Archive of Our Own

2003.12.23

The martial arts gym is a hothouse when Tana finds it, even worse than the dojo, sweat-logged and windowless with stripped walls and blue matting and not much else. Tana can feel the eyes of a couple of the other classmen snag on him, following his line of sight as he makes his way through; strange that he should be so attuned to the line of Shinsuke’s back already, but there he is, faced away and warming down by one of the equipment cages, the IWGP heavyweight champion, the only consequential thing in the room.

“Yo Shinsuke,” one of the guys calls, “looks like your boyfriend’s come to pick you up,” and Shinsuke’s eyes widen when he whips round and sees Tana, getting to his feet immediately as Tana waves in approach.

“Hey,” Tana says brightly, gathering himself. “Looks like I caught you just in time. Were you just finishing up?”

“Just,” Shinsuke says, eyes searching, respectfully confused. He seems to have grown even taller somehow, in the two weeks, or maybe it’s just that he’s cut his hair, shorn close and neat; it’s almost annoying how refreshing it looks on him even now, after hours of training. “Tanahashi-san -- wasn’t there a show tonight? I would have thought you’d have somewhere else to be, or somebody -- ”

“There was,” Tana says, fretting through his own hair, flyaway and unset. “A show, I mean. I’m not causing you any trouble, am I? I told you I’d drop by,” which is true enough, after Inoki had decided Shinsuke take up another bout and be taken off the rest of the year’s dates to prep for it, and Tana asked offhand where. “After the last Nagoya show -- I did say I’d try and drop by, right?”

“I thought you were just saying that as something to say.”

“If I hadn’t meant it, I wouldn’t have said it,” Tana says. “And anyway I wanted to see how you were doing. I was thinking we could go grab supper together? My treat. I would have called beforehand if I had your number, but I didn’t, so -- I understand if you’re not free. You need all the rest you can get, if you don’t feel -- ”

“No,” Shinsuke says. “I’m free, if Tanahashi-san insists.” He rubs the back of his neck, blinks sweat out of his eyes. “I’ll go clean up and change first, if you won’t mind -- would you prefer to wait outside the building? It’s kind of stifling in here -- ”

“Hey, I’m not going without you! Ha, it’s fine. I’ll wait here, then we can go together.” Shinsuke nods and ducks out the side door, and his absence leaves Tana out of purpose again and out of place, his awareness of being watched even keener. The sling of his bag starts to bite into him, so he lists, walking back closer to the entrance wall, when the guy who called boyfriend strolls over to him, water bottle in hand.

“Sorry to bother you but I just want to ask, do you compete or something?” He looks Tana over with a finger, tracing some speculative shape. “Ayabe, by the way. You look so damn familiar, like -- should I recognise you from somewhere?”

“Should you?” Tana asks back, then takes another breath. “I’m a pro-wrestler. Do you watch New Japan?”

“For real?” Ayabe laughs. “One of them, huh. Nah, I definitely wouldn’t know you from there. I swear though, what the hell is it. Maybe your face is kind of -- hang on, oi Miki,” to a guy lolling on the mat near them, arms tucked behind his head. “You seen him before?”

“You don’t know?” Miki eyes Tana lazily. “You were on PRIDE -- twenty-something, weren’t you, the Fukuoka one. I went to that show. Minotauro versus Henderson.”

“Huh, like what, he was on the card? I know Inoki Kanji has his fingers in the joint, but jeez -- ”

“Not as a fighter,” Miki shakes his head. “It was like pre-show, maybe they didn’t show it on TV? Before the shindig opening stuff. Inoki brought him into the ring to bow to the crowd and get slapped, you know, I have been inexcusable, blah blah blah, the whole shtick. For that stabbing scandal, you definitely know the one. It was all over Tokyo Sports last year. Can’t quite think of your name though, sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Tana says, feeling an itchy thrill run through him at the saying of it, like he’s catching the snag and finally picking the seam open. “You already have me all figured out anyway.”

“Wait, pro-wrestler -- the one who almost got killed by that crazy news announcer chick?” Ayabe exclaims. “Oh shit! So that’s who you are. And she tried to kill herself or the police or some craziness too, right? How long were you down for?”

“A couple of months. And then another couple plus alpha for rehabilitation. Long enough.”

“Shit. I guess puro-resu kinda attract crazies, huh? I’ve gotten in with some crazy people myself, but to find out you’re going out with one, like that? ’Cause you only really find out when you’re already in it, right -- that’s some real bad luck.”

