Chapter Text
The kitchen in Tadashi’s apartment smelled of stale coffee and the stench of unwashed dishes. It was a quiet space, a deafening kind of quiet that didn’t just signify the absence of noise, but the presence of emptiness.
At twenty six, Tadashi Yamaguchi had learned that life wasn’t a sprint or a marathon, it was a stagnant pool of grey water.
He worked in town planning, a job that required him to look at maps and decide where things belonged, which was a cruel irony for a man who felt he belonged nowhere at all. He spent his days drawing lines for other people to walk along, while his own path had grown over with weeds and forgotten goals.
He sat at his small table, staring at a crack in the wood that looked vaguely like a lightning bolt. Or perhaps a fracture.
Everyone else was moving. The world was a blur of hopes and dreams being, and Tadashi was the only stationary object in the frame.
He saw them on his phone, the glowing screens that acted as windows into lives he no longer recognized. Hinata was a sun that refused to set, burning bright across oceans. Kageyama was a king who had finally found a kingdom worthy of his crown. Even Tsukishima was a moon in its proper orbit.
Kei was a museum employee and a member of the Sendai frogs and it made sense. Kei had always been good at cataloging things, at putting them behind glass where they could be observed but never touched.
They hadn't spoken in three years.
The silence between them wasn't a break, it wasn't a glass shattering on the floor. It was a slow erosion. It was the way a cliffside eventually is victim to the sea, inch by inch, grain by grain, until one day you look out and realize the ground you used to stand on is simply gone. Tadashi had stopped calling because he felt like a bookmark in a grander story. Kei had stopped calling because, perhaps, he had finally finished the book.
Tadashi looked at his hands. They were the hands of an adult, yet they felt like borrowed tools. He remembered the feeling of a volleyball, the sting of a perfect serve, the hype of a successful play. That version of him was a ghost.
He felt like a house that had been framed but never finished. The bones were there. The education, the steady paycheck, the polite smile…But there was no warmth in the rooms. No furniture. Just the wind whistling through the gaps where a personality used to be.
He was dissatisfied. It wasn't the kind that sparked change. it was the kind that acted like quicksand. The more he realized how unhappy he was, the deeper he sank into the routine of being fine. "Fine" was a dangerous word.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Tadashi would find himself driving. He wouldn't have a destination, he would just follow the concrete until the city lights thinned out.
He would look up at the moon and feel a physical ache in his ribs. It was a phantom limb pain. For over a decade, his identity had been "the shadow to the light," or "the planet to the sun." Without Kei's gravity to hold him in place, Tadashi felt himself drifting into the deep black of interstellar space.
He wondered if Kei ever looked at the exhibits in his museum and saw a fossil that reminded him of a boy with freckles and a shaky serve. Probably not. Kei was different now. He didn't keep clutter or ghosts of who they used to be.
Tadashi pulled his sweater tighter around his frame. He had lost weight, or perhaps he was just becoming more transparent. He felt that if someone were to walk into the room, their eyes would slide right over him, unable to find a place to rest.
He wanted to scream, but the air in his lungs felt like lead. He wanted to reach out, to grab the world by its neck and demand a refund for the potential he’d wasted. But he was too tired for anger. Anger required a belief that things should be better, and Tadashi was beginning to suspect that this, this grey, muted, lonely existence was exactly what he deserved.
He was a spectator at his own funeral, watching the years bury him while he stood by with a shovel, too polite to ask them to stop.
He picked up his phone, his thumb hovering over a contact name that hadn't been tapped in a thousand days.
Kei.
The name looked like a foreign word. A dead language.
Tadashi put the phone face down on the table. The silence of the apartment rushed back in, filling his ears like water. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the sound of Kei’s laugh. the brilliant, bright, and quite rare sound from a lifetime ago.
But like everything else in Tadashi’s life, the memory was fading. It was becoming a sketch of a sketch, a blurred image of a man who used to love him, held by a man who no longer knew how to love himself.
He sat there in the dark, a town planner who couldn't find his way home, waiting for a morning that promised nothing but more of the same. And the worst part, the part that truly broke him…
...Was that he no longer had the energy to hope for anything else. The balcony railing was cold, a biting, metallic reminder of the physical world that Tadashi felt he had already exited. Below him, the streetlights blurred into long, weeping streaks of amber. He felt like a loose thread on a garment. Unnecessary, unsightly, and waiting for the sharp snap of a pair of scissors to finally be cleared away.
He looked at his hands again, trembling slightly against the rusted iron. These hands had once reached for the sky, desperate to catch up to a moon that was never meant to be held. Now, they were just heavy. Everything was heavy. His breath felt like swallowing stones. his thoughts were a slow motion car crash that he was forced to watch on a loop.
He didn't want to die so much as he wanted to have never been. He wanted to reach back through the years and unstitch himself from the tapestry, to leave a smooth, undisturbed surface where a boy named Tadashi once stood.