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By all means, Seijuurou’s life remains relatively normal in his first few years. As normal as it could get, for a boy living in a mansion with servants scurrying about the house, and spending dinnertime trying to practise all of his table manners, and also try not to squint very hard at his parents sitting at the far end of the table.
Too far, he thinks, and he was only eight years old. Mother would agree with him, though he was more inclined to believe that his father would merely dismiss that as but an excuse, which it was.
Then again, even a fool could tell something is wrong. Seijuurou is no fool, and something is always wrong.
—
Takeda has been chauffeuring the Akashi family for five years. Five years to watch the young master of the Akashi household grow from an adorable toddler who learnt how to read newspapers at the tender age of one to an anxious first grader, trying and failing at hiding his agitation as Takeda drove him to elementary school on his first day.
Shame, Takeda thinks, what a shame, but does not say out loud in fear of getting fired by his boss, that Seijuurou’s father did not even think his only son’s first day of school was important enough to accompany him.
So he tries to cheer the still soft-cheeked scion up as much as he could as they enjoyed the short ride to the school, in relative silence and a lot of trembling.
“Thank you, Takeda-san,” Seijuurou says, polite as ever, and walks into the school. He stands out, unlike a sore thumb, but still stark against the other children all accompanied by their parents. Stark because the lines on the small of his back are rigid and hard despite being quite short, even for his age. Stark because he carries himself with a grace Takeda doubted even most adults can manage. Stark, red hair against soft blues and yellows and blacks.
When he comes back to pick Seijuurou up that day, though, the boy has a frown on his face, but Takeda is relieved to see that he was doing relatively well.
“Make any friends?” Takeda says lightheartedly.
“None particularly catches my eye,” the Akashi heir sighs with all the airs of an old man, and it looked comical on a baby-faced six-year-old. It was also a little concerning how he seems to talk about people and friends as if they were mere specimens in a science fair. “However, there was one whom I found slightly engaging. But…”
Takeda willfully ignores the flamboyant words he uses, and how perfectly he seems to pronounce them despite his baby teeth being all intact, and resolutely does not think about how he himself was still drooling uncontrollably at that age. “But?” He prompts.
“He seems to believe in astrology,” Seijuurou sniffs, “I do not intend to fraternise with someone with such silly beliefs.”
Intend to? Fraternise? Takeda thinks and physically restrains himself from facepalming, hey. What the hell. Aren’t you 6?
He does not press further on the topic, though, but he does offer this: “Young master. While I am sure you two may not be exactly like-minded, you should still try to be friendly.”
It’s a relief for him then, a few days later, when he sees a gangly green-haired boy waving Seijuurou goodbye.
—
Shintarou has befriended a boy in the class named Akashi Seijuurou. His parents have told him after the first day of school that he is the only heir to a wealthy family and had sent him off to befriend him. Shintarou scoffed at the idea, and only became more objecting to it later on as their first impressions weren’t the best. However, despite all odds(or perhaps the fact that no one else in this class seemed to be able to hold a proper conversation nor play shogi), they became close over the past year.
Akashi has never been very vocal about his family, though he would put in his two cents whenever Shintarou went on embarrassingly long tangents about the amazing artwork his sister drew or the amazing stew his mother made and the amazing books his father gave him. Shintarou, perceptive as ever for his age, did not pry. Which is why it was surprising when the red-haired boy confided in him one day, after being prompted to talk about how he felt in his home.
“Oh,” Akashi sighs, “It’s actually a bit stifling.”
Shintarou’s mind screeched to a halt. Stifling? He had always thought of Akashi as someone who was close to perfect. Well, he is really perfect. He had a symmetrical and balanced face, first of all, and though it might be too early to tell, well-proportioned limbs. He was the heir to a rich family. His uniform is never rumpled and he always had on his face a polite yet indifferent smile. For god’s sake, he plays two instruments. Though, sometimes, a mischievous smirk would break out when he won a shogi game by a particularly large landslide, or when Shintarou would ask him for help in his schoolwork. He had a weird sense of humour, too, but they did laugh together occasionally.
Which is why it was quite surprising to hear that. Shintarou had always thought Akashi’s perfection came from his family. So what was the issue here?
“What do you mean?” Shintarou pressed.
