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smashconTitle: azimuthal projection
Rating: G
Prompt: Orenda (n.) – A mystical force present in all people that empowers them to affect the world, or to change their own lives
Fandom/Series: Haikyuu!!
Word Count: 2091
Disclaimer: I do not, in any way, profit from the story and all creative rights to the characters belong to their original creator(s).
Summary:
The day after their two-set loss to Shiratorizawa in the Interhigh Preliminaries, Oikawa finds himself wandering the eerily identical streets of a suburb just one stop down from Aobadouri Station. Or, the process of making persistence synonymous with talent.
azimuthal projection
The day after their two-set loss to Shiratorizawa in the Interhigh Preliminaries, Oikawa finds himself wandering the eerily identical streets of a suburb just one stop down from Aobadouri Station, all narrow strips of bitumen flanked by equally indistinguishable houses. He crosses the road to an intersection he thinks he recognises. Shades his eyes and squints at the closest building. Not even five minutes away from Aobajousai and he's already lost.
For some unfathomable reason he’d thought that, just because he could plot out his school and its surroundings with his eyes closed (thanks to two-and-a-half years spent steering through them), navigating any neighbouring ward would be a straightforward task. Unfortunately this line of reasoning happened to overlook his lack of anything resembling a sense of direction. He heaves a sigh of the deepest, purest regret, but the heat has driven away any potential sympathisers and there are no passers-by around to commiserate.
Oikawa slows down to an amble in the hope of passing his bewilderment off as a pleasant afternoon stroll and considers whistling a few notes to add to the character or maybe send out a coded distress signal. Iwaizumi, shirking his duty as a best friend to share his uncanny internal compass with Oikawa during such crises as these, had traipsed off to a physio appointment, leaving Oikawa stranded in this unfamiliar suburb because he, as an excellent best friend, had gallantly accompanied Iwaizumi to the clinic. Admittedly this wasn’t the soundest logic or a strictly necessary protocol, but it wasn’t as if he had anything else to do with his time today except lose his way in a place that should have been familiar but wasn’t.
That morning, practice had been progressing as per routine until his focus had slipped for a moment and a volleyball hurtled at terminal velocity into his stomach, the shock of its force knocking his breath loose. His knee proceeded to seize the opportunity to buckle beneath him. Mortifying! Before he could so much as hoist himself to his feet, the whole team had converged upon him and for a moment all he could see was blue and white, dizzyingly at odds with the bare-beamed gym ceiling beyond.
“Oikawa-san! Are you okay?” bellowed Kindaichi, throttling the offending volleyball in his hands with such fervour that it looked apt to burst. “Is anything broken? Ruptured? Should I get you an ice pack? A heat pack? Compression bandages?”
“No, no, it’s fine, Kindaichi,” Oikawa said, fluttering one hand and prodding at his abdomen with the other. “I just zoned out for a moment. Nothing’s broken. I’m one hundred percent okay!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Iwaizumi. “Ice it now, or it’ll bruise and you’ll start whining how you’re going to perish in the flames of agony. Coach’s called off afternoon training today, so you’d better get some rest before you pass out on the court, idiot.”
“Al-right, I’ll skip —”
“I mean it,” Iwaizumi growled. “If you set one foot in the gym — or watch a single second of yesterday’s footage either, while we’re at it — I will tear —”
“Okay, okay!” Oikawa eased his tone into a sunny effervescence. “I won’t, there’s no need to scare the first years with your boorish ghastliness, Iwa-chan, what kind of best friend — ow!”
Scowling, Iwaizumi had thwacked him on the shoulder, but didn’t pursue the topic further. The team dispersed again. Iwaizumi said nothing about Oikawa’s too-buoyant cheer, just as Oikawa had said nothing when Iwaizumi had turned away during the ride back to school and thrown an arm over his eyes. The motion stiff, incongruous, as though all the grace of his game had been crushed out of him by its aftermath.
A loss never really stops rankling, but enshrined by the awful, thick silence of the bus, long enough for the adrenalin to fade but too short to detach from the immediacy of it all, the bitterness had magnified. Each of them folded into themselves, the shared blow turned monoscopic, disconnected. After all this time Oikawa still had no words to draw them back together in that gutted moment. Things that should have been familiar but weren’t.