“If you want to call it that,” Tana says, and realises some part of him has been hoping for this, maybe even since he was first discharged, this casual confrontation of it, in an in-between world where people know of him but only in this context, where they can’t care less what he’s done with his life or what he could have to say about it. Not like in New Japan where he hasn’t been allowed to say anything, or in real life where he has nobody to say it to. “It’s not really bad luck if I brought it upon myself, though, is it?”

“Hey, or if she brought herself upon you. Ha!”

“If you want.” And it’s the wretched part, that had scrolled through 2chan boards with a wallowing sick-edged pleasure, that cried solely for himself, that’s itching to get it out now, say aloud all the things that have been said around and about him, that he’s said to himself: yeah, she really got me good. And I fully deserved it. What a poor example to set as a wrestler, unable to defend myself against a girl; what a poor excuse for a man, treating her like a cad. If I’d more shame than selfishness I’d have let her kill me outright, but I didn’t. I don’t.

But then as if tagging himself in Shinsuke comes back before Tana gets to say any of it, meeting his eyes, and Tana remembers who he has to be again. “Hey, now I look like the one who just came from training,” he laughs, mopping his forehead as Shinsuke joins him talc-clean and in a fresh jersey, light to Tana’s dark. “It has to be at least thirty-five degrees in here, right?”

“Forty,” Shinsuke corrects gently. “Is there anywhere you already had in mind to take us, or -- ”

“Yo, you didn’t introduce us,” Ayabe crows. “Tell the truth, is he your new boyfriend? Or is he like after you? Crazy after crazy?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Shinsuke says, shifting his duffel strap further out his shoulder. “Busybody. He’s my senpai.”

“Like your senpai can’t be your boyfriend?”

“It’s forbidden in New Japan,” Shinsuke says dryly. “We follow old All-Japan joshi rules now, Inoki-san brought them over. All wrestle and no romance. Anyway, see you. You just gonna loaf around here till closing?”

“Hey, some of us aren’t unlucky enough to suffer the chance for a million yen payout okay,” Ayabe sniffs, “subject to change K-1 screwiness or not. Some of us actually have to wait for Mayuzumi-manager to shut up shop and treat us to pity yakiniku and listen to us whine about how Shinsuke is getting all the action, even if it is with some puro-resu muscle dude.”

“Why don’t you try harder with Naomi-chan? If you got yourself a love life again maybe Zumi-san would finally be able to sleep well at night.”

“Naomi-chan’s already made it clear, she’s not gonna entertain me a love life until kiss ass fight money drops out of the sky and I can afford to pay for it. She’s not really into me anyway, she only wants to up her ranking and bleed me dry. Sorry,” he arrows to Tana. “Know what Shinsuke, how about me?” Ayabe whips his hair back, poses with his water bottle as a weight. “I’ve got muscles too, take me out on a date. I’ll even let you pay.”

“How about you take me and then I can let you pay. I’m on Naomi-chan’s side here, I’m not going to love you for free.”

“Two million yen!” Ayabe slumps to the floor beside Miki. “At least! Ah, whatever. Good luck with your forbidden whatever it is.”

Tana holds the door open for Shinsuke, and as they step out Miki speaks up suddenly from the mat: “Hey, scandal-san!” Shinsuke glances back at Tana, brow creased, and Tana nods for him to go ahead. “Hope you don’t find yourself in a PRIDE ring again. At least not for the wrong reasons.”

“I won’t,” Tana says steadily. He can’t. “Not as long as New Japan will have me.”

“Nice meeting you, and seriously,” Ayabe adds, looking sheepish, “sorry about all that stuff. Shit happens, but at least you’re alive, right?”

“Life is long,” Tana agrees, and follows Shinsuke out into the cold.

“You were on a PRIDE show?” Shinsuke asks curiously on the bus to Setagaya, and of course he doesn’t know, Tana thinks with a pang, why would he. Not when he was sequestered in some foreign gym prepping for both Bom Ba Ye and Wrestling World at the time then stitched up and sent back to America right after, the super rookie with his special training, focused on his own future, doing as he should. Not between Tana never bringing it up and Shinsuke never bringing it up for him, and no right time to either way.

“Ah, it was one of the stops on my public apology tour,” Tana says, easily, surprising himself. “For my incident. Inoki-san is the executive producer, right -- if he has as much responsibility to that ring as he does to New Japan’s, then by extension so do I. That was the thought.”

