Chapter Text
The twinge in Sai's gut was the first sign something was wrong: a painful, awful, cramping twinge as if he'd eaten something rotten, or swallowed a rock, or at the very least not taken enough fibre and liquid in the past twenty-four hours.
But here's the thing—Sai was a ghost. He didn't have a gut. He hadn't eaten anything in a thousand years. He didn't have any capacity for painful, awful, cramping twinges, not in his digestive system nor anywhere else in his non-existent body.
Somewhere inside his drowsy mind was an inescapable awareness of this. He knew, deep down inside, that the only twinges he should have been able to feel were the ones in his conscience, and boy did he have a lot of those kinds of twinges. Like those times when he sort-of-maybe-kinda-hmmm helped Hikaru (an impressionable twelve year old) cheat on his tests. Or when Hikaru sneaked out of the house to play go (leaving his chores and homework unfinished) and Sai said nothing. Or when Hikaru grumbled about being forced to play a board game just because a certain someone was so obsessed with the game he'd waited around for a thousand years in a hunk of uselessly expensive wood (Hikaru called it that, not Sai) for some poor sap (ditto) to come along and be his total patsy (ditto).
At questionable times like those, when Sai's brain would start blaring, "IT'S FOR THE GREATER GOOD" or "TORAJIROU NEVER COMPLAINED" or "LET'S START REMINISCING OVER OLD KIFU AGAIN LALALA"—well, those were the kinds of conscience conundrums Sai was used to and could entirely ignore. They amounted to metaphysical rather than physical twinges, and anyway they always faded after Sai decimated someone at go, so.
Why did his gut hurt?
Hikaru, meanwhile, didn't feel a thing. The thing was, though, he shoulda probably been feeling some kinda thing. That was his thing. He was a living thing, after all. He was supposed to breathe, and digest, and burp and fart and occasionally puke in history class. In short, he was supposed to have a body.
Supposed to.
Also, he had eaten a truly terrible amount of junk food last night, so really, he should have been feeling something in his gut.
Instead, he felt a floaty nothingness. He did not feel like he was waking up; he felt like he had never fallen asleep. His consciousness was stuck in a weird doziness, and it would stay that way until he was called back to life by—
A familiar, insistent knock rattled the bedroom door.
"Hikaru!" called Mrs. Shindou, in her polite yet firmly motherly way. That was her thing. "If you don't come out in the next two minutes, I'm going to call Akari in to wake you up, and I won't be responsible for whatever she does to your hair."
Bwuh? thought Hikaru dazedly, even though Akari had been mauling his hair as a wakeup call for years. Somehow he always forgot about this mauling habit of hers, at least until he arrived at school (late) and realized his hair looked like a dead Pikachu: yellow and black and electrified all over. What with all these hair incidents and the random puking and the excellent marks in history class and his sudden turn toward an uber-nerdy board game, Hikaru was starting to get a really weird rep at school…
Little did he know: his reputation was about to get much, much weirder.
"Hikaru," whispered Sai.
But his voice sounded like Hikaru's voice, and what's more, it sounded corporeal. "I-I think you need to show me how to use that…flushing device of yours. The Toto. Now."
"Goddamnit, Sai, don't you know how to walk?"
"Not anymore!" Sai bleated.
"You're tramping around like a drunken sheep!"
"You know that I usually float around with genteel finesse! I haven't walked anywhere for a thousand years! It's far more difficult than I remember! And so much closer to the ground!"
"Are you calling me short?"
Sai couldn't answer. Tears were gushing from his eyes and snot dribbling from his nose, which was a helluva lot grosser than it would have been in ghost form. But at least he didn't have any makeup on to ruin right now.
People on the street were, of course, staring at the drunken twelve-year-old boy as he sobbed his weird, non-sequitur complaints to the air and tried unsuccessfully to walk in a straightish line. There was clearly a big physics problem here, in the bystanders' view. The boy kept trying to shuffle along gracefully while wearing hyper-grippy, rubber-soled shoes, with predictably bad results. Also, the bright yellow shoes and bright yellow hair and bright yellow shirt and bright yellow shorts looked extremely tacky together.
The real problem, though, ran much deeper than poor sartorial choices.
