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Sai smiles at Hikaru across the goban, one white sleeve shifting so he can fan his face and hide a quiet laugh as Hikaru, grumbling, begins to replay their match. “I think you could have won that one, Hikaru!” Sai insists brightly.
“Yeah, sure,” Hikaru scoffs. But Sai looks at him with such fondness that he suddenly pushes the stones from their board. “Let's have a rematch,” he declares.
He loses again.
He doesn't mind, though.
“Sai,” he says excitedly. “Sai, that move – ten turns back – you played the Hand of God. You did it!”
But Sai only smiles again, none of his characteristic excitement to be found. “No,” he disagrees. “I never did, Hikaru.”
And Hikaru wakes up.
“You look pretty awful,” says Waya happily. “Do you really miss Touya that much?”
“I don't miss Touya,” Hikaru huffs.
Even Isumi laughs, like he's said something funny.
“You owe me a match,” Waya adds. “I don't care how much you studied last night, I'm going to win!”
And he does.
“...Wow, Shindou. Did you party with Ogata-sensei last night, or something?” Waya squints at him and sniffs a little, suspicious. “That was...”
Hikaru sweeps stones into his goke a bit more harshly than is strictly necessary. He opens his mouth to challenge his friend again, best two out of three -
Let's have a rematch.
His throat closes. “Yeah,” he mutters, and then actually remembers Waya's question.
“What! Really? ...Did you just want to beat him at another game?”
“I don't need to get him drunk for that!”
“Sure.” Waya nods to himself, apparently satisfied with his own deductive prowess.
Scowling, Hikaru taps his fingers and twists around, rolling his eyes. He pauses when he only sees a flat wall, and no one to share a glance with.
For a moment Hikaru imagines wind touching over his hair, like a gentle hand. He twitches and stands up.
“Best two out of three?” Waya echoes his earlier thought, apparently eager to take advantage of Hikaru's apparent inebriation.
For weeks Hikaru has clung to his games just as strongly as he once fled them. Sometimes he can feel the ghost of a fan over his fingers, and he watches his own moves as a reflection of Sai.
Abruptly that isn't enough. “Uh, I don't feel that great,” Hikaru says. It's not even really a lie. “I think I'm just going to go home for today."
“Don't you have classes?”
“They canceled,” he dismisses, and heads out before Waya can question him further.
Hikaru tries not to think of anything, particularly, on the way home; he spends the short train-ride staring blankly at the walls. When he gets home he slips inside without alerting his mother, shuffling upstairs and flopping onto his bed.
He falls asleep and dreams.
Sai sits beside two women, elderly but still elegant in fine red and yellow kimonos. The woman on the left smiles faintly when the young girl across from them reaches out to shift her black stone onto a large kiwa-wood goban.
Light wavers over the group, threading in shifting forms through the cherry trees above their shadows. Sai tilts his head. “Princess, do you recall our lesson about tsuke-koshi and sacrifices?”
The girl sighs softly. “I am sorry, cousin. I think perhaps this game is not for me.”
“Nonsense. You told me you enjoy it.”
“I like playing with Ōyake.” The girl thinks for a minute. “ - She usually loses.”
Sai laughs. “Well, that does help! But there is more to Go than winning or losing, Princess. The board becomes beautiful when you understand the moves – no two games are the same.”
The princess purses her lips and examines the goban, hands tucked neatly away. “Perhaps I could try a little more,” she finally says. “I think I would like to understand this game the way you do, Sai. You seem to love it so much.”
“I do,” Sai agrees, and his face glows like the light of all the brightest stars. “You'll love it, too – I promise.”
“Have you been crying?”
“No,” Hikaru snaps.
He's still breathing heavily – he woke late, despite the incessant ringing of his alarm, and had to run to the Go Association as a result. He shouldn't have bothered; his first-practice match was won by default when the opponent failed to show up.
He tried to leave, but sometimes Waya just knows when he isn't wanted, and promptly arrives anyway.
For once, the older boy doesn't look ready to tease. Waya squints a little, catching his arm when Hikaru tries to move forward. “Hey,” he says awkwardly. “Is this about – whatever weird stuff was going on two months ago?” When you were missing, he does not say. When you refused to attend your matches and made everyone worry.
