Chapter Text
Akaashi Keiji always really liked the honesty that was buried within photography, ever since he was a child.
With that specific medium, he always knew what to expect. Taking pictures always had a very straightforward path to a very specific destination.
He’s tried his hand in acrylics, oil pastels, watercolor, the works.
He hated most of them.
A simple accidental brush of a hand against wet paint ruined the entirety of the piece, or a spec of dust that had clung to the canvas would cause a distraction within the otherwise smoothness of the brushed paint once it dried.
Nobody really expected for their paintings to get messed up anyway, but they somehow always did, by accident.
With a camera, there was no way in hell he could ruin a developed photograph had he placed his hand the wrong way. A lens could always be cleaned to take sharper photos, or manipulated to take grainy ones, muffled ones, even. The zoom feature magnified everything and expressed its countenance across a wider plane effortlessly.
A meticulous build, in which the final product was just that – final.
There was always some kind of story in a photo, and Akaashi took pride in the fact that he could create fables of his own — different plotlines branching out from the way he angled his lens, reaching hands with quivering palms, always converging and lacing fingers in the end, all within the gloss of a developed photograph.
There was always a fulfilled expectation with it.
And because of photography, he’s learned the hard way that life was the complete opposite.
It threw you for loops, let you ride on wheels of hope and fabricated confidence, only to crash and burn just when you were beginning to enjoy the moment. And some crashes Akaashi found he could get over, brush his knees off and recover from quickly to move on to the next road, to get to his next destination.
High school was not one of those pileups.
The thing is, since he was little, he was told to go beyond what he thought he was capable of, being put in upper-level programs after pushing a few colored blocks around in a room that smelled like sanitizer and high class as stagnant light leaked through lunette windows, inflating his 8-year-old ego until he left middle school.
He was never pushed out of his comfort zone to know what true disappointment felt like, because he didn’t need to be. He was resistant to real challenges, because there was a stigma of kids having minds so big they couldn’t be contained in regular classes.
But it came so easy to him that he was convinced things that were difficult weren’t worth a minute of his time.
It was not hard or challenging – it was just stupid.
He had taken classes that were rumored to be ambitious for a primary student, but it was easy. Kind of like being thrown into a pool with floaties on, and told to stay above the surface, while everyone around you struggled.
It was simple. And kind of satisfying.
When he got to high school, when APs kicked his ass across the three years he was there, stress had laid nails out in the road for his rickety tires to run over and flatten out. He struggled to find things that mattered. His coasting through school had abruptly stopped, and he had not been prepared for the reality he’d hit.
Clubs and activities inside the school were either too boring, or too stupid. He gave up on new hobbies after a few days if it hadn’t interested him, and if something even remotely prodded at his brain too often, he would drop it.
That had been another thing that Akaashi hadn’t expected, either.
And once he put the name on it, as he roamed the hallways in greyscale, it made a lot more sense than anything else.
Gifted kid syndrome was a shitty thing.
But Akaashi decided that he wouldn’t let it be that much of a shitty thing, and took matters into his own hands after failing his first exam that most students in his class aced in freshman year, all because they did this weird thing that he hadn’t even dreamed of doing back then — they studied.
Akaashi felt like he owed something to himself, for having the audacity to think that good grades came easy in high school, that everyone around him was creating more unnecessary work for themselves when all he had to do was exactly nothing and score himself an A.
He worked to earn the title of valedictorian once he graduated, staying up for hours studying, skipping parties and time to spend with friends because he needed that 4.0 GPA.
His reel of memories from back then was mostly filled with the lingering taste of canned espresso, and speaking to the streetlamps, retaining the impression of his mechanical pencils in his hopeful hands.
He needed to give his parents something to be truly proud of, and wanted to have something physical that told him he was just as much a genius as he was when he was 8.
Imagine how bad it was to find out he’d lost it to some transfer student within the last five months of the year, taking it from him, just like that.
A tall boy, that looked more like his head belonged face first in a keg of beer rather than the books, whose voice rang out like trumpet fanfare when excitement often got the better of him, whose hair was styled in this stupidly endearing way, had crushed Akaashi’s dreams in a swift eagle’s dive.
He’d been completely oblivious to Akaashi’s plight, too, when he would see him at lunch with his new friends, smiles that housed summer marigolds and hands that amplified his booming laugh as he clapped along with it.
Akaashi hated him.
“I think you’re being a little dramatic. Just a touch.”
Kuroo had told him this once, his voice sweeping, bouncing around his head like stray balloons with tacks on them, drilling the hurt of broken assumptions into the soft parts of Akaashi’s brain as they danced.
The balloons jived, colorful latex blown up with silent letdown and whispered defeat. They cracked his skull deliberately, piercing his psyche with every sudden jolt as every memory of losing something he’d been striving for resurfaces. Another expectation ripped from his hands as easily as pennies slipping through pockets, or the melt of slushies in the July swelter.
Four years of sacrifice, with his bright eyes set on the top…
Only to get second place, just like that.
It made his skin crawl to think about it. Didn’t he fucking deserve it?
“Kuroo, I promised my parents I’d get that medallion.” He told him, his finger on the end of the spoon in his tea, the herbal aroma making him feel sick, his appetite lost.
“And you did, Akaashi. It was just silver instead of gold, and that’s okay.”
It was just silver.
The color of not being good enough, of baseballs slipping right out of mitts at the last inning of the big game. The color of fingertips brushing over a falling cell phone just before the glass screen shatters on the ground, or the color of broken light bulbs on the basement floor — just out of reach, until it was too late.
Akaashi hated silver.
Since then, Akaashi believed that expectations were rickety buildings with faulty foundations, and the only people who could be supported on them were those who deserved it.
He’s learned to throw most of his expectations into dumpster fires to let that shit burn. How naive of him to believe the universe would give him what he wanted, what he expected, after he’d been so spoiled from a young age.
Akaashi has learned to never look past the peak of mountains again, because he knew his hope would get tugged from right beneath him like usual, stray tires and sputtering engines veering him off track for the last time since then.
And if someone took a photo of him on his last day of high school, the only story he’d tell is one of a glorified failure, wrapped up in false promises with a bow on top, as he tried his best to hide waves of disappointment behind a small grin.