It actually takes Shindou a long time to realize that he has Issues. He's got Go and manga and the occasional pick-up basketball game and he jerks off in a sort of desultory way, and it takes Akari yelling at him to get him to realize that when you're eighteen years old, have a successful career, and live on your own, you're really a long way past the point in your life where you should be convinced that girls have cooties.
So he looks around, and sure enough, all of a sudden there is SEX all around him, practically going on in front of his face. Waya has heretofore been Shindou's staunch ally in the matter of the vague ickiness of girls, and he still is; but suddenly Shindou notices that Waya's face gets tight and unhappy when Isumi starts going on about some Chinese guy who apparently speaks every language there ever was and can build an intelligent orbiting space station out of duct tape and leftover french fries with one hand while wiping the goban with three Japanese title-holders simultaneously with the other. Ogata eyes Touya in ways that Shindou is convinced are entirely inappropriate, which is nothing new; what's new, and Shindou likes this about as well as Waya likes Chinese guys on the fast track to the Nobel Prize for Everything Ever, is the way Touya has begun surreptitiously eyeing Ogata back. Nase has a crush on Isumi. Honda has a crush on Nase. Fuku has a girlfriend, a plump, giggling, sweet girl who feeds him chicken nuggets and chatters happily with him at about ninety words a second. Akari has, improbably enough, been dating Mitani for two years. Ochi… well, Shindou isn't too sure about Ochi and frankly he'd rather not be, but given that all of a sudden he can't take two steps without tripping over SEX, Shindou's even less enthusiastic about the single-minded determination with which Ochi tries to oust Shindou and take his place as Touya's rival.
In the meantime, there's Shindou Hikaru, age 18, professional Go player. With… basketball. And manga. And lazily jerking off in the shower thinking about nothing in particular unless he gets distracted thinking about his and Touya's latest game, which he has until recently thought of as an impressive demonstration of his ability to multitask. Suddenly Shindou is kind of worried about himself.
Akari sits him down, asks him pointed questions about Go, and explains the concept of sublimation to him, and then Shindou's really worried about himself.
2. Serious Issues.
Shindou finds himself fidgeting in the chair and swirling his fingers absently in the goke and tries to stop. It's difficult, though, because he feels – strangely enough – that this is an issue he should be discussing with Touya, except that they're eighteen years old and he can't figure out how to say Hey, Touya, did you ever notice the whole thing where people we personally know are actually having sex with other people and not just sort of aware that sex exists as an abstract concept? without having Touya give him the very special Look that he usually reserves for when Shindou has missed a spectacularly obvious atari. Especially since, given the sideways look Touya just gave Ogata's ass, it's plain that Touya is much more comfortable with the idea than Shindou is.
"Hey!" Shindou says crankily, folding his arms. "Pay attention to the game."
Pay attention to me, is what he really wants to say, but even in his current state of discombobulation Shindou recognizes that that might not get him the results he wants.
Touya blinks at him in surprise. "I am paying attention," he says a little waspishly. "You're the one who can't sit still."
"Am not," Shindou argues automatically.
Touya sniffs and slaps down a stone in atekomi. Shindou tries not to dwell on how unnervingly graceful his hands are. Or what the exact color of his eyes is. Or, really, anything else about Touya that might possibly make Shindou's morning showers considerably more interesting. "Are so. You've been fidgety all evening."
"Sorry," Shindou mutters, becoming very involved with reconsidering his strategy for the next few moves.
He's played about fifteen moves ahead mentally when Ogata comes up to lounge against the side of Touya's chair, one hand resting casually on the back of it, and suddenly Shindou can't even remember where he was going to move next, or indeed where he moved last. "Your playing's a little scattered tonight, Shindou," Ogata observes, wafting smoke over the goban.
Shindou glares fiercely at Touya, trying to convey through sheer eternal rival telepathy that if Touya kisses Ogata he's going to have to brush his teeth for a week to get the cigarette taste out of his mouth. "It is not," he mutters.
Touya somehow manages to look as if he would be surprised at being glared at, but it's Shindou, and nothing Shindou does surprises him very much anymore. "What Ogata-san is tactfully pointing out, Shindou –"
"Tactfully?" Shindou objects.
