[fic] nothing i can't have

[rhodochrosite]

nothing i can't have
fandom: prince of tennis
ship: kirihara akaya/tachibana an
rating: general
word count: 2.8k
additional tags: pre-nationals, romantic comedy, [kirihara voice] you should come to rikkaidai

a/n: the original concept was '3 things an gave to kirihara' but now it's just random assortment of things i want my tinhet to do together ie share a slice of cake, go to the arcade, play tennis, wear hairclips, attend the same high school as manager and captain (not appearing in this fic), etc etc

--

An has it all planned out. She’s been turning things over for the past few days, vision to endgame; she hates admitting to fault, but the fact that she’s wronged Kirihara is incontrovertible, and she owes it to him to acknowledge that properly. So she decides on a course of action: she apologises, she buys him a drink as a gesture of her genuine contrition, he accepts, they move on with their lives.

In practice, as with many things involving racquets, it doesn’t work out quite so easily.

It starts off well enough. She marches up to the cafeteria table where Coach Ryuzaki’s team is congregated. “Hi,” she says brightly. “Mind if I borrow Kirihara-kun for a moment?”

The conversation flatlines. Every eye around the table turns to impale Kirihara with its gaze.

Kirihara rises to his feet and stares at An warily. “Me? Why?”

“I want to talk to you about something,” she says, and clamps a hand around his wrist to drag him out of the door before she can catch Ryoma’s clear voice rising over the sudden tumult of chatter in its familiar, knowing taunt.

She brings him to the vending machine in the hallway outside. Restlessly, Kirihara shifts his weight from foot to foot, radiating a steadily increasingly palpable quantity of bewilderment. “What do you usually get?” she asks, feeding two 100-yen coins into the slot.

He shoots her a hunted glance. “Huh? Ponta, I guess.”

An hits the corresponding button. A can rattles out into the slot with a loud clatter, which appears to snap the last of Kirihara’s frazzled nerves. “Look,” he blurts out as she bends down to retrieve the drink, eyeing her hand like he’s suspecting her of concealing some sort of weapon inside, which she’s almost offended by. She has better style than that! “I don’t know why you—”

She pushes the can into Kirihara’s palm, closing his fingers around the cylinder for good measure when it appears that his grip reflexes are failing to kick in. “Sorry for pushing you down the stairs,” she says.

“You didn’t,” Kirihara says.

“I hit you, and then you fell,” An amends. “I wouldn’t say that makes an awful lot of difference.”

Kirihara scowls and tilts his face slightly to the side, averting his gaze. He’s still awkwardly holding the can out in front of his body. “It’s whatever,” he says gruffly, scuffing the tip of his shoe against the ground. “Not like I haven’t gotten worse in a match. Not like I haven’t given worse.”

They both wince. “Still,” An persists. “It was—wrong of me." Kirihara opens his mouth to contest this, so An jumps in first. "Kirihara-kun, will you please just let me apologise to you?”

He casts her a desperate look from under his lashes. “I told you, you don’t have anything to apologise for. I’m the one who—”

“I’m still not completely convinced you’re a good person,” she says bluntly. “But I misjudged you, and I hurt you, and I owe you an apology for that. And I think… you’re trying to become better. I can’t fault you for that.”

"You don't owe me anything," he mutters, but he retracts his hand back towards his body, the can firmly in his grip now. Then he flinches and adds, "Tachibana-san."

Against her better judgement she's—endeared, at the clumsy attempt at courtesy. Someone on his team has probably tried to beat it into him. The Emperor, maybe. It wells up in her, irrepressible; she’s always had a soft spot for tryhards.

It’s easier to forgive Kirihara now that Kippei is out of the hospital, but the fury lies just beneath the surface, its seething shaken-up righteousness ready to come roaring out at the slightest pop. But just as easily conjured up is the image of Kirihara’s grazed and sullen face alone to one side of the cafeteria. That mutinous insistence that he'd injured himself, keeping her name so carefully out of the light. She'd given him no reason to be kind, and yet he'd extended the kindness she hadn’t thought him capable of to her anyway, without expectation of reciprocation or acknowledgement. Like he was simply repaying a debt.

The score isn’t quite settled yet. She thinks she might want a little more from him.

"My name is An," she says. "It's a beautiful name! You should use it."

She’s on her way back from afternoon club practice when she catches sight of none other than Kirihara Akaya skulking around outside the Fudomine school gates like a cartoon villain's henchman, hands jammed into the pockets of his track pants. The attempt at projecting an aura of furtiveness is somewhat undermined by the fact that the Rikkaidai sports uniform is bright yellow.

“Kirihara-kun!” she calls, waving him over.

He reels back like he’s been slapped, then tenses. “An-san,” he says, in a tone reminiscent of dismantling a bomb.

“An-chan,” she corrects. Kirihara flushes an interesting shade of puce. “What are you doing here? Light spot of pre-Nationals snooping?”

“I just slept through my bus stop,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest. “I don’t care about that shit, I'm strong enough to win without it!”

"I'm glad to see you've recovered well," An says. As the words leave her mouth she finds she really means it, more than the simple platitude.

