InsaneJournal

PsyDai: NaNoWriMo Project
Title: NaNoWriMo Project

Part: 10

Author: Me

Fandom: Prince of Tennis

Series: PsyDai

Summary: More abuse of Shishido. Atobe gets into an argument with Tezuka.

Word Count: 3,279 out of total 28,096

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Dinner at PsyDai is usually an uneventful affair. Exhausted by a day of mentally taxing academic lessons and club activities, students usually pile into the dinning commons and head straight for the food, often wolfing down their meals without trying to taste what had been on the menu. Some students take the food back to the dormitories instead of eating in the cacophonous clatter of the dining hall, thereby managing to eat and study at the same time, squeezing out an hour or so of free time before curfew hour and lights out. Others, who are not as intently concentrated on their academics or have no regards for the dormitory curfew, would spend most of dinner hour socializing with friends in loud and boisterous groups. For the older students who have alcohol privileges, dinner melds with happy hour and on days when school work are not particularly heavy, spend the evening getting drunk on heated sake. Occasionally, a few under-aged students would sneak into these drinking groups for a sip, but almost never escape the sharp eyes of the dining hall monitors who would inevitably bestow their wrath upon the young students and quickly remove them from the alcohol area.

Shishido was one of the few unlucky first years who, having gotten on good terms with a sempai in his art history class, was attempting to sneak some liquors from the older students under the encouragements of his sempai-tachi. When he had been spotted, the monitor on duty had dragged him away painfully by his ear and gave him a long, tedious speech on the evils of drink, then sent him to the corner where most of the first years were located with a pat and patronizing smile, saying, “You don’t want to grow up so quickly, Shishido-kun. You should try to enjoy your youth.”

As Shishido slumped his way to where the rest of his first year tennis teammates were gathered, Atobe noticed his arrival and greeted him with a curt nod followed by a raised brow.

“What happened?” Atobe asked as he sliced a thick steak into precise cubes, silverware eerily silent through the maneuver. He’d once told Shishido when Shishido commented on the lack of familiar clinking that “ore-sama is too refined to clatter silverware when ore-sama eats.”

“No booze policy,” Shishido muttered, ignoring the eye-roll Yagyuu gave him at the use of such a “plebian” word and Atobe’s look of pained tolerance.

“Why in the world would you want to get drunk on the first day of school?” a high pitched voice asked him from across the table. Shishido looked up to find Niou blinking back at him with a curious and definitely mischievous look.

Shishido scowled at the spiky head, remembering that this was the person who had hit a ball into his kouhai’s nose during the senior high nationals and had tricked him into participating in the humiliating dating game when Atobe had thrown his Super Tennis Festival. He remembered how Ohtori had given him the kicked puppy eyes for a whole week after that event and all Shishido had remembered was the damn machine blowing up in his face, making him inhale the smoke of burnt rubber and wires.

“Because I have to deal with people like you,” Shishido spat at the offending head.

Before Niou could comment that he didn’t room anywhere near Shishido or that they shared a total of zero classes together, Atobe interrupted with, “Shishido, I would appreciate it if you refrained from spitting into ore-sama’s wine glass when you’re expressing your burning hatred for certain persons on premise.”

“How did you get permission for wine?” boggled Shishido as he glared at the glassful of scarlet liquid.

“It’s cranberry cider,” Atobe answered with his best offended voice while chomping delicately into a cube of steak and thereby stopping any further conversation.

“Besides, you’re a sappy drunk and we can all do without anymore declarations of love from you,” Oshitari, who had been conspicuously not in the vicinity a mere minute ago, piped in.

“I am not.”

“Don’t deny your true self, Shishido,” the annoying voice of Mukahi Gakuto popped up from behind the bespectacled tensai. “Didn’t you hear it’s bad for your psyche?”

“Thank you, Mukahi, I didn’t realize you had a doctorate degree in psychology seeing as you’re still in college!”

“Wait, wait, what’s this about Shishido being a sappy drunk?” This time, it was former Rikkai Dai’s Marui who appeared, having gotten over his dislike of Hyoutei after Mukahi appeased him by offering to share the box of Belgium chocolates Oshitari bought him for snacks before tennis practice. After around the fourteenth piece of chocolate, the two net players had agreed that the orange chocolates tasted best and Kikumaru was a talentless hack who probably wasn’t a natural redhead. Obviously he dyed his pubes to cover up for this fact because no natural redhead could have pubic hair that bright, at which point the conversation had been broken up by a blushing Jackal insisting that there were better things they could talk about, such as net techniques. At the eager look the two redheads shared, Jackal had suddenly realized his unintentional innuendo and promptly threw Marui over one shoulder carrying him off to the dining area.