Case in point: this particular laneway. In the distance he can vaguely discern the greyish smudge of Aobajousai’s stolid façade, so he reorients himself and heads towards it. He passes a house with lights strung up along the fence for what he’s reasonably sure is the third time, although he’s not convinced that he’s seen the house beside it before. Oikawa takes a brief moment to mourn what could have been if only he’d taken a map from the station. And then, there, around the corner, amidst the rows upon rows of terrace houses — a convenience store, positively aglow with divine radiance! He could weep with relief.
The burst of air-conditioning that slaps him in the face as soon as he walks in the door is the most welcome thing he’s ever felt. Skirting around the magazine section (who wanted to run the risk of being assaulted by Ushijima’s stunningly unphotogenic crag of a face, anyway?), he trudges over to the food aisles. He deliberates over the chilled cans of Pocari Sweat in the display freezer, but there’s no competition with milk bread, the ultimate foodstuff, in the picture, so he gives into his impulses and grabs a milk bread bun off the shelf instead.
As the cashier rings up his purchase, it occurs to him that he still has no idea where he is. “Excuse me,” he says, “but which way is it to the station?”
She stares at him in mild incredulity. “Just down the road and turn left. It’s impossible to miss. You’ll be able to see it, it’s… it’s right there, twenty metres away.”
Of course it is. Oikawa thanks her and takes the bread. Despite its unabated pressure at his back, the sun is already beginning to list towards the horizon. He sits down on the concrete step outside the store and tears the milk bread wrapping open. He shouldn’t be here. He should be in the gym refining the edges of his sets, he should be trawling through old match footage of potential opponents to pick out any flaws he can exploit.
His gaze is dragged, unerringly as a compass needle, back towards the landmark profile of Aobajousai against the skyline: its winding corridors and wide staircases, reams of sunlight sheeting in through the windows. Matsukawa’s distinguished eyebrows, Hanamaki staring Iwaizumi down as though trying to challenge him via telepathic to yet another arm-wrestling rematch, Iwaizumi falling into step beside Oikawa with a comfortable silence that would last maybe three seconds before Oikawa felt the need to puncture the moment with a teasing remark. Even off the court, Oikawa maintains a phantom-limb awareness of each and every one of them like the streets beyond a map’s neatline, just out of its domain. His hard-won setter’s instinct.
A setter’s strength lies in bringing out the strengths of his team; as a captain, this is doubly true. He keeps a finger on the pulse of the game and adjusts accordingly. Transmuting its ebbs and flows into a coordinated stability that allows the rest of his team to soar.
The Grand King, Karasuno’s #10 had called him. Oikawa pulls the milk bread apart with a little more vehemence than required. There was nothing grand about the countless hours spent learning the pressure of the ball against his hands. Oikawa remembers training until his fingers bled and his eyes unfocused and his limbs shook with tense, glassy exhaustion. Eventually the skin on his palms would harden and the pain would subside. Eventually muscle memory would take root and that — that had to be just as good as the nebulous thing people called talent that he was utterly, utterly certain he did not possess.
He hadn’t wanted to confront it during his middle school years, it being personified in the form of an earnest first-year who coaxed spring growth from his sets like all of the years Oikawa spent splitting his hands raw were nothing. Inconsequential in the wake of someone whose body already understood, instinctively, how to navigate itself. Even after he’d left Kitagawa Daiichi, enveloped by Aobajousai’s heady tradition, its blue-and-white heartbeat, he had known that there was only so far he could grow.
It had been summer too, swelteringly airless in the school gymnasium, the scuffle of his shoes on the court almost deafening. Oikawa had spent the last one-and-a-half hours slamming serve after serve into the wooden flooring. Each time there’d been something amiss, the movement in aggregate familiar but disassembled into its individual components — the run-up, the toss, the jump, the strike — once again wholly alien to him. He choreographed the ball’s pinhead curve anew in his head. Last serve there’d been too much spin, the time before that the angle too sharp, the jump too high, the toss too far, and it was then that the thought sliced through his fatigue with an absolute, incisive clarity: I will never be good enough. It unfurled through his bones with the muted horror of a truth he’d already contoured and sketched out. No matter how long he spent on the court studying its topography, no matter how viciously he wanted it, nothing could ever make up for the fact that volleyball was, in the end, foreign territory to him. The knowledge of how to read the court sang out in a tongue he could not decipher, not yet.