The shorter boy gave an extremely uncharacteristic snort. “An Akashi never loses. Your only goal is to win. Your only purpose is to win. Winners win all the prizes and whatever they want, losers lose everything. Et cetera. It’s. Well. Tiring.” Akashi finishes with a sigh. And then, a small smile crosses his lips. “Well, at least it’s only Father. Mother usually takes me away when the rants get too repetitive.”
Shintarou didn’t know what to do with that information. It was shocking enough that the boy was divulging any information at all, truth be told. But then again, Akashi has always been a very intriguing person.
“Should you really be saying this?” The taller boy says still.
“Well, no,” Akashi muses, sliding a pawn to B8. Shintarou is cornered, once again. And then, before Shintarou could move his knight, Akashi had stalked off of his seat opposite him and had rounded on the taller boy. “But Shintarou won’t tell anyone, right?”
That’s a little too close for comfort, Shintarou thinks, as he tries very hard not to shiver at how close the shorter boy’s face was to his own. How red those eyes are, Shintarou ponders. Like a cat’s eyes. “I guess not,” he manages after a while. Akashi skips back to his seat, and it’s somehow befitting of his age, ridiculously so even after all the etiquette training his family must have put him through. Shintarou has never personally been through those himself, but his sister and mother always told him he took much after his father, who was just as ‘uptight’ as he is.
He didn’t know how to describe it. As much of an enigma as the red-haired boy could be, he was also just as childish inside. Or he’s just really good at acting. Shintarou doesn’t like to think of the second one. Then again, it’s hard to apply logic to Akashi’s existence itself. Moments like these are rare, and he supposes he should count them while they last.
They are in fourth grade, when Akashi asks him to play a duet with him.
“Would you like to,” the shorter boy says as he hands Shintarou a pristine photocopy of Kriesler’s Love’s Sorrow, Piano Accompaniment after class, “play with me?”
Shintarou’s eyebrows traverse far up until they are long hidden by his bangs. “What brought this up?”
He thinks he might have seen a blush appear on Akashi’s face. “It’s my mother’s favourite piece. I don’t know who else to ask, because I want to make this a surprise for her, and she would know if I asked anyone else.”
“I see,” Shintarou scans over the piece. He has heard his teacher play it before, the piano version– a beautiful and deceptively difficult piece. “It’s a little above my level. But I will try my best.”
For your mother, Shintarou lets it hang there, unsaid, along with numerous other strings that hung between them. I hope she does get better soon, goes unsaid as well.
It’s marginally more difficult than Shintarou first estimated, but they make it just before Auntie Shiori’s birthday that year. Shintarou does not let his envy get the better of him, even when he knew that if only Akashi could play both instruments at the same time, he would do a lot better than Shintarou. As with a lot of other areas. Most other areas, in fact. He’s gotten used to it already. And, wow, it does feel amazing after they perfected the piece entirely— the calming accompaniment flowing from the keys under Shintarou’s fingers, and the tumbling melody from Akashi’s violin that’s enough to bring any soloist to their knees.
As their weeping notes draw to a close, Shintarou thinks for a second that he could see something shining at the edge of Akashi’s eyes.
Auntie Shiori has long broken down in her wheelchair, and she, by an act of motherly miracle, sprung onto Akashi who was barely able to put away his violin before then, managed to get on her feet for the first time in two months or so.
As Shintarou watched the heartwarming scene unfold in front of him, half savouring the rare scenario where the shorter boy’s composure fully cracked, he does not think about how they were the only ones in the music hall, how Akashi Masaomi hadn’t even bothered to offer his presence to a sickly wife and his own son. Or maybe he’s scared, Shintarou thinks.
—
Most people don’t see it, but Seijuurou usually wears his heart up one sleeve and tricks up the other. Today, though, he has no tricks and there is only a hole ripped into the place where he’s supposed to have the pulsing organ. Masaomi likes to think that he knows his son. He’s done this for his own good, after all. It would be terribly cruel to make a child watch his own mother die with their very eyes.
Perhaps even crueller to not allow them to see it with their own very eyes.
