Unfinished fic: Akira has a secret career

[type_wild]

Happy Hikago day! IIRC, the below is one of the first Hikago fic I ever wrote (well, started writing). I don't imagine I'll come up with an interesting ending to ever, but reading through this a decade and half later, I personally think the idea is pretty cute.

It starts out innocently enough, with story fragments that refuse to be surpressed and forgotten and drive him out of bed at questionable hours of the morning. When it becomes clear that the midnight typing isn't going to stop anytime soon, it's time for a prolonged vacation.

Returning the third time, he feels oddly like he is coming home to his family after he has spent a week with his secretary. Guilt is not quite the word, because he knows that he doesn't owe anybody anything, but there is certainly the feeling of skirting his duties, and a more diffuse notion that he somehow is letting the entire Go community down by speeding down his carrier.

"You are going to the optician."

"Nice to see you, too," Shindou says and squints at the luggage claim.

"You didn't recognize me from eight meters away."

"You sound like Akari."

"You are driving."

"If you can't let nature take its course, you should at least consider a haircut that doesn't require to be parted that crisply. Your roots are showing."

"I'm serious, Hikaru," he starts, "traffic hazards - "

"Matsuoka called the other day," Shindou interrupts and hands him an envelope, "I think it was important, but he wouldn't come out and say it."

Important is not the word Akira himself likes to apply to any business he does through Matsuoka, but there has been a steadily increasing interest in the media before he left the country, and he was not sure he actually approved of that. Recognizing that the letter had nothing to do with his official career, he put it into one of the side pockets of his laptop carrier as Shindou glanced at the luggage claim once more and lunged after a suitcase that thankfully was Akira's, not not just one that looked vaguely like it.

"Is there anything else new?" he asked as they made their way out of the main terminal, him with the laptop and Shindou with the suitcase that he demostratively did not pull, but carry.

"Hideko's got a boyfriend."

"That's nice for her."

"He's an insei."

"Isn't that even better?"

"He studies under Ochi."

"I feel sorry for Hideko-chan, then."

"You're doing the Akari thing again," Shindou warned.

"I would have hoped that Akari-san could have talked some sense into the two of you about this by now," Akira said, and let Shindou a few steps in front of him.

"Well, it's just wrong, okay? Hideko going out with one of Ochi's students, that's like... like - " Shindou had turned around to scowl, but cut himself up before the rest came, "like if Saeki-san were going out with Ashiwara-san," he finally muttered.

"I'm not sure I see the connection between two teenagers dating each other, or two married men with children doing the same," Akira said dryly, and Hikaru dropped the suitcase by his car a little less carefully than neccesary without replying.

"I meant - oh, forget it."

"I'll be happy to. And that aside, how is she doing?"

"Oh, great. At the rate she's going, she'll make 2 dan in no time. She beat Nakada-kun in the Gosei prelimenaries last week."

Discussing Hideko-chan's promising record continuing was less likely to end in prolonged arguments than discussing Hideko-chan involving herself in the long-standing and pathetically one-sided rivalry Waya-san at some point had declared, and Shindou enthusiastically supported, against anybody associated with Kosuke Ochi. It kept them occupied long enough to localize the car and get it out of the parking lot, at which point Shindou focused his attention on squinting out of the windshield and Akira made a mental note to call the optician himself.

With the company at hand busy keeping the car on the road, Akira pulled out the letter he had been handed earlier.

"Oh, God," he said when he was halfway down the page.

"What?"

"Rainstorm won the Yuko Wajima Award."





It's kind of cool, Shindou had said at one point, Go champion at day, novelist by night!

It's not, Akira had replied, because it wasn't.

"I'm really sorry, Matsuoka-san, but I cannot accept it in person. Please give the foundation my deepest apologies."

Matsuoka made an unsatisfied noise. "Touya-sensei," he finally said, "I realized that you are a public person, but I cannot imagine how it could affect your carrier - "

"Matsuoka-san, I am a Go player. My primary reason for writing is not a wish for recognition nor money, and I have no desire to draw any attention to my person other than that connected to my carrier. I'm sorry, but I have no intentions of connecting my name to the literary merits of Takashi Kasai."

Matsuoka, who usually was friendler than this, sighed deeply once more and started tapping his pen against the manuscript in front of him. "We have gotten several requests for interviews - there have been a number of favorable reviews, and the book is selling surprisingly well."

"I'm sorry," Akira said again, because if there was anything he had been good at, it was to keeping to his policies, "I write because there are things that demand to be written, Matsuoka-san, not to make art or to discuss the greater questions of the universe."

"I think your work suggests otherwise," Matsuoka said with a wry smile, and Akira found himself smiling back, despite the uncomfortable conversation.

"I don't think I would have much to contribute with in whatever sort of analysis people wish to make out of the things I do. I'm sure that if I keep refusing long enough, they will understand my wish for privacy."

Matsuoka shook his head, and flipped the manuscript open. "You are a strange one, Touya-sensei."

"I like to keep my priorities clear," was all Akira said to that, and was still smiling as he got up and left.

