Archive of Our Own

It wasn't often that middle school student Takekura Gen got to feel like a hero.

Maybe that was why, when the chance came, he seized it.

He'd gone to the American army base expecting just a routine job, patching the hole those soldiers were complaining about in their chain-link fence. He hadn't expected said hole to have a kid stuck in it. That kid, when grasped by the waist and forcibly yanked out, turned out to be Kurita Ryoukan, of the class next door. Kurita was big enough to physically get in the way of the repairs if he wanted, but instead he just stood by weeping as Gen got to work.

"This place means so much to my friend," he said between sniffles. It was the same thing he'd explained several times now, but rather than getting inured to it, Gen found it twisting at his heart the same way he was twisting the new wires into place. "He'd be so sad if he couldn't come through here and have fun anymore."

That wasn't Gen's problem, but that didn't make it any easier to listen to.

He worked faster.

The more Kurita drizzled on him, the more frantically the hole shrunk. It ended up being the speediest repair job he'd ever completed, and he was sweating by the time he closed his toolbox and muttered, "It's done."

At least it was tidy work, even if he'd been rushing through the end. He hooked a couple links with his fingers and gave them a good, solid rattle. Nothing would be getting through here.

Then Kurita gave another soggy sniffle, and that was that. Gen's leg moved on its own. Up like a shot, and before he knew it, he'd sunk a brand new hole into the fence he'd just fixed. What a massively dumb thing to do, but the feel of his boot sinking through metal was almost as satisfying as the look of wonder dawning over Kurita's face, like sun peering through rainclouds.

"My job here is done," Gen explained. "But if the fence gets broken again afterwards, that's nothing to do with me."

Yep, that sounded cool. Gen was a hero.

That was when a face appeared in the new gap, elfen and sly. Abruptly, Gen felt like he'd kicked a hole in his own gut instead. "Don't tell me... your friend is..."

"Look, Hiruma!" Kurita chirped happily, moving forward to help the other boy climb through. "He opened it back up for you! You won't lose your special spot after all."

But Hiruma wasn't looking at his so-called friend—if the feeling was even mutual. He first stared at Gen, and then slanted his gaze up toward the security camera nearby, a look that conveyed question and amusement and calculation all at once. It was an extremely eloquent gaze.

"No one checks that footage anyhow," Gen said, with a confidence that belied his deep, instant regret. If he'd known it was Hiruma that Kurita was talking about, he wouldn't have intervened, that was for sure. Gen was the kind of kid that kept his head down at school until the bell rang and it was time to get to work—but you didn't have to have your finger on the pulse to hear all sorts of nasty rumors about Hiruma.

Blackmail. Manipulation. Schemes.

He had the sinking sensation he was about to get tangled up in these schemes.

Instead, Hiruma just smiled with all his teeth. "See you in school," was all he said.

Gen escaped unscathed from the army base, but there was no escaping Hiruma at school. Everywhere he went, every time he turned, there was Hiruma waiting to badger him. Gen would march away mid-sentence, round the corner, only for Hiruma to drop down from the ceiling somehow and pick up the conversation like he'd never left off. It took a week of this before Gen was finally forced to listen long enough to understand what Hiruma was after.

He wanted Gen to join the football team.

Gen hadn't even known they had a football team.

Come to think of it, there was a teacher who'd been interested in coaching one, a certain Sakaki-sensei, but he'd been fired. No coach, no team. Gen yelled as much at the flyers that poured out of his locker, at the footballs that rolled innocently past his feet at random times, nearly tripping him. Flyers and footballs both ignored his protests, as did Hiruma, who only intensified his pestering.

If it had been Kurita asking, Gen might have humored him, maybe dropped by a few games when work was less busy. With Hiruma involved, any sane person knew to stay far, far away.

Besides, the family business didn't leave him with much free time. Takekura Construction did some work for the school, and since Gen was enrolled, it fell to him to run point on those jobs, donning his work clothes after class, or dropping off paperwork before.

One morning, Gen stopped by the school office to pick up some signed contracts. It had been a quiet day so far: no surprises at his locker, no pointy-eared fiend waiting to ambush him on the stairwell, and the office was likewise deserted of any staff.

Strange.

About to leave, Gen stopped short at the sound of a faint, ragged... sob? It sounded like a grown man, and he pinpointed the source to the principal's office, its door left slightly ajar.

"Where did you even get these?" came a thin voice from within, wavering like a weak board on the verge of cracking. Gen put his eye to the gap, and saw the back of a familiar blond head. Hiruma was lounged upon the principal's desk, utterly casual, waving a photo between two slender fingers.

The principal was sat facing Gen but couldn't see him, because he had his face buried in his hands. "No one can know," he said into his fingers, voice muffled and hoarse. "What do you want? Just tell me."

