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Touya Kouyou – the not-so-young whippersnapper – invites him to his wedding, as well he should. After all, Kuwabara feels that he's taught Kouyou a thing or two about both Go and life, over the years. Meteoric risers always have to be taught a little humility, and no one else in the Association had seemed either willing or capable enough to knock Kouyou back a little when he'd started collecting major titles left and right.
Still, Kuwabara has to remind himself these days that Kouyou, the little upstart, isn't so little anymore and is in fact the farthest thing from an upstart in the eyes of most of the Association. Time has a habit of moving more and more quickly once one is past fifty, and fifty was a long time ago – these days, Kouyou has finished off nearly everyone else in his hunt for titles, and spends most of his official playing time now snapping at Kuwabara's heels for the Honinbou. That battle, at least, is evergreen, and has been raging between them since Kouyou was nineteen years old and still wet behind the ears. Kouyou can pry the title out of Kuwabara's cold, dead hands come time, but that time is not now.
Right now, the cherry blossoms are in full bloom overhead as Touya Kouyou walks in solemn procession behind his new wife as they head up the path towards the shrine's main complex. Touya Akiko is young and beautiful, bright-eyed and bushy tailed; Kuwabara has no idea how Kouyou nabbed a girl like that when the man frowns so much and can't crack a joke. Kouyou takes himself so seriously sometimes, and it makes for gloomy weather, especially in the winter.
Today, though, spring shines through at its finest. Kuwabara pays absolutely no attention to the formal proceedings taking place up at the pavilion proper, the guests having been relegated to waiting some distance away. Kouyou, though busy signing documents and drinking sake, is clearly happy: the late March air is clear and crisp, whispering promises of warmth to come instead of threatening temporary retreat back to the cold of winter. The weeks leading up to the wedding had seen the weather serve as Kouyou's slow herald: every day nicer than the last without exception until the someiyoshino trees everywhere in Tokyo had burst forth. A slight wind picks up, swaying the black branches of the cherry trees until petals start to rain down on the party, botanical snow.
It's a nice change following many brutal and unpredictable recent springs. Kuwabara shakes his head. It's typical Touya, really: quiet melodrama. Well, it seems like the man's found his port of call now: as they come to greet their guests, Kouyou's normally dour face has somehow rearranged itself into a smile. The breeze shifts Akiko's kimono just enough to give it movement and grace, transforming an already radiant bride into an ethereal one.
When Kouyou finally works his way down the line of guests to him, Kuwabara offers the man a raised eyebrow and a grin to complement his congratulations. 'Maybe we'll continue to have nice weather for a while, hm?'
Kouyou's lips quiver just marginally. 'Maybe we will, Kuwabara-sensei.'
'We should enjoy it while it lasts,' Kuwabara laughs. 'Because we always end up with monsoon rains come July...'
The breeze stops, but only for a moment. Kouyou thanks him without rising to the bait. Getting married really does change a man, Kuwabara reflects as he watches the flower petals follow the couple as they progress past him. Well, it'll be four more months before the challenger for the Honinbou matches will be decided: who knows how long the honeymoon period will last?
Glorious weather persists through all of April, May and June. Touya Kouyou, who'd won three of the seven major titles last year and been runner up for two, demolishes all other comers in the Honinbou League. The start of July, instead of being a scorcher, is simply pleasantly warm. Kouyou meets him across the board as challenger for the Honinbou dressed in a resplendent new set of traditional attire.
'You're doubling down on looking like an old man before your time,' Kuwabara snickers after the camera flashes of the photographers have made them both go blind for the documentation of the first move. He rearranges the ashtray laid out for him on his side table and hunts for cigarettes and a lighter.
'I would have thought you'd enjoy having an opponent who actively chooses non-western dress,' Kouyou returns evenly, sitting prim and proper across the board. As far as title-level players go, the man has too few bad habits. Rin likes to click his fan, Cho hums off-tune to drive people crazy, and Kuwabara himself opts for blowing smoke rings like a dragon, but Touya Kouyou is too good for any of that. The man drinks plain green tea and somehow never messes up his sleeves while doing so.
