Title: Spell of Forward Motion

Chapter: 1

Manga: Eyeshield 21

Pairing: You can see it as Agon/Sena or not. The focus is forward.

Warnings/Spoilers: None, unless you count mentioning character names as spoilers.

A/N: My second ES21 piece. Apologies to all who were looking forward to another chapter for my first piece; this story tripped me in the middle of writing the next chapter and I couldn't get back to writing regularly until I got this out of my system. I don't know if that happens to anyone else but I could not write a single thing until this got on paper. Er, pixels. Enjoy. I think.

There is romance in the open road. The possibility laid plain at your feet is tantalizing. Some don't realize they're being romanced until they're completely in love, fallen so far underneath the spell of forward motion that they don't really remember the sweet silent beckoning of the pavement or gravel or dirt or sand that originally called them. Their feet move, mechanically after a while, forward.

There is something sweet in the uninterrupted act of moving, at any pace, forward.

Forward.

Sena panted but didn't slow down.

Forward.

There were some who were romanced for a while by the spell of forward motion.

There were others who drowned under it.

The brunette's eyes focused only on the pavement, sometimes glancing up to calculate whether or not avoiding something would cause him to change pace.

When had forward ceased to be a direction?

It was all he knew.

Forwards.

He didn't remember why he'd begun. He had always been fast, but in American Football there was no reason to keep running once you'd hit the end zone. At first he'd thought it was because he was running from his past. But then there wasn't anything to run from in his past. Sena had a good life-a caring family, friends, good grades in school, and American Football. What was there to run form? He'd run through challenges, dashed through barriers, or if he couldn't go through them, around or over or above. And then there were new challenges, like new friends and girls, and new rivals and new techniques, and then he didn't remember. Sena took off one day along a road and never stopped running.

It was all he could do. It had become his drug. His speed.

He had always been praised for his unmatchable speed. His acceleration, his agility, his footwork, it was what had caught Hiruma's eye and effectively changed his life for good and for the better, but for one reason or another speed had become forward motion. Just going.

There wasn't a want. It was a need.

Forward.

That word encompassed everything from when his feet left the bed until he couldn't stay awake any longer.

It was all he knew.

Everyone worried, though not all of them showed it at first.

Suzuna kept up with him on her roller blades when he first went out on his endless jogs, but even with the mechanical advantage of her roller blades she couldn't keep up with him-not his speed, but simply couldn't keep going. Eventually she would fall behind or turn around, though she would show up in the morning to chase after him again. Eventually, though, she stopped showing up in the morning. The brunette noticed but ran on.

Shin kept up with Sena on his own steam. He jogged wordlessly forward beside the boy who had once been his rival. During that time, Sena had the strange sensation as though Shin was trying to communicate something through his run. As though forward wasn't just him and his legs and the road and breathing. There was Shin. When he faded Sena noticed. The spell of the simplicity of forward motion was, for an instant, broken. But then his feet took a step again, and again, and again, and it was all Sena could do to keep breathing and blinking under the weight of the spell.

Panther kept up easily for a short while though he didn't persist as long as Suzuka had. He had other things to do besides run all day, thinking only of going forward and nothing else. Sena recalled him only briefly so that must've been it.

Hiruma didn't have speed, but he could go forward. And for a while he did. But forward wasn't the only thing that was required for winning, and so eventually he disappeared. To Hiruma, forward wasn't winning, and Sena knew that. Sena understood but he never stopped.

The others tried to keep up but for all their training their stamina wasn't any match for Sena's.

In the end, it was actually Agon who ended up sticking with him the longest, perhaps because he chased after Sena for a reason none of the others had.

Sena wasn't sure whether the mystery that was the moody temperamental teenager who was Kongou Agon saw his ceaseless run as a challenge but every day the dark-skinned boy would fall into step beside him and go. And that was all there was. The sound of footsteps padded. They panted. They met, Sena from his house or from practice at Deimon and Agon from wherever it was Agon came from, and they ran.

At first Agon yelled at him. When he chased him down the first time, he came to a halt right in front of Sena. Sena moved around and kept going. Agon grabbed the back of his shirt and lifted him off the ground and asked him what the hell he was doing.

"Running."

"Afraid of me?"

"Yes."

Agon hadn't expected that answer, laughed, and let the shrimp down. And Sena ran.

The next time Agon saw him, he was running still. The third time he was running. The fourth and the fifth were the same. And then it became that it was all Agon saw of the shrimp.

The twentieth time or so he couldn't stand it.

Sena's eyes flickered from the path he was running when Agon appeared in front of him.

"You that fucking scared, trash shrimp?"