" – is that you've just missed the most obvious atari in the history of Go." Touya makes his move with an efficient pa-chi, and Shindou watches in dismay as he calmly collects at least twenty of Shindou's stones, leaving a gaping pool of ignominy in the upper left.
"I didn't miss it," he protests automatically. "I'm… trying out a new strategy."
"And what strategy might that be?" Touya asks in a steady voice that really means that impressive strategy had better be forthcoming or he won't be answerable for the consequences.
"I'll certainly be interested to see it, whatever it is," Ogata tells him unhelpfully.
"Oh, get a room," Shindou snaps resentfully.
Something probably happens between that and finding himself out on the sidewalk in front of the salon with his ears ringing and a Go stone down the front of his shirt, but he prefers to pretend that he doesn't remember what it was.
Intellectually, Shindou realizes that showing up on Waya's doorstep at well after eleven o'clock at night, in the rain, is straining the best-friends thing a bit. That doesn't stop him from doing it anyway, because Ogata was lurking around the Go salon all goddamned night again and Touya kept cutting speculative looks at him out of the corner of his eye and Shindou really thinks he's going to have some sort of breakdown. He tells himself that this is because it would be way beyond mortifying for Mr. Argyle to get laid before Shindou does, but this leads to thinking things like And anyway, OGATA, which leads to pissy ruminations about the number of ways in which Ogata has no right to touch any part of Touya's body, and Shindou's sort of afraid that he's not even fooling himself at this point.
"Hey, you know that thing with Isumi's boyfriend?" he blurts as soon as he's inside Waya's apartment.
"Isumi doesn't have a boyfriend!" Waya screeches so loudly that his upstairs neighbors bang irately on their floor.
Shindou scowls and tries again. "I think I might be gay."
Waya's face goes blank. "You… think," he says slowly. "You might be gay."
"Well, yeah," Shindou says uncomfortably.
"What exactly was your first clue?"
"Shut up, Waya! I'm having a crisis!"
Waya sighs and sits down on a large bean bag. "All right. Tell Uncle Waya what the crisis is."
"It's," Shindou begins, then suddenly realizes that Waya might not have been the optimal person to come to about this. But it's almost midnight and if Shindou turns around and leaves without spilling the dirt on his sexual identity crisis Waya might actually kick his ass, so he swallows and mutters, "It's Touya."
"God," Waya says. "Of course it is."
"He keeps staring at Ogata! Like… like that!"
"And you don't want him to stare at Ogata?"
"NO."
Waya opens his mouth to say something caustic. Uncharacteristically, he closes it again, looking down to pick moodily at a stray thread on the hem of his shirt. "Shindou," he says carefully.
Shindou's throat closes with something that feels an awful lot like dread. "What?"
"You know, sometimes… okay, and I am not saying this to be an asshole, seriously, or because I don't like Touya, or anything else. I'm just saying, sometimes other people just… have something you don't. You know?"
Shindou starts to demand what the hell Ogata has that he himself doesn't, and finds with a sinking feeling that there's a list. Ogata's rich, he's got a fast car, he's got titles, he's a better Go player even than Touya is. He oozes a sort of skeevy, self-confident sexuality and has so goddamned much experience that he could probably give Touya a screaming orgasm and a half in the time it took Shindou to get his shoes and socks off. When you come down to it, actually, the only things Shindou has going for him are youth and enthusiasm, and considering that Touya has spent his entire life around adults contemplatively playing Go, Shindou's not sure that either of those are going to be huge draws.
"I'm fucked," he says miserably.
"Join the club. We have beer and Friday night socials," says Waya.
3. Possibly entire subscriptions.
"But I don't know for sure that it's Touya, right?" he says desperately to Isumi, who gives him one of those irritatingly patient looks and busies himself tidying up the crumple of fast-food wrappers on the table. "I mean… it could just be that I'm a late bloomer or something and me and Touya have this rivalry thing going on that I'm getting mixed up with something else. Maybe it's just that I don't know any girls but Akari and Nase and Touya sort of looks like a girl and my hormones are getting… confused or something."
"Shindou," says Isumi. "Do you remember the year you passed the pro exams?"
"Yeah," Shindou says, frowning.
"How many years ago was that? Four? Five?"
"About four. Why?"