'Eh, you're a man of the modern times,' Kuwabara says, waving one unlit cigarette in the air. 'You look traditional, but your Go is full of strange ideas.' He lights up. 'You wouldn't know what to do with traditional Go if it showed up and haunted you.'
Kouyou just shrugs one shoulder, eyes intent on the board, so Kuwabara settles down himself. It's a pity how blind and deaf Kouyou is to the past: the man's more machine than anything else. He takes what he wants from the games of the old masters and throws away the rest. He memorises their moves, but disregards their spirits.
More's the shame that Kouyou's powers don't extend in that direction, Kuwabara figures. The house of Honinbou keeps him in their confidences, and Kuwabara repays that gift with interest. Though he's sacrificed the other titles many times in his career, he's kept the Honinbou at least once every three years even at his worst. In over thirty-five years since he made 9-dan, he has won Honinbou eighteen times, and – until old age started to take bites out of his stamina – once held it for twelve years running. He'd been given the title of honorary Honinbou when he was thirty-eight. Kouyou cannot, in actuality, take that from him.
Still, the wisdom of past tends to cleave to the innovation of the future every now and then. Kouyou takes the Honinbou title that year, and all of August is almost annoyingly hot as a result, with barely any days of rain. What, Kuwabara wonders, is the point of a Go player who can control the weather when matches are played indoors?
Touya Akira is born four months later on what had been a clear December evening. When Kuwabara hunts down the weather report after hearing news of the birth a few days later, it says that the snowstorm that bore down on Tokyo at 5:21PM was the most unexpected meteorological event of the decade.
'That bodes well,' Kuwabara cackles, tossing the newspaper down onto the table. 'What will you bring into our world, Touya Akira?'
The answer to that question takes a very long time to resolve. Kuwabara finds it incredibly frustrating to have to watch children grow up – it takes so long, and there's so much risk of skills being lost just because the snot-nosed little brats don't have the patience to sit still in front of a game board.
The older that Kuwabara gets himself, the clearer the past becomes to him and, therefore, the more obvious the way the world works becomes as well. As a very young child, he'd attributed the feeling of his hand being guided whenever he made good moves to the universal feeling children have that they are somehow special. As he'd grown in both age and powers and started to hear actual voices in addition to honing that strong gut instinct, he'd blamed that on the coincidental start of his career in heavy drinking. But then he'd won lifetime honorary Honinbou, passed out after a rousing celebration party, and woken up in his futon to see the ghostly face of Honinbou Shuei staring down at him. Shouting and slapping himself hadn't made Shuei disappear into the ether, so Kuwabara eventually settled down and opened up his ears, his eyes, and – finally – his mind.
It all seems to go backwards for him the longer he plays, is what Kuwabara finds. It's not age: it is time spent at the board. Shuei, 19th Honinbou – the first that Kuwabara had seen – died in 1907. By the time he turned fifty-five, he'd met every Honinbou as far back as 9th Honinbou Satsugen, though somehow not Shusaku. Now, well. Now Kuwabara is under the tutelage of Dosaku, and passes every day with as much anticipation over what he will learn next from that great player as he does trepidation over what is to come: there will be only two more of the line left to meet, after. It feels, on days when his knees and back ache after long contests, like a countdown.
In any case, one has to play to hear. Once, when he'd been taken to the hospital for pneumonia (Kuwabara chooses to blame that on Kouyou's bad temper and the consequent horrific winter that accompanied it, as opposed to tobacco companies), he'd stopped playing for a week. He'd left the hospital with a ringing silence in his ears. The doctors were almost convinced he had tinnitus, but after his first practice game, it vanished and was replaced by familiar company appearing on the other side of the Go board.