Gen left without the contracts.

Sakaki-sensei had a welcome-back party the very next morning, and was back to coaching in the afternoon.

This was exactly why Gen had never wanted to get involved with Hiruma.

Maybe Kurita really loved football. But all this—the photos, the sobbing—that was Hiruma's real sport.

And Hiruma always aimed to win.

After school, Gen went straight to work. Their current job was a multi-story building, a long-term contract that merited an office on-site. That was where all their important documents would be kept. His dad insisted on doing all the books personally, but Gen was fifteen already, and it was about time he picked this stuff up too, took some of the load off his old man. Now he was glad he'd already started to get his feet wet. He'd be able to tell if anything didn't add up, and get ahead of it before a certain someone could add it to his bristling blackmail book.

But as he pored through the numbers, Gen couldn't find any sort of pattern in their files. The pages were densely packed, each line alternating ink color, depth of pressure, steadiness of stroke. The one thing that never changed was that rough-hewn handwriting, a carpenter's scrawl, as familiar to Gen from purchase orders as birthday cards and notes on the fridge.

This entire place would fall apart without his father, no doubt about it. The man had built the company from the ground up, and never taken a vacation in his life, as far back as Gen could remember. Every single day, he was here on site, directing the workers, making calls, the beating heart that kept the rest of the business going.

Hiruma wasn't always direct about what he wanted. To get Sakaki, he had gone after the principal. What if, to get Gen, he went after his dad?

At school, Hiruma got away with murder, but out here was a different story. If that boy dared threaten Gen's father over a damn game—

A commotion outside pulled Gen from his dark thoughts, and then quickly from the dark office in turn. The construction site was one of their larger ones, marked off by chain-link from the rest of the street. It now looked much smaller with Kurita's giant form wobbling through, one enormous load of concrete mix over each shoulder.

Gen watched, gaping, as Hiruma followed after, cackling some instruction or encouragement.

"You can't be here!" Gen rushed out towards them. "And we have dollies for that, don't carry—"

"We're gonna speed up this whole operation," Hiruma claimed, picking up a random length of cast-off rebar. He was lucky the other workers were looking on with amusement, or he would have been punted out on his ass already. "Then you'll have more free time than you know what to do with. You'll play football with us."

Still with the football? Gen went through about twenty emotions in five seconds, before landing on resolve. He snatched the steel rod out of Hiruma's hands, considered whacking him with it, and settled for giving him the cold shoulder.

The best way to deal with these two was to ignore them until they went away.

It was a fine idea, which lasted for all of about five minutes.

Hiruma had always had a way of making himself impossible to ignore. Prancing across the construction site, putting himself in danger, he was a nuisance at best, a walking liability at worst.

Finally, as Hiruma set upon some partially-constructed frame and attempted to hammer... something, Gen snagged him by the back of the shirt and dragged him off to the perimeter. To his surprise, Hiruma came along with a boneless lack of resistance, like a cat.

"Will you stop messing around?" Gen demanded, when they'd reached the fence.

Hiruma lifted the hammer, and an eyebrow, and gave him an innocent look. "This isn't as easy as you make it look."

"Give me that! And no, that's not what I meant. I'm sure you already got a whole page on me in that blackmail book of yours, so why drag it out? Just lay it on me."

"That's where you're wrong." Hiruma leaned back easily against the fence, fingers threading through the chain-link, and Gen froze. He remembered another chain-link fence, kicking through it when he'd been the one called out to fix it... and the camera aimed right down at him, the one he'd been convinced no one would bother to check.

No one but Hiruma.

He'd been searching the accounts for something his dad might have done wrong, some corner cut, some deal under the table. But it was his own actions that would spell the company's doom.

He could see Hiruma knew that he knew, because those teeth came out— parted in a grin— and Hiruma said—

"I couldn't find a single bit of dirt on you. You're squeaky clean. Why else do you think we're out here doing all this?"

Hiruma released the fence with a clatter, and waved his hand over the construction site.

"How hard can it be to put up a house, huh? Me and the fatty will have it done in a jiff, and then you'll be crying for something to occupy yourself. You'll see."

Still stunned, Gen stood there like a gaping fool, while his heart rattled around in his chest, just as wildly as the still-springing fence.

Beaming, Hiruma plucked the hammer back from his slack grip and sauntered off.

Gen only barely managed to call after him, "We're not building a house!"

There are only so many calls that will pull you out of class during exam week. Before Gen even got to the principal's office, he already knew his life was about to alter course. That was how he received the news so calmly. His father had collapsed at a job site, and had been taken to the hospital.

Gen quit school that week, and went to work full time. That was just what a man did.

He should have known one person wouldn't let him go.

"It isn't just football, you know." Hiruma was waiting for him outside the hospital one night, leaned against the wall so long he'd practically become a fixture there, like a gargoyle.