"Lift your feet!" Hikaru hollered like a drill sergeant. "One, two, one, two! Use your knees! I mean my knees, damn it! Come on, Sai, this isn't rocket science!"
"I don't know what that means!"
"Then why did you steal my body?" Hikaru roared, as if rocket science had anything to do with their predicament. "You old geezer! You don't know how to deal with anything that isn't a gazillion years old!"
"I don't know what 'gazillion' means either!" Sai bawled.
"GAH! You're impossible!" Hikaru's tried to smack down Sai's awful bedhead (Hikaru's awful bedhead!) but his ghostly hands passed right through his own hair. "Give it back! Gimme back my body!"
"I want to, but I don't know how!"
"Figure it out! You're the one who's been ghosting around for a millennium! You think you'd know something about this body-stealing crap by now!"
"I wish I did." Sai stopped to stare down at his yellow sneakers and shake his head with slow, sombre futility. "Regrettably, I spent much of my time in the goban mourning the loss of my loved ones and pondering the infinite mystery of the Divine Move rather than practicing techniques of corporeal possession and such. Alas that I gave no thought to the possibility of life in my afterlife!"
"Nice!" said a nearby guy in a leather jacket who looked like he belonged in a yakuza anime. "You practicin' for a school play or somethin', kid? If yer sellin' tickets, I'll buy one off ya." The man smiled broadly, showing off his crooked yellow teeth.
Aghast, Sai covered his mouth with one hand, eyes comically wide. He shuffle-stumbled away from the scary man while Hikaru hissed, "Stop monologuing aloud! You're making me look like a nutcase!"
Hikaru, in fact, always looked like a nutcase. But it was true that he was looking even nutcase-ier than usual today, especially as his body (piloted by an incompetent ghost from several eras past) attempted to run away but fell flat on its face instead.
Sai, who had not experienced pain in a thousand years, winced and let a few tears trickle theatrically down his cheek as he gingerly picked himself off the ground, emitting a few quiet groans as he did so. This earned him a round of applause from Mr. Leather Jacket, which scared Sai enough to send him skedaddling.
"Fare thee well!" the not-actually-a-young-boy cried politely as he clomped his awkward way away.
"No tix?" called out the yakuza-guy. He shook his head and gave one last despondent look at the retreating back of the blond little thespian. "Man, it's just so hard to support the arts in this hood."
Thankfully, Sai had figured out how to 'talk' mind-to-mind by the time they reached the school gates, so he didn't need to speak aloud like a crazy person anymore.
His walking was much better too, though still definitely…odd. Hikaru's hips did not gently sway like that, thank you very much.
"Remember," Hikaru hissed. "Act natural."
"'Act natural'—did you know that that is an ironic statement, even an oxymoronic one, Hikaru?" Sai proudly and silently replied. "I learned of these concepts in your literature class."
"I don't remember studying any of that."
"I know." Sai made his psychic voice both smug and prim, the jerk. "I know that the only things in your head are video games, food, sports, randomly selected nonsense, and go. But while I occupy your body, I will make sure you receive excellent grades, my young protegé."
"Good grades are not natural," Hikaru groaned, "and super-duper out of character for me! Can you just, like, siddown and shaddup as much as possible today?"
"But I am currently walking, not sitting…"
"And stop it with the hips!"
"Yo yo yo, Shindou!" one of his more annoying classmates called out, waving cheekily. The boy was hanging out just outside the front doors of the school, as if reluctant to go inside—a feeling Hikaru totally understood. "You're late too, huh? Noice, bruh! And awesome outfit, hahaha. Did you get dressed in the dark when you rolled outta bed?"
"I thank you for your compliments regarding my most humble self," replied Sai, using Hikaru's mouth to spew his horrific politeness. "Truly, you are a kind young man of good character."
The boy's thick eyebrows shot up and formed a unibrow. "Yeeeeeeesh, Shindou. What's with the sarcasm first thing in the morning? You get body-snatched by an alien last night or sumthin'?"
"Say 'takes one to know one,'" Hikaru hiss-buzzed in Sai's ear.
"What? What does that mean?"
"Say it!"
"Takes One to Know One," wibbled Sai, bowing formally with his hands folded in front of him.
The annoying boy stared and stared. "Are you dissing me?" he demanded. "It's hard to tell."
