’s ear, and Hikaru can scent it again, that sharp cinnamon tang that is Ko alone.

Ko, he realizes. Ko, who he hates. Ko, who is like him, who feels like he does, who knows what it means to play, and then how? How can he not understand? How can he know of Shuusaku, know enough of his play to make a mockery of his famous opening, and yet dismiss him as nothing?

Ko, who hungers as he does.

“Get off of me,” Hikaru demands hoarsely, shoving at his shoulders--an awkward move with them pressed together so tightly. When Ko not only doesn’t take the hint but has the temerity to say something to him, his syllables clipped and rough, Hikaru reaches up and grabs a handful of Ko’s messy mop of auburn hair, yanking it backward and down.

Ko snarls; he reaches up and grabs Hikaru’s wayward hand by the wrist, slamming it back against the wall even as Ko holds him in place with his body. Ko rocks against him once more, rolls his hips into Hikaru’s, rubs his cock against Hikaru’s thigh, and the sensation sends a bright hot spike of need through his veins and it’s too much, it’s not enough, and when he shifts to adjust his stance, to better balance himself and nothing else, Ko’s free hand slides down between them and cups Hikaru’s erection.

“Fuck,” Hikaru whispers, head slamming back against the wall. “Fuck you. Fuck you,” he repeats as Ko’s thumb slips under the flap of his fly, running once along the zipper before he slides his index finger down to grab the zipper-pull and drag it down.

Hikaru lurches forward to bodycheck him, shoving him out of the way, staggering into the room, but when he turns to find the door he realizes that Ko’s still in his way.

With deliberate slowness, Ko reaches behind him and flips the lock on the door, then draws an index finger up to his lips.

And there it is, Hikaru realizes. He could leave if he wanted to. Hikaru could have been gone. There’s no reason for him to have let Ko touch him.

“I get it,” Hikaru says flatly for Ko’s edification.

“What?” Ko asks in acceptable Japanese.

“I hate you, you know,” Hikaru says, but he holds his ground in the middle of the room when Ko takes an experimental step forward.

“Hikaru frustrating,” Ko says simply, not attempting any sort of grammar.

“Don’t call me that,” Hikaru snaps.

Ko takes another step forward. “Hikaru?” he asks.

“Just shut up,” Hikaru growls, and when Ko takes another step closer he’s finally close enough to touch and Hikaru does, reaches out and grabs him by the wrist, and sets Ko’s hand over his erection.

Ko’s mouth curves into a smile, and when his fingers slide into Hikaru’s open fly he takes advantage of Hikaru’s momentary gasp to press his mouth to Hikaru’s.

It’s wrong, wet and slick and gross and wrong and Hikaru hates it, hates him, hates the hand Ko’s wrapping around his dick. Hikaru scrapes his too-short nails down Ko’s chest, who twitches and makes a yelp of recognizable pain.

His nipples, Hikaru thinks, identifying the opening he’s been given, thought processes slowing as Ko’s hand quickens on his cock, jacking him with short, fast strokes. But it is an opening, and Hikaru focuses on his hands, makes them work, makes them unbutton Ko’s shirt so he can yank it open, yank it apart, and when Ko slides his tongue into Hikaru’s mouth Hikaru reaches up to first rub the pad of his thumb across one of Ko’s nipples, eliciting a stuttering gasp, and then he switches to pinching it between his fingers as hard as he can.

Ko bites down on his lower lip hard, so hard Hikaru can feel it split, can feel the blood blossoming across his tongue. Ko breaks their kiss to hiss something in Hikaru’s ear, and then the hand on Hikaru’s dick pauses to scrape its fingernails across his shaft.

“Oh, fuck,” Hikaru breathes, and it’s probably not the reaction Ko was expecting but whatever, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t fucking care at all. “Do that again,” he growls, thrusting his cock against Ko’s hand, and then Ko is laughing against his his neck but he does, he glides his nails along Hikaru’s dick, and then he wraps his fingers around Hikaru’s cock once more and squeezes as hard as he can.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, yes,” Hikaru moans. Ko’s mouth is on his neck but instead of kissing he sucks, tongue pressed flat against the sensitive skin of Hikaru’s neck, sucking so hard that it fucking hurts.

“Ko,” Hikaru pants openmouthedly against Ko’s neck, rocking into Ko’s fist, rolling his hips so that he can rub his thigh against Ko’s obvious hard-on.

Ko brushes a kiss against the suck-mark he’s made before bringing his lips to Hikaru’s ear. “Yeongha,” he says.

“Asshole,” Hikaru growls instead.

“Hikaru--” Ko says sweetly, and uses his free hand to yank a handful of Hikaru’s hair as hard as he can.

