It's just after school; clubs are set to start in the next fifteen minutes, give or take. The Go club is new this semester, and as students find out about it, they trickle in, joining at this meeting or that meeting. One such student is a boy who, though normally an overachiever at the top of his class and well involved in after-school activities, holding study groups and doing volunteer work, et cetera et cetera, has spent the day nodding off in class here and there.
Mamoru Chiba, definite Person of Interest to - at the very least - both Nephrite and Beryl herself.
He had, it's on record, rather a lot of trouble toward the end of last semester, to the point where the scores on his midterms weren't perfect and he missed a few days of exams and a few days of school, in the hospital a couple of times. He hasn't missed any yet, so one would hope his troubles are over--
--but really? Falling asleep in class?
He looks like he's pouring everything he's got into not looking run down; those with the kind of senses that can tell this sort of thing will absolutely be able to tell that although he's not been drained, per se, his brilliant aura's ragged and tattered, ill-fitting. It's left him offbalance.
Gamely, he shows up at the classroom door to investigate this new club, and is the first one there. His glasses are reflecting the light a little bit as he pauses in the frame.
The Go club attracts a certain flavor of overachiever, in some ways. Some of them have been fascinated by the mathematical elements, geometry and game theory and heuristics, though they wouldn't put it in those terms. Not yet, anyway. Give them a few years. Some of them have been ... very confused, and had to be gently redirected, because they thought this was obviously a computer programming group. Perhaps they can be forgiven for thinking that a history teacher would be handling a computer programming club; after all, the Go club's sponsor is as new as it is, taking over the position from a teacher who ... well. Perhaps he's taking time off. There's been a notable lack of substantiated rumor. On the other hand, it's also possible he got eaten by a monster. Or was, in fact, a monster. These things can't be ruled out.
And of course, when Mamoru turns up at the doorway, the club's sponsor is there.
"Good afternoon." Saito's voice is tersely cordial, the tone one might expect from a teacher occupied with other things. Occupied with setting out bowls and stones, boards of a couple of different sizes. He straightens and looks toward the doorway only after the greeting, eyes clear and steady, evaluating the one standing there with a professional interest. (It is, after all, professional in either case. It's only a matter of which profession.) And as if he saw nothing at all out of the ordinary, as if there were no reason to wonder whether Mamoru might be better served by a couple of hours in bed, or possibly in an infirmary, or possibly with the rest of that aura being ripped out of him and handed off to Queen Beryl in their Great Ruler's service, he inquires with that same cordial politeness, "Do you play?"
"In theory," the student says, wry but not self-deprecating. "I haven't in a few years. I'd like to pick it back up. The club have room for the rusty?"
Tired as he is, he's watching Saito like a hawk, as if trying to place him. That's something that should, by all rights, be impossible: they've never met in any guise so far. But he takes off his glasses and places them in his jacket pocket, forcing himself to glance away as he comes into the classroom.
The boy, fine-featured and reservedly collected despite his obvious fatigue, places his school bag on a desk with careful precision, then offers a slight bow. "Chiba Mamoru, second year. And you're Saito-sensei, I expect?"
"The club has room for the rusty, the keen, and the bars of iron still waiting to meet the smith. We have more than enough stones to sharpen them all against." Saito's mouth curves upward at the corner; it's a smile that ought to be cruel, but there's just enough reflection of the expression in his eyes to take the edge off. To anyone else, it would probably be reassuring.
But that hawk's gaze is not about to miss the way it accents that sense of familiarity.
The bow is met with the hint of a nod, acknowledgment, direct. "You expect correctly. I take it that I won't have to tell you how to make a capture, then. Or that directly sabotaging one's own stones is prohibited." Saito does not meet Mamoru's eyes, not while he's saying that. Not quite. He is, instead, studying the shadows that fatigue might cast just below them - or the place where they'd be, if they're absent. A very small statement. And not in the least accidental.
The familiarity's maddening. If Mamoru had anything resembling his normal level of control over his senses, he'd be reaching out with them, examining on more than one level, analyzing that sense of deja vu that's wrenching unforgivingly at his sense of internal balance.
He doesn't. All he can afford to do is keep as many walls up as he can and still manage to converse -- and they're flimsy walls today. He should have gone home.
