Work Text:
When you factorise an equation, when you solve for x, you take out the common factor first. It makes it all so much easier, the expression so much simpler to break down.
Tsukishima just never realised how applicable this was to real life.
He’s done those questions thousands of times, rearranged an expression into its simplest form, solved for x and sketched hundreds of graphs. It’s been ingrained into his very hand, and now he thinks it comes more naturally than breathing.
It’s easy.
When there’s a common factor, you just
take it out.
And when he reflects back on his life, it’s shocking how repetitive it is. All the patterns he’s missed, the glaring signs that scream and scream and tell him what an awful person he is.
He ruins everything around him. Every friendship, every relationship he’s ever had. He goes days barely speaking to his mother, and even when Akiteru’s home they only ever see each other at dinner. Tsukishima confines himself to his world of patterns and signs from the universe and muffles everything and everyone around him with music.
Maybe he’s wrong, but he won’t let that stop him.
He’s never been a social butterfly. He speaks when he’s spoken to, makes sure to be polite and tries his best to be amiable and pleasant. When he catches himself getting too excited, speaking too much about his favourite hobbies or his favourite band, he retreats. Back into his shell, back into the quiet and the silence where no one can hurt him.
He’s always done this.
He leaves first, ends things himself before they inevitably crumble into nothing. He ruins things the second he sees the beginning of the downfall, ruins himself before anyone else can.
If he traps himself in this constant state of dull nothingness and misery and sadness and isolation, then nothing, nobody but himself can hurt him.
It’s just logic.
That’s all his life has ever been. He’s learnt his lesson; been too vulnerable too many times and let too many people in, told too many people his deepest secrets just for them to leave.
He doesn’t tell anymore.
He keeps it to himself, and he tells himself he likes the quiet. He has music playing in his headphones every second he’s awake, and he goes to empty classrooms at lunch and break to finish up his homework and put in some extra study. It’s good. This is all for his future.
But when his eyes are welling with tears at the sight of cubics and piecewise functions, and he can’t figure out the speed of the train for the life of him, he wishes he never chose this.
And it’s not just this subject. He’s in the accelerated class, the youngest in his maths class, top grades in almost all his subjects, and he’s doing good. His teachers tell him how well he’s doing, his tutor says there’s no one like him at his school. Tsukishima is smart. And that’s all that matters, right?
He’s only gotten one grade below 95 this year, and that was in a health class. He gets full marks in maths and he’s doing good he’s doing good he’s doing good,
but it means nothing.
When he’s given back his maths test and sees the 39/39 staring back up at him, innocent and mocking and laughing in his face, he feels nothing but relief. He thinks, thank goodness, and the feeling in his chest isn’t success or achievement or accomplishment or anything at all. The pit in his stomach is gone, the dread and fear of getting a score below 100, the sureness that he’d get at least a mark off, it’s all gone. And it just fades back into dullness. All his friends are standing around at the other end of the row, and he looks at his perfect grade and just wishes he could feel something.
He hasn’t started studying for exams yet.
All the teachers are saying they should, sending out emails with study strategies and offering help and study schedule templates and everything he could possibly need to score the highest he can on six exams. They’re in two weeks, and he knows he should be making summary sheets right now, going back over linear and quadratics and congruency of triangles and all these things he should remember.
But the start of this year is nothing but fog and and dullness and a vague memory of bloodstained tissues and hours spent hunched over his desk. All the days blend together and he doesn’t understand how it’s already the fourth week of the term. He should be studying, but he’s still thinking about how he’s not meant to live long enough to take these exams. He’s witnessing the beginning of his downfall. Last term, he never spent less than eleven hours a week studying or doing homework, and now he barely spends six. He tells himself the extra hours of cram school make up for it, nearly five hours a week now.
It’s pathetic.
It’s a bad habit of his, excuses and excuses to cover up his lack of ability and skill and talent. All his friends are making it, succeeding in life with career plans and goals or living the teenage dream, hanging out with each other and having fun in all their extracurriculars,
and he’s never going to make it.
