Work Text:
You will never
know, but I am so thankful. There are things that I will never
be able to repay. Things you will never know.
i.
A month before Kitagawa Daiichi loses at the junior high qualifiers, your grandfather passes away. You had been sitting on the hard-backed chair in the hospital with your volleyball recordings and your volleyball recordings and listening to him breathe all week. You had not played volleyball in a while.
The month before that had been better. Sometimes he would agree to watch a match with you. You would slot the disc into the disc player they set up in rooms for dying people and point out your favorite maneuvers, the service aces you wanted to mimic. He would nod along, speak a few words or none.
The month before that had been the worst. Your sister informed you diplomatically that your grandfather was dying. Your legs went still under the dining table. You had seen the news making its way towards you on the horizon, and missed its arrival all the same.
You don’t remember much of the funeral. Only that there are white lilies and black suits and some far-off relative tells you about the symbolism of flowers. Good-bye and be-at-peace and whatever. He’s your second cousin from your father’s side and you’ve never seen him in your life. You’re given flowers to hold; you hold them. You’re given words to say; you say them.
A month before Kitagawa Daiichi loses at the junior high qualifiers your grandfather dies and the world reshapes itself around this fact but volleyball, strangely enough, does not. Something has left with him. It is the same thing your sister took with her when she glimpsed a different version of Miyagi through the window. One full of bright girls with lovely, flowing hair and powdered laughter.
“I’m quitting volleyball,” she said, fifteen and angry and in love.
You contemplate this alongside the flowers in your hands. You superimpose. You’ve always been bad with words but you know what it feels like to set a ball from the furthest corner of the court and have it fall perfectly into the spiker’s palm. You’re not soulless.
“I’m quitting volleyball,” you imagine your grandfather saying. Afterwards, you scrub at your skin in the shower until it turns red, and begins to flake away into the drain.
ii.
See the problem is a ball lands where you ask it to, while a word spins out of control and eats your face. A ball will listen; a word will not. The world has done you a disservice and, reeling from the impact, you are only trying to stay on your feet.
A month later you step onto the court again with bubble wrap for skin. Everything is too-sharp and too-bright and the air in the gymnasium smells wrong. This smell is supposed to reassure you, you said so once. You are supposed to be in love with something. The question is: what?
Volleyball is a sport where you are always looking up. One must keep not only their eyes open but also their ears, and by extension, their hands. Process the data around you and re-purpose it into ammunition. Keep the blood in your veins burning. Ask for the ball.
Ask for the ball, that is to say: open your mouth. Say something or you will be left behind. You will yourself to do this as your teammates get slower and angrier and meaner. Your fingers begin to yearn for more contact with the ball. Somewhere in the back of your mind a voice informs you that you are losing and it sends a sliver of anxiety sliding across your cheek like a switchblade. You are panicking now.
Before this, there had been a boy with orange hair and so much hope in his bones, it made you jealous. In a desperate bid to remove this feeling, you tried to hurt him.
Your grandfather would not approve of your actions on the court today, tomorrow, or on Friday. Next week you are benched and the sensation tears at your skin like a free-fall. They give you the name King of the Court, then kick your knees into the concrete.
iii.
You ask the boy with the orange hair what he’s been doing for the last three years. The other question, the one you’re actually supposed to ask yourself, is this: what have you been doing for the last three weeks? And the week before that, too, while your sister spent the daylight hours at her boyfriend’s and you stared at the houseplant in the corner of the living room. It has been wilting, slowly and steadily, for over a month now. You consider watering it every time you walk past. You never do.
iv.
You don’t learn of Karasuno’s old histories until you get there but they seem fitting. This is nice, you decide, holding the fabric up to the light. This is where I will bury my crown.
But Hinata Shouyou—
v.
Hinata Shouyou is a disaster. He’s so bad at volleyball it makes you mad. It makes you mad that he makes you mad. You had resigned yourself to a lifetime of apathy. Whatever sacred thing you had formed with volleyball had gone up like a plume of dust when your grandfather passed away. You think you will never be over anything. You are a suitcase packed for a business trip, mostly empty.