'The only thing that doesn't fit the theory,' Kuwabara muses out loud as he plays a practice match with Dosaku, 'is how there are hundreds of good players who practice endlessly but are still as deaf as bricks and just as mundane.'
'It's inherited magic,' Dosaku says, gazing intensely at the board. 'Onmyoji from the old capital established methods of study of Go that eventually could only be mastered by people possessing very particular traits. Those traits are easiest to preserve by passing them down through family lines.'
Kuwabara squints skeptically at the ghost in front of him, then realises what he is doing: staring skeptically at spectres. 'But,' he sighs, protesting nonetheless, 'so many players were adopted, not born, into the great houses.'
'Yes,' Dosaku agrees easily, 'but many came from the same families as other great players. The pool of imperial players who were qualified to learn the methods was very small, or so they say. Most were Fujiwara to start, at the height of the popularity of the game in the old court. Eventually, of course, the Taira came around, and then the Minamoto rose...'
Kuwabara snorts. 'The rest is history.'
'It isn't exclusively hereditary,' Dosaku says, 'because aptitude is aptitude and can be moulded with training. Family is simply the most conducive environment.' He gestures at Kuwabara. 'But some just have the aptitude. Regardless, all must practice the art for it to manifest.'
Kuwabara moves a piece and folds his arms into his sleeves. 'So if Touya's brat doesn't play, we'll lose his line just like we've lost some of the others.' Kuwabara has seen it happen too many times in just the last fifteen years. There was a player who was very adept at making time slow down during matches – hateful as an opponent, but fascinating as a specimen of someone else like him. His son now plays tennis, apparently. A hateful waste.
'The rest will be history,' Dosaku nods, 'if they do not play.'
Kuwabara does not find the concept of death solely frightening, and certainly not sad or terminal. But grief licks at his insides to hear Dosaku confirm his suspicions; some days it feels like their game is dying. Kuwabara funnels the feeling into his gameplay instead of dwelling, commending it cry out to a younger generation that – he can only hope – will be around to hear it.
Kuwabara will never admit it, but when Touya Akira is finally debuted in public by his father, he breathes a sigh of relief. The kid is decent. The kid will be more than decent, given enough time, because the kid has good fundamentals, and on the day that Akira wins the first match that will start him down the path, as a non-insei, towards the world of professional Go, the clouds clear out and present them all with a spring day as perfect as one from ten long years ago.
'Now there's going to be two of you,' Kuwabara comments to Kouyou, who is attempting to look stoic and mostly failing as they spectate Akira's match. 'We'd better get someone in here who knows how to balance your family out, or this new global warming business will get very confusing.'
'Please don't exaggerate, Kuwabara Honinbou,' Kouyou says, but he's fighting a smile.
'I'm not exaggerating, Touya Meijin,' Kuwabara returns. 'You've become a formidably bad loser.'
'I beg to differ,' Kouyou says, looking at him sidelong.
'Oh, you're perfectly and pointlessly civil to your opponent,' Kuwabara agrees, meeting his eye. 'But then it buckets rain for days and I hate getting wet. Good thing you don't play many matches any more.' Three titles is now Kouyou's yearly average, and holding them releases him from playing in the qualifiers. The man needs some distracting vices. Maybe he should go partying with that other talented disciple of his, Ogata. Now there's a kid who knows how to have a good time, even if Ogata probably couldn't tell the supernatural apart from the after-effects of alcoholism to save his life.
Kouyou says nothing for a while. 'We'll see what happens,' he says eventually. 'Akira must find his own way.'
The problem with great players is that they cast long shadows. Kuwabara can understand some of that inherited weight, so he nods and considers stern little Akira failing to smile for the cameras the same way his father does. 'Don't let him get lost, though.'
Kouyou nods. 'I'll try.'
After watching Akira for a while, Kuwabara decides that Kouyou doesn't do a bad job of ushering the young boy along, but that he doesn't do quite enough, either.