Seijuurou doesn’t seem to think so, though. Seijuurou rarely cries, but tears were slipping from his cheeks uncontrollably. Masaomi wills himself to not embrace the boy. He didn’t even know how to, truth be told, as much as he hates that he barely knows his son nowadays— despite how much he’d like to tell himself otherwise. But Seijuurou needs to learn the ways of the world in all its ugliness and cruelty and cold, hard truth. That only the strong will win and only the winners will get what they want.
Even if Shiori is no longer here to provide the oasis. To act as the last bridge between father and son. Masaomi cannot show weakness in front of his son, and should his son succeed him, he would not be allowed to do so either.
“I—” Seijuurou bites out, in the middle of a pitiful sob, “hate you. Why? Why? Tell me! Why did you keep me from her?”
“You’re being childish, Seijuurou,” Masaomi warns, hand coming to rest on his only son’s soft, red hair. Shiori’s hair and Masaomi’s eyes. The same red, like blood. “It was for your own good.”
However, when Seijuurou’s own, much smaller hand comes swatting it away, he thinks he could almost see a hint of Shiori’s gold in those eyes, somewhere, eventually. His son is tiny, especially when he’s with that Midorima child, and the others he plays that silly basketball with. Seijuurou’s eyes look dim and nowhere near the brilliance they were only a few days ago, and Masaomi wills himself not to burn at that.
—
It lasts until fifth grade, this tranquil playing house, basketball and piano and violin, when everything eventually shatters. As they do, usually, with Akashi in the picture. The funeral is a quiet affair, but solemn and proper nonetheless. Akashi’s face is stony and indifferent. His father doesn’t even stand with him, doesn't even offer a comforting hand or a shoulder to cry on. Shintarou trashes that thought immediately, of Akashi crying on anyone’s shoulders. Akashi crying at all.
Though, Shintarou would actually like for him to cry more than anything else right now, because this kind of stoicity did not fit anywhere on a ten-year-old’s face, not even Akashi Seijuurou’s face. There was no light in his eyes. Akashi’s red eyes. So red. So, so red, pupils contracted into a cat’s. More predator and less child. Maybe he grew up too fast. Maybe they both did.
He’s not as emotionally dim as people like to think. He knows enough.
Shintarou feels concerned for his friend.
Time-appropriately, it was raining that day. Not a drenching thunderstorm, but it is enough to be uncomfortably wet. The funeral has been going on for four hours, and what little people who had already been here in the first place are filtering out one by one. Shintarou feels his own heart crack a little for the shorter boy. From this angle, his wet hair sticks to his face and he cannot see his eyes. Water is dripping from all the dips in his shape. He’s not close enough to tell, but even if he was, Shintarou doubts he would know whether it’s rain or tears.
For once, he hunches into himself, contrasting with the usual composure that fills the room and is larger than life. He looks smaller than he already had been. He’s always been a little small for his age. He’s always been older than his age, too.
He watches Akashi Masaomi from the corner of his eye. He didn't have an umbrella, either, but instead of looking down he was looking up, directly up, and Shintarou wonders if water is filling his eyes. Rainwater. Tears. It’s all the same, at this point. He wants to go up to the businessman and shout at him, to demand from him, why. Why, how can you sleep at night. knowing you’ve raised an experimental specimen instead of a child? And then Akashi Masaomi will look down at him, and say: I don’t, Shintarou.
Eventually, he leaves as well, and the only two people at the site are Seijuurou and Shintarou. He can’t say he is surprised. A butler had tried to coerce the younger Akashi to go, but he had been unresponsive, and Akashi Masaomi had told them to leave him.
Shintarou stayed, though, disobeying his curfew for once.
He walks up to Akashi, who was still unmoving from his spot even after four hours. Or five. He didn’t have his watch on him. Akashi was shaking a lot. He looked as if a particularly strong gust of wind would knock him over, and Shintarou quickly eviscerates that thought from his mind, because he does not like to associate that image with Akashi.
Oha Asa said that Sagittarius’ lucky item was a photo frame today. Shintarou gazes at Akashi Shiori’s warm smile upon her casket.
When he taps a hand on the shorter boy’s shoulder, he is surprised that he turned. But the look in his eyes are different, and his eyes are no longer cardinal red, red red red, blood red. They grew dull, and perhaps it was a trick of the light, but something yellow painted his left eye and Shintarou cannot breathe.
