almondinflower | 20 Random Facts about Kirihara Akaya, G

20 Random Facts about Kirihara Akaya
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Prince of Tennis So Konomi Takeshi's.
Notes:

52_flavours, theme #51. With reference to

helga_b's 20 Facts about Momoshiro Takeshi and the HP Random Facts Meme.

1. If you asked Akaya why he plays tennis, he wouldn't know what you were talking about.

2. To him, Echizen Ryoma is something like the pure essence of tennis: if a patron saint or spirit of tennis exists, then Echizen is that spirit distilled and incarnate.

That's about a third of the time.

Two-thirds of the time Echizen is a too-snarky brat just waiting to be defeated, and Akaya is going to crush him the way he is going to crush everyone else.

3. Contrary to all expectations, he comes from a stable, loving family with two children, a kind if typically absent Japanese father, and an overworked mother who fusses intolerably over her intelligent elder daughter and her athletic, incorrigible son.

4. The only person that frightens Akaya more than Yanagi-sempai does is his sister when she's stressing over a homework assignment.

5. Despite this, he hides her history essays in his room sometimes, just because.

6. His father speaks four languages fluently. Akaya plans to speak five one day, and none of them will be English.

7. He has read Genji Monogatari and the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and is stumbling his way through Endo and Abe with Yanagi-sempai's encouragement.

He'll still abandon any of these books at a moment's notice, if presented with a copy of Weekly Jump.

8. He devours yakiniku at approximately 1.47 times the speed at which Niou-sempai eats.

9. This is 37% attributable to normal adolescent hunger, and 41% a defensive mechanism, to protect his food from ~~Marui~~ greedy and unscrupulous seniors.

10. Akaya doesn't know what happened to the remaining 22%, and really really wishes Yanagi-sempai would take it easy with the observations, sometimes.

11. He has a PS2 and a newly-acquired GameCube, and is holding out for an X-box. A few more weeks of pouting and cleaning up the dishes after dinner should do the trick.

12. He often wishes he could fight for real, and actually attended aikido class for three months - until school, a dramatic increase in the Rikkai tennis team's training, and the sheer repetition of memorising kata got to him.

13. Beating Sanada-fukubuchou at Tekken is still pretty satisfying.

14. If you asked him who his best friend on the team was, he would say Jackal, because Jackal never nags like Sanada-fukubuchou, never plays mind games like Niou and Yagyuu, and maybe it's something to do with being Brazilian but Jackal doesn't act as if being called sempai gives him a right to scold and pat Akaya on the head and come up with various Lessons about Life.

15. Jackal has offered Akaya coffee three times, and all three times Akaya spat it out and decided that South Americans were crazy, even if Marcelo Rios plays a pretty decent backhand.

16. Jackal is a great friend, but he is kind and reliable and all the things that Akaya is not, and sometimes there are places where he just can't go.

He likes to touch the craziness in Yagyuu-sempai, likes to watch the Gentleman as he slices through an opponent, but looking at Yagyuu tends to tip Akaya just a little closer to not-quite-sane. He prefers to keep that place locked up unless it's really needed, like when he played Tachibana.

17. Akaya thinks that Sanada-fukubuchou is something like a wall, like a mighty dam holding back the waters.

18. He looks at Yukimura-buchou and wonders, if he ever scales that wall, what sort of river he will find on the other side.

19. Yanagi-sempai is the steps and the pathways, he thinks, and wonders about the sea beyond the river, about Tezuka and that Atobe and all the people he needs to go through in order to get his wish.

20. Someday I'll play you again, he whispers to Echizen secretly, and knows that if the force of belief is the strongest power in the world, then Akaya is not going to lose to anything.