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“Thanks for your time, Hakari-senpai. I’ll do my best!”
Kinji crosses his arms sourly as Yuuta Okkotsu, sitting across from him in perfect seiza, bows his gratitude. This beansprout of a boy is, apparently, set to be the last member of the Tokyo team for the sister school exchange event. When Gojou had announced this, Kinji had seriously doubted his teacher’s common sense; and now, looking at the way Okkotsu fidgets nervously under his glare, the thought only solidifies.
“So,” Kinji says bluntly, cutting straight to the point, “What’re you bad at?”
“Oh, um, I don’t…know? I-I mean,” Okkotsu fumbles with his words, fiddling with his uniform button as Kinji’s scowl deepens. “Gojou-sensei said my swordwork’s fine, and I can scrape by in hand-to-hand, but –”
“Scraping by ain’t gonna be enough to win us the tournament,” Kinji sneers. Okkotsu wilts a little, and only Kinji’s irritation at the whole situation keeps him from feeling bad about it. “What's your class ranking? All areas.”
“Second in technical skills,” Okkotsu says, gaze fixed resolutely on the floor, “third in physical, and…first for cursed energy.”
“Oho?” Kinji’s eyebrows shoot up in interest as he processes this. Looks like the beansprout has a few hidden talents. “First, huh? Not bad. Maybe there’s hope for you after all.”
Okkotsu, for some reason, takes that as a sign to incline his head again and stammer “thank you very much!” Kinji rolls his eyes.
“I ain’t complimentin’ you. Being third out of a class of four for physical skills is a pretty shitty ranking, but your cursed energy can make up for that at least.” He sighs and rises to his feet, craning his arms upward until his shoulders give a satisfying pop. Better limber up for this one; from the sound of it, he has a lot of work to do. “I dunno how much I can help you with that in the two weeks before we go to Kyoto, but I can at least teach you enough to not get pounded to a pulp.” He lowers his arms and mutters, “Especially with that monster Toudou competing this year…”
Okkotsu pops to his feet, eyes shining hopefully. “Okay! Thank you, Hakari-senpai!”
“Don’t thank me before I’ve even done anything,” Kinji sighs, turning his back on his kouhai as he starts to make his way into the training hall. Okkotsu trails behind him, nervous energy radiating from him in waves, and Kinji sighs again, longer and louder.
What a drag. If it weren’t for the extra credit Gojou had promised him for helping train the younger boy, he’d be happily racking up thousands in pachinko right now, with Kirara cheering praise from his side. Instead, he’s stuck for the next two weeks trying to mold this beansprout into an oak tree.
But that’s life for you — tedious and unrewarding.
He kicks off his shoes and steps into the dojo, tossing aside his blazer and waiting impatiently for his kouhai to arrange his own shoes neatly side-by-side (what a stickler), shed his own uniform top, and follow before he speaks. “All right, we’ll start with some warm-ups. Stand over here.” Kinji points to his right, and Okkotsu hurries into place and assumes a ready stance. “We’ll do twenty and alternate counting.”
He steps forward, striking into the empty air in front of him, and Okkotsu copies his movements. “One.”
Another step forward, this time with Okkotsu counting off. “Two.”
Another; Kinji’s turn. “Three.”
“Four.”
“Five.”
The rest of the warmups go by pretty quickly. Despite what he’d said before, Okkotsu has a pretty solid mastery of the basics, so Kinji doesn’t need to correct his stances or strike angling. After they finish twenty high blocks, Kinji drops his arms and turns to face the younger boy. “Okay, I can see you’ve got this down, so let’s just get into it. You ready?”
For a moment Okkotsu looks startled at his words, but determination steels his expression a split second after. He jumps back into a ready stance, and Kinji feels a spark of approval. “Yes.”
“Count to three,” Kinji says, tucking his hands into his pockets.
If Okkotsu wonders about his casual posture, then he at least has the sense not to question it aloud. “One,” he mutters, eyes flicking rapidly over Kinji’s body as if he’s searching for his weak spots. “Two. Three —”
He lunges forward, spinning into a roundhouse kick almost before he’s done speaking. Kinji dodges easily; but as opposed to the usual reaction to having missed a target — a brief second of shocked stillness — Okkotsu whirls on him immediately. Kinji feels his eyebrows raise in interest as he blocks two more rapid-fire kicks and a jab at his chest in quick succession. “Wow. You sure are spirited.”
Unbelievably, this is what makes Okkotsu falter. “Ah — sorry, was I not supposed t —?”
A backhand strike from Kinji cuts him off, and he only barely manages to get his hands up in time to protect his face before he’s sent flying. “Focus, Okkotsu.”
“Right,” says the younger boy with a cough. He gingerly picks himself up off the floor, swiping the back of a hand over his mouth — but his eyes are alight, and Kinji feels a smirk pull at his lips against his will.
This one’s got fever.
He takes his hands out of his pockets and cracks his knuckles as his smirk widens into a grin. “Round two, then. Count off.”
