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Everyone is so bright. Everybody is shining with color and their emotions are taped to their backs like jackets, sometimes zipped up, but most times not. If you squint, you can see right through them, and their weak walls crumble, great mountains that fall if prodded.
Everybody is radiant, with smiles that make Tobio feel more dead than alive.
Color doesn't exist in Tobio's world. It's dark and grey, and while everybody else is somehow able to see beauty in the dumbest things, like the sunlight or the little bunches of flowers that grow in the broken sidewalks, Tobio cannot. His walls should never crumble like dirt even when beaten upon, sandcastles that don't seem to fall.
It eats at him, because his teammates are colored shades of reds and blues and beautiful greens, but he remains grey and detached. While everyone else gains a new color everyday, Tobio's color palette remains dark, greys and blacks and whites, and he swears he will never wear his emotions on his sleeves or on his chest, back; legs, and only hold them, precious, mementos of the grey that peels away, and the black that replaces.
And Kageyama Tobio doesn't like to lose, not any game or anything, so he captures the grey that falls away and keeps the twisting color in glass jars in hopes that maybe some kind of brightness may creep in.
Kageyama Tobio remains dull- demanding, a dark hurricane that rains, rains, rains grey on everybody else. The rain soaks up some of their color, and they steal away some grey, and Kageyama rages and rages, and he's a storm of thunder and lightning that's grey, grey, grey. And when they leave, their soaked up color drains away, and the bit of happiness he felt drips down the pipes too.
Kageyama Tobio is a monster that tries hard to live and fit in, but sometimes trying only that is exhausting, and Kageyama's greys are melting into blacks.
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A bright ball of color is introduced into his life, ecstatic and joyful and ready to take anything on, even him, and Kageyama is fine with that, because losing is not something that he believes will ever happen to him.
His walls don't crumble, because he created his walls alone and packed the sand together as tight as he possibly could, and other castles and walls got washed away by salty water, but his stayed up straight, and the salty waves do not come for him. They are conquered, and Kageyama wins like he always does, wins an argument that he doesn't even want to have.
Orange is everything that he sees, and Tobio finds somebody whose walls are porcelain and easily shattered, and only when he shatters them does he realize that his walls have crumbled long ago.
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And so a long, tedious rebuilding process begins, and Kageyama's whites fade to greys and his greys fade to blacks. His castle has fallen, scattered around his feet, cerulean floors and cerulean skies.
He builds his new castle out of ash and soot, with pillars that stand tall and intimidating. He is prisoner inside of something that he created, a selfish king captive and locked behind his own bars, pride a monster bigger than himself.
And he counts his days on his prison walls, scratches them into the sand, tally marks and tally marks and white roses that wilt, black.
So Kageyama lives like this, and his mind grows muddled and confused, and he feels like he's playing a part of a losing game, despair that tastes bitter on his tongue.
And his followers leave him, not one by one, but all together, a rebellion that brings him defeat.
Porcelain walls greet him again, orange in color but clear by themselves. They are fixed with cheap glue and clear tape, doodled on and tinted with other colors, light greens and dark browns and bright yellows, but no grey, and Kageyama feels so isolated in his tower that stands tall and far from everybody else's, built up again, and not fixed, careful and frightening with cannons already aimed and ready.
All of his shots miss, and the cannons destroy only the forests beyond the castle.
And orange and yellow and green, a mass of brightness with china walls, shattered and fixed, and shattered again, reappears, with a face of surprise and denial and there's probably some hatred in there too, because Tobio was the one who first broke his walls down.
A pointed finger at his face and a stare that could probably kill if looks could, revenge his jacket, colored red.
And Kageyama remembers him, remembers his determination and how much he wasted his skill. Remembers how his face looked when facing defeat, how his expression contorted, orange to red to brown, but never black, and Kageyama remembers how he'd felt himself, angry and terrified because unlike him, Hinata oozed color.
He still does. Kageyama's frown lines are drawn in black, yelling and scowling and a constantly wrinkled forehead, and he rattles, violent, rattles his grey prison bars.
Kageyama never actually becomes colorful, and he remains how he's always been, colorless and blunt, and so he abandons his cape and his crown, king no more but prisoner still.
So Tobio sits in prison clothes, black and white stripes in a black and white cell, and he longs for the bars to fall away, to disintegrate or shatter like glass. And while everybody else sails on boats of floating feathers, he sits alone inside the captain's quarters, a conductor of an orchestra that he no longer has the will to control.
And the boat swerves and tilts and almost sinks, turns into a huge black bird, a sick crow with feathers falling.
It turns out that that mass of orange is actually a monster, too, but he's made of string instead of flesh, and one pull on one thread can cause him to break, wheezing and terrified with revenge painted red on his face, ink that drips like liquid candy, melted and hot, tasting sweet.
And this orange beast, spewing revenge from his mouth, joins him in his cell, breaks the bars apart to get inside, takes him, gentle, from his cage and his tally marks and wordless thoughts, takes him from the ocean and into the air, and Kageyama can breathe again. He gasps, and the change suffocates him, but his being turns clear and white again, eyes lightening, cerulean floors and cerulean skies.
His cape and crown fall away for real, left behind in his prison cell, and the tally marks stop.
Kageyama is on the volleyball court, feeling grey and black and white, but that isn't necessarily bad.