Water slides down Akashi’s pale face. White, red, black, gold. Shintarou hesitantly wraps his arms around the smaller boy uncharacteristically and is surprised when he sinks into the embrace. Akashi does not raise his arms to reciprocate, he looks too tired for it, anyway, but he does lend his weight to the taller boy. “I’m being so weak here, Shintarou. But it hurts so much. I feel as if a hole has been ripped into my chest and someone dissected my heart right in front of my very eyes.”
Shintarou nods numbly. There wasn’t really anything he could do here other than nod. What Akashi says next surprises him, though. Or, rather, horrifies him.
“If it was going to end like this all along, I wish she had never loved me at all in the first place,” Akashi breathes under his breath, as if talking to himself. He wonders. “Because now I will be unable to love anything else anymore.”
He wants to say something back, along the lines of but there will always be people, shogi, and basketball, but he keeps quiet.
“What shall I do, Shintarou?”
Whatever shall you do, indeed, Shintarou thinks dully, head fuzzy from standing in the rain for too long and he drags Akashi back before they could both catch a cold.
Something started to change. Like a chemical reaction that, once started, cannot be stopped. Shintarou does not think as he stares at Akashi’s sleeping face, clouded in pain and something he could not describe. Narrow, bony shoulders. Shouldering a weight and workload grown men would cry over. Sorrow, perhaps. How ironic. Love’s Sorrow and Love’s Joy. Never love something too deeply or it will be hard to let go. Never love. Never show your weaknesses. He almost wanted to shake the younger boy up and ask, hey, is it worth it, was it worth it, do you believe that now, will you succumb to his teachings then, is it still tiring, are you still going to win, have you always been like this—
—What will you do now?
Shintarou says none of that, and things start to change after that. As they do.
—
Seijuurou thinks that he truly has gone crazy, after all, when he wakes up in a dark space, living but not really awake, red and gold cat eyes staring down at him. Eyes that were simultaneously his but not him.
“Who are you?” he asks, and does not expect an answer back.
I am absolute.
“Well,” Seijuurou says after a long time, when the lines between dreams and reality have blurred and his mind too shrouded and cloudy with something to think properly, when he isn’t even sure of who he was anymore. Heir to the Akashi family, student council president, member of the basketball club. They’re all the same. “That’s a silly name.”
—
Life continues on. The earth keeps spinning. Nothing changes at all, and yet everything is different. His workload gets even heavier but his shoulders never hunch over. He does not bend. He continues to play violin, Kriesler’s copy of Love’s Sorrow for Violin Solo discarded somewhere under his stack of theory books.
He graduates at the top of his year and delivers a speech in front of the whole school, filled with faces he cannot and would not remember, all but one face of Midorima Shintarou blurring into one another. He remembers the envious looks the taller had thrown at him every once in a while. He remembers his father’s stern face. He remembers how he wasn’t there.
Akashi Seijuurou keeps on waking up at erratic times, scattered throughout the months in his last year in elementary school, holding a pair of scissors in front of his bathroom mirror in the dead of the night, and he does not recall how or when he got there.
—
Shuuzou’s first impression of Akashi is that he is absolutely an insolent and spoiled rich kid. Sure, a basketball prodigy(and perhaps a prodigy at everything else, he checked) at that, but there was this very specific sort of air surrounding him that smelt of old money and automatic superiority that Shuuzou hated most.
There was also the matter of him being a little vertically challenged. He wasn’t exactly short, but compared to the mass of basketball players in Teikou, he falls into the lower 10th percentile. And yet he still managed to gracefully tread his way into first string as a first year with less fucks to give than Shuuzou could count on one finger. However, upon observation, no amount of dry remarks about his height seemed to throw the boy off-kilter. In fact, nothing seemed to unbalance the perfectly polite smile.
Of course, that may be harsh. Shuuzou knew not to judge people like that, seeing as he himself wasn’t exactly a saint, but. Well.
“Nijimura-san,” the boy says, politely, as they prepare for practise one day. He is diligent, for what it’s worth, and comes in to help set up earlier than most others. “Could you pass me the cones up there?”