Tsukishima’s smart, but what good will knowing how to solve cubics or sketch hyperbolas do in real life? He’s smart, enough to know that this means nothing.
He’s tried to be worthy of living, put so much effort into this future, but he knows it’s futile. His mother smiles at every 100 he brings back home, and he can feel her pride when he talks about being a doctor.
He doesn’t even want this.
It feels like every waking hour has been spent wallowing in misery or working towards a future he doesn’t even believe in.
Yesterday, he was walking to sport - practically the only class he shares with Yamaguchi now, and he saw him, side by side with Hinata and laughing about something or other. And he just stared at the back of his best friend’s head, watching them turn to look at each other and playfully nudge them to the side. It’s sweet. They look so happy, a snapshot of peace and contentment in the calm of the storm. After how awful this year’s been, he’s glad to see Yamaguchi happy.
But that used to be him.
They used to be inseparable, and everyone knew them as best friends. He never went a day without texting Yamaguchi, and they’d always call after school or walk to the school gate together, where they’d part ways with cheerful goodbye’s and see you later’s. On the holidays, they’d meet up, text each other and call and talk and talk and talk.
But now, they go weeks without texting, and it’s always Tsukishima initiating the conversation anyways. He knows it’s unfair to ask for more, with all that Yamaguchi’s going through, but sometimes he just wishes. He wants things to go back to the way they were, and he hates change and what everything is becoming.
He doesn’t want to give up, but how can he continue to try when he feels like his best friend hates him.
They haven’t paired up in sport in months. In maths, Yamaguchi’s entirely facing the other way, and all Tsukishima can do is expand and divide and factorise, ignore the way his hand shakes every time he writes the ‘i’, and think about how their friendship has snowballed into nothingness, how a few days turned into weeks spent without talking have eroded three years of closeness and warmth and love. It’s just like those videos their maths teacher keeps showing them. The butterfly effect, how when you continually use rounded numbers, and your answers just get further
and further
and further
away from what it’s meant to be.
He wonders if anyone else notices them drifting endlessly apart, their limited interactions in every class they share. The days they go without talking, Tsukishima fruitlessly checking his messages every spare moment. He wonders if Yamaguchi notices.
If his presence doesn’t affect anyone, then why would his absence?
It’s just logic.
That’s all it is.
It’s sick.
And he feels so exhausted and hopeless every time he thinks of them, like nothing he could ever do would push this back the other way.
It’s just like a parabola. They’ve reached the turning point already, and now it’s plummeting down forever.
Except he knows he’s felt this wrongness for far longer than just this year. He’ll look back at old journal entries, having forgotten he’d ever felt that way.
It’s this perpetual sense of unfitting, wrongness and this separation from everyone around him. He feels out of place. Too loud and too quiet, too weird and too awkward. He talks too much and too little, and every word comes out wrong and dumb and stupid. Not the best at anything but too good to be mediocre.
He longs to be exceptional.
And maybe he should feel good about taking maths a year early, all the 100s he gets in a class he barely knows anyone in. A 98 on an essay - the highest he’s gotten in practically three years. He hasn’t gotten more than two marks off on a science test this year, and his teachers have nothing bad to say at parent teacher interviews.
But every question wrong makes him feel so much worse than however happy a perfect score could make him. He marks his own homework, and there’s a sickness in his stomach, a guilt and a shame for fixing his extended response question after he misses a power of x. He goes to extra help for maths at lunchtime, and asks his teacher about the last question of the exercise. It’s so easy, when he blinks again and sees the negative four he’s missed, forgotten to include in his set of transformations. It’s simple. It’s the easiest thing ever, and he’s fucking dumb for missing it. He brushes it off as quickly as he can, feels himself stumbling over every word and he tells his teacher it’s fine, he just forgot. He knows he’s losing his composure, but he can’t help but feel his stomach drop even more, his nails dig into the eraser as he tries his hardest to remove the evidence of his idiocy.
It’s always ‘good enough’. As long as there’s a nine, his mother jokes when he tells her his disappointment at a 96 on a chemistry test.
