WATERSTAINED Every day at practice Tezuka will play against Fuji, and every day Fuji will lose gracefully, too gracefully, the way a girl onstage crumples into a dramatic faint: the audience knows it is coming and they expect it and are too busy admiring how it happens to remember that it was planned all along. Artlessness is the most difficult art, because there needs to be a little something stochastic in the actions that lead up to the end result, and even Fuji has not yet mastered that illusion. Fuji is getting better, though. The way he loses is ingeniously different each time, and those ways are only obvious, or maybe only visible, to Tezuka. Fuji has to fight for each missed shot, and the incredible wrongness of that is always jarring to Tezuka: it's the ugly black crack running through an otherwise pale and perfect mask. Fuji is smooth, at least, unless his edges can be seen. It's not that Fuji never wins against Tezuka. It's not that Fuji never plays seriously against anyone. Everyone has, by now, seen Fuji in his eyes-wide-open moments, unleashing his unique prodigal hell on the tennis courts. It's that Fuji never does so on a regular or predictable basis. When Tezuka was a first-year, he had a teacher who declared that if you were able to get every answer on a multiple choice test wrong, then you'd get a perfect score, because if you know what the wrong answers are, then clearly you know just as well what the right solutions would be. It was an odd and unconventional philosophy, and Tezuka found many holes to poke in it, but it was intriguing. That way was like arriving at a destination by walking backwards, or breaking something to prove you actually possessed it. When Tezuka was a first-year, Fuji had destroyed him on the courts once. Tezuka glances at Fuji, who speaks his thoughts and scores his points in ways so oblique that it's easy to miss him altogether until he has passed, when he is irretrievable - and sometimes Fuji seems to like it better that way. Fuji moves through the courts and life like a feather - mesmerizing and fluttering in what seem like wild patterns that somehow always end up brushing whatever he meant to skim. Something wild and beautiful and exotic approaches, but just keeping the focus on Fuji takes all one's attention and energy, and it's not until long after the fact and the afterimage has faded that anyone understands that anything has happened. Tezuka jerks out of reverie like he's surfacing with a desperate gasp after a deep long dive, mentally scolding himself for drifting off; a ball - a word - a point, two points, an entire thought (and the game that is now 6 - 6) - could have flown past him and he would have missed it. He stares at Fuji, who is idly bouncing a tennis ball and whose eyes look fixated on nothing in particular but everything in general. Tezuka doesn't know how someone can do that. Eyes should be limited to focusing on only so much - but Fuji's eyes, however near-closed, can take up the sky. The ball comes sailing, twirling, and disappears the way Fuji slides in and out of focus. Tezuka stares and swings. It's quite a game: if he can break the technique, maybe he'll crack through a little more of the sealed smile. Tezuka cannot decide whether it is a fair exchange, or a magic trick. "15-0." He is torn between being pleased with Fuji for a glimmer of glazed honesty slicked over a flat-smiling albaster face - and being irritated for missing a real shot. Tezuka feels himself floating again, before sinking into a kind of space and time where water-light bends mind and matter, where he can trust neither what he knows nor what he perceives, where everything is refracted and if he grasps for something he will never find it, and he would go mad from frustration before he drowns. Fuji serves again, the ball flies unsteadily like an intentionally drunken bumblebee. Tezuka's racket skims it gently and captures only a light, fuzzy sensation of touch. Tezuka doesn't hear the score this time, because he is too busy devouring what he can see of Fuji. It's like peeping through a keyhole, squinting through a crack at something brilliant and hidden away. It's like seeing Fuji's eyes beneath translucent eyelids, because maybe even Fuji cannot lie with his opened gaze. Lies should be dark and dirty and tangled up. Fuji's eyes are pure. Maybe that's why the eyes are closed - Tezuka returns a shot and watches Fuji whirl towards it. - because you can't read a book when its covers are shut and locked up tight - Tezuka slices the ball, knife-hard, over the net and Fuji's eyes close as he dives and misses, but Tezuka thinks that this one was for real. - unless you already know the voice and words on that page, because you've memorized them by heart. "Nice shot, Tezuka," Fuji calls over the net. Somehow - the how is lost within a haze of muscle memory - it becomes Tezuka's turn to serve. He has no particularly