#prev prez

.

Hanzawa is looking at you like he’s forgotten to work his limbs along with his eyes. This does not bode well.

Nonetheless, you soldier on. “Have you thought about joining the ping pong club?” 

“Ping pong…?”

He’s a clever kid, this Hanzawa. He doesn’t resist interrogation, but he does resist elaboration, so you know that he has three siblings and good grades and dyed hair and a birthday that’s only one day after yours, but you don’t know how he feels about any of that. He’s still a kid that’s a whole school year your junior, though, so after he dutifully repeats your question his eyes dart to the side in confusion, nerves radiating plainly through him.

“You know, with the paddles,” you say, and at Hanzawa’s blank stare, add, “Like this,” and mime a swing. A beat of silence, and then—

He cracks a smile. “I—I know, yes.”

Ha, still got it, you crow, but only in the steel trap of your mind. You’re smart like that.

“I’m going to join the disciplinary committee,” Hanzawa offers, which lesser upperclassmen would see as refusal. You, on the other hand, know that he’s lowered his guard, and only a fool wouldn’t take advantage.

“No reason you can’t do both,” you say. This is true. “It’s pretty easygoing, too.” This is a lie. The current captain of your club is ridiculously intense about ping pong, and the team goes all out during competitions. But you think that easygoing might mean something different for Hanzawa, who makes faces at his green peppers but still methodically eats every one, and who has started the school year with a perpetual sort of readiness, like he’s just waiting for classes to kick into high gear. This is a brand of impatience you’re well-acquainted with; that scary kid in your year, Ichinose, studies like his life depends on it.

While Hanzawa is restless but measured, Ichinose will study at his desk for hours and forget to eat. It is so effed up that he’s the dorm head, and you would file a complaint were it not for the fact that he actually seems to be doing pretty well at the whole thing. Even though he’s so strict with himself, he’s never uppity towards his fellow peers, and as a dorm head he’s been nice, if a little distant. You can respect that, and respect him, and still wish he’d look you in the eyes more than he does. Last year, after you’d conned him into playing ping pong for the sports festival, he’d gotten red and angry and tired and real, so that’s your favorite look of his, now.

You and Ichinose, you suspect, are made of the same stuff. You’re both meant to have a singular, driving focus in life. His just happens to be on the incredibly valuable academic front, while you’re currently devoting yourself to a sport you don’t really plan on playing after high school. Your vision, unlike his, is as forward-thinking as it is narrow. This is what makes you a ping pong genius—the ability to think about nothing else but the game, even while you’re thinking ten moves ahead. The captain, upon hearing your speculation, had said that ping pong wasn’t chess, and basic reflexes and technique matter a lot more, but your win-loss record against him is basically tied, so there.

“We’re still in the trial period for clubs, and it’s easy to leave if you decide it’s not for you,” you add. This is unfortunately true. You have a lot of ideas for how to up retention, but they’re probably the kind that would earn the captain’s unyielding ire. What a bizarrely serious and no-fun guy… there’s just no way to win him over.

Hanzawa, at the very least, is giving you polite consideration. You can work with that, even if you figure he only needs this kind of sweet talk to trick himself into thinking it’d be fine to try things out. When you’d mentioned the possibility of doing both ping pong and… whatever the disciplinary committee does, his expression had eased, not tightened. And it’s nice, to see that happen. You think that a kid with this much brimming nervous energy deserves to loosen up. You want to see this kid play ping pong. You want to play ping pong. The rest of everything, you’ll probably only think about in the winter of your third year, because to you it just won’t matter that it’ll be over until the very day that it’s over.

Hanzawa, still fidgety, asks, “Um… so you play?”

You blink. Okay, maybe the bug-eyed nervousness is less the sweet innocence of a first year, and more your inability to say anything about yourself. “I know,” you boast, “the basketball team would love to poach me, but I’m too loyal. This is the future captain you’re looking at, here!”

Hanzawa perks up. “That’s cool,” he says, and crap, he seems to actually mean it.

To cover your butt, you add, “It’s a secret,” which is a cover like tissue paper is a blanket.

Still, now the kid is properly contemplative. He’s chewing on his lip and everything. Finally he asks, “Is it fun?”

“When you’re good, yeah,” you say. “It’s nice to move around, and when you get in the zone during a match, it’s like…” You make a vague gesture to your face. “Your whole field of focus sharpens. You can’t think about anything else.”