Sena didn't say anything, moving to go around him. Agon punched him across the jaw.

Sena fell and grunted, but sat up moments later. Agon only watched as the younger boy rubbed his jaw, got to his feet, and moved to run again. The dreaded teen snatched Sena's shoulder before he could bolt off, annoyance shining clearly through his colored sports shades, holding him in place with an iron grip.

"You're not running from me."

Why?

He never asked directly but he was still asking. Sena understood that and perhaps that's what made him stop and look up at the older boy. The lack of verbal answer got to him after a while, and Agon shook him.

"Do I have to beat the crap outta you for a straight answer, shrimp trash?"

Why are you running?

The brunette only looked up at Agon and put a hand on the fist clenched in his shirt. Agon snarled. There was no fear in Sena's eyes as he looked up at the taller boy, fingers resting on Agon's. Sena was, for the first time since Agon had seen the shrimp running, not moving to get away from him. There was no fight in the smaller boy. Just will. The hand was a silent request.

Let me go.

The dreaded boy withdrew his snarl and a frown fell on his face instead. Something about the wordless request, and the way Sena's eyes bore into his, that made him reconsider knocking him upside the head a second time. Those deep brown eyes, formerly focused on nothing but the path his feet were taking, gazed up into his own. There was a voice in that gaze, silent thought it was, and it was asking Agon to let him go.

And he did.

Agon let the boy go, watching Sena jog off in the same direction he did every day... away.

After that he followed Sena along the path he'd run. He never ran with him, only followed him from a distance discreetly. There was nothing familiar about where he ran or when he ran but he was always always running, so the 'when' part became irrelevant. Agon only knew that the shrimp would run every day until his legs gave out, and when that happened he would jog, and then when he could run again he would. By this time Sena would repeat the pattern well into the night, to the point where he would collapse.

The first time it happened, Agon had debated if this had been the brat's true purpose, to run himself into the ground. But no, Agon knew it couldn't be that. Hiruma would've found out about something so self-destructive, he reasoned, the blonde's image flickering through his mind as an annoyed twitch tugged at the corner of his mouth. But wasn't this-whatever it was-still some kind of destructive? If not in that sense... still, something was wrong with the brunette, currently curled over on himself and eating grass. He walked over nonchalantly after making sure no one was around and stood over the boy's prone figure. The brat had collapsed right into a patch of grass on the side of the road and would probably have light bruising on the arm that had 'cushioned' his fall. Agon turned the boy's body over with a foot, 'che'-ing as he spotted the evidence confirming his suspicions. But the boy was breathing and would probably return to consciousness in a few moments, and it wouldn't do for him to look like he was concerned. Instead, he backed off and returned to his post a distance away, and watched as Sena sat up, holding his head. Instead of calling it a night and walking the rest of the way home the runner got back to his feet and began to jog again. The taller boy could only watch in disbelief.

Agon watched Sena collapse several times, getting back up without help. The fourth time, he couldn't stand to do nothing any longer, and left. When Sena woke, it was next to a bottle of water and a pissed-off twin.

Agon made him drink before he got back to his feet and berated him throughly. And when Sena said thanks and turned to go Agon grabbed him by the wrist and yanked him back to sit again. They stayed side by side until Sena's breathing wasn't so uneven and Agon had supervised Sena drinking the remaining water in the water bottle. This pause was filled with a short arrogant and snappy dressing down of the runner's common sense, or lack thereof, and the sound of water being mechanically forced down a dry throat.

When Sena went to go Agon jogged beside him for a short distance. He discreetly studied the other boy, looking for clues regarding his bizarre behavior. Agon found instead something that stumped his sense of logic in Sena's eyes. There was no determination in his gaze, no goal before his eyes. Agon watched and knew with some god-like intuition that Sena was not running towards or away from anything.

He was moving forward, unable to do anything else but go.

From didn't matter. To didn't matter. All that mattered was going.

Agon left the kid alone after that, for a while at first, puzzling to himself over what had happened. Curiosity like he'd never known came over him. Why? It was the fucking shrimp trash. Not like he gave a damn. It wasn't Ikkyu, it wasn't Unsui. It wasn't someone he needed to grind into the ground anymore, that score had been settled. The fucking brat didn't even go to the same school as him. He was another opponent on the American Football field, a field he'd gotten onto in the first place to piss off a certain blonde boy. Lately he had caught himself searching for a reason to keep stepping onto that field. It was simple to win. What was the point of being a god of a world that was so easy to crush and control? Besides the simplicity of being the best without effort.

Sena was a comet of obscurity, a challenge, that had shot out at him from the world of American Football.

