Secrets
by K.Huntsman
first released 29th May 2003
The way they had sex was like the way they played Go. Usually it was Akira in the lead, but then Hikaru would make a sudden move that would throw the world on its head and Akira would have to bite his lip to keep from making a sound. He would have to fight to regain his control of both the situation and himself, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, as Hikaru's strong hands played their way across his body.
"What brought that on?" Akira panted as his breath made its way back to an even pace. To his right lay their Go board, a half-finished game laid out across its grid.
To his left, Hikaru smirked. "You have no clue how pretty you are when you look serious, do you?" He tried to imitate what he thought Akira looked like.
"I looked so 'pretty' that you couldn't even wait long enough to get out the futon?"
"The tatami are soft." As if to prove his point, Hikaru wiggled on them. Akira eyed that action, the lean muscles of his friend and lover shifting beneath sleek golden skin, against the darker gold backdrop of the tatami mats, and had to admit that the sight was worth the inconvenience of an interrupted game. Hikaru's personal fan club would probably kill to be in Akira's position...
Touya Akira hated lies. But he also knew the destructive power of the truth. Truth had destroyed Hikaru's relationship with his parents, and further truth would either ruin his career or get him thrown in an asylum. So Akira kept secrets. Some were a little more widely shared than others, such as his true relationship with his best friend and lifetime rival, while others were held closely: the true identity of the mysterious Sai who had beaten the Go world champion before vanishing without a trace. He did not anticipate the reaction that any of his secrets would prompt if they ever got out. Akira did not keep casual secrets.
Hikaru did.
Whether by design or oversight, it ended up that someone whose nature and very name were filled with light held within himself countless shadows of untruths. Surprise presents or parties, or casual lies to acquaintances about where he was going and with whom... Akira tried not to look at Hikaru when either of them had to lie about their lack of girlfriends. Slowly their inner circle of trusted friends had expanded--Ochi, Yashiro, even Akari, Hikaru's former classmate--but there still remained distressingly few people before whom they could drop their pretenses.
Akira hated secrets.
"We were thinking about arranging an omiai for you," his mother said, instantly focusing Akira's attention on her. Covering his panic, he took a bite of rice, buying himself time to think. He ate dinner with his parents once a week if they were in the country and fortunately the subject of marriage and eventual grandchildren had never come up before. It seemed Akira's grace period had just run out.
He swallowed. "Why?" he asked.
"You are a bit young for marriage," his father allowed.
"But it would be a few years before you'd want children anyway," his mother rebutted. "And it's only a meeting."
Akira knew this was it, his golden chance to tell his parents he preferred men and was living with his lover. He saw the opportunity with crystal clear sight and had been playing Go for too long to let it pass by, no matter how much the possible consequences filled him with fear.
"Actually," he said, "I'm already seeing someone." It came out sounding far more nonchalant than he actually felt.
His parents seemed surprised. "Really?" his mother asked. "Why haven't you introduced us?"
Here came the hard part, the reason Akira hated secrets. Explaining why you'd kept a secret hurt more than the secret itself. "I have. Just... not as the person I'm seeing." He didn't know whether to take a fortifying breath or just get it over with, so he blurted it out in a rush: "I'm seeing Shindou Hikaru."
There it was, hanging in the air between them, a secret he could not take back.
"Shindou...kun?" His mother seemed to be taking a moment to process the implications.
"I'm gay," Akira said in glum codicil.
"How long have you been seeing him?" Kouyo asked. Akira could read no clues in his father's impassive visage as to how he should proceed. Having begun with truth, though, he resolved to follow its course.
"Since I was seventeen. Four years."
"And you're living with him."
Akira nodded, his eyes dropping to the table. He hadn't liked lying to his parents, even if by omission, but telling them the truth, letting them know that he'd been deliberately lying to them for years, felt terrible, and terrifying. He didn't know what moves they would make in response.
"Please excuse me." His mother got up and left the room. Akira closed his eyes, holding back the hot sting of tears.
His father sipped at his tea, not saying a word. Akira felt worse and worse.
