Your Practice Is Showing

Mihashi

The math teachers had organized a carnival affair for the first years, giving their students hands-on experience with probability and odds, letting the students put together little games for other students to try and play, giving each kid a few paper tickets to use as money and candy as prizes. It was a day of trying to win sugar and hoping your own game worked when it was your class's turn to be the carnies, and generally goofing off during a school day.

At the moment, Mihashi's class was off duty, dashing between dart boards and guessing games and hoop throws. He and Tajima were bouncing around together, Izumi and Hamada off doing their own thing, when they came up to a stand with three small pyramids of bottles and a player from a different class trying to hit them down with tennis balls.

One of the two boys running the stand saw them stop and grinned, leaning on the table that served as their divider wall. "Wanna try your luck? If you knock down all of them, you get the jackpot - half our candy! Only two tickets for three balls!" The previous player finished, having only hit a few bottles off, and got a few sweets from the other boy before leaving for something easier. The bottles were set about seven meters back from the table, almost against the wall of the building, and appeared to be sample-sized bottles stacked three high. "I gotta warn you, though, no one yet's been able to win all the way!"

Tajima nudged Mihashi, who was spacing out while thinking about how much candy that could be. "I bet he can win!" The other boy, now joined by his project partner after he had reset the bottles, raised his eyebrows and grinned. "Well, we'll let anyone try – for two tickets."

With another nudge from Tajima, Mihashi tore off two tickets from his allotted supply and was given three tennis balls – not baseball weight, but just the size to clear his mind so he was on the mound and ready to pitch when he blinked. He smiled at Tajima, who winked and said in a low voice as he took two of the balls from him to hold, "They won't even know what hit 'em."

He stepped back a few paces from the table to get it a little more like pitching distance. Both other boys were laughing and joking to the side, snacking on their own candy as they prepared to see the wimpy kid with the funny hair bomb spectacularly.

Tajima bounced on his toes as Mihashi paused, wound up, and threw the first ball smack into the middle of the first pyramid, knocking down all of the bottles. The ball hit the bricks of the building behind them and ricocheted back to him, and he caught it with both hands easily.

The partners' jaws dropped comically as Tajima cheered him on and he repeated the fastball two more times, not even needing his other two chances from the speed he could keep on the ball from this short of a distance.

When the last bottle tumbled to the grass, the fake carnies were struck dumb by how soundly their math was defeated, numbly handing over one of their two remaining unopened bags of candy to an eager and gleeful Tajima while Mihashi set the balls back on the divider table, smiling as they left the boys to pick up the pieces of their project – possibly literally, Mihashi had thrown as full force he could get with tennis balls – and went to find whichever teammates they could find and share in Mihashi's conquests.

Abe

On a hot Sunday afternoon, Abe's mother roped him into helping her weed out her garden. His father weaseled out by 'going to the store', and his brother had a big project due the next day that he had barely started, so Abe was forced to pull up unwanted and unwilling plants from the ground while enduring his mother's endless gossip chatter about the neighbors, the family, the school mothers, on and on until he tuned her out completely and got into the rhythm of weeding.

"Taka? Takaya!"

"Huh? What?" He snapped from his daze and looked up to see his mother standing above him, half curious and half worried. "What do you want?"

"Doesn't that hurt?"

His eyebrows drew together as he frowned. "Doesn't what hurt?"

She laughed and gestured at him vaguely. "How you're sitting!"

He looked to find that sometime in his journey around the flowerbed, he'd settled into his catcher's crouch and stayed there, muscles too used to the burn to notice. "Oh. Huh." Now that he noticed, he fell back on his ass to sit on the dirt and stretch out his cramping legs. She laughed a little more.

"I can't believe you have to spend all of those long games sitting like that, it looks just awful!" She tried it herself, crouching down on her toes and holding it for a moment before her calves shook and she fell back to sit like her son, laughing. "I wouldn't be able to stand right for a week if I tried that for even a little while! How do you do it all day?"

He shrugged. "Because I do it all day, I guess." He knelt instead of crouching this time and went back to weeding, smiling at his mother's attempts to mimic his catcher's crouch only when she wasn't looking. It'd be embarrassing if she found out that he thought her laughter made him want to join in.

Oki

It wasn't anything special, just a three on three basketball game during gym class, but when the pass to Oki was knocked away by the other team and angled wide, he didn't even think before diving to the side and catching the ball before it went out of bounds, landing on his side on the hardwood floor. He sprang back up to his feet instantly, ready to play, only to find the other five kids staring at him like he had just jumped up on the bleachers and called himself a monkey.

"What?"

"Man, what the hell was that? You didn't have to dive for that."

Oki blinked, then realized that most people didn't dive on hard surfaces in this sport. "Oh. Right." He cleared his throat awkwardly, dribbling the ball a few times. "Didn't mean to."

