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Miyuki is self conscious and nervous about himself and his actions. He’s scared of letting people down, of being abandoned and left behind. So he tries extra hard to put up this really over-confident front in order to create the person he thinks he needs to be for other people. He has a lot of slip-ups though. When he’s not playing baseball, not around his team, he’s pretty shy. He doesn’t know how to deal with people outside of this very specific bubble he’s made for himself. He has no idea how to start talking to people, so he comes off as stand-offish. People avoid him. He thinks he’s probably not a very likable person. It hurts, but he’s used to it. It’s been his standard since he was a little kid. People like him when he plays baseball, or they’re intimidated by him, or they want to be him. He likes all of these better than not being liked at all. So he plays baseball like his life depends on it, and brushes it off as though the skills just come naturally to him.
He thinks Kuramochi is probably lonely too, but not like himself. A different, self-imposed kind of loneliness. Kuramochi surrounds himself only with people he trusts, but it takes a lot for him to trust people to begin with. Miyuki doesn’t bother with trust. Trust never gained him anything. If people were to start trusting him, he’d only let them down, and vice versa. Kuramochi decides to trust Miyuki, though, despite it all. He doesn’t trust Kuramochi back, wouldn’t make himself vulnerable like that, but he thinks Kuramochi is a likable person, and he’s okay being lonely together for however long it takes before Kuramochi realizes he’s not worth anything close to another person’s trust. It’s fun to make him laugh, at least.
Miyuki’s not afraid of many things. He’s scared of failure, when it comes to baseball. He knows it’s never his fault alone, but he bears the full weight of the failure as though it were. Sometimes he’s afraid of going home, because it feels like walking into a memory he’d rather forget. Mostly though, he’s just afraid of people finding out how much of a lie he is. Once that happens, everyone will leave. Once people see who he really is, they’ll hate him. Hate him and leave. He’s nothing special at all, just a guy pretending to be interesting so people stick around. Not very likable. It hurts to lie, but it hurts being left behind more. Even if he has to say mean things, even if he has to push and push until he’s on everyone's nerves. It’s worth it, to be accepted in some form or another.
The alarm bells in his head ring louder and louder for every day he spends with Sawamura Eijun. From the day he met him, they were ringing. Miyuki had spent years building a fortress around himself, the foundation digging deep into the ground, and the towers reaching up so high you couldn’t see the top. Every inch of it covered in spikes, in traps, in signs that say “turn back now”. A chasm separates himself and his fortress from the outside world, and inside is fire. Yet, on the day he met Sawamura Eijun, the second he caught his first pitch, the first faint warning alarm started ringing from somewhere inside that fortress. An intruder alert.
On the day he ran into him behind the shed, that alarm got a little louder. When he realized how much Sawamura wanted Miyuki to catch for him, another alarm joined the chorus. It was weird to be wanted, sought out. All the other pitchers he’d worked with would shake their head at his signs, and felt resigned to work with him. Sawamura was the total opposite. He wanted the signs, wanted to be lead. He recognized his weaknesses and looked to Miyuki to help him grow.
More alarms sounded, blaring, when he slammed Sawamura against the wall, full of anger at his attitude toward Chris, the one person he truly respected. He was revealing too much, he knew, but for some reason this kid was hard to continuously lie to. He gathered his composure quickly and left, shaking his head to get the alarms to quiet down.
It takes a long time. A long, agonizing, painful time. Sawamura has been working away at this hellish fortress for months and months. Miyuki doesn’t get it. How much more hurt does this kid want to inflict on himself before he realizes there’s no prize at the end of this journey. Just emptiness. Disappointment.
Despite all that, he persists. On an average evening identical to many of the average evenings preceding it, he decides to go and wrangle his pitcher from the field where he knows he’s running laps until he drops. The gravel crunching under his feet as he makes his way over sounds eerily similar to a sound he’s been hearing for weeks, the chipping away at his fortress walls, bits crumbling and falling as the days go on. He sees Sawamura running mindlessly as he approaches the field, as usual. As he turns a corner, he spots Miyuki and shouts, raggedly, “Miyuki *huff* Kazuya!!” He gives Miyuki this big dumb grin, and the second he feels his lips twitch upwards to mirror that grin, he hears a loud, thundering knock.
