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rhodochrosite) wrote2021-02-18 03:07 pm
rhodochrosite) wrote2021-02-18 03:07 pm
[fic] with the door wide open no one can leave
with the door wide open no one can leave
fandom: prince of tennis
ship: niou/marui, unrequited marui->yukimura (r63)
rating: g
word count: 2.5k
this fic is about my conspiracy theory that yukimura rigged the nats finals lineup to ensure 2 losses and 2 wins before yuki's grand return to the circuit at s1, with everyone who lost at kanto finals getting to win at nats and vice versa... 3byuki are truly an endless source of rotational terror. background 2882 and yukiniou seeding also
--
It takes Niou two days, which is the longest anyone’s ever managed to pull the wool over her eyes, but then she’s never quite figured out the trick to Yukimura. It’s not much of a consolation that Yukimura, in turn, hasn’t quite figured out the trick to Niou; not even Yagyuu has. The oversight rests on her own shoulders—now there’s something else Yukimura’s got her doing that she never thought she would: taking responsibility. The thing is, Niou is supposed to be an expert at pattern-finding. That’s what makes her so good at what she does. So one day, fine, she can be generous with herself, chalk it up to the shock of Yukimura’s loss, Rikkaidai’s loss. Violation of a law of nature and all that; takes time to process. But any longer and it’s a scathing indictment of her observational skills.
Obscuring factor #1: Niou’d done doubles at Kanto and singles at Nationals, and she compartmentalises her record by match type. Of course, Yukimura, being a near-exclusive singles player, does no such thing, which is something Niou should have taken into account. She keeps forgetting the boundaries between the self and the not-self, lately. Too much time spent in other people’s skins and she’s starting to believe everyone thinks the same way she does.
Obscuring factor #2: Yukimura had directly asked for their cooperation in the semifinals strategy she’d outlined to engineer Kirihara’s trial by fire. Immediately Yagyuu, ever the lady, and Marui, who would never miss a chance to jump off a cliff for Yukimura’s sake, had volunteered to throw their matches (Me too?! Jackal had exclaimed, longsuffering, but even if Jackal was not overly desperate to jump off a cliff for Yukimura she was plenty willing to do so for Kirihara. In the instant before Yagyuu and Marui’s hands shot up Niou had even contemplated volunteering herself, just for fun, but she wasn’t upset the matter had been decided without her). There’s certainly no shortage of insane fanatics on the team clamouring to die first in the firing line of Yukimura’s will; why wouldn’t she ask again?
So two days after the end of the world, Niou is alone in her room when the pattern clicks. She puts down her pencil. Picks it up again. She scribbles out the Kanto and Nationals finals lineups along the margin of her geometry homework, just to be sure, though she knows already there is no error in her understanding. The distribution of wins and losses on paper is exactly as it had been in her mind. She taps the end of her pencil against her desk, then swivels around in her chair to toss the pencil at the dartboard hanging on the back of her door. It bounces uselessly off bullseye and clatters to the floor—
—Niou catches a stray tennis ball attempting jailbreak and lobs it back into its crate. Morning in the club storeroom. She’s rostered for taking inventory with Marui today. “One hundred and fifty in this last one. We seriously need to get a manager.” Niou takes a precarious seat on the edge of the nearest crate. “Yo, Marui. Did you notice what Yukimura did with the lineup for the Nationals finals?
Marui finishes signing off the storeroom records and sinks down on the ground by the crates, heedless of the dust staining her skirt. “Huh? Seika-chan did something?”
“Didn’t anything about the lineup look off to you? Me in Singles Two, you in Doubles One…”
“Don’t be jealous just ‘cause me and Jackal scored Doubles One.”
Niou clicks her tongue. “Come on, Marui, you aren’t this stupid. Think! I don’t give a fuck what slot I play in, but you know what the Yagyuu-Niou pair win percentage is? One hundred. Remember the Kanto finals lineup?”
Marui is one of the best gamemakers on the best team in the country. Niou sees the shattering moment in her eyes, her brain racing along pathways she’s tried to blind herself towards, sieving out the logical conclusions. Is that what Niou’d looked like in her room last night, too? There had been no witnesses then but herself.
“No,” Marui says blankly.
“Yes,” Niou says. “She did. She wanted you to lose. Both of us.”
“But I could have won,” Marui says. Slow. That same blankness to her voice. She is very still. “We could have won for her.”