"Are you hurt? You hit the ground pretty hard," one of the girls said, approaching him tentatively. He shook his head and backed a step away.

"No, really, I'm fine! Don't worry about me, really." Dirt hurts more anyway. They still looked at him funny, but a shout from the gym teacher got them moving again, picking the game back up, although they treated Oki a little differently – how he couldn't quite pinpoint, but he got guarded a lot less heavily after that.

Sakaeguchi+Suyama

For a psychology experiment their teacher was having them conduct, Class 1 took a little field trip out to the baseball outfield. The experiment was about group versus individual versus pair performance, and how competition influenced how hard you tried. They ran their individual fifty meters first, marked off by their teacher timing them at the finish line and writing it down. After all of them had a base time, he told them to pair off with someone about their speed and run it again. Except for a boy on the soccer team and the twin girls on the track and field team, Suyama and Sakaeguchi were the fastest in the class – which surprised them, since neither of them were more than average on the baseball team. Their teacher put Suyama and the soccer player as the fastest pair, leaving Sakaeguchi one of the twins that he could never tell apart to race against.

The fastest went last, so by the time it was the last three pairs' turns, the rest of their less athletic classmates had already gone the second fifty meters and were waiting to the side, panting and wiping their foreheads. It was rather hot out today, although not as humid as usual, but it still confused Sakaeguchi a bit. It wasn't like it was a hard distance or anything.

His teacher's whistle blew, and he took off, neck and neck with his twin past the teacher. Both of them were barely breathing hard at the end, jogging back and joking the distance to the clump of their classmates, watching Suyama and the soccer player speed by on the way and cheering on.

The twenty students in the class grouped together while their teacher wrote down the final times and tried to get them in order for the final dash – more for fun, since it was twenty at once. They managed to coax him into running, too, using a bucket from the dugout and a few jackets as the new finish line markers, and after a run that was more laughing than anything else, they filed back into the building, most of them still sweating and panting, including their teacher. The five sports players led them, unaffected by the brief activity and talking happily about what the results might tell when they got back to the classroom. Their less fit classmates and even less fit teacher glared at their backs and hated them for actually having the amount of stamina even for a few short sprints in the warm sun.

Tajima

Although Tajima knew he was the best on his team, and frankly, one of the best players in their age group, he also knew his own faults. He wasn't perfect athletically; he had just as much room for improvement as anyone else on the team.

He just didn't like admitting that to anyone but himself.

That was why he was alone right now, sneaking into the few trees that counted as woods behind his house. He was home alone and it was Sunday, their one free day from practice a week, which meant he was inevitably going to be drawn to one specific maple tree in the "woods".

Ever since they had moved into that house, Tajima had been trying to climb that maple. It had low branches that even a smaller him could reach, and went up into the sky forever, getting thinner and sparser higher up. Because of his height, he'd never been able to get more than halfway, where the next branch up was just high enough that he could only touch it with his fingers – not enough to hold, much less feel comfortable enough to pull himself up.

Between Momokan's practice pace and sleep and school, he hadn't been able to get an unguarded moment to climb the pale in months. He was grinning as he clambered off the group into the lowest, thickest boughs.

The lower limbs went as easy as usual, if a little faster, and soon enough he was glaring up at that one branch, that one marker he had never been able to pass.

He kept one hand braced on the trunk as he reached up to try and grab it. He had grown a little since the last climb – he didn't even have to get on his toes to reach it. Carefully, he brought his bracing hand up beside it, and he was holding onto it comfortably for the first time.

Giddy now, he braced his arms and lifted his feet up a hair, and – yes, he could support his own weight on his just hands! He let out a triumphant laugh and pulled up more, finding that he could do a full chin-up on the branch, especially now that his weight was pulling it further down. Almost unable to believe it, he kept going, hoisting himself up and swinging to straddle the branch, scooting back to lean against the trunk and catch his breath. He looked up at the next branch – thinner, but lower, with a few clustered around it to help keep his balance.

His grin changed into a smile, and he turned his face from the dappled sky and started his careful tumble down.

After all, it was more fun to have room for improvement. Being the absolute best was boring.

Mizutani

Exams sucked, and math exams sucked the most for Mizutani, who was avoiding eye contact with his teacher, who was passing out the test papers to the class, slowly getting to his row by the door. He double-checked the sharpness of his pencils, that he had his eraser out, and nervously looked around at his nearby classmates to see if they were freaking out, too.

A row over and a seat up, Abe was mildly watching the teacher and drumming his fingers on his desk. He saw Mizutani looking and attempted a smile, although it didn't work very well. Mizutani's return of the gesture felt just as forced.

