Work Text:
“Tra il dire ed il fare c’è di mezzo il mare.”
"Between saying and doing, stands the sea."
There’s a boy waiting at the stop sign, shoulders set, his backpack on, a little bicycle that tries to devour the road, barely hanging while its owner powers through the early lights of the day.
The little konbini near his house that’s just preparing for the day, the old lady, a neighbor of theirs, waiting to fed the chickens and smiling at him - “Good morning, Shouyou-kun! Be ware of the cold!”-, every day like this, the same routine.
He pedals, curve after curve, stop signs, give way, be ware of the animals. The breeze of the morning and the city which blinks and wakes up, keeping him company; he spots Karasuno's gate from afar. It is the school that he has chosen, for which he has prayed non-stop his mother to go to, since it’s so far from his hometown - so far and so lonely it will be to pedal there every day, in the snow or when it’s hot, all by himself.
But it’s the road he wants to so desperately take - a journey he dreamt in a single instant when, in town, late for his errands, wandering around with everything and nothing on his mind, he stopped in the middle of the road and watched a boy fly.
And on the same rusty bicycle, the same one that today can barely contain his hungriness, he saw a miracle happen in front of his eyes.
A great jump, a terrific mid-air posture and a team watching your back. Volleyball, flying, a dream he desperately wants to achieve.
He doesn’t know it at the time, but that’s the moment his life changes.
Easier said than done, of course.
The discrepancy between dreams and reality, ideals and practice, becomes more and more tangible in his everyday life than in those long and tedious hours of literature, spent understanding why some famous author had just took years and years of his life trying to answer a question that, in Shouyou’s humble opinion, he definitely could have stopped asking altogether.
Reality is much harsher than what he had thought.
He doesn’t exactly know how to play volleyball!
So even if he dreams of it, even if he is so passionate about it - up to a point where the itching of playing becomes unbearable - he learns the most important truth of all. Practice takes time. Practice makes you a good player.
Passion is what drives you to school every single day.
Sure, Shouyou didn’t exactly thought it wold have been easy; he lives very far from Miyagi, he has never played volleyball in middle school, so he lacks training and he lacks the height - maybe the most important thing - but he always though that passion can bring you anywhere.
So he tries.
He’s got a team now!
For the first time ever, he meets a group of people who want to play as badly as he wants, people he can rely on to anchor his dream, senpai from whom he can learn new techniques and secrets, friends who inspire him.
The notebook in which Kageyama writes down his workouts and progress testifies the need for a routine, to incorporate volleyball - no longer an abstract dream - into the tangible reality of your everyday life.
Tsukishima, as private in class as he is reactive on the court, with his cold and calculated analysis, reminds Shouyou of the need to keep his senses alert, not relying only on what the body imposes and demands.
Yamaguchi's understandable cowardice, the serenity that he acquires with each game, is the greatest warning: never forget, Shouyou, that you are meant to attack. That you stand on the court to win.
And who but him has to remember these words, barely six-feet tall, with the burning desire to become an ace, the nerve center of his team, capable of piercing every wall.
But Shouyou comes from the mountains and technique cannot be acquired in one night, as hard as he may try.
He continues to pedal. He observes the outside. He treasures his mistakes. He falls, and when he does, it's devastating.
What Shouyou remembers with iron accuracy - and what he will probably never forget, one of those memories that, faded by time, will serve as a warning to find his way again - are Kageyama's words, the piercing look on his face.
"I precede you."
And now, when years have passed and the frustration of that moment has given way to the awareness that only maturity can grant you, Hinata understands what had happened. But right then he couldn't hold that look.
Kageyama could not understand what reaction had generated a simple phrase, whispered and perhaps regretted, a testimony of the tension and of the awareness that their dream at Nationals ended there.
But for Hinata, that single sentence had been the beginning of a more profound instance: that he still wasn't enough.
The pedaling and the rusty bike, the bitter cold of the morning, non-stop training to be able to not feeling left behind, the feeling of fumbling and not grasping what was missing. None of this was enough, because his greatest rival preceded him, overcoming him with each passing day.