Sai raised his head from its bow, and allowed his gaze to rest on the boy's face. "I honestly do not know myself, child."
"Uh huh," the boy backed away, rolling his eyes. "Uh, okay, I'll talk to you some other time or maybe never, byeeeeee." And he fled into the school building, door slamming behind him.
Sai bid him a perturbed yet polite adieu. Then, after a moment of wrestling with the modern door, he too swayed his way inside the school, all the while ignoring the ghost-boy yelling in his face to just go home already, damnit, before someone got an aneurysm from all this stupidity.
("Someone" being Hikaru.)
As soon as Sai did his genteel little shuffle into history class, several students perked up and started making comments about his outfit, his lateness, or his special air of weirdness today.
"Heeeeeeeey Shindou! Did Fujisaki do your hair again?"
"You trying to dress up like Pikachu more than usual?"
"No, I think he's dressed up like a banana! That's why he's wriggling around so much!"
"Whaddya mean? Do your bananas wriggle?"
By this point, Hikaru had given up on the "act natural" plan, and was drifting listlessly behind Sai in a ghostly funk.
"Shindou-kun!" the teacher greeted warmly. Her tone and smile meant some kind of super embarrassing punishment was forthcoming, but of course Sai just beamed right back at her. "Late by a full thirty minutes! I assume you have an excellent excuse at the ready? Did you get attacked by a mysterious ghost on your way to school again?"
Students tittered, their hyena faces expectant. Hikaru found himself too tired to care. But Sai faced the hyenas and their teacher with aplomb.
"I am afraid I have nothing," he said simply, as if he had lost a game of go (though if he had lost a game of go, his aplomb would have turned into a bomb…of crying). "I can only offer my sincerest apologies, as well as my assurance that I meant no disrespect; for I know quite well from my experiences under your tutelage that you are a fine educator, one who pours endless hours of study into her preparations. That I have missed even a part of your lesson is a heavy loss for an ignorant novice such as myself."
"Uh," said the teacher, "huh."
"Forgive my fumbling words; I cannot express how profound your teachings are to me! You have gleaned so much knowledge from the wider world, beyond the borders of our small country, that I am constantly in a state of wonder as I listen to your oratories. Every moment that I am in this room, I am inexpressibly joyful" (and in his eyes a shining dewdrop tear lingered at the corners) "to have the privilege to learn from one such as you. To learn anything at all is a marvelous thing, never to be taken for granted; but to be granted the honour of your worldly knowledge…ah! It is a debt I cannot begin to repay, though I shall make some feeble effort through such poorly crafted words as these. My most sincere and utmost gratitude from the depths of my soul to you, most noble one, for blessing me with the light of a master's erudition." And he bowed long and deep, while the tears that had gathered in his eyes finally spilled over in a glittering path down his plump, fevered cheeks.
The teacher, who usually just read from the state-delivered textbook without thinking about what she was saying, blinked several times. For one fleeting moment, she wondered if Shindou-kun had taken some kind of newfangled drug this morning, and if so, she really wanted to know what kind.
"Ah, but I have interrupted your lesson for too long!" the boy cried, amidst the thunderous silence of the classroom. "Forgive me once more, honoured instructor. Forgive me, my dear, patient colleagues. I shall take my seat now." And he did.
Not knowing what else to do, the teacher told everyone to open their textbooks to page forty-four. She was going to bless them with the light of a master's erudition all right.
Fifteen minutes later, Hikaru felt himself getting really, really glum over the whole situation. The teacher's droning voice was efficiently sending almost everyone in the room into slumberland (even Hikaru, who had no body to put to sleep), but Sai was sitting up with his perfect, perky posture, eyes bright with curiosity. He looked so disturbingly excited over this blaaaah history lesson. Occasionally, he would lean over to write something in his notebook, and the expression on his face as he did so was one of pure, nerdy rapture. Ugh.
(For whatever reason, seeing Sai so happy wasn't making Hikaru happy like it usually did.)