'There's no fire in him unless he's playing someone good,' Kuwabara complains to Kouyou as they drink in private after yet another Honinbou battle. They're in the middle of the series – a good time to get sloshed, what with three good clashes behind them and the delicious potential of four more ahead – and they've taken over a private room at the hotel restaurant to have a "post-game discussion" in. Mostly, they are talking over Kouyou's parenting skills, or mentoring skills, or both.
'There is no one who will challenge him at this age.' Kouyou stares fixedly at his sake cup. 'It is simply a matter of time. He'll turn professional come next April, and things will pick up for him then.'
Kuwabara sighs heavily and pushes his own empty cup over for Kouyou to refill. 'Why are all the good ones off doing other things, and all the ones who are working on their Go so pedestrian?'
Kouyou makes a non-committal noise and pours. 'He's only eleven.'
'What he needs is for someone his age to kick his ass,' Kuwabara surmises. 'Otherwise, the first time he loses to an inferior opponent, he's going to have a meltdown.'
'Akira is not going to have a meltdown,' Kouyou says sternly.
Kuwabara peers at Kouyou over his cup. 'You don't remember at all what you used to be like, do you?'
Kouyou stares back at him. On a less dignified countenance, it would look sulky.
'Akira's going to have a meltdown,' Kuwabara says confidently. He lifts his cup up to Kouyou in a toast. 'Bottom's up!'
'I took what you said under consideration, Kuwabara-sensei,' Kouyou says to him after their next match. 'Since Akira tends to meet the same set of opponents at official matches and my study group, I've encouraged him to play more at our local Go cafe.'
'Right,' Kuwabara laughs. 'Because the brat is going to meet so many great players who aren't already insei at cafe full of hobbyists.'
Kouyou shrugs one shoulder. 'Expanding his horizons will be good for him, even if he doesn't meet anyone at his level. You never know.'
You can't predict the weather, Kuwabara doesn't say out loud. 'We'll see,' he says instead.
They do see. Touya Akira has an absolute meltdown; the neighbourhood around the Go Association nearly floods after a three day, hyper-localised freak rainstorm.
'I called it!' Kuwabara tells Ogata at their next drinking session. (Touya Kouyou is a sneaky man who sends different members of his study circle out socialising with his various opponents to learn how they work – Ashiwara goes with Morishita's motley crew, and Ogata comes and behaves badly with him. Kuwabara can respect that level of subterfuge-at-arm's-distance.)
'You called Akira losing to a no-name beginner at a Go cafe?' Ogata asks dubiously.
'I called Akira-kun being a sore loser,' Kuwabara says smugly. 'Because his father was one too.'
'He'll get over it,' Ogata dismisses, digging out a pack of cigarettes for them to share. He props one arm up on the countertop and rests his head on his hand, looking over. His glasses gleam in the low light of the bar. 'He's just at that age.'
'If he's lucky, he won't get over it,' Kuwabara counters, taking the offered pack. 'Feelings like these are gifts.'
'That is only because,' the seriously tipsy Ogata says, enunciating carefully, 'you do not live around the kid having these feelings, sensei. It is not a gift; it is a curse.'
Kuwabara scoffs. 'You have no idea what a curse looks like, Ogata-kun.'
'Sure, sure,' Ogata nods, eyes going heavy behind his glasses; his chin is beginning to slip off of the hand it's resting on. 'Whatever you say, sensei... Though it is strange that a kid his age beat him that badly; I wonder...' Ogata trails off, nodding off.
There are only five or six bottles in front of them on the bar: Kouyou's boys are all such lightweights. 'Master,' Kuwabara hails down the bartender, looking down fondly at Ogata, who's starting to snore. 'Call a taxi, please. And charge it all to Ogata-kun's tab.'