How a memory burns, how painful an expression is, how important is the fact that your first partner, the first person with whom you shared that dream, your first setter, your first love, doesn't share that same adoration that you feel burning in your veins?
Shouyou is a person of action, he act and thinks and feels those feelings throbbing in his blood, mixed with the adrenaline of their training sessions and the most heartfelt matches. He feels, perceives, pedals and pedals to be at the gates, to get off the mountain quickly. There is his team waiting for him, his dream, volleyball.
And in the midst of this frenzy, what happens if that young heart, full of just sketchy feelings, indulges in the most disparate reveries for his impossible crush, for the first boy who stole his heart? Nothing happens. And everything happens.
If you look close enough, you can find him staring at Kageyama while he wipes the sweat from his forehead, writes something down in his diary, files his nails or tries to smile and ends up scaring the freshmen at the club - now they are the senpai - and then when with pinpoint accuracy he does three murderous services, impossible to receive, shining with a light so strong it takes his breath away.
He, who barely manages to perfect a jump serve that can be defined useful on court.
He, who is a starting player of a fierce team and who is there, not only, but also, because of the incredible talent of his setter.
He, who comes down from the mountain every day, greets the world that slowly wakes up, reassured by the idea of his team waiting for him, of the exhausting workouts and the challenges to come, of the time stolen to peek at the shadowy smile, beautiful, unreachable, delicate, of Tobio; he who continues to feel like an appendage of that team, not a real resource.
And just like that, routine becomes practice, the second year turns into the third, Kageyama's skill and the distance that separates them becomes even more unreachable.
From the window overlooking the airport, preparing for the long flight that awaits him, anxiety taking full possession of his limbs, Shouyou has only a moment of clairvoyance in which he thinks that at least, if he has to continue pedaling, he can do it on another continent. Dreaming big and looking at himself as a single.
In the hands and in the looks, in the faces and in the mouths, he looks for Kageyama. It's easier said than done, but such a long-hidden crush can't help but reverberate in the first months of separation.
Kageyama does four service aces against France, he's everywhere. Shouyou looks at them while riding his bike on his way to the next delivery.
Time passes, his technique improves. The sun that reverberates on immaculate beaches, the greeting to the world that has become a practice that Shouyou reflects on during his meditation, exotic food, bright colors, the first touch of a land that could not be more different from the one he was born in.
Even if his neighbor is no longer there to greet him in the morning, recommending him not to catch a cold, Shouyou manages to become friends with his new neighbors, he chats at the market with the owners of the stalls, tries to practice the language, to savor a world so different from that small reality that was his village on the mountain.
Pedal, Shouyou!
Now the bike takes him from the market to the beach, from tournament to volleyball lessons, from a silent lover to passionate and loud evenings, to first dates where neither of them know what to do or what to say, where you learn how to know yourself again by looking into some stranger's eyes.
“Why beach volleyball?” The typical question of a first date.
"To learn how to do everything." A raised eyebrow.
"To become independent."
More than independent, however, Shouyou really wants to become the epitome of the ace he dreamed of as a child; he wants to become that someone others depend on.
The sounds, the flavors, the colors are a blur. Social media help him to keep homesickness and Japanese winters at bay, the spring period when sakuras bloom after the frost and there is an atmosphere of serene peace. But he misses Natsu's birthdays, he's not there to comfort her when she suffers her first love heartbreak. He lives a half life, a part of his heart in Japan, with his friends, in their most normal lives - high school, university, keep playing volleyball without a dream that is consuming your soul and has led you to live in Brazil -, he looks at the photo he keeps on his phone, as a talisman that can protect him from the monsters under his bed.
But the monsters are inside him, they try to catch him as soon as attention falls, when the bad day turns into hell and doubts become heavier than his hopes. Techniques that do not work, a height that perhaps will never allow him to go really far - first division of the V-League, perhaps, but the Olympics, who knows -, the longing for home, the photos on the social networks of his peers and senpai that have been selected for important teams. He watches Bokuto's updates and thinks to himself that the Black Jackals locker room is a place he would love to be at that very moment.