“No,” Hikaru lies.
Waya doesn't seem to believe him. “Listen, if you ever need - “
“Is that Touya?” Hikaru blurts, straightening.
Waya pauses, glancing at the door where Touya Akira has just entered. The young prodigy glances at them – a lingering look – and then turns away as though in dismissal. He moves to the opposite side of the room.
Hikaru bristles.
“...You know what, you seem fine,” Waya mutters to himself. He drops his hand. “Nevermind.”
Hikaru takes the opportunity and leaves.
He doesn't go home. Hikaru wanders instead, feeling tired even through the anxious static crawling over his veins. He wants to sleep. He wants to do anything but sleep. It's kind of a problem.
Hikaru finds himself, eventually, at a store for manga and wanders inside. The collection isn't that great but he rifles through a few mecha selections anyway before catching sight of something he's never seen before. A short volume entitled, Onmyouji.
The cover features a man wearing a familiar white robe.
Hikaru puts down his manga, leaves the store, and walks straight home.
He sits in his dark room for awhile just staring at his goban. Without light he can almost imagine he hears the slight swish of fabric, a shuffle of feet. Sai always tried to be quiet while he slept. He was never very good at it.
When Hikaru finally looks outside night has fallen, so he calls the day a loss and decides to try sleeping after all.
“Beautiful,” Sai murmurs.
The man in front of him beams, gesturing broadly with a dark brush. “I can only work with my subjects,” he says modestly. Beside him the soft greens and yellows of an early summer day sit against a blushing orange backdrop; the canvas he's painted stretches out as wide as six men. “Which is why you should really sit for a painting, Fujiwara-dono. I could do wondrous things with you.”
“You flatter me,” says Sai happily. And he does look flattered. “But as I keep telling you...”
“If you do not have the time,” the painter says, glancing at Sai's fluttery hands, “Play a blind game with me. I have been trying to learn Go, too. That will not require you to move much.”
Sai looks even more pleased. “Well, for Go... alright.”
The real reason Sai finds such sittings difficult becomes more than obvious. Even with his focus on their game, he often shifts and stirs in his seat, smiles or frowns, and flutters his fan across his face to hide more than one knowing smile. The painter doesn't seem bothered, though, even when he loses the game rather decisively.
“And just in time,” he says. “I've finished, Fujiwara-dono. Here, take a look.”
The painting is turned around to reveal a canvas of perfect white.
Isumi glances at Hikaru while they join Waya at the table. “Are you alright, Hikaru? You seem a bit distracted.”
“Just tired,” he mutters.
“You only think it's weird that he hasn't been talking us to death about Touya,” Waya assures. “You don't need to make him start.”
Hikaru eats half his ramen in silence. When he looks up, his friends are watching him.
“What?” he asks. They shrug and turn to their own food.
Hikaru actually has a practice-match with Akira in two weeks. He thinks about it, without enthusiasm, as they return to the Association. He wasn't lying – he really does feel tired. For once the thought of meeting Touya across from a board fills him almost with dread.
(Touya knows him, and his Go, and - )
“You're coming to the study-session tomorrow, right?” Waya demands before they part. “You've been dropping a lot of lessons lately...”
“My students have been dropping me. I'll be there.”
Hikaru sits in a corner of the room and replays a few old matches by memory. No one sits across from him, but fatigue makes his senses play tricks; he jerks up a few times at the sight of movement from the corner of his eye, but no one is even nearby.
Hikaru rests one hand in the goke while considering an unusual move.
Sai tucks his fan against his face, as though it could possibly hide the beaming smile he wears while floating after Hikaru.
“Oh, look! Hikaru, that statue was made for the Emperor Kanmu, in the Nara period - “
“Uh-huh,” says Hikaru agreeably. He squints at a painting that seems to show a bunch of courtiers oohing and ahhing over a tiny golden crane. “So, where are these things from the Heien period we came to look at?”
“I don't know!” says Sai brightly. “We've never been to this museum.”
Hikaru groans and kicks the wall. A security guards glares.
“Oh, there! There, Hikaru! Look – it's all so fashionable!”
And Hikaru has to laugh.
