Work Text:
It’s not that Shouyou is bad at being an adult. Like, sure, his phone background is still a photo from high school, and his best friend played in the Olympics a year ago while Shouyou still can’t beat Carvalho and Santos. But Shouyou is friends with his roommate now. This is more than can be said of Kageyama, probably.
“Ow, fuck,” Shouyou whispers, dabbing the bloody mess of his forearm with a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol. He remembers that Pedro is away from the weekend with his new girlfriend and he doesn’t need to be quiet.
“FUCK!” Shouyou shouts. His eyes well with tears, which he blinks away because he needs to be able to see his wound to make sure there’s no sand in it.
Bad enough that he and Heitor lost to Carvalho and Santos, again. Then, during the match Shouyou dove onto a rock that had been nestled in the sand while making an awesome receive near the end of the second set.
“Fuck, ow!”
At least they won that set.
Actually, Shouyou and Heitor were pretty close to winning the third set, and the match with it. Someone, Yachi probably, would call that progress. Shouyou spreads antibacterial ointment on the scrape, then sticks a huge bandaid over it and flexes his arm, wincing at the sting.
There’s leftover rice from last night’s dinner and a few eggs left, which means tamago kake gohan for dinner. It’s a lazy meal, but Shouyou thinks he’s earned an off day. Actually, he kind of wants to go full lazy adult and just get takeout— maybe barbeque from Mr. Souza who runs the restaurant a block away. But, no. Hinata is trying to be responsible.
He rinses his hands, sticks a bowl of rice in the microwave, and grabs two eggs— the last ones left, he’ll have to remember to grab another carton tomorrow. The microwave beeps. Shouyou opens it to a cloud of warm rice steam, his fourth favorite smell probably. He takes a deep breath, a smile spreading. Today kind of sucked, yes, but he’s smelling his fourth favorite smell and about to eat his first favorite food.
Then, he hears two loud cracks behind him. Shouyou freezes. He left the eggs on the counter. Round eggs, on a not-perfectly-level counter.
Shouyou groans, turning to see a splatter of chalky white shell, gooey albumen, and two big misshapen dollops of gold, like the sun took two shits on the floor. He only knows that egg whites are called albumen because Tsukishima looked it up after an argument with Kageyama their second year.
His eyes well with tears, which he blinks away because he needs to be able to see the mess on the floor to clean it up. Then he needs to reheat the rice and get two more eggs—
“Fuck,” Shouyou whispers. Those were the last eggs. Now what am I going to eat for dinner? he asks himself with the same kind of panic and despair that approaches when it's the end of a final set and the opponent’s lead is too big to close.
His phone rings.
Shouyou fumbles it open— FaceTime from Natsu shit, his eyes are so red right now— and by some miracle answers the call without dropping his phone too.
“NII-CHAN! NII-CHAN HOLY SHIT!”
Actually, Natsu looks like she’s crying too. Her face is grainy in the phone, and splotchy and red.
“Natsu? What? What’s going on?”
“HOLY SHIT NII-CHAN—wait. Are you crying?”
“Uh, yeah I. Scraped my arm playing and then dropped some eggs.”
“What?”
“It’s nothing. What’s going on?” Shouyou asks, now feeling the odd sort of calm that settles at the end of a final set when the match is neck and neck. Is grandma in the hospital again? Did mom and dad get into a bad fight?
“Nii-chan,” Natsu says, her eyes huge and disbelieving, glowing in the dim of Shouyou’s apartment. A smile breaks across her face, too big for her face and with far too many teeth. “Nii-chan, I got in!”
Oh. Oh, holy shit.
“Oh my god.”
“I know!”
“Holy shit!”
“I know!”
In the corner of the phone screen, a smile breaks across Shouyou’s face— too big and too toothy. Grins like theirs are genetic.
“HOLY SHIT! NATSU! You did it!”
“I KNOW! Oh my god! I did it!”
Shouyou’s eyes well with tears, which he blinks back because he has to watch his little sister’s face because she just got into Niiyama Girls' High School on a sports scholarship to play volleyball, and Shouyou is a whole hemisphere away, so he has to at least remember this.
“This is incredible, I’m so proud of you! Wow,” Shouyou says, in a weird giggle that’s punctuated by those gasps you make when you cry.
“Oh my god Nii-chan are you crying?” Natsu says, rolling her eyes.
“Yeah! Of course I am! I’m proud of you, you worked so hard for this! You’re going to be amazing.”
Natsu pauses and blinks at this, or maybe the video just freezes briefly as it often does during international calls. A different smile breaks across her face, this one settled, slow, close-lipped— like Natsu has a secret and the secret is that she’s simply, abundantly, happy.
“Yeah,” she says, nodding, “I know.”
Shouyou left Japan riding the high of a semi-final finish at nationals. Natsu wasn’t even the starting setter on her middle school team.
When Shouyou says he’s proud of her, he doesn’t mean it like a coach or teacher or good older brother would. The court captured too much of Shouyou’s life to ever let him do more than offer the occasional pointer to Natsu. It’s true that Natsu started playing volleyball because of Shouyou, but everything that came after was of her own making.
So no, not the pride of a mentor. The feeling is closer to relief, the pride you feel when you step out on a random Thursday in March and see shoot-green poking out of all the mud and dead grass that the ice left behind.
“Oh shoot, mom’s calling I have to go I’m late for school!” Natsu yelps, glancing behind her, then looking back with the toothy grin on her face again. Shouyou considers taking a screenshot, but decides against it.
“Okay, yeah. Yeah, tell mom I said hi! Have a good day at school!”
“Yeah! Yeah I will!”
The call cuts closed and Shouyou sinks to the ground, lets his legs stretch into the congealing mess of splattered egg, feels the cool slush of albumen seep into his joggers, and cries.
Just, full out weeps. Sits there, huge sobs wracking his body, until the last rays of twilight disappear and the night’s constellation of city lights begins to sparkle through the open window.
It’s like he’s the Little Mermaid, crashed into sea foam by the Atlantic’s warm tide. It’s like his bones have cracked open with star shine. It’s like he’s climbing a mountain, and pauses to look out at the valley behind him, and gets caught by a sudden zephyr, which somehow becomes a gale, and pulls him apart into a scattering of limbs and flesh and skin sent spiraling in the sky like a flock of birds, free.
It’s like he’s twenty-one, ten-thousand miles from home, living in a city that will probably forget him one day. He’s twenty-one and can’t shake the suspicion that he peaked in high school. He’s twenty-one, and nothing he thought he would be, but at least his little sister is doing okay.
Shouyou stands and gets a glass of ice water, chugs it fast enough to give himself a minor brain freeze. Then, he grabs his wallet— a replacement gift from Natsu— and heads out to Mr. Souza’s restaurant, joggers still covered in dried raw egg.