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Hinata knows his teachers just want the best for him. He knows their gentle teasing and sometimes not-too-gentle pushing is all meant for his benefit. So he can strive for excellence. But sometimes, all it does is make him feel pretty damn useless. Like no matter how hard he tries, they just want more and more and more.
He tries. He really wants to believe he tries, but deep down, he’s kind of got this feeling of “I could be trying more.” So maybe that’s why he feels a jolt of panic whenever anyone says the word “grades,” especially when referring to his own. His mother might be hard on his case, but he convinces himself it’s just because she cares.
Sometimes, Hinata wishes she didn’t give a damn about him.
He feels this weight on him, like anvils sitting on top of his lungs. Almost like a broken record, he’ll repeat, “I’m sorry, I’ll try harder, I’m trying, I promise .”
Maybe that was the worst part.The making of promises he knew he could never keep. Would never keep. And that made the pressure all the worse.
He doesn’t exactly remember when, he just knows at some point, he started to hate education. He hated learning. He hated the pressure of work.
He went to school and, sometimes, it was even enjoyable. Mostly, he only went for the volleyball. He loved seeing his friends, and he loved goofing off, but the second he had a worksheet in front of him, or the teacher asked for the homework he didn’t do (and would never have done), he could feel his heart stutter and his lungs tighten for a second.
It’s not like Hinata’s dumb. He may get confused every now and then, but he’s not necessarily hard to teach. It’s just that doing work requires so much energy.
Energy that he could be using for other things.
For example, volleyball.
While all his team members joke about how volleyball is Hinata’s life, they don’t know how true that is. They don’t know that it’s the only thing he has a passion for anymore, that he feels like he’s falling apart and volleyball is the only thing stopping him from doing so. So he’ll joke along with them, and he’ll never open up, because he just doesn’t want them to worry.
It’s not like his grades have ever been spotless, so when they start to slip a bit more, no one really bats an eye.
They nudge him a bit and tell him that he should work a little harder but, really, they know it’s an empty gesture before they even think of making it.
So he’ll go through his daily life, wishing to god that he could just fall asleep and not wake up the next day, because if he wakes up, he has to deal with the pressure, with the fear, with the self hatred that comes with it all, like the shiny red bow on this fucked up package labeled “LIFE” in a black permanent marker.
He wishes the sun would go out.
It’s random, he knows it is. He knows it makes no sense. But it’s just too bright for his taste, and he would rather be locked up in his own world, where the brightest thing is the lights on the ceiling of the gymnasium and all he has to worry about is aiming his spike correctly.
But he knows that, well, that’s not really feasible, so he remains, stagnant, hoping that maybe, one day, everything will be just fine.
Because he knows, he really does, that grades are important. He knows that, if they get too low, he could be kicked off of volleyball. He knows that good grades mean a good college and, therefore, a good future, but he isn’t entirely sure that he wants to have a future. He’s pretty sure that, if he could, he would stay in his bed until it became his coffin.
All it takes is Kageyama or Suga nudging him, asking if he’s okay, for him to almost break down in front of them all. It’s not like he’s necessarily sad, really. He’s just sort of tired in every way possible. He wants to lay down and think about nothing for a few hours, even if that means he lay on the floor, getting dust and dirt all over his outfit--but maybe, hopefully, while he’s down here, he could get trampled, too, and that would really solve all his issues.
He’s just kind of exhausted.
And, really, he loves volleyball to death, but he just doesn’t know how much longer he can go. It’s like he’s running on a generator, but all the back-up energy is almost gone anyways, and, jesus, when did everyone get so loud?
If the bags weighing heavy under his bloodshot eyes are any indicator, he didn’t sleep last night and probably wouldn’t tonight either.
Really, he’s mortifyingly tired, but he stays up at night with this pressure weighing down on him, reminding him of all the mistakes he made today, and how he’ll just amount to nothing some day. Given his circumstance, he feels like he’s trying his best, but he’s not really in the mood to beg people to understand that. So they remain disappointed, ashamed, and annoyed at him for every time he brushes off a project due next week, or how he didn’t do the homework, even though it was only five word problems.
He’ll remain stagnant.
And maybe, someday, somehow, it’ll all work itself out.