Hikaru’s orgasm hits him with all the subtlety of a lightningstrike; he bucks and shudders against Ko, biting down on Ko’s neck, sinking his teeth in, and Hikaru’s rocking and moaning and begging and howling as he comes in Ko’s hand, as he comes all over Ko’s dark grey trousers.

It takes Hikaru long seconds to return to himself, for him to be able to support all of his weight on his own two legs.

Ko’s lips are on his neck. “Hikaru,” he says again, tongue licking the skin he’s made sensitive with the hickey.

And now things are clear.

Hikaru jerks backwards, reaching down and tucking his spent cock back into his pants, zipping himself back up.

Ko straightens up, his eyes narrowing. He asks a question, probably an obvious one, but Hikaru can’t find it in himself to care.

Hikaru rakes his gaze over Ko: his messy hair, his spit-slick lips, his unbuttoned shirt, his come-spattered trousers still tented by his untended erection.

“Fuck you,” Hikaru says, and turns on his heel to leave.

Ko doesn’t follow him.

Hikaru doesn’t return to the green room. He doesn’t return to the auditorium. Instead he makes his way through the back hallways of the hotel up to his room.

Hikaru waves his keycard against the door lock, waiting for the click and little flash of green light so he can open the door and finally have a private place to let his walls come down, to empty himself at last.

He doesn’t expect to see Touya sitting down at the desk in the middle of the room.

Hikaru knows how he looks; he saw his reflection in the doors of the elevator. And now Touya knows, and of course he knows, Touya always knows; Touya always knows more than he should, more than Hikaru has ever wanted him to know. And Touya, who has never in his life shied away from the uncomfortable questions, from speaking the unpleasant truth, will tell him. Touya will call him an idiot. Touya will call him a faggot.

Touya will call him a whore.

Touya’s slow gaze tracks back up past Hikaru’s half-untucked shirt, past the hickies Hikaru knows are visible through his gaping collar, past his still slowly-bleeding lip, and once again he resumes his eye contact.

“Did you finally get what you wanted?” Touya asks.

Hikaru is silent for a long moment as he holds Touya's stare. “No.”

Go to opponent's entry: Round 1 - Kyuba, "The Apple and the Tree", Fic (●)
Go to vote: Ichigaya vs. Fandom Triforce - Second Board Match

Comments

A/N (and apology!)

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry about the loss of special characters! (In particular the Mandarin tone marks.) I was careless when I created the text file to submit and neglected to set it as Unicode before I pasted my text; when this story is archived, the tone marks will be included.

[(Anonymous)]

Very intriguing story, with very nuanced characterization. This ended on such a sad, bitter note, quite appropriate to the theme. I'm not sure what to think; I empathize with Shindou's anger, attraction and confusion, but oh, it's really hard to see him so unhappy and full of self-loathing. I hope there's a sequel!

- kakari

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you so much for your comments! I agree; watching Hikaru slide further and further and make mistake after mistake was absolutely heartbreaking for me; I spent most of my time writing it in a permanent state of OH HIKARU BABY NO WHAT ARE YOU DOING LOOK AT YOUR LIFE LOOK AT YOUR CHOICES :(

[(Anonymous)]

This is amazingly intense, and the humor is just masterful, because without it this fic would make me too tense to read. It's just... perfectly constructed, really.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you so much! I'm really happy to hear that it worked for you; never-ending despair can be a bit much, especially in HikaGo where even the darkest moments were surrounded by life, and I hoped that those other moments would keep the flavour of the characters and world around Hikaru in a wider perspective even as his world narrowed once again.

[(Anonymous)]

Ohhhh, so, SOOO clever! "Uttegaeshi"--snapback! I see... so this whole thing, all that horrifying middle section where Hikaru was so out of his mind obsessed with KYH as to hurt Akira unfairly/undervalue their relationship--it was all for that unspeakably satisfying payback at the end? (or should I say, "snapback?" :D He sure lured the predator in with his "throwaway" and got him GOOD XD) Very well done! I love the way Akira is portrayed in this story--so unpetty when it counted, and so mature/clear-sighted as to weather Hikaru's 2-year absence from his senses as best as he could and keep faith that Hikaru would return to him. So glad it paid off in the end. ^^

Loved this story!

