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"Seriously, don't you ever get angry?" Abe grunted, furrowing his brows. The two sat in an empty locker room, everyone else having cleared out long ago. Abe and Mihashi had struck up another conversation about Mihashi's lack of a 'game face', the catcher wanting his battery to be far more intimidating than one player with a game face and his partner on the mound quivering like a wet kitten.
"I mean..." Mihashi looked away, wanting to do anything but answer the question. What if he gave the wrong answer? What if his answer made Abe mad at him? Forget whatever he felt, people got mad at him all the time! He had no right to feel angry when he probably deserved it--
"What if you think about things that make you angry? Like when Tajima won't shut up?"
"I-I don't mind it, Tajima-kun is really nice..."
Abe paused before a pointed sigh. "What about when they sell out of your favorite snack?"
"Then it would have been my fault for not going earlier."
"When you have a group project but you end up doing all the work."
"They're probably busy with other things, I can make their lives a little easier and pick up the slack."
Abe thought for a second. This wasn't working. He needed to dig deeper. "...What about when someone says you don't deserve the ace number. Doesn't that make you mad?"
Wrong move. It was like he could see the walls come back up around the pitcher. His shoulders tensed up and he looked away. "T-That...they wouldn't be wr--"
"Mihashi, we went over this. You earned that ace number when you won our first game." He had been choosing his words carefully (for the most part), but he was running out of ways to dance around the issue.
"I-..."
"Doesn't what happened at Mihoshi make you angry?--"
"Of course it does!" The sudden snap threw the room on its side, the outburst echoing along the walls lined by metal lockers that vibrated with the sound, almost as if they were trembling at the shout.
To be completely transparent, Abe was surprised, and that was to say the very least. He had never heard Mihashi interrupt anyone, let alone shout in pure rage like that.
He had to unpack this right now before Mihashi could backpedal.
"Good. Tell me about it." He responded, raising his voice just a bit to match his energy, rile him up.
Mihashi stood there stammering for a moment, as if he were trying so hard to filter himself.
"Don't think, just say it!"
"It was so unfair!" He blurted.
"Yeah, it was! Tell me how unfair it was!" Abe stood, hands flinging out to emphasize how big these emotions his pitcher was feeling were.
Mihashi sucked in a sharp breath. Abe agreed with him. He thought it was unfair to. He was safe to call it unfair. Words began pouring out like a broken sink, gushing and overflowing faster than either of them could stop.
"They didn't treat anyone else like that! I tried, I really did try! I did everything I could to prove to them that I earned my position in spite of my grandfather but they just wouldn't listen!"
"They should have listened!" Each time Mihashi rose his voice, Abe rose his to match, following him in his expression of all the rage he tried to hide.
"But they didn't!" Mihashi was half yelling and half crying by this point, but Abe let it happen. The tears were good. The yelling was good. He had bene holding this in for so long that it was tearing him apart, but now he was finally letting it out so he could harness its power. "They didn't listen to me! They never listened to me! They never gave me a chance!"
"And you deserved a chance!"
"It's not fair, Abe!" Mihashi wailed, an angry roar sewn into his cry. He violently threw his hands down for emphasis. "They demanded everything from me! Nothing was ever enough! But they didn't even try to treat me like I was worth anything at all!"
"And of course that would make you mad! They ruined your whole time at middle school! They wasted all of the time you could have been growing by--"
"By torturing me, Abe!" Mihashi cut him off, borderline screaming at this point.
Abe blinked in surprise, but nodded along, letting him continue. "Right!"
"It wasn't fair! It wasn't...!" He was starting to wind down, Abe could tell. He was getting tired. Not just from the yelling, but from experiencing so much emotion that he spent years mastering how not to feel them.
Abe slowly approached the pitcher who stood broken in front of him, back heaving with labored pants. "You're right. It wasn't."
Mihashi sniffled a little, beginning to pick the pieces back up that he had scattered all over the locker room. Abe's strong arm swung around Mihashi's shoulders, pulling him in for a side hug. "You feel better?"
"Mhm..." Mihashi nodded.
"See? You do have a lot of anger in there." Abe chuckled softly, ruffling his hair. "Just gotta take all that and put it into one look. Come on, try it with me." After a few seconds of staring at his face, Abe chuckled. "Do that around Tajima, and I guarantee you he's shitting his pants."