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On her tenth birthday, Yui Michimiya’s gift was the kitten she’d been dreaming of for half her life. As she held the tiny, squirming black-and-white cutie, Yui couldn’t believe how warm its belly was, how pink its nose was, and most of all, she couldn’t believe that she could ever feel that much happiness. She well and truly couldn’t believe it, to the point that it felt like it couldn’t be real.
Maybe this is a dream, she thought, as the kitten attacked her feet, because how can something this perfect be happening to me?
It finally sank in the next morning, when Yui stumbled bleary-eyed out of her room, and nearly tripped over her new kitten, her kitten, as he fiercely attacked a spider in the corner of the hallway. Only then did she throw her arms around her mom’s waist, crying from the joy that felt like it would explode in her chest.
Six years later, on the court of Sendai Gym, Yui feels that same strange floating sensation as she watches a courtside staff member update the scoreboard at the end of the second set: Karasuno 25, Shirato 24. As soon as the point card flips into place, someone crashes into her and squeezes what little air is left in her lungs. Another pair of arms wraps around her, then another, and another, until Yui is drowning in a crush of flushed skin and sweaty jerseys.
Even in the middle of it all, even though she can’t even lift a finger, Yui still feels like she’s untethered from gravity. She tries to get another look at the scoreboard, because surely she didn’t see that right—surely her last spike landed out of bounds, or she touched the net, or lost the point by breaking some brand-new, just-released rule she didn’t even know about—but all she can see is her teammates’ faces, their hair plastered to their foreheads, everyone all lit up with triumph.
After five seconds or five minutes—it’s hard to say—they all let go of Yui, and goosebumps race down her arms. Countless voices melt into a roaring wave of noise that fills Yui’s ears, blending together so that she can’t even make out the announcer’s words over the loudspeaker, so she looks back toward the scoreboard.
It still looks the same. Karasuno wins. They win. They won.
Slowly, as if afraid to pop a bubble, Yui brings her hands up to either side of her face. But before she can clap her palms against her cheeks, giving herself a brisk slap to make sure she’s awake, Sudo’s in front of her, grabbing Yui’s hands and pulling her toward the net. For a redo, Yui’s sluggish brain thinks, until Shirato’s captain is reaching under the net to shake her hand, and Yui’s ears still aren’t working right, but it looks like their captain says, “Good game”, and Yui manages to reply, “You too” before her feet carry her down the line. Then it’s like a video skips forward, and Yui doesn’t remember lining up there at all, just like she doesn’t remember if the lights were always this bright in the gym.
Just like at the net, Yui bows and thanks the audience more out of muscle memory than anything else. Something in her still keeps wordlessly whispering that this isn’t real, because it can’t be. There’s no way. Shirato wiped the floor with them in the first set, leaving Yui and the rest of her team rattled. And while Yui had done her best both on and off the court, hustling after every ball and hyping up her teammates whether they won or lost the point, victory still felt like an impossibility every step of the way.
It’s not her teammates that she doubts, no. Just the opposite. It’s only when she’s back at her bench with her teammates that Yui thinks her first clear thoughts in a while:
Oh. Right. I’ve got an awesome team.
Only when she sees their smiles and their tears and their shining pride—only then does a trickle of reality start to creep in, sharpening the dreamlike haze she’s been floating through.
“Speech!” Aihara screams to Yui’s right, turning to her captain with a mischievous grin. She knows that Yui hates this kind of thing. Too late—now Sudo is looking at Yui expectantly, and Aoki’s started a chant of “Speech! Speech! Speech!”. To her left, Yui sees Kikuchi slip behind her, and then a pair of hands nudges Yui into the center of the circle.
For the last hour, Yui has been so busy thinking about all the points she could have scored and all the calls she should have made, regrets and doubts filling her up until they threatened to take up the spaces where she keeps her hope. Now that the adrenaline is ebbing away and the nerves are crashing in like waves to fill in the gaps, Yui thinks her legs might really give out this time, the way they threatened to at the end of that final set.