'Come on, focus,' he thought, closing his eyes and tangling his fingers in his hair. Their teacher's voice snapped at someone to wait to turn over their paper until everyone had one, and he was way too close for comfort. Mizutani wasn't nearly ready, hadn't studied nearly enough –

He took a few deep breaths, and the image of the empty baseball field grew in his mind, early morning chill, dew and birds. Sitting in a handfast circle.

He breathed and smiled, sitting up straight as the teacher put a test face down on his desk. He could do this.

Who said you needed a third base runner to trigger the conditional response?

Izumi

"Hey, quit bumping into me!"

"You quit bumping into me, you're the one mooching off us!"

Izumi and his older brother glared at each other at the dinner table, having been forced to sit next to each other while his brother was home for a few weeks from his university in a different city. They had automatically sat in their usual spots from their childhoods, but either his brother had turned into a fat ass while he was gone – which was totally possible – or something was wrong with it.

"Boys, stop fighting at the table," their mother said dismissively, barely looking up from her own food. The brothers growled once more, then turned away to their food again.

It wasn't thirty seconds until their elbows bumped again, and they snapped.

"Quit that, brat!" his brother shouted, hitting him upside the head. Izumi elbowed him in the side in revenge, and they were going for the grapple when their mother put down her fork and stood, silencing them instantly. Their mother's wrath was not something mentioned lightly in their house.

"Shinji, stop fighting with your brother. Kousuke, you're eating with your left hand, that's why you keep touching him." She snatched up her plate and stalked away to eat in front of the television, leaving the brothers blinking and confused. They let go of each other and sat back, staring at the fork still held in Izumi's left hand.

"When did you start eating with your wrong hand?" his brother asked, perplexed into letting his frustration slip away.

Izumi frowned at the fork, switching it back and forth between his hands. It felt comfortable in both, which was weird – he'd always considered himself right-handed - even if he could bat both, he was better at right – but Coach had been having him practice both equally lately…

"Must be because of baseball," he said, switching his fork to his right hand. "Without you there to get in the way, I guess I never even noticed I was switching around like this."

"Huh." His brother slid around to their mother's empty place on the other side of the table. "Well, just eat with your right hand when I'm home, okay, brat?" He went back to eating, and Izumi shrugged his consent as he marveled at how it almost felt more comfortable to eat left-handed than right now, and most off, how he never even noticed he had started to do that in the first place.

Hanai

In history class, the teacher closed off his lecture about the Kamakura era and numbered them off into groups of three or four, giving them twenty minutes to put together a short presentation on a specific facet of the times. Hanai was in one of the fours, and went to their assigned corner of the room, already planning it out in his head – what his group members were best at, what points they needed to hit, who would speak, how to do their visual aid…

He took over before they had settled down, suggesting orders and offering to take the least desirable parts himself. The girl with the nicest handwriting, who he put in charge of the poster on butcher paper, watched him with a little smirk.

"So I guess you're the group leader, then, huh?" she asked, stopping his train of thought with a cough. He looked over at her, then at the other two, wavering in the face of their amusement.

"Uh – well, did you want to be?" She laughed, pulling the butcher paper and markers onto her desk.

"Nah, I just like messing with you. You're good at it; it was funny how quickly you took charge." He blinked. He was so used to being the captain and, therefore, the peer authority, that he had forgotten that his leadership wasn't usually taken for granted.

"Oh. Well, all right." He opened his textbook and cleared his throat before dividing up their section between him and the other two, softer about his order but no less demanding. Not that they minded – after all, it was less stress for them.

Nishihiro

"Hey, Nishihiro! Head's up!"

Nishihiro turned to the voice calling at him from across the school's soccer field to see an errant Frisbee speeding straight for his head. His mind panicked, but his body reacted reflexively and caught it one-handed. He stared at his hand in shock until Shinooka, who he was talking to, nudged him out of it with a good-natured giggle. He smiled at her sheepishly, then threw it back to the waving source of the voice, who he now recognized as Suyama. It wobbled a bit in the air, but it more or less reached its target, and Suyama called out "Nice catch!" before turning back to their keep away game. Nishihiro looked at his hands in wonder.

"I can't believe I just did that," he said in awe. Shinooka shrugged with a smile.

"Practice makes perfect, you know. Now, about that English lesson…"

He shook himself back to explaining gerunds and passive voice, but hugged the memory of his perfect surprise catch close for the rest of the day.

It could have been luck.

Or maybe his whim decision to join the baseball team was actually paying off in more than just making new friends.

{A/N: So, for those of you few hundred who like me for my work in Hetalia, I have a new fandom I'm playing around in! Instead of dork gay countries, it's dork gay baseball players. I'm not abandoning Hetalia - there are too many things I still want to do - but I'm going to dabble in this on the side. Bear with me, and for those of you who are actual Oofuri fans and have no idea who I am or what I'm talking about, HI! I'm going to be invading now, here and on tumblr! Hope you don't mind! :D}