To think that he used to be happy at 90s, 85s, even. Now, nothing less than a perfect score will stop him from feeling bad. And even then, he still feels empty. Hollow. Like something’s missing, and he doesn’t know where to even begin to get it back.
He tries to fix himself.
Be smilier, laugh at the things people say and respond immediately and always be engaged, always have an interested response ready. He tries to stop all the bad habits that keep forming, have better thought patterns, be nicer, kinder to himself and believe in healing.
It barely lasts.
Every good day barely lasts, and the feeling of emptiness and unhappiness follows him through every minute. It’s persistent, and he hates it so.
Maybe it’s irrational. But the universe always seems to give him these signs, telling him how awful he is and how hopeless and fruitless trying to be better is. Good days that come crashing down when he comes home. Every couple of weeks, whenever he has them, they always end this way. When school starts after a two week break, he comes home and it’s always the same.
It’s always the same.
Tsukishima always finds himself sitting at his desk, head in his arms, or lying on the cold hardwood floor. Curled up in the dark of his wardrobe, comforted by the silence and the emptiness of it all. Tears endlessly pouring out of eyes that he hates, or that dull nothingness in his stomach and engraved into his heart. Today, he’s sitting in the small space between his bookshelf and his drawers, curled up where no one can see him and away from the world.
He rearranges his room, changes all his stationery and makes a hundred resolutions at the start of every year and month and week, pledges to be better and happier.
And he goes and ruins it all again.
The first day of school this year, he came home and laid on the floor, felt so disappointed in how quickly it all ended. It was meant to be good.
When the second term of the year started, he could feel the pit in his stomach before he even stepped foot through the gates. He knew it’d end this way.
It always does.
He thinks that maybe if he tears open his skin, it’ll fix things. Eat less, talk less, try harder and study for more hours.
In a sick, twisted, way, it does.
Not for long, but long enough that he can’t stop.
Tsukishima takes pride in his grades, his effort, even if it doesn’t feel good enough half the time.
You’re only worth loving when you’re smart, his brain whispers to him, and he hates how it’s true. Maybe it’s cynical, pessimistic, to believe that everyone has an ulterior motive.
But what does he have if not this?
He’s never been beautiful, never been desirable. Even now, he’s not exceptional. He’s no good at volleyball, and the only thing he has going for him is his height. Too many years of piano for how lackluster his skill his, not good enough at maths or English for all the hours over the years spent in tutoring centres and with the best tutors his mother could find. Kageyama’s shockingly close in his mathematical ability, despite spending literally none of his time with a textbook open.
And, of course, half his class is better than him in English. Maybe Tsukishima’s above average in most subjects, but he’s not the best in a single one. There’s always someone better.
Everything’s a competition, and he’s losing.
He knows that in a room full of people, no one would pick him. So really, it’s not worth it at all. There’s no one left in the world that could love the monster that he’s become.
This has become more of a recurring thought lately. How unloveable he is, how undesirable he is. The reflection that stares back at him in the mirror is a foul and disgusting creature, and he hates it so. He styles his hair in the morning, adjusts his uniform to perfection, puts concealer over all his ugly blemishes, choose long sleeves and jumpers to hide scars and half-healed scabs.
He eats less in desperate hopes to be more proportionate, bleeds to make up for all his wrongness.
And it’s all in vain, and it’s all pointless, and nothing works.
He stops eating all meals except for dinner for a week, then the next he’s accepting every piece of food his mother or Yamaguchi offers him, eating and consuming like a bottomless pit. There’s never enough blood and no matter how many times he does it, how much skin he covers, it’s not enough. It doesn’t hurt enough, even if he feels it in every step he takes, every time he moves his arms, during the day.
He feels so sick, and he just wants to expel all this disgust and shame and the sickness that’s building up inside him.
He thinks back to a year ago, and wishes with his whole heart that it had worked.
Somehow, he feels impossibly more ashamed of what he is.
He tells himself he doesn’t care.
He has himself, and that’s all he needs.