Akira proceeds to, according to the Go Association grapevine, continue to have his meltdown long after his loss at the Go cafe. It's enough that it begins to annoy Kuwabara: the younger generation isn't as tough as they could be, and perhaps one humiliating 2-point loss is all that it takes to turn Akira off of the game and onto, who knows, tennis or something.
'You couldn't be more wrong, sensei,' Ogata grumbles to him at their next meeting, where lots are being drawn for which poor sucker gets to go look after the hordes of children at the National Children's Go Competition. 'He's more committed than ever. He's been going to the cafe after school every day since. He just sits there, waiting.'
'For the mysterious other boy to show up?' Kuwabara asks, staring down the Go Association staff member who's about to draw the names. The man quivers, and Kuwabara smiles, with teeth.
'Yes, but the kid hasn't been back.' The staff member makes the pick, and Ogata winces as his name is read out loud.
Kuwabara slaps him heartily on the back. 'It's an honour to be selected,' he tells Ogata. 'You're going to be literally the guest of honour. Enjoy it, Ogata-kun.' Something in Kuwabara's gut twists in a new and interesting way, and he takes a moment to consider what it might mean. 'Who knows. Maybe Mysterious Boy will show his face at the competition.'
'Hmmm.' Ogata looks dubious, but Kuwabara can tell he's intrigued. It's too bad that he's already booked a date with Mariko-chan that day, or Kuwabara would go himself – if he's anything like his father, Touya Akira has probably got a good eye. He wonders what the brat had seen.
'Sensei, he showed up,' Ogata reports in a little while after the children's tournament, coming into the room where Kuwabara is spectating Zama play in one of the Oza rounds.
Kuwabara looks up from the television. 'Mysterious Boy did?'
Ogata removes his jacket and drapes it over the back of a chair, which he then pulls out. 'Yes. He caused a big fuss by reading a deep play out loud, forced a game to be restarted, annoyed the officials, and then was released back into the wild by the officials before I could intervene.'
'Ho ho,' Kuwabara coos, interested now. 'Is there more to this story?'
'Yes,' Ogata nods, sitting. 'I found him not long after that, standing in the street in front of Touya-sensei's Go cafe.'
'Back to the beginning,' Kuwabara murmurs. 'And?'
'I dragged him upstairs and made him play sensei, naturally.'
Kuwabara bursts out laughing. Oh, the Touya family – adoptive or not – is truly one of a kind. They do, indeed, have particular traits. No wonder he likes them so much. 'And?'
Ogata props both elbows down on the table and leans forward as if to share a secret. 'He played a few good hands, then knocked the goke over and ran from the cafe screaming.'
Kuwabara quirks a smile. 'Kouyou does have that effect on people from time to time.'
'Sensei,' Ogata chides.
'What happened next?'
'Nothing,' Ogata sighs, crossing his arms in frustration. 'He's vanished into thin air, this Shindou Hikaru character.'
'Is Akira going after him?' Kuwabara asks.
'No idea. I guess we'll have to wait and see,' Ogata shrugs, and then they turn their attention over to the match properly.
'Our Gosei matches have been looking terrible on broadcast, don't you think?' Kuwabara laughs as he waits with Kouyou in their designated green room. 'Two old men battling one another in slow-motion on television.'
Kouyou chuckles. 'I suppose neither of us have Ogata's flashiness.'
'Ha!' Kuwabara laughs. Outside, everything is chaos as Association members run around getting the playing room set up and the television crews situated, but as players they simply have to wait in their small oasis of calm. Kouyou, therefore, is trapped with him, and Kuwabara has ample opportunity to interrogate the man about potential reasons for the great thunderstorm that had overtaken Tokyo last week. He samples the snack platter laid out for them and casually changes the topic. 'And how is Akira's experiment with his school's Go club progressing?'
Kouyou makes an ambiguous sound. 'He has since quit.'
'Oh? He doesn't strike me as the sort of give up on anything, but we did have some horrible weather for a while. Did something happen?'
'He felt that there was something he needed to do, playing club Go,' Kouyou says. 'That there was something that he feared that he had to face there.'
