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i. the magician
When Ittetsu was very young, his grandfather tried to put a jacket on him. He doesn’t remember any of this. Only the story, smeared by a dozen retellings, each warmer than the last, faded by the years. His grandfather had tried to get him to wear his jacket, and — perhaps for the same reasons he still doesn’t like the static-stiff of the blazers he’s supposed to wear at work — he hadn’t liked the way it felt, and he’d sunk his tiny canines into his grandfather’s wrist.
His mother told him about it, when he was still a child. “Your grandmother,” she said. “You know what she said? You were far too old already to be biting like that, and she knew it, and so did I. Your father tried to pry you off, horrified and apologetic, and she laughed, and she said: that boy is going to grow up to get whatever he wants.”
Later retellings, when he’s old enough to hand beer to his uncles, are a little different. They say he bit down hard enough to be suspended from his grandfather’s arm; they say it was a raincoat, or a sweater, each person sure about its smallest details. They say, every time, surveying him mild-mannered and flushed with the cusp of drunkenness, that his grandmother was wrong.
Ittetsu used to take pride in this. He found it funny, the image of his child-self defiant and wilful in ways he couldn’t imagine being any longer. But the years drew on, and the man he saw in the mirror became more wilful than ever. Skills sharper than teeth.
ii. cups
When Ittetsu is significantly less young, but still young in the grand scheme of things, he hears the phrase flightless crows for the first time. The image captures him immediately: scavengers, ruthless for all their harmlessness. Wounded; in need of care. Before he knows anything about the sport, he’s volunteered to be the staff advisor for the school’s volleyball club.
It’s barely a club. The captain is a boy — a young man, Ittetsu decides, watching him — who is stalwart in all the ways Ittetsu’s never been. Even so, Sawamura is just one teenager, and all the determination in the world can’t help him against a sport which Ittetsu rapidly realises is filled with private schools and coaches with reputations which extend beyond the prefecture.
Unless it can. Sawamura, of course, has siblings and exams to keep in mind. Ittetsu has — well, Ittetsu has those things to keep in mind, too, but he is an adult, his life no longer circumscribed by the fences built around schoolchildren. He is an adult, his life no longer circumscribed by the fences of propriety that, perhaps, he shouldn’t be climbing. He does his research, and he learns about Ukai Ikkei, and he finds his bottle-blond grandson smoking behind the register of a convenience store, and he asks.
He asks, and doesn’t stop asking. He refuses not to ask. The depth of his determination surprises him. Perhaps it’s just easier to ask for things which other people need. Students who won’t get it if he doesn’t try. If he doesn’t succeed.
Ukai Keishin is an obstacle like no other. He’s not resistant in ways Ittetsu knows how to circumvent with sweet words or tact or protocol. He’s not proud, not in ways that are easy to manipulate. He has no sense of obligation. He, perhaps, is content to live life in ways Ittetsu wishes he was: one day to the next, fully embodied in the current, sensate, perfunctory moment. He doesn’t dream.
But the longer Ittetsu watches him, the more he wants to believe Ukai can dream. That it’s possible for him. He’d become a teacher because he so dearly loved the spark to kindling of the moment a child realises they can. Not that Ukai is an overgrown child: no, his dreamlessness is something completely adult. The flicker of interest behind his flat refusals — now that’s something young enough to be nurtured into flame.
It’s his name which draws Ittetsu’s attention. It’s his resistance which keeps it. A puzzle to be solved. A man so full of desire and hurt pride that he tamps it down into disinterest. A man Ittetsu can pour into, and keep pouring, and watch overflow.
That boy is going to grow up to get whatever he wants, his grandmother had said. For a while, starry-eyed at teachers’ college, he’d settled into admiring glances from other would-be literature teachers with less affinity for poetry and thought: it’ll be my clever tongue that gets me there. It’s not that, it turns out. Nothing so glamorous. It’s something as prosaic as this: sinking his teeth in. Refusing to let go.
iii. swords
When Ittetsu is a fraction younger — before he meets Ukai Keishin — he meets Ukai Ikkei. It’s natural that he does. It’s natural that he, coming into a legacy in the form of half a dozen teenagers, retraces the crows’ steps to their last victory.
How devastatingly romantic of him, to think he’d find answers there.