And Agon followed the comet.

He couldn't tell if the shrimp was any different when he came up beside him the first day. Maybe Agon was looking too hard for something that just wasn't there. Or maybe there was something and he wasn't looking hard enough. Maybe Agon was too curious for his own good about what exactly it was that Sena was experiencing to see the boy's reaction properly as he fell in step beside him for the second time.

Sena ran. Agon ran with him.

The next day, the same thing happened.

People questioned it. People talked, as people will. People gossiped. Said things like Agon had gone homo for the runner, or vice versa, which everyone laughed uproariously at since the thought of Agon the womanizer ever going after a man that wasn't carrying a football was just that ridiculous. Said things like whatever was wrong with Sena had infected Agon, had made him go quiet and run for hours without pause except to drop pace to a walk or jog, but to continue on moving endlessly even long after the sun fell beyond the horizon.

People questioned it, yes, and people talked.

Neither of them heard anything, for there was no sound.

There was only forward.

And Agon was beginning to understand that.

They never spoke. Or rather, if they spoke, the words were meaningless prattle. Agon couldn't even recall what they'd talked about last, if you could call it talking. Sena would never start. Agon would speak first, if he spoke at all, and didn't think much about what was said. Sena would answer, and maybe that eased Agon's conscious, some troublesome thing that had developed he-didn't-remember-when, a bit, that the other boy seemed to be able to communicate still. The answers or replies he would give made sense. But they didn't matter.

Nothing mattered but forward.

Was there ever anything else?

Nothing mattered but forward.

There was no time. There was no sound. There was nothing but forward for them.

Even the shadows growing and shrinking made no difference. If it was dark they ran by streetlight or on roads they knew, or had learned in the light. If there were barricades, there were other paths. Over, under, around, beside, beyond. Agon observed somewhere along the way that Sena's path never came to a dead end no matter where he went. They jogged and ran and jumped and climbed and moved forward. Only ever forward.

There were no questions between them. There were questions from others, like Agon's girlfriends when he stopped coming to the gym as often, like from Unsui and Ikkyu. There were even questions from the blonde trash. The old man didn't ask any questions at first. When Agon was told to come in, he did. Told to practice, he practiced. And then he left, and Sena was moving, and Agon would usually find him. There were days when he didn't, and he found himself more and more moving without pause to no end.

Others might've questioned it. Did question it. Sena never did.

One day the old man called him in, finally, for a question.

"What is your purpose?"

Agon didn't have a snide remark and a scoff OR a direct answer, and the old man suspended him from the team for a week in the absence of a reply, snide or not.

The team members began to worry when Agon didn't trash the training room, or storm out to screw seven women at once, or glower and threaten and bark, but nodded silently and walked out of the room. That week he didn't come to school. Ikkyu reported having seen him running with Deimon's running back, and people talked, and people questioned it.

Agon knew none of this, of course.

For once, he knew only one thing. Forward.

"Shrimp trash."

It was another day. There was sunlight and the air was hotter than usual. Sena was panting between gulps of water, fingering the top of Agon's water bottle to twist off the top entirely for a better water-per-gulp ratio as he stood beside the towering terror himself. It was one of the rare moments when they stopped running to drink (because Agon kept bringing water and making them stop). Sena actually looked up from the water bottle and gazed through the sports shades.

"You don't have to keep up with me, Agon-san."

"I could fucking keep up with you for years," Agon spat back after getting over the momentary shock of hearing his name from the running back for the first time in weeks, "It's you who can't keep up with me, you know that."

Sena panted, and then they capped the water bottles, emptied, and ran in silence a while. Sena wasn't sure how long. Time had long ago ceased to exist. There was only forward-but, that was a lie.

Now, there was forward and Agon.

And that was...

Agon wasn't sure how to say it correctly at first, and so the first attempt failed. It was soon forgotten, like their previous 'talks', many of which involved insults from Agon and neutral comments from Sena neither offensive or defensive (or had they? Agon couldn't remember). Agon tried several other times to put it into words, running with Sena and trying to find a way to say it.

It was a rainy day when Agon realized there was no way to say it.

It was something that couldn't be said, not that it couldn't be put into words, but the words wouldn't work the same.

It had to be done.

Perhaps this was why Shin had failed, trying to put it into words with his run when words weren't what mattered. Agon, somehow, with his god-like instincts, understood exactly what had to be done.

And so he did it.

Running beside Sena, he dropped his speed. Sena kept going. Agon dropped speed form a run to a jog. Sena continued to run. Agon dropped from a jog to a walk. Sena kept running. Agon slowed from a walk to a stop.

