broken • bokuaka

15 • Bokuto

Bokuto couldn't sleep. He was physically exhausted from the practice matches, from the yakisoba he ate at dinner, from the warm bath he took after.

He was mentally fatigued as well, thoughts being scattered about, each one more tiring than the next to collect.

And yet he still couldn't force himself to sleep. It was like this some nights, nights when he was near others and didn't want them to wake in a fright from his screams and pleads that accompanied his dreams.

Nights he didn't want to attempt a feeble escape from the truth, a night when he didn't want to explain to his team, his family, that he had nightmares or the reasoning behind them.

Instead, he just stared at the ceiling, begging the dieties he never truly believed in to grant him a night of restful sleep, just this once.

He pleaded with the universe, begged the sky, cried to the air around him for any rest he could manage.

He was not granted this rest, even after a cup of chamomile tea he managed to make quietly. He tried the things the internet said would help him sleep, but try as he might, he couldn't create any false sheep to count.

He looked at his phone, brightness all the way down so as to not disturb the others, and sighed. 3:00am.

He had been staring into nothingness for hours on end. This frustrated him beyond belief, so he slipped on his shoes and a jacket, grabbing his phone before heading out the door.

He went on a walk, staring at the stars illuminating the sky. He couldn't see the moon itself, it was veiled by clouds, but the faint glow surrounding it was apparent.

Bokuto knew he wasn't the smartest, that his teachers had a rather nasty habit of calling him 'wasted potential'. He was aware that others thought of him as an idiot, one who just refused to try.

Bokuto knew all of these things, yet he wasn't sure if it angered him to hear these things or led him further into the depressive state he found himself in almost constantly these days.

He wasn't always like this. In fact, Bokuto had achieved some rather high marks in primary school, but they started to slip as classes became less interesting and things got worse at home.

It was around the age of eleven that his father started going to bars with his friends from work, and around the age of twelve when he started hurting Koutaro's mother despite his desperate cries for him to hit Koutaro instead.

It was Bokuto's first year of Fukurodani when his father had started to take anger out not only on his wife but also his son, relentlessly hitting him to the point of vomiting blood on many more than one occasion.

It was then that Koutaro went from barely passing to nearly failing all of his classes, it was then that teachers decided he was just lazy and gave up on him.

And of course. His father was sure to hurt him where the evidence would be shielded by all of his uniforms.

And in the beginning of Koutaro's third year, the worst abuse yet had come to him in the form of molestation and rape, things he had never experienced and hated with every fibre of his being.

Things that still make him feel disgusting, unworthy, unlovable. Koutaro thought that he didn't even deserve to die, that it was the easy way out, that it would just be him being to weak to keep going.

And so he didn't pay attention in class, rather staring out the window in every period of his class, wondering why life was like this, why this happened not only to him but to his mother, would it happen to his siblings?

And Koutaro ate less and less, he damaged himself more and more, further shredding his skin and littering his body with pale raised lines. He had almost been caught several times while changing, but gratefully was able to pull on his training leggings before anyone saw the mass of scar tissue on either leg.

Bokuto hummed as he laid on his back, staring at the sky. He counted every constellation he could see, a distant memory of his grandfather teaching him about the stories behind the stars.

He fell asleep outside, and woke to the sunrise a few short hours later. He glanced at his phone, seeing the illuminated '6:50' and groaning, coming to a seated position.

His clothes were slightly damp from the morning dew, to which he paid no mind, as he stood and made his way back inside. He knew the coaches didn't require any players to be awake before 7:30, but he was aware that he wasn't the only early bird in the group.

He made his way down the hallway, only to be ran into.