"Obviously! I'm good at everything, healing included."

"But not getting off at the right stop?"

He opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again, like a carp. The resemblance is only bolstered by his yellow tracksuit. He looks so lost, and is clearly trying so hard to appear the opposite. It is taking all of An's self-control not to giggle.

"Well? Come on, then," she says, tipping her head to one side. "I feel like a nice slice of cake."

"But what does that have to do with me," Kirihara says, a little despairingly.

She steps closer, loops her arm through the crook of his elbow, and beams at him. “I'll treat you," she says.

Arm in arm, An leads him to her favourite cafe, a chic sunlit establishment some way off the main road she's been frequenting since she discovered it in first year. It's never too busy, but never deserted, either, a steady trickle of patronage every time she’s there. She orders a slice of chestnut chiffon cake and requests two forks.

She picks a table near the cafe glassfront, sun warm at her back. Kirihara proves a surprisingly—or maybe unsurprisingly—animated conversation partner when he gets started on the right topic, which is naturally tennis. He rambles on and on about Rikkaidai, about the upcoming Nationals, punctuated with heartfelt declarations of his intent to defeat various luminaries of the junior high school tennis circuit. Then, with a casualness so studied An's tennis-player instinct to zero in on gaps in an opponent's defense goes off like a car alarm, he adds, "But, yeah, I guess I could always be better. Even though I'm already so good. I don't like that I have to be—like that. To be strong. You know."

An does know. Sunset in Kumamoto, the hard and distant twist to her brother's mouth. She'd seen firsthand how he'd wrestled his wild fury into a painstakingly collared shape over the past year and all the while never forgot Chitose's unfocused gaze in the hospital and now the memory dovetails: Kippei in the hospital. Kirihara's brittle mouth. She sets her fork down. She hums. “If you aren’t happy with the way you play, you can always just change."

Kirihara swipes through the corner of the cake and shoves the forkful past his lips. “It’s not that easy,” he mumbles.

It hadn't been easy for her brother. It won't be easy for Kirihara. But he hadn't chosen the easy route after all, at the invitationals camp. So An says, "Are you saying you can't win without playing tennis you hate?"

"Of course I—wait. Yeah? No! I can definitely win!"

This isn't your responsibility, An tells herself sternly. Kirihara's development as a tennis player has no bearing on your life. But when she opens her mouth to change the subject, what comes out is, “Did you know you overcompensate when you do your Phantom Ball and end up leaving your left side slightly open?"

“No I don’t,” he says petulantly.

“Yes you do.”

“No I—” He breaks off, focus turning inwards, that familiar process of rigorous self-assessment she’s seen on so many players. It contextualises him in a way that startles her, how neatly he clicks into place in her mental landscape. “Fuck,” he says, dismayed. “I totally do. That must be what Yanagi-senpai meant when he told me to watch my backhands."

“Sure you should be giving away your weaknesses to a rival team like that?” she teases.

Too late she realises she’s set herself up for the obvious insult: you hardly even count as a rival, you could know everything about me and you still wouldn’t be able to beat me in a million years. But it doesn’t seem to occur to him. Instead, all he says is, “You’re good at that. The analysis stuff. How come you aren’t Fudomine’s manager?”

“Because I’m on the girls’ team,” she says. “I can’t be in two clubs at the same time.”

“You’re always at the boys’ matches anyway, I see you around all the time,” Kirihara says. That's almost sweet; An hadn't realised he'd been noticing. “Rikkaidai would let you do both. We could use a manager.”

“Are you trying to scout me?” An says, delighted. “Very brave of you!”

“What!” Kirihara stabs his fork into the remnants of the cake in consternation. The tips of his ears turn the same colour as the single maraschino cherry still on the plate. “That’s not what—I was just saying! Or I mean… Rikkaidai also has a high school. I’m gonna go there when I graduate. It’s a really good high school. For tennis, and… things that aren’t tennis.”

An takes pity on him. “Figure out what you want to ask me first,” she says, reaching over the table to pat his elbow. “Then ask me properly.”

“Please, you should be the one begging me to…” He trails off, evidently having no idea what he’s talking about. Then he frowns at something over her shoulder. “I swear I just saw Yanagi-senpai’s creepy Seigaku dataman rival.”

An sighs, leaning back in her chair. “I think at least two-thirds of the Seigaku and Fudomine tennis clubs are hiding in the bushes outside.”

“What the hell are Seigaku doing here?”

“Well, Momoshiro-kun and I are very good friends,” An says, delicately scooping up the last of the chestnut cream with the edge of her fork. “They’re probably spying on our date,” she adds, just to see Kirihara choke and splutter. “Calm down, Kirihara-kun, I’m just having fun. But I’m not too keen about entertaining gatecrashers. Should we try to shake off our tail?"

Kirihara lights up. “I know a place,” he says.