Because Sai is fawning and fluttering around a series of old, old kimonos. They're fancy enough, he supposes, with nice bright colors and glossy fabrics. But he wouldn't call them fashionable by any stretch of imagination.
For once, though, he doesn't mind Sai being so old and ridiculous. He just grins a bit, imagining Sai in something other than his loose white robes. Trying to picture the long-haired ghost in a modern suit makes him laugh aloud, to Sai's joy.
Hikaru turns to the spirit and says, “You know, Sai, I know I complain a lot – but I'm really glad I met you that day at my grandfather's house.” He pauses. “I think I've learned a lot from you.”
He expects Sai to beam, to hug him in one of his lunging attacks, even to fall down weeping that Hikaru is important to him, too.
Sai does none of these things.
Sai doesn't even smile. He just watches Hikaru with a heavy, sorrowful cast to his features. The look he wore once when telling Hikaru about a lost game and a rushing river.
“Have you, Hikaru?” he asks
Hikaru wakes crying.
Someone shakes Hikaru's shoulder. A shadow blocks out the room's light, and someone calls, “Hey, Shindou – Shindou – wake up. Wake up.”
Hikaru falls off his chair and lands in a sprawl. Waya and Isumi stand over him, staring. They aren't the only ones; an odd silence across the room makes Hikaru raise his head, where he sees pros watching him and quickly averting their eyes. Touya is in the far corner, frozen and surprised.
Hikaru raises a hand to his cheeks and finds them wet. He rubs furiously and jolts to his feet.
“Sorry,” he tells Isumi and Waya quickly. “I was just – I'm gonna - “
He grabs his bag and flees.
He finds himself walking haphazardly down the streets, unwilling to tell his mother why he's home early again. But his heart pounds every time he looks around. There, a girl twirling an umbrella over her head with brief laughter – here, a computer cafe, and advertisements through the window saying, Meet people from all over the world -
Sai is gone but he still haunts Hikaru. It hurts but it's necessary, too. Hikaru enters the computer cafe and looks around.
A hostess stops him. She asks, “Do you want to pay for an hour on the computers?”
Hikaru says yes.
He pays and sits down. He barely knows how to use a computer, but he can do this – find the netgo site, open the old account just labeled sai, and wait.
He receives ten challenges immediately.
He wins the first match so quickly and decisively that he should feel bad. Instead, Hikaru is angry. His moves are a pale shadow of Sai's. The ghost would have found a way to tease out the game, to encourage a blossoming player. And Hikaru destroys, destroys, destroys.
He ignores the other requests. Hikaru logs off, takes the long path home, and falls asleep at five in the afternoon.
He does not dream about Sai.
Hikaru doesn't realize he was expecting it, the dream, the illusion of happiness, until he wakes up gasping.
His mother stands worriedly by his bed. “You missed dinner,” she tells him carefully. “I saved some for you downstairs.”
“...Okay.”
Hikaru's mother doesn't know what to do with him these days. She doesn't ask any questions, and he has no answers.
When she leaves Hikaru stares at the ceiling for awhile and contemplates going downstairs. It's almost midnight and his stomach presses against his ribs in an empty demand. Hikaru thinks about this and he thinks about Sai.
He turns over and wills himself back to sleep.
Sai raises the instrument over his lap, a variety of koto – maybe a gakusō. His long fingers fly over the strings with all the surety he uses at the goban.
His long hair flows and curls as the koto sings. A quiet, easy smile rests on his face, a complete contrast to the intensity and fierce analysis that Go induces. When the music fades, he is quiet; when the music fades, a hundred soft, delicate hands clap in earnest applause.
(The music fades and Sai goes with it).
“Shindou, seriously, you're freaking us out,” says Waya. “You look like you're about to fall over.”
“I'm just adjusting,” Shindou explains. He raises a fist in the air, but can't quite muster the energy necessary to fake enthusiasm. Waya eyes him dubiously. “...To my new sleep schedule!”
“Why do you need - ?”
“I read online that if you get really sleep-deprived, and start sleeping in bits throughout the day instead of in one stretch, you start dreaming immediately,” Hikaru explains. “I figure it's better than getting a long sleep and only remembering one or two dreams.”