This didn’t stop the Rikkai Dai tensai from over hearing the declaration of Shishido being a sappy drunk, which, according to Marui’s own experiences with liquor filled tennis teammates, was a sure cue to an embarrassing and infinitely amusing story.

“Shishido loves everyone when you get him juiced enough,” Mukahi was explaining eagerly to his fellow friend in arms. “If you get a good bottle of sake into him, he'll try to kiss you.”

“That is a blatant lie!” Shishido shouted in his most offended voice.

“No, it’s true,” Oshitari defended his partner's claim with subtle push of his glasses, causing the flat lens to reflect the dining hall light that shined loudly into Shishido's eyes and possibly blinding him for life. “Of course, I don’t expect you to remember our karaoke party seeing as how you were drunk out of your mind, but I distinctly remember you attempting to shove your tongue down everyone's throat. It’s a good thing Ohtori-kun had been there to stop you from slobbering over everyone.”

“Then you sort of, um, cooed at him,” added Jirou who was, for once, not asleep and was very awake. Hyper even. “It was really cute. You ruffled his hair and called him a baby and everything.”

Shishido stared at Jirou with horror, his eyes screaming “Traitor!”

“And here I thought all the while Hyotei promoted competition,” Marui mused aloud with a thoughtful look on his face. “I guess you guys are really more about making friends.”

“Not friends, alliances,” Oshitari corrected smoothly, his glasses shining wildly.

“Oh, is that what they’re calling it these days,” Niou smirked then winced as Yagyuu elbowed him viciously in the ribs. “Ow, Yagyuu!”

“Don’t be impolite,” his roommate scolded primly.

“Besides,” Mukahi went on as though there hadn’t been an interruption to his narration by half a dozen people, “it’s not as if there’s anything going on anyway, at least not if Shishido’s as dense has he seems.”

“What the hell does that mean, Mukahi?” Shishido glared at the acrobat and wished he had something to throw at the redhead. Unfortunately, if he threw Atobe’s wine glass, Atobe will probably make his life hell for the entire year, if not the rest of his college career. Or worse, the rest of his life.

Mukahi blinked at him for a second, seemingly thrown by the question, but recovered fast enough to demand, “Well, are you doing anything with Ohtori?”

Shishido just gaped as his mouth moved silently, trying to work some kind of answer that didn’t actually involve answering the question. Unfortunately, the silence seemed answer enough as Mukahi gave a nod as if Shishido had uttered the answer aloud.

“I thought so.”

“Wait,” Niou pipped up again, ignoring the death glare that was sent his way by the ruffled Shishido, “isn’t Ohtori that kid who partnered with Shishido back in junior high? That explains why he kept giving me the cold shoulder after the dating game thing.”

“So you remembered,” Shishido muttered angrily but was overrode by Marui yelping, “Whoa, you were involved way back then?!”

“Not to judge, but weren’t you a bit young?” Yagyuu asked, not at all conflicted by the fact that he actually was judging.

“Nfu, how advanced of you, Shishido-kun,” Mizuki, who’d been attracted by the boisterous crowd, observed as he twirled a strand of curly black hair around his index finger. One never knew what kind of interesting blackmail material one could pick up at these gatherings, though Mizuki rarely had enough good sense to know when to use said material.

“So if you didn’t do the deed, what did you do?”

“Niou!”

“It’s a valid question!”

“I concur!”

“My love life is not a topic of discussion for the dinner table!” Shishido finally roared as he stood up, face flaming from anger and not a little from embarrassment.

“But we’re not discussing your love life,” Marui replied sweetly with a smile that looked almost predatory. “We’re discussing the lack thereof.”

“That’s the–—”

“It’s not the same,” Mukahi interrupted Shishido’s denial obnoxiously. “We’re speculating on what everyone would have assumed by default, therefore it’s not the same breech of privacy.”

