Author's Notes: Part of the Inspiration series where I go through my Lj interests and write stories based on them. This is the one for Hikaru no Go.
Rating: Pg
Pairing: Implied Hikaru/Akira
Written: 2005
No one would ever accuse Akira of being an imaginative child. He was not prone to flights of fancy. At least off the goban. On the goban, within the known and set boundaries of black and white stones, Akira's mind could expand forever.
Off the goban, Akira's life was very structured. There were games with his father outside where the wind blew. There was school. There was afternoons spent in his father's Go salon with the golden light coming through the windows as he replayed kifu of important matches. There was shidougo and exhibition games and tournaments.
He would follow in his father's footsteps with respect to the game he loved. He was better at Go than anyone his age and some adults as well. His mother picked out his clothes. He preferred the company of adults to children. These were the undeniable truths of Touya Akira's life.
Then a boy his own age who didn't even know how to hold a Go stone properly had walked in his father's Go salon and begun playing shidougo. Humoring him and his assuredness that there was no one his age as good as him.
Akira did not take shocks well. His structured world broke down. Was it any wonder that he vowed to chase this Shindou Hikaru? Words, like Go, were not to be taken lightly. He meant it when he said "eternal rivals."
Shock came again when he played Shindou again. This Go was so... bad. Disorganized. Random. Was Shindou playing with him? Didn't he take this seriously?
He vowed to move forward, and never look back. If Shindou was not going to take him seriously, then Akira wanted nothing to do with him.
Another shock when he was supposed to face Shindou in an official match. The ambulance, the hospital, and people telling him that something was wrong with his father's heart. It wasn't Shindou's fault, Akira knew that intellectually, but he couldn't help but feel that things would not have gone that way had the chaotic element that was Shindou not been involved.
Things had changed again. Shindou had become a pro, and then stopped playing. When he returned to the game... it was as if he were a new person. He was different. His Go was different.
How was Akira supposed to deal with someone who was in constant flux? There was growing, improving and then there was Shindou Hikaru. Moving forward and backwards and sideways and sometimes skipping steps altogether. There were the challenges and the shouting and the mysteries. How was anyone supposed to deal with that?
Then, as if all that wasn't enough, one night Shindou had leaned over and kissed him.
Not quite knowing what the proper response was to that, Akira had kissed him back.
Years later, tournaments and titles later, Akira had accepted that chaos was apart of Hikaru. Laundry wound up on the floor until it was his turn to do the wash. Food was usually left on the counter after use unless Akira put it back in the fridge. Kifu were used as bookmarks, a fact which drove Akira nuts because unlike Hikaru he could not recreate all the games he'd ever seen from memory.
He'd never been an imaginative child, or an open one. Hikaru had taught him to laugh. To love. To live. He had turned Akira's life upside down and inside out, and he would never be the same.
Akira wouldn't have it any other way.