Ukai didn’t seem in any state to coach. Didn’t tell him much. He mentioned a friend — a coach, he said, who’d returned from retirement. He looked into the distance, then, eyes defocused by memory. “We retired together, five years ago. He came back. I tried.” Then, “I wish I could help you.”
How delicately those few words carry so much meaning. How devastatingly romantic, that Ukai Ikkei has a lifelong rival, the jerseys on their teenage backs long since replaced but never forgotten. It’s meant to be, he thinks, poring over years of newspaper articles and constructing a wireframe of this Nekoma. He decides not to think otherwise. He decides on his next steps: the grandson Ukai mentioned. The coach in another city. One to lure the other, though he doesn’t know which way it’ll go yet.
By the time he’s sure Nekomata Yasufumi will give before Ukai Keishin will — an older man, more willing to seize any opportunity he has left — he thinks he’ll miss the habit of it. Slipping into toddler recalcitrance or teenage doggedness or something too alien to be either. Picking up the phone, the flickering fluorescent bars in the teacher’s lounge casting him blue-black-white-green in the dark. Something inhuman; devoted. Picking up the phone. Picking up the phone. It’s so easy, that, a prayer, a reminder so constant he doesn’t need to write it into his calendar each consecutive day. Like clockwork, calling and calling. And waiting to be answered.
Nekomata says yes, because of course he does. Ittetsu doesn’t like to speculate. He knows a man with that many years of wrangling schoolteachers and assistant coaches and teenagers has developed an immunity to boyish charm. It’s not charm that brings Nekomata to him. Perhaps it’s sentiment. Perhaps it’s the romance of it, more devastating than ever before: Ukai can’t continue, but Nekomata must. Perhaps the cats will never meet the crows again, but he must try.
“My captain,” Nekomata says on the phone. A nice young man, Kuroo Tetsurou; from Nekomata’s telling, thoughtful and charming in equal measure. Conscientious. “He heard me mention Karasuno and he was in. He doesn’t even have any reason to want to play them, you know? But he’s heard me talk about it, the glory days, and I think he’s a romantic at heart. He likes that we’re the underdogs. He likes that you’re the underdogs.” A breath. More quietly, “He’s a good kid. He knows I care about… things like this. What I don’t understand is how you knew I would.”
“Maybe Kuroo-kun and I aren’t too dissimilar,” Ittetsu says, mild as ever. Then, because he probably should supply an actual answer, “I didn’t know. I just hoped you would. I don’t know much about volleyball, but I like my team. I want them to succeed. I’ll do anything I can.”
He means it. Nekomata must know that, because he laughs. “They’re lucky to have you.”
“I’m lucky to have them,” Ittetsu says, and at first it’s self-effacing. When he hangs up the phone and begins to beam, the corners of his mouth shining irrepressibly across his face, he realises it’s true.
He’ll get Ukai Keishin onboard. He knows he will. He’s won one battle. He can win the war.
iv. pentacles
The thing about magic is you make it yourself. The thing about magic is sometimes you can’t. The thing about magic is you have to be willing to see it wherever it appears.
Technically, Ittetsu’s using the same strategy that’s worked for him so far. He picks up his phone and asks. But there’s something about asking for money that sits wrong with him, and besides, there’s nobody he can hound into the full sum he needs. He can’t call everyone.
More than that, he can’t persuade everyone. There are people, like Ukai Keishin, on whom the entreaties of a wide-eyed teacher work; there are people, too many people, who need to know what they’re seeing before they believe in it. Ittetsu knows this. Yachi, it seems, does too.
That’s the surprise, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been. Yachi overhears Ittetsu and Keishin talking about finances, like world-wise children spy on their parents and worry. Yachi ropes Kageyama and Hinata in — ropes her mother’s camera and graphic design software and her own remarkable eye for design in — and creates something that goes where Ittetsu alone can’t. Shopfronts like Takinoue’s. Shimada’s donation box and bulletin board. Plastered across town, bus shelters and the backs of street signs. The posters appear everywhere; the calls roll in, Ittetsu only having to employ his charm as genuine, helpless gratitude.
Ittetsu thanks her, of course. “You’ve gone to great lengths for us,” he says.
But Yachi looks at him, head tilted just a little, wide-eyed, and for a moment he sees precisely who she’s gotten it from. “Hinata went to great lengths for me first, really.”