tricky serves, just incredibly fast and powerful ones. Tezuka could pull off Echizen's twist serve or any of a large variety of techniques he has observed over the years, should he wish, but he has no desire to use fancy tricks at the beginning. First impressions are lasting, after all, and as far as he is concerned every match is starting over. Tezuka means for his lack of a flashy serve to say something: he is willing to be honest and plain-spoken. This is totally unlike Fuji, who is liable to disappear from the very start. Tezuka's shot sails and Fuji returns it into the back corner. Tezuka runs, chases after Fuji, suddenly being struck with the distinct nostalgia of a little boy chasing after butterflies all afternoon. Thwacks and thunks percuss the rackets, legs and arms swing as bodies twist into calculated positions - Tezuka's lines are powerfully spare and severe like a swordsman's; Fuji's curves are impossible, swirling and beautiful like the flight path of swallows. Tezuka moves like sharp flashes of lightning; Fuji moves like languid shimmering of silk. The next time Fuji scores, Tezuka only thinks a silent nice shot, Fuji, and wonders why he won't acknowledge it vocally. Maybe it's because he might be lying, and Tezuka does not want to lie. Or Fuji could be lying, and Tezuka does not enjoy honoring anything false. Fuji of the non sequiturs had asked one day, "Tezuka - do you think that a half-truth is a whole lie?" Tezuka of all the immovable things had said, "Yes." Drive, volley, then Fuji's lob naturally invites a smash. Tezuka asks, and the sharp twang that the ball makes on his racket, he hopes, is audible enough to deserve a response. Tezuka sees a moment that is delicate and transient as cracked glass in the instant before it scatters. The tennis ball - in fact, the world and all its spaces, definitions, lines blur. Only Fuji stands in sharpened relief, stark like a dagger ripping through white paper as he moves. The counter soars perfectly and Tezuka runs for it, fumbling for his own return. Fuji aims his shots perfectly, he always does, and this can be used against him because Tezuka knows what exactly is coming. So he runs, feeling like he is pursuing Fuji and not merely a yellow sphere. Tezuka is halfway to the baseline when he realizes that Fuji's beautiful shot is going to be out. He runs for it anyway. Tezuka doesn't want there to be a missed chance, doesn't want to imagine that maybe there is something just waiting beyond his reach and the white line, because Fuji tosses out few enough chances as it is, because maybe it's another one of those truths wrapped up in an illusion. The ball tumbles down and lands out, and Tezuka skids to a stop. It's not the match point, and Tezuka has not won the game, but he feels a shard of something glass-sharp embed into his chest. "FUJI. Thirty laps NOW!" No one has ever heard Tezuka shout. Tezuka has always been able to apply pressure through sheer force of will, compressing intensity into his tone, cutting with shadow-thin edges of voice honed into tongue. And so when Fuji hears the cry he goes numb, slack, as if all the nerves and muscles in his hands have suddenly been severed; his gold racket clatters on the courts in tiny circles of shrill chaos, and the sound whitens his face. Fuji hauls himself to the edge of the courts as if wading through something thick and heavy like the moist, clammy air, pulling and dragging him down. Tezuka cannot bear to watch, so he looks away, and when Fuji begins circling the courts Tezuka must turn too, continuing to avoid that line of sight. Then Tezuka remembers snapshots in his mind, frozen from a time when there had been low-voiced, half-angry conversations in a locker room, when they were soaked with rain and Fuji had a washed-away gaze that was weak and penetrable enough for Tezuka to say show me the real you and who are you really? and he wonders that he cannot be so blunt now. After Fuji finishes the first fifteen laps it begins to rain, too, just like long ago. When Fuji circles near Tezuka again, eyes mostly closed against storm and wind, Tezuka draws a breath and jumps into deep water and murmurs, "Fuji, it's raining, you don't have to finish -" "You told me to," Fuji says in a bland, flowing voice. Tezuka silently gestures at the rain, and he begins to jog alongside Fuji, realizing vaguely in the uncertain back of his mind that once again, he is chasing. "But Tezuka doesn't like me," Fuji whispers, this time in the voice of thrumming rainfall, "doing something halfway." Tezuka wants to call after him, confessional, "But we didn't finish the game either," realizing that Fuji knows it just as well as he does, but the only sound that comes out of Tezuka is the rhythm of his sodden feet beating slower and heavier on the ground. Fuji runs ahead into water, edges blurred and soft, and it's like the sky is crying in answer to Tezuka. - end -