An outsider samurai visits, looking for a challenge. Echizen
gives it to him and comes a little closer to figuring things out.
They met in the training yard.
"The kid again, hm?" Akutsu looked down at Ryouma with cold eyes.
Ryouma shrugged. "We didn’t finish, last time."
Fuji decides to try his hand against Echizen. It provokes a lot of thought.
Shuusuke felt a touch of excitement flicker along his nerves as they moved out into the open, feet scuffing up tiny puffs of dust to mark where they set themselves. Echizen was good. Not good enough to make Shuusuke lose, but perhaps…
Tezuka tries to break through to Echizen.
Ryouma knelt where he was, staring up at the General. He could feel the deadly thin line of Tezuka-dono’s sword against his throat. It didn’t move when the General spoke.
Echizen enters his first battle as a samurai of Uesugi, against the forces of Kaga under Tachibana.
They would probably have been fine if Echizen’s opponent hadn’t seen himself about to be caught between the two of them and panicked. Momo reacted automatically to the man’s desperate, circling slash.
So did Echizen.
Echizen escorts Sakuno and deals with a little trouble. Other sorts of trouble, he misses completely.
Or, she admitted to herself with a silent sigh, maybe he hadn’t done it for her at all. He was a samurai, after all; she was young, but she knew how the men of her own class could be about fights and challenges.
Echizen cleans his sword and thinks about his new place.
Ryouma sat in his rooms in the middle town, with his sword over his knees, cleaning it. His hands moved automatically, years and years of familiarity guiding them while his eyes rested on the blade without seeing it.
A new, young samurai arrives at the central castle of the Uesugi clan.
Echizen Ryouma had been in Kasugayama for a week, and one of Uesugi’s warriors for three and a half days, before he ran into trouble.
Konzen gets home and he and Ryouma finally meet.
Ryouma was fairly used to uproars around the house every now and then, especially when Nanako found his dad’s latest stash of magazines or one of his noisier senpai stopped by for a game.
This, however, sounded a little different.
Michael taunts Belial about winning and Lucifer gets involved.
"Hah!" Michael took his opportunity, as the teams filtered past each other on the way out of the stadium, to taunt Mad Hatter. "Told you we’d kick your asses."
Ryouma takes a vacation.
Ryouma nodded politely to the group that had gathered at his request. Several hundred years was enough to let someone get used to the same faces and personalities, he’d found, and so he knew almost every one of the assembled very, very well. Especially since he’d played tennis with them for several hundred years. He tugged at his cap, a habit that even death hadn’t been able to banish, and sighed.
Karupin has some issues with Ryouma’s new realm.
Echizen Ryoma had two loves in his life. (Actually, he had three, though he would never admit it, at least not until the said third love stopped playing so damned hard to get.) Anyone from the Seishun Senior High tennis club could tell you the first one: tennis. Any of them could also tell you the second: his cat. So no one said anything when Karupin started to tag along on some of their practice days.
Ryouma makes Moonlily an offer.
To whom it may concern. Echizen Ryouma proposes for those Grigori who feel an interest that they claim their own place in the emerging realm of heaven/hell.
Tezuka finds out what Ryouma’s been up to.
Tezuka Kunimitsu decided that he was having a bad day when Echizen walked up to him with that look in his eye; the one that Echizen had picked up from Fuji.
Ryouma makes some suggestions to Lucifer.
Ryoma was sitting on the porch at home when a tall man strolled into the yard and stood in front of him. He decided that the man was probably someone that he could get along with…or, rather, someone that he wished played tennis.
Ryouma gets off on the wrong foot with Kurai.
Ryoma caught the demon girl looking around after Fudoumine practice. He estimated that he’d end up running about forty laps for this, but decided that it was probably worth it. “Hey, you,” he called.
Tezuka’s rules about angels.
Tezuka adjusted his glasses and gave Ryoma the quiet, grave look that meant that the boy had done something that was not, as it were, directly forbidden, but that Ryoma certainly should have known better, given his buchou, the world, and the heavenly host. "Echizen," said Tezuka calmly, "What have I told you about dealing with the heavenly host?"
Ryouma gets an offer.
Ryoma looked at the boy across from him skeptically. "Not that I think you’re lying, but remind me why you’re doing this again?"
"Call it sibling rivalry," Michael replied shortly.
Pet Shop of Horrors crossover. While visiting the US, some of the tennis boys come across an unusual pet shop. This evolves, as such things do, into some strange situations for a few of them.
If anyplace could hold the interest of his senpai when they were determined to play tourist, he’d figured Chinatown would be it. Something was always happening.
During Tezuka’s first year of college, and Ryouma’s second year of high school, Ryouma tracks Tezuka down again and they edge into a relationship not based on the tennis club.
Kunimitsu remembered that it had taken less than a month from the time he started high school to the day Echizen Ryouma had come to find him. He was not, therefore, entirely surprised to see Echizen now, not quite two months into Kunimitsu’s university studies.
Ryouma catches up to his senpai, and takes advantage of his second time around with Tezuka as his captain. This time with, perhaps, a few more insights than last time.
As soon as Ryouma came within range of the crowd noise that enveloped the high school tennis courts he started praying that his captain had a lineup for the ranking matches that would make the day, in some way, less annoying.
Ryouma drags Tezuka off for an unofficial match.
When the doorbell rang, Kunimitsu knew exactly who it was. He couldn’t have said how he knew, because he categorically refused to believe that an inanimate object such as a doorbell was capable of ringing in a cocky tone just because of who was pressing it. But the information got through somehow.
Tezuka observes one of Ryouma’s matches.
He knew people had wondered, sometimes, about how hard he seemed to push Echizen, but he’d never seen it in that light. If it seemed that he placed insanely high bars in front of his best player, he did it with the sure knowledge that Echizen would go off in search of a cliff if left to his own devices.
Ryouma and Tezuka have a mild clash of wills, over which Ryouma gets rather frustrated.
Note: This particular story really came out of my personal opinion that the whole affair with Kevin Smith in the anime was rather inconsistent with the way Ryouma and Tezuka normally behave.
Ryouma could hear the mocking undertone perfectly well, and stifled a grin. It wasn’t quite time to grin at this one, yet. Not until Ryouma had him on the court.
Yukimura apologizes to the teams his own injured, and picks up a challenge on the way.
Seiichi’s eyes narrowed. He had come here to render an apology, but he’d be damned before he stood still to be a source of entertainment for Fuji Shuusuke.
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