"Why didn't you tell us?" Kouyou finally asked.
"Hikaru's parents reacted so badly, I was afraid to," Akira admitted, still not looking up to meet his father's eyes.
"Hmm." There followed a short silence before his father sighed and asked "If you've been involved with him for four years, it can't be said that this is 'just a phase,' can it?"
"No, sir."
His father sighed again. "There are worse young men to get involved with. I suppose we should be grateful."
"Father?" Akira looked up.
Kouyo was smiling. "We've always trusted you. Even as a child, you were an adult. I can see nothing now but to extend that trust. If Shindou-kun is the one you've chosen... I will support your decision."
"Thank you, Father." Akira bowed his head in relief, his shoulders relaxing. He hadn't even realized how tightly he had been holding himself. "What about Mother?"
"I suspect she's in shock. Akiko wanted grandchildren..." His father let the sentence trail off.
"I'm sorry," Akira apologized.
"We've never been ashamed of you before. That's not going to start now." Kouyo stated. "You and Shindou-kun have been remarkably discreet up until now, if no one has noticed. With family, at least, you shouldn't have to worry about the eyes of others."
Akira dreamed that he was floating in a weightless golden place, a space of infinite light. Light as a feather, he drifted, until he finally settled on a plane that was apparently arbitrarily defined as "ground." He closed his eyes and breathed. The warm air tasted like honey and wisteria.
A shadow fell across him. Akira opened his eyes.
He'd once asked Hikaru to describe Sai for him. All of Hikaru's attempts at art had failed, and his skill with words wasn't much better, but he'd persisted until Akira had managed a reasonable mental image of the ghost.
"Tall," Hikaru had said, and Akira could see that was the truth. He'd grown a bit in the last few years, but Sai would still be several inches taller than himself if Akira was standing. And the spirit had the long black hair Hikaru had described, shining with dark violet highlights, spilling down from beneath a high black Heian court hat, caught once with a tie, drifting silkily down to his knees. When trying to describe Sai's face, Hikaru had failed until he'd gotten the idea to have Akira look in a mirror. "He looked like you," he'd said, "only his face was thinner, longer. He had a high forehead. His skin was almost white, though maybe that was 'cause he was a ghost." He'd brushed a finger down the ridge of Akira's nose. "I think you have the same nose. His eyes were purple, though." Looking now at Sai, Akira could see that as "pretty" as Hikaru thought he was, Sai was even more so. Truly, the ghost was elegant and androgynous, a classic beauty.
"I wish I could have met you," Akira whispered to the Go master's specter. "I wish I could have seen you. I would have had so much to ask you."
Sai smiled gently.
"Thank you for Hikaru," Akira said.
Akira opened his eyes to the dim light of his bedroom. Moonlight and streetlight mixed to sneak in past the cracks at the edges of the blinds, casting a faint illumination. Hikaru was warm in his arms. Akira smiled a little, then slipped out of bed. He tugged the quilt up over Hikaru's bared shoulder--his lover hated the cold--and grabbed the pyjama bottoms that lay folded on his side of the futon. He put them on in case Isumi or Waya might wake, and silently left the room.
He knew the kitchen too well to make undue noise. Water hissed into the kettle as he left it to hang on the faucet momentarily, filling while he hunted up teabags. Turning back to the faucet, Akira shut it off and transferred the pleasantly heavy kettle, water swaying around inside, to the stove. The gas click-click-clicked, then caught, a ring of blue flames shooting upwards. He turned the fire down a bit, then set the kettle atop it to begin heating.
He should write down the kifu, show it to Hikaru in the morning, see if Hikaru thought his dreams were also being haunted by the true specter of Sai's genius.
But Hikaru was Sai's heir, not Akira. He wasn't sure it was right that he should have the same kind of dreams Hikaru did. Was it right for Sai to approach him like this? Or was it not really Sai at all, but some kind of dream and wish coming forth from the relevations he'd made and had at his parents' home the previous night? Sai was a parental figure in some ways to Hikaru, maybe Akira's subconscious had used him to represent the acceptance he'd gotten from his own parents? Sai's ghost playing a match with him to represent the continuity of parent to child, teacher to student, emotional bonds that would not be severed?