“Well, she didn’t want you to,” Niou says, a little more viciously than she’d intended. It’s too easy to be cruel to Marui, she can’t help it. “We already had our turns at Kanto. So the losers got to win, and the winners got to lose.” Niou spreads her hands. “It’s only equality.”
The Child of God, in her infinite benevolence, extending a chance for redemption to Sanada, to Yanagi, to Kirihara. And the flipside: her closed fist pulping the rest of them, a necessary sacrifice for her grand rebirth. How perfectly she’d orchestrated it. An exact inversion of their Kanto results. Yukimura has always been the furthest-seeing one of them all.
Marui puts her hands to her face. Her shoulders tremble, but her voice, when it comes, is low and steady. “We failed her,” she says. “Of course she couldn’t trust us to win after that.”
“We didn’t fail her,” Niou corrects. “We won our matches, remember?”
But she knows Marui will always consider herself as having failed Yukimura for the simple fact that Yukimura lost six months of her life to a hospital ward while Marui had not. And what had their reward been, for winning, for not failing Yukimura where the others had? Between semifinals and finals Niou had barely slept, replaying the footage of the semifinals match between Shiraishi and Fuji over and over on her phone until her eyes blurred and when she blinked to resolve her vision, her right forearm swathed itself in bandages. Shiraishi’s racquet grip, Shiraishi’s footwork, Shiraishi’s meticulous focus, pulled close around her like a shroud; during that deliriously endless insomnia there were moments she thought she might suffocate to death.
And all along Yukimura had intended failure for her. It stung, even though she got it, she really did. How do you begrudge your newly resurrected captain fresh from the clutches of death one moment of selfishness? Niou wanted to win mainly for herself, yes, but she’d wanted to win for Yukimura, too. Hard not to crave the open flame of Yukimura’s regard, the way she smiled, warm and quiet, like your victory was her own. Maybe Niou hadn’t truly believed Yukimura capable of that kind of callous calculation, her personal victory at the expense of her own team. Mistake after mistake after mistake.
Marui drops her hands. An unsteady shine to her eyes; she’s close to tears. It won’t take much more. “Who else knows?”
Niou shrugs. “Yanagi should, but she’s worse than you. Yagyuu might know, I haven’t asked her yet. Not like she’d care. Everyone else… well, do I even have to say it?” She stretches her legs out in front of her. “But really, Yukimura should be selfish more often. It’s good for her. Nobody should be so—like that—all the time.”
“But I would have lost for her too! If she just asked me like she did at semis—why wouldn’t she ask, I don’t get it—”
“You know,” Niou says. “I think she was trying to be kind.”
Amazingly enough, this is what finally does Marui in. Her face crumples, shoulders hunching. The tears well up and spill over. It’s more or less what Niou had been aiming for, but now that she has it, it isn’t what she’d wanted at all. She doesn’t want to hurt Marui, except that she does, and she has. She slides off the crate, kneeling in front of Marui, and plucks one of Yagyuu’s embroidered handkerchiefs out of Marui’s pocket, stupid sleight of hand, maybe it’ll cheer Marui a little. While Marui blows her nose and subsides into sniffles, Niou says, “You realise she’s never going to love you back, right? Or at least not as much as you love her. She just isn’t wired like that.”
Yukimura’s love is an impersonal thing, scalar and directionless. It’s something that can’t help its intrinsic nature, the crushing water pressure at the bottom of the ocean, but still you find yourself diving lower and lower, trying to reach the source, the pearl within the razor-edged oyster. Marui will kill herself trying to bear the weight. Niou, by now, knows better. Should know better. Semantics, whatever.
“I don’t need her to,” Marui says thickly. “I never needed her to. I only—I just wanted to be there. I wish she—” She breaks off, crushing Yagyuu’s handkerchief into a ball.
“So noble,” Niou says.
Marui’s mouth creaks upwards. “That’s what love’s supposed to be like, isn’t it?”
What does Niou know about love? Singles Two against Fuji, sweat plastering her jersey to her back. She’d squinted past the haze of Illusion and the sun-glare to Yukimura on the bench, the steel trap of Yukimura's game face giving nothing away. And then, a little beyond Yukimura, Yagyuu seated in the stands with her hands folded primly in her lap. It was too far to tell for sure what expression Yagyuu was wearing; Niou could guess, but she wanted the reassurance of absolute certainty. She felt like she was moving through honey. Her left elbow had the blown-out deadened feeling of anaesthesia, a pain staved off. Briefly, childishly, she wished Yukimura's mouth would relax into a smile. She was no Kirihara, but in that moment she probably would have cut off a limb for a visible sliver of Yukimura’s approval.