He never mentioned to Matsuoka that he felt oddly guilty every time he came back to Japan - as though he was returning to his family after spending a week with his mistress. He didn't owe anybody anything and he knew that very well, but the theoretical knowledge did not soothe the feeling of skirting his duties, or something much more hazy about letting the entire Go community down by slowing down his carrier. Matsuoka probably wouldn't sympathize much, anyway; the man didn't know how to play Go and had only been vaguely aware of the professional community. He had never quite believed Akira when he tried to explain that he didn't write because he particularly wanted to, and nodded without looking any more convinced when Akira told him that the thing that mattered was his career, and not the stories.

"You better well should be," was what Shindou had said to that guilt, "seing that you've missed the prelimenaries to just about every major league except for your own titles because of it."

But Akira had long since realized what his father once had, and he didn't particularly mind stepping back for a little while.





Fraternization policies aside, Hideko-chan seemed to be a very lucky girl as far as first boyfriends went.

"Is that the infamous Kawamura-kun?" he asks after the boy has made his fifth attempt at leaving, and finally succeeds at walking away without turning back. Hideko-chan smiles the way only an infatuated sixteen-year old can.

"News travel fast these days, don't they?"

"Shindou is not impressed with his choice of teacher, and I had to listen to that when he picked me up at Narita."

"Hikaru-san can put a sock in it," Hideko-chan says darkly, "as can my father. Their 'rivalry' with Ochi-sensei has got to be the most pathetic attempt at a turf war the Go community has ever seen. Especially Hikaru-san - I just don't know why he even bothers, it's not like Ochi-sensei even has beaten him all that often."

"Is he good?"

The silence before she replied spoke more than her answer did. "I don't know," she said reluctantly, looking just beside his head, "he's been an insei for a few years now, but he's never really been among the best. He's really sweet, though."

"I thought that," Akira said, also smiling now, because unlike Shindou and Waya-san, he did not harbor any particular prejudices towards neither Ochi 9-dan nor his students, and the way the infamous Kawamura had been looking at Hideko-chan as he left certainly hadn't seemed to suggest that he was trying to infiltrate the enemy.

She caught him staring at the flowers, and lifted them a little in her arms. "It's been two months, today."

"Really? I would have thought your father had chased him off much sooner."

"My father," Hideko-chan said as her mouth twisted into a sour grimace, "has no say in who I wish to go out with. I have never heard of a more ridiculous grudge in my life. Do you know what it is about?"

"If Shindou is to be believed, Ochi is an 'underdeveloped freak', but that was some years ago."

Hideko-chan snorts.

"Anyway, it's not like we had a date or anything. I had a game earlier, and he dropped by to give them to me after school."

And that was the moment it hit him that Hideko-chan wasn't a little girl any longer, that his roots really were showing and that there was a reason why Shindou's eyesight had been declining so steadily for the last couple of years.

"Well," Hideko-chan said with a little sigh, "it's nice, at any rate. Not having to compete with him, I mean. Isn't that weird?"

"What is?" Akira asked, not quite over the fact that Hideko-chan at some point had grown taller than Akari-san.

"Playing against Hikaru-san," she clarified, "I mean, you live together and all - isn't it awkward to play against him? In official games?"

"Not particularly. I play against him all the time - I guess I'm just so used to it that it doesn't matter where we play, as long as we do it."

Hideko-chan blinked at that. "Wow," she finally said, "you two really are just like an old married couple."

If she had anything more to contribute with to that, that was interrupted by her mother calling and demanding that she came home for dinner; and that might have been just as well, because much as Akira might have accepted that he was going gray and that competition didn't matter as much to him as it once used to, he had not realized that Shindou actually had become his second half.




"Don't give me that look," Shindou groused, "you know I'm not good with presents."

"Thank you," Akira said, accepting the flowers, "I guess. What's the occasion?"

"Didn't you tell me this morning that you've won some sort of award? I figured that you at least deserve somebody else than that pushy twit over at the publishing house congratulating you," Shindou said with an eyeroll and went to sit at the kitchen table. Akira followed to dig the one flower vase in the house out of the cupboard.

"What did Matsuoka say?"

"They're announcing it next week, and then there's an official ceremony a month later. He wanted me to go in person."

"He just doesn't give up, does he?"

"Do you think I should go public?"

Shindou looked at him in surprise, and Akira held his eyes as he put the vase down on the table and sat down opposit of him.




"I guess it's not entirely unexpected," Shindou said later, as Akira was unpacking.

"How so?"

"You know how there was a really long review in the paper?"

"Yes?"

Shindou tossed a folded-up newspaper onto the bed beside the suitcase and pointed to one of the more tabloid parts of the culture section.

"Oh, God," Akira said again.

"Third week on the list, and number fifteen already. I'm not going to say that I follow these things religiously or anything, but I'd say that that's pretty good."

"This is insane," Akira said, staring wearily at the paper.

"Yeah, let's hope they won't demand that you come pick it up in person."

"I already talked to Matsuoka about that. I'm guessing he's the one who will be going in my place."

"Yeah, and that way, you can feed the rumors about your eccentric avoidance of society. You know, I'm starting to think that I should just announce your identity once and for all - that way, people won't have to theorize about what's wrong enough with your health to have you leave for Korea for weeks at a time."

"They think it's because of my health?"

"Well, Waya thinks you have a wife and five children in Busan, but nobody believes him."

"You know, if you are going to take everything that Waya-san says as a challenge to your masculinity..."

"I'm just point out that people are talking."