"Life's a bore if you don't challenge yourself".
"I'd guard your backs with my life if I have to".
"As long as I'm here, you're unbeatable".
"You can fly even higher".
"To the highest limit, to the farthest limit!"
Haikyuu!! gender-neutral reade...
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Ukai Keishin
For most people sports were an escape. An escape from ordinary lives, an escape from reality, a safe sanctuary where they could feel like themselves or enjoy being alive. For most people sports were important because besides keeping you in form, it was a way to bring glory to your country or family. You thought like them in the past. You thought that volleyball was an escape, a safe haven, a sanctuary, the only right thing in the world.
But then it changed. It always does.
Most professional players start playing when they are young. Probably when they are five or six years old, even before they know how to write and read. But for you it was different. For you it was always different.
You fell in love with volleyball when you were quite older for the sport. You were like twelve, an age considered too old to start any sport. Still, you started playing and playing and playing, until you told yourself that you liked it too much to stop, that spiking felt like flying and that receiving felt like you were a guardian deity, that setting felt as smooth as putting a puzzle into place for another to come to click with it. Volleyball somehow felt like a different sport, and so you decided that you weren't going to mind other people's comments about you being too older to start in volleyball.
Middle school and high school was all about learning and creating your own path through it. At the end of it, you were a great player, but not enough to be with the best of the best. So, you pushed yourself more, sacrificed a lot of things, and persevered when no one else supported you and called your love for volleyball and studies an obsession. It was in the middle of college that you got closer to what you wanted.
The big people saw something in you, and they offered you a place within the best. They weren't the best of the best, but it was something. With another couple of years, you were within the best of the best. In a couple of years, you were living your dream. Your dream of becoming something else than a simple person.
And then, when you were on the biggest stage of your life when your dream was finally complete, everything went down in the blink of an eye.
It was pretty simple. You just had to run to save the ball, to pass it over the net. You couldn't let it touch the floor. It was simple as that, but volleyball is never that simple.
The ball went too far, you stumbled, your kneepad wasn't in its right place and then, when you hit the floor, it was pretty bad. Your knee got injured and your time to recuperate was too long. You could keep playing, but the pain sometimes was too much so the medic told you that the best course of action was retirement.
Retirement from your dream, from everything you worked so hard for years. It was frustrating and most of the time, you didn't listened to them. Until the inevitable happened.
You forced yourself too much, especially when you dived to save balls. Your knee always took the worst of everything and after months of playing recklessly, your knee got hurt permanently. The pain was unbearable, your knee was fucked up and after a few surgeries, the only thing you could do right with it was walk and run short distances. You couldn't dive nor jump too high or play volleyball at all.
