A/N There’s a hint of Chinese culture in here, but it’s a blink-and-miss situation. You can decide what really happened on your own.

- Inexpressible -

Memory

Dear Tezuka,

It's been quite a long time since I've talked to you at all. I don't know why I'm doing this right now, to tell you the truth. I found this old pen that had yet to run dry and a few sheets of paper the other day. I thought I might preserve them or sell them to the antiques store a few miles away for some good money, but somehow, I ended up writing to you.

Your first reaction might be that I have yet to refer to myself as "Oresama". Such childish things are trivial now, don't you think? It's been far too long to even consider ruling the world, let alone being putting myself as high up as I used to. But that is beside the point.

How long ago has it been since Junior High? I'm not quite sure, but it must be at least seventy years now. I still remember those days so clearly - the endless hours of tennis practice and conditioning, slaving over our bodies to keep them in perfect condition so that we might win the next game, the next match, the next tournament. Refining our techniques to the point of mastering them, as well as developing new ones that might prove useful in the future. The seemingly endless supply of tennis balls that we slipped into our pockets, only to remove them moments later, in order to have an excuse to use those rackets that we loved so much.

Tell you the truth, I thought you were a strange one. Aside from the normal endless ours of tennis and going out with our teams, you seemed to like to read too much. YOu loved it too much. Others from our teams seemed to have more character than you did. Fuji with his sadistic streak and genius-level techniques, Gakuto with his acrobatics, Yuushi with his unbelievably dumb and stupid movies, Kikumar and Oishi with their... doubles, I suppose. Jiroh might have been more interesting than you, had he not been asleep so often.

You liked to read too much.

Nowadays, in the world we live in today, high in technology and endless machines, it seems as if everybody has forgotten. My grandchildren are watching the television in the room next door, projecting from a portable projector that they can bring anywhere and adjust to any size. I can hear them dictating their laptops to write that new program they've been working on, or to write their next essay for school. Someone's cell phone is ringing - you know, one of those embedded chips in your skin so you can dial from anywhere, have service anywhere, and never lose. So much more convenient than pulling your cell from out of your pocket to dial a number, don't you think?

Nothing is on paper anymore. Everything is digital now. We can teleport something somewhere in the blink of an eye, read about business and how the economy is in old archives online, speak to our friends' faces when we are only on the phone. Tennis courts no longer exist, only those virtual ones that mimic the original. You put some strange thing over your eyes, and it seems like you're playing tennis. It's an awful, messed up version though. It's impossible to use tennis techniques like we used to against the computer or our friends, though sometimes I wonder what would have happened if you'd used your Zero-Shiki against it. I doubt the computer on the hardest level could have stood up against it, if it were possible to use it in the game. We no longer listen to Beethoven and Mozart, no longer read William Shakespeare and Charlotte Bronte. Weeping over MacBeth and rejoicing with Pride and Prejudice has become a thing of such a distant past that we hardly remember it anymore.

When the rest of our generation is gone, who will be there to remember the tears of joy from musicals and concerts, the adrenaline highs from facing a difficult opponent on the court, the heart-gripping action of those books that you loved almost as much as tennis? Music, tennis, reading... in exchange for a high-tech world of live-action and fast-paced lives, it's a wonder we still survive at all.

I remember talking to my youngest grandchild last week. He was looking up an assignment online. He asked me what life was like when I was young, about fifteen or so. I remember thinking for quite a while, before I finally told him, "There were things that existed ago, things that we listened to, called music. Something that we used to play, called tennis. Things that we used to read called books."

Now old, arthritic, and not all completely there, I'd forgotten about them.

Now as my pen runs dry and I run out of paper, I'm going to seal this letter in an envelope, teleport across three miles to the nearest antique store that still sells matches. It's going to cost me a fortune, but I'm going to take those matches to you. I'm going to walk three miles from that store to meet you, no matter how long it takes.

I'm going to burn this letter in front of you, hoping that my words will someday reach you.

And I hope to play you again someday, on the courts that we loved so much.

Much love,

Atobe