I'm Blind, Not Glass

10

The rest of the day, that day specifically, was awkward. Shiro had known it was going to be, had known that this was gonna be a little weird no matter how close he was with someone, but that didn't mean it was enjoyable. Practice was odd, mostly due to Kiyoko hovering over his shoulder while she helped him go through the motions on his daily jobs, which wow, Shiro had never known there was so much he could do for a team despite not being able to do a lot of the stereotypical manager jobs.

Shiro was now the proud owner of one orange, or so he was told by Kiyoko, notebook that was slowly being filled with slanted, messy handwriting. It was notes, or statistics depending on how you looked at it, of everyone on the team. With Kiyoko's help, he kept track of who needed to practice serving more, or who needed receiving practice, who was improving, and who wasn't. He made a shitty list of who was better suited towards what positions, and what they could improve on to move to a different one if they wished. The notebook gave him a lot to do during practice, and Shiro was in a love-hate relationship with it.

Since he'd gone blind Shiro had moved almost completely digital. Technology was easier for him, considering he could talk to it and it could talk back to him, but analog with paper and pencil wasn't impossible. Trying to write anything down tended to piss the tall male off; not being able to see the lines meant his sentences were skewed at sharp angles, meant that the characters he wrote were unbearably messy and smushed together to form half-readable words. It also sucked that Shiro himself couldn't read anything he wrote down, having to take Kiyoko's word that what he was writing was correct. Shiro didn't like writing in the notebook, but he enjoyed having something to do, and it was necessary in case he was gone from practice and Kiyoko had to take over the note-taking.

Shiro was in his usual corner, hunched up as he listened to the usual chaos of volleyball, trying desperately to spell out everyone's names on their respective pages. Kiyoko had, thankfully, typed everything out onto his phone so he could get pronunciation correct, but Shiro was praying that he was getting the spelling correct. Braille only came in numbers, hiragana, and katakana, and that was all he knew how to write anymore. Writing had Shiro reduced down to an elementary kid, sentences stilted and awkward, but they got the point across at least.

And so Shiro sat there for the entirety of practice, awkwardly mouthing words and names as he slowly wrote things down, Kiyoko coming over to check his progress every once and a while. It was slow going, so god damned slow that it was pissing Shiro off to no end, but it was also oddly rewarding. This was the longest he'd had to work on much of anything in years, his wrist aching in a way it hadn't since before his accident. It was nice, relaxing almost.

Well, not completely relaxing.

Trying to spell out everyone's names when you can't see what you're writing down leads to some awkward characters and completely new ones, so Shiro hadn't even questioned it when whoever was looking at the notebook started to snicker lightly. Pretty much everyone on the team had come over to see what he was doing, mostly visits from Shoyo who would bound over excitedly to yell about what they'd been doing, and Suga who had mostly come over to escape the chaos happening around them. This laughter wasn't coming from either of them, it was laughter that Shiro didn't recognize at all.

"Geez," a voice drawled, one of the first years if Shiro was remembering correctly, "what the hell are you writing, hieroglyphics?" There was laughter behind their voice, but it was a degrading and rude sound. This was Tsukkishima, a kid that Shiro had listened to be rude as hell to Shoyo time after time.

Yeah, Shiro understood that Shoyo wasn't for everyone. The boy was loud and easily excitable, acting more like a puppy than a human being most of the time, but the sort of rudeness that came from the other first year went further than just normal annoyance. It seemed as if he almost hated Shoyo.