"A lot of people have rivals," Isumi tells him. "Not a lot of people have one particular person who is their Eternal Rival With Capital Letters. Even fewer people come close to beating the hell out of Ochi Kosuke in the hallway in some sort of desperate attempt to assert alpha male status and then play high-stakes Go games with their rival as the prize, at the age of fourteen."
Shindou scowls. "You've been talking to That Guy again, haven't you? I swear he knows more big words in Japanese than I do."
"Shindou," says Isumi kindly, "that's not that hard."
"Anyway," Shindou says around a mouthful of Isumi's french fries, "what's your point?"
"Think about it. Most people discover sex and discover that the world is full of… well, people they could potentially have sex with. You discover sex and home in on Touya like some sort of Go-prodigy-seeking missile."
Shindou brightens a little. "So you do think it's just me getting rivalry temporarily confused with sex."
"No, I think you've been in love with him since the minute you first set eyes on him," Isumi tells him bluntly.
"…Oh," Shindou says, and sips moodily at his chocolate shake.
What he wants to tell Isumi – really wants to tell him, to his own surprise, because he's suddenly convinced that if anyone in the world will believe him and understand, it's Isumi – is that when you have a neurotic thousand-year-old ghost residing in your consciousness during a delicate and precarious time in a boy's development, you become very, very good at clamping down on any potentially mortifying thoughts the moment they occur. Probably no boy in the entire history of inappropriate erections has had as much cause to put a muzzle on his sex drive as Shindou Hikaru – well, except for Honinbo Shuusaku, which explains a lot when you come down to it and is also a horribly depressing thought. Then… well, then Sai was gone, but somehow Shindou's libido never really got the message that it was okay to come out of hiding.
It's gotten the message now, all right. Shindou is very, very clean and possibly chafing; and when he's alone replaying games he's acquired the disturbing habit of sliding the stone into his mouth, drawing his tongue experimentally along the line between cool slate and the warmth of his fingers and wrapping it around the smooth heavy shape of the stone.
Almost the first thing he noticed about Touya was how beautiful his hands were. He tries not to think about that when his fingers are spit-slick and trembling in his own mouth, and succeeds about as well as can be expected.
4. One more embarrassing incident and he will probably be able to endow a library.
"Have you ever had sex?" Shindou hears himself blurting, then very nearly claps a hand over his mouth in abject horror.
The stone slips out of Touya's hand and clatters onto the board in a position that, fortuitously, puts three of Shindou's stones into atari. "Have I… what?" Touya asks faintly.
Shindou's first instinct is to flail around and yell at Touya to nevermind and keep playing, or to start an argument over whether Touya's dropped stone has to stay where it lies. To his own mortification he can't quite bring himself to do either, because it has suddenly become of paramount importance to find out if Touya is having sex when Shindou isn't. "Had," he says, and clears his throat. "Sex."
Touya is roughly the color of the nearest fishtank. Of course, that could be because there isn't much light in the back of the Go salon but the fishtank, but Shindou is pretty sure that Touya wasn't that weird greenish-white color a minute ago. Touya's mouth sort of opens and closes a couple of times, and Shindou winces, waiting for Touya to tell him to mind his own business and kick him out of the salon.
"I," Touya says, devoting considerable attention to positioning his dropped stone just so on the spot it fell onto.
"You don't have to play that," Shindou says.
Touya pauses for a minute; then his jaw firms and he settles the stone firmly on point. "I almost did, once," he says, then glares up at Shindou as though daring him to make something of the fact that he hasn't actually had sex yet. Shindou, meanwhile, is hopelessly torn between irrational fury at whoever Touya almost had sex with and overwhelming, equally irrational relief at the "almost" part. But –
"How do you almost have sex?" he asks crankily.
"Well, it isn't an all-or-nothing deal, Shindou," Touya says, clearly trying to sound lofty and knowledgeable and only managing irritable and embarrassed.
"It wasn't that fucking Ogata, was it?"
"No, it was not Ogata-san, now mind your own business and play!"
Shindou slouches in his chair and smacks a stone down onto the goban with unneccessary force. For a few minutes there's only the pa-chi, pa-chi of their stones and the quiet burbling of the fishtanks.
"It was someone I met at a tournament," Touya says finally.
Shindou's vision swims a little. "Oh my god. It wasn't Ko Yongha, was it?"