“Was it.” Shinsuke scoffs quietly beside him. “Tanahashi-san is a pro-wrestler. You shouldn’t have to prove anything to them.”

“It wasn’t too bad,” Tana lessens. “I doubt half the attendance there was even listening anyway. Some thick-headed upstart pro-wrestler who disgraced himself and now wants to make a comeback? Who cares? Get out of the ring, we want to see real men fight.” He huffs out the bitterness. “Listen to me! I sound like I’m complaining about my reception. I’m in no position to complain about anything.”

“Well, you’re allowed,” and Tana turns to look at Shinsuke, pulse skipping. Shinsuke’s smile is small and in retreat to a frown, but after the past year’s slough of empty sympathies it rings startlingly like affinity, full and sincere. And hasn’t he been hoping for this too, since. “Aren’t you? You were in pain. It’s the least you should be allowed, to feel for yourself. Tanahashi-san’s only human, after all.”

“Oho, is that supposed to be a dig at me?” Tana nudges Shinsuke’s shoulder, more for impression than effect when they’re already tamped in together. “Kami no ko living above the clouds looking down on mortals like me struggling with my selfish mortal feelings.”

“Clouds are unstable and not really there,” Shinsuke says. “Tanahashi-san at least gets to stand on solid grounds.”

“Dajyare?” The summer, at least, if not earlier, the memory recent and yet somehow already roseate. Shinsuke coming back to stay in the dojo again right as Tana was full to bursting and practically trying to kick himself out of it, the air tangy with judgment for them both. Catching each other in the flux and jogging out to Todoroki too early in the morning, alone together. He doubts Shinsuke even remembers it, amongst everything else that’s gone on. “Who would’ve figured Nakamura Shinsuke to be this much into puns.”

“And who would’ve figured Tanahashi Hiroshi to be capable of a selfish thought.”

If you only knew, Tana thinks. “No,” he says. “I shouldn’t be complaining. I could have been made to resign, buried in more than one way, but I wasn’t. And hey, I’ve held onto my singles title for months now! It’s no IWGP heavyweight championship,” he flutters anxiously, “but -- I mean, it’s something. After what I did, how I made New Japan look, the higher-ups were kind enough to give me this much. If anything I should be grateful.”

He should. Inoki having been ready to ensure Tana never worked again, Fujinami having had to go to bat for Tana and argue new contracts to dissuade him; Inoki only creating the under-30 title as a poisoned lifeline, ready to be seized at any indication of Tana’s ungratefulness, any rearing remnant of pride. Tana building himself back up after every beating and all the while angsting in secret about it, suspecting it all for an elaborate humiliation, like his efforts were being sieved through, worth less than the next person’s.

“You should be grateful,” Shinsuke says, as if to himself. “Sounds like a certain long-jawed man is telling you how to feel to save his own face.”

“It’s a lot of face to save,” Tana says mildly, and feels Shinsuke’s laugh upon him like a flooding light, warm and immediate.

“One day,” Shinsuke says, sounding pleased, “I’d like to see Tanahashi-san go right up to him and say, ‘Oi, I’m going to outlive you, old man. And my hard work is going to be counted whether or not you feel like counting it yourself. I’ll earn it for the rest of my life if I have to, but I have a right to stand in this ring!’ Not really in those words, you know, but along those lines. Make a declaration.”

“Ha, show my anger?” Tana shakes his head. “I would never be able to get away with something like that.”

“You won’t know until you try,” then seriously, “You deserve to feel for yourself -- you deserve to speak for yourself too.”

Everybody else in the roster looking past Tana for months, either obnoxious or obnoxiously mindful, the office handling him like a blight. All the mic appeals and backstage digs about spineless sissies getting stabbed in the back by a girl, how can this screw-up be given yet another chance, be fit to contend for any title; all this special treatment for Tanahashi and Nakamura when they’ve done nothing to earn it, done nothing but act like they’re above what this promotion stands for. Shinsuke not even around to stand up for himself, and Tana barely standing.

“A lot of people would say I don’t deserve anything.”

“I think a lot of those people would say I don’t deserve anything either,” Shinsuke says wryly, “including that long-jawed leader of mine, dare I say, but -- who else can I be?” He shrugs. “We’re given our roles to play. What else are we supposed to do with what we’re being given? Return it?”

“Give it to somebody else,” Tana says. “Give in. Get out altogether.”