At least Sai could use the damn pencil now. The mechanics of writing with a stick, not a brush, had been a major conceptual hurdle at first. He'd cradled the pencil lightly between thumb and forefingers, breathing meditatively like he was about to paint some super lame, old-fashioned calligraphy…then proceeded to make some unreadably faint, painterly marks on Hikaru's notebook. Dismayed and befuddled, he sat there for a long moment, gaze fixed on the offending tool in his hand, but he was smart enough to look around at how the other nerds in the class were gripping their pencils. Soon enough he was scritching and scrawling away in his annoyingly lovely cursive, even if he did insist on writing vertically and ignoring the horizontal lines.
"Hikaru," Sai telepathed at him, not pausing his note-taking for even a second. "I have seen you use the pink end of this stick to remove marks from the paper. How did you do that?"
Hikaru roused himself from his ghost-nap long enough to grouch back, "Why are you even asking? You have beautiful, perfect, ye-olden-style writing, and you never seem to make mistakes. Why would you need an eraser?"
"But it is such a novelty! Surely you must understand what a remarkable tool this is. During Torajirou's time, I heard that Western writing sticks became available for use in Japan…but only to the very wealthy. Torajirou, being a humble man in a traditional profession, never sought out such fashionable tools. In any case, I am sure those older writing sticks had no pink erasure nubs at the ends of them. The modern world is truly one of convenience."
"I guess so," Hikaru yawned, "but if you want my opinion, I think all this 'technology' you find so amazing was invented to make us do more and more of this boring stuff all day. Like this class."
"Boring! How can you say that!" exclaimed Sai silently, mouth downturned into a pretty frown that looked so totally wrong on Hikaru's face.
Hikaru made sure to throw a super ugly grimace onto Sai's face in retaliation. "For serious? There's nothing exciting about this."
"But you do not understand," Sai protested. "Here in this classroom, I can…I can touch things! I can see my thoughts flow onto the written page! I can speak with others, and they answer!"
"Yeah, and what totally brilliant conversations you've had so far." Hikaru yawned again. It sure was tiring, being a ghost who did nothing all day. "If you're going to stay up and take notes, I'm going to have a nice sleepy-poo like every other sane person in this room. I mean, even the teacher is practically asleep on her feet."
"I suppose you simply cannot understand. You who have had a body for all your life…you who are still living."
Now this was making Hikaru feel some uncomfortable…things. "But," he said with only a teensy tiny smidgen of defensiveness, "you're the one who asked for another chance at life. You wanted to play go forever, right?"
"Yes, that is true." Sai hid his mouth behind his hands, a gesture that looked very odd without his long, sweeping sleeves. "I stayed in the living world because I could not move on."
"Well, now you can play go all you like. You can live all you like. You have my body—you don't even need me anymore. You can do whatever you want while I…I sit here and watch."
And then that smidgen of defensiveness in Hikaru melted away into something else. Into some other kinda…bad feeling that Hikaru didn't feel like feeling.
"Hikaru…are you all right?"
"I'm fine. Just sleepy." Hikaru rubbed a hand over his face, but felt nothing under his fingers. "I'm fine."
The bad feeling followed him as he followed Sai out of the history room. It followed him through the crowded hallways, where people did not step aside for him; it followed him as students called out Hikaru's name in greeting, and he could not answer; it followed him into the cooking room, where he saw bowls of steaming chestnuts and bright red strawberries but could not smell them.
"Oh," said Sai softly, eyes closed. "I think…I remember this scent. A thousand years, and still…"
"Shindou-kun! Join our group?" A girl was waving at Sai and gesturing for him to come over to her table, where all the mean-yet-somehow-popular girls sat.
Opening his eyes, he nodded politely at her and sallied over to his doom.
At the next table over, Akari was shooting quizzical looks and mouthing words that flew right over Sai's head. But Hikaru couldn't be bothered to care.
"Aaaaaall right, brats!" The home ec. teacher's round face and bald head came into view in the doorway. "We're making montblanc today! Let's have some sugar, baby!"
Amid the general cheers and excited yelling, Sai exclaimed, "Oh my! What's 'mon blan'?" His group mates tittered and smiled knowingly, but even they couldn't hide how pleased they were at today's menu.