He could have stepped back, then. Sputtered to a halt on the polished school court at all of fifteen years of age, full to the brim with an awareness he could no longer evade, the heat at his back weighing just as heavy as it does now. Closed his eyes against the impending blaze of the Nationals court lights. It would have been understandable. Expected, almost. But what use was raw talent if it lay unforged, undelineated? Was the metalsmith, was the cartographer not even more so the master? Oikawa had come to Aobajousai and its burnished hallways for the promise of transformation. If he had not been born with a setter’s instinct, he would — he would just have to construct one for himself.
How easy it would be, Oikawa thinks, swallowing down the last piece of milk bread, to resign himself to the caustic taste of second-best at the back of his throat. But he’s always known he wasn’t meant for the clean upwards trajectory. Carving himself into who he wants to be was never supposed to be easy.
Oikawa pushes himself to his feet, crinkling the plastic wrapper in his hand to break the unsettling somnolent hush that’s fallen over the afternoon. The sun-soaked concrete pressing the last vestiges of the day’s heat into his skin. Buoyed by that borrowed warmth he could be weightless, every inch of him straining upwards towards the sky which might as well be the bare-beamed gym ceiling for all its unreachability. He is not Kageyama with his gardener’s hands, or even Karasuno’s #10, who has flight coded into his very bloodstream. He was born unknowing what it is to seek out the pulse of the game and shape it into something he can direct, but he’s learned — is still learning — how to find his way there. The dying light pours over the street in swathes of orange and black, and Oikawa knows exactly how to move forward from here.
He slings his bag over his shoulder and heads back towards the station, away from the deepening shadows. Interhigh is over. Any loss after this will spell the end of his high school volleyball career. And still — what it would be like to look at the expanding horizons with faith again, conscious of his limitations and shouldering past them, regardless. Believing that he too could be just as infinite. Now he works with a cartographer’s steadiness to chart the extent of his reach, broadening that little bit more each time, this inheritance of everything he’s made out of himself.
And someday, someday, he will stand on the Nationals court with his team against the knifelike fluorescence of a thousand codified dreams. The rush of that dense, coiled intensity pressing over him like a mantle. He’ll toss up the ball and leap, the entire court laid out before him, a map he’s long since learned by heart, and for that one crystalline moment before his fingers reach the ball, the world will be still. Silent. Holding its breath for his serve. Holding its breath for him.
Voting is now open. Please take the time to fill out the judging form HERE
Thanks.
Rating: G
Prompt: Orenda (n.) – A mystical force present in all people that empowers them to affect the world, or to change their own lives
Fandom/Series: Haikyuu!!
Word Count: 2091
Disclaimer: I do not, in any way, profit from the story and all creative rights to the characters belong to their original creator(s).
Summary:
The day after their two-set loss to Shiratorizawa in the Interhigh Preliminaries, Oikawa finds himself wandering the eerily identical streets of a suburb just one stop down from Aobadouri Station. Or, the process of making persistence synonymous with talent.
azimuthal projection
The day after their two-set loss to Shiratorizawa in the Interhigh Preliminaries, Oikawa finds himself wandering the eerily identical streets of a suburb just one stop down from Aobadouri Station, all narrow strips of bitumen flanked by equally indistinguishable houses. He crosses the road to an intersection he thinks he recognises. Shades his eyes and squints at the closest building. Not even five minutes away from Aobajousai and he's already lost.
For some unfathomable reason he’d thought that, just because he could plot out his school and its surroundings with his eyes closed (thanks to two-and-a-half years spent steering through them), navigating any neighbouring ward would be a straightforward task. Unfortunately this line of reasoning happened to overlook his lack of anything resembling a sense of direction. He heaves a sigh of the deepest, purest regret, but the heat has driven away any potential sympathisers and there are no passers-by around to commiserate.
Oikawa slows down to an amble in the hope of passing his bewilderment off as a pleasant afternoon stroll and considers whistling a few notes to add to the character or maybe send out a coded distress signal. Iwaizumi, shirking his duty as a best friend to share his uncanny internal compass with Oikawa during such crises as these, had traipsed off to a physio appointment, leaving Oikawa stranded in this unfamiliar suburb because he, as an excellent best friend, had gallantly accompanied Iwaizumi to the clinic. Admittedly this wasn’t the soundest logic or a strictly necessary protocol, but it wasn’t as if he had anything else to do with his time today except lose his way in a place that should have been familiar but wasn’t.