Over the next half-hour, he gets a better sense of where Okkotsu’s weaknesses in hand-to-hand combat lie. Instead of being a defensive fighter like Kinji had initially surmised from his demeanor, Okkotsu leans on offense with a near-reckless insistence. He has a high pain tolerance and bounces back to his feet with elastic swiftness every time Kinji knocks him to the floor (which is a lot, honestly), and knows how to create distance in order to give himself time to recover. His reflexes are subpar, but his sheer determination at landing his attacks makes up for that in some respects.
His preferred methods of attack seem limited mostly to kicks and palm strikes, however, which is a little off-putting. Kinji only wonders about that for about a minute until Okkotsu raises his left hand to block a punch and he pinpoints the likely reason. He stops himself mid-strike and snatches up Okkotsu’s wrist, startling a yelp from him. “What is this?”
“Senpai?” Okkotsu’s wide eyes dart between Kinji’s face and his own hand like he can’t figure out the issue. “W-What is what?”
“This,” Kinji says tetchily, tapping his kouhai’s ring finger. “What the hell do you think you’re doing wearing a ring while you fight?”
Astonishingly, Okkotsu has the nerve to go pink. He snatches his left hand back, clutching it in his right like he’s afraid it’ll be taken away, and fidgets sheepishly as he fixes his gaze on the wooden floor. “I just…it’s not a problem if I don’t punch, right..?”
Kinji scrubs his hand down his face with a long-suffering sigh. This kid… “Yes, it’s a problem. It’s not like you can just keep kicking shit until you win. You think those guys from Kyoto are gonna let you?”
“But —”
“Take it off.”
“What?” Okkotsu falters, his mouth curving downward as he regards the ring. He chews on his lip for a second, then says, “I can’t.”
Kinji cocks an eyebrow at this, unmoved. “What, ‘s it glued on or something?”
“No. I just can’t.” Okkotsu’s frown deepens, and he lifts his gaze to Kinji’s with his expression uncharacteristically adamant. “I won’t take it off.”
There’s something in his eyes as he says this; something caliginous and somber that gives Kinji pause. For a moment, the look in Okkotsu’s eyes is…
Something indecipherable. Like how the night sky must look in the Arctic after the auroras have faded — desolate and empty where there once was beauty.
Kinji hisses a sigh through his teeth, ignoring the younger boy’s reflexive wince at the sound. “Fine, fine. I’m not gonna push you. If you don’t wanna take it off, though, then you can at least wear it in a better way.”
Okkotsu blinks, his face curious now. “Better?”
“Yeah.” Kinji dips a hand under the collar of his undershirt and pulls out the thin silver chain he’d worn on a whim that morning. He’d won it the month before as a pachinko prize, but there are a million just like it back at the parlor. In other words, he won’t miss it. “Try this.”
Okkotsu watches him owlishly as he unhooks the clasp at the back of his neck and holds the chain out. When he doesn’t move to take it, Kinji waves it in front of his face with an impatient click of his tongue. “Hey. I said try it.”
“Me?” Okkotsu’s voice is so saturated in disbelief that it would almost make Kinji want to laugh if there wasn’t something so sad about it. “You’re…giving this to me?”
“You see anyone else here?”
Okkotsu cups his hands and holds them out, eyes wide, and when Kinji deposits the chain into them, he stares at it in frozen wonder as if he’s just been given a bar of gold. Kinji rolls his eyes, but he can’t help but huff a laugh through his nose. “Go ahead. Put the ring on it.”
Okkotsu glances up at him once, like he’s making sure Kinji’s not going to change his mind and snatch the chain back at the last minute (yeah, right — he’s moody, not evil); then, hesitantly, he slides the ring off of his finger and threads the chain through it. After watching him fumble with the clasp for a couple of seconds, Kinji sighs and plants his hand on the top of Okkotsu’s head to turn him around.
“Here, I got it.” He plucks the ends of the chain from Okkotsu’s fingers and easily hooks them together behind his neck, giving it a pat when he’s done. “That’s better, right? Now you don’t have to pull your punches anymore.”
He steps back, and Okkotsu turns to face him again. He’s smiling now, cheeks pink like before, and it’s such an out-of-place expression on his melancholy face that Kinji can’t help but marvel at it.
“It is better,” Okkotsu says quietly. He cups his palm under the ring, and his smile softens into something more demure as he gazes down at it. “...thank you, Hakari-senpai.”
There’s something so shy about his demeanor now, so boyish, that Kinji can’t help it when his hand rises of its own volition to settle on Okkotsu’s head again. His kouhai looks up at him, blinking, and then grunts in surprise as Kinji ruffles his hair like he's a puppy.
“Don’t mention it,” he says, and lets his answering grin be genial for once. “And don’t think this is me goin' soft on you. Starting right now, I’m gonna put you through two weeks of absolute hell. Got it?”
He lets his hand drop to shove Okkotsu away by the forehead, and is pleased to see the younger boy recover almost immediately from his resulting stumble. The light in his eyes is burning even brighter now, and he gives Kinji a grin of his own as he tucks the chain into the collar of his shirt and assumes a ready stance, fists clenched tightly.
“Got it,” he says.
And they begin again.