"No!" Touya snaps; but he's blushing now, and Shindou decides that the world will be a little better a place if he introduces Ko Yongha to Isumi's not-a-boyfriend.
There are a couple more minutes of stone-filled silence.
"I don't think you know him," Touya says. "He's a lower-dan, and he's not Japanese. He took me out to dinner."
"How far did you go?" Shindou asks out of sheer morbid fascination and possibly masochism.
Touya's face is painfully red now, and he's staring determinedly at the goban. "Not… not that far. I could have, though. He asked me to come back to his room. He was nice. But… he wasn't what I wanted."
Shindou's throat constricts so painfully at the thought of Touya saying that to someone about him that he really thinks he's never going to be able to swallow again.
"What about you?" Touya asks quietly, finally looking up at him. The look in his eyes is, just a little, like the one he gets right before he launches an all-out, bloody-minded attack on an opponent's stronghold. "Have you?"
Shindou's pretty sure he and Touya are friends, in a weird, obsessive way. He can't help wondering what this conversation would be like if it weren't for the weird and obsessive part, if they were just two guys hanging out and talking sex over a board game, telling unconvincing lies to one-up each other. Probably he wouldn't be half hard and grateful for loose shorts. He'd know what to say, or be able to pass it off with a joke if he didn't. The air wouldn't be strange and heavy, and he wouldn't taste slate in his mouth.
"I've never even kissed anyone," he says. "Unless you count Akari when we were seven, and that wasn't as much fun as she told me it'd be, so –"
Touya's eyes narrow and he slaps down his next stone with a harsh enough clack to make Shindou jump. "You're full of shit, Shindou," he says evenly. "Don't… don't make fun of me. I thought we were better friends than that."
Shindou sits up with a jolt, stung to the quick. "I'm not! I'm a late bloomer! There were extenuating circumstances!" He has a momentary, horrific vision of trying to kiss someone while Sai hovered over his shoulder fretting about Go and kibitzing his technique and shakes his head to get rid of it. "Anyway, why would you think I was lying?"
"Because," Touya says between his teeth, "I see the way other people look at you. You could have anyone you wanted."
"Well, so could you. You could have Ogata any time you wanted," Shindou counters, though it leaves his gut feeling hollow and sharp-edged to say it. "I mean, okay, pretty much anyone could have Ogata, but you're the only one I've noticed staring at his ass lately."
Touya gives a short, disbelieving laugh. "Shindou, everyone stares at Ogata-san's ass. He has a nice ass."
Shindou slams down a stone hard enough to rattle the goban. "I don't stare at Ogata's ass!"
"Shindou."
He looks up to see Touya watching him with a sort of quizzical irritation, head tilted to the side. "What?"
"What exactly are we fighting about?"
There's an uncomfortably long silence while Shindou tries to figure out the answer to that question. He really doesn't want to say that they're fighting about Ogata's ass, sorely though he's tempted. "Sex," he says finally. "We're fighting about sex."
"And we are fighting about sex why?"
For a minute Shindou wishes they played chess instead of Go, so he could reach out and tip his king over with a silent but eloquent gesture. That would be really cool, he thinks. Putting the lid on his goke just doesn't have the same panache. "What do you want?" he asks. "That guy, you said he wasn't what you want. What do you want?"
"I want," Touya starts, then at the last minute can't go on. His hair swings forward, veiling his face, and Shindou thinks of the first time they met. And the second. He was furious with Sai for days, and it took longer than that for the image of Touya's tears to leave him.
He wants to say something, anything. He doesn't know how to make that last jump to connect. It turns out, in the end, that he doesn't have to. Touya reaches out, balancing a white stone delicately between his fingers, and sets the stone down quietly in the middle of Shindou's lower left formations in a position that will cost him not only the stone but a wide-flung formation that stretches over the board like a young galaxy, stones he could easily have saved. Touya draws his hand back and sits with his head bowed, looking silently down at the board.
Oh, god, I think I love you, Shindou thinks, but all he says is, "Akira."
5. But it turns out that that's all right, because Touya likes to read.
There are raindrops splattering against the window, glittering in moonlight and the glow from streetlights. Shindou chases their shadows across Touya's skin with his tongue.
Touya retraces their game with soft fingertips on Shindou's back, and guides them to a draw.