Kirihara blanches. “Fuck, fuck, we gotta leave,” he hisses, grabbing An’s shoulders and steering her swiftly away from the arcade they’d been approaching. “Marui-senpai and Jackal-senpai are in there—”

“Hey, it's Akaya! You’re looking shifty tod—you brought a girl! Jackal, look, Akaya has a girlf—”

Kirihara breaks into a run, clutching at An’s hand to yank her along. They hurtle down the pavement, back down the street, and stumble to a stop in the shade of a huge cedar. An’s laughing so hard she can barely breathe, has to double over, trying to stop wheezing.

“Don’t laugh at me!” Kirihara says, in an injured voice. Sun through the canopy in runnels of honey over him. “You don’t know what my senpais are like—"

He hasn’t noticed they’re still holding hands, and An isn’t about to spoil the surprise. But she does have to pull her hand free from his grip so she can wipe her eyes and get a handle on her lungs.

“I’m not laughing at you, Kirihara-kun,” she assures him. “It’s just—your face—”

“My face is me!”

An's too busy snickering to respond appropriately to this. Finally, she manages to straighten up again. “Well, I’m not quite ready to call it quits on the day yet,” she says. “Do you know anywhere else we can go?”

Kirihara blinks. “Well… there’s always the tennis court,” he says.

Sooner or later it always comes back to tennis. That’s okay with An. She’s steeped just as deeply in it, after all. She runs a thumb under the strap of her racquet bag. “Lead the way,” she says.

Kirihara wins the racquet spin and they take up their positions on either side of the net. “Don’t you dare go easy on me!” An calls. “I’m very good, you know.”

He points his racquet at her, smirking. “Wasn’t planning to.”

From the length of a court away, she can’t see the colour of his eyes. Her breath catches on old fear, a heart-sized obstruction in her throat, memory superimposed over real-time vision—the red-eyed demon gleefully torturing her brother with shot after shot calibrated precisely to exacerbate his injury. But she’d been watching from outside the fence, then. Facing him down across the net he only looks like a boy.

She didn’t need to warn him. Kirihara Akaya is not the type to ever give less than his all. By the third game he’s brought out his Knuckle Serve, snatching two service aces before she manages to hit a return off the next, right down the line. Playing Kirihara is a challenge, has her dredging up every last drop of technique and power from her body, but she’s giving as good as she gets, driving him backwards with deeper and deeper shots to the baseline. He hits a scorcher of a cross-court that she dives for and misses. Two-all, three-two, three-all. She volleys at a hairpin angle and he can’t get to the net in time. Back and forth, trading off the lead.

It’s unexpectedly fun. And Kirihara looks good like this. Lit up with exertion, a pure and shining joy beaming out from him. He’s grinning, unabashedly, a startling boyish handsomeness revealing itself. The sharp grace underneath the bluster.

In the end An loses 7-5, but it's close; she finds she isn’t too upset about it. “Told you I was good,” she says cheerfully, sticking her hand out across the net.

He clasps it. “I’m still better! Though I guess your forehand isn’t bad. Rikkaidai’s girls’ team is pretty awesome too, you know, if you were wondering—”

“Trying to scout me again! Have you considered becoming a manager? You could be like St Rudolph’s Mizuki-san.”

“Ugh,” Kirihara says emphatically. “Fuck no, he’s so fucking weird.” The blatant hypocrisy of this statement is staggering, but An’s feeling merciful, so she lets it slide.

Kirihara’s hair is a sweaty, curly mess, falling into his eyes. All through the match he’d been absently shoving it out of his face every so often, pointless repetition of an action not leading to a concrete solution. Still, there’s a sort of charm to it, the persistence. The goal held so clearly in mind that all other obstacles to the vision become inconsequential.

“Here,” An says, taking one of her barrettes out and holding it out to him over the top of the net. He stares at it like she’s just offered him a bloody knife blade first, and not a glittery heart-shaped hairclip. “For your hair,” she clarifies. “Your captain uses a cap, right?”

“Vice-Captain,” Kirihara corrects. “Captain Yukimura uses a sweatband.”

“Well, there you go. You clearly need headgear if you want to be captain. You do, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he responds automatically. “I’m gonna stand at the top of the club, I’ll crush anyone who…” He starts, like he’d forgotten who he was speaking to, and snaps his mouth shut.

“Feel free to continue! You’ll crush anyone who…? Though crushing and maiming and such is bad and you shouldn’t do that except metaphorically,” An says. “Anyway, it’s Fudomine’s year next year too. Nearly our entire regular team will be intact. So we’ll be taking Nationals again.”

"Not a chance in hell," Kirihara retorts. "I'm bringing that trophy back to Rikkaidai where it belongs."

An stretches up on her toes to slide the barrette into his hair, pushing his bangs out of his face and clipping them in place. Then she steps back to survey her handiwork and nods to herself in approval.

“You look really cute!” she says.

He blinks at her. He has beautiful eyes. Huge and bright and clear.

“But you’re missing one now,” Kirihara points out. The clip sparkles in the late afternoon sun. “It looks off without both of them in your hair. Fucks up the, like, symmetry or whatever.”

Something fizzes right behind An’s sternum, a sweet and light effervescence.

“You can give that back to me next time,” she says.