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you so much for your comments! Pretty much everyone ends the fic in a terrible situation but of them I sympathize with Akira the most; it's heartbreaking watching him try to empathize and understand and facilitate and distract and focus and do all of these things trying to help Hikaru, whom he treasures, but who keeps pulling further and further away from him. Akira isn't a saint, and the things Hikaru is doing must hurt him horribly, and it's really for him that a sequel is gnawing at the back of my brain OH GOD MUST WAIT 'TIL AFTER DEATHMATCH IS OVER AHHHH

[issenllo]

This is one of the best Hikago fics I've read this year: it's measured, layered, progressing into a powerful, bitter conclusion. Poor Hikaru - I hate to see him getting this unhealthy obsession with Ko Yeungha - but I can see how that could have happened. Akira is great throughout, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh my goodness, thank you so much! Yeah, it was so hard to see him dealing with things so poorly. I think a large part of it is that I see Yeongha as more of a symbol to him than a person--he started as That Guy Who Dissed Sai Whom I Must Defeat, turned into That Guy To Whom I Lost And Thus Failed To Defend Sai's Honour, and the fact that Hikaru can't communicate with him or even follow him in media reports and interviews and things due to the language barrier builds him up more and more as a caricature rather than a real person in his eyes. The Yeongha we the manga reader knows is a canny, selfish jerk, but he does what he does in the pursuit of go, which we can understand. I think Yeongha and Hikaru would have an interesting relationship (I mean generally, not romantically or sexually, though of course it's always interesting to explore all sorts of things) if they got to actually sit down and talk to each other; Hikaru has a poisoned first impression of Yeongha, but I think Yeongha's sincere passion and pursuit of the kami no itte (to put it in Sai's terms, though I don't know if Yeongha would articulate his desire to play his best game in quite such a way) is something Hikaru would identify with.

Oh lord, poor Akira. I was trying really hard not to make him too saintly; I think he's incredibly hurt by everything that's happening and how he sees Hikaru as wandering down the garden path, but he's doing his best to understand because this is so obviously important to Hikaru. Akira is actually the person I feel the worst for, since he is trying so freaking hard to be there for Hikaru and to support him and his goals, and receives nothing for his efforts except the ability to watch Hikaru slide further and further into this horrible self-destructive morass.

[phamalama.livejournal.com]

OMG This is wonderful! I love how all the frustration built up to the end scene and that Hikaru and Ko managed to have such a relationship with the language boundaries. I especially love reading post-canon fics, which must be hard to write since there's not a ton to base it off and the variables of how ignorant is Hikaru to all this (sexual) tension that we feel in the manga! I hope to read more of your Hikago fics once you've been revealed! :D

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you so much! Oh man, I am never ever ever going to write anything again with a language barrier, hahaha. I tried really hard to resist the temptation to have the translators translating story-conveniently but unrealistically (would you perfectly translate nuance-intact the petty insults or sly underminings aimed at your friend, or would you just give him a watered-down gist?) and tried to be reasonable in terms of what Suyeong would translate or refuse to translate. Akira is a bit more fun, because while he too would avoid unnecessarily stirring the pot, he's not fluent enough in Korean to understand all of the slang (and thus what he shouldn't be translating!).

Not that I think Yeongha was really as rude as Hikaru thinks he was; I had Yeongha's dialogue in mind as I was writing this and it really wasn't that bad. I think he'd be quite genuinely interested in Hikaru and Hikaru's go, finding Hikaru's prickliness amusing, and it's a little sad that two people who actually have a lot in common and have a lot to offer each other in terms of viewpoints and ideas and whatnot aren't able to connect in any meaningful way.

[(Anonymous)]

This was mind-blowingly amazing. I am terrified of you (and your opponent), and have a new found appreciation for Waya in the Hokuto Cup arc. (*cue hand trembling as we look to weeks ahead*)

-Thunder

[(Anonymous)]

Oh god, don't worry, this isn't going to happen again. I got a late start on this (I attempted two other ideas before this one finally stuck) and it just spiraled out of control XD

Oh man, poor Waya. I wish I could have spent more time with him here (though it's for the best since he really deserves his own fic) because when I was rereading the Hokutohai prelims in the manga for this fic it struck me how hard it must be to be Shindou's friend. With very few exceptions (and this is one of the reasons why Suyeong is so interesting), people defeat Shindou when they first meet, usually pretty considerably. Shindou is likeable and earnest, and it would be easy to become his friend. But Shindou improves at lightning speed, and I think it would be really difficult to watch your cute little mascot friend suddenly turn around and beat the metaphorical shit out of you. When Waya admits to himself that he's thankful he doesn't have to go up against Shindou I think it's a major moment for him, and I would love a fic that gets to really explore these feelings.

[(Anonymous)]

Do it! You know you want to!! ^-^ (And I volunteer to read it cheerfully, because it sounds awesome.)

mamita

[(Anonymous)]

Hello, I loved your fic, especially because I love the couple YeonghaxHikaru, it's a shame that there has been more action between them, as they are, I'm sick of that goal amid Touya, either way, he does not is the only one, I hope they do more fics, keep it up, thank you and kisses.

Re: mamita

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you so much for your kind words! Yeongha and Hikaru are really fascinating because under better circumstances they'd be able to see what kindred spirits they really are. I quite enjoy fic that takes a look at them once they've gotten past their initial boyish squabbles and have had a chance to connect on a deeper level; they would find they have quite a lot in common, I think.