to greater things beyond the unknown||RK96000||

Chapter 1: Love at First Spike

ao3 - RK96000

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Shouyou's first day of high school is far more terrifying than it has any right to be.

He thinks of being able to actually play on a real, powerhouse team for volleyball, rather than one cobbled together from friends and half baked promises of meat buns and helping them practice. Thinks of playing more than one match in all three years of his middle school career- one match that had ended in half an hour and been lost in straight sets.

The thought of being a regular on an actual team is incredible, leaves him breathless and giddy, even as he sits at his polished desk, surrounded by unfamiliar faces who all seem to be familiar, but only with each other.

It doesn't matter, though.

Friends are nice but volleyball is better.

He'll make it on Aoba Johsai's team, he has to- and if he doesn't, well.

He'll prove his worth a thousand times over if he has to.

And with that thought in his mind and the thrum of volleyball in his veins, it's all Shouyou can do to daydream about hitting the perfect spike and doodle dozens of volleyballs into the corners of his notebooks (and pretend they don't overlap with his notes to the point of unreadability).

Until finally, the day ends.

It's only after Shouyou stands up, backpack in hand, that he realizes he doesn't actually have anywhere to go.

For the first time in three years, he isn't rushing to the girls' volleyball practice or pleading with his friends to practice with him.

But now-

Now, there is no one.

Slowly, but surely, his classmates leave the room in a steady trickle, everyone smiling and laughing and making conversation with each other with an envious amount of familiarity, and it isn't even the first time Shouyou has felt more than a little lost and alone today from going to a school where everyone else basically went to the same middle school. They had inside jokes and established friend circles and he's nothing but an outsider.

Volleyball, Shouyou thinks viciously instead, as if it's the answer to all of his problems.

He just needs a team.

And maybe some friends.

At last, it's down to him and just two others at the back of the classroom- the one with hair styled like a turnip smiles at him, a little too stretched to be entirely genuine while his friend, lurking next to him doesn't even bother with the pretense of a smile.

"Hinata, right?" Turnip Hair asks, rather than introduce himself. "I saw you draw volleyballs in your notebook."

Despite the flush warming up his cheeks, Shouyou still can't hold back his grin, "Yeah! Volleyball is the best! It's the best feeling ever when you spike a ball and it goes BAM as it lands!"

The friend drags his previously uninterested gaze from the ground to Shouyou, as if reassessing him in a new light. "You're pretty short for a spiker."

Oh.

And just like that, it's like the air has been knocked out of Shouyou all over again, and he's on his knees, the scent of air salonpas, once smooth and sweet and everything good, clinging to his uniform and reeking of failure.