Midorino Mizu
Disclaimer: Tennis no Ohjisama and all associated characters are the property of Konomi Takeshi.
AuthorŐs
Notes: My Inui voice was strange
today.
Yanagi Renji had
moved away from Tokyo just before they were to begin junior high, and it had
disrupted all of Inui's plans.
He and Renji,
he'd always thought, would go to the same junior high school. They would join the same club, the
tennis club. And they would always play doubles together. Always. But it hadn't worked out that way. His best friend's father had been transferred to Yokohama,
forty minutes away from central Tokyo, and Renji had moved away.
He hadn't said
goodbye, Inui remembered. One day,
he was just...gone.
Inui knew where
he was, of course. Even a school
with a fading reputation, like Seigaku, heard the rumors about the long-time
Kanto champions, Rikkai Dai Fuzoku.
Even the freshman members of the Seigaku tennis club heard about the
incredibly talented group of freshman at Rikkaidai. And Inui collected data, like other people collected shells
and stuffed animals. He knew more than most. He knew about the frighteningly talented and determined
Sanada Genichirou, the deceptively fragile Yukimura Seiichi, and the polite
Yagyuu Hiroshi.
But he knew the
most about their intelligent data specialist. Yanagi Renji.
Inui gathered
Renji's data almost obsessively; he gathered it with more concentration and
zeal than he had even devoted to Tezuka Kunimitsu. Tezuka might have been Seigaku's future, and one of the shining
stars of junior high tennis. He
might have been the only standard at Seishun Gakuen that Inui could measure
himself against. But Renji
was...Renji. His best friend for
all of elementary school. The boy
he had first played tennis with.
The one who had taught him data tennis.
Renji had been
the first person he had never been able to defeat, so Inui had to know everything about him. He wouldn't accept anything less.
Renji knew
almost everything about him; he knew all the data. It was his job as Rikkaidai's formidable strategist to know
everything about his opponents, and Inui imagined that Renji had more
information on him
than anyone else. They had been
best friends, once. WouldnŐt his
friend have been as curious about him, as he had been about Renji?
But sometimes,
Inui wondered. Did Renji really
know everything there
was to know about Inui Sadaharu?
Did Renji know about the painful mix of regret and pride he felt when he
watched Kaidoh play with Momoshiro? Did he know that Inui always went to the
same place, without fail, when he needed to think about something
seriously? Did he know about the
times when Inui had wondered if he had been too devoted to his data?
Renji couldnŐt
know about the times Inui had wondered if his single-minded devotion to his
science had prevented him from being everything he could be, if it had simply
isolated him, in the end.
Renji simply
couldnŐt know all those things.
And Inui knew that he didn't know everything about Renji, either. He knew there were things about Renji
that would always be a mystery to him.
The little moments, he thought. They were the most important part, in
the end; the small moments were the ones that changed people the most. Inui had missed every last one of those
for three years, and Renji had missed every single one of the moments that
might have changed him. Thousands
of forgotten games of Monopoly, hundreds of impromptu sushi parties, tutoring
Kikumaru in science every single term, just so he could pass. All those seemingly inconsequential
things had been what had, in the end, changed him the most, and Renji had
missed all of those things.
They were
different people now, Inui reflected as he stared across the court at his
former best friend. They were
almost strangers.
He missed his
best friend, he thought. He missed
the people they used to be, and he knew he would never get those people
back. They were just ghosts in his
memory.
But maybe, he
thought, he could win this game.
He could end thisÉthis thing
that had been a block between them for too many years now. And maybe then, they could move on, be
friends again. Their first
friendship was lost now Đ but maybe a second one was waiting for them.
Inui tossed the
tennis ball in the air and leaned back to serve. He could only believe in that, he thought. Just as he could only believe in his
data, because for all the facts he had logged in his journals over the course
of three years, in the end, he could only believe.
Renji, he
remembered, had always told him he was an optimist.