Hikaru no Go, Warikomi

Title: Shudan Arc: Warikomi [Shindou, Touya]
Rating/Warning: PG-13 for random schoolboy violence
Summary: Touya finds Shindou’s idea of ‘the proper move’ to be questionable.
AN: Thanks to marksykins for the beta and for listening to the Go babble. I think this may be the first time i’ve ever written something you might label ‘gen’ in this fandom.

Warikomi

Warikomi–a 1 point jump in between two enemy stones with room to extend on either side, creating cutting points. More info here.

“Shindou, would you just resign already?” Touya asked. Sprawled lazily in the grass on the other side of the magnetic Goban, Shindou eyed him with a smirk, knowing that Touya’s prim seiza meant that he’d have great big grass stains on his knees. “Lunch is almost over anyway.”

“No.” Shindou laid another stone, frowning the tiniest bit as the pull of the board yanked the plastic stone out of his hand, robbing him of the satisfying chink of playing it. A warm autumn breeze ruffled the tree above them and Shindou leaned back just a tiny bit to watch the rippling of the orange leaves.

“You’re losing by 8 moku.” Touya grit his teeth and finished a shape in the lower right corner. “You can’t possibly make it up.”

Shindou watched as one of the leaves spiraled down slowly and alighted on the board. Touya flicked it off impatiently, but Shindou plucked it off the ground by its stem and twirled it between his fingers.

“I just have to find the right play,” Shindou drawled, re-taking a ko just to be petulant.

“The right play,” Touya ignored his taunt and put black’s entire mid-left into atari, “is to play nothing and resign like a respectable opponent!”

“Oh, what would you do with me if I were respectable?” Shindou toyed with the idea of reaching over to tickle Touya’s nose with the leaf, but had learned from experience that if he pushed Touya too far, he’d storm off back to class and they’d never finish. “Besides, then you wouldn’t get to see my brilliant endgame move!”

Anyone else would at least peer at Shindou closely after a pronouncement like that, since it happened half a dozen times in every single tournament Shindou played, but Touya had long since learned to separate out when Shindou was a genius, and when the nonsense streaming out of his mouth was merely the result of laying in the grass, boneless from the warm autumn sun soaking into him.

“That was the brilliant move, was it?” Touya teased when Shindou played. It was sort of brilliant, just a little, but it wasn’t going to save him. “Now you’re only going to lose by 5 moku. Look, I really do have to go back to class…”

“All right, all right, you crab.” Shindou pushed himself to his knees and stretched, then started scraping the stones off the magnetic board into his hand. “Go back to your precious teachers and your precious classes.”

“You should go back to yours as well,” Touya reminded, picking up the board and snapping open the compartment for Shindou to pour the pieces in. “You should take school more seriously.”

“Eh, it doesn’t matter.” Shindou shrugged. “They’re all just studying for high school exams anyway. I spend eighty percent of my time doodling anarchic joseki in my notebook.”

“And it’s helping so much.” Touya handed the board back to Shindou, smirking at his scowl.

“Fuck you, To—” Shindou stopped mid-word as a shadow fell over both of them, and he looked up to see a taller boy in a high school uniform looming above them.

“Aw, look at little Touya Akira, practicing so hard,” he said, arms crossed, and Shindou didn’t miss the way the corners of Touya’s mouth tightened. “What’s the matter, couldn’t get anybody in the club to play you any more, so you had to call in ringers from…who the hell’s uniform is that, Haze? Seems like you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

“Oi!” Shindou snapped, jamming the goban in his back pocket and looking at Touya. “Who’s this jerk?”

“He was in the Go club with me,” Touya said tightly, looking at the ground and thinking of staring at yellowed, crumbling kifu on dusty shelves, voices snickering behind him. “He graduated last year.”

“No!” the boy snapped, advancing a step. Touya held his ground despite his obvious displeasure. “You were never a part of our club! Always sitting by yourself, all high and mighty, when really you just couldn’t get anybody to play you!”

“I played you,” Touya said icily, finally lifting his eyes at the insult to his play. “You were president last year, weren’t you? That’s pretty good for someone who was humiliated by a freshman.”