“I’ll set to whoever will help us win,” you say.
His hands curl into fists and his face crumples. It has been a while since anyone has cared enough about you to be upset instead of disappointed.
“Hah?” He’s seething. He knows you’re right and can’t do anything about it.
You pick up the ball, feel its surface singe your palms. If volleyball is over then what is this? What do you call this feeling? You look up.
“I don’t think you’re necessary to win right now,” you say.
“Hah?” he repeats. It’s one instance in a lifetime of honesty. He doesn’t know how to hide. He’s probably never needed to. Bitterness rises like bile in the back of your throat; you swallow around it.
Later, you stay to clean up the gymnasium. There is a moment in which he jumps off the stage and the setting sun splinters across his form. He is all skin and muscle, barely fifteen. He is not at all like the gods you grew up worshiping or the bleak faces you recall from junior high. This is, you observe distantly, different.
“What?” he asks, defensive. He has noticed you staring and begun seething again. Everything you do pisses him off. That’s new. Is that bad? You peer into yourself, ask the question again. Is that so bad?
“Nothing,” you tell him. You wheel the ball cart back into the storage room. The sound of shoes, rainfall, then he is there beside you. He does not pursue the matter of your eyes and therefore you do not pursue the matter of the strange way he refracts light. Physics cannot explain this. Nothing you know can explain the conundrum of Hinata Shouyou. For better or worse, you have all the time in the world to find an answer.
vi.
Several months after quitting volleyball, your sister got into a fight with her boyfriend. He was an honor roll student that took triple sciences with history as an elective because he liked it more than the sciences, and had convinced his parents it would make his resume look good. This left sparingly little time for your sister, who had, in a spur of the moment decision, quit volleyball to share her own time with him. She only wanted to walk home together a few times a week, eat lunch at the same table, go on dates sometimes; she told you these things as she did her nails and cried. You listened and tried to fit her words into the dollhouse of your universe. Spending time with someone sounded painful. It involved sacrifice, you surmised, the act of carving things out of yourself. You decided it was a pity that your sister’s boyfriend was in love with history and she had been in love with volleyball. It was hard to love two things at once, or separately.
Later she broke up with this boyfriend and you watched as she acquired a string of subsequent boyfriends who were all unwilling to give up their version of elective history for her. You wondered what exactly she was trying so hard for but were unsure how to ask. Was it companionship? Was it devotion? Was it that abstract notion of love that made your face burn with exertion, even when you had done nothing at all? She had stopped looking for boyfriends altogether by the time you entered high school, and decided eventually to pursue hairdressing in Tokyo.
vii.
Volleyball is a sport where you are always looking up. After junior high you refused to stare at anything but the ground before you, having resigned yourself to the fact that no one would want to hit a ball you had set. It seemed fair to anticipate the ball’s descent instead of its ascent. The ascent, after all, was dependent on factors outside of your control. The descent could be slowed down or at least cushioned with your hands.
“Give me the ball,” Hinata demands. He opens his mouth and the words cut right through you. Mesmerized by the sound, you toss to him and he slams the ball into the opposite court. There’s that age-old silence, the sharp intake of breath. Hinata and Kageyama’s freak quick does it again.
As long as you’re here, you think, he’s invincible.
Or is it the other way around?
viii.
Karasuno goes to the Spring High. Still it doesn’t quite sink in until you’re walking onto the orange court and the announcer with his shiny annoying microphone is reading your name off a placard. ‘Kageyama Tobio’ goes up in the air like a firework. You feel your heart scrabble for purchase on your ribcage.
You play on all three days. You inhale the stark geometry of movement and the court teaches you physics and sorcery. You have sunk your feet into the hardwood floor and you will not go anywhere until Hinata Shouyou who refracts light like a miracle falls from the sky. Until he becomes Icarus.
When he finally does, you tell him, "I'm going on ahead."