There are shadows under his eyes, though they're only suggestions; there's a mark on his neck like a fading scar, faint but jagged. His eyes are difficult things to meet sometimes, the weight of his gaze occasionally almost palpable, even if that's not the reason for Saito's alternative focus.
Chiba's jaw flexes slightly at the reminders, the subtle statement caught but not quite understood.
So: face value. "You assume correctly. I've never been entirely sure why, I may have read too many conflicting opinions -- it's a lot safer to make foolish decisions on a game board."
He crosses his arms and leans against the edge of the desk, looking at the board Saito's in front of instead of at the teacher himself. "Long-term consequences are something it'd help a lot of people to think about."
"There are some rulesets that permit self-capture." Saito's tone takes a turn for the conversational, a casual aside, and he reaches for stones, laying them out on the board: three white stones surrounding a liberty at the corner. "Even there, most suicidal moves are still illegal." He drops a black into that liberty, sweeps it away again as captured. "It does nothing. It changes the battlefield not at all. It forces the board into the same position it held before, and *that* is against the rules as a simple necessity - keeping games from being swept up into eternal argument over a single stretch of ground.
"There are occasional suicidal moves that change the shape of the opponent's forces, true, and may have some benefit in games where they are permitted. But those rules are generally in force only regionally, or as experiments. And the regions they derive from are interesting. New Zealand. Taiwan. The places in which convention permits suicide are, in essence, conquered lands."
"As experiments," points out Mamoru, eyebrows up and hand lifting to gesture vaguely in the direction of the board. "What I'm saying is that I'd argue in favor of it as a teaching tool, to show how counterproductive it can be. I didn't realize that that's already taking place. Lack of understanding withdrawn."
He glances up at Saito, eyes half-narrowed, and he watches the teacher's face, not bothering to disguise the fact that he's trying to read it, analyzing. "What about situations in which defeat is inevitable and may be more devastating than you can afford, but you know you'll recover the disputed assets eventually if you surrender?"
Why the HELL did he just ask that, it's not about Go at all.
Was he under the impression that anything wasn't about Go?
"When defeat in the entire game is inevitable," Saito replies, "it is courteous to resign rather than to waste one's opponent's and one's own time thrashing about, yes." And one recovers the disputed assets when the stones are returned to their bowls, after a fashion. "When defeat in a particular piece of territory is inevitable, but surrendering those pieces may result in part of the territory being regained -- that is a valid and sometimes necessary strategy. It is not, after all, sacrifice as a whole that is ruled out. Only destroying the stones oneself, rather than one's opponent doing so."
His expression might be expected to be clinical, professional courtesy in itself; his tone certainly is. And he does come close to the Teacher's Mask. But there are flickers of life behind it, a cool and distant amusement in pale eyes, a contrasting interest and focus expressed at the corner of his mouth. Sometimes, something harder.
"On the other hand, if you're considering that as a solution in geopolitics ... well. Ask Taiwan how well that plan's working for them. Ask Kinshasa about the gold and copper, the cobalt and uranium that they've recovered from Belgium and its companies. On the other hand, Egypt did get the Sinai Peninsula back after a couple of decades. Once in a while, when the surrendering party was the aggressor and the victorious party was more annoyed than intent, these things stumble into working out."
The new teacher is apparently an optimist.
An optimist.
"Yes," the blue-eyed boy says dryly, "if you pick a fight and you've bitten off more than you can chew, saying sorry and sheepishly giving back what you bit, and maybe smoothing it down a little, occasionally keeps you from getting stepped on."
The lean's undone as Chiba straightens -- if a little stiffly, possibly due to soreness, perhaps from a kendo match -- and then pulls a chair over to sit opposite where Saito's using the board as illustration. Then he leans again, but it's with his elbows, arms crossed loosely on the desktop in front of him.
"I was thinking about the ramifications of appeasement as soon as you mentioned geopolitics, yes," the teenager says mildly, then ducks his head slightly, so briefly. "I'm sorry, sir, it really has been years since I've played."
And still he's watching, his bright gaze intent. His walls flicker; for a split second of heady wistfulness, his heart hurts.
Then Mamoru gives the teacher a very faint smile. "Naturally, total avoidance of sacrifice is ideal, but that's hardly ever how it goes, is it?"
"As every student knows who has ever lamented that a class was an hour of his life that he won't get back." And that was --
That wasn't a smile. His mouth didn't move at all. His eyes didn't even show it - a fractional narrowing of one, maybe, but none of the telltales at the corners. A couple of degrees angling of his head, a centimeter's lift of two fingers of one hand. It wasn't a smile. It was hardly *anything*.