Sai turned out to be both a baking prodigy and a walking hazard. The second he cracked open the recipe book—full of glossy photos with clear instructions and tips for beginners—something seemed to click. His hesitation and awkwardness vanished. Yes, the measuring cups and spoons gave him a moment's pause, and Hikaru's fingers were infuriatingly stubby, but then the least mean girl at the table (or maybe just the laziest) shoved ingredients into his hands and barked orders like a glam dictator, and he was in the go-zone. Sai measured sugar like he was performing a tea ceremony, not baking in a middle school class surrounded by flying flour and emotional instability. Chestnut cream swirled under his fingers like it had been waiting for him its whole life. He had no idea what he was doing. It was beautiful.
Then he tried to use the hand mixer.
"Sensei!" the top-dog girl at the popular table screeched. "Shindou here is a big idiot! He got cream all over me!"
A bunch of boys had to make some really dirty comments about that, and at top volume. While the teacher yelled and threatened to call their parents, Sai apologized profusely to the girl and produced a fancy handkerchief out of nowhere.
The girl took it, wiped white goop off her face, then proceeded to wipe goop all over Sai's face in turn.
"I suppose this is my rightful penance," was all he said, licking at his lips.
Students were laughing and joking around and eating chestnut cream right out of the can. Sai smiled tentatively at those around him, still hapless and confused and out of place, but…more alive than Hikaru had ever seen him. The whipping cream on his face certainly attested to this.
Someone offered him a leftover strawberry, nattering on about how eating ingredients was more fun than consuming the finished product, and anyway Shindou-kun could probably use a little pick-me-up, couldn't he?
Sai took a bite of the plump red strawberry, eyes fluttering shut. He made a small, pleased little sound of pure bliss, while Hikaru watched, surrounded by noise and fervour and delight...but utterly alone.
"Shindou-kun," said the teacher, "you did both really well and really horribly at this assignment, somehow."
The portly man walked forward, passing right through Hikaru's insubstantial form, and clapped a hand on Sai's shoulder. "I honestly don't know what grade to give you, but I think you grew a lot today. Mentally, anyway. You're still a midget."
Sai smiled shyly. "Thank you, sensei. It was a wonderful lesson. I will treasure this memory."
"Ha!" guffawed the teacher. "Yeah, bet you will."
Then all at once, it hit: the fact that he, Hikaru, was the ghost now.
A ghost. He had no one to talk to other than Sai, no one else who even knew he existed. No need to do boring schoolwork, but also no chance to bake a fancy dessert. No way to play soccer, to hang out with his friends, to run outside and feel the sun and wind and rain on his face. No possibility of laying down a single stone unless Sai did it for him.
Even now, he could feel the tug of their connection, to the physical body that was his but not his, leashing him like an invisible noose. Realization settled into his nonexistent stomach, undeniable in its simple enormity. He felt sick. He felt like—
"Hikaru?"
That was Akari, voice thick with alarm. She had turned away from her table mates, her big dumb brown eyes fixed on Sai. Not on Hikaru. On Sai, who was clutching his stomach—Hikaru's stomach—with one hand, and clasping the other over his mouth, throat producing desperate heaving noises. He looked like how Hikaru felt. He looked like how Hikaru felt because he was in Hikaru's body, and Hikaru was behind him watching his own body convulse—
"Oh crap, someone grab a bucket or something!"
People were scrambling but Hikaru couldn't pay attention with all the bad feelings crashing over him. Dead, gone, and no one even knows, his head rang with the words but he couldn't say anything, he was drowning in a dark river, Sai's river, the one that turned a dead man into whatever he was now, into whatever Hikaru was now…
Dead, I'm dead, I'm only twelve and I'll never eat mom's curry again I'll never go to high school I'll never play in the tournament with the go club never hold my own stones again
Sai was leaning against the table and saying something to him, desperate and sick-sounding even mind-to-mind, but the bad feelings were filling his ears with cotton and his veins with cold blood and it felt like he'd flown into a cold grey cloud and would never come out
I didn't even get to beat Touya
And then it was too much.
"Bleafgh." Sai heaved the word, along with the contents of his stomach, right onto the beautiful, fresh-out-of-the-oven montblancs in front of him.
Then he passed out, his face falling into the hot mess he'd made.
-End Ch. 1-
A/N: Happy May 5 and happy Blind Go! Let's party like it's ten years ago! :D
Also, for those of you who love body switch nonsense, the Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee Curtis version of Freaky Friday is getting a sequel this summer! What a koinkydink! Everything old is new again, huh?