Chapter Text
Metathesiophobia: the fear of change.
2 am
In the quiet of the night, he sits and thinks of nothing. The gentle rustle of leaves, the subtle sweet scent of budding cherry blossoms seeping into his room. The occasional creaking of floorboards and the trickle of water flowing through the house. Spring was approaching, and Sakusa Kiyoomi feels nothing.
He isn’t sure of when it began. When his thoughts became so oppressively loud to the point he hears only silence, or when they began to slowly seep into the day, crossing the once impenetrable line between the light and the monstrosities of his own mind.
Kiyoomi does not know. And that is what scares him the most, more than any expectation, more than any nightmare, more than any scar.
Kiyoomi is not a coward. No matter what anyone says when he declines the regular post-match celebration at the club, or when he is overwhelmed by the sheer urge to scrub scrub scrub his skin raw after brushing past a teammate. And especially not when he runs harder than he has ever before at the sight of the mop of bleached blonde hair walking into the locker room. No, he does not run from a challenge, and he most certainly does not cower in the night. So why is he lying paralysed on his bed as the house around him slumbers peacefully? Why is he the only one who fitfully lies awake at night, blinking through the excruciatingly long hours of the never-ending abyssal darkness?
Kiyoomi does not know. For the first time in his 22, soon-to-be 23, years of living, Kiyoomi simply does not know. Something is changing inside of him. Something so dystopian and brutish, so unprecedentedly different from what is normal - or at least what he perceives as normal. Why is this happening to him, he thinks, blinking blankly at the dark ceiling of his room. Oh, how he begs to understand, how he reaches to grasp the straws to comprehend what is so, so different about him. Because in the end, that is what he is. Different. Strange. Abnormal. An anomaly. A mistake. A mistake who does not belong on the team, and a fake who does not deserve the smile of a certain blonde, who looks at Kiyoomi like he is everything.
Because he is nothing.
Kiyoomi imagines reading his own mind. He dreams of peeling his skin back and imagines seeing the ivory of bone. The next time he falls asleep, he dreams of cracking it open. He imagines dreams of unveiling the secrets of his mind. He dreams, imagines, dreams, imagines until finally, finally he finds something. His breaths are shallow and laboured, each one coming faster and harder than the last as his trembling body and convulsing hands dig deeper and deeper into the sea of red that is known as his mind… until Kiyoomi sees it. He sees what is inside. He sees it pulsating with every beat of his heart, with every breath he takes, and he relishes in the feeling. He digs and digs, unpicking every grotesque detail, every twisted secret his mind holds, only to find…nothing. Pure, yet utterly tainted emptiness, deeper than any hole, deeper than any sea trench, deeper than the Abyss itself. His eyes roll back into his head, white spots pulsating in his vision as his hands spasmed, grasping desperately for any trails of the knowledge he yearned to know. Even after peeling layers upon layers of skin, even after splitting open his skull, even after seeing his inner clock workings,
Kiyoomi still feels nothing.
Silently, he lay back down as if the strings of his puppet like body were cut. Why, he asks himself. Why is it that even after exposing his inner self, does he still not understand what is different? Why is he different? Different from Bokuto and Hinata. Different from Motoya and his siblings. Different from…Atsumu. As he rots in his cage, he screams silently at the gods who have cursed him so, tremors racking his body as he yanks at his hair, tugging and wrenching at his dead curls, his wrists bending and straining as he desperately tries to uncover more until-
Snap.
The sound reverberates across the room, shattering the silent night. He brought his shaking hands to his face. Scratch after scratch. Rip after rip. Tear after tear until he felt it. His face was wet. He inhaled sharply, air entering his lungs like a thousand shards of broken glass and stared down at his hands.
His vision was saturated by the mocking colour of crimson, seeping through his pores as it infiltrated his very being, penetrating his core. And suddenly, he could breathe again. Through the hazy red curtain behind his eyes, Kiyoomi felt it. He could see, he could feel, he could hear again. A breathless chuckle left his mouth. And then another, and another, another, another, another, his face contorting as the red slowly cleared from his vision. He knew he looked crazy. He knew this was not normal. But Kiyoomi did not care. He did not care if he looked like a psychopath and he did not care for the burning pain jolting like bolts of lightning down his arms and face. Just like all those years ago, he had found comfort once more. The only way for him to understand. His very own rose-tinted glasses, his light, his saviour. Only this time, he will never let go. Never again.
In the quiet of the night, a blood-sniffing shark lies on Sakusa Kiyoomi’s bed.