It’s funny. Niou’d been a singles player before she brought Yagyuu into the fold, but in the intervening period she’d forgotten how lonely it was, being the only person on your side of the court. What was it that she’d told Yagyuu, back then? The court seemed so small but when you were out there it felt vaster than even the sky. Even the distance from the baseline to the net, barely a handspan when you were looking down from the stands, could be insurmountable. That freezing flash of blue as Fuji said I never lose to the same opponent twice. The noose of Yukimura’s kindness pulling tight around her neck. And Yagyuu—
Afternoon practice had not been cancelled the day after finals, because they were Rikkaidai, still, even after the unthinkable had come to pass. Actually Niou had been planning to skip but habit tripped her up; on autopilot she’d made her way to the locker room after school and was halfway through changing before she remembered her intentions, and by that point Sanada had also arrived and the trouble of sneaking away after that was simply not worth the payoff.
Still seated on the bench, Yagyuu caught Niou’s wrist as Niou brushed past her on the way out of the locker room, arresting her forward motion. Oh? Niou-kun, I don’t think these nails are in line with uniform regulations.
Niou scowled and tried to stab her manicure into the back of Yagyuu’s hand. They’re green, I’m showing school pride, shouldn’t you be happy? Disappointingly, she didn’t have enough wrist flexibility to get her nails to make contact with Yagyuu’s skin. Maybe she should have studied up on Hyotei’s Akutagawa instead of Seigaku’s Kikumaru after all, if she were going to bother with a non-Marui serve-and-volleyer Illusion, but the heart wanted what it wanted.
Yagyuu still hadn’t let go of her wrist. Her grip wasn’t painful, but it was firm enough to hold Niou in place. There was an unsettling gleam in her eyes, or perhaps only a trick of the light refracted through her glasses.
Tell me something. When you were watching me play, up there in the stands, Niou said. What were you thinking?
I was hoping for your victory, of course, Yagyuu said.
Not an answer! Niou said.
What would you like me to say?
I don’t fucking know, Niou said. That’s why I’m asking. I’m—would you have done it differently? If it were you?
The lenses flashed as Yagyuu tilted her head. But I am not you, Niou-kun, she said. It would hardly be productive to speculate.
Niou wrenched her wrist free. Her skin prickled, a sensation halfway to how the mantle of Illusion felt settling over her, but she was only herself, and Yagyuu was only Yagyuu, and they had been inside each other’s skins but they were not touching anymore, though Yagyuu was barely a hand’s breadth away. Suddenly Niou ached with incompleteness. One more person on her side of the court; it was all she wanted.
“Marui,” Niou says. “You have a really fucked up idea of love.”
A choking noise that could pass as a laugh. “We’re Rikkaidai,” Marui says. “We kinda have a fucked up everything.”
“Didn’t know you knew it too.” A few strands of Marui’s hair have come loose from her braid, sticking to her wet and flushed cheeks. Niou reaches forward to brush them free, tuck them back behind Marui’s ear. “Your crying face is so ugly,” she says gently.
Marui swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Fuck you, no it’s not,” she says, almost like normal, but then Marui has to go and ruin everything by flashing Niou a wobbly smile, pressing her palm to Niou’s cheek, and saying, “Why’s it so hard for you to admit she hurt you too?”
Before she can stifle the reflexive response, Niou tenses. “That’s not—”
“It’s alright,” Marui says. Soothing. All wrong, this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. There is no heat needling Niou’s eyes. Niou lifts a hand to remove Marui's but once she makes contact she finds that she can't. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, don’t you think I get it? I know, Niou. I know.”