“… Maybe I’ll try it out, then,” Hanzawa says. He’s got a funny look in his eye. You like that kind of look. You’ve always liked it. It’s the way people look when they want something, but they haven’t quite realized it, and the way they look when they’ve gotten it, but haven’t noticed.

This might be why Mister Stick-in-the-Mud dislikes you. The handling a kid’s dreams like it’s a fun game, and all that. But you love games; it’s why you play ping pong. So you guess he’s just going to have to fall for your charms, or something, because you’ve just promised this kid that you’re going to be captain, and as member of your captain’s ping pong club, you are everything he looks for in a player—competitive, driven, and hates to lose.

Come to think of it… Hanzawa has adjusted to the dorms remarkably well. Maybe it’s because of his siblings, but he’s already managed to get on friendly terms with most of the residents, so he’s definitely good with handling people. He’d probably make for a great successor… you still aren’t thinking about what you’ll do after ping pong, but the idea of leaving some kind of legacy behind feels… nice, in a way you hadn’t thought of, before. Maybe it’s the funny feeling you like. But if you knew exactly what the feeling was, it wouldn’t be so funny.

“We’re going to be great roommates,” you tell Hanzawa, and Hanzawa’s face goes funny again, but a different kind, the kind where he’s only just realized that you could actually be a bad, bad roommate. A second later, though, that expression clears into perfect calm, and he nods, smiling as if to placate you.

.

“That can’t possibly be effective.” 

Tashiro squints at the newly arrived Hanzawa. “How do you know?” he asks, even though now that he’s stopped flapping a hand in front of his face at a breakneck pace, he realizes there’s not much of a difference. 

Still, it’s so hot that he's willing to try anything. Even Hanzawa is sweating under the height of summer, which is seriously messing with his sense of reality. On some level, Tashiro knows that Hanzawa sweats and gets exhausted just like any other guy—maybe gets a little too faint, judging by how he’d looked during ping pong practice, sometimes—but he just seems like the type of person who would never succumb to the sun. Here, though, he looks more mirage than ever, and when Tashiro squints he can see a bead of sweat roll down his neck. 

…The heat's getting to his head. 

“If it worked, I imagine someone who wasn’t you would be doing it,” Hanzawa replies, adjusting the strap of his messenger bag. “As it is, you’re all out of luck.” 

Tashiro restlessly shifts his weight from foot to foot. “Sure,” he agrees. “We’re going inside soon, right?” 

Hanzawa gives him a funny look, and Tashiro feels a year younger already. “The president’s always five minutes late to things.”

Tashiro has the urge to be pedantic. Technically, the president of the ping pong club arrived seven minutes ahead of time. One ex-president is punctual. It’s another ex-president that's late. But between the two of them, there’s only one common president.

“Then why are you on time?” 

“How about this,” Hanzawa counters, “why were you early?” 

That’s not an answer, Tashiro thinks, but it’s not like he has one, either. He goes back to fanning himself and groans, “I’m going to die in this heat.”

As if on cue, a cool shadow looms behind them. “Patience is a virtue,” the president says.  

Tashiro startles, and turns to face the president, who looms above them both, his figure a momentary alleviation of the heat. He steadies his heart. “Then I’ll be—un-virtuous, or whatever.” 

Hanzawa hums a contemplative set of tones. “Punctuality is also a virtue.” 

“Certainly,” the president remorselessly agrees. “Now, don’t abandon me now, ‘kay?” he appeals, crooking a finger to beckon them both inside. 

Tashiro has three separate protests building on the tip of his tongue. But the president’s shadow is stretching longer, farther, and Hanzawa looks like he might wilt under the heat. He follows them in.

—

Even under the welcome blast of air conditioning, it’s like Tashiro can still feel the heat creeping at his back. His restlessness makes him the first to clamber into an open booth, and he immediately regrets it when the president slides in next to him. Hanzawa slinks into the opposing side of the booth with a nonchalance that’s ruined by the smug look on his face.

Tashiro’s legs drum beneath the table, unable to kick the summer buzz. Forlornly, he says, “I wanted the outer seat.” 

“Well,” the president says, effervescent, “Clearly my legs need the room more than you do.” 

“You’re so unfair,” Tashiro says. “Hanzawa-senpai’s shorter than me, why can’t you box him in?” 

To Hanzawa’s credit, he does not comment. This might be because the first time they’d figured this out, Tashiro had immediately crouched on the ground to make him feel better. Hanzawa had burst out laughing, and said, Do you think height is going to stop me from being your senpai?