A stupid middle school habit that had wormed its way into every waking minute, into his pencilcase and into his thighs and his wrists and his hips.
He won’t wear short sleeves anymore, and he always tugs down his shorts when they have sport, hugs his knees to his chest and sits in silence and shame for what he is. For a while, it became such an essential part of his life, of him, that he could barely separate it from himself. He knew those dark lines were permenantly etched into his skin. They’d fade, and he’d make a hundred more over them again and again, but they would never really go away.
His mother got him a scar healing oil, once. That cylindrical, orange bottle with the white cap makes his stomach drop every time he looks at it. He hides it in the back of his mirror, avoids its watchful gaze and makes sure never to let its contents touch his skin.
It’s under control.
He can stop any time he wants.
Other than the fact that it’s been over two years since he started, four years since he first tried, and his arms still ache.
He’s managed to stop before.
Other than the fact that he hasn’t gone more than three days without doing it this school year, and the longest he’s ever stayed clean is fifty-two days.
He relapsed ten days into this year.
Isn’t ten supposed to be his lucky number? It almost feels like a betrayal.
But it’s the only thing that’s always been there for him. It’s never once let him down.
It’s not relapsing if he never stays clean for long enough, and he tells himself that over and over so that it’ll save him the hurt. Anything to stop him from feeling worse.
The dark lines across his thighs and the fading ones on his wrist and the ones that he can barely make out on his upper arm, he hates them all. It was fine, for a while. He barely saw them, avoiding mirrors and never taking off his jumper. But every time he hears someone talk about scars with such disgust, tone dripping with repulsion, his stomach drops a little more, and he feels a little sicker. When he’s trying on a pair of pants in a store so he can avoid the cold in the coming winter, his reflection stares back at him and he doesn’t quite recall looking like this.
His eyes are uglier than he remembers, and it’s the first time seeing himself so stripped, so vulnerable, in so long. There’s too much fat on his body, and his thighs touch and his stomach isn’t perfectly flat and he can’t see his collarbones or his ribs enough. There’s too many days where he’s woken up in the morning, and the first thing he does is lift his shirt and turn to the side, tracing every inch of his reflection in the mirror. He’s overly fixated on how he looks, yet avoidant of his own reflection and pictures and photos. Makeup can only do so much, and he feels so wrong, so fake, every time he looks in the mirror and doesn’t hate himself.
Sometimes, he thinks he looks a certain way, and his own reflection is a shocking betrayal. It’s just different. When were his eyes shaped that way, when did his skin become so dull and his body so wrong?
He’s losing control.
It doesn’t help that everyone around him is so much more beautiful. Everything’s become a constant comparison, analysis and contrast of the people around him with the monster that he is. On Tuesdays at band, he sits down and his thighs are too big, and he shifts onto his toes, lifts his legs in a desperate, futile attempt to make them look slimmer. And that’s all it is. Futile.
All his friends are more good looking, more beautiful, and he comforts himself with the fact that he’s just as smart. But they are more, and they’re all better than him, and he’s falling behind.
Tsukishima feels so ashamed, hates how he tries to pull himself up with this pathetic excuse of grades and academic awards that never really mean anything.
And his brother. His brother’s always been more beautiful, always had that creative sense and something to show off. Natural talent and hard work, and Tsukishima admires him so. Akiteru’s always been someone to strive towards, a hero in his eyes. Untouchable.
Tsukishima’s skill only comes from years of extra hours in tutoring, learning algebra and indices and auxiliary verbs and covalent bonding before he even knows himself.
He just feels worse than everyone all the time. A perpetual sense of inferiority, a hollow disappointment in knowing that this isn’t his brain playing tricks on him, making him think he’s dumber, uglier, than he actually is, but the truth. Tsukishima’s a realist. He sees the truth, and he’s self aware and knows all his flaws and everything he’s lacking in better than he knows how to be alive.
He learns how to feel better before he learns how to be alive. Maybe he went down the wrong path, relied too heavily on it for too many years as a too easily influenced child.
But he should’ve known better. It’s his own fault.