“What kind of twisted logic are you on?” Shishido growled. And why does everyone think I’m not getting any he didn’t ask aloud, knowing better than to give his teammates that kind of ammunition to use against him.

Meanwhile, Oshitari merely looked at his doubles partner with a new found respect. “I didn’t think all those semantic lessons would sink in.”

“So, speaking of those activities which you didn’t do,” Niou began and promptly received a face full of mashed potatoe.

Balancing a spoon vertically at the tip of his finger, Shishido declared smugly, “End of discussion.” Then promptly was hit on the side of the head with a blob of cranberry sauce in retaliation.

“Food fight!”

At the yell by someone in the mass of bodies, what had already been a noisy dining hall soon became filled with airborne pot roast and flung green beans. Alliances formed and broke, turncoats came up in every faction, and instead of a divided war, it was soon every man for himself, with liberal application of ketchup in strategic areas.

Atobe looked on with a long suffering face then ducked just in time to avoid a flying spoon. Turning, he scowled at Sanada who was calmly eating his meal amid the chaos.

“Aren’t you going to do something about them?” he demanded of the other boy who seemed unperturbed by the chaos that surrounded him.

“And what would that be?” Sanada asked calmly as he sipped a glass of orange juice.

“Stopping them, perhaps? They are your teammates.”

“Because Hyotei students didn’t start this food war at all, of course.”

Sneering at the other boy, Atobe stood from his seat and declared, “Ore-sama should have known to take this meal in the dorms like Tezuka, where sane people eat. Although, don’t you find it odd that neither Sengoku-kun or Seichi showed up for dinner?”

Then, without a look back, Atobe stalked out of the dining hall, smiling to himself as he heard the distressed yell of “Yukimura!”

Leaving the chaos that defined the dining halls, Atobe stalked back to his room, grumbling silently about a ruined dinner and the loss of dignity by Shishido for all Hyotei alumni, although why he’d thought otherwise was beyond him. Ore-sama was definitely giving too much credit for those miscreants.

Thus, still in an ill mood, Atobe stepped into his shared room, slamming the door as he walked in. So preoccupied with his mental castigation of his alumni, he failed to notice the multiple presence in his room until his roommate called out to him.

“Atobe, watch your step,” Tezuka was saying as Atobe finally jerked to attention and noticed that his room was filled to brimming with Seigaku graduates. Looking down, he noticed that he had been on the verge of stepping on a very supine Kikumaru who seemed to be obsessed with something in the ceiling and was not at all paying attention to the world around him.

Taking a quick glance around, Atobe saw the other half of Seigaku’s famed Golden Pair sprawled on Tezuka’s bed, one foot making lazy circles in the air while another hanged limply on the carpeted floor. At Tezuka’s foot sat Fuji and Kawamura, who were leaning into each other in a nearly drunken manner, not yet completely unconscious of their surroundings but definitely not anywhere near aware. On his bed sat the only non-Seigaku graduate, Yanagi Renji, who seemed to be in the middle of discussion with the other half of the Data Pair. On both his and Tezuka’s desk, there were multiple rows of precisely lined-up 20ml beakers, most of which empty save for a few very colorful drops of viscous liquid still sticking to the bottom.

It was then that Atobe noticed the interesting, if somewhat disturbing smell that was emitting from the bathroom.

“Tezuka, what is going on?” Atobe demanded of his roommate as he sent his best glare to the unseeing, or rather uncaring, people currently overtaking his room.

“My friends are visiting,” Tezuka informed him, his face unchanging during the exchange as he calmly continued to eat from the plate of food sitting precariously close to the edge of the table and placed as far away from the questionable beakers as possible.

“That’s lovely,” Atobe snapped back. Then he clarified, “Why are they all...drunk?”

Tezuka looked around the room as if only just taking in the situation. Peering down into Fuji’s eyes, who happened to sit closest to him, Tezuka observed, “I wouldn’t call them drunk, precisely. It’s more an adverse reaction to a non-alcoholic beverage.”

“I can’t even begin to ask.”

“Seigaku has a tradition to get together for meals after the first day of school,” Tezuka explained mildly, as if he wasn’t sitting among a half dozen worth of intoxicated tennis players, some of whom worse off than others, or that the entire situation was a somewhat common occurrence. That the latter was possibly true did not put Atobe’s mind at ease.