“Ahaha! Maybe. And maybe the leader isn't leading me to water just to see if I'll drown. But the worst thing would be to leave it alone, or lie down, and I’m not about to do that. And I would think neither is Tanahashi-san.”

He can’t, though, which is not the same thing, but not for the first time Tana wonders how good it really is to be Nakamura Shinsuke, what he’s being set up for beyond the push and glory, the Tokyo Dome main event, the youngest IWGP champion in history. If driving him so hard is driving him toward early expiry, the expectation a trap, and the reward only as grand as the punishment, and he’ll end up strung up somewhere in the straddle between MMA and pro-wrestling, not good enough either way. And wouldn’t Tana know about being strung up. Shinsuke may not put a foot wrong like Tana has, too many times now, but it’s the very road.

Still. It’s not like he’s gone out of his way to understand what will be done to Shinsuke, what may be being done to him already, for failing to be who Inoki intends him to be, the pressurised responsibility. Wishes even now he could just say easy for you to say and resent Shinsuke in a simple way, as everybody else does, as he himself does in wretched cycles, Shinsuke with everything he has that Tana doesn’t, all he’s been given that Tana can’t get, all the chances in the world where Tana has nigh run out of them, so unmoved where Tana feels so affected. Feel about Shinsuke at all in a simple way. And yet.

“If only I had your confidence,” Tana says lightly. Shinsuke snorts, his face closing, soft in some secret irony Tana’s almost sure he shares.

“Tanahashi-san has a strong heart,” he says, plainly, like it really is nothing at all for him to say it. “You’ll -- stand your ground? Ha. The higher-ups may single you out because you’re younger, have you land all their joke decisions, take all their blame, make you believe you have no say, but you do. Nobody should begrudge your right to stay in New Japan, represent New Japan, or your right to live.”

Tana looks at his lap, the lines in his palms. He’ll probably flip and feel talked down to come the new year, looking back, look for yet another reason to resent Shinsuke all over again, but -- the affinity again, ringing, like Shinsuke understands it all without saying, without Tana having to say, and the feeling knots itself with what tangled impetus led him to see Shinsuke tonight in the first place. “You sure you aren’t just saying all this as something to say?” he asks. “To make me feel better?”

“Would you prefer I say something to make you feel worse?” Shinsuke offers.

“Ahaha, no, it’s just.” Tana wrings his hands. “I think deep down I’m -- the bad side of me is just always looking for something to fight against. Or with, for that matter.”

“Well, as long as Tanahashi-san is fighting.” Shinsuke hums a sigh. “Bad side, good side -- it’s not a bad thing for a pro-wrestler to want to fight, is it. Maybe it’s bad because you’re not fighting in the right way, or for the right reasons, or the right person’s sake, according to whatever, but -- there’s what decided for us, and then there’s what we decide is right for ourselves, right? Or what we should get to decide.”

“Who is kami no ko fighting, then, above everything else?” Tana asks, thinking kami and then nonsensically: me. Thinks of the Fighting Spirit award he’d left with the office earlier, petty, before making for Shinsuke. “Rightly or wrongly.”

“Hmm, I don’t think he’s decided yet -- himself, maybe?” Shinsuke wonders, and the knot in Tana twists at the laughter Shinsuke strains out after it, undercutting everything. “Oh no! That just sounds disrespectful to Takayama-san.”

The Big Boy outlet is as close to cosy at this time of year, in a budget family restaurant way: the baubles and snowflake stencilling, the stale heating, Makki playing over the speakers. Shinsuke gets a buffet salad with a side of asari clams and doesn’t let Tana pay for it, and it occurs to him that Shinsuke must still be on that specialised diet. Shinsuke could have said, but Tana could have asked, washing him in another kind of self-consciousness about everything.

So Tana prompts and Shinsuke obliges, telling about Alexei Ignashov, Asa Made, the sparring tonight, leaving Tana free to shovel fondue steak in his mouth and stare openly, thoughts unspooling. There’s something about Shinsuke set off against the chains of tinsel over the booth panelling, the red checkered placemats, even the forks of mizuna; makes him look even younger than the age difference, more handsome, and the damn hair.

“I’m sorry if they made you feel uncomfortable,” Shinsuke tells him, putting their trays away, “back at the gym. They were -- loose-mannered.”

“No, I,” brought it upon myself, “was the one who walked into it. I’ve never really interacted with mixed martial arts guys outside of New Japan before -- I definitely didn’t at that PRIDE show! -- but they were okay. It gave me a sense of perspective, at least.”

