Niou and Yagyuu become a doubles pair, and the game continues.
Masaharu opened his mouth to ask a pointed question about why it was Yukimura making all these decisions and announcing them, and not the captain standing, silent and uncomfortable, behind the Trinity. He closed it again, with a smooth look, at Sanada’s burning glare.
Stress in school gives Niou the break in the game he’s been looking for.
Yagyuu was eyeing him like a tiger trying to decide whether some sharp-clawed creature would be more trouble than lunch was worth. Masaharu gave him a brilliant, wolverine’s smile, and he snorted.
Niou and Yagyuu settle into their partnership.
“You do realize,” Masaharu murmured, “that you can be polite while still smashing them into jelly.”
Niou coaxes Yagyuu into more intimacy; or perhaps it’s the other way around.
He reached out and, delicately, removed Yagyuu’s glasses. A signal, a symbol, a talisman, but more than anything else an intense desire to see Yagyuu Hiroshi’s eyes.
Disaster strikes for the whole team.
After such a golden autumn, no one expected what happened in the heart of winter.
Jackal and Marui on a hot afternoon, and Jackal’s attempts to convince his partner to take it easy.
Bunta knew perfectly well what Jackal was doing, of course, but he rarely turned down the opening. It was one of the reasons Jackal found his partner endlessly entertaining; his dramatics were always perfectly sincere and entirely deliberate, at the same time.
The long awaited last match of Nationals.
Seiichi’s smile changed, undiluted pleasure added to the satisfaction. It was the last round of Nationals, and they were ready.
When the third years retire from the club, Kirihara has to deal with taking over.
It was an obvious truth that few, if any, of them could become what Yukimura or Sanada or Yanagi was. Akaya nodded, and raised his voice. “It doesn’t matter. What we are is Rikkai. We will win.”
Belial gets a tennis team.
"Absolutely no interfering in the games in any way, shape or form, or the whole deal’s off," Sanada declared, firmly.
Belial leaned hir chin in hir hand. "Doesn’t that conflict with the clause about injury-proofing, though?"
The seal of the contract.
Seiichi remembered when Belial had set the seal of their contract.
Some embarrassment over the seal.
Genichirou, Renji noted, seemed unwilling to look anybody in the face—no, that wasn’t strictly accurate. There were specific people he wasn’t looking in the face, and all of them had just signed the same contract.
If the seal broadcasts sensation…
"Niou," Sanada said, carefully, "are you really suggesting an… orgy?"
The new year starts, unsettling Kirihara a bit until he talks with Jackal.
The second years he could handle; he had earned what he saw in their faces when they called him Kirihara-buchou. Respect or fear or pride, he had earned it. But the glow in the first years’ eyes, the awe in their voices when they whispered to each other about him, that made him twitchy.
Some friendly bickering within the Rikkai team.
They were all getting off the bus, stretching and exchanging dinner plans, when Masaharu heard Yanagi ask Kirihara, softly, “So which are you going to be, Akaya? A tiger cub, or the boy who swallowed a dragon pearl?”