'And?' Kuwabara prompts.
'He defeated that opponent,' Kouyou says, arms crossed. It's something, Kuwabara notices, that Ogata's inherited. He watches Kouyou tap the fingers of his right hand against his elbow, considering. 'It did not bring him peace.'
Ah, Kuwabara thinks. That would have been Shindou Hikaru failing to live up to his potential. 'Winning isn't everything. What's he worried about now?'
'That his opponent isn't who he thought he was, perhaps,' Kouyou suggests. 'That he's now further from the Hand of God than he has ever been.'
'Is that what he thinks this is all about?' Kuwabara huffs.
'We all want opponents who challenge us. When they disappoint us, isn't it sometimes worse than when they beat us?'
'I've seen so many come and go, Kouyou Meijin,' Kuwabara says, serious for a change. 'The only true disappointment is when people give up completely.'
Shindou Hikaru is an unknown quantity, but it would be a shame for Touya Akira to surrender now just because he's beaten someone too handily. The thunderstorm that had crashed down on the city had been terrific: nearly a typhoon. Kuwabara had sat in his home and looked out at water lashing itself across his garden, the fury of nature harnessed by one young lost boy who didn't realise, perhaps, how much being given a focal point had changed his capabilities. Kouyou had never changed the weather this way: he'd had no one who'd stood up to him, and therefore no one who'd let him down. It had been humbling to sit through the rain, because for the first time in a long while it had felt to Kuwabara like the Divine Move was more than just mythology or invention, but something real and catalytic. He has never wanted to see the old powers to die out; that day, for the first time, he felt like he'd watched them flare up with renewed potency. He understands Akira's emotions: it is a horrible thing to feel alone after feeling, for the first time, like you have met someone of the same strain. Loneliness is endemic to their kind. It wears them all down, if left unchecked.
Before Kouyou can respond, however, they are interrupted by staff members coming in to get them into position for their entrances. Kuwabara decides that fate can handle the rest: Touya Akira, as his father had said, must find his own way.
Later on, in the middle of the deep, still mental silence that is the hallmark of a good match, Kuwabara reflects on how fortunate he is to have had Touya Kouyou as an opponent these last four decades: a blink in the eye of god, but a lifetime worth of plays guided by god's hands.
Time continues to slip by as the seasons start to turn over. The best gossip never comes from Kouyou, who is too circumspect to dish out details and now also far too smug (having claimed the Gosei as his fourth title of the year) to bear being around, so Kuwabara squeezes it out of Ogata once more.
'I don't understand teenagers,' is Ogata's summary of the situation, which Kuwabara can generally agree with. 'Akira spent a semester getting abused by the members of the Kaio Go club just so he could play Shindou in a tournament. Shindou then turns out to be terrible; Akira can't reconcile it. And, to make matters more complicated, now there's an unknown entity on the internet named sai who is winning against all comers whose play style is...' Ogata shrugs, cutting himself off, and pretends to consult the menu in front of him instead; they are eating lunch at one of those expensive places that Ogata always finds good recommendations for.
'Hmmm,' Kuwabara hums. 'I've heard of the internet.'
Ogata sighs. 'Sensei...'
Kuwabara throws him a bone. 'So has young Akira given up on that erstwhile rival of his in favour of an internet ghost?'
Ogata sighs again, but differently. 'Like I said, sensei, I don't understand teenagers. He says he doesn't care about Shindou anymore – the game was that terrible. But it is the sort of "not caring" that people who have been broken up with say they feel about their ex-lovers, if you'll excuse the metaphor.'
'How terrible was it?' Kuwabara asks.
'Bad,' Ogata says flatly.
'I want to see,' Kuwabara pushes.
Ogata waves the menu about slightly. 'Akira won't play the full game for us. Apparently it's insulting, as though Shindou was a totally different player. Maybe he told Ashiwara – they're closer to each other in some ways. In any case, sensei, let's order...'