“They’re not pro-wrestling fans,” Shinsuke explains, “so they don’t respect it, I guess, but they don’t know it, so they don’t understand it. The whole world is alien to them. They see a pro-wrestler in the news and it’s like watching Koi no Vacance or something. It’s a skit, not a real person.”

“Ha, I can’t blame them. Sometimes it all feels like a skit to me too. So they see me as Naan no otoko?”

“Us,” Shinsuke says, and it tugs at Tana almost physically. Crazy after crazy. “Traveling between earth and hikari no kuni on my spaceship.”

“You don’t care that they don’t respect you either? Because -- not just on the pro-wrestling side, but the -- boyfriend side, you know. With the boyfriend stuff I thought,” Tana dwindles.

“You thought what?” Shinsuke closes a slow eye at him. “I guess I don’t really care either way. It’s like in the dojo, I’m used to it. Maybe if they pulled something on me during training, or said I was sleeping with the higher-ups for my spot, to my face,” he laughs blackly, “then -- but I’m not going to act offended by something that isn’t an offence to me, whether or not they mean it that way. We get along fine.”

“Oh, then,” that twisting feeling again, like Tana’s tripping over his turn to say soaring sympathetic things, or Shinsuke’s taking his turn from him, ahead of him even in this. He stirs down the ice in his glass. “Then that’s good to hear. As long you’re not letting them get to you.”

“Letting -- ah, unless Tanahashi-san was offended by my denial? I didn’t want to implicate you in anything.”

“Hey, if anything I implicated myself,” Tana joshes. But you shouldn’t have to be used to it, he could say at least. Either way. The crap about why Yasuda-san really put you up in a hotel last year, that’s not okay. And I get that stuff in the dojo too. Since my incident people have all kinds of ideas about me now. Some flashy muscle scandal idiot chasing after his overachieving kouhai wouldn’t even be the wrongest idea to get in this case. Wouldn’t even be wrong. “You don’t get friends just showing up at your training sessions, I expect. Especially not at this time of year.”

“I don’t,” Shinsuke says. “But then you’re not my friend, are you.”

Which reels Tana slightly like a rebuff, unreasonably; he isn’t. They aren’t. They hardly even get to properly hang out, on New Japan’s order and time. Besides, a friend wouldn’t have told Tana it was okay to feel sorry for himself; a friend would have told him to stop being boring and suck it up. And Kenzo is long gone. “What would you say I am to you, then?”

“My senpai? I would think?” Shinsuke cocks his head, haloed in tinsel. “Why, what else can Tanahashi-san be to me?”

“Who knows,” Tana says, and wonders deliriously if affinity can be one-sided. If it’s something more than mere bemusement starting to nip at the corners of Shinsuke’s mouth.

“Would you mind telling me why you really came to see me tonight, Tanahashi-san?”

“Honestly, I -- don’t know,” Tana says in a dumb flush, or if he did he doesn’t anymore, between where the why was and where the why is leading him to, where Shinsuke seems to have led him, Hirose Kohmi playing now over the speakers, everything tangled, every answer not true enough. “Because I wanted to. Maybe I thought we -- I’d figure it out once I saw you?”

“Oh no, like Antonio Inoki? You’ll know when you get there?”

“I don’t know,” then scrabbles to pick himself back up. “But I really did want to see how you were doing, too. Getting called to fight Ignashov when you already have to focus on your match with Takayama-san, having unkind things said about you backstage for stuff that isn’t up to you, having to be here and there all the time, and on your own -- it must be hard on you. It has been,” Tana adds, because he could have told him the same thing the past summer, the past Christmas, even the summer before. “I thought I could show you some support, or.”

“Or?”

Show I’m not lost in my own thick head anymore, that I’m a better person, than everybody else backstage, than I was a year ago. Show I mean what I say. Show I understand. Show I’m on your level. “Show -- you’re not alone? That I’m here for you if you ever need me? That we’re here for each other? Ahaha.” Tana coughs haplessly into the placemats. “Sounds stupid to say it now, right? Who would’ve thought my kouhai,” the IWGP heavyweight champion, “was going to have to console me instead.”

“So Tanahashi-san didn’t want me to feel alone,” Shinsuke considers. “Hmm. Kind of sounds like it’s really Tanahashi-san who didn’t want to feel alone, and you just couldn’t find anybody else to corner tonight into keeping you company.”