But this is not the way things go for him; he is a boy who is destined to pedal, stronger and stronger, to get off the mountain.
Now he rides through the alleys of Rio, he gets lost many more times than he would like but he is fast enough to complete the delivery, he loses himself in those warm, welcoming and chaotic alleys, he loses a part of his youth and naivety when the weight of his expectations brings him lower and lower.
Yet life has something magical and strange in store, one of those moments he will look back to when he'll remember how lucky he had been, the fortunes he has had, of the people whose touch he has been able to share and venerate.
The meeting with the Great King seems straight out of a movie for how paradoxical and unique is the coincidence that leads them to collide with each other on an ordinary evening.
One of those evenings in which time seems to stop, waiting, almost whispering to your ear that you are the one to take the first step into the unknown.
And Shouyou does exactly that, on a walk like any other, returning from their shared dinner and with the excuse of taking Oikawa-san back to the hotel.
A scene out of a Shoujo manga, but it doesn't matter.
If Oikawa had always been the symbol of a candid beauty, a conscious charm, Shouyou knows he has changed.
The tan typical of the locals, the accentuated freckles, the physique that develops to withstand the endless rides and tournaments under the scorching sun.
In Oikawa's eyes, Shouyou perceives a flicker, an attempt, and a decision follows the other.
The hand that touches Oikawa's is firm, light, young, but resolute. The gaze that Shouyou gives him is predatory in the limits of mutual knowledge, of the memory of what they were and what have been, of what they are now becoming.
A smile seems to dawn on Oikawa's lips, almost defiantly. He accepts that outstretched hand, squeezes it tightly, fixes his eyes on Shouyou's.
"You really changed, chibi-chan."
A few words that seem to open a door ajar, and Shouyou knows that he wants to show him at all costs how much and how and in what he is changing, the agglomeration of things and sensations that he faces every day alone, the abysmal difference between the frightened boy who got on that plane and the man he's trying to become today.
It is a week of bliss, of emotions let flow free, of volleyball, of home without being at home. Oikawa is all that Shoyuou needs, the step that is part of the plan, the piece, the perfect week that makes him understand what he is looking for around him. Oikawa, with a similar fate despite being as different as day and night.
Oikawa, with that crazy serve, a fantastic game, and an unfulfilled wish to go to the national championships.
Shouyou, who has been to those championships twice, almost by chance, for merits that he still does not feel his own, wanting to show the whole world that he is worth any place he is granted.
It is the first time that Shouyou has spent so much time with someone, the first time that he allows himself to indulge in his solitude and to celebrate the change of plans. Oikawa is the past that he tries to forget but to which he is still clinging, the present that reverberates in his words, in the suffocated sighs that are exchanged after a night spent exploring every inch of the other's body, and it is the future: the promise to find himself in a bigger court, a coveted land on which to clash once and for all.
And if he mentions Kageyama, the boy does it with the awareness that even that was a definitive step, to know himself, his limits, his needs.
Shouyou continues to pedal alone, the tightening of the heart that at times becomes more unbearable, and at others it becomes lighter. The mornings spent meditating on the beach, with the lapping of the waves crashing on the shore, the sound of the world taking its first steps, wavering, and waking up, and Shouyou waiting for it.
That promised, longed for, unattainable land finally becomes a reality.
A plane ticket, general information about the teams that are holding try-outs. His captain's promise to pick him up at the airport, the extra suitcase full of travel gadgets only, the heart full of love for the people he had left behind, for that cold Japan he left to follow a dream bigger than himself.
That blood that boils stronger and stronger, that feeling of helplessness that made it impossible for him to walk and wait, that fury that touched his every step, everything and more becomes Shouyou Hinata, returning from Rio and ready to take his place in those Black Jackals dressing rooms, in which - if memory serves him correctly - there is also a setter who, many years earlier, made him a promise that he needs to fulfill.