It was the next best thing to sharing the joke; to recognizing that it might have been a joke in the first place.
Saito seats himself as well, and with a certain element of grace clears the stones from the board. "So. While we are waiting for the others. What might we consider a reasonable handicap, to take such an absence into account?"
Not a smile. Hardly anything, yet it's met with a quick flicker of open delight on the part of the student sitting across from Saito, followed by significantly less hawklike watching. There's certainly still a studying sort of focus on Saito, but it's not trying to prove anything, it's not a wall, it's not belligerence or measurement. The suspicion's been suppressed, replaced temporarily by-- what? Something like relaxation, something like comfortable familiarity. Something very much like curious examination with a side of nagging 'should know'.
It's something he's felt before, many times now.
The walls crumble, and yes, there's power there. There's something wrong with it, something's happened to it, but it's in the process of regenerating the frazzled edges and knitting itself back together-- like the victim of an energy-draining youma that's been defeated, sending the energy back into the target of the attack, in fact. But the power itself...
It's no wonder Nephrite's been interested in this kid. That Beryl is, if she'd even mentioned anything. There's something about it.
"Kami-sama," he laughs, "you're probably terrifyingly good at it. I'm not entirely sure I could beat you if you were blindfolded, standing on your head, and listening to Philip Glass at 78 RPM. I'd like to see how long I could hold out, though!"
Finally, he takes his glasses from their case and settles them on his face, then lifts his eyebrows well above them. "I could also try to distract you by misquoting eighteenth century European philosophers."
"If you know enough about eighteenth-century European philosophers to misquote them," Saito says blandly, "that will be a phenomenal distraction indeed." Fingers dip into the bowl of black stones, and lay nine of them in front of Mamoru; a heavy handicap, but there's no telling whether it's accurate, insulting, or something else altogether. "And if you respond to that by telling me," he switches to English for a moment, "you just Kant..."
The narrow-eyed glare does not actually require him to say 'I'll kick you out of the room and make you go home and get some sleep.'
The narrow-eyed glare does, granted, give Saito an excuse to survey the younger man rather more extensively than he had. Failed harvest. Someone did poorly; to be reprimanded if an ally, to be watched for if not. But...
But interesting.
Interesting enough to make him wonder why Nephrite of all people, with the stars to guide his timing and mad spaces to bow to his command, hasn't brought the boy home yet. For dinner, so to speak. Probably Beryl's, granted. Maybe Nephrite just wanted more time to study that power himself, before giving it over to their Queen.
Or maybe there's reason to move carefully. An actual challenge.
It's been a very long time since one of those.
There's a flare of mixed amusement and indignation in the boy's eyes before he looks down at the pieces Saito is placing. He responds to the glare with a mischievous narrowing of his eyes. "No. That would be unreasonable. But," he switches to English himself, "I may be inclined to Hegel over your generous handicap."
He puts four of the stones back in his bowl, glances at Saito and comes up with nothing to read off his face, then begins placing the pieces he's been granted.
The four corners, and one in the center, all by itself.
"In law a man is guilty if he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he organizes intuition," he says breezily, sitting back.
"Given that you're confusing the eighteenth century with the nineteenth, I won't quibble over the problems of the rest of your arithmetic. Not many in this school would come that close to the target to begin with. I'd say they ought to study more, but who can blame them for not being certain what they ought to do?" Saito places the first white stone, diagonally off from one of those corners, hinting at an attack along Mamoru's right side.
English: "They are, of course, only Hume-an."
Throwing the board at the history teacher is probably not a long-term winning move. But it might be tempting anyway.
"He was born in the eighteenth century," grumbles Mamoru, slouching and somewhat petulantly ignoring Saito's move to start building from his right side at the opposite corner.
Given the way he came in, and the general reputation he has amongst the teachers at Infinity, this behavior is probably not normal. Especially not toward a teacher.
Like he actually sticks out his chin stubbornly. "That should count. He was an adult at the end of the eighteenth, even if he didn't publish until the nineteenth." Blue eyes glitter, the color of the Earth's oceans from space, and suddenly Mamoru starts laughing. "Anyway, quibble with my arithmetic. Errors in calculation are dangerous, the ones in philosophy are only ridiculous."