Sawamura is still pretty far off, running towards him. Miyuki laughs under his breath, feeling a little lightheaded and nauseous. Of course, he thinks, of course he would still ask permission to enter after months of fighting just to get to the door.
Miyuki has no idea what to do as Sawamura trots up to him, grinning and panting. His worst fear taking physical form, beaming at him like some poetic nonsense that Miyuki refuses to acknowledge. His head hurts, his chest hurts, his eyes are unfocused even though his glasses are on. His body and mind reacting negatively to the only intruder it's ever encountered.
“Hey!” Sawamura greets, finally close. Miyuki can feel heat radiating off of him from his workout. “Your glasses look weird in this light! They look blue,” he says, and reaches up, plucking them gently from his face. He turns the glasses up and down, trying to get them to reflect correctly. “See?” he says, once he gets the angle he’d been working at.
“No,” Miyuki says plainly, trying to hide the waver in his voice. “Because I don’t have my glasses on.”
Sawamura does this big ugly cackle that Miyuki has heard so many times. He says “Oh yeah!” and slips the glasses back behind Miyuki’s ears and up his nose. he feels engulfed, suffocated all of a sudden, and takes a half step back.
“Well trust me, they’re definitely blue,” Sawamura assures him. He feels, horrifyingly, the door to his fortress start to creak slowly open.
“I’ll never be sure, though, since I’m either wearing them or blind, idiot,” he retorts, and starts walking back toward the cafeteria so he can look somewhere, anywhere besides Sawamura’s face. He can’t talk about trust right now. His heart is beating out of his chest, he’s sweating, he thinks maybe he should run to the bathroom to vomit.
He’s stopped by a tugging at the back of his shirt. He halts, but doesn't turn around. He's very sure that he's unable to turn around.
“Something’s up with you. Are you…did you hurt yourself again?” Sawamura stomps around until he’s standing in front of Miyuki, hands on his hips. he points a finger right at Miyuki’s nose, an inch, a centimeter away from touching. Miyuki goes a little cross-eyes, flinching as he does it.
“I’m…no? I’m not injured, Sawamura. You think i’d be able to get away with that again?” he steps back again, toward the field. He feels trapped, unable to escape from either side. He feels annoyingly close to crying, his eyes stinging. He sniffs, hiding his emotions by rolling his eyes.
“Yes! You’re really good at that kind of thing! Hiding stuff from people, not showing your emotions to anyone,” Sawamura says, following Miyuki's every step with his finger still pointed right in his face. “You lie to make everyone feel better, but you just hurt yourself more!”
Miyuki, at this point, is visibly shaking, which Sawamura sees. He huffs, reaches his hand out and grabs one of Miyuki's shaking wrists, lifting it up between them. “See? Something’s wrong, and you’re not telling me what it is! Don’t lie to me, Miyuki Kazuya!” Sawamura wiggles his wrist a little to make his point, but not too much. Miyuki thinks maybe he’s being careful incase his wrist is the part of him that’s hurt. That thought makes him shake more, and he feels Sawamura let go quickly. “Sorry!” he yelps, “Did that hurt?”
Alarms, alarms, alarms. He can barely hear Sawamura. He looks up, down, to his sides, anywhere else. He steps back and back and back but Sawamura isn’t getting any farther away. His back finally hits a fence, the chainlink rattling, and he thinks Sawamura probably jumped a lot of these fences to get to that fortress door, barbed wires at the top and electric currents running through them. But he’s right here, standing on the same side of the fence as him, ready to greet whoever lies beyond that door.
“You look really scared right now, Miyuki,” Sawamura says, a confused look taking over his features. “You’re acting really weird. I mean, you’re always weird and mean and stuff, but you’re being really weird.”