“You dream immediately because your body needs that sleep, you crazy person,” Waya says. Isumi nods in quick agreement. “That's not a good thing.”
Hikaru doesn't know how to explain. He avoids their eyes, blinking past the heaviness in his head.
The only reason he can offer: “It's the best thing I can imagine.”
Water still drips off the trees, curving in slow arcs down wooden trunks and the curved shoots of flowers. Clouds overhead threaten another downpour, but Sai couldn't care less. He stands quietly by the engorged river, his whole body trembling.
In his hand he clutches a letter. The front says, Mother, in a neat and precise script.
He drops the letter first, still shaking. The water steals it away. The wetness around Sai's eyes might be from the recent rain, or it could be something else. He clutches at his own body in a convulsive motion, then raises his hands to hide his face.
Sai takes one deep breath. Two.
He steps forward and falls.
It's still night when Hikaru arrives at the Shakuji river. Late cherry-blossoms dot the trees, and the water is full of soft pink flowers that shade the whole river with a pale light.
It's dark enough that no one can see him. Hikaru approaches a gentle slope, letting his feet get suctioned down in silt and mud.
Water laps quietly at the riverbank. Hikaru sits down heavily, his ankles settling into the sucking rush. His legs twitch and shiver against the water's pull. Hikaru takes out his phone before he can think about it too hard.
Touya sounds groggy and annoyed when he answers.
“Shindou? Do you know what time it is?”
“Play a game with me,” Hikaru says. He wants it to come out like a demand, but the moonlight ripples and splits in front of his eyes. His voice just sounds hoarse.
“What? We're playing tomorrow – Shindou, if you're trying to get me too exhausted for the game - “
“I'm resigning tomorrow's match,” says Hikaru. He doesn't realize, until he says the words, how much he doesn't want to walk down the Go Association halls, get stared at by pro players, and just – pretend. “So play me now.”
“You can't just...” Touya pauses. “...Shindou? Are you alright?”
“I'm fine. Just.” Hikaru shuts his eyes, but he can still hear the slow shush of water. “ - Just play.”
Touya waits a beat longer. Than he says, “17-4.”
The game passes fast because Hikaru doesn't want to think, because he hates Touya's lingering pauses and the resultant silence. He loses badly, but Touya only offers, “Again?”, and Hikaru accepts.
The next game, without any spoken agreement, becomes speed-go.
When they finish the sun is rising. Hikaru feels a comfortable, focused numbness that he doesn't really mind; he could probably lie down and sleep forever, but the anxious pulse in his veins has disappeared. He makes himself wobble to his feet as Touya waits. “Thanks,” he mutters.
“Shindou, if something - “
“Sorry about the match,” Hikaru adds. “Good-bye.”
And he hangs up.
Then Hikaru begins the slow walk home. And he thinks, as passing colors waver over his eyes, that maybe he has a problem after all.
Sai doesn't have a grave, and one surreal, possibly-imagined memory is not enough for Hikaru to know where he was lost. Hikaru thinks about this the next day when he ignores calls from Touya, Waya, and the Go Association itself.
He spends an entire day sitting, and thinking, and clenching his arms against the shuddering feeling that he has to move right now, this second, and go look for Sai in the places he cannot be. Places where he will never walk again. Hikaru thinks crazily about visiting Innoshima, thinks about searching every hill and river in Japan until he finds the spot where Sai fell. That night he doesn't let himself rest at all.
And the next day, he goes to Isumi's house.
The older teen seems surprised when he opens the door. “Shindou – come in? Everyone's been worried... “
“I know,” Hikaru interrupts. And Isumi, blessedly, doesn't ask anything until they're sequestered in his room.
Isumi has a lovingly polished goban there. Hikaru blinks rapidly when he sees it, memories folding and crossing with another meeting that happened not so long ago.
Play this game for my sake.
“Did you come here for a reason, Shindou?” Isumi asks after a moment.
Nearly two months ago he found Sai in a Go-board. It helped a little, and he can keep that, perhaps. But he needs to move on – to stop dreaming about things that can't be.
Hikaru sits down heavily on the floor. After a moment Isumi joins him. “Yeah,” Hikaru says. “I think – I think I should tell you about Sai, first. My teacher. He died recently...”