It wasn't the height that bothered him. It was the difference. In his first year he’d been short enough to dress as a girl, so long as he shaved his legs, but now that was no longer the case. He couldn’t help but wonder what else would change.

The president wags an infuriating finger. “I just sat down!” he says, looking affronted. “I’m not going to get up just so you can switch seats.” 

Tashiro stands, still cramped in the booth because the president’s legs are long, and gangly, and he’s got a dangerous glint in his eyes that suggests he’s about to encroach on Tashiro’s personal space. He teeters dangerously over the table to stare down Hanzawa, who’s unable to hide the way his shoulders shake with suppressed laughter. “Come on, Hanzawa-senpai!” he protests. “This is an injustice!” 

Hanzawa breaks from his laughter, looking up at Tashiro, undyed brows exposed to the overhead lights, and lets Tashiro helplessly dangle above him. Finally he curls a finger around the neckline of Tashiro’s shirt and tugs him back down to a seated position. “You’re going to get weird looks,” he says. 

“And?” Tashiro rebuts. “They’ll agree with me.” 

A waiter comes by to take their orders, and after the president orders some monstrosity of a sundae, he ambles over to the restroom. Tashiro leaps for his chance.

When the president returns, Tashiro is sitting on Hanzawa’s side, legs kicked outwards and free.

“Mutiny!” the president gasps. 

“Is it really mutiny if you both chose us to be presidents?” Hanzawa argues with a devilish smile.

“Mutiny,” the president repeats, “My two proteges, striking back at their master! You can’t even beat me at ping pong!”

“He can,” Tashiro reminds him, jabbing a finger at Hanzawa, who is in the process of accepting the sundaes that the waiter has brought over.

“Stolen valor,” the president insists, undercut by the giant sundae that’s been plopped in front of him. He’s lucky enough to be tall, so his face isn’t totally covered, but it’s still silly. “I could still crush you.”

“I don’t know,” Tashiro says. “Don’t your skills dull with age? You said you were out of practice.”

The president gasps. “Well, I never,” he says, which is a sign of age better than any Tashiro could have pointed to, and then he’s off on another tirade about mutiny again, about his deceptive kouhai and how they’re true terrors, and—

“Your sundae’s going to melt,” Tashiro finally says, because it’s worrying him, and instead of going for the sides the president just squawks and dives into the center, which makes Tashiro accept that smart people can be really, really dumb. And misleading. For all his stupid tirades and strange manner of speech, the president’s best subjects are the sciences, which Tashiro had only learned after hearing him babble about metabolic processes in the midst of kidnapping him back to the ping pong club. He was tricky like that.

Under the table, the president’s foot kicks against his ankle. Tashiro frowns and taps the foot to the side. Another kick. “Seriously?”

“Why, I have no idea what you’re talking about, Tashiro-kun,” the president says, with a shit-eating grin. There’s a spot of ice cream on his lips. His sundae is totally melting.

Tashiro finishes off his sundae. He kicks back at the soles of the president’s sneakers.

Hanzawa says, “I can see you playing footsie under the table.”

Tashiro jerks his feet back. “He started it,” he says, and then, “Captain, your sundae’s going to melt over—”

The president makes an unintelligible noise and attacks the spilling over sides. Once he’s finished it—quicker than he should—he wipes his mouth, says, “Same time next week, yeah?” and flits off.

Tashiro slouches in the booth and grumbles, “He’s so demanding.”

“It’s not like you have to say yes,” Hanzawa says. With that face, he should have a lucrative poker career.

Tashiro taps his ankle with his feet. Lightly, because Hanzawa’s delicate. In response, Hanzawa slips out from his hold and hooks his foot around Tashiro’s ankle. He eats the last bit of fruit from his sundae like that, and doesn’t let go even when he’s done.

“You know that’s not true,” Tashiro says with a look of consternation. It’s the inevitability of existing within the president’s inner circle. Once you’re in, you can’t get out.

With a smile, Hanzawa pays for the three of them. Their ankles uncross, but they exit together. “Are you planning on showing up early, next week?” he asks.

Tashiro thinks it over. “Only if you are.”

.

High school reunions weren’t so glamorous when they were held only two years after graduation. Not all of them were old enough to drink, so they couldn’t use alcohol to smooth out the awkwardness of separation, and their nostalgia wasn’t strong enough to achieve the same effect. Ichinose, who discovered on his twentieth birthday that not only was he a total lightweight, he also hated the taste of alcohol, still found his hands twitching for a shot glass.