Miyuki huffs, looking to the side and hoping desperately for some sarcasm to claw it’s way out of his mouth. “Your face is pretty scary, you know. And I’m not the only one acting weird,” he says, eyes refocusing to meet Sawamura's, “You're–”
The foundation suddenly shifts under him, a fault in the ground rips open and the high towers of his fortress quiver back and forth for a moment before suddenly snapping like toothpicks and tumbling heavily to the ground, dust and debris rising rapidly into the air, which quickly becomes unbreathable. His eyes meet Sawamura’s, and the genuine worry he’s greeted with is the final blow, the wrecking ball blowing through his emotional barrier. He can’t finish his sentence, can’t even breathe. He just stands there stupidly staring back at eyes that suddenly have a look of realization in them, and then shock. Miyuki wonders why he's so shocked, for a moment, before he feels hot streaks drip down both sides of his face, meeting each other at his chin and falling down between them into the dirt. For a moment, he wishes it were blood. Wishes he was physically injured so that Sawamura could focus on that, instead of the emotional chaos he’s wreaking inside Miyuki’s mind. But as much as he’d like to think Sawamura is simple-minded, he can tell just by looking that he sees right through Miyuki, to the very center of him. Past the captain, past the catcher, past the liar. He sees Miyuki, lonely, afraid, and drained. Defeated and embarrassed.
“Don’t cry,” Sawamura says in a soft, careful voice that reminds him so much of his mother that more tears start spilling. He turns his eyes away finally, flushed with embarrassment.
“Yeah,” he says, even though there wasn’t anything to agree with. They both stand there, Miyuki staring blankly at the back wall of the dorms, and Sawamura staring at him, for minutes and minutes. He can’t hear any alarms anymore, and he finds himself feeling awkward for the first time in a long time. What is he supposed to do, after crying helplessly in front of Sawamura? How does he get himself out of this? What words does he have?
They stand there. It’s awkward.
“This is weird,” Miyuki says, finally. His voice sounds gross because his nose is all clogged up. He looks back at Sawamura, but his glasses are foggy and wet from his tears. He feels Sawamura grab at his glasses again, and sees him blurrily rub them against his dirty shirt before sliding them back onto Miyuki’s face. “Gross,” he says, and weirdly he feels like crying again, but not because he’s sad. He just kind of wants to cry.
“Hey, go to your dorm. I’m gonna go get a whole bunch of rice balls and we’re gonna see who can eat the most, okay?” Sawamura asks, but Miyuki can tell he’s asking something else. Still asking for permission, even after the fortress has waved it’s white flag.
“Yeah, um. Alright, okay,” he says. Sawamura gets behind him and pushes him like a snow plow up to his dorm room, before turning around and running full speed to the cafeteria. He stops at the bottom of the stairs to yell, “What kind do you like?”
Miyuki sits stupidly on his bed for a moment before getting up and popping his head out the door. “Whatever’s fine with me, you can choose!”
“Roger!” and he’s run off again.
Sawamura brings back a big plate full of rice balls, and they somehow have all of Miyuki's favorite fillings. Maybe Sawamura thinks he’s a likable person. Maybe he trusts Miyuki. Miyuki doesn’t know much about that kind of thing. He does know that he cries more as he eats the rice balls, and that Sawamura takes his glasses off this time so they don’t get foggy, and because maybe he knows Miyuki doesn’t want to see what Sawamura’s face looks like as he cries. He knows he falls asleep sitting up with rice all over his mouth, and when he wakes up a few hours later, Sawamura is still there, looking through Miyuki’s books and things like a little snoop. He knows he’s lost this long game he’s been playing when all he does is laugh as Sawamura stares at him, caught in the act like a deer caught in headlights. He feels light, like he could float right through the ceiling, but before he can even manage to lift a foot off the ground, Sawamura slams down in front of him and throws playbooks in his lap.
“Teach me!” He shouts.
He looks toward his clock on his nightstand. “It’s 3 in the morning,” Miyuki replies, voice heavy with sleep. “And what do you even mean, ‘teach you’?”
“I dunno,” Sawamura mumbles. “You’re always looking at these playbooks all day and night. I figure I could help, sometimes, so you don’t have to do all the work yourself. Or something.” He flips one of the books open half-heartedly, looking down. Miyuki can see a faint blush across his cheeks.
“Um,” Miyuki says. He pauses for a long time, a war going on in his head. Sawamura probably doesn’t even understand what he’s asking of him. He swims and swims through his thoughts. He thinks about Kuramochi, and how he decides who he wants to trust, even if it’s only a few people. He thinks about his dad, and growing up alone and hurt. He thinks about how Sawamura is sitting in front of him, and what that means. His mind wars on and on, but after the battle is over and relief spreads across the survivors, the victor announces their win with a battle cry. “Okay.”