“I’ll show you what I was president of,” the boy snarled, letting his bag drop off his shoulder. “You and your girlfriend here…”

“OI!” Shindou barked, leaping to his feet, and the boy blinked because it was hard to tell that Shindou would unfold his tangled limbs and be suddenly tall, green eyes blazing underneath wind-mussed bangs.

“Shindou, no!” Touya scrambled to his feet as well when Shindou launched himself at the other boy without further warning, driving his shoulder into the boy’s chest and knocking them both down into the grass. They rolled over a few times, scuffling, until Shindou, blood pooling on a split lip, came up on top. Seizing the other boy’s collar with one hand, Shindou banged his head on the ground hard.

“Get off on beating up junior high kids?” Shindou demanded, pulling back a fist and splitting his knuckles against the boy’s cheekbone. He was drawing back again when hands clenched in the back of his uniform jacket and yanked him off.

Shindou landed hard on the Goban in his pocket, which gave with a sharp crack. His tailbone stung from hitting the ground and he glared up at Touya as the other boy scrambled to his feet and pushed up his sleeves.

“Just WHAT is going on here?!” a teacher demanded, running over, freezing all three of them in place.

******

“Your Go club sucks,” Shindou grumbled, sucking a little on his split lip. The hard seats outside the principal’s office wasn’t doing it much to assuage his sore tailbone either. Touya sat back down in the chair next to him and handed him the paper towel he’d just wet in the water fountain for his knuckles.

“It wasn’t my club,” he said quietly after a few moments. “And no one did want to play me.”

“Good!” Shindou announced loudly, making Touya jump a little, and the office secretary glared at them over her horn-rimmed glasses. Shindou lowered his voice a little as he wrapped the paper towel around his fingers and watched blood seep through the paper in watercolor splotches. “They shouldn’t get to play you. They’re crap. And if they didn’t want the chance to learn from someone a billion times better, they’ll always be crap.”

“Shindou…” There was nothing really to say to that, though. “I’m sorry about your board.”

“You should have come played in our club.” Shindou kept on going, but it was hard to tell whether he was talking to Touya or just the air. “We’d have played you…well, except for Kaga, who hates your guts, and Mitani’s kind of a jerk sometimes too…and Akari could barely play at all…and Tsutsui…well, I’d have played you.”

“You told me not to come,” Touya pointed out, smiling just a little. “You slammed a window in my face.”

“I did!” Shindou slapped a hand over his mouth as he remembered. When his hand dropped, his grin was making blood well in the corner of his mouth, and Touya’s thumb twitched to wipe it away.

Touya clenched his hands tightly in his lap.

“Neh, you should have come anyway,” Shindou nudged Touya’s shoulder with his own. “You should have chased me for once. Should have made me play you.”

“Don’t tewari our lives,” Touya admonished, “it’s cheap.” Touya stared at his very grass-stained knees with a frown. His mother was going to kill him. Stupid white uniforms.

“You’re cheap,” Shindou shot back. “And you talk like an old man. Honestly, ‘don’t tewari our lives’?”

“Fuck you, Shindou,” Touya said easily.

“What was that, young man?” said the principal from right in front of them, startling Touya so badly that he had to put his head between his knees and draw a few deep breaths. Shindou thwacked a hand between Touya’s shoulderblades.

“I’m hyperventilating, not choking!” Touya snapped. Shindou eyed the speckle of blood he had just put across Touya’s uniform’s back and said nothing.

“Shouldn’t you be at your school?” the principal demanded of Shindou, arms crossed. “Or is Haze sending us their delinquents now? Kameko,” he called to the secretary, “look up the number of the principal of Haze Junior High.”

Shindou rattled off the number without hesitation, and Touya rested his head against his knees because laughing made him even dizzier.

Other notes:

Atari–when a shape only has one possible ‘eye’ or space not blocked by enemy stones.

Ko–a formation where taking an opponent’s stone(s) results in them being in a position to take yours, in an endless loop. In Japanese rules, you cannot re-take the ko immediately, you must play elsewhere on the board first.

Tewari–removing all the non-essential stones in a formation and evaluating the efficiency of what is left over to determine which player made the better moves.

“the proper move” is really “Tesuji”, which is the best move possible in a local sequence of moves.