'What,' Kuwabara asks Dosaku as they both peer down at a match record on the board between them, 'do you think the point of playing Go is?'
'To win, most of the time,' Dosaku says, brow furrowed as he examines the pieces. 'But that is not what you are asking. What do you think the point of our game is?'
Kuwabara has asked himself this question for so many years over the course of so many matches that he's unsure if there can ever be an answer. 'There's always talk about a Divine Move,' he says, wrapping his haori around himself more closely. These days he gets cold easily: it can't be helped, but it makes study and play both harder. He's getting older, slowly and inevitably. 'Kouyou's beloved Hand of God. But that's a game-within-a-game; a game for two players that's played over time. I'm an old man with no wife – if I can't manage that much, how could I manage a proper rival?' He laughs, tapping the tatami with his palm to indicate the empty space beside him.
'And so?' Dosaku prompts.
'I think,' Kuwabara says slowly, 'that the point of me playing Go is to keep the Honinbou house alive.'
'Yet you have chosen no successor,' Dosaku observes. 'No close disciples.'
'The right one hasn't turned up,' Kuwabara shrugs. He looks up at Dosaku. 'Sometimes I worried that they never will, but...'
'But?'
Kuwabara reaches out and adjusts the positioning of one of the stones on the board. They're playing Shindou Hikaru's first match against Touya Akira – squirrelled out from Ashiwara, who in turn had pried it out from their little prince after a long period of negotiation. It is terrible: more amateur than even an amateur's game should be, made worse by flashes of occasional unresolved pseudo-brilliance that might just as well have been pure luck. It's an honest game, full of the feeling of youth.
'But I have a feeling,' Kuwabara laughs; it's rough on his throat – he has had a persistent cold – but he laughs anyway. He pushes the stones on the board off into a goke, erasing the game, and pulls out a set of printed kifu from a folder. One by one, he lays them out on the floor in front of Dosaku – the most interesting of sai's recorded games, retrieved off of the ghostly new internet.
Dosaku peers at them, his eyebrows raised. 'How interesting...'
'Here is the missing rung of our great ladder,' Kuwabara declares, tapping one of the sheets with a finger. 'Here is the future.'
Dosaku flicks his eyes upwards.
'Shuusaku,' they both say at once.
'Shuusaku,' Kuwabara confirms again, and laughs some more. He's breathless for all manner of reasons. 'Shindou Hikaru. Now all I have to do is wait.'
'Do you think he'll keep playing for long enough to fulfil his own promise?' Dosaku asks critically. 'The Touya game is genuinely bad.'
'Touya Akira changed the weather for this boy,' Kuwabara says. 'If Shindou Hikaru has any sight at all – and I'd bet every last title I've held that he does – he will know, sooner or later, how much that is worth.'
Like Touya, like Ogata, like all players before them, Kuwabara decides to wait and see. Things, if destined, will ultimately fall into place.
One day, as he exit the elevator onto the Association's ground floor, Kuwabara finds himself greeted by a small army of insei. They do their bowing and scraping as he walks past them – all, that is, but one. A marvellously oblivious boy with messy bleached blond hair stares at him, a ghost at his shoulder dressed in Heian whites.
Well, that's not Shuusaku, is Kuwabara's first instinctive thought as he turns his head back to gaze into the figure's face. How interesting, is his next. How marvellous, is his last.
'Shindou Hikaru,' Kuwabara mutters under his breath as Touya Akira's foil takes himself off with the others. 'Shindou Hikaru Honinbou,' he says out loud, rounding the syllables around in his mouth to test how they sound. They sound quite good, he thinks; far better than Touya Honinbou.
'Come and get it, young man,' Kuwabara laughs to himself as he takes himself out of the building. The people at the front desk stare out of the corner of their eyes, but he ignores them and laughs and laughs until his old bones sing. 'Come and get it.'