He doesn’t agree, not truly. He remembers Yachi, stepping in behind Shimizu, cowering from every noise. Remembers being a child like her: overwhelmed, overwrought, overfull, tamped down into something polite that hides how much she sees. Remembers himself, then, unassuming and always — already — ready to devour the world. Ready to fear it and stride forward into it anyway, step by excruciating step.
“And besides,” Yachi says, bashful, “I— I think I really needed something to care about.”
It’s honest. It’s true. “Me too,” Ittetsu says. He smiles at her. She understands him, he thinks, even if she wouldn’t dare say so. “I signed up as advisor before I knew anything about volleyball. And now… I have something to care about, too.” Multiple somethings. Multiple someones.
The thing about magic is: you let it go. And see who picks it up, and where it goes.
v. wands
When Ittetsu is a few years older, he receives an email. He replies to it, delighted; he receives a reply, and it spirals out into years of correspondence. Advice and anecdotes and questions he can’t answer. Videos of people they have in common. Late-night musings, one-sided at first, then less so. He doesn’t see Sugawara Koushi again in person, though, not yet.
By the time they’re gathering to watch Hinata and Kageyama face each other again, Ittetsu’s hair is streaked with just a little silver. It comes to him early; it came to Suga by birth, and it makes him easy to find. After the match, it’s trivial to call out to their very first third-years, so recognizable even with the broadness and ease of adulthood. Three heads turn, then two more. Tanaka hollers, rushing over; Azumane raises an eyebrow, more relaxed than Ittetsu remembers him. But it’s Suga who Ittetsu’s looking at, really. That silent conversation, quicksilver between them: I hope you’re well. I’m glad you’re well.
They don’t get a moment alone for some time. Their current team clusters around the graduates, peppering them with questions about their most famous juniors. Then it’s time to shepherd them onto the buses and get them back to school. But Suga texts Ittetsu the address of a bar, later, and Ittetsu looks at Keishin, and they go.
The thing about passion is you have to hold it loosely. Ittetsu let it come to him, and it changed his life. “And hundreds more,” Suga tells him, quite seriously, though the flush to his cheeks diminishes the effect. Ittetsu lets him speak. “You took a chance on us, and — did you hear the announcer earlier? He called us the monster generation. Us. And sure, Bokuto and Ushijima and all the others were already there. But I think we all agree that Kageyama and Hinata were a huge part of that title.”
He’s leaning over the table now, so intent that Azumane has to rescue a bowl from his gesturing. “You changed the shape of Japanese volleyball, the two of you.”
“And all of you, in some way,” Keishin objects. “We didn’t do it alone. Hell, I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
Ittetsu laughs, but Suga presses on. “We change each other. But you changed things first, sensei.” He looks down, suddenly bashful. “I suppose that’s why people like us get into teaching, isn’t it? You make a difference for someone, in a few hours a week, and then what they do with that is up to them. You changed my life, and I’ll — hopefully! — change some lives too, and it goes on like that forever.”
Every person built on the people they met, the people they touched, the people who saw what they could be. Every piece of literature built on every sentence before it, the building blocks for word and phrase and language and sentiment that have blossomed into meaning. “It does,” Ittetsu says, quietly.
Somewhere across town, Udai Tenma doodles a little giant on his napkin, back bowstring-taut, ball directly above him like the midday sun. Here, Keishin nudges a companionable elbow against Ittetsu’s side. The night draws long. Sawamura deftly wrangles Suga out of starting some kind of argument with the next table; then, as if in slow motion, Ittetsu watches Suga break free of Sawamura’s hold by sinking his teeth into his ex-captain’s free wrist.
“It never ends,” Ittetsu murmurs. “It’s always beginning.”
Keishin looks at him with complete incomprehension, but that’s nothing new. He looks at him with complete trust, and that’s a little newer. “If you say so, sensei.”
vi. the fool
This is part of the story: a boy who doesn’t know what’s impossible yet fits his jaw around his grandfather’s forearm.
This is part of the story: a boy who doesn’t know what’s impossible yet fits his toothless gums to his sister’s volleyball and blinks at his grandfather’s startled laughter.
This, too, is part of the story: a boy who doesn’t know what’s impossible yet slows his bicycle to a stop outside an electronics store. And watches another boy fly.