Title: Dragons
Fandom: Prince of Tennis: Fudomine Chuugaku
Characters: Mori Tatsunori, his mother, Uchimura Kyosuke
Prompt: 047 - Heart
Word Count: 1102
Date finished: 01/12/2008
Rating: G
Summary: Mori had always wanted a dragon.
Author's Notes: Another one that came out of Kathryn's death.
Disclaimer: Characters are owned by Konomi Takeshi, and whoever did the anime. At any rate, it's not me.

Mori Tatsunori had wanted a dragon for as long as he could remember.

He talked about it constantly, until, at six years old, his mother sat him down and told him that wanting a dragon was fine, but he had to stop asking his father for one. His father didn't believe in them, and would hurt him if he didn't stop. Tatsunori took that to heart, and never talked about it around his father.

In third grade, he found out the hard way that his school friends had the same attitude as his father. Ridicule and a couple of black eyes taught him that speaking of dragons would only get him hurt. So he stopped. He also never grew close enough to any of his classmates to let them hurt him like that again. He never spoke of his dreams, choosing instead to lie when asked what he wanted for Christmas, his birthday, or what he wanted to be when he grew up.

In fifth grade, he met Uchimura Kyosuke at tennis lessons. They only played three weeks together, and then Tatsunori's father left, and his mother couldn't afford to keep him in the lessons. To his surprise, the day after he didn't show up for the next lesson, Uchimura hunted him down at school and demanded an answer.

Tatsunori stared at him. "We can't afford the lessons," he said. "But I really wish we could." No one had ever done that before, noticed when he stopped something and then hunted him down.

Uchimura scowled. "That's not fair."

Tatsunori shrugged. "Nope, but it's life."

Uchimura's scowl deepened. "Can't do anything, huh?"

Tatsunori shook his head. "Not really."

"I can." The scowl vanished. "Meet me at those street courts after school tomorrow."

And so he learned tennis through his new friend. Kyosuke proved himself again and again to be the kind of friend Tatsunori had always wanted.

"Did you get the assignment about what you'd want for a pet?" Kyosuke asked one afternoon in sixth grade.

Tatsunori looked at him out of the corner of his eyes as they stretched to get ready to practice. "Yeah," he said warily.

"What are you gonna put?"

He shrugged. "I don't know."

"I'm going to put a Kitsune," Kyosuke said.

Tatsunori froze. "You… are?" he asked, stunned, turning to look at his friend.

"Yeah. Sensei said to use our imagination. So, I am. I'll have to do some work to figure out how to house it and feed it and stuff, but I'll come up with something."

Maybe…. Tatsunori took a deep breath. "I thought about doing a dragon."

Kyosuke stared at him, then grinned. "Awesome idea! After we get through everything here, want to go to the library and see what we can find for information?"

Tatsunori blinked, barely able to believe his luck. "Yeah," he breathed. "That'd be awesome."

Slowly, through the rest of the year, Tatsunori revealed how much he wanted a dragon. Kyosuke never once ridiculed him for it, helping him develop what he wanted it to look like and everything else.

The beginning of seventh grade brought a change. Leaving for school one morning, his chest hurt so badly that he had to stop and sit down on the doorstep, where his mother tripped over him on her way to work. She called the ambulance when she couldn't revive him.

He spent three days in the hospital, poked and prodded and eventually released. He never heard anything about what was wrong, and every time he asked his mother, she distracted him by asking about what he'd decided about his dragon lately.

The trouble with the older boys on the tennis team frustrated them all; even as he made more friends, he still told no one but Kyosuke about his wish to have a dragon. Besides, who would he tell? The others were so focused on tennis - and so was he, actually - that the dream faded a little, replaced by something else.

But that winter, after they had made it to Nationals, and done a good job, considering where they'd started, he began working on the dragon again, refining, imagining - and trying to ignore the pains in his chest. He couldn't always hide them, and his mother would give him something to ease the pain when she knew about it. She asked him, sometimes, and her smiles got sadder and sadder as he answered her questions.

The next tennis season started, and he set the dragon dreams aside again, focused on developing the growing tennis club without Tachibana.

And then, one afternoon, in the middle of a practice match with Kyosuke against Ishida and Sakurai, the pain in his chest nearly swallowed him whole. He collapsed, staring up at the sky - and saw, perfectly outlined, a huge dragon. It looked exactly as he'd imagined it, winging down carefully to land on the court. "My dragon," he breathed, and then the pain was gone, and the weight holding him down, and he leaped to his feet, running toward the beautiful creature, who greeted him with a happy sigh.

He climbed on the dragon's back, and it leapt into the air, winging him away from Fudomine, Tokyo, Japan… the Earth.

Mori Yuuka shut the door after the last wave of sympathy-wishers and retired to the kitchen. Intending to get herself something to eat, she instead sank down at the table and covered her face with her hands.

Something thunked down on the table in front of her, and she lifted her head and opened her eyes. A glass of water sat there - and beyond it, Tatsunori's best friend. "Thank you," she said.

He nodded. "You didn't seem very surprised," he said in a voice very unlike him.

She shook her head. "No," she said softly. "Remember when he spent that time in the hospital?" He nodded. "The doctors diagnosed him with something he would never recover from. I had the choice: let him live as he wanted, or to keep him in the hospital and maybe extend his life. Maybe."

Kyosuke stared at her. "I see. In other words, he might have lived longer, but he would not have been my partner, would not have been able to go to Nationals, right?"

She smiled. "Yes. That is exactly right."

He took a deep breath, struggling not to cry. "Then you did the right thing," he said, so softly she barely heard him, then lunged from the table. She heard the door slam shut after him.

And the sole decoration on her son's casket was the perfect model of the dragon he'd always wanted.

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