At the very least it would give him something to do—the faces around him were disconcertingly familiar, and without a distraction he was slipping back into old habits. He craned his neck and scanned the room, ostensibly looking for someone he knows, but really just waiting for the dorm manager to appear like a miracle.

This would not happen, because the dorm manager was busy doing things like managing a dorm instead of the lives of former students. Absently, Ichinose patted the pocket he’s slipped his phone into. Today was an event night, so he’d turned the alarms off. Not his alarms—the new ones that Ichinose had set, when his university schedule didn’t quite match the timings of his dorm life. The old ones lingered in his clock app, deactivated and rotting. At a real low point, Ichinose had stared at them for hours, like with enough focus he’d be able to hear the concern in the dorm manager’s voice all over again.

That was what he missed—the dorm, not high school. For all that the kids in his year look the same, they weren’t who he knew and remembered. They weren’t who he wanted. If the dorm had held a reunion, Hanzawa would be holding court at center stage, directing the crowd as if it were a symphony, and Kagiura would stand a head above the sea of people, and Hirano would be by his side, blond hair like another lighthouse. And the dorm manager would be—he’d be there. And that would be enough.

Here, though, he was completely adrift. The best he could do was manage a few lines of small talk before the questions died out—yes, school is tough, yes, he was studying, yes, he was aiming to be a lawyer, thanks for the good luck, no, he wasn’t seeing anyone, yes, they’d see each other again, maybe some time, maybe never. Some people from the dorm had been his same-year peers, but most of them had moved out in their final year, and even the conversations with them eventually peter out. He didn’t know anyone in the planning committee—if he did, he’d shake them down and ask, Why would you run an event like this? But his criticism wouldn’t hold any water, because he’d still shown up.

…So, maybe he was lonely. And desperate. He should’ve anticipated that this would only exacerbate those feelings, but Ichinose had a knack for self-inflicted agonies.

He hadn’t meant to stop visiting. He’d meant to drop by often, but visiting was a process. A whole production. A reminder that he was no longer a part of that place. And he liked his classes, and his studies—even when it was hard or boring or annoying it was a reminder of the future he was chasing—but academics took up so much time that it was hard to pull away from. When he’d lived in the dorm, the distance from his room to the dorm manager, or academic focus to socialization, had been just a few steps. Comparatively, the distance now felt insurmountable. Maybe in a few years it would change. Maybe the feeling that he was pushing his luck could disappear. Maybe he’d even stop tracing out the characters for Yanagimoto Kazuma. Maybe absence made the heart fonder. Right now, it sucked.

Vitriolically, he thought, Hanzawa Masato would have been on the planning committee. He wouldn’t do this to me—

“You've got a scary face there, Dorm Head.”

Ichinose jolted at the statement, tripping over air—but before he could take a nasty fall there was a steady, muscled arm at his chest, pulling him back upright. He inhaled, sharp and strained. Tried to regulate his breathing. Tried to still the pounding of his heart, the excessive, unbearable wanting…

When he turned around to face his savior, it was not the dorm manager, but the former president of the ping pong club who stood before him, eyeing him with malicious humor. Ichinose hadn't expected much—the dorm manager liked to call him by name—but just for a moment, in that position… he'd flickered into the past.

“Don’t sneak up on people,” he said, and then disdainfully added, “Captain.”

The president—now former, his time two years past and then some, though Ichinose couldn’t seem to remember that whenever their eyes met—smiled, gaze off-centered, and Ichinose wondered what he was looking at. If he was amused by the ruddy splotches around Ichinose’s neck, because that was how he flushed—violently. Whatever it was, it was a harbinger, he thought, recalling the horrendous boot camp he’d been put through for the sports festival, year after year.

Blithely ignoring the irritation radiating from Ichinose in waves, the president said, “I was doing a public service.”

He felt a headache coming on. More accurately, it had already come onto him, and now he was going to suffer the consequences. “Public service?”

The president inclined his head towards the crowd. “They're avoiding you because they're scared,” he explained. “See their faces?”

Ichinose dryly watched as a few squinted curiously at the two of them before moving on in benevolent apathy.

With an affected falsetto, the president squealed, “Eek! What if the dorm head busts me for breaking curfew!” Dropping back to his normal voice, he nodded, all-too-satisfied with his impression. “That’s what they’re thinking.”

“It’s been two years,” Ichinose scoffed. “No one’s thinking about curfew.”

The president tapped knowingly—annoyingly—at his temple. “But an elephant never forgets.”

Ichinose snorted. “What, and you’re the elephant?” He was tall. And broad-shouldered. But he was not gentle.