It was at the topmost shelf. They hadn’t needed to use that in the first few weeks when they were still doing mass training, but now that they are finally being properly split into the three strings they would start to use these. Shuuzou was, indeed, quite tall for a second year, so he reached up and took down the cones. Just as Akashi reached out for them, though, he lifted it just a bit higher so that he would miss.
“It’s Nijimura- senpai, brat,” Shuuzou says gruffly. He had just been promoted to vice-captain, and the way Akashi pronounced his name made it sound somewhat degrading. Maybe it’s because of his subconscious bias, but hey, he earned this respect.
Akashi quirked a red eyebrow, as if humouring him, and Shuuzou felt his blood pressure rise. “Alright, then. Nijimura-senpai.”
Shuuzou handed the cones to him anyway, but despite the leftover sour taste in his mouth after the interaction, he still couldn’t help but gawk at the fluidity of the boy on the court later on.
Apparently Akashi won the seat of student council president, and it isn’t even his thirteenth birthday yet. Shuuzou briefly wondered if there was a rule saying that you can only run in your second year, but he supposed that it was inevitable, after all, because if anyone’s going to be student council president being only a first year, it’s going to be Akashi Seijuurou. Akashi Seijuurou who is apparently Teikou’s only source of gossip since he enrolled. Akashi Seijuurou who is perfect in every way imaginable. Or maybe Shuuzou just doesn’t know him well enough yet.
He doesn’t feel envy, or anything of the sort, even though his underclassman is obviously more successful than him in the academic regard. Because the coach had just appointed him captain of the basketball club as the third years approached retirement, and he has never felt more elated. There is also the matter of appointing a vice captain, and he had given Shuuzou a few days to think it over.
Shuuzou already knew who to choose, though. It was only a matter of time, but he could see how everyone in the first string— no, he could say almost the whole club— could see Akashi’s potential for leadership. How he carries himself with poise on and off the court. His talent in basketball and natural leader’s charisma that somehow gets everyone, even the more rowdy ones, to listen. No matter what room he comes into, he somehow garners the attention of everyone present, despite his average height.
It must be the aura, Shuuzou thinks. He’s not blind, either. He sees his underclassman’s straight back and rather amiable exterior. He would be the perfect person for the job. But something felt wrong about this whole thing. Not just handing it to a second year. Not just pushing the responsibility to someone who was already so busy with the student council. Akashi would be able to deal with that, though, but whenever Shuuzou wants to think that, he is afraid his deceptively fragile shoulders will snap after all under the weight of it all. There is also the matter of being Akashi Seijuurou, which seems like a heavy burden to bear at all.
He makes up his mind, one day, when Sanada is being particularly bitchy.
The look on Akashi’s face, in his eyes, is not something Shuuzou had expected. He didn’t know what he expected. Something straightforward like glee or gloom, perhaps, at the added responsibility and glory of being vice captain. But nothing involving Akashi Seijuurou will ever be predictable, other than absolute victory, maybe. Shuuzou has given up on that a long while ago, so he doesn’t even know why he still tries.
Anyway, Akashi will do a wonderful job as vice captain. Maybe even better than Shuuzou as captain, and he sure as hell doesn’t want to manage all that paperwork by himself.
Akashi will do great things, one day, Shuuzou thinks. Knows.
—
Nobody ever notices the snow accumulating on a hill until it crashes down.
Or they do, but tell themself that I’ll handle that later, I’ll get more people to help later. Eventually, eventually, eventually.
It starts off with Nijimura’s early retirement from captaincy as soon as he entered third year. Seijuurou had seen this coming for a long time— he'd seen how Nijimura looked. How he lost his focus during game breaks and how he was on his phone more and more. Aomine had said that he probably got a girlfriend, but the stricken expression Seijuurou saw on his captain’s face suggested otherwise.
He also knew that Nijimura would pick him for captain.
It made him want to dig up a hole and just stay there forever. Maybe dig it next to his mother’s grave that he hadn’t visited in so long and curl up inside there, beside her. Alas such weaknesses are not allowed for an Akashi and when Nijimura asks him that night, moonlight filtering into the hallway through the windows, and he hadn’t even looked him in the eyes as he told him he would be entrusting the future of the Teikou basketball club to him.
You’re afraid, the voice remarks in his head gleefully, you’ve seen them. You can tell, too, can’t you? Aomine is starting to fall apart. So let me do it.
