Work Text:
After they lose to Karasuno in the Spring High preliminaries, there is a single moment in which reality springs loose from its rubber mold and quivers in the cold heavy air of the gymnasium. Goshiki Tsutomu walks off the court, and feels strangely like he is floating.
He doesn’t want to cry immediately after the match, not when his seniors are all still standing there with their eyes on the hardwood floor or each other’s shoes. He is the only first-year starter at Shiratorizawa, and this is something he is fiercely proud of. One day his name will be passed around in the bleachers like something sacred, like Ushijima’s once was, though he doesn’t know this yet. It will become the kind of name that floods cities.
But right now, he is only the only first-year starter at Shiratorizawa, and he can only imagine the immensity of their disappointment. For the first time in many, many years, the crown has been taken by someone else. Recognizing the cruel significance of this, he wants desperately not to cry, and yet the frustration wells up in him in waves, beating pitifully against his throat and his scrunched-up eyes.
He cries. Oohira-san puts a hand on his shoulder. He thinks to himself: I hope no one else is looking.
He figures he’ll be okay by the time he gets back to his room, but he cries his eyes out all over again, and he’s too loud; the guy next door knocks and asks if he’s okay and he has to wheeze out a soggy “yes”, which only makes him feel more embarrassed. He thinks about Tendou-san, who had not cried. He thinks about Ushijima-san, who had not cried, either. What do they have that he does not; what is the secret to their unflappability, their immovable conviction? He will have to learn from them if he wants to remain here. Goshiki Tsutomu feels everything twice as hard as the average human being. This has its pros: He is an excellent spiker. He is the only first-year starter in Shiratorizawa. But at times like this, when their godly otherworldly strength fails them, his excellence grows dull with their passage through the afterlife of defeat, the minutes that crawl over each other like worker ants. He cannot help but feel that he owes an apology to everyone, and most of all, to himself.
::
With or without them, the Spring High goes on. Shiratorizawa, excluded this time from the cycle of reincarnation, watches the proceedings from the other side of the screen, picking and preening at their feathers with razors. Time inches along through the same old universe.
At first he doesn’t want to follow Karasuno’s matches. Doing so feels like performing thirty jump serves after pulling your leg; each time you kick off the ground the pain is fresh and sharp and jammed into a single point in your body, and as the minutes wear on the lines between pain and the absence of it begin to blur. He is a bitter, sore loser and fully aware of it, but he’s also tired. He doesn’t want to do anything about it.
Still his bitterness fades with time, and as Shiratorizawa begins to buzz with news freshly-delivered from Tokyo, it is subsumed by simple curiosity. Watching Karasuno run Tsubakihara into the ground, he understands for the first time in his life what it means to have complex, opposing feelings that twist in your gut and flare up in your chest like firecrackers. He is both happy and sad, proud and incredibly disappointed at the same time. And jealous, of course; he is jealous.
“It’s got nothin’ to do with some goddess or whatever,” Shirabu-san comments bitterly in the middle of Karasuno’s match against Inarizaki. He has affixed himself to Goshiki’s shoulder like a satanic guardian deity and made it his life’s purpose to cause him as much discomfort as is humanly possible. To his horror, Goshiki now has to exercise self-control. And this is supposed to be his time off, too. He is sad about all of it.
“No,” he agrees, keeping his voice as even as he can in case Shirabu-san blows a fuse and tries to murder him. Shirabu-san pulls a face at him anyway, leaning closer and squinting at the screen. There’s an odd smell in the room. Some sort of shampoo, but definitely not his, because he only uses the good stuff and the good stuff doesn’t smell like this.
On the screen, Karasuno's number three makes a face like he’s been constipated for the last three weeks; it’s his turn to serve. Does Goshiki want Karasuno to win? Does he want them to lose? What does it matter to him and his seniors, to Ushijima-san who is graduating this year and will never play with them again anyway? Goshiki ponders these things as he watches number three suck in a horrible constipated breath and take several horrible constipated steps backwards.
“Shirabu-san, do you want Karasuno to win?”
“Huh? Of course not.” Shirabu-san scowls at him, then stops scowling, pauses, is uncharacteristically calm for a moment. “But I don’t want Inarizaki to win more, ‘cos their setter’s face pisses me off. So Karasuno better not lose.”
He serves; the ground shivers. It’s in. Four hundred kilometers away, in a familiar gymnasium in Tokyo, the crowd goes wild.