Without missing a beat, the president replied, “Maybe I’m more of a sacrificial lamb? You’re all glowering and intimidating in the corner, I’m all brave and tragic, and for the sake of those kids I’ve offered myself up to you…” He looked at him, expectant.

Disbelievingly, Ichinose echoed, “...Intimidating?” There was too much bullshit to address it all.

“…Yyyyes?” the president said, stretching the word out with perfect innocence.

“Obvious—it's not—no way!” Ichinose protested, heat pooling at his cheeks.

“You are, you scary smart top ranker,” the president drawled. “you're going to Todai for law, you should be sitting up on a throne somewhere, not hanging out with us peons. Isn’t that why you’re tucked away like this?” He cast his gaze around the room. “Or what, are you just too nervous to talk to anybody?”

He sure knew how to hit an opponent’s weak spot. “I’m—it’s not like that,” Ichinose says. “I’m—normal.” He winced, but still petulantly added, “And if you're talking to me, how are you any better?”

He’d called him “Captain” for petty equivalence, but it was also the name he best knew him by. It’d been shouted through the hallways, muttered in greeting, indignantly sputtered, and delivered from his lips with arrogant poise. As the president of the ping pong club, he was akin to a living idol, but during class he took notes with surprising diligence, limbs tucked neatly under his desk. In the dorm, he was friendly, but not aggressive—he had to have been, to rope in a first-year Hanzawa Masato into his club.

The president froze, face caught in comical awkwardness. “Dorm head, you're really too vicious.” To put it simply, he was just whining, Mean…

Ichinose rolled his eyes. “Captain,” he stressed, a teasing lilt to his voice, “if we’re talking vicious, what about sports festival practice?” Each year, the president had concocted a torture exercise he liked to call Ichinose’s Special Training Regimen. This entailed a series of ping pong matches in which Ichinose lost by an order of magnitude, after which the president fussed about Ichinose’s paddle grip and reaction time and serve form, mostly in service of gloating about his win. It trained no skill but the spirit of endurance.

“A toast to that,” the president said. “Why did you subject yourself to it for three years?”

At least he was self-aware. “You begged me to,” he retorted, and—out of his mouth the words took on a sudden, implicative weight.

The president turned scarlet and bloody. He raised his hand up to his face, fingers long and palm wide enough to obscure most of it, but it was no help since the back of his hand had also become the same bright red.

Ichinose's face reflexively mirrored his heat. “Why are you—”

“Jeez,” the president said. “You're kind of a bold guy, aren’t you? I should have realized.”

“...Should have?”

“Our dorm heads are spectacular, after all,” the president said. “My lovely protege, Hanzawa-kun, has that killer instinct for ping pong. Nowadays, he's even beaten me—and so the student surpasses the master!”

Ichinose briefly closed his eyes, relieved to tread familiar ground. “He was a much better dorm head, too.”

“Don't sell yourself short,” the president said. “You were a hotshot dorm head.”

“I... was?”

“Poor judgement, again,” the president chastised. “How will you ever make it as a lawyer?

His eye twitched. “I’m not a judge,” he said. “My job is to argue.”

“And you argue with me so well, don’t you?” the president affirmed with a smug grin on his face. “You’d do it all the time during ping pong.”

“…You sure remember a lot of me in high school,” Ichinose grumbled.

“What, don’t you?” the president asked. “You forgot everything already…?”

Ichinose looked past him—hard, considering the space the president took up—and into the sea of familiar, distant faces. He looked back at the president—brows furrowed, lips pursed, hair curling at the base of his neck. “No,” he said. “I think I just… remembered it different.”

The president nodded sagely. “Very Rashomon.”

It startled a laugh out of him. “Nothing that dramatic,” he said. “I just… remember the dorm better. Studying in my room, taking tests, those sorts of things. This scenery”—he gestured to the crowd—“it’s familiar, but it’s not mine.”

“Ping pong tables, competitions, chasing troublemakers… ” the president reminisced. “That’s mine—the most vivid parts of my high school life.” He fluttered his eyelashes down at Ichinose. Maybe fluttered, maybe batted, maybe just lowered, Ichinose wasn’t sure. It was an attractive sort of blinking. “But I also remember you, Ichinose. Because I’m nice.”

The president was smiling. His eyes held a seductive light. This was a harbinger, Ichinose knew—the man before him was not nice. He was sneaky, and awful, and possessed a terrible kind of charm. This was what had conned Ichinose into choosing ping pong for three years.