What you really mean is: I want you to chase me.
ix.
“What’s volleyball to you?” Hoshiumi asks once after practice. The question comes from nowhere and arrives nowhere. You simply happen to be present.
“Volleyball is volleyball,” you say perfunctorily.
Hoshiumi tilts his head back like a Yakuza. “That’s a stupid answer. Think harder.”
You slide your notebook into the front pocket of your bag. You picture rows of plastic bottles placed at equal intervals along a court. You hear the ball falling. The smear of shoes.
“Think harder,” Hoshiumi repeats. You think maybe he’s psychic, though he’s probably just bored. You think you would be nothing without volleyball. And Hinata, if he had not pulled you out of the sky and tied you to a kinder religion.
You consider Hinata Shouyou and the ball. Which matters more, which is the elective history class you cannot give up? Hoshiumi taps his feet against the floor impatiently.
“Volleyball just is,” you decide. Something has come upon you. You know what it looks like but not how to describe it. Hoshiumi can take his weird questions and shove it.
“Hah?” Hoshiumi tilts his head so far back you worry that his neck will snap. You zip your bag and sling it over your shoulder, nod in his direction without meeting his eyes.
“Yeah.”
“Kageyama, you’re full of bullshit.”
“Yeah.”
x.
He calls you one night from Brazil, drunk off his ass, and you burn like Alexandria with the urge to put your hands on his throat.
xi.
“Is that so bad?”
“No, but the Black Jackals are annoying. Atsumu still holds a grudge against me for the Olympics. Sakusa’s going to make everyone use his hand sanitizer and then he’s going to run out and he’s going to make one of us buy him refills.”
“And Hinata Shouyou.”
“Yeah. And Hinata Shouyou.”
xii.
Maybe passion is frustration. Maybe love is consumption. Maybe Hinata comes back from Brazil and the first thing you think when you see him in the hallway outside the toilet is that you want to lick the smile right off his face. It has taken you several years to reach the place where the shadow of junior high and the family you left behind does not cast itself across your shoulders, but merely the tips of your toes. Your feet are planted firmly in the dirt.
Your grandfather used to say that no one understood what was and wasn’t important to you better than yourself. At eight you felt that he was being evil and deliberately cryptic. At twenty-two, you think you understand. Volleyball is Hinata is volleyball. You cannot have one without the other and you cannot have neither, so you want to have both.
The Black Jackals win. As the crowd surges out of the bleachers, calling your names like promises, you duck under the net to the other side of the court. The sound of shoes, rainfall; then he is there beside you.
“It’s my win,” Hinata says, smiling so hard you think he’s going to crack right open. He's sweaty and gross and you've never seen anything quite as spectacular.
“Yeah” you say, and then you kiss him.
xiii.
Everyone knows Kageyama Tobio fucked up at the junior high qualifiers, but most people don’t know he borrowed his father’s suit for his grandfather’s funeral. He didn’t want to go in the first place. He was scared of the faceless casket he would be forced to confront.
By the time he emerged onto the court again he had retreated so far inside of himself, there was little left on the outside but a motorized shell which remembered, vaguely, how to play volleyball. They called him King of the Court for months afterwards, but they didn’t see the way the court had swallowed him up and spat out his bones. His teammates had been watching him with curious resentment for months. His coach had little sympathy for the sullen genius with the brackish words. No one saw that he was carrying a wound for a heart. They saw only the court and the ball and the way the spiker’s hand fell short of its golden trajectory.
Look at that, they said in wonderment. Isn’t that terrible.
Everyone knows Hinata Shouyou sucked at volleyball at the start, but they don’t know that Kageyama Tobio looked at him for the first time that day and hoped immediately, from some strange and selfish part of his chest, that Hinata would be the one to wake him from his solitary dream. That he saw in him the face of a sleeping god.
They don’t know that Kageyama spent six years watching for the shadow of the sun through the clouds, and then was there to greet it at first light.
0.
By the grace of God and with this crown, I name you king of everything.