It’s not like Marui is applying any particular pressure with her hand but Niou’s immobilised anyway, just as surely as she was in the locker room with Yagyuu’s fingers braceleting her wrist. One more person on her side of the court, isn’t that why she told Marui in the first place? This persistent weakness, this pattern she’s discerned too late in herself. Niou got careless about caring and now she’s formed a habit. Let down her guard. Wasted time on the unnecessary. However and whoever she frames it the fault is her own. The incalculable damage Yukimura's love has done to her. Opening her up to the want of more, the staved-off pain making itself known at last. Niou's hand folded over Marui's on her face, keeping Marui in place with her for just a little while longer. Just a little while longer.
fandom: prince of tennis
ship: niou/marui, unrequited marui->yukimura (r63)
rating: g
word count: 2.5k
this fic is about my conspiracy theory that yukimura rigged the nats finals lineup to ensure 2 losses and 2 wins before yuki's grand return to the circuit at s1, with everyone who lost at kanto finals getting to win at nats and vice versa... 3byuki are truly an endless source of rotational terror. background 2882 and yukiniou seeding also
--
It takes Niou two days, which is the longest anyone’s ever managed to pull the wool over her eyes, but then she’s never quite figured out the trick to Yukimura. It’s not much of a consolation that Yukimura, in turn, hasn’t quite figured out the trick to Niou; not even Yagyuu has. The oversight rests on her own shoulders—now there’s something else Yukimura’s got her doing that she never thought she would: taking responsibility. The thing is, Niou is supposed to be an expert at pattern-finding. That’s what makes her so good at what she does. So one day, fine, she can be generous with herself, chalk it up to the shock of Yukimura’s loss, Rikkaidai’s loss. Violation of a law of nature and all that; takes time to process. But any longer and it’s a scathing indictment of her observational skills.
Obscuring factor #1: Niou’d done doubles at Kanto and singles at Nationals, and she compartmentalises her record by match type. Of course, Yukimura, being a near-exclusive singles player, does no such thing, which is something Niou should have taken into account. She keeps forgetting the boundaries between the self and the not-self, lately. Too much time spent in other people’s skins and she’s starting to believe everyone thinks the same way she does.
Obscuring factor #2: Yukimura had directly asked for their cooperation in the semifinals strategy she’d outlined to engineer Kirihara’s trial by fire. Immediately Yagyuu, ever the lady, and Marui, who would never miss a chance to jump off a cliff for Yukimura’s sake, had volunteered to throw their matches (Me too?! Jackal had exclaimed, longsuffering, but even if Jackal was not overly desperate to jump off a cliff for Yukimura she was plenty willing to do so for Kirihara. In the instant before Yagyuu and Marui’s hands shot up Niou had even contemplated volunteering herself, just for fun, but she wasn’t upset the matter had been decided without her). There’s certainly no shortage of insane fanatics on the team clamouring to die first in the firing line of Yukimura’s will; why wouldn’t she ask again?
So two days after the end of the world, Niou is alone in her room when the pattern clicks. She puts down her pencil. Picks it up again. She scribbles out the Kanto and Nationals finals lineups along the margin of her geometry homework, just to be sure, though she knows already there is no error in her understanding. The distribution of wins and losses on paper is exactly as it had been in her mind. She taps the end of her pencil against her desk, then swivels around in her chair to toss the pencil at the dartboard hanging on the back of her door. It bounces uselessly off bullseye and clatters to the floor—
—Niou catches a stray tennis ball attempting jailbreak and lobs it back into its crate. Morning in the club storeroom. She’s rostered for taking inventory with Marui today. “One hundred and fifty in this last one. We seriously need to get a manager.” Niou takes a precarious seat on the edge of the nearest crate. “Yo, Marui. Did you notice what Yukimura did with the lineup for the Nationals finals?
Marui finishes signing off the storeroom records and sinks down on the ground by the crates, heedless of the dust staining her skirt. “Huh? Seika-chan did something?”
“Didn’t anything about the lineup look off to you? Me in Singles Two, you in Doubles One…”
“Don’t be jealous just ‘cause me and Jackal scored Doubles One.”
Niou clicks her tongue. “Come on, Marui, you aren’t this stupid. Think! I don’t give a fuck what slot I play in, but you know what the Yagyuu-Niou pair win percentage is? One hundred. Remember the Kanto finals lineup?”
Marui is one of the best gamemakers on the best team in the country. Niou sees the shattering moment in her eyes, her brain racing along pathways she’s tried to blind herself towards, sieving out the logical conclusions. Is that what Niou’d looked like in her room last night, too? There had been no witnesses then but herself.
“No,” Marui says blankly.
“Yes,” Niou says. “She did. She wanted you to lose. Both of us.”
“But I could have won,” Marui says. Slow. That same blankness to her voice. She is very still. “We could have won for her.”
