Cimorene

aja has more data pair icons than i do, so perhaps i am wrong and she ships as fervently as i do, in her heart.

i kind of like splitting everyone into neat little pairings because i want them all to be happy, and i love kirihara, but... i will just have to find someone else that i like pairing him with, because i have a difficult time looking at yanagi and not seeing the inui/yanagi, although in canon yanagi's feelings (in the present timeline at least) are more hidden than inui's. based on what i know, i find it easier to imagine yanagi and kirihara's relationship sort of mentor-ish.

i really hope you do write this gap-filling fic you mention. i can hardly express how happy i would be to see what you came up with. i've thought about that empty space too. when i watch the anime, it kind of feels like that question of why yanagi didn't tell inui he was moving almost isn't meant to be answered. there must have been some slightly more immediate explanation, but my first reading of the events on-screen was, just as you say, that he couldn't express what he was feeling. there's such a poignant atmosphere of dramatic irony in that sunset-tinted flashback of love in canon that it almost makes me cry. baby yanagi's love seems so clear to me, and while you see how much baby inui loves him too, his affection is untainted while baby yanagi's is already flavoured with angst. it might be just that which makes me imagine baby yanagi is a little more conscious of the romance in their attachment, but he does seem kind of yearning to me, while he's pained. i can't even talk about his desire to play against inui in singles coherently. i just devolve into a mess of talking about that little tezuka-golden pair-silver pair bit where we learn about how doubles partners playing all-out against each other can be the purest form of love and öalksjfdölaksjdöfa. (see?) i get the feeling that inui is naturally more emotionally open than yanagi, that he already was as a child and that during their match in the semi-finals he still is, even though yanagi's leaving changed him and hurt him so much.

i love the senbatsu part, too. that little exchange on the court about their petnames where yanagi tells inui not to call him that on the court because he can't concentrate (!!!!!) - that suggests to me that he hasn't really finished making his realisations about inui then, even if he thought he had.