That morning, practice had been progressing as per routine until his focus had slipped for a moment and a volleyball hurtled at terminal velocity into his stomach, the shock of its force knocking his breath loose. His knee proceeded to seize the opportunity to buckle beneath him. Mortifying! Before he could so much as hoist himself to his feet, the whole team had converged upon him and for a moment all he could see was blue and white, dizzyingly at odds with the bare-beamed gym ceiling beyond.
“Oikawa-san! Are you okay?” bellowed Kindaichi, throttling the offending volleyball in his hands with such fervour that it looked apt to burst. “Is anything broken? Ruptured? Should I get you an ice pack? A heat pack? Compression bandages?”
“No, no, it’s fine, Kindaichi,” Oikawa said, fluttering one hand and prodding at his abdomen with the other. “I just zoned out for a moment. Nothing’s broken. I’m one hundred percent okay!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Iwaizumi. “Ice it now, or it’ll bruise and you’ll start whining how you’re going to perish in the flames of agony. Coach’s called off afternoon training today, so you’d better get some rest before you pass out on the court, idiot.”
“Al-right, I’ll skip —”
“I mean it,” Iwaizumi growled. “If you set one foot in the gym — or watch a single second of yesterday’s footage either, while we’re at it — I will tear —”
“Okay, okay!” Oikawa eased his tone into a sunny effervescence. “I won’t, there’s no need to scare the first years with your boorish ghastliness, Iwa-chan, what kind of best friend — ow!”
Scowling, Iwaizumi had thwacked him on the shoulder, but didn’t pursue the topic further. The team dispersed again. Iwaizumi said nothing about Oikawa’s too-buoyant cheer, just as Oikawa had said nothing when Iwaizumi had turned away during the ride back to school and thrown an arm over his eyes. The motion stiff, incongruous, as though all the grace of his game had been crushed out of him by its aftermath.
A loss never really stops rankling, but enshrined by the awful, thick silence of the bus, long enough for the adrenalin to fade but too short to detach from the immediacy of it all, the bitterness had magnified. Each of them folded into themselves, the shared blow turned monoscopic, disconnected. After all this time Oikawa still had no words to draw them back together in that gutted moment. Things that should have been familiar but weren’t.
Case in point: this particular laneway. In the distance he can vaguely discern the greyish smudge of Aobajousai’s stolid façade, so he reorients himself and heads towards it. He passes a house with lights strung up along the fence for what he’s reasonably sure is the third time, although he’s not convinced that he’s seen the house beside it before. Oikawa takes a brief moment to mourn what could have been if only he’d taken a map from the station. And then, there, around the corner, amidst the rows upon rows of terrace houses — a convenience store, positively aglow with divine radiance! He could weep with relief.
The burst of air-conditioning that slaps him in the face as soon as he walks in the door is the most welcome thing he’s ever felt. Skirting around the magazine section (who wanted to run the risk of being assaulted by Ushijima’s stunningly unphotogenic crag of a face, anyway?), he trudges over to the food aisles. He deliberates over the chilled cans of Pocari Sweat in the display freezer, but there’s no competition with milk bread, the ultimate foodstuff, in the picture, so he gives into his impulses and grabs a milk bread bun off the shelf instead.
As the cashier rings up his purchase, it occurs to him that he still has no idea where he is. “Excuse me,” he says, “but which way is it to the station?”
She stares at him in mild incredulity. “Just down the road and turn left. It’s impossible to miss. You’ll be able to see it, it’s… it’s right there, twenty metres away.”
Of course it is. Oikawa thanks her and takes the bread. Despite its unabated pressure at his back, the sun is already beginning to list towards the horizon. He sits down on the concrete step outside the store and tears the milk bread wrapping open. He shouldn’t be here. He should be in the gym refining the edges of his sets, he should be trawling through old match footage of potential opponents to pick out any flaws he can exploit.
His gaze is dragged, unerringly as a compass needle, back towards the landmark profile of Aobajousai against the skyline: its winding corridors and wide staircases, reams of sunlight sheeting in through the windows. Matsukawa’s distinguished eyebrows, Hanamaki staring Iwaizumi down as though trying to challenge him via telepathic to yet another arm-wrestling rematch, Iwaizumi falling into step beside Oikawa with a comfortable silence that would last maybe three seconds before Oikawa felt the need to puncture the moment with a teasing remark. Even off the court, Oikawa maintains a phantom-limb awareness of each and every one of them like the streets beyond a map’s neatline, just out of its domain. His hard-won setter’s instinct.
