The bus ride passed in awkward silence.
Finnian didn't speak to Hikaru the entire way. Hikaru had fully expected him to taunt him, mock him, but every time he risked a glance at his face, he found Finnian pressed to the window and staring outside. Never saying a word, never even looking at Hikaru. Which should be a relief, really, but somehow it was unnerving. Finnian's mockery was something Hikaru knew by now. His silence was new, and like all new behaviors in another person, he didn't understand it.
It wasn't that he wanted Finnian to talk to him—or anyone, for that matter. He liked silence. This was just…suspicious. Too good to be true, except good didn't really feel like the right word for this situation.
The bus reached their destination with ease, only briefly forming an Otherworld portal to evade a minor traffic jam. Hikaru got up and stretched, observing the parking lot of the competition grounds. Other schools' buses were already lined up around them. There wasn't anything of interest here—just concrete pavements and concrete buildings, grayer than ever in the dull light of the cloudy sky.
Finnian waited for Hikaru to get up before he followed him, avoiding his gaze and keeping his distance. Hikaru himself fell into stride behind Bianca, still keeping his headphones on to drown out the chatter of his teammates. His eyes scanned their surroundings. The place looked unremarkable, but if he looked very closely he could distinguish that subtle flicker, like warm air in an open window on a cold winter's day, revealing the magic shielding them from non-magical eyes. It was a standard warding procedure; the school used it too, and so had his middle school at home, and the competition grounds, and pretty much any other magical place he had ever been to.
Most things, he thought, really were the same everywhere. For the part of him that needed routine, that was a relieving realization; but he couldn't help wondering if going abroad was really worth it if everything was the same anyway.
But all these thoughts were brushed aside when he followed his teammates into the flying arena.
The gray of the concrete stadium parted in an archway, and beyond it he was greeted by a flurry of colors. Students from over a dozen schools were bustling all over the place, each clad in their team's colors, red and blue and green and yellow and orange, scouting out the grounds or having eager discussions with their teammates and opponents. From the rows of seats above, their schools' banners dangled down, bearing names Hikaru had never heard of in every color of the rainbow.
But when the team from St. Lucia's walked in, decked out in perfect white, a hush fell over the stadium.
Hikaru straightened on instinct as hundreds of eyes fell on their group at once. Fingers were pointed, and though he was still wearing his noise-canceling headphones, he could tell at a glance that people were whispering. He resisted the urge to shrink and hide. But he didn't have to; Finnian had already stepped into his way, standing tall and proud and perfectly shielding Hikaru from people's questioning eyes.
Curious, Hikaru lifted his headphones just enough to hear.
"What are you looking at?" he heard Finnian say. "Want to memorize the faces of the people who'll beat you? Go on, have a good long look." He made a grand gesture. "Since you won't get the chance when we're up in the air."
Little by little the staring crowd dissipated. The upperclassmen went off to greet people from other schools and were soon wrapped up in conversations. Finnian, too, wandered off and had already been hugged by three different people before he was more than five meters away.
Hikaru, meanwhile, remained behind. Along with the two first-years—freshmen, he reminded himself; at home they'd still be in middle school—who were also new to the team.
Not that different from home either.
The two freshmen, a slight girl with curly hair and glasses named Noelle and a chubby, freckled girl with close-cropped hair named Dawn, remained by his side for a while, but eventually they, too, were approached by people from other schools. Hikaru remained alone, feeling both relieved and horribly out of place.
On their own his eyes roamed to where Finnian stood surrounded by a group of strangers in different-colored uniforms. How on earth did he do this so easily? The Finnian he knew wasn't a nice person. And yet, surrounded by these people from different schools, he seemed perfectly amiable.
If we'd become friends, would I be standing with that group too now?
Hikaru didn't understand why he even had that thought. He didn't want to stand there talking to a large group of cool, popular people from a country that wasn't his, trying and failing to keep up with their conversation while struggling to filter the background chatter. It was just—so unfair. Here he was all alone, and the person who seemed to understand him the way few other people did was also the same person who loathed him and would mock him in front of anyone who tried to pay him attention.
He had always wanted to be understood, that was all. And here Finnian was—understanding him, somehow. And he still hated him.