“Well, she didn’t want you to,” Niou says, a little more viciously than she’d intended. It’s too easy to be cruel to Marui, she can’t help it. “We already had our turns at Kanto. So the losers got to win, and the winners got to lose.” Niou spreads her hands. “It’s only equality.”
The Child of God, in her infinite benevolence, extending a chance for redemption to Sanada, to Yanagi, to Kirihara. And the flipside: her closed fist pulping the rest of them, a necessary sacrifice for her grand rebirth. How perfectly she’d orchestrated it. An exact inversion of their Kanto results. Yukimura has always been the furthest-seeing one of them all.
Marui puts her hands to her face. Her shoulders tremble, but her voice, when it comes, is low and steady. “We failed her,” she says. “Of course she couldn’t trust us to win after that.”
“We didn’t fail her,” Niou corrects. “We won our matches, remember?”
But she knows Marui will always consider herself as having failed Yukimura for the simple fact that Yukimura lost six months of her life to a hospital ward while Marui had not. And what had their reward been, for winning, for not failing Yukimura where the others had? Between semifinals and finals Niou had barely slept, replaying the footage of the semifinals match between Shiraishi and Fuji over and over on her phone until her eyes blurred and when she blinked to resolve her vision, her right forearm swathed itself in bandages. Shiraishi’s racquet grip, Shiraishi’s footwork, Shiraishi’s meticulous focus, pulled close around her like a shroud; during that deliriously endless insomnia there were moments she thought she might suffocate to death.
And all along Yukimura had intended failure for her. It stung, even though she got it, she really did. How do you begrudge your newly resurrected captain fresh from the clutches of death one moment of selfishness? Niou wanted to win mainly for herself, yes, but she’d wanted to win for Yukimura, too. Hard not to crave the open flame of Yukimura’s regard, the way she smiled, warm and quiet, like your victory was her own. Maybe Niou hadn’t truly believed Yukimura capable of that kind of callous calculation, her personal victory at the expense of her own team. Mistake after mistake after mistake.
Marui drops her hands. An unsteady shine to her eyes; she’s close to tears. It won’t take much more. “Who else knows?”
Niou shrugs. “Yanagi should, but she’s worse than you. Yagyuu might know, I haven’t asked her yet. Not like she’d care. Everyone else… well, do I even have to say it?” She stretches her legs out in front of her. “But really, Yukimura should be selfish more often. It’s good for her. Nobody should be so—like that—all the time.”
“But I would have lost for her too! If she just asked me like she did at semis—why wouldn’t she ask, I don’t get it—”
“You know,” Niou says. “I think she was trying to be kind.”
Amazingly enough, this is what finally does Marui in. Her face crumples, shoulders hunching. The tears well up and spill over. It’s more or less what Niou had been aiming for, but now that she has it, it isn’t what she’d wanted at all. She doesn’t want to hurt Marui, except that she does, and she has. She slides off the crate, kneeling in front of Marui, and plucks one of Yagyuu’s embroidered handkerchiefs out of Marui’s pocket, stupid sleight of hand, maybe it’ll cheer Marui a little. While Marui blows her nose and subsides into sniffles, Niou says, “You realise she’s never going to love you back, right? Or at least not as much as you love her. She just isn’t wired like that.”
Yukimura’s love is an impersonal thing, scalar and directionless. It’s something that can’t help its intrinsic nature, the crushing water pressure at the bottom of the ocean, but still you find yourself diving lower and lower, trying to reach the source, the pearl within the razor-edged oyster. Marui will kill herself trying to bear the weight. Niou, by now, knows better. Should know better. Semantics, whatever.
“I don’t need her to,” Marui says thickly. “I never needed her to. I only—I just wanted to be there. I wish she—” She breaks off, crushing Yagyuu’s handkerchief into a ball.
“So noble,” Niou says.
Marui’s mouth creaks upwards. “That’s what love’s supposed to be like, isn’t it?”
What does Niou know about love? Singles Two against Fuji, sweat plastering her jersey to her back. She’d squinted past the haze of Illusion and the sun-glare to Yukimura on the bench, the steel trap of Yukimura's game face giving nothing away. And then, a little beyond Yukimura, Yagyuu seated in the stands with her hands folded primly in her lap. It was too far to tell for sure what expression Yagyuu was wearing; Niou could guess, but she wanted the reassurance of absolute certainty. She felt like she was moving through honey. Her left elbow had the blown-out deadened feeling of anaesthesia, a pain staved off. Briefly, childishly, she wished Yukimura's mouth would relax into a smile. She was no Kirihara, but in that moment she probably would have cut off a limb for a visible sliver of Yukimura’s approval.