::
Once in elementary school, they had a science project where they got to grow green bean plants in little plastic cups full of cotton wool. He was supposed to spray the contents of his cup twice a day, once in the morning and then again in the evening, and so he did, carefully, watching with delight as the tiny pods split open, revealing skinny, pale green shoots. By then he had begun experiencing the astounding growth spurt that would last until his last year of high school, and yet his charges’ growth exceeded even his own. He was diligent about his work. He took measurements every day and recorded them down in the blank pages of an old exercise book, in a table he had drawn with a ruler and pen. Once enough time had passed, his grandmother helped him transfer the single remaining shoot into a fresh plot of ground in their backyard, beside which he planted the small wooden sign he had made the day before. Goshiki Tsutomu’s garden space, DON’T TOUCH, it said in permanent marker.
Even after all his classmates’ green bean plants died and he submitted his exercise book to his teacher, he continued to look after his plant. In his mind’s eye, he envisioned it growing and growing until it was as tall as a skyscraper. Every morning he would sit at its very peak and survey the winding streets of Miyagi, making sure the world everyone woke up to remained the same as it had been the day before.
::
At first he doesn’t want to follow Karasuno’s matches because he’s still bitter and a little clumsy, and therefore young enough that when his chest hurts, he’s unsure how to act like it doesn’t hurt until it goes away. But he’s young enough to change, too, so, bit by bit, he gets over himself. The next morning, Karasuno plays against Nekoma. ‘The battle of the trash-heap’, the commentators call it, injecting their voices with what he decides is faux-admiration. The alternative would be real admiration, and it pisses him off that the new rulers of the court are receiving this sort of familiar, warm welcome, have their own history on the fairgrounds of what was supposed to be his paradise. He’s not ready to deal with this yet.
“Shirabu-san, I didn’t know you had invited Tendou-san as well,” he sulks in the interim between the first and second set.
“I didn’t,” Shirabu-san responds flatly, pushing his damp hair out of his face. He’s perfectly at ease in Goshiki’s room, perched on the edge of the bed while his legs thump erratically against the mattress. “He invited himself.”
Tendou raises his eyebrows, smiling. “You’re sulking, Goshiki.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Am not.”
“He’s sulking,” Shirabu-san agrees.
Goshiki sighs deeply, feeling the years piling up on his shoulders like weights. “It’s Nekoma’s turn to serve again. Are you sure you want to miss this?” He asks irritably. Abruptly, both of his seniors jerk their heads towards the computer screen. Nekoma’s captain unleashes a nasty jump serve, but Karasuno’s libero gets it back up into the air flawlessly; to be honest, Goshiki has always admired him, has always admired their fierce unflinching pride. To be honest, he is relieved.
::
He didn’t think he would make it onto the starting lineup in his first year at Shiratorizawa. Granted, he had been the ace at his previous middle school, and granted, he had always been good at volleyball, significantly better than most. But Shiratorizawa wasn’t just significantly better than most, it eclipsed the rest of them altogether. The prefecture’s best had to fight to get into its ranks, clawing at each other’s skin with rough, volleyball-hewn hands. Even then, some would inevitably fail. Recalling the way his school had cheered his name from the bleachers during matches, his confidence wavered.
When he was younger, just beginning to play in proper games, there was a single occasion in which he messed up, very badly. He was unable to recall the details, but for months afterwards whenever he was reminded of the incident he would immediately shut down as if trying to protect himself, his shoulders stiffening and his expression becoming as blank as fresh snow. Though rare, these instances drew the world’s eyes to him in a way that he, who was used to being praised and fawned over by smiling middle-aged ladies at the supermarket, discovered that he hated. They made him feel vulnerable.
To make matters worse, his green bean plant died that summer. It hurt more than he thought it would, mainly because he hadn’t thought it would happen at all; as the great blue sky overhead was washed away by the night, he sat down in the backyard in front of his crooked wooden sign and cried.
His parents, who couldn’t empathize with him no matter how hard they tried, were more amused than anything, but his grandmother brought him rice crackers after dinner, and sat beside him on his bedroom floor while he wallowed in the particular brand of misery only a twelve-year-old is capable of conjuring. The culprit, she told him, was a particularly malignant species of beetle.
“I hate that beetle,” he declared. He pictured the ugly shiny thing scaling the stem of his plant, chewing up all its leaves as it went, and began to cry again, softly.
His grandmother patted the top of his head. “The beetle was probably trying its best as well.”
“But it killed my plant.”
She seemed to think about his words for a moment. “When many people try their best at the same time, some of them aren’t able to get what they want. But this doesn’t mean those who don’t get what they want should hate anyone. Not even themselves. Because they tried their best, and that is a good, important thing.”
He frowned. “Then what should I do?”
“Be kind, Tsutomu,” said his grandmother, smiling gently. “Be kind.”