All of a sudden Hikaru found himself wishing for his familiar. The large komainu had always felt like a shield between him and the world, something he desperately needed right now; but he knew the rules of competitions. No summoning familiars except in cases of grave emergency, or else chaos would break out.
So he waited until Coach Greene gathered the team back together for a last-minute strategy discussion.
"We're in Block C," she explained, "so we still have some time. Start warming up some ten minutes before we're scheduled to start. You know the order in which you're flying?"
Nods from Helio, Sol, Finnian and Hikaru. Of course they did. How could they forget?
"Good," she said. "Our block's not too difficult. Helio, make sure you're faster than Preston from Snow Peaks; I heard he's gotten faster again this year."
Helio gave a firm nod. "Will do."
"Sol, don't fly too recklessly," Greene continued; "we can't afford you getting injured. Finnian, Hikaru…no advice to you two. Build up our lead and then hammer it home."
"Gotcha!" said Sol, their voice all the louder against Finnian and Hikaru's stony silence. "We've already won this, am I right?"
~ ~ ~
Truth be told, Hikaru had never cared much for competitions.
He didn't need to be the fastest flyer on the racing grounds, or even the team. Prizes and victories didn't matter to him; they only meant attention that he didn't know how to deal with. He just happened to be very good at flying, good enough to be constantly competing anyway.
Or, well, for people to be constantly competing with him.
So slow, he thought as he watched flyer after flyer shoot out onto the grounds, looping through the obstacles, the pillars and circles reaching high into the air. The overwhelming majority of people here were amateurs. They weren't fast; their form was poor; and he could tell at a glance which ones were afraid of the height and the obstacles, could see it in the way they held themselves on their broomsticks and clung to them. Why were they so slow? It had been the same back at home. He had gone from his middle school's regular team to the Tokyo selection team and then the under-eighteen national team, but the people who could keep up with his speed had always remained few and far between.
Then it was their team's turn, and he watched as Helio, then Sol darted through the obstacle course with ease. They were better than ninety-five percent of their competitors, he observed. But even they couldn't measure up to the raw natural talent he saw in Finnian: the kind of one-in-a-million ability that reminded him, fascinatingly, infuriatingly, of his own.
Sol returned. Finnian darted out like a bow shot from the arrow, quickly leaving the competition behind. At the starting line Hikaru grew antsy. He was eager to fly—fly alongside Finnian, not after him, compete with him because he was the only person here that was worth competing against.
But they weren't opponents. They were teammates, and so he waited.
They did end up winning their block by a long shot. They even ended up with the best time of the entire racing meet. Somehow it rang hollow. It felt too boring, too easy; unearned, perhaps, was the word he was looking for.
A few strides away, Finnian was looking just as displeased as Hikaru felt, which only made matters worse. He didn't want to agree with Finnian on anything. So, unhappy as he was, he straightened his back and made a deliberate point to look as pleased as possible.
"You guys were both amazing today," said a voice from behind, and he turned to find Bianca catching up with him and Finnian. "We really have a shot at winning nationals this year! We always place pretty high," she explained to Hikaru, "but we've never won it in our time. Finnian came very close last season, but—"
"Bianca," Finnian interrupted her, "do you go blabbing about people's defeats to anyone who'll listen?"
"You lost to a senior who's gone pro since," she answered. "By fractions of a second. I really don't think that's something to be ashamed of!"
He scoffed. "A loss is a loss," he said. "Since when is, 'But they were really good!' an excuse for anything?"
She gave him a look that Hikaru could only interpret as long-suffering. "I really don't think you should be that harsh on yourself."
For a brief moment Finnian looked caught, then he shrugged and made a sarcastic gesture. "Forgiving yourself for your failures is how you get mediocre results."
Bianca rolled her eyes, but Finnian fell back to talk to the freshmen before she could say anything. Hikaru thought of Finnian's reaction to the story, the poorly-concealed embarrassment, and made a decision.
"Tell me about how he lost."
~ ~ ~
"Great work today," Coach Greene told the team when they were back at the bus. "I'm going to need just that from you in the next round, and a little extra since our opponents will be stronger. But I still think we have a good chance with Hikaru and—"
She paused. Looked around, right and left, searching.
"Finnian," she said after a moment. "Where's Finnian?"
The others exchanged a glance, but no one seemed to know.
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