Around them, spectators file out of the exits, and the gym staff mill around on the court, wiping down floors and unhooking nets. The teams’ eyes are all still on Yui, waiting for what she has to say, but she's not sure how to be any kind of captain, let alone a winning captain, and so she wrings her hands and tries to remember what words are. She makes herself take a deep, deep breath. And when she opens her mouth, it’s not words that come out, but a laugh. It starts out as an exhale, and then it catches on that growing sense of reality, and the delayed joy transforms it into an explosive, relieved, ecstatic laugh. Yui’s so glad that she can’t open her eyes, because everyone must be looking at her like she’s crazy right now.
Eventually she catches her breath, pulls herself together, dries her tears, and chokes out the only word that come to mind:
“We did it!”
The circle erupts into another round of cheers.
The sun is low in the sky by the time the bus arrives back at school. Yui is one of the first off the bus, and she stands just to the side of the door to see off the rest of the team.
Sudo and a handful of the other second years are still in tears. Aihara chides them, telling them to get it together already, and Sudo reminds her that it’s the girls team’s first win at Inter-High in years.
“We only won one game,” says Watabe, ever the pessimist, “not the whole thing.”
“It’s still a historic day, okay?” Sudo fires back, right before blowing her nose.
“Thank God Niiyama isn’t in our bracket,” Sasaki mutters. “Can you imagine if we had to play them next?”
Aihara shrugs. “I’m not worried about them,” she says flippantly as she fixes her ponytail. But Yui notices this is the third time in as many minutes that she’s untied and re-tied her hair, a nervous habit of hers. It makes Yui think that maybe she should have given a speech after all. Maybe then people wouldn’t still be so anxious.
But then Yui blinks the setting sunlight out of her eyes, and when she sees her team again, she counts more smiles than anything else. So maybe it’s okay if she’s not the fearless leader she wishes she could be. Maybe they’ll be okay, whatever happens next. Yui still has her doubts, but she has her hopes, too. She claps her hands to her cheeks, trying to slap the worries away, trying to herself back down to Earth.
“Don’t even think about that right now!” Yui beams, smiling so wide she can feel it in her still-stinging cheeks. “We won! Just let yourself be excited about that!”
“I know,” says Sasaki, taken aback, “It’s just—” Yui cuts off Sasaki by grabbing her by the shoulders. “We! Are! Winners!” she yells, giving Sasaki a firm shake with each word. “You say it too!”
“We’re winners, okay?!” Sasaki manages to get out, her voice wobbling. “We’re winners!”
Yui lets her go and plants her hands on her hips, satisfied. “Good. Now go get some sleep, everyone. You’ve earned it!”
The team replies in unison, some mumbling, some practically shouting, all of it music to Yui’s ears. Aihara slips her arm through Yui’s elbow, and Yui uses her free hand to wave goodbye to the others before they all set off for home.
At the corner where they part ways, Yui says her goodbyes to Aihara with a firm shoulder slap. The quiet makes Yui think back to that breathless moment of disbelief as she looks at the scoreboard. At some point during that game, she’d given up. That was why she couldn’t bring herself to believe it. As much as she wants to be the tirelessly optimistic leader, she isn’t nearly there yet.
"Even if you don't have any confidence that you can win," Sawamura had told her once, "of everybody, we captains can't give in and say any of that ourselves."
As she turns down the narrow side street toward home, she imagines his broad back walking in front of her, all confident and rock-steady calm. Yui decides then and there that becoming the person you want to be is really, really hard work. She wants to ask Sawamura what he would have done, what he would have said, if he were in Yui’s shoes, during all those little make-or-break decisions that happen on and off the volleyball court.
But Yui has never been good at imagining what it's like to be someone else. She only knows what it’s like to be her, the girl who laughs too loudly and sometimes too late. She only knows her one way to cheer on her team, to lead them, and it seems to have done the trick today. At her front door, she gives herself one last bracing pat on the face. So maybe she spaced out a little too long today after their big win.
That’s okay.
They’ll just have to win the next one, then. And the one after that. And on and on, until Yui can fully embrace her happiness in the moment.