It’s funny. Niou’d been a singles player before she brought Yagyuu into the fold, but in the intervening period she’d forgotten how lonely it was, being the only person on your side of the court. What was it that she’d told Yagyuu, back then? The court seemed so small but when you were out there it felt vaster than even the sky. Even the distance from the baseline to the net, barely a handspan when you were looking down from the stands, could be insurmountable. That freezing flash of blue as Fuji said I never lose to the same opponent twice. The noose of Yukimura’s kindness pulling tight around her neck. And Yagyuu—
Afternoon practice had not been cancelled the day after finals, because they were Rikkaidai, still, even after the unthinkable had come to pass. Actually Niou had been planning to skip but habit tripped her up; on autopilot she’d made her way to the locker room after school and was halfway through changing before she remembered her intentions, and by that point Sanada had also arrived and the trouble of sneaking away after that was simply not worth the payoff.
Still seated on the bench, Yagyuu caught Niou’s wrist as Niou brushed past her on the way out of the locker room, arresting her forward motion. Oh? Niou-kun, I don’t think these nails are in line with uniform regulations.
Niou scowled and tried to stab her manicure into the back of Yagyuu’s hand. They’re green, I’m showing school pride, shouldn’t you be happy? Disappointingly, she didn’t have enough wrist flexibility to get her nails to make contact with Yagyuu’s skin. Maybe she should have studied up on Hyotei’s Akutagawa instead of Seigaku’s Kikumaru after all, if she were going to bother with a non-Marui serve-and-volleyer Illusion, but the heart wanted what it wanted.
Yagyuu still hadn’t let go of her wrist. Her grip wasn’t painful, but it was firm enough to hold Niou in place. There was an unsettling gleam in her eyes, or perhaps only a trick of the light refracted through her glasses.
Tell me something. When you were watching me play, up there in the stands, Niou said. What were you thinking?
I was hoping for your victory, of course, Yagyuu said.
Not an answer! Niou said.
What would you like me to say?
I don’t fucking know, Niou said. That’s why I’m asking. I’m—would you have done it differently? If it were you?
The lenses flashed as Yagyuu tilted her head. But I am not you, Niou-kun, she said. It would hardly be productive to speculate.
Niou wrenched her wrist free. Her skin prickled, a sensation halfway to how the mantle of Illusion felt settling over her, but she was only herself, and Yagyuu was only Yagyuu, and they had been inside each other’s skins but they were not touching anymore, though Yagyuu was barely a hand’s breadth away. Suddenly Niou ached with incompleteness. One more person on her side of the court; it was all she wanted.
“Marui,” Niou says. “You have a really fucked up idea of love.”
A choking noise that could pass as a laugh. “We’re Rikkaidai,” Marui says. “We kinda have a fucked up everything.”
“Didn’t know you knew it too.” A few strands of Marui’s hair have come loose from her braid, sticking to her wet and flushed cheeks. Niou reaches forward to brush them free, tuck them back behind Marui’s ear. “Your crying face is so ugly,” she says gently.
Marui swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Fuck you, no it’s not,” she says, almost like normal, but then Marui has to go and ruin everything by flashing Niou a wobbly smile, pressing her palm to Niou’s cheek, and saying, “Why’s it so hard for you to admit she hurt you too?”
Before she can stifle the reflexive response, Niou tenses. “That’s not—”
“It’s alright,” Marui says. Soothing. All wrong, this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. There is no heat needling Niou’s eyes. Niou lifts a hand to remove Marui's but once she makes contact she finds that she can't. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, don’t you think I get it? I know, Niou. I know.”
It’s not like Marui is applying any particular pressure with her hand but Niou’s immobilised anyway, just as surely as she was in the locker room with Yagyuu’s fingers braceleting her wrist. One more person on her side of the court, isn’t that why she told Marui in the first place? This persistent weakness, this pattern she’s discerned too late in herself. Niou got careless about caring and now she’s formed a habit. Let down her guard. Wasted time on the unnecessary. However and whoever she frames it the fault is her own. The incalculable damage Yukimura's love has done to her. Opening her up to the want of more, the staved-off pain making itself known at last. Niou's hand folded over Marui's on her face, keeping Marui in place with her for just a little while longer. Just a little while longer.