With the stress of running the company, all the workers depending on him to keep a paycheck in their pockets, and his father being the single most recalcitrant patient in history—Gen didn't have the energy to deal with this. He lit up a cigarette, and Hiruma sneered at it, as if it proved his point. "You're throwing your whole life away."

"If you don't already understand, there's no point explaining it to you." Gen took another drag of his cigarette—and then choked on it.

A slim black book had appeared in Hiruma's hand.

Gen reacted to it like he'd react to a poisonous snake. Instantly, he slammed Hiruma against the wall, smoke sluicing between them as he fought to pin Hiruma's arm in place. He'd seen that book bite too many others to fall victim to it too.

"I need you to promise me something. Listen, Hiruma," he snarled, when Hiruma tried to squirm free. "Promise you won't interfere with my decision, no matter what. When you get tired of losing, don't come after me. When they're trying to cut the club because you don't have enough members, don't you dare try to get me back with your... this."

"You think I'd do something like that?" Hiruma elbowed himself some room to disappear the book with a flick of his wrist, like a magic trick. "Anyway, Anezaki will keep your student registration open, you know her, so—"

Gen knew an evasion when he heard one. With a furious jab, he dashed out his cigarette against the wall, centimeters from Hiruma's face.

Hiruma's eyes darted over at the hiss-scratch, then narrowed to slits. Finally, he was listening.

"Promise me," Gen insisted, staring into Hiruma's face until it closed off.

"Fine," Hiruma spat. "I promise."

And then the impossible happened.

He left Gen alone.

Being back on school grounds wasn't so hard anymore, now that the business had stabilized, and his father's health had too, more or less. It was strange, though, working on the wrong side of the windows from his former classmates and teachers. Sometimes he suspected that Hiruma hired his company just for this: a taunting reminder of what school was like, what his life might have been like. But Hiruma had never suggested that he re-enroll, never so much as left a football out for him to kick, and eventually Gen had lost some of his wariness, and relaxed into the simple satisfaction of his work.

Of course, that was when his old nickname started appearing on the team newbies' lips.

They made students smaller these days than he remembered. More dogged, too, in their curiosity. From what he gathered, they had found his old kickstand, one thing led to another, and now they were convinced that if they could only find out who this "Musashi" was, and bring him back to the team, they'd have an actual shot at winning.

While the two freshmen ran themselves ragged looking for him, Gen paused for a smoke break right outside their clubhouse, and mused how strange life was.

"You're not going to tell them?" he said, when Hiruma appeared. "That the kicker they've been searching for has been underneath their noses this whole time?"

Hiruma gave him a flat look. "That would be interfering, wouldn't it?"

It took a minute for the meaning to sink in, another for Gen to pick his jaw up off the floor. After all this time, Hiruma was keeping a promise that had been all but forced out of him?

The Hiruma who'd go to any lengths to win? The Hiruma whose blackmail book had only swelled in volume in the years since?

That Hiruma?

"Don't look so shocked," Hiruma shrugged. "Who's to say I didn't leave your stand out on purpose? A little bit of mystery is like catnip for those fucking shrimps, they're so simpleminded."

"Guess I'm safe from them then." Gen took another pull of his cigarette, and exhaled upwards, blotting out a patch of blue sky. "I didn't think you had it in you, to hold yourself back."

Hiruma snorted. "They're going to get you either way. Fucking shrimps are tenacious as hell. And when they drag you back here, you better not still be hacking and coughing on those cigarettes. Bad enough you look like an old geezer, I won't have you wheezing like one too."

"Really, Hiruma. You've got kids on your team who smoke too. Those three delinquents, I've seen them."

"I mean it, you better quit now."

"Or what?"

Like a magic trick in reverse, three years in the making, Hiruma's blackmail book appeared in his palm. "I only promised not to make you come back to the team, doesn't mean other things aren't still on the table. I've had plenty of time to collect more material on you, you old man. Want to bet you're still as squeaky clean as you were back then?"

"Back then" hit Gen like a flashback. Those early days, when he'd been so convinced that Hiruma was preparing to blackmail him at any moment, just itching for the chance to strike.

Now that it was finally happening, he had to wonder what he'd ever been so afraid of.

"What are you chuckling about?" Hiruma scowled, and made a big show of rifling through the pages.

"Put that away before you give yourself a papercut, I've been meaning to quit anyway." Gen tossed his butt to the ground, snuffed it under his heel. "You know what, I'll even go have a word with those delinquents of yours, see if I can't knock some sense into them too."

Hiruma stopped mid-flip, to give him a suspicious look. "You will, will you?"

"You bet." Gen waved away some of the lingering smoke, and took in a breath of fresh air. "You guys got a good chance this year. Be a real shame to waste it."