Waya shuffled around the doorway and leaned against the wall of the unlit kitchen, yawning fit to split his head. "Hey, Touya."
"Waya-san. What are you doing up?"
"Had to piss. Heard you turn the stove on. What're you doing up at--" Waya peered at the clock "--two thirty-seven?"
"Making tea. Do you want some?"
"Sure." Waya yawned again. "What, you couldn't sleep? Shindou keeping you up?"
"No." Akira still wasn't used to being teased about his sex life. He and Hikaru tried to keep quiet, but Waya was shameless and apparently possessed of very good hearing. Either that or he was a deliberate eavesdropper. Akira wouldn't put either possibility past him. At least Isumi kept his thoughts on the matter to himself. "Just odd dreams."
The silence stretched on long in the kitchen. It was a pleasant silence, one filled oddly with another person, one whose presence Akira didn't tend to associate with silence. Waya was much like Hikaru--brash, bold, and annoying. He also lacked Hikaru's redeeming moments of stillness and clarity, the suddenly revealed wells of ageless depth that sometimes scared Akira. Yet somehow Akira had survived being housemates with Waya for two years. They were, Akira suspected, beginning to blunt one another's edges after so much close living, sharing cooking and cleaning duties, running into one another half-dressed in the mornings while brushing teeth.
The silence was oddly companionable.
He knew Isumi liked toast for breakfast, dry by preference or with eggs when he was feeling especially hungry or had skipped dinner the night before in favor of collapsing after an intense match. He knew that Hikaru liked salmon onigiri best and that he cooked a real dinner every Saturday night because that had been the one night a week his whole family ate together. He knew that Waya was a shameless omnivore who stashed little boxes of rice candy absolutely everywhere and had a notebook filled with the stickers he'd gotten out of them.
It scared Akira a little, to realize just how precise his knowledge of his housemates was. Their dietary habits were only the smallest example. It was frightening how easy it was now between the three of them and himself. How much control he'd let go. He kept no secrets from them. Except the secret of Sai. But it wasn't his secret to give or to keep. Sai's identity was only his on the sufferance of Sai's heir. Standing like this, in the smallest hours of the morning, in a cold kitchen with Waya, of all people, it suddenly became all right that Akira still had to keep that one secret from the world. There were some things... some magics... that the world was perhaps not suited to keep.
Knowledge might destroy truth.
Akira would do anything to keep Hikaru from being destroyed.
A lie of omission, in the end, would hurt no one.
He could keep this secret, and happily. Let the world have their mystery.
The wall clock ticked on and Waya yawned, happily ignorant of Sai.
Akira smiled. "'In the winter, the early morning is best'," he quoted. Waya looked quizzical. "The Pillow Book of Sei Shounagon," he informed the other man.
The tea kettle began to whistle, and Akira moved to take it off the stove and begin their tea seeping.
Author's Schism
This story is the third in a series, following "His Name" and "Evanescence." Thanks to Aishuu Shadowweaver, whose fangirling with me over HikaGo got me to finish this story, and who also edited it for me. Thanks also to N-chan and Shanti, from whose X story "Two Casts... One Stage... And It's the End of the World" I may've nicked a line or two.
The entire Sei Shounagon quote may be found on page 50 of the Hikaru no Go Sai ("Color") artbook, which my Evil Friend Jeanne has convinced me to translate, and is as follows: "In the winter, the early morning is best. The falling of the snow cannot be described. The pure white frost, also. In the stark chill, the fire is quickly stirred up, and the charcoal being carried over is very pleasant. When it becomes midday, warming and gradually heating up, the flames of the heater are unpleasantly likely to turn into ash." The translation is once again my own.
The opening line of the story was actually never the more obvious "the way they played Go was like the way they had sex" because, according to the Akira and Hikaru who reside in my brain, Go isn't a metaphor for life, it's life that's a metaphor for Go! As a matter of self-preservation policy, I never stand between fanatics and the text they want me to write.