It must be saying something, for Seijuurou has been talking to himself a lot lately. Sign one of mental illness. Maybe he really did snap and go crazy. It’s saying even more, though, when Seijuurou is actually considering the idea. What would be the consequences of letting a scissors-obsessed, magically yellow-eyed, childishly apathetic personality with the emotional intelligence of a rock free? A lot, it would seem.
“I strive to not disappoint,” Seijuurou says, and it came out a lot more bitter than he really meant to.
It should have said enough when more than half the club looked like they had expected Seijuurou’s nomination, more or less, which makes him more grounded than it should. He thinks they were more surprised about Nijimura’s retirement, but no one said anything to a mere second year bossing them around. They have a practise game the next day against a rather decent middle school, though they are still nowhere near as good as Teikou, and he benched Nijimura throughout the whole game in favour of testing out Aomine’s capabilities as a power forward.
His friendship with Midorima is slowly dwindling down to nothing but he found it hard to bring himself to move. About Midorima. About them. And a lot of other things that he probably should.
It started with his early captaincy. And then spiralled, when Haizaki got on the last of his nerves and he opened his left where Nijimura had closed one eye, when Aomine stopped coming for practise, and when he came by too often for it to be healthy. Not that he was ever. Somehow, bearing the name of Akashi seems to come with more issues than your daily newspaper. One series of unfortunate events leading up to one another, so on and so forth. Then came Murasakibara and his childish rebuttals, and everything was starting to fall apart in front of his own eyes, as if Seijuurou was unable to control them anymore. The last thing he thought before pushing Momoi away from between him and Murasakibara was sorry, Nijimura-senpai, I don’t think I can do a very good job.
A mere five minutes and four points from his loss later, with Seijuurou’s knees on the ground and Murasakibara mumbling something incoherent behind him, he tried very hard to close his left eye. And then he snaps.
It was so weird, he thinks, watching it play out with his eyes while the movements were clearly not his own. It felt like he was watching his own life as a movie in a theatre. He sat there and felt his lips curl up into a smile, looking into Kuroko’s widened eyes filled with fear and something too far within for him to decipher. A hand comes up to grip at his chest, where he had felt a hole torn through on the day of his mother’s death, and punched the tentative scar tissue through to make way for new blood. His own hand.
That night, he walks as if his legs didn’t belong to him(they didn’t). Today, his father will come back from his business trip from Hokkaido and have dinner with him for the first time in three weeks. He had been dreading this, and is somewhat glad it was not him he was talking to. He wonders what his father will say when he sees Shiori’s cat-like golden left eye instead of his blood-like red.
Akashi Masaomi maintained unflinching eye contact with Seijuurou, and for once in his whole life, his father looked away first, and Seijuurou didn’t know if he wanted to rejoice at that or be disgusted because it was not him who had won this time. His father does not press further, and instead drones on mindlessly about potential business partners and expanding the conglomerate, as if exploiting their current companies weren’t good enough. Seijuurou listens, but none of his father’s stern words register in his head, and it was silent but too loud, his mind clouded over and deafened by some pseudo white noise in his brain. Someone else— his own voice speaking and clamouring to himself.
Seijuurou closes his eyes. His father does not say anything anymore, and he goes back to his room, silent and mechanical, mismatched eyes sweeping through the bland and impersonal room that was too large, too small, too empty, too suffocating. He goes to search for his assignments, to find that he has completed everything and there is nothing to do. There was always too much to do, so why was today any different?
A wave of fatigue crashes over him, like an ocean— the type that seeps into your bones like seawater through sand, engulfs your entire being until you are forced to pass out, or the kind that is so tiring that you can’t even find the energy to appear tired. So he exhales and lays himself down on the bed that is too large, not even bothering to take off his school uniform and pulls up the blankets, arms and legs laid straight and parallel to his body. Even his sleeping pose is practised. The curtains are open but the night sky is clouded, though Seijuurou doubts it was time to sleep yet.
Dead man’s pose. Corpse on his bed. He watches through eyes that weren’t his, and he wasn’t even sure who he was. Either way, it was them. I am you and you are me. He doesn't move nor closes his eyes, staring blankly up at the ceiling. He does not sleep, but he does not think either.