Sena kept running.

And Agon stayed behind.

Sena ran on.

The next day, Agon dropped behind in the same way. Sena never stopped to look back, never broke pace unless he was suffering to that extent. And Agon continued to bring down his speed until eventually, finally, he stopped running beside Sena altogether.

Sena ran.

He ran and he ran and then something happened that usually didn't until he couldn't move anymore. His legs slowed down.

He thought about it. Something like curiosity was emerging from a slumber induced as, through the blur of things around him and the dull thud in the air after every step and the sharp huffs of breath that indicated that he might still be alive, something gave way to a quiet murmur in his mind.

'I was running,' he thought, 'just a minute ago.'

And then he blinked the sweat out of his eyes and realized that he was cognitive and aware of it.

It meant nothing to the monotonous pounding machines that propelled Sena surely strongly in that single direction. The legs that worked mechanically below took no or little notice of this hiccup. Sena did. How long had it been since he had actively thought anything? Anything but forward. Onwards. Step after step in an endless echo. Sena felt the breath hitch in his chest and somehow his legs were slowing down again. What was happening? Moreover, why was he suddenly aware of what was happening?

More sweat blinked out of his vision and Sena could see the road. It was taking him by Deimon High. Class wasn't in session today and Hiruma hadn't scheduled anything for this time of day (there was practice every day).

Practice. Practice for what?

"..."

More blinking as he realized he wasn't running. He had been running. Had been, now was not, and this was something akin to a jog. Most people couldn't jog at his speeds so maybe it was a run rather than a jog, but was it really a run if his run was other people's sprint? And was his walk a fast trot? Maybe his jog was a canter and his sprint was a fierce gallop and his speed of sound was the speed of light and maybe god-speed was isntantaneous.

His jog was now a walk or something slow like that.

"..."

The panting between all these thoughts was so loud in the air that Sena nearly tripped. He was hearing. There were things going on around him that weren't running. Other things moved besides himself and they were all moving at their own paces in all sorts of directions. Upwards, downwards, left, right, sideways, this way and that way, forwards and backwards.

And just like that, he was falling out of step, into discord, into slowing, into stopping, and eventually stopped.

Sena was still breathing hard when he took his last step. His chest was heaving and that was wonderful, really wonderful, because he could feel his lungs expand and pull in and out and he was aware of it again. There was so much sweat. He probably stank a mile away. It was so awesome to take in a lung full of the awful stench that Sena let the smell burst out of him in a laugh that sent several birds into the skies. And bright amber eyes shone in the brilliant light of day because it was day and Sena could see that! It was daytime! And those were birds, that was the sky, still and impassive and impressive as ever. He'd forgotten such a thing existed. He set his head on a swivel and his eyes blinked little as possible to take in everything old new again.

Words ran through his head as he listed off things that were around him-bike, road, shrub, rake, pot, trash bin, plastic, wire, fence-and his eyes took in more than his mind could list. He breathed in again and took in as much air as his lungs would hold until he felt as though he would burst. There was a moment of magic in which he breathed in the entire world with one long breath.

The braver of the birds sent scattered to the skies earlier were sent again from their perches as Sena laughed and laughed into the stillness of the summer afternoon.

"Agon-san."

The dreaded teen cocked his head to one side and a superior smirk broadened.

"Still scared?"

"I'm not scared," Sena agreed, "not anymore."

Agon sneered. He hadn't helped the pipsqueak. He'd caught up to him. Caught him. He was here, standing still, and no one else had managed to get that.

He had done what was impossible for others. Again. That was all.

"Agon-san?"

"What?"

"Would you..." a small smile pulled at Sena's lips, slightly ruining the repentant look he'd walked over wearing, "...ah, that is, if you're not busy..."

Agon looked over the boy's posture and clothing. Those were running shoes and Deimon's training clothes.

He stood up. Sena's smile bloomed.

"I never said I would do anything," Agon spat, though Sena had the distinct feeling it wasn't said for him so much as for appearances, should anyone else be watching, but fell in step beside the other boy.

"To Deimon?"

"Of course. That blonde fucker's got you practicing to make up for weeks of slacking off." It lacked the offended bitterness which Agon usually associated with the brunette's captain. Agon pretended he couldn't see Sena's smile growing. "How often?"

"Every day. Don't you?"

"Che. Like I need to practice."

Two pairs of footsteps echoed off in the direction of Deimon High in the palpable pattern of an easy jog.

FIN

A/N: This is the end. I'm not sure what I wanted to say with it, or if it says anything. It's a one shot and I'm grateful you've made it all the way through. Thank you.