A setter’s strength lies in bringing out the strengths of his team; as a captain, this is doubly true. He keeps a finger on the pulse of the game and adjusts accordingly. Transmuting its ebbs and flows into a coordinated stability that allows the rest of his team to soar.
The Grand King, Karasuno’s #10 had called him. Oikawa pulls the milk bread apart with a little more vehemence than required. There was nothing grand about the countless hours spent learning the pressure of the ball against his hands. Oikawa remembers training until his fingers bled and his eyes unfocused and his limbs shook with tense, glassy exhaustion. Eventually the skin on his palms would harden and the pain would subside. Eventually muscle memory would take root and that — that had to be just as good as the nebulous thing people called talent that he was utterly, utterly certain he did not possess.
He hadn’t wanted to confront it during his middle school years, it being personified in the form of an earnest first-year who coaxed spring growth from his sets like all of the years Oikawa spent splitting his hands raw were nothing. Inconsequential in the wake of someone whose body already understood, instinctively, how to navigate itself. Even after he’d left Kitagawa Daiichi, enveloped by Aobajousai’s heady tradition, its blue-and-white heartbeat, he had known that there was only so far he could grow.
It had been summer too, swelteringly airless in the school gymnasium, the scuffle of his shoes on the court almost deafening. Oikawa had spent the last one-and-a-half hours slamming serve after serve into the wooden flooring. Each time there’d been something amiss, the movement in aggregate familiar but disassembled into its individual components — the run-up, the toss, the jump, the strike — once again wholly alien to him. He choreographed the ball’s pinhead curve anew in his head. Last serve there’d been too much spin, the time before that the angle too sharp, the jump too high, the toss too far, and it was then that the thought sliced through his fatigue with an absolute, incisive clarity: I will never be good enough. It unfurled through his bones with the muted horror of a truth he’d already contoured and sketched out. No matter how long he spent on the court studying its topography, no matter how viciously he wanted it, nothing could ever make up for the fact that volleyball was, in the end, foreign territory to him. The knowledge of how to read the court sang out in a tongue he could not decipher, not yet.
He could have stepped back, then. Sputtered to a halt on the polished school court at all of fifteen years of age, full to the brim with an awareness he could no longer evade, the heat at his back weighing just as heavy as it does now. Closed his eyes against the impending blaze of the Nationals court lights. It would have been understandable. Expected, almost. But what use was raw talent if it lay unforged, undelineated? Was the metalsmith, was the cartographer not even more so the master? Oikawa had come to Aobajousai and its burnished hallways for the promise of transformation. If he had not been born with a setter’s instinct, he would — he would just have to construct one for himself.
How easy it would be, Oikawa thinks, swallowing down the last piece of milk bread, to resign himself to the caustic taste of second-best at the back of his throat. But he’s always known he wasn’t meant for the clean upwards trajectory. Carving himself into who he wants to be was never supposed to be easy.
Oikawa pushes himself to his feet, crinkling the plastic wrapper in his hand to break the unsettling somnolent hush that’s fallen over the afternoon. The sun-soaked concrete pressing the last vestiges of the day’s heat into his skin. Buoyed by that borrowed warmth he could be weightless, every inch of him straining upwards towards the sky which might as well be the bare-beamed gym ceiling for all its unreachability. He is not Kageyama with his gardener’s hands, or even Karasuno’s #10, who has flight coded into his very bloodstream. He was born unknowing what it is to seek out the pulse of the game and shape it into something he can direct, but he’s learned — is still learning — how to find his way there. The dying light pours over the street in swathes of orange and black, and Oikawa knows exactly how to move forward from here.
He slings his bag over his shoulder and heads back towards the station, away from the deepening shadows. Interhigh is over. Any loss after this will spell the end of his high school volleyball career. And still — what it would be like to look at the expanding horizons with faith again, conscious of his limitations and shouldering past them, regardless. Believing that he too could be just as infinite. Now he works with a cartographer’s steadiness to chart the extent of his reach, broadening that little bit more each time, this inheritance of everything he’s made out of himself.
And someday, someday, he will stand on the Nationals court with his team against the knifelike fluorescence of a thousand codified dreams. The rush of that dense, coiled intensity pressing over him like a mantle. He’ll toss up the ball and leap, the entire court laid out before him, a map he’s long since learned by heart, and for that one crystalline moment before his fingers reach the ball, the world will be still. Silent. Holding its breath for his serve. Holding its breath for him.
Voting is now open. Please take the time to fill out the judging form HERE
Thanks.
