Chapter Text
It happens on the day that's always been Shouyo’s beginning. Not the one where he stopped his bicycle in front of a TV and saw a high schooler soaring across a court gleaming with sweat and glory. The one where his heart caught onto that promise of flight and never let go.
No.
It's the day when that passion turned into drive. When he partook in his first and last tournament in middle school and learned what defeat really meant. When a piercing stare glued itself to him in a mixture of contempt and longing that back then he couldn't have possibly understood and scathing words tore down the world around him.
The day that marked his beginning with a promise.
A day he hasn't lived yet .
He sits on the edge of his mattress, an hour before his alarm is supposed to ring, and he feels like he's slept an entire life away. Maybe he has.
What else explains the images and memories playing on repeat on the inside of his head. Of people he doesn't know and places he's never seen.
Because it makes no sense how there's an entire life in his head that he hasn't lived. Why he can see how his first match, which he's been feverishly awaiting ever since he convinced his friends to help out, turns out when he closes his eyes.
He's been through confusion, been through denial, and now the thing that lingers is a simple question that makes his heart clench painfully.
How is it fair?
He stares at the ground as if it might answer him and tries to push everything away because he can feel tears welling up in his eyes and he doesn't want this.
An answer doesn't come and his mind continues to show him what he doesn't want to see.
A team . Celebrating and crying, drenched in sweat but faces cast in the glow of victory. And there are boys hugging someone that looks just like Shouyo and he knows they're his teammates. But that isn't Shouyo. Because he's watching them and his chest is empty.
He doesn't feel a thing.
Doesn't know what that person who's supposed to be him felt in that moment, doesn't know what he thought
No. For him, the whole thing is just something he sees. Like an outsider looking in.
And , he thinks as the first tear spills over his cheek, that's unfair .
Why is his life suddenly laid out in front of him? Why does he have to watch how everything turns out without experiencing any of it?! Why doesn't he get to live that himself?
He sits there, hands clenched around an old battered ball like a lifeline and he can't stop the steady stream of tears that drop onto his keepsake.
It feels like an eternity that he spends in his room in absolute silence before he leaps up with foggy eyes and gets dressed in record time. He's out of the house a few moments later, running like someone is chasing him.
(And faintly he thinks that's because he'd seen something like that and he thinks of piercing eyes and a deep frown and that makes everything worse. Because he never got to meet that person, and now it'll never be the same.)
At the edge of the world, or the small hill next to the bridge he will cross every day when he gets to Karasuno-
if
he doesn't know if he'll get in
except he does
- he stops and he screams.
His lungs are burning and his legs buckle. He's been running faster than he's ever run before and his body can't keep up and he screams more.
Screams till his voice is hoarse and the sun has risen fully over the horizon.
An eternity of silence and a lifetime of screaming is what leads him back home, back to the volleyball he had discarded earlier.
When Shouyo picks it up his head isn't cleared in the slightest, it keeps buzzing away with thoughts he doesn't know how to handle. But , he spins it between his palms and there are images of players he's never met doing the same thing in front of his eyes, it doesn't matter.
Someone took an amazing future away from him. Took excitement and pride, friendships and promises.
Shouyo is sure that the other him he sees when he closes his eyes lived a good life, a great one even. But for him, there's only one solution to go forward.
He’ll live an even greater one.
Sometimes the easiest solution is also the best one. So he swallows down all of the complicated stuff and keeps moving.
He will fly.