“They,” Tezuka was still saying as he gestured to the fallen people with a fork, “were playing a card game of some sort and decided to use Inui’s newest concoction as the penalty. 30 milliliters for each loss was the wager, I think. Anyway, I suspect that there was some ingredient in the new juice that wasn’t compatible with them, which is why they look slightly...”

As Tezuka paused to find an appropriate word, Atobe suggested, “Deranged?”

“Incapacitated,” Tezuka reprimanded. “Anyway, they should come around soon, they usually always do.”

“And why are those two,” Atobe made a vague gesture to the two usurping his bed, “sober?”

“We didn’t lose,” Inui answered in Tezuka’s steed, his glasses glinting proudly.

This was not an unexpected development, at least not by those who were familiar with Seigaku’s brand of insanity. Earlier in the day, Inui had finished perfecting the newest formula involving liberal use of poppy seeds and millet extract for his Inui Juice in his organic chemistry laboratory section. However, due to school and laboratory policy against eating or otherwise ingesting anything in the lab, Inui had not been able to test his newest invention, much to his lab partner Yanagi’s relief. Thus, in the time honored tradition of testing Inui Juice on live subjects, Inui had, with the help from Yanagi, came up with an elaborate plan to coerce others into ingesting the vile liquid now that he was no longer the manager for the tennis team. The plan had involved the complex process of developing a game that had the odds stacked in extreme favor for the Data Pair while seemingly to handicap them at first glance. After convincing Kikumaru that their former buchou and good friend deserved a socializing visit from his fellow alumni, it had been exceedingly easy to gather his test subjects into an easily accessible situation.

Of course, that the majority of Seigaku alumni, with exception to Tezuka, seem to lack good judgment when it came to competition in anything that’s not tennis greatly helped with the collection of interesting responses to the newest juice forumla. Responses such as the repressive effect on Kikumaru’s curiosity and general sense of hyperactivity, turning the boy into a more mellow version of himself than usual and far less affectionate, which, after consulting with Yanagi, Inui had presumed to be indicative of Kikumaru’s drunk response, though it bears further testing. The most interesting reaction by far, Inui personally believed, was Kawamura’s lack of burning mode when holding phallic objects once fully under the influence of the new juice. This lack of immediate burning mode manifested many interesting responses Kawamura would otherwise normally have to holding long, round objects, one of which included a disturbing amount of petting that Inui had decided best left uninvestigated.

There were limits to even his tolerance to too much data.

His discoveries, as interesting and useful as they were, did not seem to inspire much by way of awe from Tezuka, who Inui had always considered academically inquisitive, if somewhat procedurally conservative. Possibly not a little over enthusiastic at the newly discovered nuances to his teammates, Inui was eager to share this bountiful knowledge and had sprung at the first opportunity, which in this case was the sudden intrusion into the room by Atobe. Unfortunately, his greeting and declaration of victory was not met with anything resembling hospitality or interest.

Throwing a glare in Inui’s direction that indicated “Ore-sama wasn’t talking to you”, Atobe addressed Tezuka regarding the fallen bodies lying haphazardly, “Get them out of ore-sama’s room.”

“I’ll have them leave once they’ve recovered,” Tezuka informed Atobe flatly, his brows crinkling minutely, the only indication of his displeasure at Atobe’s proprietary reference to their shared room.

“Now, Tezuka,” Atobe bit out, his voice unnaturally bland as he tried to convey the urgency of needing his room emptied of chaos immediately.

“As soon as they’re capable of standing,” Tezuka responded in a similarly stiff voice, warning underlying each word. Don’t be unreasonable.

With one last general glower to everyone in the room, but saving the burn of his anger for Tezuka, Atobe sharply turned about face and stalked out of the room, slamming the door closed again.

Wincing at the loudly closing door, Inui turned to Tezuka and asked with concern, “Will he be all right?”

“It’ll be fine,” Tezuka assured him without a change in expression and began finishing his dinner as if his roommate had not just stormed out or that the discourse affected him.

Sharing a look with his current roommate, Inui relented as Yanagi gently shook his head. At least neither one triggered destructive powers when angered, unlike certain others who were also part of the PsyDai student body.

It was at this thought when Inui felt a large rumble followed by a loud crashing sound coming from the direction of the dining halls. Wincing, Inui looked to Yanagi who was shaking his head and mouthing, “Shishido.”