The next day was Saturday. He rose at the cusp of dawn and, with the help of a shovel, removed the dead plant that stood in Goshiki Tsutomu’s garden space. At the same time, he thought about the horrible thing that had happened to him last year; or rather, the horrible thing he had done. This was immediately accompanied by feelings of guilt and shame and failure, but he held out stubbornly against them, repeating his grandmother's words to himself in his head. Had he tried his best? He thought so. This was the only thing he really remembered. He had tried his best.
Later, he found a plastic cup in the kitchen cabinet and some cotton wool, and retrieved the jar of green beans he had harvested over the past few months. When he returned to the backyard, he discovered that the beetle who had killed his plant was still there, so he called his grandmother, who helped him coax it onto a leaf, and they left it at the park nearby.
Good-bye, he whispered. Don’t come back.
::
On the third day of the Spring High, Karasuno plays against Kamomedai. Hinata Shouyou gets taken out in the third set, and while Shirabu-san strangles Goshiki’s bolster and Tendou-san attempts to merge his soul with the laptop, Goshiki wonders if he will come back.
He doesn’t come back. When Kamomedai slams their final spike down into Karasuno’s side of the court, there is a single moment in which the gears of the universe cease their perennial grinding, and he realizes with abrupt clarity that he had been hoping that he would do so. Shirabu-san tuts, loudly, but his voice is strained and his shoulders are tense. Tendou-san flounces out of the room, singing something about how Wakatoshi-kun will have to hear about this, Wakatoshi-kun will have a field day. Goshiki makes a mental note of what he’s going to tell Hinata Shouyou later, and only remembers, halfway through the impromptu motivational speech he has crafted, that they are not friends.
What is Hinata thinking right now? He recalls waking up to his dead plant all alone in their sun-lit backyard. Back then it had felt like the sort of monumental failure he would cling to for decades, like the start of a haunting in a bad horror flick. He was miserable for weeks, even after speaking to his grandmother, even though her words stayed with him for years afterwards.
If Hinata is feeling anything at all through his bruised hands and his bruised heart, Goshiki thinks, it is probably so immense, he will never have the words to describe it. Nevertheless, he hopes Hinata will be kind to himself. Kindness is the one thing that allowed Goshiki to move forward from the horrible thing that happened in elementary school.
If anything will save Hinata right now, it is this. Perhaps, if he is lucky, it will even lead to a miracle.
::
There are a lot of things Ushijima Wakatoshi could potentially say to the young budding talent that is Goshiki Tsutomu. Goshiki considers all of them as Ushijima-san makes his way through the ranks of Shiratorizawa’s boys’ volleyball team. Perhaps Ushijima-san will finally berate him properly for daring to call himself the ace. Or maybe he has prepared a long list of Goshiki’s flaws, and will read them out one by one in front of the entire team. No, Goshiki shakes his head to himself, he is being audacious; there is no way Ushijima-san has paid him that much attention in the mere year they have spent together. He has had no reason to do so.
“Goshiki.”
He looks up.
“Yes.”
Ushijima-san has stopped in front of him. His shoulders are squared and his expression is serene, unperturbed; it is the same one he wears when he’s running in the morning before practice, or listening to Tendou-san talk about Shounen Jump, or waiting in line at the cafeteria for lunch. Goshiki is just another obnoxious first-year, only a little more obnoxious than the rest. He swallows sharply. This is the last time he will see Ushijima-san like this, off the court but still clothed in Shiratorizawa’s deep purples and clean whites, clothed in regalia. He swallows again.
Yes, Ushijima-san, please go on.
::
He didn’t think he would make it onto the starting lineup at Shiratorizawa, but somehow he did, and it makes him so proud, his chest hurts. That Coach Washijou saw something in him that made him fit to stand on the court alongside miracles, that Semi-san never gave him the evil-eye for being a first-year and a starter even though he had braced for it from the beginning, that Shirabu-san never stopped picking on him but still gave him the best tosses in games— since joining this team, he has been surrounded by nothing but kindness. Now it is his turn to carry the torch.
::
One day his name will be passed around in the bleachers like something sacred, like Ushijima’s once was, though he doesn’t know this yet. It will become the kind of name that floods cities, and when he holds his fist in the air the crowd will rise up to meet it with a roar. Children will ask him to sign their shirts with embarrassed, bitten-lip smiles, watching from a polite distance as he uncaps the marker, scribbles the same signature he’s been using since he was eight years old and he decided that he wanted to be the best volleyball player in the world. One day, he will be a king.
Today, Ushijima Wakatoshi looks him straight in the eye, and says I’m counting on you.
He cries.