He was thirteen, and old enough to know that whatever happened from then on would be his fault and his fault only. Besides, he’s always been mature for his age.
And now, he has the result of two years worth of futile attempts to fix himself and feel better.
They seem to mock him, laugh at him and scream about how weak he is.
It’s a reminder.
Every bad grade he’s ever gotten, every mean thing he’s ever said.
Every bad day.
And the worst thing is, he knows he deserves it all.
It’s only making up for how awful of a human being he is. It’s a system, in a way. Whenever he’s too mean to the people he loves, too irrationally angry, too hypocritical, it fixes things. It makes him feel a little worse, a little better, and he’s hurting for all the hurt he brings the people in his life.
Every grade below a 95 last year, every score that’s not perfect this year.
He’ll do it over everything, anything, and nothing at all.
It’s the first time this term that he’s done it at school. It happened today, and he’d been thinking about it all day long.
A year ago today, he was supposed to be dead.
Too many pills that ended up not being enough, something that should’ve worked but failed so miserably.
She calls it nearly catastrophic, tells him that this year was just as bad as last.
He calls it a disappointment.
What a pity it didn’t work.
What a shame he woke up that next morning.
In homeroom and in science, he pillows his head with his arms on the desk, ignores everyone and everything around him. He wants to go back to May last year, go back to October or even March and make sure it had worked.
In English, they’re writing memoirs and short stories. It’s meant to be expressive, reflective, and they make profiles of themselves with all their deepest, darkest, secrets. Tsukishima can barely get a full sentence on the page, and thinks about all the things that disgust him when he describes his physical appearance. He knows himself all too well, and that’s the problem. He knows that everything he thinks and says is irrational and contradicting, that he has no reason to be upset or to feel so awful all the time.
It’s his own fault.
If it weren’t for himself, nothing would’ve even happened.
All his problems, everything that makes him feel so bad and exhausted and drained everyday comes from him.
He can’t blame this on a traumatic event that never happened, or some disorder or illness he doesn’t have.
It’s just him.
He ruins every happy moment, every good day, destroys things before they inevitably end, leaves and isolates before they have the chance to. Tries to kill himself while he and his favourite people are on distant, but at least good, terms.
He wants it all or nothing.
He wants to be perfectly exceptional or dead.
For Tsukishima, happiness and stability can’t coexist with success.
And without success, there’s nothing left to make him loveable.
He longs for unconditional love.
To be loved when he’s hurting, when he doesn’t have the energy to love anyone back. When he’s not smart enough, when his grades barely scrape the 90s, when he’s beautiful and when he’s not.
He stops eating breakfast because it makes him feel nauseous, stops eating lunch because an empty stomach makes him concentrate. He only feels tolerable on an empty stomach, only feels beautiful when he can fit his fingers around his wrist. There’s always someone to comment on every behaviour he’ll ever have. They ask him where his lunch is, and tell him good job, you’re actually eating for once, when he does. Wow, you’re eating so much!, or his friends pacing their bites to match him. It’s mocking, and he feels so much shame for how angry, how hurt he gets.
Yamaguchi never did that.
But now he and Yamaguchi barely talk, and it’s as much Tsukishima’s fault as it is his.
Tsukishima avoids his best friend, barely locks eyes for more than a second when they pass each other in the hallways, pairs up with Kageyama in sport and watches him sit shoulder to shoulder with someone other than him. At lunch, Hinata asks him about him and Yamaguchi. His own hesitation sickens him, and he ignores the lump building in his throat when he says that they’re still best friends.
In maths, his only friend isn’t there, and he knows he can’t last long enough so he opens his pencilcase and lets the world come crashing down.
When he stands against the wall in the bathroom stall and holds the cold metal in his hand, he thinks about how he’s letting himself down. How this is the first time in so long he’s done it at school, how this’ll be the first time he’s ever done it in this class. And when he finally draws blood, he barely feels any better.
It’s comforting, but still, no matter how many times he slides the blade, it’s not enough.
It’s been a year, and nothing has changed for the better.
