Categories > Anime/Manga > Prince of Tennis

Black and White Photography

by dreamwhisperer 0 reviews

'Niou Masaharu likes photography.' In which love isn't really an issue, but fascination is.

Category: Prince of Tennis - Rating: PG - Genres: Drama - Characters: Niou Masaharu, Yagyuu Hiroshi - Published: 2006-07-24 - Updated: 2006-07-24 - 649 words - Complete

1Insightful
Black and White Photography

Niou Masaharu likes photography.

There was something, he thinks, about the beauty of taking a picture, of calculating angles and bearings, of adjusting just the correct percentage of colour to use in proportion to black and white.

Masaharu's favourite subject is maths, something that surprises many when he tells them. He thinks that they're stupid, because who can deny the utter beauty of numbers? Numbers are predictable and unpredictable, he thinks, and there's so much sheer variety that it never gets boring. X plus Y may not always equals to Z, for sometimes X equals to two and Y equals to one, and sometimes it's the other way around or some other number entirely. There are so many different formulas, different methods that always yields different results, but every single answer is always correct in its own way. There is a correct answer, yes, but there is always room for flexibility in maths.

It's like photography. A photograph, Niou knows, must be taken by a camera, but there are many different types of cameras, aren't there? There is the expensive, mega pixels digital cameras, the cheap, store-bought disposal ones, the large, professional ones, and, of course, the black and white camera. Niou likes the last camera the most, even though the one he owns is half-broken and it takes over five seconds for a picture to be taken. Niou didn't mind. He's a patient person, though he may not look it. He doesn't look the most things he /is/.

His favourite photography subject is Yagyuu Hiroshi.

There was something, Niou thinks, about Yagyuu. Niou looks through a camera's lenses and sees straight lines of pressed clothes and curves of a lean body, black hair and white uniform and blindingly white glasses. He looks through the lenses of the mind and sees a white, polite façade and a black, competitive streak. The striking contrast, the lack of grey in between the black and the white, utterly fascinates Niou. Yagyuu is an anomaly, he thinks, an anomaly in the equation, something that doesn't quite fit because it was copied down wrong.

Yagyuu fascinates Niou, and so Niou tries to dig in deeper, watching through black and white camera lenses. He watches as his own grey-black and grey-white clashes against Yagyuu's stark black and blind white, and likes to think that he will be able to see the colours melding together, black and white fading into grey, someday.

Yagyuu knows of Niou's interest in him, and yet Niou knows perfectly well that Yagyuu won't do anything, because something that is completely grey is an object of interest to someone of stark black and whites as well. Niou knows Yagyuu likes reading mysteries, and what better mystery than that of a human?

They fascinate each other, a dangerous sort of appeal that might cause them to attract or to repel each other. Like a pair of magnets, Niou thinks, or two chess pieces, black and white or red and blue, complete opposites and sharing characteristics all the same. Niou thinks that being so completely enthralled by someone as interesting as Yagyuu Hiroshi isn't that bad, because it's always a challenge to try to poke at the black and white of Yagyuu's personality, to see if it could meld into Niou's grey. He raises his camera again, and watches stark black dance with brilliant white.

Outside Niou's lenses, Yagyuu adjusts his glasses and doesn't smile, for he knows Niou doesn't realize that his camera has gone faulty a long time ago. Yagyuu's black and white had long disappeared and had been replaced by Niou's shades of grey-black and grey-white. It is rather inevitable, Yagyuu thinks. Niou has a certain gift of changing things, of changing /people/.

Yagyuu doesn't tell Niou, because, he hopes, one day Niou will throw the lenses away and see Yagyuu with his own eyes.

End
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