Tana snorts loudly, caught. Of course. He feels like a loose thread dangling where Shinsuke’s too polite or impassable to pull it because that’s what he’s been the entire night, a straining seam that Shinsuke must have seen him for from the start, right through. “When you put it like that -- maybe there wasn’t anybody else but -- in a nice way, you know? Like there is nobody else for me -- do I really come on that strong?” he asks in dismay, and whatever’s showing on his face turns Shinsuke’s smile liquid, hand over his mouth like he has to catch it from spilling out. “What is it?”

“Nothing.” Shinsuke leans forward upon the table, cheek into his hand. He really is annoyingly handsome. “It’s -- how do I put it. It’s just always very hard to tell where Tanahashi-san is coming from. Like if you do care how I’m coping or if you only want me to prop you up in some strange way and tell you you’re a good person.”

“Am I a good person?” Tana asks and cringes. Either his hands are cold or his face is warm. “As in -- seriously.”

“Seriously? To me -- hmm. I don’t think it’s up to me to tell Tanahashi-san what kind of person you really are. Did being a good person bring you here to see me, or did you bring yourself to see me to be a good person? Are you here for me or for yourself? To see or to be seen?”

Both, Tana thinks, either, at all, but what comes out is, “What would Nakamura Shinsuke find more interesting?” Which is what breaks Shinsuke up, shoulders loose and sniggering into his palm, and maybe he does remember the summer after all. “Oi.”

“Who knows,” Shinsuke echoes back. “How about whenever Tanahashi Hiroshi decides for himself what he can be to me, he can let me know?” He wrinkles his nose innocently. “Then I’ll see what’s there for me to be interested about. Maybe I’ll even try and see from there what I can be to him.”

Whatever it is. “Going forward,” Tana says, hearing his own voice quaver like it’s a question, and isn’t it.

“As opposed to going backward? Ha, wherever. The only way there is for us to go, however lame that sounds.” Shinsuke looks at Tana looking back, collected, eyes both sharp and soft. “So -- Tanahashi-san didn’t just have a Christmas date cancelled tonight or something?” he asks after a beat playfully, dispersing the air, like there’s nothing Tana actually had to answer for. Like it actually is okay. “You weren’t marking some secret special occasion, or making up for it?”

“No,” but for a wanting moment Tana thinks to pick his own seam where Shinsuke won’t anyway: that he had felt alone, as he’d felt alone this time last year, wretchedly, adrift in lies and ugly feelings, in awful shape, having to say things for other people’s sakes. That some deep down part of himself must have felt the itch of the memory crawling up his spine tonight and been mutely certain Shinsuke was the only person who could exorcise it. That Shinsuke, above and apart and yet in the same situation, was the only person who could make him feel not alone.

And perhaps that’s where he’s really coming from, amongst all these thoughts of aloneness and lifelines and affinity, why Shinsuke, why tonight, why at all, and where he’s turned out to be, looping back. Last year there had been nothing to at all for Tana to make of the future, a black immeasurable thing without definition, the only consequential marker obviously unreachable, nothing to draw from, nothing to hold onto, no point for comparison. He hadn’t set out to forget the year, but maybe he’d wanted to be reminded, remind himself, beyond Inoki gekijou and I don’t see a bright future for myself, there was still something real enough to believe in here.

What was it that Kenzo had said to him in hospital after Tana had cried abandonment at him, saying screw it maybe he should leave too, what more did he have going on for him in this place: All I’m doing is looking out for my own future. I have no future here, but you still do, and if you don’t open your eyes and see it through I’ll never forgive you. With Shinsuke, and within arm’s reach, to stay, Tana thinks his eyes may finally stay open.

“No,” Tana says, “but ha, come to think of it, there is one thing I -- can I ask for your number? If you’d be willing to give it to me.”

It must be Tanahashi who stands (in rivalry) with Nakamura. It must not be any wrestler other than me, was my thought. (...) As I embraced my affinity with Nakamura, along with my jealousy, at the same time I was given the marker I needed to lift myself up.¹

— Tanahashi Hiroshi, c/o Yanagisawa Takeshi, 2011-nen no Tanahashi Hiroshi to Nakamura Shinsuke. (2018)

TANAHASHI: I’m sorry for the trouble I have caused. (…) But this is how I live my life. As long as I’m alive, I have a chance!

— PRIDE 24 comments. (December 23rd, 2002)