Maybe his friends didn’t need him then, but now he’s sure of it. Yamaguchi’s happiest when they don’t talk, and Tsukishima doesn’t sit with anyone at lunch anymore, doesn’t text his best friend or ask him how his day was.
It’s not like he’d reply anyways.
There’s no one but him to blame for this, but all his friends are closer, and he sees them all sitting together and laughing together and leaning against each other. He chooses to be alone, but he knows it wouldn’t be any different if he sat with them at lunch or if started initiating conversations again, anyways. He can sit in a room full of people and still feel so utterly, awfully, alone. Every word people say is in one ear and out the other, and the one person he longs to just look at him is closer with everyone else.
Tsukishima can never remember just how bad it was, last year in May or October or even last term. Yesterday, he looked through his journal, and he doesn’t recall half the entries. So many pages have been filled, and he laughs at himself for the irony and the idiocy and the self-pity of it all.
He’s been seeing the signs from the universe since before this year, and he’s felt out of place for as long as he can remember.
Recently, he’s been getting a suspicious amount of Panadol ads whenever he’s listening to music in his headphones.
The timing makes him laugh, almost, and it’s too much of a coincidence to be anything other than a sign.
The universe is screaming at him to just try again, and he wants so badly to listen. To follow through with everything his brain and his heart is telling him, everything everyone seems to silently whisper.
Today, all he could think about was how he’s meant to be dead. He was never meant to take those exams last year, never meant to even make it to fifteen. And now he’s closer to sixteen than he is to fourteen, and exams are in two weeks and he still hasn’t started studying. He’s still thinking of all those plans, all those fruitless fantasies of dying on a beach with fucked-up insides from too many pills or slit wrists.
Every time they talk about subjects for next year, prerequisites for degrees he doesn’t want, careers and futures and what your life will look like, he can’t picture anything. It’s all a pretty little picture of a perfect son with the perfect subjects and everything maths and science, a dream to practice medicine and take care of his parents when they’re old and earn enough money to make up for all the time and space he’s wasted.
He wants to be the top of his class when he graduates, wants to get into direct medicine and make his parents proud. He wants to be the one his grandparents boast about, a successful doctor as a first-generation immigrant. He wants to go to university with Yamaguchi and study medicine together, laugh and cry when they get their results from their final exams and when they see whether they get accepted into their dream universities or not. He wants to travel, see the world and learn how to drive and get a job and earn his own money for the very first time. He wants to love his family and his friends and his dogs, cherish what time they have left. He wants to grow up, and he wants to have a family.
But it’s never going to happen.
Because the only, only thing that’s been better this year are his grades, and even then, they don’t feel good enough. He’s ahead, he finishes all his worksheets early and goes to extra help for maths at lunchtimes. It’s easy, but he swears it takes him hours just to do one exercise, and every question wrong feels a hundred times worse than however good a perfect score could.
What good is full marks on a trigonometry test if he and his best friend haven’t spoken in weeks?
What good is studying three hours after school if all his friends are hanging out together?
What good is any of this if it’s all for a future he doesn’t have.
Some days, the world seems like it’s moving a million frames quicker, and it’s all he can do to keep up with the people around him. But other days, everything feels dull and muted and he can’t seem to understand where it all went wrong, and where his ability to see all the beauty and life in everything went.
There’s only one thing left to do.
Since last year, it’s only gotten worse. And there’s no hope for a brighter future, a life where he doesn’t feel like dying everyday, where he doesn’t long to open his skin with every bad feeling.
It’s just getting worse,
exponentially,
infinitely,
and he wants it to end now.
He can’t do this anymore, and he doesn’t want to stick around to fail his exams and lose his scholarship. With the rate things are going, he won’t be able to keep up these grades any longer.
If he takes himself out of the equation, then it’ll all be better. It’s fix everything, and he’ll finally be able to solve for x and the rest of the question will go so much easier.
He knows it won’t hurt anyone.
It never would’ve.
All it’ll take is courage and whatever he can find and letters that he needs to rewrite.
And after that, everything will be better.